The dirty towel wadded around his wrist was thick with blood. “I don’t think it’s too damn bad,” he said without any assurance, and Mrs. Crowell let him in, ushering him straight to the surgery.
Thomas, who had heard the man, joined them just as Mrs. Crowell turned the gas jets up so high that they sputtered. The twenty-year-old shrank back at the physician’s touch.
“The bandage, young man,” Thomas coaxed, and he lifted an end to see that the wrap was nothing but a piece of filthy, grease-laden rag. The moment the rag was released, blood flooded across the man’s hand and into the basin that Mrs. Crowell had anticipated. “Your name, son?” He hadn’t seen this fellow out at the camp or in the timber.
“Name’s Frye,” the young fellow groaned.
“Well, Mr. Frye, what have you done to yourself?” Thomas pushed the flannel sleeve out of the way, and shifted so that the light from the nearest gas sconce illuminated the wrist. The jagged slash started on the swell of muscle below the right thumb and sliced in a nasty fashion down into the tendons of the wrist. Three inches of undamaged tissue marked where the tool had then skipped before inflicting a final slash on the man’s underarm.
“How did you manage this?”
Between clenched teeth, trying to look away from his own arm but inexorably attracted to the sight, Maurice Frye whispered, “Fell on the damn thing.”
“The thing being?”
“I was just sharpening the saw. That’s all I was doing. Got up to stoke the stove so I could make some coffee, and damn.”
“Off with the shirt, sir,” Thomas said. He slapped a clean linen bandage over the wrist. “Hold this now. Hard.” Then he helped Mrs. Crowell with Frye’s damp woolen shirt. The wound was more frightening in appearance than reality, with no major vessels lacerated, and no tendons cut. But the flesh gaped enough that the moment Thomas removed the pad, young Frye’s eyes rolled up and he collapsed backward.
“Quickly, now,” Thomas said, and he scrubbed out the wound thoroughly, nearly finishing before Frye groaned back into consciousness.
“Will you want an injection?” Mrs. Crowell asked. The question was asked with more than a hint of weariness, as if she didn’t care whether he wanted the needle or not, and he glanced up at her. Too tired, he thought. Everyone is too tired.
“Indeed. Morphine, half a grain. Otherwise he won’t enjoy the stitching.”
He finished cleaning the wound and frowned at the counter behind him. “We are lacking in dressings,” he said. “We must rectify that tonight. We have been fortunate these past few days.” As Mrs. Crowell handed him the sterile, charged syringe, Thomas leaned sideways a bit, looking the blanched Frye in the eye. “You’re going to be fine, young fellow. A few stitches, and you’ll be on your way. No serious…” He jerked his head around at the sound, a deep, prolonged borborygmus from Mrs. Crowell’s gut.
“Oh, pardon me,” she said, but this time, looking closer, he saw more than mild embarrassment on the woman’s face.
“Where is Doctor Hardy?” he asked gently even as he gave the young man the injection in the heavy muscle of his upper arm.
“He is with the women’s ward,” she replied. “I saw him there last.”
“You will go there immediately,” he ordered, straightening up.
“Oh, but…”
“Mrs. Crowell, I will not be debated on this. You will take the Otis and find Dr. Hardy this instant. I will finish here. If your distress is a mild gas bubble, he will ascertain that soon enough. If it is more than that, well, then.” He felt a wash of sympathy as he saw the fear creep across her face. “Right now, Mrs. Crowell.”
“Really, Doctor…”
“Mrs. Crowell,” he said again. “Please.” He dropped the empty syringe in the pan. “I can manage here. And then I’ll be to the ward.” The nurse stood as if her shoes had been nailed to the floor. What a terrible thing to face, he thought as he watched the range of emotions play across Mrs. Crowell’s lined face.
“As you wish, Doctor,” she said finally, and Thomas watched her leave the surgery, her step with none of her characteristic bustle.
“She sick, Doc?”
“We would hope not. Now, the morphine burns?”
“Like hell, Doc.”
“Does the arm hurt?”
“No.”
“Well, it will, Mr. Frye.” The logger winced with alarm. “But not that much. The worst has been done while you were away.” With the wound spritzed with ether, he began with the sutures, and after the second, Maurice Frye cooperated by fainting again. The remaining ten closed the wound. By the time the logger was alert and could focus his eyes, the arm was bandaged and the thumb splinted immobile.
“Now, sir,” Thomas said, and stopped when Bertha Auerbach entered the surgery. “Mrs. Crowell has reported to Dr. Hardy?”
“She has, Doctor. She denies feeling ill.”
“Don’t they all, early on. I hope that I’m wrong. If I am, then nothing is lost beyond a little peaceful sleep. If I’m correct, all might be gained.”
“Will you need assistance here?”
“We’re finished,” he said, slapping Frye’s bare shoulder. “Dr. Hardy will need you, Berti, without doubt. Elaine hardly has the experience.” He realized what he’d said, and added, “She has two days experience, in fact. I’ve come to think of her as part of the medical staff.”
Bertha helped the young man don his shirt. “Keep it absolutely clean, Mr. Frye,” Thomas said. “You will do well to avoid the sort of activity that might reopen the wound. I want to see you…” He turned to Berti. “What day is this?”
“Still Saturday, Doctor.”
“Ah. Perfect. You won’t work tomorrow in any case. I want to see you on Wednesday next, then, Mr. Frye. Do not allow this to become wet, do not take off the bandage and pick at the wound.” The image of one logger who’d prematurely taken out his own stitches with a skinning knife came to mind. “Do not play with the stitches, even should they itch.”
“I can’t work with this thing on,” Frye complained, holding up the wooden splint that projected beyond his fingers.
“Indeed you can’t, unless you find one-handed work. The wound must be allowed to heal, sir. If not, we cut it off first here,” and he made a sawing motion across Frye’s wrist, “and then here,” and moved his hand to the young man’s elbow, “and finally here,” and he touched Frye’s shoulder. He frowned severely at the ghastly expression on the logger’s face. “I’m not making sport with you, Mr. Frye. Keep it clean and dry, keep it immobile, and come to see me on Wednesday. That’s simple enough. You can manage it.” Perhaps, Thomas thought. Buddy Huckla had managed an hour before tugging off his wrap—but scarce difference that made to him now.
“Man’s got to earn a livin’. Can’t do that sittin’ on my ass, Doc. How much is this going to cost me?”
Thomas tipped his head judiciously. “This part is ten dollars, sir. If there are no complications, that’s all it will cost. If you don’t do as I say, it may well cost you more than you ever want to pay. Amputations start at thirty. Beyond that, I don’t recall what Mr. Winchell charges. You understand my meaning?”
The logger swore, then realized Bertha Auerbach was standing at his side, and he blushed. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“Where are you living, Mr. Frye?”
“Got me a camp up on Tillis Creek.”
“You and a crew?”
“I work by myself.”
“Well, good for you. That’s commendable. How did you get here tonight?”
“My mule.”
“Ride carefully going home, then. And good luck to you.” He kept a hand on Frye’s elbow as the man slid off the table. “Wednesday next.”
They watched Frye walk a bit unsteadily out of the surgery. “And don’t bother stopping at the Clarissa for a whiskey,” Thomas called after him. The man paused halfway across the waiting room. “They’re closed until further notice.”
“How’d you know I was goi
ng to do that?” Frye asked.
Thomas tapped his own skull. “I am a soothsayer, Mr. Frye. Promise me that you will go home and collapse into your own bed. You have a bottle for the pain?”
“Nope. That’s what I was going to get.”
“Then here.” Thomas stooped and opened one of the cabinet doors. He found the bottle he wanted and handed it to Frye. “It’s not bad,” he said. “Wrap yourself around it tonight.”
“Thanks, Doc.” Frye managed a smile and headed out the front door.
Thomas gazed at the tray of surgical implements wistfully. “It feels as if it’s been years since I tended something as simple as that,” Thomas said. “A few stitches, and there we are. I’m afraid our world has become one of rectal tubes and other unpleasantries.”
Bertha didn’t offer a smile. “Janie Patterson has passed, Doctor.”
He felt as if she had punched him, and he could think of nothing to say.
“She awakened, feeling cold. The last evacuation had been nearly two hours, with little gut distress. But she complained of chill, and said that her back ached terribly. We drew a hot bath, and Elaine was tending her. She simply closed her eyes and stopped breathing.”
“Elaine is with her now?”
“Yes. We lifted her out of the tub and wrapped her in clean linen…such a wisp of a thing. I don’t think the child weighed twenty-five pounds.” Bertha’s mouth pursed, and Thomas could see the lines of every muscle in her jaw. “I don’t know why, Doctor. I don’t know why she died.”
“Nor I. There must be at least a cursory post mortem to discover the answer.”
Bertha sighed. “I dread that.”
“It must be done.”
“I know, Doctor. I know. It just seems like the final insult to such a wonderful little creature.”
He reached out a hand and rested it on the nurse’s shoulder. “If it can save another wonderful little creature, it’s worth doing, Berti.”
“Oh,” she said, shaking her head in dismissal. “I agree with you completely, Thomas. It’s just so…so sad.” He realized with a start that this was the first time that Bertha Auerbach had addressed him by his given name.
“Indeed it is. Eleanor is aware of her passing?”
“Elaine and I told her as best we could. Poor Elaine—she is such a rock, but I fear there is so very little left of her reserve.” Bertha put a hand on either side of her head, rocking it from side to side. “And Eleanor has just gone somewhere, Thomas. I mean her thoughts have flown away, and where we don’t know. When told of her sister’s death, she simply nodded. Just a little nod. Nothing else.”
“I’ll talk with her,” Thomas said. “You’ll assist Dr. Hardy with Adelaide? If there’s a way to stop the contagion…that is what baffles us, isn’t it.” He followed her out of the room and around to the stairway. “That’s what baffles us,” he repeated. “It is as if the cholera bacilli have their sport with us.”
Half way up the stairs, they paused when they saw Eleanor Stephens appear on the landing. She was dressed in her nightgown, with a robe drawn close. Her arms were wrapped around her middle.
“You shouldn’t be up,” Berti said, but Eleanor just smiled at her and took her time with the stairs.
“Eleanor, I’d like to talk with you if I may,” Thomas said. He intentionally blocked the stairway so that the girl would have to make some sort of decision. She stopped and moved her hand to the railing.
“I must inform Pastor Patterson about Janie,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “He will want to know.”
“Of course he must know. But I don’t want you walking down there by yourself, Eleanor.”
“Am I ill?”
“I don’t…you have no gastric symptoms? None whatsoever?”
“No.”
“Gert James is with your step-father. You mean to help her with the house and church?”
“I will do what I can,” Eleanor said. She gazed at Thomas with an expression of complete resignation, as if in her mental travels during the past few hours, she’d seen something far worse than what now gripped Port McKinney, and had returned to take on the lesser of two evils.
“You’ll do what you must,” he said finally. “Might I suggest proper clothing if you’re going out?”
“Of course.”
He stepped to one side to let her pass, then hurried after Bertha, who waited for him at the top of the stairs.
“She shouldn’t be allowed to leave the clinic,” she whispered.
“How can I stop her?” Thomas said, holding out his hands. “She answers now as if all rationale has returned. She is well, I think. And after all, Berti, she is not a child. We have other matters to attend to. In a few minutes, I will walk down and check on her. And on Gert.” He hesitated. “And on Roland Patterson. Would that his rationale would return.”
Chapter Thirty-two
Thomas entered the men’s ward and stopped short. The magnitude of the problem was now painfully clear. Every bed was filled, now including four young men recently brought from the camp. True to the perverse nature of the disease, there was no predicting the path the contagion would choose.
Two of the new cases were in the second stage of cholera, their evacuations like rice water, a gushing torrent that literally carried with it the lining of their gut.
Young, hearty loggers, proud of their ability to conquer the big timber, now lay as emaciated old men. Restless, anxious, in the fight of their lives with no ability to do anything about it, the men simply sank away. The cold perspiration soaked them until there was no more perspiration to be had. Their mouths were too parched to form words.
One of the loggers recently arrived showed only the lightest symptoms—a nagging stomach upset, painful gut, vomiting and diarrhea that he could managed well enough with the chamber pot without soiling his bed. There was no reason Mike Tierney should have been more resistant, but he was, healthy enough to curse his fate in the most vocal terms.
The ambulance ride to the clinic had all but killed the fourth logger, who had been in the third stage of cholera, his face sunken and unresponsive, eyes half-closed, pulse a mere flutter. He had been a big man, but now had shrunken to a pathetic marionette, as easy for Nurse Auerbach to arrange on the bed as a child. His oral temperature had fallen to 91 degrees, and at first, Thomas did not believe Bertha’s recording. He took the temperature himself, and the mercury rose sluggishly, stopping at 90.5.
Through all this, in his private chambers at the back of the men’s ward, Sonny Malone slept on, his shaved head encased in ice with periodic respites for warm wraps. He now took tiny amounts of brandy, amounts small enough that they evaporated in his mouth. The swallow reflex managed what few drops lingered on the back of his tongue.
“We must be as patient as he is,” Lucius Hardy had observed at one point.
When he had a moment, Thomas dashed up to the women’s ward, where he found Hardy now just leaving Adelaide Crowell’s bedside.
“How is she?”
“Desperate, Thomas. I have never seen such a thing.”
“And the young women?”
“I wish I could be optimistic.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “It is as if, by being so close to the initial outbreak, the virulence is somehow more intense. I don’t think that can be possible, but so it seems. If even one survives, I will be surprised.”
“And Lucy?”
Hardy gazed toward the front of the ward. “She lingers. And I suppose I could say that her struggle is remarkable in all respects. The disease has reduced her to a mere shadow, yet a stout heart drives her on. We continue to support her system as best we can. If she lives, it may be weeks before she has convalesced sufficiently to rise from her bed. And that’s without the rather lengthy list of sequelae that might impede her course of recovery.” He took a deep breath and looked at his watch. “I ramble on. I’m sorry. I’m tired. I’m hungry…but with no appetite.” He grinned. “Make sense of that, if you can, Doctor.�
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“We must find help for Bertha,” Thomas said. “She has worked without pause since yesterday.”
“She is adept,” Hardy said. “I have walked through the ward more than once and seen her on the bed toward the back of the ward, sound asleep. Yet she stirs and wakes at the smallest moan from a patient. My grandfather used to call those ‘wolf naps.’”
“If this continues, she’ll need more than a wolf nap,” Thomas said.
“She spends a lot of time with the girl…with Elaine.”
“I can’t even imagine,” Thomas said. “I confess I don’t know what to say to the child. It is easy to accept her as a nurse-in-training, without dwelling on the collapse of her world. I don’t know how to help her deal with that.”
“That may be all we can do right now.” Hardy smiled gently. “Have you yet noticed that not very much of what we do here was ever discussed in the quiet, secure halls of the medical college?”
Thomas laughed. “I have noticed that, Lucius.”
“Old Roberts will see our article in the journals and say, ‘My God, those two were but pups who didn’t know one end of a scalpel from the other just a bit ago.’”
“Should we live to see it,” Thomas said philosophically. “I admit to always listening with half an ear for my own borborygmi.”
Hardy’s own laugh was quick and loud. “You must remember what we called the ‘students’ syndrome.’ With each new disease that we studied, we began to show symptoms. We died a thousand dread deaths, Thomas. We’re invulnerable now.”
“Would that were so. Eleanor has left the clinic. Did you know she was going to do that?”
“No.”
“I need to find the time later tonight to visit the Pattersons. She will be at the house, with Gerti.” He pulled out his watch. “And now, a few moments with the tiny child. I must know what killed her.”
Back downstairs, he ducked into his office to fetch his journal. The place was a sanctuary, although the smells of the wards touched each corner and cranny of the clinic. He entered and was struck by a new aroma, a bouquet that lingered, this one altogether lovely. Alvina had come to the clinic? Surely she had not brought their son into the wards. Had she done so, another presence would have followed her…the dog would not leave Alvi and the infant.
Comes a Time for Burning Page 26
