Death in Berlin

A wild cat lunged at me, while a big horn sheep and several antelopes gazed in my direction. A bear and other carnivores hovered nearby. A big game hunter, Dr. Laws hung his trophies in his dark, narrow waiting room. Like the other two doctors and one dentist in the town of Berlin, Dr. Laws worked out of his house, a big, old, form-stone-covered, four-square.
My nervous mother waited on the old sofa with me. I wondered why she was nervous. I was the one with the devastating case of poison ivy. I tried not to scratch the raw, oozing blisters on my hands, arms and face. I didn’t understand how I got it. I avoided any vines when I rambled in hedgerows and fields. I didn’t know poison ivy grew as a woody shrub along the dirt lane where I picked wild flowers.
The north facing waiting room remained cool on that warm September day in 1964. We waited alone. I felt grateful Mum hadn’t taken me to Dr. Shot. She’d hauled me to his dark, unsanitary office a couple of years before when I had stepped on a rusty spike. Dr. Shot said I needed a tetanus shot and took a horse-sized needle from a rust-stained pan on a stove and used it to give me the painful injection. The next week, my arm swelled and hurt worse than my foot. My parents had muttered unfavorable things about that old doctor and that’s why we now waited in Dr. Laws’ office.
The somber and reticent doctor opened the door and we stepped into an office that probably looked as it had when Dr. Laws began practicing in the early 1900s. He looked old to me, but I was fourteen and every adult looked old to me. In the 1960s, many old people didn’t qualify for Social Security and didn’t retire unless forced to by incapacity. Elderly people worked all around town and doctors were no exception.
I sat on the examining table, hoping I wouldn’t have to undress, while my mother chattered about my affliction. Dr. Laws glanced at my ravaged skin, strolled over to a glass case and took out an unlabeled, brown, glass bottle. “Have her take a table-spoonful of this morning and evening,” he said.
My mother paid the modest fee. Since most local people didn’t have health insurance, doctors charged what they thought their patients could afford. If they charged too much, word got around. That’s why we didn’t go to Berlin’s youngest doctor, a man in his forties. People said he charged an arm and a leg.
I took the thick, brown medicine as prescribed. The mysterious substance tasted like cola syrup. I didn’t expect it to do any good, but the poison ivy blisters that usually lingered for weeks disappeared in one week.
My parents thought highly of Dr. Laws until my grandmother, who lived with us, had a heart attack. Dr. Laws lived down the street, so my father called him immediately. “Give her whiskey,” the doctor advised.
That was the first and last whiskey that ever touched her lips. She died. My parents waited in vain for Dr. Laws, but he didn’t show up and they never forgave him. They declared, “Dr. Laws and Dr. Shot are too old to practice medicine.”
The old doctors’ patients didn’t help their reputations. A Mr. Jones frequented Dr. Shot for asthma treatments. Dr. Shot gave him injections to aid breathing. Mr. Jones had been ailing for months when his oldest son, Bill, about twenty, visited. Mrs. Jones asked Bill to drive his father to Dr. Shot’s for an injection. Bill helped his father into a station wagon and drove to the doctor’s house, where he helped his father out of the wagon. Mr. Jones said he felt too weak to walk to the back of the house, where the doctor had his office. Bill seated his father on the front porch steps and walked back to get the doctor.
Dr. Shot prepared the injection and walked back to the front steps with Bill. Mr. Jones had slumped over. Dr. Shot examined him briefly and said, “Best get him to Miss Anna’s.”
“What!” Bill exclaimed. Miss Anna was the town’s undertaker.
“No need to have her come out here. You can just take him there,” the doctor added. Dr. Shot grabbed one end of Mr. Jones and Bill the other. Together, they hoisted Mr. Jones’ mortal remains into the back seat.
“Now hurry on,” Dr. Shot said, eager to get the dead man away before anyone noticed he’d lost a patient.
As their patients died of old age, the doctors’ practices faded and then they died, too. Dr. Laws’ poison ivy remedy remains a mystery. Jewelweed is an antidote for poison ivy, perhaps it was the ingredient in Dr. Laws’ cure.