Time Travel Omnibus, page 922
My sister Ethel did something wrong in the game. Usually I would have been out fishing from before sunup until after dark with a few breaks during the day when I’d have to come back to the house. Breakfast was always made by my grandfather—who had a field holler that carried a mile, which he would let out from the back porch when breakfast was ready, and I’d come reluctantly back from the Big Pond. My grandfather used a third of a pound of coffee a day, and he percolated it for at least fifteen minutes—you could stand a spoon up in it. Then lunch, which in the South is called dinner, when my aunt would come out from her job in town and eat with me and my sister, my grandmother, and any cousins, uncles, or kin who dropped by (always arranged ahead of time, I’m sure), then supper, the evening meal, after my grandfather got home. Usually I went fishing after that, too, until it got too dark to see and the water moccasins came out.
But this morning we were playing croquet and it was still cool so I must have come back from fishing for some reason and been snookered into playing croquet.
“Hey! You can’t do that!” I yelled at my sister.
“Do what?” she yelled back.
“Whatever you just did!” I said.
“I didn’t do anything!” she yelled.
“You children please be quiet,” yelled my grandmother from her bed by the window.
“You cheated!” I yelled at my sister.
“I did not!” she hollered back.
One thing led to another and my sister hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet about as hard as a six-year-old can hit. I went down in a heap near a wicket. I sat up, grabbed the blue croquet ball, and threw it as hard as I could into my sister’s right kneecap. She went down screaming.
My grandmother was now standing outside the screen door on the porch (which rich people called a verandah) in her housecoat.
“I asked you children to be quiet, please,” she said.
“You shut up!” said my sister, holding her knee and crying.
My forehead had swelled up to the size of an apple.
My grandmother moved like the wind then, like Roger Bannister who had just broken the four-minute mile. Suddenly there was a willow switch in her hand and she had my sister’s right arm and she was tanning her hide with the switch.
So here was my sister, screaming in two kinds of pain and regretting the invention of language and my grandmother was saying with every movement of her arm, “Don’t-you-ever-tell-me-to-shut-up-young-lady!”
She left her in a screaming pile and went back into the house and lay down to start dying some more.
I was well-pleased, with the casual cruelty of childhood, that I would never-ever-in-my-wildest-dreams ever tell my grandmother to shut up.
I got up, picked up my rod and tackle box, and went back over the hill to the Big Pond, which is what I would rather have been doing than playing croquet anyway.
That night my sister got what we thought was a cold, in the middle of July.
Next day, she was in the hospital with polio.
My aunt Noni had had a best friend who got poliomyelitis when they were nine, just after WWI, about the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt had gotten his. (Roosevelt had been president longer than anybody, through the Depression the grownups were always talking about, and WWII, which was the exciting part of the history books you never got to in school. He’d died at the end of the war, more than a year before I was born. Then the president had been Truman, and now it was Ike.) My aunt knew what to do and had Ethel in the hospital quick. It probably saved my sister’s life, and at least saved her from an iron lung, if it were going to be that kind of polio.
You can’t imagine how much those pictures in newsreels scared us all—rows of kids, only their heads sticking out of what looked like long tubular industrial washing machines. Polio attacked many things; it could make it so you couldn’t breathe on your own—the iron lung was alternately a hypo- and hyperbaric chamber—it did the work of your diaphragm. This still being in vacuum-tube radio times, miniaturization hadn’t set in, so the things weighed a ton. They made noises like breathing, too, which made them even creepier.
If you were in one, there was a little mirror over your head (you were lying down) where you could look at yourself; you couldn’t look anywhere else.
Normally that summer we would have gone, every three days or so, with our aunt back to town after dinner and gone to the swimming pool in town. But it was closed because of the polio scare, and so was the theater. (They didn’t want young people congregating in one place so the disease could quickly spread.) So what you ended up with was a town full of bored school kids and teenagers out of school for the summer with nothing to do. Not what a Baptist town really cares for.
Of course you could swim in a lake or something. But the nearest lake was miles out of town. If you couldn’t hitch a ride or find someone to drive you there, you were S.O.L. You could go to the drive-ins for movies. The nearest one was at the edge of the next county—again you needed someone with wheels, although once there you could sit on top of the car and watch the movie, leaving the car itself to the grownups or older teenage brothers and sisters. (They’d even taken away the seats in front of the snack bar where once you could sit like in a regular theater, only with a cloud of mosquitoes eating you all up—again because of polio.)
Me, I had fishing and I didn’t care. Let the town wimps stew in their own juices.
But that was all before my sister made polio up close and personal in the family and brought back memories to my aunt.
But Aunt Noni became a ball of fire.
I couldn’t go into the hospital to see my sister, of course—even though I had been right there when she started getting sick. Kids could absolutely not come down to the polio ward. This was just a small county hospital with about forty beds, but it also had a polio ward with two iron lungs ready to go, such was the fear in those days.
My aunt took me to the hospital one day, anyway. She had had a big picture-frame mirror with her, from her house.
“She’s propped up on pillows and can’t move much,” my aunt said. “But I think we can get her to see you.”
“Stay out here in the parking lot and watch that window,” she said. She pointed to one of the half-windows in the basement. I stayed out there until I saw my aunt waving in the window. I waved back.
Then my aunt came out and asked, “Did you see her?”
“I saw you.”
“She saw you,” she said. “It made her happy.” Yeah, I thought, the guy who kneecapped her with the croquet ball.
“I don’t know why,” I said.
Then Aunt Noni gave me some of my weekly allowance that my parents mailed to her in installments.
I took off to the drugstore like a bullet. I bought a cherry-lime-chocolate coke at the fountain, and a Monster of Frankenstein, a Plastic Man, and an Uncle Scrooge comic book. That took care of forty of my fifty cents. A whole dime, and nowhere to spend it. If it would have been open, and this had been a Saturday, when we usually got our allowance, I would have used the dime to go to the movies and seen eight cartoons, a Three Stooges short, a newsreel, a chapter of a serial, some previews, and a double feature: some SF flick and a Guy Madison movie if I was lucky, a couple of Westerns if I wasn’t.
But it was a weekday, and I went back to the office where my aunt Noni was the Jill-of-all-trades plus secretary for a one-man business for forty-seven years (it turned out). It was upstairs next to the bank. Her boss, Mr. Jacks, lived in the biggest new house in town (until, much later, the new doctor in town built a house out on the highway modeled on Elvis’ Graceland). Mr. Jacks’ house, as fate would have it, was situated on a lot touching my aunt’s, only set one house over and facing the other street back.
He wasn’t in; he usually wasn’t in the office when I was there. Aunt Noni was typing like a bunny, a real blur from the wrists down. She was the only one in the family who’d been to college. (Much later I would futz around in one for five years without graduating.) She could read, write, and speak Latin, like I later could. She read books. She had the librarian at the Carnegie Library in town send off to Montgomery for books on polio; they’d arrived while I was having the Coca-Cola comic book orgy and she’d gone to get them when the librarian had called her. There was a pile on the third chair in the office.
I was sitting in the second one.
“I want to know,” she said as she typed without looking at her shorthand pad or the typewriter, “enough so that I’ll know if someone is steering me wrong on something. I don’t want to know enough to become pedantic—”
“Huh?” I asked.
She nodded toward the big dictionary on the stand by the door.
I dutifully got up and went to it.
“P-?”
“P-E-D-A,” said my aunt, still typing.
I looked it up. “Hmmm,” I said. “Okay.” Then I sat back down.
“They’re talking like she won’t walk again without braces or crutches. That’s what they told my friend Frances in nineteen and twenty-one,” she said. “You see her motorboatin’ all around town now. She only limps a little when she gets really tired and worn out.”
Frances worked down at the dress shop. She looked fine except her right leg was a little thinner than her left.
“My aim is to have your sister walking again by herself by next summer.”
“Will it happen?”
“If I have anything to do with it, it will,” said Aunt Noni.
I never felt so glum about the future as I did sitting there in my aunt’s sunny office that July afternoon. What if she were wrong? What if my sister Ethel never walked again? What would her life be like? Who the hell would I play croquet with, in Alabama in the summer, if not her, when I wasn’t fishing?
Of course, a year later, the Salk vaccine was developed and tried out and started the end of polio. And a couple of years after that came the Sabin oral vaccine, which they gave to you on sugar cubes and which tasted like your grandfather’s old hunting socks smelled, which really ended the disease.
We didn’t know any of that then. And the future didn’t help my sister any right then.
My parents had of course taken off work and driven from Texas at the end of the first week; there were many family conferences to which the me part of the family was not privy. My parents went to see her and stayed at the hospital.
What was decided was that my sister was to remain in Alabama with my grandparents for the next year and that I was to return to my dead hometown in Texas with my parents and somegoddamnhow survive the rest of the summer there.
My sister Ethel would be enrolled in school in Alabama, provided she was strong enough to do the schoolwork. So I fished the Big Pond and the Little Pond one last time, till it was too dark to see and the bass lost interest in anything in the tackle box, and I went over the low hill to my grandparents’ house, robbed of a summer.
Next morning we got the car packed, ready to return to Texas, a fourteenhour drive in a Flathead 6 1952 Ford. Then we stopped by the hospital. Aunt Noni was already there, her purple Kaiser parked by the front door. My parents went in; after a while Aunt Noni waved at the window, then I saw a blur in the mirror and a shape and I waved and waved and jumped up and down with an enthusiasm I did not feel. Then I got in the car and we went back to Texas.
Somehow, I did live through that summer.
One of the things that got me through it was the letters my aunt took down from my sister and typed up. The first couple were about the hospital, till they let her go, and then about what she could see from the back room of my grandparents’ house.
We’d usually only gone to Alabama for the summer, and sometimes rushed trips at Christmas, where we were in the car fourteen hours (those days the Interstate Highway System was just a gleam in Ike’s eye—so he could fight a two-front war and not be caught short moving stuff from one coast to the other like they had in the Korean War when he was running Columbia University in NYC). We stayed at our grandparents’ places Christmas Eve and on Christmas morning and then drove fourteen hours back home just in time for my parents to go to work the day after Christmas.
So I’d never seen Alabama in the fall or the spring. My sister described the slow change from summer to fall there after school started (in Texas it was summer till early October, and you had the leaves finish falling off the trees the third week of December and new buds coming out the second week of January.) She wrote of the geese she heard going over on the Mississippi flyway.
She complained about the schoolwork; in letters back to her I complained about school itself: the same dorks were the same dorks, the same jerks the same jerks, the same bullies still bullies. And that was third grade. Then, you always think it’s going to change the next year, until you realize: these jerks are going to be the same ones I’m stuck with the rest of their lives. (As “Scoop” Jackson the senator would later say—it’s hard to turn fifty-five and realize the world is being run by people you used to beat up in the fourth grade.)
Third grade was the biggest grind of my life. My sister was finding Alabama second grade tough too; there was no Alamo, no Texas-undersix-flags. In Alabama there was stealing land from the Choctaws and Cherokees, there was the cotton gin and slavery, there was the War for Southern Independence, and then there was the boll weevil. That was about it. No Deaf Smith, no Ben Milam, no line drawn in the dirt with the sword, no last battle of the Civil War fought by two detachments who didn’t know the war was over six weeks after Appomattox; no Spindletop, no oil boom, no great comic-book textbook called Texas History Movies which told you everything in a casually racist way but which you remembered better than any textbook the rest of your life.
I told her what I was doing (reading comics, watching TV) and what I caught in the city park pond or the creek coming out of it. It was the fifties in Texas. There was a drought; the town well had gone dry, and they were digging a lake west of town which, at the current seven inches of rain a year, would take twenty-two years to fill up, by which time we’d all be dead.
I told her about the movies I’d seen once the town’s lone theater had opened back up. (There were three drive-ins: one in the next town west, with a great neon cowboy round-up scene on the back of the screen, facing the highway—one guy strummed a green neon guitar, a red neon fire burned at the chuck wagon, a vaquero twirled a pink neon lasso; one at the west edge of our town; and one near the next town to the east.)
Anyway, I got and wrote at least one letter a week to and from my sister, my aunt wrote separate letters to me and my parents, they called each other at least once a week.
Somehow, Christmas dragged its ass toward the school year; my parents decided we’d go to Alabama during the break and see my sister and try to have a happy holiday.
My sister was thinner and her eyes were shinier. She looked pretty much the same except her left leg was skinny. She was propped up in bed. Everybody made a big fuss over her all the time. There was a pile of Christmas presents for her out under the tree in the screened-in hall that would choke a mastodon.
I was finally in her room with no one else there.
“Bored, huh?” I asked.
“There’s too many people playing the damned fool around here for me to get bored,” she said.
“I mean, outside of Christmas?”
“Well, yeah. The physical therapist lady comes twice a day usually and we go through that rigmarole.”
“I hope people got you lots of books,” I said.
“I’ve read so many books I can’t see straight, Bubba.”
“Have you read All About Dinosaurs?” I asked.
“No.”
“I’ve got my copy with me. You can read it but I gotta have it back before we leave. I stood in a Sears and Roebuck store in Fort Worth for six hours once while they shipped one over from the Dallas warehouse. The last truck came in and the book wasn’t there. They were out and didn’t know it. I’d saved up my allowance for four weeks! Without movies or comic books! I told anybody who would listen about it. A week later one came in the mail. Aunt Noni heard the story and ordered it for me.”
“Bless her heart.”
“I’m real sorry all this happened, Sis,” I said, before I knew I was saying it. “I wish we hadn’t fought the day before you got sick.”
“What? What fight?”
“The croquet game. You hit me.”
“You hit me!” she said.
“No. You backsassed Mamaw. She hit you.”
“Yes she did,” said my sister Ethel.
“Anyway, I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
I really was going to talk to her more but some damnfool uncle came in wearing his hat upside down to make her laugh.
My sister grew up and walked again, and except for a slight limp and a sometime windmilling foot (like my aunt’s friend Frances when she was very tired), she got around pretty well, even though she lost most of a year of her life in that bed in Alabama.
I remember walking with her the first day of school when she had come back to Texas and was starting third grade.
“Doing okay?” I asked. We lived three whole blocks from school then, but I wanted her to take it slow and not get too tired.
“Yeah. Sure,” she said.
I remember the day they handed out the permission forms for the Salk polio vaccine, which was a big shot with a square needle in the meat of your arm. My sister laughed and laughed. “Oh, bitter irony!” she said “Oh, ashes and dust!”
“Yeah,” I said, “well . . .”
“Have Mom and Pop sign yours twice,” she said. “At least it’ll do you some good.”
“Once again, Sis, I’m sorry.”
“Tell that to the school nurse,” she said.
At some point, when we were in our late teens, we were having one of those long philosophical discussions brothers and sisters have when neither has a date and you’re too damned tired from the school week to get up off your butt and go out and do something on your own and the public library closed early. Besides, your folks are yelling at each other in their bedroom.
