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Sam’s onion field was somewhere on the other side of the lake. Once or twice a week he would row across the lake and pick a new batch to fill the cart. Sam had big strong arms, but it would still take all day for him to row across the lake and another day for him to return. Most of the time he would leave Mary Lou in a shed, which the Walkers let him use at no charge, but sometimes he would take Mary Lou on his boat with him.
Sam claimed that Mary Lou was almost fifty years old, which was, and still is, extraordinarily old for a donkey.
“She eats nothing but raw onions,” Sam would say, holding up a white onion between his dark fingers. “It’s nature’s magic vegetable. If a person ate nothing but raw onions, he could live to be two hundred years old.”
Sam was not much older than twenty, so nobody was quite sure that Mary Lou was really as old as he said she was. How would he know?
Still, nobody ever argued with Sam. And whenever they were sick, they would go not only to Doc Hawthorn but also to Sam.
Sam always gave the same advice: “Eat plenty of onions.”
He said that onions were good for the digestion, the liver, the stomach, the lungs, the heart, and the brain. “If you don’t believe me, just look at old Mary Lou here. She’s never been sick a day in her life.”
He also had many different ointments, lotions, syrups, and pastes all made out of onion juice and different parts of the onion plant. This one cured asthma. That one was for warts and pimples. Another was a remedy for arthritis.
He even had a special ointment which he claimed would cure baldness. “Just rub it on your husband’s head every night when he’s sleeping, Mrs. Collingwood, and soon his hair will be as thick and as long as Mary Lou’s tail.”
Doc Hawthorn did not resent Sam. The folks of Green Lake were afraid to take chances. They would get regular medicine from Doc Hawthorn and onion concoctions from Sam. After they got over their illness, no one could be sure, not even Doc Hawthorn, which of the two treatments had done the trick.
Doc Hawthorn was almost completely bald, and in the morning his head often smelled like onions.
Whenever Katherine Barlow bought onions, she always bought an extra one or two and would let Mary Lou eat them out of her hand.
“Is something wrong?” Sam asked her one day as she was feeding Mary Lou. “You seem distracted.”
“Oh, just the weather,” said Miss Katherine. “It looks like rain clouds moving in.”
“Me and Mary Lou, we like the rain,” said Sam.
“Oh, I like it fine,” said Miss Katherine, as she rubbed the donkey’s rough hair on top of its head. “It’s just that the roof leaks in the schoolhouse.”
“I can fix that,” said Sam.
“What are you going to do?” Katherine joked. “Fill the holes with onion paste?”
Sam laughed. “I’m good with my hands,” he told her. “I built my own boat. If it leaked, I’d be in big trouble.”
Katherine couldn’t help but notice his strong, firm hands.
They made a deal. He agreed to fix the leaky roof in exchange for six jars of spiced peaches.
It took Sam a week to fix the roof, because he could only work in the afternoons, after school let out and before night classes began. Sam wasn’t allowed to attend classes because he was a Negro, but they let him fix the building.
Miss Katherine usually stayed in the schoolhouse, grading papers and such, while Sam worked on the roof. She enjoyed what little conversation they were able to have, shouting up and down to each other. She was surprised by his interest in poetry. When he took a break, she would sometimes read a poem to him. On more than one occasion, she would start to read a poem by Poe or Longfellow, only to hear him finish it for her, from memory.
She was sad when the roof was finished.
“Is something wrong?” he asked.
“No, you did a wonderful job,” she said. “It’s just that … the windows won’t open. The children and I would enjoy a breeze now and then.”
“I can fix that,” said Sam.
She gave him two more jars of peaches and Sam fixed the windows.
It was easier to talk to him when he was working on the windows. He told her about his secret onion field on the other side of the lake, “where the onions grow all year round, and the water runs uphill.”
When the windows were fixed, she complained that her desk wobbled.
