At times Will drew parallels between things I told him about my job and its politics and “the firm” as he referred to his company. I had the uncanny feeling during my visits with him that he was ministering to me. He had come to understand my sense of impotence when it came to his symptoms; he knew there was little more I could do. And yet, even though I thought his lack of a clinical response indicated imminent death, he was certain that he still had a long time.
This was the great mystery to me: Here was a man infected with a deadly virus, a virus that his wife had now contracted, a man living in pain with death staring at him, a man hiding the enormous secret of his infection from his children and his social circle, and yet he had more equanimity than I had, more courage and self-assurance than I—a younger, uninfected professional—could muster. It was this that kept me in his room so long: I wanted to explore and understand the roots of his character, the wellspring of his integrity. Here was a man and a marriage that I would shamelessly copy if I only knew its ingredients.
He made a cryptic comment to me when I asked him if he didn’t mind us doing a few more tests; could he bear our medical inquisitiveness a little longer? “Any man that can survive the Rat Line at VMI can handle anything in life.” When I looked puzzled he said:
“Virginia Military Institute. It is the West Point of the South. Only better. When you land up there that first year you are a ‘Rat.’ You walk around with your chin tucked into your chest like this, you cut square corners, and you sit and eat staring straight ahead at full attention. And any time a senior sees you walking the Rat Line he can stop you and ask you to recite from the Rat Bible. It’s living hell.”
Square corners? Rat Bible? Rat Line? He had lost me.
“The Rat line is literally a line that all Rats have to walk on whenever they are moving around the barracks. And when you come to a corner you make a ninety-degree turn—a square corner. And the Rat Bible is a book that the Rat has to memorize: it’s ninety pages long and seniors stop you twenty times a day and ask you things like, ‘Who were the ten cadets killed in the Battle of New Market?’ or ‘Describe the inscription on the parapet’ or ‘Who are the ten members of the Honor Court?’ or ‘What’s Natural Bridge worth?’ ”
Will Johnson had a glint in his eye and he leaned forward and said, “Try that question, Abraham: What’s Natural Bridge worth?”
I knew Natural Bridge was one of the wonders of the world located somewhere in Virginia. But what was it worth? “It’s priceless,” I said.
“Nice try, but if you were a Rat you would be doing fifty push-ups now because you hadn’t read the Rat Bible! The correct answer is, Natural Bridge is well worth a visit by every cadet, sir!”
He laughed delightedly. For a moment AIDS and esophageal disease were forgotten.
“It’s on page 40 of the Rat Bible: 215 feet high, 100 feet wide, and spans a depth of 90 feet. Well worth a visit.”
On Bess’s next trip back to the house to check on mail she packed Will’s VMI yearbook and some photograph albums. As soon as I walked into the room, Will patted the mattress next to him and pulled out his yearbook. VMI was in scenic Lexington, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The institute was steeped in Confederate history—one early, somewhat eccentric, professor of physics was none other than Stonewall Jackson. In the coming year, VMI would celebrate its two hundred and fiftieth anniversary.
Will Johnson watched me with twinkling eyes as I turned the pages and saw the towering barracks made of light-brown stone with turrets on the top. The barracks dominated the campus. There were other photographs showing magnificent archways and long corridors—plenty of square corners. There were lush green parade grounds reminiscent of Mountain Home. And the glitter of parade uniforms that seemed to owe something in the gray tones to the Confederate uniform. I lingered over one photograph: An upper classman had his nose pushed against a Rat’s face and appeared to be screaming at him; there was mortal terror in the Rat’s eyes, as if in the next second he would faint or cry. I looked up at Will and he nodded at me, as if to say, yes, it was every bit as bad as that.
From the yearbook it was clear that Will Johnson had been an outstanding cadet: He rose to be the commander of one of the four companies that made up VMI; he was one of the ten members of the honor court. I was beginning to understand something about the construction of his character.
“The Rat year was the worst time in my life; but my four years there were also the best time of my life. It gave me a standard for how I was to conduct myself. It mattered nothing at all who you were when you came there. My daddy was a coal miner. Others had fathers who were senators. But every outward thing that defined you was stripped away and you had to find inner strength. Words like honor, honesty, self-discipline—these can mean nothing in the outside world, but they take on a new meaning there. And I have no firmer friends in the world than my Brother Rats. I kid you not, they would die for me.”
“Have you told any of them?” I had broken the spell. It was a line we had not as yet crossed, the issue of secrecy.
He shook his head.
I plunged ahead. I said, “It’s such a lonely business to carry this burden alone. Your children would help, your Brother Rats can help. Your church members will stand by you.”
Will Johnson shook his head and smiled indulgently. “If anyone in our community knows, then the next time Bess and I go to church there will be no one there. It will be an empty church.”
For once I thought he was wrong. I told him about Gordon, and how Essie and her family had the support of just about everyone in their church. How the community had rallied around the family, how Gordon had been baptized in the church, cared for by neighbors and friends, how the whole community had shown up for the funeral of this prodigal. Will smiled: it was a nice tale but he was quite unconvinced.
“I worry about Bess,” he said. “After I die, I don’t want her to face the stigma of AIDS. We have no idea how our children will react to this. We have every reason to think they will support us, but we don’t know that for sure. How will our daughter’s husband feel about us being with their children, our grandchildren? We know—we researched this very carefully—that we are no risk to the children. But why take the chance that they may not see it this way?”
I looked at Bess. There were tears streaming down her cheeks as Will talked candidly about his death. Was the decision to keep this secret to themselves something that Will Johnson had unilaterally decided and that she had gone along with? Had he sought her counsel? Or had he talked her into his vision of how things should be?
“See, Abraham, I also have to worry about the firm, the possible ramifications of this on my partners, the unreasoned responses of people who hear about our plight.”
At one level I was disappointed. If they were “innocent” victims, the sort that I and everyone I knew could easily identify with, then their testimony could be so powerful, so valuable in dispelling certain myths about AIDS. They believed the ugly metaphors of AIDS: AIDS = gay, AIDS = sin. They could not get past what it seemed to imply about lifestyle and morality. The metaphor was to them larger than their standing in church and community. But I felt that they far outclassed the metaphor; who they were could never be tainted by a virus. It was a curious paradox in Will Johnson that he did not see this; it was a blind spot in his view of the world.
I was in a minority, however. Dr. Sarah Presnell advocated secrecy. The few people they took into their confidence advised secrecy.
To the degree that Will and Bess needed all their mental and physical strengths to combat this disease, it seemed a shame for them to expend such prodigious amounts of energy in keeping up the veneer of secrecy. How much more painful it was to bear this all alone. How much effort was involved in making their way, just the two of them, to this faraway hospital, having only each other for comfort and support.
He seemed to be reading my mind. “Abraham, I don’t think you understand. We are not alone. The one
unshakable presence in our life is Christ. I personally think this thing, this virus, is from hell, from the devil himself. It is not from God. Nor do I believe God ‘let it happen.’ See, Bess told me about the strange-looking individual who preceded her into your office the day she came to see you.”
Bess blushed; I knew Will was referring to Raleigh.
“I would never understand an individual like that. But I would never, ever condemn him either. I don’t think any human being deserves this curse, and it is certainly not from God. My God is not a vengeful God, I surely don’t understand the why of AIDS, but I’m convinced this is an evil onslaught from hell—a test, if you will—and I’m determined with the help and strength of Jesus Christ, I will pass this test. It matters not so much what happens to us as how we deal with it. And we’ll never be given to endure more than we can bear.”
I had the sense that this last phrase was something he had repeated many times before, it was his creed. He said it almost as he would say a mantra or a prayer.
“When we were driving back from Sarah’s office and she had given us the terrible news—and by the way, we went on to see the high school football game we set out to see that evening; we had made an instant decision that we would conduct our outward lives as if nothing had changed—the first thing that came to my mind was Jesus Christ. He died an agonizing and disgraceful death in the eyes of the people around Him and He didn’t deserve it. He had healed people with leprosy—the AIDS of His time. I knew that He’d know what I’d be going through all the way. From that night on and every night since, most of my prayers have been to Him. He has always answered and has comforted me. There have been several times when He’s interceded and helped me. His mercy is great.”
I was staring at him, speechless. Perhaps this was the element that distinguished us, made my life so different from his. My faith was vague, and not mediated by church or sect. In whatever way I saw God, I rarely saw him in the concrete terms that Will was describing: a protector, an immediate presence.
“I’m determined to fight this thing with all I have and by Christ’s constant help. Meanwhile I’ll make what contribution I can as a husband, father and grandfather. And for the firm. As long as I can think and move and breathe.”
He chuckled here, and shifted position in the bed. “Oh, it will get me eventually, but only after a fight. I’ll never give in or quit. Never, never, never.”
Bess was weeping silently; she had moved from the recliner to sit next to him, on the other side of the bed from me, to kiss his hand. He held her but he continued, dry-eyed:
“I’ve grown closer to God and learned much about living each day at a time.” He was looking into Bess’s eyes but speaking to me. “Bess and I have grown closer to each other. She is the most magnificent woman I know. She has been the same all the time, smiling, supportive, cheerful, loving, uncomplaining. No one can ever imagine the greatness of this woman. She’s in my life by the grace and through the love of God Himself. She’s been dealt a bad hand but she is making her life a triumph over it.”
Bess was overcome now, sobbing heartrending sobs. Will and I were crying, too. We sat like that on the bed, the three of us, holding hands.
When Bess left for the bathroom to compose herself, Will leaned forward and put his hand on my shoulder as if I were his son. He drew me to him and said to me softly, “You know I’ve lost all libido. I have become impotent. What once was an act of love, of joy, an act of life, has become an act of death for me. It holds nothing other than horror for me.” He shuddered and looked out of the window.
A SHORT TIME LATER I stumbled out of their room, hoping no one would see my red eyes. I took the back stairwell down to the parking lot.
I drove back to Mountain Home but I was not ready to go home as yet. I parked near the bandstand. Long-distance truckers will often, on their return, sleep at the truck depot and only then shower and go home. I felt the same way: I wanted to sort out my emotions, expunge the anguish that sat heavily in me, weep for the Johnsons and all the rest of us caught up in this viral visitation from hell. When I eventually entered the house and picked up Steven and Jacob, I wanted to be able to give them the same all-consuming attention that Will Johnson gave me in his room.
In my car I had a pair of tennis shoes and shorts. I changed in the cockpit of the Datsun Z, an exercise in itself. I have never been much of a jogger—once a week is all I can stand. The thing that motivated me was the beauty of the jogging trail that circled the VA. That and the desire to optimize my tennis game, make up with quickness and finesse what I lacked in raw power.
I stretched against a lamppost next to the bandstand. It was not yet dusk but the lamp was on. The lamppost was dull green. From a thick base it tapered upward and then blossomed into an old-fashioned carriage lamp with opaque glass shutters and a metal crown. At one time this had been a gas lamp. When the first generator arrived at Mountain Home, the lamp was carefully converted to hold an electric bulb
I climbed onto the bandstand. From here one could appreciate how Mountain Home had once been a plateau of fallow farmland surrounded by a thick forest of pine and maple with a mountain stream coursing through it. The monotony of the land was broken up by shallow ravines, spattered woods, small rounded peaks, rock formations. The Great Smoky Mountains were a perfect backdrop for it all. The architect’s challenge had been to take this land and design clusters of buildings on it of different functions but all of which were to be one homogeneous organism that in turn was a part of the landscape, barely disturbing it, only enhancing it. I couldn’t imagine anything other than the French Renaissance buildings of Mountain Home being on this land; they appeared to have grown out of the land just as the magnolias and the oak trees had.
The flag fluttered on the flagpole above me. The vast lawn over which the bandstand looked could accommodate five softball teams and any number of Frisbee players. It was a tempting place to fly a kite. But a steady wind which came up from the pond and swept up to the hospital meant a high kite mortality. I was always climbing the giant oak tree in front of my house to retrieve other people’s kites that had strayed. Steven and I had thus built a small kite collection in our basement. We fixed the kites up, doctored them with our colors to conceal their origins, and went to my choice spot on a little rise by the back gate, the perfect place to launch a kite and have it soar safely over Mountain Home.
I jogged down to the duck pond and started my circuit there. A few old veterans had their lines in the water. Sometimes I wondered whether there was a hook, let alone bait, at the end of the line. They did not appear to have the energy to wrestle a fish to land. The ducks were having a quiet convention on the bank. They were an aggressive lot and sometimes a goose would come after you if you jogged too close. Once or twice a year I would see two or three magnificent Canada geese swimming in the pond, having picked Mountain Home for a refueling stop. The next time I came by they would be gone, having resumed their long voyage.
I ran parallel to the railway track on the edge of the property. A lumber yard in the adjacent property gave off the smell of fresh oak and sawdust. I turned up, past the cranes and the new hospital construction and into the forest, coming out near the main gate and the cemetery. The cemetery had old gravestones of Spanish-American War Veterans in a circle known as the “silent circle.” All the newer tombstones were laid flat into the ground, slightly recessed so that the big mower could run over them without damaging them and still keep the lawn perfectly groomed.
I turned at the Mountain Home post office and went down a long hill, the squirrels looking at me, annoyed, as I made crashing sounds on the dry leaves underfoot. I was now at the back gate to the Miracle Center, and I ran the long half-mile stretch of wire fence that separated the Miracle Center from Mountain Home.
I made a square corner at the southern boundary of the VA and ran parallel to the railway track. Soon I was back at the bandstand. The flower beds around the bandstand were a red, white and blue display of cannas
in the center with sage, dusty miller and ageratum around the edges.
I watched the sun go down. I felt more at peace with myself. The bell rang in the clock tower of the domiciliary canteen. From all over the darkening campus, veterans rose from benches, rose from the lawns, rose from their balcony chairs, rose from the duck pond packing away their rods, and heeded the call to supper.
THE NEXT DAY, Will had a surprise for me. And I had one for him.
“Abraham, last night I had a vision of Jesus Christ.” He searched my face carefully for skepticism, disbelief, but I did not react. “I had a vision of the devil emerging from the television—the set was off. I called out to Jesus. I was scared. And I saw the devil driven away, and the next thing I know, I felt Jesus come out of this cloud near the foot of my bed and take me by the hand and assure me that He would be fighting for me.”
I was speechless. This was the second time a vision of Jesus had occurred in the hospital. I tried to recollect whether Gordon had seen Jesus in the same room.
“I think I’m ready to go home, Abraham.”
I was pleased to let Will go home. We had little more to offer him. The mysterious ulcers in his esophagus seemed to trouble him less, though they were still there.
I asked him now how he felt about Duke, about the possibility of being enrolled in an AZT trial there.
He pondered the question for no less than a full minute before he answered.
“I have a hang-up about Duke. You know I wrote to them when I learned they discharged me with an undiagnosed broken back? They didn’t answer my letter. If I look at my experience with them,” and now he held out the fingers of his hand, “one, the ‘normal’ cardiac checkup when my stress test at home was abnormal; two, giving me blood transfusions but not warning me that as much blood as I received I might have been at risk for AIDS so at least I could have spared Bess; three, missing the broken back—there is a consistent pattern of poor professional care in my opinion. One of my biggest challenges has been to handle my rage. But I must control my rage. And I have succeeded in this fairly well, too. I would do myself considerable damage if I went on a rampage against them—in court or elsewhere—just to punish.”
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