how she could take things from this doctor, and my grandmother said, “Nothing is happening I do not already deserve and have not deserved for some time.”
But an achievement some months afterward that won her a feature interview in the Sunday paper as well as a biographical sketch in the next year’s edition of Busy North Carolina Women had nothing to do with the real doctor’s gratitude. She single-handedly saved five children in a backwoods family from malaria. She was called to the family’s home, a filthy cabin on a stagnant loop of the Tar River, on the evening of the Fourth of July. She had just walked back in from reprimanding our neighbor’s four children for exploding firecrackers underneath a tin tub, when Marvin Jenkins, a tall, oafish boy who came to school every three months or so, banged up the steps and shouted through the screen door into the kitchen, “I’ve come for the doctor! Come on! Everybody’s going to be dead! Mama said tell you they’re too hot!”
We knew the boy was talking about malaria, because it had been a dangerously hot summer, and we knew where and how his family lived. Every once in a while malaria roared through the lower-lying areas of this part of the state, and those with a mind to helping themselves as God commanded had long since moved to higher ground. This particular family was of the variety made famous in Tobacco Road , so one fairly easily gets the point that they suffered everything from close-breeding to ticks. My grandmother loaded her satchel, cursing the fact that she had only two quinine tablets left. Knowing she was useless sick, she swallowed them and said she would send out for more once she got to the boy’s house, and realizing the trip there would be a muddy ordeal for her, my mother and I wanted to go with her, even without quinine, but she assured us that she would be fine.
When she walked past us, we noticed her shoes were missing the laces. “They’re soaking,” she said. “I’ll keep my toes bunched.” The laces were soaking, as they were every Sunday night, in a bowl of linseed oil. By doing this, she had made them last thirty years. “My shoestrings,” she told me once, “have lasted years longer than most people can stand each other.” As we watched her climb into the rickety buggy, my mother said how worried she was that the boy wouldn’t get my grandmother to his house before dark. There was to be no moon that night, and nights on the back loop of the river were said to be darker than black, darker than the Earl of Hell himself.
My grandmother had to help the boy dig the buggy out of the river mud twice. They didn’t get to his house until after ten o’clock. She went right in and immediately confirmed five roaring cases of malaria. She had left so hurriedly that she forgot her prescription pad. When she searched the Jenkins house for a piece of paper, she found nothing. She told me later, “I looked up and I looked down, and then I looked up and I looked down again. The mother of this gang told me they never had a call for paper, and whenever they got any it was highly appreciated in the outbuilding.” What did my grandmother do? She wrote out a lengthy prescription on the side frame of the bedroom door and instructed the oldest boy to rip the piece of wood off the wall and take it to Hayes Barton and wake up the pharmacist, who lived over the store. While the boy was gone, she chastised the mother for keeping her children in a filthy hotbox, and then sent another boy to our house to collect clean linens.
The five children survived, though sorry to tell, they didn’t amount to anything worthy of the heroic effort that had been put forth to save their lives.
I kept the newspaper photograph of these recuperating children, all of them sitting up in one bed with the famous door frame displayed across their legs. For years, the piece of wood hung over the soda fountain at the Hayes Barton Pharmacy, where I ate lunch every day. On
But an achievement some months afterward that won her a feature interview in the Sunday paper as well as a biographical sketch in the next year’s edition of Busy North Carolina Women had nothing to do with the real doctor’s gratitude. She single-handedly saved five children in a backwoods family from malaria. She was called to the family’s home, a filthy cabin on a stagnant loop of the Tar River, on the evening of the Fourth of July. She had just walked back in from reprimanding our neighbor’s four children for exploding firecrackers underneath a tin tub, when Marvin Jenkins, a tall, oafish boy who came to school every three months or so, banged up the steps and shouted through the screen door into the kitchen, “I’ve come for the doctor! Come on! Everybody’s going to be dead! Mama said tell you they’re too hot!”
We knew the boy was talking about malaria, because it had been a dangerously hot summer, and we knew where and how his family lived. Every once in a while malaria roared through the lower-lying areas of this part of the state, and those with a mind to helping themselves as God commanded had long since moved to higher ground. This particular family was of the variety made famous in Tobacco Road , so one fairly easily gets the point that they suffered everything from close-breeding to ticks. My grandmother loaded her satchel, cursing the fact that she had only two quinine tablets left. Knowing she was useless sick, she swallowed them and said she would send out for more once she got to the boy’s house, and realizing the trip there would be a muddy ordeal for her, my mother and I wanted to go with her, even without quinine, but she assured us that she would be fine.
When she walked past us, we noticed her shoes were missing the laces. “They’re soaking,” she said. “I’ll keep my toes bunched.” The laces were soaking, as they were every Sunday night, in a bowl of linseed oil. By doing this, she had made them last thirty years. “My shoestrings,” she told me once, “have lasted years longer than most people can stand each other.” As we watched her climb into the rickety buggy, my mother said how worried she was that the boy wouldn’t get my grandmother to his house before dark. There was to be no moon that night, and nights on the back loop of the river were said to be darker than black, darker than the Earl of Hell himself.
My grandmother had to help the boy dig the buggy out of the river mud twice. They didn’t get to his house until after ten o’clock. She went right in and immediately confirmed five roaring cases of malaria. She had left so hurriedly that she forgot her prescription pad. When she searched the Jenkins house for a piece of paper, she found nothing. She told me later, “I looked up and I looked down, and then I looked up and I looked down again. The mother of this gang told me they never had a call for paper, and whenever they got any it was highly appreciated in the outbuilding.” What did my grandmother do? She wrote out a lengthy prescription on the side frame of the bedroom door and instructed the oldest boy to rip the piece of wood off the wall and take it to Hayes Barton and wake up the pharmacist, who lived over the store. While the boy was gone, she chastised the mother for keeping her children in a filthy hotbox, and then sent another boy to our house to collect clean linens.
The five children survived, though sorry to tell, they didn’t amount to anything worthy of the heroic effort that had been put forth to save their lives.
I kept the newspaper photograph of these recuperating children, all of them sitting up in one bed with the famous door frame displayed across their legs. For years, the piece of wood hung over the soda fountain at the Hayes Barton Pharmacy, where I ate lunch every day. On
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