...

 

HEALER’S LEGEND

It began simple enough, in the afternoon, after the miners who’d made it out of the collapse were done enough for the day. They’d threaded their way as soon as they could, boots still covered in the muck of where they dug, enough to be scolded by Madam herself as they walked into the Saucy Puss.
“Scrape your boots by the door!” she yelled. “Honestly, I got that boot scraper for this!” She thwacked the waiter and he rolled his eyes, grabbing a towel. He wiped up the muddy boot tracks from the ground and was just finished when Mac Fianna, an old gaunt miner, walked in past him, re-muddying the walkway.
“Honestly!” Madam said again. “I should just let this place rot, the way you people won’t keep it clean.”
Mac seemed about to say something, but just before the words formed on his lips, a gurgling cough overtook him. The other miners grabbed his back and hit it, and a small piece of something dark and black, like the coal in the mines sputtered onto the floor.
“Rank and vile,” said the waiter, as he rolled his eyes again and cleaned up the dark sputum. Mac turned towards the bar, lifted his finger, and began to cough again. He doubled over, wincing with the pain of the coughing.
By the usual circumstance of him coming in for an afternoon whisky, at that moment the plump, handle-bar mustache bearing, pleasantly plainly clothed Doctor of the town entered the saloon. Doctor Samuel Thompson, whose office bore licensing from Medical College of South Carolina, surveyed the scene quickly. He nodded to one of the miners, and together they placed their arms quickly around Mac’s waist.
“My drink,” Mac said, as they dragged him out of the saloon to the doctor’s office. “I haven’t had my drink.”
“Me either,” said Doc Sam. “But first things first. We’ have to find out what’s going on with you.”
The miner helped the doctor place Mac on the examination table, tipped his hat and then left.
“Obliged,” said Doc Sam.
Then he took out his stethoscope. The ear tips lodged firmly in place, he traced the chest piece over Mac’s body. He made a clicking sound with his tongue. Mac stared forwards, coughed again, and spit on the floor.
“There’s something there alright,” said the doctor. “And I do have a spitoon.”
Doc Sam motioned to the door, where a golden receptacle waited. Mac started to say something but he hacked and coughed again, and more saliva and sickness fell to the ground, staining the oak boards of the doctor’s office.
“Black lung,” the doctor said.
“Everyone has a black lung,” said Mac, finally finding his voice. Doctor Thompson nodded, moving his stethoscope down from his ears. He turned to the small medicine cabinet behind his desk. It took him a moment, but he drew a key out of his vest’s left breast pocket, and carefully unlocked the cabinet. He took a small bottle of whiskey, a reserve of Healer’s Legend, and took a sip himself. He bit his lip as he took in the draught, almost expectorating himself.
Carefully wiping off the lips of the glass bottle, he handed it to Mac. Mac took a quick slug.
“Woo!” he said. “That’ll warm you up on a cold night when you ain’t got a partner.”
Mac took another slug, then handed the whiskey back to the doctor. Sam carefully wiped the lip of the glass off again. He dipped a rag in a cleaning solution, a mix of even more potent alcohol he mostly kept for treating small wounds and scrapes. He cleaned the glass a second time, then took another sip of his own.
“Listen, Mac,” Sam started to say. But Mac held up his hands.
“I’ve heard doctors,” Mac said. “And you aren’t gonna tell me anything different. It’s not like you know much anyway, not like you can stop a death that’s happening in front of you.”
“I can try,” said the doctor. “Listen I don’t know what happened to you back East, but–”
“But nothing,” said Mac. “That life, the one with the comfortable estate, the wife, the child…” Mac could barely say the word child. He winked his eyes and turned away from the doctor, who pointedly turned away from Mac. A small tear, involuntary, a little moisture made it’s way out of Mac’s eye down onto the newly stained floorboards. “The child and all… All that is gone. This is a place to get lost, out here.”
“But you don’t have to die preternaturally,” said Doc Sam.
“Everything’s preternatural, Doc,” said Mac. “Naturally it’s all predetermined. Predator natural. If I die, I die.”
“You don’t have to, Mac!” The Doctor pressed his hand against Mac’s chest, knocking him back.
“Hey, sick man,” said Sam. “You will stay that way if you don’t listen to me…”
Mac shook his head. He coughed again, grabbing his throat like a prima donna singing Violetta in La Traviata.
“Listen to me,” the doctor said. He turned away from Mac again, and grabbed a notepad from his desk. He began scribbling something on it. “You’re right we all go some time. Doesn’t mean we have to invite death in just because you got black lung. Go see Clara over the general store, get this paregoric and ipecac. If you can’t pay I’ll cover it.”
“Sure thing,” said Mac. He took the paper from the doctor and looked down at this. “Say, I can’t read this.”
“That’s a power comes from my medical training. Only me and Clara know what it means, so you can’t just try and get whatever you want from her. It’s always the cocaine too.”
“Well Doc, I do thank you for helping today,” Mac said, sliding off of the examination table. “I’ll certainly go and get this medicine.”
“Just come in if you have any trouble,” said the doctor. “Who else am I going to clean out at poker every thursday night?”
Mac laughed. He started to say something, but began coughing again. Close now to the door, he spit the black substance into the spittoon. With a wave, he walked out into the street.
From inside his office, Doc Sam watched as Mac let the prescription fall to the ground. A rogue wind blew through the town, taking the note with it. For his part, Mac looked towards the general store, back to the doctors office, then to the Saucy Puss. Making a clear choice, he walked straight out of town.

Mac spent the night shivering in his tent, unable to sleep. He ran too hot as he sat for hours by the small remnants of his smoldering fire, over which an almost full stew stood ready to be eaten at any time. Every few hours he tried a spoonful, but this led to an entirely new round of coughing.
When he tried to lay down in his tent, to cover up in his bag and blanket, he felt entirely too cold. So he played hot and cold, moving from tent to fire and back from fire into his tent again, kicking and turning and coughing up the black lung all the way.
Around dawn,a cough erupted from his lips again. More than a cough. The small amount of stew he’d managed to choke down erupted all down his shirt.
“I have to do something,” he said, as he tore off his shirt and headed towards the river. As he tried to wash the phlegm and vomit off his shirt, his head turned downstream. He watched as small specks of night quite gold played with the early morning light. Pyrite. When he’d first gotten to town from the east he’d been fooled, like so many greenhorns, the specks appearing to reveal a river full of gold. The forty-niners back then often told new searchers after wealth to take a pan of the river-gold back to town and register it.
Despite coughing again, flecks of spit still tinged with blackness dropping into the water, Mac laughed. Recently he’d done the same thing to a hopeful greenhorn, raced back to the Saucy Puss, and heard all about the new miner’s trying to register fool’s gold in the bank.
He’d slapped the greenhorn’s back and bought him a drink, more than any of the niners ever did when they broke in new prospector’s five years ago.
It hurt for Mac to continue to laugh. Instead, he finished washing off his shirt and started to wring all of the water out of it. He twisted it up into a coil and wrung it out. Then he wrung it out again. A shiver wind blew through the trees, and dewdrops fell off the nearby sweetgrass. A tiny squeaky voice in the distance called “chi-ca-go, chi-ca-go” then changed and suddenly the song was a flute played sweetly among nature. Frog croaks followed.
“That’s night frogs,” said Mac as he scanned his surroundings. There, at the top of the second tallest tree of this river-grove, sat the prodigious bird producing all of these sounds. Mac groaned. “Mockingbird. Typical.”
Mac redressed, putting his mostly dry shirt back on his back. He shivered with the remnant of the water, and then took some time, hands trembling, putting on his trail coat. He took a quick look around his small river-plot, and then mounted his burro.
It took him several attempts to mount the beast, which quietly waited, chewing on the grasses around the camp. Finally, after the third attempt, Mac lifted himself up onto the burro’s black back. He stared up into the mountains, towards two tall and mountainous peaks that pierced the sky like the saw sharp and serrated teeth of a cougar. The sky was flesh and the peaks biting into the gray-blue of the early day.
“La Bruja,” Mac muttered, slapping his ass on its ass, spurring it onwards up the mountainous trail. He continued to mumble “must get to La Bruja, la bruja…. Bitch… witch… Bruja…”.
As it clopped along the trail, only Mac’s murmuring and the burro’s occasional snorts could be heard, the songbirds all having taken wing on the early morning air and left to better climes. Every twenty minutes or so, as the trees got a little thinner, the forest got to be a little further away down the trail, Mac stopped and coughed or vomited again, black spew after black spew falling behind him, like a mucus trail left behind. Any tracker could easily follow it to his hacking coughing body, slumping as he rode onwards and upwards, almost sliding off the burro every so often.

Hours passed. Mac rode higher and higher up through the mountain range. As he rode upwards, the very shape of the mountain itself seemed to become like the teeth of a predator. Crags and jagged, loose rocks surrounded him, perhaps shaped by wind or small imperceptible movements of the earth. At any moment the rocks might close down and reveal themselves to be the bone marrow incisors of some gigantic beast.
Beneath his feet, rocks tumbled down now and then, slip-sliding away. He grabbed back onto his beast of burden as it wound its way further up through the mountains.
The call of a coyote, long and drawn-out, echoed across the vast distances of the prairies below, rebounding off the walls of small canyons.
Here and there, Mac dipped between awareness and a dream state. He reached the pinnacle of the spire peaks and then began a journey back downwards, winding around a small deer path. This path was not without evidence of human activity; in the sand, there were several sets of human feet going all directions, mainly forward, mainly onwards the way Mac wended. The footprints laid out a path onwards. Mac pressed on that way.
Still mumbling, still murmuring, Mac kept repeating: "La Bruja, la Bruja, bitch witch. Got to get to La Bruja. I won't die tonight.”
He turned around on his burro. He coughed, spat out more black bile, and clambored back around to right himself, carefully sitting forward in his saddle.
Finally, a long wooden bridge, suspended as if hanging right in the air but tied together by four poles on either side of a large chasm, came into view. The logs were rickety, some out of place, and Mack took some effort in dismounting his burro, tying it to one of those posts, and beginning to cross the bridge.
Two or three steps forward, then one step back, he held his stomach in pain, coughing and spitting off into the vast distances below. After more steps, he stepped almost directly through one of the gaps in the bridge. He avoided falling, teetering backwards and holding his hands out wildly before grabbing the fraying, graying rope that tied the whole thing together. But the bridge began to swing back and forth. With some violence.
The wind pushed the construction to swing harder as Mac fell to his knees, clawing his way forward, almost climbing up the bridge as if it was a ladder. Moment by moment, what seemed like hours were only split seconds, and soon he found himself on the other edge. He’d finally found himself there at the door to La Bruja’s cave.
There, the dark door painted with warding eyes, warning and warding with red flame-like glares that resembled some mystic monster peering out of a cave, confronted him. A large, five-paneled wooden door, painted long ago and nearly repainted with a flush of blood, looking so much as the mark of lamb's blood on the doorpost at Passover.
Coughing and doubled over, still retching, Mac knocked on the door and called out "La Bruja" before collapsing forward just as the portal opened.
La Bruja, a thin woman with a small mustache of tiny fibers looked down at the man at her doorstep. She was swaddled in a blanket of intricate pattern, something of stars and whirling logs with arms bent outwards, and a series of red crosses arranged in a just so pattern almost like a spider’s web. Her face was wrinkled, dark grooves in an ancient tree, and she blinked to see the man stretched out before her.
She whistled and a young woman arrived, silently, and began to drag the body into the cave. This woman looked like La Bruja, only a younger version, as if those lines of wisdom on the older woman had been reversed, had been traced back through time, all cruelties and sadnesses and even dimples of happiness pushed back to their origins. Her smooth whistle skin, like alabaster or the white reflection of a full moon contrasted against the leathery darkness of the old woman’s own body.
Mac awoke on a small table cut out of the rock of the cave. La Bruja stuck a spoonful of a foul substance into Mac’s mouth and Mac began to cough, to sputter, to choke. He spit out more and more of the vile black stuff that had lodged within him.
Again La Bruja whistled for the younger woman. That woman arrived, her hands pressing a cold pack against Mac’s face. He murmured something, not a word known to this world, something like thank you. Her delicate fingers pressed this cold packed bag of herbs across his face, then across his chest.
La Bruja fussed over a small cauldron. She lit a stick on fire and placed it in a small alcove of the cave, next to a burning torch. A scent like lavender washed over the entirety of the cave. The young woman nodded, still mute, and sat down recessed somewhere in back of the cave.
“Voy a sacar la mala sangre con este puñal,” the old woman said, drawing a long dagger more akin to a short sword than a knife from somewhere on her person. Mac sat up at seeing the knife, but the old woman pressed him back down. She ran her wrinkled, bony hands over his face, and then whispered, "Por supuesto, un bobo como tú podría morir”.
With a certain strength, she held down Mac’s chest with one hand and then plunged her dagger into his chest, next to his heart. She made a large, long incision, but did not cut far into the skin.
“Estoy sacando la mala sangre y la tristeza de tu pasado,” she said. Her hands then pressed a piece of flesh open, so you could see the raw granulated tissue. Mac bit his tongue as he glanced down. The open wound was ridges and bumps of red and white flesh, blood pooling between each mound.
“Mala Sangre,” the younger woman echoed. She brought over a bottle of Cognac, Fil d’Or de Rumpel, an imported bottle from before the war. She carefully poured a small portion of the bottle into a snifter, and forced it into Mac’s mouth. He swallowed, almost spitting the alcohol back out as he did, nearly coughing before the liquor went down.
La Bruja meanwhile worked over his wound, plucking a needle from behind her ear. She sewed at first with nothing, an invisible thread, above the wound. Then, she pierced her needle directly into Mac’s skin, and threaded a small wire across the wound in a criss-cross pattern, closing it back up. Mac bit down on his tongue again, spit out a bit of blood and Cognac, and closed his eyes.
La Bruja kissed the sewn together wound and said “Ha terminado.” She licked her fingers together and the younger woman returned back to the dark recesses of the cave, only to come out in mere moments with a small satchell.
“Listen, gringo, you take this salve, si? You take exactly one finger of it per day. Uno. Uno. Dilo conmigo. Uno!”
She held up one finger. Mac held up one finger.
“Uno,” he said.
“One,” the old woman repeated. “One per day. No more no less. You’ll be fine in two weeks.”
“I do feel a little better already,” said Mac, undercut by his immediate hacking and coughing, and throwing up a bit more of the black stuff onto the ground.
“¡Santo cielo! ¡Maldita sea la hora en que entró este inútil! ¡Niña, ven aquí y limpia esta porquería ahora mismo!" La Bruja whisked herself away, now back into the dark and shadowing corners of the cave herself. In those dark recesses, as Mac struggled up, he could see that the woman sat on a chair made from scavenged wood, so that the entire things looked like a throne of brambles and wild leaves.
The young woman began cleaning up his bile. Mac dug in his pocket, found a greenback, and left it on the table. He bent down at that strange painted-face door and collected his hat. He turned to bow to La Bruja once more, but the inside of the cave became dim. He could see nothing inside anymore except a small fire at one end, and an even smaller fire stoked in a pipe that the old woman had lately lit.
As he turned to cross back over the bridge, he heard a flurry of furious words in spanish, lowly spoken by the old woman as she sat in her cave.
It went on an on, like a train picking up speed at a station. As he rode away, Mac heard something like:
“Estos malditos gringos, siempre arrastrándose hasta mi puerta con sus cuerpos maltrechos, como si les placiera el sufrimiento. Mi niña, algún día tendrás que lidiar con estos inútiles, estos estúpidos, estos maricones, que prefieren arrastrarse aquí y ahorrarse unos centavos antes que ir al apuesto Doctor Sam Thompson. Si yo empleara mis hechizos para asuntos de amor... oh, sería una bruja formidable para un médico como él.”
He coughed his way back down from the Bruja, all the way into his tent, where he wrapped himself up in his blanket, the warm winter one. He stuck the salve beneath his pillow and drifted into a restless sleep, tossing and turning so much that in the morning when he finally awoke, the sun far too high in the sky for it to really be morning anymore, he found he’d rolled right out of his bed over into the ash of the previous night’s fire. He inhaled, then dug under his pillow to find the salve.
As instructed he placed one small line of the salve against the newly created wound. It felt cool and light to the touch, and smelled of mint. He went about his morning ablutions, and by noon could sit up and choke down some of his long-leftover stew.

The next day, he would walk around more. He did not feel the need to be so close to the river, to his tent, to the hole he’d dug for his waste. By the third day he was able to lightly pan in the nearby river.
“I feel better,” he said as he inspected his pan, finding only pyrite. “That gets me to thinking…” He let his thought sit there in the wind, not announcing it until much later. As he sat by the fire, cooking his dinner of a small fish caught when he noticed it trapped beneath a log, scooped out of the water as if by a bear or some passing bird of prey, he finally said as much to the dead fish as to his nearby burro, “if the salve she gave me works so well, if I were to double it up I would get even better even quicker.”
“Yes, that’ll do,” he laughed. “It’s not like these healers know everything. It’s a simple principle really.” He laughed well into the night, taking from time to time a sip of his own moonshine, a simple alcohol purchased some time before from a passing family of pioneers. He’d warned them to turn a different way and avoid La Bruja, and not to follow the path the Donner’s had some time before.
Drunk and laughing, he fell into his dreams. The next morning, as the mockingbird began to execute a series of calls of other birds, still sitting in its place in the second tallest tree, Mac woke up and grabbed for the salve. He drew it out from under his pillow and carefully examined the bag. He dipped in one finger, and then another. The medicine cooled against his skin, and he set out for a day’s trek to a nearby vein.
“Oh I’m feeling really much better,” he said. Then he would cough, shrug at the cough, and whistle again. “I really am much better and returning to my work.”
The next day he reasoned, “if two fingers make me feel this much better, then three will return my health even faster.”
That night, after finishing his dinner, he hacked up a ball of black bile the size of a coal chunk itself. Except for the mucus, spit, and saliva on this ball of refuse, it might even have been mistaken for the burning fuel.
“That’s nothing,” Mac said, and the next morning he drew four fingers of salve across the wound. Checking his supplies then, he quickly gathered his backpack, secured his belongings, and spurred his burro down into Ruddy Creek, following the natural pathway that the creek itself wove as it poured forth from the mountains and became the steady trickly that sustained life in that small and dusty desert village.
Doc Sam was waiting for him when he got to town. The docs clean white boots tapped on the wooden sidewalk next to the clinic.
“I don’t wanna hear it doc, I am just here for some supplies,” said Mac.
“Mac,” Sam said, “you can’t go on like this. I hear you went to La Bruja?”
“How’d you find out? There was no one else up there.”
“Two things, Mac, you know them. Nothing talkier than the winds across these plains, and nothing spreads faster than information.”
“It’s my life doc,” Mac said.
“Sure,” said the doctor, “but that doesn’t give you a right to end it.”
“You’re just mad I found an alternative to your sterile dead sepulchre of your clinic.”
“Sepulchre?” Doc Sam said, hid hand to his face, massaging his chin.
“I wasn’t always a Miner, Doc. I been educated. I met Poe once.”
“I don’t know who that is, but if you don’t go get real medicine you’ll die.” Doctor Sam Thompson stamped his foot down on the sidewalk. Mac started to say something, started to rebut the argument, but another coughing fit overtook him, bending him over, and he had to hold his stomach in with his hands just to remain upright. “See what I mean?”
“Only medicine I need is some drink from the Saucy Puss and some food from the general store. Now Doctor, if you don’t mind.” With a flick of his wrist, Mac gestured for the doctor to return to his office. Mac pointedly looked away from the doctor, heading painful though it was to the saloon.
“You’re not gonna spit on my floor again, are you Mac?” asked the Mada.
“No ma’am,” said Mac. “I am all better.” He swallowed back a little bit of Bile. “La Bruja can work wonders.”
“La Bruja?” Doc Sam wondered out loud. Rather than complying with Mac’s instructions he’d followed the man, and stood outside the saloon doors, peering through the cracks into the dusty bar room. He turned away, ready to return to his work. But his turning was too fast, too sharp, and he nearly knocked into the preacher.
“La Bruja?” the Preacher asked.
“That’s what he said. Wouldn’t take laudanum and science but he’d go up to some wild mountain woman.”
“ And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?” the Preacher said.
“Preach, that ain’t it. I’m in health right now and I would take a day should I need it. I wouldn’t go wandering into the woods in hopes some magic sprite popped out and gave me a placebo.”
“Placebo Domino in regione vivorum?”
“Exactly, Preach.” The doctor kicked the dirt in front of the saloon. “These simple people lost all sense they came out here, even though all they have is proper modern science. The railway, the telegraph, the opium for pain. Yet they cling to these old ways.”
“Some old ways seem worth it,” the Preacher said, nodding his head back towards the church. “But even so, it is true we are commanded against sorcery, and this Bruja seems that.”
“Sorcery? Preacher, you got some problems if you think magic is real.”
“But it is,” Preacher said. “Miracles and faith require–”
“Preach, I’m as good a Christian as any Doctor who took his hippocratic oath in these territories, but it always seemed to me the old stuff was from before we had science. A combination of Christ and rationality, that understands a metaphor...”
“Either way, this Bruja remains a problem.”
“True,” said Doc Sam. “I suppose I will have words with her next time she’s in town.”

Despite his stated recovery, Mac continued to from time to time to expel a serious amount of this black and dark substance. Over the next several days, a pattern emerged where Mac would finish his work, head to town, and seem fine as he sipped a beer or two and played poker. But then it would all become too much and he would begin to double over.
Mainly, he would spit in the brass spittoon that sat on the table before him, but each day there came a point where he could not hold himself and he spewed all over the table, all over the floor, and once, all over the poor waiter—at which point he was kicked out of the Saucy Puss for a week.
“Mac, get out, you're barred for a week,” Madam said.
In the meantime, the doctor hoped to find the old woman, to come close to a confrontation with her. He looked up from his work, distracted every time a wagon rolled into town. He kept looking out towards the mountains, frowning. One woman he worked on complained to him that he gripped her arm far too tightly as he injected her with a dose of morphine. She complained until the dosage arrived in her system and the doctor wiped his hands.
“Never fear Mrs. Emmet, this dosage should help you with your menstrual hysteria.”
But the witch woman never did arrive in town.
“I’ll have to do something about this,” the doctor said. “I’ll have to talk to her. Can’t have superstition running through this town when good properly researched medicine will do.”
Doc Sam saddled up his horse, and turning to the preacher, let him know he would be back, hopefully within a day or so. He gave the religious leader the key to his clinic and clear instructions that not everyone's problems would be solved with a tipple of Healer’s Legend—only triage needed to happen while the good doctor was away.
As he rode out through the dust of the desert towards the mountain's edge, the doctor watched small mammals begin to run ahead of him. He watched as a circling hawk made a dive and grabbed a vole, tearing it up in the air; he watched as kingfishers waited until it was time to snap up a fish. They struck suddenly, snapping down into the water all of a sudden moment.
The loud and rattling cry of different birds, the distant lowing of herds of cattle, the growling of foxes and coyotes, and perhaps even the deep rumble of a bear—plodding along somewhere within the mountain forest— all of this came to his ears as he crossed out of the desert into the mountainous landscape where trees began to swirl all around him, rising up like waves in a great green sea.
He meant to turn up the path towards La Bruja, but he found a diseased and possibly dying Mac, nestled next to the river, not too far from that pathway.
Mac's tent was there, with his burro sniffing around the area. The animal continued grazing, chomping up whatever small food it might find on the ground.
“Hey Mac,” Doc Sam called out.
Mac began coughing, calling out, crying guttural cries of anguish within his tent. Doc Sam descended from his horse and quickly gave the burro a carrot before kneeling down to enter into Mac's tent.
"You see, this is exactly what I meant," said the doctor. "You need to take some medicine, and you need to take it right now."
Mac tried to say something, but he began to cough up that black and vile substance all over himself, so that like an oil derrick, the dark things within him spilled all over his face.
"You old hands, just stubborn," said Doc Sam. “I’m like a wife they way I care for you all when you won’t listen to me.”
He dug into his medicine bag and pulled out a cloth, wiping away the grime from Mac's face. He pressed another cloth into the river and laid that watery cloth over the miner's head. He took out his stethoscope and once again examined the man, pulling his shirt off and noticing the incisions that the witch woman had made, groaning and saying lightly as he clicked his teeth: "You know, all of this was for a show. No one needed to cut into you to get it out. We are scientists now. Weare not bloodletters from some backwoods barbaric Middle-Aged death factory. What would you prefer?"
Mac said nothing at all but pushed the doctor away.
His hands tried to grab the doctor, trying to push the medicaway. The doctor faltered, but calmly and slowly he eased each of Mac's arms to the side. He forced a small mixture, properly made and labeled at the General Store—some combination of ipecac and opium—into the miner's mouth.
Mac passed out in the middle of objecting to this, in the middle of trying to spit out more of the bile, and the doctor carefully wiped up all of the refuse around the camp.
He took his time cleaning out the vomit that was making a circle. It had been spit all over the ground, so much that it looked like some protection circle of someone summoning a demon.
Doc Sam buried the turned-over stew, swept away what he could, took his time in feeding the burro, let ashes return to their proper place within the pit of the campfire, reoriented and righted the stew pot, and once Mac's place was back in proper order, the doctor picked him up, threw him on the back of his burro, and dragged him unconscious back into town.
Preacher, standing in front of the good doctor's clinic, was in the middle of giving out a small sip of whiskey to a parishioner. Doc Sam looked at the preacher and said, "What did I tell you?"
The preacher said, "People like to get healed if they think it's fun. I thought you were going to La Bruja?"
Doc nodded and said, "I didn't get that far. I found Mac here nearly passed out. I will have to attend to him in my clinic for a matter of days. If you see her, tell her I want to talk to her."
The preacher said, "We don't really talk. The only time I saw her was when her mother passed, and she and that young girl brought the body down into the town to be buried. Staring into that body, it didn't even seem so much like it had ever held a human soul, but something like a vessel, more like a bowl to hold the spirit of a human than a body tied to the dual parts of our physical existence and metaphysical wholeness. It was like a corruption of the revived bones in the valley in Ezekiel thirty-seven."
"I'll have to think about that later. For now, I must engage in my own spiritual battle with this most stubborn of men, and I will heal him whether he wants it or not." The doctor nodded, considering, and motioned for the preacher to open the door.
The preacher nodded approvingly and began to shut the door. The doctor called him back.
"I'll take my healer's ledger back if you please," he said. "Should you wish to share some alcohol after I have finished saving this man's life, we can split some at the saloon."
The preacher grinned and tossed the bottle back to the doctor, who just barely caught it, and set it down on his desk in a practiced play-actor like fashion. He overly exaggerated his gentle movements in lightly letting the bottle touch back to his oaken desk.
"I don't know why I think I'll ever get away with it," the preacher said.
Doc Sam said, "Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler; whoever is led astray by them is not wise."
Murmuring under his breath as he closed the door, the preacher said, "To be wise, you have to make mistakes first. My only mistake ever was–”
“--Being your friend,” Doc Sam finished. “Now go, I have work to do.” The Doctor turned back to his patient, and began murmuring to himself. He grabbed a pad from his desk and began to write down everything he saw, carefully scratching out each observation in that almost illegible handwriting.

It was later in the evening when La Bruja rolled into town. Doc Sam was hard at work looking at some of the blood in his dusty microscope. He cursed the cost and expense of even bringing that item out here. The blood seemed to clot beneath the lens of the device.
“See,” he told himself, “if I was back east I could use a colleges device for this study, but I wanted to experience life on the borderlands.” Not for the first time, he said, “and the steak was better back there too. I could go a Beasley’s Beef and Potato Meal around now.”
The doctor almost didn’t notice her, walking into town preceded by the younger woman, who seemed to be the spitting image of La Bruja. Decked out for town, La Bruja now wore a fine red and black satin dress. She held a coin purse in her hands, clinking as she walked. Her final accent, a matching red mantilla. The last time the people of Ruddy Creek had seen her wearing this outfit was at the funeral of her mother, who everyone at the time remarked looked so very much like her that they could be doubles of each other except for the wrinkles of age the older, passed woman wore proudly on her skin.
She walked daintily, as if her very feet didn't even land on the ground so much as glided, the ground itself not daring to stain even their very souls. By chance he looked up, considering the strange and splotchy movement he saw within the blood, something like a fractal pattern bubbling up.
“This is beyond bile,” the doctor considered. As he stared out the window he saw La Bruja passing. He leaned out his small clinic door and shouted.
“Hey! You there! Come here!” he said. La Bruja paid him no mind, and neither did her the younger woman, that young apparition of La Bruja herself. They continued to stride towards the general store, the older woman muttering something under her breath, in Spanish, as she counted out small coins one by one into a small purple paisley coin purse. She snapped it closed.
Doctor Sam left his clinic door open and crossed in front of the old woman. He waved his hand.
“Hey!” he said. “I am talking to you, I need to say something.”
“Vale,” she said. She stopped, her hands on her hips, her eyebrows arched. The younger woman stopped as well, but she was waved off, onwards to complete her shopping. “What is it Don Thompson?”
“I need you to stop practicing your folk medicine on the people of this town. You’re hurting them,” said the Doctor. “And my name’s Sam, not Don.”
"Lo siento, Don Thompson, pero he proporcionado un servicio. Hago lo mismo que usted, solo que de formas diferentes; hay espacio para ambos." She moved to walk away from him, yet the doctor stepped in front of her again. He grabbed her wrist.
The people walking by stopped as well. No one before had taken a hand and reached out to grab the woman. The younger woman, in the midst of stepping through the green door into the general store, stopped. As if all on swivels, pulled by some unseen thread, everyone in the street turned to look a the Doctor and the Bruja. Heads swiveled so fast they seemed about to twist around themselves, like the heads of owls.
Like an owl himself, Doc Sam asked “Who do you think you are? This is a modern town and requires modern medicine, not some supernatural foolishness,”
“Lo siento again, Senor,” La Bruja said, “but I am a doctor too. I have been taught by Lidia and she was taught by Don Marconi, and he received the knowledge from the Nahuatl. Just because my knowledge isn’t of your scientists does not mean it is incorrect. No hay cosa más imposible, excepto lo que es pasado, que lo imposible posible.”
“Still, it’s not right for you to give aid to my patients.”
“What patient?”
“Mac Fianna,” Doc Sam said. “He came back from seeking you and I found him vomiting more and more.
“Then let me examine him as well,” she said. Without waiting for his leave, she picked up her skirts and trod through the dirt and dust of Ruddy Creek. She walked right through his open clinic door, set her fancy lace headcovering down on his desk, and began to work over Mac with her hands. Doc Sam followed her in, holding his hand up to object, but she made tutting and clicking sounds as she inspected the body of the barely conscious Mac Fianna.
“Ah, Senor, this is your problem,” she said. She pointed one long, bony, wrinkled finger at a trail of slime rubbed down Mac’s chest. “Despite my instructions, he has been using more and more of my medicine. He will run out and he is not taking the time to heal. He is working for a quick fix.”
“I’ll bet,” said the doctor. He bent down and sniffed the salve that Mac had applied too vigorously to his chest. He sniffed in, suppressing his gag reflex. “Vile thing,” he said.
“Si, pero it works,” said the witch woman.
“Yeah right,” said the doctor, but he took a little bit of the salve on his finger and placed it under his microscope. He slowly, fussily dialed in the lenses so he could look at the substance. He was surprised to find, when he viewed the substance, that it was salicin crystals mixed with crushed beetles.
“Some of this is helpful,” the doctor said. “But just because there are some good guesses doesn’t mean this is all scientific. He got worse after he went to see you.”
“He got worse after he didn’t listen to my instructions,” the old woman said.’
“He wouldn’t listen to mine either.”
“So you have that in common,” a voice said. The preacher, ducking his head down as he entered the room, laid his own hat on the desk next to La Bruja’s headpiece. He took a moment, strode between the two conscious medics, and sat down in the doctor’s chair. “More alike than different really.”
“I suppose your here to tell us all about faith or something?” asked Doc Sam.
“Yes,” said the preacher. “And I was hoping for a tipple of Healer’s Legend. After all, I feel, cough cough, I might be getting sick. A snifter of whiskey might be just the thing.”
“I’m going to start charging you by the glass,” Doc Sam said.
“Consider it professional courtesy between us three,” Preacher said. “After all, what she does bridge what I do and what you do.”
“But what you do is the bible. What she does is superstition.”
“Some have said the same about the book,” Preacher pointed out.
“Usually that’s my argument,” Doc Sam said. He stood a while, in thought. Then he sighed, threw his hands up over his head, and unlocked his medicine cabinet. He brought out the bottle of Healer’s Legend and three glasses. He poured a shot for the Preacher, La Bruja, and himself.
They clinked the glasses together and made a silent toast.
“Hey!” said Mac from behind them. “I want in on that.”
They turned towards him. He seemed if not healed, then slightly better. He coughed, and spit on the floor, and less of the bile seemed within his sputum. “That stuff'll revive a dead horse.”
“You’d be a dead man if I didn’t find you,” Doctor Thompson said. He grabbed his stethoscope and made his own examination, carefully checking Mac’s pulses, making the man open up, checking his tongue, and checking for a pulse.
La Bruja crossed over to Mac. She started him straight in his eye and then spit on the ground. She made a hmph sound and looked away from him. She downed what was left in her glass, and held it out for a refill. Before Doc Sam could stop him, Preacher reached out and filled up the woman’s glass.
“Ma’am,” said the Preacher.
“Denade,” said La Bruja. Then she turned back to Mac and poked him in the chest. “You’d be a dead if he hadn't helped you. You have to listen to the professors,” La Bruja said. She was spilling more of her whiskey than drinking it now, ramped up into a monologue.“Escucha bien, porque no repetiré. Las hierbas que te di tienen espíritus que exigen respeto. Si no sigues mis instrucciones exactas, no mejorarás y podrías dañarte. Tres gotas son tres, ni más ni menos. No juegues con esto. Sigue el tratamiento como te dije, o las consecuencias serán graves. Respeta la naturaleza y sus remedios.”
She punctuated each sentiment by pushing her hands against Mac’s chest. At her last sentence she slipped something small and green into the miner’s pocket.
“Listen Lady,” said Mac. “With all respect, I don’t understand anything you just said. Ingles?”
“I think,” said Preacher, “what she means is that if you go to a doctor, you have to listen to the doctor, whichever sect you follow.”
“You almost died because of your fool stubbornness,” said Doc Sam. “That’s the message here. I hope that now you’ve almost killed yourself, you'll listen this time.”
Mac Fianna raised his right arm in the air. “I swear I will listen to you doc, even if I don’t like it.”
“Good,” said the doctor. “You aren’t supposed to like it, just get healthy by following orders. Hers or mine.”
“Yes, yes,” said Mac. “That’s all fine.”
“So is this,” said the doctor, who had used the distraction to work his way behind Mac. He slipped a needle into Mac’s skin and let the morphine rush in.
“Ouch, hey Doc, what gives?” Mac asked.
“Sorry,” said the doctor. “I just know you hate shots so I thought I’d give you a quick jolt of something you need before you could say no.”
“Well that’s fine Doc, but how about we go to work on that bottle?’
Doctor Sam Thompson nodded. He pulled up a chair for each of them. They sat down and the preacher took out a deck of cards. Each of the four players was dealt in and a game began in earnest. Just when it looked like Mac Finna had the upper hand, sitting on a flush, the cards clattered to the ground.
“He folds,” said Doc Sam.
“What did you do?” asked the preacher. La Bruja politely reached her hand out and scooped up a small collection of coins.
“She always gets me like this when she plays,” the preacher added, before the doctor could give him the information he’d requested.
“He was never going to let me administer to him without being knocked out,” Doc Sam said. “So I gave him a little morphine. Just had to wait for it to kick in. Should keep him in here a couple of days and we can get the black bile out of his system.”
“That’s my cue to leave as well,” said the preacher. “Men’s souls and the darkness they carry? That I can do all day. But a little vomit? Not for me.”
“Say, have you been eating?” asked the doctor. “I know you weren’t for a while after… after Raymond passed.”
“I’ll be fine,” said the preacher, putting his hat back on. “Each day’s a little better and a little worse.”
Doctor Thompson nodded. Left alone with his unconscious, formerly quarrelsome patient, he sat down and stared at the body for a while. Then he pulled a pipe out of his desk drawer, loaded and packed the tobacco, and sat smoking in the silence of the evening.

The next day, groggy, but feeling much better, Mac woke up. He shook himself awake. And stood carefully up from the table in the clinic. A small, rough blanket fell from on top of his body. Mac surveyed the scene,finding Doc Sam sitting in his chair, pipe in his mouth.
Mac gently removed the pipe and set it down on the desk, next to the bottle of Healer’s Legend. Less than a finger left. His hand twitched towards the bottle, but the dusty motes of sunrise beginning to creep through the window, the feel of desert morning cold in his bare feet warned him away from it.
“Coffee,” he said. “I’ll get coffee instead.”
He patted through his pants to find his money. He found his wallet– empty. Searching through his clothes he found only a small green crucifix, woven out of tall river-grasses. It had been placed in his shirt pocket.
Tip-toeing out the door, Mac made his way quietly back to his camp. Later on in the day, his money recovered from it’s secret burial beneath his tent, the miner returned to the Doctor’s office.
“Doc,” he said, “I gotta tell ya. I feel much better.”
“That’s because I was able to administer medicine to you,” Doc Sam said.
Mac Fianna nodded his head.
“La Bruja helped too.”
“Maybe,” said Doc Sam. “But you didn’t listen to her either. You went and over did it with her cure as well. Now, she did seem to be right about the willow bark, we use it in some medicines ourselves.”
“I get you, Doc Thompson,” Mac said. He took a long breath. “I will always follow the doctor's orders and not overdo it. Unless of course, there’s a bit of Healer’s Legend. Then I’ll down a double dose or more.”
Mac and Doc looked at the bottle of whiskey left on the Doctor’s desk. Sometime between Mac’s exit in the morning and his return this afternoon that last bit of liquid had disappeared. Doc Sam wiped his lips.
“Some things are a miracle on their own,” the doctor said.