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The WORLD MADE STRAIGHT
Ron Rash is an award-winning poet, short-story writer and novelist. His novels include The Cove, The World Made Straight and New York Times bestseller and 2009 PEN/Faulkner finalist, Serena, now a major motion picture. He is also the author of several short-story collections including Nothing Gold Can Stay, Burning Bright, winner of the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and Chemistry and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award. Ron Rash lives in the Appalachian Mountains, USA.
ALSO BY RON RASH
FICTION
Above the Waterfall
Something Rich and Strange
The Ron Rash Reader
Nothing Gold Can Stay
The Cove
Burning Bright
Serena
Saints at the River
One Foot in Eden
Chemistry and Other Stories
Casualties
The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth
POETRY
Waking
Raising the Dead
Among the Believers
Eureka Mill
The WORLD MADE STRAIGHT
RON RASH
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Ron Rash, 2006
A version of chapter one appeared in a slightly different form in
The Kenyan Review and The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in the United States in 2006 by
Henry Holt and Company, LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 275 4
eISBN 978 1 78211 276 1
Designed by Kelly S. Too
For my son, James
But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Moby-Dick
CONTENTS
PART ONE
August 5, 1850
A.M.
Lansford Hawkins, age 48.
Complaint: Fevered, headache.
Diagnosis: Coriza. Consulted Wood’s Theory and Practice of Medicine.
Treatment: Dover’s Powder. At patient’s insistence cupped sixteen ounces of blood from left arm to remove morbific matter. Rest in bed two days.
Fee: Fifty cents. Paid in cash.
Clementine Crockett, age 58.
Complaint: Locked bowels.
Diagnosis: Same.
Treatment: Blue mass.
Fee: Fifty cents. Paid with twenty pounds flour.
P.M.
Summoned to Shelton Farm.
Maggie Shelton, age 25.
Complaint: Uterine bleeding. Seventh month with child.
Diagnosis: Physical exertings inducing early labor. Consulted Meigs’s Females and Their Diseases.
Treatment: Tincture valerian to relieve spasmodic tendency. Bed rest for week. No field work until month after child born. Black haw tea twice daily to lessen bleeding. Bloodstone for same though dubious of effectingness.
Fee: Two dollars. Paid with venison, two dozen eggs delivered next time in town.
ONE