Wingshooters by Nina Revoyr Page B

for medical care,” said Dr. Del Gordon, the clinic’s chief administrator. “There are a lot of people out there on the old farms and in the backwoods who never see a doctor.” Free services will be provided by licensed medical staff and students in the clinic’s new nursing program, and will include immunizations, tuberculosis tests, mammo-grams, and physicals. The Deerhorn Central Clinic will be absorbing all costs of renovating the building, Dr. Gordon said. “We want to extend our appreciation to the town of Deerhorn and both our old and new staff for helping turn our clinic into the medical jewel of Central Wisconsin.” The satellite clinic will be open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., every Wednesday, at 342 Besemer Road, just off of Route 5.
    Deerhorn was not a generous place. Almost everyone in the town had once been poor, or had at least struggled hard to get by. Every family had stories of crops that didn’t flourish, businesses that folded, farms that closed up as country people moved into town; and the Depression was still so fresh in the memories of my grandparents and their friends that it might have occurred within the last decade. Years before, a local boy—the son of a poor farmer, a veteran—had been elected to the House of Representatives, and had eventually become one of the most conservative members of Congress. People in town believed that if they had made it, if they had struggled and fought successfully to keep their heads above water, then everybody else could too. The people I had seen the previous week, living in tin shacks and cobbled together hand-me-down trailers, did not evoke their sympathy or sorrow. And so no one seemed to care that those same people would now have access to medical care. An institution whose presence the townsfolk resented was helping a set of people they chose not to see.
    Those next few days at school, it seemed like the contro-versy around Mr. Garrett had settled down, or at least had leveled off. The number of students who came to his class held steady at ten or eleven. From what I could gather, no one from the school called the other students’ parents to demand that they return; some of them had enrolled in the Catholic school. There had been talk that the two fifth grade classes might be combined, putting Mr. Garrett out of a job, but nothing came of it. Things were quiet. Miss Anderson had settled into a kind of tense determination, and we all started to learn again, at least a little. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday rolled by, and I was almost lulled into believing that the school was accepting Mr. Garrett and that everything would be all right.
    Then on Wednesday afternoon the telephone rang, just as we were sitting down for supper. My grandfather answered it and his expression grew darker. His fingers curled into a fist, which he placed on the desk. “All right,” he said into the phone. “Come over after supper and we’ll get our heads together. Call Jim and Earl too.”
    He hung up and sat at the table in front of his empty plate. My grandmother, who’d been getting ready to bring in the food, looked at him expectantly.
    “That clinic out there for the country people,” he said. “That nigger nurse was out there today.”
    We looked at him, waiting for more.
    “That nurse ,” he repeated, looking up at us now. “She gave people shots. She was giving them physicals. She laid her hands on our children .” And as he said this he cringed, physically withdrawing from his words, as if from the actual hands he found so offensive.
    I looked at my grandmother and saw her eyes open wide. “She shouldn’t have gone out there,” she said, sounding more surprised than anything, as if one of her friends had played out of turn in bridge. “They should have told us she was going to be working there.”
    “Those people had no warning,” my grandfather said. “No warning at all. It just got sprung on them.” He got up from his chair and walked out to the patio,