Galore - Michael Crummey [72]
—She’s hardly more than a child.
—Bride was never a child, is the truth of it, Doctor. I minds the time Thomas Trass tried to come aboard of her when she wasn’t much above twelve. Trass was drunk and pawing at her and he said, Bride, I’d love to get into that little dress of yours. Shambler ducked his chin to his chest, trying to head off a spurt of laughter. —And Bride said, Sure there’s already one asshole in there Mr. Trass, why would I want another one.
Newman turned his head to the door as if he might catch a glimpse of her still.
—What a saucy little bitch, Shambler said when he’d caught his breath. —It’s two years you signed on for is it, Doctor?
—That’s right.
—Any regrets now you had a look at the place?
Newman downed the last of his rum and rolled his shirtsleeves another turn up his arms. He felt bizarrely elated. —No, he said. —No, I think I’ll be quite happy here.
He took over an abandoned house near the public school, setting up an examination room and a surgery in the front rooms and sleeping on the second floor. Half the men on the shore were away at the cod fishery on the Labrador for the summer and he saw mostly women and old men and children in those first months. He set broken limbs and pulled teeth, he treated swollen glands and apoplexy and typhoid, gangrene and pneumonia and asthma. When the fishermen returned in September he dealt with strains and sprains and boils, water pups, bones rotten with tuberculosis, cuts from fish knives gone septic under a foul poultice of molasses and bread.
The patients he saw were virtually incapable of articulating their troubles, offering only the broadest, most childish descriptions of what ailed them. I finds me side, they told him. I finds me legs. I got a pain up tru me, they said. Bad head, bad back. Bad stomach, which sometimes meant trouble breathing. Even under questioning they had difficulty presenting specific symptoms, which made them sound like a crowd of hypochondriacs, but it was rare to root out a malingerer. People on the shore were unable to distinguish illness or injury from the ordinary strain and torment of their days until they were crippled and it was only the desperate who braved the clinic, and only after they’d exhausted every quack potion and home remedy available. No one had money to spare for treatment. They paid the doctor with potatoes and cabbage and salt fish, with a turn of split wood, with pork hocks and herring and dippers of fresh blueberries and bakeapples, with a day’s work on the roof or help digging a well, with spruce beer and goat’s milk and eggs, with partridge and turr, with live hens.
Newman’s company was actively courted by the town’s quality and he suffered their attentions with a curt politeness meant to keep them at bay. He ate at Selina’s House where Ann Hope Sellers offered lectures on a variety of political subjects while Absalom and their youngest daughter occupied themselves with the needs of an ancient aunt. Ann Hope was a long-time abolitionist and had written some two hundred letters to the House of Lords and to the Congress and president of the United States on the matter. —You’ve undoubtedly become acquainted with Nigger Ralph’s Pond, she said. The name, she felt, was a black mark on the shore.
—A black mark, Mrs. Sellers?
Ann Hope set down her soup spoon. —You know what I mean, Doctor, she said.
Ann Hope had long since retired from teaching, but she’d devoted the last five years to having the new public school built near the Episcopal church. There was no money for desks or books or fuel to heat the building and she meant to make it an issue in the next election.
The daughter was past thirty, with the guarded look of someone trying to hide a permanent scar. Insular, he could see, but not shy. She taught in the unfurnished school but showed little interest in the upcoming campaign or anything political. Everyone referred to the aunt as Mrs. Gallery. The old woman was suffering the advanced stages of senility and she spent the meal cursing a long-dead husband who