The Accident

Story #2 — The Accident

It was the summer of 1946 in Greenwood, Indiana and I was the youngest of five (three girls, two boys) children in our family. My father worked at the local grain mill and in the late summer my mother picked tomatoes. She carried me with her, sat me on a basket, and went down the rows, all hunched over. I remember the colorful tomato worms and the smell of thousands of tomatoes. She would bring me the best tomatoes to eat. 

I remember our house with a huge porch. We lived in front of a train track and every day the train shook our house as it flew by. I remember the well having a long handle to pump up the water. I remember the outhouse and the ice box. I remember my mother wringing a chicken’s neck for supper and how it jumped around with no head. I remember my father bringing home bags of food and buttermilk. (I still love to drink buttermilk.) I remember how my sisters played with me and tickled me. We were dirt poor (as I understood later in life) but we were happy.  At least until I turned five years old—when our world began to fall apart.

I don’t remember “The Accident” but my sisters and family told me everything about it when I was older. All I have as a memento of it is a very visible scar to this very day. Evidently, we were all playing on the front porch and my sister, Darlene, had me in a baby stroller. For some reason she slipped and fell while pushing the stroller. When she fell she let go of the stroller (with me in it) and it when flying of the porch! Can you imagine how scared she would have been? Of course, I was thrown off the porch and my face hit a broken Coke bottle. Talk about a freak accident!

The wound was sooo severe. The cut went from the middle of my eyebrows all the way to the bottom of my upper lip. It was a deep cut. According to my family, my face split open so wide that you could see my eye with no skin cover at all. I was bleeding like a stuffed pig. By all odds, this was a fatal injury. We didn’t own a car and we were five miles from the Johnson County Hospital. My mother and my siblings were scared to death. Now, you have to understand—we lived in the boonies, close to a lot of farms but our house was actually on a street with cars and trucks going by.

Now, here is the miracle of this story and it is truly unbelievable. At the exact moment I went flying out of that stroller, a young doctor was walking right by our home. He was carrying the little black bag that all doctors carried in those days and ran towards me, stopped the bleeding, and protected the wound from infection! He then flagged down a truck and took me to the hospital where the doctors saved my life. My aunts and uncles said my mother held me for forty days and forty nights. It took over forty stitches to close up my wound. It took a long time to heal. I have the scar, even today. I was sooo lucky. I often think I have a guardian angel looking over me. Miracles actually do happen and I consider this a true example!

Little did we know this was the beginning of the end—my father died of tuberculosis soon after and we lost our home, our income, and everything! From a happy home to abject poverty in just a few short months. Go figure!

Count your blessings every day!

Roy Lee Barrett

Click to go to the next True Story,
“The Elvis Impersonator Who Saved My Life”