Photo by Oluwaseyi Johnson on Unsplash
A boy from my old town messaged me on Facebook: “My dad is sick. Really sick.”
I told him to take him to the doctor.
He told me that his dad didn’t trust doctors, and the boy couldn’t drive since he was 15. Ambulances were too expensive, too.
So I asked, “Why’d you call me.”
“Aren’t we cousins or something?”
“We’re fifth cousins, if anything,” I said.
The boy said how I was from around those parts and understood those country people. I was the closest thing to a doctor that the boy’s father could trust.
I was a nurse.
The boy said that would have to do. With the promise of payment, I agreed to drive 1 hour and 45 minutes to examine the boy’s father. I’d give an expert opinion. With any luck, it was something minor, and I’d only diagnose one or both with hypochondria.
The boy and his father lived near the old mines. I drove past the mountains of boney piles pretending they were a natural part of the landscape that let me know I was almost there.
The house had faded green siding and a richly brown wooden porch. It went well with the surrounding forest.
The boy came out at the sound of me driving over the gravel. He waved and said my name as though we were old friends. Given his age, he was perhaps only just born around the time my family moved to the city.
My own father left the town to give my stepmother and I better lives. He grew tired of the simple minds, and the ghostly nature of a small town that was only getting smaller and smaller with every board over a door and every abandoned building. We moved to Wilkes-Barre when I was in middle school. A step up from the residential drive-thru we were born and raised. It was in Wilkes-Barre that my father and stepmother ran many lucrative businesses and sent me to school so that I could take over. I wasn’t much of a businessman. That’s why I became a nurse. For the most part, my father was an open-minded and compassionate man and never gave me too much grief for being a male nurse, but the word doctor was always on the tip of his tongue whenever we discussed what I was doing with my life. Guess that’s why I took the boy’s offer. I could be close to a doctor.
“You need to tell him you’re a doctor,” said the boy.
“I’m a nurse.”
“He can’t know that. He needs to think you’re a doctor.”
“That’s pretty illegal.”
“So’s the meth lab on the farm up the road. I’ll double your pay.”
The boy had the dilated eyes of dire need.
I said, “Don’t worry about doubling it. That would only make it worse. Take me to him.”
As I made my way to the man, I asked myself, is it a crime if I am helping someone? I told myself how Dr. Kovorkian was helping people, and he was a real doctor who still went to jail. I said to myself, I’m not trying to end anybody’s life. I’m trying to help someone help themselves.
I asked the boy if his dad was some Christian Scientist or just didn’t trust doctors.
The boy took a pause and said that his father thought he had been cursed by a witch.
“That’s different,” I said, “archaic.”
The boy told me his father had always been old-fashioned.
The boy’s father was not what I was expecting. He was not much older than me. I could picture the two of us on the same elementary school bus. He looked more ill than I thought he would. He had the pallor and sweat of near-death. It was something I’d had an uneasy amount of experience with. He breathed heavily, which couldn’t be entirely blamed on the man being a little overweight. It seemed like he wanted to say something, but only pants came out.
“Here’s a doctor, Dad.”
The words came, and they weren’t polite, “I’m not sick, for fuck’s sake! I am cursed!”
I got closer to the man in a pull-out mattress in a living room with yellow, shag carpeting resembling bile, asking about this curse.
He said, “It was Jezibaba.”
I said, “Jezibaba.”
He said, “Jezibaba. She came to me in my sleep and said she was going to curse me so that I’d die a slow and painful death.”
I had never heard the word Jezibaba, but it sounded Slovak. I knew little Slovak beyond swear words and “Jezis a Maria” that my father often said in frustration, which was the only Slovak he knew, learning it from his mother.
“When did this start?” I asked the boy in the privacy of the kitchen.
“The illness or the Jezibaba stuff?”
“What happened first?”
“He wasn’t feeling well last night. He fell asleep on the couch, and he woke me in the middle of the night, saying how Jezibaba had cursed him.”
We went back to his father, who had forgotten meeting me. When he saw me, he asked who the fuck I was.
“He’s a doctor,” said the boy, forcing his voice to sound patient.
The man said that doctors wear lab coats and stethoscopes. He looked at my jeans and my t-shirt and said, “You’re no doctor.”
“He’s a doctor, Dad.”
“No, he’s not!”
I took the boy aside again and said he’d have to just take him to the hospital. I would drive.
“There’s too much fight in him for that. His fight and flight responses work in tandem.”
I said, “He really needs a doctor.”
The boy just about had a light bulb appear above his head, and he flew up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” I called after him.
The boy said that for me to play the part, I must look it.
He came down with a toy stethoscope and a white bathrobe.
The robe smelled like a plastic tote accompanied by the whispering scent of a woman.
“Dad doesn’t know how to throw things away.”
The robe constricted, and the toy stethoscope didn’t fit around my neck. The boy grabbed a lanyard from his room and entwined it around the hard plastic of the red, yellow, and mostly blue stethoscope.
I asked the boy if the robe was his mother’s. He said she had left it behind when she moved out. I asked him where she was now. He told me Ohio. When I asked him if she knew what was going on, the boy said that he didn’t tell her. He didn’t want his mother to worry. I asked if she should be worried. The boy said, “I’m worried enough for her, me, and him.”
The man groaned.
We went to him.
“Look, we have a doctor here, Dad,” said the boy.
The man slowly, using all the strength he had, looked me up and down.
“Doctor,” said the man, “I’ve been cursed by a witch.”
“I’m sorry to hear,” I said.
“Jezibaba,” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said.
“Do you know magic?” asked the man.
I shook my head and said, “I don’t.
“Then how the hell can you help?” said the man.
“I want to,” I said.
“It will take more than want. I need someone who knows magic,” said the man. “You’re absolutely no good to me.”
I reminded myself that he was a gravely ill man suffering from delirium and God knows what else and that I wasn’t actually a doctor, but now I was feeling an inferiority with this task. I wasn’t even a good fake doctor.
I took the boy aside again. I asked if he had a new plan.
“I don’t,” said the boy.
I said jokingly, “A witch hat might do the trick.” I wanted to create some levity.
The boy’s face glowed, and he beamed as he said, “Yes!”
He ran upstairs and came down with a big witch’s hat he told me had been used as a decoration. “We used to put out witch hats for Halloween and Christmas trees in their place for Christmas.”
I put the hat on my head and tipped it. “Let’s do this.”
We went to the boy’s father.
“Dad, look! I found a witch-doctor! He’ll break the curse!”
The man said, “Break it and be quick!”
I put up my hands like I’d seen in movies and spoke pseudo-Latin like I’d seen in movies: many words and many waves. I knew I wasn’t breaking a curse so much as a code. I knew if I said the right made up things, he would let a real doctor help. But I was losing my train of thought, my nerve, and my understanding of what Latin sounded like, so I said the first thing that came to me, that dwelled within me with so many faded or dormant memories, “Jezis a Maria.”
The utterance brought a look of relief to the man. He appeared at peace, but still, he looked unwell. And here I was hoping it was psychosomatic.
“The curse has been broken, but you’ll still need to go to the hospital to get fluids.”
“I’m too weak to drive, witch-doctor,” said the man.
“I’ll drive,” I said.
We were putting him in the back of my car when he asked who I was. I still had on the witch hat, robe, and stethoscope. I said, “I’m a witch-doctor.”
“What’s your name?” the man asked.
I gave him my name. I had forgotten to make something up.
He said, “Ah, Kay’s boy.” He said I looked a lot like my father, but he was my mother’s cousin.
I said, “Yeah, I know.” Even though I didn’t know he was related to me through my mother. I thought he was a distant relation through my father.
My old house was on the way to the hospital. It appeared to be kept in good order. It was around Halloween, and the front yard had a fake corpse hanging from the big tree, and in the center of the front yard was a ship with skeletons in it. I was glad the mansion was being taken care of.
I waited with the boy as the man was taken straight from registration to a hospital room. We sat in the room and waited for his blood to be drawn.
“You don’t have to stay here,” the boy said.
“How will you get home?” It was a school night.
“I’m not going home until my dad can go home,” he said.
“Will you at least tell your mom?” I asked.
“If I wanted my mom to be here, she would be here.” He gave me two $100 bills and thanked me for my time.
“How do you have this kind of cash, kid?”
“Entrepreneurial spirit,” said the boy. He put a hand in his pocket. I feared it would be drugs, but he took out a business card for a landscaping business.
“Landscaping?”
“I can drive a lawnmower,” said the boy, “and I’m really good at driving a lawnmower.”
He looked so proud as he said. I tried to smile without looking like I was making fun of him.
I handed him back one of the hundreds. “You have a long night ahead of you.”
He nodded and pocketed the hundred with his business card.
I went the long way back to Wilkes-Barre, driving through the old town. Most of main street was boarded up, but there was one old clothing store that had been closed since the owner died, years ago. Back when I was still in diapers. The store sat in stasis. The old mannequins still wore the unused, vintage clothes that would likely turn to dust from one touch. The family hadn’t the heart to sell it or get rid of it. They had thought about an indoor yard sale once, but the owner’s widower and son took one sniff of the musk created by the garments and sealed it all away before leaving the town forever. The store was a relic showing the owner was ever there. The pink sign above the awning read “Kay’s Shoppe.”
The toy stethoscope was still around her son’s neck as he drove by.
Ashley Bach is currently pursuing her MFA at Temple University. Her fiction has appeared in Eunoia Review, Maudlin House, and Fiction Attic Press.