The Merry Widow

My mother was born Delilah Mae Teddlie in Texas at the beginning of the century. Her father, Jim Teddlie, was a railroad johnny, one of those men who repaired track or laid it. He died when my mother was seven or eight. She used to say he died of malaria while working in the swamps around Houston, but she had a postcard from him which he’d sent from a hospital in Colorado; perhaps he had tuberculosis. Was TB a more shameful disease than malaria? Was it the Aids of its day?