The Giant-Slayer (37 page)
Laurie looked down from the window, across the grass toward the pond. James was still sitting on the bench, though not feeding the ducks anymore. They stood around him instead, gazing up like fat little people come to hear him talk.
“What do you see?” asked Carolyn.
Laurie felt a funny sense of déjà vu. It swept her back to her first day in the room, and she almost believed that if she turned around it would all begin again, that none of it had happened. When the sensation faded away, it was like waking from a dream.
“James is sitting at the pond,” she said, poking her glasses. “Under the trees, on a bench. The willows are all droopy ’cause it was raining, but now the sun’s out and they look shiny and bright, like rhinestone trees.”
The red car—the Starlight—came into view below her. It went slowly down the driveway, paused at the gate with a red blink of its brake lights, and raced off down the road, heading north.
The gurgling roar of the engine made Chip strain his neck to see in the tilted mirror. “Was that the Starlight?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Laurie.
Dickie asked, “Was Dr. Wishman driving?”
“I don’t know,” said Laurie.
“I bet he was. He’s traveling on,” said Dickie. “He’s going to help someone else now.”
“Where’s he going?” asked Laurie.
“He doesn’t know. Not yet.”
Laurie was smiling. “He’ll just keep driving north.”
“I guess so,” said Dickie. “He’ll know where he’s going when he gets there. He’ll find someone who needs him.”
“That’s keen,” said Laurie. “What will happen then?”
Dickie looked at Laurie in his mirror. He saw her poke her glasses into place and wondered how many times he had seen her do that already. She looked happier now than she had when he first met her, before summer, before polio. And she was looking at him with none of the pity she had shown before, as though she understood that he didn’t really mind the iron lung. It made him feel safe, protected. It was more a cocoon than a prison. At night, in his dreams, he came out
of it, riding as Khan through the mountains, living forever at the edge of the sky.
Laurie recovered completely from her polio. When Carolyn left later that month, Laurie walked beside her iron lung, down on the elevator, out to the ambulance.
It was a huge production that made Carolyn blush with embarrassment. There were two people spelling each other on the hand bellows, and a generator in the van that came to get her. It had a little elevator to hoist her up inside.
Laurie wished she could hold hands with the girl, but had to settle for putting her palm on the window of the respirator, just as Mr. Valentine had done for her.
“Good luck at home,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Carolyn. “Thanks for everything, Laurie.”
As the van pulled away, Laurie ran beside it, round the curve past Piper’s Pond, out to the gate where it speeded up and left her behind.
She said goodbye to Dickie and Chip a few days later, when both were moved to a bigger hospital. Chip kept gazing at Laurie, but he seemed shy and awkward surrounded by nurses and orderlies. “I’m going to miss you like crazy,” he told her in the elevator. Then his face blushed a very bright red. Laurie smiled back at him. “I’ll send you postcards,” she promised. “Cross my heart. I’ll write every week.”
Dickie’s parents were there that day, and they wept as he was loaded into the ambulance, because even they could see
how small and weak he’d grown, though his grin was as big as ever.
“So long,” he said, just before the doors were closed. “Pretend that I’m waving, Laurie.”
His parents had their car all packed. They would follow the ambulance and settle in with a sister of Mrs. Espinosa. “We’re taking everything,” said Dickie’s father. “I hope we’re there a good long time.”
From that day on, the polio ward seemed a little lonely. There was no wheeze and whirr from the iron lungs, no need for Laurie to go farther down the hall than the big room with the television set. But she often did, on her weekly visits. She would walk beside James as he lurched on his crutches, or with Ruth and Peter in their wheelchairs. And she would stand at the door of an empty room, thinking of things both sad and wonderful.
There was a day in the future when James Miner wouldn’t struggle along beside her. On that morning he would come running instead, his crutches forgotten, his braces discarded. He would race down the hall with his knees kicking high, his hair blowing back, a huge grin on his face.
“Laurie!” he’d shout. “Laurie, I beat it!” He would hold out his little arms, and Laurie would sweep him up and hoist him to her shoulder, the way the crowd had lifted the giant-slayer at the edge of the world. She would stagger back with his weight, and the two of them would fall to the floor, laughing.
James would be first on his feet. He would reach down to help her as she lay sprawled on the floor, still giggling. And
for a moment he would tower above her, below the poster of the striding boy.
His picture would be in the newspaper—not the big daily, but the local weekly. He would be part of a story about the March of Dimes, and Mr. Valentine would be in it too. It would tell how James had been a Polio Pioneer, “a hero,” it would say. “Here’s a boy who risked everything in the fight against polio. And that fight nearly cost him his life. But polio could not have been beaten without James and the others.”
In August of that year of 1955, Laurie Valentine sat with her father in the grass of the Shenandoah valley. The creek was nearly dry then, in the middle of a long, hot summer. The mud was gray and cracked. But a tiny stream still trickled from the culvert, and there a boy was building little weirs from willow sticks, trapping the black water into pools.
He was blond and big, not at all like Dickie. But Laurie felt a pang to see him.
“I hope that boy had his shots,” said Mr. Valentine. He bit his lip and stared around the little park. “I wonder if I should find his parents and have a word with them.”
“No, Dad, he’s okay,” said Laurie. “Don’t worry about everybody.”
Mr. Valentine was still wearing his tie, the one that he had worn home from work. But at least he had loosened the knot, and now he gave it another tug before he settled back
on his elbows. “People think that it’s over, but it’s not,” he said. “It will be years yet before polio’s gone altogether. The war’s won, but it isn’t ended. There’s a lot of mopping up to do.”
Laurie looked up at her father’s tired face. He looked like a very old soldier now, wearied by his work. “Will you have to get another job?” she asked.
He smiled sadly and shook his head. “The Foundation will go on as long as
I’m
alive,” he told her. “We’ll have to keep the respirators running. We’ll have to pay for the wheelchairs and the crutches and braces. Every year we’ll need more money, and it’s going to be harder than ever to drum up donations for a beaten disease.” He sighed; he scratched his head. “Laurie, I lay awake last night thinking about this. I’m afraid my work is really only starting.”
She felt sorry for him because he seemed so desperate. But she was disappointed too. He was away so much already, and she hated the thought that he could somehow be even busier.
“But look,” he said, reaching out to touch her arm. “We don’t have to think about that today. And we don’t have to think about it tomorrow, because we’re going to do something together.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever you want.” He sat up, looking suddenly younger. “And in the evening I’ll take you out for dinner. There’s a place that was your mother’s favorite.”
“But, Dad,” said Laurie, “tomorrow’s Friday. It’s not even the weekend yet.”
“I know that,” said Mr. Valentine. “Can’t a man spend a Friday with his daughter every now and then?”
They leaned back until their shoulders were on the grass. The shadows of the clouds moved across their faces.
“I wish we could do it all the time,” said Laurie.
“Now, now,” said Mr. Valentine. “Be careful what you wish for.”
NOTE
T
here is an image in my mind of a child in leg braces, lurching on crutches while an adult towers at either side. It is my only memory of polio, and so faint that I wonder at times if it’s really there.
I was born the year polio was beaten in North America, the year the vaccine developed by Jonas Salk was made available to millions of people. Polio still thrived in other parts of the world, and even lurked at the edges of my own, like a bogeyman in the darkness, leaping out now and then to strike down a child. But I never knew the terror that gripped whole towns and cities when polio appeared every summer.
It was a terrible disease, as old as civilization. There are drawings from ancient Egypt of polio-stricken people. In North America, the worst epidemics began right after World War II, with about 20,000 cases reported each year for the rest of that decade, and nearly 60,000 in 1952.
Polio attacked children more often than adults, paralyzing muscles in the arms, legs, and chest. For most who got it, the disease came and went as simply as a common cold, yet others were crippled, often for life, able to walk only with metal braces strapped around their legs. Those with paralyzed lungs spent months, or years—or sometimes all their lives—lying on their backs in iron lungs that did their breathing for them with mechanical pumps and bellows.
An iron lung was huge and hulking. It looked like an enormous metal barrel on a frame of legs and wheels. It encased a child from toe to neck, leaving only the head outside. The bellows that pushed air through the machine were so powerful that smaller children were sucked in a bit, and blown out a bit, with every breath. When the epidemics of the 1940s and ’50s brought more and more polio patients into hospitals, some bigger iron lungs were built, able to stack the children into layers, with one set of bellows breathing for four or five patients. It was a photograph of one of those machines that inspired this story, a five-person iron lung the size of a small room, with the heads of four children poking out from its front like dice spots.
The children’s heads rested on pillows, on shelves extending from the round openings of the respirator. Taped to the metal above one of the children’s heads was a painting of a boy and his dog. A nurse stood off to the side, smiling, her
white uniform crisp and perfect. She was smiling, but the picture was sad. It made me wonder how those children had passed endless days and weeks and months. I imagined that the picture showed them in a rare moment of happiness, in lives full of sorrow and anger.
But I was wrong to think that. I had no idea of the strength of childhood spirit until I met a man who had lived in an iron lung.
His name is Richard Daggett. I’ve never seen him, or heard him speak, but I feel as though I know him well. By e-mail and Internet, he has told me the most private and intimate things imaginable.
Mr. Daggett contracted polio in 1953, just after his thirteenth birthday. He woke one day with a stiff neck, and ended the next in an iron lung, with his breaths whistling in and out through a hole that doctors had pierced in his throat. On a family Web site—
www.downeydaggets.com
—Mr. Daggett tells his amazing story of recovered strength. He got out of the iron lung; he learned to walk again. Now Mr. Daggett is president of the Polio Survivors Association, a writer and speaker, and an advocate to preserve the famous polio hospital, Rancho Los Amigos, where he struggled as a child.
Over the course of a year or so, Mr. Daggett taught me a lot, and not only about the polio. Among the things he most wanted me to know was the fact that a polio ward was not the terrible place I’d imagined, that there was laughter there, and hope and happiness. He felt that I’d made the children in my story too lonely, and not properly thrilled by each small success.
He recommended a few books that show how others lived with polio. My favorites included
In the Shadow of Polio
, a combination of history and memoir by Kathryn Black, and
Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio
, by Peg Kehret.
When Dr. Jonas Salk introduced his vaccine in 1955, he was hailed as a hero, the worker of miracles. He declined to patent the vaccine, not wanting any personal profit. Later, asked why, he said, “Could you patent the sun?”
A massive immunization began that year, and instances of polio plummeted. In 1953 there were 35,000 cases. In 1957 there were only 5,600.
But the vaccine brought a tragedy. Because of mistakes in a medical lab, a small number of people contracted polio from the vaccine that was meant to protect them. And because of that, thousands more shunned the immunizations while new epidemics burst out among them. Who can say what lives were changed as the result of a simple error?
In a way, that incident is at the heart of this story. It seems incredibly sad to me that the first people to hurry for the vaccine would fall victim to the disease. I don’t like to think how it must have haunted Dr. Salk.
This story shifts back and forth between a grim reality and a fantasy that is perhaps a bit quirky. I found it hard sometimes to leave the world of Jimmy the Giant-Slayer and go back to iron lungs and paralyzed children. It was more fun to write about the imaginary place, where a woman without a name would put on lipstick before heading off to the swamp, where facts didn’t matter so much.
But still, I wanted the fantasy world to have a truth of its
own. I filled it with creatures from different mythologies, not thinking that it mattered where they came from, as I didn’t think it would have mattered to Laurie Valentine. The hunter in her imagined world was as likely to bag a hydra as a manticore, though the hydra came from Greece, the manticore from Persia. It was as if he had the whole world to travel across, and held the beliefs of all men.
I wrote with a gnome perched in front of me. He sat on the top of my monitor, a bearded man about seven inches tall, dressed in red cap and striped shirt, holding a shovel with a copper blade. He was a gift from a Swiss-born friend, Maya Carson, the person I turned to to learn about gnomes, because I thought of the little men as belonging to middle Europe.
Maya grew up with tales about gnomes, believing the creatures lived in caves, that they worked underground to care for the earth. It surprised me that her gnomes were old men, every one, with never a woman nor child among them.
I took what she said to heart, and was pleased by the way my gnomes turned out. But Maya, I think, was disappointed. Very little of what I wrote matched her childhood stories. Her gnomes cared for the earth as selflessly as Jonas Salk, taking nothing for themselves. No one would be frightened of gnomes, she said; to see one was a blessing. Even the little coveralls I’d given the creatures didn’t belong with the stories. Maya’s gnomes worked in their floppy hats and slippers, dressed just like the one on my monitor. And gnomes could never, ever share a world with trolls.
I may regret that my gnomes and other creatures are not
more faithful to mythology. But they exist here as thoughts in the mind of an American girl from the 1950s. If you come away from the story thinking you’ve learned something about polio, I’ll be happy. If the gnomes don’t make sense, it’s my own fault.