The Doolittle Clan relocates too elegant Richmond
Next time the child opened his eyes he was laying on the table in his mother's waiting room. His entire family was gazing down upon him as he lay. The sight of their faces generated a warm feeling making him very happy on the inside. His mother sensed the cheerfulness radiating outward, as she gazed into his tender smiling face. Her father gazed upon the child as he himself smiled, then glanced back toward his mother.
"Well Lindza, I must say that you certainly made a fine young son there. He favors you and his father quite a bit. I can clearly see the both of you in him."
Her mother, Nederland Nannie, gazed down into the face of the child, then glanced backward toward her daughter.
"He really is a fine young fellow, there. Have you picked out a name for him yet?"
The child's mother beamed warmly, then replied.
"I am just so glad those horrible operations are over for the time being. I haven't thought much about a name, but I pondered the name of Christopher. How do you feel about that name, mother?"
"Christopher?" spouted the child's grandmother, Nannie. "What a name, Christopher Doolittle. It does have somewhat of a ring to it, I should say."
"But a ring somewhat off note, I am afraid!" snaps the grandfather, with a chuckle and a sudden smile.
"Well, I have been thinking about the name, Hansel, but then everybody would call him Han So Do-little in jest. The name, Lenard, strikes a pleasant chord, if I give a middle name of Leon. There again, the problem is where some person out of jest would label him some twisted name, more rude than my capacity to imagine, if not Lanker Doolittle."
"The entire Doolittle clan has been called the Doo-lezz crowd for the past hundred and fifty years. I don't see why we should ever fear anything like it in this day and time," suddenly retorts a small, sun browned, rather muscular man, who otherwise had little to say until now.
This man was the child's father, and his tendency was to speak only when the moment provided a maximum benefit for him to do so. The benefit in doing so here was where he may be destined to have a final say in what the child's name would be. "I personally am content with the name, Hansel, myself. This child truly is a gift from Almighty God."
"Hansel Doolittle is a fine name, as far as I am concerned," spouts his grandmother. "People may call him Lanker whatever, but then they may call him far worse, as virtually every person gets called somewhere down on the road of life. I do not feel it is wise to allow these types of worries to influence our conclusions in such matters, such as our choice in names for our children. I mean, after all, it's not like we are about to name him Lisa, Jane, or Sue."
His mother smiles warmly as she reaches out toward him, rubbing his chin with her right index finger, then gently picking him up as she pulls him in closely toward her bosom. She commences rocking backward and forward with great ease, while she sat in the upward tilted hospital bed. She glances backward, then upward and outward toward the others standing there in the room.
"It looks like I need to come up with a song to sing about this lovely child here. What do all of you have to say about it? Does singing right about now sound like a good idea?"
"Feel free to do as the urge motivates," they all announce in gleeful unison.
"He rocks so sweetly upon his mother's knee,
The cutest little thing you ever did see.
He'll grow up tall as an old pine tree,
He'll show them all, because he'll do as he may please.
Hansel, Hansel Doolezz,
Just a babe as wonderful as can be.
Does my song sound good? How does it sound to all of you? Tell me, now, please!" pleads his mother.
"Oh now, that song sounds so divine," snaps the child's grandmother, Nannie.
"He must be a chip right off the old block," snorts his father, as he takes a long drag on a freshly lit Winston cigarette, filling the hospital room with its pungent blue smoke.
"Oh Hendrik!" spouted Lindza, the child's mother. "Must you fill the room here with that putrid smoke? It may be bad for the baby. Can't you go outside to do that?"
"I shall agree with clear emphasis, that this child most certainly has a heavy dose of Doolittle and Johnston blood in him, for sure," retorts the grandfather with a hearty smile of glowing pride. "To tell you the truth, I'll add in a song to go with the one sung by his mother over there. He dances his head from side to side as he commences to sing.
"Git that treasure, boy, go far and wide,
Cause boy, there isn't anywhere for you to run and hide.
Be brave, and be daring, as a lion is bold,
life is way too short for you to shun a pot of gold.
Cross yon' mountain and go deep inside that holler,
for therein lies a golden nugget way too big fer a dragon to swaller.
Keep your mouth shut and dig it quietly out of that hole,
or they'll steal everything you've got, then throw you out in the cold!"
"Oh, Tom, for goodness' sake, don't you ever think of anything else other than money, getting it, or making it?" snaps his wife, Nannie.
"Well, I should say money certainly makes the world go around," abruptly replies the grizzled grandfather with his eyes widened. "What I am doing is giving this child my blessing. Now all should remain well with you ladies of the house, if you will. I want him to be wealthy and to have all I could never manage to do. All I have ever known was labor, sweat, and grueling toil; in heat, cold, dirt, and mold, until the very day I am gray, bent, and bloody gald-darned old! I honestly want so much better than that for this child, my dear ladies."
Time dragged on inside that hospital until three weeks soon felt like a year. There wasn't much for the adults to do but only sit and talk or read one of the few magazines laying around inside the hospital lobby. Most of these magazines were about boring topics such as women's clothes, food, or the pages were graced with pictures of people dressed up in their underwear. The television, with its four gloomy channels, only had news, talk shows, or soap operas on them: nothing at all interesting, informative, or exciting. The air was cold, and the food was rather bland as it was exasperatingly expensive. But what else were poor humble people to do, but simply wait this process out?
The father was in and out, since work obligations continued to call, regardless of personal situations. The grandfather was only recently retired, and his retirement was the best that US social Security could provide back in 19 and 54, which really wasn't all that bad for the times. The women were all self-employed as bakers, dress sewers, and even candlestick makers, with a new twist, of course.
These candle sticks were the scented kind, of their own special types. One type was crafted from the juice of springtime wisteria. Another type was crafted from the juice of Jasmine. At that time, virtually no other such scented candles could be found anywhere else, at least inside this general broad area at large, between this specific riverside hospital and the small village railroad town of Hog Waller.
After maybe five visits with long spans of time in between them, doctor Roldoge' finally made his way toward the family, tightly grasping a thick stack of papers in his right hand as he walked down the hallway, bearing a subtle smile on his face suggesting good news.
"I have your release papers among this stack, madam," he announces with a nod toward the child's mother. "Your child and you are hereby free to go. Your appointments are once a month at the center right down the road here, as is clearly stated inside those release papers. It is imperative that he never miss a single appointment. Is this matter perfectly clear?"
The doctor hands the papers to the mother, who merrily received them.
"Yes," replied the mother with a childlike tone in her voice, "I fully comprehend the seriousness in this matter. I just can't wait to get back home with my young child."
"I know you can hardly wait. Have a safe ride home, and God-speed," replies the doctor with a polite nod, smiling warmly as the woman, the family, and the child amble past him.
The trip homeward
With the first rise of the sun, the family was motoring back down to the apartment on Sailor's Wharf Road. The complex was an aging ten story building, somehow seeming to date back to the 1920's. Being so close to the sea caused a dark moss to accumulate on the off-white stone face of the high-rise structure. The general spirit of the place was one of an eerie mystical type, causing inquisitive visitors to feel as if the structure itself was inhabited by past lives, cut off and unfulfilled, yet few were in possession of the ability to put these perceptive intuitions into proper wording.
The child sensed this unseen presence, never being totally at ease with it. His crying was incessant. The child's young mother tried feeding him milk, checking him for messy diapers, bouncing him upon her knee; giving him numerous alternative pacifiers, yet nothing completely worked. His crying became even more pronounced when the family, and especially his mother, stepped away from the crib.
"Oh, dear Hendrick, what on earth are we going to do?" cries the mother to her husband.
"I honestly don't know. It's like the air around here doesn't agree with him, or something. How do you feel about this room, Lindza?" asks her husband.
"Well, at night there is a kind of draft, shall we say, like the type a person makes when he walks past. The only problem with this conviction is the fact of there being no person to be seen, yet the draft his body made as it passed was still obtrusively present. Have you ever noticed such a thing, Hendrick?"
"I am so tired when I make it home, Lindza, if anything like that was present, I would have faded off to sleep anyway. I am gone all day, and away until ten or eleven at night. You, being here all day might have allowed you to notice such a thing, that may have slipped past me, to speak the truth about it," replies the husband to his dear wife. "Are you sure this draft you feel is not from some vent, the cracks in the wall, or the lack of a seal around these heavy old windows?"
"I searched those areas, but found nothing for the effort," exclaims the mother in a voice of frustration. "In fact, everything appears fairly airtight to me. At times I feel somewhat uneasy, but not to a great extent. While in the microfilm section at the library the other day, I researched the history of this building. Yes, it dates back to the 1920's, making it more than thirty years old by now, but that much is not all. This building was constructed on a grave site from a big harbor fight of the past, you know. All of the dead sailors were buried in two mass graves: one for the boys hailing from the meridian army, and the other for those foreign sons of the marriage between banks, corporations, and the government.
"This building gives one the perception of a much greater antiquity than merely thirty plus years. I have not researched it, but I wonder if the building wasn't already here. If that conviction is so, most certainly part of it crumbled during the heavy bombardment of our last war on home soil. After the fight ended, sections of the building remaining were simply reinforced, with the crumbled parts firmly reconstructed. These walls here are solid, being some four feet thick, like those from a standard fort built way back when.
"This place gives me the feel of being more of a chilly hospital, than a comfortable apartment. Maybe that is what the deal here was; a hospital for wounded soldiers, and a simultaneous graveyard for those critically wounded so far away from home, during an era and environment where medical care was rudimentary at its best," the mother speaks in direct reply to the husband's remark.
The husband sighs with a slight laugh, then hangs his head.
"This history lesson, Lindza there, is interesting at best, but what does knowing all of this information do to assist us in our specific situation? What on earth are we going to do about this aggravating circumstance, for the sake of our dear child?"
The young mother's eyes widen, then she sighs, only to laugh out of astonishment at the husband's remarks.
"Well, in the first place I want to be certain we are right about the cause of this unfortunate business. When I reflect on the matter at hand, I need to be certain for myself that an invisible spectrum is what is responsible for this distress in our child. If it is, then our solution is simple; we can simply move out, for crying out loud here!" the mother spouts with both arms spread out before her. "If this distress in our son is caused by some other issue, then we most certainly need to try something else, other than a move. If we move then, our problems may only follow us, depending on what that cause for our concern really is."
The husband's eyes widen again as he draws a breath in frustration at his wife's response.
"How do we go about determining such things, for Pete's sake here? What on earth are you proposing?
"Well., I have been thinking about this matter for some time now, to speak the honest truth, and doing a bit of personal research into this matter. Didn't you tell me about some coworker who had a Ouija Board?" Lindza asks in earnest as her husband glares blankly off into space. "Yes., I believe you did a while back.
"Why don't we get three candles, two white and one black. Four candles would be better, I think. Three white and one black, which sits in the center of a triangle crafted from the positioning of the white candles. Inside this triangle by the light of the midnight black candle, is where we will sit with the Ouija Board."
The husband begins to chuckle again, as he shakes his head from side to side.
"I simply cannot believe what I am hearing! A church going woman like yourself, talking about something resembling a seance; and a Ouija Board of all things, for crying out loud here. What on earth am I to make of this, much less anybody else, if they were to ever find out? What if we get much more than we bargained for when we monkey around with this junk?"
The woman suddenly gazes directly at her husband, with a very firm expression on her face.
"Do you have any better ideas?"
"Well, we could take him to a doctor, a different kind of doctor than before, of course," replies the husband.
"Yeah, we could get another doctor in on it, I guess. But then, what will we do? How else could we find out what was going on?" quickly retorts the baby's mother.
"I simply don't know?" replies the husband to his wife's question. "We could do the Ouija Board thing, I suppose. Let's get some friends in on this. At least we could add in some fun to this rather negative circumstance."
"I'll call up Phoebe and Stewart, in company with George and Sherrie tomorrow," Lindsa announces with a twinkle of joy in her eyes. "We can make a home-based dinner date for this weekend. Our entertainment will be the Ouija Board. I'll let Annette keep the baby for us. She owes us a favor anyway, as I am sure you'll recall. We'll soon find out if any spirits dwell in this room, other than old King Muscadine, Adolf Coors from way out West, or good ole Jim Beam. How do you feel about it?"