Forever Will

By July of 1963, only a cursory number of doctors in the rural Virginia countryside still made house calls. Dr. James Russell Boldridge was one such doctor. His office was on the ground floor of his Culpeper County antebellum home, but Dr. Boldridge was best known for his willingness to come to his patient’s home – night or day – rain or shine. He was seventy-six years old at the time, and still practicing medicine. (He practiced medicine beyond his eighty-ninth birthday) He was a slightly gruff old gentleman, tall, lanky, and his method of sterilizing a syringe was to hold it under a water faucet for a moment or two, then wipe it off with his handkerchief. His bedside manners varied greatly with his moods, he was armed with a well-used vocabulary of inappropriate words that on occasion, would have caused a Barbary Coast sailor to blush, and the white porcelain medicine cabinet in his office was filled with mysterious brown-glass bottles (some with no labels) containing God only knew what, and for God only knew how long. But Doc Boldridge was cheap when compared to his younger, office-entrenched colleagues, charging only eight dollars for a house call to tend an adult, and six dollars to administer to a child, which included a needle filled with whatever kind of medicine he happened to have deemed necessary at the time. I was a newly-married, telephone company lineman on a particular hot July morning, struggling to raise my family on a very austere income. I was home in bed, running a fever, and I needed help. My beautiful bride, Glenda, pleaded with the blabbermouths that were hogging-up our eight-party telephone line to get off, which they compliantly did, and she called for good ol’ Doc Boldridge to come to the rescue. He soon arrived in a cloud of dust with his dirty brown doctor’s satchel full of… whatever – the same kind of satchel you would have expected to see any doctor carrying… in the early 1900’s maybe. Anyhow, with the same old painfully dull needle that he jabbed everybody else with, he soon had me taken care of, and I paid him the eight-dollar fee. Almost four hours later, he bid my wife and I good day and left in his old sedan. What happened during his four-hour visit was something that I’ve remembered ever since. Doc Boldridge was the son of a doctor, descending from a family of devout southerners, which included many old civil war veterans there in Culpeper County, and the good doctor enjoyed nothing more that talking about the civil war to anyone who would listen. In my sickened state, I was a captive audience. In that four hours, he shared many stories with me, and I have somehow managed to forget every one of them – save for one. With a goodly portion of condescending disdain in both his voice and his fiery eyes, he told me the story of two “wretched, low-life, widow - bitches,”[sic] living on a tobacco plantation in a county southwest of Culpeper, that had taken a badly wounded “Yankee bastard”[sic] into their home under the guise of him being a wounded Confederate soldier, and over a period of a year, nursed him back to health. The doctor went on to say that the wounded Yankee never went back north to “his own kind,”[sic] but actually married one of the ladies, and eventually fathered children with both women, and lived there on the farm the remainder of his life. The doctor did not speak fondly of the Union soldier or the ladies who harbored him and nursed him back to health, but I have always assumed that his ire was fueled by the residual hatred that was instilled in him through his Confederate ancestry. Dr. Boldridge never outgrew his bitterness toward Yankees. In his heart, as well as the hearts of many others, the civil war still raged on. His shortages of medical etiquettes notwithstanding, Dr. Boldridge rendered a valuable service to the community over the many years he practiced medicine in Culpeper, Rappahannock, and Fauquier Counties, and even with his occasional social ‘sourness,’ people in the community my age or older remember him with fondness. My family and I moved to northern Virginia shortly after that, and I never saw the good doctor after that special day when he shared so many stories with me. He was recognized far and wide as being the region’s supreme civil war historian, knowing the exact location of every battle, every skirmish, and every encampment. I wish I had taken notes and recorded names, dates, and precise locations, but I did not, and the story that I have so unpretentiously pieced together is but the product of the fragments that have remained imbedded in my mind for more than a half- century. I have no doubt that the story is true, excepting of course, the literary embellishments that novelists are guilty of. Dr. James Russell Boldridge died in a nursing home in 1983 at the age of 97, and I’ve often wondered how many other taunting stories he must have carried along with him to his grave. May he rest in peace, assured that at least one of his stories, imperfectly accurate as it may be, will linger in print.