The Art of Breathing Read online

  “Donnie, I need to talk to you about something important.”

  “What?” my little son inquired. His brows knitted together in their usual way when he was looking perplexed or meditative, or angry, but at the moment, he was looking at me real hard, as if he was steeling himself for something big.

  “Donnie, honey, I’m not feeling very good these days. I’m pretty sick.” There. It was said. I’d lain awake half the night trying to figure out the best way of telling him and had finally come to the conclusion that I trusted myself enough to know how, when the moment came.

  “The doctor didn’t make your cold go away? I heard you coughing.” His brows remained pinched, worried.

  “No, it’s not a cold, darlin’. It’s something else with a real long name that’s hard to say. The doctor wants me to see some other doctors who can help me more than he can. I have to go where they are, and stay for a little while. Remember when we went to Asheville to see that play, The Nutcracker, at Christmas?” He nodded. “Well, I have to go to a place that’s not too far from there.”

  “Will you see a play?”

  I laughed. His five-year-old world was very small, compartmentalized. “No, honey, I’m not going to the theater, just to a hospital that takes care of people who are sick, like I am.”

  “Oh.” He looked away as he digested this and I knew that suddenly the awfulness of my going away was sinking in. The word “hospital” had done it. “How long will you stay?”

  “I’m not sure, but I’m hoping it won’t be too long . . .”

  Also by Janie DeVos

  Beneath a Thousand Apple Trees

  The Art of Breathing

  Janie DeVos

  LYRICAL PRESS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  “Donnie, I need to talk to you about something important.”

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PREFACE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2 - Home to Howling Cut

  CHAPTER 3 - A Very Solid Whole

  CHAPTER 4 - A Glass Half Full

  CHAPTER 5 - Withered Things

  CHAPTER 6 - A Shivaree

  CHAPTER 7 - One Word

  CHAPTER 8 - Past Meets Present

  CHAPTER 9 - Altered Lives

  CHAPTER 10 - The Threshold

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 11 - Rules and Rebels

  CHAPTER 12 - Patients and Patience

  CHAPTER 13 - On the Front Lines

  CHAPTER 14 - Crossing Paths

  CHAPTER 15 - News from Home

  CHAPTER 16 - Spirits of the Darkness and Light

  CHAPTER 17 - An Inconvenient Truth

  CHAPTER 18 - The Great Divide

  CHAPTER 19 - A Hobbyhorse Rodeo

  CHAPTER 20 - A Visit from Santa

  CHAPTER 21 - A Birthday

  CHAPTER 22 - Lungs and Tyrone

  CHAPTER 23 - Of Earth and Air

  CHAPTER 24 - Yessiree, George!

  CHAPTER 25 - Promises Broken, Promises Kept

  CHAPTER 26 - Divided We Fall

  CHAPTER 27 - Parting Paths

  CHAPTER 28 - Lost and Found

  CHAPTER 29 - The Ties That Bind

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 30 - The Betrayal

  CHAPTER 31 - Declaring Victory

  CHAPTER 32 - The Feeling of Home

  CHAPTER 33 - The Power of Love

  CHAPTER 34 - Prodigal Sons

  CHAPTER 35 - Fight or Flight

  CHAPTER 36 - Ends . . .

  CHAPTER 37 - . . . Another Road Begins

  EPILOGUE

  Teaser chapter

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  LYRICAL PRESS BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Janie DeVos

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Lyrical Press and Lyrical Press logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  First Electronic Edition: February 2017

  ISBN: 978-1-6018-3683-0

  eISBN-10: 1-60183-683-X

  ISBN-13: 978-1-60183-684-7

  ISBN-10: 1-60183-684-8

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my

  grandmother, Kathryn Flaharty Sandell, who lost

  her battle with tuberculosis in a Chicago, Illinois

  sanatorium in 1938, but whose loving spirit was

  felt throughout the writing of this story. And to my

  wonderful father, Don “Donnie” Sandell, who lost

  his mother at age eleven but kept her love alive

  through his memories of her kindness and

  gentleness—and amazing fudge cake. May you two

  be together again, sharing a heavenly slice.

  And finally, to my dear friends Teaky Tollison and

  Nancy Lindeman, who accompanied me on many

  field trips as I researched this book: Thank you

  for sharing this important journey with me.

  Until the next one!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are many people who must be acknowledged for their time and effort in helping me to bring this story to life. First, I’d like to thank Stacy Merten, Director of the Historic Resources Commission for the City of Asheville, NC, who was able to work a little magic in providing a tour of the home of Dr. Karl Von Ruck, one of Asheville’s pioneer physicians dedicated to curing tuberculosis. I’m also grateful to Ms. Merten for taking me on a neighborhood walking tour to study some of Asheville’s outstanding architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thank you, Stacy, for your time and knowledge. We shall break bread again soon.

  I owe a wealth of gratitude to the good people in Chicago, IL, who gave me an in-depth tour of some of the buildings and grounds that were once part of the Chicago Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, but which have been reincarnated into a vast park system. I’m especially grateful to Kiala Moore, Peterson Park Supervisor, and Sean Shaffer, Education Naturalist, at the North Park Village Nature Center, whose generous gifts of time and knowledge of the CMTS painted a much clearer picture as to what my grandmother’s life and death must have been like in the sanatorium in 1938. You will never know how much that afternoon meant to me personally; and professionally, it was invaluable in the writing of this book. Thank you, both.

  I’m also indebted to Dr. Richard Rhea, Assistant Director at the Black Mountain Neuro-Medical Treatment Center, which at one time had been the Western North Carolina Sanatorium, in Black Mountain, NC. Through his help, I was able to see how drastically things changed for the better in mid-twentieth century sanatorium life, including society’s more tolerant attitude toward tuberculars, better quality of institutional care, advancements in progressive medications—most specifically streptomycin—and the use of far fewer radical surgical techniques. At last, the victims of this most formidable harbinger of death found reason to hope. Thank
you, Dr. Rhea, for your wonderful insight and vital information in helping to create my character’s sanatorium experience.

  And finally, I’d like to express my deepest thanks to my husband, Glen DeVos, who let me drag him along on my research trip to Chicago, and who patiently stood by me through my long writing days and nights, while graciously putting up with countless dinners of frozen pizzas and takeout food: I owe you a lot of good home cookin’, dear. And to my good friends in Spruce Pine, NC, especially the Spruce Pine Rotary Club, who understood why I disappeared for half a year and welcomed me back when I finally walked out into daylight again.

  To all of you, my deepest gratitude, respect, and love. J. D.

  PREFACE

  The strangling coughs and ineffective rapid breathing of the patients in every bed, on every floor, ward, and separate cottage were the commonality of the patients suffering from tuberculosis. It bound them together and forced each one to witness the slow and painful death of so many around them. Up until the mid–twentieth century and the discovery of streptomycin, only a small percentage recovered, while for the vast majority the wet, rattling cough grew ever more relentless with the passing days. It was the dreaded sign that the patient’s lungs were growing weaker as cavities and lesions grew bigger.

  One of the earlier names given to the disease was “consumption.” Not only did it consume the lungs and other organs, but it consumed the hopes and dreams of its victims. Most patients fought with every cell in their bodies to beat the slim odds of recovery, knowing they had to accomplish just one thing: to keep breathing. For each patient it became a beautiful art form—that easy, even, rhythmic flow of breath that was taken for granted by those who didn’t suffer the slow suffocation of tuberculosis. But eventually, the vast majority lost that battle, measuring the progress of their disease by the quality of each measured breath. And the more labored it became, the more obvious it was that patients would soon leave the sanatorium behind for a quiet and gentle place; a haven where the tired, wasted body was replaced by spirit alone, and where the beautiful art of breathing need not be practiced anymore.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  April 1954

  I was born in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, in the small logging town of Howling Cut. And though it was just two hours away from the city of Cabot, where I would live once I was married, the difference between the two places made it hard to believe they were so close. Cabot had grown by leaps and bounds, and social status and wealth were the measuring sticks of success. By contrast, Howling Cut grew at a much slower pace because of its higher elevation and far harsher weather. For the people in my hometown, success was measured by the number of winters and illnesses you were able to survive, and whether or not you could hang on to the family farm for another year.

  My parents, Jack and Rachel Harris, built the white two-story house I grew up in on the edge of their enormous apple orchard. My home wasn’t far from my great-grandmother’s place, which she’d bought as a young woman in the 1880s and where my grandmother and mother had been born. The town was so small that most everyone was related in some way, even if they were “distant, distant somethings,” and if they weren’t related, then you could bet your last dollar that they knew each other well—well enough to know things about each other that they probably shouldn’t have.

  I was the first of Jack and Rachel’s three children, and I looked like a combined image of the two. My hair was dark brown, like Daddy’s, and my nose was the female version of his straight and strong one, but the rest of my facial structure was much like Mama’s. We both had light eyes as well, but whereas hers were a true “Carolina blue,” just like the sky on an October day, mine were as green as the grass in June.

  My brother, Andrew, was sixteen months younger than I, and nearly a carbon copy of me. Though he’d grown into a ruggedly handsome young man, he’d been a beautiful, almost delicate-looking baby. I thought he was pretty and called him such, although my toddler’s attempt at saying the word “pretty” came out sounding like “Ditty,” and the name stuck.

  Our sister, Emily Nell, came into the world two years after Ditty, and she was fierce and fearless from the start. I heard Mama once say that she was startled when she first laid eyes on Emily Nell because she reminded her so much of her own sister, my wayward aunt Merry Beth, whom I’d never met. According to Mama, both had hair as black as the inside of a coal mine, and it grew as fast and wild as a wisteria vine. And apparently, both of their spirits were about as wild, too. I’d questioned Mama about my aunt a few times, but it wasn’t a conversation she wanted to get into. She simply said that Merry Beth had ended up going down the wrong road with the wrong ride; then Mama would conveniently find something else to distract us.

  When Emily Nell was two years old, she caught a cold that just wouldn’t go away. It was early January, and we were experiencing record cold that winter. The house was warm enough, but even so, the north wind crept through every tiny space it could find in the walls, relentlessly working to bring the below-zero temperatures into our home. Daddy kept the kerosene heaters full, and the fireplaces blazed, but even so, Emily Nell developed pneumonia.

  For nearly a week, the roads were impassable because of the thick layer of ice that covered them like glaze on a coffeecake, and we stayed frozen in place because of it. The house grew quieter as Emily Nell’s ragged breathing grew louder, until all sounds of her began to fade. I felt a certain amount of sympathy for her, as much as I could at my very young age, anyway. But there would come a time when I would have the deepest kind of empathy for her, and not because I was an adult by then but because I was no longer a bystander.

  My parents knew that they had no choice if there was any chance of saving my baby sister, so wrapping her as warmly as they could, they took her to the hospital in Marion, slip-sliding down the mountain roads as they did so, all the while praying to God that they would not all die in the attempt.

  Though they arrived at the hospital in one piece, and the doctors used every medication and technique available to them at the time, Emily Nell was just too far gone. She died there in Mama’s arms three days later. It was the darkest period I’ve ever seen my family go through, and even though I was only six years old at the time, I’ll always remember the black grief that gripped our family as deeply and as painfully as the north wind that winter.

  But spring unfailingly returned, as did the cycle of seasons over and over again, and through those years, my parents expanded their apple orchard as often as they could. They had contracts with the Gerber baby food company and with several restaurants in Cabot and nearby Asheville, and every year, it seemed, more of my parents’ apples were in demand.

  The spring freeze of ’44 had damaged many of the trees, and that year my parents were forced to purchase apples from orchards farther south in order to fulfill their contracts. Over the following two years they’d had to purchase more trees as well as more land, leaving less money to help with my college expenses. So I worked long hours as a short-order cook at Woolworth’s, in Durham, to help make ends meet.

  I’d decided to study nursing at Watts Hospital School of Nursing, just as my father’s sister, my Aunt Harriet, had done, and I met my future husband, Geoffrey Cavanaugh, during his final year of law school at Duke. One late frigid January evening in 1948, I had just begun to degrease the grill after a twelve-hour shift when a highly intoxicated Geoffrey, along with several of his fellow law school friends, staggered in. Silently scolding myself for not having locked the door before starting on the grill, I grabbed an order pad and walked to the middle of the counter where the four inebriated men had made themselves at home on the red leather stools.

  “What can I get y’all?” I asked, with pencil and pad at the ready. But the men were in their own world, laughing at things that only they found humorous, and slurring any word that had more than one syllable. I waited another minute for the customers to pull themselves together, but when they still cou
ldn’t, I firmly told them that I had work to do and asked them to leave. However, one of the men, shorter and stockier than the other three, did not take well to being told what to do and he declared that I had all the telltale signs of being the daughter of an ignorant cabbage farmer.

  “Easy there, Tanner.” Geoffrey immediately interceded, rising from his stool and moving to stand behind him, then slapping him on the back much too forcefully to have been a friendly gesture. “The poor girl is just trying to get out of here, that’s all. No need to insult her. As a matter of fact, you really owe her an apology.”

  At the same time, he applied just enough pressure that his friend croaked out a very disingenuous and humiliated, “I’m sorry!”

  “There now, don’t you feel better?” Geoffrey asked the red-faced young man, patting the place he’d squeezed. “Let’s go. Let the young lady close up. We’ll get a bite over at Dusky’s.” The four of them started for the door, but not before Geoffrey laid an extravagant tip of five dollars on the counter and said, “Sorry for the trouble, pretty lady. I’ll be seeing you.” Then, smiling broadly at me, he opened the door and, with a great flourish, bowed while sweeping his hand out before him and allowing the other three to exit before him. When he straightened up, he looked at me and winked, and in return I smiled a soft, grateful smile. Then he, too, walked out.

  I quickly went to the door and locked it while my eyes remained on the handsome young man with the dark blond hair as he rejoined his group. Abruptly, I turned away, though, wishing that I’d done so a half second sooner, for Geoffrey had turned around just in time to catch me watching him, as if he was sure I would be. Smiling, he lifted his hand in a wave before he walked out of the circle of light cast by a street lamp, and faded into the darkness.