K was tending to a patient who’d been carried in on a ladder, so Rosie was on her own. Her patient’s husband spoke no English at all. Rosie steered him by the shoulders and positioned him behind his wife’s head, his arms looped around her shoulders up to his own. Rosie went back to the other end of the wooden pallet and took the woman’s ankle gently into both hands. The patient gasped. This boded ill. She made the patient take five deep, slow breaths. She made the husband take five deep, slow breaths. She took five deep, slow breaths. Then she pulled like hell. The patient screamed. The husband screamed. But the bone realigned. And the baby stayed put. Lacking an intramedullary nail—she knew enough not to even ask for that one, not that she could have placed it without an X-ray anyway—she stabilized the leg with fabric wrap, a section of branch, and plates made of coconut shells. As long as the remedy required was something that grew on a palm tree, you were all set.
The patients in Thailand also knew what to do without what they never knew they were doing without. Absent antibiotic ointment, honey would stop a burn from getting infected. Dried papaya seeds crushed into powder would get rid of intestinal worms. Tea made from corn silk would reduce swelling. It was the way here. It was the only way. So it was this skill Rosie started employing, a few weeks into Thailand, a few weeks into Claude 2.0, not so much looking for remedies on palm trees as looking for them where she hadn’t been looking before.
She wasn’t so na?ve as to imagine there was something she could crush up or stir in or scavenge from a plant to help her child live in the world. But if she could doctor without drugs, medical equipment, or sterilized bedding, surely there was another option besides the ones she and Penn had been considering so far. Surgeries, side effects, appropriated choices, and life interrupted on the one hand versus misery, failure to fit, and life disallowed on the other was not a choice any more than dying from dehydration or dying from an enema used to treat dehydration. The trick was neither to make peace with medical intervention nor to eschew it altogether. The trick was to doctor a palm frond to help Poppy and Claude find their way in the world. Rosie didn’t know what that trick was yet, but she was getting a crash course in looking for it.
Oral Tradition
After three weeks at the school, Claude’s hair was two and a half centimeters of pathetic brown fuzz, and his class had grown from three to seven to ten to twenty-five children. The woman in charge with the painted cheeks (principal? teacher? secretary? mayor?) who’d assured him on the first day, “You fine,” had evidently not believed it herself. It became gradually clear to Claude that Mya, Dao, and Zeya were sent over first because they were the easy ones. They were well behaved, and their English was strong, and they weren’t really in need of the dubious skills of a ten-year-old American tagalong. This meant they were the ones Claude most wanted to spend time teaching. It also meant, Naw Ga, the principal/teacher/secretary/mayor explained, they were the ones who needed it least. She’d sent them over in the first place so as not to overly traumatize the new teacher—who in addition to being not even a teenager yet had no training whatsoever—but she got over that quickly.
“I don’t know how to teach English.” Claude was mildly panicked as his class doubled in size then doubled again and again.
“You speak.” Naw Ga gave him international so-what’s-the-problem eyes.
“I speak it, yeah, but I don’t know how to, you know, teach it to someone else.”
“No one know.” Naw Ga waved her hand, already turning off toward other students, other lessons. “How you learn?”
“To teach?”
“To talk.”
“Oh. I don’t remember. I was a baby.”
“So be they mama,” Naw Ga advised. “You learn from listen, talk, read. They same.”
Whereas the original three had sat quietly and respectfully and listened, the twenty-some wiggled and giggled in a language Claude didn’t know while he tried to be serious with them in a language they were supposed to be learning but weren’t. Whereas the original three had been happy to have old books read to them, the new ones complained (at least that’s what he thought they were doing) that they’d read these books already many times before. As far as learning English went, Claude suspected they’d already expanded their vocabulary as much as it could be expanded from their dusting-into-dry-leaves copy of Mother Goose. He did not think terms like “tuffet,” “curds,” “cockleshells,” and “pease porridge” were likely to come up in everyday English language conversation anyway. At least they had yet to do so for him. And whereas the original three were little girls like he was, like he had been at any rate, at least half of the new kids were boys, and though once upon a time he’d been one of those too, it seemed like something his father had made up: long ago and far away and pretend. The little boys were scary because he didn’t know how to talk to them. And because what if they looked at him and realized he was one?
“You tell us new story,” one of the alarming little boys demanded.
“A story about what?”
“About new.”
“I don’t know any stories about new,” said Claude.
“Tell story about old,” suggested Zeya, who at this point felt like an old friend. “New story about old.”
“I don’t know any new stories about old.” Did telling them stories instead of reading them stories even count? Was that learning English?
“Tell us favorite story,” someone said, and even as Claude was about to say he didn’t know any stories, he realized that of course he did.
“Well, I do know one story. One long, big, long story about a prince named Grumwald and a night fairy named Princess Stephanie.”