Dr. Lee Edward
Edens

Prologue by F. V. Normann

​

For the tiny boy in the tiny town of Bertram, Texas, the sun soaked the landscape with friendliness, even when its shine glimmered in heat waves along the horizon. It was the night that trampled his soul in troubled thoughts, when there was no moon and the galloping hooves from away off inevitably brought a pounding knock at his father’s door. "Doctor! Doctor?"

Lossen Brizendine would be having another baby on a black, stormy night, 'way out at Gabriel Mills’, or maybe it was Old Grandpa Hutto's bunch precipitating another case of typhoid. In minutes, The doctor would be dressed, mounted, and galloping in tune with the retreat of the first galloper. Sometimes he didn't get back until the wakeful lad had entered several tombs of despair, opening up the possibilities that Papa might not make it all the way back through the lightning streaks and barbed wire fences this time.

Almost like a banner, Papa's faith through the happenings seemed like high breezes playing at trees' tops with the sparkle of sunshine. From out such openings as were available in the 80's of the last century he had chosen this life-death career, when death too often won, in that spirit which Mama, who would keep a wood fire burning on frosty nights when Dad was out, would recall with pathos years later: "When they need me, I'd crawl to set there if I had to." That was the creative power H.L. Edens' knowing hands commanded from the scant learnings his will had covered in his brief professional preparation for this towering role. It was not without deep appreciation from the friends out there in the dark of far less preparation for their bouts with the hazards of health, but it was with a price for the doctor himself that bent him, and posterity, to pay.

Little Lee was a favored child--taken along to open gates on his father’s daytime buggy-borne calls for all but "confinement cases." He knew the countryside for miles around this little country town where he, too, was born.

Mrs. Jim Bally, neighbor and merchant's wife in the scant town, was in attendance at that event: Mama's fourth time to bear a son. For the young doctor, though, it was a first,  experiencing of that climactic moment when a generation meets its own blood in the next. A momentous delivery this time, for this babe was more fragile-tenderly vulnerable to all the ills of the timer, than most.

How much that vulnerability taxed the father's skills in the arts of survival can never be known. Since FDR and LBJ, visual life in country Texas is as brightly lit electrically as in any town wherever, but then it was the kerosene lamp of country that lit the little cottage home of Bertram's doctor, and just as dimness prevailed that 2 AM on February 27th, 1894, we cannot now know exactly what happened then. But this we can know, here was a father and son born to be medical men, with the music of ultimate performance in the souls of their application.