Butterfly Weed

by Donald Harington

  The rest of Colvin’s visit will be a blur in her mind. Much of the rest of her short life will be a blur in her mind. She will recall asking Colvin if the abortion will hurt and he will assure her that it will not hurt nearly as much as the artificial pneumothorax, but it will hurt none the less, and produce blood. He will refuse her request to have a glimpse of the fetus. Will Colvin stay two more nights at Herod’s? Or only one? She will not be able to tell. She will know that they will never be able to sleep together, and he will take her back to Hemingway each night, and then eventually he will be gone. She will not even be able to recall the details of their parting. There will not have been anything dramatic or sentimental about it that will furnish her memory something to dwell upon. Her memory, like her vision, will withdraw into blur.

  When Dr. Baker will find out that she has had an abortion (which his very next examination will uncover), he will pretend at first to be sternly disapproving, because of sanatorium policy, but then he will say, “You know, if it weren’t for the damned policy, I would have done it for you myself. Your Colvin Swain is a very wise man, and an incredible physician, with a vast knowledge of tuberculosis. Did he tell you that Dr. Stewart offered him Dr. Schroeder’s job? Schroeder is leaving, and we need a men’s physician, and Dr. Stewart made your Colvin a very good offer, with the added inducement that he’d be able to keep a close watch on you, who are apparently his all-time favorite patient. But apparently that wasn’t enough to persuade him to give up his practice in Stay More. Tell me about this Stay More. What’s it like?”

  So Tenny, growing increasingly nostalgic herself, will attempt to give Dr. Baker a picture of Stay More, what little she knows of it. She will be haunted by the “what-if” of the possibility that Colvin could have become a permanent fixture around the sanatorium, and she will wonder why Colvin will have never mentioned the offer to her, but she will understand something she will not say to Dr. Baker: Colvin will have turned down the offer not because of his love for Stay More (although certainly that will be a strong consideration) but because he will have known that if he took the sanatorium job he might not hold it very long before his “all-time favorite patient” will no longer be there, because she will have gone to that Other Place where people no longer have to breathe or try to breathe or eat or try to eat or shit or try to shit.

  She will be moved, eventually, from Hemingway to Hospital. The latter will not require long stretches of sitting on the porch in Rest. In fact, the schedule in Hospital will not even be the same as elsewhere in the sanatorium. No one in Hospital will be allowed out of bed.

  One day Dr. Baker will announce to her, “We would like to try a thoracoplasty on you.” The very name, which rhymes with nasty, will terrify her, and none of Dr. Baker’s efforts to explain the need for the operation or what it involves will do anything to lessen her horror. She will realize why so often the rest of her short life will be becoming a blur: because a clear view of it will be too much to take, and she will not be able to accept the idea of a thoracoplasty, which will involve the removal of all of the ribs on one side of her chest, leaving her deformed and with long hideous scars. All she will be able to see in the blur is her body as a misshapen blob.

  “If I’ve got just a short time on this earth anyhow,” she will say, “I’d much rather that Colvin laid my pore body to rest with it still looking mostly like it ought to,”

  “But possibly the thoracoplasty will buy you some time to enjoy life a little longer,” Dr. Baker will argue.

  “‘Enjoy’ aint the word,” she will say.

  “Wouldn’t you rather get out of Hospital and go back to Hemingway?” he will attempt to tempt her.

  She will realize that she misses the long Rests on the veranda, especially now that spring is here and everything is blooming and the air is so fine. But to pay eleven of her ribs for it? “Could I write to Colvin and ask him what he thinks of the thoracoplasty?” she will request

  Dr. Baker will look annoyed. “The operation ought to be done at once. I’ve scheduled it for tomorrow morning. By the time your letter got to Stay More and you received a reply, it would be too late.”

  She will attempt to write Colvin anyway, that last evening before the operation, but will discover that she cannot properly apply a pencil, let alone a fountain pen, to a sheet a paper. The effort will resemble a first-grader’s letters, and, dismayed at her handiwork, she will allow all the letters to become a blur. She will ask the nurse to write a letter for her, but dictating a letter, something she will have never done before, will deprive it of its privacy and she will not be able to tell Colvin that she thinks Dr. Baker is some kind of mean rascal. “I guess by the time you get this, I won’t be your Tenny anymore,” she will say.

  She will have hoped that the operation will be one of those where they put you to sleep and when you wake up it’s all over and you don’t feel a lot of pain. But she will discover that the operation will be performed under local anesthesia. She will be made to lie on her good side, with sandbags holding her flexed body in place, and most of what happens will happen behind her, on her back. If it will not have been for the newly acquired power of her mind to make a dull blur out of everything, she will have been able, if she desired, to count the removal of the ribs, one by one, with a big pair of shears that makes one cut on one end and another cut on the other end, and then she will have been able to hear the sound of each cast-off rib clattering into a bucket But she will blur all this out and will think instead of Colvin’s Hygiene class, that first day when they studied bones and she had made her comparison between the skeleton and the timbers holding up a building. What now will hold her up? Will she be able to stand? To walk?

  Dr. Baker will assure her that with the help of a chest support she will be able to stand and to walk but that she ought to spend as much time as possible at Rest, on the Hemingway veranda. He will tell her that all the bandages will have to remain in place for a week, and that she will have to resist the temptation to look beneath the bandages to see if her body is still there.

  After several days, she will ask him, “Was that operation supposed to make me feel any better?”

  Maybe it will be a question that he will have never given any thought, because he will not be able to answer it. “Thoracoplasty has often been thought of as a lifesaving last resort,” he will tell her. “We didn’t do it to make you feel better.”

  By cruel coincidence, the day that the bandages will be removed will also be the day that Colvin will return.

  “I wouldn’t advise you to look in a mirror,” Dr. Baker will caution her. But of course that will not stop her, although her mind will shift automatically into blur as she approaches the mirror, and she will not be able to notice the length or the shape or the configuration of the scar, nor even how it has made her lopsided. Being in blur, her mind will not even be able to notice that her face will still be Tenny, her hair will still be Tenny, her breasts—albeit one of them will be droopy on one side—will still be Tenny.

  Being in blur, her mind will not even recognize Colvin when he will appear. “Tenny, sweetheart, it’s me, Colvin,” he will attempt to get her to see him. “I’ve come to take you home.”

  “Colvin?” she will say, trying to see him through the blur. “Why are you here? Have you come to take that job?”

  “No, hon, I’ve come to take you home. Let’s get all your stuff together and get out of here.”

  Dr. Baker will appear, and Tenny will recognize him. He will begin talking to Colvin, and Colvin will begin answering him, the two doctors talking simultaneously in rising animosity. Their contention and their noise and their gestures, which seem to be threatening each other with bodily harm, will upset Tenny and force her further into blur. She will be too blurred to notice that Dr. Stewart will have arrived also, and that the three doctors will have gone into another room, closing the door so that Tenny cannot hear their quarrel. For a long time they will leave Tenny alone in the cocoon of her blur.

 
“Tenny. Tenny.” The caller of her name will be Colvin, and she will attempt to fight her way up out of the blur so that she can see him. “Tenny, sweetheart, listen to me careful, and see if you caint answer. Do you want to go home?”

  “Not to Brushy Mountain,” she will say.

  “No, no, no. I reckon I had in mind Stay More. I ort never have let you leave it in the first place.”

  “Okay,” she will say, and will manage a smile.

  “Well, I aim to take ye there. The confounded problem is, this goddamn institution has got a policy which says a patient cain’t be discharged just on the signature of a physician. A family member has to sign the discharge papers.”

  Tenny’s mind will be coming out of its blur enough for her to understand what this means, and she will wonder how they could possibly get the discharge papers up to Brushy Mountain for Momma or Daddy to sign them.

  “There aint but one thing to do,” Colvin will say, “and that’s for me to become a family member. Tenny, will you marry me?”

  Tenny will be simply thrilled, and will come entirely out of her blur. “Colvin Swain, how could you want to marry me, looking the way I do?” And she will turn to show him the hideous scar running down her back.

  He will put his fingers beneath her drooping chin and lift it up. “You are just as beautiful as you ever was, and always will be,” he will declare.

  “But aint me and you both already married to somebody else?” she will want to know.

  “Not as far as we’re concerned,” he will say. “As far as we’re concerned we’ve done already been married to each other for quite a spell. But we’ve got to make it official. So I’ve got to run out and see if I caint find us a preacher. You just go up to your room and put on your best dress, and pack your suitcase, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

  But Colvin will take a long time to return, and Tenny will begin to worry. She will have another worry too: just as her mind has a way of drifting into its blur, maybe she’s also beginning to imagine things. Maybe Colvin will never have been here at all.

  Nurse Hull will insist that Tenny take her afternoon Rest, even if she will be wearing her wedding dress. Tenny, still largely in control of the future tense, will determine that it will be the very last Rest she will ever have to endure.

  Rest will not have ended when Colvin will return, with a man, dressed in gray and with one of those funny collars. Tenny will whisper to Colvin, “He aint a Catholic, is he?”

  “No,” Colvin will say. “He’s an Episcopalian. I presented our situation, in honesty and truth, to several preachers, but they all turned me down, except this feller.”

  Where would they like to be married? Right there on the Hemingway veranda, in full view of all the other patients? No, they will go downstairs to a private room, the same room that Dr. Baker and Dr. Stewart will have used for their fight with Colvin. Tenny’s friend Penny will serve as a witness and sort of the maid of honor. Colvin will reject the idea of either Dr. Baker or Dr. Stewart as the other witness and best man. He will recruit a simple man, a groundskeeper nicknamed by the patients “Grasshopper.”

  Tenny will be greatly moved by the beauty of the ceremony, so rich in contrast to the simple words that the courthouse justice had used to marry her and Russ.

  She will be especially delighted that the ceremony, like this narrative, will appear to be in the future tense:

  Tennessee, will you have this man to be your husband; to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?

  She will be about to answer in the future tense, “I will,” but her poor body will collapse, and only the quickness of Colvin and the preacher will prevent her from falling to the floor. A chair will be drawn up into the gathering, and she will remain seated for the remainder of the ceremony. As soon as her body is propped into the chair, she will say, determinedly, “I will.”

  Colvin, will you have this woman to be your wife; to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?

  Colvin will say, “I will.”

  The preacher will read from his Bible. “And they twain shall be one flesh; so then they are no more twain but one flesh.”

  Then Colvin will take her hand and say, “In the Name of God, I, Colvin, take you, Tenny, to be my wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.”

  She will reach for his hand and will repeat the words after him, “In the Name of God, I, Tenny, take you, Colvin, to be my husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until death do us part.” Then she will add, on her own, “Except that we won’t be parted by death.”

  “That’s for sure,” Colvin will agree.

  The minister will cast a disapproving eye upon this improvisation, then he will announce, “Now that Colvin and Tennessee have given themselves to each other by solemn vows, with the joining of hands, I pronounce that they are husband and wife, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.”

  Tenny’s husband will bend down and give her a long kiss. And over the next few days, he will kiss her so frequently and so passionately that she will be moved to ask, “Are you trying to give yourself my disease?”

  “Yeah,” he will admit “I reckon I am.”

  Tenny’s last memory of the sanatorium will be not so much a memory as an awareness of the need for her last blur: Dr. Baker and Dr. Stewart, and another doctor too, whom she will not have recognized, still arguing with Colvin, continuing their controversy all the way out to the buggy, as Colvin will place her in it, and will climb into it himself and will say some final angry words at the doctors, and will cluck at Nessus and drive off.

  She will never know just what the doctors were fighting about. Once the sanatorium is behind her, the blur will dissolve, and she will be able to see everything, to hear everything, to smell everything, all the way home to Stay More. Or almost.

  Right away she will need to put on the smoked glasses she will have bought at the canteen with the money Colvin will have sent her.

  When they reach the open highway, Colvin will say, “Now Tenny, I want you to tell me if the buggy’s bouncing hurts you at all. I want you to let me know whenever we’re going too fast, and I’ll take Nessus down from a trot to a walk.”

  And when she will never complain about any discomfort of the buggy, he will say, “I want you to tell me any time you feel any pain, anywhere, and I’ll give you something for it.”

  But she never will. Her only requests, infrequently, will be when she will need to “go,” not just to make water but to defecate, an awkward and embarrassing situation, and the only truly unpleasant aspect of the journey.

  They will need to spend three nights to reach home. The first night, their honeymoon night, will be in Paris, and Colvin will not be able to avoid making a few jokes about the great romantic city of Europe and what an ideal place for a honeymoon it would be. He will have very little money; they will stay in a very cheap hotel. She will not expect, nor ask, that he do on the honeymoon night what husbands are supposed to do. She will remind him that in a way they’d already had their honeymoon night, that time in the Commercial Hotel in Jasper when she’d got married to Russ. She will be happy enough to go to sleep in his arms, although she will wake more than once to find him hooked up to her chest with his stethoscope. “Put that thing away and go to sleep,” she will say, and will realize how bossy, how wifely, it sounds, and she will think, Tenny Swain.

  Their second night, in a hotel in Clarksville, she will have thought for a long tim
e about having control of the future tense and what it implies, and how it’s something both powerful and dangerous, like dynamite: it can help build or it can help destroy. It will be easy, with the future tense, to get little things you want; for instance, she will ask Colvin, since he will be trying to go to sleep with his ear up against her chest anyway, if he would mind sucking on her breasts, and he will gladly oblige. Since she will never have been able to have a baby, she will want to know what it feels like, and Colvin will not mind, although he will admit he will never have done it before. She will discover that it will make her very horny, and she will wish that they were able to make love, because obviously it will have made Colvin somewhat horny too. The exquisiteness of the sensation will be something that she will be able to take with her, wherever it is that she is soon going, that Other Place perhaps. In the past tense, “He sucked her breasts,” and regardless of how well he did it, it was done, and all she had left was the memory of it. In the present tense, “He sucks her breasts,” and it is driving her wild, for the whole duration of the present moment, but the moment does not last. In the future tense, “He will suck her breasts,” and it will be a feeling that she will be able to have any time she will want it. For eternity.

  Their third day on the road, she will begin to think a lot about dear old Grampaw McArtor and that Other Place that he talked about going to when he died, that place where every bird and bug went when their time was over, and the birds and bugs as well as the people didn’t have to breathe anymore, nor eat, nor take a shit. She will wonder what sort of place it really is, because Grampaw didn’t give her a very good description of it, and just suggested that perhaps folks could go fishing or fiddle and dance and sing even if they didn’t breathe nor eat nor take shits. Tenny will wonder if the place will look anything like this, for they will have reached the Ozarks now—“Not much further to the Newton County line,” Colvin will say—and she will want that Other Place to look as much as possible like this place. She will recall those old jests about how Ozarkers gone to Heaven break down and cry every springtime out of homesickness.