Listen to Racheal read from the Wind Seller
on Treve Cole's www.authorsaloud.com website.
Excerpt
Minas Basin, NS: May 31, 1924
The schooner is stranded on the mud flats, the tide
almost all the way out or already on its way back
in—Hetty despairs of keeping track of the
water’s daily creep with the ease of the villagers,
who count on their fingers from the last new or full moon.
Esmeralda climbs down the wharf ladder first, then extends
her hand to Hetty, who struggles with her dress and worries
about her shoes.
“It’s easier to board when the tide’s
in.”
“I would think it’s easier to board in
trousers,” Hetty responds. She brushes her hands over
her clothing, as much to rid herself of the disconcerting
feel of Esmeralda during the ride to the wharf—wiry
hand about her waist, muscles in her lean thighs adjusting
beneath her—as to straighten and dust her dress.
“Possibly.” Esmeralda seems even more
distracted now they are aboard. Hetty, standing at a slant
on the deck of the schooner she was spinning fantasies
around only a few hours before, feels the same;
Esmeralda’s fretting is contagious, and Hetty is not
without misgivings, is not naïve enough to believe her
actions won’t have consequences. Peter will want an
explanation. His wife, hurried out in the middle of the
afternoon by Noble Matheson and a beautiful young female
sailor in men’s clothing. Already she is editing the
tale for his benefit.
Esmeralda vanishes down a set of dark narrow steps at
the bow of the ship, and, her pulse racing, Hetty follows.
At the foot of the steps she bumps up against one of the
crew members and almost leaps backwards. The skinny man she
saw that first day. Except that isn’t a birthmark on
his face. A carbuncle has spread its poison across the
man’s left cheek like a knuckled port wine stain,
disfiguring him. Carbuncles, one of the doctors had said
repeatedly during Hetty’s years at the Nova Scotia
Hospital Training School for Nurses, manifest themselves in
the weakest part of the body but gather their
corruption—here he rolled his Scottish r’s with
relish—from every organ, limb and digit.
“I’m sorry. You made me jump.” The air
is close down here, almost wet with moisture. He grins, but
his eyes stay cold—like a dead fish, Hetty thinks,
watching him disappear up the stairs. He isn’t the
patient she’s come to see, but someone should lance
and drain that thing on his face.
The dim light, the lack of air, the angle of the floor
on which she is standing are all disorienting. Esmeralda
has disappeared into the gloom. When Hetty reaches out to
the side someone grabs her hand. Noble Matheson. Her first
instinct is to pull away, but her eyes still adjusting, she
allows herself to be guided towards the bunk beds corralled
on the side of the mess. Hetty smells the man she is here
to tend before she can make out his form in the narrow
berth. Breathing thickly through her mouth, she approaches
the cot.
A young man. Someone standing in the shadows hands
Esmeralda a kerosene lamp and Hetty takes in his
sweat-drenched face, his pallour, his eyes, glassy with
pain. John James is scarcely more than a boy.
“John James,” she says gently. For some
reason children always better handle their pain than they
do their fear.
“J.J. This lady has come to make you better.
She’s a nurse.”
“I’m not any—” Hetty begins but
Esmeralda taps a warning on her arm. When Hetty turns
around she all she can see is the lamp Esmeralda is
holding. When she looks back at the comatose boy in the
bunk, spots dance before her eyes.
“He has a bit of a fever. Not much, though, not
enough to make him this ill. He is a strong man
usually.”
Man? Exactly how old is this man, Hetty wonders, with
his plump lips, his skinny hairless chest and the faintest
burr of a moustache on his upper lip? No more than sixteen,
for sure. Esmeralda leans forward and, pulling the grubby
sheet back from J.J.’s legs, reveals a wound in the
flesh of the boy’s inner thigh, just above his knee.
The stench of rot is stomach-turning. Hetty feels her
nurse’s demeanor slip like a second skin over her
face. Pustulence and the telltale blackened skin of
necrosis. Part of this boy’s leg is already dead. She
squeezes his hand. J.J. doesn’t stir; in fact he
seems to have no sense of the people around him. How long
has he been lying like this?
“How did this happen?”
A silence fractionally longer than it should be, and the
back of Hetty’s neck prickles. “This wound.
What caused it?”
“He slipped on deck, the circumstances are a
little confusing. Somehow he managed to impale himself on a
grappling hook.”
Somehow indeed. “The bone is shattered.”
Crepitus. She kneels on the floor of the cabin, not wanting
to cause the boy more pain by disturbing the fractured
bone. Her statement is met with silence.
“So there is nothing still in his leg?”
“Such as?” An edge has crept into
Esmeralda’s voice.
“Debris, a piece of metal. Even a shred of fabric,
something from the pants he was wearing can bring on this
kind of infection if it’s left too long.”
Bullet. Only a bullet could have caused such destruction.
She opens her mouth to say as much but it is as if
Esmeralda has drained the air from the cabin and Hetty can
no longer breathe.
“It was cleaned out,” Esmeralda says
eventually, and air flows back into the tiny cabin,
Hetty’s jaw unclenches.
“When was that? How long ago?” By whom? For
she would like to wring his neck. It is just such meddling
that has caused the infection. What had he used? A dirty
penknife from his back pocket? Or had he taken the knife
the cook just finished preparing dinner with?
“The day before yesterday.”
“He’s been sick this long? Why didn’t
you take him straight to the doctor?” She holds the
back of her hand to his burning forehead.
“J.J.,” she says again softly to the boy, who
might or might not be able to hear her. She takes his pulse
as he mumbles in reply. Nonsense words. Delirium is a late
symptom. His heart is racing.
“He was fine until this morning.” Now Hetty
knows she is lying. This wound has been festering more than
a few hours. “And then his leg swelled and . . .
everything just happened so fast.”
“He has gas gangrene.” The cabin is deathly
quiet. Gas gangrene. The soldier’s nightmare.
“See the bubbles of air under his skin, the bronze
discolouration.” She says it out loud, partly to
reassure herself of her own diagnosis. Hetty hasn’t
had any real experience with gas gangrene, but she’s
heard tales. It is a front line disease mainly. Not that
you couldn’t develop it from an industrial wound, a
cut from a ploughshare that turned because it wasn’t
treated quickly or aggressively enough. The wounds of boys
she’d met in that last year of the war became
infected because the mud they had crawled through had been
farmed for generations, was contaminated with centuries of
manure, and now body bits—soldiers, horses, dogs. But
they’d usually had the offending limb or limbs
amputated in the Casualty Clearing Station in Europe, long
before they came under her care.
“I’ll need some things,” she says, her
own pulse quickened with the act of taking charge. No time
to waste. Blood poisoning is the next and, given the
circumstances, fatal stage. The dead tissue needs
debriding. A doctor’s job usually, but she knows the
procedure. “Iodine. Peroxide. Do you have any?”
They should have something about for cleaning wounds, stuck
out at sea for weeks on end. “Carbolic acid will do.
Some clean rags. And a knife. It should be razor
sharp.”
Esmeralda turns and mutters instructions to the lamp
bearer. The lamp is passed to Matheson and the first man
scurries away.
Minutes pass and Hetty hears feet coming down the
companionway. Now there’s a press of people at her
back, thickening the already stale air. Another lamp is
lit, and a third. The lamps are held aloft. Other hands
come and go, assembling the necessary items on an upturned
crate by the side of the bunk. Esmeralda slips an apron
over Hetty’s head. Hetty mumbles a thank-you.
She’d rather have gloves to protect her hands from
J.J.’s wound, but she appreciates Esmeralda’s
concern for her dress.
Pouring peroxide on the rag, a much-laundered
undershirt, Hetty wipes her hands: backs, palms, fingers,
nails. Choosing the smaller of the two knives laid out for
her—what looks like a paring knife—she
sterilizes first the blade, then the handle, then braces
her left hand on J.J.’s right knee for support, and
approaches the wound. His skin is already cold. Hetty
flinches, grits her teeth. Though J.J.’s unfocussed
eyes roll in his head the fire is elsewhere in his body.
Having long since lost all sensation in his lower leg, he
does not stir at her touch.
Air thick with the high sweet scent of decay pushes at
the base of Hetty’s throat, hot and humid. Beneath
her undergarments her skin is slick with sweat. More
peroxide. She pours it undiluted over the wound, and begins
scraping. Like a rotten pear the dead flesh yields to her
knife and falls away; brown pus runs over her hands.
Someone places a bowl on the bed beside her and she fills
it. Knife, peroxide, another dripping rag. Quickly she is
down to the bone, glistening white. It is always a shock,
the healthy whiteness of bone. Peroxide again. She could
run out before she finishes. Then what? But she
doesn’t have time to consider. Staring hard at the
thin wavy red line on J.J.’s skin that marks the
border of the gangrenous tissue, Hetty swears she can see
the infection advancing before her eyes, creeping up his
thigh, the surrounding flesh swollen hot and tight.
“Someone is going to have to go for the
doctor.” Why Esmeralda hadn’t called for him in
the first place is beyond her, given the severity of the
boy’s wound. “I can’t treat him.
It’s too far gone.” Esmeralda is biting her
lips.
“There’s nothing you can do?”
Hetty stares numbly at the red line on the boy’s
leg, feeling a part of herself retreat, wishing herself
well away from here and the demands being made of her. She
is a mill owner’s wife now, her hands are soft and
she wears pretty dresses and party shoes. She cannot summon
what she needs here.
“Your village doctor, Dr. Baker, he’s away
delivering a baby out at a farm somewhere. It’s too
far away. His wife says she doesn’t expect him back
for hours yet.”
Hetty wipes the sweat from her face with the back of her
arm and bites herself, the edges of her teeth sinking into
muscle, trying to stem her threatening tears. Why ever did
she answer the damn door?
“Please say you can do something, that you can
make him well again.”
Make him well again. Who has put all this on her
weakened shoulders? It isn’t fair. Her back is so
stiff and sore she thinks all she can manage is to lie down
beside J.J. and weep until the pressure in her throat
eases. Where is that feisty young girl who leapt at fate
and threw herself into caring for the wounded the morning
of the Explosion? Where the practical nurse in her sensible
shoes, her black leather bag crammed with remedies and her
head with no-nonsense advice? What have Peter Douglas and
Kenomee village fashioned her into? Just who has she
become? So many eyes on her, she can feel them on her skin,
in her hair. Is she being selfish? She’s only ever
assisted once. She looks down at John James again. He is
just a boy, with a mother somewhere, missing him.
“Do you have any laudanum?”
“Laudanum. We may have some.” Esmeralda
turns to one of her troops. “Laudanum. Go on.
Go.”
Hetty raises her hand from her lap and, well clear of
the red line, draws a finger across J.J.’s leg.
“A tourniquet. Something strong, like a leather
belt.” She clears her throat. “And I’m
going to need a saw.”
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