A Treasury of Doctor Stories

by Fabricant, Noah D. ; Werner, Heinz;

  “Very well, we’ll operate here. Sister, are you willing to help me? It’ll mean staying here till tomorrow’s train.”

  “Ja, doctor, of course.”

  I turned to the foreman.

  “Tell them.”

  He shrugged and began to address them again.

  They answered him, and he slapped his knee and h’yucked a kind of hound dog laugh in his throat and said to us,

  “W’, if you go ahaid, these Messicans here say they’ll sure ’nough kill you if you kill Pancho!”

  Yes, it was worse than I could have expected.

  This was like being turned loose among savages.

  You might have thought the searing heat of that light steel sky had got everybody into fanciful ways.

  “Why, that’s ridiculous!” I said to him. “He’s nearly dead now! Osler himself might not save him! Nobody can ever guarantee an operation, but I can certainly guarantee that that man will die unless I take this one chance!”

  “W’, I dunno. See? That’s what they said . . .”

  He waved at the Mexicans.

  They were tough and growling.

  Sister was waiting. Her face was still as wax.

  “Can’t you explain,” I said.

  “Man, you never can ’splain nothin’ to this crew! You better take the church lady there, and just get back on that train, that’s what you better do!”

  Well, there it was.

  “You go to hell!” I said.

  I looked at Sister. She nodded indignantly at me, and then smiled, sideways, that same sly look between her cheek and her lens, which she never meant that way; but from years of convent discretion she had come to perceive things obliquely and tell of them in whispers with many sibilants.

  “Come on, we’ll move him. Get some help there.”

  The Mexicans wouldn’t budge. They stood in the way.

  “Give me your pistol!”

  The foreman handed it over. We soon got Pancho moved.

  Sister helped me to carry him.

  She was strong. I think she must have been a farm girl from one of the German communities of the Middle West somewhere. She knew how to work, the way to lift, where her hands would do the most good. Her heavy thick robes dragged in the dust. We went into the tool shed and it was like strolling into a furnace.

  I hurried back to the train and got my bags and then went back again for hers. I never figured out how she could travel with so little and be so clean and comfortable. She had a box of food. It was conventional, in its odors, bananas, waxed paper, oranges, something spicy. Aside from that she had a little canvas bag with web straps binding it. I wondered what, with so little allowed her, she had chosen out of all the desirable objects of the world to have with her and to own.

  My instrument case had everything we needed, even to two bottles of chloroform.

  I got back into the dusty red shed by flashing the foreman’s pistol at the mob. Inside I gave it back to him through the window with orders to keep control over the peasants.

  What they promised to do to me if Pancho died began to mean something, when I saw those faces, like clever dogs, like smooth-skinned apes, like long-whiskered mice. I thought of having the engineer tele-graph to some town and get help, soldiers, or something; but that was nervously romantic.

  It was dark in the shed, for there was only one window. The heat was almost smoky here, it was so dim. There was a dirt floor. We turned down two big tool cases on their sides and laid them together. They were not quite waist high. It was our operating table.

  When we actually got started, then I saw how foolish it was to try it, without any hospital facilities. But I remembered again that it was this chance or death for the little Mexican. Beyond that, it was something of an ethical challenge. Yes, we went ahead.

  I remember details, but now so long after, maybe not in the right order.

  I remember a particular odor, an oily smell of greasy sand, very powerful in the shed; the heat made the very dirt floor sweat these odors up, and they made me ill at ease in the stomach.

  It was early afternoon. The sky was so still and changeless that it seemed to suspend life in a bowl of heat. The tin roof of the shed lowered a very garment of heat over us.

  Faces clouded up at the window, to see: to threaten: to enjoy. We shook them away with the pistol. The foreman was standing in the doorway. Beyond him we had glimpses of the slow dancing silvery heat on the scratchy earth, and the diamond melt of light along the rails of the track.

  The camp cook boiled a kettle of water.

  Sister turned her back and produced some white rags from her petticoats.

  She turned her heavy sleeves back and pinned her veils aside.

  The invalid now decided to notice what was going on and he tried to sit up and began to scream.

  Sister flicked me a glance and at once began to govern him with the touch of her hands, and a flow of comforting melody in Deutsch noises. I got a syringe ready with morphine. And the mob appeared at the door, yelling and kicking up the stifling dust which drifted in and tasted bitter in the nose.

  I shot the morphine and turned around.

  I began to swear.

  That’s all I recall; not what I said. But I said plenty. Pancho yelled back at his friends who would rescue him. It was like a cat concert for a minute or so.

  Then the morphine heavied the little man down again, and he fell silent.

  Then I shut up, and got busy with the chloroform. Sister said she could handle that. It was suddenly very quiet.

  My instruments were ready and we had his filthy rags off Pancho. Sister had an instinctive adroitness, though she had never had surgical experience. Yet her hospital service had given her a long awareness of the sometimes trying terms of healing. In fascinated silence we did what had to be done before the operation actually started.

  There was a locust, or a cicada, some singing bug outside somewhere, just to make the day sound hotter.

  The silence cracked.

  “He is dead!” they cried outside.

  A face looked in at the window.

  Now the threats began again.

  I said to the foreman,

  “Damn you, get hold of that crowd and make them shut up! You tell them he isn’t dead! You tell them—”

  I began to talk his language again, very fancy and fast. It worked on him. I never cussed so hard in my life.

  Then I turned back and I took up my knife.

  There’s a lot of dramatic nonsense in real life; for example: my hand was trembling like a wet dog, with that knife; and I came down near the incisionary area, and just before I made the first cut, steady? that hand got as steady as a stone!

  I looked at Sister in that slice of a second, and she was biting her lips and staring hard at the knife. The sweat stood on her face and her face was bright red. Her light eyebrows were puckered. But she was ready.

  In another second things were going fast.

  I once told this story to someone, and later heard it repeated to someone else. I hardly recognized the events as my friend described them, because he made it all sound so dramatic and somehow like a scene in the opera, grand and full of high notes. No, it seems to me that the facts are more wonderful than all the things time and play-going can do to a person’s imagination. The whole situation couldn’t have been meaner; more dangerous from forces like dirt and stupidity, instead of forces like fate or fascinating Mexican bandits. There was the hazard, too, of my own youth, my inexperience as a surgeon. There was my responsibility for Sister, in case any trouble might start. There was the heat and a patient with temperature and no way to cool off boiled water in a hurry, and the dust rising through the cracks of the door and window and walls of the shed, as the outraged men kicked and shuffled outside. We could see the sheets of dusty light standing in the room’s dusk, sliced from the gloom by a crack of that sunlight and its abstract splendor.

  Oh, my surgery professor and my colleagues would’ve been shocked
to see some of the things I did, and didn’t do, that day!

  I tried to hum a little tune instead of talk.

  But now and then the noise outside would get worse.

  Or the foreman would creak the door open and stick his varlet face in to peer.

  Or the patient would almost swallow his tongue making a noise like a hot sleeping baby.

  So I’d swear.

  Sister said nothing all the time.

  She obeyed my instructions. Her face was pale, from so many things that she wasn’t used to—the odors, the wound, manipulation of life with such means as knives and skill, the strain of seeing Pancho weaken gradually; she was glassy with perspiration. Her starched linen was melted. There was some intuitive machinery working between us. Aside from having to point occasionally at what I needed, things she didn’t know the name of, I’ve never had a more able assistant at an operation in all my long life of practice.

  I think it was because both she and I, in our professions, somehow belonged to a system of life which knew men and women at their most vulnerable, at times when they came face to face with the mysteries of the body and the soul, and could look no further, and needed help then.

  Anyway, she showed no surprise. She showed none even at my skill, and I will admit that I looked at her now and then to see what she thought of my performance. For if I do say it myself, it was good.

  She looked up only once, with a curious expression, and I thought it was like that of one of the early saints, in the paintings, her eyes filmed with some light of awareness and yet readiness, the hour before martyrdom; and this was when we heard the train start to go.

  She looked rueful and forlorn, yet firm.

  The engine let go with steam and then hooted with the exhaust, and the wheels ground along the hot tracks.

  If I had a moment of despair, it was then; the same wavy feeling I’d had when the train had stopped here a couple of hours before.

  The train receded in sound.

  It died away in the plainy distance.

  Shortly after there was a rush of voices and cries and steps toward the shack.

  It was the laborers again, many of whom had been put back to work on the track ahead of the engine, in order to let the train proceed. Now they were done. Now they were crazy with menace.

  It was about four O’clock, I suppose.

  Fortunately, I was just finishing up. The door screeched on its shaken hinges and latch. I heard the foreman shouting at the men.

  Then there was a shot.

  “Most sacred Heart!” said Sister, on her breath, softly. It was a prayer, of course.

  Then the door opened, and the foreman came in and closed it and leaned back on it.

  He said they sent him in to see if Pancho were still living. I told him he was. He said he had to see. I said he was a blankety-blank meddling too, must have looked like a challenge, an alien force, to him. done, and if he had to smell around he could come.

  I showed him the pulse in the little old Mexican’s neck, beating fast, and made him listen to the running rapid breath, like a dog’s.

  Then he looked around.

  He was sickened, first, I suppose; then he got mad. The place was dreadful. There were unpleasant evidences of surgery around, and the and low-down blank to come bothering me now; but that I was just heat was absolutely weakening, and the air was stifling with a clash of odors. Sister had gone to sit on a box in the corner, watching. She,

  He grew infuriated again at the mysterious evidences of civilization.

  He began to wave his gun and shout that next time, by God, he’d fire on us, and not on them Messicans out yander. He declared that he, too, was agin cuttin’ on anybody. He was bewildered and sick to his stomach and suffering most of all from a fool’s bafflement.

  He bent down and tried to grab back the meager sheeting and the dressing on Pancho’s abdomen. He was filthy beyond words. I butted him with my shoulder (to keep my hands away and reasonably clean) and he backed up and stood glaring and his mouth, which was heavy and thick, sagged and contracted in turn, like loose rubber.

  Sister came forward and without comment, knelt down by the wretched operating table which might yet be, for all I knew, a bier, and began to pray, in a rich whisper, full of hisses and soft impacts of r’s upon her palate, and this act of hers brought some extraordinary power into the room; it was her own faith, of course; her own dedication to a simple alignment of life along two channels, one leading to good, the other to evil.

  I was beginning to feel very tired.

  I had the weakness after strain and the almost querulous relief at triumph over hazard.

  I’d been thinking of her all along as a woman, in spite of her ascetic garb, for that was natural to me then. Now for the first time, listening to her pray, I was much touched, and saw that she was like a doctor who thinks enough of his own medicine to take some when he needs a lift.

  The foreman felt it all too, and what it did to him was to make him shamble sullenly out of the shed to join the enemy.

  We watched all night.

  It got hardly any cooler.

  Late at night Sister opened her lunch box with little delicate movements and intentions of sociability, and we made a little meal.

  I felt intimate with her.

  I had a sense of what, together, we had accomplished, and over and over I tried to feel her response to this. But none came. We talked rather freely of what we still had to do, and whether we thought the Mexicans meant it, and whether the train crew knew what was going on, and if they’d report it when they reached Eddy.

  We had an oil lamp that the foreman gave us.

  When I’d get drowsy, my lids would drop and it seemed to me that the flame of the wick was going swiftly down and out; then I’d jerk awake and the flame would be going on steadily, adding yet another rich and melancholy odor to our little surgery.

  I made Sister go to sleep, on her corner box, sitting with her back against the wall.

  She slept in state, her hands folded, her body inarticulated under the volume of her robes, which in the dim lamplight looked like wonderful masses carved from some dark German wood by trolls of the Bavarian forests . . . so fancifully ran my mind through that vigil.

  I saw morning come, like a cobweb, on the little window; then steal the whole sky that I could see; and then just as a flavor of cool sweet-ness had begun to lift into the air off the plains, the sun appeared (rapidly, I thought, but then it was I, not the sun, whose fever hurried life along that day).

  Early that day Pancho became conscious.

  We talked to him and he answered.

  He was enclosed in the mystery of pain and the relief of weakness.

  When he identified Sister by her habit, he tried to cross himself, and she smiled and crowed at him and made the sign of the cross over him herself.

  I examined him carefully, and he was all right. He had stood the shock amazingly well. It was too early for infection to show to any degree, but I began to have a certain optimism, a settling of the heart. It had come off. I began to think the day was cooler. You know: the sweetness over everything that seems to follow a feeling of honest satisfaction.

  Then the crowd got busy again.

  They saw Pancho through the window, his eyes open, his lips moving, smiling faintly, and staring at Sister with a child’s wonder toward some manifest loveliness, hitherto known only in dream and legend.

  In a second they were around at the door, and pushing in, babbling like children, crying his name aloud, and eager to get at him and kiss him and gabble and marvel and felicitate.

  They were filthy and enthusiastic, flowing like life itself toward that which feeds it. They were, then, infection personified.

  I shouted at them and made them stay back. I let them see Pancho, but from a distance of three feet.

  He spoke to them, thinly, and they cried “Aiee!” with astonishment, and nodded their heads as if sagely, and blinked their eyes at me, ducking their little bodi
es in homage. They couldn’t have been more friendly now. They went yes-yes, and my-my, and how wonderful to have such a man! and he is my friend, and so forth.

  But their very presence was dangerous, for they kicked up the dirt floor, and they hawked and spat on their words, and I finally put them out.

  The foreman’s mood was opposite to theirs.

  He was now surly and disgruntled that we had pulled it off successfully.

  He knew, as I had known, that the Mexicans really would kill if Pancho died.

  We had the unpleasant impression that he felt cheated of a diverting spectacle.

  We watched Pancho carefully all morning; he grew uncomfortable as the heat arose. But then, so did we. It rose and rose, and the bugs sang, and the tin roof seemed to hum too, but that must have been dramatic imagination. I had all our plans made. When the noon train came along, we would flag it, and carefully move Pancho on board, and take him down the valley to Eddy, where he could spend two weeks in the company hospital.

  Mid-morning, I stepped outside and called the men together and the foreman, and made them a speech. Now they had their hats off, listening to me. Their little eyes couldn’t have looked more kindly and earnest. Sure, I could take Pancho off on the train. Sure, they wanted him to get well. By all means the senior medico must do what he thought best. So with a great show of love for them, I shook hands with myself at the little mob, feeling like a gifted politician.

  The train finally arrived, and as it first showed, standing down the tracks in the wavering heat, it looked like a machine of rescue.

  There was only one more thing there.

  When we went to take Pancho on the train, the foreman refused to help.

  “I won’t he’p you,” he declared. “I ain’t got no authority t’move none of my men, and I won’t he’p you.”

  I picked out two of the less earthy natives and they helped me to bring the patient on board the train. We carried him on a camp cot. It belonged to the foreman. When he saw that, he got so mad he threw down his hat and jumped on it. The dust flew. His fish-white brow broke into sweat. Then he came running to stop us. We barely got Pancho on the train in time, and the door closed and latched. It was a state of siege until the train went again. It must have been ten minutes. Fortunately I’d brought my bags on board the first thing, and Sister’s.