Читать книгу My First Hundred Years - Donald R. Fletcher - Страница 9

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“Look to the Rock”

Look to the rock from which you were hewn,

And to the quarry from which you were dug

(Isaiah 51:1 NRSV)

So counsels the prophet in the Hebrew Scriptures. The rock from which I was hewn was the staunch and spare tradition of Scottish Presbyterian faith, as exemplified by my dad, Archibald G. Fletcher, MD, and, in softer form, my mother, Jessie Rodgers Fletcher. Arch Fletcher’s forebears had migrated, several generations earlier, from Scotland to Canada; those of Jessie Rodgers, from Scottish Northern Ireland to Philadelphia. Now these two young people, coming from very different settings, had enlisted individually with the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. and had been sent to Korea.

This was in the second decade of the 1900s. Japan had annexed Korea, as the ancient Korean kingdom collapsed; but in terms of Christian mission enterprise, the people of Korea were proving to be remarkably ready and responsive, and Japan remained open to and accepting of Western influence.

Arch and Jessie, both in their late twenties, were part of a thrust of recruits eager to learn the language and customs and to adapt to the needs of the Korean people. After several years, they found themselves together in Taegu (also spelled Daegu), a provincial capital in the warm southern part of the Korean Peninsula. Arch, a Canadian farm boy from Ontario, was assigned to the medical work in Taegu, while Jessie, a Philadelphia girl, was there provisionally, helping with a large gathering of Korean women.

Different though they were, Jessie and Arch quickly found that they enjoyed one another’s company. It was spring, and several bewitching May evenings were enough for a very brief courtship. They each knew who they were, and now knew that they were in love. The proper mission and civil authorities were consulted, and within a short time they were married.

The major social adjustment fell to Jessie. She was now the doctor’s wife, making a home just up the hill from the hospital, such as it was. And very soon she was pregnant. Baby Elsie, my sister, arrived the following May, and a year later, in August of 1917, my brother, Archie (Arch Jr.). My appearance came in January of 1919, but not in Taegu. That is another story.

*****

“Dr. Adams, please, come quickly. Arch needs you.”

The Rev. Dr. James Adams, veteran senior missionary, lived next door to the doctor’s house. He had wakened to a timid but urgent knocking on his bedroom window. When he got it open, he made out the figure below, just recognizable in the first glimmer of daylight.

“Why, Jessie, is that you?”

“Yes, yes! Please hurry!”

Dr. Adams found his shoes and a wrap against the chill of late winter. As he and Jessie crossed to her house, she told him, in brief snatches, what had happened. Arch had been working all day—seeing outpatients through the morning and performing one surgery after another in an afternoon that stretched into evening. He got home too exhausted to eat dinner; just fell in to bed. Now, only a short while ago, he woke her.

“Get me a basin, quick!”

When she brought it, he coughed up a torrent of bright red blood. At first, she didn’t dare leave him; but she had to have help.

The basin was still there; the blood darker now.

“Yes, Jessie, you did the right thing.”

Taking charge, Dr. Adams, first thing in the morning had a telegram sent to the main mission hospital in Seoul. Arch’s father and his eldest brother had both died of tuberculosis. The significance of the pulmonary hemorrhage was clear. He dared not make even a modest exertion, while the family packed for the earliest passage available across the Pacific to the United States.

Arch had to watch helplessly, while Jessie shouldered the whole burden of preparing to leave, with no assurance that they would ever return. There was no treatment, yet, for tuberculosis. The “cure” was rest, with plenty of fresh air. When the family was back, finally, in the eastern US, Arch would be spending long months in a sanitarium at Saranac Lake, New York, while Jessie and the children lived with her parents just outside of Philadelphia.

It was a stressful time, more so because Jessie was pregnant again. How vast was her relief when Arch wrote, in October, that he was soon to be released from the sanitarium. The Pennsylvania Medical Missionary Society had several cottages, on the Jersey shore, in the town of Ventnor, and he had secured the use of one of them for the family.

To Jessie it seemed dream-like to stand in front of that white clapboard, two-story cottage in the late October sunlight, with Arch beside her, looking quite fit now, holding toddler Archie by the hand, while Elsie ran ahead excitedly to try the door. This would be home—their first family home in the United States.

The cottage had a screened porch on the second floor, where Arch, obedient to his “cure,” could sleep in the fresh air. It was certainly fresh on that cold night of January 6, 1919, but Arch was not sleeping. In a second-floor bedroom, lights were burning past midnight. It was now the seventh. Jessie was in labor, and Arch was the physician-in-attendance.

Why not use the hospital in nearby Atlantic City? Arch had investigated the cost, which he himself would have to pay. He had delivered both my sister and my brother in Taegu; now this third baby, who would complete the family. He wrote his decision to his doctor brother Gordon, in Orchard, Nebraska, and Gordon promptly sent a complete obstetrical kit—including a surgical gown and gloves, and the latest drug in use to ease delivery. Arch was equipped—plus, he had at his side a registered nurse, a missionary wife also on furlough, who served in Siam (now Thailand).

Happily, the birth went well. Around 2:30 a.m. I entered the world. Elsie and Archie were sound asleep, which also was well. Our parents were both in their early thirties when they were married; so, by their choice, we three had come along quickly. In fact, for four months each year, from my birthday, January 7, to Elsie’s, May 2, our ages would always be consecutive—like three, two, one. That gave Mother a handful, when we were small.

She came to love that Ventnor cottage, though, as winter turned to spring and then summer. Her life was taken up with her new baby and the other two children. Arch, always eager to make the best of any opportunity, now turned his medical focus to tuberculosis. The disease was widespread in Korea. He attached himself to an x-ray specialist in Philadelphia, learning all that he could.

The Board of Foreign Missions in New York supported those efforts, anxious to see him fully restored and purposeful before sending the family back to Korea. That meant that I was a curly-headed one-and-a-half-year-old when our family of five was on a ship crossing the Pacific to Japan, then by ferry to Pusan, Korea, and finally by train to Taegu.