June 1944
We crowded around Bobby while we waited for the ambulance. He was laying on the couch with his head on Momma’s lap, still as a stop sign. Not even his eyes was moving.
“He’s dead,” wailed Ida.
“No,” said Momma. “He’s still breathing—and feel how warm he is.”
I grabbed ahold of his hand and it was hot. But I was cold—shivering and shaking and my teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. It seemed like we was all shivering and huddling up to Bobby like he was a woodstove in the middle of winter. I forgot all about how it was a hot day.
Junior kept walking to the window to look for the ambulance and then coming back to offer us a drink of water. Or to touch Momma on the shoulder like he wanted to take Daddy’s place but didn’t know how.
And I for sure didn’t feel like the man of the house.
Finally we heard a car. Junior run to the window and said, “Somebody’s here. But it’s sure not an ambulance.”
Momma picked Bobby up and carried him out on the porch, and we all followed. Then I seen what Junior meant. It wasn’t an ambulance. It was a hearse.
Momma cried, “No! Oh, dear God, no.” She turned to go back in the house.
By that time the driver had backed up to the steps and was climbing out of the hearse. “Don’t let it scare you, ma’am,” he said. “There’s a shortage of ambulances, what with the war taking so many and now the epidemic. Sometimes this is the only way we can get a child to the polio hospital. But it can save your boy’s life just as good as an ambulance.” He opened the doors in the back, and inside was a low bed.
Junior put his hands on Momma’s shoulders and turned her around. “It’s okay,” he said.
The driver come and tried to take Bobby from Momma, but she held on tight. “Ma’am, you can come along with him. Is there anything you want to get, in case you need to stay a few days?”
Momma shook her head and I knew she wasn’t thinking straight. If she was, she wouldn’t want to be seen in her everyday dress and apron. So I run and got her pocketbook. And I grabbed her nightgown and housecoat from the nail on the back of her bedroom door. Daddy had took our suitcase off to the war, so I pulled the pillowcase off her pillow and stuffed her nightgown in it. And I threw in some underclothes and her Sunday dress and run outside.
When I got there, Momma was kneeling by Bobby in the back of that hearse, hanging on to his limp hands. I threw the pillowcase bundle to her right before the driver closed the door.
It all happened so fast that none of us said goodbye to Bobby. And even though Momma said he wasn’t dead, it sure made us feel like he was, him riding away in that hearse like that.
Junior stayed with us the rest of the day and helped us dig the potatoes. I would’ve let them rot in the ground if he hadn’t been there to nag at me. Then he hoed weeds.
I couldn’t force myself to cook supper, so I just poured a bowl of corn flakes for everybody. Nobody but Junior had an appetite. He tried to cheer us up by playing a game of pretend.
“Let’s pretend we’re going to Hollywood,” he said.
Hollywood is the last place I’d expect Junior Bledsoe to want to go. But I reckon he thought us girls would like the idea.
“Let’s pretend we can see anybody famous that we want to,” he said. “Who do you want to see, Ida?”
Ida twirled her spoon through her cereal. “Bobby,” she said. “I wanna see Bobby.”
“Oh,” said Junior. “But what about a movie star? Which movie star do you want to see?”
Ida just stared. “I don’t wanna see no movie stars.”
“Sure you do,” said Junior with an extra helping of cheer in his voice. “Oh, I know—you want to see Shirley Temple, don’t you?”
Ida picked up her spoon and held it out in front of her. She turned the spoon sideways and watched as the corn flakes and milk dribbled off and plopped into her bowl.
Junior give up on Ida then and turned to Ellie. “What about you? Let’s pretend Shirley Temple is standing there with her head full of curls, cute as anything, right in front of you. What would you say to her?”
Ellie slumped back in her chair and folded her arms. She didn’t say a word.
“Well,” said Junior, “I see I’m on my own here. Okay then, let’s pretend we all go to Hollywood and suddenly, right there in front us, is James Cagney. Now wouldn’t that be a Yankee Doodle Dandy?”
For some reason Junior is real keen on James Cagney. And he knew me and Peggy Sue seen him in the movie Yankee Doodle Dandy. But Junior was wrong if he thought a movie star could take my mind off of Bobby and what I done to him.
I got up and put my bowl of cereal in the refrigerator. “Let’s pretend Bobby’s not sick,” I said. “Let’s pretend you ain’t sitting there acting like everything is all hunky-dory dandy. If we pretend, will that make it true?”
Junior dropped his spoon in his bowl and said, “I’m sorry, Ann Fay. I was just trying to help.”
“Well, don’t,” I said. “On account of it ain’t working.”
I went outside on the back steps and stared at the johnny house, wishing a miracle would step out that door.
Instead, Junior come to the screen door behind me. “I reckon I’ll be getting on home,” he said. “But I’ll be back in the morning.”
“Don’t worry about us,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” Which was a lie if I ever told one.
Of course, there was no point in telling Junior not to come back. The next morning he was on our front porch, calling my name. I was drawing water from the well and wondering how in the world my momma and Bobby was doing. “I’m out back,” I yelled.
He come around the side of the house with a small crock in his hand. “Momma sent you some bread pudding,” he said. “She’s sorry it’s not sweeter, but we’re out of sugar till we pick it up at the ration board today. I got the starter fixed, so the truck is ready whenever you are.” He handed me the crock and finished cranking the water bucket up out of the well.
I took the bread pudding inside and let the screen door slam behind me. “I don’t think I’ll go for sugar,” I said. “I might not can blackberries after all.”
Junior followed me inside and poured the bucket of water into our water crock on the kitchen cabinet. “Don’t start talking like that,” he said. “According to the papers, this is our last allotment of sugar for canning this year. I’d pick it up for you except you have to be there in person with your ration book. I’ll help you pick them berries, but you gotta do your part. You can’t just stop living.”
“I don’t wanna pick blackberries,” I said. “I don’t wanna can them and I don’t wanna buy sugar. I just wanna go to the emergency hospital and see Bobby.”
“Well, Ann Fay, I know how you must feel. But according to the radio they got the police over there keeping people away from that hospital. The best thing you can do for Bobby is pick those berries and fix him some blackberry cobbler the minute he comes home. So get your overalls on.”
He just had to mention them overalls.
I knew if it wasn’t for Junior I would just run off through the woods and stay out of the garden and the blackberry patch too. But there was work to do and I was the man of the house. So I put on my overalls.
Just then I heard a car pull up outside, and both me and Junior went running to see if it was Momma and Bobby back from the hospital. But two women got out of the shiny black car. The tall woman in the plaid dress spoke up. “I’m Dr. Dorothy Horstmann.” Then she nodded toward the other woman. “And this is Frances Allen, your public health nurse.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m Ann Fay Honeycutt.”
“Ann Fay, I’m an epidemiologist from Yale Medical School,” Dr. Horstmann said. “I study diseases, especially polio.”
“I know,” I said. “I seen you in the papers.”
“Then you know we work at the emergency hospital,” she continued. “We looked in on your brother this morning. He’s breathing easily with the help of an iron lung.”
An iron lung! All of a sudden I couldn’t catch my breath.
I think that Frances Allen woman seen it too. “Oh, don’t let the iron lung worry you,” she said. “Right now, it’s keeping him alive until he can breathe for himself again.”
That give me some hope, so I asked, “Is he gonna get better?”
She squeezed my shoulder and said, “He has good doctors, some of the best in the country. Even one of the doctors from the president’s Warm Springs polio rehabilitation center is at the hospital.”
Dr. Horstmann give me a letter from my momma. She waited while I read it.
Dear Ann Fay,
I just can’t leave Bobby here alone. He’s too little and he’s very sick. I can’t get close to him yet, but I can stand outside the door of his ward and wave to him.
The hospital needs my help too. I’m working in the kitchen. I know I can count on you to take care of the girls. And Junior and Bessie will help, too.
Remember the man who gave us money at the train station? He volunteers at the emergency hospital. He invited me to stay with his family as long as I need to. I wouldn’t have the gas coupons to go back and forth every day, but he lives nearby. Him and his wife want to help as much as possible because of their little girl, who had polio.
Their phone number is 0577. If I don’t come home by Thursday, I want you to go to the Hinkles’ around 7:00 in the morning and call me. I’ll be free then and I’ll tell you how Bobby is doing. You and the girls say a prayer for him.
All my love,
Momma
Thursday morning! It was just Friday now. How could I wait till Thursday? It almost killed me to think Momma could be gone that long.
Dr. Horstmann didn’t give me no time to worry about seeing Momma or Bobby. She told me she and Nurse Allen was going to examine our house and ask lots of questions. They needed to find out how Bobby caught the disease.
I spent the morning answering questions for them strangers. They wanted to know what kind of milk we drunk and where our toilet facilities was. They asked me who Bobby had seen or touched or played with in the last couple of weeks. They went through every room in the house taking notes.
I hadn’t washed a single dish since yesterday morning, and the chamber pot hadn’t been emptied either. Not only that—one of the girls had left the lid off of the chamber pot and there was flies crawling over it like ants on a jelly biscuit.
I put the lid on quick, hoping those women wouldn’t notice. But they did. They even set up a trap to catch them flies. Dr. Horstmann explained to me how the poliovirus had been found on flies and trapping them would help her research.
The twins was both awake by now and hanging on to Junior like he was their daddy.
“Which one of you left the lid off of the chamber pot?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting either one of them to admit to it. I just wanted them women to know we don’t make it a habit to live like that.
But how could I make them understand? When your baby brother gets hauled off in a hearse with the most dreaded disease in the country, all on account of you making him work till he dropped, you just can’t make yourself do all the things you do any other day.
Before those women inspected our johnny house, I told them, “Don’t worry. It’s clean. My momma takes disinfectant and a broom to it once a week. She scrubs it top to bottom.” I felt bad that these women wasn’t getting a true impression of my momma’s housekeeping. And I was sure glad Momma wasn’t there to see how I had let it go.
As soon as them women was gone, a health officer come and hammered a sign on the front door.
INFANTILE PARALYSIS
IN QUARANTINE
I tell you what’s the truth. When I looked at that polio sign next to the blue star flag Momma hung up there for Daddy being a soldier, I felt like I was looking down a doublebarrel shotgun—and fixing to get blowed all to pieces.
“How many people live here?” the health officer asked.
“Just me and my two sisters,” I said. “Momma went to the hospital with my brother. My daddy’s off fighting in the war.”
The health officer looked at Junior. “You a neighbor?”
“Yes, sir,” said Junior. “You passed right by my house coming in.”
“Well,” said the man, “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave. Only family members are allowed in this house.”
Well, I could tell Junior Bledsoe wasn’t going to take that sitting down. He stuck his thumbs under the clasps on his overalls and said, “Sir, these girls’ momma and daddy didn’t have no choice in the matter. But I’ll be dad-gummed if I’m going to run off and leave them too.”
The officer said, “Well, it’s the law. So you really don’t have any choice either. I’ll drop you off at your house on the way out.”
Junior started to argue, but I jumped in. “Aw, go on, Junior,” I said. “I can take care of the girls and you know it. What do you think my daddy give me these overalls for? I’m the man of the house now.”
I winked at Junior when the man wasn’t looking, so he could see I knew him well enough to realize he’d be back—as soon as that man was out of sight.
Before they left, the man turned to me and said, “I can see you’re a strong young woman. That’s good, because I’m going to ask you to do one of the hardest things you’ve ever done.”
He took my arm and pulled me aside—away from Ida and Ellie—and spoke real low so they couldn’t hear what he was saying. “I need you to wash every blanket and towel in the house. And all of your brother’s clothes. Scrub the house. Anything your brother touched could have the germs.”
The man took a deep breath and lowered his voice even more. “And here’s the hard part. Your brother’s toys must be destroyed. I want you to burn them. It’s the only way to get rid of the germs. It’s the only way to protect your little sisters. Understand?”
I think I nodded at him. I guess I agreed. I must have. Because it seems like he patted me on the back and said, “Good, I know you can do it. I’ll check back on you tomorrow.” Then him and Junior got in his car and drove off.
When they was gone, I tried to talk myself into burning Bobby’s toys. But I didn’t get around to it for the rest of the day. There’s never a good time to do something like that, especially with two little girls watching your every move. So I started scrubbing down the house and washing all the clothes and towels and sheets, which I didn’t nearly get done before Junior come and took us to the ration board for our sugar.
When we was almost there, it hit me and Junior that I wasn’t even supposed to go because of the quarantine. But I knew I had to show my own ration stamps, and so far nobody besides us and Junior knew anything about that quarantine sign, so I decided to go in quick and leave quick. I made the girls stay in the car.
While I waited in line for the sugar, I studied the war posters lined up on the wall. They was all about stuff I should be doing to help the war effort—plant Victory gardens, buy war bonds, and give my cooking grease to the butcher so he could give it to the army to make explosives. And that was just the beginning.
It seemed like you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing Victory posters. They used to make me feel proud and helpful. I wanted to do what they said because it made me feel like I was helping to win the war. But today, just looking at a picture of a soldier and the words DO THE JOB HE LEFT BEHIND drained the last bit of energy right out of me.
All the way home, I hung on to that sack of sugar like it was my sweet daddy.