The Doctor

A Story by Jesse Hill Ford

THE first inkling the doctor had gave him no full measure of warning as to what was to follow. The first patient was a colored female, age sixteen, with multiple beer-bottle lacerations of the breast, neck, brow, and check. When the doctor suggested that she be taken to Ormund City General, or failing that, to the nearer but substandard Negro hospital, Patrick Memorial, her companions expressed a curious bewilderment.

“We not for certain to get there,” said the most forward of the three. “We not for sure.”

Just then the doctor heard the sirens. A strange prickling of the nerve ends coursed the skin at the back of his neck along the joint between spine and skull. His first thought was of his daughter, Elizabeth Anne. For a wild moment he imagined that she was out of the house. Then it came to him just as suddenly that she was in the next room watching television with one of her high school friends, a girl whose father worked at the Ormund City Body Shop.

“Then let’s step next door to the clinic,” the doctor said. The girl was dripping blood on the kitchen tiles. He felt her arm. She was going into shock. “This way,” he had said. Then he shouted for his wife. When she appeared she (almost as an automatic gesture) got the mop kept for such occasions. She began wetting the mop under the kitchen faucet, preparing to clean up the blood, and he paused at the door, still holding the wounded girl’s arm. “I believe it’s big trouble,” the doctor said.

She looked at him from the sink. A siren howled by in the street. Tires squealed at the corner. Then came a sharp sound, like a blowout, an instant later a large thump. The doctor knew the later sound, an automobile collision. One of the girls in the kitchen — not the wounded one — began to moan.

The doctor turned. He took the Sunday Ormund City Times from the kitchen table, and spread it carefully on the floor. “Lie down,” he told the wounded girl. “Put her flat on the floor.”

The girl did as she was told. The three teenagers with her, the two girls and the boy, helped her down. They stooped, squatting beside her.

“You be all right now,” the boy was saying. “We got the doctor now.”

“We taken her nex doe to de clinic?” one of the girls was asking. “Doc?”

The doctor went to the closet and got his fishing coat and covered the girl lying on the newspapers.

“Keep her still a moment,” he said.

His wife was mopping the blood. A handlike groping of terror commenced reaching into the doctor’s throat. He fought it back, reminding himself. He was the only Negro physician living in the district. Another siren passed. Fire truck, he thought.

“Fill the bathtubs,” he said.

“All right.” She was still mopping. It was a rich quality she had. Small things could tear her nerves to pieces. Yet when the chips were down she was calm as stone.

“Fill the tubs and the sinks. Let the girls help you. Draw the blinds. Fill any pots and pans, tubs, buckets. Check the windows, lock the doors when you leave and bring along the keys. Don’t lock us out. Tell the girls to stay just where they are. Call Mrs. Cunningham, and tell her Dinah must stay here. Tell her Dinah is safe.”

“All right,” his wife replied.

“Then come next door. I’m going to need help. Start the autoclave. Phone both hospitals, and tell them I’m going to stay here. Tell them I’m going to do what I can.”

“From the sound,” she said, “a good many won’t make it either to Patrick or Ormund General.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the boy, squatting beside the lacerated girl. “It already bees pretty bad in dat way,” he said softly.

“All right,” said the doctor. “Come along. Let’s get her on her feet.” Her pulse was better. “She can walk,” he said firmly. “Let’s move her next door.”

They went out with her, across the porch, through the carport to the clinic. The doctor opened the door to a treatment room. “Get her on this table.”

“The girls are filling the tubs.”

He looked up and saw his wife. She had tied her head in a green surgical cloth. It came to him like a strange shadow in front of his eyes that she had not worked in the clinic for seven years. The place was strange to her. When she had worked for him, during the toughest years, the clinic had been located in an old house. They had lived in another part of it.

He scrubbed rapidly and pulled on his gloves. “Take these scissors and cut her dress from here down and pull it aside,” he said.

His wife took the scissors and followed instructions.

A commotion occurred just outside in the corridor. The doctor nodded to his wife. She left the room. More casualties were arriving.

The doctor took a sponge. He began cleansing the wounds. The girl moaned. He took the syringe from the little pan of boiling instruments at his elbow, seated a needle, and drew it full of Novocain. He began on the girl’s face, with a laceration that passed through the eyebrow. He took care to line up the two edges of the severed brow. “Wipe the blood away.” He clamped a sponge and handed the clamp to the boy who stood beside him. “Wipe the blood away with this,” he said. “So I can see to stitch. Here, where I’m working.” The boy responded.

“You,” the doctor said to the girl. “Lie on the floor.”

“Me?”

“I don’t want you to faint. Lie on the floor until you feel better. Then step outside and help my wife.”

“She laid down,” said the boy, sponging, wiping away the oozing blood.

The doctor worked quickly. When he had closed the gash over the eye he began on the cheek. He probed. The girl screamed.

“Glass,” he said. She screamed again. His ears rang. “You’ll have to be still,” he said. “You’ve got glass in this one. We can’t sew up glass into your face. Do you understand? I’m going to try to deaden it, but there are other people waiting to be helped.” She began moaning. He found the sliver and drew it out, beer bottle brown. He dropped it on the floor.

“The hospital is going to try to send an ambulance,” his wife said behind him, “ The ambulances arc all out. Some, especially the funeral homes, are refusing calls.”

“How about a taxi?”

“I called,” she said. “Blue Top is going to try. They’ve lost four cabs.”

“Four new air-conditioned ones,” the doctor said. “Well.” He threaded a fresh needle with black suture thread. “Prepare me some needles,” he said. “Fill the syringe with Novocain.”

“All right.” She prepared the sutures, putting them in a line, in a neat row just as she had been taught, long ago, by her husband.

“Have we more cases?”

“The clinic is full,” she said. “The waiting room is full.”

“Get them off their feet, the bad ones. Move the furniture. Get the bad ones next to the wall.”

“Father Ned’s here,” she said. “He’s helping.”

She was gone then. A child was screaming in the corridor.

Conscious of the dragging of time, of others who were worse, the doctor nonetheless worked on, feeling more and more alone. He also felt helpless. He felt hopeless. Both sensations began passing through him in emotional waves. It was like nausea.

THE child was brought in next. “How old is she?”

“She seven, doctor,” said the mother.

“Let’s get her on the table,” he said.

He pulled away the dirty towel. The left eye, he saw, was utterly destroyed.

“What did this?”

“I don’t know. She come off the street. She saying somebody shot her. I was next door. Is she bad?55

There was nothing for it but to apply a pressure bandage. He worked as rapidly as he could. “When you can get downtown, take her to a hospital. The eye will need some work. I can’t do it here. She’s going to have pain.” He shook a dozen APC tablets into a small envelope. “You can give her half of one of these now. This is powerful pain medicine. She can have another half in four hours. Half a tablet every four hours. No more than that. Because this is a powerful drug. Her pain ought to be a lot better in a few minutes.”

He could already feel the child responding to the magic of sympathetic suggestion. “How do you feel?”

“I feels a whole lot better,” she said.

“Your mama is going to take you home and give you some powerful pain medicine. I’m going to give you a shot now. Have you had shots before?”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is to keep you from getting a bad infection and make you feel better. Can you count to ten?”

“Yes, sir.”

The child counted. He raised her knee, turned her quickly sideways, and slipping aside her panties, gave her a shot of penicillin in the buttock.

“. . . nine, ten,” said the child. “I feels a whole lot better.”

“Get her home. Keep her still,” he said. “If you have trouble, call me. If you can get her to the hospital, get her there, of course.”

“I believe we couldn’t make it, now, doctor,” said the mother. “I have other childrens. Some of them are out —”

“Get home with her,” he said.

“What I owe you?” said the woman.

“Just take her home.”

“Thank you, doctor.”

He crossed the hall and treated a woman with a gunshot wound. The slug had passed downward from behind, had missed the bone, and was lodged just beneath the skin to the left of her knee. He sliced quickly through to the coppered slug, a .32 caliber, and removed it with forceps. He gave her a shot of penicillin and dropped the disposable syringe in the waste can. His wife bandaged the leg.

“Can I have it?” the patient asked, eyeing the slug.

“Sure,” the doctor replied.

“I was thinking maybe they would need it as evidence?” she said, rolling the bit of metal in her hand.

“No,” he said. “How did it happen?”

“She had went acrost the street and got a teevee out the store where the glass was busted. I tole her not to go,” said the man with her. He was a big fellow with a touch of gray at the temples. “She got what she went for when she stepped out the door to steal,” he said. “She come halfway acrost and it was lack she sorta stumbled and somebody else they snatched and grabbed the teevee away from her and she went down on her knees and I tole myself the next sheen come going hit her sure. So I run out and I got her back to the house and it was right then the first I knew she was shot. Somebody needs to whup her for crossing that street the first time.”

“She-it,” said the woman. She stuck her tongue out. Her man picked her up and shouldered his way into the hall with her,

“Boy thirteen. Broken leg,” said the doctor’s wife. “Simple fracture. The cast room?”

“All right,” said the doctor. He was working automatically now. “How is Elizabeth Anne?”

“She’s helping up front.”

“Send her home. Can’t you follow instructions?”

“George, these are her people too. She’s helping.”

“I don’t want her hurt. I don’t want her killed. What if it moves this way?”

THE boy in the cast room was sobbing. “Crying won’t help,” the doctor said.

“I hurt,” the boy said.

“How did you do this?”

“Somebody throwed a cinder block. From up high on a building.”

“Why were you in the street?”

“They all in the street. Everybody in the street. The cops killed Hatcher. He was good. Hatcher was a buddy to everybody that knew him, and the cops, they cut him down in the street like a dog. Hatcher was kind to everybody. Everybody went in the street because of they memory of how good he was.”

“That won’t bring him back. It won’t unbreak your leg,” said the doctor.

“You just can’t understand! You too old to dig it what I am driving at,” the child said. “I don’t mind this leg!”

He was feeling braver. “When this leg get all right I’ll go back in the street again. Freedom now. Maybe you don’t dig what I’m saying.”

“Shut up,” the doctor said.

“Maybe you don’t —”

“I said shut up.”

Mr, Ford’s second novel, THE FEAST OF SAINT BARNABAS, from which this story is excerpted, will be published later this month by Atlantic-Little, Brown.

The boy lapsed into silence. The doctor applied the cast. “You’ll lie right here. Later we’ll get an X ray. Meanwhile, you’ll lie here until we can move you. Are you hurting much?”

The boy shook his head. He closed his eyes. Tears welled from beneath his delicate lashes. “If you start hurting we can give you some medicine. All right?”

“Uncle Tom!” the boy hissed, his teeth clenched, his hands pressed stiffly at his sides. “Uncle Tom!”

The doctor’s wife drew him away. Still the doctor heard the Parthian shot: “Motherfucken Uncle Tom!”

The cry, thought the doctor, of marginal man, drifting, self-reared and self-instructed, self-decimated and seeing the enemy in every face, the man to whom every face is alien, even (perhaps especially) his very own.

Given time he could have told the boy a few things, the doctor thought, feeling a strange separation between himself and what was happening.

He saw himself as he had been in World War II, as a young man wearing captain’s bars, an officer in the medical corps. He was given a few days’ leave before he told his wife good-bye and kissed his infant daughter. It was the last time he would see his father alive.

Then he was crossing the Continent on the train, ordered to the Pacific theater of operation. He had found himself pretty well famished by the time the train stopped for a brief layover in Abilene, Texas. Dismounting from the train as rapidly as he could, the doctor had rushed into the Abilene terminal dining room only to be told that Negroes were not served.

“You might have time, I don’t know,” said the counterman. He was an older man, blue-eyed, leathery-faced. “There’s a nigra restaurant — or maybe you’d call it a cafe. Anyhow, if you could grab a taxi you might just make it there and git some grub before she pulls out,” said he, nodding toward the train.

Out the doctor raced. He stepped into a cab, explained the situation, and was rattled across town to the fly-ridden nigger diner. There he gulped down a grease-drenched plate of “soul food.” Greens, potatoes, pork chops, corn bread, stale coffee — back then into the waiting cab for the return trip to the terminal with the rancid taste of the squalid, run-down cafe lingering against his tongue like strange smoke.

He was in plenty of time. As it turned out the train was delayed. The cause of the delay, as it happened, was a contingent of German prisoners of war who, seated at the long counter of the terminal restaurant, were feasting.

It was a taste, a bitterness, that he carried with him out of the Army and into private practice. It was a taste that returned to haunt him when Elizabeth Anne asked why she couldn’t swing on the swings and slide down the slides in the city parks of Ormund City. Given time he could tell these marginal men a few things . . .

“Like those other children, Daddy?”

He always replied gruffly. “You just can’t because we don’t have time.” Then he lived with the look of reproach in the eyes of his own flesh from the third through the tenth year of her life.

When she was ten years old she came into the clinic in tears. A man had called her a nigger, a white man. He had told her she could not sit on the public bench while waiting for the bus. “Why, Daddy?”

He had to tell her then, and again when she asked him why he could never exceed the speed limit when called out on emergencies. “Other doctors drive fast. All the other doctors drive fast to save lives.”

The doctor: “Yes, but I am a Negro. The police might not understand my violation as well as they would understand the violation of a white physician. There’s a difference.”

Elizabeth Anne: “It’s not right. It is not fair.”

The doctor: “What is right and what is fair sometimes has nothing to do with what is, and is will very often in your life be the word you must come to terms with if you expect to live and do well in this country.”

She had nodded thoughtfully.

Now she was questioning him again.

“Are the hospitals sending us any help, Daddy?”

He looked at her, his flesh, a mature woman.

“Stop a moment, please? Drink this,” she was saying. “I made it.”

He took the cup of coffee.

“Change your coat,” she said. “Look at you all sweaty and bloody.”

She drew him into the private office and pulled off the soiled smock, the drenched undershirt. She wet a cloth and wiped his face and his arms. She moved the cloth across his chest and handed him a fresh undershirt, a clean smock. “Drink your coffee,” she said.

He swallowed a fifteen-milligram dextro-amphetamine-sulphate spansule with his coffee, looked briefly at his watch, and calculated the time span of his awareness. He would be good now until 3 A.M. or thereabouts, tomorrow, Monday morning, by which time he could risk another spansule and work straight through, if need be. Food was out of the question for him. There was no time to be spared.

HE FINALLY spoke to the chief resident at Ormund City General. The phones were giving trouble. The white man’s voice, young and vibrant though it was, seemed to be spanning an enormous distance. It was as though the barrier were one of miles and centuries instead of mere minutes and city blocks. A phone never before had felt so strange to the doctor’s hands. “I need help down here,” he kept saying, and all the while he was aware that in the mere telling, the mere pleading, time and blood and agony were being spilled in the corridors outside, just beyond the strangely still dignity of this sedately paneled office where he stood quietly talking, quietly pleading.

“We’re covered up down here,” the resident was saying. “I don’t think there’s a chance, doctor. Reports from the drivers indicate something worse than mere physical danger down there. The mob situation is apparently pathological, and a white face, physician or otherwise —”

“I’m going to lose some people if I can’t get them to you or get your help. I’m almost out of Novocain.”

There was a pause, the more agonizing because children were crying and a woman shrieking, shrill with hysteria. Someone pounded on the office door, went away, returned, pounded again. “George!” The doctor’s wife. “Daddy!” His daughter.

“We might help you there,” the chief resident was saying. “Now just where are you located? Some of the Blue Tops have been having better luck. Negro drivers seem to stand a better chance. We put a Filipino intern on one of the wagons. Novocain? That address?”

The doctor gave the address. “I’ve already set one leg. I don’t know how many more fractures I have. I could use some surgical plaster if you can spare it.”

“Right away. I’ll run right down to central supply. What else?”

“Gauze, sponges, disposable penicillin, suture thread —”

“I get the picture,” said the other voice, eons distant, light-years away. “I’ll grab as much junk as possible. We’ll hustle it out and hope for a cab. They come through sporadically. I can’t promise you just when. Let me read this address back.”

The doctor listened. “That’s correct,” he said. The pounding on the office door began again. A siren screamed in the street.

“You must be right in the heart of it.”

“I am,” said the doctor. Then he hung up, unlocked the door, and stepped into the corridor, there to be greeted by the first of the burn victims, a senile woman, near to eighty as best he could judge. There was no time to find out her age. Ten minutes later she died on the treatment table. “Where?” his wife said, making a gesture.

“In the back room. No relatives?”

“None so far.”

“Put her in the back room. Tell Father Ned.”

“How did it happen?” the doctor asked.

“A dry cleaner’s was fire-bombed. The fire moved to her rooming house,” said his wife. “We’re out of linens.”

“Send Elizabeth Anne for our own.”

“I have,” she said.

“Try the hospital again. I forgot to mention linens,” the doctor said. “If you can get them, also see about something for burns.”

Father Ned appeared. “Dead?” the priest asked.

The doctor nodded. “For the time being let’s use the very back room.”

“Yes,” the priest replied. He lifted the worn body tenderly in his short, sturdy arms. A cry arose in the hallway. “They shooten! They gone kill us all!”

The next case was also a burn. A child. Then a man. Another child. An old woman. Then a sixteen-year-old girl with head wounds, gunshot.

“The circuits are all busy,” said his wife. “Nothing works. I can’t get the operator.”

“Never mind,” said the doctor. “It probably doesn’t matter anyhow.”

“This one?”

“Dying,” said the doctor. “Move her into the hallway. Ask Father Ned if he can find out who she is.”

The doctor moved as though stepping into a dream, doing right and left those things he would never have dared attempt in the years of a lifetime’s normal practice. It came to him from time to time as the minutes fled beneath his methodical fingers, as his back began to ache and his own perspiration, time and again, stung his eyes, almost blinding him, it came to him that should these people, his own people, any of them, decide afterward to sue for malpractice, they could very probably take away from him everything he had earned and accumulated, everything he ever would earn in the future. Doing right and left those things the general practitioner should never dare, he thought grimly. Those things the general practitioner should never be called upon to do, he thought, in the dreamlike quiet, in the deathlike, twilight solitude and silence into which his consciousness, by the urge, dent, and burden of sheer concentration, had eventually been pushed.

Motherfucken Uncle Tom. Even when the younger ones did not say it, he saw it. If they said it, he did not hear it or mind it. My people, he thought. The idea sickened him a little.

“Has it moved this way?” he asked once.

“It has come this way twice and has passed on,” said the priest. “My own house has burned.”

“I’m very, very sorry,” the doctor replied. “The girl? The head wound?”

“She just passed,” said the priest. “We moved her to the back room.”

“Someone please clean the floor,” the doctor said absently. “Don’t let the treatment room doors get slick. I don’t want to lose my footing.”

It was as though no one had noticed the blood before. Elizabeth Anne went on her knees, wiping the floors in the treatment rooms. An explosion boomed across the street.

“They got the paint store,” said a voice. “That’s one mother that is sure gonna burn-lawd-burn!”

“I believe it is going to come back this way. I believe it is coming,” said the priest.

“Perhaps they realize we’re a hospital,” the doctor said. “Can you try to move some of the walking ones down to the church? They can’t stay here if they can walk.”

My home, my family, my clinic, my practice, and I built it all for this, he thought. Christ have mercy. For this.