Galore - Michael Crummey [98]
Tryphie was unconscious when they carried him in. Layers of ruined skin peeling away when the blankets were lifted. There were two dozen people in the room and Newman had trouble locating a pulse amid the babble. He ordered everyone out but Bride and Mary Tryphena. —One-forty, he said aloud. There was severe swelling and capillary dilatation in the damaged areas and the boy’s blood pressure was bottoming out. —He’s in shock, he said, still talking to himself. —We’re going to lose him.
—He’ll live, Doctor, Bride said and he glanced up at her. —We got him here to you, he’ll live.
There was something distressingly erotic in her surrender to the compass of his knowledge and skill. —You’ll have to help me, he told her.
—Tell me what to do.
Newman thought it possible there was a God after all.
There was an extension built onto the clinic with an examination room, a crude operating theater, and six beds for in-patients. But after Tryphie stabilized, Newman had him moved upstairs in the main house, laying the boy on his stomach in a tent of sterile sheets. He jerried up a wooden frame to keep the sheets clear of the burn, a kerosene lamp under the bed for heat. The sheets and pillowcases were sterilized in gentian violet and at night the lamplight made the room glow like a Sacred Heart, the pale, unearthly purple visible through the window outside.
Tryphie was in a coma for seventeen days. Even after he regained consciousness Newman told Bride the risk of infection made his recovery unlikely.
—He’ll live, she said.
—It’ll be months yet before he’s out of danger.
Bride said, You know we got no way to pay for all this.
—Now Bride.
She raised her hand. —And you got no one here to help.
—Miss Sellers comes by three days a week when the school year is done.
—I knows all about Adelina Sellers, Bride said.
Adelina passed out at the sight of blood, the smell of urine and vomit made her nauseous, she was more nuisance than help. Newman occasionally lured medical students to Paradise Deep for internships and twice an American nurse spent a winter at the clinic, but the dark and cold and relentless work drove them off. Newman resorted to a regular cocktail of ethyl alcohol flavored with blueberries or partridgeberries to survive the grind alone. Twice in the past year men came by to pay him for birthing children he had no memory of delivering. It was a matter of time, he knew, before he maimed or killed someone.
—Everything happens for a reason, Doctor, Bride said.
The Devine men left for the Labrador in mid-May and Bride moved into the room across from Tryphie, Newman sleeping in an outbuilding with a bunk and stove for propriety’s sake. She cooked and laundered and assisted during procedures as anesthetist and scrub nurse. She had the stomach of a soldier and a nose for the rare shirker or hysteric, culling them from the doctor’s lineup with suggestions of an imminent amputation or enema. She saw patients when Newman was away on calls, triaging and performing simple dental procedures, admitting the truly desperate and keeping them alive until the doctor returned.
Tryphie wasn’t out of immediate danger until August when the threat of infection passed. Eli Devine started to make regular visits to see him as soon as he was allowed and Newman made a point of examining Eli’s scalded hand when they crossed paths in the hall. —That looks to be coming along fine, he said.
Eli helped Tryphie out of bed and they spent the visit kneeling at the window. Tryphie wore a johnnycoat that tied loosely across the back and Eli couldn’t avoid the sick sight of it. Ridges of black scab and pus and scarlet new skin. He could guess the torment Tryphie was suffering from his own injury and he did his best to divert his cousin’s attention, fabricating elaborate histories for the vessels at anchor on the waterfront. Even the most pedestrian