The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  Hug Tenny: she definitely has TB. When Colvin leaves that auditorium and goes downstairs, first to the principal’s office to see if the vial of tuberculin has been delivered (it has), and then to his own office, Tenny follows him, and they lock the door. At once they use the sofa, out of similar as well as different reasons, both out of love, but Tenny out of overwhelming desire and Colvin not so much from desire as out of solace for his miseries, including his continuing embarrassment over the mix-up. He wants to ask Tenny if she herself, being in both Basketball and Psych, had not realized his error, and, if so, why in heaven’s name hadn’t she told him? But she will not let him ask. Her hands are all over him. Her mouth is all over him. The ferocity of her ardor almost scares him, for he has never known a woman to want it so much. The building is emptied now of people, the school grounds are likewise evacuated, but still there must be someone around who can hear the sounds that Colvin and Tenny are making. Somewhere out there, surely, is Russ Breedlove, waiting to take Tenny home atop Marengo. He will just have to wait.

  He will just have to wait even longer, for Colvin and Tenny, when they have finished, do not rise from that sofa but lie there in each other’s arms for a long time, not simply because it feels good to hold each other like that, nor simply because they are all worn out from a busy day and a strenuous turn at sex, but because it is postponing as long as possible the test.

  But finally he must get up and administer it. He keeps his back to her while he dilutes the tuberculin and draws into the hypodermic syringe a tiny amount, 0.1 mg., and then he takes her arm and promises that it will not hurt very much, and it does not.

  “What’s it supposed to do?” she asks. “What do you think might be wrong with me?”

  Colvin Swain surprises himself by not telling her the truth. “Likely there aint nothing wrong with you,” he says, “but this here is just a little test to make sure. We’ll keep a close watch on your arm there where I stuck ye, and see if it has any kind of reaction. Now if you want a ride home, you’d better run and see if you caint find your husband.” He kisses her one more time, asks her to contrive to meet him here about this same time tomorrow, and she is gone.

  He has no microscope in this office. He takes home with him to Stay More the specimen of her sputum he had collected earlier, and uses his microscope to examine it, after an acid-fast stain. Long after he has finally and positively identified a bacillum, Mycobacterium tuberculosis humanis, he continues to stare into the microscope, watching the goddamned critter. “Know your enemy,” he says to himself, and he wants to study every curve of this tiny, evil rod until he can almost predict what it is trying to do. He knows what its brothers and sisters are already doing inside Tenny’s lungs. Thriving on oxygen, they are seeking out the parts of her lungs where they can get plenty of air. They are hunting for her alveoli, the tiny air sacs of her lungs, private chambers, where they can have their orgies and reproduce.

  But her strong young body has not welcomed them, and it has sent platoons of white blood cells to interrupt those orgies in those alveoli, and rout them out, swallow them up, and ideally kill them. Yet in swallowing them, the white blood cells might not be killing them but only giving them protection by enwrapping them in pockets, spinning caseous cocoons around them. These shells are the tubercles. Tenny’s body becomes hypersensitive not only to the bacilli but to those tubercles, and this is what will cause her skin to become inflamed where Colvin injected the tuberculin.

  Maybe, just maybe, her disease will not progress beyond this point; the bacilli will spread no farther, and any of them remaining in her alveoli, instead of having further orgies, will go to sleep and remain dormant, sealed off in those tubercles, and she will have a normal life.

  That is what he hopes for. After supper, though the night grows chilly and dark, he sits on the front porch, wearing his favorite cardigan sweater. He needs to think. His dog Galen comes up and slobbers on his shoe, and nuzzles his leg, and gets a pat or two on the head for his pains, then curls asleep at Colvin’s feet. Colvin is moved to think of the dog’s namesake, and he remembers that Galen, the last of the great Greek physicians, quite possibly suffered from tuberculosis himself. Galen established the first institution for the treatment of TB and sent his patients to recuperate on the most beautiful beach in the world, in a place where the special herbs eaten by the cows produced the magical therapeutic milk that Galen prescribed for his patients. There is no record of the rate of cure of all those milk-drinking patients of Galen.

  Colvin thinks of all the names that the disease has been called since Galen’s time, when it was known as phthisis, pronounced not as bad as it looks, thigh-sis, inherited into old-time parts of the Ozarks as “tis-sis” or “tis-sick” as in the legendary tissick weevil, who was thought to cause it. But most people in the Ozarks still knew it by its nineteenth-century name, consumption, because that is what it does, it consumes the body, starting with the lungs. Colvin had enough experience with it—from patients of his who thought they had catarrh, asthma, bronchitis, weak heart, stomach trouble, scrofula, or just the common cold, and succumbed to it, despite his ministrations (there are no really effective ministrations)—to think of it as the Great White Plague. During the years of his medical education, with Kie Raney or by himself, it was the Number One Killer in the country, and he had learned to fear it more than any other disease. Like any good physician, Colvin takes pride in his ability to manage and conquer his patients’ ailments, and he can stare arteriosclerosis in the face and say, “Arteriosclerosis, I am your better!” but he cannot face up to the Great White Plague with the same fearlessness and confidence. It is the one disease that is better than he.

  Colvin broods on his porch for so long that finally his wife, Piney, comes out of the house and sits beside him, and, because she knows everything, she knows that something is profoundly disturbing him. All she says is, “Do you think you could talk to me about it?”

  Because she knows everything, he asks her, “Is there any cure against the Great White Plague?”

  Although she knows everything, she does not know that one, nor does anyone else, at that time. “You would surely know if there was,” she admits. After a while she asks, “Who has it?”

  “A girl named Tenny,” he divulges.

  “Yes,” she says. “Tenny.” As if it’s someone she’s known all her life.

  Colvin wants to say more. He wants to confess his great inner conflict: he had first permitted himself to become so involved with Tenny because he knew for certain that, hypochondriacal as she was, she would never have anything actually wrong with her, she would never need him as her doctor, and therefore it was not a breach of doctor-patient ethics for him to fall madly in love with her. But now that he has discovered that Tenny does indeed have a great need of his attentions as her physician, will he have to violate ethics (not to mention Kie Raney’s Oath) in order to go on loving her?

  Because he cannot voice this torment, his wife at length speaks up, saying, “You’d best come in the house, Colvin. It’s getting cold. Real cold. And I suppose you won’t be waiting until next Friday to be going back to Parthenon, will you?”

  No, he cannot wait another week. Reactions to the tuberculin test begin to show up within twenty-four hours, and he goes back to his Academy office the next day, Saturday, to meet her. She has escaped from Jasper, from her husband and her domineering mother-in-law, on the excuse that there is an important meeting of the Erisophean Society, the Academy’s literary club.

  Although Colvin hardly needs to see the results of the tuberculin test to confirm his diagnosis, he has to punish himself, or make himself share the ordeal that lies ahead for Tenny, by seeing it anyway: the swelling and the redness on Tenny’s arm, the positive reaction declaring, “This pore gal is infected, infested with the Great White Plague. So now what, Doc?” He cannot answer.

  Tenny wants so eagerly to make love again, without even waiting for him to explain what the redness and swelling from her tuberculi
n test signify. Colvin knows, from his vast knowledge of the enemy, that the Great White Plague is rumored to increase the sexual urge, that perhaps if it doesn’t directly heighten the libido, it causes some kind of mysterious chemical effect in the body which stirs the glands, or at least it raises the temperature of the body in such a way that the heat is perceived as sexual heat. He is not certain that he can believe any of this. He wants to believe, and he has every right to believe, that Tenny desires him so ardently not because of her fever but because she loves him as much as he loves her. And when he obliges her and himself, and marvels yet again at the intensity and abandon and joy that she expresses in the act, he does not permit any thoughts of fever or chemistry to diminish his own pleasure.

  They are still lying in each other’s arms, in the Saturday sunlight coming through the window that is almost enough to take the October chill out of the air, when she at last requests, “Okay, my dearest dear, it’s time maybe you tell me how come my arm has turned red and swole up where you stuck me.”

  Colvin, as I think we have seen, is a good liar but not a great one. He knows he cannot indefinitely postpone letting her know the truth. She will have to learn it all somehow, sometime. But he can be as gentle as possible without lying. “Do you recollect,” he says, fully aware that they are lying on the very sofa where she had reclined to tell him about it, “that time when you was a child and your good old Grampaw McArtor lay sick abed and you spent so much time with him, and even sent your best friend ’See down inside of his lungs to see if she couldn’t cure him?”

  “Sure I remember all that,” Tenny says.

  “Well, there’s just a possibility that you might have caught what he had, although catching the disease didn’t mean that you’d show any sign of it for many a year. The little bacilli that cause it could have been asleep in your system all this time, just waiting for a reason to wake up and start doing their dirty work again.”

  “Colvin Swain!” she says, and sits up abruptly. “Are you tellin me that I might have consumption?”

  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 nov
els 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.”