My name’s Nescia Flint and I’m a columnist: that is to say, I write a weekly column for the Altamount Dispatch, or the A-Patch, as it’s known in these parts. That’s the town newspaper. It comes out twice a week, on Wednesday afternoons and Saturday mornings. The A-Patch is not much of a newspaper, but then Altamount’s not much of a town – 724 souls, give or take a couple, some of them damned, most of them Methodist, and that’s counting all the country folk that come in of a Saturday afternoon to buy feed and fertilizer and sell eggs. If you look Altamount up on a map, you’ll find it smack dab in the middle of West Texas: we’re one of those bitty old dots halfway between Abilene and Lubbock, near to where the Brazos River slides into the Double Mountain Fork. Dry, yellow country, flat and open as the palm of a hand, good for not much but growing sorghum and some cotton, pigs and dust storms.

The A-Patch don’t subscribe to a wire service. For national and world news folks get the Dallas paper and the TV, but for local news, nothing beats the A-Patch for keeping folks up to date on how the Altamount Armadillos are ranking in the playoffs (last), who won the plowing match at this year’s Aggie Fair (Bobby Hiemstra, the only one to compete since 1993); the secret ingredient in Marsha Laramoor’s prize-winning White Wedding Salad (marshmallows) and who’s feeling puny that week.

That’s where I come in. I write the Puny Column.

I say that with a certain amount of pride. Writing the Puny Column is a family thing, a sacred trust, handed down, mother to daughter, over three generations. First my grandmother, then my mother. Now me.

My grandmother started writing the column back in the twenties. Those were more discrete times: the Puny Column consisted of little more than an enumeration of those who had felt puny over the last little while with an indication of their status in parentheses, as in, "would welcome visitors," or , "is not expected to recover," or, "would appreciate cakes and other baked goods dropped off on the screened-in porch at the back." Conventional diseases were mentioned – lumbago, sciatica, neuralgia, the pips – but distressing ones, such as venereal disease or a fallen womb, were not named. Then, too, many people just "wasted away." Judging from Grandmother’s columns, that particular malady seems to have been endemic in our area through the twenties and well into the thirties.

My mother took the column over when Grandmother died and expanded her circle of visitation to include all Altamount’s puny, provided they were white – Grandmother, being a chartered member of the Daughters of the Confederacy, had only visited those citizens equipped with appropriate Southern credentials, no carpetbaggers, Northerners, or persons of foreign persuasion or of colour. Mother also started to flesh out the column, as it were, by including the nature of the ailment, its symptoms and the course of treatment prescribed, as in: "Mrs. Van Doren is experiencing some female distress this week due to excessive affluence leading to thin blood and lightheadedness, for which Dr. Kelsey has proscribed Geritol and plenty of bed rest. Cakes, pies and biscuits appreciated as Mrs. Van Doren may not remain upon her feet long enough to bake in this heat."

Then, about fifteen years ago, Mama started to go off (I don’t mean crazy, I mean off: vague, preoccupied, occasionally disoriented and subject to sudden, severe panic attacks) – and, on account of her debilitation, we thought it best that I take over the column.

Now I, being a graduate of Junior College and, therefore, a trained researcher, took a slightly different approach to the column than Grandmother and Mama: I make it a point to look up every illness I write about in my column in the medical encyclopedia at the county library so I can provide my readers with background and details.

In addition, because I pride myself on being untainted by any sort of prejudice whatsoever, I make a point of visiting everybody in Altamount, regardless of their colour, creed or religion. Red and yellow, black and white, as the old Sunday School song goes, they are precious in my sight. I even visit drug addicts, trailer trash and known homosexuals. (One of my best columns ever was about how Joey Denton came to be Josie Denton. The letters we received!) The only criteria that matters to me is: do they feel puny? If they do, I’ll visit them if they’ll have me and you want to know the truth? They always do. If there’s one thing I have learned from fifteen years of writing the Puny Column, it is that there is not one soul alive on this earth, no matter how puny he or she may be feeling at the moment, that does not relish the thought of being interviewed, like they have died and gone to Heaven, even if the focus is on their lazy bowel or the unfortunate fact that they somehow have acquired Tourette’s Syndrome or that they have fungus growing under their fingernails that they got from Julie the manicurist at Hollywood Aesthetics who never sanitizes her kit.

Or they’ve been abducted by aliens.

"I swear, Jack!" I declared, peering at him through the haze of his own personal weather system. "The town council should issue a smog alert and move to control your emissions. It’s not bad enough that your second-hand smoke has killed every secretary that’s ever worked here?" Jack’s last three secretaries, all non-smokers, all dead of some kind of cancer or other in the past seventeen years.

"Type-As," Jack shook his head sorrowfully. " Would have died anyway from self-induced stress. And God knows, Nescia: I’ve never knowingly induced stress in a living soul."

"Well, that’s a true statement," I acknowledged. Jack’s mother had died peacefully in her sleep; he’d never shown any inclination to marry; and he was such a big, shuffling thing that no woman had ever thought to fall in love with him. "Maxie Downs? Do I know her?" I asked.

"Barker was her maiden name," replied Jack.

"I remember her. Barker? Barker? Oh, yes. A county girl from over towards Meadowlark. Did Howie say what was wrong with her?"

"By aliens?" I repeated.

"That’s what it says," replied Jack. He spelled it out: "A-l-i-e-n-s."

"Well, this’ll be different," I observed, tucking the piece of paper into my purse.

"Liven things up," agreed Jack, looking out the window at the dusty conjunction of streets baking in the sun and populated by slow-moving tumbleweeds.

• • •