“Oh! Oh, dear!”
Dorothy darted back around and knelt next to the writhing man. He grappled in the air to keep her hands away as she reached to stop the bleeding on his shin and there was nothing for it but to rise and back away.
“Now hold still, sir, and I shall have a bandage for you in a moment.” She chatted in a soothing voice while she searched for a clean strip of linen in the bottom of her canvas market bag. There was always a bundle of bandages and a lone bottle of Tincture of Merthiolate in the bottom, along with a small bundle that held scissors, tweezers, and a few odd small instruments. This time, however, she had to dive deep into the bag to find a bandage strip that didn’t match the poor fellow’s pants.
“Panji humble self cannot pay, Memsahib,” he wailed, and the intense agony his tone communicated told her that fact pained him far worse than his bleeding shin.
“Panji? This is your name?” she asked, and his head wobbled up and down.
“Panji, it’s my fault you fell, you see, so nothing is owed me for tending to your wound.”
He gulped awkwardly enough that she feared he would swallow his tongue.
“Not a thing. In fact, since I caused you to fall, it is my duty to help you.”
“No, no, Memsahib!”
“Yes, Panji, it is my duty and I must do the right thing.”
The air was stifling, still, practically oppressive as they hunkered there in the dirt. No monkeys chattered in the distant trees at midday. Only a single jungle bush quail cooed in the wild almond that grew crookedly behind the pretty bungla. Everyone had gone home for their post-luncheon nap. She set her bag on the ground, at the same time draping two bandages across it. Now he would not have to take anything directly from her hand. There would be no risk to him of touching her.
Moving swiftly but with great calm she retrieved the Tincture of Merthiolate and set it on the closest brick just as he reached for one of the bandages.
“Now Panji, you must use one bandage to clean your leg, then dab on the Merthiolate,” she pointed to the small brown bottle and made a dabbing motion, “and then bandage the wound with this other strip. Understand?”
He grimaced, his eyes straying to the small bottle. Clearly he would avoid the stinging tincture if she were not here.
She raised her brows, cocked her head toward the little bottle, and nodded briskly. There was no doubt he understood her instruction, and he muttered as he moved to follow through with his self-inflicted torture.
“It appears to me, Panji, that you are a fine builder of...things,” she said, indicating the nearly completed verandah. “A mistri?”
Panji’s eyes darted toward the bungalow then back to her.
“As it happens,” she continued, “I myself am in need of a carpenter…a…a mistri, such as yourself. If I were to hire you...”
“No, Memsahib. Panji cannot. It is not allowed.”
“And why not?”
“Panji is not free, owe much rupees.”
“Ah.” Dorothy eyed the patch on the man’s tunic, finally realizing its significance.
He was a marked man, a criminal.
“I see,” she sighed. It would be just her luck to find that the most gifted artisan in the village was an ax murderer. “May I ask your crime?”
The man shook his head, clearly not understanding her question.
“Much rupees. Why?”
“Ah,” he groaned. In a jumble of words and hand gestures, he slowly made it known to Dorothy that he owed four rupees to one of the market stall owners because his pig had eaten half a day’s produce early one morning. When he couldn’t pay to replace the produce, the stall owner said he would take the pig as payment. But the pig was worth ten rupees. Evidently it was a very fine pig.
The pig would feed Panji’s extended family for the winter and into the spring, but if he gave it to the stall owner, his family would starve. So he did the only thing he could do. He hid the pig.
And now he was in jail.
At least his family would not starve.
Dorothy laughed. The poor man blanched, confused by her reaction.
“Well, then,” she smiled. “It seems that you may be the answer to my prayers, and I to yours.”
Again the man looked askance.
“You need four rupees.”
He nodded.
“I have four rupees.”
His eyes went wide.
“And I need a carpenter. A mistri.”
The two stood, and a slow smile spread across Panji’s face.
“You getta mistri. I getta rupees.”
She nodded, brushing the dust from her skirt and sliding her face into the somber expression that such an important bunderbusting business arrangement required.
“Come, you follow me,” he says. “We go to jail.”
To jail.
Of course.
At last God had blessed her “single-blessedness” and provided a man to get the job done.
See there, little daughter? You have no need of a husband. God will always provide a man to accomplish your tasks.
But really. Jail?
March 1936
The new bassinet that we had made at the jail works beautifully and is rather nice looking. It has a white standard frame and the basket is wicker and the entire thing has been white enameled. They made it a bit too high but that will be easy to remedy and it will certainly help us out. We have put in an order for a chain of four baskets that will fit into our rack side-by-side and will have that white enameled. Won’t that be fun! Our baby room will begin to look more like home then and goodness knows it is 1000% better now than it was when we first started to use it for nursery.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FICKLE FATE
Even the wood ducks outside her window seemed to understand her excitement this morning as Dorothy readied herself for a full day in the surgery. Their chatter easily overpowered the little tune she hummed. It was a beautiful day.
She would pop into the hospital nursery and give the staff the sheer blue bassinet drapes she’d stayed up half the night sewing, and then she’d start Panji on the youth beds she envisioned. If he was half as successful in crafting them according to her design, they’d be sensational. Falling over the poor fellow’s pile of bricks had been the best thing she’d done all week.
But her anticipation this morning had nothing to do with the new baby beds. It was something far more personal that had the butterflies roiling about in her stomach. They flitted and skittered, reminding her that this evening she would embark on her big adventure, an adventure whose outcome she could not yet fathom.
She was entertaining Fred.
A wry chuckle slipped from her throat as she took one last look at the clothes she’d laid out for the evening. The drop-waisted linen with one pleat down the left side was perfectly suited for the evening she had planned. The skirt would give just the right touch of feminine movement if they decided to dance.
Oh dear. Did Fred dance? She’d forgotten to ask!
Monglu had the lamb loin cooling in the Frigidaire that by the grace of God had decided to work this week. Dorothy’s favorite music was strategically placed beside the Victrola, and Edna and Millie had already been prompted to be prepared to join in the dancing. After all, she was plying them with a five course dinner. They’d probably agree to do just about anything in return!
She’d planned it all so carefully that she’d been ready for nearly a week now. Ready for more than a highbrow dinner. Ready for so much more than that. Male companionship is what she was ready for. An almost date. The very pitch of it, the colors of it, the brilliant essence of it was already singing in her veins.
It was trilling so clearly now that Dorothy nearly missed the drama that began to play out just beyond her window. But instinct stilled the humming of her heart when the escalating noise drew her across the room to pull aside the lace curtain which had held up beautifully
in the five years since she’d made it. Three pygmy goose chicks raced about in the yard below the branches of the tree that almost but not quite gave shade to the sleeping porch of her bungla. They raised almost as much of a ruckus as the fellow who had come to the medical bungalow begging for help.
The recognition of an emergency materialized fully in her brain even as she was already halfway out the door.
Edna hurried from her side of the bungalow and tried to intercept her. Everyone had been holding their breath for a week, worried that something might come to interfere with Dorothy’s “big event”. They knew what it meant to get a breath of normal life now and then. And they knew it had been far too long since Dorothy had that opportunity.
“Dorothy, really, you needn’t go. I’ll get Millie, or Lahaori, and—”
One look at Edna’s ankles made Dorothy’s decision for her. Edna’s phlebitis was nearly under control, but she was in no shape yet to run and find Lahaori. And it would have to be a run, since Monbahadur and the car were away in the next valley returning a patient to her home. In a fluid move, Dorothy shrugged on her white coat, checked the stethoscope in her pocket, and sprinted back up the steps.
“No, no. It’s alright, Edna. I’ll collect Millie and Lahaori on my way past the hospital.”
“But you have surgery, and Mr. Chambers—”
“—will be there when I get back. Do get my bag while I change my shoes. And tell Doctoroni to wait until after lunch to prep the patient scheduled for surgery.”
Dorothy was already on the run. The man who fell into step beside her had been her most accomplished teacher of the Assamese language and culture when she’d first come out. She owed him everything for not only the language skill he’d raised in her, but the insight he’d given her that had so effectively ingratiated her to this new people in this ancient land.
March 1936
Early this morning the pundit that I had when I first came out came running up to the house and wanted us to see his wife right away. He lived in back of the Compound and there is no road there. Millie and I and one of the nurses started out to see what the trouble was.
We arrived and found his wife (really not his wife) in a dying condition. She had been sick for a week and when we saw her had a peritonitis probably the result of a ruptured tubal pregnancy or an incomplete trauma-induced abortion which had become infected. She had been accidentally hit on the back just before the illness started while grinding rice. He had waited to call us until she really “looked bad” and then when she began to gasp for breath he came running for us.
We asked him if there was someone there who could help bring her into the hospital. He said “no-o”. When we asked if he did not have friends there he said “no-o”. Millie went out and got a man to help. The Hindu (that is, certain of them) believe that they should not put their shoulder to a burden except with one of their own caste is responsible for this.
We took two poles and with a big piece of cloth we found, rigged up a hammock stretcher and brought her in, but it was too late and she died two hours later.
“How oft would I—and ye would not”.
He knew us all, had worked for us for years, lived just back of us, and then let his wife die for lack of medical help.
. . . .
Dorothy concentrated harder than she could ever remember having to do. One foot in front of the other, don’t sway too much or you’ll topple to the path. Left. Right. Just a little farther.
The day had run amok. Almost from the first moment. There had been no hope of saving the wife of her favorite teacher, her first pundit when she had come out to Gauhati all those years ago. He’d waited too long. And it had been too late.
Why? Why hadn’t he come for help sooner? She was his wife, for God’s sake. Sort of his wife, anyway. But still.
Left foot. Right foot. Just a little further.
Now she could see the lights of the bungla. Just one left on to light the steps. The party she’d prepared so carefully had never happened. No lively dinner. No relaxing glass of bala fruit “wine” beneath a full moon. No dancing. Everyone would have gone to bed by now.
If only for the pundit’s wife, Dorothy would have been home in plenty of time for the festivities. But the child they’d stumbled upon on the way back, the small boy left to die by the track, had kept her at the surgical table for the next six hours straight.
He’d been brutally beaten, then cast out of the village. A whipping boy, of sorts, most likely an orphan. Some misfortune—real or imagined—must have befallen the village, and the headman had identified the little boy as the bearer of the demons which had caused bad luck to fall on his community. Whether or not he had called for the child to be beaten, he had at the very least cast the boy out, and the villagers had done the rest.
And then, just as she had the boy stabilized, another patient was carried in, bruised, bleeding, and very, very broken. Dorothy never even left the surgery, but shifted the boy to the care of the nurses and began to work on the girl.
Every hour or so someone had called to her from the door of the surgery, to see if she might be ready soon and they could begin to cook the lamb loin. She had answered the only thing she could.
“Soon, I think! Soon!”
And then another vessel would rupture and she’d set about containing the damage it threatened.
The young girl had been horribly crushed at a bridge-building site. She’d merely wanted to bring dinner to her sweetheart.
The irony of it was too much. Dinner for sweethearts had been the order of the day. It must have been as joyous a morning for this young girl as Dorothy herself had experienced, planning a special treat for her beau. But now two sweethearts had been left waiting, while Dorothy raced to repair fractured bone and torn muscle.
She had even heard Fred’s cultured tone as he spoke quietly out in the hall at some point in the early evening. The very sound of his voice drove Dorothy to a startling revelation. Nothing had ever before torn her concentration from surgery, from the fragile life struggling beneath her hands. But his voice had. His voice had caused her heart to roll in her chest, had set her toes twitching to head for the door.
She couldn’t hear what he said, or perhaps she might if she stopped working on her patient, but that was not an option. He was most likely telling them to give Dorothy his apologies, that he was leaving, that he’d come again.
That had been hours ago. And now she faced the simplest yet most exhausting task of the day—carrying her weary body home.
Left foot. Right foot. She was at the bottom step. Now she’d have to lift her whole body up one whole step, and then another. It was too much.
Dorothy stood swaying by the bottom step. Perhaps the step was wide enough. She could sleep right there.
Being ridiculous, Dor.
She managed to raise a hand to brush her damp hair back behind one ear, just enough so she could see the step more clearly. It had looked so grand this morning, her hair had. So pert and just the way she liked it. Now it just fell in haphazard clumps.
But no matter. He’d gone home. Who cared what she looked like. Two steps were all she had to navigate and then she could collapse on her bed. Oh, but there was the long hallway. And then she’d have to get out of her clothes, and—
Too much. Too much. Just focus on the two steps first.
Dorothy took a deep breath and checked her balance, preparing to put her entire being into hoisting herself up the two steps.
Imagine that Fred is there. Waiting.
Her imaginary enticement did the trick, and she was suddenly on the first step.
Ah, that helped. Now do it again.
She gathered her strength and focused on the fanciful allure of a handsome headmaster waiting just steps ahead.
“Dorothy?”
Ha! Focusing just a bit too hard, she realized. So hard that she’d actually heard his voice.
“Dorothy?”
It was cruelly real. It was his voice—a sound she had taken into her heart of hearts. But it came from behind her, and not ahead, where she’d put him in her imagination.
Dorothy laughed, a feeble, weary sound of disillusionment even to her own ears.
“Dorothy?”
The voice was still there, closer now, and she turned to cast an eye over her shoulder, mostly to convince herself he wasn’t really there. But the movement threw her off balance, and it was only as she began to realize she was going to fall that she saw him.
The moon and the dim verandah light conspired to cast him in layers of shadow worthy of the cinema. But all she saw was the light coming from his eyes, and his open arms.
As she fell into them.
. . . .
“You stayed.”
Fred chuckled. “You’ve said that umpteen times now.” He tapped her chin with his finger. “Why can’t you believe that it wasn’t possible for me to leave without seeing you?”
They’d brought the Victrola out onto the verandah and now stood swaying to the muted music, he holding her up and she taking a much needed rest dancing in place in his arms.
“If I say it forty-leven times, I’ll mean it more each time. You stayed. You have no idea what that means to me.”
He chuckled again.
“And you have no idea what it means to me that you are here, dead tired, completely knackered from your brutal day, and yet here you are. So don’t you see? It’s the same thing for me. You stayed.” He sighed.
“Yes,” she sighed in answer. “We stayed.”
The very idea of it crept through her veins like some invigorating, mystical element that pumped her full of energy.
She lifted her head from his shoulder and stepped back a half step, not so far as to lose the feel of him, but far enough to look up into his face.
“We stayed,” she said again.
Fred looked down into her eyes and slowly brought his forehead to rest against hers. “We stayed,” he agreed. “And I—”
Courage in a White Coat Page 10