Gone at 3:17 by David M. Brown

Author:David M. Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potomac Books, Inc.
Published: 2012-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

22

Mother Frances

Walter Freeman couldn’t help but wonder, time and again, if he was going in and out of a dream. He had been at school and was knocked down and hurt badly when the room collapsed. The nightmare next put him in the midst of other students, groaning and dying, and Walter tried to say something, ask some questions, but his voice was very weak. Then he awoke in an ambulance with a siren blaring, feeling it swerve to take a steep curve. Now, it seemed an angel was gazing down at him.

A black hood with a white collar curved around the beautiful oval of her face. She smiled at him. He wanted to say something but still felt deflated, too tired even to say hello. He heard the voices of men, his flather in work clothes and a doctor in a white lab coat, standing in the doorway of the hospital room.

“Is he going to make it?” Mr. Freeman asked.

“If he makes it through tonight, I think so,” the doctor said.

Although Walter didn’t know what she was doing—or what she was, since he’d never seen a nun—he felt comforted by the sister as she swabbed his head injuries and gently probed his chest and arms. She was preparing the boy for surgery to repair the compound fracture in one arm and place a cast around his entire body, from head to toe, with slits for his eyes, nose, and mouth. His broken back and cracked ribs were not believed to be life threatening; doctors were most concerned about the concussion.

Walter Freeman soon drifted back to a semiconscious state, mixing the reality of his surroundings with dreamlike images, unaware that he was one of the first patients in the new Mother Frances Hospital in Tyler.

Walter’s eleven-year-old sister, Jeanette, was with their mother, still looking all over the place for her other sister, Myrtle Marie, nine, who went by “Shug.” Nobody had seen Shug since the explosion. They finally located her at a temporary morgue in Overton. Her head was wrapped in cotton and one of her legs was missing. Somebody had put a leg with the body but it didn’t look to belong to Shug. “It took me a long time to get over that,” Jeanette Freeman Martin said. “You never do really.”1

Mother Mary Regina, provincial officer of the Sisters of the Holy Family, took it upon herself to open the hospital immediately upon learning of the school explosion.

She heard about it when a phone call came in late Thursday afternoon requesting medical assistance for disaster victims. She was visiting Mother Frances to participate in the formal blessing and grand opening ceremonies scheduled for Friday. All that could wait, she decided; these injured children were the highest priority for the new facility and its staff of sisters trained as nurses. Mother Mary Regina sent ten of the nuns straight to the disaster site, with instructions to return with patients coming to the hospital in ambulances and emergency vehicles, and then

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