Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [227]
The little boy heard her nightly paroxysms from the other room and covered his ears with the pillows. “Undoubtedly consumption,” Dr. Winthrop said to Thomas one day, using a delicate word for tuberculosis as he put away his stethoscope and thermometer. “It has turned dry. The sicca form of phthisis, you know.” He talked to the little boy as if to a colleague and shook his hand with gravity. When would she get better? “Rest and diet and hydrotherapy,” said the doctor. “Some of the time— let's say, much of the time—it becomes quiescent. After all, it's not up to us, is it, Master Stone?” When Thomas asked, Please, sir, whom might it be up to, Winthrop raised his eyes to the ceiling. It was only later that the little boy understood the doctor did not mean Justifus, whose heavy tread shook the chandelier. He meant God.
One morning Thomas awoke dreaming of horse-drawn carriages, and with the thunder of hooves echoing in his ears. He discovered that in the night his mother had coughed up blood, lots of it, and Winthrop had been summoned. They bundled her off, not letting her kiss her son's brow. She traveled to Coimbatore, and from there the narrow-gauge toy train took her up the mountain to a hill station sitting just below Ooty. Dr. Ross had built a sanatorium in the Nilgiri Hills fashioned after Trudeau's famed Saranac Lake in New York. The white cottages around the hospital were replicas of those at Saranac, with the same airy porches and trundle beds.
Thomas wept himself to sleep on Sebestie's bony chest. He was angry with Hilda for getting sick, for having fostered such a closeness with him so as to make this separation unbearable. He was not like his schoolmates who loved their ayahs more than their parents and cared nothing about long separations. Overnight, Sebestie blossomed into a surrogate mother, but Thomas was wary of giving her his love. For then she, too, might disappear.
Before school Thomas visited St. Mary's and recited fifty Our-Father-Hail-Marys and did the same on his way back. He was on his knees so often that boggy sacs formed under his kneecaps. Around his neck he fastened with twine the heavy crucifix that had been on her wall, hiding it under his school uniform, where it gouged the skin over his breastbone and the twine cut into his neck. Not having a firstborn or a ram or ewe, he sacrificed his Don Bradman signature cricket bat, smashed it on the washing stone. He fasted till he was dizzy. He cut his forearm with a razor, spilling blood onto the shrine for the Virgin Mary that he built in his room. Sebestie took him to the Mambalam Temple and even to the tiny pavement temple behind their house. If it was up to God, He did not seem to listen.
Meanwhile his father never missed a stop on his circuit: Vellore, Madurai, Tuticorin, and parts in between. When Justifus Stone was home, he barely had time to remove his pith helmet or unpack his bags before he was off again. Justifus called his son the Archbishop of Canterbury, and if these were words of reassurance, they did nothing for Thomas. He spoke to his son as if he were addressing multitudes. At night Thomas could hear his uneven footsteps like those of a giant in a bedroom of Lilliputian dimensions who could not help knocking over furniture. It was a relief when Justifus went out on tour again.
A YEAR PASSED with Thomas living all but parentless in the big house, along with Sebestie, Durai (the cook), the maali, Sethuma (who washed clothes and swabbed the tile floors), and an untouchable who came once a week to clean the toilets—that was his family.
On Christmas Day, son and backslapping father came together for dinner; his father's clerk, Andrew Fothergill, was their sole guest. “Well, what a feast! Good to have you all. Fine repast, just