Mary Russell - Doc

But it was summer in Atlanta! Everyone suffered from the humidity and heat, so John Henry didn’t take much notice. The weight loss was subtle as well, for he was slender to start, but there came a day when he realized uneasily that no clothing he had owned for more than six months still fit.

That winter, a brutal chest cold left him with a deep and painful cough that interrupted examinations and made handwork increasingly difficult. Success was proving too much for him; he simply could not keep up with the hectic schedule of patients. No amount of sleep made him feel rested. He was exhausted from the moment he awoke.

In June, he made the clinical diagnosis himself. Even before his uncle confirmed it, John Henry knew . Advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his mother. Two foci in the inferior lobe of the right lung, another developing high in the left. He might survive one or two more summers in Atlanta’s soggy heat.

Six to eighteen months—that’s all the Fates had left him.

He was not quite twenty-two.

His horrified family gathered to discuss this fresh disaster. Once again, however, Dr. John Stiles Holliday was able to say of his nephew’s condition, “This need not be fatal.” Growing evidence suggested that the dry air, warmth, and sunshine of the North American West could effect remarkable results among consumptives. There were stories of remission and even cures—some undoubtedly exaggerated, but others that sounded legitimate. With rest, a nutritious diet, and moderate amounts of healthful wine, convalescence in that climate seemed possible.

After much anxious consideration and a flurry of letters, a plan developed. John Henry would accept a partnership offered by a Dallas dentist. While his cousin recovered his health in the West, Robert Holliday would finish his studies with a different preceptor. Just before John Henry left, the boys purchased an office building together so that Robert could establish their Atlanta practice in his cousin’s absence. The sign above the door would bear both their names, in anticipation of John Henry’s return.

Aunts and uncles and cousins came together for another farewell party, but this time their confidence in John Henry’s prospects seemed glittery and artificial, their cheer more resolute than giddy. He himself spent most of the evening sitting at the piano, playing Chopin.

At the depot the next morning, Martha Anne wept.

John Henry promised to write.

He boarded the train.

And his life cracked in half.

The journey soon took on a wearisome rhythm, for the country was a patchwork of independent short-haul railways in those days. Atlanta to Chattanooga. Find a room. Change trains. Chattanooga to Memphis. Find a room. Change trains. Memphis to Jackson. Find a room. Change trains. Jackson to New Orleans. Find a room. Change trains …

At first, he passed the time with game after game of solitaire, laid out on the travel case he kept in his lap. Watching every penny, he’d buy a stale sandwich and an apple from the newsboy, and make them last all day. When the train stopped to take on coal and water, he would get a cup of tea at the railway house. If he could charm a waitress into finding a little honey in the kitchen to sweeten the tea and ease his cough, he’d leave a generous tip.

He sent his first note home from Jackson. It was to Sophie Walton, in care of Aunt Permelia: I play cards by the hour and imagine myself with you, sugar, sitting at the cookhouse table back in Fayetteville .

The cinders and smoke were inescapable. By the time he crossed the Mississippi line, his throat was raw and his chest ached from coughing. He ran out of rails in Louisiana, but learned that there was a ferry to Galveston and looked forward to the fresh air of a crossing. When he got to the dock and found how expensive it was, he could only sit on the luggage with his head in his hands, trying not to cry.

Spunk up , he told himself, but every breath hurt and his chest felt strangely hollow. He was uncertain whether the sensation was physical and genuine or merely morbid imagination mixed with memories of the cadaver he had dissected in dental school. He could sometimes see that body as clearly as if it were still beneath his hands: its cavitated and fibrous lungs laid open, its belly concave, its limbs wasted to ropy muscle and bird-thin bone …

The stagecoach to Beaumont, Texas, was far cheaper than the ferry; it was also two hundred miles of jarring, bruising, dust-choked punishment. Waiting for the train from Beaumont to Houston, he mailed a second note, this one to the elderly brothers Wilson and Chainey Holliday, in care of his Aunt Martha. I wish that I had been sensible enough to accept your kind offer of help on this journey , he wrote. It would have made all the difference .

Too late now, he thought. In any case, the expense of three travelers would have been ruinous. And from what he’d seen so far of Texas, it was no place for colored folks.

There was one last stretch of track from Houston to Dallas. He found a telegraph office, intending to wire his arrival time to Dr. John Seegar, the dentist who had offered him a position. While John Henry was writing out the message, the telegrapher announced to the room that one of the big northern railways had just gone bust.

“After what them damn Yankees done to us,” someone remarked, “it serves the sonsabitches right.”

John Henry was inclined to agree with the sentiment, but railroad trouble didn’t concern him as long as the Houston train still went to Dallas. He submitted the form, paid for the wire, and gathered himself for another effort. He had sent his baggage on ahead, but simply walking unencumbered to the platform now seemed herculean.

Dr. and Mrs. Seegar were waiting for him at the Dallas depot. He had done his best to make himself presentable, but judging from the looks the couple exchanged, a good first impression was not in the cards. His throat was so raw, he could hardly be heard above the noise of the crowd when he introduced himself.

Appalled by what eleven days and sixteen hundred miles had done to a boy who’d been sick when he’d started the trip, Mrs. Seegar clapped little gloved hands to plump, pink cheeks. “Oh, honey, don’t even try to talk!” she cried. “You look ready to drop, child! See to his things, darlin’,” she ordered, and her husband did as he was told.

Her accent was balm. John Henry wanted to tell her so, but he could only gesture at his neck, grimace an apology, and croak, “You’re from—?”

“Georgia, honey. You can tell, can’t you! I grew up in Lovejoy, just down the road from Jonesboro. Your mamma had kin there, didn’t she?”

He tried to say something about his father’s sister Mary Anne, but Dr. Seegar told him brusquely to be quiet and insisted on examining John Henry’s throat, right there in the street.

“I thought so. Completely ulcerated—all that damn coughing! Our buggy’s right around the corner,” Dr. Seegar said, gesturing to a porter to bring the bags.

“Are you hungry, honey?” his wife asked John Henry. “You must be perishin’! Our girl Ella has a ham and greens and biscuits waitin’ for us at home. You are gonna eat your fill, and then go straight on up to bed. Don’t you dare argue with me! I won’t hear a word!”

The final leg of the journey was a short drive to the Seegars’ home, during which Mrs. Seegar did the talking for all three of them, naming friends in Lovejoy and kin in Macon and acquaintances in Decatur, hoping for a connection. She was thrilled when John Henry whispered that he had indeed met a lady she knew in Atlanta.

“Why, she is my second cousin!” Mrs. Seegar cried. “Do you know her husband, too? Oh, but he was a handsome man when they married!” Her voice dropped to confide, “He was disfigured in the war, poor soul. Dreadful, just dreadful …”