Boon Island - Kenneth Roberts [140]
Dr. Packer came in, followed by two women in gray dresses. One, the Widow Hubbard, was short and stout and had a luxuriant mustache. The other, Widow Macklin, was tall and cheerful-looking with a cast in one eye that
Page 360
made her seem to be examining a distant object when in reality she was looking straight ahead.
"Now then," Dr. Packer said to Captain Dean, "we'll have off these bandages. Colonel Pepperrell sent word he wants to see you as soon as you're fit to be seen. There's some others too. They want to hear all about it. How do they think I'll get around to seeing all my other patients if I yap, yap, yap all day about you!"
The nurses brought buckets and rags, stoked the fire, swept the barn floor and set up a table for the gifts Captain Furber had mentioned.
As the doctor sopped at our legs and feet with rags dipped in the concoction in one of the buckets, he rumbled fretfully about our condition. "Hurt much?" he asked. When we said No: no more than an aching tooth, he demanded further details about the treatment our feet had received after the cutting off of our boots.
"There's something here I ought to get to the bottom of," he mumbled again and again. "You'd lost toenails when you cut off your boots, and some toes came off when you washed 'em in urine. Then you put on pieces of linen and some layers of oakum. Then you went out on the rock and kept getting your feet wet, and had no fire."
We said that was correct.
"Hurt much?" he asked again.
Captain Dean saidand Neal and I agreedthat the most painful of all was when we put our hands in water to loosen mussels. We tried to explain to him the excruciating agony that almost paralyzed us after the fifth or sixth immersion; but pain, of course, can't be described.
Page 361
"Mussels, now," the doctor said. "Could mussels have anything to do with it?"
We didn't know.
"And you ate seaweed every day," he ruminated. "Could seaweed be a remedy against frostbite?"
"I don't know why I made 'em eat seaweed," the captain said. "I knew we had to eat it. There wasn't much of anything else till Chips Bullock died. The fat from Chips's kidneys helped us a little. You'd better not forget to mention kidney fat if you make a report to those Boston doctors. It certainly eased the pain in our feet and legs."
"It's annoying," Dr. Packer said. "We can't go out to Boon Island and carry on experiments under the conditions you encountered, because in the first place nobody'd be such an idiot as to go there under those conditions; and in the second place, everybody that went would die before we found out anything. Exasperating!"
"How long before we'll be able to walk?" Captain Dean asked.
"Well," Dr. Packer said, "we could move you to an upstairs room today, if you felt you'd like to get out of this barn and into a comfortable bed."
"I don't want to," Captain Dean said. "I'd feel choked in a comfortable bed. I'd rather stay here, where we can practice walking again with only about half our feet."
Dr. Packer looked relieved. "That's the best thing to dostay where you'll be out from under foot, and handy to the privy."
"How's my brother?" Captain Dean asked. "How's the rest of 'em?"
"Your brother's all right," Dr. Packer said. "He's just
Page 362
the same as you. He lost toes, the same as you did; but when they fell off, they sort of healed themselves, just like those lizards down in Antigua, that shed their tails if you so much as look at 'em."
He pronounced it Antigga, so I knew he'd sailed thereprobably in one of Pepperrell's vessels.
"When can I see my brother?" Captain Dean asked.
"Since you'll stay here in the barn," Dr. Packer said, "I think I'll move him over here later today. I don't think much of the sailors he's with. If I tell 'em they can have a certain amount to eat, they