As I was driving up the rutted dirt driveway, I couldn't help but grin. It was a gorgeous crisp fall morning early enough that the frost was just begining to melt away and the trees were covered in red and orange leaves so vibrant they seems to be on fire. A faint whiff of a spicy smokey scent permeated the air letting me know that someone had been burning leaves in the distance. I was a home health nurse making my visits to patients for their daily nursing care.
My first destination was a trailer was about a mile up in the woods at the foot of the mountain on a narrow and winding dirt and gravel road. It hadn't rained in weeks, and the dust rose in billowing clouds around my truck tires. As the trailer came into sight, my first impression was that someone had discarded a old tincan on it's side and left it to rust. The trailer had to be at least 25 years old and sagged in the middle like a sway-backed sow. There was a rusted out old jeep with no wheels and a busted out windshield propped up on crumbling cinder blocks. The trailer sat about 3 feet off the ground with only jagged remnants of underpinning left, but there was no porch and no steps leading to the front door. The entry consisted of old half rotted 2 X 4's propped onto concrete blocks to form sort of a make-shift wheelchair ramp.
I knocked on the delapidated door that was dirty with years and years of being slammed on rusted hinges and heard a feeble, "Honey, come on in here!" As I pulled open the door, a gust of stale air thick with the odor of kerosene and rancid bacon grease mixed with the smell of rubbing linament assaulted my senses and stung my eyes.
My patient was sitting in a wheelchair wearing an old cotton "duster" stained with fried egg yolk and crumbs from severeal meals. The wheelchair arms were missing upholstery exposing thick ripped yellow padding. She was watching "The Price is Right" and Bob Barker was getting ready to host the Showcase Showdown.
I noticed right away that both legs had been amputated..the right one below the knee and the left one above. The right stump was covered with a white gauze bandage with bloody yellow drainage seeping through the layers on the end where the wound just refused to heal. Her body has been ravanged by diabetes and had been whittled away bit by bit....first a toe, then another toe, then a foot, then below the knee, then above the knee....her body dying slowly inch by inch. Her blood sugars were sky high as she just couldn't really understand the concept that Little Debbies and Brown Cow icecream were killing her.
We laughed and joked and offered our best bids on the Showcase Showdown while I changed her dressings, carefully forming a perfect figure 8 dressing around that stump. We got along well; despite her lack of teeth and obvious lack of formal education, she was a gentle and caring woman. As I was packing up my supplies and getting ready to leave her home, she put her hand on my arm and warned, "Now watch out fer Ole Tom when you go out to yer car."
"Tom?" I asked. "Is Tom your dog?" Mean dogs are the bane of mailmen and visiting nurses.
"Oh Law no, child. He's my Tom Turkey!' she beamed.
I sighed, somewhat releived that I wasn't facing a mean slobbering Doberman or Rotweiler, only a turkey. How bad could THAT be, afterall? It's only a bird. I waved good bye and pulled the door shut behind me, stepping out onto the wobbley planks heading down the ramp to solid ground. When I turned from the door to watch my footing, I found myself face to face with Ole Tom.
Ole Tom was strutting toward the foot of the ramp with his red floppy waddle jiggling obscenely back and forth. I never knew turkeys were so large! and SO UGLY! and threatening. His beak looked razor sharp and his beady eyes rolled around in his scrawny tough wrinkled head like a mad man with a glass eye. His claws were thick and dark yellow and surprisingly sharp, like taradactyl talons from a prehistoric horror flick. He was daring me to step off that ramp onto the ground.
We faced off for severeal minutes. Every time I tried to move, he moved too. I was terrified. Now, I had worked in home health for years and years in the inner city and had always carried mace but never used it. I kept it on my keychain...just in case. I slowly slid my hand into my lab coat pocket and wrapped my fingers around the small cylinder. I gathered up all my courage rushed down the planks right for the turkey and aimed straight for the turkey's face and sprayed and then without looking back, I took off running for my truck as if the hounds of hell were on my heels. I made it to my truck, slid into the seat and slammed the door before I had enough gumption to look for the turkey.
I had never seen such a sight in my entire life as that angry-maced turkey. He kept spinning in circles, rubbing his head on the ground, stomping his death talons, flapping his wings and squalking an awful sound with unrestrained poultry rage. Not wanting to wait around for revenge when he recovered, I slammed the gears into reverse and roared down that dirt road in a could of dust.
This happened about a month before Thanksgiving that year....and that year.....I opted to go vegetarian for my Thanksgiving meal.
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