Doc - Mary Doria Russell [128]
Wyatt didn’t feel a thing when that first tooth was pulled, but Morgan still had a knot on the back of his head from where he hit the doorknob going down. When he came to, Doc was furious with him. “Dammit, Morgan, I didn’t know whether to shit or go bust! There’s Wyatt in the chair, and there’s you on the floor, and there’s the Eberhardt boy with eyes like saucers, sayin’ ‘I pump drill now, sir?’ I can’t have it, Morg—not while I’ve got a patient under ether. It’s too dangerous!” So Mattie Blaylock came with Wyatt for the next three appointments. She was real good about things, too, cooking him soft stuff like eggs and soup for a few days after each session, while his mouth was sore.
“What is that song?” Morg asked after a while.
Doc looked up, puzzled.
“The one you were whistling.”
“Was I—?” Doc thought for a moment. “Oh! The Rondo from Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.”
Morgan knew what a violin was, anyways. “You play fiddle, too?”
“Not by a wide mile,” Doc murmured, eyes on the mount. “When I was in dental school, I went to every concert and recital I could at the Philadelphia Academy of Music. Fell in love with that piece … I was studyin’ the score when we were learnin’ to make bridges. Comes back to me, I guess.”
Must be hard on him, Morg thought, being so far from things like that. “Real pretty tune,” he said.
“Indeed. You have excellent taste, Morgan.” Doc put the tools down and stretched out his back, then winced suddenly, like he was snakebit. He sat still for a time, but relaxed again and went on. “Our houseboy—Wilson?—he disapproved of whistlin’ somethin’ fierce. Always said it was common. ‘A low-class, cracker habit,’ Wilson called it, but Mamma encouraged the practice when I was a boy.”
“Why would she want you to do something low-class?”
“Helped me establish control over the orbicularis oris.” Doc gestured with a finger, circling his mouth. His hand dropped into his lap and he considered Morgan for a time, like he was deciding something. “I was born with a harelip,” he said finally. “The defect was repaired when I was a baby.”
Morgan couldn’t help staring.
Doc threw his head back and stared right back, like he was daring Morg to make fun. “It is nothin’ to be ashamed of,” he declared.
And you could tell somehow: it was his mamma’s voice Doc heard when he was saying how it was nothing to be ashamed of, but he was ashamed—a little, anyways. You could tell that, too.
Morg made himself stop looking at Doc’s mouth. “I knew a kid once who had a harelip. I didn’t know they could fix it.”
“My Uncle John is a fine surgeon. You can—Oh, hell—Dammit! Some kind of—obstruction in the bronchus—I just can’t seem to—”
Morg put the lamp down and waited again while the bourbon was administered and the coughing eased off. Since the fall on the Fourth, Doc had been drinking more than usual. He drank it a little at a time, though, and it didn’t seem to affect him beyond helping with the cough. His eyes stayed clear and his hands were steady when he went back to work on the denture. It was such finicky work, but he seemed to have all the patience in the world, doing it. Strange, for a man who’d fly off the handle so easy, otherwise.
“I wouldn’t last five minutes doing what you are,” Morg said. “How can you spend so much time on something so little?”
“It’s hours for me, but it’ll be in Wyatt’s mouth for years. The tiniest flaw will be a trial to him … We all have different gifts, Mamma used to say. I’ve watched you and your brother walk straight into a mob and wondered, Where do they get the sand? I couldn’t do what you do.”
“You’ve got plenty of sand, Doc.”
“Morgan,” Doc said, “I am doin’ my best … How are you and Mr. Dickens gettin’ along?”
“I like him better than Dostoevsky,” Morg admitted. “Oliver Twist reminds me of Wyatt when he was a kid. I liked how Oliver stands up for himself and that other kid when they was so hungry. Wyatt was like that. He cannot abide a bully. Never could, even when he was little.”
“And why do you suppose that is?”
“Just his nature, I guess.”
“You met Mr. Fagin yet?