View From a Kite (8 page)

3. The Lübeck Infants:
   In 1926, in Lübeck, newborn infants were injected with BCG, meant to provide them with immunity to tuberculosis. Instead of the vaccine they were given a virulent strain of the bacilli. Of 249 babies 76 died of acute tuberculosis, 173 developed minor lesions and survived.

4. The Poes:
   Edgar Allen Poe's mother died, aged twenty-four, of tuberculosis. An actress, she played a number of benefits to raise money to pay her medical bills and support her children after her death. Edgar Allen was three when she died. Twenty years later his brother and best friend, Henry, was spitting blood and wasting away. Henry's drinking, a well-established addiction, gave him some relief. He died August 1, 1831, the same age his mother had been when the disease took her.
   Edgar Allen's wife, Virginia (the Annabel Lee of his poetry), suffered a serious hemorrhage while singing and playing harp for some friends in 1842. Poe, well acquainted with various mind-altering substances, responded to her imminent demise by taking his use of alcohol and opium from hobby to professional status. Virginia died in 1847, at the age of twenty-four, of tuberculosis.
   Poe, however, lived past the magic number of twenty-four. He died in 1849, insane and addicted to alcohol and opium. His brain was most certainly destroyed, and it seems probable his lungs were in a like condition.

CHAPTER 13

“We need some entertainment,” says Mary. “Between the weather and The Witch and the long buss on you I'm about to crack.”

“That would be entertaining.”

“Shut up and get out of bed. We're going to Rehab.”

“And do what? Make doilies out of old pantyhose? That's your idea of entertainment?”

“Get up.” She grabs me by one foot and hauls until I am half in, half out. I'm still trying to get my slippers on as she shoves me out the door.

“What's your hurry,” I grumble, but I want to go. I've been depressed ever since I got back and I am tired of the way my mind spins around and around, up and down stairs, in and out of black holes every time I close my eyes. Nobody is at the nurses' station, but there is a commotion coming from cranky old Mrs. Cyr's room. They are trying to give her a sponge bath and she is screeching that they are trying to kill her with newmumia.

“Should we leave a note?” I ask.

Mary gives me an exasperated look and steers me towards the stairwell. Rehab is in the basement, the other end of the hospital from the library. It has high windows that look out on the staff parking lot. If you stand on a chair and look out you can see a lot of red convertibles.

“Why,” I muse, “do so many of the nurses drive red convertibles?”

“One: they can afford them because they get danger pay for looking after this disease-ridden, infectious lot. Two: they're naturally reckless, otherwise they wouldn't be here in the first place.”

“Even The Witch?”

“The most reckless of all. Every day she stalks the corridors surrounded by people who want to kill her.”

“Good point.”

Rehab has a most peculiar smell. There is cigarette smoke, of course. The two guys who run the place, Rudy and Colum, are both chain-smokers. There is a strong smell of dust from a shelf piled with crêpe paper and construction paper and thin, coloured foam circles. Occasionally one of the women from Ward B makes off with some of the foam circles and uses them to create an elaborate ball gown for a plastic doll whose legs are then to be stuck in a roll of toilet paper and the whole thing used to decorate a bathroom. I'm not making this up, I've seen the finished product. You aren't supposed to use the toilet paper under the doll, ever. If the roll on the holder runs out you're supposed to search under the sink for a fresh one and if you can't find one, dig the used Kleenex out of your pocket, fluff them up and use them.

No one has figured out what to do with the crêpe paper, although in a fit of seasonal
joie de vivre
the student nurses have been known to hack out bells and trees from red and green construction paper and stick them on the windows in the wards.

There is a lovely smell of leather. Rudy and Colum make things out of leather, wallets and belts mostly. They crank them out and sell them for a small but regular income. They are supposed to teach any of the rest of us who want to learn leatherwork and they get a small stipend for that, too. We have to pay for the materials.

The creepiest smell is from a metal and glass box-like contraption at one end of the room. Everything Rudy and Colum and the rest of us make that's meant to leave the Sanatorium has to be put in this box, which is then flooded with some kind of gas for hours, overnight. The gas kills any TB germs sticking to the stuff we make. In the morning the nurses put the de-gassed belts and wallets and toilet-paper dolls into sealed plastic bags and then, and only then, can they be released to the outside world.

Rudy and Colum have been patients in the hospital for seventeen and twenty-two years, respectively. There aren't any drugs that will let them go negative and stay that way. Every few months, they test positive. Every few years, OFN told us, someone comes up with a new drug and the doctors try it on Rudy and Colum, but it never works for long. They both go home, for a while, when they've got a negative report, but they never get to go home for good. Home is the San. You'd think they'd go crazy or commit suicide or something, but they don't. They are shy and patient and kind, and happy to show anyone how to make a wallet. Rudy had a wife who divorced him and married somebody else after the first ten years. Colum got married sixteen years ago and has two kids, fourteen and ten. His family lives in Port Hawkesbury and he goes there once a month, if he's negative, for a week.

Mary and I go down to Rehab every day for five days and learn how to make a wallet. It's a lot more complicated than you'd think. All the little compartments have three or four bits of leather to be put together. There's gluing, with sticky, smelly glue that probably came from spoiled, boiled horses. There's sewing, with strips of thin leather and an awl, a lot of pushing and shoving, nothing like regular sewing. It's not for wimps, you could hurt yourself. The best part is stamping designs on the outside with little metal stamps. You put the stamp on the leather, hammer it, but not too much. You want to mark the leather, not cut right through it. Rudy and Colum have a million little stamps, all different designs. It's hard to choose, and then hard to stop yourself from overdoing it. I make two wallets, one for me and one for George. Rudy gasses George's for me and then I get OFN to mail it off for his birthday.

After that, we drop by once or twice a week to chat, to hammer designs into scraps of leather we make into bracelets, and to listen to the radio. Normally Rudy and Colum prefer fiddle music, but they let us switch to the top 40 when we come to visit. They have the only good music left in the hospital, because even The Witch doesn't mess with Rudy and Colum. They've seen her kind come and go.

CHAPTER 14

“‘…There is no disease requiring more persistent care, more absolute perfect control. Every detail of the patient's life should be under constant observation.'”
I suspect The Witch has been reading from
The Cape Breton
Book for the Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculosis
, even though it's sixty years out of date.

She has banned all local radio stations. She says they play too much Cape Breton fiddle music and that it gets the patients all gingered up and then they don't rest properly.

Colum says it's just that she's got it in for John Malcolm Harris. She caught him step-dancing on his bedside chair during afternoon rest period and when she told him to stop acting the fool and get back into bed at once he told her to go piss in her lard-arse underwear. She says if she hears anything other than Montovani or Mass for Shut-Ins she's going to confiscate every radio on Ward C.

Joe Paul's in trouble again, too. We are supposed to report him if we see him trying to escape, but we all keep our mouths shut when we see his shadow moving along the west wing, or notice his skinny form gimping down the drive after dark—so he makes it off the property fairly regularly. It isn't so much that he needs a drink—well, that's part of it, but his friends smuggle in God's own quantity of booze when he wants it and The Witch never finds more than half. No, it's just that he is wild to dance.

Every third or fourth Saturday night, he breaks out and hitches a ride to the nearest dance hall. Sometimes he gets roughed up when the local rednecks take offence at him dancing with their girls (he's really good, so he's really in demand), but that never stops him. He always gets stinking drunk, he always dances until his feet blister and the blisters break. The nurses say when they roll him into bed and undress him his socks are bloody.

He comes staggering and crashing around the laundry door at three or four a.m. If OFN is on back shift she'll drag him in, lock the door, and shush him upstairs to his room. Last weekend, The Witch was on, so she left him on the floor inside the door and lectured him for twenty minutes. Joe didn't really care by then, it was like falling down in the mud, one more thing to be endured before he could get to his bed. He'll be sick and footsore for the next week, but he won't give it up. To punish him, Dr. Robichaud has cancelled his next leave home. He says it is because Joe has had a “setback” and needs extra bedrest, but we all know better. Joe is so morose, the only thing that cheers him up is the thought of the next dance. You'd never think it to look at him—he's homely as a mud fence. Even when he's dressed up he looks like an old bed nobody ever makes, but somewhere deep inside, in his head, or his heart, he is a prince. A prince or a poet. Only a prince or a poet would dance his feet bloody.

Before 1882 the causes of tuberculosis were believed to include: hereditary disposition, unfavourable climate, sedentary indoor life, defective ventilation, deficiency of light, depressing emotions. Almost any kind of unconventional behaviour was suspected of causing the disease: too much food, too much booze, too much partying, newfangled fashions, excessive use of tobacco, improper position of the spine while sitting, a passion for dancing. The threat of consumption was used to try to keep people from having too much fun.

In the early 1800s, when waltzing was all the rage, it was called the “ally of consumption and death.” When the polka became fashionable it got slapped with the nickname Polka Morbus. All that swirling and swinging about was potentially lethal.

But you could kill yourself at a dance without actually setting foot on the floor. Slouch in your chair, wear a frivolous dress with an immodest neckline, scoff one petit four too many—and it's off to the graveyard with you.

“…If the muscles (of the splanchic area) are allowed to relax though improper position in standing or sitting, the result is stagnation of blood in the abdomen, and this in turn results in a vicious circle of evil effects…”

I say we get up on our chairs and dance like hell.

CHAPTER 15

We are stalled on the main drag in the middle of downtown Sydney in a bus, a Walter Callow bus with a big sign on it so everyone knows we are a bunch of cripples and misfits and invalids. I hunch down on my seat, scribbling, scribbling, hoping none of the people walking by on the sidewalks, gawking in the windows, will recognize me. Why should I care? I don't know.

Twice a year the San gets the loan of the bus and takes everyone deemed well enough on a recreational expedition. Last time, I've been told, they went off to see the Christmas lights and parked the bus on a side street near the bandshell so they could hear a Christmas concert. This time we are being taken to Louisbourg to look at the fortress (from the outside only; we aren't to go wandering around and exhausting ourselves) and the sea (but we aren't to go swimming, it's too cold and we'd exhaust ourselves) and—the big treat and the main objective—we are going to stop at McDonald's, ditch the soggy lunches packed for us at the San, and jam ourselves full of Big Macs and fries.

“Sit up, Gwennie,” says OFN, who is our chaperone and the chief reason we are going to be allowed to eat hot grease instead of cold glue. “It's bad for your lungs to sit all hunched over like that.”

I sit up, smile, then scrunch back down when she moves up the aisle. The bus gives a great shudder, the engine roars, and we move again. I peek up over the window ledge; we're swinging through the outskirts and heading for the blue Atlantic and Louisbourg. Nobody in this end of town knows me so I sit up and stretch. There is nothing much to see until you get to the coast where there are rocks and waves, except for the Mira River wandering out to the sea. You have to get to the water—out to the ocean or in to the Bras d'Or Lakes—to see anything pretty in this part of Cape Breton. Otherwise it's just scrub spruce, road kill, coal towns, and the industrial mess of Sydney. All the wild Scottish Highlands, and the Margaree Valley—that's all on the other half of the island. This is the part the Atlantic beats down, and the humans piss on.

We get to Louisbourg and the clouds and sun race shadows over miles of rock, lichen, and swamp along the coast. The fortress looks magical, something hauled up out of history, dug in against the weather, and a little arrogant—as I imagine all such fortresses do before guns or time reduce them to grass-covered rubble. Not too many get put back together again like this one. The driver takes the bus up really close, in by the main gate, and a guide comes aboard and gives us a little speech about the fortress. He is dressed in a tricorn hat, frock coat and short pants, and he looks nervous as hell. Mary coughs a couple of times just to see him flinch. They won't let us out of the bus at all, and all the tourists gawk at us and one or two take pictures of the bus. I slide down in my seat and wait for it all to be over.