The North Water(73)

He palpates the abdomen again, feeling its lines of hardness and give. He wonders for a moment if he has made a mistake, if this is a hernia or a tumor rather than an abscess, but then reminds himself why that can’t be true. He tests the sharpness of the lancet against his thumb, then presses the blade’s edge down into the priest’s flesh and makes a lateral cut from the top of his hip bone, halfway to the navel. It takes him several attempts to penetrate the layers of sheath, muscle, and fat and get into the abdomen proper. As he presses deeper, blood wells up and he wipes it away with a cloth and continues cutting. As soon as he pierces the cavity wall, a pint or more of foul and flocculent pus, turbid and pinkish gray, squirts unhindered out of the newly made breach, spattering across the table and coating Sumner’s hands and forearms. The roaring stench of excrement and decay instantly fills the cabin. Anna yelps out in horror and her brother drops the metal bucket. Sumner gasps and jolts backwards. The discharge is fibrinous, bloody, and thick as Cornish cream; it pulses out from the narrow opening like the last twitching apogee of a monstrous ejaculation. Sumner, squinting against the reek, curses, spits onto the floor, then, breathing through his mouth, cleans the muck from his hands and arms, and tells the brother to wipe the table down and throw the soiled rags into the stove. The three of them, working together, tip the priest over onto his side to further speed the drainage. He makes a low moan as they move him. Anna, with shaking hands, reapplies the etherized lint to his face until he settles. Sumner presses down on the skin and muscle around the edges of the wound with his fingertips, pushing out as much of the remaining foulness as he can. It is hard to believe that the priest’s body could contain such an abundance of pus. He is not tall, and, stripped naked as he now is, he appears slight, bony, and almost boyish, yet it gurgles out of him like water from a rock. Sumner presses down and the brother wipes up the outflowings. They press and wipe, press and wipe, until eventually the stinking stream slows, then ceases altogether.

They carry the priest back to the bed and cover him over with blankets and a sheet. Sumner cleans and puts a dressing on the wound, then washes his hands with oil soap and opens the window. The air that rushes in is flecked with snow, odorless and starkly cold. It is dark outside and the wind is whistling in the eaves. He doubts the priest will live more than a day. With an abscess that severe, there is almost certain to be some form of perforation in the gut, he thinks, and once the shit starts leaking out, that is generally the end of it. He gathers the few medicines they have that might relieve or moderate the pain and instructs Anna how and when to use them. He lights his pipe and goes outside to smoke it.

That night, asleep in his own bed, he dreams he is afloat again on the iceless reaches of the North Water. He is alone and drifting in his pal Tommy Gallagher’s leaky old currach, its hull patched and its thwarts smoothed and worn to a shine by usage. He has no oars that he can see, and there is no sign of another vessel, but he doesn’t feel afraid. He spots an iceberg on his larboard side and standing, perched high on one of its ledges, clad in a green tweed suit and brown felt hat from Dames of Temple Bar, is William Harper the surgeon, the man who found him and took him in. He is smiling and waving. When Sumner calls out for him to come down, he laughs as if the very thought of swapping the majestic iceberg for the pathos of the currach is absurd. William Harper’s face appears quite normal, Sumner notices, and he is moving his right arm freely enough. There is no sign of paralysis or injury, no evidence of the hunting accident that drove him to the drink. He has been wholly restored, it seems, and now he is perfect again, entire. Sumner wishes, more than anything, to ask him how this remarkable feat was achieved, what methods were used, but the currach has drifted too far away, he realizes, and his voice is too weak to carry across the water.

In the morning, to his surprise, the priest is still breathing and he looks no worse than he did before. “You’re a tough old fucker, you are,” Sumner says to himself, as he removes the dressing and inspects the wound. “For a man who puts his faith in the life everlasting, it appears you’re awful keen to linger on amidst the toil and strife of this one.” He wipes around the incision with a rag, sniffs the seepage, then throws the old dressing into the bucket to be washed and makes up a new one. As he works, the priest opens his eyes a crack and looks up at him.

“What did you find inside me?” he asks. The voice is grainy and faint, and Sumner has to lean down to hear it.

“Nothing good,” he answers.

“Then best be rid of it, I’d say.”

Sumner nods.

“You try to get your rest now,” he tells him. “And if you need help, just call out for it or raise your hand. I’ll be seated at the table.”

“You’ll be watching over me, will you?”

Sumner shrugs.

“There’s precious little else to do around here until the spring arrives,” he says.

“I thought you might be off hunting seal with your new spear and anorak.”

“I’m not a seal hunter. I don’t have the patience for it.”

The priest smiles, nods, then closes his eyes. He seems to be drifting back to sleep, but then, a minute later, he opens his eyes again and looks up as if remembering something else.

“Why did you lie to me before?” he says.

“I never lied to you. Not once.”

“You’re a strange fellow though, aren’t you? And a source of great mystery to all who know you.”