The Yale Journal for Humanities in Medicine

Ray Hicks and the Doctors
(continued)

Joseph D. Sobol, Ph.D.
sobol@mail.etsu.edu

Now the intern had slowly relaxed during this performance into the state all storytellers know as the Story Listening Trance.  His mouth hung open.  His eyes had glazed over.  He had lost all his doctorly authority and rigor.  In fact, he had lost his tongue and his senses altogether and simply stood there, staring sullenly at Ray for a long time while the medical students snorted and chortled and slapped their clipboards.  And every time I looked at that intern’s stunned face, I would be catapulted back a step or two with glee till eventually, and I can’t explain how this happened, I fell to the hard linoleum floor and actually bounced up again like one of those inflatable clown dolls that can’t stay down.  The room was in utter pandemonium around the tableau of Ray, smiling in triumph from the prone position, and the defeated and slack-jawed doctor standing over him.

Finally the intern roused himself and announced in a crestfallen way that he would now have to administer a prostate exam. All except for Rosa and the medical students had to scurry out of the room.  The curtain was drawn for a long, solemn moment.  Then it was thrown back, and the intern marched out, flanked by his medical students, their clipboards held high.  He said something in medicalese to the duty nurse, and the troika disappeared down the corridor.

Word went up and down—they would admit Ray Hicks to the hospital.  When I went back in the cubicle, Ray was muttering to Rosa, “The places that feller was a-pokin’ me, I was fixin’ to snap his finger off.”

But Ray’s spirits were now much improved.  When I came to his bedside, he said, “I know now why they’re gonna let me in here.  It’s so’s I can teach to ’em.”

And so it was.  Ray spent the next several days in the Johnson City medical Center, teaching to the doctors, nurses, staff, and other patients—to anyone who came near him—about grace in the face of change.

The following day, Ray was diagnosed with cancer of the prostate and colon that had metastasized to his bones.  He would be treated with some short-term chemotherapy and released to home hospice care.  When I went to visit that day, Ray was downstairs receiving more tests.  Rosa was there, and Susan O’Connor of the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough.

Susan was shaking her head in wonder.  “Ray took a walk this morning after they told him,” she said.  “And when he got back to the door of his room, he just turned around to all the people in the corridor, and he announced—in that great Ray voice, you know—he said, ‘If I’m gonna go, I might as well go singing!’ And he raised up his hand and started singing this song that went something like, ‘I’m gonna lay down my old guitar.’  Then he just turned around and went back in his room, leaving everybody kind of awestruck.  I wish you could have heard it.”

I wish I could have heard it too.  But I got to hear the story.

Gonna lay down my old guitar.

Gonna lay down my old guitar.

I wish I could strop it to my side,

And carry it along with me.

They had put Ray on the pediatric ward—for reasons of space, they said—but somehow it seemed right.  The following day when I went to visit, the doctors came in to give him his shot of chemo.  They shooed us out of the room and closed the door.  While I waited outside, I saw a little girl coming down the hall with her grandmother.  The little girl was freckle-faced and blue-eyed, with just a few colorless wisps of hair and patches of fuzz on her scalp.  Her grandmother was shaking with palsy and clinging to the railing along the wall.  It was hard to say which one was sicker.

I said hello to the little girl, and then I had an idea.  “Hey,” I asked her, “do you like stories?”

She nodded.

“Well, today’s your lucky day because one of the best storytellers in the country is staying right there on your hall, which makes you neighbors.  So maybe sometime when you and he aren’t busy, you can stop by for a visit, and he can tell you a story.”

She nodded.

Just then the door opened, and the doctor swept by.  “Well,” I said, “maybe if he’s feeling OK now, you can come in and introduce yourself.” So we went in.

“Ray,” I said, “this is your neighbor, Kimberly.  She’s staying on this hall, and she says she likes stories.”

Ray asked her last name and the grandmother’s last name, and after careful consideration, they determined that they were probably nearabout kinfolk.  So after that ritual was completed, Ray began:

“Now this story is about a time when grownup folks didn’t mind hittin’ and beatin’ children.  Parents, teachers, neighbors, the same.  They’d beat a child till he had bruises in his bones sometimes.  It happened to me. Teachers, they’d whup you with a board or a strop, put bruises in the bones o’ your legs, arms. Sometimes’d never come out.

“Now one time that happened to Jack.  His father beat him for not cuttin’ the wood, doin’ the chores.  Put bruises in his bones.  Jack decided he was gonna light out.  Run away.  Get out o’ there.”

And Ray went on to tell the story of “Jack and the Animals,” in which Jack rounds up a crew of old, sick, feeble, abandoned animals—a horse, an ox, a dog, a cat, and a rooster—and they manage to defeat poverty, brutality, crime, and the lack of love just by cleverness, grace, and by sticking together.  Ray lay back in the hospital bed and told the story with total concentration while the IV monitors bleeped and the hospital intercom crackled and summoned the doctors to this or that emergency code—and all of that ceased to exist.  In the end, Jack and the cast-off animals had a home, plenty of gold, and a new family made up of one another.  And the little girl and her palsied granny stood in the doorway and listened and stared only at the storyteller.

And at the story’s end, when Jack and the animals were happy and safe, I turned to the little girl and said, “You know, you’re a lucky girl to have heard that story today from this man.”  And she nodded and skipped off down the hall.

And when she was gone, her grandmother said, “She don’t even have a daddy.  Her daddy’s plumb mean.  Found him another woman ’fore she was even born.  Won’t even send her a Christmas card.”

And it hit me that Ray had somehow selected the one story in the Jack tale repertoire in which Jack’s father is plumb mean too.  How he knew is between him and the mysterious source of all human grace.  But I thought that whatever else happens in that little girl’s life—and no matter how long or how short—that on that day, she was like Jack—and like the rest of us who’ve had the grace to have had a transcendent storyteller in our lives—just plain lucky.

"Ray Hicks and the Doctors" first appeared in Now & Then magazine, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Summer 2002). © Center for Appalachian Studies and Services, 2002. Used with permission.

Published: November 27, 2002

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