Flash Electricity

He made his way to the small barn with his usual cadence, leading with his left leg and then placing his shorter, stick-thin leg down like a peg, causing his right shoulder and hip to dip slightly on every other step. He had just finished slapping a coat of his signature red paint over the top of the chipped, faded coat from several years ago. The grass around the edges of the barn betrayed his haphazard effort, as did the red stains around his fingernails. The horses wouldn’t care, he thought. Painting over the wood would prolong its life and protect it from premature rot and decay. Appearance was secondary to usefulness. Proudly, he plodded down the yard, every movement a victory against the affliction that had secreted away his childhood. 

His childhood stories were legend, lore in the family’s mental archives. The summers he had spent in body casts and polio wards, isolated from sunshine and other un-broken children and the years that had imprinted a grown-up sadness on such a little boy, held a place in her psyche as well. With each re-telling of his tender years, she bore a burden of sadness with him, for him. They all did, the family, so that ultimately a sort of low voltage electricity hummed through them all, transmitting his sorrowful despondence, limiting even the smallest spark of happiness. 

He illustrated his suffering with every step, and with every step, his past was now. Sickness and death had surrounded him as a young boy, but some tenderness, some comfort remained in his memory, too. The nurses who were more like mothers than his own offered tender, yet compassionately impersonal care. Their jobs required an emotional shut-off valve, but concern still seeped through, and whatever compassion they sprinkled over their patients was often more than the children’s disappointed, heartbroken parents could deliver. After all, most of their parents had other little ones at home to manage, to feed, to care for. They only had so much to give, and their sick child would suck them dry, if they had let them, leaving nothing for the healthy ones. He must have seemed half-real to them, his family, half-alive. For the sake of the living, they had to stay away. He had surely felt his own mother’s absence, at first, anyway. He often talked about the strong, younger brother at home on whom his mother doted.  He still held resentment for the brother who had stolen his mother’s love. 

Families would make obligatory weekly visits, when possible, but it was never enough. They stayed away from that life-death fear beyond any prophetic capabilities. No one knew. Anything. The year he caught the virus, over 3,000 people died, and thousands more were paralyzed. Some became the living-dead, confined to torture-coffins, machines called iron lungs that provided compression and decompression of their paralyzed diaphragm -- keeping them alive-yet not living. 

Death was around each corner, and the panic was real. No one was sure who would be next. No one was sure how the disease traveled. No one knew who its next victim would be.  Not even the President of the United States was safe. People had to detach, withdraw, and distance themselves from the sick. Fear was a living, breathing monster, an entity that lurked inside their homes, out in the air, and most certainly in the hospitals. Death happened daily there, in the polio wards. Gurneys containing barely perceptible little bodies, often rolled out of the swinging ward doors towards a hopeful surgery. Hours later, when those doors swung open again, the gurney was often replaced by a teary-eyed nurse, laden with freshly bleached sheets and burdened with the charge of keeping the already obvious secret from the other children. They would ask the questions, always, even though they knew the answers. 

“When will Mary return?” 

“Is she going home?”

“Will she get to see her new baby brother?”

The nurse would issue a trembling smile, maybe offer a slight nod if she could manage. These children, the ones who spent their summers (and some all year round) in the child polio ward of Kansas City, Missouri’s, Children’s Mercy Hospital, knew death as an intimate companion. A profound, pronounced presence lingered in the air, slithered around, under, between, and over their beds in the smells of disinfectant, bleach, and blood. They were fighting, make no mistake, and in fact, fewer children died here than in other places because hope walked the floor as well as heartache, ushered in by the brilliant polio doctor who admitted a select number of children to his cutting-edge, curated program.

Experimental treatments and therapies were starting to save lives here, and those unfortunate children who had been afflicted with the disease, some just months before the vaccine became available, believed, had to believe, their treatment would be the one that worked, that they would walk home, play kickball, catch a football pass or skip rope. 

A tragic, devastating, heartbreaking childhood, he often reminded her. Did she even know how lucky she was?! Made of a point of asking her. He had told her the stories since she could remember. The stories of playground bullies whom he’d learned to defeat with the power of his upper body after he’d willed his way out of the hospital, forced himself seemingly beyond endurance, pushed his body to bear physical torture, all so the braces on his legs would one day fall off. She’d heard the stories about his mother (her grandmother), who was less than kind and more than a little disappointed that her firstborn son developed such a debilitating, stigmatizing disease before the age of three. 

He’d tell her his stories, laying these offerings at her feet at a too-young age, creating complicated and confusing emotions for a such a young girl. Gratuitously, he’d share, expound on his experiences, making clear that any discomfort in her own life, any perceived troubles or daily complications were but a grain of sand in his hourglass of suffering. No pain, no discomfort, no illness, injury, or even mental anguish (what could that possibly be, anyway?) could ever compare to or equal his childhood agony. He wore his pain around his neck like a medal, on his foot like a chain, on his head like a crown, yet the burden was hers to make sense of. He wanted to transfer, share the pain with her, with all of them. 

At first, and for a long time, his burden was theirs--the family was subject to his disease, felt it like a jolt every time he experienced painful memories of the past or perceived prejudices towards the disabled.   

His polio defined him in profound ways, even as he spent every moment of his life and all of his energy fighting against the injustices of disability and prejudice. Sensitive to every lingering glance, every turn of the head, to be expected with his unusual walk, distressed him to indignation. A moment of hesitation on the part of a waitress taking his order was an insult to his intelligence and an assumption that his physical impairment also equaled mental incompetence. Every reaction, every perceived slight was a low-voltage shock, like the ones she felt when touching the electric fences she had helped him erect on the property. Cattle and horses were large animals, requiring containment, and electric fences kept them confined in their place. Even the slightest contact with the repressive fence would shoot an unpleasant tingle through her body,  momentarily take her breath away, and leave her feeling out of sorts, bewildered. Like the low-level, yet effective shock of the fence, his distress reverberated through to them, the family, until all of them felt the memory, the shame, the pain, the loss. 

Afterwards, they would all feel indignation with him, like him, for him. Nothing insulated them from the electricity of the slight. An insult, are you stupid?!, or a single-knuckle to the head could preclude darker moments at home, long after the perceived offense should have waned. They would never know how or when the cruelty would crop up again, only that it would. It would come, and it might stay an hour or a month.

His awareness of these so-called offenses acted as a kind of low-voltage shock-with him as the conduit, and all the family members experienced whatever degree of electrical intensity that the situation generated.  And, just as in most electrical injuries, where the damage can lead to the dysfunction of organs and tissue, a profound mental and emotional dysfunction would ultimately permeate the very fiber and structure of his family. 

For now, however, the shocks produced mere flash injuries: arcs and superficial burns. The electricity had yet to saturate the psyche - to alter the consciousness of his family. How did he navigate the public landscape and still manage to achieve professional success in a major corporation? Control. He was a master at certain kinds of control. The right kinds of control. She often wondered if all that time as a child, when he lacked control in every aspect of his life, influenced him in ways he didn’t understand. From where he went to school (a school for the mentally disabled until he was 14), to the experimental treatment his mother enrolled him in as a young boy, his world was out of his control. He was not consulted in matters of his own life or death.  As both limiting and challenging. Every experience, every encounter offered an opportunity to assess how the world viewed a “handicapped” man, as he referred to himself. Polio defined him - his every move, his every thought, his very being. 

Perhaps as a byproduct, death was never far away and was always on his mind. How many times had she heard the story of him sharing a polio ward with dying children. Seeing friends off to surgery, only to find the nurses packing up their things the next day and preparing the bed for a new patient. These were the unlucky ones. The ones who had missed the polio vaccine by a few short years. The first polio vaccine was licensed in the United States on April 12, 1955, a month before his 15th birthday -- too late for him -- too late for his friends.  Even so, he overcame mountainous obstacles: walking when he never should have; graduating college without any financial support from his family; becoming a husband and a father; securing a job that would bring him much recognition; developing this little hobby farm in a bucolic part of the Midwest. 

He built a good life for himself, except for the times when the shocks of the past struck him like lightning. When that happened, the entire sky about their little hobby farm darkened like a sea squall over the family. No amount of pleading, promising, apologizing would bring about the sun until he was good and soaked with his grief, pity, and self-loathing. No one was safe, when the darkness descended. No one knew quite how to navigate the storm, the disaster in his mind. Yet, he clung to all of them like a poorly constructed lifeboat. How were they to save him, release him from the turmoil he couldn’t even name but somehow blamed them for. 

He did blame them, those children, those naïve creatures whose purpose was to honor his every command. They must do better. For next time. So the next time won’t happen.

This is what she remembers as she sees him hobble determinedly towards the faded red barn.