“He’s breathing,” Mr. Duncan roared, just as Phil saw Danny’s chest rise. Len did not react, other than to wipe his hands with the rag. Around him, the men began congratulating him, some of them patting him on the back.
“It’s not over,” Len told them earnestly. “We need to get Danny to a hospital.”
“What—?” a voice said in obvious dismay. Still on his knees, Phil turned to see that Dr. Lyles had arrived. “What’s happening here?” the old man asked, eying Danny and no doubt seeing the bloody rag in Len’s hands.
“Doctor,” Len said, rising to his feet. He walked around Danny and over to Lyles, where he took him by the elbow and guided him away from everybody. Phil watched them as he stood up himself. The two men spoke for a minute or so, and then Lyles looked toward Danny.
“Somebody get the stretcher from the back of my car,” he called as he paced over. “We need to get Danny to my office right now.” Lyles bent down to examine Danny’s neck.
“Is he going to be all right, Doc?” Buddy asked.
“Yeah, I think he is,” Lyles said. “But we really need to move him.”
The stretcher arrived a few moments later, and the doctor directed the men on how to load Danny onto it. Once they had, they carefully carried him outside. Some of the men followed, while some, including Len and Phil, stayed in the mill.
As Buddy and Jake and the others began asking Len questions—How could he cut somebody open like that? How did he know how to save Danny?—Phil hung back. He watched his friend still wiping his bloody hands with a rag, calmer than anybody else around him, and knew that he would never look at him the same way again.
McCoy left the Seed and Feed just after sunset. The procession of the seasons had grown markedly more noticeable of late, the daylight hours dwindling as autumn advanced toward the winter solstice. As dawn had this morning, the gloaming possessed a briskness, a brittle tightening of the air that foreshadowed the darker, cooler days ahead.
Yet for McCoy, each tomorrow now promised a brightness long missing from his future. As he stepped down from the plank sidewalk to cross Carolina Street, he felt energized. This morning, he’d plied his trade as a doctor, something he hadn’t done—hadn’t really done—in quite some time. He’d provided first aid back at the 21st Street Mission, but had carried out nothing remotely like the procedure he’d performed on Danny Johnson.
McCoy reached the edge of the commons and started across it, toward the intersection of Mill Road and Main Street. The temperature had obviously fallen below the dew point, the grass wet with evening moisture. Finished now with work, he intended to clean himself up at the boarding house, eat the supper Mrs. Hartwell cooked, and then walk out to Lynn and Phil’s. He looked forward, as always, to spending time with the couple, although earlier he’d considered canceling his plans to see them. Shortly after Danny Johnson had been toted out of the mill, McCoy had managed to extract himself from the scene without answering the many questions put to him. He’d known, though, that Lynn and Phil would be just as inquisitive when next he saw them, and he had no idea how he would respond.
But he’d found out soon enough. When people in town had heard the emergency whistle this morning, many of them had hurried out to the mill. Word had evidently spread quickly from there. Everybody who’d stopped by the Seed and Feed today had spoken about Danny Johnson choking, and about how McCoy had saved his life; some townspeople had even come by, not to purchase anything, but specifically to talk with McCoy about what had happened. Many had asked the same questions as the men at the mill had: How had he known how to save Danny, and when and where had he learned to actually do it?
Mabel Duncan, the wife of the mill superintendent, had already been at the Seed and Feed, talking with Gregg Anderson, when McCoy had shown up for work. Unlike earlier, immediately after the incident, he’d been unable—or at least unwilling—to evade the direct questions they’d put to him. He wanted neither to walk out of his job nor to be rude to Mrs. Duncan and Mr. Anderson. He’d thought to tell them that inserting a tube into Danny’s windpipe to allow him to breathe had simply seemed like the smart thing to do, but such an assertion—and the implication that he had never before done such a thing—would have strained credulity. Not only had he performed a surgical procedure, not only had he saved a man’s life, but he’d taken charge of an emergency situation in order to do so. For so long now, McCoy had sought to avoid revealing “too much” about himself so that he would not alter history, but he knew that ship had gone to warp. Convinced that he’d already irrevocably changed the past, he’d left New York to make a new start and a new life for himself. He’d done that here in Hayden, but now the time had come for him to take the next step. And so he’d told Mrs. Duncan and Mr. Anderson the truth about himself: that he was a physician, though he hadn’t practiced recently.
Thinking about all that had happened today, McCoy reached the northeast corner of the commons and started across Mill Road. He’d only gotten to the center of the street when he heard a voice call to him from behind. “Mister McCoy.” He turned to see the tall but stooped figure of Dr. Lyles walking in his direction down Main Street. McCoy had been anticipating this conversation. He returned to the corner and waited for the doctor to reach him. “Thank you for stopping,” Lyles said.
McCoy nodded. “How’s Danny?” he asked. During the course of the afternoon, several of the people who’d visited the Seed and Feed had heard that the doctor hadn’t needed to send Danny to the hospital—a positive development, considering that would have necessitated a two-hour drive into Greenville, over mostly unpaved roads. Instead, people had told him, Lyles had treated Danny himself, a fact he now confirmed.
“Resting comfortably,” the doctor said. “I cleaned up his stoma and re-intubated him. This afternoon, I gave him a muscle relaxant, sedated him, and was able to get the offending bit of food out of his trachea. ’Twas wedged in there pretty good.”
“Did you remove the tube after you cleared his airway?” McCoy asked.
“Not yet,” Lyles said. “It’s been a long day for Danny. I decided to do it in the morning.”
“Will somebody watch him tonight?” McCoy asked.
“Doreen’s in with him now,” Lyles said, mentioning Danny’s wife. “And Lorinda was there most of the day.” Lorinda was Danny’s mother.
“Well, that’s fine,” McCoy said. “I’m glad everything worked out.”
“Thanks to you,” Lyles said.
“I was happy to help,” McCoy said.
Lyles regarded him silently for a few seconds and then motioned toward a bench in the commons, half a dozen meters away. “Would you care to sit for a minute?” he said. “These old bones get tired of standing after a while.”
“Of course,” McCoy said, and the two walked over to the bench. When they arrived there, McCoy saw that dew had condensed on the green slats. “Just a second,” he told Lyles, then crouched and wiped the arm of his jacket across the seat and back a couple of times, drying it. Lyles thanked him and, taking the arm of the bench, carefully lowered himself onto it. McCoy sat down as well, still waiting for the doctor to broach the subject of his medical training. He did so at once.
“Mister McCoy,” he said, “I’ve been hearing tell from folks today that you say you’re a doctor.”
“I am a doctor,” McCoy said, “and I don’t think you needed to hear that from people to know it’s true.” When Lyles had arrived at the mill this morning, McCoy had taken him aside and explained Danny’s choking, and that he’d had no choice but to perform an emergency tracheotomy. He’d tried to recall exactly when Chevalier Jackson had codified the modern surgical method—historical knowledge and use of tracheotomy techniques went back millennia on Earth—but unable to do so, he’d decided to risk speaking in medical detail about the procedure. Since Lyles would subsequently treat Danny, it had been most important that he knew precisely what McCoy had done.
“You certainly have a great deal of medical knowledge,”
Lyles said. “Where did you study?”
Nobody else in town had asked McCoy this, but he’d expected the question from the doctor. Though McCoy had chosen to reveal to people that he was a physician, there remained the practical problem of proving his credentials. While the University of Mississippi had been founded in 1848, its School of Medicine hadn’t existed for at least a century after that. Regardless, McCoy hadn’t earned his degrees—wouldn’t earn his degrees—for another three hundred years. Though he did not wish to lie, he wanted to provide an answer not as readily verifiable as a claim of a medical education at Ole Miss would be. “I studied abroad,” he told Lyles.
“I see,” the doctor said, sounding dubious. “Have you practiced in the States?”
“No,” McCoy said. “No, I haven’t.”
“Did you serve in the war?” Lyles asked. It seemed to McCoy very much like the doctor wanted to find some source of information that he could check.
“No,” McCoy said, opting not to elaborate. Lyles shifted on the bench and then again looked at him for a moment without saying anything. Finally, the doctor spoke his mind.
“Should I believe you, Mister McCoy?” he said.
McCoy fought the impulse to identify himself as Doctor McCoy. Instead, he appealed to Lyles as honestly as he could. “Should you believe me?” he repeated. “I can see why you wouldn’t, because I’ve lied to you. Well, I haven’t lied to you directly, exactly, but I’m sure you’ve heard folks saying that I’m Phil Dickinson’s cousin.”
“Yes,” Lyles said. “I’ve heard that.”
“You’ve heard it,” McCoy said, “and you know it’s not true.”
At that, the doctor actually smiled. “It didn’t seem likely,” he said. “You told me you hopped a freight to get to Atlanta and then jumped off when two vagabonds attacked you. Seemed like an awful coincidence that you would’ve jumped off right in your cousin’s backyard.”
“I’m sure stranger things have happened,” McCoy said, “but no, I’m not Phil’s cousin. I also didn’t ask him to tell people that I was. It was just something he started saying when he introduced me around.”
Lyles seemed to consider that. “Maybe Phil did that ’cause folks don’t cotton to strangers round these parts,” Lyles said with what might have been an arch tone.
“Really?” McCoy said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
Lyles blustered in a way that might have been amused acceptance or righteous indignation. McCoy heard the mechanical chug of a vehicle, and he peered across the length of the commons to see Woodward Palmer driving along Church Street. “Mister McCoy,” Lyles said, and then he corrected himself. “Doctor McCoy, what are you doing here?”
“I’m just trying to live my life, Doctor Lyles,” McCoy said honestly, and then, not quite as honestly, added, “The crash affected a lot of folks.” He hoped to insinuate that the current worldwide economic decline had been responsible for his itinerancy, which had ultimately brought him to Hayden.
“That it did,” Lyles said.
“Now I just want to live my life,” McCoy said again. “Just like anybody else. I’m not on the run and I haven’t done anything wrong. And if you want me to leave, Doctor, well, I don’t think I’m going to, but if you push me, I just might. I don’t want any trouble. I only want to live a quiet, peaceful life, nothing more.”
“It wasn’t quiet this morning,” Lyles observed.
“No, it sure wasn’t,” McCoy agreed. “But it does bring a kind of peace when you can help somebody like that.”
“Yup, I know that it does,” Lyles said. He took a deep, raspy breath, then lifted his hands and dropped them flat on his thighs, as though deciding something. “I don’t want you to leave Hayden, Doctor McCoy. I don’t dislike you, but I have been suspicious of you. But you also paid me the money I charged you for stitching up your leg. And when you paid that first two dollars, I was rude to you.”
“You were just watching out for the folks in town,” McCoy said, wanting to put his differences with Lyles to rest.
“Well, I’m sorry anyway,” the doctor said. “Like you told me that day, that ain’t the way of southern hospitality.”
McCoy shrugged. “I accept your apology. Thanks.”
“So I’ve been thinking about you being a doctor and all,” Lyles said. “And I was thinking maybe you’d want to help me in my practice.”
McCoy’s head jerked back in surprise, almost as though he’d been struck. “Pardon me?” he said, thinking that he must have heard Lyles incorrectly.
“I’m getting older, Doctor McCoy, and most of what I do these days isn’t all that difficult,” Lyles said. “Why, part of the time I end up treating folks’ animals instead of folks themselves. But I’m moving slower, and even the simple things are getting harder. I could use an assistant.”
“I’m…shocked,” McCoy said. “And honored.”
“Don’t be too honored, son,” Lyles said, pulling himself up to his feet. “I’m just talking about you assisting, and I’d pay you as an assistant. I’d still do the doctoring. We could start out a couple days a week, see how it goes.”
McCoy stood up and faced the doctor. “I’d very much like that,” he said. “Thank you, Doctor.”
“You’re welcome, Doctor,” Lyles said. “Why don’t you stop by my office after church on Sunday and we’ll work out the details.”
“I will,” McCoy said, and he held out his hand. Lyles took it and then pulled him in close. Even with his stoop, he towered over McCoy.
“I saw the work you did on Danny Johnson,” Lyles said. “With no medical equipment, and no time to waste, you saved his life. More than that, you kept his brain from getting damaged. That’s good work.” He let go of McCoy’s hand and headed toward Main Street.
“Thank you,” McCoy called after him, still stunned by the turn of events. He stood there and watched Lyles make his way slowly back down Main, then diagonally across Carolina Street and into his house. McCoy was still there five minutes later when Sheriff Gladdy came out of his office a little farther down on Mill Road. The slam of the door closing broke McCoy from his reverie. As the sheriff began lighting the gas lamps along the street, McCoy hurried across Mill Road and down Main Street, headed for the boarding house. Now he couldn’t wait to see Lynn and Phil, to tell them what had just happened.
Since he’d arrived in the past, this had been the best day of all.
Twenty-Six
2270
Kirk stood in the far corner of the nearly empty observation lounge, peering out through the deck-to-overhead viewing ports at the wounded husk of the Enterprise. The starship hung lifelessly in space, surrounded by Starbase 10’s repair dock, a brace of horseshoe-shaped platforms set at right angles to each other. The flurry of movement and activity about the ship did nothing to ameliorate her moribund appearance, but rather served to reinforce it. The power tethers stretching at various points from the platforms and into the Enterprise, the work bees gliding about, the space-suited engineers teeming around the hull, all served to highlight the essential inertness of the once-vital vessel. Kirk could not bear to look at her, and yet he could not look away.
Gazing at the ship from alongside and above the circular primary hull, he had a select view of what remained of the bridge. The place from which he had commanded the Enterprise for the past five years had been reduced to rubble. Only shards of the white dome that had covered the control center now remained, blackened by the heat of the explosion that had destroyed it. The curved bulkheads that had housed the various crew stations had been blown outward, the hull splitting open like the scarred, misshapen petals of some great metal flower.
Kirk finally turned away, troubled by the scene. He wondered why the admiral had wanted to meet with him here. Had it simply been a matter of convenience or preference, or had he intended to convey some unspoken message? In Kirk’s experience, Heihachiro Nogura took few actions, made few decisions, without due consideration of the smallest details.
Folding his arms across his chest, Kirk looked about the lounge. Describing a long, narrow arc, the compartment traced a section of Starbase 10’s biconic hull, at the midpoint between its highest and lowest decks. Small circular tables paraded along the outer perimeter and food synthesizers lined the inner bulkhead. Indirect lighting provided faint illumination, allowing a clear view through the ports. At the moment, only a handful of tables were occupied, all of them by personnel in Starfleet uniforms. Besides the Enterprise, several smaller vessels currently visited the station, including the transport Tucker, which had just ferried Admiral Nogura here.
As Kirk waited at the far end of the lounge, away from the others present, he couldn’t keep himself from staring back out at the Enterprise. At numerous places on both the primary and secondary hulls, he could see where the Klingon torpedoes mined across their course had torn through the ship. In his time as the Enterprise’s captain, he’d never seen her appear so…defeated. More than anything else, the demolished bridge laid bare her ruin.
Did I do that? he asked himself. If he had, he couldn’t remember it. The concussion of the blast that had wrecked the bridge had not only sent the turbolift askew and lodged it in its shaft, but had knocked out each of the six members of the bridge crew it had carried. When they’d recovered—Kirk had taken three days to come out of a coma—none of them had been able to recall the minutes leading up to their loss of consciousness, a common consequence of such an injury, according to McCoy.
Regardless of whether or not Kirk had somehow sabotaged the bridge in order to prevent a Klingon boarding party from taking control of the ship, he bore the responsibility of what had happened to the Enterprise—and to her crew. Eleven dead, he thought grimly. While he had lain insensible in the turbolift, his crew had beaten back a contingent of Klingons down in engineering, but at the cost of nearly a dozen of their own lives.
Crucible: McCoy Page 38
