Read Online The Giant-Slayer by Iain Lawrence - Free Book Online

the old iron maiden? It’s just like that.” Splinting, she said, was something that Cotton Mather would have done to a witch in Salem if he’d been cruel enough to think of it.
    Her iron lung breathed in and out, and she talked in the whoosh of air. “First,” she said, “there’s nothing more painful than polio. It eats away at your nerves. Then the muscles start to wither. They shrink and tighten. Your legs and arms go crooked; they twist like corkscrews. Your knees bend backward. Your arms look like gnarly little sticks.
    “The doctors say, ‘We’ll help you.’ First thing they do, they stick a tube in your spine. They suck out some of the fluid. That’s the only way to make sure you’ve got polio. But they don’t tell you if you’ve got it or not; they don’t tell you anything, ’cause you’re just a kid. They go away, and you don’t know when they’re coming back. You think maybe they’ll never come back, but they do.”
    Carolyn wetted her lips with her tongue, then went on as before, talking in snatches between the breaths of her respirator.
    “They put wooden splints around your legs. Or they put on plaster casts, or metal things that look like armor from a knight. They pin you down like a butterfly to make sure your bones won’t bend. But it happens anyway, and then they start to operate.
    “They put you to sleep and smash your legs. They break your bones, then straighten them out and stick them together with pins. They put on the splints and casts again. They bind your legs so tightly that the bones can’t grow. And maybe they leave out a bit so you won’t have one leg that’s longer than the other, ’cause they sure don’t want you to look weird.
    “They tell you, ‘There! Now you’ll be better.’ It hurts so much that you wish they’d take away the splints and castsand leave you alone. But you trust the doctors; you think you must be getting better. Then they come back and tell you, ‘Well, we have to operate again,’ and it all starts over.
    “By then you hate the doctors. You think there’s nothing in the world more scary than a doctor.”
    At the window, Laurie nodded. “Yeah, I know!” she said loudly. “When I was five I had my tonsils out and—”
    “Big deal. Big hairy deal,” said Carolyn. “It’s not like tonsils.”
    “That’s not what I meant,” said Laurie.
    “How can you say that? How can you be so stupid?” Carolyn glared at Laurie. “I hated my doctors. I wished they would die. They stole me, you know. That’s what they did. They took me away from my mom and my dad, and they locked me up in hospital.”
    It came into Laurie’s mind to say,
They were just trying to help you
. But, still stung by Carolyn’s reaction to her tonsil story, she was careful not to say anything wrong. “How did it start?” she asked.
    The machine pulled air through Carolyn’s mouth. The rubber collar that sealed her neck vibrated very slightly. Talking slowly, keeping time with the iron lung, she sounded like a poet with a breathy chorus in the background.
    “When I was a kid Daddy called me ‘kitten.’
    “Wherever we went, he leaned sideways. Bending down to hold my hand.
    “We went to the store and the zoo. To the park and the pool.
    “We were always alone. Just me and my dad. That’s the way I wanted it.”
    Her eyes were red and wet. She rolled her head against the pillow, trying to blot her own tears.
    “I was six years old. Dad took us to a cabin on a lake. There were cottages all around. Everybody swimming all the time.
    “There must have been a thousand people,” she said. “Maybe more. But no one else got polio. I was the only one.”
    In that way, in little sentences or phrases, Carolyn told her story. It was the first time that she had done it, from beginning to end.
    “One morning,” she said, “I felt sick. Hot and creepy. My mother said it was too much sun. She made me stay in bed.
    “The sheets hurt me. Just the weight of the sheets.