Butterfly Weed (37 page)

Maybe the only differences you’ll notice are these: the rest of this story aint so comical. Assuming you’ve been amused by a lot of what I’ve told you—even though you don’t laugh much, I can tell when I’ve tickled you—you may find the rest of this story somewhat downbeat, certainly minor key. And also I’m fixing to switch it into the present tense. Why? Well, why do
you
do it your own self? In all your novels, you downshift (or upshift, is it?) from the past to the present tense toward the end, and then finally into the future tense. I’ve studied what you’ve done. I’ve considered that in my own collections of tales, there is often a kind of indiscriminate shifting from one tense to another, because that’s simply the way those old folk stories got told, perhaps without any rhyme or reason as far as tenses are concerned.

But if you’ll pardon the analogy, there exists between storyteller and listener a kind of romance, and the progress of it parallels the stages of courtship: holding hands, hugging, and finally fucking, or some kind of consummation. All that past tense business is just holding hands, making contact, nothing truly intimate. But when you shift to present tense, you’re drawing the listener into more intimate contact, as if to make sure that the listener becomes a part of the story, not just an audience to it. And then, through the ultimate intimacy of the future tense, you make sure that the listener is
always
a permanent part of the story. Am I right? Thank you for bringing me the Smith Brothers cough drops. I need them.

Hug Tenny: she definitely has
TB
. When Colvin leaves that auditorium and goes downstairs, first to the principal’s office to see if the vial of tuberculin has been delivered (it has), and then to his own office, Tenny follows him, and they lock the door. At once they use the sofa, out of similar as well as different reasons, both out of love, but Tenny out of overwhelming desire and Colvin not so much from desire as out of solace for his miseries, including his continuing embarrassment over the mix-up. He wants to ask Tenny if she herself, being in both Basketball and Psych, had not realized his error, and, if so, why in heaven’s name hadn’t she told him? But she will not let him ask. Her hands are all over him. Her mouth is all over him. The ferocity of her ardor almost scares him, for he has never known a woman to
want
it so much. The building is emptied now of people, the school grounds are likewise evacuated, but still there must be someone around who can hear the sounds that Colvin and Tenny are making. Somewhere out there, surely, is Russ Breedlove, waiting to take Tenny home atop Marengo. He will just have to wait.

He will just have to wait even longer, for Colvin and Tenny, when they have finished, do not rise from that sofa but lie there in each other’s arms for a long time, not simply because it feels good to hold each other like that, nor simply because they are all worn out from a busy day and a strenuous turn at sex, but because it is postponing as long as possible the test.

But finally he must get up and administer it. He keeps his back to her while he dilutes the tuberculin and draws into the hypodermic syringe a tiny amount, 0.1 mg., and then he takes her arm and promises that it will not hurt very much, and it does not.

“What’s it supposed to do?” she asks. “What do you think might be wrong with me?”

Colvin Swain surprises himself by not telling her the truth. “Likely there aint nothing wrong with you,” he says, “but this here is just a little test to make sure. We’ll keep a close watch on your arm there where I stuck ye, and see if it has any kind of reaction. Now if you want a ride home, you’d better run and see if you caint find your husband.” He kisses her one more time, asks her to contrive to meet him here about this same time tomorrow, and she is gone.

He has no microscope in this office. He takes home with him to Stay More the specimen of her sputum he had collected earlier, and uses his microscope to examine it, after an acid-fast stain. Long after he has finally and positively identified a bacillum,
Mycobacterium tuberculosis humanis,
he continues to stare into the microscope, watching the goddamned critter. “Know your enemy,” he says to himself, and he wants to study every curve of this tiny, evil rod until he can almost predict what it is trying to do. He knows what its brothers and sisters are already doing inside Tenny’s lungs. Thriving on oxygen, they are seeking out the parts of her lungs where they can get plenty of air. They are hunting for her alveoli, the tiny air sacs of her lungs, private chambers, where they can have their orgies and reproduce.

But her strong young body has not welcomed them, and it has sent platoons of white blood cells to interrupt those orgies in those alveoli, and rout them out, swallow them up, and ideally kill them. Yet in swallowing them, the white blood cells might not be killing them but only giving them protection by enwrapping them in pockets, spinning caseous cocoons around them. These shells are the tubercles. Tenny’s body becomes hypersensitive not only to the bacilli but to those tubercles, and this is what will cause her skin to become inflamed where Colvin injected the tuberculin.

Maybe, just maybe, her disease will not progress beyond this point; the bacilli will spread no farther, and any of them remaining in her alveoli, instead of having further orgies, will go to sleep and remain dormant, sealed off in those tubercles, and she will have a normal life.

That is what he hopes for. After supper, though the night grows chilly and dark, he sits on the front porch, wearing his favorite cardigan sweater. He needs to think. His dog Galen comes up and slobbers on his shoe, and nuzzles his leg, and gets a pat or two on the head for his pains, then curls asleep at Colvin’s feet. Colvin is moved to think of the dog’s namesake, and he remembers that Galen, the last of the great Greek physicians, quite possibly suffered from tuberculosis himself. Galen established the first institution for the treatment of
TB
and sent his patients to recuperate on the most beautiful beach in the world, in a place where the special herbs eaten by the cows produced the magical therapeutic milk that Galen prescribed for his patients. There is no record of the rate of cure of all those milk-drinking patients of Galen.

Colvin thinks of all the names that the disease has been called since Galen’s time, when it was known as phthisis, pronounced not as bad as it looks, thigh-sis, inherited into old-time parts of the Ozarks as “tis-sis” or “tis-sick” as in the legendary tissick weevil, who was thought to cause it. But most people in the Ozarks still knew it by its nineteenth-century name, consumption, because that is what it does, it consumes the body, starting with the lungs. Colvin had enough experience with it—from patients of his who thought they had catarrh, asthma, bronchitis, weak heart, stomach trouble, scrofula, or just the common cold, and succumbed to it, despite his ministrations (there are no really effective ministrations)—to think of it as the Great White Plague. During the years of his medical education, with Kie Raney or by himself, it was the Number One Killer in the country, and he had learned to fear it more than any other disease. Like any good physician, Colvin takes pride in his ability to manage and conquer his patients’ ailments, and he can stare arteriosclerosis in the face and say, “Arteriosclerosis, I am your better!” but he cannot face up to the Great White Plague with the same fearlessness and confidence. It is the one disease that is better than he.

Colvin broods on his porch for so long that finally his wife, Piney, comes out of the house and sits beside him, and, because she knows everything, she knows that something is profoundly disturbing him. All she says is, “Do you think you could talk to me about it?”

Because she knows everything, he asks her, “Is there any cure against the Great White Plague?”

Although she knows everything, she does not know that one, nor does anyone else, at that time. “You would surely know if there was,” she admits. After a while she asks, “Who has it?”

“A girl named Tenny,” he divulges.

“Yes,” she says. “Tenny.” As if it’s someone she’s known all her life.

Colvin wants to say more. He wants to confess his great inner conflict: he had first permitted himself to become so involved with Tenny because he knew for certain that, hypochondriacal as she was, she would never have anything actually wrong with her, she would never need him as her doctor, and therefore it was not a breach of doctor-patient ethics for him to fall madly in love with her. But now that he has discovered that Tenny does indeed have a great need of his attentions as her physician, will he have to violate ethics (not to mention Kie Raney’s Oath) in order to go on loving her?

Because he cannot voice this torment, his wife at length speaks up, saying, “You’d best come in the house, Colvin. It’s getting cold. Real cold. And I suppose you won’t be waiting until next Friday to be going back to Parthenon, will you?”

No, he cannot wait another week. Reactions to the tuberculin test begin to show up within twenty-four hours, and he goes back to his Academy office the next day, Saturday, to meet her. She has escaped from Jasper, from her husband and her domineering mother-in-law, on the excuse that there is an important meeting of the Erisophean Society, the Academy’s literary club.

Although Colvin hardly needs to see the results of the tuberculin test to confirm his diagnosis, he has to punish himself, or make himself share the ordeal that lies ahead for Tenny, by seeing it anyway: the swelling and the redness on Tenny’s arm, the positive reaction declaring, “This pore gal is infected, infested with the Great White Plague. So now what, Doc?” He cannot answer.

Tenny wants so eagerly to make love again, without even waiting for him to explain what the redness and swelling from her tuberculin test signify. Colvin knows, from his vast knowledge of the enemy, that the Great White Plague is rumored to increase the sexual urge, that perhaps if it doesn’t directly heighten the libido, it causes some kind of mysterious chemical effect in the body which stirs the glands, or at least it raises the temperature of the body in such a way that the heat is perceived as sexual heat. He is not certain that he can believe any of this. He wants to believe, and he has every right to believe, that Tenny desires him so ardently not because of her fever but because she loves him as much as he loves her. And when he obliges her and himself, and marvels yet again at the intensity and abandon and joy that she expresses in the act, he does not permit any thoughts of fever or chemistry to diminish his own pleasure.

They are still lying in each other’s arms, in the Saturday sunlight coming through the window that is almost enough to take the October chill out of the air, when she at last requests, “Okay, my dearest dear, it’s time maybe you tell me how come my arm has turned red and swole up where you stuck me.”

Colvin, as I think we have seen, is a good liar but not a great one. He knows he cannot indefinitely postpone letting her know the truth. She will have to learn it all somehow, sometime. But he can be as gentle as possible without lying. “Do you recollect,” he says, fully aware that they are lying on the very sofa where she had reclined to tell him about it, “that time when you was a child and your good old Grampaw McArtor lay sick abed and you spent so much time with him, and even sent your best friend ’See down inside of his lungs to see if she couldn’t cure him?”

“Sure I remember all that,” Tenny says.

“Well, there’s just a possibility that you might have caught what he had, although catching the disease didn’t mean that you’d show any sign of it for many a year. The little bacilli that cause it could have been asleep in your system all this time, just waiting for a reason to wake up and start doing their dirty work again.”

“Colvin Swain!” she says, and sits up abruptly. “Are you tellin me that I might have
consumption?
”

He sits up too. “It appears so,” he admits. He explains how the tuberculin test works. He also confesses to having taken the sputum specimen home with him and examined it under the microscope and seen the curvy rod in its acid-fast stain. Does she remember from Hygiene class, he asks, what bacilli are, and how they behave?

“I reckon I learnt the practical reason,” she says, then smiles and adds, “but I never learnt the pretty one. If there is one.”

“Awfully pretty from the bacterium’s way of lookin at it,” he says. “If I was a bacterium, I’d be mighty proud to cavort around in one of yore lungs.”

“But you’d be a-killin me,” she points out, rightly.

“I wouldn’t know I was,” he avows, rightly. “Like all other critters in this world, including humans too, I’d just be doing my job, to git along in the world, competing with my fellow critters as well as with my host or hostess for my share of being able to breathe and to eat and to—”

“To shit,” Tenny says. She shudders, and clutches her chest. “So now my lungs are filling up with bacteria shit and I caint even cough hard enough to git it out.” Involuntarily, but as if she wants to do it, she coughs violently, and Colvin reaches for a handkerchief for her sputum, which does not yet, he is glad to see, contain any blood. Whether it contains any bacteria shit he might not even be able to determine with a microscope, but Tenny has given him a thought: if the tuberculosis bacilli are creatures, what happens to their excrement? He realizes that science has spent much time determining that they must breathe, but not that they must eat and shit.

She clutches his sleeve and asks in the same child’s voice she first asked him, a year before, “I’m like to die, aint I?”

But a year before it had been almost as if she were seeking constantly to find something that would kill her, and Colvin had to assure her continuously that she was not going to die. Now she has everything to live for, and earnestly wants to, but he is going to have to remind her that, as the textbook had concluded, we should not live to die, but live prepared to die. “Not everbody who catches the Great White Plague dies from it,” he declares. “Lots of ’em live forever. Or, I mean, at least a natural lifetime.”