Christy

by Catherine Marshall

  Then there was the problem of Lundy Taylor. Since Bird’s-Eye was still at large, Miss Alice felt that Lundy should stay at the mission house rather than live alone. And Isaak McHone simply wanted to be with us. So great was the need of a supervised program that of a morning I had taken to gathering all the boarders into the schoolroom for informal work and play, calling it “vacation school.”

  It was two days later, in the schoolroom, as I was reading a story to Little Guy and Wanda Ann, that I was interrupted by a cry from Isaak.

  “Teacher, teacher, he’s a-bleedin’!”

  I jerked my head up to see Lundy Taylor slumped over a desk. Blood was pouring from his nose.

  Snatching up a pile of the handkerchief rags from my desk, I dashed down the aisle and pressed them to the boy’s face. “Lean your head back, Lundy. Not forward, back.”

  He complied instantly, but my order was a mistake because he was soon choking on blood in his throat.

  “Lundy, stretch out on the floor. In the aisle—”

  “Can’t hear ye. Ears a-roarin’—”

  I raised my voice. “On the floor, Lundy. Lie down. Here, straight out. Full length. Yes, that’s it.”

  As I knelt down to hold more rags to his nose, I saw Wanda Ann standing rigid with fright, one fist in her mouth, her bloodshot eyes wide and staring.

  Since coming to Cutter Gap, how often I had wished that I knew more about first aid. But now I did remember something . . . “Lundy, lift your hands and arms up above your head.” I took one arm to show him what I meant and held it in the air. It took a long time for the bleeding to stop.

  As soon as the immediate crisis was over, I could see that the big boy, always starved for attention, was enjoying his prominence. “Lundy, better lie there another minute or so.” He grinned up at me. I noticed that his always-pimply skin was mottled pink and white. “I’m going to send you over to the big house to rest awhile,” I told him.

  I took Isaak aside. “Will you go with him, Isaak? Explain to Miss Grantland about the nosebleed and ask her to put Lundy to bed. Tell her that Dr. MacNeill should see him.”

  That afternoon on his way to two other urgent requests for help the doctor stopped by. David and Miss Alice were off somewhere, so after examining Lundy, the doctor sought me out. “Not much question, Christy. It’s typhoid all right—early stage. Now we do have a situation on our hands.”

  Immediately I was concerned for the other children in the house. “Isn’t it dangerous for the other boarders?”

  “Dangerous for everybody.”

  “What about Little Guy? Shouldn’t we send him home?”

  “Probably. We’ll talk about that later. But first, Christy, we need supplies—medicines and disinfectants, more than I have in my saddlebags. There’s plenty over at my place but I have two other calls to make this afternoon. Could you—would you ride over and get some stuff?”

  I glanced out the window. The clouds which had been building up all day were towering storm heads now, dark and threatening. “Of course I’ll go,” I said.

  “Then I’ll write you out a list so you’ll know what to bring.” He pulled out a piece of paper and began to scribble.

  I threw my body against the door, the driving rain that had been pursuing me to the doctor’s cabin pelting at my back. The door flew open and the wind almost blew me inside. With my back I slammed the door against the weight of the gale and stood leaning against the hard wood to catch my breath. The mustiness of the house not lived in for days closed about me: stale tobacco, the smell of leather, burnt bacon grease. There was a ghostly appearance to the room in the afternoon light, waning now, and all but extinguished by the thunderstorm.

  I knew that the locked room, where the doctor had said I would find the medicines, was somewhere to my right. A flash of lightning momentarily illuminated the interior of the cabin and gave me an idea what pieces of furniture stood between me and the locked door. After a few steps I walked into some cobwebs and had to fight with the gossamer tangles in my face and hair. Then my right leg banged into something and I almost fell over it. Groping fingers told me that it was a chest of some sort and I stood still, rubbing my leg, awaiting another flare of lightning. Perhaps I should use the next brief light to search for a lamp, but unless there were matches beside it, I knew that I would never find them in these murky shadows.

  Outside, the thunder rolled and rumbled and crackled like a violent artillery bombardment. I thought of Buttons out in the storm and hoped that she was all right.

  There was another growl of thunder and lightning zigzagged across the sky, flaming at the windowpanes. I found no lamp close by, but I did see that the floor area was clear between where I was standing now and the locked door. My fingers felt for the key in the pocket of my jacket—an old-fashioned brass key, much larger than the ones made nowadays. The hard cold metal was reassuring and excitement rose in me. The doctor had entrusted the key to me. Whatever the secret of the locked room was, I should soon know. I walked with one hand stretched out to keep from colliding with the door, then slid my fingers over the panels to locate the keyhole. There was a moment’s difficulty fitting the key into the lock in the darkness, then I turned the key to the right—but it would not move. I took both hands and tried it. No good. But I thought all keys turned clockwise. Fighting off a feeling of panic, I tried twisting it to the left. The key now turned easily and the door swung open.

  There was an odor of chemicals, but I could see nothing at all. This room was even darker than the outer one. Since this was a smaller place and might contain all manner of breakable objects, I dared not move a step. Actually, I thought, the lightning is a boon. The next flash came—but, disappointingly, did not light the room at all. Then I understood. The windows were covered.

  Now I had to find a lamp. Cautiously I stretched out one hand and moved it in an arc around my body. To my right there was a shelf, and oh, great relief, an oil lamp waiting, as if necessary for anyone entering this room. In that case there must be matches close by. Steadying the lamp with my left hand so that I would not knock it off the shelf, I groped with my right. A canister with a top. Yes, inside were matches. I struck one match with such haste that I broke off its head and had to reach for another. Then I held it with shaking hand while I removed the glass chimney and lighted the wick.

  Lifting the lamp aloft, I scanned the room eagerly, trying to take in everything at once. A laboratory! I was in a laboratory. It had been a bedroom once, for a bed was pushed sideways against one wall, and there was a mirror and an old wooden trunk. In the middle of the floor stood a stool and table with a microscope, an alcohol lamp, beakers, and a lot of other equipment on it. Against the wall to my right just beyond the lampshelf were standing cabinets with shallow drawers, not of the kind that even a fine mountain craftsman could possibly have made. Doctor MacNeill must have sent to a city to buy these. I moved across the floor and with great curiosity—feeling as if the doctor were looking over my shoulder—pulled open a drawer. Slides, many of them, meticulously arranged and numbered. I pulled out one drawer after another, all full of slides, hundreds, thousands of little glass squares, each one labeled, each one representing—what? And all together, how many years of work were contained in these endless files!

  Another wall was covered with charts, several of them large pictures of the human eye. Some were of a normal eye and others were dreadful pictures of raspberry-colored eyelids or heavy upper lids drooping half-shut. I did not want to look, so I turned to the other charts. They were big squares of paper covered with notations in Dr. MacNeill’s handwriting. I held the lamp closer but could make nothing of the memoranda, a combination of figures and abbreviated medical terms—many of them in Latin. This was not the usual physician’s illegible writing; rather, the neat scrupulously ordered notes of the scientist.

  At the far end of the room, shelves had been built floor to ceiling, one section for books, the rest for bottles of medicine and pills. This must be the doctor’s
private pharmacy where I would find the drugs for which he had sent me, actually the only part of the room that should concern me.

  Yet I stood for a long while letting the yellow light from the lamp flicker over the walls and ceiling, trying to understand. A covering of dark cloth had been carefully placed over the two windows so that no passer-by could look in. This was not the sanctum of an ordinary backwoods doctor. Some type of research, important to Dr. MacNeill at least, had been going on here for a long time. Standing there, new admiration and respect for the owner of this room rose in me. It had not been easy to find all the necessary hours for the work accomplished here while being the only practicing physician in this entire region.

  And David had been right: I had misinterpreted Dr. MacNeill’s carelessness about personal appearance to mean sloppiness in general. Yet there was no untidiness in this room; quite the opposite—an extreme of precision.

  So now I knew the truth about the locked room, and it was more logical and more significant than all the rumors I had heard. The doctor had known that the mountain folk would not understand the type of research he was doing. He had not felt that he could explain. Nor could he run the risk of the woman who came at intervals to clean his cabin, moving this equipment to dust it, or tampering with the slides—or having access to the drugs, either, for the mountain people liked to sample any and all medicines.

  But more important to me was what this room divulged about the doctor. Depths in him which I had glimpsed briefly, at odd moments, and tried to discount . . . Then I wondered about something. With the storm coming on, couldn’t Dr. MacNeill have left the list of drugs for David, asked him to go when he got back? Or had he wanted me to see this room, me in particular, wanted me to read some message written here?

  That unusual looking trunk, what was in it? Cautiously I made my way toward it. The floorboards creaked under my feet, and jumping guiltily, I looked over my shoulder almost expecting to see someone behind me. I set the lamp on the floor by the trunk and the yellow light illuminated the initials MHM just under the bass lock. I should not be snooping; this was really none of my business. But experimentally, I touched the lock and found it open. Then impelled by a curiosity I could not put down, I lifted the lid.

  It was a deep trunk—not filled to the top. I held the lamp to peer in. A woman’s clothes—dresses, a bonnet with fur on it. So this was where Dr. MacNeill had gotten the dress for me that day old Theo dropped me in the creek. And there was a pair of knitting needles stuck in some yarn. The yarn looked yellow in the lamplight. Perhaps it had once been white. Shyly I picked it up. It was a half-finished baby’s jacket. Mute evidence of a life interrupted, a mother’s and a baby’s. Gently, I put the tiny jacket back where I had found it and hastily shut the lid of the trunk. I must get the drugs and start home.

  I carried the lamp to the shelves of bottles, each jar and bottle carefully labeled: Chloroform, C.P. . . . Nux Vomica, NSP . . . Ext. Gelsium, LY . . . Iron Quin & Strych . . . Wampoles Formolid . . . One jar contained nothing but empty capsules to be filled; another, corks. On a nail stuck in the wall was a sheaf of invoices from Masengill Brothers, Pharmaceutical Jobbers in Bristol, Tennessee—Virginia. There were rows of empty medicine bottles, one row marked “Sterile,” the others, “To Be Sterilized.” Like all country doctors, Dr. MacNeill had to be his own pharmacist.

  I took the list of wanted drugs out of my pocket and laid it on the shelf close to the lamp. Such odd names. To me, hieroglyphics! It took me a long time to search over the labels on the tall bottles and find each medicine: ­Bismuth . . . Sulphate Quinine . . . Morphia sulphate 61/8 . . . Glycerine . . . Carbolic-acid . . . Dover’s powder . . . Stractine . . . Calomel and Sodium Tablets, 1 gr . . . Rubbing alcohol. Then having located what was needed and set the bottles aside in one place, next I had to pour a specified amount of each into sterile containers since my instructions had been, “In no case, bring it all, Christy. I can’t have my private supply stripped of any one drug.”

  At last it was done and I looked around for some box or basket in which to carry the assortment of bottles and pill boxes out to my saddlebags. There was nothing—except a mortar and pestle. Finally, in desperation, I removed the pestle and stuck the bottles in the mortar, cramming my pockets with the rest.

  There was a sense of urgency now. I had no idea how long I had already tarried in this room. Quickly I returned the lamp to its shelf, turned down the wick, blew out the flame, shut the door and locked it.

  Outside I was relieved to find that the fury of the storm had abated. It was still raining, but softly now with only an occasional clap of thunder reverberating in the distance. Buttons, delighted to see me, nuzzled my hand as if eager to be off and back to her warm stall. After carefully arranging the medicines in the saddlebags, then carrying the mortar back inside and pulling the front door shut after me, I mounted and rode off as fast as I dared toward the mission. There was so much to ponder.

  Now that Lundy was ill in the mission house, as a precaution we did send Little Guy back home. Soon we saw that Lundy was going to be an ill-tempered, demanding patient, though his case did not seem serious; even the evening rises in temperature were only moderately severe.

  “Maybe I was wrong,” Dr. MacNeill admitted to us one evening after taking Lundy’s temperature. “Typhoid’s fooled me before. It can wear more guises and present more variables than almost any disease I know.”

  “What guises?” Miss Alice questioned.

  “Well—let’s see.” He looked toward the ceiling and thought. “It can look like colitis, meningitis, malaria, nephritis, influenza, pneumonia, endocarditis—”

  “Enough—enough! Now thee is over my head.”

  “But Dr. MacNeill,” I said, “I thought Fairlight had both typhoid and pneumonia.”

  “That’s right. She did. Pneumonia can be a typhoid complication. And speaking of complicated cases, I’ve some rough ones across Raven. Too many. I’m riding over tomorrow. I may have to stay overnight.”

  We hoped fervently that no emergency would arise in the doctor’s absence. But he had scarcely disappeared down the road in the direction of Fairview Flats flagstop when Rob Allen was at our front door with the urgent message that Ruby Mae Beck was “took bad.” Her husband Will had brought word of the emergency to the mill and asked that it be relayed; he could not leave his young wife longer than that.

  “Didn’t Will give any details?” I asked Rob.

  “No’m.”

  “Does he think it’s typhoid?”

  “Said he couldn’t rightly tell. Jest that she be awful sick.” The primitive cabin which Will Beck was building himself on the back side of English Mountain was in the opposite direction from Raven Gap where Dr. MacNeill had gone. This meant that someone from the mission house would have to go.

  Rob went with me for a hasty consultation with Miss Alice. Once she had heard the situation she did not hesitate. “Of course I’ll go as soon as I get some supplies together.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I told her.

  She looked at me thoughtfully. “No, Christy, that’s not best. No telling how long this will take. With Lundy and Wanda Ann thy hands are full already.”

  I hesitated. I had never before questioned Miss Alice’s word. But into my mind came the picture of Ruby Mae standing behind David in the kitchen doorway staring over his shoulder at me on my first morning at the mission. I thought of how she had trailed me around the house and grounds, all but driving me out of my mind. And suddenly I knew what I had to do. “Right from the start Ruby Mae’s been part of my special bundle,” I told her. “It’s one of your favorite sayings and I’m quoting it back at you—so I have to go.”

  I did not think Miss Alice would dispute this. Nor did she, but she surprised me by asking, “Does thee really want to go?”

  “Yes, I do. It isn’t just duty. I care about Ruby Mae and I want to help.”

  Still she looked at me searchingly. “All right then,” she said quietly, �
��but will Ida take on Lundy’s nursing?”

  I smiled at her. “I think so. Miss Ida’s been a real friend since that night we were besieged. I’ll talk to her before we leave.”

  By “getting a few things together” Miss Alice meant some professional medical supplies. Since coming to the mountains, circumstances had often forced her into the roles of practical nurse and midwife. On occasions when no doctor was available, faced with emergencies like the top of a foot hacked by the mis-stroke of an axe or a mother suddenly in labor, she had learned to take over quite adequately. Often she had borrowed Dr. MacNeill’s medical books and questioned him until sometimes, in amused exasperation, he would light his pipe, settle comfortably into a chair and give her the equivalent of a medical-school lecture on how to handle lacerations or broken bones or the more common complications of childbirth.

  Since Miss Alice had a retentive memory and a high degree of ability to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and applied skill, she had learned a great deal. Years before, she had sent to Philadelphia for an obstetrical kit and a doctor’s bag which she carried in her saddlebags. I watched her check the contents now: a thermometer that looked like a pen with a cover; the usual stethoscope; small wire objects that she told me were splints for setting bones; a tiny alcohol lamp; assorted syringes and probes; and an odd-looking little object Miss Alice called a “speculum,” assorted vials, ointment cans, and medicine bottles.

  Inside the Beck cabin, we found Ruby Mae flushed pink with high fever. Her features were drawn, her eyes too bright and staring. “Oh, I’m sick, so sick,” she moaned over and over. She was finding it hard to get her breath so that her words came out in tight gasps. “Water, Will. More water. Please—so thirsty.”

  Miss Alice took her temperature, looked at her tongue and felt her pulse. After a while she left the bedside and motioned Will and me outside the cabin.