Mom took a heavy pair of scissors from the basin, then filled the basin from the bucket. Steam eddied off the surface. “There’s a nurse in Australia who claims that putting children in casts is exactly the wrong thing to do.” She snipped the scissors open and shut a few times. “Your muscles are paralyzed, but they’re not dead, so we’re going to remind them what it feels like to be active.” As she talked, she worked her way down the cast, using both hands to clip through the plaster-stiffened cloth. Clarence wanted to shrink away from the blade as Mom cut past the knee and down the shin. “President Roosevelt himself recovered from polio, and look how far he’s gotten. There.” She pulled the cast apart like a long clam. Clarence’s leg, marked with grime at the thigh and ankle, lay as pale as a fish in the middle. No mold! But it smelled like the root cellar. Clarence wrinkled his nose.
Mom moved to the next one. When she finished, she dipped a towel in the basin, then cupped her hand under his knee and gently lifted. A ripple of pain flashed from his knee to the back of his thigh. Clarence gasped.
“Sorry,” said Mom. She draped the hot towel over his leg. Water pooled in the cast. “The Aussie nurse says that the muscles will respond to stimulation. I’m going to rub the muscles, but I also have to move your leg, son. It might be uncomfortable.” She put one hand under his knee again and the other on the foot. Her serious eyes stared into his. Clarence nodded. Mom pressed the foot toward him while pulling the knee up.
Clarence had read that polio is the cruelest of diseases: it paralyzes but feeling remains. Liquid fire poured down his leg, like the skin would turn inside out. He scrunched his eyes tight. Thigh muscles stretched, moved, tore apart, melted, screamed a thousand tiny voices of death and torment, remade themselves into agony battalions, fought bloody battles, crushed each other with stones, ground salt into their wounds, flailed their backs with rose stems, broke their bones, pulled their fingernails off, stuck each other with rusty pitchforks, then twisted them deeper and deeper.
“There,” said Mom. “That’s one. Four more on this leg before we go to the next.”
In the middle of the night, Clarence lay on his back in bed, his legs’ memory a throbbing reminder of the session Mom said they would go through again in the morning. The clock ticked loudly in the hallway, forever holding tonight’s pain and the inescapable progress to tomorrow’s session.
From the bedroom next door, Mom and Dad argued. “How could an Australian nurse know more than our own doctor?” Dad talked calmly, his voice a steady rumble. “If her system was good, don’t you think doctors here, American doctors, would prescribe it?”
“Sister Kenny has shown results. I don’t have faith in that ‘convalescent serum.’ It doesn’t make sense to pump blood in him from people who have recovered from the disease. That doesn’t work for other diseases.”
Like all of their arguments, they were reasonable with each other, but Clarence still rolled over carefully, helping his left leg to go over his right, biting his lower lip until it stopped moving, then buried his head under the pillow. The sheets smelled of the menthol and petroleum jelly Mom had rubbed into his skin.
A little while later, their voices quieted, then their bedroom door clicked open. Steps creaked in the hallway before his own door opened. Mom padded into the room. Peeking under the pillow, Clarence saw her bare legs beneath her short robe and the thick wool socks she wore as slippers. She rubbed his back gently.
“I’m awake,” Clarence said, sliding the pillow aside.
Mom’s hand stopped. “You should be asleep. Sleep heals.” She kneaded the muscles under his shoulder blade. The motion felt comforting. Clarence sighed. He remembered today’s broadcast. He had wanted to tell Mom about it earlier, but hadn’t had a chance. “Do you think Professor Gilded can really make a horse disappear?”
Mom laughed. “I saw a magic show once. The magician sawed a woman in half, and then he put her back together. He made a table float, so I suppose, but, Clarence, it’s a radio show. He could tell you he was making the state capitol vanish and you wouldn’t know any different.”
“There were people there, ten of them. They saw Professor Gilded turn a real horse into a pile of bones, and then the horse was whole again, outside the studio.”
Mom moved to the other shoulder blade. “They said ten people were there. They could be actors.” She scooted farther up on the bed so she could rub his shoulders. “But maybe it is true, son. Marvelous things happen all the time, miracles, even.”
“Do you think Professor Gilded makes miracles?”
She stopped rubbing again. “You have to believe in miracles. Miracles and hard work. That’s a powerful combination.”
“Does Dad believe in miracles?”
“Well, that’s a good question. He told me once that he believes in Jesus, but he doesn’t believe someone who says he’s talked to him lately.”
Clarence giggled.
She patted his head. “Now, you go to sleep. In the morning we’ll try a little of the hard work and see if we can’t help our miracle along. How do your legs feel?”
“They hurt. They didn’t hurt as much in the casts.”
“I think they’ll feel better soon. Remember, they haven’t moved in a month.” She pushed herself up from the bed. “Oh, I found your birthday quarter eagle in my sock when I put it on.” The coin clicked when she placed it on his nightstand. “I have no idea how it got there, but you better hold onto it. Remember, it’s for luck.” She tucked the covers in so they pulled snug against his chest. “Don’t forget, tomorrow your dad and I will both be at work. Mrs. Bentley from next door will come by to see if you need anything.”
Clarence nodded. In all the times Mom and Dad had been gone together, Mrs. Bentley never dropped in, which was okay because Clarence could listen to the radio as long as he wanted.
After she left, Clarence pulled himself close enough to the nightstand to reach the coin. New aches broke out as his legs shifted, but he gritted his teeth until his fingers found its mellow, round shape. From the light coming in off the street, he examined its soft gold. It fitted neatly into his palm, then vanished into his fist. “Now you see it,” he said in the empty room. “Now you don’t.” He opened the hand where the quarter eagle still sat, but he imagined what it would be like to make it go away. When his hand hid it, the coin was both there and not there. He only had to choose the reality where it wasn’t, and the hand would be empty. How did the coin get into Mom’s sock? What had he been thinking about the coin during Professor Gilded’s show?
He fell asleep thinking about coins appearing out of a lady’s hat, and long red velvet lined black robes, and then, finally, as he slid into the deep darkness, he dreamed of a horse galloping across a field of spring hay, a divine roan with a long tail whipping behind, until it staggered on suddenly weakened legs, trying so hard to stay upright and running. It buckled, whinnying in terror as only a horse can, its eyes wide, its nostrils snorting, before the fur and flesh disappeared. Pathetically, it took one skeletal step, then clattered into a pile of crisp white bones. Green hay poked up between its ribs as the skull rolled a few feet more, the last of its momentum used up. In the dream, Clarence cried until he saw a gold glimmer reflected in the horse’s jaw. It was his quarter eagle clenched between the teeth, catching the sun.