For many years this penance was easily made. Prison food and prison medication, required only rarely, were more than adequate, and my cell and few furnishings therein provided me with adequate comfort, and on the few occasions when my life was threatened by the violence of certain prisoners, my cowardice, though it shamed me, also made it so that I was making my penance, for it kept me from foolhardiness and forms of reckless behavior. Too, I was rarely ill during the early years of my imprisonment, partly because of my constitution and partly because of the generally benign physical conditions of the prison. Also, until her death, I was tenderly looked after by my wife, despite her own failing health, so that whenever I showed any slight sign of illness, no matter how insignificant, she would hurry to me with medications and kindness and would quickly cure me.
After her death, however, and following hard upon the visit from my sons, there commenced my period of illness. It introduced itself to me modestly enough, so that, unawares, I did not protect myself against it, because, as yet a man of time is inevitably inclined, I saw each new affliction as separate and independent from the other and saw not at all any sequence or heaping up, and surely I did not suspect that I was entering upon a whole and lengthy period of illness. Therefore, when there came into the corners of my mouth and upon the bridge of my nose a small number of boils and hard chancres, I was not alarmed or even especially discomfited by them, and so I merely waited for them to leave as they had come, silently and in the night and without apparent cause.
They did not leave, however, although individual boils and chancres did sometimes soften so that the pus beneath could break through and drain from the sore, which sore, when it had fled, would seem to reappear in another part of my mouth or nose. During this time I also contracted the disease called favus, which is characterized by small yellowish crusts on the scalp with raised edges and depressed centers. The crusts have a peculiar odor, like that of a mouse nest, and the hairs in the encrusted areas become brittle, loosen, break and fall out, so that when the inflammation has passed, there are left blotches of baldness across the scalp. This condition did not seem to me a disease at the time, for while I had the disease I was aware only of the itching, which was irregular, and I did not discover the bald patches until sometime later. The peculiar odor, because it was indeed so like unto that of a mouse nest, I simply attributed to the presence in my cell somewhere of a mouse nest. Furthermore, I was also then suffering for the first time from a condition known as dry seborrhea, which affects the foreskin of the penis and is characterized by itching caused by an accumulation of a cheesy material consisting of body oils mixed with dead cells and other tissue debris, and thus I was somewhat distracted from the favus infection on my scalp.
The reader should keep in mind that I did not at this time know what was yet to come, and therefore each new affliction I regarded as the last in a series. When I had developed boils, I did not know that favus would follow and that dry seborrhea would follow the favus. Nor did I know, when the dry seborrhea had cleared somewhat, that I would soon be afflicted by neuralgia, the chief symptom of which is extreme pain that comes on in paroxysms and severe twitching of the muscles of the affected part, in my case the cheeks of my face and the muscles surrounding my mouth. These symptoms took expression as a sudden grimace, practically an openmouthed but silent laugh, despite the pain, and thus I was often thought to be enjoying some private hilarity, when in fact I was not. To further confuse people, one of the boils from my mouth had relocated in my right ear, to be followed by another in my left, and soon the swelling in the canals had become sufficiently extensive to cause a temporary but total deafness, so that I could not know what was being said to me and thus could not answer questions with regard to the incongruity between my facial expression and the absence of anything particularly humorous in my immediate situation or surroundings.
Along about this time I began to reason that there was a connection between my various afflictions, however tenuous, and I grew fearful, yet none of my diseases were such that they could be cured by any treatment other than rest and cleanliness, which were my habits to encourage anyhow. Unavoidably, one affliction seemed to lead to another, so that one night during my sleep, the neuralgic twitching of the muscles surrounding my mouth caused me to bite into the meat of my tongue accidentally, which in a short time became inflamed, swelling the tongue exceedingly and leading to an ulcerated and very tender condition and also several abcesses there. This condition brought on a constant and copious flow of saliva and also made it difficult and very painful to speak. In a few days I observed that my gums as well had become infected, for they had grown spongy and tender and had puffed out and sometimes bled and from time to time oozed pus from between my teeth. And still there was little I could do to cure myself, except to provide myself with rest and cleanliness.
Here I became sufficiently ill that the jailor at last brought a physician unto me, for there had appeared on the skin of my chest several large thickly encrusted areas of a purplish color. These masses of granulated tissue and tiny abcesses, bathed in a thin film of pus, had come from within my lungs, the physician thought, and indicated a condition he named blastomycosis, which he speculated had been caused by some type of yeast infection somewhere in my body. When I had told him of my dry seborrhea, he chuckled and said that it surely explained the cause but gave not a hint for the cure, for there was no cure, except to treat the affected areas of the skin with certain chemical solutions, which he dispensed to me and which I assiduously applied, bringing about a small measure of relief. I was left, however, with a painful cough and more or less difficulty with breathing, and with chills and sweats in alternation, and an indisputably foul-smelling sputum, these all coming as a result of the lung infection, which the physician told me might in time abate of its own volition.
I lay in my cot for most of my days now as well as the nights and no longer moved outside my cell. The pain from my lungs and from the boils and divers other sores as had appeared across my body and from the neuralgia and the diseases that filled my mouth and stopped up my ears, and the continuous itching in the various parts of my body, made me shrink inside myself like some dumb animal cowering in a corner, and I began to fear that I might be compelled, by my commitment to my life time’s period of penance, to live this way for a long time, and this brought me to conclude that my will to atone was being tested by the dead. I believed that the dead were trying me because there had come into my spirit during these weeks a longing to join them that was exceedingly strong and that was not altogether spiritual. Against this longing I brought forth numerous scriptures and remembered teachings from my youth and all my powers of reason, for this was now a clash that rang out continuously in my mind with all the noisesome fury of a great clash between armies. I know that I often wept and groaned aloud and thrashed helplessly through the long nights.