Most kids lose or break their toys. I curated mine.
In 1976, the University of Iowa renamed an existing history-and-literature program America Studies. It drafted me and some other merry hippie Ivy graduates to blanket the state and gather “existing folk manifestations.” We plundered far-flung Salvation Army thrift stores and rural junk shops. We hunted the simple tools and dolls that our essays overinterpreted. Those startup treasures helped found my folk collection, one that’s not unknown today.
Handwrought nineteenth-century artifacts were criminally cheap then. “Midwesterners don’t know what they have, or had,” we Easterners gloated after country raids.
Prior to radio, before television, savage winters spent indoors turned many German-Americans into excellent wood-carvers. Unable to afford child whimsies (even from the Sears catalogue), a farmer just whittled his brood’s amusements. Those things sure lasted! Here we have a horse-drawn-farm-cart toy, scaled for one specific kid. You can still feel the father’s February yearning for a warm harvest, his love for the mismatched horses hand-portrayed and for his boy, born to inherit Dobbin, Paint, and the family acreage.
These days, I’m sometimes interviewed about my collection. Lazier reporters ask me to name my most valuable find. It was actually a gift. I divide my career into two rough phases: “Toys” and “Post-Childish Things.” And this—hung right over my rolltop desk—still marks the turning point between the two.
We cheerful avid youngsters, lured to Iowa City, were given five twenties a month to spend on outsider art. Our professor, born in Rome, jokingly called this “ethnographic colonialism within one’s native land.” His lectures were persuasive and dynamic; he was callous in the pan-gender bedding of his students, yet sensitive to how all empires fall. He’d grown up amid artistic beauty that was broken to pieces but left in place.
We set off every Friday full of caffeine and an acquisitive sleekness that sometimes passed for sexy. Wearing thrift-shop moose-motif sweaters, driving borrowed jalopies, we were cerebral hucksters out to pillage the second-flight antique shops of eastern Iowa, western Illinois. The odder our finds, the brainier we felt. Uncover some handwrought gimcrack, write an article about it, read it aloud in class, then seek publication in some journal suitably obscure. Our Roman professor stressed the long view, advising us, “Sapete sempre che voi siete stranieri . . . in un Paese molto più strano.” And, this being a state school, he immediately translated, “Always know you are strangers . . . in a land far stranger.”
We clocked many country miles during a long Friday’s “picking.” Toward the end of such a trek, my classmates were heading back from the western edge of Illinois, bound for Iowa City, in a borrowed Ford wagon; I followed in my overloaded Jeep. We stopped for gas and bathrooms. Then the others waved goodbye. I’d spent eighty of my allotted hundred. My haul? A rural mailbox, made in a 1946 shop class and shaped like not one or two but three Scottish terriers, two white, the middle one black, whose conjoined mouths accepted letters, parcels. A pink chintz hostess smock edged with so much nineteen-forties rickrack it looked all but Aztec. And my hands-down most ironic iconic Find of the Week: a handsomely lettered five-foot-long sign explaining, “You’ve Got to Be a Football Hero to Get Along with the Beautiful Girls. THEREFORE, GO TECH!”
This kind of joke was then thought “smart.” And no one was more enslaved to fashionable smartness than a hyper-educated boy of twenty-six with a twenty-nine-inch waist and, so Mother always hinted, a colossal I.Q. I look back on him with a curatorial mixture of pride, amusement, and pity. I think he condescended to the very loot he intended to save then praise. (But surely that problem’s built into the notion of taking a graduate degree in “self-taught artists”!)
Though tired and hungry, I felt greedy for one more twenty-dollar prize. Proud as I was of my football pep-squad board, I knew I’d not yet found this outing’s “it.” I imagined discovering, in every dairy barn I passed, some primitive oil portrait of Lincoln, painted when he was yet a beardless state legislator here.
My friends swore they’d save me a stool at Hamburg Inn No. 1. The blue-plate special, this being Friday, was surely fried fish. Sunset offered a limitless salmon-orange. In one farmyard, a tractor tire on its side—painted white—had been filled with soil, then white geraniums. Dusk now turned these all the colors of a campfire. Tidied fields shadowed toward something sinister. And should that huge rooster be crowing right at sundown? I sped through a pretty little town called La Verne. And, just as its propane gasworks and beauty parlor (itchily called LuAnn’s House o’ Hair) gave way to corn-green countryside, I spied a dangling Colonial sign whose girlish freehand promised:
“Well, hell. Somebody’s thinking,” I said aloud.
I aimed my Jeep toward the unlit store, which, up close, looked out of business. I’d already popped my clutch to find reverse when I flicked on my headlights, then my high beams, then braked. That cigar-store-Indian thing bent in the window? With jewelry all over it? It appeared to be either some dressmaker’s dummy or perhaps a human being. Oosh, it’d definitely moved.
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How Hard Is It to Find a Cheap Sofa in New York?
“Evening,” I said, smiling through the door chimes’ sweet-and-sour tinkling. “You must be the eponymous The-o . . .”
“Herself.” I warranted one courtly, bitter nod.
Caught hovering at her window, worried this might seem invitational, the owner must’ve made a fast crablike retreat to a high stool. The climb still had her panting. She presided behind an outmoded silver cash register that itself looked like a costly toy, circa 1923.
What had bent her so? Fever? Birth defect? Her spine showed the exact angle of an opened safety pin; its clasp, her hooded face. Theodosia, weighing less than ninety pounds, seemed to wear her best stuff. A county’s worth of timepieces were pinned to her otherwise concave chest. Ladies’ watches, some with clock faces visible, others locketed away, a few on pulleys that allowed easy consulting, quick return. Their metals glinted across her front like military decorations.
It was the day’s last stop, so I quickly scanned, nose wrinkling. I sometimes imagined I could smell the hidden treasure. Where was “it”? Maybe lurking within reach of this “it” girl. Her backbone might’ve been cruelly bowed, but her deep-set eyes gleamed my way, briar-sharp. Theodosia seemed one of those maimed or homely people who—feeling themselves unimprovable—make a militant point of glaring you down. Seated on high, she flaunted her un-assets as a form of deficit flirting.
At that age, I still likely looked my best. (I remained ignorant of my face value, even while trading on the bargains it brought. You really notice your looks only once you’ve lost them.) Now barging toward the poorest-lit corner of her two-room shop, I felt “it,” hiding. Ballroom chairs stacked to the ceiling. Narrow pathways corkscrewed tributes to her bent spine. Theodosia offered no chat, none of the usual jolly prying: “So, where’d you folks say you’re from? You with the Depression-glass convention in Moline, betcha.” Nothing but her alum gaze, her arms crossed over six pounds of locket clocks.
Things here did look finer than in most shops out this way. And—a good sign—her place smelled not of euphemizing potpourri but of the proper musk peculiar to some dry attic’s last few centuries. And yet the major Gothic grandfather clock lacked one finial; three beautiful nineteenth-century pumpkin-colored paisley shawls had been moth dessert decades back. Nothing displayed justified her full snootiness. I did stop before a pile of Harper’s Weekly magazines from the eighteen-sixties. Hating knowing that she knew, I stood scouting for Winslow Homer’s war illustrations. Nothing.
Her voice scratched me from a room away. “The toys are in that half-timbered neo-Tudor sideboard to your right.”
I asked the stale air before me, “How’d you know?”
“I’ve got it pretty much down to a system. Can identify all you migrating birds, boy-o. I get three of you a day in here.”
“Thanks,” I said, for spite.
Theodosia’s toys proved overpriced, missing wheels, made in Munich or New York circa 1915, just before war claimed all such metal. I found nothing local, handmade, or heartfelt enough for my advanced urban taste.
Last thing, as I headed for the Jeep, feeling as irked as stubborn, I squatted before the clear vitrine in front of her stool. Four minutes of silence hadn’t thawed her. She still emitted the nunnish hauteur of some impoverished old countess out of Chekhov.
Sunset, gold as egg yolk, now scored with value many otherwise half-worthless things. Pot lids, cufflinks, rims of chipped Venetian claret glasses.
“Hope I’m not holding up your evening plans, right here at six and all, ma’am,” so ran me in faux-farmboy mode. No reply. With brooch clocks dragging down her blouse, she just sat ticking like a knitting class.
Only now—as I squatted before the glass, peering over Grover Cleveland campaign buttons and crystal bulldog inkwells—I felt observed from floor level. Beside her white shin, a face—a force—stared back at me. A head-and-shoulders portrait rested on the floor. The man depicted must’ve been about my age. Dark eyes above a beginner’s goatee—he’d posed fastened in a black tie and a high starched collar. His face was handsome, if both blank and sad, hound-earnest.
“So what’d be his story?” My index finger touched cold glass. I felt then, in the knots of my stiff neck and impressionable groin, a collector’s sense that he might be today’s it.
Silent, she studied her fingernails. Sales technique? Orneriness? Both?
“I asked, Can you tell me about this sweet guy in the painting near your left foot?” Why did her not answering mount up so? Unlike in the last three shops, there was no radio playing Champaign-Urbana’s classical FM. No noise out here but wind crossing her roof or the odd twist of carved wood popping in her far room. I felt foolish at the din my voice made.
But I kept staring through the glass box at this young gent’s melancholy message of a face. Maybe he looked a bit like me and—being painted actual size, given the glass between us—became some sort of mirror? Maybe all bright young men, seriously questing, look a bit alike.
The picture tipped half out of its eighteen-fifties rosewood frame. The canvas showed its age. The oil-paint execution seemed able, even affectionate, if conventional; the background, solid black. But what held me was the boy’s expression. Not just an invitation, almost a plea for help. I felt first approached, then nearly summoned. Didn’t understand quite what I’d found, but, seeing him, I recognized some calibre of longing or emergency.
“Just want information, lady! But, why’m I even bothering you? As if you knew the slightest thing about him!” This is how one avid story “picker,” holding only twenty bucks, challenges another.
She snorted finally: amused at anybody’s thinking Theodosia might not keep total narrative lock on every celluloid buttonhook in her place. (Since she belonged to my grandmother’s flapper generation, I’d maybe gauged her partly right: such ladies were most charming when provoked.) When Theodosia’s voice at last emerged, it sounded adenoidal, dry, so “local” I felt disappointed.
“You look to be one of those ones I get in here from the grad school over to Iowa City. Printmaking department’s pretty good, they say. But why would anybody waste time doing prints when you could just paint? Yeah, real artistes, you kids! You all look alike. Come out here huntin’ somethin’ for nothin’. From the parking lot, I knew ye. Expensive haircut wanting to play like it just grew wild that way. Wearing clothes the people in New York City wore three years back. Nosing out this far from Moline, hoping and trick us natives. You’d probably make a funny story out of me, my shop, this poor boy painted here.”
Now some test would be required. Proof that I was not just another trust-fund tinhorn, condescending.
And, as I leaned nearer the glass, I could “read” her bony torso. Most of the watches clamped there told roughly the same time (within fifty minutes). But, when I scouted from left to right, four lines, top to bottom, her system started becoming clearer: the rows began with austere Federal design, chaste and “classical,” until Ionic geometry blossomed, enlarging to certain manufactured overelaborations of the eighteen-fifties, sprouting roses and leaves and fat gilt tendrils of prosperity toward a silver Nouveau calla lily, then onward to a watch mitred with onyx swallows and the chopped fan lines of the Eastlake moment, slimming again into industrial edginess as a Deco locket put an end to time’s weird progression across her chest.
“So,” I tilted up and spoke over the glass. “Today you’ve come to work dressed as 1830 to 1930?”
She gave me her hardest look. “Wrong. Eighteen-thirty-four to nineteen-thirty-four! Still, for graduate work . . . You’re at least the first today to ‘get’ my latest try.”
I laughed. She smirked, and then, in her piping oboe voice, conceded in a hurry, half-mechanical, “About this picture you’re so dead set to blunder into the story of: Around 1849, no, in 1849, June 4th, a sailor named Sanders Woolsey came home to La Verne from an eight-month voyage to the Far East. Sandy’s ship, the John Gray, brought back tea, Canton ware, and ginger. He’d sailed into Chicago, which was then a going port, thanks to their dredging Canada’s waterways. You can imagine the meal his mother and sisters fixed his first night home. Baked chicken, be my guess. And Sandy, mostlike, so full of tales: the monkeys, the pagodas, what have you. They ate that dinner at their farm three miles due east of here, more toward Matherville. And it was Sandy Woolsey who pretty well ruined us out this way. Was Sandy brought us the cholera. His poor mother and sisters would be dead in six days, along with most of three households, their nearest neighbors. Two of those homes still stand, back by the propane distributorship you passed but never noticed. A new doctor’d just arrived in town. Boy so recent to practicing medicine he had price tags still strung on his best surgical tools. . . . You think I’m exaggerating what all I got in here, do you? Think I made that up about his tools?”
“No, you clearly know your stuff. So the fellow in this picture isn’t the sailor but the new town doctor, right? My only question is whether you’ll need to stand up to run and fetch that doctor’s bag, or have you maybe got it tucked somewhere close?”
“Look harder at me, son. I’ve never ‘run’ toward—or, comes to that, from—anything in my whole life. However, you’re not totally stupid.”
She bent, first with a broken-backed degree of inconvenience, then with visible pain. From beneath the cash register, Theodosia lifted a cardboard box intended for canned green beans. From it, she hoisted a goodly leather satchel. Brown, it was bigger than the doctors’ black bags seen in movies and pharmaceutical ads. Clanking it atop her glass counter, she expertly opened its silver latch. Her eyes never abandoning mine, she now slid toward me one small saw.
Ash-wood handle, a fine blue Sheffield blade. Amputation-worthy, that heavy to the touch. And, along its cutting edge, one price tag still dangled from string. “Dollar-fifty,” she read aloud. “Then.”
This implement she whisked from me and shoved back, as the satchel dropped to the floor just beneath her stool. “Doctor’s name was Frederick Markus Petrie. He’d just turned thirty. Had been in town less than three weeks when Ordinary Seaman Sandy Woolsey, twenty-one, brought sickness out here to us. Morning after his homecoming feast, the boy begged to stay in bed till nine. By noon, admitted he was pretty sickly. First, the sailor’s older sisters tried treating him. They were proud girls, skilled in home arts. Glad, I guess, to finally lay eyes on the boy who’d been so far away so long.
“Before the Civil War, we were even more backward a little place, being out this far from Kewanee. And just the idea of a local boy getting to sail clear to China and home without being drowned, well, a certain kind of fame must’ve hooked onto that fellow. And hadn’t he brought his mother, to dress up her plain farm mantel, one of those ivory carvings with little worlds inside other little worlds and all shaped from one hunk of tusk? I have that in back, though it’s not cheap.”
“I’ve seen plenty of those. Please, go on.”
Now we seemed in this together, serious evening drawing down hard around us. Opening a box of kitchen matches, Theodosia lit one candle.
“Pretty soon,” she continued, “ ‘a little feverish’ turns more toward ‘diarrhea.’ And then their bringing another basin becomes ‘Maybe too much for us. Send for Doc Eaton.’ But old Eaton, he’d just retired, see? And there was only that recent graduate, so new he yet boarded with Hester Brinsley, and was still out looking for some rental of his own.
“They say the eldest Woolsey girl, which’d be Dorothea, found the boy doctor out this way, having just paid his first month’s rent on a little house not an eighth of a mile back toward the Coal Valley turnoff. Dorothea rushes in, says, ‘We’ve got something. At home, we tried and take care of it, but Sandy’s having something bad to where we . . .’ and fainted. She had raced out here so fast, see. Her horse, a nag, was lathered. So there stands our young Dr. Markus Petrie. He’d best get prepared. Him not even all-the-way unpacked. And having to replace old Doc Eaton that everybody loved. Because Eaton’d do everything you wanted and never tell another living soul about it. Girls in trouble used to troop out here on the train clear from Chicago, stay in Hester Brinsley’s pretty rooms, and she’d look in on them for the day before and after, till they appeared strong enough to climb back on that train alone. (Eaton did his little operations right at Brinsley’s boarding house after dark, leaving his buggy out of sight in Hester’s barn, we heard, with her getting a small cut, so to speak, out of every lost child.)
“But Eaton had lately grown too shaky to even fake acting able, being so up in years. And here’s this new boy, Petrie. They’d advised all the young fellows graduating from state med school to grow facial hair—that’d make a kid look older, so’s people would trust him more. Important, trust. Anyways, young Petrie, mustache and silly new goatee, helps the sailor’s sister rise up. He ties her horse behind his new-leased phaeton and a rental bay from Brinsley’s stable. Petrie walks in, and here is the Woolseys’ parlor strewn with fine red-and-gold silks that Sandy’s just brought home, cloth still tossed everywhere and . . . no, I don’t have those in back, since somebody careless left them in direct sun and they pretty much fell to pieces. But Petrie goes in the room, and there are basins set all round the iron bed, and the poor mother, burning up herself, is working hard, washing a naked boy, who’s embarrassed and, you can see he knows it, losing his life at both ends. This going to be too much for you?”
“Nothing is too much for me. Yet, I mean. And this? Is the . . . portrait of that very doctor, you say?”
“Didn’t say. Getting to that. But answer me this—you think you’re so smart—how did young Markus Petrie know it was cholera and from halfway cross the room? Hmm?”
I shook my head one sideways swipe. (Never contradict or upstage your teller. Besides, I hadn’t a clue.)
“Because in the bowls, mixing bowls and pans pressed into service to spare the home’s one good mattress, the doctor saw ‘rice stool.’ ”
“Which is . . .”
“Which is where the person has already been so emptied of food that nothing but what’s clear is left to come out, and here’s the cholera part: it’s only clear broth but with little white bits of dissolving intestines that look like rice and float just like rice.”
“A trip home from the Orient with rice stools.”
“That’s it. But, of course, what happened, the sailor was already near to dead, and his sisters and mother went soon after, and then it was the two neighboring farms downhill of their groundwater and all that scrubbing and suds the brave Woolsey women loosed on that poor boy’s leavings, then let seep into the soil and stream downhill. Back in Chicago, the disease was going wild, folks falling by the hundreds. Eighteen-forty-nine, nobody knew the word ‘bacteria.’ Pasteur still hardly more than a student, if my dates are right. Their sad idea of a cure? Mustard plasters, hot as you could stand, then ‘bleed’ the patient to calm him good. No, up Chicago way? The panic eventually got so bad, town fathers voted to pump in drinking water, not from that little latrine Chicago River downtown but from clear cold Lake Michigan. Officials were that desperate, and, for once, the bigwigs got it right. But they had money and city ways. Out here? Our folks, well, we only just had Petrie.
“That young doctor was so new among us he’d not made arrangements to get his laundry done. And yet already Markus was giving us whatever we were going to get of hope. All of us were strangers to him, all. Looking after mortally sick people you love, that is hard enough. (I should know.) But to get some address in writing that’s on a street you don’t know how to find, even in a town as tiny as La Verne, and to walk in there and discover another whole family puking and voiding in plain view?
“They were so grateful there was somebody to send for. And, when he did turn up, Markus was a fine looker, with a deep voice. Sober and polite and right out of an accredited Illinois school—well, it reassured. Little beard, such dark eyes. And with a plain way that out this far means real skill. No wonder the worship started! Even old Doc Eaton couldn’t have got such a sudden following. Old Eaton, see, people still tipped a hat to him downtown. Hadn’t he delivered most of the folks in sight? But they knew about his serving those family-way city girls, and about certain other mistakes he’d buried. Plus, there was a drug habit he got into real bad at the end. Strange, somebody like that waiting so late to find a vice. Like some delayed vacation for him to retire into. Old Eaton soon drifted into falling asleep while standing there mid-operation, hands’d fly up all of a sudden palsied, so the mayor and a committee had sent, just in time, for Petrie, fresh as paint out of university. Fourth in his class, too.
“But, even if Doc Petrie had come during a normal healthy season around here, he woulda been quite a standout. I mean, unmarried, fine-looking as still shows here, if in a darker-than-Swedish kind of way—but that would’ve been romantic to all these towheaded braided girls for miles hereabouts.
“He kept asking locals to please, please just call him Mark, but ‘doctor’ was a godly word by then. And those folks of ours that hadn’t yet come down with the cholera? Instead of hiding from Petrie, they took to bringing him fresh-dug beets from out their gardens and sending their daughters over with the food. Matchmaking! And here it was the middle of our terrible epidemic year. I guess it was superstition. Because the more folks got sick the healthier and taller did that boy look. He’d turn up at church, and, my mother’s mother told me, they clapped. Dr. Petrie, white shirt, black tie, black suit like you see here, he walked into the Lutheran chapel and the whole place, choir and sourpuss preacher and all, applauded. . . . It made him stay away, of course. Man never set foot in there again. And he’d only come into their sanctuary hoping to find a little support from On High, a little quiet, relief from farm folks that were turning gray and becoming a puddle at both ends. See, that’s what the cholera bug does to you, I guess. Liquefies. It’s awful catching. And the doctor was soon the only person brave or fool enough to duck under the orange quarantine ropes, ignoring warning signs he himself had nailed to the doors of those farmhouses worst hit.
“Locals were real glad Doc Petrie was up on the techniques of 1849 from our best state school. Taxpayer money well spent. But, listen, there were no techniques, except don’t wash your ricey basins in the river, where the poisons will drift, which was exactly what they went out and did, poor fools. And too soon the Mengers and the Hurleys, then the Hopwoods and the Mortensens, they all come down with it. ‘Come down,’ you hear me? Going back like this, I fall right into my grandmother’s voice. Now, after suchlike buildup, you might think there’s not much of a story to the rest of it. But what’s mainly inter-resting is such madness as grew up around him during the worst part of our plague. All La Verne left enough bread puddings and bushelled fruit outside his house to where he couldn’t open the front door of a morning. Had to go out around the back to see what gifts had him so locked in. Doc kept busy, writing off for help, him so new to the practice and out here in this throwback sickness. But most doctors elsewhere had their own hands full. Still, Petrie made newspaper suggestions that the Bugle printed and passed along. He listed do’s and don’ts, most of them a scared boy’s purest guesswork. Mainly meant to keep folks’ panic down. And, at the end, he added how important it was that people stick by each other through the worst. The doctor wrote how civilization depends on nobody going untended.
“And then Petrie ‘strongly suggested’ that families gather into bands to insure that no matter how bad it got somebody’d stay put and tend those left alive. And local tribes, especially those with farmland adjoining, they went along with him on this. And, oh, but that sure saved many a local. Later, they gave Doc Petrie all the credit. His idea: the Health Alliances, they were called, and that still holds. Nowadays, they’re mainly used for tornado-watch and swapping Christmas gifts. Community granges, like, but they’re still called the Petrie Alliances.
“Was a real warm June, that June, which was bad for spreading the cholera but good, you know, for how stuff grows in soil this black. Young girls brought him masses of zinnias, and they got into his house, and folks heard tell that more than one threw herself at him. What he did, who knows. And yet you kind of hope he at least tried something with a few of our better-looking ones that were spunky. They weren’t all peaches, trust me.
“Petrie would be home in his rental, hurting his hands with carbolic acid, trying to burn the infection off them, washing up, and shucking off his pants and throwing hot water and soap even over his good shoes, standing there alone wearing nothing but his shirttails, and more girls would come in. Folks swear that for weeks there were virgins turning up at all hours of the night. And their parents right aware of where the daughters’d gone and what for at this ungodly hour. Guess I can still hear them: ‘Now, daughter, don’t you be letting that Grace Cunningham get a jump on Doc ahead of you. Why, sister, when this is over, after all he’s done to help our county, he can stand for governor, sure. They say Boss Brinsley alone gave him two hundred-dollar gold pieces when their spoiled littlest girl pulled through. But brush back your hair off your face, why don’t you. Show those features. Grace Cunningham is not a patch on anybody pretty as you.’ Oh, but it was a pagan time, 1849, I swear to God.
“Now, this,” and here she awkwardly angled off the stool, finally scooping up the painting and clamping its lower edge against the glass counter between us. “This portrait of Petrie came to me, it’d be just five weeks back. Been hanging up in the public library on the square since our town fathers commissioned his portrait, eighteen and fifty.”
Theodosia finally placed into my hands the oil painting. His image was pulling away from old yellow pine stretchers still marked as coming from a shop in Cedar Rapids.
“This painting, see, was done from a daguerreotype they got his mother to send. Talented local lady painted it, one Miss Beech, a teacher who’d been at the church the few times he set foot in there before they applauded him off. He still kept introducing himself as Mark—maybe it was what his mother called him. But he’d got too important to ever be that casual around.
“Well, one day ’bout four weeks into the worst of it, he was out at the Brinsleys’ again (mighty demanding, the Brinsleys), and their little daughter they thought he’d saved and had paid him so well for saving, she was down and looking but poorly again. Petrie bends over her asleep, and shakes his head and says to her rich parents, ‘I just don’t like her color.’ And instead of agreeing or mumbling thanks, instead, both the Brinsleys point. Just point at him, saying, ‘What—her color? Pot comin’ in here callin’ our dear little kettle black!’ Folks claim he walked toward a mirror was hanging in her room, and when he saw it plain, him already sweating bad, they say young Markus threw up across the new rose-patterned wallpaper, like he’d been waiting for the permission of others’ noticing. Boy must’ve guessed already. He apologized for making a mess and at once excused himself and stepped into the hall so’s he could buggy home, clean up. At their fine front door with stained glass cut in it, those Brinsleys gave him a mighty wide berth and wouldn’t shake Petrie’s acid-black hand. Oh, no, not now. His mistake was in ever letting people see him sick. Especially the Brinsleys, born talking, every one.
“Soon, people said as how a native son so fine as Sandy Woolsey could not have brought this much badness down on us. No, more likely Petrie had. Look at your calendar. Didn’t it all turn up about a week or two after this standoffish young doctor did? And aren’t you always reading in the papers about certain firemen that set the fires themselves so they’ll get the headlines and the bonuses? Well? Local rumor added as how young Markus Petrie’s own case of the cholera—what with his having been around those many others—his degree of sick, it had to run you twelve to fifty times worse, way more potent than others’. Some said his ran up to seventy-five times more catching! And that’s why they, one by one, stopped leaving food, and now the girls were nowhere to be seen. And even the dying quit sending for Petrie. Which meant, since he lived out here most of three miles from town and so alone, nobody knew what all exactly was happening to him. Might could be getting stronger? Or going down toward worse? Did he have sufficient food, so forth, what with his being a bachelor and all? Well, let’s say the interest in him tapered right off. Even as the number of cases did. People said more than ever that he’d been the agent of it, spreading it amongst us, then trying to take credit for being so kind. New here, after all, and, in the end, what’d we really know about strangers? Coming in here like a rooster among our fine local white hens and turning girls’ heads.
“Finally, with no word, no sight of him, about ten days in, they found his horse broken loose and chewing the neighbor lady’s roses. That’s when our mayor that’d helped hire Petrie, he organized a ‘fact-finding expedition,’ the local paper called it. One of the wives packed a few sandwiches as a false reason for their visit. Petrie had at least put together the Health Alliances. You had to give the boy that. They found him in the back room of his house. He’d tied himself into his own bed with the last of his orange quarantine rope, hog-tied himself, owing to the shakes, maybe. Or could be just to keep himself from rushing off in search of others, at the end. All La Verne had hoped for a good young country doctor, and maybe that was his last wish, too.
“My guess is he’d tied himself not so much to keep from going for help, because who could have helped him? No, more because, even if you’ve lived your life alone, you want to at least perish within the sight and sound of other folks. Don’t you?
“So, once the local sick either started improving or went to white ash on the pyres they’d put out past the fairground to contain it—once the farm folks’ worst fear ended, and they’d unpinned his Petrie Alliance newspaper rules off their kitchen walls—they did what they’ll always do when they’ve forsaken somebody who dies helping them, someone they failed to honor while he was still alive. Why, the doctor looked different, now that their health was back. Boss Brinsley’s pet daughter had recovered, after all. And the child, if no one else did, recalled how the handsome doc’s house calls had saved her. So the Brinsleys held a late ceremony and put up the oil-portrait money, and in two months, why, they’d made a hero out of our abandoned Frederick Markus Petrie, M.D. Hung his picture in the library. And he became the new country doctor, the boy that’d singlehandedly saved most of 1849’s La Verne! That is who-all’s face you got ahold of there, young man.”
It’d grown so dark—even with her candle guttering—that I had to clutch his picture nearer. Canvas all but touched my nose. So I sniffed it then, front and back. Though the photographic image that had inspired the painting had perhaps been taken during graduation, young Petrie’s features already seemed to foresee some complex fate ahead. And yet his eyes looked half-willing to accept whatever medieval destiny awaited his modern medicine out here in these godforsaken wheat fields.
“But,” I asked a little too loud, “who authorized taking his portrait down? After what? A hundred and twenty-odd years? Why’d your town park him out here and order you to sell him?”
“ ’Cause nobody remembers anymore! Nobody but me and the daughter of the youngest of those Mortensens he saved. And even she claimed the library just couldn’t keep him, since that last remodel made the place real ‘contemporary.’ The young hotshot librarian phoned. Calls me Teddy, which is all they’ve ever thought to call me hereabouts. She explained how, with their new yellow walls and mirrors, young Petrie here, he sure looks ‘kinda gloomy.’ Her very words, son. Besides, his picture needs some restoring. So, well, here he is, on consignment-like. ‘For whatever he brings.’ Brings!
“Funny, I’m out here near the little house Doc paid his first two months’ rent on. They’ve shipped him right back to his old neighborhood where he hardly even got unpacked. But what does it smell like? ’Cause I admire you thought to nose that out. See, my sense of smell, I lost most of it to childhood scarlet fever. Was six months old, just so much cartilage. Those fever spikes rolled through me, messed me up pretty good, as you can see. So, not too much of a sniffer left. One sense shy of a load.”
I held it near my nose again. “The picture and Petrie, I guess, smell of tar and maybe day-old bacon grease, likely cooked over a wood fire. Dust and maybe linseed oil. Also, I swear, of Bactine! Funny, there’s something medicinal about it. Though this was surely painted months after they buried him.”
“Burned him, you mean. And all those odors still in there, huh? You don’t say.” Theodosia finally fell silent. Slouching as if exhausted by some marathon.
Then I risked it. Told her I didn’t suppose she’d willingly part with him, even considering his slightly flaking condition. But I did vow, hand in the air, that no caretaker would ever hold onto him longer or be surer not to let Markus and his story get lost the next time around.
I admitted, “All I have is twenty dollars cash. But, if you’ll trust me to send you a personal check, it won’t bounce, I swear.”
“Now you know his story, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“And after my giving you that? You figure I could take a penny for him? Why, that’d be like . . . like sellin’ some other human. No, it’s yours. He is. Was hoping you might notice it when you come in here hunting toys. Toys aren’t the half of it. They’re the way we want it to be, not how things turn out. And, well, you found it. But your smelling it’s what put you over the top, boy. Made me know you’d guard him pretty good. Might could you’ll someday even remember to talk about him. La Verne never deserved fine young Petrie here. Did not deserve him, alive or dead.”
I stared at his picture, then again at the lady armored in cricket-clicking watches. “You saw him,” she nodded. “Most my customers come ringing through that door like elephant herds hunting Depression glass. Right name for the stuff, the way it gets me down. Take him. In La Verne, if you act too kind or smart or interested in much, they’ll make you pay. And pay. Yeah, take him quick. ’Fore I need to hold him back behind the counter with me. Get, or else I’ll change my mind, boy. And not to worry—I’ve saved enough to where, in six months, there’ll be no more winters for Theodosia, who tends to fall on ice. Moving to San Diego. Seventy-two degrees year-round, they tell me. Now, skedaddle. Get him finally clear of us. Misery loves company, but help me not be selfish at the end! Go!”
So I lifted it and, flinching through her door chimes, yelled my thanks and ran it to the Jeep. Felt like a hostage rescue. With his frame propped in my passenger seat, I snapped the safety belt across him at a kindly angle that’d leave his dark eyes free.
And then, around midnight, in a Jeep full of junk from earlier, we achieved escape velocity. The night country smelled of growing corn. It seemed as though I was saving him from the town he’d saved, then paid for saving. Once we passed the Iowa line, we had moonlight all the way.
Until that night, toys had been my specialty. But, as I started guarding Petrie, I somehow put aside childish things. The homemade treasures that’ve attracted me since? They’re more about work than play. They are what my small collection is best known for. It now boasts six hundred and ten portraits of anonymous working American citizens, from 1710 to 1937. They are all shown on the job, in their aprons or welding goggles, manning their forges, minding their pharmacies, curating their pyramids of wholesale pumpkins. Some of these are masterpieces. Most were painted by artists just as unknown as their subjects.
His portrait still presides over my desk here. Even a hundred and seventy years after he died alone, the doctor’s presence feels half-healing. It seems we’ve recognized and befriended each other across time.
Money-wise, of course, he’s far from the collection’s most valuable item. But, in case of fire, I’d save him first.
Four decades into our cohabitation, I found a better frame for him. As I was transferring the painting, an old calling card slid out from under the wooden stretcher. Some librarian’s fine penmanship attested, “Dr. Frederick M. Petrie, b. 1819–d. 1849, saved town, cholera. Caught it.”
I’d never thought to Google him. But what first came alive onscreen? His original 1849 La Verne Bugle proposal for surviving a plague. Those neighborhood organizations he helped found are still in use, his bulletins yet considered a model of improvised public health. So I gladly give good young Petrie the last word:
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