Medicine Woman

By AMELIA WEISS

TITLE: CHARMS FOR THE EASY LIFE

AUTHOR: KAYE GIBBONS

PUBLISHER: PUTNAM; 254 PAGES; $19.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: Three generations of Carolina women, one better than the next, are told by a fourth, the best yet.

SOME PEOPLE MIGHT GIVE UP their second-born to write as well as Kaye Gibbons, so graceful and spirited are her fictional histories of North Carolina women. In her fourth novel, Charms for the Easy Life, Gibbons presents Charlie Kate Birch, a midwife and self-proclaimed doctor who meets her ferryman husband as she crosses the Pasquotank River to deliver babies, nurse the sick and lay out the dead. Her granddaughter Margaret, narrator of the book, imagines, "Between my grandmother, her green eyes . . . and the big-cookie moon low over the Pasquotank, it must have been all my grandfather could do to deposit her on the other side of the river."

That's the first and last romantic view of Charlie Kate, a blunt and righteous woman who eats garlic on toast for breakfast, smells of mothballs and ties her "resolute shoes" with 30-year-old laces soaked every Sunday in linseed oil ("My shoestrings," she says, "have lasted years longer than most people can stand each other"). An eccentric who knows as much about Thomas Hardy's novels as she does about cirrhosis of the liver, Charlie Kate is in fact a healing genius who uses herbal cures like evening primrose and Saint-John's-Wort, as well as all the modern medicine she can get.

But her best healing power lies in her self. She is in full possession of easy-life charm, and it is her "winning streak" of a life that she passes on to her daughter Sophia and to Margaret: "I trusted my grandmother. Everything she had ever said had been true, and I had long since learned to do whatever she told me to do. Trusting her to guide me . . . was like falling backward like her chloroformed women, knowing that not only would I be caught, but I would be caught before I realized I was falling."

Men pass through now and then. But they're mostly sketchy figures in suits and uniforms, the sorely afflicted or, like the ferryman, no-accounts who come to stud and go off to do something else. In 1910 the Birches move from Pasquotank to Raleigh, where matriarch Charlie Kate raises her daughter and granddaughter, practices medicine and becomes a Wake County legend: "Remember when she got Tessa Jerrod's arm out of the wringer? . . . Buttercup Spivey's dropped kidneys rose. Malcolm Taylor stopped wanting to scratch his missing leg. Everybody saw the miracles all around."

But Margaret's miracle is her grandmother. From pamphlets on birth control to instructions about courting ("He's not going to leave you alone. Not since Satan tackled Eve has somebody gone after a person as hard as he'll go after you"), through the Depression and into World War II, Gibbons paints this medicine woman in colors as pungent as mashed garlic, as envigorating as sarsaparilla, and as soothing as lemon-balm tea. The charm for the reader is that there is still such a thriving population of Southern women left in the author's well-healed imagination.