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Show 1«1 through the operation Mama's heart stopped and so did her breathing. They had no plasma and no blood on hand for transfusion if, indeed, they knew how to do it, and so they filled her veins with saline solution. Dr. Steiner massaged her heart and got it going again, took over the operation, tied the loose ligaments with one winding of catgut, packed the cavity with sterile gause and closed the wound. Mama slipped in and out of consciousness for a week and it seemed one day to her. Nobody thought she had a chance of living. Papa was terrified, and imported a nurse for special, twenty-hour duty. She stayed on the job twenty-four. Her name was Mary Swan, recently returned from war nursing in France. She gave Mama a hypo every fifteen minutes around the clock for a week, slept with one eye open for the rest of the month Mama was in the hospital, and got her installed in a nursing home. The hospital had failed and was being disbanded. Mama was still very sick when I left home, still in the hospital, so now I thought of her, and what it would do to her if somebody told her I had left home. By morning I was in a self-sacrificial mood. I would go home for her sake. But not for Papa's. Uncle Will saddled a good horse for me and tied my pillow-case on behind the saddle. I can't remember one more word of conversation with Ershel, not a backward glance. Our relationship had come to an abrupt end the day before. Three miles out of Three Creek, on the Devil's Dance Floor (a part of the road that bumped over weathered sandstone) I met Papa. |
