Costigan's Needle

by Jerry Sohl

  “Dance hall?” Sudduth said as if he hated the words.

  “Square dancing mostly, Eric. Ever tried it? It’s fun. Some of the kids are working up an orchestra for regular dancing. Won’t you sit down?” He indicated the first row bench. “You know Mr. Tooksberry, don’t you?” He gestured to a man at another table a little farther away. “He’s writing our constitution and by-laws. We’re going to have a convention before long to adopt them. Mr. Tooksberry used to be a lawyer with Inland before his displacement. He remembers the statutes rather well. Because he knew something of the law, he performed the wedding ceremonies for those who wanted to get married.”

  Tooksberry was writing laboriously with a quill. “I’d give anything for a pen. Even a ball-point. It’s hard enough writing without my glasses.”

  “Where’s your secretary?” Devan asked. To Sudduth he said, “You remember Miss Beatrice Treat? She’s his wife and secretary now.”

  “Left for obvious reasons a few moments before you people came in.” Tooksberry smiled at them, made a gesture that included all the papers on the table. “My big opportunity. I can include all the laws I thought were good, forget all the bad ones. A tremendous responsibility, I’ll tell you. Of course many of the laws I knew will not be applicable, such as traffic laws. But then the statutes we adopt can always be revised in such an eventuality.”

  “All very enlightening,” Sudduth said with disgust. “Will you please bring in the six I’m to take back with me, Mr. Orcutt?”

  “You mean if they agree to go with you.”

  A boy of about sixteen years of age came into the hall. “Mr. Orcutt, sir,” he said, “those people wouldn’t come. They said they didn’t want to see either Mr. Sudduth or Mr. Blaine.”

  “All right,” Orcutt said. The boy ran out. “There’s your answer, Eric.”

  “You think you can fool me like that?” Sudduth said, his face darkening. “It’s obvious you told the boy to say that.”

  “You’re wrong. He was telling the truth. I could have told you that before, only I wanted you to hear it yourself. It took so long to contact all six persons because they all are working in different places. All except one that I know had a dental appointment.”

  “Dental appointment?” Sudduth’s eyebrows rose slowly, his face became calmer and his eyes lost their fire. “Did you say dental appointment?” When Orcutt nodded, he added, “That means you have a dentist here.”

  “A logical conclusion,” Orcutt said, laughing a little. “Do you mean to tell me you didn’t know that? A Dr. Van Ness. Didn’t you meet him before?”

  “He’s very good, too,” Devan said.

  “You knew that everyone lost his fillings during the transition, didn’t you?”

  “Of course. We’ve been using clay and beeswax and sap. What kind of treatment does this Van Ness give?”

  “He uses gold,” Devan said. “I’ve had several filled. See?” He displayed teeth into which Dr. Van Ness had laboriously pounded gold with a mallet.

  “Beautiful job.” Sudduth was impressed. He sighed. “He’s a good dentist.”

  “The best,” Sam said.

  “I got bad teeth,” Blaine said.

  “So have the people back in your caves,” Devan said. “It’s a pity they can’t have theirs fixed up.”

  Eric Sudduth was wringing his hands.

  “Too bad the fillings will drop out when we go through the Needle again,” Orcutt said.

  “Through the Needle again?” Sudduth eyed him wonderingly. “When are we going to do that and how?”

  “When we get the second Needle built.”

  The silence was suddenly oppressive inside the building. From far off came sounds of activity, children’s cries, the clink of metal, the clang of hammer on metal. A bee that wandered inside zoomed around the men for a few moments and then, as if sensitive to the tension there, zoomed out again.

  Eric Sudduth’s lips were thin, his forehead corrugated as he stood there shaking his head. “I forbid it!”

  “It’s the only way we’ll ever get back,” Devan said gently. “We’ve got to make another Needle.”

  “You can’t do it!” Sudduth shouted, his eyes round, his face white with rage. “Look what happened when you made the last one against my advice. God’s wrath leveled against all of you connected with the Needle and your needless experimentation has resulted in this. Our not putting on garments is our penance for evil ways and you should do the same. This is your hell, don’t you see? And mine, too, because I didn’t stop you.”

  “You sent Orvid Blaine,” Orcutt said. “He nearly did.”

  “He failed and you wouldn’t listen.” Sudduth was grave. “We must now be penitent. You can’t make another Needle. We mustn’t let you. The punishment God would impose on us all if we broke His laws a second time would be horrible.”

  “Where do you get the idea this is all against God’s wishes, anyway?” Devan asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you see it all around you? Are you all so stupid you won’t believe your eyes? This place this time. Where will it be next time?”

  “You’d better quiet down,” Orcutt said.

  “Nobody tells Mr. Sudduth to be quiet, mister.”

  “Shut up, Orvid,” Sudduth said. “Come on, we’re leaving. You can keep the six. I refuse to have anything to do with people who can’t see God’s handwriting on the wall.”

  “Amen,” Blaine said.

  15

  It was early October before Devan got his share of glass for his cottage windows. It wasn’t so bad being without it during the day but the nights had been rather chilly and he wasted no time getting the panes in place because, if this Northern Illinois was like the other Northern Illinois, there was plenty of precedent for chill winds and cold rains even in the daytime. There was no sense in taking a chance of getting the inside of the cottage wet.

  As it was, it was a Sunday afternoon when Devan received word his glass was ready and, since Betty was home, too, they both went to Basher’s glass shop to pick it up. Even at that they were among the last in the camp to get glass because, for one thing, Devan didn’t want to take advantage of his position and friendship with Orcutt to get it and, for another, there were other families whose need was greater: families with babies and children, elderly people, sick people, though there were few of the latter. It was remarkable, Devan reflected, that as busy as they all had been there had been no ill people to speak of, though a hospital had been one of the first buildings to be constructed in the stockade. And of course it and other public buildings had been enclosed in glass first, too.

  The first glass was brittle, green and almost opaque and Basher had had a time trying to improve it until the old storekeeper, Elmo Hodge, the amateur astronomer, heard about it and told Basher how to correct the tint by adding chemicals which would create a complementary color and the unwanted hues would cancel each other out. He knew about it because of his work with telescopes, which brought him into contact with lenses and optics. He got interested in the process and was working alongside Basher making just plain glass for windows and planning the manufacture of lenses for telescopes, binoculars and microscopes, though plans for the last-mentioned items had not as yet been perfected.

  “If I remember right,” Hodge said, “you have to replace the potassium to get hard glass, replace some of the calcium with lead to get the flint glass you can make lenses out of.” He rubbed his hands together. “After that we can concentrate on plate glass, safety glass, Pyrex and coated lenses. It will take time but it will be worth it.” Devan had heard those words a lot lately, had heard himself say them many times.

  The glass he and Betty carried to their cottage had only a trace of green and it was quite clear. The windows had been made with what the camp had adopted as a module. A man who was known to have been exactly six feet tall served as the basis for the module and inches were arrived at by the proper division of his length, down to the inch. Since the window sash had been
made only a fraction of an inch larger than the glass, the pane fitted in very nicely, though Devan took the precaution of bedding it in with putty someone in the camp had made from linseed oil and limestone.

  Betty insisted on helping, so they worked together, Devan spreading a thin layer of putty on the wood prior to Betty’s pressing the glass into the sash and securing it firmly with glazier’s points of Devan’s own manufacture. Then she added the outside putty.

  When he finished his last window, Betty had only half finished her part of the job. Not because she was slower. She simply had more to do. So he came around the cottage to where she was working in the warm afternoon sun, being careful not to step in flower beds she had taken time to plant. He came up to her and stopped to watch her work.

  “You the foreman?” she asked.

  “Damn right. You on a slow-down?”

  “Until I get a raise in pay, yes.”

  “You’re overpaid now.”

  “You can take over the job any time you want.”

  “Carry on.”

  She flashed white teeth at him and continued. Betty was still the same woman he had known back at the Rasmussen factory. She had lost none of the intense look in her dark blue eyes and, though she had done a man’s work in the stockade from orderly in the hospital to helping on the sewing and weaving projects, she had lost none of her grace. The errant forelock still fell over her eye now and then and her black hair was soft and wavy as it fell to her shoulders. She was brown of arm, suntanned of face and her long legs were nicely bronzed. He decided there was no one in New Chicago quite as attractive.

  She gave him a look. “What’s the great thought?”

  “Just thinking about you.”

  “You didn’t have to say that.”

  “I wouldn’t have, if it weren’t true.”

  She smiled again as if it were something beautiful inside that caused her lips to part and her eyes to brighten.

  He had to kiss her.

  “Is it wrong, Dev?” She held him away and looked at him.

  “Is what wrong?” He knew what she meant. When she didn’t answer, he said softly, “I don’t think so.”

  Both had had children before and they missed them and felt it not fair to talk about them since they avoided all talk about their former families. When they did mention children, they did so casually, generally and evasively. Now they had reason to talk about them openly, specifically.

  There was a commotion to their left down the long way designated as Orcutt Street that ran clear to the gate, a gate they had worked feverishly to make in the early days and which now was left open all the time because there was nothing to close it against.

  “Somebody’s yelling outside,” Betty said. “People are running out.”

  Things happened so seldom in New Chicago they found themselves walking excitedly to the gate and through it. There was a crowd around something on the ground. When they got close enough, Devan and Betty could see that it was a nude man on a stretcher made of twined reeds and two stout branches. The man was Eric Sudduth and he was in pain. His face was paler than Devan had ever seen it before. His breath was rapid, sweat making his body shine. He rolled his eyes.

  “Give me a hand,” Devan said, reaching for one end of one of the branches. “Let’s get him to the hospital.”

  “Let me alone,” Sudduth groaned, twisting a little on the reeds. “Let me die. God wants me to die.”

  The stretcher-bearers met Orcutt on the way to the hospital. “What’s going on?” he asked. Then he saw the man on the reeds.

  “They brought him up to the gate and left him,” Devan said.

  “Let me die,” Sudduth said. He turned to Orcutt. “Make them let me die.”

  In the hospital Sudduth’s sickness was quickly diagnosed as appendicitis and he was rushed into the operating room. Orcutt asked Devan to stay with the man temporarily and act in his behalf and Betty, saying she had nothing better to do, stayed with him.

  “You know how Eric dislikes Dr. Costigan and alcohol,” Devan said when he and Betty were waiting for the man to come back from the operating room. “Just think: he’s being anesthetized with ether made by Renthaler from grain alcohol distilled by Dr. Costigan.”

  “I don’t think you’d better tell him.”

  “He’s being operated on with a scalpel made out of carbon steel manufactured and sharpened to a razor edge by Gus Nelson, who likes to drink. He’s being stitched with catgut through the courtesy of that old mountain goat who ate too many grape pulps and we had to butcher.”

  “One thing I do know,” Betty said. “He couldn’t be operated on by two surer, more confident men than the two who are doing the job.”

  “They were interns just seven months ago. Interns at Cook County Hospital, wondering where and how they were to start their practices. Now the health of all of New Chicago depends on them.”

  They were both at Sudduth’s side that night when he came out of the ether and when he finally quit his thrashing around on the hospital cot and regained consciousness. He looked up with bloodshot eyes and said hoarsely, “Go away,” sending ether breath their way. He retched. Betty was practically professional.

  “Don’t talk if you don’t want to,” Devan said. “We won’t bother you.”

  It was eerie, then, the three of them there in the flickering candlelight in the rustic room, Sudduth lying like a corpse, looking up at the log ceiling, his eyes puffy, his face ashen, his lips cracked, Devan and Betty sitting silent in chairs near by. Only occasionally would Sudduth blink his eyes.

  “I’m not staying,” Sudduth said, finally.

  “You’ll stay the required number of days,” Devan said.

  “Who are you, the doctor?”

  “Guess again.”

  “How long do I have to stay?”

  “About a week in bed.”

  “It’s twenty miles to your camp, Eric,” Betty said. “You couldn’t expect to walk there for several weeks.”

  Sudduth snorted. “Orvid Blaine brought me here. Had those stupid men carry me all the way. I could wring his neck. God wanted me to die. Wasn’t that plain to him? Couldn’t he feel it in his bones as I could in mine? Why didn’t you let me die?”

  “If God wanted you to die,” Devan said, “He’d have made the doctor’s hand less skillful while you were on the operating table.”

  “You brought me in here, so I’m not beholden to you or anybody in this camp. I didn’t want an operation.”

  “Maybe it would have been a good idea to let you die. At least we wouldn’t have an ungrateful man on our hands.”

  “Griping comes natural to Eric,” Betty said. “That only shows he’s getting back to normal.”

  The convalescence of Eric Sudduth was something to behold. From the first meal his cheeks lost their paleness, became ruddy. His lusterless eyes grew brighter and his disposition kept pace. Betty found it easy to convince him that, since he was going to be in the hospital for a while, he might as well have the gold fillings his teeth needed. This pleased him.

  Devan liked to think the person responsible for the change in the man was Betty, for she had asked to be assigned to him, stating that all Sudduth needed was a little love. She saw that he got it. She had everybody in the camp visiting him and bringing him things to eat and listening to his ideas. He took to the easy chairs in the sunroom the first days in November, enjoyed sitting there smoking long cigars, his hospital robe barely able to cover his paunch, talking with the people who came to see him, conversing with Betty when there was no one else around. He looked content.

  The second week in November was not as good, Betty reported.

  “Eric’s glancing at people sort of sideways,” she said. “He’s not sleeping too well, the nurse says.”

  The third week he made his announcement.

  “Eric wants to go back to his people. I wish you’d go talk to him, Dev. I’ve done all I can.”

  Devan found him in the sunroom looking a littl
e disgruntled.

  “It’s my bounden duty,” he told Devan after the sparring was over. “God would have me with my people and that’s where I’m going.”

  “That isn’t the kind of life for you,” Devan said. “A man like you just getting over an operation. You still need care.”

  “I’m as sound as a dollar,” Sudduth said, pounding his chest with his fist and then, embarrassed, finding he had to cough. “Well, I am anyway.”

  “It’s getting mighty cold out. Are you sure you want to go?”

  “My personal wishes are of no account. It’s my devotion to duty. That’s all I have to think about.” He looked out the windows, saw the leaves letting go and falling to the earth, dipped the end of his cigar in his ashtray. “God will give me the strength.”

  “You’re going to need it.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow. Told the doctors. Told the nurse.”

  “What do they say?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Devan came to the hospital to see him off the next day, gave him a box of cigars.

  “I’ll walk to the gate with you,” Devan said.

  “Kind of you.”

  They started out on a cool, wet and windy November lead-sky day, both bent against the wind, coats flapping in the breeze.

  When they came to the gate, Sudduth handed Devan the coat and Devan was shocked to see the man had nothing on underneath.

  “Don’t be a damned fool!” Devan said. “You’ll freeze to death without anything on!”

  “If my people can do it, so can I,” he said, drawing himself to his full height. “You don’t hear them complaining, do you?” He turned and strode away, a ludicrous figure of a man, box of cigars under one arm, gingerly walking barefoot over the ground.

  Devan knew the man could not make it; it was only a question of how long he would last. He figured he’d wait at the gate and if he didn’t come back soon, he’d get somebody and they’d go look for him.

  He didn’t have to get anybody.

  In a few minutes Sudduth came limping into sight, his box of cigars still under his arm, his hands clutching his right side.