The Worm in the Frontiersman

I was sad about the nature of things and decided to visit the King of America, though I didn’t have any specific purpose in mind.

It is quite a long hike to get there.  He lives way up in the mountains but well off the beaten path.  He has a log cabin he built himself tucked into a piney slope just above a sedgy pond with clumps of tall grass right up to the edge, and a small peak behind him.  He has ricks of firewood he cut and split himself, a few cattle he raises, and his books to read.

He is an old man, even in the summer he wears a jacket.  He has an old red-and-black check flannel jacket that he wears, and other times a wool Navajo southwest style jacket that used to be bright before it faded. But to be fair to him, it is cool up there even in the summer.

His cabin is not large, but he does have a porch with some rocking chairs.  That is generally where we converse.

On this visit, after we had talked about this and that, idly, him asking after my family and me after the cattle and the state of the grass, and staring at the pond, he considered me for a bit and then told this story.

One time, he said, there was a frontiersman on the frontier who was just about the greatest that ever lived.  He could drink more whiskey ‘n Daniel Boone.  He could shoot further ‘n Davy Crockett.  Yes sir, he was something, and he only got more so as he went along.

Problem was that from almost his very birth he had a kind of canker that gave him trouble and sometimes bloody fits.  Rabbit, who was the doctor in that neighborhood, said he expected it was some kind of worm.  Which it was.  Rabbit even said he supposed this frontiersman’s gifts might not be unrelated to the canker and the pains, him, Rabbit, supposing that perhaps the man’s body reacted to the canker by strengthening the hinder parts in a sort of compensatory way.

Now, in the general run of things no one worried too much about this cankering worm, not even the frontiersman, on account of he was going from strength to strength.  Some jokers even expressed some admiration for the worm and wryly observed that they wished they had half his complaint.

But the more he grew the more the worm grew.  And so from time to time Rabbit and other physicks took their hand at dosing the worm.  Rabbit tried dosing him with some smelly concoction he made up. And though the concoction seemed to abate the worm for a time, it never did kill it before the patient said he’d had enough of this particular type of doctoring.  The concoction threatened fair to abate the patient also, or so he said.

After Rabbit’s treatment failed, along came Squirrel.  He proposed a dietary remedy.  He said it wasn’t the worm itself that was the problem, it was that it kept growing.  This seemed reasonable enough, so when Squirrel prescribed a strict diet of non-worm-alimenting foods the frontiersman agreed to give it a try.  There was some logic to this diet, right enough, but the problem was two-fold.  Worms are living things, and living things are meant to grow.  The worm in his bosom seemed to draw at least a trickle of nourishment from even the strict diet, or from time to time it would turn and gnaw on the vitals.  And of course the frontiersman wasn’t the sort who could always keep to a strict diet, as who would be.  So from time to time the worm got the food it liked.  The upshot was that despite the intervals of success in the eating, on the whole the worm still seemed to be flourishing like the green bay tree.

Then along comes Coyote.  With a sly grin he said that all these other physicks were going about it all wrong.  What needed to happen, he said, was the opposite sort of diet.  Aliment the worm to the fullest, he said, all day, every day.  He reckoned that would do the trick.  His reasons why were a little hard to follow but Coyote was a plausible creature and only sometimes malicious so the frontiersman got himself up to give it a try.

Well, the natural sequel was what you would expect.  That worm thrived like no other worm had ever thrived and the man got sicker and sicker.  But when it was like to kill the patient, there were some signs of what Coyote’s plan might be.  The man’s body, which seemed to ignore the worm when it was just a canker and pain, now turned on the worm for the first time.  And the man also seemed willing to take Rabbit’s concoction again, all the way up the worm-killing dose, since no matter how bad it was it couldn’t be worse than the worm.

Here the old man King of America paused for a very long time.

I decided to prompt him.  “Well,” I said, “how did the story turn out?”

The look he gave me might have been described as withering if it came from a less kindly man.

“It ain’t yet,” he says.