My Own Country

by Abraham Verghese

  She told George how Doochie would do the service but was scared to prepare the body.

  “—I’ll do it,” George said. She felt a huge burden lift off her shoulders. “Don’t you worry none. And I’ll ask if Doochie’ll let me use his mortuary. He won’t have to do a thing—I’ll do it all myself. That’ll save me from having to take the body all the way to Norton and bring it back.”

  “I’ll tell Doochie,” Essie said.

  Essie called A. J. “Doochie” Jones and told him how it was going to be.

  TWO HOURS LATER, old Doochie’s black Cadillac pulled up outside the house. She saw George get out from the passenger side, calm and professional in his maroon blazer. Doochie was in shirtsleeves, fussing with the back door of the Cadillac. His hair, which he dragged from one ear to the other, had fallen away like a wing, revealing his bald scalp.

  They carried the gurney into the bedroom, unfolded its legs and set it parallel to the bed. Doochie pulled on what looked to Essie like calving gloves. George, gloveless, went to the head of the bed. Doochie gingerly peeled the covers away from Gordon’s feet. Essie couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “Doochie Jones! Just move out of the way. I’ll help George.” She pushed past him.

  “Why, Essie,” Doochie whined but stayed back against the wall. She and George unfolded the plastic sheet, rolled Gordon to one side and tucked it under his body. Then they rolled him the other way and pulled the sheet through. They wrapped Gordon in the sheet, then lifted Gordon onto the orange blanket that lay spread out on the gurney.

  “Folks like you,” Essie said to Doochie as she helped George fold the monogrammed blankets over Gordon, “is supposed to be educated about this sort of thing. This here is nineteen and eighty-seven. Do you think for one moment that this is the last time you’re going to be called to do this?”

  Doochie made no answer. He and George maneuvered the gurney out of the bedroom and into the living room. Essie’s father came and put his hand on the orange mound, silent tears trickling down his cheeks.

  The men waited.

  After a while Essie nodded at them to go on.

  Essie watched them down the porch stairs. She watched Gordon’s legs disappear into the back of the Cadillac. She watched until the car turned at the end of Preacher’s Creek. She felt like bawling; she wanted to scream, to fill the valley and its every hollow with the sound of the loss of her baby brother. But there was much that remained to be done, And back in the house, she could hear the awful sound her father made, a sound like the splintering of an old tree, and then a high wailing as big buckets of tears came gushing out of him.

  ESSIE CALLED TO thank me for what I had done. I was tempted to go for the memorial service or the funeral. The drive did not dissuade me and I could have found someone to cover for me. I felt as though I had not done much for Gordon. As his father had pointed out, hospitalization had only resulted in Gordon’s getting sicker. Perhaps to see me at the funeral would be a reminder to his parents that he had died of AIDS. I elected not to go.

  A few weeks later, I called on Essie at her house.

  “You know,” she said, “my father still says he died of a stroke. Stroke, he understands; AIDS, he does not. And my mother is keeping it all inside. She won’t even talk about it.”

  I asked Essie to tell me about the funeral. “Gordon had wanted a closed casket. He said, ‘When my time comes, I don’t want everyone gawking and staring at me to see if they can see AIDS on my body.’ So that’s what we had, a closed casket.

  “I went up to his duplex the night that he died to get his white suit. He had this bee-yu-tiful—I mean it was gorgeous—white suit, and he had a silk tie and shirt and handkerchief all picked out. He told me where it all would be. I took the suit over to the funeral home. They were working on him till late in the night. Then the next day, I went over to Kingsport and bought two dozen yellow roses, his favorite kind. I went back to the funeral home—I wanted the roses laid on the casket with a picture of Gordon in front of them. Doochie Jones showed me which room we were in. The casket was sitting there.

  “Suddenly I got to thinking: What if Gordon’s really not in the casket? I’ve read about stuff like that happening. Or what if they didn’t do him right? I said to Doochie: ‘Doochie Jones, I want you to open that casket!’ He said, ‘Why, Essie, you said you wanted a closed casket!’ I said, ‘I wanted it closed for everybody else. But I want to see that he looks all right. You open it right this minute.’

  “Well, he went off looking for the key. I was getting more and more nervous. He finally comes back with this big old key—I mean it was huge. And he puts it in the lock and opens the casket and sure enough there was Gordon. And he looked so pretty in there with his white suit. They had done him good, I had to give Doochie that. I almost wished that it had been an open casket service so they all could see how beautiful my baby brother was.

  “But then I looked at his feet and he didn’t have no socks on! I said, ‘Doochie, hows’a’come Gordon don’t have no socks on?’ ‘Essie, we don’t usually put no socks on,’ he says. I said, ‘I don’t want my brother going to heaven without socks. You get some socks for him, right now.’ Well he goes off and gets some white socks and he comes back and he’s got them big calving gloves on again! Son, I was mad. ‘Doochie Jones! What in the world do you think you’re going to catch from him now? You done pickled his body; there ain’t a bug that’s going to survive that.’ He says, ‘Why, Essie—’ And I said, ‘Don’t you why Essie me! You take off those gloves and put his socks on right now. Go on. I want to see you do it. Git!’ I stood there and made him put those socks on Gordon’s feet.”

  Essie’s eyes were still flashing, her hands were on her hips, and as she told me the story she was reliving the anger that she felt that day. Essie held her pose for a few seconds more, and then her dimples flashed to high beam and peals of laughter escaped from her body as she reflected on her own audacity.

  I told Essie that I would like to see where Gordon was buried. The kids wanted to come with us but Essie discouraged them.

  We drove out of Blackwood to Big Stone Gap and then out of the city limits into the country. Maple and pine trees lined the side of the road, forming a shady canopy. We drove past sea-green pastures with mares and foals grazing freely. Essie pointed out a driveway that sprang on us suddenly; the driveway led to a mansion on top of a knoll. She told me the name of the owner: a doctor from India, who was now also a gentleman farmer.

  The road became twisty and I took the curves carefully, staying clear of the median. The traffic coming round the curves in the opposite direction was hidden by the overhanging foliage and the hedges that spilled onto the shoulder. We seemed to be descending, plunging down into a basin.

  Suddenly, as we rounded another curve, the trees dropped away and the whole world seemed to open up: I saw ahead of me a breathtaking valley, huge in its expanse, gradually rising on all sides to towering mountains, the shadow of one range thrown onto the other.

  Essie guided me to the cemetery entrance, a discreet path off the main road that I barely saw for the splendor around me. I stumbled out of the car when she told me to stop. High up, at the top of the mountain facing me, I could see the faint outline of the bridge that Essie told me was part of the new highway to Norton, a highway that had been under construction when I last visited. That mountain had to be Stone Mountain. And the one to my left was Little Stone Mountain—the town of Big Stone Gap sat right between the two. To my right was Powell Mountain. The cemetery sat at the very center of Powell Valley.

  We trudged past neat brass plaques in the grass. When I looked ahead, I saw Sabatha and Joy: they had driven Essie’s pickup through the back roads and arrived at Gordon’s grave ahead of us. Essie scolded them but without any conviction.

  Gordon was right next to his infant brother, Robert Lee, whose epitaph read, “Safe in the arms of Jesus.”

  I slowly turned my body 360 degrees, taking in the vista from Gordon’s va
ntage point. Frothy white clouds, tinged with gray, spilled over the tops of the mountains and looked as if they would flood the valley. It was drizzling though the sun was shining. The valley was so green that it was almost too much for the eye. The mountains ringing it pressed on me as if they were God’s own toes.

  “It’s where he wanted to be buried,” Essie said, studying my face. She must have known that in all my travels, I was unlikely to have seen anything quite like this. I thought to myself that it was where I’d want to be buried.

  “That’s my plot,” Essie said, pointing to the ground to the left of her brother’s grave.

  9

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 10, 1987, a few months after Gordon Vines’s death.

  I awoke dreaming that my beeper had sounded its two-tone signal. Its imaginary echo lingered in the room. I sat up, eyeing the silent black form on the night table The previous day its summons had been unrelenting, insistent, like a truculent child.

  Rajani, now in her ninth month of pregnancy, slept propped up with four pillows. A little mound of blankets separated us, and when I pulled the covers back I found Steven, his right hand on his face, his fingers curled delicately across his cheek in a thoughtful, Nehru-like pose. My two-year-old had taken to appearing magically in our bed; we were never aware of when he came.

  While the household slept, I showered and shaved. The rattle of the hot water in the pipes, the groans and sighs of the wooden floors of the old house were reassuring, as if my home were stirring with me, keeping me company. When I closed the back door behind me—never locking it—and stepped out, it was five minutes before 6 A.M. I was on my way to see Scotty Daws in the ICU at the Miracle Center, the first stop of my day.

  Outside, the morning silence was broken only by the hum of the window air conditioner from our bedroom and by a bird cry that sounded like Sweet, sweet, I’m so sweet. A yellow warbler, I thought. I started the car and let the motor idle while I studied my pocket appointment book to remind myself of where else I had to be that day. The penciled notations under “Wednesday” were in contrast to the sparse entries on either side. Wednesday had ballooned into the rest of the workweek. My Wednesday afternoon clinic had been transformed: Instead of a faculty wife with the chronic fatigue syndrome, or a Southern Baptist missionary back from Kenya with indolent malaria, my clinic at the University Physicians Group had become an HIV clinic.

  This turnabout had happened suddenly: one week, my first and second patients were both follow-ups with problems related to HIV, and my third patient was a no-show. The next week, three out of four patients had HIV-related problems—one new and two follow-ups. When the following week’s clinic looked like it might shape up the same way, I joked with Carol that “pretty soon they’re going to call us an AIDS clinic!”

  “Honey, they’ve been calling us that for some time now. You just didn’t know it.”

  “ ‘They,’ who?”

  “The front office. Everyone that works here. All the other doctors.”

  “And how does that make you feel?” I asked

  “About what I do? I love what I do. There’s them that don’t want to be assigned to this clinic; they’d rather work on the other side. But I don’t mind. And Hope doesn’t mind working here if I’m tied up giving chemotherapy.”

  According to my appointment book, this afternoon I would see Fred and Otis (Fred had called to say he was bringing Otis in) as well as Vickie and Clyde McCray. And there was one new person with a positive test referred to me from the Public Health Clinic—a new person who in a few short weeks could become a regular.

  Gordon, my first patient, had materialized in the fall of 1986. Now, the summer of 1987, and I had reached double digits.

  The morning was unusually foggy and a heavy mist clung to the shrubs that ringed my house. One sweep of the wipers cleared my windshield, but all I could see of the sprawling lawns of the VA was a green fringe on either side of the asphalt. The mist gave the illusion that it hung over a body of water, a giant reservoir that had appeared overnight. A few domiciliary veterans were on the road, collars upturned, hands in their pockets, cigarettes stuck to their lips, trekking to the cafeteria. It was difficult to imagine that in a few hours the heat and humidity could climb to a level that rivaled anything I had experienced in Africa or India.

  The doctors’ parking lot at the Miracle Center was almost empty. A handful of dew-coated cars, the windshields dull and opaque, were scattered around the parking lot. They belonged to doctors who had spent the night in the hospital.

  The side entrance to the Miracle Center led directly to the doctors’ lounge, a room with tan wallpaper, orange carpets, crate-shaped orange armchairs and silky white drapes—a corporate art-deco look. The TV was on, the coffeepot full, and the tray of doughnuts covered in Saran Wrap slightly ruffled at the lower right hand corner where Dr. H, the neurosurgeon, had extracted his sweet jelly roll. My favorite doughnut, the chocolate-glazed kind, awaited me, a proper reward for being up this early. There was a move afoot to replace the doughnuts with a fruit bowl. I was dead set against it.

  I poured my coffee and, doughnut in hand, moved to the workstation in the corner of the room. GOOD MORNING, the monitor read, a clock ticking away in the top right-hand corner of the screen. I punched in my code and used the pen pointer to scroll to my name and print my “list.” This terminal supposedly spoke to a mainframe somewhere in California which tracked the data on all the hospitals across the country that were managed by this same corporation. I was told that I could use the computer to order tests, to schedule appointments, to check on the patient’s insurance status and to perform assorted other tricks. All I ever needed from it was a patient list.

  The printer came to life, spitting out four names and room numbers. Every name except that of Scotty Daws had an asterisk next to it, to indicate that I was a consultant and not the primary physician on the case. Two of the names had the word DISCHARGED in parentheses next to them. Scotty Daws’s name had no asterisk. I was his primary physician.

  I refilled my coffee. A woman from medical records next door poked her head into the lounge to check on the coffeepot, see that it was full—part of her duty.

  “Misty out there, ain’t it? How are you, Doctor Verghese?”

  “Very well, thank you,” I said, the coffee and the doughnuts having done much to lift my spirits. “Fog’ll burn off soon.”

  This doctors’ lounge with its coffee and chocolate-glazed doughnuts, its carpeted floors, its printer chatter, seemed to objectify the difference between the private sector and the spartan VA hospital next door. At Mountain Home, the coffee came out of a coin-operated machine; you punched the buttons for extra cream or extra sugar. What emerged tasted faintly of the beef bouillon the machine was also capable of dispensing. And there was no doctors’ lounge at the VA; you met your fellow physicians at the nurses’ stations.

  I took the back stairs to the ICU to see Scotty Daws. Scotty had come to the emergency room three weeks before with fever, headache and stiff neck. He had complained bitterly of his symptoms in a nonstop soliloquy that, after three minutes, suggested that more than just the meninges (the lining of the brain) was inflamed; the underlying brain was surely affected. The ER physician summoned the neurologist, who did a spinal puncture. The lab called back to say that the fluid was teeming with Cryptococcus, an unusual fungus for an apparently healthy young man. The neurologist had gone back and readily elicited from the garrulous Scotty that he was gay, that he had been living just across the North Carolina mountains in Greensboro, and that Desmond, his lover, had recently died of AIDS. The HIV test came back positive. I was summoned, and wound up inheriting Scotty from the neurologist.

  Scotty, like a myna bird, would parrot everything I said to him. It was as if I stepped into an echo chamber: Scotty took on not just my speech and tone, but that of the nurse with me, as well as the audio from the television on the wall. It was a feat that drove me batty. I thought more than once of Gordon’s Looney Tune imi
tations.

  I learned that if I shouted “Scotty!” I could stop this cycle. In the stunned silence while the feedback loop was momentarily arrested, I could ask Scotty a question about himself, and the echolalia—the parroting of what I said—did not resume. Instead, a torrent of speech would commence, a veritable word-salad that climbed up the drapes, bounced off the ceiling and circled the bed.

  The content of this speech was peculiarly lucid, even though it had no discrimination or restraint. It had a tangential relationship to the question I asked: he would tell me how he was feeling and in the next breath tell me how he could make the drive from Greensboro to Johnson City in four hours flat, how his uncle had beaten the hell out of him for being a faggot, and then he would go on to a discourse about the faggots in Greensboro, their classification, the prevailing hierarchy. He would leap from there to an analysis of his excrement. Interspersed with this were loud laments over the death of Desmond. Sometimes he repeated Desmond’s name over and over again and thereby soon slipped back into the echo mode.

  But ten days after his admission, the myna bird had suddenly been stilled. He remained alert, the blue eyes darting around, following me, the face animated and twitchy, but no words emerged. Scotty’s meningitis, which had seemed to improve, had now suddenly worsened. Perhaps the area of the brain that subserved speech had become entrapped in pus and clotted off. The silence was eerie; the room seemed to want to implode from the vacuum created.

  And then one day when I walked in, I noted he was breathing very rapidly. I percussed his lung: it had lost its normal resonant tone. My stethoscope confirmed that he had developed a pneumonia in his left lung base: I heard a harsh, loud, aspirate breath sound that told me his lung had solidified.

  When the pneumonia worsened, interfering with his ability to oxygenate his brain, I summoned his family. Sister and uncle arrived. His uncle—a scruffy individual whose long hair emerged out of a ball cap and who reeked of stale liquor—was indifferent. When he used the word “faggot” in front of me, I was certain that he had in fact beaten Scotty up. Scotty’s sister was a heavyset woman. The leathery skin of her face, the puffy bags under her eyes, her steel-wool hair and her missing eyebrows made her look like an old lioness. I was sure she was an alcoholic. I explained to the family about the pneumonia. I felt there was a good chance I could pull him through, but he would need to be on a ventilator, at least temporarily. The uncle seemed indifferent to this idea, and the sister had no concept of what being on a ventilator meant. I went ahead and put him on one.