Each Man's Son (6 page)

 

Six

N
O SUCH THOUGHT
was in Ainslie's mind when the night superintendent turned and went back along the corridor with him, giving a meticulous report along the way. “I'm afraid your OB case will have to wait,” she said. “A horrid accident has just been brought in and there's no other surgeon in the hospital. I telephoned Dr. Grant and Mrs. Grant said he'd come over at once.”

Ainslie nodded. Angus Grant was his usual anesthetist. He kept on walking through the corridor with the nurse rustling beside him.

“It may not need operating.”

“I'm afraid it will, Doctor.”

“What's the damage?”

“It's a young Newfoundlander with his hands horribly crushed. I've ordered the OR prepared. I put him in that empty room next to the ward.”

“Has he lost much blood?”

“A good deal, I'm afraid. They had tied some filthy rags around his wrists. Dr. Weir took them off and applied tourniquets. He hasn't lost consciousness.”

“What about Mrs. Morton? Who's looking after her?”

“Dr. Weir's with her now. He says it may be a very long labor.”

“Yes, I know. Is Weir the only houseman on duty tonight?”

“Yes, he is at the moment.”

“All right. Let's take a look at this case. You may have to rouse out another houseman later.”

When they reached the room next to the ward Ainslie saw a young, pain-drawn face staring up at him from white sheets. The boy's body was rigid from fright and dark stains were visible on the fresh bandages covering his wrists and hands. While the nurse stood at the foot of the bed, Ainslie drew up a chair, sat down and put his hand on the boy's forehead. It was covered with sweat and too cold for his liking.

Suddenly the doctor smiled and the pug-nosed face watched him. “Tell me something–how old are you?” Ainslie said.

“Twenty, zurr.”

“And not long out of Newfoundland, eh?”

“No, zurr.”

As Ainslie held the frightened eyes, all the strain faded from his own face. By an effort beyond the reach of words he tried to tell the boy that his fear was being absorbed and conquered. He said nothing for some minutes. Then, in a tone of voice that betrayed none of the considerations coursing through his mind, he said, “You've had a bit of bad luck, haven't you?”

“It's warse than bad luck, zurr.”

“How do you know? You're not the doctor.” He was still smiling and the boy made an effort to smile back. “Have you ever been in a hospital before?”

“No, zurr.”

“Well, this is a place where people are made right again. We're going to take good care of you. You're in the best and safest place in the world.”

The boy searched his face and Ainslie smiled back at him calmly. Then he rose and set quietly to work, checking the pulse, listening to the heart, looking at the chart of the blood pressure. He motioned to the nurse and she laid her hand on
the boy's forehead, turning his head away while Ainslie removed the bandages from one of the hands. Weir had done a good job of packing them. The doctor pressed several places gently while he watched the boy's face for signs of pain, but the expression on the pug-nosed face did not alter and Ainslie replaced the outer bandages. When he examined the other hand the boy winced sharply.

“Good!” Ainslie said, and replaced this bandage, too.

After he had examined the boy's entire body and found only a livid, spreading bruise on the left side, with no internal injuries which could be detected, he replaced the blankets and smiled again.

“I don't know what happened to you, but it seems as hard as ever to kill a Newfoundlander.”

The boy gave a twisted grin.

“I'm going to put you to sleep for a little while and you're not to be afraid. The stu? you have to breath will smell bad for a minute or two, but it won't smell half as bad as a beach after the catch is in and the fish have been gutted.”

“There be beaches in Labrador,” the boy said, speaking slowly through the narcotics that had been given him, “thet do stink 'orrible when the sun gits to 'em.”

“Indeed they do. I've smelled some of them myself. Now you're going to sleep and when you wake up safe and sound you won't be feeling a thing.”

The boy's eyes blurred with sudden tears and his Adam's apple moved up and down as he swallowed. Ainslie stood calmly smiling at him, a lock of dark hair loose over his forehead, and so he stayed until he sensed that he had reached through the boy's fear and found his courage.

Outside in the corridor he gave the nurse instructions in a quick, precise undertone and then hurried away to mount the stairs two at a time. He found Angus Grant waiting for him in the changing room, and as he made himself ready he
answered the big, red-haired anesthetist's questions about the case.

“What I don't understand,” Ainslie added after explaining the condition of the two hands, “is how such an accident could have happened. The pits and machine shops closed hours ago. It's damned odd.”

“Well,” said Grant, “I hope it won't take long. The
Strand
came today and I was halfway through the new Sherlock Holmes.”

He laughed as Ainslie grunted his disapproval of such reading habits. The two men went to the operating room side by side, and by the time they reached it Ainslie's concentration was so intense he did not look at the patient on the table or bother to nod to the nurse and junior houseman in attendance. He stayed out of the Newfoundlander's sight until Grant set to work, and then he checked his instruments, articulated his fingers several times, and stood as though frozen until Grant gave him the signal. If he hesitated more than a fractured second in making his decisions while he worked, no one who watched was aware of it.

When the operation was finished and he stood back, his shoulders suddenly drooped. He took off his rubber gloves and handed them to a nurse. Then he nodded to Grant, squared his shoulders and walked briskly out of the operating room, down the corridor and down the stairs to the desk of Miss MacKay.

“Any news from Dr. Weir?” he said to her.

“No, Doctor. Are you going up there now?”

“Not unless Weir is in need of me. There's another matter I want to attend to first.”

Miss MacKay pursed her lips. “I'm afraid Mr. Morton is getting very impatient to see you.”

“He's not having the baby. Neither has he got a rheumatic heart. Let him cool his heels. He should have worried about
his wife's heart nine months ago. I want to get to the bottom of this accident case.”

“I'm sorry, Doctor,” said Miss MacKay, “I tried to get Dr. McCuen, but he was out.”

“What for? Oh–his colliery, was it? Well, you got me instead. That young Newfoundlander is probably illiterate and the loss of his hands is going to be a serious thing for him. I've saved four fingers out of ten and I was lucky to be able to do that much. Three was the best I'd bargained for. How did it happen? If he was on company property he's entitled to some compensation.”

Miss MacKay made a gesture of helplessness. “The men who brought him in talked such a lingo I couldn't understand a word they said. You know what those outport Newfoundlanders are like when they all speak at once.”

Ainslie was walking up and down in front of her desk. He stopped and looked at her. “Didn't you tell them to wait? Where did they go?”

“I ordered them to stay in the outpatients' waiting room. That's probably where they still are.”

Ainslie was halfway down the corridor before she finished speaking. In the outpatients' room he found three young men, all with cowlicks in their hair and flat cloth caps in their hands, sitting on a varnished oak bench. They rose respectfully when he entered and watched him with the humble, fearful, protective expressions such people nearly always have in the presence of doctors. When he addressed them Ainslie's voice had lost its sharpness. He had always been fond of Newfoundlanders and he respected them as a man living in a hard country respects neighbors who live in a land even harder.

“Are you the men who brought in the boy with crushed hands?”

“Yes, zurr.”

“Are you members of his family?”

“No, zurr.”

“Where does he live?”

“Blow-Me-Down, zurr.”

“I mean here, not in Newfoundland.”

“Bill don't live no place 'ere, Doctor. But 'is old man and old woman and 'is brother Garge do live in Blow-Me-Down.”

Ainslie's large eyes pinned their stares to his own. As he searched their expressions he saw no violence in them and knew the patient was not here as the result of a brawl. But he also knew they were trying to conceal something.

“Now see here,” he said. “The first thing for you to understand is this–I'll put up with no lying.”

“No, zurr.”

“Very well. The second thing for you to understand is that I'm trying to help your friend. He's in need of help. I had to amputate.”

They looked at him blankly.

“I've just cut off one of his hands and part of the other.”

Ainslie knew they were moved, but their faces still showed nothing. One of them said, “I told 'e, Tom, they was squatten all abroad.”

“Then you weren't with him at the time it happened?”

“Not us, zurr. But Tom, 'ere, 'e was with 'im.”

Ainslie turned to a freckle-faced youth with sandy hair and a telltale line of coal dust circling his neck. After a series of sharp questions a story came together.

Tom and the injured boy had arrived in North Sydney the week before on a schooner from St. John's. There they had decided to leave their ship. Two days later they found a job breaking coal at the pithead of McCuen's colliery, and for the first time in their lives they encountered machinery more complicated than a motorboat engine. There was a steel cable in the engine house which fascinated them in particular. It seemed to come out of the floor very fast with a perpetual motion as though there were no end to it. Near the roof it disappeared into a wooden housing, then it appeared again
about a foot and a half away and ran down again into the floor with what seemed to be the same perpetual motion. Tom was sure it was not just one cable but two, because one ran up and the other ran down. Bill thought it was a single cable. All week they argued about it, then Bill bet Tom a quarter that it was one cable and said he would prove it. Late this afternoon they had seen the foreman leave the engine house and both of them had sneaked in. They were alone inside and Bill was ready to win the quarter. He grabbed the upgoing cable to find out where it was bound for, and it swept him to the roof. Before he knew what was happening, his hands were crushed against the housing, and if Tom had not been underneath when he fell he might have killed himself. Tom tore off his shirt and bound up Bill's wrists as soon as he caught his breath and then he tried to wipe up the floor because they were afraid of getting into trouble with the foreman. But no one saw them and they had sneaked out the gate together and walked half a mile to the house of the two friends who were here with Tom. Everyone had taken some rum to help them think it over and then Bill fainted. So they finally carried him out to a coal cart and brought him to the hospital.

Except for questions now and then to keep the story from drifting off into aimless legend-making, Ainslie listened in grim silence. When he decided they had told him everything, he said shortly to the one called Tom, “Come with me.”

The boy followed him down the corridor, his nostrils twitching with apprehension at the fear-inspiring smells of the hospital, and Ainslie turned him over to Miss MacKay with instructions to question him again and make out a report for the company.

After he had changed his gown and settled himself into his dark suit, Ainslie's tension began to ease. He went upstairs to see his OB case and then to pacify an anxious and indignant husband. When he returned to Mrs. Morton's room he found her in a state of manic talkativeness, so he sat down and
forced himself to be calm in order to calm her. Dr. Weir went out and returned, and by the time Ainslie left, her fears had been submerged by her interest in the details of her own case as Ainslie had outlined them for her.

Once again Ainslie beat his way down the corridor, down the stairs and along another corridor to the doctors' common room.

 

Seven

T
HE ROOM WAS EMPTY
when he closed the door behind him, for Grant had already gone home. It had the heavy smell of rooms where tired men relax and smoke their pipes. No curtains were at the windows and there were no pictures on the walls, but the floor was carpeted and two walls were covered by shelves of medical books and journals. A large oak table stood in the center of the room, a shaded lamp rested in the middle of it, two worn armchairs faced each other on either side of an empty hearth, and other chairs lurked in the shadows. The founder of the hospital had intended the room as a library. It still served that purpose, but few of the doctors ever found time to study a portion of the books on its shelves.

Ainslie dropped into one of the armchairs beside the hearth. He was still stiff with a tension that had become chronic. He heard through the open window the distant scream of tramcar wheels grinding around MacDonald's Corner. On the hat rack he recognized a battered felt with several fishing flies hooked to its ribbon and recognized it as the property of Big Collie McCuen, a man who might have found his professional level more easily in Nelson's fleet than on the staff of a hospital, Ainslie thought. In the corner behind the hat rack were a heavy blackthorn and a worn umbrella. Ordinarily Ainslie would have seen none of these things.
Tonight his eyes missed nothing. The blackthorn belonged to Jack Paterson, a man built as ponderously as McCuen, a heavy breather and a heavy eater, but a sound enough doctor so far as he went. His chief weakness was his incapacity for learning anything new and his resentment of those who did. It was Paterson who had dubbed Ainslie the Regius Professor. The umbrella belonged to Ronald Sutherland, a good surgeon but tied inexorably to the textbooks. Ainslie sighed and closed his eyes. The accouterments of his colleagues reminded him how few men there were in Broughton with whom he could talk.

Beyond the oak door the hospital was still. Ainslie began to feel some of the tension easing out of the muscles of his back and passing like a quivering presence down his legs and out his toes. He lay back in the half-darkness and tried to sleep, but his mind refused to blur. He thought about Margaret and the things she had said to him. Did they spring from something she had been thinking about for a long time or were they words of the moment only? It made no difference. They were one more symptom to add to the diagnosis. He was past forty, he had no children, he was in a treadmill which he could neither slow down nor escape by jumping off, and Margaret's unhappiness made him feel increasingly guilty day by day.

He heard the post office clock striking the hour, but he missed the count and could not trouble to take out his watch to check the time. When had he got to sleep last night? He couldn't remember. As his mind began to blur at last he saw the curve of a woman's hip as golden as a harvest moon, but when he reached out to caress it, the color changed to white and it was Margaret. The doctor's hands went loose on the arms of his chair, his head dropped to one side and his dark hair became tousled over his forehead. The lines of his face smoothed perceptibly as his consciousness disappeared like a ship into a fog.

Dr. Dougald MacKenzie was standing over him when Ainslie's eyes opened, and for an instant Ainslie thought he
was looking up at the picture of the founder of the hospital that hung over the mantel of the fireplace, rather than at the man himself. But he came out of sleep with a doctor's trained rapidity. He rubbed his forehead and looked with undenied pleasure at his old friend, the only person in the whole of Cape Breton whom he honored totally and without question.

“Sorry, Dan. I should have left you to rest.”

“I wasn't really asleep.” Ainslie sat up. “What time is it, anyway?”

Dr. MacKenzie took a gold hunter from his pocket and snapped open the cover. “Twenty past eleven. What keeps you here so late tonight?”

“A confinement. It's Morton's wife. I thought it was best to bring her in here because she's got a bad heart and I don't like the look of it.”

MacKenzie sat down in the other armchair across the hearth, jerked it forward and lifted his long legs until his heels rested on the edge of the low mantel. His heels had been scraping that mantel ever since it had been built, but this was MacKenzie's favorite posture at home and he saw no reason to change it here.

Ainslie felt some of the weight leave his mind as he looked at the old man. Dougald MacKenzie was now seventy-six, he was still active and all his life he had been equal to whatever he had tried to do. In the early days of his practice he had ranged over the whole of Cape Breton, and it was said with truth that he had once known every family in the island. The story of his three-year assault on the smallpox had already become a legend. He had traveled by carriage, by horseback and by boat until he had visited every village and outpost to vaccinate the children, and it had taken all his force, all his volume of character, to persuade some of the parents to let him do so. His physical size had helped him. MacKenzie was six feet four and broad in proportion. His feet were so big his
boots were made to order, and now, with the whole length and breadth of them exposed on the mantel, the toes wide, boxed and glistening with polish, they looked to Ainslie like a pair of bear cubs winking down at him in the light.

“Tired?” MacKenzie said, looking sideways at Ainslie.

“Not particularly.”

“Why not admit once in a while that you're human? It would do you good.”

“I'm human enough. Did Miss MacKay tell you about the amputation I did tonight?”

“She did, indeed!”

“That upset me. They're such fools!”

“Of course they are.” MacKenzie's strong white teeth showed in a smile as he took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. “At that, it's better than it was in the old days when we were a novelty to them. I well remember an old farmer near Cape North who never forgave me for telling him that the only reason why he was plagued with boils was that he ate nothing but porridge and pork and beans. He lived all alone with his Bible and he was convinced he was the Chosen of the Lord. The boils made him a latter-day Job.” MacKenzie chuckled. “Man's trouble isn't what he does or doesn't do, it's what he dreams. That old fellow was dead in a few months without a boil on his body. I changed his diet and I probably killed him by telling him the truth.”

Ainslie watched MacKenzie's large, lined thumb pressing the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and he wondered as he had often wondered before how a man with such huge hands had been able to perform thousands of careful, precise operations. He saw the long mustache, drooping at the ends, making its white splash against the ruddy cheeks, and thought about the change in MacKenzie's personality in recent years. When Ainslie had first met him, Dr. MacKenzie had been consciously the chief, a silent, earnest listener who was so absorbed
in medicine he never seemed able to give a moment's thought to anything else. After giving up practice in the colliery to which he had been attached, he had remained as chief surgeon and director of the hospital which owed its existence to his energy and determination. At one time or another all the doctors in Cape Breton had come under his influence. But now he lived alone, and in his partial retirement he had taken to reading with the same quiet thoroughness he had once given to his work. It was the reading that had made him more talkative and self-revealing, less clinical and more given to speculation. There had been a time when Ainslie had believed MacKenzie to be a genius, but he knew now that the old man's mind was one which understood, rather than discovered.

“I suppose I ought to be going home,” MacKenzie said without moving from his chair. “Since Janet died and the children went away that house of mine gets on my nerves. Some day you'll know what it's like to be afraid of going home in the dark.”

MacKenzie's rich bass voice broke into a laugh and Ainslie watched the tobacco smoke rising in clouds over his stiff white hair. It was the head of an old Highland chief, but it was also the face of a man who had worked with Lister in the Old Country and against Lister's advice had deliberately chosen to return to his isolated island. That choice, and the hard years since he had made it, were all marked in the expression of his deep blue eyes. Ainslie knew himself to be grateful to MacKenzie for many things which would never be told, but perhaps for nothing more than the sense he had given him of belonging to the great world of international medicine.

“It's the unnecessary nonsense that I grow weary of,” he heard himself saying. “About a third of the work I do is unnecessary. Last night it was a hysterical old woman with indigestion. The night before I was had out by a blackguard who'd gotten into a brawl and wanted me to patch his eye. Och, I could brain them!”

“Why don't you?” MacKenzie smiled. “You can put a stop to that sort of thing any time you want to, and when you stop feeling sorry for yourself, you'll do it.”

Ainslie flushed. “How? By barricading my surgery door?”

“No. There are other ways. The turning point in my life was that flash explosion fifteen years ago in my colliery. Do you remember it?”

“Yes, I remember.” The flush began to recede.

“Since that time I've saved myself a total of about three years of sleep. I'd been on my feet fifty-eight hours by the clock after that explosion and I'd just managed to get to bed when the surgery bell rang. I went down in my nightgown and there was Jumping Rorie MacNair with nothing worse than a cracked septum and a black eye. ‘It took two of them to fix me, Doctor, honest to God'–that was how he introduced himself.” MacKenzie paused. “Didn't I ever tell you that story?”

“No.”

“I should have. I hauled Rorie inside by the scruff of the neck–I could do it in those days–and I said, ‘It's only going to take one man to fix you now.' And I made him stand in my surgery and begin to count the bottles with the Jolly Roger on them. When he got to twenty I said, ‘Do you know what the skull and crossbones mean?' ‘Indeed, Doctor, yes I do.' ‘Do you know who signs death certificates when men die?' He knew that, too. ‘Well, Rorie,' I said, ‘think this over. The doctor is a very busy man. The doctor gets tired and needs sleep just like other people. And when the doctor gets wakened up by a rogue at three in the morning, only God Himself has the slightest idea what he might think of doing. Wouldn't it be an awful thing, Rorie, the next time you came in here like this for nothing, if you died knowing that the man who would sign your certificate was going to be me?'”

MacKenzie's right eyebrow cocked as he looked at Ainslie, his blue eyes twinkling. “It fixed him, Dan. What's more, it
fixed the whole lot of them in my colliery. I never got so much respect in my life as I got after that.”

Ainslie pulled himself to his feet, stretched and then began to laugh grudgingly, more at the old man's remembered pleasure than at the implications of the story, for any sense of fun had to rest in his mind for a while before it began to amuse him.

“It's time for me to have another look at Mrs. Morton,” he said as he left the room.

The hospital was dark and silent as he walked through it. In Mrs. Morton's room the nurse in charge was timing the pains and Mrs. Morton was half asleep as she waited for the next one. Ainslie looked at the nurse's chart, made a mental estimate and went away again. In the ward he discovered that the Newfoundland boy had vomited twice on coming out of the anesthetic, but now was resting. After glancing at the charts of several patients on whom he had operated earlier in the week, Ainslie retraced his steps. On his way he saw that Mrs. Morton's husband was with her and he did not go in.

Dr. MacKenzie was still in the common room, hunched over the table reading. Ainslie took off his shoes, hung up his jacket and stretched out in the chair he had left, flexing and unflexing his toes.

MacKenzie closed his book and pushed it aside. “It's nearly midnight,” he said. “Why don't you go to sleep? Weir's on duty, isn't he?”

“I don't feel like sleeping.” Ainslie stretched. “If I'd remembered to bring my Homer I might have got through a hundred lines.”

MacKenzie turned away from the table and looked into the empty hearth, and as the minutes passed and he made no further move Ainslie had the unmistakable impression that the old man was gathering his forces.

“Margaret's right,” MacKenzie said finally. “Your tension's not caused by your work. It's rather a new thing they're calling
hypertension.” He smiled. “But then, you're rather a new type of man.”

Ainslie ignored the last comment. He said sharply, “Margaret? What's she been seeing you about?”

“Friendship, you might say. After all, I was the first person in this world to make her acquaintance.” MacKenzie's voice became the persuasive voice of a doctor confronted by a recalcitrant patient. “Dan, you're the best man we ever had here.” The old man spoke gently. “But for the past three years you've been getting so irritable there's no knowing what to do with you. What's causing it? Don't tell me it's your work, because it isn't.”

Ainslie crossed and uncrossed his legs. He saw the old man's kindly smile and he knew it was prompted by a deep understanding, but he felt himself rigidly on the defensive.

“Whenever a man courts unnecessary work–and believe me, you've been doing it–it's not natural,” MacKenzie went on. “You don't really want to read Homer tonight. Why do you flog yourself into doing things like that?”

“Benjamin Jowett could read Greek as easily as he could read English.”

“Could he also remove an appendix?” The blue eyes were studying Ainslie closely. “You're forty-two years old, and you're going into a pretty hard time of life. A man in middle age is like a ship on fire at sea with a gale driving her.”