Race for the Dying

by Steven F Havill

  “Jake said to take him direct to one-oh-one.”

  “Heard him. Get a move on, now.”

  For a brief moment of relief, the board underneath him did not move. Breathing was so difficult that Thomas fought the fear of suffocation, as if a wad of dripping, foul seaweed was being thrust down his throat. Once more he felt hands holding his shoulders. “Just lay easy,” the voice said. “Ain’t no point in struggling.”

  “Need to see,” Thomas tried to gasp. “Can’t breathe.”

  “Ain’t nothing to see. We got you all sitcheeated in the wagon, and we’ll be gettin’ you up the hill directly. Just rest easy.”

  Wagon. Thomas knew what that one awful word meant, and he groaned in anticipation. He remembered the mule’s plunging run down the coast trail, over the hummocks of sedge and through the wet, slick rocks. A wagon on that same trail? But they weren’t listening. With a creak of leather the wagon jerked under Thomas.

  “I can’t,” he tried to say, but that thought ended as he passed out.

  ***

  A dog barked somewhere. “Okay, he’s back,” a calm voice said. Thomas felt a cool touch on his right shoulder, skin on skin, not through his wet, fragrant woolens. “Thomas, you’re going to be all right.”

  “I…”

  “Yes, you did,” the voice agreed with an easy chuckle. “Most spectacular, I’m told. If you were planning on a downright Shakespearean entrance to our stage, you did a most credible job, but the worst is over now. You’re safe at one-oh-one, and you have nothing to do but mend. You’re a lucky young man.”

  Thomas tried to picture the face that went with the reassuring voice. The hand patted his shoulder again. “Doctors make the worst patients,” the voice said. “I have no reason to think you’ll be an exception. Let me give you something to ponder before the laudanum takes effect, and that may help you avoid some foolishness later in the mending process.”

  “Ribs,” Thomas managed to say.

  “Oh, indeed, ribs. Spectacular bruises, I must say. And more pieces than there should be.”

  Thomas sensed the figure beside the bed pull away, and could not make out the quiet conversation that didn’t include him, but shortly the voice returned.

  “You have a messy laceration that runs from just in front of your right ear all the way across the top of the right orbit to the bridge of your nose. I’m told that you found a seaside rock with your face.” Thomas felt a finger near his lower left eyelid, and the bandage was gently lifted a fraction. The room was dim, and he could make no sense of light and shadows. “Your eyes will be all right, but I want to make sure about any concussive injuries.” The hand returned to Thomas’ shoulder. “Do you remember anything of the fall?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not surprised. I think what we have is a whole symphony of lacerations and bruises. At first I thought that your left hip had been shattered, but now I’m not so sure. Certainly there is some tendon and ligament damage that will give you something to think about. The battered skull, the broken ribs…and oh, your left thumb is fractured.”

  The hand moved away and Thomas felt his right hand taken in a firm but gentle grip. “Welcome to one-oh-one, Dr. Thomas Parks. I regret that I wasn’t able to meet you when you stepped off the Alice earlier. Somehow I was expecting the little towheaded child that I remember that summer in Leister. We’ll put all these pieces back together, and then, in a few short days, we’ll raise our glasses in a proper toast of greeting.”

  “Thank…”

  The hand squeezed again. “Not at all. In a day or two, we’ll talk. For now, let the sedative work.” The voice drew closer to Thomas’ left ear. “Picture each bone, each muscle, each ligament, Doctor. Picture them all back in place, and picture them mending. The mind is our best medicine. If you should need anything, there will always be someone near at hand.”

  This time, Thomas could smell the pungent aroma of tobacco smoke that clung to clothing. As the opiates found the nooks and crannies of his body, the voices receded and he sensed little else.

  Chapter Four

  Thomas Parks concentrated on lying absolutely still, letting his mind do the wandering as the morphine wrapped his body in soft flannel. He drifted in and out of consciousness, never quite knowing when he crossed the boundary nor when one hour blended into another.

  He awoke with nothing to tell him what time it might be. He wasn’t sure which night it might be, if night it really was. With nothing to provide an anchor to time or place, disorientation became nausea. He tried to picture himself lying in the bed, as if he were the attending physician calmly assessing the battered patient.

  The gash on the right side of his skull throbbed under the mound of bandage. The fire in his left hip smoldered. No matter how he experimented, he could not flex so much as a single toe without skewering himself with a great, saw-toothed lance. He could not bend ankle or knee without the same result, yet he could not determine what the center of the injury was.

  When the pain struck, his natural reaction was to suck in a breath, and when he made that mistake, it took his mind off head and hip. The lance stabbed him through the torso so savagely that even the opiates provided no more relief than sucking on a piece of willow bark.

  He found that the solution was absolute immobility. But Thomas’ natural curiosity fed his impatience. He recalled the most recent harangue by the dynamic, animated British physician, Dr. Marcus Hester. In the noted doctor’s guest lecture at the university, Hester had maintained that physicians were ill advised to allow patients to lollygag about in bed, waiting for joints to heal themselves. A joint must move, Dr. Hester had argued. A joint must not be allowed to freeze into uselessness. “If we surrender to pain,” Hester had said, one index finger pointing toward the heavens, “we resign ourselves to immobility, and then, without fail, uselessness. If we wish to create cripples, let them languish in bed.”

  Thomas had listened in rapt attention, sitting in the comfort of the university’s medical school theater—imagining along with the other students the frightful damage to other people’s joints.

  He could imagine Hester exhorting him. The healthy always knew what was best for the hurting. Thomas lay in the darkness, thoroughly depressed. He might end up walking like some peg-legged survivor of Gettysburg, scarred face startling the ladies.

  Thomas experimented with his right hand, inching his fingers across to the great pad of bandages that corseted his torso. I am still alive, and I am breathing, he thought.

  That was small consolation, since the world outside was passing him by. The raw excitement of arriving in this new country grew stale and distant. It was not possible to lie in this bed, in this room, for days, weeks, maybe months. He was but twenty-six years old. He had things to do.

  Yet every time he so much as twitched, the lance promptly stabbed him into pathetic, gasping submission. At one point, shortly after a particular vicious attack had left him drained and on the brink of passing out, he heard cautious footsteps enter the room. Don’t touch me, he thought, but could not bring himself to risk uttering the words.

  “Can you hear me?” a soft, feminine voice asked. Its owner bent down so close that he could feel her breath against his left ear.

  “Yes.” He let the word out as nothing more than a whisper.

  “I want to open the window and the curtains,” she said. “It’s impossibly beautiful outside today, and the fresh air would do you good.”

  “Wonderful,” he said—or thought…he wasn’t sure which.

  “I didn’t want to startle you,” she said, and a wash of sunlight sliced across the room. He willed himself to lie like the dead, and listened as the girl—he assumed it was but a girl, the voice sounded so youthful—lifted the window. He felt the stir of breeze.

  “Now you’ll feel better,” she said. The bandage around his head allowed him to see only her bottom
half, silhouetted against the light. Tall, perhaps. Thin enough that hip bones marked her apron. She stood quietly, and he assumed that she was examining him. “The doctor said that the mule rolled right on top of you, and that you would have drowned if Jake hadn’t been so quick-witted.”

  This would be Alvina, he thought.

  “We’re going to try some broth this morning,” she continued. “But that’s going to take some planning. We don’t want you gagging.”

  No, we don’t.

  “Let me adjust that bandage a little,” she said. “How can you see like that?” He heard her turn away, then the sound of a cabinet opening. In a moment she was beside him again. “I’m just going to trim around your left eye a little. They got carried away, didn’t they? But then again, there wasn’t much to see, and you weren’t in any condition to see it. Alvi will be in later to do a more artistic job.”

  He closed his eyes, feeling the feather touch of her fingers, the gentle snick of the scissors. So this wasn’t Dr. Haines’ daughter, Alvina. The housekeeper? The owner of the Mercantile had mentioned her name. Gertrude something.

  “There. That’s better.”

  He opened his left eye—the right one was buried under a mound of bandages. The light was still behind her, but he could see that his first assessment had been right. Despite the wonderful voice, this woman was thin as a scarecrow.

  “What do you think?” she asked. “Are you in terrible discomfort?”

  Discomfort. That word appeared in myriad textbooks and lectures, written by someone who wasn’t in any at the time.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I would think so,” she said. “I know exactly where the accident happened. My soul, you couldn’t have chosen a worse spot.”

  “What happened at the mill?”

  “One of the sawyers slipped and managed to become hung up in the log carriage somehow. I don’t know more than that. I’m afraid the poor man passed away.”

  Thomas closed his eye. “I was close,” he whispered.

  “Yes, you were. Everyone thinks you were so heroic to do what you did, riding out like that. I’m told that even Mr. Schmidt wants to meet you.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Bert Schmidt. He owns the mill out on the point. We’re just about a company town here in Port McKinney. He said he might stop by this afternoon to meet you.”

  “I don’t need…a circle of mourners,” he managed.

  The woman reached out and rested her hand on a small patch of exposed forehead above Thomas’ left eye.

  “You’re one of his nurses?”

  “My, no. I’m Gertrude James, Dr. Parks. I’m the housekeeper. Gert, most folks call me.” She said something to herself and then adjusted the thin blanket. “The doctor will want to talk to you here in a little bit. Then we’ll see about eating something.”

  We’ll see, Thomas thought dismally. He watched Gert as she worked in front of the glass cabinet across the room. “I shall return in a moment,” she said, and left. Thomas reached up carefully with his right hand, delighted to discover that his arm worked freely. He wiped his lips and held his fingers close, examining them. Then a twinge of apprehension tightened around his gut. Gertrude James had returned, this time carrying a small hypodermic needle in a white enameled pan. He watched her closely.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “We’re trying to keep you from coughing so much,” she said. “The morphine helps. You breathed in about half of the inlet, and Lord knows what else. Every time you cough, it sounds as if you’re trying to turn inside out.”

  With deft, practiced hands, she arranged his arm, found the vein, and slipped the needle in before he could think of anything else to say. And in seconds, the warm fuzz of the opiate pressed him deeper into the soft mattress. He let his body relax, his initial apprehension about a housekeeper administering injections drifting away. The morphine didn’t actually do much for the pain itself, he observed. Rather, the drug simply made the pain not matter.

  Her light touch settled on his shoulder. “I’ll be nearby, should you need anything.”

  “Better luck,” he whispered.

  She laughed pleasantly. “That’s true for us all, Dr. Parks.” She stood for a moment, looking at him. “Mr. Lindeman told me that Prince didn’t bite you. That’s something, at least.”

  He lay quiet, wishing the window were a foot lower so that he could see something other than bright light. Far in the distance, a steam whistle shrieked, a reminder that the world was continuing its commerce without him.

  He dozed off, then awoke listening to muffled voices. For how long he had done so, he had no idea, nor did he remember—if he had known in the first place—what the gist of the conversation was. As his consciousness clarified, he tried to distance himself from the battered creature who lay in the bed with weak, shaky breaths coming in agonizing little stabs.

  The door clicked open, and Thomas opened his left eye to see who he assumed was the man who had been his father’s closest friend for more than sixty years. Thomas knew that his father, Fredrick Parks, and John Haines had been delivered by the same midwife within hours of each other in the tiny village of Essex, Connecticut. He’d heard that story a dozen times. John and Fredrick had shared a childhood that had been one of pastoral delights, and Thomas had listened to his father tell endless tales, most of them no doubt tall, of childhood escapades.

  The distinguished physician moved one of the large, heavy chairs close to the bed. He sat down heavily and regarded Thomas in silence.

  Thomas turned his head a fraction so he could see Haines without effort. The old man’s white beard and mustache were tinged from years of enjoying pipe and cigars, but his lively blue eyes, framed by deep crow’s-feet, twinkled. His large, fleshy nose showed the signs of good living, the tiny capillaries running close to the surface.

  “So,” Haines said at last. “How’s my boy this morning?”

  “I don’t know,” Thomas managed. “I don’t feel…” He stopped, the list too long.

  Haines leaned forward a little. “Well, for what it’s worth, I’m pleased, young man. You have the most damnably remarkable set of bruises I’ve ever seen—and a laceration or two that required stitching. Two or three broken ribs, perhaps. But that’s the extent of it. I think. I want to take another look at that right eye. That’s worrisome.”

  “Fracture?” Thomas asked.

  “It’s hard to tell, with all the swelling.” He reached up and touched his own right eye, at the outer end of his bushy gray eyebrow. “That’s where you and the rocks collided first, I think. It’s fortunate you have a hard head.” He watched Thomas’ face.

  “The mule rolled over you, and that explains the rib damage,” he went on. “You’re bruised from clavicle to hip to sternum and back again.”

  “How long have I been…”

  “Useless? I understand that you were off the boat less than an hour before your spectacular dive into the sea. That was Saturday, the day before yesterday, shortly before the dinner hour. Now I feel all the worse for not having met you on the dock.

  “Then we might both have ended up—”

  The older physician waggled a finger. “I have a policy, you see, and you might well adopt a similar one. I do my patients no benefit by not arriving, Thomas. I take my time, you see. Better to arrive at the scene of carnage five minutes tardy than not arrive at all.” He leaned forward and patted Thomas’ left forearm. “But”— he shrugged expansively, straightening his gold-brocade vest—“that’s not the concern at the moment.” He pulled a gold watch from one vest pocket and snapped it open. “I have a number of calls to make. Then, late this afternoon, I’ll be back to inflict a little torture. I want another look at that eye. You rest. Then we’ll see what we find.”

  Chapter Five

  Thomas dozed fitfully. The opiates prompted bizarre, tro
ubled dreams, often of the Alice floundering. After one such episode, he awoke to an oddly textured gray sky. Then he realized he was staring, not at an expanse of sky, but instead at an expanse of waistcoat. He focused on the watch chain that decorated the spread of tweed. The individual gold links formed an interesting pattern against the vest.

  “How’s the nausea? I was called out, and when I returned Alvi reported that you’d had a bit of a bout.”

  “I don’t remember,” Thomas managed. Neither the nausea nor Alvi. He reached down and worked the thin linen sheet up toward his chin.

  “Well, that’s good, then. Unpleasant things are best left unrecalled.” Haines bent over the bed, scrutinizing the white bandage around Thomas’ skull. “Let’s take a look, now.”

  The physician took off his jacket, and once again Thomas smelled the rich combination of tobacco, alcohol, and pharmacy. “I’ve sent a telegram to your father,” the physician continued. “I thought that he should know the particulars.”

  “He’ll just worry,” Thomas whispered.

  “Ah, he will. But that’s his due, I think. I promised to send him a complete report on a regular basis. Perhaps if you wanted to compose something, I could include that. Paper and pencil.” He pointed at the table beside the bed, within easy reach.

  “I think I can get up,” Thomas said.

  “No, you can’t,” Haines countered. “Not yet, anyway. Let’s have a look, now. You took a fearsome rap on the head, my boy. That’s my major worry at this point, along with those nasty rib fractures. The rest of you is one big bruise, but bruises will heal.”

  He clipped the end of the bandage and with a light touch unwrapped his nurse’s handiwork. A little tug brought a flash of pain, and Thomas winced.

  “Ah, those stitches,” Haines said, “but that’s getting to it now.” He fussed some more, humming to himself. “You want to examine?” he asked, pulling back. “Of course, you do. Professional curiosity, if nothing else.” In a moment he returned with a large looking glass. With an odd mix of eagerness and apprehension, Thomas stared at the apparition in the glass.