Jamie Grant: ‘Black Medicine’

Black Medicine

The morning after her hundredth birthday party
my mother perches on a chair in her room
at the nursing home, and talks as she always

has, without interruption. When the Nigerian
male nurse comes to the door to offer her lunch,
she sends him away. Her recollection

takes her back to the nineteen twenties
while outside the building midsummer
heat shimmers over a green expanse

where voices are calling and figures dressed
in white stand still and then move. To take in
that grassy vista one has to enter a code

into a keypad at the door—my mother’s home
resembles a prison where the innocent are held
against their will, or at least from where some

would escape if they were able, for old age
itself is a prison. She can remember being alive
in simpler days, and the details of a voyage

around the world to meet her father’s father,
an Irish doctor in Portrush. His practice
was well known in the town, where he would offer

his patients a choice: The Black Medicine
or The White Medicine (one assumes that meant
Guinness or whiskey, unless the line

referred to cod liver oil and milk
of magnesia). When my mother landed
in Ireland, her grandfather said he would take

her with him to visit a patient in a village
over the border in the republic—to get
to the south, they had to drive north to the edge

of the territory ruled by the British. A guard
peered out from a sentry box at the border,
and questioned my mother’s grandfather, who said

“I’m going to see an old man in that village over
there.” The sentry waved the car through,
and at a house nearby my mother

waited outside. Her grandfather returned
to the car, and drove back to the border.
The same guard greeted them: “How’d

you get on with that old man?” he asked.
“I killed him,” said the doctor.
“You did well,” said the guard.

Jamie Grant