The members of the audience exchanged looks with one another, and Colvin hoped that they were actually thinking about the matter. Jossie Conklin raised her hand and said, “Perhaps in view of the subject, we ought to be the Butterflies!” and she laughed and looked around to see if any others had grasped the significance of her remark, but only Nick Rainbird, who taught history, was also laughing.
Tim James, the new man (Bible and Hygiene, and destined shortly to become Jossie’s lover), said, “Since we’re the Newton County Academy, what say let’s call ourselves the Academicians?” and he fell out of his seat with his own laughter but few of the faculty and none of the students joined in.
“Let’s let the students be heard from,” Colvin suggested, and they listened to several suggestions, some of them good ones based upon the local fauna, such as Hellbenders, which, however, was thought a little too naughty for a Christian school.
Russ Breedlove suggested, “If it’s the Newton County Academy, how about we call ourselves the Counts?”
“And call the girls the Countesses?” Colvin asked. He rather liked the idea although he wasn’t wild about it. He proposed to write the various suggestions on the blackboard and let them vote on a winner. He wrote down all those suggested, and waited to see if any others were proposed.
Tenny raised her hand and rather quietly offered, “As far as that matter goes, how about the Newts?”
There was a lot of laughter. Colvin allowed as how that might be appropriate if they had to travel distances through rough country, because newts were amphibious salamanders. “Of course, newts is tiny little critters, but they’re elusive and slippery and they can go ever which way,” he pointed out. “Yeah, that might be an appropriate name for us. I’m all for it. Thank you, Tenny.”
“Excuse me,” Jossie Conklin said to him, “but what does all of this have to do with psychology?”
Colvin wasn’t sure he understood her question. “Wal, I reckon if we had a mascot name, it would give us a sense of identity, you know. If we think of ourselfs as newts, even though they’re slinky and no-account, we can play our games better as a team.” He was proud of his answer, but he also was beginning to have a growing sense of uneasiness that something was amiss.
“A team?” said Jossie Conklin. “I should think we’re perhaps a class, not a team. I facetiously suggested that if we have to adopt a mascot for Psychology class, it might be the butterfly, but I don’t suppose even you, Dr. Swain, realize the connection between Psyche and the butterfly, do you?”
Colvin stared at her. Slowly he began to understand his great mistake, and as it dawned on him, he grew very red in the face and could hardly breathe. He could only stand there, thinking that it was bad enough he had mistakenly lectured to his basketball teams on Consciousness and Instinct, but it was unforgivable that he had urged his Psychology class to wear jock straps and bras. He sought some consolation from the excuse that Tenny’s problem had distracted and rattled him. And indeed, that was all he could think about. His eyes sought hers in the crowd, and he tried to communicate to her by his eyes alone his misery. His real misery, he understood, was not over his embarrassing mistake but over the possibility that this lovely girl, who had captured his heart, who meant everything in the world to him, and who had even, just now, by a stroke of her original mind, given a name to the official mascot of the Newton County Academy, had fallen victim to the Great White Plague.
“Friends,” he said to the filled auditorium in a voice quiet and abashed, “doggone if I aint done went and made a boo-boo. The sorriest kettle of fish I ever mommixed. I’m supposed to handle two things, Psychology and Basketball, but I’ve done got ’em all confused one with the othern, and I’ve preached to the Basketball folks as if it was Psychology, and here I’ve been talkin to y’uns as if this was Basketball. So I do humbly beg yore pardon. Some way we’ll git this all straightened out.
“But, you know,” he went on, “come to think of it, it don’t make all that much difference. If you stop to think about it, in the scheme of things, in the coming and going of the seasons, in the times for laughter and the times for crying, the times for building up and the times for tearing down, and all those other times the Preacher spoke of, trying to tell us about vanity and how everthing don’t matter all that much anyhow, whether we are studying Basketball or playing Psychology, or the other way around, don’t really amount to a whole heck of a lot of hills of beans, nohow. There are more important things, like love and staying alive. So if y’uns will excuse me, that’s all I can tell y’uns today.”
Chapter ten
A couple more afternoons is all it will take. I have enjoyed your company so much that I’ve been tempted to drag this story out as long as I can just to keep you here, but I think you realize yourself that we’re getting toward the end of it.
Push that little red button on that thing, will you? And I hope you don’t mind. My young friend Mike Luster, who aspires to be a folklorist and comes to visit me just about as often as you do, has left his tape recorder here with the request that we preserve the remainder of whatever words I have to say in this story. Not that he mistrusts your ability to remember, let alone to hear, any of this, but he just wants to be sure that the end of the story is permanently recorded. You don’t need to worry that he might ever try to make a novel out of it himself.
I suppose there’s a possibility that the tape recorder could intimidate me somewhat, hold me back, slow me down, whatever. For, although I insist that I’ve always told you the exact and honest truth without any embellishment, I’ve never had to be constrained by any thought of what permanent reception my words may have. In this regard, I’ve been like the old-time Ozark storyteller himself: my words have been only for the occasion, only for the present audience; I’ve known that my words might get repeated by my audience to some future listeners, but as far as the story goes, it begins and ends right here and now. I never had much luck trying to use a tape recorder myself, not for stories. I collected hundreds of folk songs with my recording machines, but those songs were things already known and rehearsed and possessed of some permanence to begin with. Whenever I tried to tape a good story, it somehow inhibited the storyteller.
Maybe the only differences you’ll notice are these: the rest of this story aint so comical. Assuming you’ve been amused by a lot of what I’ve told you—even though you don’t laugh much, I can tell when I’ve tickled you—you may find the rest of this story somewhat downbeat, certainly minor key. And also I’m fixing to switch it into the present tense. Why? Well, why do you do it your own self? In all your novels, you downshift (or upshift, is it?) from the past to the present tense toward the end, and then finally into the future tense. I’ve studied what you’ve done. I’ve considered that in my own collections of tales, there is often a kind of indiscriminate shifting from one tense to another, because that’s simply the way those old folk stories got told, perhaps without any rhyme or reason as far as tenses are concerned.
But if you’ll pardon the analogy, there exists between storyteller and listener a kind of romance, and the progress of it parallels the stages of courtship: holding hands, hugging, and finally fucking, or some kind of consummation. All that past tense business is just holding hands, making contact, nothing truly intimate. But when you shift to present tense, you’re drawing the listener into more intimate contact, as if to make sure that the listener becomes a part of the story, not just an audience to it. And then, through the ultimate intimacy of the future tense, you make sure that the listener is always a permanent part of the story. Am I right? Thank you for bringing me the Smith Brothers cough drops. I need them.
Hug Tenny: she definitely has TB. When Colvin leaves that auditorium and goes downstairs, first to the principal’s office to see if the vial of tuberculin has been delivered (it has), and then to his own office, Tenny follows him, and they lock the door. At once they use the sofa, out of similar as well as different reasons, both out of love, but Tenny out of overwhe
lming desire and Colvin not so much from desire as out of solace for his miseries, including his continuing embarrassment over the mix-up. He wants to ask Tenny if she herself, being in both Basketball and Psych, had not realized his error, and, if so, why in heaven’s name hadn’t she told him? But she will not let him ask. Her hands are all over him. Her mouth is all over him. The ferocity of her ardor almost scares him, for he has never known a woman to want it so much. The building is emptied now of people, the school grounds are likewise evacuated, but still there must be someone around who can hear the sounds that Colvin and Tenny are making. Somewhere out there, surely, is Russ Breedlove, waiting to take Tenny home atop Marengo. He will just have to wait.
He will just have to wait even longer, for Colvin and Tenny, when they have finished, do not rise from that sofa but lie there in each other’s arms for a long time, not simply because it feels good to hold each other like that, nor simply because they are all worn out from a busy day and a strenuous turn at sex, but because it is postponing as long as possible the test.
But finally he must get up and administer it. He keeps his back to her while he dilutes the tuberculin and draws into the hypodermic syringe a tiny amount, 0.1 mg., and then he takes her arm and promises that it will not hurt very much, and it does not.
“What’s it supposed to do?” she asks. “What do you think might be wrong with me?”
Colvin Swain surprises himself by not telling her the truth. “Likely there aint nothing wrong with you,” he says, “but this here is just a little test to make sure. We’ll keep a close watch on your arm there where I stuck ye, and see if it has any kind of reaction. Now if you want a ride home, you’d better run and see if you caint find your husband.” He kisses her one more time, asks her to contrive to meet him here about this same time tomorrow, and she is gone.
He has no microscope in this office. He takes home with him to Stay More the specimen of her sputum he had collected earlier, and uses his microscope to examine it, after an acid-fast stain. Long after he has finally and positively identified a bacillum, Mycobacterium tuberculosis humanis, he continues to stare into the microscope, watching the goddamned critter. “Know your enemy,” he says to himself, and he wants to study every curve of this tiny, evil rod until he can almost predict what it is trying to do. He knows what its brothers and sisters are already doing inside Tenny’s lungs. Thriving on oxygen, they are seeking out the parts of her lungs where they can get plenty of air. They are hunting for her alveoli, the tiny air sacs of her lungs, private chambers, where they can have their orgies and reproduce.
But her strong young body has not welcomed them, and it has sent platoons of white blood cells to interrupt those orgies in those alveoli, and rout them out, swallow them up, and ideally kill them. Yet in swallowing them, the white blood cells might not be killing them but only giving them protection by enwrapping them in pockets, spinning caseous cocoons around them. These shells are the tubercles. Tenny’s body becomes hypersensitive not only to the bacilli but to those tubercles, and this is what will cause her skin to become inflamed where Colvin injected the tuberculin.
Maybe, just maybe, her disease will not progress beyond this point; the bacilli will spread no farther, and any of them remaining in her alveoli, instead of having further orgies, will go to sleep and remain dormant, sealed off in those tubercles, and she will have a normal life.
That is what he hopes for. After supper, though the night grows chilly and dark, he sits on the front porch, wearing his favorite cardigan sweater. He needs to think. His dog Galen comes up and slobbers on his shoe, and nuzzles his leg, and gets a pat or two on the head for his pains, then curls asleep at Colvin’s feet. Colvin is moved to think of the dog’s namesake, and he remembers that Galen, the last of the great Greek physicians, quite possibly suffered from tuberculosis himself. Galen established the first institution for the treatment of TB and sent his patients to recuperate on the most beautiful beach in the world, in a place where the special herbs eaten by the cows produced the magical therapeutic milk that Galen prescribed for his patients. There is no record of the rate of cure of all those milk-drinking patients of Galen.
Colvin thinks of all the names that the disease has been called since Galen’s time, when it was known as phthisis, pronounced not as bad as it looks, thigh-sis, inherited into old-time parts of the Ozarks as “tis-sis” or “tis-sick” as in the legendary tissick weevil, who was thought to cause it. But most people in the Ozarks still knew it by its nineteenth-century name, consumption, because that is what it does, it consumes the body, starting with the lungs. Colvin had enough experience with it—from patients of his who thought they had catarrh, asthma, bronchitis, weak heart, stomach trouble, scrofula, or just the common cold, and succumbed to it, despite his ministrations (there are no really effective ministrations)—to think of it as the Great White Plague. During the years of his medical education, with Kie Raney or by himself, it was the Number One Killer in the country, and he had learned to fear it more than any other disease. Like any good physician, Colvin takes pride in his ability to manage and conquer his patients’ ailments, and he can stare arteriosclerosis in the face and say, “Arteriosclerosis, I am your better!” but he cannot face up to the Great White Plague with the same fearlessness and confidence. It is the one disease that is better than he.
Colvin broods on his porch for so long that finally his wife, Piney, comes out of the house and sits beside him, and, because she knows everything, she knows that something is profoundly disturbing him. All she says is, “Do you think you could talk to me about it?”
Because she knows everything, he asks her, “Is there any cure against the Great White Plague?”
Although she knows everything, she does not know that one, nor does anyone else, at that time. “You would surely know if there was,” she admits. After a while she asks, “Who has it?”
“A girl named Tenny,” he divulges.
“Yes,” she says. “Tenny.” As if it’s someone she’s known all her life.
Colvin wants to say more. He wants to confess his great inner conflict: he had first permitted himself to become so involved with Tenny because he knew for certain that, hypochondriacal as she was, she would never have anything actually wrong with her, she would never need him as her doctor, and therefore it was not a breach of doctor-patient ethics for him to fall madly in love with her. But now that he has discovered that Tenny does indeed have a great need of his attentions as her physician, will he have to violate ethics (not to mention Kie Raney’s Oath) in order to go on loving her?
Because he cannot voice this torment, his wife at length speaks up, saying, “You’d best come in the house, Colvin. It’s getting cold. Real cold. And I suppose you won’t be waiting until next Friday to be going back to Parthenon, will you?”
No, he cannot wait another week. Reactions to the tuberculin test begin to show up within twenty-four hours, and he goes back to his Academy office the next day, Saturday, to meet her. She has escaped from Jasper, from her husband and her domineering mother-in-law, on the excuse that there is an important meeting of the Erisophean Society, the Academy’s literary club.
Although Colvin hardly needs to see the results of the tuberculin test to confirm his diagnosis, he has to punish himself, or make himself share the ordeal that lies ahead for Tenny, by seeing it anyway: the swelling and the redness on Tenny’s arm, the positive reaction declaring, “This pore gal is infected, infested with the Great White Plague. So now what, Doc?” He cannot answer.
Tenny wants so eagerly to make love again, without even waiting for him to explain what the redness and swelling from her tuberculin test signify. Colvin knows, from his vast knowledge of the enemy, that the Great White Plague is rumored to increase the sexual urge, that perhaps if it doesn’t directly heighten the libido, it causes some kind of mysterious chemical effect in the body which stirs the glands, or at least it raises the temperature of the body in such a way that the heat is perceived as sexual heat. He
is not certain that he can believe any of this. He wants to believe, and he has every right to believe, that Tenny desires him so ardently not because of her fever but because she loves him as much as he loves her. And when he obliges her and himself, and marvels yet again at the intensity and abandon and joy that she expresses in the act, he does not permit any thoughts of fever or chemistry to diminish his own pleasure.
They are still lying in each other’s arms, in the Saturday sunlight coming through the window that is almost enough to take the October chill out of the air, when she at last requests, “Okay, my dearest dear, it’s time maybe you tell me how come my arm has turned red and swole up where you stuck me.”
Colvin, as I think we have seen, is a good liar but not a great one. He knows he cannot indefinitely postpone letting her know the truth. She will have to learn it all somehow, sometime. But he can be as gentle as possible without lying. “Do you recollect,” he says, fully aware that they are lying on the very sofa where she had reclined to tell him about it, “that time when you was a child and your good old Grampaw McArtor lay sick abed and you spent so much time with him, and even sent your best friend ’See down inside of his lungs to see if she couldn’t cure him?”
“Sure I remember all that,” Tenny says.
“Well, there’s just a possibility that you might have caught what he had, although catching the disease didn’t mean that you’d show any sign of it for many a year. The little bacilli that cause it could have been asleep in your system all this time, just waiting for a reason to wake up and start doing their dirty work again.”
“Colvin Swain!” she says, and sits up abruptly. “Are you tellin me that I might have consumption?”
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