the C&T Ward

The C&T Ward is the hospital nickname for the ward at Central Maine General Hospital where patients in persistent vegetative states are kept alive by respirators. The initials stand for "Cabbages and Turnips," a brutally reductive label that reduces human beings to the level of root vegetables. The term appears only once in Gordon Lachance's memoir, in the chapter recounting the deaths of his childhood friends, but it carries the full weight of the story's confrontation with mortality, futility, and the thin line between life and death.

Origin and Meaning

The nickname is used by the nurses and orderlies at Central Maine General Hospital, the same hospital where Teddy Duchamp was taken after his father burned his ears on a woodstove and where Chris Chambers was treated for his father's beatings. The ward is not a formal medical designation but a piece of gallows humor from the hospital staff, who deal daily with patients who are technically alive but have no consciousness or hope of recovery. The term "Cabbages and Turnips" strips away all pretense of dignity, reducing a human being to something that grows in the ground, is harvested, and is consumed. It is the institutional equivalent of the way the boys' own town reduces people like Chris Chambers to "no-account Chamberses" or Teddy Duchamp to "loony's kid."

The Crash and Its Aftermath

Teddy Duchamp died in a car crash in Harlow around 1971 or early 1972. His Chevrolet Bel Air was full of friends, and they were passing around marijuana joints and bottles of Popov vodka when the car hit a utility pole, sheared it off, and rolled six times. One girl came out of the wreck "technically still alive." She was taken to Central Maine General Hospital and placed in the C&T Ward, where she lay for six months, kept breathing by a respirator, her body present but her mind gone. The nurses and orderlies who cared for her used the ward's nickname as a matter of routine, a verbal shorthand for the kind of case that had become almost ordinary to them.

The Mercy Killing

After six months in the C&T Ward, "some merciful phantom pulled the plug on her respirator." Gordon Lachance does not name who did it, nor does he speculate on whether it was a doctor, a nurse, a family member, or a stranger. The phrase "merciful phantom" suggests an act of compassion that could not be acknowledged openly, a decision that the hospital's official machinery could not make but that someone made anyway. The girl's death is recorded as a fact, not a crime; no investigation is mentioned, no charges are filed. The C&T Ward, in this telling, becomes a place where the boundary between life and death is maintained by machines and where the only mercy available is the one that breaks the rules.

Thematic Significance

The C&T Ward stands as the final, most brutal expression of the story's meditation on what it means to be alive. Earlier in the memoir, Gordon Lachance describes the corpse of Ray Brower, a boy their age who died alone in the woods after being hit by a train, and reflects on the distance between his bare feet and his sneakers hanging in the bushes as "a googol of light-years." The C&T Ward extends that meditation: the girl in the ward is not dead, but she is not alive in any meaningful sense either. She is a body kept going by machinery, a human being reduced to the status of a cabbage or a turnip. The nickname is the story's final, bitter joke: that the medical system can keep a body breathing indefinitely, but it cannot give back the person who once lived in it. The only way out of the C&T Ward is the one that cannot be spoken aloud.