And Nothing but the Tooth: Still More Humorous (and Sometimes Touching) Tales from a Globe-Trotting Dentist's Storied Life

By Dr. Carroll James

Whether attending decidedly awkward dinner parties or hayseed weddings complete with karaoke and inebriated attendants, or risking life and limb to aid the impoverished in Belize and Peru (with near-drastic results of misspoken Spanish), there’s a story for everyone in this third installment of Dr. Carroll James’s series of rollickin

• Language: English
• Publisher: RidgePublishing
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780996791786

Dr. Carroll James

Dr. Carroll James is the author of I Swear to Tell the Tooth and The Whole Tooth, and is a graduate of Gettysburg College, receiving his doctorate from the Farleigh-Dickenson University College of Dentistry in 1975. For two years, he practiced as an Associate in Rockville, MD, before establishing a private practice near Bethesda. As a child, Dr. James spent summers at his maternal grandparents' primitive home in the rugged Appalachian heartland of southwest Virginia. This experience forged his passion for serving impoverished peoples throughout the far reaches of the world. Blessed with three children and five live-wire grandchildren, Carroll and his wife, Kate, are now happily retired.

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PRAISE FOR

I Swear to Tell the Tooth

"Who knew teeth and their owners could be so interesting and funny? Very much in the vein of the beloved James Herriot stories about a country veterinarian and the community he served in Great Britain, I Swear to Tell the Tooth follows the adventures of rural Maryland dentist Carroll James. . . . [He] tells stories about a range of people he’s met and worked with over about three decades, from an odd lab partner to eccentric and unpredictable assistants, but always with lighthearted humor . . . James’s engaging stories will make the reader feel like she’s met Dr. Rolph Dolph, Ole Lincum, Uncle Joel, Mr. Herman, and the rest of the heartwarming and hilarious characters."  

—Linda Spivey, The Roanoke Times

Deftly written by a dentist who clearly has a winning sense of humor.

—Dr. Geoff Jones, VA pediatrician

Better written than a book I just edited by a best-selling author.

—Michael Garrett, Stephen King’s first editor

Amazing stories . . . thoroughly enjoyed it!

—WRWL, Amazon reviewer

A great tribute to dentistry, family, fellowship, and life.

—Dr. Mary Alice Connor, PA dentist

A handsome and witty book. A true gem . . . can’t wait for the sequel.

—Cynthia Armstrong, MD, RN

Couldn’t put it down!

—Bill Rhea, underemployed Texas nice guy

PRAISE FOR

The Whole Tooth

Dr. James received all outstanding ratings in the 24th Annual Writer’s Digest Book Awards

I liked Dr. James’s down-to-earth, fresh voice and his willingness to talk about embarrassing moments . . . letting the mask slip and allowing readers into the peculiar world of running a successful dental practice.

—Review; Judge 52

Amazon Top Customer Reviews

"Even more entertaining, if possible, than its predecessor (I Swear to Tell the Tooth) . . . Dr. James has a rare gift for seeing the humorous side of almost any situation, while appreciating the common threads of humanity that we all share."

—George F. Jones

The first book was so good that I bought this one the first day on the market. This is even better.

—Ralph Dixon, medical biologist

These books by Dr. James are just great. I have bought two copies, one for me and one for my dentist for Christmas.

—Valerie Townsend

[Dr. James] tells the stories of his life in a fascinating way . . . the book is a fun read, and the author is a good example of a servant heart.

—Judy Williams, Belize missionary

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Other Books by Dr. Carroll James

I Swear to Tell the Tooth

The Whole Tooth

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Copyright © 2017 Carroll James

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published 2017

ISBN: 978-0-9967917-8-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941258

Editing and book design by Stacey Aaronson

Published by:

RidgePublishing

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to my children and their soul mates:

Lara and Alan, Jim and Nicole, Bill and Maria,

and to my grandchildren, Jakob, Erik, Kate, David, Lily,

and counting.

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Prologue

Chapter 1: Harold

Chapter 2: The Quarry

Chapter 3: The Dinner Party

Chapter 4: A Tropical Paradise

Chapter 5: To Dream, Perchance to Sleep

Chapter 6: Metal Mouth

Chapter 7: ’Til Death Do Us Part

Chapter 8: Melungeon Mullins

Chapter 9: The Road Not Taken

Chapter 10: The Road Taken

Chapter 11: Bitch in Heat

Chapter 12: Runaways

Chapter 13: How to Embarrass Your Kids

Chapter 14: So Tired

Chapter 15: Geez Louise

Chapter 16: The Hundred Years War

Chapter 17: Mutton Anyone?

Chapter 18: Two-Gun

Chapter 19: Penance Is Forever

Afterword

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During my college years, I thought the sorceress of my childhood nightmares might fade and, with any luck, disappear altogether. I hadn’t visited my relatives in southwestern Virginia and Nealy Ridge in years, not since I found Grandma lifeless in her bed. During my adolescent years, the witch called on me less frequently than in my younger days. Then I joined a fraternity.

Soon after moving into a frat house during my sophomore year, I went to the kitchen late one afternoon for a snack. Rounding the corner from the dining hall, I was startled to see that very same witch standing over a large pot of boiling potatoes. I stopped dead in my tracks, sweat beading on my forehead, knowing this was not a haunted dream.

It was Cate the Cook, who I’d been warned about by all the upper-class brothers.

Whadda’ you want, she said without looking up.

Nothing, I mumbled, which wasn’t entirely true.

Cate looked to be a hundred years old but probably wasn’t a day over seventy. Shriveled, short, and bent, she was standing on a step stool to see into the pot. Janis Joplin and the Holding Brothers blared from a room somewhere on the second floor but seemed to be coming from inside my skull. The old gal looked irritated. I later discovered that she always looked irritated.

Despite her diminutive size, she wrestled the pot over to a huge stainless steel sink and dumped the hot water before returning it to the stove.

A cigarette hung from her languid lips as she grabbed a potato masher and stabbed at the now softened mush. Although it was half-burned, the cigarette hadn’t been flicked since she lit it and a long ash hung over the starch she was preparing for the night’s frat dinner. She half turned to grab a large block of butter and toss it into the pot, the ash increasing in length and limpidness.

Just as she started to whip the lard into the mix, the ash broke loose and floated south. Without missing a beat, the old geezer nonchalantly knocked it aside with her free hand, then continued to stir. Most of the ash never reached the mashed potatoes.

Well? she asked.

I’m fine. Just seeing what’s for dinner, I said before quickly effecting a retreat.

That night, when my fraternity brothers sat down to a dinner of whipped spuds, mystery meat, and canned peas, a classmate asked, Carroll, do you want some mashed potatoes? They sure are good. I think Cate put something special in them.

No thanks. I knew what that something special was.

After Kate and I wed, the evil witch (not Cate but the one who repeatedly haunted my nightmares in Grandma’s farmhouse) seemed to have died—stone-cold, slain by marital bliss. Although she had persisted throughout my young adult life from time to time, and once blindsided me in my Maryland bedroom—the product of a dream within a dream—she never once disturbed my slumber during the two-plus years Kate and I lived in Pyleton.

Then we moved to Gloyd.

Shortly thereafter, while asleep on the waterbed in our unfinished bedroom, I awoke in the middle of the night to Kate poking me. Carroll, wake up. You’re screaming, she said softly.

Wha’ . . . I was doing what? I tried to prop myself up but the rolling waves I created threw me off balance. Yuk, I said, soggy from yet another leak that the bed’s liner had sprung sometime during the night. I rubbed my eyes with one hand while trying to stabilize myself with the other. I was screaming? I again asked, confused.

Actually, it was more like howling than screaming, Kate said with an alarmed look. Eerie, as if from the pit of Hell.

I didn’t remember dreaming anything right before Kate woke me up, and I never remembered howling myself awake during those recurrent nightmares of my youth; that witch had been too sly to alert the whole household to her presence. She had never shown up in our Pyleton home but I was always leery, never knowing when she might reappear.

It was so loud, I thought you were dying, Kate said, showing genuine concern.

Maybe I thought I was drowning, I replied, forcing a grin while climbing out of the undulating bed. Or falling off a cliff, I added, which I once did on Nealy Ridge.

I’d never been one to remember my dreams, only that one nightmare that plagued me for thirty-odd years. Sometimes, I awoke in the morning and knew that I had dreamt something glorious, or profound, only to forget it by the time I brushed my teeth. I once put a packet of Post-its and a pencil on my bedside table to record the improvements of mankind’s condition my dreams revealed. They failed, however, to make any sense after my first cup of coffee.

People should be as happy and content as dogs. What does that mean?

Use only spoons for cereal. Ya think?

The world would be better off without bad people. Duh.

My brother was an only child, a clever saying penned by Jack Douglas, but I thought I had dreamed it up. Maybe Jack knew my brother.

Although the witch was finished with me after Kate and I married, Kate said I continued to occasionally howl for another twenty years. I wish I had kept track of the times my wife woke me up only to tell me to go back to sleep. In retrospect, I wondered if I only howled during a full moon, which would make me a werewolf. However, I continued to lose hair—except in my ears and nose, where notable gains were made.

As the years passed, I no longer howled, only snored, as attested to by a quick jab in the ribs from my wife. The CPAP recommended by a sleep study never really helped; it merely kept me awake so I couldn’t snore. What did help was Ambien and losing twenty-five pounds.

I just took a pill for a good night’s sleep so I can start writing chapter one of this book in the morning. I should be alert tomorrow because, after all, the wicked witch is dead . . .

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A knock on the front door of our new home in Gloyd was soon followed by a staccato bam, bam, bam, which rattled the decrepit doorframe, shaking the entire house. I feared the rotten door, frame and all, would give way and crash into the foyer.

A makeshift stoop, composed of four cockeyed 2x8 steps, led to the six-panel door, which was not very inviting: it had never been painted, only primed, and that had long since faded. We never used the front entrance, so anyone knocking probably wasn’t a close acquaintance. Most of our friends simply sauntered through the kitchen door and called out, Anybody home?

Neither the dining room, nor the living room, nor anything else along the front half of the house was finished. The floors were plywood and the bare drywall was never spackled. The modus operandi of Halfway Dick, the previous owner, was to leave things half-done or totally undone. This was complemented by his placing a carpet remnant in the living room on which to store his Harley.

While standing in what should’ve been the foyer, and by shifting your line of sight from side to side, the evening daylight could be seen filtering through a dozen small slits and several sizable cracks in the secondhand front door.

I originally wanted to name our farmette Hurricane Hill because gale force winds often blew up the hill, penetrating our house’s front window sashes along with the door. A hard rain created an artsy waterfall on the inside of the door, which puddled on the subflooring. I never bothered to wipe it up because it eventually seeped into the unfinished basement, doing no real harm. Along with everything else in the house, the front was due for a major rehab once we could afford it.

Our rather formal dining room set consisted of a cherry wood table with two large leafs, flanked by an enormous breakfront and server with fold-down wings, purchased while we still lived in Pyleton. It was not only incongruous with the rest of the house, it seemed embarrassed to reside on the rough floor. That problem was partially solved when Kate’s Aunt May gave us a family heirloom—a nice Karastan rug handed down from her grandmother. That couldn’t quite mask, however, that two electrical wires (capped with wire nuts so no one could get shocked) hung over the table, begging for a chandelier or even a simple light bulb.

To hide the fact that the two single-pane dining room windows lacked trim, Kate mounted cheap curtains over them, which billowed whenever the wind picked up.

We had a very small, four-seater kitchen table that the five of us squeezed around after Joel was born. The only place we could entertain company was in the dining room, where Kate once set a formal table for a dinner party with a couple from Potomac.

It had been raining sideways that day but stopped long enough for us to mop up the pool of water in the front hallway prior to the arrival of our upscale guests. It was impossible to totally dry the inside of the wooden door, which glistened proudly, as if painted in dew. However, our guests didn’t notice the water when they first came in, as they were distracted by the grease spot Halfway’s Harley had left on the carpet remnant and the bare electric wires dangling overhead. With frozen smiles, they sat at the table, then glanced down at the plywood floor.

Midway through the meal, the wind slowly began to kick up again and screeched through the door. (When I was a kid, I’d moisten a blade of grass and sandwich it between my two thumbs. That was the sound the door made, only it was twenty times louder.) Powered by the force of nature, it was deafening. Joel smiled and made train whistle noises as accompaniment; Tara and Russell excused themselves early, which was okay because our guests were not overly fond of children.They definitely didn’t see the humor of Joel’s backup sounds to the roaring notes emanating from the front door.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we were never invited to their house.

Now someone was pounding on our warped front door. I opened it to find a huge man casting an even larger shadow across the threshold. The top step groaned under his weight. He wore torn jeans, a filthy Polo shirt, and elegant yet mud-splattered riding boots. His piercing blue eyes were ringed by bloodshot whites set in a field of sweat-smeared grime. He might’ve been blond but the prevalence of so much dirt made it hard to get a real fix.

Trickling from the corners of his mouth, blood gathered at the bottom of his scruffy chin and dripped onto his once-blue shirt, staining it a splotchy rust color. He might’ve been youngish but it was difficult to tell through the homeless appearance.

Alarmed at his facial lacerations, I half closed the door and asked, Yes?

You the dentist?

That’s right, I answered, further closing the door, leaving it open only a crack. We’re eating dinner just now. (My family was gathered around our tiny kitchen table, not in the adjacent dining room.)

I don’t think this can wait, he said while the steady flow of blood continued to drip, punctuating his point.

Uh, yeah . . . okay. I’ll take a quick look. Go around to the side and I’ll come down to unlock the office door.

Without a word he turned and stomped down the front stoop, the treads bowing under his weight. Trudging through our weed-infested front yard, which lacked a sidewalk, he disappeared around the corner.

Who was that, Carroll? Kate asked, looking up from her plate.

An emergency, I replied. I’ll be in the office for a bit. Save some dessert for me. I didn’t want to miss out on Kate’s signature dessert, a gooey concoction of vanilla wafers, chocolate chips, whipped cream, and pudding, topped with fresh strawberries to help allay any feelings of guilt. It was Russell’s favorite.

Do you need any help? Kate asked, ready to chip in.

Nah. I’ll be fine, I answered, then paused at the thought of all that blood. If I do, I’ll let ya know.

I flipped on the office lights and saw the big stranger waiting patiently in the parking lot. He nodded amiably when I unlocked the door, then stared down at his boots before stomping to knock off the top layer of sludge. That valiant attempt was in vain: he still tracked a considerable amount of mud into the waiting room. I handed him medical and dental histories on a clipboard for him to fill out.

I’ll be right back, I announced before leaving to go fire up the compressor and high-speed suction.

Okay, he muttered, squinting at the forms.

I soon returned and set out an emergency packet of instruments, wondering what had brought this guy to my door. There were plenty of on-call dentists in the phone book. My emergencies typically came from folks already enrolled in our practice, and they usually phoned ahead. This was one of those exceptions, like the time I extracted a farmer’s loose tooth on a Sunday afternoon between supper and dessert. He had come to the front door saying, I tried to get this one out doc, but it wouldn’t come. This situation promised to be a replay.

Harold walked into the operatory and plopped hard onto my ancient dental chair, which threatened to collapse. The steep slope of the original floor had yet to be corrected and the chair, with big Harold squeezed into it, seemed in danger of tottering over. Sitting on my stool, I thought, I’ll be crushed if the dental chair gives up the ghost right now. (Not long after, I took out a loan, had the floors leveled, and purchased new equipment.)

When he opened his mouth, all I saw was blood, dried and caked. Looking more closely, I realized that his upper front teeth were quite loose and more blood was oozing from his gums. The poor guy had to be hurting but didn’t complain—not even a subtle wince—while I poked around. I took a few radiographs that revealed two major root fractures: these bad boys weren’t salvageable.

I began a long, drawn-out explanation about why those two teeth needed to be extracted.

Go ahead ’n’ yank ’em out, he interrupted.

He quickly sat ramrod straight, appearing more menacing than he had at the front door. The few words he’d spoken were soft—almost muffled—but obviously tired of hearing me talk, he spoke much louder. Whatever. Let ’er rip an’ git it over with . . . sooner the better.

Uh, sure, I said, staring at his partially completed chart to avoid his eyes. I’ll get right to it, Harold. Can I call you Harold?

He relaxed a bit. Yes. My name is Harold and I’m ready.

Although buckets of anesthetic were called for, I wondered, How much can you give a small horse without killing him? I certainly didn’t want him feeling any pain, nor did I want to tick him off while I dug at those fractured roots. We’ll start with three carpules of lidocaine . . . and maybe one of Carbocaine for good measure, I reasoned.

After I had administered the fourth shot, Kate came bounding down the stairs from the house and breezed into the operatory. Can I help? When she put her hand on Harold’s shoulder to comfort him, the beast looked