The Tilted World by Tom Franklin Beth Ann Fennelly

Author:Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

I T WAS CLOSE TO 10 P.M., D IXIE C LAY PACING WITH THE BABY HELD IN front of her like a goblet, when there was a banging on her door. She ran to unlock the bolt, already yelling, “Oh, thank God you’re here. Thank God—”

But it wasn’t Dr. Devaney with his black satchel. It was Ingersoll, shucking off his slicker right there on the gallery, tossing his hat aside. He stepped forward and filled the doorway, rain coursing off the saddlebag that he dropped to take the baby before she could even make sense of things.

“Wait,” she said. “No. He’s sick, he’s burning up. I’m waiting for—”

“Doctor’s not coming.” Ingersoll wasn’t looking at her but walking with the baby to the lamp. He rested the child on one palm and with the other turned its chin from side to side. He parted Willy’s eyelids with his thumb and index finger and looked in.

“Not coming? But—”

“Not coming.” He thumbed the baby’s mottled chin down and peered into his throat. “I need alcohol. Not to drink. For the fever. Alcohol, cold water, towel. Now.”

The baby did his cough, one-two-three barks, Dixie Clay with a hand to her mouth while his chest jumped, as if snagged by a fishing line.

“Now!” Ingersoll yelled. And she whirled about and opened the crate by the pantry and lifted a half-pint of whiskey and handed it to him as he strode past into the kitchen. She followed and saw him grab the dish towel off the stove handle, then bite the cork from the bottle and spit it out. At the sink he found a bowl, poured it half full with the whiskey, filled it the rest of the way from the tap.

“Hold him,” he said, and then slid one of the baby’s arms out of its swaddling and dabbed the dish towel in the bowl and then blotted from Willy’s shoulder to his wrist. Then he rolled Willy’s limp arm between his large hands, like dough that you elongate for a pretzel. Ingersoll tucked that arm back in and removed the other and did the same, his movements brisk and confident.

“What you’re doing—how can I—”

“The alcohol evaporates,” he told her, moving to a leg now, “and it cools him, and we rub him down, see, we bring the blood to the surface. We break the fever. It’s cooling him. We’ve gotta break the fever first.”

Ingersoll continued with the other leg, the torso, and then took Willy from Dixie Clay and flipped him to do his back. “You got a croup kettle?”

She shook her head.

“Then get your teakettle going.”

She ran to the stove while Ingersoll crossed her kitchen in three long strides and entered the hall and returned with the baby bed. He flung it before the stove and yelled to Dixie Clay, “Get a sheet, a bedsheet.” She flew to yank one from her bed and when she returned he’d laid Willy in his crib. They kneeled on either side and Ingersoll tented the sheet over their heads, holding one end so the kettle’s spout was under the sheet.

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