Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  That first day, a most pleasant Monday in October, with the trees and sumac shrubs already turning every color of the warm part of the spectrum and the crisp air hinting of cool days to come, Colvin’s first task was to examine everybody. Teachers first. There were six of them, and Miss Jossie introduced Colvin to his colleagues as she brought each of them to his office for examination: Miss Billie Hood, a high school graduate from downstate, would teach the primary department, first through sixth grades, and had postnasal drip, for which he could only prescribe that she attempt sleeping with two pillows under her head and drink butterfly weed tea instead of coffee. Miss Dulcie Best, a graduate of the big high school at Little Rock, would teach the intermediate department, seventh and eighth grades, and had herpes zoster (shingles), for which he gave his special lotion compounded of herbs. Next, a stunning creature, name of Mrs. Venda Breedlove, a graduate of Jasper High School and Shenandoah Music School, would teach music, and had Ménière’s syndrome, with vertigo and deafness, for which she was under treatment by Dr. McFerrin of Jasper, so Colvin did not wish to intervene, even though Venda was the prettiest lady he’d ever seen outside of Stay More, and she flirted shamelessly with him during his examination of her. Nicholas L. Rainbird, a young possessor of the lone master’s degree, from the same angel factory that had produced Jossie Conklin, would teach history and natural sciences, and would not accept Colvin’s diagnosis that the chancroid lesions in his genital area were venereal; he insisted he had never, never, and would therefore get a second opinion from Dr. McFerrin. Miss Bee Leach, also from that angel factory but with only a “B.M.T.” like her classmate, Jossie, would teach English and Latin (!), which prompted Colvin to offer both his diagnosis and his prescription (for an unmentionable “female trouble”) in that language. Nec amor nec tussis celatur. And finally, Miss Jossie herself, who in addition to her administrative duties would teach arithmetic and something called “business,” and who said, “I don’t have to take off my clothes, do I?” All that he could find wrong with her, with her clothes still on, was that she had a very bad headache, treatable by his special neck massage and some aspirin.

  The student body was much worse off than the faculty, and in the course of what remained of that first morning he was hard-pressed to see all 144 of them and give smallpox vaccinations to those who hadn’t had them. By coincidence, 144 is a dozen dozen, or a gross, and he used up a gross of wooden tongue depressors examining their gross throats and finding some gross disorders and diseases. He also examined their gross anatomies. Those with hookworm he could recognize at once because of their “angel wings”: protruding shoulder blades; those with pellagra he spotted because of their spots, distinguishable from the red dots of those with scarlet fever and the pimples of those with smallpox. There were cases of goiter, bone malformations, and assorted other abnormalities, including one lad, Russ Breedlove, son of the comely music teacher, Venda, who had diphallus (he possessed an extra penis), but did not realize his situation was irregular. Those who did not have a preexisting condition quickly were catching something from someone else, either infectious microbes or lacerations, abrasions, bruises, and punctures in the school-yard brawls necessary for boys to prove themselves to each other on school’s first day, or the rope-skipping (and -tripping) contests the girls were conducting, and all of these wounded were coming to Colvin in droves and exhausting his supply of Mercurochrome, which they learned to call Doc Swain’s “Cure ’em chrome” and wore proudly as a kind of war paint—or, rather, school paint.

  One youth, refusing the antibiotic treatment Colvin tried to give him for his mastoiditis, declared he would just wait until he got home and “dream it off.” Colvin grabbed him by the collar and said, “What’s your name, boy?” and when the young man answered Lum Dinsmore, Colvin said, “You’re from Stay More, aint ye?” and Lum nodded. “Are they any more of ye?” Colvin wanted to know, and Lum told him that Dewey Coe and Opal Whitter were also from Stay More. Colvin got the three of them together in his office, closed the door, and gave them a stern lecture. Had any of them already told any of their classmates about the dream cure? Not yet, they said. Well, then, he said, they must promise him never, ever, under any circumstances, not for personal aggrandizement or gossipy inclination or even cash money, reveal, divulge, or betray, to any of their classmates, that the general populace of Stay More was no longer patronizing their doctors because they had learned how to use the dream cure instead. Their promises alone did not ease his mind, so Colvin threatened them, telling them that if they ever breathed a word of the dream cure to a soul, and then got sick with anything, he would refuse to let them into his dreams. He would stay up all night if he had to.

  Few of the boys who attended Newton County Academy came daily from home, like Lum and Dewey. Most of them lived at such distances that they were boarded out at one of the homes in Parthenon, or they had rooms on the second floor of Casey’s General Store, an impressive stone building in the village. But all of the girls, except the few who already lived nearby, were housed in a dormitory, one of the other big buildings on the hill, just a stone’s throw from the main building. This girls’ dormitory was a fine two-story wooden building, with a hipped roof like the main building and a general style of architecture resembling Jacob Ingledew’s mansion in Stay More but three or four times as big. Colvin showed me the spacious empty room on the main floor that had been the dining room where everybody had their noon dinner together, but he missed his that first day, or rather was late for it, because he had to perform an emergency appendectomy on a student, Ora Casey, who had complained of “cute inner jestion.” She had been his last patient of the morning, and, sitting down to have his dinner with the “help,” the three girls who worked in the kitchen to pay their tuition (three or four dollars a month for those who could afford it), he was exhausted and realized he had only twenty minutes to eat before rushing off to meet his first class in hygiene, whatever that was.

  But those twenty minutes were never forgotten by Colvin, because one of those three kitchen maids was Tenny. As a matter of courtesy, he asked the three of them their names, although he’d already inspected each of them earlier that day, finding asthma in Orva and scoliosis (a spinal curvature) in Olive, but nothing in Tenny, even though the young lady had insisted her right arm was killing her and her stomach really ached clean through all over down to the ground inside out slam to pieces. There were three things that struck him about Tenny: one, she was the only student at the Academy who, despite his thorough examination, was negative, negative, negative, not a thing in the world wrong with her; two, through one of those odd concatenations of circumstance or happenchance or whatever it was, she was the only girl at the Academy whose first name didn’t start with “O”; and three, she was the prettiest little thing he ever laid eyes on. I mean, she was a knockout of a looker. She had plenty of here and there for her age, fifteen, and she might even grow up (not that she wasn’t already fully grown) to look as gorgeous as that music teacher, Mrs. Venda Breedlove, who was a golden blond, but whose hair wasn’t nearly as long and wavy as Tenny’s light-brown hair. In addition to the almost-blond hair that came down nearly to her waist, and eyes that would put the sky to shame, and a mouth which seemed pouty because the lips were so broad and full and ripe, Tenny just had scads of taking ways about her. Oba and Orlena and Oma had eyes that were too far apart in their heads, while Odele and Orpha and Ona had eyes that were too close together, but Tenny’s azure eyes were set just exactly the right distance apart. Olga was too fat and Opal was too thin, but Tenny was just right. A poor girl named Olma had acromegaly, with massive jaws; another one, Obedience, had exophthalmic goiter with a permanent expression of frozen terror; Odessa had an adrenal cortex disease which gave her a heavy beard; and Oneida had myxedema, a very puffy face. Oleta and Orena and Orela had faces that were too pear-shaped, while Omega and Ova and Oklahomy had apple-shaped faces. Tenny was a peach.

  “How’s your tunny, Temmy?” Colvin asked her as
she started her second helping of custard pie.

  “Huh?” she said, her full lips forming a perfect, tender, pretty-pink O, which struck him as ironic: of all the O-named girls, she alone could make her mouth into that exact pure shape. Ora and Olga and Orena had lips that were too fat and lopsided, while Oma and Olive and Opal had lips that were hardly visible, but Tenny’s lips…

  He realized his slip and wondered why he was nervous around her. “How’s your tummy, Tenny?” he corrected himself. “You tole me this mornin it was a-hurtin ye bad, but I see it aint hurt yore appetite.”

  “Hit’s a-killin me still, Doc,” she said. “I don’t reckon I can hardly walk, it hurts so bad, and probably I’ll be dead before sundown.”

  “I misdoubt it,” he tried to assure her, but, fishing out his gold pocket watch and opening it, discovered he was already late for class. “’Scuse me, gals,” he said. “I got to run.”

  His classroom was up there on the top floor of the main building, next to the auditorium, and its windows had a commanding view of the whole valley, now painted so nicely in autumn colors, a view that would provide his pupils with a relief from the tedium of the lessons. Jossie Conklin was waiting for him there outside the door, her arms full of books. “You’re late,” she said, as if he were a tardy pupil himself. Then she put the books into his arms and said, “The publisher, Mr. Henry Holt, is a good Baptist himself, and he donated a dozen of these to the school. Be sure the students take care of them.” Then she led him inside and introduced him to the twelve members of the N.C.A. freshman class, although he’d already met all of them that morning during his inspections of them. As she was finishing the introduction, the door opened, and Tenny came skipping in, her long hair streaming out behind her, and took a front-row seat. “You’re late,” Miss Jossie said to her. “Tardiness will not be tolerated in this school.” And she gave Colvin a glance to remind him that he was included in that intolerance. “Well, they’re all yours,” she said to him, and departed.

  He cleared his throat. “Wal, howdy, folks,” he said, determined not to call them “boys and girls,” even though they were, ranging in age from fourteen to twenty. All he knew at that point about the course he was about to teach was that it was something you had to learn, and the only way you can learn something is to be treated as equally and civilly as Kie Raney had treated him. “Jist let me give each of y’uns a copy of this here book,” he said, but discovered after distributing the texts that he didn’t have one left for himself, so he had to look on with Tenny at her copy. The book was called The Human Body, and it was by H. Newell Martin, “Late Professor of Biology in the Johns Hopkins University and of Physiology in the Medical Faculty of the same.” Colvin was somewhat relieved for several reasons. He recalled the professor of physiology he’d met that afternoon many years ago at the Missouri Medical College, a pretty decent sort of feller. This book had a subtitle, “Its Structure and Activities and the Conditions of Its Healthy Working,” which suggested that the subject might be something that Colvin knew a few things about, since that was his line of work, more or less. The one thing he knew about “hygiene” was that it must have something to do with the ancient Greek lady Hygieia, who’d been the goddess of well-being. He’d once told Piney that if they had a baby girl he’d like to name her Hygieia, but Piney had made up her mind the baby would be a boy.

  So this was simply a course in how to stay well, which all of them (except possibly Tenny) really needed to learn how to do. He ought not have too much trouble teaching these young people whatever they’d like to know about how the body works and what we ought to do to keep it running proper. He could use Kie Raney’s system of teaching that there’s both a practical reason and a pretty reason for everything. “I got a idee,” Colvin suggested. “How about let’s each of y’uns jist let yore book fall open to a page, and then you can ask me anything you like about whatever’s on it. Let’s jist go around the room, startin over here with you, Miss. What’s yore name?”

  “Ophelia,” the girl said. “Folks call me Philly.”

  “Wal, Philly, jist let yore book fall open and ask me anything.”

  Philly took her book and let it fall open. Then she screamed, “AAAAAAHHHHHH!” and jumped out of her seat and tried to run away from it, as if a spider had landed on her. Colvin got her calmed down but he couldn’t get her to go back to her book. “Thar’s a skeleton in thar!” she said.

  Sure enough, on page sixty-two was a walking spooky skeleton, looking as if he was a-coming to get you with a big grin on his face. “Folks, there’s nothing to be a-feared of,” he sought to assure them. “Hit’s only a pitcher. The pitcher is jist a-trying to show how the jiants of the body are hinged together. Did you know you’ve got two hundred bones in yore body? Now who can tell me why critters have bones?”

  The youth Russ Breedlove (he of the diphallus) raised his hand and suggested that critters have bones so their skin won’t slide off, but another boy said, “A chaunk of meat has got to have bones so you could pick it up and carry it to the kitchen, and have something to gnaw on.” Philly finally came timidly back to her seat and sneaked a peek at the skeleton, and said that bones are hard and rough so’s to protect us from our enemies, or leastways scare ’em off. Finally Colvin resorted to the young lady he knew would be his star pupil. “You, Tummy,” Colvin called on her, but added, “I mean, Tenny.” Why does that gal tie up my tongue? he wondered.

  “Bones is like the timbers that hold up a house or barn,” she said. She poked herself in her lovely ribs. “My ribs hold me up the way the timbers hold up the building.”

  “Right,” Colvin complimented her. “But do they do anything else for your pretty torso?” The class giggled, and he was as abashed at his adjective as she was.

  “I reckon they protect my lungs,” she said, “like the rest of my bones protect the rest of my innards. Bones is all we got to protect us from gittin squoze and scrunched by the cruel, mean world. But lots of times we git scrunched anyhow. I know a man who died of broken bones.”

  “Bones can break, shore,” Colvin agreed. “But they’re also springy and pliable. I could jump out that winder right chonder, and maybe not break a thing.”

  “LET’S SEE YE, TEACHER!” the thirteen of them chorused.

  Colvin wasn’t sure he could survive the drop with all his bones intact and he realized he was getting off the track. “Wal now, if I was to break my fool neck, I’d not only fail of making my point, but I wouldn’t be around for the next part of the lesson, which is this: there’s both a practical reason and a purty reason for everything. The practical reason you’ve got a skeleton inside of you is to hold ye up and protect yore innards and get ye to moving around and about. But what could be purty about having two hundred bones? Anybody?”

  The students stared at the textbook skeleton and screwed up their faces in concentration. They looked at one another. They examined their elbows and their kneecaps, their fingers and their toes; they poked their cheekbones and rapped their skulls. Finally Russ Breedlove offered, “Is it so’s folks can be sure you’re dead, if that’s all that’s left of ye?” Colvin suggested there were easier ways to determine if somebody was dead. A girl suggested that it’s mighty pretty to know you can sit up straight and walk tall because your skeleton is a-holding ye up. Various other near-the-truth answers were exchanged before Tenny held up her hand and said, “Humans are the purtiest of all God’s critters, and the reason they’re the purtiest is because of the way their skeletons stand ’em up on their hind legs and let ’em move about so’s they can do anything!”

  “Except fly,” Colvin said. “Some critters can fly. How do they do that?” Because they got wings, several students said. “But what are their wings made of?” Colvin asked. Feathers, of course, the students said. “No, feathers are just the skin. The wings are bones.” He went on to ask them to speculate about the many ways that humans are indeed, as Tenny said, the prettiest of all God’s creatures despite their inability to fly. He
asked them to discuss the prettiness of the visible bones, but none of them were able to name any visible bones, until finally Tenny said, “Fingernails? Toenails? Teeth?” Tenny’s fingernails were somewhat dirty from her kitchen work, but she had the best teeth Colvin had ever seen, if she would only smile, so he complimented her on her answer, which made her smile, and then he got them to talk about why we use our mouth bones—our teeth—to make ourselves more pleasant. Why do girls always show more teeth than boys? He also wanted to point out that the pubic arch in the female pelvis is also broader, to allow for births, and he wanted to talk about the articulations and ligaments that connect the pelvis to the legs. He wanted to talk about cartilage and foramina and vertabrae and marrow, especially about marrow, to ask if they (or Tenny) could figure out how hard bone can be alive like the rest of the body. And he wanted to talk about how diseases can hurt our bones as well as our tissues, how tuberculosis, for example, thought to affect primarily the lungs, can also attack the bones and cause their abscess. He wanted to talk about arthritis and bursitis and how drinking lots of milk might keep them from getting the osteoporosis that was stooping their grandmothers.

  But Jossie Conklin came into the room and said, “This period was over fifteen minutes ago, and you have made these boys and girls tardy for English.” Colvin had time only to say, “Well, see you next week,” and make a wave of farewell.

  None of his pupils made to leave. Moments passed, with Jossie glaring at them, her hands on her hips. Finally Tenny asked the principal, “How come he caint jist teach us English too?”