The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [420]
Save me. Save me. Save me.
And they chased him and he ran, still screaming, and they shouted:
Stop thief.
Save me! Save me! Save me!
“He’s dying,” Mrs. Lonigan screamed, and the nurse rushed into the sick room. Mrs. Lonigan soaked her fingers in the holy water fount, and stood over the bed, sprinkling her tossing, squirming, delirious son with holy water in the sign of the cross. She dropped to her knees and prayed, her body shaken with sobs.
IV
“Well, Mary, how is Bill now?” Dr. O’Donnell asked, stepping into the house.
He was a short, thick-faced man with a clipped gray mustache, gray hair, ruddy complexion and a large head. “Oh, Doctor, he’s very bad. I’m so worried.”
“Well, we’ll take a look at him. Maybe you’re more worried than you should be. You know, sometimes in these pneumonia cases the patient will look to be much worse than he is,” Dr. O’Donnell said, hanging his hat on the hall tree and setting down his bag.
“Doctor, I do hope so,” she said.
“Mary, don’t you worry. What you want to do is to take care of yourself, and let us watch Bill. How are the girls?”
“Fine, Doctor. Both Frances and Loretta are happy. They both married such fine, decent boys.”
“Ha, I remember them when they were tots. And Paddy, how is he?”
“He’s not so well, Doctor. You know these worries he has on his mind.”
“Mary, check the worries now, and you’ll be better off.”
“Doctor, it’s just what I hope Paddy will do.”
“You’ll tell him I prescribed it. And now I better take a look at Bill.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
He walked to the sick room, followed by Mrs. Lonigan. “Mary, I think you had just better let me look at him, and I’ll come out and tell you.”
“Yes, Doctor. And Doctor, would you like a cup of tea?”
“No thanks, Mary. I have another call right after this one.”
“Well, how is he?” Dr. O’Donnell asked the nurse.
“He’s been in a restless coma, and here is his fever chart, Doctor. He doesn’t look very good, so I advised Mrs. Lonigan to call you.”
“Yes. It was lucky she caught me,” the doctor said, wrinkling his brows as he read the fever chart. He opened his bag and, with the nurse’s assistance, turned Studs over on his back. Sitting on a chair beside the bed, he felt Studs’ pulse and found it feeble, one hundred and ten a minute. He noticed the flushed and fevered face, and, opening the mouth, perceived a thick and ugly coating on the tongue.
“It doesn’t look so good, does it?” he said meditatively.
He found that the respirations were shallow, forty a minute, and that the patient, in his coma, was very weak.
“He’s not as restless as he was when I telephoned you, Doctor.”
“In a case like this, there is not much to do. We must let Nature take its course and hope for the best.”
He again looked at the patient and saw the blueness around the mouth, heard the grunting breathing, and Studs mumbled inarticulately.
“You gave him digitalis?” the doctor asked.
The nurse shook her head.
“He has rales, and a great deal of congestion. What we must watch for is cardiac failure. I’m afraid the heart is going to give us trouble, and I’ll leave a prescription for strychnine. It had better be administered at once.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“If he survives, I’ll be greatly surprised.”
“He seems to have been losing steadily all day.”
“Well, we might as well do what we can and make him more comfortable,” the doctor said.
He and the nurse bathed the patient’s limp, thin body by giving him an alcohol rub. The patient was set face down-ward again. He drew irregular breaths with a small clicking noise, and uttered feeble moans, and then a wailing, sad cry. The doctor looked meditatively at Studs, closed his case, left the room, meeting the shaken mother in the parlor.
“Doctor, how is he?”
“In such cases, Mary, it’s difficult to say. Nature must take its course. All we can do is hope for the best and trust to the will of God. We’ll do all we can and the rest is not in our