David Nickle - Eutopia

“I see.”

“Do you?” Colour was rising up the other man’s neck. He snapped his board behind his back and turned abruptly. “If I may observe, Dr. Waggoner, the sheltered arrogance of the east coast is not confined to the white race.”

Andrew let the words sit in the air a moment before he answered. “I’m not to judge,” he said. “Better that you do it than someone like the one who took a hook to Maryanne Leonard.”

“Quite.”

Bergstrom swung his arms in front of him, as though summoning his own energy for a jump. “Well,” he said, stepping toward the door, “I shall, I think, leave you to rest a time. I needn’t say it, I hope, but you need not worry about either paying for the treatment you receive here, or the receipt of your pay over the time you remain.”

“That I remain? Do you mean in this bed? Ah. You don’t.”

Bergstrom stopped, his hand on the doorknob. “No,” he said. “I thought that we had come to an understanding. Once you’re able to travel, you must go. Your not-inconsiderable skills are no longer required, and your injury prevents their application in any event. We will make arrangements for your return to your family in New York, where you can recuperate in relative safety. But you cannot remain here—not with the Ku Klux Klan at large. It is unsafe for everyone, as I am sure you’ll agree.”

And with that, Dr. Nils Bergstrom slid behind the door, pulled it shut behind him and left Andrew alone in his room.

The pain got worse as the day progressed. Several times, a nurse came with a tray offering a shot of morphine for it. But Andrew refused.

“You are only agonizing yourself,” said the nurse. Her name was Annie Rowe. She was a tall, thick-faced woman who, Andrew had discovered, had trained in a hospital in St. Louis where she had for her own reasons not elected to remain. It had to have been her own choice: she was one of the better women who worked beds at Eliada, and she’d have excelled in any city hospital.

Andrew smiled. “Pain,” he said, “is how the body communicates with the mind. Lets it know what it’s up to. What its limits are. Why would I quiet all that good communication?”

Annie smiled. “Communicating’s one thing. I can see by the sweat on your brow that it’s past that and there’s a lot of foolish shouting now. Come on, Doctor. Take a shot. You’ll rest better.”

“No, thank you,” he said. “I had my fill of it last night. Although I don’t recall asking for any.”

“Oh,” said Annie, “I know. I heard your views on it. Ears are burning red in Paris, I’ll bet.”

“Yes. Sorry about that.”

Andrew chuckled and Annie laughed.

“I work in a logging town,” she said. “I’ve heard worse. Here—won’t you let me drug you, just a little? No? At least let me wipe your brow. Care for some water in a glass as well?”

“I surely would,” said Andrew. Annie lifted the water jug and poured from it into his water glass. He took a sip then set it aside as Annie poured more water into a basin and dipped a cloth into it.

“Annie,” he said, “mind if I ask you a question?”

“Not at all, Doctor.”

“You ever see Mister Juke?”

She paused, the water dribbling from the cloth and rattling along the edge of the basin. “No,” she said. “Quarantine is not on my rounds.”

“But you knew about him.”

“Sit back,” said Annie. She brought the cloth to Andrew’s forehead. It felt cool and good there as she dabbed it. “Yes,” she said. “I knew they brought in a fellow. I heard some of the fellows start calling him that name.”

“They brought him straight to the quarantine?”

“As far as I know.”

“Now why do you think they would do that?”

“How do you mean, Doctor?”

“Why would they take a fellow straight to the quarantine? Was he contagious? Exhibiting symptoms?”

“I suppose he must have been.” Annie dabbed the cloth down Andrew’s cheek. “You could do with a shave,” she commented.

“So no one told you what they thought he might have,” said Andrew.

“Kept it pretty quiet,” she said.

“I’ll say they did,” said Andrew. “All winter long, I didn’t see anyone bring him in. Didn’t see it, didn’t hear about it.”

“Well of course not,” she said. “That fellow came in late last summer. He’s been there the whole time.”

“Since the summer?” Andrew shook his head. “And I didn’t hear a word about it.”

“Really.” Annie stepped back, inspecting his face like it was a canvas and she’d finished painting it with water. “He would have been an interesting case for you—for any surgeon from Paris, I’d thought. What with his irregularities.”

“That is the second time I’ve heard that word used when talking of this fellow. What are his irregularities?”

Annie reddened a little at that. “They are not widely—I mean to say—those of us who had a look at him when he came in—”

Andrew nodded encouragingly.

“Well. He is not entirely a… he.”

Annie seemed literally about to entirely collapse into embarrassment, then remembered who she was and what she did—her profession—and cleared her throat, stood straighter.

“The word is hermaphrodite. Do I really need to go on?”

Andrew raised his eyebrows. “A person of both genders?”

Now Annie smiled a little. “I imagine you saw those sorts of folk all the time, studying in Paris.”

“No, not really. I’ve read case studies, but that is as far as it went. Hermaphrodites are as unusual in France as they are in Idaho.”

“Well you should have been able to have a look,” she said. “It would have spared me recounting it. You must be in poorly with the management, for them not to’ve told you about it.”

“I don’t doubt it,” said Andrew and threw Annie a grin. She grinned back, and told him to rest some more, then started getting ready to leave him for the night.

He could put as fine a face on it as he wanted to, but Annie Rowe was right. Andrew Waggoner was in poorly with the management; very poorly indeed. He was in so poorly he was fired—fired for upsetting Klansmen in a mill town, having done nothing worse than applying his meagre skills to a girl who needed more. Fired for hurting his elbow in the course of protecting himself from one of those Klansmen—for hurting it badly enough he might seriously not be able to operate again. Fired, at the core of it, because he was a Negro, who so far as the management was concerned did not belong here from the beginning, who was not fit to consult on the charity case in the quarantine.

Gloom fell on him like a wool blanket on a hot summer’s day.

It wasn’t, he brooded, as though no one had foreseen this sort of problem. His uncles had been deeply sceptical when Elmore Waggoner announced that he would be putting a year’s profits in the Connecticut livery company he founded towards sending his oldest boy to France to study at the Paris School of Medicine. Andrew would not be the first or even the second Negro to lift a scalpel in the United States. But he would be consigned, they predicted, to ministering to the ill in Harlem or other similar neighbourhoods in big cities. To try and find a place in a surgery—a surgery where white men’s wives and children might one day lie down under the scalpel—would be throwing good money away, they said. And not helping his boy a whit.

But Elmore was stubborn, and because he had some money he could put behind that stubbornness, he was able to send his boy on a boat to France, and welcome him back with a medical certificate from one of the finest schools of medicine in the world.

Who was right? As the sun climbed past the scope of his one window and the room fell into cool, grey shadow, Andrew thought it might be time to congratulate those sceptical uncles of his. Them, and Nurse Annie Rowe.