As Covenant paused, he thought, I should write a poem.
These are the pale deaths
which men miscall their lives:
for all the scents of green things growing,
each breath is but an exhalation of the grave.
Bodies jerk like puppet corpses,
and hell walks laughing-
Laughing-now there's a real insight. Hellfire.
Did I do a whole life's laughing in that little time?
He felt that he was asking an important question. He had laughed when his novel had been accepted-laughed at the shadows of deep and silent thoughts that had shifted like sea currents in Roger's face laughed over the finished product of his book laughed at its presence on the best-seller lists. Thousands of things large and small had filled him with glee. When Joan had asked him what he found so funny, he was only able to reply that every breath charged him with ideas for his next book. His lungs bristled with imagination and energy. He chuckled whenever he had more joy than he could contain.
But Roger had been six months old when the novel had become famous, and six months later Covenant still had somehow not begun writing again. He had too many ideas. He could not seem to choose among them.
Joan had not approved of this unproductive luxuriance. She had packed up Roger, and had left her husband in their newly purchased house, with his office newly settled in a tiny, two-room but overlooking a stream in the woods that filled the back of Haven Farm-left him with strict orders to start writing while she took Roger to meet his relatives.
That had been the pivot, the moment in which the rock had begun rolling toward his feet of clay-begun with rumbled warnings the stroke which had cut him off as severely as a surgeon attacking gangrene. He had heard the warnings, and had ignored them. He had not known what they meant.
No, rather than looking for the cause of that low thunder, he had waved goodbye to Joan with regret and quiet respect. He had seen that she was right, that he would not start to work again unless he were alone for a time; and he had admired her ability to act even while his heart ached under the awkward burden of their separation. So when he had waved her plane away over his horizons, he returned to Haven Farm, locked himself in his office, turned on the power to his electric typewriter, and wrote the dedication of his next novel:
“For Joan, who has been my keeper of the possible.”
His fingers slipped uncertainly on the keys, and he needed three tries to produce a perfect copy. But he was not sea-wise enough to see the coming storm.
The slow ache in his wrists and ankles he also ignored; he only stamped his feet against the ice that seemed to be growing in them. And when he found the numb purple spot on his right hand near the base of his little finger, he put it out of his mind. Within twenty-four hours of Joan's departure, he was deep into the plotting of his book. Images cascaded through his imagination. His fingers fumbled, tangled themselves around the simplest words, but his imagination was sure. He had no thought to spare for the suppuration of the small wound which grew in the centre of that purple stain.
Joan brought Roger home after three weeks of family visits. She did not notice anything wrong until that evening, when Roger was asleep, and she sat in her husband's arms. The storm windows were up, and the house was closed against the chill winter wind which prowled the Farm. In the still air of their living room, she caught the faint, sweet, sick smell of Covenant's infection.
Months later, when he stared at the antiseptic walls of his room in the leprosarium, he cursed himself for not putting iodine on his hand. It was not the loss of two fingers that galled him. The surgery which amputated part of his hand was only a small symbol of the stroke which cut him out of his life, excised him from his own world as if he were some kind of malignant infestation. And when his right hand ached with the memory of its lost members, that pain was no more than it should be. No, he berated his carelessness because it had cheated him of one last embrace with Joan.
But with her in his arms on that last winter night, he had been ignorant of such possibilities. Talking softly about his new book, he held her close, satisfied for that moment with the press of her firm flesh against his, with the clean smell of her hair and the glow of her warmth. Her sudden reaction had startled him. Before he was sure what disturbed her, she was standing, pulling him up off the sofa after her. She held his right hand up between them, exposed his infection, and her voice crackled with anger and concern.
“Oh, Tom! Why don't you take care of yourself?”
After that, she did not hesitate. She asked one of the neighbours to sit with Roger, then drove her husband through the light February snow to the emergency room of the hospital. She did not leave him until he had been admitted to a room and scheduled for surgery.
The preliminary diagnosis was gangrene.
Joan spent most of the next day with him at the hospital, during the time when he was not being given tests. And the next morning, at six o'clock, Thomas Covenant was taken from his room for surgery on his right hand. He regained consciousness three hours later back in his hospital bed, with two fingers gone. The grogginess of the drugs clouded him for a time, and he did not miss Joan until noon.
But she did not come to see him at all that day. And when she arrived in his room the following morning, she was changed. Her skin was pale, as if her heart were hoarding blood, and the bones of her forehead seemed to press against the flesh. She had the look of a trapped animal. She ignored his outstretched hand. Her voice was low, constrained; she had to exert force to make even that much of herself reach toward him. Standing as far away as she could in the room, staring emptily out the window at the slushy streets, she told him the news.
The doctors had discovered that he had leprosy.
His mind blank with surprise, he said, “You're kidding.”
Then she spun and faced him, crying, “Don't play stupid with me now! The doctor said he would tell you, but I told him no, I would do it. I was thinking of you. But I can't-I can't stand it. You've got leprosy! Don't you know what that means? Your hands and feet are going to rot away, and your legs and arms will twist, and your face will turn ugly like a fungus. Your eyes will get ulcers and go bad after a while, and I can't stand it-it won't make any difference to you because you won't be able to feel anything, damn you! And-oh, Tom, Tom! It's catching.”
“Catching?” He could not seem to grasp what she meant.
“Yes!” she hissed. “Most people get it because” for a moment she choked on the fear which impelled her outburst “because they were exposed when they were kids. Children are more susceptible than adults. Roger-I can't risk-I've got to protect Roger from that!”
As she ran, escaped from the room, he answered, “Yes, of course.” Because he had nothing else to say. He still did not understand. His mind was empty. He did not begin to perceive until weeks later how much of him had been blown out by the wind of Joan's passion. Then he was simply appalled.
Forty-eight hours after his surgery, Covenant's surgeon pronounced him ready to travel, and sent him to the leprosarium in Louisiana. On their drive to the leprosarium, the doctor who met his plane talked flatly about various superficial aspects of leprosy.
But when Covenant was settled in his room at the leprosarium-a square cell with a white blank bed and antiseptic walls-the doctor took another tack. Abruptly, he said, “Mr. Covenant, you don't seem to understand what's at stake here. Come with me. I want to show you something.”
Covenant followed him out into the corridor. As they walked, the doctor said, 'You have what we call a primary case of Hansen's disease-a native case, one that doesn't seem to have a-a genealogy. Eighty percent of the cases we get in this country involve people-immigrants and so on-who were exposed to the disease as children in
