No one heard anything of Father Phelan but for rumours of his nomadic work in the furthest reaches of the country where the Church held too little sway to bar him gathering congregations of six and seven in a kitchen. The priest living itinerant in the isolated realms of his parish like a thief, baptizing and wedding and burying as he passed through. Callum was years dead on the Labrador ice fields before the only shred of real news reached the shore—that Father Phelan had drowned while travelling among the northernmost islands of the coast. The priest’s corpse was found afloat on its back in open seas, decked out in the threadbare remains of Cunico’s clerical robes, his arms crossed over his chest. The fishermen who recovered the body found the pyx nestled safe in Father Phelan’s hands, the Blessed Sacrament inside it still dry.
{ PART TWO }
{ 5 }
THE DOCTOR WAS SCHEDULED TO ARRIVE via packet boat out of St. John’s and the entire population crowded the landwash to watch him come ashore. He was greeted on the wharf by Barnaby Shambler, publican, undertaker and member of the Legislature for Paradise District since elections were first held in Newfoundland thirty years before. Shambler had courted other doctors and nurses to serve his constituents, two or three of whom had made it as far as Halifax or St. John’s before illness or belated discretion sent them packing. People doubted his most recent recruit would get any closer and they’d been waiting with a skeptical anticipation. Even Shambler was surprised to see the man step off the boat with his leather medical bag in hand, as if he were ready to see patients on the wharf.
The Honourable Member’s official words of welcome were slurred and the doctor thought him drunk at first, the swelling on the right side of his face disguised by the handlebar moustache and beard.—If you would be so kind, Shambler managed, rubbing his cheek.
The surgeon was an American, fresh out of medical school in Baltimore. Harold Newman. Granny glasses on a young face, his smile like a whitewashed fence.—I hope there’s no underlying message, Newman said as he pried the infected molar loose, to the fact the district elected a mortician to government.
—Uhnrh uur hhunnrhu, Shambler replied.
Newman’s father was a doctor, as was his father before him.—It was passed on to me, Newman told Shambler, like a disease. He preferred fishing, mountain climbing, big-game hunting and sailing to anything he encountered at home in Hartford or in medical school. He’d spent a summer away from his studies in Alaska and almost stayed for good. Not yet twenty-six, lanky and athletic, he’d come to Newfoundland to avoid the stultification of an urban practice, the straitjacket of Connecticut manners and expectations. Days before he left the States he’d broken off an engagement to a distant cousin brokered by his mother.—My parents, he said, have all but disowned me for coming here. He stuffed cotton into the crater that surrendered Shambler’s tooth. Wild country was what drew him to Newfoundland, rivers and lakes, caribou and black bear and ocean. Half a world away from his father was also a draw.
The relief Shambler felt after the extraction made him giddy.—A drink, he muffled through the mouthful of cotton.—A drink to welcome the good doctor.
He was working in a corner of Shambler’s tavern, a long line of people who followed him up from the wharf waiting their turn at the door. Shambler set a bottle of dark rum on the counter and parcelled out a shot to patients before their turn in the chair.
—You see now how he gets elected, the next in line told the doctor.
Newman had never encountered mouths in such a state of decay and sorry misalignment. Everyone he saw was in need of dentistry and he spent the afternoon packing gums with cocaine before reefing with the forceps, his forearms flecked with blood, white shards of enamel under his feet.
A girl sat in the empty chair and smiled up at him.—I wants them all out, she said.
—All what?
—Me teeth, she said.—I wants them all pulled.
—How old are you, miss?
—Sixteen.
She said some more then that was incomprehensible to Newman, though Shambler laughed and slapped his hand on the bar. She was tall and barefoot, the part in her brown hair as sharp as a blade. Not beautiful, Newman thought, but handsome. Something non-European in the features, in the fullness of the nostrils and lips, the olive skin.—Open wide, he said. The tendons in her neck pulling taut as she tipped her head back. The delicate line of the clavicle.—There’s two that may need to come out, he said.
—I won’t get out of this chair till they’re every one gone, she told him. Or so he guessed.
—There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the rest of your teeth.
She went on awhile in response, Newman trying desperately to pick words from the rushing stream. He glanced across at Shambler.
—She says they’re only going to cause her grief later on, Shambler translated.—And she’ll as like be somewhere she got no one to pull them. The Honourable Member shrugged to say he had no argument to counter the girl’s insistence. She got up from the chair an hour later, her mouth packed with cotton and her bloody teeth in a handkerchief.
Shambler called Newman to the counter.—You’ll want a little pick-me-up, he said and handed the doctor a tumbler of rum. Newman took a mouthful and shook his head. Startled to have disfigured so pretty a face.—I should have refused her, I suppose.
Shambler spat a clot of blood into an empty glass.—She can watch out to herself.
—She’s hardly more than a child.
—Bride was never a child, is the truth of it, Doctor. I minds the time Thomas Trass tried to come aboard of her when she wasn’t much above twelve. Trass was drunk and pawing at her and he said, Bride, I’d love to get into that little dress of yours. Shambler ducked his chin to his chest, trying to head off a spurt of laughter.—And Bride said, Sure there’s already one asshole in there Mr. Trass, why would I want another one.
Newman turned his head to the door as if he might catch a glimpse of her still.
—What a saucy little bitch, Shambler said when he’d caught his breath.—It’s two years you signed on for is it, Doctor?
—That’s right.
—Any regrets now you had a look at the place?
Newman downed the last of his rum and rolled his shirtsleeves another turn up his arms. He felt bizarrely elated.—No, he said.—No, I think I’ll be quite happy here.
He took over an abandoned house near the public school, setting up an examination room and a surgery in the front rooms and sleeping on the second floor. Half the men on the shore were away at the cod fishery on the Labrador for the summer and he saw mostly women and old men and children in those first months. He set broken limbs and pulled teeth, he treated swollen glands and apoplexy and typhoid, gangrene and pneumonia and asthma. When the fishermen returned in September he dealt with strains and sprains and boils, water pups, bones rotten with tuberculosis, cuts from fish knives gone septic under a foul poultice of molasses and bread.
The patients he saw were virtually incapable of articulating their troubles, offering only the broadest, most childish descriptions of what ailed them. I finds me side, they told him. I finds me legs. I got a pain up tru me, they said. Bad head, bad back. Bad stomach, which sometimes meant trouble breathing. Even under questioning they had difficulty presenting specific symptoms, which made them sound like a crowd of hypochondriacs, but it was rare to root out a malingerer. People on the shore were unable to distinguish illness or injury from the ordinary strain and torment of their days until they were crippled and it was only the desperate who braved the clinic, and only after they’d exhausted every quack potion and home remedy available. No one had money to spare for treatment. They paid the doctor with potatoes and cabbage and salt fish, with a turn of split wood, with pork hocks and herring and dippers of fresh blueberries and bakeapples, with a day’s work on the roof or help digging a well, with spruce beer and goat’s milk and eggs, with partridge and turr, with live hens.
Newman’s company was actively courted by the t
own’s quality and he suffered their attentions with a curt politeness meant to keep them at bay. He ate at Selina’s House where Ann Hope Sellers offered lectures on a variety of political subjects while Absalom and their youngest daughter occupied themselves with the needs of an ancient aunt. Ann Hope was a long-time abolitionist and had written some two hundred letters to the House of Lords and to the Congress and president of the United States on the matter.—You’ve undoubtedly become acquainted with Nigger Ralph’s Pond, she said. The name, she felt, was a black mark on the shore.
—A black mark, Mrs. Sellers?
Ann Hope set down her soup spoon.—You know what I mean, Doctor, she said.
Ann Hope had long since retired from teaching, but she’d devoted the last five years to having the new public school built near the Episcopal church. There was no money for desks or books or fuel to heat the building and she meant to make it an issue in the next election.
The daughter was past thirty, with the guarded look of someone trying to hide a permanent scar. Insular, he could see, but not shy. She taught in the unfurnished school but showed little interest in the upcoming campaign or anything political. Everyone referred to the aunt as Mrs. Gallery. The old woman was suffering the advanced stages of senility and she spent the meal cursing a long-dead husband who haunted her still. The entire household seemed quietly lunatic and Absalom Sellers, who barely spoke a word all evening, offered the doctor a bashful look of apology now and then.
Newman refused all invitations to attend church and let it be known in an offhand manner that he was an atheist. Some thought the assertion would be the end of his appointment, but Reverend Dodge and the Catholic priest let the matter be. Dodge had served the parish nearly half a century, Father Reddigan more than a decade, and neither was willing to see the shore stripped of its sole medical professional. Only the Methodist evangelist took issue with the scandalous claim, pushing handwritten copies of his sermons on the doctor. He’d converted half the local Protestants and a handful of Romans in his two years in Paradise Deep and he considered the atheist doctor a personal challenge.—Since you’re too busy to join us on Sundays, he said, pointing to the sheaf of papers he’d laid on Newman’s desk. Reverend Violet sported a tidy navyman’s beard, black strings of hair combed over the bald pate of his head. There was an agitated optimism about him that kept his hands in motion as he spoke. Newman glanced down at the sermons, the topmost epistle titled Sleep as the Urging of the Devil.—I prefer sleep to reading, he said, pushing the pile back across the desk.
He spent what little free time he had in the open air. Half a dozen government roads ran miles into the backcountry beyond Nigger Ralph’s Pond, built by destitute fishermen forced to work for their dole during the worst years of the century. They were intended to open up the island’s interior where fields of arable land were simply waiting to be plowed and planted, according to Shambler and his like. That mythic Arcadia never materialized and the roads petered out among the same dense stands of spruce and low scrub and blackwater marshes that covered the entire island. The gravel thoroughfares were in constant use by horse and cart hauling wood or bog turf, by berry pickers and trout fishermen and youngsters in search of freshwater swimming holes. Newman walked them all with a fishing rod or rifle in the early mornings and on Sundays when his surgery was closed. Everyone he crossed paths with was civil but a little distant, he thought. They warned him to carry bread in his pockets to ward off the Little Ones who might lead him astray when he tramped through the woods and offered tips on the best rivers for trout and then wished him a good day. They were a people at their best with visitors, he was learning. They would turn their own children from their beds to give a night’s sleep to a stranger. But Newman occupied an odd middle ground, an outsider they were beholden to, someone who might very well overstay his welcome, and they were slightly wary of him. He took what kindness came his way and was grateful otherwise to be left alone.
While the weather held through the fall Newman occasionally travelled by foot to the smaller coves and inlets within the district or was ferried along the shore in a bully boat owned by Obediah and Azariah Trim. In his first week of practice he’d removed an egg-shaped fibroid below Obediah’s Adam’s apple, slipping it through an incision that could be hidden afterwards behind a shirt collar. The trips were intended as payment for that procedure but the Trims carried on with the service for years as a Christian duty. They were among Reverend Violet’s first converts on the shore and like all Methodists they were teetotallers who never took the Lord’s name in vain regardless of provocation. They quoted the Gospels endlessly and let the atheist doctor know they were praying he be brought to Jesus. Once the snow settled in they carted Newman to medical emergencies by dogsled, harnessing their motley assortment of animals at a moment’s notice.
The brothers were chalk and cheese to look at—Azariah a squat tree trunk of a man, his face as livid and sinewy as a plate of salt beef, Obediah nearly six foot, a dimpled chin like the cheeks of a baby’s arse—but they were twinned in their dispositions. Newman never heard a word of complaint from either man. They ran alongside the sled and were cheerfully tireless. One or the other would take the harness at the lead when the dogs flagged or the sled bogged in heavy snow, shouting Crow boys! to encourage the team ahead. They never lost their way or seemed even momentarily uncertain of their location. They travelled narrow paths cut through tuckamore and bog or took shortcuts along the shoreline, chancing the unpredictable sea ice. Every hill and pond and stand of trees, every meadow and droke for miles was named and catalogued in their heads. At night they navigated by the moon and stars or by counting outcrops and valleys or by the smell of spruce and salt water and wood smoke. It seemed to Newman they had an additional sense lost to modern men for lack of use.
They worked for Sellers like everyone else on the shore, but had tried their hand at any entrepreneurial opportunity the country afforded, spinning wool and churning their own butter, fur trapping and fishing the local rivers for salmon. They’d built a sawmill that they ran with help from the sons, brothers-in-law and nephews in their widely extended families. They were practical and serious and outlandishly foreign. They described the deathly ill as wonderful sick. Anything brittle or fragile or tender was nish, anything out of plumb or uneven was asquish. They called the Adam’s apple a kinkorn, referred to the Devil as Horn Man. They’d once shown the doctor a scarred vellum copy of the Bible that Jabez Trim had cut from a cod’s stomach nearly a century past, a relic so singular and strange that Newman asked to see it whenever he visited, leafing through the pages with a kind of secular awe. He felt at times he’d been transported to a medieval world that was still half fairy tale.
He filled his letters to Connecticut with the medical oddities he encountered, providing clinical descriptions alongside the apocryphal or speculative pathology he was offered by locals. He visited Red Head Cove where more than half the population had inherited red hair and freckled skin and hemophilia from a single foxy Irishman. He treated a five-year-old with webbed fingers that were somehow supposed to be a vestige of her grandfather’s tryst with a merwoman. Saw a family of seven brothers and sisters in Devil’s Cove who were suffering accelerated senescence, their bodies entering puberty within the first three years of life, progressing through middle age by five. Two older siblings hadn’t survived beyond a decade and the younger children had no hope of outliving them. It was a widow’s curse according to some and the strangely ancient children defied any medical explanation Newman could dredge up. He took photographs of these and other striking cases, idiopathic scoliosis presenting with a forty-five-degree curvature, cleft lip, birthmarks in the shape of animals or continents. A middle-aged brother and sister born bald and without fingernails in Spread Eagle. He developed the albumen plates in his office, bathing the glass in solutions of gallic acid and silver nitrate and fixing the image with hyposulphate of soda.
Newman was on a call to the Gut when he first laid eyes on the st
artling figure of Judah Devine, throwing rocks into the cove for a black Labrador, the dog retrieving the stones and dropping them at his feet. Newman introduced himself, asking permission to do an examination. There was a boy with Judah who explained the man was mute. Jude sat quiet as the doctor checked his eyes and ears and mouth, and ran his hands against the grain of the white hair to see the scalp. The stink off him almost unbearable.—What’s his name? Newman asked the boy.
—Jude Devine. He’s me grandfather. The boy had a Nordic look about him, the hair white-blond and his face pale as the royalties of Europe. Eyes a blue so light they were almost colourless.—He was born out of a whale’s guts, the youngster said.—That’s why he suffers so with the smell on him.
—What do you mean, born?
—Devine’s Widow cut him from the belly of a whale with a fish knife, they says. Jude come out of it naked as a fish.
—And you believe that, do you?
The boy shrugged.—He is what he is, Doctor. I got no reason to doubt it.
—Do you think he’d let me take a photograph of him?
—He’s not deaf.
Newman wrote his father a long description of the faux-albino of indeterminate age, salvaged from the belly of a whale about the time James Woundy enjoyed his dalliance with the mermaid. Man suffers acute bromhidrosis, Newman wrote, and is completely mute. Eyes, oddly, displaying no lack of pigmentation though the blue is unusually faint. Not a true albino, then, although he could think of no other explanation for the man’s appearance. A full set of teeth but for a central incisor lost to some blunt trauma.
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