Stella Disarmed

ALL CHARACTERS ARE ADULTS.

A brisk south wind swept Washington Street as I walked to the livery stable to get my horse. I planned for a long ride into the country to see a snake-bite patient. Drought conditions existed at the time, and the cool winter temperatures were long past due. The wind felt good against my skin.

But as I neared the stable it looked to me like fog was spilling onto the street. Smoke! Something was ablaze. The boarding house next to the stable, I wondered? People dipped buckets into the stable's water trough and ran with them to the building.

As I entered the stable, the fire-house volunteers pulled their pumper wagon up to the scene. I concluded the situation was under control and didn't require my assistance so I rode away and put it out of mind.

The road from Oakhurst to Simona is lovely the whole way. It falls abruptly from the court-house to the railroad track, first between deep red cuts in the earth, and then between rows of cabins, each with a garden of rose-bushes. In the swale beside the train track flowed a creek. The creek spilled out of 'The Cascades,' a deep artesian spring that cripples and distraught mothers drowned themselves in during bouts of spiritual crisis.

The cuts were excavated from low ridges the road passed through. Depending on the season, the cuts were draped with purple, orange, and white lantana, or a profusion of fragrant, white honeysuckle, brilliant Mexican poppies, and yellow oxalis. Beds of black-berry vines also grew along the roadside, between the wheel-track and the cuts.

Where the natural woods remained, waxy-leaved magnolias, sweet gums, and long and short-leaf pines thrived. These woods were filled with choirs of mole crickets. Many of the trees were covered or surrounded by clematis, woodbine, or wild grape-vines called fox-grapes.

Ahead of me I saw a plantation of orange-trees, laden with young fruit and blossoms. I can't imagine a better perfume than the fragrance of orange blossoms.

Among the hills north of the road, lay wide, cultivated slopes, dotted with cottages enclosed by tall, solitary pecan and oak trees. Closer to me, a short distance away, a man plowed a field with an ox haltered to a primitive harness coupled to pieces of wood. The chocolate colored soil of this region has a texture like cookie dough and opposes the plow with minimal resistance; both man and ox seemed to be having an easy time of it as the plow blade sliced through the soil.

Beyond them, a half-mile away, a man plowed with a mule, and in another direction a third man did likewise. Cotton is the cash crop here and filled the fields around me. These men were sharecroppers who rented the land and the cabins of Captain Houston, paying him a portion of their cotton for each mule they worked.

Further along I spied a comical figure heading towards me on the road. He was a boy of perhaps ten or eleven years, smoking a cigarette, aboard a huge mule that he prodded with enormous spurs he had fastened to each of his bare brown feet.

Still further along my route, I happened upon a turkey hen in the middle of the road. Seeing me, she ran down the horse-track for perhaps a rod before she turned and escaped into the forest.

After riding the road for several miles, I took a trail that passed through a swamp and flat-woods. My patient lived three miles up this trail. The trail pushed in through thick shrubbery and bay-trees bordering it, absorbing the noises coming from the swamp, of which the air was full. Loggers had recently felled a stand of bald cypress, and swollen stumps, three or four feet high, were all that remained of the trees. A chickadee struck up a sweet and gentle strain in the very depths of the swamp, like an angel singing in hell.

The swamp in Palmetto County is a dense wood growing in stagnant black water covered with patches of duckweed and similar growth; a frightful place at times, it's the home of snakes and evil. Stories of slaves hiding in cypress swamps came to my mind. It must have been desperation that drove them to it. Buzzards flew overhead and studied me.

"Another fool has come to the swamp to flirt with death," I imagined them saying. "No one comes here for anything else! Wait a little, and we will pick his bones."

They perched nearby, and, refusing to waste time, used the interval to clean their feathers of mites. Once in a while one of them shifted his perch with a noisy and ominous rustle. They waited for me, and seemed patient for a fat meal.

The swamp seemed inside a door marked 'never-more,' and there was no going farther without plunging into a mire. I sat still on my horse, looking and listening. Some strange noise, bird or devil, came from the depths of the swamp.

A flock of grackles settled on a tall cypress close by, and for a time created a racket. How quiet it was after they left! I was mesmerized from the black water full of slimy green roots and entanglements, any one of which might suddenly lift its head and open its deadly white mouth to devour me.

In the unharvested places stood huge cypress trees, each one swollen at its base, rising straight and branchless into the sky. Dead trees, one might assume, apparently with no bark to cover them; but when I looked up, I saw that each had at the top a scanty head of branches just now erupting in fresh green leaves, draped with long, thick streamers of black and gray Spanish moss.

A short while later, with the sun out, and my general course perfectly plain, I became lost after I took a wrong fork in the trail. The message I had said 'veer right at the fork,' and I went left. I knew the way and forgot it. Whether to bear to the left or to the right was a simple matter of guess-work. I made my guess, and guessed wrong, which became apparent soon enough when I found the road under deep water for several rods ahead of me. I hate wading, and there was no ready way of going round, since the cypress and palmetto scrub crowded close up to the road, and just here was impenetrable, or more trouble than I wanted. So I turned my horse around and went back.

After I returned to the fork and took the correct trail, I soon passed from the swamp to flat-woods. Flat-woods are different from other forests. Forwards, backwards, and on either side, the pinewoods are ever the same for great distances. It is this monotony, this utter absence of landmarks, that makes it so dangerous to wander in. The sand is deep, the sun is hot; one place is like another, and the palmetto shrubs that cover the ground between the pines are thick with rattlesnakes. What use, then, to abuse yourself? And so, unless you're going somewhere in particular, as I often do, you're continually stopping to ascertain where you are.

After passing through the flat-woods, I came to my destination, the home of Miss Stella Murray and her uncle. Their farm was pine forest and hammock and broad fields rising gently to the horizon. The lane to the house, covered with crushed oyster shells and open on one side, was bordered on the other by a deep red ditch and a zigzag split-rail fence, along which grew vines, shrubs, and tall trees. Young grain sprouted in the dark, ploughed fields.

Declaring that rattlesnakes would not bite her because of her Christian faith, and that if they did their bite would not be poisonous, Stella Murray, aged 18 years, went to a meeting of the holy rollers at Simona, a few miles east of her farm, Sunday night. There she inserted her hand into a box that contained a large rattlesnake. The snake warned her to keep away but did not strike.

Her pastor, Bob Nixon, a holy-roller preacher, did the same thing, and the snake did not strike him, either. Miss Murray then repeated the performance, insisting her faith would protect her. This time it struck her on the right forearm. She refused medical attention, saying she was full of holiness and safe from the effects of the bite. She guessed wrong, became ill, and I was summoned.

At the house, I examined Stella's wound, and saw evidence of wet gangrene developing from the snake venom and bacteria. Stella was pale and seemed exhausted from the ordeal, but also seemed past the danger of death from the effects of the venom, but I worried about the bacterial gangrene.

Snakes are funny about how much venom they invest in a bite. A young rattler has less venom than the old duffer, but goes the whole hog when he bites; the old snake seems to measure and apportion his dose before dispensing it. Not many people die from rattler bites, the real danger is from bacterial infection and muscle degeneration.

I left her to sleep, and spoke with her uncle, Bradford, during lunch. He spoke freely about Stella's fascination with snakes.

Bradford Murray rose from his chair and moved to the fireplace that separated the parlor from the dining room. He set the screen aside, rested his hands on the mantle, then kicked the logs with the toe of his boot. The smoldering wood burst into flame with an eruption of orange sparks that flew up the chimney. After a few moments of silence he resumed speaking.

"My niece, Stella, went for a walk in the meadow to gather wildflowers. This was last April. She did not return when expected and I became anxious. I checked the time, armed myself with a shotgun, and went in search of her.

"After a time I saw Stella in the distance, sitting in the grass. I immediately noticed the curious way she swayed, as if in time to music. I approached her cautiously, peered over her shoulder, and was horrified when I saw the head of a huge rattlesnake waving from side to side in front of her.

"I called to her in a soft tone of voice, but she didn't respond. I told her to remain still and not move a muscle. I then raised my gun, took aim, and shot the snake," He said.

"But Stella moved her head at the instant I fired, and one of the shotgun pellets punctured her neck. She collapsed, bleeding profusely. It was a flesh wound. I wrapped the wound with my shirt, lifted her, and carried her to the house, where I cleaned and bandaged her."

"When she regained her senses, she told me that she had wandered across the meadow picking flowers until she felt tired, and sat beside a clump of white flowers. She admired their beauty and kept her eyes fixed upon them, gradually slipping into an irresistible drowsiness and stupor, such as people feel when looking at the coals of a dying fire or watching waves roll onto shore."

"Although aware that the flowers were snow white, she noticed, as time passed, that they changed color and lost their clarity. The new colors reminded her of a rainbow, she said. From this iridescent mass, at regular intervals, a tongue of living flame danced about, almost blinding her with its brilliance. She said she felt possessed with terror and sensed evil close at hand, yet was paralyzed to speak or move. How long she was under this influence she had no idea. Nor was she conscious of its nature till, coming to herself after the shock of the gunshot had thrown her into a faint, she saw the dead serpent.

"The snake was enormous. When I attached the dismembered head onto the body, it measured an even seven feet in length. The body was eighteen inches around, with sixteen rattles and a button." Mr. Murray ceased speaking and returned to his chair.

"Was this the only time you saw Stella react strangely to snakes?" I asked.

He poured himself a cup of coffee. "No, there was one other time when I happened upon her in the midst of similar circumstances.

"Shortly after Stella came to live with me, she came with me while I surveyed a low hammock near the lake. I went about my work and she explored the area. After a while I became aware that I hadn't seen her recently, and decided to check on her.

"I walked into the woods by a path that leads into the swamp, and in a few minutes I found her, sitting upon a stump in a grove of hardwoods, in the midst of a large bed of ferns. As I approached her I felt something glide over my shoes and between my legs. I froze instantly, then tried to locate the snake. I'm slightly deaf, but I recognized the pit of a snake, and smelled its musty odor. Soon I noticed the ferns moving, and I thought from the movement that I was in a nest of snakes. Snakes seemed to be all around me.

Occasionally I got a glimpse of a writhing body gliding through the ferns, then I saw two snakes at the same time. Looking about, there seemed to be hundreds of snakes around us. I stood motionless for fully a half hour, a cold clammy sweat pouring out of every pore; my only protection against the snakes was a pair of boots. Stella didn't seem alarmed at all!

"After a while things began to quiet down and the snakes seemed to have moved on to other haunts. Stella rose from her seat, smiled at me, and I led her back to where I was working."

When he finished speaking I told him the arm needed to come off, the sooner the better. He nodded. We went to see Stella.

My plan was simple: The uncle would assist me, holding the chloroform mask over Stella's face and squeeze the rubber bulb of the Junker's Chloroform inhaler while she slept. I would attach a tourniquet above the elbow, then cut through the skin with a knife, careful to leave a flap of skin to cover the exposed bone, and cut through the elbow joint to separate the two halves of the arm. I would control the bleeding by tying the arteries with surgical thread, and smooth the stump of bone with a bone file. Last, I planned to sew the wound shut; fifteen minutes, from start to finish. At the end I'd wrap Stella's arm in a warm, clean bandage and awaken her.

I told Stella the arm needed amputation and was candid about my fear.

"No!" was her adamant reply. "My faith will take care of me." She tried to cross her arms over her chest to express her defiance, but the wound was too painful, and she abandoned the physical display of opposition to sulk silently.

"What now?" Bradford asked.

"If you don't mind, I'll stay, to see if she changes her mind, and to do what I can. I can't act without her consent." I replied.

"But, doctor, I'm her guardian, can't I give consent?" He argued.

"According to the law, she's an adult when she turns eighteen. I'm sorry. May I shelter my horse in your barn for the night?"

"Certainly," he replied.

I went outside to smoke. The south-wind was stronger, now, and blustery. Fat streets of black and silver clouds drifted across the sky, south to north. I anticipated a storm. The trees around the house swayed in the constant wind. I untied my horse and lead her to the barn. I unsaddled her, made the stall comfortable with fresh hay, fed and watered her, then returned inside to check on Stella. Bradford was sitting in her room reading. Stella was asleep. I went outside to sit and wait.

The storm arrived about sundown with strong claps of thunder and bright explosions of lightning; the rain fell in sheets and torrents, punctuated with bouts of hail. The gale lasted most of the evening. During this time, the temperature dropped forty degrees in four hours and continued to fall. I checked the thermometer at midnight; it was twenty-seven degrees, and about then the rain changed to fat flakes of snow.

I checked Stella before I went to bed. She and Bradford were asleep. Her arm looked bad and worse.

"Stella? Wake up." the angel said.

Stella opened her eyes and whispered, "Where are you?"

"Don't speak, answer me in your mind," the angel told her.

"Yes," Stella said to herself.

"Don't let the doctor take your arm," the angel said.

"I won't," Stella promised.

"You showed your faith with the snake, now I want you to prove it by keeping your arm. Do you understand me?" the angel said.

"Yes." Stella replied.

"Good! Don't let me down," the angelic voice whispered.

I slept until three-o'clock, checked on Stella, and awoke her and Bradford.

"You're running out of time. The arm needs to come off soon!" I spoke plainly.

"No." Stella insisted. "I'll be alright; God has given me an ordeal to test my faith."

"I think you'll die, and I don't believe that God wants your life since he allowed me to be here to help you," I argued.

"No!" She repeated.

Bradford appealed to her and tried to reason with her, without result. I went outside to smoke.

The world was covered with snow. By four o'clock the thermometer hovered at zero. The strong wind had moderated to a frigid breeze, and my breath floated across the porch into the yard in drifting languid clouds. Christ! It was cold. I smoked my pipe and went inside to loiter by the fire. I pulled a comfortable chair close to the hearth and fell asleep.

At dawn Stella was unconscious and mildly delirious. I couldn't arouse her. I poured a cup of coffee and went outside. Water was frozen as thick as a silver dollar in the bird-bath. I guessed there was 7 inches of snow in the yard. The temperature was 2 degrees below zero. Florida generally has mild winters, but occasionally arctic storms find their way to the Gulf and the sunny South is frozen to its roots.

I contemplated Stella's situation and my obligation to help her, if it existed. I lit my pipe and thought long and hard for several minutes. She wanted no assistance, and the law backed her. The law opposed suicide but allowed you to refuse care that might save your life. I believed it was suicide of a kind. Do I bow before Death, or do I oppose it? was the issue in my mind.

"Benjamin? She made her decision, you need to respect it," I said to myself. "She has a legal right to refuse help. And you'll lose your medical license if you take the arm and she dies. If you impose your will on her you'll invite a heap of problems down on your head," I reasoned.

I went inside to Stella's room, examined her arm, and made a hand gesture for Bradford to follow me. We walked to the kitchen.

"What?" He enquired.

"Heat a pot of boiling water, quickly." I told him.

"You're taking the arm?" He asked with surprise.

"Yes. And I need your help to do it."

An hour later it was done.

"What now?" Bradford wondered.

"We wait," I said, and rummaged through my bag for a bottle of laudanum.

"Oh! My!" Bradford said when he read the nomenclature on the bottle's label. "Going the whole hog, I see."

"Hang for a penny, hang for a pound. She'll believe I sold her soul to the Devil anyway. Use a teaspoon of it at a time; every four hours, less as time passes. It will help her sleep and dull the pain. It's a mix of opium and alcohol. Do not leave her alone with the bottle!" I warned him.

"Addicting?" He asked.

"She may be suicidal for a while. I think melancholia is the greater danger. I'll stay until she comes around or dies," I said.

She came around that night. She wasn't entirely lucid, or coherent, but she was conscious and understood what was said. The following morning she was alert and angry and depressed. I changed her dressing, gave further instructions to Bradford, promised to return soon, and left for town.

Hugging myself to keep warm I returned the way I came. I saw, in the woods and orange groves, groups of men huddled around roaring fires. Some men kept fires burning in their groves; a pretty scene if you've ever seen it. I wondered if their efforts to save the orange trees weren't futile. Out on the main road I passed a wood carter whose wagon consisted of two long planks fastened to two axles. He was hauling firewood to town.

Further along the road I passed clusters of horsemen warming their hands over fires they built to keep warm. They were cold. It was still a bit early to go about the business that brought them to town: so what was more natural than to hitch your horse, get together a few sticks, and kindle a fire on a cold morning?