"Before Penicillin"
to the memory of E.S. Waring, M.D.
The doctor steps into the shack.
Light
is December dusk. Sleet clouds
bunched up.
All the beds are here in this one room
pushed up against the wall
and even from across the room and even in the shambling light
her face—
Mask-like. Greenish-gray.
The facies of impending death.
The parents
pull up a straight-backed chair for him.
He takes the hand of a child he delivered
fourteen years ago.
Her pulse is a thread
so thin it would fray if you blew on it.
It's alright, Evie.
Then he folds the army blanket down.
The girl's entire abdomen is abscessed.
Burst appendix rotting for days and now spread.
He listens to her chest,
tucks the blanket back under her chin.
She opens her mouth and the
smell
It is 1933.
There is no such thing as penicillin.
Let me get her to the hospital—
No, Sir, the father says. You take her over there, she'll die.
They quarrel until the mother says PLEASE
once, then is still.
When the doctor finally steps outside,
he can hear the younger children begin to keen.
He tugs the brim of his hat down low.
His wife will be angry again, at him and the house
and the bank in town which has filed to foreclose
and their four small girls whiny with colds and the sleet
which will needle him wicked thwik
on the road and in the ditch the nine miles home.
He can hear the younger children begin to scream.
He washes his hands on the bristling grass,
runs them under his mare’s black mane and
leans on her neck—
on her fragrant, inculpable neck.
—Belle Waring
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