Each Man's Son

by Hugh Maclennan

  “With hands like yours,” MacKenzie’s voice was quiet and strong with authority, “with the flair you have, you could become one of the great surgeons of the world. But you need wider experience. You need to measure yourself against bigger men. I’d like to write to Pyke about you. I had a letter from him only last week. I wrote him when he was knighted. His work at Golden Cross may not be quite as advanced as Cushing’s, but it’s pretty close to it.” MacKenzie smiled. “Did I ever tell you that Sir Wystan Pyke was my junior once?”

  He looked at Ainslie, knocked out his pipe and pulled his feet from the mantel. “Man,” he said, “you’re dead to the world. And no wonder.” At the door he paused, so tall and broad and solid he filled most of the opening. “If I’ve said anything tonight that was ill-considered, forgive me. I’ve probably become an interfering old man since my boys went away.”

  Eight

  NOW ONCE MORE Ainslie’s brain dimmed and for three hours he was out of the world. His sleep was so profound that it took him longer than usual to come out of it; he kept clinging to the borderline of consciousness because he felt so cool and peaceful he hated to return. He was home in the Margaree Valley where he had been born, it was the Queen’s Birthday and he was a boy of fifteen walking down the slope of the hill from his father’s house through John MacGregor’s field to the river bottom. The meadow at the foot of the hills was stately with lone elms, the fans of their upper branches distinct in the first light, their trunks dim. The tall grass was heavy with dew and he felt the cold wetness come through his trouser legs as he walked through it. As he neared the stream a deer came out of an alder clump and bounded into the field ahead of him, stopped to stare and paw the ground with head held high, feeling safe because it was spring when no guns were fired. The deer’s hide was wet with dew and there was a scar on his right shoulder from combat in a past rutting season. The sky lightened, and before the boy reached the river it was gray bright over the hill lines; then the whole landscape began to open up and now he could see the full sweep of the hills coming splendidly down the flanks of the valley to their final bend a mile below him where the river straightened and ran smoothly between meadows to the sea. The boy reached a spit of shingle from which the freshet had receded, walked out on it past a dead hawk with its eyes pecked out and found a washed-up spruce at the place where he wanted to fish. The spruce had been years in the river and its branches were worn as smooth as old bones. He dragged it away from the point and stood in its place with the mainstream at his feet, the water narrowed by the spit so that it poured deep without a ripple and ink-dark in the first light. He secured a homemade fly to his leader and the sound of his reel tore brassily across the monotone of the stream as he made the first trial casts to lengthen his line. The smooth stones of the spit grew white as daylight increased, and by the time he had his second trout, red clouds were splintering out of the east in advance of the rising sun. He remembered Homer’s line about the rosy-fingered dawn and was proud of the Margaree, for here as in the ancient Troad the dawn was exactly as Homer had described it. The moist air was fragrant with alder, the cleanest, most innocent smell in the world, and when his rod bent double and the line screamed out for the third time he knew he had a grilse instead of a trout. The grilse broke water once so far down the pool it seemed to have no connection with him at all. The deer returned and stepped noiselessly over the white stones about twenty yards to windward and drank. The reel clacked as the boy wound it in, sang out again, clacked and sang. Then its noise disappeared as the entire valley opened up, the hills rolling back like the Red Sea before the Children of Israel into a light-flooded plain loud with the movement of men in armies, and Dr. Daniel Ainslie opened his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Doctor.”

  He was back in the hospital again and the air was not cool with alder but stuffy with the smell of the tobacco he and MacKenzie had smoked, compounded with a sharp stink of carbolic sneaking in the open door. The voice of a nurse, so Gaelicky it made two syllables out of every one, actually did sound sorry. A voice like hers sounded sorry all the time.

  “I did not want to trouble you, Doctor, with you so tired, but Dr. Weir says the patient is getting too much for him to handle.”

  Ainslie jumped to his feet. “Confound it, why wasn’t I wakened earlier?”

  “Och, Doctor, but it iss not the OB case at all, it iss the young Newfoundlander. I think he iss going crazy.”

  “Is he bleeding?”

  “He tried to tear off the bandages, but without hands he could do little harm to himself. Another patient called out, and when I went into the ward, there he wass with his teeth into the gauze. Now he hass the whole ward awake.”

  “You say Dr. Weir is with him?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Ainslie sat down, scuffed off his slippers and reached for his shoes. “He’s probably a little drunk from the ether. However, I’d better take a look at him. People like that with high thresholds of pain sometimes get beside themselves when they panic. Is everything else quiet?”

  “There hass been nothing to bother you with, Doctor, but of course it iss Saturday night.”

  Ainslie grunted as he worked his toes into his shoes. The Margaree was still close to him and he hated to leave it.

  “Dr. MacMillan hass been busy,” the nurse went on. “He iss new and not used to it, and he wass very nice to them, I must say.”

  “They’re lucky they had him to deal with instead of me.”

  “Indeed, Doctor, that iss just what I said to Red Whillie MacIsaac when he came into the outpatients.”

  “So he was at it again, was he?”

  The nurse was relieved because the doctor she feared more than any of the others seemed to be so congenial tonight.

  “Indeed he wass, him and Mick Casey again. They started in front of Jimmie MacGillivray’s and before it wass over it spread all the way up to MacDonald’s Corner. Everybody it seems got in on it tonight.” She failed to notice that the doctor had begun to frown as he tied the laces of his shoes. “It wass real disgraceful, Doctor. They say Magistrate MacKeegan talked them into it. They were so drunk they were ready to kiss each other, but MacKeegan said loudly why should he spend two dollars to see Archie MacNeil in the ring when he could see Casey and MacIsaac fighting in MacDonald’s Corner for nothing, and after a while MacKeegan himself would have been in it only Big Alec McCoubrie reminded him of his position. We had two broken noses, one broken jaw and compound fractures of two ribs altogether. But everything is quiet now.”

  “Everything?” Ainslie said dryly and walked past her out the door.

  He could hear the boy’s cries before he reached the open door of the ward. When he entered he saw the heads and shoulders of patients sitting upright in their beds. Only the night lights were burning and the ward was a forest of shadows. Young Weir’s white jacket rose from a bedside and approached him with a what-have-you shrug of the shoulders, but he cut the houseman short before he could speak.

  “You’d better rest, Weir. I’ll take over.”

  He sat on the side of the Newfoundlander’s bed and with quiet strength forced the boy to lower his right wrist. Then he felt the pulse with his finger high on the forearm. It was fast but steady, though the boy’s whole body was shaking so violently the bed shook with him. Ainslie put his hand on the forehead and felt the sweat.

  “It’s not easy, is it, lad?”

  The boy sobbed again and his body gave a convulsive twist.

  “You can’t go on like this, you know.”

  The boy started up wildly, his chest bursting Ainslie’s hands away. “Only a week ago I was ’ome in Newfoundland and look at me now since I come ’ere! I want to go ’ome.” He lifted his bandaged stumps and shook them at the doctor. “What kin I do with these?”

  “You can lay them on the bed and rest them.” Ainslie’s hand returned to the sweating forehead and remained there. His fingers felt the trembling nerves begin to relax. Suddenly he smiled. “What’s your
name?”

  The boy swallowed before he spoke. “Bill Blackett.” Then for nearly half a minute he lay still, his mind roaming through fear, shock, the lingering delusions produced by the ether and the cloudy effect of the sedatives he had been given.

  “With a fine name like that,” Ainslie said, “you’re going to be famous.”

  The boy gave a twisted grin. “Blackett ain’t so much, but ’ome in Blow-Me-Down they do call me Billy Foreskin.”

  “What did you do to earn that?”

  “Nuthin I done, zurr, but I got a long ’un.”

  Ainslie smiled. The quivering in the boy’s nerves was less noticeable now. “Can you read and write, Bill?” he said.

  “No, zurr, I ain’t smart.”

  “Ever been to school?”

  “I were out in the dories when I were eight.”

  “How do you know you aren’t smart,” the doctor said, smiling, “if you never went to school?”

  “I were none too smart in the dory, thet were what my old man said.”

  “Don’t believe what he said. Believe in yourself, Bill.”

  “With thim squatten ’ands?”

  Ainslie bent forward. “Listen, my boy–you aren’t too badly off at all. I’ve saved four fingers, and on your right hand, too. Did you think I’d turn you loose with no hands?” In the night light the doctor’s face became lined and concentrated as once again he merged himself with the patient and moved forward towards the boy’s need. “Those four fingers–you think about them. Tonight they became the most important four fingers in the world.” He paused as he saw the stare of wonder flicker upward towards hope, and then he continued in a voice so low the man in the next bed could hear nothing but a murmur. “Before you get out of hospital, you’re going to begin to learn how to read and write. All you need for reading is your eyes–and you’ve got fine eyes, much better than mine. For writing all you need is two fingers of the four you’ve still got. The day will come when you’ll think this accident was the luckiest thing that ever happened to you.”

  Blackett looked up, then shook his head. “Doctor, I were a fool about them cables with Tom, but I ain’t a fool enough to call these squatten ’ands lucky.”

  “That’s just where you’re wrong. This accident is going to compel you to get an education. So long as you had your hands, there was nothing in front of your bows but coal heaving or the dories. But now, Bill, you’re going to be a man of brains because you’ve got to be.”

  It took a while for the shocked mind to grasp even a partial meaning in the doctor’s words. Ainslie watched the boy’s face quietly and at last he saw the lips part in a slow smile.

  “My old man can’t read or write neether.”

  Ainslie smiled back at him.

  “My brother Garge knows ’ow to run a motorboat, but last election ’e made ’is mark, same’s me.” The smile turned into a wide grin. “Doctor, you ought to know Garge, for he’s real smart. Last election ’e got two dollars out of the Liberals for voting five times, and seventy-five cents from the Tories for voting twice.”

  “There couldn’t have been many votes left in Blow-Me-Down after that.”

  “It weren’t in Blow-Me-Down Garge done thet, Doctor, it were in Port-aux-Basques.”

  “Forget about Garge,” Ainslie said. “Think about what you can do yourself for a change. Garge is going to envy you some day.”

  Ainslie sat by the bedside for another five minutes, speaking occasionally. His quest with the patient had taken his mind out of Cape Breton to a dark gray coast so clean and pure that men, whose crops must rise out of corruption, could grow scarcely a vegetable on it. He saw the outport villages of Newfoundland perched on stilts in nooks of the granite cliffs, square gray huts under a gray sky with sudden blinks of green and yellow emergent over the ocean. He heard the dragging surge of water in Bonavista Bay. He remembered his first glimpse of yellow dories lifting and disappearing in the shelving Banks’ roll under a cold mist of rain and the mate of the bark pointing at them, shouting over the scream of a sticky halyard block that those men fished all winter long with bare hands, adding that they couldn’t navigate but smelled their way through the fog like seals. He remembered the Newfoundland doctor whose entire practice depended on a motorboat because there were no roads in the district, a thick-set man with bowlegs and wind-burned cheeks telling him there was less fuss in taking the leg off an outport Newfoundlander without anesthetic than in removing the tonsils of a city man with all the innovations of a modern operating room.

  “I saw your home once,” Ainslie said.

  “You seed Blow-Me-Down, zurr?”

  “A long time ago. I was younger than you are now. I only saw it from the sea.” Ainslie got to his feet, wondering if the place he remembered really had been Blow-Me-Down. “Now turn over and go to sleep. And when you wake up, remember–you’re going to learn to read and write.”

  The ward was silent as Ainslie left it. This time he did not trouble to remove his shoes when he reached the common room, but stretched out in the chair, expecting to be called within the hour. He was wrong. He slept until eight o’clock and then he was wakened by a smiling nurse who was bearing his breakfast on a tray.

  Nine

  MARGARET lay drowsily between sturdy sheets in the bed where she had slept as a child. It was in the old part of the house which had been constructed from timbers salvaged from the last brig her grandfather had built. Over her head was a porthole instead of a window. Even in her childhood that porthole had been a reminder of brave days that were gone forever. She had heard so often of the great fire in the shipyard, of how her father and grandfather had fought it for two nights and a day, that she could hardly believe, even now, that she had not seen the fire herself. Her father and mother were scarcely a year married at the time, and since the foundation of their house was already laid, they had used the few undamaged sections of the brig from sentiment as much as from thrift. The timbers built into the wall by Margaret’s bed had come from the ship’s deckhouse.

  She heard a creak of boards in the narrow corridor outside her room as one of her sisters went to the bathroom. A door closed and there was a faint rumble of water filling a tub. She smiled to herself, remembering what a rush there had been for that single bathroom in the days while her father was still alive, before her second-nearest sister had married and gone to live in Upper Canada and her two brothers had left for the States.

  She stretched luxuriously and eased the muscles of her throat, wondering if she had sung too much the night before to have any voice left for her solo in church this morning. Everyone in the house had gone through passages from “The Messiah,” parts of which had been sung by the church choir at regular intervals for the past eighteen years. They had also eaten sandwiches and drunk coffee and sung light opera until eleven o’clock, and afterwards they had danced in the hall until the advent of the Sabbath put an end to the party. No matter how many of the Eldridges married and moved away, there were always young men in the house on Saturday nights.

  Margaret yawned. It was good to be back now and then in a place where laziness was a normal state of being. There had never been any tension in this family. After the loss of the shipyard her father had lived quietly for years as the town’s postmaster, while her mother reigned in the house like a queen. Mrs. Eldridge possessed the female kind of ambition which concentrates on being rather than doing. It was still hard for Margaret to accept as natural the inexorable inner drive of her husband, just as it was difficult for her to believe that a man’s judgment could ever be as final as the judgment of a woman. Her own father had never stood up against her mother, and all the young men who thronged the house had come to sue for favor from its female inmates. It was a house that had always been quick with changing female moods, and until her father’s death there had generally been a baby on the way, a baby just arrived, or an older girl falling in love.

  Margaret stirred lazily in the sheets and began to think of her husband wit
h increasing fondness. She wondered if he had spent the whole night on his feet and would be too tired to enjoy her later in the day. A cat smile appeared on her lips. She loved having Dan enjoy her; it was her secret belief that she was very good at making love and she wished Dan would give himself more time to enjoy her properly. Under her closed eyes the smile lingered while she stirred languorously. All her annoyance of the night before had disappeared. She had sung it away in Handel’s arias, and this morning she wanted to tell Dan how sorry she was for having hurt him.

  Some minutes later she opened her eyes to see her youngest sister, Ruth, sitting on the edge of her bed. Ruth was in a flannel dressing gown and her cheeks were shining with soap and water. At sixteen her mouth was so generous that most of her smiles resembled grins; at thirty she would probably still have the face of a gamin.

  “Wake up,” Ruth said, “even if you are old and married. You’ve got to sing ‘O Rest in the Lord’ this morning.”

  “Your hair looks nice the way you’ve put it up,” Margaret said and yawned.

  “I know it does, but you might tell Mother so. You can have the bathroom next. Norah’s in the tub now. And Sheila’s getting breakfast.” Ruth made a wry face. “It won’t be any good, either, because she burns the pancakes on purpose whenever it’s her turn. She always thinks that’s the way to get out of her day in the kitchen, but it never works.”

  “Annie used to do the same thing.” Margaret stretched her toes. “I wonder what she’s like in her own kitchen now.”

  Ruth made another face. She knew she was Margaret’s favorite sister. “You were mad at Dan last night, weren’t you?”

  “Did it show?”

  “All over you. I thought maybe you’d decided to give him up for good.”

  “Oh, he’s not as bad as all that.” Margaret stretched her creamy arms and smiled broadly. “The poor man just happens to be a genius, but he doesn’t know it.”