Butterfly Weed (40 page)

After giving her a sixth of a grain of morphine to relax her, he explains to Tenny what he is going to do, and asks her to try very hard not to cough during the procedure. He has made sure the room is warm enough that he can remove her gown, and he has her lie on the side of her “good” lung. She cannot quite understand why he wants to make one of her lungs stop working, and is uncertain about how well she can breathe with only one lung. He tries to assure her that she can breathe just fine with one lung, and that stopping the bad lung will force it to rest, just as she is forcing her body to rest, and rest is really the only cure for her condition at this stage.

The very sight of the Floyd-Robinson needle with its trocar and tubing attached would be enough to throw any patient into shock, so he must be very careful that she does not see it. He gives her novocaine, taking care to infiltrate the pleura. He is going in behind her armpit, and he uses a small cataract knife to make an incision to allow the needle to penetrate more smoothly. Very slowly and gently he inserts the long needle, wishing he had a third hand to place on her forehead, a fourth hand to hold her hand, and a fifth hand to wipe the sweat off his brow. Tenny whimpers. The sound is so childlike that he realizes just how young she is. Now he begins frequently to pull out the trocar on the back end of the needle, and take readings from the manometer. The manometer now begins to fluctuate, and shows a negative respiration, and he realizes that the needle has reached the desired space between two layers of pleura. He can now inject the gas. As the gas goes in, he keeps a steady eye on the manometer, as it begins to register positive pressure, and he slowly injects about 15 cc of gas every minute or so, until he has injected 250 cc, which has taken him nearly half an hour.

“Tell me when I can cough,” Tenny pleads. “I need to cough, real bad.”

“Shhh,” he hushes her. Her voice is causing the manometer to fluctuate, but he realizes he has injected enough gas, and he slowly pulls the needle out, and seals the wound with collodion. “Okay,” he says. “Cough, but not too hard.” And she does.

Immediately afterwards she feels fine, and even wants to get out of bed, but he wants her to lie still. He takes a washrag, dips it into the washbasin on the stand beside the bed, and wipes the sweat from her face and body. He takes a hairbrush and smooths out her long, long hair, which he then arranges nicely on either side of her head on the pillow, and down over her bare breasts. She is a vision, and he bends down and gives her a long kiss. He is not unmindful that you should never kiss anyone with
TB
, but this is not just anyone; this is Tenny.

She breaks the kiss, and whispers, “There’s somebody standing in the door.”

He turns. It is Piney. He is mortified, more even than he had been that time that he and Venda were caught in sexual labor by Russ and Tenny. That time, at least, he had had the excuse of being under the influence of both a love potion and whiskey, and not responsible for his behavior. Now he has no excuse for being a mature, conscientious, respected physician, sober and ethical, who is keeping his mistress as a patient in the Stay More Hotel and is discovered by his beloved wife giving his mistress a kiss which is passionate enough to show any but a blind person or an idiot that he is deeply in love with her.

For her part, Piney, who knows everything, does not know what to say. She does not need an explanation, nor an introduction. She knows that this is Tenny, of whom her husband spoke often in his sleep and finally in his wakefulness in telling Piney that the girl has the Great White Plague. Piney knows that Tenny is not simply Colvin’s patient, not simply his student, certainly not simply his friend, but his true love. Piney knows, without even observing the Floyd-Robinson apparatus beside the bed, that her husband is doing his level best to cure the girl of the Great White Plague, and she knows that if anybody can cure the girl, Colvin can do it. But the kiss she has witnessed confirms her in her knowledge that some kind of bond exists between Colvin and Tenny that transcends both conventional morality and “reality,” whatever that is, and is a bond that can never be broken. This is the thought, and the knowledge, that brings tears to Piney’s eyes, and validates the supposed superstition,
Sing before breakfast, Cry before supper.
So in a sense she has brought this great sadness upon herself by foolishly neglecting to remember that venerable axiom. Her own sense of blame does nothing to diminish her tears, but increases them, until she is standing there weeping so hard she cannot stand it, and, being unable to stand it, turns and flees.

It is the last that Colvin will see of her. Much later, he will hear a rumor that she is living with her sister Sycamoria on the other side of Demijohn, and, later still, he will hear that she has moved into Harrison, the biggest town in that part of the Ozarks, and is working there in a grocery store. And later still, he will attempt to locate her, at least to offer to convey to her the player piano, if she still wants it, but he will not be able to find her in Harrison. Years later, and even at the time I was a patient in Doc Swain’s house, some of the folks of Stay More will still be speculating that Colvin is still waiting for Piney to return, but if that is true, and I have reason to doubt it, it is a futile expectation.

Three or four more treatments with the Floyd-Robinson apparatus are necessary in order to complete the collapse of Tenny’s lung, but Colvin is able to carry out only a couple of these before Tenny is evicted from the hotel. Drussie, with Willis backing her up, comes to Colvin to tell him that, one, since Piney has moved out he might as well move Tenny into his own house, and, two, there is such a scandal attendant upon the rumors of why Piney has left town that the Ingledews don’t want to contribute to it any further by harboring a love nest under their roof.

Reluctantly, because he still thinks there’s a chance that Piney might come home any minute as soon as she recovers from her shock or grief or jealousy or whatever emotion she is having, Colvin moves Tenny into his own house, but puts her to bed not in the big bed that was his and Piney’s. He puts her in the selfsame cot that I was to use during my convalescence there, and I have to confess that when I learned that fact it gave me the same sense of immediacy and actuality that I am trying to achieve with this present tense. One reason he will not put her in the big bed, apart from its being Piney’s, is to minimize the temptation for further sexual activity. For although Tenny despite her illness continues to be as hungry for him as ever, if not more so, he doesn’t think it’s wise to risk further hemoptysis brought on by the labor of love.

When finally her lung is collapsed, and the hemorrhaging has stopped, her disposition and outlook have improved so much that he allows her to get dressed and get out of bed. She even wants to fix meals for the two of them, but he doesn’t think she’s strong enough yet for that. He does allow her to sit at the marvel of the player piano and pedal it, asking her not to play “Roses of Picardy” but willingly listening to her play “Arkansas Blues” over and over again.

She is not well enough to return to school. During his day-long trips to Parthenon each Friday, during which he does his job as quickly and perfunctorily as possible (and the Newts, both girls and boys, have yet to taste their first victory), he canvasses Tenny’s other teachers for her lessons, so that she can try to keep up. And of course he gives her special tutoring in Psychology.

Then the Christmas season comes, and school shuts down.

Colvin cuts down a scraggly cedar tree, eschewing a more attractive pine, and Tenny helps him trim it with popcorn strings and gilded walnuts and strips of colored paper glued into chains.

“What would you like for a Christmas present?” he asks her, being not very good at shopping, or surprises.

“I just want to be fucked!” she exclaims. It is the first time he has heard her use that word, and he is both somewhat shocked and aroused. He dearly wishes he could oblige her, and he attempts to explain why it is not advisable. She pouts, and sulks, and continues to brood until finally she announces, “I want to go home for Christmas. I mean, really
home.
Brushy Mountain.”

When he has determined that she will not have it otherwise, he decides that it will be good to get her out of this house, which is still haunted by Piney’s spirit if not her presence. And almost without his noticing, his practice has collapsed as much as Tenny’s lung, on account of the scandal. Despite the increase in illnesses that are provoked by the stress and guilt of the holiday season, people have stopped coming to Doc Swain’s or calling for him to come to them, even as a last resort. Unbeknownst to him, he has become an outcast in his own community, and it will take him some time to overcome it.

So he hitches Nessus to the buggy, and takes Tenny home to Brushy Mountain. Snow has fallen and accumulated in the upper reaches, and the going is difficult, but he gets her there, wrapped snugly in furs. Her family, having heard not a word from her since Russ took her away on his white horse, are overjoyed to see her, but they can see at once that something is wrong with her, and she tells them right off that she is being consumed by the Great White Plague, and that Doc Swain has had to collapse one of her lungs.

She turns to him. “I never did bother to ask ye. How long has my lung got to stay collapsed?”

“Two years, at least,” he admits. “Maybe three or four.”

“
What?!
” she says. “How come you never told me? I thought it would only be for a few weeks or so.” She pounds her fists on his chest until he can seize her wrists and stop her. And she may be heard, at other times of that day, saying to him such things as “What have you done to me?” and “How could you do something like that?” and she begins to realize that she is losing her temper, and that she is very angry at the world, or at life, for having allowed her to come down with a real disease, and she is taking out her anger on her dear sweet Colvin. But this knowledge doesn’t stop her from doing so. The Tennisons and her Grandma McArtor cannot help but notice it, and they wonder what she is doing in the first place with this man she hates so much, since it was Russ Breedlove that she was supposed to have taken up with.

Angry Tenny wants to take over the rest of this story, and we may soon have to let her. She wants to assert herself, to stop being the passive dupe of artificial pneumothoraces and the helpless victim of dreadful diseases and the passive, fragile heroine of a novel and to see if she can’t take control of her own life. So she decides to send Colvin away. He is permitted to spend this one night, sleeping on a pallet on the kitchen floor, but he must go back to Stay More after breakfast. In her own bed, thinking of him sleeping on the pallet on the kitchen floor, she remembers that that is the same way and the same place that Russ had slept, and, dwelling upon this, she cannot sleep. Insomnia has rarely been a problem for her, but eventually she rises and lights a candle, and remembering how she had accidentally dripped hot candle wax on Russ, sets the candle at a distance from Colvin’s body. She gives him a little shake, and then a less gentle shake, but he is deep asleep. She whispers his name without succeeding in waking him. She speaks his name aloud without waking him. She slips under the covers and embraces him without waking him. Now she notices that his penis is fully erect, making a tent in the bedcovers, and she marvels at this, wondering what kind of dream he could be having. Fondling it, she remembers all the incidents of pleasure it has given her, and she decides that she would like one more. She hikes the hem of her nightgown and sits atop him, and gets it into her very easily, and sighs and moans so loudly it ought surely to waken him, but it does not. Taking charge now, wanting to keep this moment of joining as a sensation to be experienced forevermore, even through eternity, she will permit time for her, and thereby for us, to slip into the future tense. She will rise and settle, lift and ease down, again and again and again. Not only will she create enough buffing and smoothing to throw her into her own mighty climax, but she will also generate enough sliding of his penis’s skin to force his testicles to erupt their contents upward into her. She will only briefly reflect that it will be perhaps the wrong time of the month, two weeks since her last period, the only time in her heavy affair with Colvin that she has not observed the calendar or taken precautions.

The next morning she will be tempted, before sending him on his way, to ask if he will not have been at all aware of what she will have done. But she will still be maintaining her attitude of anger, or at least vexation, and she will not even bring herself to be properly appreciative of the gift he will give her upon his departure, which will be the only Christmas gift he will have been able to think of that might be useful to her: a year’s supply of the roots of butterfly weed, which he has dug up from the very patch that Lora Dinsmore had turned into when Alonzo pursued her, roots which Colvin has reduced to a powder with his mortar and pestle. “It won’t do ye no harm,” he will say. “And maybe it’s all that can help.” She will not want her folks to see her kissing him good-bye, so she will not kiss him.

At least the tea made with the powder from the butterfly weed will be more soothing, and therefore helpful, than the various remedies and nostrums that her family will begin to employ upon her. Throughout the holiday season, one after another of these will be tried, beginning with Grandma McArtor’s old-time, surefire cures which Grandma will regret she will never have been able to use on Grampaw McArtor until it was too late. One of these she will remember from back home in Tennessee will involve a rattlesnake, and Wayne Don Tennison will sacrifice one of his prize pets so the snake’s skin can be pickled with whiskey, and Tenny will drink the whiskey. But this will only make her drunk, so more radical cures will be tried:

As an inhalant, it will have been known that pulmonary disorders can be relieved by constant exposure to the unpleasant but beneficial fumes of feces, so Tenny will be instructed to spend as much time as she can stand, hour upon hour, sitting in the privy, taking deep breaths. But it will be so cold out there that this will come close to giving her pneumonia, and the odor will cling to her whole body and will make her offensive company.