2
The fight with the boar had two immediate consequences: Sarah suffered a nervous collapse, and Ulysses S. Grant, although carefully tended, proved conclusively that he would not be prize-winning material for the fall of 1913.
It was the veterinarian who was called first and later the family doctor.
"Now don't you worry about me," Sarah said. "I'm all right. You just take care of Ulysses and go on getting ready for the fair. I don't need to go this year."
"Why, I couldn't go without you, Mother," Stud said, "and ... and without Ulysses."
Old Doc Carlyle, the vet who had tended Ulysses ever since he was a small, squealing red suckling, shook his head sadly. He had a genuine fondness for the vicious old boar and had always claimed that he would make blue ribbon material.
"You hadn't ought to beat no dumb animal like you beat Ulysses," he told Stud. "It ain't Christian."
The less efficient and far more callous general practitioner, Doctor Whitehead, who came to see Sarah, took her pulse with his inch-thick stem-winder and as usual lost count at eleven. He took her temperature with a thermometer which had not been properly sterilized in three years, and looked down her throat with a spoon.
He pooh-poohed her fear that she had been internally injured during the fight with the boar.
"Probably some female ailment," he insisted, shaking several harmless pink powders onto papers which he folded deftly and left upon the dresser. "You ain't bad off. You'll be up and around in no time."
Sarah watched a spider making his web in the corner of the ceiling. She continued to watch him long after the doctor's Ford could no longer be heard down the road.
"Spin your pretty web," she told him. "I won't brush it down. I'm just going to let myself be sick. I reckon I got a right to lie back and be sick one time in my life."