Our Nervous Friends - Robert S. Carroll (pdf ebook reader txt) 📗

reference. He was proud of his whiskey-drinking. One quart of Kentucky’s best Bourbon from sun to sun, decade after decade! “I have drunk enough whiskey to float a ship—and some ship too. Look at me! Where will you find a healthier man at sixty-five? I haven’t known a sick minute since the war. If you drink whiskey right, with plenty of water and plenty of eatin’, it won’t hurt anybody.” This was the law and the gospel to Doctor Jim; he never failed to proclaim it to pale-faced youths or ailing mankind; and the Book of Judgment, alone, will reveal the harvest of destruction which Time reaped through Doctor Jim’s influence in L–County. Yet, oddly, it was Doctor Jim’s principle and practice never to treat. He claimed he had never offered a living soul a social drink.

 

“Drink whiskey right and it won’t hurt anybody!” Did it hurt?

 

Doctor Jim and his two brothers spent their early life on a plantation in Mississippi. The father wanted the boys to be educated. Two of them took medical courses in New Orleans. Doctor Jim wished to see more of the world, and literally did see much of it on a two-year cruise around the Horn to the East Indies and China. He was thirty-five years old in ‘60 when he married. Then he served as surgeon—“mighty poor surgeon” he used to say, for a Mississippi regiment throughout the four years of the Civil War. He and his two brothers passed through this conflict and returned home to find their father dead, the negroes scattered and the old plantation devastated. The three with their families journeyed to Texas—the then Land of Promise! At twenty-five cents an acre they bought river-bottom lands which are to-day priceless, and the losses of the past were soon forgotten in the rapid prosperity of the following years.

 

Mrs. McDonald represented all that high type of character which the dark years of the war brought out in so many instances of Southern womanhood. Patient, hopeful, uncomplaining she lived through the four years of war-time separation, left her own people and journeyed to the Southwest to begin life anew. She was particularly robust of physique, domestic in a high sense, gentle and deeply kind. She passed through hardship, privation and prosperity practically not knowing sickness.

Her children could not have had better mother-stock, and the scant days were in the past, so they never knew the lack of plenty. There were eight, from Edith, born in 1870, to Frank, in 1885, including the twins.

 

Did whiskey-drinking hurt?

 

Edith grew into a slender, retiring girl, her paleness accentuated by her black hair. She was quiet, read much, and took little interest in out-of-door activities, entering into the play-life of the other children but rarely. Her father insisted, later, on her riding, and she became a fair horsewoman. She was refined in all her relations.

Edith went to New Orleans at seventeen. The spring after, she developed a hacking cough and had one or two slight hemorrhages, but at twenty was better and married an excellent young merchant. The child was born when she was twenty-two; three weeks later the mother died, leaving a pitiable, scrofulous baby, which medical and nursing skill kept lingering eighteen months.

 

The first boy was named James, Jr., as we should expect, and, as we should not expect, was never called “Jim.” But James was not right. He developed slowly, did not walk till over three, was talking poorly at five; he was subject to convulsions and destructive outbreaks; he was uncertain and clumsy in his movements, so provision was made that he might always have some one with him. But even in the face of this care, he stumbled and fell into the laundry-pot with its boiling family-wash, was badly scalded and seriously blinded. James mercifully died two years later in one of his convulsions.

 

Mabel was the flower of the family. Through her girlhood she was lovable in every way, and beloved. She was blond like her father, though not as robust as either father or mother, and in ideals and character was truly the latter’s daughter. She finished in a finishing school, had musical ability and charm, and soon married and made a happy home—an unusual home, until the birth of the first child. Since then it has been a fight for health, with the pall of her family’s history smothering each rekindling hope. Operations and sanatoria, health-resorts and specialists have not restored, and she lives, a neurasthenic mother of two neurotic children. Happiness has long fled the home where it so loved to bide those early days, before the strain and stress of maternity had drained the mother’s poor reserve of vitality.

 

The history of Will and John, named for the two uncles, would prove racy reading through many chapters. “The Twins” were the father’s text for spicy stories galore many years before their death. From the first, they were “two young sinners.” They both had active minds—

overactive in devising deviltry. Mischievous as little fellows, never punished, practically never corrected by their father, humored by sisters, house-servants, and the plantation-hands, feared and admired by other boys, they seemed proof against any helpful influence from the earnest, pained, prayerful mother. As boys of ten, they had become “town talk” and were held responsible for all pranks and practical jokes perpetrated in Donaldsville or thereabout, unless other guilty ones were captured red-handed. Multiply your conception of a “bad boy”

by two and you will have Will at twelve; repeat the process and you will have John. They possessed one quality—dare we call it virtue?—

which kept them dear to Doctor Jim’s heart through their very worst.

They never lied to him, no matter what their misdeeds. They could lie as veritable troopers, but from him the truth in its rankest boldness was never withheld. As the years passed, they made many and deep excursions into the old doctor’s pocket. But he paid the bills cheerfully and sent his reverberating laugh chasing the speedy dollars, as soon as he got with some of his Main Street cronies. The boys planned and worked together, protecting each other most cleverly.

Still they were expelled from every school they attended after they were thirteen. A military academy noted for its ability to handle hard cases found them quite too mature in their wild ways, and sent them home. They may, for reasons best known to themselves, have been “square with the old man,” but they were a pair of thoroughgoing toughs by twenty, not only fast but cruel, even brutal, in their evil-doing.

 

Will was the first to show the strain of the pace. When twenty-two, the warning cough sobered him a bit, and in John’s faithful and congenial company, he went first to Denver, then to New Mexico.

Doctors’ orders were irksome, whiskey and cards the only available recreation for the boys, and so they tried to follow their father’s example in developing a powerful physique on Kentucky Bourbon (“best”). John suddenly quit drinking. “Acute nephritis” was on the shipping paster. Delirium tremens was the truth. Will was too frail to accompany his brother’s remains home. He was pretty lonely and anxious, and miserable without John, but for several weeks behaved quite to the doctor’s satisfaction. It didn’t last long, and within the year tuberculosis and Bourbon laid him beside his brother.

 

May was a promising girl, “almost a hoiden,” the neighbors said. She rode the ponies bareback; she played boys’ games, and at twelve looked as though the problem of health could never complicate her glad, young life. But cough and hemorrhage, twin specters, stalked in at sixteen and the poor child fairly melted away and was gone in a year.

 

Annabel, the youngest girl, was a quiet child and thoughtful. Some called her dull, but rather, it seems, she early sensed her fate. When but a child she was sent to “San Antone” and operated on by a throat specialist. After May’s death she went to the mountains each summer and spent two winters in South Texas. But she grew more and more thin, and in the end it was tuberculosis.

 

Frank, the last child, was different from all the others. He seemed bright of mind and active of body. He attended school as had none of the other boys; he even went to Sunday-school. Physically and mentally, he gave promise of prolonging the family line—but he proved his father’s only admitted regret. He lied and he stole. The money which his father would have given him freely he preferred to get by cunning. Doctor Jim could not tolerate what he called dishonesty, and from time to time they would have words and Frank would be gone for months. His cleverness made him a fairly successful gambler; that he played the game “crooked” is probably evidenced by his being shot in a gambling-joint before he was thirty.

 

We have thus scanned the-wreckage of a generation bred in alcohol.

Children they were of unusual physical and mental parentage, parents who never knowingly offended their consciences, children reared in most healthful surroundings with every comfort and opportunity for normal development. Four of them showed their physical inferiority through the early infection and unusually poor resistance to tuberculosis; one was born an imbecile; one died directly from the effects of drink; the only girl who survived early maturity, the best of them all, spent twenty years a nervous sufferer, mothering two nervously defective children; the physically best was the morally worst and died a criminal.

 

Doctor Jim lived on with his habits unchanged, his laugh, only, losing something in volume and more in infectiousness. Still proud of his health he preached the gospel of good whiskey well drunk, never sensing his part in the tragedy of his own fireside. He was nearly eighty when the stroke came which bereft him of any possibility of understanding, or of knowing remorse. He had laid his wife away some years previously and for months he lingered on paralyzed, demented, in the big, empty house, cared for by an old negro couple, hardly recognizing Mabel when she came twice a year, but never forgetting that, “Whiskey won’t hurt anybody.”