Free View From a Kite by Maureen Hull Page A

mostly. They crank them out and sell them for a small but regular income. They are supposed to teach any of the rest of us who want to learn leatherwork and they get a small stipend for that, too. We have to pay for the materials.
    The creepiest smell is from a metal and glass box-like contraption at one end of the room. Everything Rudy and Colum and the rest of us make that’s meant to leave the Sanatorium has to be put in this box, which is then flooded with some kind of gas for hours, overnight. The gas kills any TB germs sticking to the stuff we make. In the morning the nurses put the de-gassed belts and wallets and toilet-paper dolls into sealed plastic bags and then, and only then, can they be released to the outside world.
    Rudy and Colum have been patients in the hospital for seventeen and twenty-two years, respectively. There aren’t any drugs that will let them go negative and stay that way. Every few months, they test positive. Every few years, OFN told us, someone comes up with a new drug and the doctors try it on Rudy and Colum, but it never works for long. They both go home, for a while, when they’ve got a negative report, but they never get to go home for good. Home is the San. You’d think they’d go crazy or commit suicide or something, but they don’t. They are shy and patient and kind, and happy to show anyone how to make a wallet. Rudy had a wife who divorced him and married somebody else after the first ten years. Colum got married sixteen years ago and has two kids, fourteen and ten. His family lives in Port Hawkesbury and he goes there once a month, if he’s negative, for a week.
    Mary and I go down to Rehab every day for five days and learn how to make a wallet. It’s a lot more complicated than you’d think. All the little compartments have three or four bits of leather to be put together. There’s gluing, with sticky, smelly glue that probably came from spoiled, boiled horses. There’s sewing, with strips of thin leather and an awl, a lot of pushing and shoving, nothing like regular sewing. It’s not for wimps, you could hurt yourself. The best part is stamping designs on the outside with little metal stamps. You put the stamp on the leather, hammer it, but not too much. You want to mark the leather, not cut right through it. Rudy and Colum have a million little stamps, all different designs. It’s hard to choose, and then hard to stop yourself from overdoing it. I make two wallets, one for me and one for George. Rudy gasses George’s for me and then I get OFN to mail it off for his birthday.
    After that, we drop by once or twice a week to chat, to hammer designs into scraps of leather we make into bracelets, and to listen to the radio. Normally Rudy and Colum prefer fiddle music, but they let us switch to the top 40 when we come to visit. They have the only good music left in the hospital, because even The Witch doesn’t mess with Rudy and Colum. They’ve seen her kind come and go.

CHAPTER 14
    â€œâ€˜â€¦There is no disease requiring more persistent care, more absolute perfect control. Every detail of the patient’s life should be under constant observation.’”
I suspect The Witch has been reading from The Cape Breton Book for the Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculosis , even though it’s sixty years out of date.
    She has banned all local radio stations. She says they play too much Cape Breton fiddle music and that it gets the patients all gingered up and then they don’t rest properly.
    Colum says it’s just that she’s got it in for John Malcolm Harris. She caught him step-dancing on his bedside chair during afternoon rest period and when she told him to stop acting the fool and get back into bed at once he told her to go piss in her lard-arse underwear. She says if she hears anything other than Montovani or Mass for Shut-Ins she’s going to confiscate every radio on Ward C.
    Joe Paul’s