Galore - Michael Crummey [111]
He drank the cocktail to the dregs and set his forehead on the desk with his eyes closed until Bride came for him. He splinted the broken finger and prescribed strict bedrest for the strained back and spent the rest of the morning dealing with the steady stream of patients as they arrived. That sliver of discomfort with him the entire time, its suggestion of some buried thing he couldn’t guess the borders of. He’d just lifted his head from an impacted molar when Barnaby Shambler appeared at the door. The member opened his coat to reveal the neck of a bottle in an inside pocket. —You’ll want a little pick-me-up, Doctor.
It was half an hour more of work before he was able to join Shambler in the office. He poured a tumbler of rum for his guest and mixed himself another cocktail of ethyl alcohol and juniper berries. —You prefer the medicinal drink? Shambler said.
—I prefer not smelling like a drunk while I work.
—Your Methodist inamorata disapproves, I imagine?
—Don’t talk riddles to me this morning.
—Now Doctor, Shambler said. —Let’s not be coy.
—Fair enough, Newman said. He took the affidavit out of a drawer and tossed it across the desk. —You are a disgrace to your office, Shambles.
—Without a doubt.
—You don’t have a single shred of integrity.
Shambler raised his glass. —Preaching to the choir, Doctor.
—You are an absolute pig of a man.
Shambler drew his head back, a look of feigned hurt on his face. —I preferred you when you were being coy.
—Judah Devine is no more danger to the King than the ass you’re sitting on.
—Undoubtedly so.
—Goddamn it, Newman said. —I don’t understand how you can be party to such a farce.
Shambler raised his shoulders and dropped them in an elaborate sigh. —I live here, he said. He seemed genuinely exhausted. —Look, he said, play along and you’ll have the hospital you want. No one ends his days with his neck in a noose. And Levi gets some satisfaction for the loss of his ears, among sundry other complaints. It seems a perfectly reasonable course of action to the ass I’m sitting on.
Newman finished his drink. —Damn it, he said. —Damn it all to hell.
Shambler looked into his empty glass, hesitating over a question. Glanced up at Newman finally. —Any regrets, Doctor?
The last of his patients was dealt with by mid-afternoon and Newman took his muzzle-loader into the backcountry, tramping through the first heavy frost of the fall. He wanted motion and silence, to let his mind skim out over the barrens like a stone across the surface of a pond. To see where it came to rest once it settled.
He crested a rise a mile beyond Nigger Ralph’s Pond just as the sun was dipping behind the Breakers, three hills spooned one into the next like a run of waves curling onto a beach. He’d always loved those hills, the sculpted look of them mirroring one another precisely. They loomed on the horizon and regardless how far he traveled in their direction they always appeared the same distance off. The melancholy surge he’d felt in Bride’s presence that morning came over him again, knowing he’d never get closer to them than this. And his mind dropped into the edgeless black of what had been worrying him all day.
None of this was his. He was being swallowed up body and bone by the shore and he didn’t belong here regardless. The place he loved would never return his feelings as he wished. The irrefutable fact of it made him turn on his heel like a soldier ordered about-face and he made his way back toward the coastline. The sky startling alive with