But where was here? For he should be close to the Baldwin house; only as he tripped, in the gathering night, over great piles of boards, like a carelessly kept lumberyard, did Butch realize that there was no more Baldwin house, and then, looking around wildly, that there was no Necrawney house on the hill, no Peltzer house below it. There was not a light, not a sound, save the rain falling on the fallen trees.
He broke into a run. When he saw the bulk of his father’s house in the distance, he gave a “Hey!” of relief, but coming closer, he realized that something was missing. There were no out-houses and the built-on wing that held Pinky’s room had been sheared completely away.
“Mother!” he called. “Dad!” There was no answer; a dog bounded out of the yard and licked his hand. . ..
. . . It was full dark twenty minutes later when Doc Janney stopped his car in front of his own drug store in Bending. The electric lights had gone out, but there were men with lanterns in the street, and in a minute a small crowd had collected around him. He unlocked the door hurriedly.
“Somebody break open the old Wiggins Hospital.” He pointed across the street. “I’ve got six badly injured in my car. I want some fellows to carry ’em in. Is Doc Behrer here?”
“Here he is,” offered eager voices out of the darkness as the doctor, case in hand, came through the crowd. The two men stood face to face by lantern light, forgetting that they disliked each other.
“God knows how many more there’s going to be,” said Doc Janney. “I’m getting dressing and disinfectant. There’ll be a lot of fractures——” He raised his voice, “Somebody bring me a barrel!”
“I’ll get started over there,” said Behrer. “There’s about half a dozen more crawled into town.”
“What’s been done?” demanded Doc Janney of the men who followed him into the drug store. “Have they called Birmingham and Montgomery?”
“Telephone wires are down, but the telegraph got through.”
“Well, somebody get Doctor Cohen from Wettala, and tell any people who have automobiles to go up the Willard Pike and cut across toward Corsica and all through those roads there. There’s not a house left at the crossroads by the nigger store. I passed a lot of folks walking in, all of them hurt, but I didn’t have room for anybody else.” As he talked he was throwing bandages, disinfectant, and drugs into a blanket. “I thought I had a lot more stuff than this in stock! And wait!” he called. “Somebody drive out and look down in that hollow where the Wooleys live. Drive right across the fields—the road’s blocked. . . . Now, you with the cap——Ed Jenks, ain’t it?”
“Yes, doc?”
“You see what I got here? You collect everything in the store that looks like this and bring it across the way, understand?”
“Yes, doc.”
As the doctor went out into the street, the victims were streaming into town—a woman on foot with a badly injured child, a buckboard full of groaning Negroes, frantic men gasping terrible stories. Everywhere confusion and hysteria mounted in the dimly illumined darkness. A mud-covered reporter from Birmingham drove up in a side car, the wheels crossing the fallen wires and brushwood that clogged the street, and there was the siren of a police car from Cooper, thirty miles away.
Already a crowd pressed around the doors of the hospital, closed these three months for lack of patients. The doctor squeezed past the melee of white faces and established himself in the nearest ward, grateful for the waiting row of old iron beds. Doctor Behrer was already at work across the hall.
“Get me half a dozen lanterns,” he ordered.
“Doctor Behrer wants iodine and adhesive.”
“All right, there it is. . . . Here, you, Shinkey, stand by the door and keep everybody out except cases that can’t walk. Somebody run over and see if there ain’t some candles in the grocery store.”
The street ouside was full of sound now—the cries of women, the contrary directions of volunteer gangs trying to clear the highway, the tense staccato of people rising to an emergency. A little before midnight arrived the first unit of the Red Cross. But the three doctors, presently joined by two others from near-by villages, had lost track of time long before that. The dead began to be brought in by ten O’clock; there were twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty—the list grew. Having no more needs, these waited, as became simple husbandmen, in a garage behind, while the stream of injured—hundreds of them—flowed through the old hospital built to house only a score. The storm had dealt out fractures of the leg, collar bone, ribs, and hip, lacerations of the back, elbows, ears, eyelids, nose; there were wounds from flying planks, and odd splinters in odd places, and a scalped man, who would recover to grow a new head of hair. Living or dead, Doc Janney knew every face, almost every name.
“Don’t you fret now. Billy’s all right. Hold still and let the tie this. People are drifting in every minute, but it’s so consarned dark they can’t find ’em——All right, Mrs. Oakey. That’s nothing. Ev here’ll touch it with iodine. . . . Now let’s see this man.”
Two o’clock. The old doctor from Wettala gave out, but now there were fresh men from Montgomery to take his place. Upon the air of the room, heavy with disinfectant, floated the ceaseless babble of human speech reaching the doctor dimly through layer after layer of increasing fatigue.
“. . . Over and over—just rolled me over and over. Got hold of a bush and the bush came along too.”
“Jell! Where’s Jeff?”
“. . . I bet that pig sailed a hundred yards——”
“—just stopped the train in time. All the passengers got out and helped pull the poles——”
“Oh, Jen! Where’s Jeff?”
“He says, ‘Let’s get down cellar,’ and I says, ‘We ain’t got no cellar——”
“. .. If there’s no more stretchers, find some light doors.”
“. . Five seconds? Say, it was more like five minutes!”
At some time he heard that Gene and Rose had been seen with their two youngest children. He had passed their house on the way in and, seeing it standing, hurried on. The Janney family had been lucky; the doctor’s own house was outside the sweep of the storm.
Only as he saw the electric lights go on suddenly in the streets and glimpsed the crowd waiting for hot coffee in front of the Red Cross did the doctor realize how tired he was.
“You better go rest,” a young man was saying. “I’ll take this side of the room. I’ve got two nurses with me.”
“All right—all right. I’ll finish this row.”
The injured were being evacuated to the cities by train as fast as their wounds were dressed, and their places taken by others. He had only two beds to go—in the first one he found Pinky Janney.
He put his stethoscope to the heart. It was beating feebly. That he, so weak, so nearly gone, had survived this storm at all was remarkable. How he had got there, who had found him and carried him, was a mystery in itself. The doctor went over the body; there were small contusions and lacerations, two broken fingers, the dirt-filled ears that marked every case—nothing else. For a moment the doctor hesitated, but even when he closed his eyes, the image of Mary Decker seemed to have receded, eluding him. Something purely professional that had nothing to do with human sensibilities had been set in motion inside him, and he was powerless to head it off. He held out his hands before him; they were trembling slightly.
“Hell’s bells!” he muttered.
He went out of the room and around the corner of the hall, where he drew from his pocket the flask containing the last of the corn and water he had had in the afternoon. He emptied it. Returning to the ward, he disinfected two instruments and applied a local anæsthetic to a square section at the base of Pinky’s skull where the wound had healed over the bullet. He called a nurse to his side and then, scalpel in hand, knelt on one knee beside his nephew’s bed.
III
Two days later the doctor drove slowly around the mournful countryside. He had withdrawn from the emergency work after the f
irst desperate night, feeling that his status as a pharmacist might embarrass his collaborators. But there was much to be done in bringing the damage to outlying sections under the ægis of the Red Cross, and he devoted himself to that.
The path of the demon was easy to follow. It had pursued an irregular course on its seven-league boots, cutting across country, through woods, or even urbanely keeping to roads until they curved, when it went off on its own again. Sometimes the trail could be traced by cotton fields, apparently in full bloom, but this cotton came from the insides of hundreds of quilts and mattresses redistributed in the fields by the storm.
At a lumber pile that had lately been a Negro cabin, he stopped a moment to listen to a dialogue between two reporters and two shy pickaninnies. The old grandmother, her head bandaged, sat among the ruins, gnawing some vague meat and moving her rocker ceaselessly.
“But where is the river you were blown across?” one of the reporters demanded.
“There.”
“Where?”
The pickaninnies looked to their grandmother for aid.
“Right there behind you-all,” spoke up the old woman.
The newspapermen looked disgustedly at a muddy stream four yards wide.
“That’s no river.”
“That’s a Menada River, we always calls it ever since I Was a gull. Yes, suh, that’s a Menada River. An’ them two boys was blowed right across it an’ set down on the othah side just as pretty, ’thout any hurt at all. Chimney fell on me,” she concluded, feeling her head.
“Do you mean to say that’s all it was?” demanded the younger reporter indignantly. “That’s the river they were blown across! And one hundred and twenty million people have been led to believe—”
“That’s all right, boys,” interrupted Doc Janney. “That’s a right good river for these parts. And it’ll get bigger as those little fellahs get older.”
He tossed a quarter to the old woman and drove on.
Passing a country church, he stopped and counted the new brown mounds that marred the graveyard. He was nearing the center of the holocaust now. There was the Howden house where three had been killed; there remained a gaunt chimney, a rubbish heap and a scare-crow surviving ironically in the kitchen garden. In the ruins of the house across the way a rooster strutted on top of a piano, reigning vociferously over an estate of trunks, boots, cans, books, calendars, rugs, chairs and window frames, a twisted radio and a legless sewing machine. Everything there was bedding—blankets, mattresses, bent springs, shredded padding—he had not realized how much of people’s lives were spent in bed. Here and there, cows and horses, often stained with disinfectant, were cropping again in the fields. At intervals there were Red Cross tents, and sitting by one of these, with the gray cat in her arms, the doctor came upon little Helen Kilrain. The usual lumber pile, like a child’s building game knocked down in a fit of temper, told the story.
“Hello, dear,” he greeted her, his heart sinking. “How did kitty like the tornado?”
“She didn’t.”
“What did she do?”
“She meowed.”
“Oh.”
“She wanted to get away, but I hanged on to her and she scratched me—see?”
He glanced at the Red Cross tent.
“Who’s ’taking care of you?”
“The lady from the Red Cross and Mrs. Wells,” she answered. “My father got hurt. He stood over me so it wouldn’t fall on me, and I stood over kitty. He’s in the hospital in Birmingham. When he comes back, I guess he’ll build our house again.”
The doctor winced. He knew that her father would build no more houses; he had died that morning. She was alone, and she did not know she was alone. Around her stretched the dark universe, impersonal, inconscient. Her lovely little face looked up at him confidently as he asked: “You got any kin anywhere, Helen?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve got kitty, anyhow, haven’t you?”
“It’s just a cat,” she admitted calmly, but anguished by her own betrayal of her love, she hugged it closer.
“Taking care of a cat must be pretty hard.”
“Oh, no,” she said hurriedly. “It isn’t any trouble at all. It doesn’t eat hardly anything.”
He put his hand in his pocket, and then changed his mind suddenly.
“Dear, I’m coming back and see you later—later today. You take good care of kitty now, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” she answered lightly.
The doctor drove on. He stopped next at a house that had escaped damage. Walt Cupps, the owner, was cleaning a shotgun on his front porch.
“What’s that, Walt? Going to shoot up the next tornado?”
“Ain’t going to be a next tornado.”
“You can’t tell. Just take a look at that sky now. It’s getting mighty dark.”
Walt laughed and slapped his gun. “Not for a hundred years, any-how. This here is for looters. There’s a lot of ’em around, and not all black either. Wish when you go to town that you’d tell ’em to scatter some militia out here.”
“I’ll tell ’em now. You come out all right?”
“I did, thank God. With six of us in the house. It took off one hen, and probably it’s still carrying it around somewhere.”
The doctor drove on toward town, overcome by a feeling of uneasiness he could not define.
“It’s the weather,” he thought. “It’s the same kind of feel in the air there was last Saturday.”
For a month the doctor had felt an urge to go away permanently. Once this countryside had seemed to promise peace. When the impetus that had lifted him temporarily out of tired old stock was exhausted, he had come back here to rest, to watch the earth put forth, and live on simple, pleasant terms with his neighbors. Peace! He knew that the present family quarrel would never heal, nothing would ever be the same; it would all be bitter forever. And he had seen the placid countryside turned into a land of mourning. There was no peace here. Move on.
On the road he overtook Butch Janney walking to town.
“I was coming to see you,” said Butch, frowning. “You operated on Pinky after all, didn’t you?”
“Jump in. . . . Yes, I did. How did you know?”
“Doc Behrer told us.” He shot a quick look at the doctor, who did not miss the quality of suspicion in it. “They don’t think he’ll last out the day.”
“I’m sorry for your mother.”
Butch laughed unpleasantly. “Yes, you are.”
“I said I’m sorry for your mother,” said the doctor sharply.
“I heard you.”
They drove for a moment in silence.
“Did you find your automobile?”
“Did I?” Butch laughed ruefully. “I found something—I don’t know whether you’d call it a car any more. And, you know, I could of had tornado insurance for twenty-five cents.” His voice trembled indignantly: “Twenty-five cents—but who would ever of thought of getting tornado insurance?”
It was growing darker; there was a thin crackle of thunder far to the southward.
“Well, all I hope,” said Butch with narrowed glance, “is that you hadn’t been drinking anything when you operated on Pinky.”
“You know, Butch,” the doctor said slowly, “that was a pretty dirty trick of mine to bring that tornado here.”
He had not expected the sarcasm to hit home, but he expected a retort—when suddenly he caught sight of Butch’s face. It was fish-white, the mouth wide open, the eyes fixed and staring, and from the throat came a mewling sound. Limply he raised one hand before him, and then the doctor saw.
Less than a mile away, an enormous, top-shaped black cloud filled the sky and bore toward them, dipping and swirling, and in front of it sailed already a heavy, singing wind.
“It’s come back!” the doctor yelled.
Fifty yards ahead of them was the old iron bridge spanning Bilby Creek. He stepped hard on the accelerator and drove for it. The fields were f
ull of running figures headed in the same direction. Reaching the bridge, he jumped out and yanked Butch’s arm.
“Get out, you fool! Get out!”
A nerveless mass stumbled from the car; in a moment they were in a group of half a dozen, huddled in the triangular space that the bridge made with the shore.
“Is it coming here?”
“No, it’s turning!”
“We had to leave grampa!”
“Oh, save me, save me! Help me! Help me!”
“Save my soul!”
There was a quick rush of wind outside, sending little tentacles under’ the bridge with a curious tension in them that made the doctor’s skin crawl. Then immediately there was a vacuum, with no more wind, but a sudden thresh of rain. The doctor crawled to the edge of the bridge and put his head up cautiously.
“It’s passed,” he said. “We only felt the edge; the center went way to the right of us.”
He could see it plainly; for a second he could even distinguish objects in it—shrubbery and small trees, planks and loose earth. Crawling farther out, he took out his watch and tried to time it, but the thick curtain of rain blotted it from sight.
Soaked to the skin, he crawled back underneath. Butch lay shivering in the farthest corner, and the doctor shook him.
“It went in the direction of your house!” the doctor cried. “Pull yourself together! Who’s there?”
“No one,” Butch groaned. “They’re all down with Pinky.”
The rain had changed to hail now; first small pellets, then larger ones, and larger, until the sound of their fall upon the iron bridge was an ear-splitting tattoo.
The spared wretches under the bridge were slowly recovering, and in the relief there were titters of hysterical laughter. After a certain point of strain, the nervous system makes its transitions without dignity or reason. Even the doctor felt the contagion.
“This is worse than a calamity,” he said dryly. “It’s getting to be a nuisance.”
IV
There were to be no more tornadoes in Alabama that spring. The second one—it was popularly thought to be the first one come back; for to the people of Chilton County it had become a personified force, definite as a pagan god—took a dozen houses, Gene Janney’s among them, and injured about thirty people. But this time—perhaps because everyone had developed some scheme of self-protection—there were no fatalities. It made its last dramatic bow by sailing down the main street of Bending, prostrating the telephone poles and crushing in the fronts of three shops, including Doc Janney’s drug store.
A Treasury of Doctor Stories Page 53