The Tender Winds of Spring (12 page)

The gathering of the berries had taken quite a while, for, like all berry bushes, the ripest ones had had to be reached for, then carefully manoeuvred down.

When Jo and Sukey came back to the wreck Jo saw that it was perceptibly darker. Dicky won’t make it tonight, she thought.

They had water aboard, a few biscuits and some barley sugar Abel had put in in case the children were airsick. Dicky should have had those, but no one had thought of them, and now they sucked blissfully on them, and Sukey even forgot the mushrooms Jo had not let her pick.

Night came suddenly. Up in these latitudes it arrived sooner than in the south, but to compensate for that the moon and the stars were bigger, brighter. But it would be different here, Jo knew. They were so deep down, so enclosed, so—imprisoned, she felt certain they would see neither moon nor stars, the all-encompassing trees would block that. So at the last flicker of daylight they all got into the wreck, Amanda, as befitted the superintending sister, in front beside the patient, Jo and Sukey behind.

So started a long dark night.

For a while Jo diverted Sukey with stories, and Sukey responded with her own version of ‘I Spy’, for Sukey would quote any alphabetical letter at all and seem amazed when Jo could not guess. Amanda did not join in. She had the torch and every now and then she would check Abel.

Soon after the real darkness set in, Sukey blessedly slept, blessedly for her, and blessedly for Jo, who had run out of diversions. Also blessedly for Amanda, who had told Sukey several times to lower her voice.

‘Well, I’m glad she’s off,’ Amanda grumbled. ‘Noise isn’t good for a patient.’

Amanda had found a large handkerchief (Abel’s) and tied it professionally round her head.

‘You can sleep, too,’ she told Jo. ‘I’ll wake you in several hours for you to take over your shift.’

‘Oh,’ Jo said, ‘then I am going to be allowed to help?’

‘It’s necessary. A nurse must be rested to give her best.’

‘I think you give a wonderful best, Amanda. I think you’re a remarkable girl. I know my sister would have been very proud of you had she—if she—I’m sure your father was.’

Amanda, who had glowed visibly under Jo’s praise, lost her glow at Jo’s last words. Jo sighed to herself. That subject was still taboo then, she thought. Even down here in the forest huddled in a crippled plane Amanda would not open up.

But she did open up when Jo came back to nursing. ‘Yes,’ she answered Jo, ‘I was always going to be a nurse. Even before they had that class at school I knew. A lot of the girls decided afterwards, but I knew before. I would have liked to be Florence Nightingale, but I expect there’ll be more wars.’

‘I hope not, dear,’ protested Jo.

‘Anyway, you have to be prepared, and I’m preparing now. When I waken you to take over the shift I’ll go to sleep like that’ ... she snapped her fingers ... ‘because I’ve trained myself. Every night I say to myself: “Tomorrow you have a difficult case, so now you must rest”, and I do rest. We were told that at class.’

‘And you don’t oversleep?’

Amanda looked shocked at the idea. She closed the talk by repeating: ‘I’ll waken you in several hours.’

Jo did not feel like sleep, she felt like confidences. Surely if she did not get this child’s confidences now, confidences apart from Florence Nightingale, she would never get them.

She leaned back, a little restricted by Sukey’s dead weight. Sukey was sound asleep. She puffed out little snores.

‘Like a possum,’ Jo remarked to Amanda, but was met with silence. Amanda had told her to sleep and she expected sleep.

To her surprise, later, Jo did just that.

She became conscious of Amanda’s hand on her arm, of being shaken quietly but firmly.

‘The patient is still doing well,’ Amanda reported. ‘There’s nothing for you to do except check now and then, and rouse me if you’re at all doubtful. I will now rest.’ Amanda spoiled the speech somewhat by adding: ‘You see how quick I go off, I’ve trained myself.’

She did, too. Within minutes there were two sets of childish snores, possum variety. Jo smiled into the darkness and wished that Abel was out of his drifting and able to smile with her.

She groped for his hand to check his pulse, but she never did so, for the hand she groped for caught hers first. Weakly. Not really awarely. But it held to her hand, so Jo held on. Held until Amanda woke up and took over.

Then it was all repeated again.

It was a long night, a long dark night, but eventually it was over. Somewhere a bird sang sleepily, then more consciously. Another joined him. Crickets whirred. A frog croaked. A shaft of light actually penetrated through the deep green trees.

Sukey woke, and Jo took her to the little stream they had found yesterday and washed her face. They picked
some more berries and had them with another barley sugar for breakfast.

Amanda meanwhile had been busy on Abel. She had sponged him as well as she could in his crouched position, eased away the congealed blood that had formed during the night. She moistened his lips continually and put compresses on his brow. At length she said gravely to Jo: ‘I’ve done all I can. Now something more is needed. I wish they would come.’

This was the moment that Jo had been dreading. How did she, or Amanda, or Sukey know if anyone ever would come? Where was Dicky? Why in heaven’s name had she ever let him go? Perhaps he was lying somewhere in the forest, perhaps he had fallen over a cliff, been bitten, stung. Perhaps he was lost. Even a compass cannot save you if there is no one for it to guide you to.

All through the night the wood pigeons had kept up their perpetual ‘Move-over-dear’, and they still called it, for they never seemed to stop or sleep. But now there were other birds crying out, noisy currawongs, sweet-voiced dollar birds, the crisp pluck of the whip bird ... and through it an unmistakable sound. The sound of feet. Men’s feet. Coming down the cliff to the cleft at the bottom.

‘Cooee!’ called a voice, and it was Dicky’s.

‘Cooee!’ Jo called back.

‘Not too loud for the patient,’ reproved Amanda, but she looked very relieved.

‘For the patient,’ echoed Sukey happily, and she escaped Jo’s detaining hand and ran forward.

‘Dicky’s dead!’ she called back dramatically, adding comfortingly at an alarmed look in Jo’s face: ‘His foot is, anyway, because it’s in a sock and he’s being carried.’

Dicky indeed was being carried, Jo saw, he was borne by two strong men, and he did have a foot in a sock.

‘I’m sprained,’ he called out importantly, ‘but I found that camp. I thought I’d better show them the way because none; of these fellows can read a compass. They’ve brought a stretcher for Abel and food for you. How is Abel, is he—’

‘No,’ called Abel from the Cessna, and though his voice was weak it was clear and quite sensible. ‘Not passed on yet, just cramped. In fact you could say bl—very cramped.’ He leaned back again, exhausted at such a long speech, and Amanda tut-tutted and sponged his brow.

Jo and the children were deposited a distance away from the wreck, Amanda protesting under her breath and saying she should be at hand, then the posse of lumbermen started the difficult task of extricating Abel.

First of all the conveyor wheel had to be removed, and to do that they had to take off the pilot’s door. Then Abel was edged out and put on the stretcher, after which one of the lumbermen gave him something from a flask that Amanda said knowledgeably would be hot sweetened coffee for shock, but Jo had a shrewd idea it was something else.

‘How is he?’ Jo managed to ask the lumberman who had produced the flask.

‘Like anyone would be with a conveyor wheel on top of them for all those hours.’

‘Is he—’

‘Broken? Sprained? Injured? I don’t know. I don’t think so, but the doctor will soon tell. I think he’s just flattened.’

‘Will you take him to hospital?’ It was Amanda. ‘I am the attendant nurse,’ she added in explanation.

‘Pleased to meet you, Sister. I don’t know yet. We’ll take him up to the camp. We’ve already phoned through for medical help.’

‘Just a doctor would have done,’ Amanda said jealously.

The lumberman looked sidewise at Jo, then back at Amanda and praised: ‘I’m sure of that, Sister, but we didn’t know about you then.’

Amanda, satisfied, went off, and the lumberman grinned and said: ‘She’d be as good, anyway, as that over-proof I just gave him. Ah, we’re moving.’

Much slower than they had come down, they started up again, Abel on the stretcher and taking the necessary bumps that must be sheer agony to his cramped limbs with fortitude, assisted by more of Amanda’s hot sweetened coffee from the lumberman’s hip flask.

The children and Jo came behind, Dicky walking with difficulty, so welcoming the very slow pace.

It took Sukey to sum it all up, which she did very well for four. She said:

‘When the plane came down it went quicker than this.’ Yes, thought Jo, taking Dicky’s weight but not letting him know it, much quicker than this. But we’re here. We’re walking up to the sunlight. God’s in His heaven. ‘Thank you,’ she called, looking upward.

They stared at her in puzzlement, and Jo explained: ‘Thank you, God, for us being alive.’

‘Alive,’ said Sukey.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When
they reached the lumber camp the doctor had already arrived from the nearest timber town.

He examined Dicky and Abel cursorily at first, dismissing Dicky’s ankle as strained but not actually sprained, then he had Abel taken into one of the timber chalets where he spent more time on him.

‘As Abel’s nurse I should be there, too,’ Amanda complained.

‘I wouldn’t worry if I were you, Amanda,’ Jo soothed her. ‘By the look of Abel I feel you’ll have a lot of nursing yet to do on him.’

When the doctor came out he said almost the same words.

‘Nothing broken, sprained, crushed or pulled,’ he told them. ‘I’ll never know why, after taking the weight of a conveyor wheel. However, unlike our younger man here’ ... he looked at Dicky ... ‘he has suffered considerable shock and strain. He just has to have absolute rest, the very best of care.’

‘He will,’ Amanda assured him.

The doctor looked at her and then at Jo.

‘Sister Grant,’ introduced Jo, ‘uncertificated yet, but not that you’d notice.’

‘Then, Sister Grant, the patient is in your good hands once you leave here. But while you are at the lumber camp naturally you’ll have to give way to the company male nurse who’s always flown in on such occasions.’

‘Of course Sister Grant would understand that,’ came in Jo before Amanda could protest.

‘But once Mr. Passant leaves here,’ repeated the doctor, ‘Sister can take over.’

‘How long will that be?’ demanded Amanda.

‘A few days will be enough. I am assuming, of course, he has somewhere to go.’

Jo’s ‘He’s living in a camp’ and Amanda’s ‘We have a suitable room’ came at the same moment. Jo smiled secretly at the doctor and capitulated with: ‘Yes, he has a place to go.’

‘Excellent. Keep up the good work, Sister Grant. And who is this?’ He touched Sukey’s head. ‘An assistant nurse?’

‘I’m a cook,’ said Sukey. ‘I can cook toast.’

Jo murmured automatically: ‘And cuddled eggs.’

‘That sounds wonderful therapy to me,’ praised the doctor. ‘We’re all much better with a little love. Well, I’ll look in on Wednesday. After that, all going well, you can make your way home.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jo.

She searched out the camp manager and asked him to recommend a town motel for herself and the children until Abel was fit to travel. The manager would not hear of it. They had several empty chalets, he said, and the cook was anxious for more customers. Cooks always were.

When Jo told the children, they were delighted.

‘I couldn’t have gone, anyway,’ pointed out Amanda. ‘That male nurse might look after Abel very well, but I’d still have to make certain.’

Dicky was pleased because he had already inspected the huge circular saws, the veneering processes, and he wanted to know more.

Sukey had found the sawdust pile, gold, lemon and amber, very soft, sweet-smelling, just the thing to play with.

That left Jo, and she knew that she didn’t want to go either.

She had always been fascinated by lumber camps. Next to banana plantations they were her favourite background. There were quite a few in her own home mountains, for there the mahoganies grew tall and straight and were very profitable to the lumber millers, and a visit to them had always been sheer delight. She had loved that honey breath of the trees, the sweet smell of the sawdust as the blades did their work, the endless leaves that seemed to touch the sky, the sound of the wind in the top branches, soft and sibilant.

A larger chalet with a dormitory of beds was found for Jo and the children, and Abel went to the sick bay.

Amanda, after sulking for a while when the male nurse would not allow her into his hospital, decided to make a holiday of it instead and prepare herself for the nursing that lay ahead.

‘Very wise,’ Jo nodded.

She watched sadly as the children ran wild and happy and grew brown as berries. What was it back home that restricted them once they were away from the house? in the house, too, if the conversation took an inward turn to themselves. What was it that made them wary? Uneasy? Here they were three normal young people, and it was refreshing, if puzzling and disheartening at the same time, to see them enjoy themselves so much.

After a day of absolute rest Jo was allowed to visit Abel. The children, too, but they were permitted a few seconds only.

‘Put yourself in the nurse’s place,’ appealed Jo when Amanda said she would not visit at all, ‘wouldn’t you do the same?’

‘I would stop Dicky and Sukey, Dicky talks too much and Sukey echoes.’

‘Echoes,’ said Sukey, ‘and I do not so.’

‘But I wouldn’t stop me,’ said Amanda.

‘But then you know yourself and your worth, Amanda, and to the company nurse you’re only a little girl. Please help Abel’s recovery by putting your head round the door and saying hullo to him.’

‘Oh, very well,’ snapped Amanda.

The three of them did what Jo requested. They looked round the door and called ‘Hi, Abel’ and then went out again. It was brief, but Abel was pleased with the greeting and very impressed with their happy looks.

‘Not a thing wrong with any of them,’ said Jo. ‘Dicky did turn an ankle, but it seems to have worn off. Also Amanda feels she’s been pushed out of her rightful position, and Sukey, as usual, is echoing a little of the complaints of each of them. But in all nothing amiss.’

‘They were great kids,’ Abel said seriously.

‘Wonderful. When we needed their co-operation they came forward with it.’

‘And what co-operation! Tell me about it in detail, Josephine.’

Jo did. She told him about Dicky’s march into the forest for help, Amanda’s quite uncanny sizing up of the nursing requirements of the episode, Sukey’s general good behaviour. She told him about
Pennies dropping
and how it had accompanied them into the jaws of death—well, nearly the jaws.

‘A very handy song,’ nodded Abel. ‘You’ve used it before.’ He looked shrewdly at Jo. ‘Did any of this get you any further with the kids?’

‘Oh, we got on tremendously.’

‘But any
further,
Josephine? Further into the mystery of the old banana storehouse and who, or who not, Amanda believed she saw? Did it throw any light on a mine? Did it establish anything about their lives before your sister wrote to you and said she was to be the mother of three? Did it help you with your one out of three?’

“No.’

‘But good heavens, you had an opportunity you might never get again, an opportunity to pump these kids.’

‘They didn’t want to be pumped,’ said Jo.

‘Naturally. I’ve no doubt that Dicky doesn’t want to take a bath every day, Amanda and Sukey to do things that they are obliged to do, but that doesn’t mean—’

‘It did mean in this situation, Abel. They shrank from it, and I decided it was not the time and place.’

‘Then good lord, what will be the time and place?’

‘I don’t know. Abel, don’t rush me. After all,
it’s
only a couple of weeks still since—’

‘Time runs out,’ he reminded her sourly. ‘I think you’d better go now. I’m tired.’

Jo went.

There were several such deadlock visits, but Jo still had to come to the sick bay, the camp manager and the nurse expected it.

But they did not always argue. Sometimes the talk did not even touch on the children. Abel was naturally upset about his Cessna, and said so.

‘Oh, yes, I’m insured, but insurance doesn’t cover inconvenience and—well, personal loss.’

‘Personal loss?’ queried Jo.

‘It was a really good experience flying up there with you and the kids.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ Jo said, touched, but trying not to show it, ‘you were on cloud nine?’

‘Bang on,’ he grinned, ‘and blown there by the tender winds of spring.’ A pause. ‘All four of them.’

There was a moment of silence that Jo did not want to break but knew she had to. ‘Can the Cessna be brought out?’ she asked.

‘Never.’

‘Vines growing over it,’ said Jo, thinking of Sukey.

‘Yes, but let’s not look back,’ Abel shrugged, ‘there will be other kites, other days, other clouds in skies.’

‘Cloud nines?’

‘Could be.’

‘Other children?’

‘Could be again, though I will say this, Josephine, I’ve become rather accustomed to our particular brand of young horrors.’

‘You’ll find other horrors,’ Jo assured him. A pause. ‘Also another superintending adult who doesn’t superintend, or question, as much as she should.’

‘Oh, no,’ Abel came in at once, ‘there’s only one Josephine Millet.’ He added: ‘Thank heaven.’

About to become indignant, Jo laughed instead.

On the Thursday a four-wheel-drive utility large enough to carry the five of them (Abel lying full length) arrived from the plantation, and the doctor having given his consent, the patient and his party were waved off by the lumber camp back to the world of bananas. Before they left, the doctor had taken Jo aside. ‘If I were really worried,’ he’d said, ‘I’d have kept you here longer or insisted on your being accompanied by a trained nurse. But Abel has a superb constitution, and all he will need is a short rest to get over the journey. Young Amanda is perfectly capable of coping with that. So you just relax. He’ll be as good as new in a few days.’

It took longer by truck than by air, but being a four-wheel drive it could take the bush short cuts that an ordinary car dared not attempt, and by dusk the same day they were back at Tender Winds.

Jo noticed that although the children were more subdued than at the camp, they were not the same nervous souls as before. New courage? New confidence? Or was it because they were going strictly to the house and not to the bush surrounding the house? For Jo could not get it out of her mind now that somewhere in that bush was the answer to their uneasiness.

Abel was taken to one of the many .bedrooms, but not before Amanda had duly inspected it.

‘Light but not too much light,’ she said importantly. ‘Quiet. Something to look at through the window. Cheerful colours but nothing disturbing. The carpet, of course, must come up. I need a bare scrubbed floor.’

‘The heck you do!’ protested Abel. ‘I’ll hear every footstep. The carpet stops.’

‘It’s unhygienic. Have you ever heard of a carpeted hospital ward?’

‘I’ll not put up with plink-plonk, plink-plonk every time you come in to plump a bloke’s pillow,’ Abel protested, for from her hospital course kit which she guarded jealously Amanda had unearthed plain black rubberless oxfords. ‘No, Sister,’ he refused, ‘I’ll not put up with that.’

Alas for Abel. He had not even started to put up with things.

The next day he did start.

At first everything was charming. A young girl, and Amanda was a pretty young girl, no wonder Gavin rather had leaned to her for the one out of three, tending a patient in a manner that would have pleased the nursing manual, was quite a delightful sight. Especially wearing the veil, not a handkerchief, that Jo had made, and even, to Amanda’s supreme joy, sewn on a red cross.

‘Oh!’ Amanda had gasped incredulously at the veil and insignia, and that had been all the thanks that Jo had needed.

But soon the patient’s pleasure diminished somewhat at the amount of rules that Amanda seemed to have absorbed from her course and was determined now to impose on Abel.

No smoking. Abel didn’t, not very much, but he did like to suck on a pipe now and then. No nips, definitely no nips unless they were barley water.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ Abel said to Jo, ‘but there are several things I prefer to barley water.’

Temperatures. Abel had his taken so often he said he was beginning to prefer the flavour of the thermometer to tobacco.

Most of all Baths.

The first time he only smiled indulgently as Amanda tripped in and out of the sickroom, laden with towels, washers, soap, flannels and what-have-you. But the second time when evidently she wore a more intentional face than just the sponging of brow and cleansing of hands, he shouted:

‘Sling me the necessaries, Sister, I’ll do it.’

‘You’re too weak,’ objected Amanda, ‘or’ ... accusingly ... ‘you should be.’

‘The towel and soap, please, Amanda.’ No Sister now. Amanda came out to Jo in high dudgeon.

‘Baths,’ she said to Jo, no doubt repeating her lesson in home nursing, ‘act mainly on the skin, but through the skin they can influence the blood and circulation.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, dear, and I’m sure Abel realises this.’

‘Then why is he being so silly?’ Amanda’s lovely red-crossed veil had come awry and it slanted over one indignant eye, taking away from her ‘Sister’ status, making her just a very cross little girl.

‘Amanda,’ said Jo carefully, ‘Abel is a man, not merely a child like Dicky.’

‘Oh, I know all that, but to a good nurse’ ... what lesson is this going to be? inwardly groaned Jo ... ‘everyone, be they young, old, male or female, is just a patient.’

‘Yes, I know that’s how the nursing fraternity looks at it, but what about Abel?’