The green kitchen chair has this one leg that always taps against the baseboard if you sit down too fast, a dry little click I have known by heart for thirty-four years. I was sitting right there at six-fifteen on a Tuesday morning, listening to Arthur shuffle down the back stairs in his woolen slippers, and before he even reached the linoleum floor, I caught that first thin, sulfurous wave drifting up through the stairwell. It smelled like an old cellar where somebody had dropped a crate of onions and forgotten about them until August.
At first I thought it was just the oilcloth lining in his hunting vest or maybe a bad turn in the grease trap under the sink. But by the second week of October, that smell had settled into the wallpaper of our front hall, into the fabric of the sofa cushions, and right into the gray wool sweaters I washed twice a week in vinegar water just to take the edge off. Arthur swore up and down it was nothing, just a bit of lingering swamp-damp from checking the drainage ditch down by the lower pasture, but a man does not sweat like a chemical plant unless something deep inside him is quietly failing. I spent ten days waking up at three in the morning, lying there in the dark with my eyes wide open while he slept beside me, listening to the heavy, uneven rattle of his breathing and convincing myself that he was carrying some kind of internal rot he was too stubborn to name.
By the time I finally put my foot down and dialed Dr. Bradley’s office, Arthur looked like he was walking to his own hanging. He sat in the passenger seat of the Buick with his hands clamped tight over his knees, staring straight through the windshield at the gravel county road as if it had personally insulted him, refusing to turn the radio on or even answer when I asked if he wanted his coffee in the travel mug. He had lost weight, too, or maybe he was just holding himself so stiffly that his flannel shirt hung off his shoulders like an old coat on a scarekeeper’s pole. I did not care about his stubborn pride anymore, not after watching him spend three evenings sitting on the edge of the back porch with his face buried in his hands, groaning softly every time he tried to stand up from the bench.
I pulled the Buick right up against the white gravel strip outside the clinic, killed the engine, and turned to look at him until he finally reached for the door handle.
The waiting room smelled like floor wax and old magazines, and Arthur sat as far back in the vinyl chair as he possibly could, trying to make himself small while the woman at the front desk typed away on her computer. When the nurse finally opened the inner door and called his name, he gave me this look, half-pleading, half-terrified, that made my stomach turn right over, because Arthur was a man who had pulled three teeth with a pair of pliers in the tool shed rather than pay sixty dollars to the dentist, and if he looked scared of a doctor, then the thing inside him must have been truly enormous. I stood right up with him and followed him down the narrow hallway, but when Dr. Bradley held the exam room door open for us, he took one look at my hand on the brass knob and cleared his throat in that dry, clinical way doctors use when they are about to tell you that you need to sit down.
He told Arthur to go on back behind the paper curtain and get his trousers off for the pelvic check, and then he looked right at me and said, “Why don’t you wait out here in the hall for just a minute, Martha? Let’s let him get settled.”
I let go of the door and watched it swing shut, leaving me standing on the scuffed blue linoleum of the corridor with my handbag clutched so hard my knuckles turned the color of lard. The hospital clock on the wall had a loud, dragging second hand that made a heavy thud every sixty seconds, and by the time it had gone around five full times, I was ready to claw my way through the wood paneling just to find out if my husband was dying of something terrible. Then the exam room latch clicked, and Dr. Bradley stepped out into the hallway, pulling the door closed behind him with one hand while he pressed the other flat against his mouth. His face was the color of a fresh-picked beet from his ears right down to his collar, and his shoulders were shaking so hard his stethoscope was bouncing against his white coat like a pendulum gone wild. He didn’t say anything for three whole seconds because he was trying so hard not to howl out loud, his chest heaving as he fought for air.
“Martha,” the doctor finally managed to choke out, his voice squeaking up an octave before he caught himself and pressed his knuckles hard against his lips. “You might want to go in and see for yourself.”
I just stood there with my mouth half-open, my brain refusing to fire on more than one cylinder at a time because this was not the sort of behavior you expect from a man who has just discovered a man with a rotting liver or a terminal blockage. I said, “Doctor, what’s going on? Why are you laughing?” But he just waved a hand toward the door, turned around, and leaned his forehead right against the bulletin board of the nurses’ station while his whole body shook with silent gasps. Before I could even reach for the knob, the door swung back open on its own, and Arthur stepped out into the hallway into the cold fluorescent light. He looked like he had just been caught robbing the church collection plate, his face burning bright crimson right up into his receding white hair, his shirt half-tucked into his trousers, and his hands dangling uselessly by his sides. He looked at me, looked down at the linoleum floor, and then he let out this long, shaky breath and said, “Honey… I’m not sure how to say this… But I…”
I didn’t wait for him to finish stumbling over his words because I pushed right past him into the exam room, my heart still hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. The first thing that hit me wasn’t medicine or rubbing alcohol, but that same thick, eye-watering wall of garlic and sulfur that had been haunting our kitchen for nearly a month, only ten times worse now that it was concentrated inside four small walls. On the examination table, right on top of the torn white paper, sat a tangled, glistening mess of clear plastic cling wrap, three strips of heavy-duty silver duct tape, and a clump of greenish-brown herbal sludge that looked like something you’d scrape out of the bottom of a tractor radiator. Dr. Bradley finally managed to walk back in behind me, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye with a paper towel, and he pointed a finger at the table and said, “Your husband, Mrs. Vance, is as healthy as a plow horse.
His prostate is smooth, his urinalysis came back clear as spring water, and the only thing wrong with him is a mild case of saddle chafing from that vintage three-speed bicycle he refuses to grease properly. But the man spent the last nineteen days wrapping his lower half in raw garlic paste, fermented sheep tallow, and sulfur powder like he was trying to cure a side of bacon.”
Arthur came shuffling back into the room behind us, looking smaller than I had ever seen him in thirty-four years of marriage, rubbing the back of his neck with a hand that wouldn’t quite stop trembling. He looked at the mess on the table and then down at his shoes, his voice barely louder than a whisper when he finally spoke up to explain himself. He told us how he’d been reading some wild-haired forum on his old tablet down in the basement late at night after I’d gone to sleep, convinced that a mild ache from riding ten miles into town to pick up seed corn meant the beginning of the end. He said he was too proud to tell me he was scared of going under a knife or sitting in a waiting room to hear bad news, so he found a recipe from some nineteenth-century wilderness manual that promised to draw out any hidden rot through the skin if you sealed it up airtight with plastic wrap every single morning before putting on your thermal underwear. He told us how he’d been sneaking down to the workbench at five in the morning to mix the crushed cloves and mutton grease in an old mason jar, hiding the whole operation behind the paint cans so I wouldn’t ask questions.
For a second, standing there in that cold little room with the smell of a French bistro crossed with a fertilizer plant hanging in the air, I didn’t know whether I wanted to scream at him until my throat gave out or fall down on the floor and start laughing right alongside the doctor. I looked at Arthur standing there in his sensible loafers and his wrinkled shirt, looking so thoroughly humiliated that he couldn’t even meet my eyes, and all that dark, cold terror I’d been carrying around in my chest for three weeks simply dissolved into nothing. I walked right up to him, grabbed him by the sleeve of his flannel shirt, and said, “You are a grown man, Arthur Vance, and you’ve got the sense of a fence post.” Dr. Bradley handed Arthur a tube of mild hydrocortisone cream for the contact dermatitis the raw garlic had burned into his skin, dumped the entire cling-wrap mess into the yellow biohazard bin with a loud clatter, and told us both to go home, throw away the mason jars, and use plain old soap and water from now on.
The ride home was the quietest twenty minutes we had spent together since the Eisenhower administration, neither of us saying a word while the Buick hummed along the gravel road. But as soon as I pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, Arthur let out this little snort of a laugh from the passenger seat, and then I started in, and before we even made it up the porch steps we were both leaning against the fender of the car, laughing so hard the tears were running down our cheeks and neither of us could catch our breath. We spent the whole afternoon down in the basement together, clearing out the workbench, unscrewing the lid of that disgusting mason jar, and dumping the yellow-brown paste right into the black trash bin outside while Arthur promised me on his mother’s grave that he would never touch an internet health forum as long as he lived.
By evening, the house had that clean, quiet feeling it hadn’t known in weeks, the bedroom window wide open to a crisp autumn breeze that smelled of damp leaves and chimney smoke. The lemon detergent I used on the sheets made the whole upstairs smell fresh and bright again, and down on the kitchen counter, the empty, bleached-out mason jar sat right in the center of the butcher block, holding a bunch of yellow garden daisies I’d clipped before the frost got them. Arthur came up behind me while I was wiping down the stove, wrapped his big, warm arms around my waist, and rested his chin right on my shoulder without saying a word. I didn’t say anything back to him either, just reached up and patted his hand where it rested against my apron, knowing well enough that he’d probably find something else to worry about by next spring, but knowing too that as long as we kept laughing about it together, we’d get through whatever foolishness came next.
