When finally her lung is collapsed, and the hemorrhaging has stopped, her disposition and outlook have improved so much that he allows her to get dressed and get out of bed. She even wants to fix meals for the two of them, but he doesn’t think she’s strong enough yet for that. He does allow her to sit at the marvel of the player piano and pedal it, asking her not to play “Roses of Picardy” but willingly listening to her play “Arkansas Blues” over and over again.
She is not well enough to return to school. During his day-long trips to Parthenon each Friday, during which he does his job as quickly and perfunctorily as possible (and the Newts, both girls and boys, have yet to taste their first victory), he canvasses Tenny’s other teachers for her lessons, so that she can try to keep up. And of course he gives her special tutoring in Psychology.
Then the Christmas season comes, and school shuts down.
Colvin cuts down a scraggly cedar tree, eschewing a more attractive pine, and Tenny helps him trim it with popcorn strings and gilded walnuts and strips of colored paper glued into chains.
“What would you like for a Christmas present?” he asks her, being not very good at shopping, or surprises.
“I just want to be fucked!” she exclaims. It is the first time he has heard her use that word, and he is both somewhat shocked and aroused. He dearly wishes he could oblige her, and he attempts to explain why it is not advisable. She pouts, and sulks, and continues to brood until finally she announces, “I want to go home for Christmas. I mean, really home. Brushy Mountain.”
When he has determined that she will not have it otherwise, he decides that it will be good to get her out of this house, which is still haunted by Piney’s spirit if not her presence. And almost without his noticing, his practice has collapsed as much as Tenny’s lung, on account of the scandal. Despite the increase in illnesses that are provoked by the stress and guilt of the holiday season, people have stopped coming to Doc Swain’s or calling for him to come to them, even as a last resort. Unbeknownst to him, he has become an outcast in his own community, and it will take him some time to overcome it.
So he hitches Nessus to the buggy, and takes Tenny home to Brushy Mountain. Snow has fallen and accumulated in the upper reaches, and the going is difficult, but he gets her there, wrapped snugly in furs. Her family, having heard not a word from her since Russ took her away on his white horse, are overjoyed to see her, but they can see at once that something is wrong with her, and she tells them right off that she is being consumed by the Great White Plague, and that Doc Swain has had to collapse one of her lungs.
She turns to him. “I never did bother to ask ye. How long has my lung got to stay collapsed?”
“Two years, at least,” he admits. “Maybe three or four.”
“What?!” she says. “How come you never told me? I thought it would only be for a few weeks or so.” She pounds her fists on his chest until he can seize her wrists and stop her. And she may be heard, at other times of that day, saying to him such things as “What have you done to me?” and “How could you do something like that?” and she begins to realize that she is losing her temper, and that she is very angry at the world, or at life, for having allowed her to come down with a real disease, and she is taking out her anger on her dear sweet Colvin. But this knowledge doesn’t stop her from doing so. The Tennisons and her Grandma McArtor cannot help but notice it, and they wonder what she is doing in the first place with this man she hates so much, since it was Russ Breedlove that she was supposed to have taken up with.
Angry Tenny wants to take over the rest of this story, and we may soon have to let her. She wants to assert herself, to stop being the passive dupe of artificial pneumothoraces and the helpless victim of dreadful diseases and the passive, fragile heroine of a novel and to see if she can’t take control of her own life. So she decides to send Colvin away. He is permitted to spend this one night, sleeping on a pallet on the kitchen floor, but he must go back to Stay More after breakfast. In her own bed, thinking of him sleeping on the pallet on the kitchen floor, she remembers that that is the same way and the same place that Russ had slept, and, dwelling upon this, she cannot sleep. Insomnia has rarely been a problem for her, but eventually she rises and lights a candle, and remembering how she had accidentally dripped hot candle wax on Russ, sets the candle at a distance from Colvin’s body. She gives him a little shake, and then a less gentle shake, but he is deep asleep. She whispers his name without succeeding in waking him. She speaks his name aloud without waking him. She slips under the covers and embraces him without waking him. Now she notices that his penis is fully erect, making a tent in the bedcovers, and she marvels at this, wondering what kind of dream he could be having. Fondling it, she remembers all the incidents of pleasure it has given her, and she decides that she would like one more. She hikes the hem of her nightgown and sits atop him, and gets it into her very easily, and sighs and moans so loudly it ought surely to waken him, but it does not. Taking charge now, wanting to keep this moment of joining as a sensation to be experienced forevermore, even through eternity, she will permit time for her, and thereby for us, to slip into the future tense. She will rise and settle, lift and ease down, again and again and again. Not only will she create enough buffing and smoothing to throw her into her own mighty climax, but she will also generate enough sliding of his penis’s skin to force his testicles to erupt their contents upward into her. She will only briefly reflect that it will be perhaps the wrong time of the month, two weeks since her last period, the only time in her heavy affair with Colvin that she has not observed the calendar or taken precautions.
The next morning she will be tempted, before sending him on his way, to ask if he will not have been at all aware of what she will have done. But she will still be maintaining her attitude of anger, or at least vexation, and she will not even bring herself to be properly appreciative of the gift he will give her upon his departure, which will be the only Christmas gift he will have been able to think of that might be useful to her: a year’s supply of the roots of butterfly weed, which he has dug up from the very patch that Lora Dinsmore had turned into when Alonzo pursued her, roots which Colvin has reduced to a powder with his mortar and pestle. “It won’t do ye no harm,” he will say. “And maybe it’s all that can help.” She will not want her folks to see her kissing him good-bye, so she will not kiss him.
At least the tea made with the powder from the butterfly weed will be more soothing, and therefore helpful, than the various remedies and nostrums that her family will begin to employ upon her. Throughout the holiday season, one after another of these will be tried, beginning with Grandma McArtor’s old-time, surefire cures which Grandma will regret she will never have been able to use on Grampaw McArtor until it was too late. One of these she will remember from back home in Tennessee will involve a rattlesnake, and Wayne Don Tennison will sacrifice one of his prize pets so the snake’s skin can be pickled with whiskey, and Tenny will drink the whiskey. But this will only make her drunk, so more radical cures will be tried:
As an inhalant, it will have been known that pulmonary disorders can be relieved by constant exposure to the unpleasant but beneficial fumes of feces, so Tenny will be instructed to spend as much time as she can stand, hour upon hour, sitting in the privy, taking deep breaths. But it will be so cold out there that this will come close to giving her pneumonia, and the odor will cling to her whole body and will make her offensive company.
Also from an excretory perspective, it will have been widely known that urine is a specific for pulmonary tuberculosis, and Tenny will be urged, and then required, and then compelled, to imbibe her first water upon arising, morning after morning, until she will be tempted to try to get back out of the future tense because she will no longer feel in control of what will be happening to her. The butterfly weed tea will help to remove the taste.
She will tell this to Colvin on a postcard, belatedly thanking him for the butterfly weed, and she will conclude, “Between shit and piss, I am
fed up with all the old-time superstitions, and I wont have nothing more to do with none of them. But I will keep on drinking your tea.”
Tenny’s momma, noting that the grandmother’s traditional albeit radical remedies will not seem to be working, will decide to dose Tenny with Tuberclecide, Prof. Hoff’s Consumption Cure, Yonkerman’s Tuberculozyne, and Nature’s Creation. None of these, however, will produce any noticeable effect, since the essential ingredient of most of these is simply a combination of turpentine and kerosene.
Tenny’s much-older sister Oriole will come home for a visit, mainly to show off the new automobile which her rich husband will have given her for Christmas, a Climber Six Roadster—“The Car Made in Arkansas by Arkansawyers.”
Like her fancy Climber auto, Oriole will be progressive and modern, and when she will find out that baby sister has the TB and will be doing nothing for it except fooling around with the stuff that Gran and Momma will have been trying on her, Oriole will decide to take matters into her own hands. She will put Tenny in the Climber and drive her to the Booneville Sanatorium.
Tenny will hope that their route might take them through Stay More, so that she might see Colvin once again. She will have forgiven him for the artificial pneumothorax, which probably has done her a lot more good than the shit and piss and kerosene, and also the butterfly weed has kept her calm and helped her cough and made her feel generally good.
But the route will not go to Stay More. To get from Brushy Mountain to Booneville, Oriole will drive the Climber on some terrible roads westwards only until she can reach the state highway, which will be graded and fairly smooth and will get them to Russellville, and thence across the Arkansas River, out of the Ozarks, up into the Ouachitas, and finally to Booneville.
So the best that Tenny will be able to do is to send Colvin a postcard, once she will have settled at “San.”
Colvin will crush the postcard in his fist, and will be heard to say to nobody in particular, or to all of the postal patrons of Stay More, most of whom will have forgiven him his scandal, because he will now be living alone and paying the awful price of his loneliness for it, “The soul has gone out of the Ozarks!”
Chapter eleven
Bless your heart, you’ve brought me a bouquet of butterfly weed! Mary, lookee here at what Harington has done! Oh, goddamn me, I not only forget that Mary can’t see these flowers, more importantly I forget that today Mary aint even there! Is she? No, last night Dr. Bittner decided to move her to City Hospital for a while. Nothing too serious, I hope, and just in case you’re looking for synchronicities as you usually do, it don’t have anything to do with Mary’s lungs. It certainly aint TB. Something wrong with her gallbladder. She can’t eat. Dr. Bittner says it could be cancer of the gallbladder, maybe not, but he wants to be sure. Anyway, I’m sure sorry she’s not here to listen to my telling of the end of my long tale, but I reckon she can make it up, hearing it on Mike Luster’s tape recorder, if you’ll kindly push that little red button there.
No, wait, first I just want to say another thing about Mary and then I want to say something about these lovely butterfly weed flowers you’ve brought me. I don’t want you to take this as any sort of criticism or blame of any kind, but do you recall that Mary was your instructor for freshman English, for all of two weeks, back in the early fifties? Mary hasn’t forgotten it, how you came to her and told her you were transferring out of her class because, one, you’d spent all your high school years with women teachers and you were hoping to have men teachers in college, and two, damned if you were going to read the Holy Bible as your first assignment in the course. You were kind of an arrogant sonofabitch, weren’t you? With a typical freshman attitude. You didn’t know who Mary was, that she was the only expert on Ozark folklore at the University. You thought she was just some homely looking spinster teacher like all those you’d had in high school, and you thought the worst part of it was that she was so all-fired religious she was going to make you read the Bible. Well, let me say two things: just as you didn’t know who Mary was, she had no idea of course who you were, that you were going to become, many years later, one of her favorite novelists. Anyway, you didn’t hurt her feelings dropping her course. It happened all the time to her. But it made her a little sad that she hadn’t been able to make clear to you, maybe on account of your poor hearing, that she was assigning some of the Bible to read not because she was the least bit religious, which she aint, but because it contains some of the finest fiction in the history of literature.
I reckon I bring this up, on this very last day that I may see you, just to remind you that the story I’ve been telling you, no less than the Bible, can be taken either as the exact history of some people, of the love between a doctor and a young girl in a remote part of the Ozark Mountains, or it can be taken as a clever yarn. The point is, what difference does it make? Would you have enjoyed it any more if I could verify everything in it? I have here at the foot of my bed a stack of photocopies which our mutual friend Bob Besom—special agent in Special Collections at the University, last heard from when he showed us parts of Doc’s journals to indicate how Doc was involved in the dream cure with Lorraine Dinsmore—has taken the trouble to copy from various issues of Sanatorium Outlook, a newspaper written and published by the inmates—I mean, the patients—at the Booneville Sanatorium between 1923 until the year 1970, when tuberculosis had been so largely eradicated, partly, as we’ll see, because of what Doc Swain did, that the sanatorium had to shut down and become a ghost town. Anyway, there are a few references to a Tennessee Breedlove, or a Mrs. Breedlove, or “our sweetheart Tenny” in these issues, if you’d care to look at them.
But before we join Tenny at the sanatorium, let me just thank you from the bottom of my heart for these lovely orange flowers, which, I take it, are your parting gift to me just as the roots of this plant were Doc’s parting gift to Tenny.
The plant goes by more names than tuberculosis does: in addition to butterfly weed, it has been called white root, silkweed, pleurisy root, orange milkweed, orange root, canada root, witchweed, swallowwort, wind root, chigger weed, archangel, agerajum, and, one of my favorites, Indian paintbrush, because, as you can see, it looks as if each flower, compounded of dozens of these little umbels, each one of which resembles, if you look closely, a ballerina in bright orange tutu, could be the head of a brush that an Indian might have smeared with orange pigment in order to paint a picture.
I won’t ask you where you picked these, because I think I know: the roadside, or waste places, spots where even other weeds can’t grow, because the butterfly weed can stand the most severe drought and the worst possible soil. It can grow anywhere. And even though the monarch butterflies, after getting drunk on the nectar of the flowers, lay their eggs on the leaves, and the caterpillars strip the foliage bare, it doesn’t kill the plant. The plant keeps on growing, and seems to grow forever.
Will we find a metaphor here for Tenny? I doubt it. Much as I’d like to draw parallels between the bacilli consuming Tenny and the caterpillars consuming the butterfly weed, there really isn’t any connection. The caterpillar eats in order to metamorphose into a gorgeous butterfly. What possible beauty is there in what the bacilli do, other than propagate their awful species?
And since we are not concerned with the butterflies and the caterpillars so much as the big white roots of the plant, which are used to make that miraculous tea, we might conclude that the only connection, if there is one, is in the botanical name of our plant, Asclepias tuberosa, and its double allusion, to both the great Greek physician and to tuberculosis. But I’ll have to leave you to explore that. I am running out of time.
As far as butterfly weed is concerned, one of the first things that will happen to Tenny, when she will be checked into the sanatorium, will be that a gruff nurse, Mrs. Hull, searching Tenny’s belongings, will discover the year’s supply of powdered butterfly weed root that Colvin will have given her, and will confiscate it, on the grounds that it violates a regula
tion: patients are permitted to have only those medicines that the sanatorium doctors prescribe for them.
“But it makes me feel so much better!” Tenny will protest. “And it aint really a medicine, just a harmless stuff for making tea.”
“There’s another rule you better learn fast,” Nurse Hull will snap. “Don’t never talk back to me.”
Tenny will quickly discover that Booneville will not be Saranac Lake, nor will it be Davos-Platz, which she will not have known about, because this will be the same year that Thomas Mann will first publish The Magic Mountain. Tenny’s magic mountain will be twelve miles away but will seem to loom closer, Mt. Magazine, at 2,800 feet the highest point between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The sanatorium itself will be at a high elevation, over a thousand feet. It will have its own farms and dairies and gardens for the raising and growing of all of the food consumed in the sanatorium.
“They set a real scrumptious table here,” Tenny will write to Colvin, “and I am trying to get my weight back up, although many a morning I just can’t keep my breakfast down.”
She will be installed in Hemingway Hall. This certainly will carry no allusion to the novelist, who will not have published his first novel yet, in fact will still be proofreading his first collection of stories, In Our Time. Judge Hemingway of Little Rock (no known relation) will have been one of the founders of the institution, which will have been one of the very first state sanatoriums in the South, and will eventually become the largest in the nation.
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