Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [132]
Hekking was the gatekeeper between the sick ward and the railway work parties. When the Japanese came around demanding workers, patients looked to him for a reprieve. Hekking would place the worst ones on the limited-duty or no-duty list. The next morning, if the Japanese couldn’t fill their quota of workers, they would go through sick bay and grab the sick for duty on the line. It fell to the doctor to protest the selection. Many times, he got the hell pounded out of him for his audacity.
Henri Hekking worked one of his miracles on Jim Gee. The Marine was one of the first Houston men to go down with a fever, collapsing while digging a grave in the jungle out by 26 Kilo Camp. Taken to a medical tent, he lay unconscious for three days. His meltdown was so severe, his loss of fluids so pronounced, that he lost fifty pounds within a week. In the midst of his delirium, Gee remembered coming to and seeing a strange man speaking a strange tongue. He didn’t know if he was in heaven or hell. He heard someone say his struggle had been long and difficult, that he had nearly lost his mind. It was Hekking, who for thirty-six hours straight had sat by his bed, patiently enduring the Marine’s rage. Hekking had brought a large sack full of roots taken from a low-growing weed known as Cephaelis ipecacuanha. Major Yamada, in a show of mercy—or perhaps just impatience with Hekking’s doggedness—had permitted him to go into the jungle, under guard, to gather the plants. He boiled them into an herbal tonic and cajoled the Marine to drink, encouraging him, touching his hand to his patient’s clammy skin. Gee struggled to sit upright and drank. Hekking got some people to carry him outside and sat him in the sun. When Gee’s strength came back, the good doctor saw to it that he was taken back to the field hospital at Thanbyuzayat.
CHAPTER 39
For Charley Pryor, working with Branch Five in the lowlands near 18 Kilo Camp, the work was hard but manageable. He found that the guards didn’t bother him much if the work got done. They had food. They even had entertainment. One of the Dutch prisoners in Branch Five was a professional magician who had once worked on Holland-to-America cruise ships. For the Americans, his sleight of hand was a welcome diversion in a countryside that seemed immune to reason. The natives saw it differently. When he set a silk handkerchief prancing and fluttering, the few romusha brave enough to watch from the perimeter disappeared in terror.
The Americans could have learned from the natives’ jungle wisdom. Clearing a right-of-way through some bamboo thickets, sweeping their picks back and forth, they were liable to disturb real estate claimed by all types of wild creatures. They found big blue-black scorpions with six-inch tails whose stingers were sharp enough to stick fast in a hickory-handled shovel. Charley Pryor said he caught a centipede that measured twenty-eight inches in length. Later he unearthed a nest of tiny snakes lying under a clump of bamboo. Curious, he put on a pair of gloves, reached down, and pulled one up, holding it by its head. He opened its mouth with a knife blade and noted two fangs deep in the cavity. When some natives saw what he was doing, they broke and ran. A safe distance away, they turned to Pryor again and began making frantic gestures. Pinching their forearms, they pointed to the sun in the west, then to the eastern horizon with a negating wave of the hand. The sun would go down, but another sunrise wouldn’t come. Talking to a British prisoner later that day, Pryor discovered the serpent he had been toying with was a krait, more poisonous than a cobra.
They would start work at sunup and fulfill their quota