Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

strawberries and Agnes the cow’s celebrated double cream. Within hours she had to be taken to the nearest hospital, seven miles away in New Milford. Still, as bad as it was, the sight of Bridget with hives was nothing compared to the ghastly spectacle of Bridget with a ripe case of poison ivy. A crimson rash would spread like wildfire over her slender little body, ruthlessly sparing no area, not even the cracks between her toes. Then came a period of unendurable itching that sometimes necessitated tying her hands down or stuffing them in gloves so that she couldn’t claw at herself. The next day began a long cycle in which, concurrent with the overall swelling of her body that would deform it past recognition, the rash consolidated itself into grotesque blisters that erupted, burst, oozed an evil sticky fluid, unbelievably erupted again, became open lesions, and crusted over at last into a solid orange scab, like a grisly coat of armor, which cracked and bled when she moved. We would soak her for hours in tubs of Epsom salts and boric acid, compress her with wads of cotton-soaked medicinal remedies like Burow’s solution, pour calamine lotion over her, swab her with anesthetic salves, and wrap her in yards of gauze to keep the flies off.

“Oh, my God, Maggie!” exploded Father at his initial glimpse, having been spared the first stages by sequestering himself in New York City for a few welcome days of business. “The child’s got leprosy, for Chrissake! What the hell are we doing in this godforsaken place, anyway? It’s the tail end of civilization—she never looked like that in Los Angeles, never before in her life.”

But she looked much worse many times afterward, because poison ivy was just a common weed on the farm, hard to avoid brushing against even when we became familiar with its distinctive three-leaved configuration—a seductive plant, shinier and greener than any other in the summer, turning, in the fall, to glossy red. Bridget developed the unerring instinct that wild animals have about their natural enemies; she could feel a clump of poison ivy growing behind a tree or stone wall and would stop in her tracks, with her nose to the wind, quivering, until Bill or I led her past it. Since we ran around all summer barefoot and practically naked, Emily took the precaution of scrubbing her down every evening with a big cake of smelly carbolic soap—a suggestion of Dr. McKenzie, the kindly Brookfield doctor, who had become resigned to making at least one emergency house call a week on behalf of one or another of us. Often in the middle of the night, he chugged up to Stone Ledges in his old car, shaking his head with sleepiness and disbelief. “Nothing like preventive medicine,” he said, as the incidence and virulence of Bridget’s rashes steadily increased. “This stuff should disinfect an army.” But the soap was of little use. Bridget could get a major case of poison ivy even when she stayed in the house and went nowhere near it. Mother and Dr. McKenzie took a long time to figure out how, but they finally deduced that if Bridget so much as patted a dog that might have walked through a patch of it days earlier, she was in trouble. Or, in the autumn, when the farmers burned their fields, in which, of course, poison ivy grew along with everything else, the slightest contact of the smoke on her skin—even if she was standing a long distance away, fully clothed, with only her face exposed—did the trick.

As for Bill and me, we inherited all of Father’s other allergies, the most prevalent of which was, on a farm, hay fever. There were variations: if Bill ingested certain shellfish, his throat swelled up to the point where he couldn’t breathe and required hospitalization; and it was said that, at birth, I was so allergic to all milk (“including your mother’s and anything else we could round up, goat, monkey, whatever,” Father used to say with a semblance of pride) that until some weird formula was devised, nobody was quite sure how to keep me alive. But by and large, Bill and I were besieged with hay fever much worse than Father’s. We—particularly I—might come down with an attack if we walked through any enclosed space with dust in it, dust or animals or hay. Barns. Cows, sheep, horses, chickens. A serious enough attack landed us in bed, sneezing and wheezing. “Lousy respiratory systems, just like your father,” Father would remind us comfortingly when he came upstairs to visit us, propped up with our bed trays in the heavily vaporized room, steamy and pungent with eucalyptus oil, sealed off by Emily from the rest of the house. I was more allergic to more things than Bill, and wheezed louder, convincing myself that eventually I would stop breathing altogether and die and that nobody except Emily believed me or cared, except maybe Bridget and Bill, who, on the other hand, might be only too delighted to have me out of the way so they could divide up my books and games. Whoever was sick was regarded by the others with light-headed relief and, only as an afterthought, compassion. It was really at mealtimes that the absence of the bedridden sufferer was disturbing, when the dining-room table—at which, at long last, we were allowed to eat with the grownups—was overcast with a nagging sense of loss, of broken unity, as whichever two of us who weren’t disabled tried to ignore the empty chair of the third.

Bridget, far more than Bill or I, took an interest in the gruesome details of our maladies. Around this time, when she was six, her ambition shifted from becoming a housewife with ten children to becoming a doctor; not a bad idea, we all agreed, since the family could certainly use a good one in permanent residence, and besides she had a knack not only for precisely remembering