Sea Trial

by Brian Harvey

  “He was crushed,” Charley told me. “Those headlines, terrible, his reputation. Some of the other doctors . . . they backed off.”

  “I thought you were supposed to close ranks,” I said.

  “They didn’t. He didn’t make it easy on himself.”

  “No kidding. What was he like, professionally?”

  Charley considered. “Crusty,” he finally said. “Fantastic training, but there was always something. I had him and two of the neurologists at my kitchen table once, trying to get them to get along. It didn’t work out.”

  Charley had arrived in Victoria in 1952, the year after we did. He’d been mediating ever since.

  “The funny thing was, he didn’t like operating. He told me once he wished he’d become an internist like me, where you could do the detective work, and others could do the surgery. That he’d gotten to the point where he just didn’t want to cut anyone anymore. He was dedicated, though. In the early days, he flew up north in a private plane to see a young woman who’d gone over her horse’s head. He brought her back to Victoria; we both worked on her. She never came out of the coma.”

  I remembered that case; it was one of the ones he’d talked to us about. The woman’s family tried a faith healer brought in from England. When that failed, they took her off life support. It never stopped nagging at him. Very Harvey Cushing.

  “But he was definitely different. You know about the concerts, in the pediatric ward?”

  “Concerts?”

  “He used to play his violin for the sick kids at the old General Hospital. I never forgot that he did that.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “When was that?”

  “Back in the mid-seventies, I guess.” Exactly the time he operated on Billy.

  ***

  I shoved the stowaway’s legal file back under the seat, tried a few pages of that incomprehensible book on Buddhism that my father had been trying to get through when he died, and finally crawled into bed with my wife and dog. Charley was on my side of the pizza slice–shaped berth, so maybe Brent was right: he was coming between us. The wind moaned in the rigging, Vera snatched nervously at her mooring lines, and I thought about the axe murderer next door. Or wherever he was. What if he really did have to deliver five boats a hundred miles to Egmont, alone and at night, piloting a daisy chain of derelicts through the rapids? What if he was just a loner trying to make a living, instead of the ogre my wife was probably having nightmares about already?

  Finally, I fell into an unsatisfying sleep. I dreamed I was eight years old again, trapped in the middle of Haro Strait. This time, though, I was sitting on Zero Rock with the seals, watching my father struggle past.

  My Friend Phil

  When I woke up, the droning noise next door had stopped, but there was still no sign of our troubling neighbour. His generator had probably just run out of gas. Brent’s boat was shuttered and looked even colder than it had the night before. Should I walk over and say goodbye? I tried on a couple of scenarios: Brent in his sweatpants, spread-eagled and snoring? Kim cupping a steaming mug in Brent’s fatherly embrace? Neither appealed. We’d sort out the battery problem ourselves.

  I started the engine with the remaining battery, untied the boat while Hatsumi jumped into her clothes, and headed for the closest town with a chandlery, Port McNeill. We squeezed through the Blow Hole, a tricky tidal constriction, past the celebrated Lagoon Cove, and then started a long swim up the arteries of Clio Channel and Baronet Passage. As usual, the northwest wind funnelled down the narrow passage, but we were getting used to it: the serious wind wouldn’t arrive until mid-afternoon, by which time we’d be through the last section of Johnstone Strait and tied up in Port McNeill.

  I wolfed down the breakfast Hatsumi passed up to me, remarkably chipper once we had severed ties with Minstrel Island. Besides eating, my responsibilities were limited to keeping Vera midway between the clear-cuts on either side. Only two weeks in, and the trip was becoming a grind. When Baronet Passage finally opened into Johnstone Strait, the sea became lumpy and confused, and that was exactly the way I felt. If we turned right, literally thousands of small islands would lie before us. We could slow down, kick back, and get lost in Broughton Archipelago Marine Park. To the left lay another two days following the smooth curve of Vancouver Island, with a stop in Port McNeill for groceries and minor electrical surgery. And after that, the Nahwitti Bar.

  We turned left.

  For its last fifteen miles, Johnstone Strait behaved itself. From now until the Nahwitti Bar, we’d be in the much wider Queen Charlotte Strait. Vancouver Island was beginning to narrow toward its northern tip, drawing away from the mainland. The last sizeable island was Malcolm, where we’d first gotten the crazy idea of buying a sailboat four years before. Tucked in its lee, the small crescent of Cormorant Island was home to the ‘Namgis First Nation. Brent, who I imagined still sleeping it off back on Minstrel Island, lived in its main town, Alert Bay.

  Suddenly the wheel jumped in my hand, as though seized from below. Vera lurched and a wave slapped the hull. Where was this coming from? Another one batted us from the other side. Charley got to his feet.

  “What’s happening?” said Hatsumi.

  We were surrounded by standing waves, a clearly delimited field of them extending a half mile or so in all directions. Currents snatched at Vera’s keel.

  “Aha!” I pointed to the chart. “The Nimpkish River, look, it empties right over there. We’re on Nimpkish Bank.” The Nimpkish was short but significant, a major salmon producer draining the elongated Nimpkish Lake. The darker blue of shallow water bloomed halfway across to Cormorant Island. We were where the chart said we should be, well outside the shallow area, but the sea was still chaotic.

  “Same idea as the Nahwitti Bar,” I said, as we passed into normal water again.

  “It’ll be like this? I mean, that’s all?” Compared to some of the tidal passes we’d been through, the Nimpkish Bar had been a blip. But Hatsumi sounded worried.

  “Nothing to it,” I said.

  If you look at a small-scale chart of Vancouver Island, the contrast between the two coasts is striking, like two brothers who have gone down different roads. The east side is smooth-shaven and respectable. Yes, all those narrows and constrictions lend character, but it doesn’t actually look menacing. But the west side — the bad brother — is another story: grizzled, unkempt, taking the wind in gapped teeth.

  Port McNeill was still on the respectable side, well sheltered at the end of a long east-facing bay almost directly across the island from the forbidding stub of the Brooks Peninsula. I liked it immediately. How could you not like a place where a sign at the marina entrance says, “No welding permitted in the harbour”? Where commercial fishing boats unloaded great arrowhead-shaped halibut onto idling trucks at night, and the morning low tide laid out a feast of carcasses for eagles to tear apart? You could hear the twist and snap of beak on bone, as the big birds worked their way along the vertebrae.

  Port McNeill has around four thousand residents, and in the days we spent there I felt as though I had met most of them. People smiled at us in the street, they squatted to make friends with Charley, a knot of teenage boys on bikes actually moved aside to let us pass on the sidewalk. Almost everyone in Port McNeill, it seemed, was friendly.

  Except for Phil.

  Phil ran the chandlery. If you were a boater, you needed Phil. And Phil needed you — or at least, basic business logic suggested he should. I did everything I could to make Phil like me, beginning by buying the simple battery switch I foolishly believed would end my electrical problems, and spiralling to levels of expenditure on things I didn’t even know had gone wrong. But he resisted my advances to the end. By the time we left Port McNeill, I was in love with the town but I wanted to kill Phil.

  The battery switch couldn’t have been the problem: a new one only cost fifty dollars, a number
that, in a chandlery, is more like statistical noise than actual money. Replacing it was, of course, hell, since all the “hidden” electrical wiring on a boat is crammed into inaccessible, knuckle-shredding spaces. But the batteries still refused to work. I retightened every connection between batteries and the electrical panel. Still no go.

  “I dare say,” I could hear Brent intone through a marijuana haze, “it’s the batteries themselves.”

  Vera takes her everyday electrical juice from a bank of four “golf cart” batteries stacked, two on two, in a cockpit locker beneath the water line. I can barely lift even one of them. Replacing all four meant rigging up a pulley system suspended from the boom. I pulled, Hatsumi guided, and one by one the heavy batteries swung over the side and into a dock cart. Then we dragged the contraption, its tires flattened by all that weight, all the way up the sloping gangplank and across town to Phil’s shop. Charley nipped at our heels.

  “How do you know he has the right batteries?” panted Hatsumi, as usual speaking the thoughts I had decided to keep to myself.

  “Of course he does,” I said. “He runs a chandlery, doesn’t he?”

  But Phil didn’t have four golf cart batteries, he had one.

  “It’s bent,” I said. “Look, the terminals are wrecked.”

  Phil fingered a leaning lump of lead. He managed to look surprised. “Somebody must’ve dropped it off the pallet. Now, when do you need these for?”

  “Well, we can’t actually go anywhere without . . .”

  “Just a moment, my friend.” He punched the offending battery lightly, as though it had let him down, and dug a phone out from under a sea of junk on the parts counter: a dead oil pressure gauge, a stack of unpriced boxes, a pile of unsent invoices.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said to a beaten-looking employee cradling a phone to one shoulder. “Go lock yourself in a room and type up all these work orders.” Then, into his own phone, “Who’ve I got? Okay. Phil here, Port McNeill. Look, I’ve got a customer, wants some six-volts so he can get on his way. What about tomorrow?”

  That sounded better. Because was anybody going to say no to this guy? Phil was big, a head taller than me, with an aggressive gut and a greasy white pompadour. He’d run a boat-building business once, he told me. Now, the added cares of operating a chandlery in a seasonal town seemed to have pulled his features into a lugubrious slide so that the face below the shock of white hair was an avalanche zone of pouches and jowls. The voice travelling down the line to whatever hapless distributor Phil was bullying was a sepulchral, carton-a-day rasp. He put down the phone.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Eight thirty. You can pay me now.”

  I paid him $850 while a lineup of yachties and sport fishermen fumed behind me. We spent the rest of the day buying groceries and doing laundry. While the sheets levitated and collapsed in the dryer, we crossed the street to the Port McNeill Museum. The place was crammed with lethal-looking logging gear, including a two-man chainsaw the size of a surfboard.

  “What happened when it bucked?” I asked the elderly guide.

  “What?”

  I yelled my question again, and he shouted back the answer. Maybe he’d made himself deaf by talking too much? I tried to find out.

  “So, were you a logger too?”

  “No! Driller-blaster! Come from Alberta originally, moved up to Campbell River to meet girls! And I did, not the kind you’d want to marry, if you get my meaning!”

  He was a nice guy, and we were his only customers. I bought a “Hug a Logger Today” sticker, and we went back to collect our sheets. Outside, a man walked past carrying a carved and varnished salmon under one arm. Apart from Phil, Port McNeill was turning out fine, and we still had the rest of the day to kill before our shiny new batteries showed up. We walked back to the boat trailing the smell of clean laundry. Hatsumi pulled out a book in Japanese and left me to my stack of elderly papers.

  ***

  Enough scientific background. Now, I wanted to pick up Billy’s story after my father had done the first operation, inserting the shunt that would relieve the pressure on Billy’s brain.

  When we last saw Billy in Refuge Cove, he’d just been operated on; I guess you could say Act One was almost over. Fever spikes kept Billy in the hospital another three weeks, while his family doctor and two different pediatricians did two lumbar punctures to check the cerebrospinal fluid for signs of meningitis (there weren’t any). The pediatrician noted that the baby cried during the spinal tap. I would have too. Three different antibiotics, plus phenobarbital and Tylenol, were dripped into Billy. In the file, vital rates charts took up an inch of paper. Finally, he went home.

  Two months later, it was time for Act Two. Billy was back in the hospital. The fever wouldn’t go away. Blood cultures grew Staphylococcus epidermidis, convincing his doctors that the shunt had gotten infected. And so my father removed it. Billy was getting standard treatment for the time.

  But even the standard treatment, as I’d learned in my research over the last week, could go off the rails. With the shunt removed, Billy’s little train took a shunt of its own. The source of the infection was gone, but so was the pressure relief, and Billy still had hydrocephalus. It was now wait and see: Billy had entered the no man’s land where his doctors were banking on infection subsiding before the lack of a drain caused dangerous pressure on their patient’s brain. I reminded myself this was standard procedure and, not for the first time, was profoundly glad that I had never had to make such a decision. The doctors’ order sheets tick off the days with blood tests and adjustments in antibiotic dose. Do this, do that, continue this, add that. At twenty-five minutes past midnight on an uneventful day, there was my father’s unmistakable handwriting: “Please give 2 a.m. and 8 a.m. cloxacillin.” He may have been a martinet, but he was a polite one, even in the middle of the night.

  But the race against time and infection was lost. Billy became lethargic. He started to vomit. Something was going really wrong. For the next thirty-six hours, the records are in minutes, not days. Time began to elongate. At 4:20 a.m. on Labour Day, Billy had a seizure. The most likely cause was increased pressure on the brain. An hour later, his pediatrician, Dr. Beamish, did the thing that led eventually to $1.5 million changing hands and my father’s name in the newspapers: he put a needle into Billy’s spine to relieve that pressure.

  This was the lumbar puncture that would become the sticking point in the case against my father, the reason I had tried so hard to understand lumbar punctures and their risks. Because half an hour after the LP, Billy stopped breathing. He turned blue. Working fast, Beamish “bagged” him with oxygen and tubed him through the trachea. Billy started to breathe again.

  There was no gloss of hindsight or accusation here but, despite my idyllic surroundings, I found myself transported to a scene as vivid as any movie. The child struggling beneath the O.R. lights in the wee hours, the pediatrician and the nurses fighting along with him; I could almost hear the pounding soundtrack.

  What happened next? At 7:30 a.m., my father installed a new shunt on the other side of Billy’s head. How long he had been present — what time in the early morning he had gotten up, pulled on his clothes, driven through empty streets to the hospital in the ritual I had slept through all my childhood — was maddeningly unclear. But once the new shunt was in, Billy settled down. The records went back to daily; normal time resumed. Billy stayed in hospital another month. Was he visually impaired? It was impossible to tell. I leafed through the many reports — hematology, urinalysis, bacteriology, CSF analysis, infusion therapy, neurological vital signs. Billy kept the lab busy. His mother was so traumatized by the experience that she demanded, and got, a completely new team of specialists.

  With that, my father’s role in Billy’s life was over. A hydrocephalic infant had been shunted; infections predictably ensued; the shunt was removed; there were some dicey hours when cerebrospinal pressure
built; a new shunt was put in. The child recovered. Life went on.

  In preparing for his trial, my father had obviously gone over these records meticulously. Even after fifteen years, the splodges of his highlighter were still bold, and some sections of notes had been bordered in heavy black lines. I added my own markings, struggling to piece together what the nurses were contending with.

  Most of the record was legible, but it was impossible to know how complete it was. In particular, what should one make of blanks in the “doctor visited” box? Were they real? Or did a nurse simply forget to tick the box? I totted up the number of times any of Billy’s several doctors came to see him and found ten days for which there were no recorded visits. Real or not? Which was more likely, that none of the doctors bothered to look in on a shunted, feverish hydrocephalic infant with a swelling head, or that their visits didn’t get recorded?

  I was still left with the impossible-to-answer question, the one any son had to ask: when the critical decision to do the third LP on Billy was made, was Dr. Harvey there? Was he at least consulted? Ten years after the incident, by which time he was in his mid-seventies, he remembered nothing about Billy. But for someone whose father used to appear at the breakfast table with blood spatters on his horn-rimmed glasses, who was so seldom “off call” that I gave up wondering who was more important, me or some patient with his head wrapped in gauze, the answer to that crucial question was easy: of course he was there, and the nurses forgot to write it down. But I knew that answer really only had meaning for me. What other people said — the nurses, the doctors, the child’s family — was just as important, at least to a court. Because, after the crisis had passed and Billy went home, his road got rockier, not smoother. Labour Day was just the end of Act Two.

  ***