Читать книгу A Thin Place - Jack Peterson - Страница 20

June 13, 1991

Austin, Minnesota

Chronologically, Dr. Jeremiah Trent had had no trouble admitting to being old. He knew that most, if they knew his date of birth would automatically label him as old, but he never conceded age had anything to do with how he lived his life. The locals would back him up. Physically, everyone around town knew he could match men half his age. Mentally, his colleagues often bragged for him, telling others that he had few peers and that his historic and distinguished medical career would be remembered long after he passed. Trent thought little of their opinions. His only concern at this stage of his life was staying alive, and he was doing all he could to cheat death.

An avid runner and long distance swimmer, Trent honed his aquatic skills daily at Eastside Lake, swimming the length of the one-mile span and back again six days a week. On alternating days, he preceded his swims with a brisk five-mile run down the gravel road that ran from his house to the highway and back. Sunday was his only day off from his physical regimen. The day was always set aside for his church duties as an elder at Austin’s Presbyterian Church.

After his early morning swim, Trent sat alone on his favorite park bench next to Austin’s City Hall, allowing the mid-day sun to warm the all too familiar aches that were a permanent part of an unwanted territory others liked to call old age. Austin was a quiet little town, population just over ten thousand. He looked up and down both ends of Main Street, but not much was happening. Par for the course, he said to himself. He closed his eyes, listening for a few minutes as a few wispy breezes danced through the park, rattling the leaves of several large oak trees that towered behind. Other than mid-winter, he had followed the same daily routine ever since he retired as Chief of Staff of Rochester’s Mayo Clinic nearly twenty years earlier. Early summer was his favorite time of the year. The cold was over, and the heat not so hot as to prevent him dressing in his favorite attire. Wearing clean faded jeans, his favorite cowboy boots, and a long sleeved western shirt, he looked like a cowboy dressed for church. It made him feel good. He leaned back on the corner rail of his bench, stretching his lengthy legs outward to the front edge of the sidewalk while scanning the passersby. At this stage of his life, simply relaxing and enjoying the scenery was always a pleasant option but not for long. He stood, bent over and touched his toes, then jaywalked across the street to Hahn’s Rexall drug store. He wanted a newspaper.

Bob Hahn tossed a greeting from behind the prescription counter. “Morning, Doc!”

Trent waved and headed straight for the newsstand. “Where’s the Tribune?”

“Ya know, it’s not in yet. One of my customers said they saw the delivery truck broke down just outside of Albert Lea. Can’t say when it will get here. If it comes in, I can have my delivery boy bring one on his way past your place if you want.”

Trent smiled and shook his head, waving off the offer. How anybody could make money offering a courtesy delivery of a two-bit newspaper stretched his imagination, but it was exactly why he preferred living in a small town. The people were genuine, not caught up in the latest fads or trying to impress others with their money or knowledge. He picked up a copy of the Austin Daily Herald. With only a handful of pages, it was mostly local news and no match for the Minneapolis Tribune, but it had a good cartoon section and a daily crossword puzzle that he occasionally challenged just to kill a bit of time. He resigned himself to the fact that this would be one of those days. He threw a quarter on the counter. “See you tomorrow!”

Trent walked outside, returning to his favorite bench. The headline proclaimed the election of Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. Winning with 57% of the vote, he became the first popularly elected president in Russian history. The entire Yeltsin article was only two paragraphs. Trent knew the locals generally only cared about local news, and the Herald catered to that. Finding anything of interest outside of crop predictions was rare, and today was no exception. It was the height of corn on July 4th that always occupied the upper echelon of the local news, written or verbal. If the crop was knee high on the fourth, it was going to be a good year. If not, the subject was never discussed. Hoping bad news would just go away, the locals usually accepted the long-standing practice of simply ignoring it.

Trent breezed through the inner page trivia, quickly arriving at the back page. Then, he saw it. Near the bottom of the page was a small fill-in article datelined Atlanta, Georgia. His eyes turned intense, laser-like. He needed no interpretation. It was a short announcement outlining an accelerated vaccination program proposed by the federal government’s Center for Disease Control. It proposed that all children in the United States be vaccinated against what Trent knew to be largely an adult disease, Hepatitis-B. Backed by the medical community, the CDC’s proposal would bring the national childhood vaccination schedule to include nine different inoculations.

Trent squirmed. While Yeltsin’s victory percentage was interesting, he was generating his own calculations, and the results were not encouraging. He reread the article, three times. He pulled a pencil he had tucked over his ear and began reproducing his mental calculations on the blank margins of the newspaper. He had to be sure.

That night, just before midnight, Trent sat at his dining table reviewing the numbers he crunched earlier in the morning. A messy stack of ruffled papers with barely legible equations, charts, and myriad notes rested under a small desk lamp he pirated from his den. He had analyzed and reanalyzed. The results never varied. It was inconceivable to him that he could be the only person addressing the potential problems with the CDC’s vaccine schedule. A sorrow, not present since the passing of his wife four years earlier, slowly began to surface but this time it was different. When Mary passed, he felt incapacitated, enduring many lonely nights. This time, his sense of despair was different. He could do something about it. There was work to do, and the prize was a small chance he could finally ease an ache he had carried for sixty-four years.

For the first time in years, sleep came quickly. Tomorrow was a new day, but fate had a cruel sense of timing. This time, age did make a difference. He had to live long enough to prove his point.