Butterfly Weed (41 page)

Also from an excretory perspective, it will have been widely known that urine is a specific for pulmonary tuberculosis, and Tenny will be urged, and then required, and then compelled, to imbibe her first water upon arising, morning after morning, until she will be tempted to try to get back out of the future tense because she will no longer feel in control of what will be happening to her. The butterfly weed tea will help to remove the taste.

She will tell this to Colvin on a postcard, belatedly thanking him for the butterfly weed, and she will conclude, “Between shit and piss, I am fed up with all the old-time superstitions, and I wont have nothing more to do with none of them. But I will keep on drinking your tea.”

Tenny’s momma, noting that the grandmother’s traditional albeit radical remedies will not seem to be working, will decide to dose Tenny with Tuberclecide, Prof. Hoff’s Consumption Cure, Yonkerman’s Tuberculozyne, and Nature’s Creation. None of these, however, will produce any noticeable effect, since the essential ingredient of most of these is simply a combination of turpentine and kerosene.

Tenny’s much-older sister Oriole will come home for a visit, mainly to show off the new automobile which her rich husband will have given her for Christmas, a Climber Six Roadster—“The Car Made in Arkansas by Arkansawyers.”

Like her fancy Climber auto, Oriole will be progressive and modern, and when she will find out that baby sister has the
TB
and will be doing nothing for it except fooling around with the stuff that Gran and Momma will have been trying on her, Oriole will decide to take matters into her own hands. She will put Tenny in the Climber and drive her to the Booneville Sanatorium.

Tenny will hope that their route might take them through Stay More, so that she might see Colvin once again. She will have forgiven him for the artificial pneumothorax, which probably has done her a lot more good than the shit and piss and kerosene, and also the butterfly weed has kept her calm and helped her cough and made her feel generally good.

But the route will not go to Stay More. To get from Brushy Mountain to Booneville, Oriole will drive the Climber on some terrible roads westwards only until she can reach the state highway, which will be graded and fairly smooth and will get them to Russellville, and thence across the Arkansas River, out of the Ozarks, up into the Ouachitas, and finally to Booneville.

So the best that Tenny will be able to do is to send Colvin a postcard, once she will have settled at “San.”

Colvin will crush the postcard in his fist, and will be heard to say to nobody in particular, or to all of the postal patrons of Stay More, most of whom will have forgiven him his scandal, because he will now be living alone and paying the awful price of his loneliness for it, “The soul has gone out of the Ozarks!”

Chapter eleven

B
less your heart, you’ve brought me a bouquet of butterfly weed! Mary, lookee here at what Harington has done! Oh, goddamn me, I not only forget that Mary can’t see these flowers, more importantly I forget that today Mary aint even there! Is she? No, last night Dr. Bittner decided to move her to City Hospital for a while. Nothing too serious, I hope, and just in case you’re looking for synchronicities as you usually do, it don’t have anything to do with Mary’s lungs. It certainly aint
TB
. Something wrong with her gallbladder. She can’t eat. Dr. Bittner says it could be cancer of the gallbladder, maybe not, but he wants to be sure. Anyway, I’m sure sorry she’s not here to listen to my telling of the end of my long tale, but I reckon she can make it up, hearing it on Mike Luster’s tape recorder, if you’ll kindly push that little red button there.

No, wait, first I just want to say another thing about Mary and then I want to say something about these lovely butterfly weed flowers you’ve brought me. I don’t want you to take this as any sort of criticism or blame of any kind, but do you recall that Mary was your instructor for freshman English, for all of two weeks, back in the early fifties? Mary hasn’t forgotten it, how you came to her and told her you were transferring out of her class because, one, you’d spent all your high school years with women teachers and you were hoping to have men teachers in college, and two, damned if you were going to read the Holy Bible as your first assignment in the course. You were kind of an arrogant sonofabitch, weren’t you? With a typical freshman attitude. You didn’t know who Mary was, that she was the only expert on Ozark folklore at the University. You thought she was just some homely looking spinster teacher like all those you’d had in high school, and you thought the worst part of it was that she was so all-fired religious she was going to make you read the Bible. Well, let me say two things: just as you didn’t know who Mary was, she had no idea of course who you were, that you were going to become, many years later, one of her favorite novelists. Anyway, you didn’t hurt her feelings dropping her course. It happened all the time to her. But it made her a little sad that she hadn’t been able to make clear to you, maybe on account of your poor hearing, that she was assigning some of the Bible to read not because she was the least bit religious, which she aint, but because it contains some of the finest fiction in the history of literature.

I reckon I bring this up, on this very last day that I may see you, just to remind you that the story I’ve been telling you, no less than the Bible, can be taken either as the exact history of some people, of the love between a doctor and a young girl in a remote part of the Ozark Mountains, or it can be taken as a clever yarn. The point is, what difference does it make? Would you have enjoyed it any more if I could verify everything in it? I have here at the foot of my bed a stack of photocopies which our mutual friend Bob Besom—special agent in Special Collections at the University, last heard from when he showed us parts of Doc’s journals to indicate how Doc was involved in the dream cure with Lorraine Dinsmore—has taken the trouble to copy from various issues of
Sanatorium Outlook,
a newspaper written and published by the inmates—I mean, the patients—at the Booneville Sanatorium between 1923 until the year 1970, when tuberculosis had been so largely eradicated, partly, as we’ll see, because of what Doc Swain did, that the sanatorium had to shut down and become a ghost town. Anyway, there are a few references to a Tennessee Breedlove, or a Mrs. Breedlove, or “our sweetheart Tenny” in these issues, if you’d care to look at them.

But before we join Tenny at the sanatorium, let me just thank you from the bottom of my heart for these lovely orange flowers, which, I take it, are your parting gift to me just as the roots of this plant were Doc’s parting gift to Tenny.

The plant goes by more names than tuberculosis does: in addition to butterfly weed, it has been called white root, silkweed, pleurisy root, orange milkweed, orange root, canada root, witchweed, swallowwort, wind root, chigger weed, archangel, agerajum, and, one of my favorites, Indian paintbrush, because, as you can see, it looks as if each flower, compounded of dozens of these little umbels, each one of which resembles, if you look closely, a ballerina in bright orange tutu, could be the head of a brush that an Indian might have smeared with orange pigment in order to paint a picture.

I won’t ask you where you picked these, because I think I know: the roadside, or waste places, spots where even other weeds can’t grow, because the butterfly weed can stand the most severe drought and the worst possible soil. It can grow anywhere. And even though the monarch butterflies, after getting drunk on the nectar of the flowers, lay their eggs on the leaves, and the caterpillars strip the foliage bare, it doesn’t kill the plant. The plant keeps on growing, and seems to grow forever.

Will we find a metaphor here for Tenny? I doubt it. Much as I’d like to draw parallels between the bacilli consuming Tenny and the caterpillars consuming the butterfly weed, there really isn’t any connection. The caterpillar eats in order to metamorphose into a gorgeous butterfly. What possible beauty is there in what the bacilli do, other than propagate their awful species?

And since we are not concerned with the butterflies and the caterpillars so much as the big white roots of the plant, which are used to make that miraculous tea, we might conclude that the only connection, if there is one, is in the botanical name of our plant,
Asclepias tuberosa,
and its double allusion, to both the great Greek physician and to tuberculosis. But I’ll have to leave you to explore that. I am running out of time.

As far as butterfly weed is concerned, one of the first things that will happen to Tenny, when she will be checked into the sanatorium, will be that a gruff nurse, Mrs. Hull, searching Tenny’s belongings, will discover the year’s supply of powdered butterfly weed root that Colvin will have given her, and will confiscate it, on the grounds that it violates a regulation: patients are permitted to have only those medicines that the sanatorium doctors prescribe for them.

“But it makes me feel so much better!” Tenny will protest. “And it aint really a medicine, just a harmless stuff for making tea.”

“There’s another rule you better learn fast,” Nurse Hull will snap. “Don’t
never
talk back to me.”

Tenny will quickly discover that Booneville will not be Saranac Lake, nor will it be Davos-Platz, which she will not have known about, because this will be the same year that Thomas Mann will first publish
The Magic Mountain.
Tenny’s magic mountain will be twelve miles away but will seem to loom closer, Mt. Magazine, at 2,800 feet the highest point between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The sanatorium itself will be at a high elevation, over a thousand feet. It will have its own farms and dairies and gardens for the raising and growing of all of the food consumed in the sanatorium.

“They set a real scrumptious table here,” Tenny will write to Colvin, “and I am trying to get my weight back up, although many a morning I just can’t keep my breakfast down.”

She will be installed in Hemingway Hall. This certainly will carry no allusion to the novelist, who will not have published his first novel yet, in fact will still be proofreading his first collection of stories,
In Our Time.
Judge Hemingway of Little Rock (no known relation) will have been one of the founders of the institution, which will have been one of the very first state sanatoriums in the South, and will eventually become the largest in the nation.

Hemingway Hall will have a very long veranda running the whole length of it, upstairs and down, and Tenny will be taken to the upstairs veranda her first afternoon. As far as her eye can see, women and girls are wrapped in identical blankets, reclining on identical white wooden lounge chairs, all of them wearing identical expressions of wakefulness but obliviousness. There will be almost a military aspect to it, the uniformity of it, the endlessness of it. Tenny will not know just what she will have expected, but she will not have expected to conform to the identical poses and blankets and sickly demeanor of all these dozens of females lined in ranks off into the distance. Mrs. Hull will place Tenny in an empty lounge chair and wrap her in blankets, saying, “You will stay here until the bell rings at three o’clock. You are a lunger, is what you are, like all these other ladies. Some of them are chasers, but you may not become a chaser until you’ve proved that you can abide by all the rules and handle yourself properly. There will be two hours of absolute rest each morning, and two hours of absolute rest each afternoon. You must rest four hours each day, in addition to ten hours sleep at night. The reason you need so much rest is because—” Tenny will want to interrupt and tell Mrs. Hull that she has already had quite a lot of experience at resting, on Doc Swain’s orders, and she knows how to do it, and doesn’t need any explanations of the need for it. But Mrs. Hull will consider that talking back, and will reprimand her for it. So Tenny will wait patiently, stretched out on her wooden lounge, until Mrs. Hull will finish her long lecture on the need for rest, and leave her alone.

Tenny will ask the woman reclining next to her, “Aint there nothing to read around here? No magazines or nothing?”

The woman will look at Tenny in shock, and then will look at the woman on the other side of her, as if to confirm that the other woman will have heard Tenny. Then she will say, in just a whisper, “Hush! We aint allowed to talk during Rest, ever, and we shore aint allowed to read nothing during Rest.”

Tenny will lie there, taking in the view of Mt. Magazine, but her eyes will be hurting from the bright sky, until finally the bell will ring, and all of the women will get up identically, rising in the same motions, unwrapping their blankets in the same motions, and folding the blankets neatly in the same motions to leave on their identical wooden lounge chairs.

The woman next to Tenny will inform her, “Rest is over. It’s Our Own Hours now.” Our Own Hours is a kind of free spell, nothing required, and the residents of Hemingway Hall will want to meet the new girl, give her the once-over, and give Tenny all of the “inside dope” on the way of life here. Introducing themselves, they will reveal to Tenny something which will confirm her impression of the sameness, the uniformity of the place: every last one of them will have a given name or a nickname starting with P: there will be Pinkie, and Peeny, and Paula, and Petra, and Polly, and Portia, and so on: there are even some with very unusual names like Philadelphia and Phronsye and Persephone.

Giving her the lowdown on what’s what, they will want to warn her that while visiting between the sexes is permitted in certain supervised areas during Our Own Hours (and a number of them will have already gone off to visit men and boys), the one rule that is the most hidebound rule at the sanatorium is that no “pairing off” is permitted between men and women. You may think of one of the fellows as your boyfriend, but you cannot go off alone with him, anywhere, anytime. Why, just last week two of the patients were caught trying to do some heavy wooing out in the woods behind Echols Hall, and both of them were “fired,” that is, sent home to their families.