Once the Son, Now the Father
W.W. 米德 / W.W. Meade
One winter evening as I sat reading, my young son, Luke, approached my chair in shy silence. He stood just outside the half-moon of light made by an old brass student lamp I cherish. It once lighted my doctor father’s office desk.
In those days, Luke liked to approach me with his most serious problems when I was reading. The year before, he did this whenever I was working in the garden. Perhaps, he felt most at ease with difficulties when I was doing what he was getting ready to do. When he was interested in growing things, he learned to plant seeds and leave them in the ground instead of digging them up the very next morning to see if they had grown. Now he was beginning to read to himself— although he wouldn’t admit to me that he could do that.
I looked up from my paper, and he gave me his wide-open grin. Then his expression turned abruptly serious, a not-too-flattering imitation of me. “I broke my saw,” he said, withdrawing the toy from behind his back. “Here.”
He didn’t ask if I could fix it. His trust that I could was a compliment from a small boy to the miracle fixer of tricycles, wagons and assorted toys. The saw’s blue plastic handle had snapped. My father, who treasured the tools of all professions, would not have approved of a plastic-handled saw.
I said, “There are pieces missing. Do you have them?”
He opened his clenched fist to reveal the remaining fragments. I did not see how the saw could be properly mended.
He watched me intently, his expression revealing absolute confidence that I could do anything. That look stirred memories. I examined the saw with great care, turning over the broken pieces in my hands as I turned over the past in my mind.
When I was seven, I’d gone to my father’s office after school one November day. My father was clearly the best doctor within a thousand miles of the small Ohio River town where we lived. He always astonished me—and his patients —by the things he could do. He could not only heal whatever was the matter with anyone, but he could also break a horse, carve a top and slide down Long Hill on my sled, standing up! I liked to hang around his waiting room and hear people call me “little Doc” , and I liked the way his patients always looked better when they left his office.
But on this day, when I was seven, my purpose was to see my best friend, Jimmy Hardesty. He hadn’t been in school for three days, and his mother had sent word to my father’s nurse that she just might bring Jimmy in to see the doctor today.
When the last of the afternoon’s patients had gone, Jimmy had still not arrived. My father and I then went off to make house calls. He liked to have me with him, because he liked to tell stories when he drove. It was nearly seven when we finished. As we started home, my father said suddenly, “Let’s go up and check on old Jimmy.” I felt squirmy with gratitude, certain that my father was doing this just to please me. But when we came in sight of the old gray stone house, there was a light in the upstairs back window and another on the back porch—the ancient beacons of trouble.
My father pulled the car right into the dooryard. Alice, Jimmy’s older sister, came running out of the house and threw her arms around my father, crying and shaking and trying to talk. “Oh, Doc. Jimmy’s dying! Dad’s chasing all over the county looking for you. Thank goodness you’re here.”
My father never ran. He used to say there was no good reason to hurry. If you had to hurry, it was too late. But he told Alice to let go off him, and he ran then. I followed them through the yeasty-smelling kitchen and up the narrow, dark hall stairs. Jimmy was breathing very fast and made a high, airy sound. He had mounds of quilts piled over him, so that I could barely see his face in the flickering light of the kerosene lamps. He looked all worn out and his skin glistened.
His mother said, “Oh, Doc. Help us. It was just a little cold, then this afternoon he started this terrible sweat.”
I had never seen Jimmy’s mother without an apron on before. She stood behind me, both her hands on my shoulders, as my father listened to Jimmy’s chest. He fixed a hypodermic and held the needle up to the light. I was certain that it was the miracle we all must have. My father gave Jimmy the shot. He then got a gauze pad from his black case and put it over Jimmy’s mouth. He bent over him and began to breathe with him. No one moved in that room and there was no other sound except the steady pushing of my father’s breath and Jimmy’s high, wheezing response.
Then suddenly as lightning, there was the awful sound of my father’s breathing alone. I felt his mother’s hands tighten on my shoulders and knew, as she knew, that something had snapped. But my father kept on breathing into Jimmy’s lungs. After a long time, Mrs. Hardesty went over to the bed, put her hand on my father’s arm and said, very quietly, “He’s gone, Doc. Come away. My boy’s not with us anymore.” But my father would not move.
Mrs. Hardesty took me by the hand then, and we went down to the kitchen. She sat in a rocker and Alice, looking as forlorn as I’ve ever seen anybody look, threw herself on her mother’s lap. I went out onto the porch and sat down on the top step in the cold darkness. I wanted no one to see or hear me.