I laughed aloud. “I know I shouldn’t,” I said. “It’s funny, but it’s sad too.”
“Yes, it is sad. But don’t misunderstand me, Christy. Those Friends were God’s savory salt. They were erring on the side of goodness. If that’s erring, it produced great people.
“What I didn’t understand then was that they were training their wills in the only way a will can be trained—by practicing giving up what we happen to want at the moment. Also while it was probably healthy for our relationship to have it out with my mother on cutting the fringe, it also reinforced my daughter in her selfish, determined ways.
“So Margaret grew up—vital, full of ‘frivol.’ The cry of her spirit was for freedom and more freedom. I could sympathize. I’ve always been something of a rebel too.
“But in her teens Margaret fell in with a group of people—young intellectuals, writers and artists—to whom freedom was a way of life. Not freedom for anything, just freedom from restrictions or irritations or responsibilities of any kind. They talked a lot about women’s ‘rights’ and feminism; about the ‘new’ intellectualism; the revolution in child labor and sweat-shop laws and trade-unionism in general; and the ‘cult’ of art and the new poetry. To Margaret, all of this was intoxicating.
“Then came the moment in her teens when she insisted on knowing more details about her birth. The scene is etched in me: I, sitting on the bed beside her, answering all her questions as quietly and gently as I could; she, listening carefully, scarcely saying a word. I remember how I sought to draw her to me. How I needed some sort of response from her! There was none. On her spirit there seemed to be a kind of high gloss that reflected back only coldness, like the glaze of ice. “Soon after that she discovered that the manner of her birth made a great impression on her new friends. In our Quaker circle, where the facts had always been known, of course, it had made no difference. Oddly, with the young intellectuals, her illegitimacy gave her added acceptance, even glamor. So suddenly she swung into full rebellion. Everything that I or my parents or our community of Friends were for, she was against.
“It was about that time that she met Neil MacNeill, in his first year of postgraduate bedside training at Jefferson Hospital. Neil liked Margaret’s independent spirit. In her rebellion she had a kind of fiery beauty. Her personality reminded me of one of those Fourth of July sparklers, twinkling off in all directions. Her eyes would glow, her wit flash, though there was sometimes a cutting edge to it.
“On Margaret’s side, young Dr. MacNeill seemed perfect, especially since her family’s fond wish was that she would find a husband within her own Quaker circle. He was not from a proper background at all, she thought, but from some wild place down south, she didn’t know or care where. Then the doctor boasted that he had taken science as his god and that he needed no other. That too suited Margaret’s mutinous spirit. She told him too about her birth. ‘A bastard child,’ she called herself—and he liked her blunt honesty.
“So they ran off and got married. But I fear there was a flaw at the heart of the marriage—a certain feeling of unworthiness in Margaret. I was never sure of this, but at least once I heard her refer to herself as an ‘accident conceived in man’s lust.’ And since she was discounting God, naturally she had no understanding of some of His greatest miracles: bringing good out of man’s treachery and baseness.
“Poor Neil! Margaret’s devaluating of herself had been so cloaked behind her happy-go-lucky personality that he never saw it until after their marriage. Even worse, I think, was his inevitable discovery that Margaret had picked him as a husband because she thought of him as also inferior and therefore, a proper mate for such as she.”
She paused. “Am I going into too much detail, Christy? Do you really want to hear all this?”
“Oh, yes—yes, I do. Please go on, Miss Alice.”
“Well then—in the first six months of their marriage, Margaret wrote one short note to me. After a while, when all my letters went unacknowledged, it became apparent that she and Neil meant to sever every tie with home.
“I’d long since learned that no difference in viewpoint should ever be allowed to cause the least break in love. Indeed, it cannot, if it’s real love. True, Margaret and Neil had wandered far afield from my faith. But relationships can be kept intact without compromising one’s own beliefs. And if we do not keep them intact, but give up and allow the chasm, we’re breaking the second greatest commandment. I couldn’t do that. So—uninvited and unheralded—I traveled down to Cutter Gap.
“As I anticipated, Margaret resented my coming, interpreted it that I was unwilling to cut the apron strings—so naturally, I didn’t stay in Cutter Gap. By then I was a bit wiser and had learned that there’s only one way to give advice to the young: give it, and then be perfectly unconcerned as to whether they take it or not. God alone is capable of managing other people—even our own children. So I explored other sections, and that was when I started the Big Lick Spring school. Still, the necessary contact with Margaret and Neil had been reestablished, and this was right.
“In time I think all these relationships would have been made right. As the quiet months went by and Margaret watched her husband’s work in Cutter Gap and saw his need of her, she began to see rebellion in its true light: as the easy way, so much easier and safer than commitment to positive values. She and Neil seemed slowly to be finding their way to a love based on something more enduring than partnership in flight. I believe that sooner or later love—Neil’s and mine—would have dissolved Margaret’s feelings of unworthiness.
“And then—that summer the scourge came early. All during her pregnancy Margaret felt depressed. Openly, she voiced the thought that perhaps it was wrong to perpetuate ‘her kind.’ And suddenly, she missed her own group of friends from Philadelphia; life in Cutter Gap seemed dull, devoid of intellectual stimulus. Once again, she withdrew into herself and the hard gloss reappeared. And so with this attitude of depression, along with the typhoid, she had little will to fight for her life.
“With his young wife’s death, Dr. MacNeill’s rejection of religion was complete. In his eyes, what the Society of Friends had tried to do for me and my daughter in giving us love, had failed. Perhaps in his eyes, I too, had failed. Therefore, Christianity just didn’t work! Let others get whatever they could from it; it was not for him. For a long time after Margaret’s death his attitude toward me was nothing more than a polite, cool aloofness.
“Lately our relationship has improved, especially after I built my cabin in Cutter Gap following Margaret’s death, and we got to know one another better. Neil has strengths and depths in him that not many of the mountain people understand.”
I nodded. “All those hundreds of slides there in the room where she died. I saw them too when he sent me for supplies. What are they?”
“Neil’s the only one who understands enough about them to tell you. It’s research on trachoma. For years he’s been using every spare moment trying to track down the cause and to find a cure. No cure yet, of course. Just new techniques of treatment. He’s written a paper on his findings, published in the Southern Medical Journal. It was very well received, I understand.
“You mightn’t guess it, but Neil is a man who carries dreams in his heart. One of them is to turn his practice in Cutter Gap over to someone else for a year or so and concentrate on research on eye disease. He has a medical hero—a Doctor Ernst Fuchs in Austria. Neil dreams of being associated with him in Vienna for a time.” She arose. “I must go. I’ve been away from Lundy too long.”
“Miss Alice, how can I thank you? You didn’t have to tell me any of this.”
Her eyes were warm as she looked at me. “I see her in you, the same vital force. So much ardor; the eagerness to grasp life—all of it; impetuosity; that spice of old Adam in thee that will not quite be put down. Anyhow,” she twinkled at me, “I told thee, I always toady to the young too much.”
The next morning Dr. MacNeill arrived early at the mission house a
nd insisted on gathering us three women and David into the parlor for more detailed instructions on sanitation. His clothes were disheveled, his face deeply etched with fatigue and worry lines. He looked as if he had not slept properly for many nights.
As the doctor held the parlor door open for me, he gave me such an intent look that it flustered me, and I walked by him hastily. My thoughts swung back to my impulsive kiss that morning we had ridden back together from Ruby Mae’s. It had been a gesture of gratitude, nothing more. It meant only a change from suspicion—and, yes, hostility at times—to acceptance of Dr. MacNeill as a friend. There was admiration and respect in my feelings toward him now. But his scrutiny was so speculative that it made me uneasy. Surely the doctor could not misinterpret my light heedless gesture. After all, I was in love with David. The doctor must see this!
“Situation doesn’t look good,” he began. “Two new cases again yesterday. They’re so scattered that it gives me no clue as to the source.” Absently he ran his fingers through the back of his hair, his forehead creased in thought.
“But I called you in here to try to help you protect yourselves.” Here he looked directly at me. “Christy, you’ve had no experience nursing typhoid. I’ll write all this down, but I want to explain it too. First off, all water drunk in this house from now on has to be boiled—”
We groaned, thinking of the extra work. Miss Ida’s face was a study.
“We’ll use formalin for disinfecting Lundy’s room. I’ll show you how. After handling anything from the sickroom, hands have to be washed with 70% alcohol or bichloride solution. I’ll make up some solution for you. All linens used for Lundy to be soaked two hours in carbolic acid solution, then boiled, then washed in lye soap.” He went on and on, with each sentence sounding more like a sergeant-major snapping out orders.
This professional side of Neil MacNeill always seemed so inconsistent with his tousled sandy-red hair and his careless clothes. “You’ve got to think of all urine or stools as pure culture of typhoid bacilli,” he persisted. “It all must be taken out to the woods and buried in a deep trench. Your job, David, I’m afraid. Sorry, Christy, no use to turn up that nose of yours. Disease isn’t pleasant. No way to make it genteel for you. Let’s strip off the party gloves and talk straight about it.”
That night Lundy complained of a raging headache over his eyes. For the past two days his temperature had risen steadily. He kept trying to sit up, but then would fall back giddily. I was frightened to see him picking and fumbling at the bedclothes exactly as Fairlight had done. His temperature continued to rise, and the next morning Miss Alice told us how his mind had wandered in and out of nightmare and delirium all night.
I was beginning to understand what devoted nursing typhoid required around the clock. There was the endless carrying in and out of pails and water basins and chamber pots. We must bathe and sponge the boy two, three, four times a day to try to bring down the fever; regularly rinse out the mouth and apply glycerine to tongue and lips to keep the brown fur and the typhoid sores from forming. But most continuous and time-consuming of all was the liquid nourishment which Miss Alice spoon-fed to Lundy every half hour.
“Everybody says, ‘Feed a cold and starve a fever,’ ” Miss Alice commented, “but since typhoid can last five to six weeks, they’ve starved many a patient to death. So Doctor MacNeill claims it’s best to keep pouring the soup and the eggnogs in. Nothing solid, though.”
So Miss Alice raced up and down stairs, back and forth between the kitchen and the sickroom for beef bouillon, milk with sugar of milk added, peppenoid, gruels, buttermilk, whey, oatmeal, cream soups, soft custard . . . Lundy was in too much of a stupor to be hungry; he pushed away the food, and she had to force it between his lips.
I helped some, and so did Miss Ida. But Miss Ida was still resentful that our patient had to be Lundy Taylor. She would stand in the kitchen and rail, her thin lips drawn even tighter than usual, “A fine thing! Our fingers worked to the bone as it was for that young ape! He would be the one to get sick.”
But when Miss Alice came to breakfast on Saturday morning with red-rimmed eyes, Miss Ida took pity on her. “Don’t care a picayune about that boy,” she said tartly, “but I do care about you. Alice Henderson, you get away from here. Go on over to your place and sleep. I’ll nurse.”
Miss Alice nodded gratefully. She was almost dozing at the table. “And I’ll take the night shift tonight,” I told her. So it was arranged.
At ten o’clock that night, Miss Ida had finished giving Lundy some bouillon and was getting him ready for the night when Miss Alice came into the room. “How is he, Ida?”
“Last temperature reading’s 103. This one’s no rose-Matilda to take care of, I can tell you. I hope he’ll sleep,” she added as she went out the door.
“Christy, I came over to see that the cot was set up for you for the night watch,” Miss Alice said, gesturing toward a camp bed sitting against the wall. “Also I’ve had my comfortable chair carried over. Try to snatch some rest, Christy, between jumps.”
“I’ll manage fine,” I assured her more confidently than I felt.
She stood there a moment looking at me with such a warm smile flickering across her features that it was almost a caress. Then she left.
When I turned to my patient, I saw that he was wearing an old patched nightshirt which Miss Ida had found somewhere. His eyes were open but I was not sure that he recognized me. His arms and legs were thrashing at the sheet and one quilt over him. “Hot kivers . . . Toes be tetchious,” he complained in a whiney voice. “Untellin’ misery in toes . . . Take beddin’ off’n me.”
Since Miss Ida had said that the last temperature reading was 103 degrees, I did not think it a good idea to remove any covers. But as he continued to kick about and complain, sticking his big feet out from under the covers over the side of the bed, I looked gingerly at the toes. At least, I thought, for once he’s clean. But I could see nothing wrong with the toes.
“A-hurtin’ in my feet. Git that thar counterpin off’n me,” he ordered whimperingly over and over. Finally I concluded that his toes must be sensitive for some reason I did not understand, so I placed a straight chair with its back against the foot of the cot and pulling the covers out at the foot, draped them over the chair to lift the weight of the bedclothes from Lundy’s feet. In a little while, after a drink of water, he dozed off.
I blew out the lamp, keeping it by me, then sank into the easy chair and fell asleep almost at once. I was awakened by a terrible stench along with groanings and mutterings from the cot.
Lighting the lamp again, I took it to the bedside, and steeling myself, lifted the quilt and sheet off the hot body. The diarrhea which I had seen noted on a tablet lying on the table was still unchecked. Fortunately, Miss Ida had put several thicknesses of what amounted to a huge diaper on the big boy. Above the diaper his stomach was bloated, with rosy spots on it.
Now began as repugnant a task as I had ever faced. I covered Lundy up again, and went running downstairs for buckets of water. Using the pump at the sink, I filled two pails and one additional pan of water for scrubbing myself afterward.
But the water was icy; too cold to touch that feverish body. Since Miss Ida had banked the fire in the range, there were some coals left. I found small sticks of kindling, opened the damper on the stove and got the fire blazing, put some lumps of coal on to hold it, and started the water heating.
Then in Miss Ida’s clothespin basket hanging on a hook on the back porch, I hunted for that new kind of clothespin with a spring on it, found one and put it in my pocket. I waited until the water was warm enough, then leaving the one pan on the stove, carried the pails upstairs along with a pack of old newspapers.
The foul odor met me at the top of the stairs. I set the buckets down and carefully pinched the clothespin onto my nose. It might look funny, but there was nobody to know or to see.
In the next few minutes my thoughts moved as fast as my hands. No need to feel sorry for
yourself. Lots and lots of people have to endure worse than this. Student nurses have unpleasant duties all the time, more disagreeable than this. Put your mind on things like—like what? Well, Grandmother Rudd’s rose garden. Remember the old-fashioned white roses with the light yellow centers and the delicate fragrance. Or that cerise rose, one of Grandmother’s favorite bushes. Beautiful only in bud though. The mature blossoms always droop.
How I wished for rubber gloves! I wondered if Dr. MacNeill had any. I would ask him tomorrow. The clothespin was pinching my nose, but I welcomed the nips of pain. Now it was hurting badly so that my attention was focused on the pinching rather than on the smell and the odious task under my hands.
Finally it was finished and I stuffed the soiled diaper and the wet rags into the chamber pot, put the lid on tightly, and set it in the hall. In the corner of the sickroom on a pile of clean rags I found some of the outsize diapers neatly folded—and blessed Miss Ida for that. As I put the diaper under Lundy and brought up the corners to fasten them with safety pins, I thought, “Giant baby boy.” He was so huge.
I found myself thinking what a ludicrous contrast this situation was to my sheltered girlhood. And Dr. MacNeill had laughed at me during Ruby Mae’s wedding infare. He had thought I didn’t know enough about life. Well, I was learning. Now there should be few embarrassments left. I pulled the covers over Lundy again.
Downstairs I dumped some water and chloride of lime into the pot and set it outside the back door. In the morning the contents would have to be buried in the earth with lye.
Then I began scrubbing myself, grateful for the scalding hot water and the carbolic acid solution. By Miss Ida’s battered alarm clock ticking so loudly on the shelf behind the range, I saw that it was only ten minutes past twelve. I couldn’t believe it! My vigil had scarcely begun.
Christy Page 51
