“I’ll get started over there,” said Doc Behrer. “There’s about half a dozen more crawled in.”
“What’s been done?” demanded Doc Janney of the men who followed him into the drug store. “Have they called Birmingham and Montgomery?”
“The telephone wires are down, but the telegraph got through.”
“Well, somebody get Doctor Cohen from Wettala, and tell any people who have automobiles to go up the Willard Pike and cut across toward Corsica and all through those roads there. There’s not a house left at the crossroads by the nigger store. I passed a lot of folks walking in, all of them hurt, but I didn’t have room—or anybody else.” As he talked he was throwing bandages, disinfectant and drugs into a blanket. “I thought I had a lot more stuff than this in stock! And wait!” he called. “Somebody drive out and look down in that hollow where the Wooleys live. Drive right across the fields—the road’s blocked… Now, you with the cap—Ed Jenks, ain’t it?”
“Yes, doc.”
“You see what I got here? You collect everything in the store that looks like this and bring it across the way, understand?”
“Yes, doc.”
As the doctor went out into the street, the victims were streaming into town—a woman on foot with a badly injured child, a buck-board full of groaning Negroes, frantic men gasping terrible stories. Everywhere confusion and hysteria mounted in the dimly illumined darkness. A mud-covered reporter from Birmingham drove up in a sidecar, the wheels crossing the fallen wires and brushwood that clogged the street, and there was the siren of a police car from Cooper, thirty miles away.
Already a crowd pressed around the doors of the hospital, closed these three months for lack of patients. The doctor squeezed past the melee of white faces and established himself in the nearest ward, grateful for the waiting row of old iron beds. Doctor Behrer was already at work across the hall.
“Get me half a dozen lanterns,” he ordered.
“Doctor Behrer wants iodine and adhesive.”
“All right, there it is… Here, you, Shinkey, stand by the door and keep everybody out except cases that can’t walk. Somebody run over and see if there ain’t some candles in the grocery store.”
The street outside was full of sound now—the cries of women, the contrary directions of volunteer gangs trying to clear the highway, the tense staccato of people rising to an emergency. A little before midnight arrived the first unit of the Red Cross. But the three doctors, presently joined by two others from near-by villages, had lost track of time long before that. The dead began to be brought in by ten o’clock; there were twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty—the list grew. Having no more needs, these waited, as became simple husbandmen, in a garage behind, while the stream of injured—hundreds of them—flowed through the old hospital built to house only a dreads of them—flowed through the old hospital built to house only a score. The storm had dealt out fractures of the leg, collar bone, ribs and hip, lacerations of the back, elbows, ears, eyelids, nose; there were wounds from flying planks, and odd splinters in odd places, and a scalped man, who would recover to grow a new head of hair. Living or dead, Doc Janney knew every face, almost every name.
“Don’t you fret now. Billy’s all right. Hold still and let me tie this. People are drifting in every minute, but it’s so consarned dark they can’t find ’em—All right, Mrs. Oakey. That’s nothing. Ev’ here’ll touch it with iodine… Now let’s see this man.”
Two o’clock. The old doctor from Wettala gave out, but now there were fresh men from Montgomery to take his place. Upon the air of the room, heavy with disinfectant, floated the ceaseless babble of human speech reaching the doctor dimly through the layer after layer of increasing fatigue:
“… Over and over—just rolled me over and over. Got hold of a bush and the bush came along too.”
“Jeff! Where’s Jeff?”
“…I bet that pig sailed a hundred yards—”
“—just stopped the train in time. All the passengers got out and helped pull the poles—”
“Where’s Jeff?”
“He says, ‘Let’s get down cellar,’ and I says, ‘We ain’t got no cellar’—”
“—If there’s no more stretchers, find some light doors.”
“…Five seconds? Say, it was more like five minutes!”
At some time he heard that Gene and Rose had been seen with their two youngest children. He had passed their house on the way in and, seeing it standing, hurried on. The Janney family had been lucky; the doctor’s own house was outside the sweep of the storm.
Only as he saw the electric lights go on suddenly in the streets and glimpsed the crowd waiting for hot coffee in front of the Red Cross did the doctor realize how tired he was.
“You better go rest,” a young man was saying. “I’ll take this side of the room. I’ve got two nurses with me.”
“All right—all right. I’ll finish this row.”
The injured were being evacuated to the cities by train as fast as their wounds were dressed, and their places taken by others. He had only two beds to go—in the first one he found Pinky Janney.
He put his stethoscope to the heart. It was beating feebly. That he, so weak, so nearly gone, had survived this storm at all was remarkable. How he had got there, who had found him and carried him, was a mystery in itself. The doctor went over the body; there were small contusions and lacerations, two broken fingers, the dirt-filled cars that marked every case—nothing else. For a moment the doctor hesitated, but even when he closed his eyes, the image of Mary Decker seemed to have receded, eluding him. Something purely professional that had nothing to do with human sensibilities had been set in motion inside him, and he was powerless to head it off. He held out his hands before him; they were trembling slightly.
“Hell’s bells!” he muttered.
He went out of the room and around the corner of the hall, where he drew from his pocket the flask containing the last of the corn and water he had had in the afternoon. He emptied it. Returning to the ward, he disinfected two instruments and applied a local anaesthetic to a square section at the base of Pinky’s skull where the wound had healed over the bullet. He called a nurse to his side and then, scalpel in hand, knelt on one knee beside his nephew’s bed.
III
Two days later the doctor drove slowly around the mournful countryside. He had withdrawn from the emergency work after the first desperate night, feeling that his status as a pharmacist might embarrass his collaborators. But there was much to be done in bringing the damage to outlying sections under the aegis of the Red Cross, and he devoted himself to that.
The path of the demon was easy to follow. It had pursued an irregular course on its seven-league boots, cutting cross country, through woods, or even urbanely keeping to roads until they curved, when it went off on its own again. Sometimes the trail could be traced by cotton fields, apparently in full bloom, but this cotton came from the insides of hundreds of quilts and mattresses redistributed in the fields by the storm.
At a lumber pile that had lately been a Negro cabin, he stopped a moment to listen to a dialogue between two reporters and two shy pickaninnies. The old grandmother, her head bandaged, sat among the ruins, gnawing some vague meat and moving her rocker ceaselessly.
“But where is the river you were blown across?” one of the reporters demanded.
“There.”
“Where?”
The pickaninnies looked to their grandmother for aid.
“Right there behind you-all,” spoke up the old woman.
The newspapermen looked disgustedly at a muddy stream four yards wide.
“That’s no river.”
“That’s a Menada River, we always calls it ever since I was a gull. Yes, suh, that’s a Menada River. An’ them two boys was blowed right across it an’ set down on the othah side just as pretty, ’thout any hurt at all. Chimney fell on me,” she concluded, feeling her head.
“Do you mean to say that’s all it was?” demanded the younger reporter indignantly. “That’s the river they were blown across! And one hundred and twenty million people have been led to believe—”
“That’s all right, boys,” interrupted Doc Janney. “That’s a right good river for these parts. And it’ll get bigger as those little fellahs get older.”
He tossed a quarter to the old woman and drove on.
Passing a country church, he stopped and counted the new brown mounds that marred the graveyard. He was nearing the centre of the holocaust now. There was the Howden house where three had been killed; there remained a gaunt chimney, a rubbish heap and a scarecrow surviving ironically in the kitchen garden. In the ruins of the house across the way a rooster strutted on top of a piano, reigning vociferously over an estate of trunks, boots, cans, books, calendars, rugs, chairs and window frames, a twisted radio and a legless sewing machine. Everywhere there was bedding—blankets, mattresses, bent springs, shredded padding—he had not realized how much of people’s lives was spent in bed. Here and there, cows and horses, often stained with disinfectant, were grazing again in the fields. At intervals there were Red Cross tents, and sitting by one of these, with the gray cat in her arms, the doctor came upon little Helen Kilrain. The usual lumber pile, like a child’s building game knocked down in a fit of temper, told the story.
“Hello, dear,” he greeted
