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The Rain Crow Chapter II: My Father's Patients

The Rain Crow is an ongoing body of work which is evolving in chapters which I will

continue until my father’s death. It is the story of my father, a beloved country surgeon,

recently retired, and his connections to his patients, the South, our family farm and its

inhabitants. My father is a brilliant doctor and a renegade. He designed his own surgical

tools or repurposed construction tools when a proper instrument for surgery was not

available. He went to his patients’ homes to treat them and was a part of their life. People

would travel from two counties away for him to be their doctor, and would gladly wait for an

appointment until 3am. When patients couldn’t pay they paid him in trade, and often in pies.

I remember there were always at least ten pies in his office at all times.

The title The Rain Crow is derived from southern folklore. The rain crow is a solitary

bird that hides in the woods, predicting death and rain each with different calls. My father is

always listening for the rain crow when his farm needs water in the summer. After decades

of setting store by the call of this bird, he believes the rain crows are dying out due to the

use of herbicides and pesticides on farmlands as is my father’s way of life. Most people fail

to notice or even care about the birds diminishing numbers because rain crows are not a

valuable game bird. My father says “The rain crow is left over from a different time. They are

from an era when people told time by the angle of the sun and hollered from hilltop to hilltop

to borrow a plow.They don’t belong in this time and neither do I.” He retired at age seventyseven

in part because he was no longer allowed to accept pies for payment. He practiced

medicine and lives his life in a different way still deeply connected to nature and

Appalachian culture complying to an observance all his own on land that he is determined

to conserve. The Rain Crow strives to preserve the dignity and simplicity of his way of life