John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

“Your arm is broken up near the wrist, Cuttis, and if I don’t set it it’s going to heal but in the wrong position—”

“It be crookit.”

“That’s right. Now you’re going to have to help me—”

If it was a Monteggia fracture he’d insist they see a licensed doctor, somebody with a fluoroscope, but this is relatively standard — a distal fracture of both bones, the radial fracture complete and displaced, the ulnar of the greenstick variety, no obvious neural or vascular damage.

He gets a grip above and below the radial fracture. “I want you to take a deep breath now—”

The reduction is simple, rapid traction and torque, the boy crying out sharply and the mother rushing back in with a black cotton stocking in her hand.

“He ain counted to three,” complains the boy, tears running down his cheeks.

But Dr. Lunceford has the bag open, fishing in it for the can of rolled bandages. Most of the space is taken up with bottles of Dr. Bonkers’, but he manages to crowd a few useful articles between them, most of them purchased from a notorious thief on Tenth Avenue, a young Irishman who had never seen or heard of a colored physician.

“Barbers, I knew you had them,” he said, laying out his wares on a tabletop. “And the ginks who soak you to plant you under the ground. But a colored croaker, who’d a thought that?”

The bandages, already permeated with plaster of Paris, must have been prepared in a hospital, and Dr. Lunceford assumes the crime was perpetrated during a sojourn in one of the city wards, the thief making his rounds while still convalescing. “The quicker the patient can return to preferred activities,” Dr. Osler used to say, “the speedier the recovery.”

“I could use that water now,” he says to the mother.

She hands him the stocking and backs out of the room. He has the boy slowly supinate and pronate the wrist, feels the bones to make sure the reduction is holding, then helps the boy off with his shirt and slips the stocking over his arm, attempting to smooth out the wrinkles. A long-arm cast is not specifically called for, but with young boys the more immobilized the limb the better, discouraging their more rambunctious instincts.

The mother returns with a pan of hot water and he asks her to set it on the floor.

“The break will hurt quite a bit for the rest of the day,” he tells the boy as he wets the bandage and begins to wind it around his crooked arm, “but tomorrow most of the pain should be gone.”

He has seen no facility in the apartment, perhaps everybody sharing an outhouse in the alley, or common toilets, tiny closets, placed on every other floor. He has seen every possible unsanitary solution as he has moved Yolanda and Jessie from building to building, structures thrown up to maximize profit per square foot, not to house human beings.

“Do you have any sort of medicine you use for the children? For toothaches or that sort of thing?”

The woman frowns, then walks to a rickety cupboard and pulls out a box of baking soda and a bottle of Mrs. Pinkham’s panacea.

“I got this for bad stomach,” she says raising the baking soda, “and the other for my lady problems.”

He nods to the Vegetable Compound. “Give him two tablespoons of that before he sleeps tonight.”

The potion is largely alcohol and will certainly have a soporific impact on a small boy. Kopp’s Baby Friend, basically morphine in sugar water, would be more effective, but Dr. Lunceford has refused to represent it.

“I got to buy your bottle too?”

He smiles. “Dr. Bonkers’ Brain Food is a tonic for a remarkable panoply of afflictions. A broken arm, however, is not one of them. I shall visit, if you don’t mind, in a week to be sure this cast is not causing problems. If you can’t spare anything now, perhaps at that time—”

The return visit is both responsible and good commerce, as only the most indigent or unembarrassable will allow you to walk away empty-handed more than once.

“I get you something.”

She steps out and Dr. Lunceford turns to the boy, who is watching his arm as the bandages begin to harden around it.

“Which arm do you throw with?”

“One that’s bust.”

“If you can be patient it will get strong again. Strong enough to bounce a lump of coal off this James’s noggin.”

The boy smiles. He has a beautiful face, really, and Dr. Lunceford vows to carry that smile, like a talisman, with him through the rest of the day’s adventures.

Dr. Lunceford knocks on every door in the next two buildings, then navigates through the crowd of humans and vehicles to begin on the structures across the street, the stairways unlit and coffin-like, each with its own particular odor, none pleasant. A few people answer, more just call and ask who he is, and none are in need of Brain Food. It is a wonder, given the conditions they live in, that the denizens of Hell’s Kitchen are not in a constant state of epidemic. Many people down home are poor, yes, certainly with less to their names than these urban colored, but they are not crushed into narrow, disease-breeding dwellings in such numbers, not part of an anonymous and vaguely threatening multitude. Dr. Lunceford finds himself, when on the more peopled avenues, walking in a kind of protective daze, eyes focused just beyond any approaching stranger, whereas in Wilmington each pedestrian requires a greeting tailored to their status and circumstance. Once, in their second week on 47th Street, he walked past a throng, taking only fleeting notice of a young pregnant woman, only to have Jessie call him back from his daydream. It troubled him to see her in such a context, his daughter only one more dismissable face among the millions. There is a harmony of purpose, despite its seemingly frantic activity, in a beehive or a colony of ants, but so much of the busyness here resembles nothing more than poultry overcrowded on their way to slaughter, each animal climbing over its neighbor for the last breath of air.

There are young men, and some not so young, lolling on the stoop of the next building. There are layabouts in Wilmington, most notably in the dead season between cotton crops, but there the men tend to congregate at a handful of drinking resorts and barbershops. In this city the front steps of many buildings are draped, by noon, with the unemployed, colored or white depending on the dominant population of the street.

“Bout time somebody come for that girl,” says one of the loungers as Dr. Lunceford steps carefully over his outstretched legs.

“She aint passed yet?”

“You know that she aint if you been hearin her Mama boo-hooin on the landing every night. ‘Oh my po’ daughter, Lord Jesus help my po’ daughter!’ ”

“We in the back. Don’t hear nothin but cats.”

“She enough to drive a man to bad habits.”

“Like you got none of them already.”

The men laugh.

“May I ask,” says Dr. Lunceford from the doorway, “where I can find this afflicted individual?”

The men eye him without respect or annoyance. He is a passing phenomenon, to be commented on when he is gone, a part of the meager entertainment afforded by the street that lays before them.

“Up five an in the front,” says the first young man. “And mind them steps by the second flo’.”

The steps just below the second-floor landing have fallen through on one side, Dr. Lunceford stepping carefully on the risers and supporting himself by pressing the wall rather than trusting the treacherously loose banister. He wonders how long they have been in this state, wonders that none of the men relaxing in front has access to a hammer and nails or the inclination to borrow such items. In their first apartment after the move from Philadelphia, in the tenement near the corner of 51st and Ninth, the toilet that served their floor was a swamp. After futile entreaties to the landlord’s somnolent representative, a hunchbacked Pole who dwelt in the basement, and marked indifference from the tenants who shared the level, Dr. Lunceford spent a day cleaning, scraping, painting, and doing his best to repair the rudimentary plumbing. When finished he could bear the idea of his wife and pregnant daughter employing the facilities, but within a week the room was back to its former squalid condition.