Race for the Dying (26 page)

All the blood and gore was too much for the faint mill hand, and he collapsed backward, flailing to keep his balance.

“Jake, get in there,” Schmidt shouted.

When he was sure Beautard was supported, Thomas worked to draw the man's left arm up and away from his body, trying to place the arm as if the patient were reaching to scratch the center of his own back. Haines moved with surprising speed to offer his assistance.

“The bone's shattered,” he breathed.

Thomas said nothing, but waited as Haines manipulated the arm. Like gaping shark's teeth, the blade's rakers appeared, along with a flood of black blood. A sheen of sweat broke out on Haines' face, and he bared his teeth. “Free,” he said triumphantly.

“Bring it down and in,” Thomas instructed. He held a compress against the wound, padding it closed as Haines brought the arm down, now under the blade, holding the man's forearm tight against his lower ribs.

Thomas wanted to stand, but found he could not. He looked up at Jake Tate. “He must be moved gently back toward you,” he said. He held out his hands to explain, and Tate's eyes widened as he stared at the physician's blood-soaked fingers. “Do you hear me?”

Tate gulped and nodded, looking down.

“Slide him back away from the blade,” Thomas instructed. “Two at his legs, and two of you at his head and shoulders. Gently now.”

Working in awkward concert, the mill hands positioned themselves and then waited in hushed silence as Thomas frowned. Then he held up his right hand.

“Wait. This isn't going to work,” he said. He rummaged in the medical bag and came out empty.

“Do you have more gauze?” he said to Haines. His question was met with a blank expression. “More gauze?” he repeated and held out his hand to accept a large pad from the older man. In a moment, he had positioned the gauze deep in Beautard's body, underneath the blade. “Maybe now,” he said, and nodded at Jake. “Easy now. Straight back.”

At least three inches of the blade's spine was buried in Larry Beautard's chest, and after what seemed an eternity, the sawyer was free of the steel.

“He's clear,” Thomas shouted. Both hands held the sawyer together, and the young physician let his own weight add both to the pressure on the gaping wound and relieve the shrieks of pain in his own hip and ribs.

“I'll need bandages, Mr. Schmidt,” he called. “I don't have enough. Clean bed linens will do, torn into four-inch strips.”

“We don't, ah…” Schmidt hesitated.

“Clean long johns then. Anything at all.” Thomas could no longer see clearly, his own sweat stinging his eyes. “And a wagon with a mattress in the back.” He turned to find Schmidt. “Something to protect him from the rain as well.”

“He going to make it?”

“Most likely not,” Thomas said sharply. “Certainly not if we all stand around dithering. Come on, now.”

He almost lost his balance and floundered with his right hand as he maintained the pressure on the enormous wound with his left. He lowered his voice and said to Haines, “We must find a way for me to ride in the wagon with him. If we can hold him together…”

By the time Thomas and John Haines had prepared Beautard for the agonizing journey to Port McKinney—two miles as the crow flies, but three miles of jolting, rutted torture by road, a fresh team of mules stood outside the mill, harnessed to a heavy freight wagon. A tarpaulin had been tented over the bed of the wagon, each raindrop making a soft plopping sound as it struck the canvas. Two horsehair mattresses had been found, lumpy, hideously stained things that reeked of mildew.

“Nothing but the best,” Thomas muttered, and frowned at Schmidt in exasperation.

“We didn't plan this,” Schmidt said.

“No, we didn't,” Thomas said. He maneuvered his crutches carefully, having unwillingly given up his post at the wounded man's side for the trek from mill to wagon. Haines took his place, clamping the injured man's arm against his ripped torso as Beautard was carried outside, a twenty-four-inch-wide spruce plank serving as a stretcher. “Someone must find this man's wife,” Thomas said. “She should meet us at the clinic.” He didn't wait for a response, but Schmidt caught him by the arm.

“You'll look at the other one?” Schmidt asked.

“Other one?”

“Over on the other side of the carriage,” Schmidt explained.

The young victim rested against a wheel housing, pale and trembling, lips compressed white. Thomas crutched carefully around the debris, marveling at its immensity. The gigantic band saw's blade had tracked on the enormous drive and idler spools above and below the carriage. Part of the fractured blade had stabbed up through the roof and now hung above them, swaying gently. A six-foot long portion had snaked out and stabbed through the opposite wall. The remainder of the snarl of steel had lashed out at the sawyer's control shack.

The young man rested with a large pad of greasy, bloody rag pressed tightly against the back of his thigh. Thomas halted and stared. The remains of another sawyer lay in the sawdust where he'd been flung, slashed into two ragged halves, no doubt dead before he understood what had hit him.

“Your name, son?” Thomas asked, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.

“Melvin Smith,” the young man managed. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the corpse a dozen feet away.

“He might as well ride into town with Beautard,” Schmidt said. “And for God's sakes, someone cover Skip,” he ordered.

“I'm…I'm all right,” Smith said.

Thomas leaned one crutch against the carriage and bent down, pulling Smith's hand away from the bandage. The wound, compared to a sawyer cut in half or another skewered, was a trifle, a mere eight-inch flick of the blade as it flashed past.

“We don't have enough sutures left to do anything here,” Thomas said.

“Oh, I don't need to…,” the man stammered, and started to pull away.

“Oh, yes, you do,” Thomas said. “If you want to save that leg, you'll do as you're told.”

Leaning on companions, Melvin Smith hobbled out into the rain, hand still pressing the bloody cloth against his leg. He leaned his good hip on the tailgate of the wagon and rolled in, letting out a yelp as he skinned his injury against the wooden sides in an effort to avoid Beautard's silent form.

“One of you will ride with me,” Thomas said. By the time he had the freight wagon organized to his satisfaction, Dr. Haines had already set out to Port McKinney on horseback.

Schmidt looked at Thomas with a mixture of apprehension and worry. The young physician had found enough room to lie beside Beautard, legs out straight, back propped against the wagon sides. He had instructed Jake Tate how to cradle Beautard's body so that Tate could provide additional compression and support.

“What else do you need?” Schmidt asked.

“Find Mrs. Beautard,” Thomas replied. “Make sure someone is with her.” Craning his neck, he caught Jake Tate's attention. “Careful now,” he ordered.

The wagon eased forward in the mud.

Chapter Forty-five

Where the hours went, or what time of the day or night it might be, Thomas was unaware. At some point, he realized that it might be possible to save both Lawrence Beautard's life and his arm, and that notion consumed him. He tied off thoracic vessels, positioned a drainage tube in the pleural cavity after successfully reinflating a collapsed lung, and stitched so many sutures that Bertha was hard pressed to keep pace. All the while, a portion of his mind tussled with another challenge—the possibility of repairing the patient's mangled left arm.

Dr. John Haines had been assisting, and Thomas found himself minding his tongue when the older man's hesitancy got in the way.

“I need a piece of silver,” Thomas said at last. An idea had hovered, despite the improbability of it all or the difficulty of the surgery at his fingertips. Haines looked up, eyes blurry.

“A what?”

“I need a small piece of pure silver, John. A bar perhaps a centimeter wide, perhaps ten or twelve centimeters long. Half a centimeter thick at least.” He held up his fingers, illustrating what he wanted.

“I have no such device,” Haines said.

“It can be made from the handle of a fork or spoon, I think,” Thomas said. “A silver fork. Not a steel one.”

“A fork.”

“Yes. I should think that the handle could be easily fashioned. Surely Mr. Lindeman has a grinding wheel for sharpening axes. It would take but a few seconds to grind down the handle of a piece of silverware.”

“My God, man,” Haines said, an exclamation of wonder mixed with excitement. Thomas felt a chill of admiration that Haines, weary and ill, still grasped the essential thought in Thomas' mind without further explanation.

“I'll talk with Alvi,” Haines said, holding out yet another suture.

“Please impress on her the urgency, John. We have no time.”

“Yes.” Haines stepped away from the table and swept off his apron. On the table, Beautard stirred with a long, awful groan. Thomas knew that Beautard, young, strong, and fit, was nearing the end of his endurance.

“A quarter of morphine, please, Bertha,” Thomas said. “If we must go deeper with the ether, we will, but I'd rather there was no added burden on his system.”

“I have it ready,” Bertha responded. Together they continued, and Thomas became absorbed in the laborious process of repairing the large brachial artery. What had saved Beautard's life was the very impact of the blade that had torn him apart. The major artery running down the inside of his arm essentially had been crushed shut, the flying steel becoming an enormous, violent arterial clamp, the hot steel macerating the tissue into an instant clot.

Thomas felt a hand on his forehead as Bertha reached across and patted the sweat away from his eyes. He had still not replaced the bandage on his head, and his eyes stung now from both concentration and perspiration.

“It was unpleasant after you left,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper.

“How so?” he asked impatiently, not looking up.

“You left Miss Haines with the dog?”

“I had no choice.”

“I could hear her arguing with Mr. Riggs.”

Thomas glanced up at her. Under other circumstances, he would have been curious, but at the moment, such matters seemed ridiculously trivial. “He has an odd way,” he said, dismissing the subject.

“Odd? That's a generous way to put it. He was issuing orders right and left, but I suspect that you've come to know enough of Miss Haines to know that most of them were ignored.”

“Orders?” He found it odd that Bertha felt the need to keep up the constant chatter. Perhaps it was her way of trying to calm his nerves, strung at the moment as tight as a banjo string.

“Yes. The dog was to be out of the building instantly, he said. No more time wasted on such things. And on and on he went.”

Thomas sighed. “He and I will have to have a talk.”

“Be careful about that, Doctor.”

“More sponges here,” he said. “The dog survived, I hope?”

“He's asleep in the office,” Bertha said. “On the old rug in the corner. I check on him from time to time.”

“The more sleep the better,” Thomas said. “If we keep him substantially lubricated with opiates, he may leave the stitches alone.”

“One would wonder how an addicted dog behaves,” Bertha said with amusement.

“We shall find out, won't we?”

In a moment, or maybe ten, maybe more, he heard the clock in the waiting room chime, and ignored the number, then heard it chime again. As if the chimes were an announcement, he felt rather than saw an added presence in the room. He glanced up to see Alvi waiting at his elbow.

“This?” she said, and held up a small enameled pan. Lying in the pool of phenol was a highly polished sliver of silver, exactly the dimensions Thomas had imagined, but tapered gracefully to a point at each end.

“Perfect,” he exclaimed. “My God, you're a wonder.”

“My father had most specific instructions. I can't say that Gert was overly enthused about losing one of my mother's best, but Father didn't stop to negotiate.” Her eyes shone with excitement.

“I'll replace it if this doesn't work,” Thomas said.

“Ah,” Alvi said, stepping back from the table, “but it's going to work, Dr. Thomas.”

“In which case, Mr. Beautard will replace it.” Thomas turned his attention back to the sawyer's mangled arm. The humerus had been slashed in half ten centimeters below the shoulder joint. There was no logical way he could imagine to hold the two ends of the severed bone together, despite—or maybe because of—the reasonably clean cut. Under the best of circumstances, no plaster cast in the world would result in anything beyond a hideously contorted union, permanently weak and ill-formed. But held in place by a neat pin until true union could take place, that might be a different matter, Thomas speculated.

It seemed logical to the young physician that leaving the slashed ends of the bones somewhat rough might be preferable to a journeyman woodworker's approach where butted ends were trued and flat. Unavoidably, the bone would heal a bit short in any case. His proposed repair was simple. Just as the carpenter might drive a dowel into the two jagged ends of a broken chair rung, the silver pin could unite the two lengths of bone.

Holding his breath as if expecting an explosion, with the upper arm muscles separated and clamped, he gently tapped the pin so that one sharpened end sank into the bone marrow of the upper portion of the humerus. Aligning upper and lower portions was another story entirely, and it was only because Bertha's deft little hands seemed to read his mind that he finally succeeded with a union that satisfied him.

“We'll need a stout splint,” he said between clenched teeth. “With the splint under a plaster, it might hold the arm secure if we cast from shoulder to wrist. But we'll have to leave a significant opening in the cast so that we can tend the wound's progress.”

Keeping the wound clean had become Thomas' obsession from the first moments. The saw blade would have carried fragments of sawdust and who knew what else with it, as well as exploding bone chips throughout. Thomas had observed that nothing seemed to create sepsis quite as effectively as wood. Even a minor wooden splinter, let untended, festered. If Beautard's wound wasn't perfect in its cleanliness, all the clever surgery in the world would not save his life.

Beautard struggled again, a series of small jerks that appeared as if he was trying to flex his legs.

“Doctor,” Bertha said quickly, and Thomas looked up to see Beautard's eyes wide open, although entirely unseeing. The man's breath came in swift little stabs, his lips turning blue.

“The ventilator,” Thomas snapped, but before Bertha could prepare the rubber bag and bring it into position, Beautard had sucked in a great, shuddering breath, let it out, struggled again with a horrible gagging sound, and then the air in his lungs whistled out for the last time.

Thomas grabbed his stethoscope and heard the last feeble, struggling heartbeat and then profound silence. He looked across at Bertha in disbelief.

“A clot, maybe,” Thomas said helplessly. “My God, we had him.” He moved the bell of the stethoscope to a half dozen locations, as if a pulse might be hiding from him. Even at the side of the neck, the great vessels now felt as unresponsive as wood. Finally he straightened up, tossing the forceps that he had been cradling in his left hand toward the enameled pan. It missed and clattered on the floor.

“I'm so sorry,” Bertha said. “You did everything you could.” She picked up the forceps and then started to pull up a linen sheet to cover Beautard's remains. Thomas held up a hand. He took the forceps and with a wrenching flick, withdrew the silver pin and dropped it into the pan.

“Perhaps someone else can benefit,” he muttered. Bertha drew up the sheet.

“Mr. Smith still waits,” she said softly.

“No one tended him? In all this time? How long has he waited?”

“Long enough, Doctor. And no…No one has looked at him.” She held the wheeled table with a hand on each side of the corpse's feet. “I think that Dr. Haines had to return home. He wasn't feeling well. Alvi mentioned that after she left the pin for you.”

“I didn't hear her say that,” Thomas said.

“You were involved,” Bertha said, and favored him with a tender smile. “It will be thirty minutes or so until we have more sterile implements. Shall I have Mr. Smith come in?”

“Of course.” He collapsed back into his wheelchair, watching Bertha Auerbach wheel the table out of the room. If she struggled with the weight, it didn't show. He closed his eyes, forcing himself to review each step of his procedures. In a few moments, Bertha's voice startled him.

“Mr. Schmidt would like to speak with you,” she said. “Shall I show him in?”

“Certainly.”

The burly mill owner appeared in the doorway and stopped, regarding Thomas. “You look like hell,” he said.

“And feel like it,” Thomas said. He saw now that Bert Schmidt was well beyond middle-aged, his close-cropped hair a uniform salt-and-pepper. “Before today, I'd heard so much about you that I was sure we'd already met,” Thomas said. He held out a hand, then grimaced and started to pull back. “I should clean up.”

Schmidt moved quickly and grasped the physician's gory hand with a powerful grip. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “That's what I wanted to say.”

“Well, we lost him,” Thomas said. “For a few minutes there, I was hopeful. I'm sorry. I truly am.”

“We've lost a good man,” Schmidt said. “I valued Lawrence Beautard highly. But you did more than I could have asked of anyone.”

Thomas pushed himself up a little straighter in the chair. “Someone needs to tend to his widow,” he said. “She's with child again. This will be a difficult time for her.”

“My wife, Carlotta, is with her now.”

Thomas sat for a moment with his face cradled in both hands, and Schmidt waited patiently for him. The young physician straightened and shook his head. “You know, I've heard that Seattle has an entire telephone system, Mr. Schmidt.”

“So it has.”

“We should have one. If the mill could have placed a connection here, how much time would that have saved? Twenty minutes at the very least? Half an hour? That might have been enough. That and a proper ambulance, ready and waiting.”

Schmidt watched Thomas in silence for a moment. “Your dejection is to be expected,” he said. “Bertha says that a successful result was tantalizingly close.”

“We'll never know.”

“I've seen a good many injuries in a third of a century in the timber, Doctor. My guess was that Lawrence's number had been called the instant that saw shattered.” He heaved a sigh. “When I saw you that first day, I would have guessed the same thing. And now maybe someday, we'll have that dinner together.”

“I would hope so.”

Schmidt nodded quickly. “Have you looked at Melvin yet? I saw him sitting in the ward. He's more afraid of you than that saw.”

“I'm on the way,” Thomas said, “and hope to God for no complications there. A fair amount of yelling, a few stitches, and a marked limp for some time. He'll not be eager to lift anything heavier than a whiskey glass for the next week or ten days.”

“That will break his heart, I'm sure.”

“You'll need someone to come by later this afternoon to fetch him,” Thomas said. “He won't want to walk.”

“Done.”

“What caused the saw to explode, do you know?”

“Well,” Schmidt said, his face taking on a determined set, “I haven't had time to look, but one of my men said that the blade struck something in the wood.”

“Really. I wouldn't think a knot or whatever would make much of a difference to such a huge apparatus.”

Schmidt laughed without a trace of humor. “Knots don't.”