Galore (20 page)

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 hyposulfate of soda.

Newman was on a call to the Gut when he first laid eyes on the startling 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 colorless. —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.

His father complained frequently in those early months about losing his son to a backwater of superstition and ignorance, but his tone thawed in the face of Newman’s unexpected passion for his vocation, in the carefully detailed histories the letters offered. He responded with advice and articles and requested follow-up on cases of particular interest. There were no questions about his son’s personal life or his plans for the future and as far as Newman was concerned, that was just as well.

It was during the long hours of travel with Obediah and Azariah Trim that the doctor learned most of what he knew about the people on the shore. The brothers’ knowledge of the coastline’s genealogy was biblical in its detail and they offered all they knew in a call-and-return that had the fluency of a catechism.

Obediah: James Woundy now, he was a lazy stawkins.

Azariah: Not quite right in the head, but sweet as molasses.

Obediah: Sweet as molasses and just as slow.

Azariah: He had the one daughter. And James Woundy had all he could do not to choke on his food so there’s no telling how he managed it.

Obediah: The child’s mother was Bridget Toucher and the Touchers was a hard crowd to grow up a girl among.

Azariah: They was never married those two but they had Magdalen between them. And Bridget Toucher, she finally settled with Lester Flood and they both come to the Lord last year, just before Les died of the consumption.

Obediah: Young Magdalen, James’s daughter that is, she jigged up with a fellow name of John Blade.

Azariah: Not John Blade from Devil’s Cove now. John Blade from Devil’s Cove, he turned Catholic and married Peter Freke’s widow and they lives up on the Gaze. The Roman Blades, they are.

Obediah: Magdalen married the John Blade whose father come over from Devon. John and Magdalen have got the three youngsters between them now.

Azariah: There’s James and Matthew. And the young one with the webbed fingers, Hannah her name is.

—Yes, Hannah, Newman said, relieved to have a face to cling to. He sometimes used a pad and pencil to map the spiraling connections but even then he lost his way. The roots of each family so intertwined they were barely distinguishable. Obediah’s first wife, Sara Protch, died in childbirth and he was married now to her younger sister. Azariah’s sister-in-law married her way through the Toucher triplets, the first fellow freezing to death on the ice, the second lost to a bout of typhoid. The third passed away not eight months ago, asleep on the daybed in the middle of the afternoon.

—Identical triplets? Newman said.

—You doubt it, do you?

—One in two hundred thousand. Never seen it myself.

—It was Alphonsus that Sandra married the first time round, Az Trim said. —And she called her husband Alphonsus regardless which one it was in her bed, they were the spit of one another in every particular.

Newman was surprised by their candor. There was no confidence, no family intimacy from the past century they seemed unacquainted with.

Obediah: Adelina Sellers now, she teaches the little ones up at the school. She’s the youngest of Absalom’s lot save Levi. She was afflicted with warts as a girl, Doctor. Used to walk around in a mourning veil, with her hands tucked up in her sleeves, half the shore thought she was born without fingers.

Azariah: ’Twas Mary Tryphena Devine cured her of the warts. She got the gift for such things.

Obediah: Adelina’s sister Nancy, she married a Yank and left for the Boston States. Thirty year ago. The two older brothers followed after her and they haven’t so much as cast a shadow on the shore since. Only Levi and Adelina is still with us.

—Absalom inherited most of the shore from his grandfather and once Ab is gone, Levi will have it all.

—He’s a hard man, young Levi. Money is all he thinks about. He’s married to Reverend Dodge’s daughter Flossie but he don’t have a thought for a soul except his mother.

—He got no time for Absalom at all.

—Well, I expect he’s got his reasons to dislike his father.

—Now Brother, Azariah said and the two fell silent. It was a rare instance that saw the Trims edit the catechism, stumbling on a subject too sensitive or scandalous to mention in the company of an outsider. —Crow boys! Az shouted to the dogs, as a way of ending the conversation. —Crow!

Each time they passed the droke at the foot of the Tolt the dogs bristled and growled at the trees and shied from the path. The brothers averted their eyes and kept quiet until it was well behind them, as if they were holding their breath against some poison in the air. There was a grown-over clearing in the trees and Newman was curious to know who had lived there and why it was abandoned. —You’d do well to keep clear of it, was all the brothers offered.

On Old Christmas Day the Trims carted him seventeen miles up the shore to see a man reported by a son-in-law to be on his deathbed. Newman drunk and running alongside the sled to sober up. Deking off the trail to puke into the spruce trees before catching up the Trims. —You’re having a fine old Christmas, I see, Az said.

Mummers had invaded the clinic the first night of the season and stayed until light the following morning. Newman didn’t know what to make of them or their antics, swinging him by the arm while music was played on fiddles and accordions, demanding he feed and water them, and all hands taking liberties with his arse as if they were testing the freshness of a loaf of bread. He sat them to glasses of rum and slices of the dark fruitcake patients brought in by the dozen and they left without ever revealing their identities. Each of the next eleven nights followed the same pattern though the troupe of mummers was always different. He guessed some of them from their limps or postures or physical tics and when the rum ran dry he sent around glasses of ethyl alcohol that they drank down honey-sweet.

The clinic was still crowded with mummers when the Trims came looking for Newman with news of the dying man. They left two hours before light and arrived mid-afternoon to find the elderly gentleman sitting with a glass of rum next to a fire. —I was feeling a bit nish when Sally’s man come by yesterday, he told the doctor, but I’m the finest kind now. Newman listened to his heart and checked his temperature and reflexes and there was, from what he could tell, not a thing wrong with the man. It was ten hours’ hard travel to reach him and after a meal of tea and bread and molasses they started for home, arriving after the moon had set and twenty-four hours without sleep for all three.

Newman insisted they stop at the Trims’ property to spare the dogs another half-hour hauling and he walked back to the surgery on his own, half asleep on his feet. There was a man sitting in the darkness of the front room when he arrived. —I let myself in, Patrick Devine said and he hurried out the door holding Newman’s sleeve. —I hope to God we haven’t lost them both.

He led Newman over the Tolt Road to a house in the Gut where a man with a wooden leg met them at the door. —Lazarus Devine, the man said by way of introduction. There was a somber group at the kitchen table, a woman with an infant in her lap, and Amos Devine, the young Nordic boy he’d seen with the albino. There was a man at the head of the table smoking nervously and rubbing his knuckles across a weak chin. —My brother Henley, Patrick Devine said, nodding to the smoker who had nothing like the shock of white hair on Patrick’s head.

—You the father? Newman asked.

—I hope to be, the smoker said. He stuttered on the
b
and had to stamp his foot finally to move past it.

—That’s my wife, Druce, Patrick said, pointing to the woman with the child in her lap.

Lazarus took the doctor’s arm. —We’ll have time for all that now the once, he said and ushered Newman to a back room where the pregnant woman lay unconscious on the bed, her breath coming in long, ragged intervals. Newman turned the girl’s face toward the lamplight and saw froth speckled with blood at the corners of the toothless mouth. —Jesus Bride, he whispered. She must have been newly pregnant when he pulled her teeth his first day on the shore.

Mary Tryphena was sitting beside the bed. —The baby was coming along fine this afternoon, she said, but Bride’s eyes started rolling back into her head just after suppertime. She had a spell of convulsions then, before this come over her.

Newman swore under his breath. He couldn’t guess what kind of distress the baby was suffering but the mother had little chance of surviving the severe eclampsia. He looked around the tiny room and cursed again.

Mary Tryphena said, If swearing was any help, Doctor, Bride would be up and around this ages ago.

The bed was narrow and nailed to the wall and Newman called the men in to help carry Bride to the kitchen, clearing mugs and cutlery to lay her out. Patrick’s wife stood rocking her own crying child until Mary Tryphena ordered her home out of it. Amos went with her and Henley was headed for the door as well before Newman called him back. —You’ll have to help hold her, he said. He unpacked forceps and a scalpel and pushed the unconscious woman’s muslin shift high above her belly, cut the perineum from the vaginal canal all the way to the anus. Newman arranged the family around the table, each assigned an arm or leg. Henley weeping and whispering J-J-Jesus Jesus. Newman picked up the forceps and put one foot up on the table’s edge to brace himself. —Everyone hold tight, he said.

By first light the baby was washed and swaddled and asleep in a cradle beside the stove. Bride was back in her bed, drifting in and out of consciousness while Newman stitched the ragged folds of skin together as best he could. Mary Tryphena watching over his shoulder. —Do you think she’ll live, Doctor?

—With any luck.

—She’ve had precious little of that the last day or so. You’re a dab hand with a needle and thread, Doctor.

He guessed the midwife’s age at somewhere north of sixty. Small fine features, a thick head of gray hair shot through with filaments of the deepest black.

The men were sitting about the kitchen smoking as he came through. The table and floor already scoured clean. Lazarus had removed his wooden leg and Newman leaned over to examine the stump. A rough amputation from another lifetime. —Does it give you any trouble?

—Falls over every time I tries to stand on the bugger is all, Lazarus said.

Newman looked across at Mary Tryphena. His head swimming from lack of sleep and twelve solid nights of celebration. —Send for me if the girl’s no better by this evening.

It was a full week before he was sure of Bride and he engaged the Trim brothers for a call to Spread Eagle he’d put off to stay close to her. A day of still cold, clear skies and nearly windless, the sound of the dogs’ barking echoing crisp off the hills. They stopped in a sheltered valley to boil the kettle and Azariah said, So you been round to see the Devines.

—I have.

—Mary Tryphena says they’d have lost the girl and the baby both if you hadn’t come by.

Newman brushed the notion aside. —How did Lazarus lose that leg?

The brothers glanced at one another and shook their heads. They gave a brief account of the hard times that fell on the shore forty years ago, sneaking up on the details. How many seasons the new sealing vessel lay frozen in the harbor before it was able to make its maiden voyage to the ice. Everyone hungry and in debt and there was a fight for berths aboard the ship. The Devines with only two tickets and Lizzie insisted Laz be accompanied by his father. But Devine’s Widow wouldn’t suffer Lazarus to go to the ice without Judah, thinking it unlucky somehow.