LOSING LITTLE DAVID

      Mama and Daddy were in their early thirties. I was 11 and the oldest of their four kids. Mack was 10. Elaine was 4. David Earl Lord was four months short of turning 6. 

      It was springtime in Natchez with the azaleas in full bloom. The six of us had spent part of the weekend riding around town and the countryside in Daddy’s 1938 Chevrolet.

      That Sunday, March 27, 1949, David came down with a fever. After he went to bed that evening, it got higher and Daddy phoned a doctor who lived nearby.

      The doctor came in the middle of the night, diagnosed his illness as a strep throat infection, gave him a shot of penicillin, and said he should be better in the morning.

      David slept that night with Mama and Daddy in their bedroom. Around daybreak they noticed he was not breathing. Daddy and Jerby Campbell, who lived in the other half of our duplex, rushed him to a hospital. But it was too late. 

      David had died in his sleep.

      For many years we figured the cause might have been the penicillin shot. But later I came to suspect toxic shock syndrome, the same strep related disorder that killed Jim Henson, the Muppets creator.

      David was a delight. He had red hair, like Mama’s, and lots of Howdy Doody-type freckles. He was loads of fun. He liked to follow me and Mack and our 12-year-old neighbor Teddy around the neighborhood. 

      I’m not sure we were a good influence.

      Though he never had a chance to go to school or kindergarten, he was smart and curious. He enjoyed perusing the 20-volume set of World Book Encyclopedias that Mama had bought for us. 

      “Lewis, here’s the ‘B’ book,” he said that spring as he handed me Volume No. 2.  “Read me about birds.”

      We had a little dog, a rat terrier with a stub for a tail, that David named “Shorty.” They were inseparable.

      Two or three days after David died, Shorty disappeared into the hundred acres of thick woods on the Monteigne estate that flanked our house. 

      We searched and searched for him. After nearly a week, he dragged himself back to our backyard, starved and emaciated and covered with maggots. We rushed him to a vet. But it was too late.

      He died in the vet’s office. He had grieved himself to death. 

      Shorty’s period of grief lasted less than a fortnight. Mama’s endured for two or three years. Then came a big change that lasted the rest of her nine decades. 

      As best I could tell, she no longer moped and wept. It seemed instead that whenever she thought of David, her eyes lit up and she smiled. She loved to tell folks, some of them complete strangers, what a joy her little boy was.

      Indeed he was. And I confess that I both smile and weep as I write this remembrance. 

Lewis Lord was a journalist  in Washington at United Press International and U.S. News & World Report