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what else can it possibly do?
I tell you frankly, I was more relieved than sorry when I lost the last tooth
down below ten years ago it was now. My bottom false teeth fit tolerably well,
and I don't mind 'em a bit. But I wanted to hang on to the ones I have up top.
I still do want that, as a matter of fact. If you have a full plate up there,
they hold in your uppers with springs, and that is another infernal invention.
There are plenty of ways I would like to be like George Washington, but that
is not one of them.
But God does what He wants, not what you want. Not what I want, either. About
six months ago, it was, when one of my top left bicuspids went off like it had
a fire lit inside it.
What's a bicuspid? On each side, top and bottom, you have got two teeth
betwixt your eyeteeth and your grinders. Ask a dentist, and he will tell you
they're bicuspids. I have done a powerful lot of palavering with dentists over
the years. I know how they talk. I am a man who likes to learn things. I
want to find out just precisely what they are going to inflict on me before
they go and inflict it.
And a whole fat lot of good that has done me, too.
I kept hoping the toothache would go away. Might as well hope the bill
collector or your mother-in-law will go away. You stand a better chance.
Before long, I knew it was time to get me to a dentist that or go plumb out of
my mind, one. I had not had to lose a chopper for five or six years before
that. The last quack I had gone to was out of business. Maybe the folks he
tormented strung him up. I can hope so, anyhow.
So I found me another fellow, a Dutchman named Vankirk. He grinned when he saw
my poor sorry mouth.
His teeth, damn him, were as white as if he soaked 'em in cat piss every
night. For all I know, maybe he did.
He poked at my poor sorry chopper with one of those iron hooks his miserable
tribe uses. You know the type I mean like out of the Spanish Inquisition, only
smaller. He had to pry me off the ceiling afterwards, too. You bet he did.
Then he gave me another shiny smile. "Oh, yes, Mr. Legrand," he says, "I can
have that out in jig time, and a replacement in the socket, and you will not
feel a thing."
I laughed in his face. "Go peddle your papers," I says. "I am not a blushing
bride at this business. I have been with your kind of man before. I have heard
promises like that before. I have stupefied myself with every remedy known to
nature. And it has hurt like blazes every single time."
"Every remedy known to nature, perhaps," says Vankirk. "But what about
remedies known to man?
Have you ever visited a dentist who uses chloroform?"
Now, I had heard of his stuff. It was written up in the
Baltimore Sun not so long before. But, "Just another humbug," says I.
Vankirk shook his head. "Mr. Legrand, chloroform is no humbug," he says,
solemn as a preacher at a millionaire's funeral. "They can take off a man's
leg with it never mind his tooth, his leg
and he will not feel a thing until he wakes up. I have been using it for six
months, and it is a sockdolager."
In my day, I have been lied to by a good many dentists. I am familiar with the
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breed. If this Vankirk was lying, he was better at it than any other
tooth-drawer I have had the displeasure to know. I felt something
I had not felt since my very first acquaintance with the pincers. Friends, I
felt hope.
"You can pop a replacement tooth in when you yank mine, you say?" I ask him.
"I have had that done before, more than once, and never known it to hold above
a year."
"Plainly, you have been visiting men who do not know their business," says
Vankirk. "From examining your mouth, I believe I have the very tooth that will
make a perfect fit in your jaw."
He opened a drawer and rummaged in a box of teeth and finally found the one he
wanted. It looked like a tooth to me. That is all I can tell you. It did not
have blood and pus all over it, I will say that, the way mine do when one
butcher or another hauls them out of my jaw. I ask him, "Where did it come
from?"
"Out of the mouth of a brave young soldier killed at the battle of Buena
Vista," Vankirk says. "This tooth, Mr. Legrand, is good for twenty or thirty
more years than you are. You may count on that."
I never count on anything a dentist tells me. I say, "In my day, I have had
teeth put in my head from men slain in the War of 1812, the Black Hawk War,
and the war the Texans fought against Mexico before the
US of A decided to teach Santa Anna a lesson. Not a one of them lasted. Why
should I think this here one will be any different?"
"It is not the tooth alone, Mr. Legrand. It is the man who puts it in," he
says, and strikes a pose.
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