World Made by Hand

Sixty

Loren was on all fours in the cold, damp gravel beside Black Creek when we returned. He couldn’t stand any longer, and he couldn’t sit, he said, and it was too wet to lie down. He had been busy puking there on and off since I left. We brought the stretcher down for him and helped him aboard. Four of the strongest brothers hoisted him up the bank to Jerry’s wagon and loaded him in the box. Jerry got him to lie on his stomach on the mattress and we backed the wagon around. Joseph and his men then continued on toward Karptown. I followed behind Jerry’s wagon and we got back to town in half an hour.

Jeanette Copeland had prepared the room that Jerry used sometimes as a lab and sometimes for surgery. It was a far cry from the hospital operating rooms of the old days, but it was what we had. Bobbie Deland, a registered nurse-in the days when nurses were registered-was on hand along with Bonnie Sweetland who, as a midwife, had competence to assist. They had fired the boiler upstairs and had the room blazing with candles, several with reflector mirrors on adjustable wooden stands that could be moved as needed. Jerry also had an autoclave fitted over a small alcohol stove for sterilizing his surgical instruments. Steam curled out of it. In contrast to this makeshift equipment, the operating table was a fully articulated model that had come out of the Glens Falls hospital, complete with fixtures for placing a surgical patient in what Jerry called the lithotomy position. Altogether, the setup was a retreat from the heyday of high-tech medicine, but a lot better than nothing. At least we still understood the role of microorganisms and the need for cleanliness. Jerry had done a few surgical rotations as an intern years ago, but beyond that he had no formal training. The surgeries he did now took place in a gray area of expertise somewhere between what he had managed to learn on his own and what circumstances forced him to do. Sometimes he simply found himself in uncharted territory and did what he could.

As soon as we got there, Jerry gave Loren a morphine lozenge to place under his tongue. Jerry had been experimenting lately in refining cooked opium into a crude morphine alkaloid using slacked lime and sal ammoniac from soldering blocks to precipitate the morphine out of solution. It was a process not unlike what they used to do in the jungles of Indochina and the slums of Tijuana in the old days of the international drug trade, so it wasn’t that difficult. He had managed to produce a few grams of the stuff so far. Loren began to feel relief from the pain in a little while, and not long after that he fell into a stuporous sleep. The five of us lifted him out of the cart on the stretcher, into the operating room, and into position on the table. Jerry scrubbed his hands, then drenched them and his arms clear up to the biceps in grain alcohol. Bobbie cut Loren’s pants off with scissors. Bonnie swabbed the dried blood off his thighs. Jeanette laid a set of shiny steel surgical instruments on a clean towel on a rolling cart. They worked together with impressive efficiency. I searched Loren’s pants pockets until I found what I was looking for: the key to the padlock on the other cell back at the jail. Otherwise, it was obvious that I was in the way. The room was barely large enough for the four of them and the patient, and besides I had other things to do, so I left and rode Cadmus over to the rectory.

Jane Ann was up reading by candlelight when I came in.

“Where is he?” she said with a strong note of accusation in her voice, as if she knew something bad had happened and I was naturally responsible.

“He’s over at Jerry Copeland’s.”

“What happened?”

“Wayne Karp… did a job on him.”

“What kind of job?”

“Jerry’s checking him out right now.”

Jane Ann got up and put her sandals on.

“If you go over there,” I said, “you can’t barge into the room. Jerry’s got him on the table.”

“The table?”

“The operating table.”

She went white.

“I’ve got a horse outside,” I said.

I rode her back over to Jerry’s. She knocked on the door to his lab and called through to them inside. Jerry said not to come in. Jeanette said, “Go in the house, Jane Ann, and make some tea. We’ll come and get you when we’re done.”

“Is he going to be all right?”

“We’re stitching him up,” Jerry said.

“Go in the house, Jane Ann,” Jeanette said again.

“Will you stay here with me?” Jane Ann said to me.

“I can’t. They’re bringing Wayne to the jail. I have to be there.”

Jane Ann broke down in tears and fell into my arms. She cried there for a while, then pushed herself away. Then she went inside the Copeland’s house where a candle was burning in the kitchen. I could hear that she was still sobbing when I rode off on Cadmus.

I went to my own house next. It felt like a week since I had been there. The clock on the mantelpiece said it was three twenty in the morning. I found Britney upstairs in my bed. I had to wake her.

“Where have you been so long?” she said.

“We’ve had some trouble,” I said.

“I thought it was something I did. I thought you were mad at me.”

Moonlight streamed in the window. I was struck by how beautiful she looked in it, sitting there, naked from the waist up.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said. “But I have to get something here and go.”

“Go where?”

“They’re bringing Wayne Karp to the jail. Can you move over to the other side of the bed for the moment, please? I have to get something from under the mattress.”

Britney moved over. I reached down at the head of the bed to a place between the mattress and the box spring, where I felt around and pulled out the pistol that I took to Albany with me and killed a man with, the same pistol that had killed Shawn Watling.

“What is that?”

“Nothing,” I said, as I tucked it behind my back in my waistband.

“It looked like a gun.”

“Okay, it was a gun.”

“What’s going on?”

“Just a precaution.”

“Will you come back?”

“Of course I’ll come back.”

“I’m sorry if I made you feel bad.”

“You didn’t make me feel bad,” I said. “You made me feel whole.”

I left her there in the moonlight.