Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  Bruce stretched his legs in the sun while we caught up, though he jumped up briefly to give Hatsumi a hug. He wore shorts and a frayed sailor’s hat that had long ago lost its shape.

  “You can just leave her here, you know,” he said, holding on. Hatsumi put her head on his shoulder. Within fifty feet of where they stood were plastic barrels, rusted chain, a coil of frayed and faded ship’s hawser, and a salvaged yellow weather buoy with what looked like a perfectly good strobe light fixed to the top. The dock was so untidy you needed a map, or the feet of a dancer, to negotiate it. Yet here was my clutter-abhorring Japanese wife, clutching the proprietor.

  “Hey, don’t I get one of those?” Gordon appeared, dressed in filthy jeans, a plaid shirt, and an Innovative Aquaculture baseball cap, incongruously bearing a pitcher of lemonade and a stack of disposable plastic glasses. Where Bruce is voluble (his conversation has been called “the Bruce-wind”), Gordon is self-deprecating and ironic. Bruce’s humour is broad; Gordon’s draws blood. Their banter is unrelenting. Apart from the separate skiing holidays they take when the hatchery slows down in the winter, the brothers are inseparable. They both got long hugs.

  “We have mussels to set,” said Gordon, draining his glass.

  “I know, I know,” said Bruce.

  Gordon and Bruce went off to prepare the mussel rope for planting, a baffling procedure that involved pulling what looked like an endless roll of narrow cotton pantyhose over a length of thin plastic pipe as it spat out a slurry of mussel larvae, then attaching the string to hundreds of feet of hairy plastic rope.

  “It’s therapy,” said Bruce, slicking the cotton sock off the plastic tube like a jaded Casanova. While they worked, I passed an hour making a detailed inventory of the back-from-the-deep party boat tied up next to Vera. The whole place reeked of mould. I wondered how long it would sit here before Gordon and Bruce towed it around the corner to join the seaplane and the rest of the abandoned reclamation projects.

  When I emerged, they were attaching the seeded mussel rope, now coiled in the bottom of a workboat like an enormous chain of sausage links, to the underside of a floating raft made of thirty-foot lengths of black plastic sewer tube. Gordon straddled two of these barely floating logs, reeling in the sausage Bruce fed to him and suspending it from hooks so that it fell in gentle underwater loops, beneath a trapped scum of twigs, crab moults, and weed. In a few months, the whole thing would be dragged up again, foot by slippery foot, the sock rotted away and the baby mussels firmly attached. Back it would go for stripping and sorting by a mechanical grader, and then the brothers would go through the whole pantyhose-therapy business again before retrieving the mussel-garlands a final time, tearing the finished shellfish off the plastic rope before grading, power-washing, bagging, and shipping them. If anyone wondered why moules marinière cost more than steak, here was a tiny part of the answer.

  Aided by their long-time business partner Cathy (a.k.a. the Algae Queen), Gordon and Bruce had been growing oysters, clams, and mussels for decades. In a barnacle-like warren attached to the cliffs above the docks, Cathy maintained thirty-foot fibreglass tanks for coddling the baby molluscs until they were ready to set and an entire room of ten-foot-high circular algae tanks that would feed the larvae. Each translucent silo looked like a core taken out of the ocean. Tethered just off the point, more algae multiplied in swimming-pool-sized vinyl tanks held up by a ring of floats. The Joneses even processed algae into a vile green toothpaste, packaged it, and marketed it to other growers. There really wasn’t anything they couldn’t do.

  “Except, maybe, get a life,” said Gordon later that evening. The dogs had collapsed in malodorous heaps. From the upper “boardroom” lined with books and hung with Bruce’s paintings, where we’d just finished a gargantuan pot of mussels, you could see the sailboats anchored in Bull Harbour and just make out the black cliffs behind them. The VHF Coast Guard channel muttered in the background.

  “He sleeps with it under his pillow,” said Gordon. I could believe it: Bruce could be in full rhetorical flow, hands chopping the air, then suddenly halt, alert as a hound catching a scent, and dart for the radio.

  I reached down to squash a mosquito on an unprotected ankle. “Any problem if we stay another day?”

  “Another day? Why not a week? Better still, just leave your wife—” The VHF burbled. Bruce jumped up and disappeared in mid-sentence. When he reappeared, he was putting on his floater coat.

  “Some guy drifting out in Bull Passage. If you want to come, we have to go now.”

  This was a Bruce I hadn’t seen before. The bonhomie and bad puns were replaced by a headlamp vanishing down the path. The southeaster was still blowing. Even in Skerry Bay, the dark water was ruffled and uneasy. Out in Bull Passage, a disabled boat would drift quickly, and there was nowhere to go but rocks.

  I picked my way after him, back down the treacherous path to the Pac 1, the aluminum landing craft used for transporting supplies, hosting parties, and rescuing feckless mariners. We hurriedly off-loaded an orange sofa, some white plastic lawn chairs, and a barbecue. I cast off the lines and hunkered down on the huge foredeck as the twin diesels erupted under my feet. In the raised wheelhouse aft, I could see the ghostly green faces of Gordon and Bruce, illuminated by the radar screen. Within seconds, the big boat was at top speed, cutting a foaming wake between the anchored sailboats. I imagined the owners clawing their way into their suddenly rocking cockpits and going “What the . . . ?”

  There was enough of a moon to pick out the sixty-foot cruiser rolling in the slop from what was now a more serious fifteen knots of wind blowing their baby toward Jedediah Island. A searchlight played briefly over the little knot of anxious-looking people on her foredeck. We came alongside and made fast under the great flaring bow, the two boats jostling while I scrambled around trying to insert fenders between them without losing a finger. The owner shouted down, Bruce shouted up, and we pieced the story together while Gordon slowly backed the joined boats away from the rocks: their anchor windlass had jammed with sixty feet of chain out. Part of it hung in a loop from the bow.

  “I keep resetting the circuit breakers!” said the owner. “Is there some way to get this thing up manually?”

  “Shouldn’t you know that?” said Bruce under his breath. He was struggling to pull the vinyl cover off a hydraulic crane. This wasn’t life-threatening, simply absurd: Charlie’s Charm couldn’t go very far with an anchor ready to snag anything shallower than sixty feet. Bruce rigged a length of elderly polypropylene line to the dangling chain, pushed the button to withdraw five feet of chain from the waters of Bull Passage, and went back for more. The anchor itself finally emerged, to nervous clapping from above. I felt cautiously superior; we’d never done anything quite this dumb.

  We returned sedately through the anchored yachtsmen, who were probably just getting back to sleep. Gordon brought the Pac 1 to the dock with the kind of seamanship that takes a lifetime to acquire, shuttling in and out of gear so that the twin screws fired bursts of blue-green bioluminescence. Beside Vera, the weather buoy that had drifted into Skerry Bay was blinking serenely. Hundreds of miles from where it was supposed to be, it seemed perfectly at home here.

  “Maybe we will stay another day,” I said.

  We hung around, firmly in the clutches of the Lasqueti Triangle, while the weather improved and the long dock filled up with the next shift of summer visitors. With each boat that came in, we untied Vera and shifted her back, until there was only six inches of water under her keel and I could count the furred-over bottles on the bottom.

  But I didn’t spend long chatting with the latest arrivals. Instead, I decided to ease into my father’s story by having a look at those intriguing “other patient” files he’d held onto for so long. Who were they? Why had he kept them? Maybe there was something revealing mixed up in all those carbons and onion skins and yellowing envelopes.

  A Hole in the He
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  My father had been sixty-four when Billy came along, near the end of his career as a surgeon but still playing the violin he had begged his father for lessons on and had practised every day in the woodshed for exactly an hour. He was still taking photographs too, still sailing. In his fifties, he made two more attempts to leave his practice in Victoria for situations in the United States where he could spend more time doing medical research and less time dissecting out brain tumours and operating on bad backs. But neurosurgery in California had struck him as mercenary, and neurological consulting in Baltimore bored him. Maybe he missed his leaking boats and his darkroom. In his sixties, he ground it out back in British Columbia. The years of wandering were over.

  “I’m a cobbler,” he told me then. “People bring me stuff; I mend it.” It was a long way from the young doctor whose early cases had been fodder for the stories I grew up with. The strangest were from his wartime years as a psychiatrist. One patient was a physician with acute schizophrenia who endlessly pencilled perfectly round breasts on reams of toilet paper. My father tried to get the attendants to give the artist some decent paper and a set of coloured pens.

  “No pens,” they said.

  “Why?”

  “They always end up in his rectum.”

  That was all I had on the crazy physician, but the other patient files I’d brought along on Vera were different because they told stories that actually involved my father as a surgeon. Occasionally, while I was growing up, he had talked about cases he was especially proud of, or especially upset by. Jimmy Ho, I thought, he never forgot about Jimmy Ho. I bet he’s in this bunch of files — and he was. I started to read.

  Jimmy was four when he fell out of bed. Not much happened for a month or so, then he started falling again. His hands shook. He listed to one side, a small sinking ship. My father’s notes were, as always, colourful, and as I read them I began to notice the little things that showed how he felt about his patients.

  “We find a four-year-old Chinese male sitting at the desk looking quite well,” he began of the initial examination. But then, “He appeared quite frightened . . . and he could not co-operate in testing the sensory system.” Not “would not,” but “could not.” The narrative of that first visit ends, “I think he has a left cerebellar tumour.”

  Remember, this was long before CAT scans. Symptoms were all you had to go on. But my father’s in-office diagnosis was correct: Jimmy did have a tumour. It took more than four hours to tease out a growth the size of a lacrosse ball. Jimmy’s heart stopped on the operating table and his lungs filled with fluid; the surgeons massaged and intubated. His heart stopped again; they restarted it with adrenaline. It was the worst tumour my father had ever seen.

  “The post-operative course was stormy,” he wrote years later to an insurance company needing a statement on Jimmy’s condition. He charged the company $15 for the report, which probably gave him some pleasure to write, because Jimmy Ho did recover, and his family never forgot. They moved to Hawaii and began to send letters and photographs. My father’s collection was fat with invitations to Jimmy’s high school graduation in San Francisco, letters of gratitude and career updates from his parents, and from Jimmy himself a record of his grades, his new Schwinn bicycle, and a succession of school photos featuring gigantic horn-rimmed glasses. A wispy moustache appeared, then a wife, a child, a better job. The last letter in the file, more than thirty years after the operation, ended, “All my love through the years.”

  The next patient I finally got to meet was known as “The Korean Seaman,” a 21-year-old “struck by a pipe onboard ship in the right parietal region in a way which he finds difficult to describe accurately due to his language difficulty.” Seaman Park had staggered into my father’s office. His head hurt. My father found that “a circle eight centimetres in diameter was completely punched out and a great deal of hair driven into the wound. A fragment of bone was driven in 15 millimetres, pushing the derma before it.” The pipe had struck end-on, like a javelin, cookie-cutting the scalp and creating a mess of buried bone shards. On top of the fracture was a hematoma that needed to be sucked out. When a second operation was needed two weeks later, the young man produced this handwritten note: “I am sorry to give you trouble again. I am not worry about this operation. I trust you. Do my operation please with peace of mind.”

  The bill was sent to the shipping agents in Victoria. There is no record that it was paid; many bills weren’t. My father asked for $969, not bad for saving a life. A month later, another Victoria doctor and his wife escorted the refurbished seaman back to Korea. A Christmas card came the next year, with a picture of a delicate painted vase that made me think of the frailty of the human head.

  Beside me in the cockpit, Charley lifted his own head and made a sound I hadn’t heard before, a kind of whimper. His ears stood out like wings.

  “He kept writing to me, you know.”

  Despite the heat in Skerry Bay, my father was still wearing the checked wool jacket. Charley turned three rapid circles and went back to sleep.

  “He wanted advice on his condition, but he didn’t want his physician to know. Dr. Lee, I think it was.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  He looked at me sternly. “The only thing I could tell him. That there were many good doctors in Korea.”

  “So you actually remember this Korean guy? The details, I mean? The hematoma, all that stuff?”

  “Was there a hematoma?” He pulled the folder out of my hands and leafed shakily through it. “Oh yeah, there was. But no, I don’t remember it. Details like that, you don’t. Nobody could.”

  “So you just kept the file because it turned out well?”

  “Most of them turned out well.”

  But not all, even in this tiny sample he’d left. One was a two-year-old Indigenous boy, whose folder was marked “subdural; child abuse.” The notes said, “I saw this little boy shortly after his admission to Emergency with the story of having been spanked by his mother and subsequently losing consciousness.” He had a subdural hematoma, a dangerous, pressure-producing bleed, which was removed. But, “in the Recovery Room the boy went quite flat. We took him back to the operating room because it seemed likely he was bleeding again. This was true. By the time I had lifted out the bone flap, the child had died.”

  Why did he keep this file? It was the briefest of histories and the sorriest. Was he especially moved by the child’s case? Why did he add, in his notes, “It should be specifically noted that at no time was any sign of external injury to the head present”? There was an autopsy, which found some bruising on both legs, but nothing in the file suggested charges had been laid. Maybe he simply feared legal complications down the road. I knew better than to ask him about this one.

  My father surely had mixed reasons for hanging onto Sergeant Maxwell’s file. His interminable handwritten letters were always addressed to “Dr. John Edgar Harvey B.A., M.A., M.D., Ph.D.” — I could practically taste the bile. “Possibly it would have been better if the scalpel had slipped in 1966. NO — that is not fair to say — you are so skilled!”

  Sergeant Maxwell had an aneurysm — a burst vessel in the brain — which my father repaired in 1966. But the sergeant had a mental problem that couldn’t be surgically removed: he refused to accept repeated rejection from the Canadian Pension Commission. Once, he left a demand that my father write to the commission stating that he was “invalided out of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police due to service conditions causing an aneurysm to rupture.” That particular letter went on for nine pages, alternately fawning and berating. The letter ends, “I really feel I was summarily dismissed from your office today!”

  “A nutcase,” muttered my father, still perched behind Vera’s wheel. “I should have climbed out the window when I heard him coming.”

  “Did you help him out with his pension problem?”

  “Of course not! If that�
��s the kind of conclusion you’re going to draw from my stuff, I want it back.”

  Sergeant Maxwell’s letter was written two weeks after the fateful operation on Billy. Charley yipped in his sleep, and I was alone again in Skerry Bay.

  ***

  High standards to the end; no fudging with the truth. That was my father all right, and those patient files had just confirmed it. Where had those traits come from? His upbringing in a small Alberta town may have accounted for some of it, but all I knew of those few years (he left home at sixteen) was the relentlessly rosy picture he painted in his own memoir. The bigger influence was almost certainly a role model, and for him that could only be one person: Dr. Harvey Cushing. Cushing was my father’s hero. My father even had a copy of Cushing’s first biography, by the surgeon-historian John F. Fulton.

  Fulton’s biography was clearly the “official” one, written shortly after its subject’s 1939 death of lung cancer at age seventy (like so many doctors of my father’s time, Cushing was a chain smoker). Here was the saintly if prickly Cushing. Even so, it was easy to understand why my father had idolized the man. They were peas in a pod: multitalented, peripatetic, indefatigable, authoritarian. Cushing’s biographer described him as a perfectionist with the temperament of an artist and the enduring patience of a scientist; that sounded like someone I knew.

  Both men had interests far beyond neurosurgery, and Fulton’s book includes lengthy extracts from Cushing’s diaries and letters, revealing a note-taker and observer with a dry, naturalistic style. It was easy enough to find similarities. Art, for instance. Cushing sketched prolifically: he drew fellow surgeons, a country inn, the preferred route into the third ventricle. My father’s artistic side, apart from the sheaves of unpublished essays I found on side-punched computer paper, was best expressed through his violin and his photography. And lineage: both men came from a long line of physicians. Both were formidable workers who rarely took holidays, both were popular with their patients, and both were feared but respected by nurses, who may be the best judges. It was an O.R. nurse who wrote the following poem about Cushing, and the doggerel could easily have described my father: