The Giant-Slayer (9 page)

The woodsman was next to put a coin in the cradle. He hoped to travel along with the old man, and so was quick to please him. And the gryphon hunter, not to be left out, tossed another Rhodes into the keg.

Fingal’s eyes were gleaming then, bright with the shine of gold. When the Woman came home from the market and ran to collect little Jimmy, Fingal steered her away. “Here, leave the babby with me,” he said. “He’s a wee pleasure to have about, that babby. I’d miss him like the devil.”

The Woman was delighted. She went up to her bed and had the first good sleep that she’d had in a year. From her room upstairs she could hear the cradle rocking and the baby laughing inside it.

Fingal made up a sign that night:
Tip a babby; fortune follows
. In the morning he salted the crib with a few copper Constantines, to add a musical jingle to the pitching of the cradle. By evening, Jimmy was sloshing about on a bed of coins.

Salting the cradle became a daily ritual, a chore as happy as the watering of the ale or the draining of used glasses back into bottles. From then on, no traveler passed through the inn without slipping a coin into the keg. Shepherds and hunters, nobles and thieves, they all touched the tooth and tipped the baby. For the first time, the “Jimmy” column in Fingal’s ledger began to show a profit.

Fingal was finally a happy man. But of course it didn’t last.

There came a day when Jimmy didn’t fit in the cradle. For
a week or more, Fingal had been jamming him into it, like a cork into a bottle. But now, no matter how he squeezed and pushed, it was no use. His little boy—sadly—was longer than the keg.

Fingal replaced the keg with a small barrel. But even as he did it, he knew it was at best a temporary solution. The barrel was only two inches longer, and Jimmy was steadily growing.

“Don’t let him splint his legs,” said Chip.

“What do you mean?” asked Laurie.

Chip was wincing. He had listened to the story quite happily up to now, just lying with his eyes closed, his mouth in a peaceful smile. Now he tried to turn his head far enough to look at Laurie. He said, “I don’t want Fingal to splint the baby’s legs.”

“Why would he?” asked Laurie.

“That’s what they did. To polios.”

“They did it to me,” said Carolyn.

Above the girl’s head,
The Catcher in the Rye
was sagging from its clips. Laurie took it down and put it away. She turned the mirror in its frame so that Carolyn could see the sky and trees outside the window. “What’s it like?” she asked. “Splinting.”

“It’s like a torture,” said Carolyn. “Remember the old iron maiden? It’s just like that.” Splinting, she said, was something that Cotton Mather would have done to a witch in Salem if he’d been cruel enough to think of it.

Her iron lung breathed in and out, and she talked in the whoosh of air. “First,” she said, “there’s nothing more painful than polio. It eats away at your nerves. Then the muscles start to wither. They shrink and tighten. Your legs and arms go crooked; they twist like corkscrews. Your knees bend backward. Your arms look like gnarly little sticks.

“The doctors say, ‘We’ll help you.’ First thing they do, they stick a tube in your spine. They suck out some of the fluid. That’s the only way to make sure you’ve got polio. But they don’t tell you if you’ve got it or not; they don’t tell you anything, ’cause you’re just a kid. They go away, and you don’t know when they’re coming back. You think maybe they’ll never come back, but they do.”

Carolyn wetted her lips with her tongue, then went on as before, talking in snatches between the breaths of her respirator.

“They put wooden splints around your legs. Or they put on plaster casts, or metal things that look like armor from a knight. They pin you down like a butterfly to make sure your bones won’t bend. But it happens anyway, and then they start to operate.

“They put you to sleep and smash your legs. They break your bones, then straighten them out and stick them together with pins. They put on the splints and casts again. They bind your legs so tightly that the bones can’t grow. And maybe they leave out a bit so you won’t have one leg that’s longer than the other, ’cause they sure don’t want you to look weird.

“They tell you, ‘There! Now you’ll be better.’ It hurts so much that you wish they’d take away the splints and casts
and leave you alone. But you trust the doctors; you think you must be getting better. Then they come back and tell you, ‘Well, we have to operate again,’ and it all starts over.

“By then you hate the doctors. You think there’s nothing in the world more scary than a doctor.”

At the window, Laurie nodded. “Yeah, I know!” she said loudly. “When I was five I had my tonsils out and—”

“Big deal. Big hairy deal,” said Carolyn. “It’s not like tonsils.”

“That’s not what I meant,” said Laurie.

“How can you say that? How can you be so stupid?” Carolyn glared at Laurie. “I hated my doctors. I wished they would die. They stole me, you know. That’s what they did. They took me away from my mom and my dad, and they locked me up in hospital.”

It came into Laurie’s mind to say,
They were just trying to help you
. But, still stung by Carolyn’s reaction to her tonsil story, she was careful not to say anything wrong. “How did it start?” she asked.

The machine pulled air through Carolyn’s mouth. The rubber collar that sealed her neck vibrated very slightly. Talking slowly, keeping time with the iron lung, she sounded like a poet with a breathy chorus in the background.

“When I was a kid Daddy called me ‘kitten.’

“Wherever we went, he leaned sideways. Bending down to hold my hand.

“We went to the store and the zoo. To the park and the pool.

“We were always alone. Just me and my dad. That’s the way I wanted it.”

Her eyes were red and wet. She rolled her head against the pillow, trying to blot her own tears.

“I was six years old. Dad took us to a cabin on a lake. There were cottages all around. Everybody swimming all the time.

“There must have been a thousand people,” she said. “Maybe more. But no one else got polio. I was the only one.”

In that way, in little sentences or phrases, Carolyn told her story. It was the first time that she had done it, from beginning to end.

“One morning,” she said, “I felt sick. Hot and creepy. My mother said it was too much sun. She made me stay in bed.

“The sheets hurt me. Just the weight of the sheets. When I cried, Mom said, ‘Don’t make a fuss. You’re barely even sunburned.’ She waited three days to call a doctor.”

Carolyn described the doctor as a smelly old man with white hair in his ears. “He had lollipops in his shirt pocket,” she said. “I could see the little sticks poking up. He pulled out a purple one and held it toward me, and he was disappointed when I didn’t want to eat it. ‘Well, I’ll leave it on the table here,’ he said.

“Then he opened his black bag. He took my temperature and tapped my chest. He looked in my ears with a flashlight on a stick. He told my mom, “It’s a summer cold. Nothing to worry about.’ He said, ‘Let her rest a few more days. She’ll be as fit as a fiddle.’”

That afternoon, said Carolyn, her arms stopped working. When the sun went down she was having trouble breathing. Her father flew into a rage, ranting about the doctor. “He seemed twenty feet tall,” she said, looking up at the mirror
above the iron lung. “His voice shook the room. I thought my bed was whirling round and round.”

She didn’t remember clearly what happened after that. “I was in an ambulance. We were rushing along gravel roads, shuddering over potholes. There was a little bump when we came onto pavement.”

Soon, said Carolyn, the darkness of the country gave way to city lights. She remembered the coolness of the air as the ambulance doors were opened, and looking up to see people looming all around her, frightening figures in gowns and gloves, with masks on their faces. “All I could see were their eyes.”

Beside her now, Chip was silent. No one made a sound as Carolyn talked.

“The next thing I knew, I was sealed in an iron lung,” she said. “There was a hole in my throat, and a tube stuck inside it. Air was going in and out with horrible whistles and gasps.”

The next days seemed hazy to her now, she said. She had slept and woken, and slept again. And then a priest was standing at her side, clothed as black as a crow. He was holding something above the iron lung, moving his hand in the sign of a cross.

“It was the last rites,” she said. “I was dying.”

She described how he muttered the strange Latin words, how his hand moved up and down, back and forth. “I thought when he finished I would die,” she said. “I wanted to signal to him that I was still alive. But I couldn’t call out. I couldn’t move a hand to warn him. I could feel my fingers, my toes, my arms and legs, but couldn’t make them work.”
Every muscle in her body was burning hot, she said. But her skin was all prickles and ice.

“Then it was morning. There was sunlight in the room, and a bird was singing somewhere,” said Carolyn. “A nurse in white was moving round the iron lung. Her shoes were squeaking.

“When she saw me, she smiled. It was the most beautiful smile.”

Now Carolyn too smiled up at her mirror. She told how the nurse ran to the hall, shouting, “She’s awake! She’s awake!” and then ran back again to hold the girl’s face in her hands, to stroke the blond hair that was then nearly as short as a boy’s.

“Her hands were warm,” said Carolyn. “She kept saying, ‘I knew you’d pull through. I just had a feeling you would.’ I tried to talk, but no sound came out. Then the nurse put her finger on the end of the plastic tube, and suddenly there was air passing through it, into my mouth, over my lips and gums and teeth.” Sucked with lovely coolness down her throat, it filled her lungs, and as the bellows pumped below her machine, Carolyn spoke for the first time in ten days.

“I asked, ‘Where’s my daddy?’ That’s all I cared about. He was out in the hall. He had been there every night,” she said. “When he came in, he looked as old and worried as Rip Van Winkle. All he did was cry. He just stood beside me, crying.”

Laurie asked, “Was your mother there?”

“No, but she came right away,” said Carolyn. “She was in a hotel down the street.”

Laurie looked at Carolyn with a new understanding. Chip
had turned his head away, and little Dickie was staring up toward his comic of the Two-Gun Kid but not reading the words or seeing the pictures.

“That was more than seven years ago,” said Carolyn. “They moved to a new city. They moved again. Dad bought a company, and that took them even farther away.

“I have a sister now. She’s three years old. I only saw her once.

“They went to Niagara Falls. To the Grand Canyon. To California.

“And I haven’t left this room. Not once in all that time.”

Dickie tipped his head toward her. “They couldn’t take you,” he said.

“Think I don’t know that?” asked Carolyn. “Think I couldn’t figure it out?”

“I mean, you shouldn’t be mad. Boy, it’s not their fault.”

“Oh, shut up,” said Carolyn.

Laurie stepped away. “Do they still come to visit?” she asked.

“Oh, they did at first.” Carolyn talked about it as Laurie moved along the row of iron lungs, to Chip’s and then to Dickie’s, taking down the magazine and comic book, flipping mirrors over.

For a week, said Carolyn, her father and mother had come every day to the hospital. Each time they brought a tiny bunch of flowers, or candy that she couldn’t eat. They always asked how she was doing, as though they couldn’t see that she was just the same. Then they had to go home; Mr. Jewels had to go back to work.

“Dad started coming by himself. All that summer, he
came every weekend,” said Carolyn. “In the fall it was every
second
week. By the end of winter it was once a month.

“And now …” She sobbed and sniffed. “It’s maybe once a year. He came last month, and stayed for less than an hour.”

“Were you mean to him?” asked Dickie, piping up above the huff of the respirators. “Did you get sore at him?”

“Mind your beeswax,” said Carolyn.

But Dickie kept on, with the serious expression that made him look so much older. “Did you shout at him? Then not even talk at all? Boy, I bet he looked so sad.”

“Well, good for him!” she snapped. “Why shouldn’t he be sad?”

“’Cause he came to see you,” said Dickie.

“You stupe. He didn’t
want
to come. He
had
to,” said Carolyn. “He hates coming here.”

She looked mean now, not pretty at all. Her face had set into hard lines, her forehead into rows of wrinkles.

“You should be nicer to people,” said Dickie. “Then they’d be nicer to you.”

“You should shut up,” said Carolyn.

She and Dickie might have argued all day if not for the boy between them. Chip lay for a while with his eyes closed, his teeth gritted, as though he hoped to block out the sound. Then he tossed his head back and forth; he slammed it up and down. He did it so violently that one of the photographs shook loose from the front of his iron lung and drifted in zigzags to the floor. “Quit it!” he said in an angry voice.