Noon came and went before the doctor finally got there, Marlene Mae Haegar’s blood still wet on his clothes. Grandma heated a basin of water and sliced off a piece of lye soap so he could wash up before he looked down Hursey’s throat and in his ears and up his nose and listened to the gurgles of his stomach and the beatings of his heart, prodding and poking at his little boy body. She remembered a streak on the doctor’s forehead where he’d pushed his hair aside with a bloody hand when he was tending Marlene. Funny how some little thing like that will stick in your mind.
Grandma had stewed an old rooster until the meat on his bones fell off, thickened up the broth, and pinched off biscuit dough to make the kind of puffy dumplings Hursey liked. Still, he only ate a bite or two. The doctor was another story. He hadn’t eaten a hot meal since the day before, so he made up for it by downing a big portion of that rooster along with generous helpings from the pot of leather britches, potatoes, and onions jiggling together in a savory broth. Leather britches were green beans threaded onto strings and hung from the ceiling to dry, which toughened up the shells. If you wanted a mess ready for supper, you had best put them on the fire before you measured out the coffee for breakfast.
He sure did hate to eat and run, but it couldn’t be helped, the doctor had said, pulling off the napkin he’d tucked under his collar to protect his stained green necktie. He said there’s a baby over toward the tipple waiting to be born and he prayed to God that little one would have a better outcome than the one he just came from. He told Grandma to try to get some broth down Hursey and to keep on with the wet rags. Other than that, there was little else to be done.
All that time he was talking to Grandma, looking right past my mother.
Being ignored like that did not set well with her. When the doctor picked up his black valise to leave, Grandma said my mother reared right up on her hind legs and told the doctor this was her child, and she knew a place where something else could be done. She had driven a car since she was fourteen years old, so she’d picked Hursey up then and there and carried him out, all swaddled in a quilt, and laid him on the backseat.
My daddy and Grandpa were both down in the mines, Grandma said, and there was no way to get word to them, so my mother drove through a snow storm to the hospital in Beckley, leaving Grandma to tend to Vonnie, her still a babe in arms. A man saw her struggling up the icy hospital steps, Hursey heavy in her arms, and took him from her and carried him inside. The man smelled of antiseptic and another odor she couldn’t name, camphor maybe, and when she followed him through the double doors those same odors, stronger still and mixed with bleach, sickened her stomach. She swallowed hard to quell the urge to retch. When she saw a Christmas tree in the corner of the room, she realized it was the pine sap she smelled. Unable to think of Christmas, now only days away, she turned her back on the tree and its hateful red and green lights.
The overheated waiting room steamed with faceless people in woolen sweaters and scarves and coats that gave off the odor of wet dogs. They hadn’t made her wait in that room though, and she was grateful to the man for that. Turned out he was the first of many doctors brought in to shake their heads over this child who was sick unto death.
The doctor ordered the nurses to strip Hursey and put him in and out of an ice bath until they got his temperature down. Over the next day or two they put him through every test they knew to do. Mother told her the worst were the spinal taps, holding him down while they stabbed long needles into his back that made him scream like an animal. And the next day they did it again. Finally the big-shot doctors, who were pretty near as useless as the company doctor from home, least by her way of thinking, came up with a name for what my brother had.
Spinal meningitis.
It was a relief in a way to put a name to the enemy they were fighting.
But Grandma said that was before my mother knew exactly what it was they were dealing with. The doctor who carried Hursey into the hospital explained that spinal meningitis was an infection caused by bacteria that somehow got into the bloodstream and settled in the spinal cord and the brain. He was trying a course of sulfa drugs, but she should know she had a very sick boy. It was a fearsome battle ahead, and make no mistake, this disease could kill him.
If Hursey had only got the spinal meningitis a few years later, they might have given him penicillin shots, and that would have cured him before the disease took its hold. But it was 1937 that he got sick. It wasn’t until 1944 that a patient at Fairmont General Hospital in West Virginia became the first person ever to be treated with a full course of penicillin. Fairmont was only a Sunday drive from Beckley. But for seven years plus the few hours it took to drive there, our brother might not have lost his hearing.
Grandma said everybody was praying God would perform a miracle, and several went with Grandpa to the hospital and laid on hands and prayed that Hursey be delivered from the sickness that had him in its grip, but it wasn’t to be.
At
