Galore - Michael Crummey [71]
The Honorable Member’s official words of welcome were slurred and the doctor thought him drunk at first, the swelling on the right side of his face disguised by the handlebar moustache and beard. —If you would be so kind, Shambler managed, rubbing his cheek.
The surgeon was an American, fresh out of medical school in Baltimore. Harold Newman. Granny glasses on a young face, his smile like a whitewashed fence. —I hope there’s no underlying message, Newman said as he pried the infected molar loose, to the fact the district elected a mortician to government.
—Uhnrh uur hhunnrhu, Shambler replied.
Newman’s father was a doctor, as was his father before him. —It was passed on to me, Newman told Shambler, like a disease. He preferred fishing, mountain climbing, big-game hunting and sailing to anything he encountered at home in Hartford or in medical school. He’d spent a summer away from his studies in Alaska and almost stayed for good. Not yet twenty-six, lanky and athletic, he’d come to Newfoundland to avoid the stultification of an urban practice, the straitjacket of Connecticut manners and expectations. Days before he left the States he’d broken off an engagement to a distant cousin brokered by his mother. —My parents, he said, have all but disowned me for coming here. He stuffed cotton into the crater that surrendered Shambler’s tooth. Wild country was what drew him to Newfoundland, rivers and lakes, caribou and black bear and ocean. Half a world away from his father was also a draw.
The relief Shambler felt after the extraction made him giddy. —A drink, he muffled through the mouthful of cotton. —A drink to welcome the good doctor.
He was working in a corner of Shambler’s tavern, a long line of people who followed him up from the wharf waiting their turn at the door. Shambler set a bottle of dark rum on the counter and parceled out a shot to patients before their turn in the chair.
—You see now how he gets elected, the next in line told the doctor.
Newman had never encountered mouths in such a state of decay and sorry misalignment. Everyone he saw was in need of dentistry and he spent the afternoon packing gums with cocaine before reefing with the forceps, his forearms flecked with blood, white shards of enamel under his feet.
A girl sat in the empty chair and smiled up at him. —I wants them all out, she said.
—All what?
—Me teeth, she said. —I wants them all pulled.
—How old are you, miss?
—Sixteen.
She said some more then that was incomprehensible to Newman, though Shambler laughed and slapped his hand on the bar. She was tall and barefoot, the part in her brown hair as sharp as a blade. Not beautiful, Newman thought, but handsome. Something non-European in the features, in the fullness of the nostrils and lips, the olive skin. —Open wide, he said. The tendons in her neck pulling taut as she tipped her head back. The delicate line of the clavicle. —There’s two that may need to come out, he said.
—I won’t get out of this chair till they’re every one gone, she told him. Or so he guessed.
—There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the rest of your teeth.
She went on awhile in response, Newman trying desperately to pick words from the rushing stream. He glanced across at Shambler.
—She says they’re only going to cause her grief later on, Shambler translated. —And she’ll as like be somewhere she got no one to pull them. The Honorable Member shrugged to say he had no argument to counter the girl’s insistence. She got up from the chair an hour later, her mouth packed with cotton and her bloody teeth in a handkerchief.
Shambler called Newman to the counter. —You’ll want a little pick-me-up, he said and handed the doctor a tumbler of rum. Newman took a mouthful and shook his head. Startled to have disfigured so pretty a face. —I should have refused her, I suppose.
Shambler spat a clot of blood into an empty glass.