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Show 14 When Mama was able to get Eldon to a doctor he marvelled at her quick thinking, but more that it worked. She had to be nearly seventy years ahead of her time. This lesson stood me in good stead in later years when I was company nurse for the Annie Laurie gold mine in Kimberley, Utah, and when miners came to me with severed digits, smashed fingers, and in one case, where a man had hacked at a troublesome bee with an ax and almost amputated his own nose. Poets are only half angel. There was no doctor near the day I wanted the butcher knife Eldon was playing with. When he wouldn't yield right of way I bit his finger so hard he slashed at me in a reflex action and laid my eyelid down on my cheek, nor when the Jackson hayfork, a contrivance made of curved horns of devil, hooked Papa's ribs, followed them around to his backbone. It was up to Mama to pull the inch-square tine from the eight-inch wound and treat him the best she could. He was back to work within a week. My wound healed to a little puckered scar above my eye which still reminds me not to bite people. Fear was slowly compounded to become the snake in Mama's Eden. Up to then she and Papa had been happy, but her nervousness was whetted by the proximity of the railroad, up and down which tramps (now called hippies) passed going north and south. Once you gave one of them a "hand-out" your doom was sealed. Mama didn't know it then, but they carved coded messages for each other on the railroad ties, thus insuring a steady stream of customers to the givers' doors. |
