by Ann Walsh
“This will help a great deal,” I told Mrs. Fraser, trying to sound confident. “The doctor will be back soon, but for tonight I know this medicine will give all of you a better rest.” To myself, I added, “I sincerely hope I’m right.”
But J.B. had not come back when, late in the day, I left the surgery and went home. I was too worried to eat much at dinner, and when I finally slept I dreamt of J.B. He was calling to me, but when I went to search for him, he was not there. Although that dream could hardly have been called a nightmare, it left me uneasy the next morning. Uneasy, and worried.
My mother sensed my mood, and asked if I was feeling poorly.
“No. I am well.”
“And Doctor Wilkinson?” she asked. “He is no longer so fatigued?”
“He is well, too,” I said, and changed the subject. I did not want to tell her of J.B.’s strange behaviour. Surely today he would be back to attend to his patients and I would not have to make excuses for his absence over and over again.
The door to the surgery was unlocked, and when I pushed it open I saw that J.B. had returned. He was sitting at his desk, sprawling across it, his head resting on the desk top and one arm dangling beside his chair.
“J.B.” I said, going to him. “I am relieved that you are back.”
He did not answer me. I put my hand on his shoulder and shook it, gently. “Are you asleep?”
Still there was no answer. I shook him once again. “J.B., wake up.”
He groaned and lifted his head from the desktop. Today he looked even worse that he had yesterday. His skin was not just sallow, it was almost white with a waxy sheen. He had not shaved, and the bristles of his beard showed black against his paleness. His eyes were red-rimmed and watery, and it seemed he kept them open with great difficulty.
“Who are you?” he asked, peering at me, puzzled.
“Who am I?” I was too surprised to think of anything else to say.
The doctor blinked and stared harder. “Of course. You are Ted MacIntosh. Forgive me, my mind seems confused today. Well, how can I help you?”
“J.B., I…” was all I could manage. “I… I mean…”
He tried to straighten up in his chair, and rubbed his hands across his face before speaking again. “You mean what? Quickly, young sir. I have important things on my mind. What are you doing here, what do you want of me?”
“I am your assistant. Don’t you remember?”
“Assistant. I could use one of those. Fine, consider yourself hired. Now leave me alone.” He put his head back on his desk, cradling it in his arms.
“J.B.? What is wrong? Surely you can not have forgotten that I have been your assistant for many weeks. You must be ill.”
His voice when he answered was indistinct. He did not raise his head, and the words were muffled. “I remember, please forgive me. I am not ill, but I can not sleep, Ted. I can not sleep.”
Relief filled me. His memory was not gone; he would be all right. I spoke cheerfully. “No, you most certainly can not sleep now, J.B. You have patients who will begin to arrive shortly, having missed you yesterday. There will be many of them and some will be angry at you, I am afraid.”
He lifted his head and smiled at me. At least, I think he believed it was a smile. It looked more like a grimace.
“No, you misunderstand. I do not mean that I can not sleep now, at this moment. At night, all night. I have not slept since Mrs. Fraser’s twins were born. I am sick for lack of a night’s rest.”
“Do you dream, J.B.? Is it nightmares which keep you awake, dreams of Mrs. Cameron and her children?”
“I can not find sleep, Ted, not anywhere, not at all. My eyes close, but my mind will not stay still. It jumps and twitches and ties itself into great knots of anguish.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“No, I had not thought you would.” Again his face twisted into that horrible spasm as he tried once more to smile. “Dreams, ah, the dreams, Ted, the dreams. Those which come at night, that are brought by sleep, those are unwelcome. Dreams that come during the daylight, those are much, much better. I fear I have dreamt too much during the day, and sleep has forsaken me at night.”
His eyes slid away from me and, mumbling something I could not understand, he lowered his head and stared intently at a large stain on the desk top. It was dried ink, and it had not been there when I left the surgery last night. J.B. picked up an uncorked ink bottle lying on its side, frowned, then began to rub his fingers across the stain. “A stain, a spot,” he said. “A wretched spot.”
Suddenly he lifted his head and threw the empty ink bottle at me. I ducked and J.B. laughed. “Out, out damned spot,” he said. “Out, out damned Ted.”
“What?”
“Get out. Go. Leave. Dispatch yourself. Depart. Depart directly.”
“J.B.? Why do you want me to leave? I don’t understand. Let me get Doctor Bell for you…”
“What Doctor Bell, which Doctor Bell, wherefore Doctor Bell? Nevermore Doctor Bell. What, bring in a physician to watch me while I wrestle with slumber? Never. The Bell shall not toll for me. Especially not belligerent Doctor Bell. Go away, Ted. Leave me. Now.”
He spoke like a madman. Perhaps he had contracted brain fever, perhaps some other disease which made him act this way. I must get help for him, but I was afraid to go to fetch a physician. Once I left the surgery, I felt sure that J.B. would lock the door and refuse to let me, or anyone else, enter. I could not leave him, but I didn’t know what to do if I stayed.
J.B. had prescribed laudanum to help me sleep when my nightmares were so troublesome. Why did he not take laudanum or a similar medicine himself? There was none prepared, but I could mix some and offer it to him. Once he slept, perhaps his mind would clear. Lack of sleep can make anyone irrational and ill.
My mind was made up. I would go to the dispensary and mix a mild tincture of laudanum and make sure that J.B. took it. There was more than enough opium to prepare the mixture; there had been a full bottle in the order I picked up from the express office yesterday.
I would get J.B. to bed, make him drink some warm tea, give him the medication, and stay to watch over him. I would have to explain to his patients that he was unavailable, but there were other doctors in Barkerville who could tend to any emergencies until he had recovered.
J.B. could not see patients in this state, and I did not intend to let any of them get even a small glimpse of him. He looked so ill and his manner was so peculiar that he would surely frighten them. They might never again trust him as a physician.
He was silent now. With his head down on his arms he could not see me, and if I were quiet he would not know that I had not left as he had ordered me to.
Cautiously, trying not to make a sound as I moved, I went to the dispensary and eased the door shut behind me. I straightened the doctor’s bed, lit the stove and set a kettle of water on to boil. Then I went to the medicine chest to gather up the ingredients to prepare laudanum.
Again today the lid to the chest stood open, and I could see that some of the containers had been replaced incorrectly. I moved things around, setting them right, then pulled the bottle of opium from the compartment where it was kept. There was a smell in the chest, too, a strong smell. It wasn’t just the sulphur I had spilled yesterday, it was another medicine as well.
Something was wrong. I had put the new bottle of opium in here after picking up the order from Barnard’s Express. When I had prepared laudanum for a patient yesterday, I had used up what was left in the old bottle and taken only a few drops from the new supply. Now that bottle was almost empty.
I looked more closely into the chest, and I sniffed. Something else had been spilled, something with a bitter smell which almost overpowered the sulphur odour.
It was liquid opium. It had been spilled over the bottles and jars in the chest and had mixed with the sulphur powder which I had not been able to completely remove when I cleaned the chest. The liquid opium had dried stickily, com
bining with the sulphur to form yellow clumps. It looked as if small gold nuggets were sprinkled across the contents of the medicine chest.
I suddenly felt frightened. J.B. moaned and sat up, looking wildly around him, then collapsed back onto his desk, his head thumping as it fell. Jumping at the noise, I swallowed nervously and took a deep breath.
Then I ran for my father.
Nine
Once before I had run to my Pa’s carpentry shop as frightened as I was now, but then I had collided with James Barry. This time no one would stop me. I burst in the door and barely paused to take a breath.
“Pa,” I gasped. “Oh, Pa. I don’t know what to do.”
He took one look at me and put down the table leg he was sanding. “Is it the doctor, son?”
“Yes. Something is wrong with him.”
“I am not surprised. I thought he looked frail at your birthday celebration.”
“I don’t know what has happened,” I said. “He looks terrible and he won’t stand up and when he talks it makes no sense at all. It’s frightening.”
My father nodded. “No need to be frightened, son. In my opinion, Doctor Wilkinson’s conversation makes little sense even when he is not ill. But I will come with you and see what is wrong. I suspect that his trouble has returned to plague him again.”
“What trouble? I don’t understand. What’s wrong with him?”
My father took his pot of glue off the stove, then pulled his apron over his head and hung it up. “The opium, son. Some years ago, Doctor Wilkinson began to take too much of his own medicine. It became a habit, and it was only with great difficulty and the help of his friends that he overcame the addiction.”
“Opium? J.B. is not ill or in pain. He has no reason to take opium.”
“Not ill,” said my father, ushering me out the door and closing it behind him. “Not in the body. But there was much pain in his heart when Sophia Cameron died. At first the opium eased his agony, but then it became his greater torment. I am sorry to hear he has succumbed again, but this time we will deal with him quickly before the drug has him too firmly in its grasp.”
My father took one look at J.B. and told me to fetch Doctor Bell. Then I was firmly sent away. J.B. would be taken care of, I was told. I was not needed. Feeling extremely disgruntled, I went home.
And at home I stayed. Except for trips to town to visit with Moses, to fetch supplies for my mother, or to borrow books from the library, I did not leave my house for almost two weeks.
I heard nothing about J.B. When I asked about him, my father only said that Doctor Wilkinson was being well taken care of, but was not able to receive visitors.
“I am not a visitor,” I said one day as Pa and I worked together in Ma’s garden. “I’m his assistant. And his friend.”
“Nevertheless, Ted, you would not be welcome. Give the doctor a while longer to recover. Once he is more himself, he will be glad to see you, but not yet. He needs time to regain his health and his sensibilities.”
“He will want to see me,” I said. “Is he in the hospital?”
“No, son. But he is being well taken—”
“I know, you keep saying that. But what is wrong with him? Why did he make himself so ill?”
My father straightened up and wiped the sweat from his face. He leaned on the hoe he had been using around the hills of potatoes, and looked at me seriously.
“Perhaps it is time we told you the rest of the story son. Then you will better understand what has happened to your friend.”
“I knew that J.B. had not told me everything! There’s more about Mrs. Cameron isn’t there?”
“Aye, but also about the doctor.”
“Tell me, Pa.” I had been kneeling in the soft dirt, but I stood up and faced him.
“Before Mrs. Cameron died, she told her husband she did not want to spend all of eternity here in the goldfields. She called it a hateful place and made him promise to take her home, to be buried with her own people.”
“Home?”
“Ontario. On December 22, exactly two months from the day his wife died, Cariboo’s claim paid off. He was now a very rich man, so he had a special coffin built for Sophia. It was solid, lined with tin, and watertight. He filled it with whiskey before placing her in it.”
“Whiskey? In her coffin?”
“Mrs. Cameron had a long journey ahead of her, Ted. Although she left Barkerville in the dead of winter, her trip would take her much further south, where it was warmer. As a doctor’s apprentice you surely must have learned that alcohol, any type of alcohol, is an excellent preservative.”
“It is,” I agreed, swallowing hard.
“Mr. Cameron hired men to help him carry his wife,” my father went on. “The gossips have said that he also took with him a fifty pound sack of gold, but I do not know the truth of that. I do know he paid the men well—twelve dollars a day with a two thousand dollar bonus when they reached Victoria.”
“That is a great deal of money!”
“It was well earned, son. The snow was so deep that pack horses could not be used for much of the journey and the men had to carry Mrs. Cameron on their backs. I have heard it said that they often lost their footing on the frozen trail, and that her coffin fell many times. She suffered dreadfully.”
“She was dead. She didn’t suffer.”
“Maybe not, but those who went with her did. So many miles to travel with only a dead wife and her grieving husband for company.”
“Did they reach Victoria, Pa?”
“That they did, and in the spring of 1863, Mrs. Cameron was buried there, awaiting passage on a ship to take her and Cariboo to Ontario. Finally she arrived home and was buried once more in the family graveyard.”
“She was buried three times?”
“Each time with a proper service, so they say. Also—”
“The boy has heard enough,” my mother said. I did not know how long she had been listening, but her voice was angry.
“There is no need for him to know everything, Ian. It is ghoulish to be speaking of such things.”
“But, Ma—”
“I said you have heard quite enough, Theodore. Doctor Wilkinson is your friend. Why would you wish to pry into his life in this way? I can not understand why your father would repeat such gossip. Ted, you will finish the weeding alone. Ian, I would have a word with you. Right now.”
I watched my father as he slowly followed my mother into the house and I thought I was very happy to stay outside with the chickweed and the dandelions.
In the next two weeks I chopped enough firewood for the entire winter. I split kindling and I cleared bush from around Ma’s garden, pulling fiercely at every weed I found. Pa requested my help digging a new hole for the backhouse and the two of us spent most of the day labouring with our shovels and then gently edging the small building into its new position. It was all hard work, but none of it helped me forget.
I missed J.B., missed his laugh, even missed the way he played with words. “I most miserably miss you, J.B.” I said to myself. “Please promise to promptly recover. Please come back.”
Still no one spoke of J.B. at all. His condition, like his location, was a secret, at least from me. “He is well taken care of. He is mending,” was all I could get out of anyone. It seemed that there was a conspiracy among the town’s adults not to mention him. Pa would not talk to me again about Mrs. Cameron or about J.B. no matter how many times I asked him.
I who had spent weeks as J.B.’s closest companion, who knew of his nightmares and his fears, who had helped him scrub his dispensary and deliver the twins, was not allowed to share in the secret.
For almost a month I stayed close to home, chopping firewood, assisting Ma with her chores, sometimes reading from one of the medical books that J.B. had loaned me. But without J.B. to help me with the words I didn’t understand or to explain the Latin names for the diseases, reading soon became boring.
My father suggested more than once that I return
to work with him in the carpentry shop, and one day I did. I brought home a small piece of sanded wood, thinking I would spend some time whittling and carving. I sat in the sun with my knife, but at the end of two hours what had taken shape beneath my hands was not the book-end I had intended, but a distorted face, its mouth open in a scream. I threw it into the fire and did not return to Pa’s shop.
Even Moses, whom I visited frequently these days, would not tell me anything. I strained my ears when he chatted to his customers, hoping that someone would pass on a bit of information about J.B. But either no one knew or no one would speak while I was present.
On the door of the doctor’s locked surgery was a “Closed” sign, and the curtains had been drawn tightly. The building looked so deserted that I usually turned my eyes away from it when I walked by; its emptiness made me sad. But one day I stopped and stared at the surgery door, realizing that I felt anger as much as sadness.
I was angry at J.B., angry at my parents and the other adults who spoke only in whispers, angry at being ignored, angry because J.B. did not want to see me, angry because I was lonely.
There was no one on the street near me, so I picked up a big piece of dried mud and hurled it at the surgery door. It hit the “Closed” sign and shattered, scattering dust and pieces of dirt across the front step. Then I turned my back on Doctor Wilkinson’s empty surgery and walked away, vowing never to look at it again.
One morning late in June, Ma sent me to town to do some shopping. She had been doing that a lot recently, finding something for me to attend to in Barkerville nearly every day. Since many of her errands were not all necessary ones, I think she just wanted to get me out from under her feet. I didn’t really want to go anywhere, but I dared not argue with Ma. She had that look on her face again, a look that had been there frequently since I had been at home.