Each Man's Son (19 page)

 

Twenty-One

W
HEN
did the boy get sick?” Ainslie snapped at Camire as they drove out to the main road.

“Yesterday 'e was not feeling good and today 'e felt terrible. But it was after dinner the pain got bad.”

“Why wasn't I notified before?”

“
Docteur
, poor people 'ave not got the telephone.”

Ainslie looked at the Frenchman's profile. “You've got two good legs. You should have come for me at once.”

He cracked the whip and the mare reached the main road. He sat in tense silence while she trotted hard down the hill and braced for the pull on the opposite side. The miners' row looked, as usual at this hour, like the flank of a ship that had run aground with all her lights burning. The mare hauled hard towards the center of the row, and when she reached the MacNeil house, Ainslie jumped out with his bag in his hand, calling to Camire to hold the mare's head. He opened the door of the house without knocking and encountered a woman in the hall he remembered as Mrs. MacDonald.

“Is he upstairs?”

“Oh, Doctor, we are afraid for him. All day he has been vomiting.”

Ainslie brushed past her and mounted the stairs. Since all these houses were identical, he knew where to go. He found
Mollie sitting by the side of Alan's bed looking unnaturally calm. The boy's face was flushed and his cheeks were stained with tears.

Ainslie crossed the room and put his hand on Alan's forehead. The boy looked up at him and smiled, and as though in answer to a challenge, Ainslie smiled back. “Well, you're warmer tonight than you were in the fog at Louisburg, aren't you?”

When he turned to open his bag he heard Mollie whisper to Alan that everything was all right now the doctor was here. He slipped a thermometer into Alan's mouth, drew down the covers and examined the boy's right side, pressing gently and stopping when he saw the wince. He replaced the covers and took the pulse, removed the thermometer, registered in his mind the information it gave him and added it to the whole. When he snapped his bag shut again he nodded to Mollie and went into the outer hall. She followed him and Ainslie closed the bedroom door.

“I'm afraid it's an acute appendicitis,” he said quietly.

“That is what Mr. Camire said.”

“You'd have done better to consult me sooner. Has Alan had a pain in his side before?”

“Last winter he talked about it sometimes.”

“Why didn't you call me then?”

“I thought it was only a stitch.”

“And the vomiting–has he done that often?”

“Sometimes, Doctor, but I did not want to be bothering you if it was only something he ate.”

Seeing the anguish in her eyes, Ainslie suppressed a rebuke. “All right,” he said, “I'll get Mrs. MacDonald to help you. Wrap him warmly in several blankets and I'll drive him into the hospital myself. There's no time to waste.”

She grew pale and her breathing came so quickly he could see she was swallowing air. “Are you going to cut him open, Doctor?”

It was a question he had heard many times before. As often as possible he answered it with a calculated laugh to brush away the layman's primitive fear of the unknown, but this time he had no laughter to spare. He found himself tensing his muscles as he had done years ago before his first operation, and he recognized the similarity of the reflex, without taking time to inspect its implications.

She clutched his wrist with a strength that surprised him. “Please, Doctor! He is so frightened. Would you speak to him? He thinks you are so wonderful. If you tell him everything is fine he will believe it. It does not matter if everything is fine or not, I don't want him to be afraid.”

All ages of women were in her face and the boy was every sick child Ainslie had ever seen. For a moment he felt dizzy. Mollie's face, the spirit of love emerging through her fear, shook him, but years of meeting emergencies had provided him with reflexes which he obeyed with certainty. He turned and walked down the stairs with calm steps. When he reached the open air the dizzy feeling left him and in its wake was a gnawing sense of his own unworthiness.

In front of the house he saw Camire holding the mare's head.

“Was I not right,
Docteur?
” Camire said.

“Yes, you were right. Stay here with the mare. I want to be ready to get under way as quickly as possible. I only hope it doesn't rupture before we reach the hospital.”

He returned to the house, climbed the stairs again and saw that Mrs. MacDonald was about to lift the blanket-bundled Alan from the bed.

“I'll do that,” he said. He bent forward, placed his hands carefully under Alan's back and thighs and lifted him. “Tell Mrs. MacNeil to hurry along,” he said to the woman. “I want her to go with us.”

With Alan in his arms, bearing him downstairs with scrupulous care to avoid any sharp movements, Ainslie was
once more totally the doctor. He stood holding the child while Mollie climbed into the carriage. Instructing Camire how to help him, he transferred the weight of the boy from his arms to Mollie's knees. Camire held Alan's head while Ainslie went around to the other side of the carriage and took his place in the driver's seat. Alan's head then rested on his thigh and Camire tucked the blankets closely about the boy's body.

“Good!” Ainslie said, “Good!”

He picked up the reins and set the horse in motion. When they rounded the corner he cracked his whip loudly, and the trained mare, knowing the whip crack came only when there was need, began to trot and make the wheels hum in the dust. They passed the long wire fence of the colliery property with Alan silently watching the bulge of the doctor's elbow, and high above them a skyful of stars.

To go into the dark, Ainslie was thinking, to go into the dark and share the patient's fear. Had he heard those words from some other doctor or were they his own? To become everybody–father, mother, child and old man–to become everyone in order to be a doctor. Osler with his drooping mustache on hands and knees woofing like a bear in order to give a child the curiosity which turned into the germ of a will to live. Was it sentimental? His hand dropped to Alan's forehead and rested there, feeling the high temperature and sensing through the heated skin the boy's fear, sensing it and knowing that while the pain was the boy's, the fear had probably come from the mother.

“How is it now?” he asked.

Alan was trying not to whimper. When he answered he said, “It's worse.”

“That's good,” Ainslie said. “That's a good sign.” He held the mare steady and watched the road. “Alan, can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“I'm going to tell you what's going to happen so you won't be surprised. You have a useless little thing inside of you called
an appendix and I'm going to take it out. It's been hurting you and making you sick, but in a few weeks you'll be telling all your friends about it and they'll be wishing they'd had an operation, too.”

Ainslie looked at the nearest landmark and calculated they would be at MacDonald's Corner within another twelve minutes.

“This is what will happen when we reach the hospital,” he went on. “You'll be carried up to a big shiny room with a high table in the middle of it, and there'll be doctors and nurses waiting for you. One of the doctors is Dr. Grant. He's the one who will put you to sleep so you won't feel the pain any more. When he tells you to breathe deeply, you'll open your mouth and breathe as hard as you can. Open your mouth as wide as a codfish if you feel like it. You'll hate the smell of the stu?, but it won't hurt you. Just at the moment when you're thinking how much you hate it, you'll drop off to sleep. And you'll like Dr. Grant. He has the reddest hair you ever saw in your life.”

After a while Alan said, “As red as Red Willie MacIsaac?”

“Compared to Dr. Grant's, Red Willie's hair is as dark as mine. Dr. Grant's hair is red enough to set the woods on fire.”

A moment later Alan said, “How long will I be asleep?”

“Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if you were asleep all night, just as if you were in bed at home. And you're going to have wonderful dreams. When I had
my
appendix out, I dreamed I was at the circus on a merry-go-round full of pipers.”

Alan's voice brightened. “Did you have yours out too?”

“Indeed I did. What's more, I've got it pickled in a bottle in my surgery right now.”

There was almost a laugh in the boy's voice. “Can I have mine in a bottle, too?”

“You wouldn't think much of it. It's an ugly little thing.”

“I want it in a bottle so I can put the bottle on the fence and throw stones at it.”

“Well, we'll ask Miss MacKay to save it for you, then.”

The wheels hummed as the mare kept up her pace. They crossed the bridge and drove up the half-empty main street, turned through MacDonald's Corner, and then they left most of the lights behind as the mare slowed for the pull up the hill.

Ainslie glanced down again and saw Alan's face staring up at the stars. “They're fine tonight, aren't they.”

Alan nodded.

“When I was seventeen I went to sea for five months all one summer and fall. One night I crawled forward on the bowsprit and lay on my back the way you're lying now. The bark had all her sails spread and it was like flying through the air chased by a pack of clouds. There was phosphorus in the water and every time the sprit lifted I could see the waves of the ship's passage blazing away from her sides like fire. Each time the sprit dipped, I could look up–just like you're doing–and see Orion swinging in and out of the gap between the jib and the fore-topmast staysail.” He pointed up. “Do you see that cluster of very bright stars? That's Orion. Orion was a great hunter.”

“But a star isn't a man.”

“No, but that cluster looks like a hunter with belt and sword, so the old people named it after a great Greek hunter called Orion.”

“Greek,” said Alan, “like Mr. Petropolis that sells the bananas?”

Ainslie laughed. “Petropolis? He's just a little fellow, but Orion was a giant.”

“Was he stronger than Giant MacAskill?”

“Where did you hear about MacAskill?”

“Mr. MacNeil told me.”

“Did he tell you about how he picked up the ship's anchor that weighed a ton and threw it?”

“No, but he told me how he blew the American over the rainbow. Was he stronger than Orion?”

“I wouldn't think so. Orion used to break the tops off
mountains and throw them at people. Or perhaps that was the Cyclops.” The mare had turned into the hospital yard now. “When you're better I'll tell you about both of them, but now we're going up to the operating room to see Dr. Grant.”

When the carriage stopped, two orderlies came down the steps with a stretcher. They lifted Alan out and placed him on it. Mollie, still silent, walked beside the stretcher holding his hand while the men carried him in. Ainslie tethered the mare and went in by another door. He was washing his hands in the alcove off the common room when he heard Grant come in and ask what the case was.

“Appendix,” Ainslie said without turning around. “An eight-year-old I'm rather fond of. His father's Archie MacNeil.”

“If the kid's half as tough as his father,” Grant said, “a little thing like an appendix won't hurt him.”

“He's not like his father in any respect whatever,” Ainslie said, and left the room.

When he was in the hall the strange feeling of being about to perform his first operation settled upon him again. He looked at his hands and saw they were trembling. He stood still and breathed deeply several times, leaned his head back and closed his eyes. Slowly he brought his nerves under control, but when he looked at his hands again he saw they were still tighter than they ought to be. He walked on down the corridor and stopped at Miss MacKay's desk.

“That case I just brought in–is the boy's mother still with him?”

“She went upstairs with the orderlies, but I don't know where she is now.”

Ainslie looked down at his hands as he massaged the fingers of his right hand with those of his left. Then he separated his hands and articulated them.

“I want one of the private rooms prepared for them,” he said. “His mother will spend the night with the boy when the operation is over.”

Miss MacKay's voice showed her surprise. “Isn't that unusual, Doctor? I mean, isn't it unusual for a patient from the collieries to have a private room?”

“The bill for the room will be sent to me,” Ainslie said shortly.

“But, Doctor…” Miss MacKay smiled. “That's quite out of the question. I was just thinking that if she didn't know…”

Ainslie flushed in sudden irritation. “Miss MacKay, it's unusual for me to have my orders questioned. If hospitals were run by intelligent people no child would ever be left without its mother after an operation. A child alone in such circumstances is a frightened child, and so long as we do things like that to children the world is going to continue to be the sort of place it is now.”

The nurse flushed under her gray hair and Ainslie hurried off, annoyed with himself for having betrayed his emotions. But after he had climbed the stairs and reached the operating room, he was cool and aloof. As he articulated his fingers once more he knew they were as strong and delicately sensitive as those of a concert pianist. Grant, his head flaming over the white sheet covering the patient, was bending down to give Alan the benefit of the routine jokes he always reserved for the moment before he held the mask over a patient's face. Ainslie nodded to him to begin and turned his back. As he inspected the instruments he heard a whimper from Alan, followed by Grant's soothing voice telling him it would not be long, and finally he heard the heavy breathing that meant Alan had gone over the frontier and no longer cared. When Ainslie approached the table he had forgotten what Alan's face looked like. All he saw was the exposed abdomen and flank of a slightly built child with delicate skin. He picked up the scalpel and made his incision.