Hurricane Nurse (9 page)

The door itself had been somewhat damaged by the time it swung open. Cliff gazed at the damaged lock and shook his head. "It's going to need a new one," he decided.

Donna darted inside and looked about her. "We should have brought the flash," she told Cliff. "It's pretty dark in here." But she made out great bags of flour and sugar, large cans of tomatoes, glass jars of dried beans. Other containers too shadowy to identify filled the shelves farther back. Cans of milk, smaller than anything in the closet, occupied a low shelf where, had Donna not been persistent, she could have overlooked them. She filled a large paper bag with a dozen of the cans and came out once more.

It was still twenty minutes before the appointed hour, and the group took their places on chairs about the outside door. The wind outside howled so loudly that it discouraged small talk and they waited rather like racers at the starting point, to make a dash for it when the wind died.

And finally, die down it did. The silence that came suddenly seemed louder than the noise to which they had become accustomed. Stunned by it, all of them sat silent and still for a minute. Then Cliff spoke briskly. "Now. And as quickly as you safely can."

The door opened easily now. Cliff went first with the thin cot mattress. Jack, carrying Missy as though she were the most precious of burdens, followed. Baby LaRue with the newborn child came next. Donna, carefully locking the cafeteria behind her, came last with the bag of milk cans. They all moved quickly, Indian fashion, down the portico to the double doors which gave entrance to the big hall of the main building. Cliff knocked, the sound echoing in the unbelievable silence. When someone came and opened the doors, the little party streamed in, and Donna noticed that it was Dusty who had acted as doorkeeper.

She had hardly come into the hall and had the doors closed behind her when a distracted-looking mother, her hair stringing about her strained face, accosted her. "Miss Ledbury, I've got a sick child, an awful sick child. I've been looking for you everywhere. Come and look at him, will you?"

Donna gave Dusty the sack of milk cans and nodded. "In what way is he sick? Mrs. Worth, isn't it? The little boy you brought in yesterday?" That child, she remembered, had looked anemic, filmy-eyed, completely bored, even under most unusual circumstances. She had thought at the time that she ought to suggest to the mother that he see a doctor. Now she fervently prayed that it would not turn out to be acute appendicitis, with an operation indicated.

Donna followed the frantic woman down the hall, dodging playing children, walking about men too much engrossed in what they were saying to one another to budge. The room the Worths were occupying was near the end and on the left. The child lay on a pallet on the floor.

Even before the nurse touched him, she knew that he had a high fever. His lips had a dry, cracked look. His face was flushed, his eyes, opening when she knelt beside him, unseeing. Donna took a deep breath to ease her sense of responsibility and fear and touched the thin cheek. She had been right. The boy was burning up. She turned once more to the mother.

"Go down to my office. It's on the left of the entrance as you face it. Ask somebody there to get me a thermometer out of the top drawer of my desk."

The boy's father, who had been sitting in the chair at the teacher's desk, got lazily up and moved over to the girl. "He's pretty sick, ain't he? Never been really strong, and his ma babies him. I say if she'd let him be like other boys, it'd toughen him up and he wouldn't be always whining about how bad he feels."

Donna looked up into the unshaven face and the stupid little eyes, and wondered if his uncaring attitude was ignorance or indifference. "And it might be the death of him," she said quietly. Then she turned to the child. "Will you tell me your name? I had it yesterday when you came in, but there were a lot of boys about your size and I've forgotten it."

He tried, swallowed painfully, and then whispered, "Sammy."

"Do you hurt anywhere, Sammy?" She pushed his colorless hair out of his eyes and determined to ask his mother to comb it when she was through looking him over.

He put his hand to his throat. "It hurts here. Like knives cutting." He began to cry in self-pity.

Donna almost groaned aloud. To herself, she thought, Polio? Scarlet fever? Almost anything could begin with a sore throat. Polio usually had a stiff neck as well, she remembered. She tested that, and found his neck almost too limber, which frightened her anew because she didn't have any idea what it might portend. "Meningitis?" she questioned herself. "I ought to have studied medicine and specialized in diagnosis."

Mrs. Worth was back with the thermometer now, and Donna put it into the hot little mouth. Sammy had had his temperature taken often before and accepted it with forbearance. The three adults waited, Donna counting a racing pulse. The thermometer measured a fever of a hundred four degrees. Donna shook it down hurriedly and turned an artificial smile on the parents.

"He does have fever," she admitted, "but children run a fever easily. I'll get some alcohol from my office and we'll rub him down." Aspirin, she thought. That couldn't hurt him, and it was all she knew to do until she could get the boy to a doctor.

Sammy took the two tablets meekly, complained a little at being undressed by a stranger and finally lay limp and half-sleeping as she rubbed his skinny little body until it grew cooler. Then she covered him carefully and began to question his mother.

"I reckon it started yesterday. Sammy woke up with the sniffles. I gave him some cold tablets they advertise on television and kept him in until it come time to come over here. He got a little wet then, but I changed his clothes right off. I don't think he took no more cold then. And last night he was out playing with the other kids. And some this morning, only he didn't seem to feel so good. And when he fell down playing tag, he come to me crying and I knew he had a fever and went hunting for you."

Donna nodded. Maybe it's something contagious, she thought with an inward shudder. "Has he had his polio shots, Mrs. Worth?" she went on aloud.

The woman nodded, fear coming into her eyes. "He ain't got polio, Nurse! You ain't tellin' me he's got polio, are you?" She covered her face with her hands and began to sob.

"Now, Clara," her husband comforted roughly, "the lady didn't say nothing of the kind. She said had he had his shots, and he has."

Donna rushed to reinforce his argument. "There's no reason to think he has polio, Mrs. Worth. Especially since he's had his shots. I was just checking. He's probably got a bad case of the sniffles, but don't let any of the other children in here. It might be measles or mumps, or any of a dozen of children's diseases. Nearly all of them begin with a cold. And we don't want to spread even a cold any more than we have to, do we?"

Mrs. Worth's eyes clung to the girl's with hopeful dependence. "It ain't nothing worse'n a cold, is it?" she begged for reassurance.

"I think it's a cold," Donna said cautiously. "I'm not a doctor, Mrs. Worth. I wish today that I were. But sometimes even doctors can't be sure of diagnosis at this stage. I'll be back and forth and do everything I can to keep Sammy comfortable. You may be sure I'll do all I can. You keep on hoping it's only a cold, and say a little prayer." She, herself, would pray; in fact, already had, in the ardent hope that Sammy's trouble would not be anything serious.

She patted the worried woman on the shoulder and flashed a smile at the man, who looked more anxious than he had in the beginning, and started back to her office.

Her way took her past the faculty room where she remembered that Mrs. Ward probably was. She had liked the little gray-haired woman who was confined to her wheel chair and decided to stop and check on her. A knock brought a sweet-voiced, "Come in."

Donna opened the door and announced herself. "I'm Donna Ledbury, Mrs. Ward. Are you all right? Is there anything I can get for you?"

Mrs. Ward moved her chair toward the door in a welcoming gesture. "Bradley's out hunting a match for our stove. We're going to have soup and sandwiches for lunch. Won't you stay and have it with us?"

Donna shook her head. "Thank you, but I believe everybody's supposed to eat his own provisions, just in case we're here longer than we hoped." Hank had told her that, and she thought of all the things she had shared, both Cliff's and the supplies from the cafeteria. She had a notion that the Wards actually did not have food to share.

"I can't pretend that I need you professionally," the old lady went on brightly, "but I would like it if you would come in and tell me all about the new baby. It will be something interesting for her to tell all the rest of her life, won't it, being born in a schoolhouse during a hurricane?"

Donna laughed. "It'll probably be something I'll talk about for the rest of mine, too. A nurse isn't trained as a midwife. At least I wasn't. If I'd known about hurricanes and the duties of school nurses during them, I think I would have learned a few extra things. The baby's a little beauty, though. I'll wheel you down to see her this afternoon, if you like. We don't have a big, glass-enclosed nursery like she would have had in the hospital, but we can let you look at her from a distance. I do hope she'll stay well. We haven't been able to keep her in sterile places, and she's already been handled by unsterile people."

Mrs. Ward smiled at her. "I imagine more than half of the babies even in the United States aren't kept under those conditions. And yet most of them manage to grow up and be healthy. And even in hospitals they get that infection—you call it staph?—don't they?"

"You are a comforter," Donna told her gratefully. "No wonder Dr. Ward is still so much in love with you."

Mrs. Ward blushed like a girl. "He's been talking about what a fine girl you are, and how pretty," the older woman changed the subject graciously.

Donna could feel her own cheeks flushing. "We did hit it off. He's a wonderful man, Mrs. Ward. My mother and father are like you two, congenial and very much in love even after raising all us children. I hope they'll live as long as you have and be as happy together."

Mrs. Ward nodded thoughtfully. "We've had our troubles and our disappointments, of course, but even in the midst of the worst of them, we've been happy because we had each other. That's what worries me about us now." She faltered into silence.

Donna waited a bit for her to go on, then said "Yes?" so softly that if Mrs. Ward didn't want to go on she could easily pretend she hadn't heard.

The single word prompted her to continue. "It's a thing that hangs over me all the time—a worry. I know that, except for my foolish legs, I'm in much better health than Bradley. It's his heart, you know. He has heart spasms, and every time he has one, I'm frantic for fear he'll die and I'll be left alone. Still, that isn't the thing that bothers me most. Even in a wheel chair, I'd get along somehow. Women can, you know. But men are dependent and lonesome creatures. I simply can't imagine what Bradley would do without me, poor darling. If he were younger, I'd hope he'd marry again, but I guess he's a bit old for that." Her face was half-wry, half-mischievous.

Donna patted her hand. "Bridge-crossing never did anybody any good, Mrs. Ward. You just be glad you've had each other so long."

The old lady dimpled at her. "Oh, I am that. But I do think of Bradley alone, too. And even sometimes of myself alone. A women does when she's my age. Eighty-nine, I am. And even with the stretched age span, that's old. Though I can't say that, inside, I feel much older than I did at seventeen."

"Seventeen," Donna mused, thinking of her own senior year in high school. It seemed a very long time ago.

Thinking about it had made Mrs. Ward's round, dimpled face look younger. "That was the year I met Bradley. It was his first year of teaching. He was so good-looking, and so shy. He would teach away with his eyes on the desk top or on the blackboard, and blush and squirm every time one of the girls spoke to him. All of the girls fell in love with him and used to tease him unmercifully. I must admit I was one of the worst of them. But he fell in love with me, and when I finished college, we were married." She sighed, a happy, satisfied sigh.

Donna chuckled. "My men teachers, both in high school and college, were mostly old and dry, but there was an English teacher when I was a freshman. He wrote poetry—and looked every inch of it. Only, he thought I was hopeless because I couldn't write compositions. I suffered and bled over some of the things he said to me, but I recovered. Now I can't really remember what he looked like. Funny."

"But you must have a sweetheart, a pretty girl like you," Mrs. Ward suggested.

"Not a serious one," Donna assured her. "I like to dance and go to the theater or to dinner as much as the next girl, and I like boys, too, but I don't believe I've found anybody I'd like to spend the rest of my life with—anybody I'd feel toward as my mother does toward my father, as you do toward Dr. Ward."

Unbidden, the thought of Cliff Warrender rose before her, his stern, dark face solemn, then breaking into a smile that changed it entirely. She didn't believe that Cliff was the man for her. She honestly couldn't approve of his idea of the practice of law. But she thought of him. She had to admit that to herself.

It was in that moment that she realized the hurricane was blowing again. It must have begun while she was concentrating on the needs of young Sammy Worth. The sound seemed louder to her than it had before the eye had passed over them. The windows creaked in their steel frames. A coconut blew from one of the trees in the patio and struck a crossbar in the window, cracking a pane all the way across. Mrs. Ward drew away in what looked like reflex action, whirling the wheels of her chair with plump white hands.

Donna cried out, then muffled the sound with a hand to her mouth. "That could have been a lot worse," she tried to say cheerfully, but her voice shook. "I'm glad the coconut didn't strike the glass. That could be dangerous."

Mrs. Ward was shaken, too. "We must remember to stay as far as possible from the window. Flying glass could kill. It would be almost sure to leave permanent damage if anyone stood near. I must caution Bradley."