Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  He sits up too. “It appears so,” he admits. He explains how the tuberculin test works. He also confesses to having taken the sputum specimen home with him and examined it under the microscope and seen the curvy rod in its acid-fast stain. Does she remember from Hygiene class, he asks, what bacilli are, and how they behave?

  “I reckon I learnt the practical reason,” she says, then smiles and adds, “but I never learnt the pretty one. If there is one.”

  “Awfully pretty from the bacterium’s way of lookin at it,” he says. “If I was a bacterium, I’d be mighty proud to cavort around in one of yore lungs.”

  “But you’d be a-killin me,” she points out, rightly.

  “I wouldn’t know I was,” he avows, rightly. “Like all other critters in this world, including humans too, I’d just be doing my job, to git along in the world, competing with my fellow critters as well as with my host or hostess for my share of being able to breathe and to eat and to—”

  “To shit,” Tenny says. She shudders, and clutches her chest. “So now my lungs are filling up with bacteria shit and I caint even cough hard enough to git it out.” Involuntarily, but as if she wants to do it, she coughs violently, and Colvin reaches for a handkerchief for her sputum, which does not yet, he is glad to see, contain any blood. Whether it contains any bacteria shit he might not even be able to determine with a microscope, but Tenny has given him a thought: if the tuberculosis bacilli are creatures, what happens to their excrement? He realizes that science has spent much time determining that they must breathe, but not that they must eat and shit.

  She clutches his sleeve and asks in the same child’s voice she first asked him, a year before, “I’m like to die, aint I?”

  But a year before it had been almost as if she were seeking constantly to find something that would kill her, and Colvin had to assure her continuously that she was not going to die. Now she has everything to live for, and earnestly wants to, but he is going to have to remind her that, as the textbook had concluded, we should not live to die, but live prepared to die. “Not everbody who catches the Great White Plague dies from it,” he declares. “Lots of ’em live forever. Or, I mean, at least a natural lifetime.”

  “Can you give me anything for it?” she asks, forlornly, as if she knows the answer: there is no medicine for tuberculosis.

  “I’m givin ye some creosote for your cough,” he says. “And some cod-liver oil to give ye vitamins A and B. You need all the vitamins you can git. You need to keep on eating good and don’t lose any more weight. You’ve done already lost too much.” He seizes her arms and gazes earnestly into her eyes and says, “Look at it this way, Tenny. It’s a mighty fracas. On one side, there’s them bacilli a-trying to break ye down and consume ye. On the other side, there’s you and your body, with me doing my best to help ye, fightin back at the bacilli. We don’t have any medicine that can kill ’em. Caint nothin kill ’em exceptin yore own white blood cells. Remember leucocytes, in Hygiene? In the battlefield of your lungs, there’s going to be a powerful fight a-raging, and you can win it!”

  His pep talk about winning reminded him of what he had said to the Psychology class under the assumption they were the basketball teams. Perhaps it reminded her as well, because she asked, “Will I have to quit school?”

  “Maybe not,” he says. “Jist don’t go around coughing in nobody’s face, and let’s hope you don’t start a-sneezing. Sorry to say, but I caint let ye be on the girls’ basketball team. It would be too strenuous for you, and you need to rest ever chance you git. But you can be the team manager and come to all the games.”

  In the weeks ahead, Tenny has to make a number of adjustments. She has to give up her job working in the kitchen and dining room. Colvin does not tell anyone that Tenny is tuberculous, but he thinks it advisable that she not have to handle the chores she had done to help pay her tuition, not alone because she needs to rest but also because it reduces the risk of her spreading her disease. She proposes to work in the laundry instead. The laundry is a creek bank down the hill from the school, and the laundress’s job is just to maintain the big black iron kettle in which water is heated and the clothes are thrown. “So long as you didn’t spit in the pot,” Colvin teases her, “that would be acceptable.” But he doesn’t want her working, at all. He persuades her to allow him to pay her tuition, and, optimistically, he pays it for the full year, $28. She can devote what energy she has to her classes.

  What she mostly needs, to prepare her for the fight against the disease, is rest. Colvin gives her a key to his office so that she can go there at all times of the day when she doesn’t have classes, and rest on the sofa. Officially he uses the office only one day a week himself, but now, because of Tenny, he comes to school two, three, sometimes four times a week. Piney smiles and says nothing, because she knows everything and people who know everything are inclined to smile and say nothing.

  But there are many hours, every day, when Colvin is not in his office, and Tenny comes to let herself into it and rest on the sofa. Lying on the sofa reminds her of all those sessions with giant lollipops, and it is a comfortable memory. Now, though, she is alone, and only occasionally has Colvin to talk to. Colvin wants her to open the window beside the sofa to let in as much fresh air as possible, although the air is cold and Tenny must keep her winter coat on. He tells her the fresh air will help stop her cough, but she does not quite understand why, if the tuberculosis bacilli are such lovers of air and seekers of oxygen, this exposure to the fresh air isn’t aiding and abetting the enemy. And indeed, medical science itself is confused on this matter, but Colvin is inclined to side with those who believe that fresh air is beneficial.

  Lying there for hours on the office sofa, Tenny is bored. If she can fall asleep and take a nap, fine, and she often does, but more often she just lies there. She begins to stop by the library upstairs to get whatever reading matter she can find, a magazine or a newspaper or a book. The library has a few novels that might keep her in sustained thrall, by Gene Stratton Porter, Harold Bell Wright, Rafael Sabatini, and Grace Miller White, but for some reason she is not able to read a novel. She makes an attempt to read one of them, Kathleen Norris’s Butterfly, attracted by the title, but can only plod through a couple of chapters before losing interest. Colvin brings her to read some books that he has obtained for himself and finished: F. M. Pottenger’s Tuberculosis and How to Combat It, D. MacDougall King’s The Battle with Tuberculosis and How to Win It, A.K. Krause’s Rest and Other Things, and Dr. E.L. Trudeau’s An Autobiography. She finds these readable and interesting and very helpful, although they impress upon her how easily and frequently fatal the disease is. The latter book introduces her to the concept of the sanatorium, and she wonders how far it is to Saranac Lake, New York, and she begins to have daydreams of living that kind of life in a place like that, with nothing to do but rest, eat good food, get lots of sunshine and fresh air, and live forever.

  “Colvin,” she says wistfully one day, “I don’t reckon there’s any place like Saranac Lake hereabouts, is there?”

  No, he tells her, the nearest thing to it is just the Arkansas State Tuberculosis Sanatorium at Booneville, down in Logan County on the other side of the Arkansas River, maybe a hundred miles or so away, and probably not nothing at all like Saranac Lake.

  “Oughtn’t I to be there?” she asks.

  “Hell, it aint even in the Ozarks!” he tells her. “It would sort of be like gittin sent off to prison, and you’d be surrounded with a lot of folks in worse shape than you, and you’d feel all cooped up, and have lots of strict rules to foller.” He pauses, then adds rhetorically, “and when would I ever see ye again?” When she cannot answer that, he observes, “Tenny, this here is your own private sanatorium, with your own personal doctor who loves you. And you git to stay in school besides.”

  She not only stays in school, but, typically, excels in all her classes. In Colvin’s course in psychology—and, for the most part, he has straightened out the difference betwee
n Psychology and Basketball—Tenny is always the first among the hundred or so filling the auditorium to raise her hand with answers to his questions about Reflex, Instinct, or Sensation, and, more importantly, to ask pertinent questions about things he has overlooked or never even considered.

  Despite his first-day error, or because of it, the Psychology class continues to refer to themselves as the Newts, and to talk about winning, and to think of themselves as a team who are out to beat the world by developing superior reflexes, instincts, and sensations.

  Principal Jossie Conklin summons him to her office one day. She begins by saying how much she has been enjoying the Psychology class, and how she has learned so much in the class about Expression that she has had an easy time of approaching the new man, Tim James (Bible and Hygiene), and revealing to him her attraction to him, which he has reciprocated, even to the extent of—with some suggestions from her best friend, Venda Breedlove—the development of episodes of quite intimate contact between them. But, and this is the main reason she wants to talk to Colvin, Jossie has inadvertently discovered that Colvin is “keeping” Mrs. Tennessee Breedlove in his office, perhaps for purposes of gratification of the flesh. What happened was, Jossie had observed Tenny letting herself into Colvin’s office on a day when Colvin was not there nor supposed to be there. After a while, Jossie had let herself into the office with her master key and discovered Tenny sound asleep on Colvin’s sofa. Rather than wake her and ask for an explanation, Jossie had decided to keep a close watch and see what was going on, and, on another occasion, when Colvin was there and was supposed to be there, she quietly unlocked his door and peeked in to discover that he was doing something he was not supposed to be doing: he was atop Tennessee with his trousers down. Jossie had been quickly able to determine, from Tennessee’s own behavior and sounds, that the student was not being taken advantage of, in fact was a willing, eager, even joyous participant in the proceedings. Indeed, Jossie has to confess, she had even learned a thing or two, by watching, about the possibility of the female’s taking a less than passive role in the exchange, contrary to what she had been taught or had assumed and had followed in her relations with Tim James. Nevertheless, in any event, be that as it may, for having said all that, Jossie feels constrained to demand, “What in hell is going on?”

  “Tenny and me are crazy about each other,” Colvin confesses.

  “Obviously,” Jossie says. “But you are both married to other persons, and you are committing adultery, and you are using school property for illicit purposes, and you are violating every conceivable standard of personal and professional morality, and I ought to fire you and expel Tennessee.” When Colvin cannot think of a proper defense against that indictment, Jossie goes on, “But Tennessee is the top student in this school, and you are not only doing a bang-up job with Psych class but I hear that your boys’ basketball team went up against the fearsome Antlers of Deer and lost by only thirty points.” Colvin is humbly grateful for that “only.” But it is true that the Deer team is the best in Newton County, and the Newts had been lucky they hadn’t lost by a hundred points. “So,” Jossie says, “I can’t fire you, and I don’t suppose it would do me any good to try to forbid you to keep on seeing Tennessee. But I can’t allow her to have a key to your office, so that she can come and go in there any time she pleases.”

  “Wal, heck,” Colvin protests. “Mostly she just goes in there to rest on the sofer.”

  “Rest?” Jossie says. “If you call that rest, I’d like a chance to watch when she’s busy.”

  “No, I mean when I’m not here, between her classes, she needs to take it easy, doctor’s orders, on account of her condition.”

  “What’s her condition?”

  “You know,” he says truthfully, “doctors aint supposed to tell their patients’ troubles to other people.”

  “Okay. But is it contagious?”

  Once again he decides to lie, but a little white lie about the Great White Plague. “Nope.”

  “That’s what you said about her cerebral palsy,” she reminds him. “But the whole school caught it.” And he is all too aware that there is a possibility the whole school could catch Tenny’s tuberculosis if they were exposed to it closely and constantly over a long period of time. He cannot promise anything.

  Jossie says, “Well, you are lucky that poor Venda isn’t holding this against you. Maybe because she’s got another boyfriend now.”

  As a matter of fact, fortunately for our story, which already has such a tangled web of interpersonal relationships that it needs all the simplification it can get, Colvin has not been seeing much of Venda, outside of Psych class, where she has called attention to herself with some rather stupid answers to questions, and a general ineptitude for the subject. He has escaped her extracurricular blandishments with the lie that he is being faithful to his wife. Venda would have found this inexcusable and frustrating, but it happens that Nick Rainbird, the History and Natural Science teacher, also as a result of being in the Psych class and learning the same ideas of Expression that had helped Jossie start something with Tim James, has been liberated to express his long-secret infatuation for Venda. So passionately have Venda and Nick become involved with each other that she has even lost interest in her continual revenge upon poor Tenny. After subjecting Tenny to the three ordeals, or tasks—the sorting of the jumbled pantry, the shearing and gathering of wool from some dangerous sheep, and being sent to climb Mt. Sherman with a bucket to fetch home some water from an ice-cold spring that was jealously guarded by a cranky old man’s attack dogs—Venda had planned a fourth and final, crushing task for Tenny but, becoming involved with Nick Rainbird, Venda couldn’t even remember what she had planned. “Oh, the hell with her,” Venda has said. “She can go to Hades for all I care.” And while this may be construed as a dismissal, perhaps in its perverse way it is consigning Tenny to the fate of her fourth and final task, her descent into the Underworld of tuberculosis.

  While Venda has lost interest in Tenny, her son has not. Russ still sleeps with Tenny every night…except those occasions when the basketball teams must travel to such remote locations for their games, Huntsville over in Madison County, Valley Springs in Boone County, Snowball in Searcy County, that an overnight is necessary, and while Russ opts to bunk with the other guys in one room, and Tenny is presumed to be bunking with the girls in another, Coach and Manager are actually contriving and conspiring to spend the night together in a third, in each other’s arms. Russ does not know this, but he knows that his wife cares more for Coach than for anyone or anything in the whole wide world. He has resigned himself to this fact. He cannot change it any more than he could change the seasons so that summer would follow autumn. Still, he is able to sleep with Tenny almost every night, kissing her goodnight and snuggling up against her and, after waiting until she is deeply asleep, experimenting with one or another positioning of his dual peckers in an effort to get one or another of them to penetrate one or another of her orifices, always, alas, without ease or success. These sessions usually leave him achy and restless. But he has made a shrewd and remarkable observation: after such a night, he always plays better in basketball, as if the frustration and pent-up jism of his efforts with Tenny are translated into his energy for the game. Russ Breedlove is the star forward of the Newts, or at least the highest scorer, and he doesn’t mind admitting to himself that his shot goes through the hole more frequently and adroitly because he cannot shoot off either of his peckers into any hole.

  But there are still all those days when there aren’t any games to be played, and Russ would sure admire to shoot off both barrels every chance he could get. He is still convinced that if only he could get rid of his surplus pecker he would be able to poke the survivor not only into Tenny but into any gal who struck his fancy. He keeps planning to visit Doc again when the man is Doc and not Coach or Teach or Wife’s Lover, and remind him once again of his standing offer to slice off the spare. He keeps putting it off, however, and eventuall
y it is Doc who calls him in, not, as it turns out, over the matter of performing the surgery.

  “Russ, son,” Doc says, “has Tenny told ye anything about what her trouble is?”

  Russ realizes that Tenny has many troubles, but he isn’t sure which one Doc is talking about, so he shakes his head.

  “She hasn’t told you she has tuberculosis?” Doc asks.

  “Aw, hell, Doc,” Russ observes, “at one time or another’n in her life, she has had cystic fibrosis, multiple sclerosis, neurosis, diagnosis, halitosis, and just about ever other ‘osis’ there is.”

  “Those were only in her mind,” Doc points out, “but she has really and truly got tuberculosis, and it can be catching if you’re exposed to it long enough, and I thought I’d better warn you that it would be better for you if you didn’t sleep with her.”

  Russ narrows his eyes at Doc. “Shitfire, Doc,” he says, “you’re jist a-makin that up, because you don’t want me to sleep with her, because you’d rather sleep with her yourself.”

  Doc coughs and blushes, and Russ realizes he has hit him where he lives. But Doc tries to deny it. “No, now, I’m a-tellin ye the honest to God truth, boy. What she has got aint easy to catch, like the common cold, but if you’re exposed to it night after night, month after month, the chances are you jist might come down with it yourself.”

  Russ thinks. At length he asks, “Is that there tuberculosis the reason she coughs so much, and is gittin right skinny, and looks so pale, and drenches the bedclothes ever night with her sweat?”

  “You’ve noticed,” Doc says, not without a little sarcasm. “Well, then, believe me, it’s serious, and it’s catching, and I jist thought I’d better do what I could to keep you from gittin it too.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” Russ says, “but there aint a extry bed in our house. I may jist have to start sleepin with my momma!” The thought greatly amuses him, and he has a fit a laughter, although the possibility privately captivates him.