“How could you have seen anything in there?” I decided to play along a little further as long as May was out of earshot. “It’s too far from the road.”
“I climbed through the fence.”
“Who was with you?”
“Nobody.”
“You went in alone?”
“Course I did.” Sammy tilted his head proudly and I recalled that as a seven-year-old nothing in the world would have induced me to approach that house, even in company. I looked at my son with a new respect, and the first illogical stirrings of alarm.
“I don’t want you hanging around that old place, Sammy—it could be dangerous.”
“It isn’t dangerous.” He was scornful. “They just sit there in big chairs, and never move.”
“I meant you could fall or … What?
“The old people just sit there.” Sammy pushed his empty plate away. “They’d never catch me in a hundred years even if they did see me, but I don’t let them see me, ‘cause I just take one quick look through the back window and get out of there.”
“You mean there are people living in the Guthrie place?”
“Old people. Lots of them. They just sit there in big chairs.”
I hadn’t heard anything about the house being occupied, but I began to guess what had been going on. It was big enough for conversion to a private home for old people—and to a child one silver-haired old lady could look very much like another. Perhaps Sammy preferred to believe his grandmother had moved away rather than accept the idea that she was dead and buried beneath the ground in a box.
“Then you were trespassing as well as risking …’ I lowered my voice to a whisper as May’s footsteps sounded on the stairs again. “You didn’t see your Granny Cummins, you’re not to go near the old Guthrie place again, and you’re not to upset your mother. Got that?”
Sammy nodded, but his lips were moving silently and I knew he was repeating his original statement over and over to himself. Any anger I felt was lost in a tide of affection—my entire life had been one of compromise and equivocation, and it was with gratitude I had discovered that my son had been born with enough will and sheer character for the two of us.
May came back into the room and sat down, her face wearing a slightly shamefaced expression behind the gold sequins of its freckles. “I took a tranquilliser.”
“Oh? I thought you were out of them.”
“I was, but Doctor Pitman stopped by this afternoon and let me have some more.”
“Did you call him?”
“No—he was in the neighbourhood and he looked in just to see how I was. He’s been very good since … since …”
“Since your mother died—you’ve got to get used to the idea, May.”
She nodded silently and began to gather up the dinner plates. Her own food had scarcely been touched.
“Mom?” Sammy tugged her sleeve. I tensed, waiting for him to start it all over again, but he had other’ things on his mind. His normally ruddy cheeks were pale as tallow and his forehead was beaded with perspiration. I darted from my chair barely in time to catch him as he fell sideways to the floor.
Bob Pitman had been a white-haired, apple-cheeked old gentleman when he was steering me through boyhood illnesses, and he appeared not to have aged any further in the interim. He lived alone in an unfashionably large house, still wore a conservative dark suit with a watch-chain’s gold parabola spanning the vest, played chess as much as possible and drank specially-imported non-blended Scotch. The sight of his square hands, with their ridged and slab-like fingernails, moving over Sammy’s sleeping figure comforted me even before he stood up and folded the stethoscope.
“The boy has eaten something he shouldn’t,” he said, drawing the covers up to Sammy’s chin.
“But he’ll be all right?” May and I spoke simultaneously.
“Right as rain.”
“Thank God,” May said and sat down very suddenly. I knew she had been thinking about her mother and wondering if we were going to lose Sammy with as little warning.
“You’d better get some rest,” Dr. Pitman looked at her with kindly severity. “Young Sammy here will sleep all night, and you should follow his example. Take another of those caps I gave you this morning.”
I’d forgotten about his earlier visit. “We seem to be monopolising your time today, Doctor.”
“Just think of it as providing me with a little employment—everybody’s far too healthy these days.” He shepherded us out of Sammy’s room. “I’ll call again in the morning.”
May wasn’t quite satisfied—she was scrupulously hygienic in the kitchen and the idea that our boy had food poisoning was particularly unacceptable to her. ‘But what could Sammy have eaten, Doctor? We’ve had everything he’s had and we’re all right.”
“It’s hard to say. When he brought up his dinner did you notice anything else there? Berries? Exotic candies?”
“No. Nothing like that,” I said, ‘but they wouldn’t always be obvious, would they?” I put my arm around May’s shoulders and tried to force her to relax. She was rigid with tension and it came to me that if Sammy ever were to contract a fatal illness or be killed in an accident it would destroy her. We of the Twentieth Century have abandoned the practice of holding something in reserve when we love our children, assuming—as our ancestors would never have dared to do—that they will reach adulthood as a matter of course.
The doctor—nodding and smiling and wheezing—exuded reassurance for a couple more minutes before he left. When I took May to bed she huddled in the crook of my left arm, lonely in spite of our intimacy, and it was a long time before I was able to soothe her to sleep.
In spite of her difficulty in getting to sleep, or perhaps because of it, May failed to waken when I slipped out of the bed early next morning. I went into Sammy’s room, and knew immediately that something was wrong. His breathing was noisy and rapid as that of a pup which has been running. I went to the bed. He was unconscious, mouth wide open in the ghastly breathing, and his forehead hotter than I would have believed it possible for a human’s to be.
Fear spurted coldly in my guts as I turned and ran for the phone. I dialled Dr. Pitman’s number. While it was ringing I debated shouting upstairs to waken May, but far from being able to help Sammy she would probably have become hysterical. I decided to let her sleep as long as possible. After a seemingly interminable wait the phone clicked.
“Dr. Pitman speaking.” The voice was sleepy.
“This is George Ferguson. Sammy’s very ill. Can you get over here right away?” I babbled a description of the symptoms.
“I’ll be right there.” The sleepiness had left his voice. I hung up, opened the front door wide so that the doctor could come straight in, then went back upstairs and waited beside the bed. Sammy’s hair was plastered to his forehead and his every breath was accompanied by harsh metallic clicks in his throat. My mind became an anvil for the hammer blows of the passing seconds. Bleak eons went by before I heard Dr. Pitman’s footsteps on the stair.
He came into the room, looking uncharacteristically dishevelled, took one look at Sammy and lifted him in his arms in a cocoon of bedding.
“Pneumonia,” he said tersely. “The boy will have to be hospitalised immediately.”