Page 55 of Doing No Harm
He grabbed her in a fierce embrace and kissed her smack on the forehead. “You’re all crazy here north of Hadrian’s Wall. That is my new curse word. Olive Grant, we have work to do. Get me some blankets and a pillow. He’s crawling with lice and he’s not coming in here.”
He clung to her another minute apologizing all the while, babbling something about being tired of doing so much by himself, wishing he could drop himself into the middle of the Canadian wilderness, and sick of endless misery. Appalled at himself, he finally stopped ranting and stepped away from the comfort of Olive’s arms. And here he thought he was holding her; quite the opposite.
“What came over me?” he asked, embarrassed.
Olive appraised him as professionally as he might observe the sick and the wounded. “You’re just tired of working and working and seeing no end in sight. So am I,” she said simply. “We need a bold stroke here in this miserable town.”
“Oh, about that …”
“Nay. You’re right. Hush and let me finish.” She put her hands on his shoulders and he saw the fight in her eyes, banked but not even remotely extinguished. “We have to think bigger than either of us have ever thought before.”
She leaned forward and rested her forehead on his chest for a brief moment, too brief to suit him.
“Poor man! All you wanted was to pass through Edgar and get somewhere else. We’ll let you go, because it is perhaps illegal to hold someone in our village against his will, but we need you first. That’s the truth of it.”
Silently, he agreed that it was. “All right then. I’m going to clean off that wicked-looking abscess on Joe’s arm and give him blankets to bed down right where he is. Tomorrow I’ll find a way to either douse him in the river or stuff him into a tub. He reeks and I won’t have it.”
They walked toward the shed, Olive carrying blankets and Douglas with his satchel. He stopped. “Suppose that man has scarpered off?”
“Then we’ll hunt him down and fix him,” Olive said.
He felt a measure of his good humor returning. “Even if he doesn’t want to be fixed?”
“Especially if he doesn’t want to be fixed,” Olive teased in return. “He should be on a leash, more like.”
But there Joe Tavish was, leaning against the wall of the stone shed and shivering. He seemed surprised to see them again, as though everyone had failed him for so long that he couldn’t imagine anything going well. He appeared to be looking over Olive’s shoulder for someone else.
“There will be no constable,” Douglas told him, interpreting the gaze. “Let me look at your arm.”
Douglas expected a struggle, but Tavish did as directed. He hadn’t the strength to hold it out, so the surgeon rested the forearm on the man’s upraised knee. The cut looked raw and angry, but with laudable pus, thank goodness.
Olive must have gone across the street to her tearoom because she came back with a brass can of lukewarm water. “The Rumford has been extinguished for hours, so this is the best I can do,” she apologized.
She poured the water into a basin and Douglas dipped in a square of gauze, cleaning the area around the wound, caused, he suspected, by a small cut that became infected.
“It was just a scratch,” Tavish said as he leaned back, as though trying to distance himself from his own stink.
“In a cow bier?”
“Aye.” He sighed.
Douglas wiped the wound clean and then looked over in surprise of his own as Olive washed Joe Tavish’s face. Douglas nearly told her not to waste the water, but he saw Joe relax as the grime came away from his face.
“I always feel better when my face is clean,” she told Joe, who actually smiled at her. With the exception of his forearm, bandaged now, and his face, Tavish was as filthy as a man could be. Funny how a clean face made a world of difference. Olive understood what Douglas had forgotten.
He dressed another inflamed cut and wrapped it, at a loss of even where to begin tomorrow in resurrecting this man. He leaned back himself, exhausted and disheartened with the enormity of cleaning Joe Tavish, never mind trying to help so many. He stared at the wall and what he saw touched his heart—a drawing of a crofter’s cottage, perhaps done with a burned stick, with mountains towering behind it, and another drawing of a woman and small boy.
Tavish watched him with a wary expression, as if daring him to make fun of the little works of art, which they were, no matter the medium. He looked at Joe Tavish with new respect.
“I recognize your wife and son,” Douglas said. “The other one?”
“Glen Holt, near Inchnadamph,” Tavish replied as his voice took on an unexpected softness. “We Tavishes lived there for two hundred years, minding our own business, raising a few cattle, growing a few crops.” He turned away with another sigh and stared at the wall with no drawings.
“What happened?” Douglas asked. “I … I ask not to dredge up a wound, but I truly don’t know.” He put away his salve. “I’ve been so long away.”Maybe in more ways than I even know, he told himself.
Douglas did know, because Olive had told him, but he also understood, perhaps better than most, the emotional value of conversation. He thought of the times he had done nothing more than sit at men’s bedsides and listen to them. At first, he had sat out of sheer exhaustion. What he learned when he listened opened up a new side of medicine to him.
He thought Tavish might not speak, because the man continued to stare at the empty wall. With a groan and an oath, he carefully lifted the drawing of Rhona and Tommy Tavish from the nail and held them in his lap, as though deriving comfort from the mere images. He traced the outline of his wife’s face.
