Read The Road Taken for Free Online

felt a wave of panic, and sent Hugh to get the doctor.
    “Blood poisoning,” the doctor said, and sent Alfred back to bed.
    How quick, how frightening, to become so sick from such a little thing! Although there were methods to try, everyone knew there was no cure for septicemia; it either cured itself or it didn’t. The doctor had given Alfred aspirin for the pain and fever and gone away. Celia tried to put cold, wet compresses on his painful face, but he moaned and turned away from her. She was shaking with fear, holding back the tears. By that evening his eyes were swollen almost shut.
    The family prayed, and waited, and slept at last, but Celia couldn’t leave her son’s bedside. She had told Hugh to sleep in Rose’s room, in Maude’s old bed, but a moment after she had sent him away he came back.
    “I want to be with him,” Hugh said. His eyes were full of concern and fear. He sat next to Alfred’s bed and took his hand. “I’ll stay with my brother,” he said.
    He had always referred to Alfred as his brother, and she had always encouraged it, but suddenly a voice deep inside Celia screamed silently:
He’s not your brother. He’s nothing to you, he’s mine.
Then she as quickly realized the thought had been unkind . . . although she had meant it, and felt it still. Alfred was the joy of her life. No one but a mother could know how strong their bond was.
    “You may stay, but don’t disturb him,” she said.
    Early in the morning Rose and William came in to Alfred’s sickroom. When she saw him, Rose gasped.
    “I’ll take care of the little girls,” William said. “Should I get the doctor again, should we take him to the hospital?”
    The doctor came, and said again, gravely, that nothing could be done for blood poisoning. “If the aspirin doesn’t help, I can give him something stronger for the pain.”
    “Cure him,” Celia said. “I don’t care what you do, but do something.”
    “Ah, yes, something,” the doctor said. “There are things we know now in medicine and much we don’t. You know, when people are shot or stabbed it’s often the septicemia that kills them, not the wound itself. I can try strychnine, eggs, and coffee enemas to strengthen him . . .”
    “You must bleed the boy to get rid of the poisons,” Celia said.
    The doctor looked grave. “I think bleeding is old-fashioned and barbaric myself, and I’ve never seen it work. People think it works, but it’s God who does the healing. I will try the other things, and above all, let us pray.”
    “We
did
pray!” Celia cried.
    She kept a vigil for four days, nursing him. Sometimes she slept a bit from exhaustion. The girl who cleaned their house brought her food, which she couldn’t eat, and water. Alfred, refusing the eggs, drank a little water, but by the second day he was delirious, his distorted face oozing pus. He thrashed in his bed and moaned from pain. When he became unconscious it seemed a respite. Perhaps now he could get some peaceful rest, and that would strengthen him.
    Oh, my brave, beautiful boy, Celia thought. All the times you played and hurt yourself and I thought nothing of it. What terrible thing was in the garden, on that thorn, to make you so sick? What germs were there that weren’t there before when you fell, when you tore your skin? Was it something on your hands? A little boy’s dirty hands, carrying fatal disease? You were
just playing.
You were only having a happy childhood! What weakness of your system made this the time when you were cursed?
    Just before dawn Alfred died.
    Celia screamed like an animal and would not be consoled. She didn’t want to let go of her son so he could go to the funeral home. At his graveside, William and her son-in-law, Walter, had to hold her up so she wouldn’t faint or throw herself into Alfred’s grave to join him. She had never been so emotional, and the family was alarmed.
    In the days after the funeral she held her two little girls so constantly and so