As he left his house, not aware he was running, he kept calling, “Where’s a doctor?
Where’s a doctor?”
Those were the words Ted Conner heard and did not understand—before he went back indoors, checked the gas and the lighting circuits (there was no power) and got his coat and hat in preparation for making his scarey way over to the school to report.
It was what they had always planned he should do if his radio set was knocked out, or the power failed.
Mrs. Conner was on her way to the Presbyterian Church, a fairly long walk. She was, wearing her old winter coat—glad she hadn’t given it away—and carrying a heavy suitcase. The suitcase was her own idea and she hadn’t told Henry about it. In it were “odds and ends,”
assembled by Beth as she had listened over the years to Civil Defense talk about what might happen. She had slipped onto her arm the brassard of her volunteer corps: “Emergency Nurse,” it said, in red, white and blue felt letters.
The sirens were warbling like wounded demons and the only other people on foot were air-raid wardens, here and there, who hurried toward her to tell her to take cover, then saw the arm band and grinned and called, usually, “Hello, Mrs. Conner!” or, “Watch it!”
She answered mildly. She was thinking about Nora. And she was obliged, besides, to cross carefully at the intersections. There weren’t many cars about in this part of town; but the ones moving were hitting sixty or seventy and taking corners on two wheels, some headed away from town but most of them converging on South High where Henry would be.
The Light caught her on Ash Street, near Arkansas Avenue. Henry had told her to get down in the gutter with the curb between herself and the hot whiteness, but she was afraid of the cars. There were, however, small terraces in the Wister’s front lawn, where Maud had crocuses because of the southern slope. Beth dropped on her hands and knees, then flattened herself. The blast and the Wister windows and some of the tiles from the roof went over her and she was not hurt.
She got up and trudged on, carrying the suitcase still. When she reached Lake View Road she saw that the windows of the Jenkins Memorial Hospital had been blown away; and the steeple of the Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, her destination, a hospital itself in the event of emergency, had been broken off at the middle.