He found two little girls in the hallway on their hands and knees, one about eight, the other four. “Git back in bed before I smack you,” Gina hissed.
“But, Mom, what’s wrong with J—”
Billy tucked one girl under each arm and tiptoed up the stairs with them.
The wallpaper was blotched and bubbled to three feet above the baseboards. Josh tried to imagine the whole Island vanished, rolled underwater. Serves them right if that storm taught them a lesson. Yes, sir.
Enough. He had a patient to tend. No time to indulge in pointless guilt. “Do you have any drugs in the house?” Josh whispered to Gina. “Mushrooms? Jimson weed?”
“Billy’s mom grew a little pot in the garden out back. That’s all I know.”
“Did Joe eat anything different from the rest of you?”
“I didn’t keep track of every dead rat, Josh.” Gina’s upper body was still rocking. “We’ve been eating whatever shit we could find. Mother Tucker’s lucky we didn’t eat her.” She was only a few years older than Josh, but it seemed like far more. She had three kids and a husband, and already there was grey showing in the wisps of hair that hung in front of her gaunt face. “Found her in the bedroom. Glass came out of the window and took her head half off at the neck. You know what I ate today? Half a can of peanuts. Billy gave me his share.”
Billy came down the creaking stairs. “We’re all right,” he said. “Don’t mind Gina, she’s just upset.”
“I’m upset,” Gina said.
“Did Joe act like he might have eaten or drunk anything unusual?” Josh asked. “Complained about his stomach? Trouble walking or breathing?”
“Well, he’s gimped on one side, but that’s on account of a stob,” Billy said.
“Told him to stay out of the big houses,” Gina said. “Wouldn’t listen to me. Like waiting dinner on a stray cat. Goddamn boys.” She took a deep breath. “Not your fault,” she said to Billy. “You done what you can, I know that. I’m just upset. He gets worse every hour, and it doesn’t matter what I do.”
Billy reached out for his wife. She rocked stiffly in the circle of his arm.
“A stob?” Josh said carefully. A sharp stick. The Mathers used that word sometimes.
“Went salvaging—”
“Stealing.”
“—over on Seventeenth Avenue,” Billy murmured. “The second story of one of the fancy houses gived out and he fell through. Got a real sharp old splinter dug way up the calf.”
“I boiled some seawater and washed it out,” Gina said. “Did that boy screech. Wrapped it up good as I could in one of Mother Tucker’s old pillowcases. Figured she wouldn’t need ’em anymore. I’m so sorry, Billy.”
Josh’s heartbeat sounded dully in his own ears. Joe’s mother rocked in her hallway, regular but without purpose, like a clock keeping no time. She couldn’t know the horror Josh’s mind had just leapt to, but she was the boy’s mother and she knew something was terribly, terribly wrong with her child. “I better take a look at that leg,” Josh said. Walking back into the Tuckers’ living room, he glanced back at Billy. “Is there a kitchen table in this place?”
“Yessir. Why?”
Josh didn’t answer. He knelt at the foot of the couch where Joe tossed and squirmed, restless as a burn victim. “Hold him,” Josh said. Billy gently pinned his son’s arms to his chest. Gina held his feet. Josh took the lamp off the coffee table, set it on the floor near the boy’s legs, and turned it up as bright as it would go. Joe squealed and bucked. Josh peeled back a dressing of damp cotton from the boy’s leg. It was an ugly injury, a deep puncture going in at the back of the calf. The flesh around the wound was tight and dull red. Josh’s mouth went dry. “When?”
“Three days ago. Three and a half now,” Gina said. “I changed that twice.”
Josh held the cotton dressing to the lamplight, looking for traces of thin red serum leaking from the wound. He found them.
Josh palpated the boy’s calf. Joe screamed and screamed. “Take it easy,” Billy murmured. Josh squeezed and kneaded. Slight crunchiness nearly up to the back of the knee. Gas bubbles. Joe screamed and screamed and screamed. Gina was staring at Josh, her face like stone. Billy held the boy tighter and tighter, crushing his arms against his chest. Joe screamed and screamed. Josh squeezed his calf again. Crunch, crunch.
Josh stood up. Joe kept screaming. “Shut up,” Billy hissed. The kid flopped like a fish inside his arms. “Shut up! Shut up!”
Josh picked up the lamp and dimmed it. He set it on the coffee table. He found Gina still looking at him. “Don’t make me wait all night,” she said. “And don’t lie to me. I never did like you, but I know you don’t lie. Tell me straight.”
“Your son has gas gangrene. He’s going to die.” Josh felt his calm clinician’s manner slipping away from him. “I am so, so sorry.”
“You can’t do nothing.”
“If this were back before the Flood I could. If I had any penicillin I could. If it was too late for penicillin I could send him to a hospital with I Vs and anesthetic and real trained doctors and they could take his leg off at the hip and maybe save him.” Christ, there were tears on Josh’s cheeks, how dare he cry in front of the boy’s mother, in front of a woman who was going to lose her child. He wiped them off and shook his head. “No. I can’t do anything for him.”
Joe screamed and struggled. The muscles bunched in Billy’s arms. He was breathing real fast and hard. He sat back on his haunches.
There was a creak on the staircase.
“Then take off his leg,” Gina said.
“I’m not a doctor.”
“Try it. He’s gonna die anyway, right?”
Billy slammed his hand down on the coffee table. “Gina, dammit, the man says—”
“He’s a gutless sack of shit,” Gina said. “And I don’t care. He’s gonna save our boy.”
“Gina—”
“He’s gonna try.”
The cold white figure of Bettie Brown came up beside Josh. “Noblesse oblige,” she murmured.
“I can’t,” Josh whispered. Gina stared at the men implacably until Billy bowed his head. Josh shook his. “I can’t,” he said. “I don’t have—”
The stairs creaked again. The motionless Billy suddenly exploded. “I told you girls to stay in bed!” he yelled. Joe screamed again. Josh made out the shape of the older daughter crouched on the stairs just as Billy picked her up and threw her against the stairwell so hard it made the walls shake. She grunted, falling heavily down several stairs and then her father picked her up and threw her up to the landing, a blur of pajamas and a white leg cracking against the banister at the stair head. Up in the shadows the four-year-old started to cry.
“Bill,” Gina said.
The car-cutter stood halfway up the stairs, his shoulders shaking. “Don’t say a goddamn word.”
“See what Mr. Cane needs,” Gina said.
Billy turned, breathing hard. The anguish in his eyes was so terrible it killed Joshua’s hysteria. It erased his right to suffer. Josh turned away, unable to bear that look. “Have you got a hacksaw?” he said.
The silence stretched out. “Billy?” Gina said.
“In my toolbox.”
“I’ll need rope, too, as much as you’ve got. And nylon fishing line.” Clamps, clamps. “And needle-nose pliers, as many as you can find. Or even plastic clothes-pegs,” Josh said. His voice sounded high and clipped and fake to him. “Gina, if there’s any marijuana left, see if you can get Joe to take it. If he won’t smoke, make him eat it. If he won’t eat a brownie or something, just burn it under his nose. Liquor, too, if he’ll take it. Get any walkaways you can find, the best charms you got.” The Recluse was gone and the magic was back. Even if the walkaways didn’t help Joe survive Joshua’s butchering, at the very least they had to try to keep any minotaurs at bay. The good Lord knew there was going to be some pain here tonight, some horror and some unbearable fear for the magic to wrap itself around. Josh wished he hadn
’t lost the habit of praying. “Clear off the kitchen table,” he said. “I’ll put some water on to boil.”
HALF an hour later they strapped the boy to the kitchen table with hanks of ancient yellow nylon rope, so old it felt fuzzy to the touch and its plastic fibers were frayed. Despite his hypersensitivity, Joe showed no signs of delirium. Gina told him Josh was going to cut off his leg and that he would have to be brave. He peed himself and bit his lip to keep from yelling. “Be a man,” Billy whispered. Joe broke down and started begging. Josh thought about gagging him, but decided against it. He had to be able to tell if Joe swallowed his tongue.
Josh set Gina to boiling the five pound nylon fishing line he meant to use for sutures. He went through Widow Tucker’s knives and found the biggest one, then set Billy to sharpening it to the thinnest edge the discolored old steel would hold. While Billy worked, Josh took strips from the kitchen curtains and cinched them painfully tight around his right wrist, to give it more support. He didn’t dare risk trying to operate left-handed.
Billy put down his whetstone and traced the blade of the filleting knife lightly across his thumbnail. Then he let the blade slide. It caught in the groove in his nail. He handed it to Josh. “How about the saw?” Josh asked.
“It’s sharp.”
Josh pulled down Joe’s pants but left him in his urine-soaked underwear. He swabbed the boy’s leg with palm whiskey. It stank. Joe spoke, his voice raw and shaking. “Pa says I ain’t old enough for the hard stuff.” It was supposed to be a joke.
Josh set out his instruments on the kitchen counter beside him: carving knife, hacksaw, two pairs of needle-nose pliers with a third rusty one boiling in a pan of seawater on the stove. He had already threaded two needles with fishing line, and he had lots of cotton waiting, dingy grey balls of local stuff. He would cut as fast as possible through Joe’s flesh with the carving knife, using the hacksaw only for the bone. The key thing was not to sever the femoral artery. He would need to dissect the tissue out around it and clamp it off. If he cut the femoral, the boy would die in seconds, without much pain.
It would be a very easy mistake to make.
Nobody could blame him. Nobody could prove he had done it on purpose. It wasn’t as if he had ever performed an amputation before.
Josh found Miss Bettie looking at him. Quietly she said, “Galveston expects your best, Mr. Cane.”
He tried to decide where to cut. The higher the better, to make sure he stopped the gangrene. He held the hacksaw upside down and laid it on Joe’s leg, trying to see how high he could go and still have room to maneuver without hitting the boy’s other thigh. Joe peed a little more into his underwear but kept from screaming.
“Sponges,” Josh said. He’d forgotten sponges to sop up the blood from the little vessels. The pliers he needed to save for bigger arteries where he couldn’t control the bleeding with pressure.
He had read somewhere that in the days of sailing ships navy surgeons could take off a man’s leg in three minutes from the first cut to the last stitch. The faster the better, of course. Less blood loss, less trauma.
Josh started to faint. He forced himself to breathe until his eyes cleared and he no longer felt like throwing up.
Joe started banging his head against the table. “Quit that,” Gina said.
“Don’t want to be awake,” the boy said raggedly.
“Be a man!” Billy said, grabbing his son’s head. The car-cutter’s face was white. “Be a man.”
Josh picked up the knife. Joe tried to smack his head again, harder, but the ropes strapping him down didn’t allow enough play. He screamed.
Say ten minutes for a first timer, Josh thought. I can do that.
IT took eighteen. Josh nicked the femoral artery but didn’t sever it. Blood spattered out of the boy in pulses, hard as the sprinklers in front of city hall. Twice Josh got the hacksaw blade stuck in the thigh bone and had to jerk it out and start cutting again. The second time Billy walked out of the room. There was blood everywhere. Josh had started his cut wrong and almost didn’t have enough flesh to cover the bone. He spent an eternity grabbing Joe’s skin and tugging on it like a man trying to wrap a present with not quite enough paper. Gina never moved. Joe screamed until his voice was a stump, but he never fainted. Josh lost all hope in a merciful God then. If there was a God in heaven who gave a damn, that boy would have fainted.
But he didn’t die.
When Josh had pulled his last suture tight, he dropped the needle on the table and palpated the boy’s stump. He couldn’t feel any crepitance, but maybe the gas bubbles were still small or maybe he was in no state to feel anything. Maybe he wouldn’t have felt a pound of road gravel under Joe Tucker’s skin. The boy had long since stopped screaming, he could only moan now. Josh put his bloody hand on Joe’s neck. His pulse was weak and spidery. No surprise there. He must have lost, what, two pints of blood? Three? Four? A mosquito settled on Joe’s cheek. Josh brushed it away, leaving a splotch of blood on the boy’s face. Josh felt a hand on his arm. It was Gina. She had blood in her dirty blond hair. “Thanks,” she said.
Thank you for maiming my boy, thank you for butchering him in the clumsiest way you could. Thank you for making him a cripple, something for other kids to laugh at. Thank you for ending the life he thought he had in front of him.
“You’re welcome,” Josh said.
“WILL he live?” Miss Bettie asked.
“I don’t know.” Josh had gone out into the backyard. He was sitting, completely drained, on the wreckage of what had once been Widow Tucker’s henhouse. Wan grey light was seeping into the east, though overhead the stars still burned in a black sky. “I couldn’t feel any bubbles in what’s left of his leg. As long as the gas doesn’t come back, he’ll be fine. As long as the wound doesn’t get infected. As long as he doesn’t get blood fever or peritonitis or lockjaw. As long as he gets enough to eat and good clean water to drink, he’ll be fine, sure, yeah, he’ll be fine,” Josh said. His throat was tight with rage. “Of course if he’d had the sense to be born thirty years ago, he’d be dandy. Three grams of penicillin. That’s all he needed. Three grams of penicillin the day he got stuck.”
“We didn’t have penicillin when I was a girl either,” Miss Bettie said. “Very few people ever have, Mr. Cane. You seem to find it so unfair.” The great lady of Galveston society climbed gracefully on top of an overturned pig trough and settled next to Josh. He could feel the cold falling from her shoulder. She looked searchingly at him. “Civilization isn’t what happens in the absence of barbarity, Mr. Cane. It’s what we struggle to build in the midst of it.”
Josh bent over with his face in his hands. He had never felt so tired, not even in the hurricane, not even when George was whipping him along Highway 87. He was drained all the way down to the pit of his stomach. Unbelievable to think that the last time the sun had come up, he was still two miles shy of the Point Bolivar Ferry Terminal. He had been a different man then. He had left Galveston a criminal with one friend in the world; he returned a free man with none. The houses and the neighbors, they hadn’t changed, exactly; it was what they meant that was different. He had come home, and found himself a stranger to his own life.
He wanted the Tucker boy to live so badly he dared not even think it to himself.
“Why did you have to come for me?” Josh asked Miss Bettie. “Why not get a real doctor? Hell, why even come here at all? These aren’t your people. You belong over there,” he said, gesturing toward Broadway and the Strand, the few enclaves where the streetlights had already been repaired.
“‘One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity,’” Miss Bettie recited. “Andy Carnegie, the old humbug. I suppose I am an indiscriminate woman. Carnegie also said that surplus wealth was a sacred trust, which one was duty bound to give away in one’s lifetime. I’ve done him one better, haven’t I?” she said with a laugh. “You should clean up.” She passed him a plain grey tea towel. Taken from one of Wid
ow Tucker’s kitchen cupboards, no doubt. Josh stared at it, stupid with weariness, then began to wipe himself off.
A small miracle happened. Wherever Joe Tucker’s blood had lain, Josh found his skin had turned milk white, as if dipped in acid. His hands were like salt. Strangest of all, his right wrist was dented but smooth, as if some of the muscle lost when the maggots cleaned out his wound was still missing, but the skin had already healed seamlessly over the top of it. Streaks and drops of whiteness straggled up his arms, past his elbows. He looked at himself in wonder. “And your face, Mr. Cane,” Miss Bettie said. He wiped his cheeks and his forehead and saw another section of the towel come back red. “Washed in the blood of the lamb,” Miss Bettie said softly.
He stared at her. “Did you do this?”
“No, sir, not I.”
“Then…?”
Miss Bettie’s lace and ruffles fluttered in a shrug. “Our little sandbar has gone under the tide at last, Mr. Cane. Who is to say what miracles shall come to pass?”
They sat together and watched dawn spill across the sky. At last Josh stirred. He should see how Joe was doing, he should talk to Billy and Gina. Tell them to hang their charms and feed their boy dandelion tea, make sure his electrolyte balance didn’t go to hell. Soon he should present himself at the Bishop’s Palace, where, they said, Sloane Gardner would be waiting. He tried to imagine what he would say, but his mind kept slipping to less personal, more important things: cholera and malaria, clean water and bandages.
He noticed Miss Bettie was wearing a watch, a steel Rolex with diamond chips. “What time is it?” he asked.
Miss Bettie glanced at him and laughed. “You do seem to have difficulty remembering, don’t you? Well, then, I shall tell you. It’s now, Joshua Cane. Always and only now.”