Hot Coffee in Agua Dulce  (1930)

 

Well, let’s see...we’re in Tampico – my father, my mother, and myself.  When I’m almost a year old, we moved to Agua Dulce.  Agua Dulce was about 20 – 25 miles of Coatzacoalcos, on the State of Veracruz, in Mexico.  And, it was a very small oil camp.  I do not remember what company, what oil company, my father was working for, ‘cause he worked for all of them at one time or another, and he was a driller, and uh, the camp was very small it had, mmm, I don’t know, maybe half a dozen houses, no more, or a dozen, if that much – I doubt it.  And my father, used to work for one week, the evening shift, and the next week it would be the day shift. And this week, he had been working the night shift, which was from eleven in the evening ‘til seven in the morning. And those were the hours that he worked. 

And we had a very small house that was provided by the oil company, and my father was about to arrive.  And we had a, sort of a native girl from Veracruz, that was something like my nanny, that used to play with me and take me for walks around the oil camp.  And when my mother heard that my father was arriving, she said to the girl, “Quickly, take Thelma away from here.  Take her for a walk, because if Grady sees her, and Thelma sees him, he won’t sleep.  She’ll want to play, and he’ll play with her, and then he will not sleep.”  And all he was able to sleep was four or five hours, and she didn’t want me to disturb my father’s sleep.  So, “Ok”, says the girl but she decided to take with her a small coffeepot and a mug, to have her coffee, because it was seven in the morning. 

So she went, and as we’re leaving, I heard my father’s voice, so I quickly turned around – she was carrying me in one arm and in the other hand she had the coffeepot and the coffee mug – and I turned, and she poured the whole coffeepot, not the mug, but the whole coffeepot, in my back, and all I was wearing, the only thing I was wearing, was a diaper.  I didn’t have socks or shirt or shoes, anything, just a diaper, and of course, I let out a howl.  And she quickly put her hand over my mouth, so I, so they wouldn’t notice it, that I was crying of what she had done. And my mother says, “I thought I heard the baby cry”, but then they didn’t hear anything, and they kept on walking.  But I turned loose and let another one, so they ran over there, and by the time they, uh, they, uh, they arrived, the skin on my back had just risen, it was just all up in a big old bubble.  And my father was absolutely furious, and my father was really a very soft-spoken, calm person, and not violent whatsoever but he was furious, and he just pushed her and says, “Get out of my sight, and I don’t ever want to see you, because if I do, I’ll kill you!” 

Well!  She took off like lightning and we never saw her again.  And my father didn’t know what to do, because he didn’t have a car.  He had been dropped off at our house, and but there was no car to take me to the very small clinic, that was maybe four miles from, you know, our house, or three miles, there was a small clinic.  And they saw what they call a man car, that goes on a train trail, and my mother was carrying me on the back, while my father was moving the handle to make it go. 

And we got to the, to the depot, and that’s where the clinic was, and it was, as I said, a very small clinic.  And it was ran by a doctor who was German, and he saw me, and says “Be careful with the bubble, because it can mean life or death.”  My father and my mother looked at him like saying, “What are you saying, life or death?” he says “If the bubble breaks, the infection will get in and she’ll die, because it’s too big a burn”, he says, “but if the bubble doesn’t break, there’s a chance that she will live.” 

So he quickly took me to inside and laid me on a table, and gave me a morphine shot, so I wouldn’t move, and I wouldn’t feel the pain- which was very, it was almost a third-degree burn.  And he says “That’s gonna be a problem, this child, because to keep her, you know, without turning.”  So what they did, that they had a table and, a little wooden table there, and where they made people sit down and so forth, if they had injured, you know, if they had scraped their leg or something, and they tied me.  I was on my tummy, and they tied me there and they kept me there three nights.  And of course, with morphine, and they were, uh, giving me a little bit, in the moment I would be awake, the few moments that I would be awake, they would try to give me a bottle with milk, and that was all. I wouldn’t eat anything but the milk, and that was all, I wouldn’t eat anything but the milk, and I was, and of course, my mother didn’t move.  She was there the three nights and my father was beside himself. 

But what saved me is that this, I wish I would remember the name of this doctor but of course I can’t, I was barely a year old.  And he was a surgeon, and he was, uh, had gotten all his experience on bad burns, on the First War in Germany, when the pilots came burned from crashes on airplanes.  He attended them and that’s why he learned so much about burns. And, oh, as for medication, what he put, every so many hours, he would come with a, with a, some cotton and a container, and put tannic acid all over my back, that’s the only thing that was put there.  Says, “Absolutely no ointments, of any kind”, says, “people have the wrong idea, that when you have a burn you should put butter, or some kind of greasy thing."  Says, “That’s bad.  Something cool, very cool. Because this tannic acid was kept on ice, so the skin will kind of shrink, and if you put any ointments, or butter, like people put on their fingers when they get burned in their kitchens, it will attract insects and it will punch the bubble, and it will break, the liquid will go out.”

And so, I survived that, and he was a very kind man.  I don’t remember but my parents tell me he would spend many hours at the clinic, watching me also, and trying to think how he could make me comfortable.  So the thing was, that ‘til I was seven years old, I had a dark spot in my back, like when you get a regular sunburn, first it’s red and everything, then it’s kind of brownish, and then it disappears.  Well, mine didn’t disappear.  I had that all over my back ‘til I was seven.   And then eventually it did disappear.  But psychologically, it really left me frightened, and from there on I couldn’t stand anything hot.  If I was given a bath, it had to be almost cold, no, barely tepid, because the minute the water would be hot I would scream, because I would remember. And it remained ‘til I was an adult.  My showers to this day have always been, you know, in the cool side instead of the hot, and also soup, I can never take a, I’m always blowing on it, and coffee, I’m always putting an ice cube.  I cannot take any liquid hot.  And that’s it, I don’t know how much longer we lived there but that’s the famous burn in Agua Dulce.