I spent the afternoon dodging rain showers as I collected donations. I drove to the houses on the list I was given and gathered sheets and blankets, towels and hot plates, dishes and glasses and any other sundry items that would fit in the Cadillac—which I drove with great care. Then I brought the donations to the fledgling hospital and stored them in the freshly built cupboards of the two new pine wards. Each time I arrived at the hospital, I was astonished by the progress. The new switchboard was in. Therapy tubs were being set up. The sewer lines were functional. Fire hydrants had been installed on the grounds. Men carried in dozens of donated beds and cribs, lining the walls of the wards with them. Businessmen and carpenters, lawyers and plumbers—so many volunteers!—mucked through the mud, carried wood, cut down green trees as the donated lumber ran out, and hammered on the roof of the building that would eventually become the kitchen. All of them were working toward one end: getting the Emergency Infantile Paralysis Hospital up and running as quickly as possible.
I was amazed by the generosity of my Hickory neighbors as I drove from house to house. People scoured their homes for items they could share. They helped me load things into the car and thanked me for volunteering. Even people who were obviously struggling to make ends meet gave what they could, as well as those households with blue stars—and in one case, a gold star—hanging in their windows. Surely their minds were on their own families and not Catawba County’s sick children, but still they gave. Nearly everyone shared a story of a friend or acquaintance from another part of the country who had been touched in some way by polio. In one afternoon, I discovered something I hadn’t learned in my five difficult months in Hickory: the town was full of generous, compassionate people. My experience of Hickory had been limited to the Kraft family’s small circle of judgmental friends who’d seen me as a manipulative interloper. The majority of the townspeople were nothing like that at all.
* * *
It was possible, I discovered, to perspire even in the rain, and I was both sweaty, rain-soaked, and exhausted by four o’clock when I pulled the Cadillac up to one of the new wards and began unloading a batch of donations. I carried an armful of linens into the building and headed for the cupboards, where I found Ruth’s friend Mrs. Wilding, the woman whose niece was a nurse. I almost didn’t recognize her in capris and a sleeveless yellow blouse. She was checking the plug on one of the donated hot plates.
“Hello, Tess.” She smiled at me. “I heard you were collecting donations today too.”
“Yes.” I returned her smile as I set the linens on one of the cupboard shelves and brushed the sweat from my eyes. “Who knew it would be such hot, wet work?”
“That’s why I’m dressed this way,” she said. “I don’t ordinarily go out of the house like this, but really! You must be stifling in those nylons.”
“I am,” I admitted. A dozen times that afternoon, I’d thought about stopping home to change into something more comfortable, but I hadn’t wanted to take the time.
“But you’re Ruth Kraft’s daughter-in-law, aren’t you.” She gave me a knowing smile, then chuckled. “You have an image to uphold.”
I tried to determine what was behind her teasing tone. Sympathy? Understanding? Whatever it was, at that moment I felt she was on my side.
“I try.” I smiled back. Wanting to get the conversation off myself, I motioned behind us toward the two long rows of beds and cribs. “This is amazing, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “This is Hickory,” she said. “The real Hickory. I’m glad you’re finally getting a chance to see it.”
* * *
I was heading back to the Cadillac for yet another load of linens when a truck pulled—way too fast—into the clearing. Everyone looked up from his or her work, including Henry, who was hammering molding around one of the windows. I gasped, afraid the truck was going to plow straight through Henry and the window, but it stopped short of the building with a squeal of brakes.
A man and woman jumped from the cab, wild-eyed, wild-haired. Both of them were dressed in dungarees, and the man grabbed Henry’s arm.
“We need a doctor!” he shouted.
“Our boy!” the woman said, lowering the tailgate and climbing into the truck bed. “He woke up with the polio!”
“The hospital’s not up and running yet,” Henry said to them, gently extricating himself from the man’s grasp. He looked toward the rear of the truck, and I walked toward the truck myself, trying to see inside the bed. A crowd of workers was beginning to gather around it. “You’ll have to take him to Charlotte,” Henry said. “There’s no medical staff here yet.”
“Charlotte!” the woman said, kneeling down in the truck bed. “That’s too far. He could die!”
I moved close enough to see the boy she knelt over. He lay motionless on a folded blanket in the truck’s bed and his mother clung to his hand.
“I’m a nurse,” I said, walking even closer to the truck. I didn’t dare look at Henry. “May I see your son?”
“Tess, no,” Henry said, but there wasn’t much heart behind the words and they were drowned out by the man’s response.
“Yes!” he shouted. “Please!” He helped me climb into the truck bed and I felt one of my nylons run in the process. This was foolish of me, I thought. I had no mask or gloves or anything to protect me from this boy’s illness, whatever it was.
I knelt next to the boy, across from his mother. The little guy was seven or eight with hair the color and texture of hay. His blue eyes were open. He was pale for a farm boy, but he smiled up at me and I returned the smile.
“Hi, sweetheart,” I said. “Can you tell me your name?”
His father started to answer from where he stood outside the truck, but I held up my hand to stop him. I wanted to see how alert and aware this child was.
The boy licked his paper-dry lips. “Frankie,” he said.
“He had a bellyache and was sick on his stomach all night,” his mother said. “That’s the infantile polio, ain’t it?”
“It could be one of many things,” I said. “Did he also have diarrhea?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Frankie answered for himself. “My belly near exploded.”
“Has he been around anyone who was diagnosed with polio?” I asked his mother, pressing my palm to his forehead. He was no warmer than I was on this clammy day.
“No, ma’am,” his mother said.
“He’s been keepin’ to hisself, helpin’ us with the crops,” his father said. When I raised my head to look at the man, I saw that a crowd of curious volunteers had gathered around the truck. I returned my attention to Frankie.
“Do you have a sore throat, Frankie?” I asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Any other illnesses in the last few weeks?”
“Nothin’,” said his mother. “He’s the healthiest boy there is.”
I examined him as best I could without any instruments. I checked his reflexes—all normal. I lifted his shoulders from the truck bed to see if he could support his head. He could. I bent his legs and asked him to push them against my hands. He quickly knocked me off balance and I fell from my kneeling position to my bottom, laughing. I was not a doctor, but I didn’t need to be one to feel quite certain this boy didn’t have polio. I knew the definitive test was a spinal tap, but I doubted Frankie was going to have to endure that painful procedure.
“What did you eat yesterday?” I asked him. “Starting with breakfast.”
“He had the same thing for breakfast he always has,” his mother said, and again I stopped her.
“Please let Frankie tell me,” I said.
He told me about his breakfast of eggs and ham, the three ham sandwiches he ate for lunch, and the fried chicken and okra he had for dinner.
“Did everyone else”—I looked at his mother—“did you and your husband eat the same things?”
“We did, exceptin’ for I only had one sandwich,” she said.
“I had the three too,” Frankie’s father said.
“How about snacks?” I asked Frankie.
“Nothin’,” he said. “Ain’t no time for a snack on account of they got me workin’ in the field every darn minute.”
“Frankie!” his mother said. “Watch your tongue!” She looked at me. “We’ve got to get the crops in,” she said.
“What were you harvesting yesterday?” I asked.
“Pole beans,” Frankie and his mother said at the same time.
“Ah,” I said. “Did you snack on any of them?”
His mother laughed. “They’re his favorite,” she said. “He can’t get enough of them.”
“How many would you say you ate while you were working yesterday, Frankie?” I asked.
He shrugged, and I had the feeling he was afraid of getting in trouble.
“A lot?” I asked, and he gave a guilty nod.
“A whole lot?” I smiled at him with a wink.
“Maybe,” he said, not making eye contact with any of us. “I don’t rightly recall.”
I was quite certain I knew what was wrong with this boy, and it was nothing that a day away from raw green beans wouldn’t fix. But if I was wrong?
I peered over the side of the truck bed and saw that Mrs. Wilding was one of the onlookers. “Could you call Dr. Poole and see if he’d be able to take a look at this boy if his parents bring him over?” I asked her.
Mrs. Wilding nodded, then left to give the hospital’s new switchboard its first call.
I told his parents why I didn’t think he had polio and that it was possible he’d simply eaten far too many raw beans the day before.
“You’re sure?” the man asked.
I shook my head. “I can’t be one hundred percent sure,” I said, “which is why I want you to see Dr. Poole. But his symptoms really don’t seem to fit polio.”
A few minutes passed and Mrs. Wilding ran—yes, she ran, and I felt proud of her—back to the truck. “He says to bring him right over,” she said.
I gave the husband directions to Dr. Poole’s office. His wife hugged me and thanked me, and Henry helped me climb from the truck bed. We watched as the truck pulled out of the clearing, and the workers who’d observed the whole exchange gave a little round of applause. I blushed, feeling like the sole performer in a drama. I turned to Mrs. Wilding, ready to escape the attention.
“Can you help me get another armload of donations from the car?” I asked her, and together we headed across the muddy clearing toward the Cadillac.
Henry walked into the building as I was placing a stack of folded blankets in the cupboard.
“Tess?” he said.
I looked up from my work. “Yes?” I stiffened, expecting him to be angry. He would tell me I’d overstepped my bounds by having anything to do with that young boy.
“You were different out there.” He stood in front of me, hands in his pockets. “It was a side to you I haven’t seen before. Self-confident and … I don’t know. Capable, I guess is the word.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I was proud of you.”
I felt myself blush yet again. “Thank you,” I repeated.
He drew in a long breath and let it out in a sigh. “The hospital is going to need you,” he said, “and you need it. I can see that. You can work here if you want.”
“As a nurse.” I made it a statement rather than a question.
“As a nurse,” he agreed.
“What about your mother?”
“I’ll deal with my mother,” he said. “Just let me be the one to tell her.”
“Thank you, Henry,” I said again, and as he walked away and I folded another blanket and put it on the shelf, I grinned to myself. “Well, Walter,” I whispered to the air, “what do you think of that?”