Galore - Michael Crummey [89]
Newman nodded. He thought of regret as Barnaby Shambler’s word. —Any regrets, Doctor? Shambler asked each time the doctor committed to yet another contract extension.
—Not a one, Newman said and the answer felt more evasive every time.
He lived alone in the clinic, the woman who occupied his thoughts in rare moments of quiet was married and born-again beside, the work relentless and most of what he could do for people provisional or useless. It didn’t amount to much of a life, looked at through his father’s eyes. He’d traveled home to the States on three occasions in the past five years, touring to raise funds for clinic equipment and medicine, trying to explain the place to industrialists and politicians and professional philanthropists. He spoke at colleges, at men’s and women’s clubs and churches, in the private drawing rooms of the wealthy. He brought along his medical pictures and wide-angle portraits of buildings perched over the ragged coastline, the images so outlandish they had the air of forgeries, like photographs of fairies in a garden. His audience intrigued and amused by his stories, peppering him with endless questions about the Spanish pig.
He’d been called from the clinic to the shoreline one spring, pushing through a wall of spectators to find Matthew Blade kneeling in the shallows, cradling his intestines against his belly. His brother James was crouched beside him, both boys with bloodied faces. Someone reported the fight had started at Shambler’s before migrating to the landwash, as if this explained the state of things. Matthew was scooping careful handfuls of seawater, flushing away the sand that coated his guts when they’d spilled onto the beach. At the clinic Newman examined the intestine strand by strand before packing it into the stomach cavity. The incision made by the knife was almost surgical, slicing through the abdominal wall without causing any internal damage. He stitched the layer of muscle and then set about closing the surface wound. It was a miracle, Newman told the brother, that the intestine wasn’t perforated. —Will he live, Doctor? James asked.
—If he stays out of Shambler’s and away from knife fights, he might have a chance.
James was nineteen and the older of the two brothers by a year. —I’ll watch out for him, Doctor, on my mother’s grave.
—Who was it cut him, James?
The boy’s face went brick red. —I only said something about his girl as a game, to get his goat, Doctor. He got a fierce temper, Matthew have. I wouldn’t have used the knife if I didn’t think he meant to kill me.
Matthew nodded out of the ether fog sometime through the night and he left the clinic with James in the morning, leaning on his brother’s shoulder for support. Newman found them sitting together when he stopped by Shambler’s that evening, Matthew showing off his stitches to everyone who came through the door. They toasted the doctor from across the room and stood him a glass of rum and went arm in arm into the dark when they left the pub.
Hannah Blade came by the clinic two days later, taking her hands out from where they were hidden under her apron. The girl was only seven or eight, her adult teeth just coming in. Red hair and a ribbon of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She held out the eggs to him, two in each hand. —For patching up Matthew, she said.
—Your father sent along half a barrel of salmon yesterday, Newman told her.
She nodded, proffering the eggs again. —They’re awful good to me, Doctor, she said. —James and Matthew.
Newman took them from her one by one, the shells still warm from sitting in the folds of skin webbed between the girl’s fingers. —How is Matthew doing?
—No worse than James, she said. —Father hauls him out of bed first light every day, sets him to chopping wood. To teach him a lesson, he says. Matthew is only stacking, on account of the stitches.
Newman turned away to