“But look,” he said, reaching out to touch her arm. “We don’t have to think about that today. And we don’t have to think about it tomorrow, because we’re going to do something together.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever you want.” He sat up, looking suddenly younger. “And in the evening I’ll take you out for dinner. There’s a place that was your mother’s favorite.”
“But, Dad,” said Laurie, “tomorrow’s Friday. It’s not even the weekend yet.”
“I know that,” said Mr. Valentine. “Can’t a man spend a Friday with his daughter every now and then?”
They leaned back until their shoulders were on the grass. The shadows of the clouds moved across their faces.
“I wish we could do it all the time,” said Laurie.
“Now, now,” said Mr. Valentine. “Be careful what you wish for.”
AUTHOR’S
NOTE
There is an image in my mind of a child in leg braces, lurching on crutches while an adult towers at either side. It is my only memory of polio, and so faint that I wonder at times if it’s really there.
I was born the year polio was beaten in North America, the year the vaccine developed by Jonas Salk was made available to millions of people. Polio still thrived in other parts of the world, and even lurked at the edges of my own, like a bogeyman in the darkness, leaping out now and then to strike down a child. But I never knew the terror that gripped whole towns and cities when polio appeared every summer.
It was a terrible disease, as old as civilization. There are drawings from ancient Egypt of polio-stricken people. In North America, the worst epidemics began right after World War II, with about 20,000 cases reported each year for the rest of that decade, and nearly 60,000 in 1952.
Polio attacked children more often than adults, paralyzing muscles in the arms, legs, and chest. For most who got it, the disease came and went as simply as a common cold, yet others were crippled, often for life, able to walk only with metal braces strapped around their legs. Those with paralyzed lungs spent months, or years—or sometimes all their lives—lying on their backs in iron lungs that did their breathing for them with mechanical pumps and bellows.
An iron lung was huge and hulking. It looked like an enormous metal barrel on a frame of legs and wheels. It encased a child from toe to neck, leaving only the head outside. The bellows that pushed air through the machine were so powerful that smaller children were sucked in a bit, and blown out a bit, with every breath. When the epidemics of the 1940s and ’50s brought more and more polio patients into hospitals, some bigger iron lungs were built, able to stack the children into layers, with one set of bellows breathing for four or five patients. It was a photograph of one of those machines that inspired this story, a five-person iron lung the size of a small room, with the heads of four children poking out from its front like dice spots.
The children’s heads rested on pillows, on shelves extending from the round openings of the respirator. Taped to the metal above one of the children’s heads was a painting of a boy and his dog. A nurse stood off to the side, smiling, her white uniform crisp and perfect. She was smiling, but the picture was sad. It made me wonder how those children had passed endless days and weeks and months. I imagined that the picture showed them in a rare moment of happiness, in lives full of sorrow and anger.
But I was wrong to think that. I had no idea of the strength of childhood spirit until I met a man who had lived in an iron lung.
His name is Richard Daggett. I’ve never seen him, or heard him speak, but I feel as though I know him well. By e-mail and Internet, he has told me the most private and intimate things imaginable.
Mr. Daggett contracted polio in 1953, just after his thirteenth birthday. He woke one day with a stiff neck, and ended the next in an iron lung, with his breaths whistling in and out through a hole that doctors had pierced in his throat. On a family Web site—www.downeydaggets.com—Mr. Daggett tells his amazing story of recovered strength. He got out of the iron lung; he learned to walk again. Now Mr. Daggett is president of the Polio Survivors Association, a writer and speaker, and an advocate to preserve the famous polio hospital, Rancho Los Amigos, where he struggled as a child.
Over the course of a year or so, Mr. Daggett taught me a lot, and not only about the polio. Among the things he most wanted me to know was the fact that a polio ward was not the terrible place I’d imagined, that there was laughter there, and hope and happiness. He felt that I’d made the children in my story too lonely, and not properly thrilled by each small success.
He recommended a few books that show how others lived with polio. My favorites included In the Shadow of Polio, a combination of history and memoir by Kathryn Black, and Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, by Peg Kehret.
When Dr. Jonas Salk introduced his vaccine in 1955, he was hailed as a hero, the worker of miracles. He declined to patent the vaccine, not wanting any personal profit. Later, asked why, he said, “Could you patent the sun?”
A massive immunization began that year, and instances of polio plummeted. In 1953 there were 35,000 cases. In 1957 there were only 5,600.
But the vaccine brought a tragedy. Because of mistakes in a medical lab, a small number of people contracted polio from the vaccine that was meant to protect them. And because of that, thousands more shunned the immunizations while new epidemics burst out among them. Who can say what lives were changed as the result of a simple error?
In a way, that incident is at the heart of this story. It seems incredibly sad to me that the first people to hurry for the vaccine would fall victim to the disease. I don’t like to think how it must have haunted Dr. Salk.
This story shifts back and forth between a grim reality and a fantasy that is perhaps a bit quirky. I found it hard sometimes to leave the world of Jimmy the Giant-Slayer and go back to iron lungs and paralyzed children. It was more fun to write about the imaginary place, where a woman without a name would put on lipstick before heading off to the swamp, where facts didn’t matter so much.
But still, I wanted the fantasy world to have a truth of its own. I filled it with creatures from different mythologies, not thinking that it mattered where they came from, as I didn’t think it would have mattered to Laurie Valentine. The hunter in her imagined world was as likely to bag a hydra as a manticore, though the hydra came from Greece, the manticore from Persia. It was as if he had the whole world to travel across, and held the beliefs of all men.
I wrote with a gnome perched in front of me. He sat on the top of my monitor, a bearded man about seven inches tall, dressed in red cap and striped shirt, holding a shovel with a copper blade. He was a gift from a Swiss-born friend, Maya Carson, the person I turned to to learn about gnomes, because I thought of the little men as belonging to middle Europe.
Maya grew up with tales about gnomes, believing the creatures lived in caves, that they worked underground to care for the earth. It surprised me that her gnomes were old men, every one, with never a woman nor child among them.
I took what she said to heart, and was pleased by the way my gnomes turned out. But Maya, I think, was disappointed. Very little of what I wrote matched her childhood stories. Her gnomes cared for the earth as selflessly as Jonas Salk, taking nothing for themselves. No one would be frightened of gnomes, she said; to see one was a blessing. Even the little coveralls I’d given the creatures didn’t belong with the stories. Maya’s gnomes worked in their floppy hats and slippers, dressed just like the one on my monitor. And gnomes could never, ever share a world with trolls.
I may regret that my gnomes and other creatures are not more faithful to mythology. But they exist here as thoughts in the mind of an American girl from the 1950s. If you come away from the story thinking you’ve learned something about polio, I’ll be happy. If the gnomes don’t make sense, it’s my own fault.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people helped with the research and writing of this story. These are just a few of them:
Kathleen La
rkin of the Prince Rupert Library;
Richard Daggett of Downey, California;
Kathy O’Kane of Grande Prairie, Alberta;
Françoise Bui and everyone else at Delacorte Press, New York;
Bruce Wishart of Prince Rupert, British Columbia;
Darlene Mace of Gabriola Island, British Columbia;
Alysoun Wells of Grande Prairie, Alberta;
Kristin Miller of Gabriola Island; and all the people, wherever they’re from, who told me their own stories about polio, stories about fathers and brothers and sisters and friends.
Thank you, all of you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IAIN LAWRENCE studied journalism in Vancouver, British Columbia, and worked for small newspapers in the northern part of the province. He settled on the coast, living first in the port city of Prince Rupert and now on the Gulf Islands. His previous novels include the High Seas Trilogy: The Wreckers, The Smugglers, and The Buccaneers; and the Curse of the Jolly Stone Trilogy: The Convicts, The Castaways, and The Cannibals; as well as The Séance, Gemini Summer, B for Buster, The Lightkeeper’s Daughter, Lord of the Nutcracker Men, and Ghost Boy.
You can find out more about Iain Lawrence at www.iainlawrence.com.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Iain Lawrence
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lawrence, Iain.
The giant-slayer / Iain Lawrence.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When her eight-year-old neighbor is stricken with polio in 1955, eleven-year-old Laurie discovers that there is power in her imagination as she weaves a story during her visits with him and other patients confined to iron lung machines.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89374-2
[1. Poliomyelitis—Fiction. 2. Storytelling—Fiction. 3. Imagination—Fiction. 4. People with disabilities—Fiction. 5. Medical care—Fiction. 6. Fathers and daughters—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L43545Gid 2009
[Fic]—dc22
2008035409
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
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