My Imperfect Arm

Circled here is a lump on my arm.  Evidence of a bone broken when I was just twelve years old.  It's a lump now because Jim Campbell and Mike Barkett thought they were doctors.

My brother Joe played football for Andy Mullins at St. Andrews.  My sister and I were in the lower school.  During one of Joe's games, I joined a pickup game of nerf touch in the area in front of the Upper School Library.  As sometimes happens in a game of touch, I was tackled and held out my arm to break my fall onto the worn, compacted spot of dirt where the older kids walked to class every day.  It hurt.  It hurt a lot.  I sought out my mother.

When I was little, Daddy's career caught fire.  It required him to miss many things in our childhood, most things, really,  but he never missed a football game.  Not one.  

"Let me see, buddy,"  Daddy said.  "Make a fist.  Try to squeeze my finger.  Try harder."  

"I AM trying.  It really hurts!"

Mike Barkett, baseball coach, and lower school administrator, saw the commotion and came over.  

"It looks like a sprain.  I know what to do."  With that, Mike fetched a bag of ice and an ace bandage.  After wrapping my wrist in the ace bandage, they then wrapped the ice bag onto it with another ace bandage.

"Keep that on there for a while, Buddy.  It'll feel better."  So I sat on the bleachers the rest of the game, trying not to cry, with an ice bag wrapped onto my hurting arm.

At home, mother refreshed the ice bag during supper and sent me to bed with the entire contraption wrapped to my now useless left arm.

In those days, St. Andrews hired a Greyhound bus to take us kids, to and from school.  Some kids still had their moms take them to school, but I was under orders not to be spoiled and ride the bus like a man.  Not a problem.  Normally I could draw on the bus all the way home, and my second favorite girl rode it too, dropping off just before I did.  Riding the bus with my left arm immobilized in the ace bandage, which had by then increased to three bandages meant that I had nothing to hold the sketchbook with, and every bump was causing considerable pain.  The girl I liked talked her mom into taking her home for a while.  The bus driver always did his best to look out for me.  "I'll avoid the bumps, pal.  You sit quiet."

After the second week of this, I was still complaining of pain in my arm.  Some kids thought it was funny to jostle me on the bus, causing even more pain.  "I'm calling J.O. in the morning." Mother said at supper.  J.O.  was James Oliver Manning.  One of dad's oldest friends.  They had both been number one at the Alpha Upsilon chapter of KA at Ole Miss.  There was a time when every third house on Honeysuckle lane had the name of a KA on the title.  Dr. Manning and Dr. Turner were Jackson's busiest orthopedists.  In the days to come, J.O. Manning would found Mississippi Sports Medicine, where I would also become a patient. His wife was a brilliant painter.  One of my favorites.

Once again, I was checked out of school by my mother, who sat in the waiting room in J.O.'s office near the stadium on Woodrow Wilson.  Mother was obsessed with paperback novels, all mysteries, and she would consume about one a week, fifty-two paperback mystery novels a year.  She kept them in paper grocery bags when finished to trade at a paperback book store near Parham Bridges' Park.  The person who taught me to read, read herself. A lot.

"Let's get you x-rayed," a pretty nurse said.  She maneuvered a gigantic machine, the kind that I'd seen turn tarantulas into monsters on Horrible Movie the weekend before, over my poor arm, naked of its ace bandages for the first time in twelve days.  "Hold still," she said as she moved behind a heavy screen.  "Why does she need to be behind a heavy screen when I'm here practically naked!" I thought.  This wasn't going to end well.

Once the ordeal with the X-Ray machine was over, the nurse returned me to the waiting room where my mother sat, one leg crossed over the other, reading her mystery novel, her basket purse with houses painted on it that she made herself with Jane Lewis and Onie Flood sitting beside her.  With some help from the nurse, I sank onto the examination table and sulked.  This won't go well, I thought.  

"How'd it go, buddy?"  "

"Fine."

 "Do you want a sucker?"

"No."

"Does it hurt?"

"no," I lied.

After a while, Dr. Manning came in.  He had a voice that sounded like he was speaking to you through an oak barrel.  He flicked on a light table and jabbed two x-ray sheets into the holding clip.  It was my arm.

"Tell Jim Campbell I'll make a deal with him.  I won't sell pencils if he won't practice medicine.  Your son has a broken arm."  

In the x-ray you could see pretty clearly where the break was.  It was also pretty clear that the bones didn't line up exactly right at the break.

"I want to put him in a cast.  It'll heal and be strong, but it might not be perfectly straight."

Forty-eight years later, it's still not perfectly straight.  

Momma and daddy and Dr. Manning would have many more opportunities to take care of me, but Daddy and Mike Barkett never tried to practice medicine on me again.  That's too bad.  It produced some great stories.