Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  Hemingway Hall will have a very long veranda running the whole length of it, upstairs and down, and Tenny will be taken to the upstairs veranda her first afternoon. As far as her eye can see, women and girls are wrapped in identical blankets, reclining on identical white wooden lounge chairs, all of them wearing identical expressions of wakefulness but obliviousness. There will be almost a military aspect to it, the uniformity of it, the endlessness of it. Tenny will not know just what she will have expected, but she will not have expected to conform to the identical poses and blankets and sickly demeanor of all these dozens of females lined in ranks off into the distance. Mrs. Hull will place Tenny in an empty lounge chair and wrap her in blankets, saying, “You will stay here until the bell rings at three o’clock. You are a lunger, is what you are, like all these other ladies. Some of them are chasers, but you may not become a chaser until you’ve proved that you can abide by all the rules and handle yourself properly. There will be two hours of absolute rest each morning, and two hours of absolute rest each afternoon. You must rest four hours each day, in addition to ten hours sleep at night. The reason you need so much rest is because—” Tenny will want to interrupt and tell Mrs. Hull that she has already had quite a lot of experience at resting, on Doc Swain’s orders, and she knows how to do it, and doesn’t need any explanations of the need for it. But Mrs. Hull will consider that talking back, and will reprimand her for it. So Tenny will wait patiently, stretched out on her wooden lounge, until Mrs. Hull will finish her long lecture on the need for rest, and leave her alone.

  Tenny will ask the woman reclining next to her, “Aint there nothing to read around here? No magazines or nothing?”

  The woman will look at Tenny in shock, and then will look at the woman on the other side of her, as if to confirm that the other woman will have heard Tenny. Then she will say, in just a whisper, “Hush! We aint allowed to talk during Rest, ever, and we shore aint allowed to read nothing during Rest.”

  Tenny will lie there, taking in the view of Mt. Magazine, but her eyes will be hurting from the bright sky, until finally the bell will ring, and all of the women will get up identically, rising in the same motions, unwrapping their blankets in the same motions, and folding the blankets neatly in the same motions to leave on their identical wooden lounge chairs.

  The woman next to Tenny will inform her, “Rest is over. It’s Our Own Hours now.” Our Own Hours is a kind of free spell, nothing required, and the residents of Hemingway Hall will want to meet the new girl, give her the once-over, and give Tenny all of the “inside dope” on the way of life here. Introducing themselves, they will reveal to Tenny something which will confirm her impression of the sameness, the uniformity of the place: every last one of them will have a given name or a nickname starting with P: there will be Pinkie, and Peeny, and Paula, and Petra, and Polly, and Portia, and so on: there are even some with very unusual names like Philadelphia and Phronsye and Persephone.

  Giving her the lowdown on what’s what, they will want to warn her that while visiting between the sexes is permitted in certain supervised areas during Our Own Hours (and a number of them will have already gone off to visit men and boys), the one rule that is the most hidebound rule at the sanatorium is that no “pairing off” is permitted between men and women. You may think of one of the fellows as your boyfriend, but you cannot go off alone with him, anywhere, anytime. Why, just last week two of the patients were caught trying to do some heavy wooing out in the woods behind Echols Hall, and both of them were “fired,” that is, sent home to their families.

  One thing that will be permitted, or at least will be over-looked or even not known to the authorities, will be communicating with your boyfriend at night by flashing him messages in Morse code with a flashlight, if his cottage or dormitory is within sight of yours. There will be a canteen in the main building, carrying all kinds of wonderful things and goodies, where you will be able to buy a flashlight. Will Tenny know the Morse code? No? Well, Pippa or Prunella or Poppy will be glad to teach it to her. First, of course, she will have to find herself a boyfriend to “correspond” with, and the best time to do that will be during the Monday night and Thursday night picture shows, when the men and women will be allowed to sit together.

  Tenny will find some things to like about the place, such as those picture shows (even if she will never sit with a male, she will never have seen a picture show before, and will be spellbound, and will become almost addicted to the magical screen), some things that will leave her indifferent or just annoyed, such as the required religious worship services four times a week, and some things that she will not like at first but will come to appreciate, such as the daily shower. She will never have had a shower bath before, and, if you can imagine, her first experience with this new ablution will greatly discomfit her.

  She will enjoy seeing her name in the newspaper. Hand me the top sheet from that stack. Just a few days after her arrival, she will get this issue of Sanatorium Outlook, and just as the picture show and the shower will be totally novel experiences for her, so will be the experience of seeing her name in print, set in type, somehow permanized. Here it is: “Let us welcome the new arrivals this week: Mrs. Petunia Butterfield, Gardiner Evans, Miss Patricia Brewer, Harry Dunlap, Mrs. Tennessee Breedlove,” et al., et alia, two dozen names in all, but there is our Tenny big as life among them.

  Here directly below the list of new arrivals is another column of names, beneath the headline ARRESTED THIS WEEK. Tenny will study the names, equally divided between males and females, not finding anyone she knows, and wondering what crimes they will have committed. She will have noticed, particularly among the men patients of the population, a number of shady-looking characters, almost thugs, whose very appearance will frighten her. But some of the women too, sickly and morbid and mean-looking, will have looked as if they were capable of felonies or at least misdemeanors. Tenny will suppose that it will be possible to get yourself arrested just by violating any of the two dozen rules which she will have been required to memorize, and she will wonder if the sanatorium has its own jail where those arrested are locked up. Reading this house-organ newspaper, she will also learn that there are thirty thousand cases of tuberculosis in the state of Arkansas. She will wonder, since the population of the sanatorium is just a fraction of that, if all the others are just dying at home. She will learn that one of those thousands does indeed die every two and half hours, around the clock. And she will learn that the motto of Sanatorium Outlook, indeed the motto of the sanatorium itself, is “Better, Thank You.”

  Tenny will wait a long time for someone to ask her, “How are you today?” so that she will be able to say, “Better, thank you.” But the chance will never come—not because nobody will ever ask her that, but because if they did she will only be able to reply, “Not any better, I’m sorry to say.”

  She will not be able to avoid the feeling that day by day she will be growing worse. The simple mirror will tell her that. She will visit the sanatorium’s doctor for women, Dr. Baker, a handsome and friendly young man, more often than she will be required to. He will have given her X rays and fluoroscopes and a bunch of other tests. He will ask her who performed the artificial pneumothorax and she will tell him about Colvin. “Good job” will be his only comment. She will ask him if she cannot please, please have returned to her the harmless butterfly weed that Nurse Hull took away from her, and he will ask her where she got it, and she will tell him that Doc Swain gave it to her. “I suppose we might as well let you have it back,” he will say, “but let me have it tested chemically first, just to make sure it can’t do you any harm.”

  On her most recent visit to Dr. Baker, she will remind him that she will still not have got the butterfly weed back. Then, after he will have spent long minutes listening to her chest with his stethoscope, she will ask, “Will I ever be able to say ‘Better, thank you,’ when somebody asks how I am?”

  His face will be full of sympathy. “I wish I could encourage you,” he will
say. “I wish so much that I could give you some hope. I wish so much that I could make you into a chaser.” She will wait to hear him add, “But I cannot.” He will not. His face will seem to say it.

  She will write to Colvin, plaintively, “If I could only live long enough, I might learn how to live.” But she will not be learning anything about how to live in that sanatorium. Paradoxically, she will be a prisoner of the clock and the bell which rings to signal the end of one period and the beginning of the next, but at the same time she will have no sense of time at all, so that after two whole months she will think that she will have been there only a month, and she will have to depend upon her one close friend, Penny (who will rhyme with her and even agree with her in many ways, including the nature and extent of her condition), to remind her that it is Monday or Thursday, the day of a picture show.

  “I hate to ask you for anything, dear Colvin,” she will write to him. “But the sunlight on the veranda hurts my eyes so, and some of the other women have smoked glasses which they wear to shade their eyes. I could buy some in the canteen, for only 78 cents, but I don’t have a penny to my name.”

  In return Colvin will send her ten dollars, and a birthday card for her seventeenth birthday, on which he will write: “I wish this was more. But I am trying to save up my money so I can come and visit you, which would cost me hotels and food and all. Do you want me to come and see you?”

  Tenny will be very happy that Colvin wants to come and visit her. Most of the other patients will have visitors from time to time, but she will not have. She will be worried that the very sight of Colvin will make her want to violate all sorts of rules with him. She will have heard the rumor that there is a certain place, in the basement of the main building, where patients who are married may take their visiting spouses for brief sessions of supposedly conjugal recreation, but Tenny, not married, or at least not to the man who will be visiting her, will not be able to apply for the use of that facility.

  On a lovely day in March, with signs of spring in full flourish, Colvin will arrive during morning Rest and will wait patiently for morning Our Own Hour, when Tenny will come downstairs and into his arms. After they will have kissed, Tenny will tell him that one of the rules forbids all kissing. “I’ll probably be arrested,” she will declare. “Every week, a passel of folks gits arrested, for all kinds of things.”

  “I wish you could be,” he will say, chuckling, and when she will look peeved he will take the trouble to explain to her something that nobody else has troubled to explain. “Arrested” in sanatorium parlance has nothing to do with the detainment of violators but refers to the checking of the disease. If your tuberculosis is arrested, you are well enough to go home, hence the Sanatorium Outlook’s regular list of those arrested is a list of those released from the sanatorium. “It would be so wonderful if your disease could be arrested,” he will say to her. “But I reckon you know the chances are pretty slim for that.”

  She will have to wait, nervously, while Colvin will go off to confer with the sanatorium doctors, with Dr. Stewart and Dr. Baker. Our Own Hour will be expired before he returns, but he will have received permission to remain with her the rest of the day. “I aint too darn certain your doctors and me saw eye to eye on a lot of things,” he will declare. “Leastways, they let me look at your X rays, and I managed to reclaim your butterfly weed. Also, I got permission to examine you myself. Come on.”

  Colvin will take Tenny out to his buggy, still drawn by good old Nessus, and will drive her the four miles into the town of Booneville, where he has a room at Herod’s Hotel, not fancy but comfortable. Along the way, Tenny will want to know all of the news he knows from home. He will tell her that he will not be teaching at the Academy this term, although he will still be visiting once a week as the physician. Tenny’s husband, Russ, and his girlfriend, Oona Owens, will be inseparable, and it will be assumed that since Tenny will never return that Russ and Oona will become permanently connected. Venda and Nick Rainbird will be talking of getting hitched. Jossie Conklin and Tim James will be doing likewise, and Tim will have been hired by the Mission Board to replace Jossie as principal. The basketball teams will be dissolved, but Russ himself will be teaching archery, and quite a lot of the student body will be taking lessons in the sport. Tenny will not ask Colvin if by any chance Piney has returned home; she will assume that Colvin will have told her if Piney had.

  Finding herself alone with Colvin in his hotel room will be almost too much for Tenny. She will beg him to take her to bed. She will complain that it has been so long, months now, since she will have had him inside her—not even informing him of that last time, which he probably didn’t know about—and she will miss it so, will dream of it so, will want it so.

  “Dr. Baker told me you had morning sickness for two or three weeks,” Colvin will say to her.

  “Hell’s bells, Colvin, I’ve had morning sickness, afternoon sickness, evening and night sickness too, day in and day out, but all I’ve got right now is heartsickness and lust. Take off your doctor’s face if not your clothes and come to bed with me.”

  But he will keep his doctor’s face, frowning, and will say, “Throwing up in the mornings is not a symptom of tuberculosis. It’s usually a symptom of pregnancy.”

  She will think about that, and will declare, “It’s true I aint flown the red flag the last few times I was supposed to.”

  “So,” he will say. “It sure didn’t take you very long to find yourself a boyfriend.” His voice will express anger, so unlike him, and he will add with bitterness, “You know, I’ve been persuading myself it’s just a superstition, or leastways just a faulty observation, that folks with TB are prone to get horny. But you seem to be a living example!”

  She will laugh. “I never heard that. But I can tell you there are some gals in Hemingway Hall who don’t never talk about nothing else! I can also tell you, though, that it’s practically impossible for any couples in that sanatorium to find any way to get together for that purpose.”

  “So how did you manage to do it?”

  “Colvin, even if I had a boyfriend, which I don’t, the only way he could’ve knocked me up, with all the rules they’ve got in that place, would’ve been to slip me his sputum cup—we’ve all got these sputum cups we have to turn in twice a day—he could’ve slipped me his cup filled with his jism instead. Yeah. That must’ve been what happened.” Saying this wryly, mockingly, she will have hoped to bring a grin to Colvin’s face, but he will still look as all-fired solemn as ever.

  “Then who was it?” Colvin will want to know. “When and where?”

  She will take his hand. “Dear Colvin, I have never had any man inside me but you.”

  He will withdraw his hand. “The last time we did it was that Eureka hotel in November! That wouldn’t give you morning sickness in February!”

  “No, the last time we did it, or maybe I ort to jist say the last time I did it to you, was on the kitchen floor of my house on Brushy Mountain, in the middle of a night before Christmas.”

  He will stare at her, and will abruptly sit on the bed. She will sit beside him. “That’s pretty hard to believe,” he will say.

  “I reckon there’s a lot about me and you that’s pretty hard to believe,” she will observe, smiling. “But I did it to you without ever waking you up, and got your jism inside me at just the best time of the month, so now me and you are going to become Mommy and Daddy.”

  He will shake his head. “Having a baby will kill you.”

  “If it does, then the baby—and maybe it will be a girl—will keep you company in your loneliness, and maybe sometimes remind you of me.”

  Colvin’s eyes will fill with tears. “Tenny, I won’t never need nothing to remind me of you. I will remember you every day of my life, all the days of my life. But listen to me, sweetheart. It takes nine months to make a baby, and even if you could hold out that long, and the baby could be born, the baby would be infected with tuberculosis too. Even if you could do it, woul
d you want to bring into this world a baby as sick as yourself?”

  Tenny will think about that. Instead of answering his question, she will ask, “You don’t think I can last nine months?”

  “I brought you here to look at you,” he will say. “Now we’d best get on with it.”

  He will have her undress. He will spend a long time with his stethoscope pressed to her chest, her back, her sides, even her shoulders, having her take deep breaths, shallow breaths, and coughs. He will look into every one of the openings of her body, including the one through which she will have hoped to pass the baby. “Hmmm” is all he will say, then or throughout his hour-long examination.

  At length, he will ask, “Did Dr. Baker ever tell you how long he thought you might last?”

  “No, only that I don’t have much of a chance.”

  “There’s something you’ve got to think about, Tenny, and I won’t beat around the bush. Trying to carry that baby in your womb is going to shorten your life, which, Lord knows, aint going to be very long anyhow. My advice is: terminate the pregnancy. Now,”

  “You mean take it out of me? Aint that illegal?”

  “Yeah, abortion is illegal, not only according to the laws of the state of Arkansas, which strictly forbid it, but also the policy of the sanatorium, which will not allow it.”

  Tenny will burst into tears, letting out a lot that she’s been holding back. “I wanted so much to have your baby,” she will say between her sobs. Colvin will keep his arm around her for a long time, until she will be able to stop crying. At length, when she will be in control again, she will ask, “So how can I git it taken outen me if nobody will allow it?”

  He will tell her about Doc Kie Raney, and the oath that Kie had made him swear as a young doctor just starting out. “I’ve been practicing medicine now for many a year, but I’ve never performed an abortion. That don’t necessarily mean that I don’t know how to do it, though. I think I can do it. Would you trust yourself to me, knowing that all I want to do, all I could possibly do, is make you live just a little bit longer?” At these words, Colvin will burst into tears again himself, which will prompt Tenny to begin crying all over again, and they will just hold each other and have a good long cry for a good long time.