The House Near the River (18 page)

Unlike the last time she’d spent the night outside the house, she slept well and without the memory of dreams. She’d brushed her teeth and washed her face and was thinking about breakfast when she
started
to notice the flashes again. She had begun to learn that she could tune them out, lessening the pull they had on her by her own will. What caught her attention this morning was the familiarity of the scenes she was seeing. She saw Clemmie in her garden, then the children, Shirley Kay and Anna playing with their dolls on the porch, Sharon and Danny throwing a ball between them.

She poured still warm coffee from her thermos and
,
sipping it
,
continued to watch. Then she saw Matthew and sat frozen as he, a long dirty sack strapped over his shoulder, grasped boll after boll of fluffy cotton into capable hands, steadily filling the sack. But the field wasn’t here at the farm, the soil was black, not red, and the workers around him were not familiar to her.

She started toward him, calling his name, when another opening appeared on her other side. “Clemmie wept silently over the bedside of a child, who tossed restlessly,
his
face blushed red with fever and
his
eyes wild with delusion
. Danny! Danny was dying.

When she glanced back at the other image, Matthew was gone and only the gray sky of an October afternoon backed up the crumbling house. She willed herself to sustain the continuing vision of the sick child and flung herself into it, stepping into the front bedroom of Grandma’s house to where the scent of fever and illness was in the air.

Clemmie cried out wordlessly at the sight of her, then grasped her in a fierce hug. “Oh, Ange, if you only knew how I prayed for you to come.”

Angie hugged her back, “What’s wrong with Danny?” she whispered, though it was obvious that no sound could reach the boy who appeared to be out of his mind with fever.

“What’s wrong with all of them? The children are all sick. The doctor says it’s food poisoning and he’s doing what he can.”

“Why aren’t they in the hospital?”

“It’s so far, Ange, and they’re too sick to be moved. The girls are in the other bedroom, but Danny’s the worst. He doesn’t even know me.”

Desperately Angie told herself they’d all live. Gran
dma
had survived to old age, back in Michigan
Shirley Kay
was still alive, calling herself
Kay.
They’d said
Anna
had passed away in her middle years and that Danny was gone, but she’d had the impression he’d lived to be an adult.

But were those fixed facts or could they be changed?

“Tobe has to work and though the doctor thinks it’s food poisoning, he said to keep everybody out in case it is contagious.” Her eyes widened in horror. “You shouldn’t be here, Ange. Get out before it’s too late.”

“I’m here, Clemmie. It’s already too late and anyway, you must have help to c
are
for the children.”

Clemmie looked as though she were about to protest further, but Angie ignored her, insisting on seeing the girls. They greeted her
weakly but with joy from their bed in the room
she’d shared with David. She wa
s relieved that though pale and weak
looking, they by no means appeared to be as sick as Danny.

She hugged them and asked Clemmie about their symptoms. She sure wasn’t medically trained, but the decades in which she’d lived had shown considerable development in knowledge. Maybe something she knew could help here.

“Throwing up and well, coming out the other end as well. Can’t keep a thing down ‘til I’m afraid to urge them to eat.”

Sharon looked sick at the idea of food while Anna made gagging sounds. “I’m hungry,” Shirley Kay said.

“She throws up, then wants to eat,” Clemmie explained ruefully.

Angie looked for signs of dehydration, pinching their arms lightly, checking their gums for loss of color. As best she could judge, they didn’t seem to be too badly dehydrated.

“How long have they been sick?” she asked.

“Just since yesterday,” their mother said. “I was afraid that meat was a little off, but Tobe thought it would be all right. He didn’t want to waste it.”

“Did you all eat the same thing?”

“Not Tobe, he had to hurry off because of a call, but I did.”

“And you weren’t sick?”

“A little. Not so much as the girls and Danny couldn’t eat a bite he was already so sick. I was sure the girls were getting what Danny had and made Tobe bring the doctor out. He said food poisoning and they’d be better soon.”

“You told him Danny was already sick and he hadn’t eaten with the rest of you?”

She nodded. “But he wasn’t so bad then, he got worse last night
. And with all of them being sick . . .”

“It can be really confusing if everybody’s sick, like in a flu
epidemic
, What if the symptoms seem s
imilar, only it’s something else?”

“Flu?” Clemmie asked. “Bad flu like after the old war. People died of that flu. My aunt’s whole family died.”

Angie didn’t think this was flu. She went back to where Danny lay half out of his mind and groaning with pain. Gently she  touched his tight stomach with one finger and he screamed. It hurt that bad.

“It could be appendicitis. We’ve got to get him to a surgeon.”

Clemmie met her eyes. She knew as well as Angie what appendicitis meant.
“Sick as he is, it may be about to rupture.”

“I’ll call Tobe. He’ll get us to town.”

“Call him?”

“He has to have a phone because of his job, so he had one put in.”

Angi
e
could only hope they could get through on it. She followed Clemmie into the living room and watched while she cranked the phone, then yelled into it, “Sarah, this is Clemmie. Get the sheriff’s office for me. It’s an eme
r
gency.”

She had to repeat the message three times before the operator understood and then she was unable to talk directly to her husband
’s office
. The operator had to communicate the message.

Finally she hung up. “They’re sending a radio message to Tobe. He’s not too far away.”

Then Clemmie raced back to Danny’s side, Angie following. The boy must be in torment, Angie thought. He moaned constantly with pain. She just hoped he lasted long enough to get to a hospital, long enough for surgery.

“I’ll have to stay here with the girls,” she decided. “While you go with Danny.”

“No,” Clemmie was emphatic. “I’m taking them all with me. They’re sick too, I w
on’t
leave them out here.”

Angie wanted to argue, but she saw by looking into the other woman’s face that this was not a debatable subject. Anyway, Clemmie might be right. Sick as the girls were they might become dangerously dehydrated.

They wrapped the kids in blankets and Clemmie whispered to the sick girls that they were going to the doctor. There was no use trying to explain to Danny, he was beyond understanding.

Angie
w
ondered when penicillin came into common use. Sometime in the 40s, she remembered, but when? She had no doubt that the availability of the drug meant the difference in whether Danny had a chance at life. If he could survive surgery. If she was right about what was wrong with him.

She seemed to remember that it had been used during the war, but that sure didn’t mean it was available in a dinky little hospital out in the middle of nowhere just a little over a year after the war ended.

They heard the scream of a siren and Clemmie stayed with Danny while Angie ran to the door to see the sheriff’s car tearing up the driveway. Tobe glanced at her in surprise, but didn’t bother to ask questions as he raced into the house, took one look at Danny, nodded at his wife, then lifted the boy into his arm. While he was settling Danny
,
who twisted and cried out
,
in
to
the back seat, Angie and Clemmie carried the  girls out. Clemmie got in back with Danny while Angie sat in the front passenger seat with
one
girl on her lap and the other two bunched at her sides. Shirley Kay started vomiting again from the movement
and Anna
soon joined her. Only Sharon sat still and white, but not vomiting.

The air sour around her as she moped up with the towels she’d brought with her and
Danny moaning with pain
, it was the most torturous trip Angie had even taken. Tobe kept his siren on the whole way, moving through light traffic as they entered  town
, his face set in lines of stone. Clemmie murmured soft, meaningless words of comfort to her suffering children even after they came to a stop at the hospital.

Angie looked at the hospital and her heart dropped.

It didn’t
look like any hospital she’d ever seen. A one-story wood frame building,
it
appeared more like a
large plain house that was beginning to go a little shabby. A sign out front proclaimed it as the Dr. Taylor Jones Hospital.

“Is this the best hospital in town?” she asked.

“Only hospital,” Tobe corrected. He picked up a now silent Danny from the back
seat and Angie feared the boy was dead. Clemmie followed him while Angie waited in the car with the girls, hoping that the help Tobe promised to send would come soon.

Two young men who looked more like maintenance than medical staff came out and carried the older girls inside, while she followed with Shirley Kay. The only thing she could find to be grateful about was that David wasn’t here to be sick with the rest of the children.

Inside she saw no sign of Danny or the two adult family members and her
inquiry
only produced the respond that the little boy was being seen to while the girls were put
to bed in a shared hospital room
. No doctor came to examine them and she was told that Dr. Jones was busy with Danny. Appa
r
ently he was the only doctor available and Angie’s heart sank. For all she knew it was already too late for Danny, but she was almost certain the only hope for the boy was the services of a skilled surgeon.

She heard a siren out front and then a nurse came into the room, telling her Clemmie wanted her. When Shirley Kay protested her departure, the nurse joined the one already seeing that the girls were washed and dressed in clean gowns
in
looking after them
. “Clemmie needs you,” she said. “We’ll see to these little ones.” When Angie still hesitated, she said, “Clemmie went to school with me. We’re old friends. She knows she can trust her little girls to me.”

Angie nodded and went off in the direction the nurse indicated with a pointing finger. As she hurried down the hall, the heard the sound of a siren starting up outside and wondered if that was Tobe in his car.

She found Clemmie at the end of the hall with a short, rather round man in a white coat. “This is my sister-in-law,” a white-faced
Clemmie
introduced her
with lips that trembled. “This is Dr. Jones, Angie.”

The little man nodded and Angie ignored the fact that Clemmie had changed her relationship to the family. The woman was obviously in shock.

“You were right, Angie. He thinks its appendicitis.”

“If he has a chance, Mrs. Harper, it’s because you insisted on getting him here. It looks like the
appendix has ruptured, his whole body is poisoned. I’ve done plenty of these surgeries myself, but I’d prefer a specialist. There is a young surgeon in the next town who is really skilled and the sheriff is going to fetch him while we get Danny ready.”

“How much time does he have?”

The doctor hesitated, looking at Clemmie. “We won’t give up yet, Mrs. Harper.”

“Do you have penicillin?”

He frowned at her.

“Well, do you?”

He nodded.
“We’re already administering it, but I won’t lie to you, the boy is in bad condition.”

“Still in terrible pain.”
             
  
“Not for long. We’re getting ready to put him under the ether.”

She went limp with fear. Why had she come back here for this tragedy? Nothing she could do would change the fact that the boy was going to be operated on under primitive conditions for a medical situation that might have cost his
life
even in the 2000s.

At least they had penicillin. She remembered that back in the beginning it had been called the miracle drug. Well, they certainly ne
eded a miracle along about now.

The doctor left them and she guided the trembling Clemmie to a chair. “My girls?” she asked.

“Well taken care of.”

“Mary Lou and I were in grade school together. She’s a good nurse.”

Angie nodded, understanding that she was talking about the nurse who had sent her down here.