Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  “Let’s keep this a secret,” Doc requests. “No sense in gittin anybody alarmed about it, so I don’t want nobody in this school to know about it.”

  Russ agrees to keep mum, and takes his leave, but comes back a moment later. “Doc,” he says, “I hate to keep on reminding you, but there’s still a little problem that you promised to fix,” He points to his crotch.

  “Yeah, I aint forgot,” Doc admits. Then he asks, “What do ye think of Oona Owens?”

  “Don’t change the subject, Coach,” Russ says, although, by changing his form of address from “Doc” to “Coach” he has already partly changed the subject himself, because if he is the star forward of the Newts, Oona is the star guard of the Lady Newts (or Newtesses, as some call them). “She’s a whiz, aint she, Coach?” Russ observes. “Aint never seen a gal who can grab a ball the way she can.”

  Coach Swain has often, during practices, allowed the girls’ team and the boys’ team to scrimmage against each other, by prior agreement “playing dirty,” no holds barred, the girls clawing and scratching and as often as not out-rebounding and out-shooting the boys. Russ has never faced a boy guard anywhere who can hamper him as effectively as Oona does. He not only admires her ball-hawking and bodychecking, but he also thinks she’s an awful pretty dish for an athlete. He even adores the odor of her sweat.

  “Have you ever thought of steppin out with her?” Coach asks.

  “Shoot, Coach, I’m a married man,” Russ reminds him.

  “So am I” is all Coach says, but it is enough to remind Russ that Coach has not allowed the marriage vows to stop him from extramarital activity, including with the two women closest to Russ, his mother and his wife.

  “You’re jist tryin again to git me away from Tenny,” Russ accuses.

  “No, I’m jist tryin to git ye to find out if there might not be some other gal in this big wide world who could pleasure ye more than Tenny.”

  “How could Oona do that?” Russ wants to know.

  Colvin Swain must do some debating with himself. As Doc Swain, he is bound by oath not to let know Russ know of Oona’s “condition.” But as Coach Swain, he has no oaths. No, perhaps Coach Swain is not allowed to know everything that Doc Swain knows. “There is jist no tellin,” he says to Russ. “But if I was you, I’d shore keep my eye out fer a chance to play with Oona off the basketball court.”

  And sure enough, there eventually comes a chance, during the post-Thanksgiving tournament in Eureka Springs, which requires two nights on the road, and possibly three if the Newts can advance into the semifinals. For once, the teams are staying in an actual hotel, albeit a small and very cheap hotel, but one in which there are several rooms at their disposal, three for the boys’ team, so that they’ll only have to sleep two to a bed, three for the girls’ team, ditto, one for Coach (and clandestinely Manager too), and even a spare room which happens to be the place where Russ Breedlove and Oona Owens discover that they have an anatomical affinity which affords many possibilities and delights. Coach Swain is supposed to chaperone his players on these overnight trips, but he is preoccupied and does not seem to know or notice that Russ and Oona are spending the night together. He is somewhat troubled, or disappointed, the next day in the tournament, when both the Newts and the Lady Newts are embarrassingly blown away by their opponents, principally because their star players, Russ and Oona respectively, are not giving it their all. Although eliminated from the tournament, they have one more night in their hotel before the long trip home, and once again Russ and Oona conspire to seclude themselves together in the spare room.

  In his own room, with Tenny, late in the night after they have exhausted themselves with sexual doings, Colvin cannot resist telling Tenny what may be happening nearby between Russ and Oona. He is violating his oath, but he feels that Tenny ought to know. The disclosure renders Tenny speechless. Colvin wonders about this, because she has already told him that Russ is no longer sleeping with her, that Venda has consigned Tenny to sleeping on a pallet in the pantry, and that Russ has even told her that as far as he’s concerned they might as well not consider themselves man and wife anymore. Finally, Colvin has to ask her, “Well? Does it make ye mad that your husband is cheatin on ye?”

  “Oh, no,” Tenny says. “I jist feel kind of jealous, as if she’s able to do somethin that I could never do.”

  Colvin laughs. “Would you want an extra vagina if you could have one?”

  “I’d like to have a dozen of ’em,” she says, “if you could have a dozen penises.”

  He laughs again. “Where would you put all of ’em?”

  “Here,” she says. “And here. And one of ’em around here. And one up here.”

  Playfully they re-create their anatomies so that they could be joined together all over their bodies. Almost by accident, Tenny gives herself a vagina in her left lung, her bad lung, and at the moment of realization of what she has done, she begins coughing, and for the first time spits up blood.

  Hemoptysis. He has hoped that this would not happen. He realizes that it is spontaneous and inevitable, but that sexual activity can bring it on. There is less than a teaspoon of blood. This hemoptysis does not alter the prognosis, except that it may spread the disease to other parts of the lungs, and it can also increase the risk of pneumonia.

  “’See?” she says. He thinks at first she is saying it accusingly, as if she knows that their act of love has caused it. But then he realizes that she is calling out to her old playmate or other self. He hopes that verily ’See will return and help in the battle. He knows that Tenny must remain in bed for seven to ten days until the bleeding has stopped, but he can’t keep her in this bed.

  “We’ve got to git you home so you can rest in bed for a week or so,” he declares.

  “Home?” Tenny says, and laughs. “Where’s that?”

  “Don’t laugh,” he says. “Try to stay as still as you can. Don’t even talk unless you have to. Talking and laughing can make it worse.”

  As soon as he had learned that Tenny has been sleeping on a crude pallet in Venda’s pantry, an airless room reeking with smells of foodstuffs—vinegar and onions and spices and moldy cheeses—Colvin has been putting his mind to the problem of a better place for her. She cannot return to the dormitory. There are a couple of spare rooms in the gymnasium, but they are not heated at night. Likewise his office is unheated.

  Now he decides bravely to take her to Stay More. Of course he cannot put her up in his own house, not with Piney there, but he can put her up in the hotel. Not too long before, the old woman living in the big Jacob Ingledew house on Main Street, the woman you have chosen to call Whom We Cannot Name in your architecture novel, died, and the house was inherited by Willis Ingledew, the bachelor storekeeper, who moved into it with his spinster sister, Drussie Ingledew, who realized that a house of a dozen rooms was too big for the two of them and decided to turn it into a hotel, the only hotel that Stay More ever had, and not a very successful one. In fact, when Colvin installs Tenny in one of the upstairs guest rooms, a south-facing one (Colvin’s own house is on the north side of the hotel), she is the only guest there. Both Drussie and Willis are greatly in Doc Swain’s debt for various medical services that he has rendered for both of them, and they welcome the chance to barter Tenny’s hotel bill in return for their medical bills, and they are even amenable to Doc’s request that they not tell a soul that a young lady is confined to one of their upstairs rooms. Colvin explains to them simply that she is a student at N.C.A. who has come down with a disease—medical ethics prohibits his revealing to the Ingledews just what the disease is—which requires confinement to bed for as long as ten days, and the N.C.A. itself simply does not have the facilities for such infirmary care. The reason for secrecy, he says, is so that word will not leak back to the student body of N.C.A. and possibly bring a horde of other students wanting to be treated likewise in the Stay More Hotel.

  Tenny loves Stay More, as all of us who have seen it are bound to do, even if she can
only see south and west from her room—enough, at least, to see the big general store, the old gristmill, pretty Banty Creek, the schoolhouse, and the looming rise of Ingledew Mountain. She is, however, somewhat nervous at the thought that Mrs. Swain, her lover’s wife, dwells just a short distance to the unseen north. Her agitation is compounded by the fact that patients with hemoptysis usually become extremely nervous. Knowing this, Colvin gives her half a grain of codeine sulfate, and watches to see if he might need to give her morphine, but he does not. Not yet, at least. The codeine quietens her, and he hopes he can keep her quiet and resting without any more of it. Even if he could get up his nerve to sneak out on Piney in the still of the night, he makes no attempt to sleep with Tenny while she is in Stay More.

  But he visits her several times a day, and in the evenings too. Drussie Ingledew is, if nothing else, an excellent cook, and she follows Colvin’s dietary instructions to the letter in making sure that Tenny gets the nourishment she needs, including half a gallon a day of the same splendid well-water that helped my own recuperation at Stay More. With all of this attention, Tenny ought to be getting better.

  Piney observes that Colvin isn’t running off to Parthenon every chance he can get. He seems to be hanging around his office at home much more than usual. Or he seems to be moseying down to the Ingledews’ house/hotel more than once a day. She could easily ask him why, but she decides to ask Drussie Ingledew, who, being her nearest female neighbor, is also the closest thing on this earth to what might be called a “best friend,” other than Colvin himself. At least Drussie and Piney are on good speaking and gossiping terms, and Piney has permitted Drussie to come and pedal her player piano any time she feels like it. But when she asks Drussie why Colvin is spending so much time at the Ingledews’, all Drussie can say is to stammer that it appears Willis and Colvin have got a lot to talk about. Piney, knowing everything, knows this is not true: she knows that Colvin doesn’t talk to Willis at all except to exchange howdies. Drussie knows that Colvin is spending most of his time upstairs just talking to the girl. Or listening to her. Once, Drussie eavesdrops, curious to see what on earth could possibly be the subject matter that can keep them talking for hours on end, but all that she can make out is that the girl is talking about how “it looks as if I have always had this need to suffer, so now I’m really and truly doing it,” and Doc Colvin is trying to tell her that although he is sure sorry about her suffering, he feels he ought to try to get her to see that if people didn’t suffer they wouldn’t appreciate all of the many things that bring on the opposite of suffering, namely, pleasure and joy and happiness. If it didn’t rain so hard, we wouldn’t appreciate sunshine. Et cetera. Drussie thinks Doc would have made a good church preacher.

  Piney is so happy to have Colvin staying in Stay More so much more these days that she makes a mistake: early one morning, even before putting the breakfast coffee on to boil, she sits herself down at her piano and puts in the roll of “Roses of Picardy” and plays it, singing all the words about the hush of the silvery dew, et cetera. It is only when she is all the way through, all the way down to “there’s never a rose like you,” that she realizes her grievous error, and announces loudly to the house, “Any fool knows, Sing before breakfast, Cry before supper,” which, although Piney knows too much to be superstitious, is the one superstition which she does not consider a superstition because it is so unfailingly true. All day long she waits to see what is going to make her cry.

  This is the day that Colvin has to make an important decision. Tenny’s hemorrhaging has not stopped. If she loses much more blood, he will have to give her a transfusion. He knows that the next step in the treatment, if the bleeding continues, is artificial pneumothorax. This involves injecting gas into the pleural cavity in order to collapse her lung and keep it from working. He has induced pneumothorax with other patients, and knows how to do it, and he possesses in his clinic the Floyd-Robinson apparatus for properly doing it, although he realizes the Floyd-Robinson is not without its faults: the manometer is too short, and sometimes if the patient coughs it can blow out the entire contents.

  After giving her a sixth of a grain of morphine to relax her, he explains to Tenny what he is going to do, and asks her to try very hard not to cough during the procedure. He has made sure the room is warm enough that he can remove her gown, and he has her lie on the side of her “good” lung. She cannot quite understand why he wants to make one of her lungs stop working, and is uncertain about how well she can breathe with only one lung. He tries to assure her that she can breathe just fine with one lung, and that stopping the bad lung will force it to rest, just as she is forcing her body to rest, and rest is really the only cure for her condition at this stage.

  The very sight of the Floyd-Robinson needle with its trocar and tubing attached would be enough to throw any patient into shock, so he must be very careful that she does not see it. He gives her novocaine, taking care to infiltrate the pleura. He is going in behind her armpit, and he uses a small cataract knife to make an incision to allow the needle to penetrate more smoothly. Very slowly and gently he inserts the long needle, wishing he had a third hand to place on her forehead, a fourth hand to hold her hand, and a fifth hand to wipe the sweat off his brow. Tenny whimpers. The sound is so childlike that he realizes just how young she is. Now he begins frequently to pull out the trocar on the back end of the needle, and take readings from the manometer. The manometer now begins to fluctuate, and shows a negative respiration, and he realizes that the needle has reached the desired space between two layers of pleura. He can now inject the gas. As the gas goes in, he keeps a steady eye on the manometer, as it begins to register positive pressure, and he slowly injects about 15 cc of gas every minute or so, until he has injected 250 cc, which has taken him nearly half an hour.

  “Tell me when I can cough,” Tenny pleads. “I need to cough, real bad.”

  “Shhh,” he hushes her. Her voice is causing the manometer to fluctuate, but he realizes he has injected enough gas, and he slowly pulls the needle out, and seals the wound with collodion. “Okay,” he says. “Cough, but not too hard.” And she does.

  Immediately afterwards she feels fine, and even wants to get out of bed, but he wants her to lie still. He takes a washrag, dips it into the washbasin on the stand beside the bed, and wipes the sweat from her face and body. He takes a hairbrush and smooths out her long, long hair, which he then arranges nicely on either side of her head on the pillow, and down over her bare breasts. She is a vision, and he bends down and gives her a long kiss. He is not unmindful that you should never kiss anyone with TB, but this is not just anyone; this is Tenny.

  She breaks the kiss, and whispers, “There’s somebody standing in the door.”

  He turns. It is Piney. He is mortified, more even than he had been that time that he and Venda were caught in sexual labor by Russ and Tenny. That time, at least, he had had the excuse of being under the influence of both a love potion and whiskey, and not responsible for his behavior. Now he has no excuse for being a mature, conscientious, respected physician, sober and ethical, who is keeping his mistress as a patient in the Stay More Hotel and is discovered by his beloved wife giving his mistress a kiss which is passionate enough to show any but a blind person or an idiot that he is deeply in love with her.

  For her part, Piney, who knows everything, does not know what to say. She does not need an explanation, nor an introduction. She knows that this is Tenny, of whom her husband spoke often in his sleep and finally in his wakefulness in telling Piney that the girl has the Great White Plague. Piney knows that Tenny is not simply Colvin’s patient, not simply his student, certainly not simply his friend, but his true love. Piney knows, without even observing the Floyd-Robinson apparatus beside the bed, that her husband is doing his level best to cure the girl of the Great White Plague, and she knows that if anybody can cure the girl, Colvin can do it. But the kiss she has witnessed confirms her in her knowledge that some kind of bond exists between Colvin and Tenny t
hat transcends both conventional morality and “reality,” whatever that is, and is a bond that can never be broken. This is the thought, and the knowledge, that brings tears to Piney’s eyes, and validates the supposed superstition, Sing before breakfast, Cry before supper. So in a sense she has brought this great sadness upon herself by foolishly neglecting to remember that venerable axiom. Her own sense of blame does nothing to diminish her tears, but increases them, until she is standing there weeping so hard she cannot stand it, and, being unable to stand it, turns and flees.

  It is the last that Colvin will see of her. Much later, he will hear a rumor that she is living with her sister Sycamoria on the other side of Demijohn, and, later still, he will hear that she has moved into Harrison, the biggest town in that part of the Ozarks, and is working there in a grocery store. And later still, he will attempt to locate her, at least to offer to convey to her the player piano, if she still wants it, but he will not be able to find her in Harrison. Years later, and even at the time I was a patient in Doc Swain’s house, some of the folks of Stay More will still be speculating that Colvin is still waiting for Piney to return, but if that is true, and I have reason to doubt it, it is a futile expectation.

  Three or four more treatments with the Floyd-Robinson apparatus are necessary in order to complete the collapse of Tenny’s lung, but Colvin is able to carry out only a couple of these before Tenny is evicted from the hotel. Drussie, with Willis backing her up, comes to Colvin to tell him that, one, since Piney has moved out he might as well move Tenny into his own house, and, two, there is such a scandal attendant upon the rumors of why Piney has left town that the Ingledews don’t want to contribute to it any further by harboring a love nest under their roof.

  Reluctantly, because he still thinks there’s a chance that Piney might come home any minute as soon as she recovers from her shock or grief or jealousy or whatever emotion she is having, Colvin moves Tenny into his own house, but puts her to bed not in the big bed that was his and Piney’s. He puts her in the selfsame cot that I was to use during my convalescence there, and I have to confess that when I learned that fact it gave me the same sense of immediacy and actuality that I am trying to achieve with this present tense. One reason he will not put her in the big bed, apart from its being Piney’s, is to minimize the temptation for further sexual activity. For although Tenny despite her illness continues to be as hungry for him as ever, if not more so, he doesn’t think it’s wise to risk further hemoptysis brought on by the labor of love.