by Brian Harvey
This matter of the phone calls got murkier the more I thought about it. The nurses came across as heroic and frustrated and on the side of the plaintiff. “Something went wrong,” they were said to have told her. “We called him five times.” The media liked this — and used it. But how many times had I myself — has anybody — said, “Look, I tried to call you. A couple of times, really!” We know it’s a lie, a little, ass-covering white lie, but it saves face, and who’s to know? The hospital was being sued too, and that included the actions of the nurses. Maybe, with the nurses, that’s all it was: damage control for them, and let the big-shot doctor fend for himself. I knew, from reading these anguished notes made at the trial, that he was incensed that a nurse’s note of a single phone call “attempt” seemed to count for more than his statement that he would never ignore such a call, had he got it. It was her word against his. I guess he’d forgotten how Harvey Cushing’s nurses felt about him.
From phone calls, his notes turned to the timing of the shunt replacement on Labour Day: “What’s the big deal about a day or two of [raised intracranial pressure]? We see many head injuries recover from two days of pressure.” And this one, which summed up the doctors’ dilemma: “Would not have epilepsy if shunt replaced earlier? Might be dead too.”
These were notes for his defence. There were so many, and in such detail (I haven’t included them all here), it was clear he was itching to get back at the people who were questioning his judgment. Sometimes he complimented one of the hostile witnesses (“He described this okay”); often, he asked himself the unanswerable: “Did A.T. believe me? Does anyone?”
The saddest were the notes that described how he felt as the barrage wore on: “You find out who your friends are.” There was even some Shakespeare, some lines from Othello he obviously knew by heart:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing.
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands.
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.
It wasn’t hard to imagine him sitting in the courtroom, pulling out his pen and writing these words as his own good name was filched in front of him. And “poor indeed” is exactly how the experience left him.
During what I assume was Billy’s mother’s testimony, my father’s notes became more urgent and longer. He could see which way the emotion was going. The nurses hugging the mother, saying, “Something had gone wrong” — and all the rest of what appeared the next morning in the newspapers. His writing became a scribble, with abbreviations and dashes as he raced to get it all down — even though it was exactly the same recitation as in the examination. But this time, for the audience that counted.
The next day, it was over. All he’d written was “Back to hotel. Vera there. Call from A.T., settled out of court. Problem: the lumbar puncture.” And it was a lumbar puncture he hadn’t even done.
The last note I found was dated just after the trial, after the newspaper stories had appeared. It said, “Fiona asked me if I had turned a little boy into a carrot.” Fiona was one of his grandchildren. She was six.
***
These notes were excruciating reading. All I could think was, Why didn’t you tell me any of this? Why did I have to go through a thousand pages of scribbles and photocopies, half-truths and hyperbole to find out what was going on?
“Nobody asked you to do any of that,” my father said. He was still wearing the ridiculous hat I’d thrown into Haro Strait. I turned on him.
“On the contrary. You asked for it every time you got all defensive about the damn trial. Moaned and groaned.”
“You wouldn’t have understood.”
“What, that some people screw up? That other people are perfectly okay with standing up in public and lying? That they wouldn’t give a shit if you’d trained with Harvey Cushing himself? ‘Truth and hard work is the best way’ — look where that landed you!”
“Watch your language.” He squinted, the way he did when he felt I wasn’t taking him seriously enough.
“Honesty is the best policy? That got you on the front page of the newspaper. Two newspapers! At least, if you’d talked about it to your family, they would have understood.”
“Understood what?”
“That your patients came first. That you wouldn’t have left a patient hanging. That somebody screwed up, maybe a nurse, maybe one of the other doctors. I mean, we just had to accept that on faith. It took me months of slogging through all this shit to realize it was true! One of the other doctors blew it!” I tossed the hated transcripts across the cockpit, missed the seat, and watched them subside untidily into the scuppers.
“I’m trying to do yoga down here,” said Hatsumi.
“Anyway,” continued my father, “even if one of my colleagues made an error of judgment, and I’m not saying he did, that was his call. It could have gone either way.”
“You mean the LP.”
“Yes.”
“So you just suffer in silence? The fraternity of medical brothers?”
“What would you know about it?”
“But you were constantly complaining about this or that colleague, how they had terrible training, how they wrecked patient’s backs, how they couldn’t operate their way out of a paper bag!”
“Privately, in the family. But not publicly. It wasn’t done.”
“Wasn’t done? What do you think that dickhead, who couldn’t even describe a ventriculogram, didn’t even know we have more red blood cells than white for God’s sake, what the hell do you think he was doing? And for money!”
But my father was unflappable. He shook his head. “I wouldn’t do that. And I wouldn’t expect you to either.”
“So you let yourself get taken down by a . . . a neurologist!”
Even that didn’t get to him. “Neurologists are more knowledgeable these days, I’m told.”
“By whom? Is there a whole bunch of you guys up there, wherever that is? Some kind of Wounded Ivy League Surgeon’s Club that meets every Thursday afternoon to congratulate themselves on how they always put the patient first?” I was crying now.
“Leave him alone.” My wife’s face appeared in the companionway. Hatsumi looked serene, as she always does after touching her toes to her forehead on the cabin floor for an hour. “You’ve got it wrong.”
“What?”
“Backward. It’s not that he wouldn’t talk to you. You wouldn’t talk to him.”
“How do you know? You weren’t his son.”
“I watched you. For ten years. And I helped take care of him.”
“You’re talking about me as though I weren’t here,” said my father. “That’s rude.”
“You’re not here,” I said.
“Of course he is,” said Hatsumi. “You wanted to talk to Brian, didn’t you? About all those things?” She waved at the transcripts soaking in the scuppers.
“So I didn’t have to read all this?”
“I could have saved you the effort,” he said. “But I am sort of flattered you didn’t just throw it away.”
“Which you told me to do.”
“That was because you wouldn’t talk to him,” said Hatsumi.
“Because he was impossible to talk to! He always had to be right!”
My father extended two mottled fingers and tapped the pile of soggy paper, like a doctor sounding a patient’s chest.
“Well,” he said, “was I?”
Would a man wracked by guilt have written a book about it? Maybe. But would he have written one in which he never, not once, felt the need to say, “It’s unfair. I’m innocent”? Not a chance. He never said that because, as I’d been taught so well, one didn’t have to.
“Yeah,” I said finally. “I guess you were. Somebody scre
wed up, made a call that went the wrong way, you closed ranks and took the heat.”
“Something like that.”
I played my trump. “Then why couldn’t you get over it? You paid for the rest of your life. Why couldn’t you just say, ‘I know the truth, the rest of you are beneath contempt,’ just, you know, fuck it? Oh, sorry.”
I knew he didn’t like swearing. But it didn’t matter, because he was gone. I wasn’t going to get the answer I wanted most. I gathered the remaining papers and stuffed them back in their bags. I never wanted to see them again.
“Can we go to the onsen now?” said Hatsumi. “He won’t be coming back.”
“Let me grab my bathing suit,” I said.
***
As it turned out, we could have gone in naked, which is the only sensible way to take advantage of sweet, sulphurous spring water that emerges from a crack in the earth, cascades over a rock shelf exactly at shower height, and meanders through a chain of rock pools to empty into the chilly Pacific. The reputation of the springs at Hot Springs Cove as a spectacular, intimate and unspoiled rotenburo (the Japanese word for an outdoor pool) was built on accounts from fifty years ago, when the only non-Indigenous users were the occasional intrepid boaters. You could still only get there by water or air, but the explosion of tourism in Tofino now meant a daylong stream of water taxis and float planes like the one that had dropped out of the sky on top of us. The three or so usable pools were hellishly crowded now; you had to stand in a towel, waiting your turn, until a rosy, steaming form emerged from one of the pools to make its way unsteadily to the changing rooms in the woods.
But the pools themselves were unspoiled, under protection of B.C. Parks, which acquired the land in 1957 from a long-time resident. All the cranky, stressed-out boater had to do was wait until six-thirty or so, when the last water taxi had returned to the restaurants and spas of Tofino, then row to the dock, walk the two kilometres of boardwalk, and slither into their own private pool.
Which we did, three times in the two days we stayed at Hot Springs Cove. We ignored the “no dogs” sign, as did the harassed-looking park ranger finishing up with his daily tidying after the pools had been used by — how many people? We must have passed thirty of them on their way back along the boardwalk, and it’s probably unfair to say they were all loud, pasty, and smoking, but that’s how it seemed to me after so many days in inaccessible places where the only tourists were there to fish. The boardwalk itself was something of a legend, a kind of yachtie roll call where the owners of visiting boats had carved, chiselled, or scraped the name of their boat into a plank. I found myself reading these planks compulsively, even upside down, which they were on the way back. On either side, ferns burst from the forest floor like green fountains, between waxy salal leaves and nurse logs and stupendous moss-wrapped cedars that had escaped the loggers.
We smelled the pools before we could see them. Hatsumi took the first shift, a look of wonder on her face as she disappeared around a dripping rock while I took Charley to the nearby beach and sat watching the hypnotic breathing of the ocean around the black rocks that guarded the cove. When Hatsumi finally reappeared, she looked beatific.
“Heaven,” she said. “Go.”
“Heaven” was a chain of pools carpeted with flocculent sulphur-slime and fed by a cascade. I stood under the waterfall, closed my eyes, and let the pungent steaming water pound out my noisome cargo of frustration, fog, fatigue. Too bad my father hadn’t hung around for the hot springs; he could finally have gotten warm.
We walked back on rubbery legs, not talking, watched by the silent cedars. By the time we got back to the boat, the fog had found Hot Springs Cove, and Vera was a vague greenish form floating in liquid glass. We ate a simple dinner with the heater hissing and jazz on the stereo. There was wine.
“You look happy,” I said.
“I don’t have the dream now.”
“The dead man?”
“Not since Cape Scott.”
“So maybe that’s all it was. Anxiety.”
Hatsumi smiled.
When I rowed Charley ashore before bed, I rested momentarily on the oars and could hear only the distant tinkling of Oscar Peterson from our boat and, fainter still, small domestic sounds from the family in a sailboat that had arrived while we were in the hot springs. We fell asleep to the sound of the fog whistle on Sharp Point, a single note, attacking and fading slowly, a crystal wineglass out there in the dark.
Us and Them
Ahousaht is a strange place, a few hours around the top of Flores Island from Hot Springs Cove and down the long neck of Matilda Inlet. Actually, Ahousaht is two places. I’d briefly experienced the First Nations village, properly called Marktosis, which sits on a thread of land so narrow it looks both ways: inward, toward the inlet, and outward, to the Catface Range on Vancouver Island. I’d spent a strange night there, a few years ago, wearing my biologist hat, and had written about the experience. This time, I wanted to see the other side. I wondered, was Ahousaht-Marktosis the same arrangement as Walters Cove and Houpsitas? Whites on one side, Indigenous people on the other?
We passed a native longliner on the way, probably going after dogfish. Just before the entrance to Matilda Inlet, several salmon farms were tethered in the shallow channel. There was another concentration of farms here, extending from Estevan Point to Barkley Sound. Not as many as in the heavily peppered stretch around Johnstone Strait and the Broughton Archipelago, but enough for visitors like us to notice.
Ahousaht — the white version — was a string of sagging concrete docks beneath a blue general store with a carved sign featuring an extravagantly endowed mermaid. Next to the store were a restaurant and a shed that served the fuel dock. I knew we were on the fuel dock because a long snake of diesel hose extended in lazy waves down a gangplank and along the dock, as though waiting for someone to come along and squeeze the trigger. This, I learned, was more or less how you got fuel in Ahousaht; I watched a string of locals, in everything from runabouts to trollers, pick up the hose, gaze expectantly landward, and be rewarded with the appearance of a stern woman who shaded her eyes and yelled, “Diesel or gas?”
This person was the sister of the store owner, a toadlike man in his seventies out of whom, for a while, I made it my business to try and coax a smile. I wasn’t successful, unless you counted his mirth at my expense, which he shared with a crony whose troller was hauled up on the ramshackle marine ways behind the store for bottom-painting.
“What’s that up on your mast?” said the fisherman.
“Yeh, looks like a fender. We been thinking, why’s that sailboat got a fender up its mast?” Har, har.
“Radar reflector,” I said. Charley was making friends with the man’s dog, leading it on a chase up and down the gangplank. “The kind that works.”
A cheap radar reflector, which is supposed to make you visible to everybody else’s radar, looks like two metal Frisbees welded at right angles inside a shoebox. A better one, like the one Vera had, has all the metal elements encapsulated inside a smooth white plastic lozenge. It does look a lot like a fender, or a really big suppository.
“Yeh, well,” said the store owner. I noticed the “For Sale” sign in the window behind him. No wonder. Inside, the place was dim and untended. He had some eggs, some plastic-wrapped bread, candy bars. The store served as the local post office, and I’ll give it this, there was a fine selection —although it was beginning to look more like a collection — of the practical stuff needed to keep a working boat working: chain, pipe elbows, electrical wire, many boxes of screws. No sissy stuff like jiffy salmon smokers or solar showers. I didn’t buy anything.
I led Charley on a stroll around the grounds and took my own inventory of a place in collapse. Or maybe it was just transition, like so many outposts along this coast, because, on closer inspection, there were things happening here, they just weren’t what the present owners
had signed on for. In behind the docks where the salmon boats used to come to off-load their catch, where the fat cocked elbow of the fish chute still swung in the wind like an amputated limb, there was evidence of life.
A bunkhouse housed miners contracted for the exploration of the Catface Range — unpopular in Tofino, but business. And next to the old torpedoes and dried-out flower boxes in front of the restaurant was a shiny blue undersea rover the size of a toddler’s wading pool, fitted with tiny propellers and bearing the logos of suppliers and sponsors. A nice young man with an English accent told me it was for his research; he was from the University of Bath. Most of the funding was from the U.K., but the rover also bore an Earthwatch sticker, which explained the fleet of kayaks at the hostel.
Earthwatch provides a “field science experience” by inserting paying “volunteers” into research projects around the world. The project in Ahousaht, I found out, was about tracking grey whales, although the dockside briefing I watched a young man give a group of middle-aged kayakers seemed more to do with his research on sea otters. It was all very confusing: English and American researchers, using funding from their own countries and from a global grant-maker with offices in London, Boston, Melbourne, and Tokyo, teaming up with the science tourists who flew in to “help” them.
The fuel-selling sister was renting out her “rustic but comfortable” hostel to the visitors. She had them figured out.
“It’s all bullshit,” she told me.
The restaurant, also glowingly described on the Earthwatch website, wore a sign in magic marker on a scrap of cardboard: “The Restaurant Is Not Open.” When I looked more closely at the shot I had snapped, a native troller was reflected in the window with the testy sign, and I remembered the man who had tied up, come into the store to collect his mail, and left. I also remembered asking the store owner about the marine ways in the First Nations village, which had been an impressive facility for boat repair when I’d first visited.