Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [31]
Hannah had been out the door at the sound of the axle’s cracking and was already dashing to the road when the child was thrown sharply against the stone bridge. From the sound of the skull’s cracking she knew the boy was quite possibly doomed; it was the sound she most dreaded in the world. By the time she reached him, the boy was sitting in the water, attempting to stand, not yet aware of the gravity of his wounds, and the father was shouting against the hiss of rain, “Eh, lad, you took a crack, dintja?” when Hannah gathered the boy in her arms and cried, “Never you mind your trap. Fetch the Doctor for your boy!”
The mother was moaning. The boy turned to his father, smiled and tried to lift his hand, and suddenly stiffened, eyes rolled back, tongue gagging in his throat.
THE BLOOD was everywhere, smeared over the dark dining table and cloth she’d embroidered, and deep up her arms as though she had been playing in the cavity of a fresh-stuck pig; when the mother, father and the Doctor arrived half an hour later, wet, mud-plastered from the slick road they’d been forced to walk and the spattering from traps and carriages that had doused them, and the mother, her arm immobilized against her bodice by a torn man’s shirt, the boy, whom they’d left in apparent good health with nought but a bruise and a caution, was laid out like a corpse with a blood-drenched witch spooning great gobs of gelatinous blood from a hole she’d bored above the boy’s right eye.
“Hag from hell!” the father cried. “You’ve taken my boy.”
“Quick, my leeches,” the Doctor commanded. The father had been entrusted with the medicinal bottle of squirming black worms, short, thick and thirsty, tapered at the sucking end for tight body crevices just like this one.
“Yes, the leeches,” said Hannah. In her experience treating skull wounds, she’d found more patients were lost to the logic of tightly binding the wounds, attempting to repair the shattered bone and hold it in place by bandaging, than by removing the shards and keeping it open, at least till the bleeding stopped.
The father pushed Hannah aside, threatening to kill her, to expose her as a ghoul and witch.
The Doctor was expert in leech arrangement. Each found a pool of dead blood and began draining it. They elongated and broadened themselves, each tiny black filigree becoming finger-wide and long as the rusty-red pools receded. Then the leeches began their migration to fresh sources of blood, the bright red blood from the tiny vessels prone to easy puncture.
“Pull them off now,” Hannah insisted. The father raised his fist at her approach to the boy, and the Doctor hesitated. His tested black beauties had not yet begun to show their ingenuity.
“I have treated these injuries,” said Hannah. “You must trust me.”
“Madam, I am a physician and bleeder trained by the Royal College.”
“And I am a survivor of Indian massacres,” said Hannah. “The boy has bled enough. Now we must close him up. Sir, be good enough to remove your leeches.”
She refused permission to move the boy, and so he lay on her dining table, the handcrafted cherry table that Gabriel Legge had brought on the Swallow; she knew the herbs to boil with the bandages and the importance of changing the dressings and permitting the wound to drain. And all the while, she lectured the Doctor and the parents on the practice of medicine in the Bay Colony, how frontier warfare placed a premium on cranial nurses, how timing was all, how infection wiped out the most delicate surgery, how unpredictable paralyses could