THE mudcat season has come. After the winter’s diet of salt herring, and
before the open season for bass and pickerel, comes the mudcat, alias
bullhead, to give us the taste of fresh fish again. From April fifteenth
until the fifteenth of May is the closed season for pickerel, and from
April fifteenth to June fifteenth it is forbidden to fish for bass, so
now the humble mudcat comes to his own.
Over on the Drapeaus’ shore the men are all skinning bullheads for
market. They have rigged up a machine that twists off the heads and
strips off the skins at one turn of a handle. Andy Drapeau dips the fish
out of the live box, Black Jack skins and beheads them, George Drapeau
rakes away the offal, Harry Spriggins and Lewis Drapeau pack the fish in
barrels. The whole shore reeks of them, the beach is red with their
gore, for your bullhead is a very bloody fish. He is an ugly
creature—great head, thorny spines, wicked-looking mouth, but he tastes
very good indeed, if one has not seen Black Jack skin him.
I have come in for the usual present, and have to restrain my friends, or
they would give me at least a half barrel.
“Kin you git their inside out, ef I take the hide offen them?” asks Black
Jack. And I assure him that for the sake of fresh fish I can do
anything.
John Beaulac was not there. The Beaulac baby—my godson—was “awful sick.”
Later in the day came young Louis to the island to ask for the loan of
some alcohol. The doctor had seen the child, by chance, as he was
passing through the farm on his way to the lake, and had prescribed a
warm bath and an alcohol rub. Young Louis’ eyes were big with horror.
To wash a sick child was evidently the same thing as killing it outright.
I supplied the alcohol and, gathering up clean sheets, soft towels, a new
washcloth and talcum powder, took shipping for Loon Lake.
Rose Beaulac sat in the center of a red-hot room, the window shut, the
door shut, every chair, box and square foot of floor space occupied by a
child or a dog, and held the gasping, moaning baby, despair in her face.
One look at its crimson cheeks and glazed blue eyes told me that it was
an ill child indeed. My thermometer showed a temperature of a hundred
and four when it came out from the burning little armpit.
John stood beside the woodpile and called me as I left the house.
“Was the baby very ill? Ought he to send for the doctor?”
It was “Yes” to both questions.
Then John did some figuring in his mind. His beady black eyes stopped
twinkling, his face grew stern and set. This has been a hard winter for
Jack. The war stopped the export of mica and the mines have been shut
down. Last year was a wet season when the hay floated in the meadows and
the grain sprouted in the stooks. It has been almost impossible to make
ends meet, but if the child needed the doctor—well, he must be called and
he’d be paid somehow. John left the decision to me. I must call the
doctor if I thought best.
So away up the lake, three miles to the telephone, I rowed, and the
doctor promised to come the next day.
“Tell John to have a boat at Henderson’s landing for me, at seven-thirty.
I can’t make the fifteen miles there and back over these roads to-night.
Meanwhile keep up the bathing and the alcohol rubs, and tell Rose to keep
that door open. Don’t forget that. Tell her that child must have plenty
of air”—an injunction that Dr. LeBaron did not in the least expect to
have obeyed when he gave it; it was merely a part of his general course
of education.
How did those eight people manage to breathe in that stifling room; how
could that ill child survive in that foul atmosphere? I wondered, as I
laid my weary body down on my clean, cool bed. And if I were worn out,
what must Rose be, who had sat for three nights with that tossing,
suffering baby in her arms?
Whether the lake is more beautiful in the early morning or at sunset, I
have never been able to determine. At six o’clock, as I pushed off from
the dock on the blue water, the thrasher’s liquid song followed the
rhythm of the oars. Out on the open bay the swallows wheeled and dipped
all round the boat, so near that I could have touched their burnished
blue-green backs. On the beaches the sandpipers ran tipping up and down,
their plaintive piping mingling with the robin’s song. A gentle breeze
roughened the water and every little ripple that hurried to the shore was
tipped with a winking star.
At Beaulac’s all was in readiness for the doctor. Rose’s eyes were
glazed with sleeplessness, her face lined with fatigue; but she had found
strength to comb and braid her dark hair, the children’s faces had been
washed, and the baby had been dressed in a little new pink cotton frock.
There was a dishpan full of newly hatched turkeys behind the stove, for
even if one’s child is dying one must try to save the fowl, and there was
a basket of young kittens under the bed. But Richard, the pet lamb, had
been banished to the meadow and the hounds were tied to the fence. John
had gone for the doctor. Mary was alone with the ill child. She had
done all she could, she could only wait.
“I’m glad you got me his picture,” she said with a piteous little smile
and looking over at a kodak print of the baby that we had taken some
weeks before. “He’s never been nowheres to have his picture took. I
guess I’ll be glad of that one.”
Far out on the shining bay we saw the boat returning. There was only one
figure in it. John was coming back alone. The doctor had been stopped
by an accident case; he could not come until evening. Rose’s lips
trembled, but she made no complaint. What was the life of one baby when
there were so many, so many that needed the doctor?
Back to the island for my midday meal, back to Loon Bay to meet the
doctor. This time there were two figures black against the evening sky.
John was rowing with quick jerks of the short, straight oars. In the
stern sat a bulky shape digging away with a paddle. Under its weight the
upward pointing bow waved from side to side. Over the gunwale amidship
came a steady stream of water. Mrs. LeBaron, the doctor’s wife, crouched
on the bottom, was bailing away for life.
“By gol!” said John, in an aside to me, as the party climbed the hill.
“By gol! but the doctor iss a heavy man. I thought she was over two,
three times.”
Oh, the method of these country doctors! There’s no talk of “Call me in
the night if the change should come.” No promise: “I’ll see you the
first thing in the morning.” No, Dr. LeBaron only gave his verdict. The
baby had pneumonia. The right lung was suffused. He was a very ill
child, but he might pull through—no one could tell. And all the time the
doctor’s deft hands were making up powders, counting tablets, measuring
drops. On every package he wrote the day and the hour the dose was to be
given. He set down the times for baths and nourishment, he told us what
symptoms we might expect. He gave his directions over and over again,
slowly, clearly, waiting for a repetition of his words. There was no
haste, no irritation at our ignorance, only infinite care, infinite
patience. Then he ordered out the children, the young turkeys and the
cats, shook hands with the mother, stepped into the boat and was rowed
away. If the child lived, we would not need him again; if it died, we
were to notify him at once, and twice a day he wished me to telephone him
the baby’s temperature, respiration, pulse, and a general account of the
progress of the disease. And then when excitement was at its height,
someone broke my thermometer, the only one in miles; there was no more
taking of temperatures—and the child got well!
The last time that Dr. LeBaron came to Many Islands it was to treat Harry
Spriggins’ boy, who had cleft his kneecap straight through with an ax.
There was no fire in the house. The Doctor had to build one and boil a
pan clean before he could sterilize his instruments. There was no one
willing to help him give an anæsthetic, so he had to sew up that wound
while the boy sat and watched him do it.
“How in the world did the child stand it, Doctor?” I asked.
“Well, it was pretty hard on him,” answered the doctor. “I told him that
I’d thrash him within an inch of his life if he moved—it was the only
way—and the poor kid gritted his teeth and swore like a trooper all the
time. But the wound healed perfectly, almost without a scar, and the
joint did not stiffen.”
“You would be quite surprised to know how little charity work I do,”
continued the Doctor, giving me a very direct look from his keen, gray
eyes. “There are not many bad debts on my books. The country people pay
remarkably well, all things considered.”
A quick little smile flits over Mrs. LeBaron’s face at his words. I
imagine she could tell quite another tale. Doubtless she knows how much
of time and strength and pity is given for which no money can ever pay.
“What do you call charity, Doctor?”
It is not, of course, charity to charge Johnny Bagneau ten dollars for
driving twenty miles through the blinding snow; to sit, through the long
night and half the day, beside the bed where little John makes his
delayed entrance into life; to eat a breakfast of eggs in the shells and
a dinner of potatoes in their jackets, and to stand outdoors in the
bitter cold to eat them, because even the doctor, inured to filth and
foul air, cannot eat in that poor room.
“No, the Doctor does not work for charity,” the people tell me. “He gits
paid for what he does.”
Younger men come from the hospitals of Toronto and Montreal and hang out
their signs in Queensport for awhile. They get a percentage of the town
cases. They do not “go in” for the country practice.
“They young chaps is all very good when there’s nawthin’ much the
matter,” says old Mrs. Drapeau. “But when it’s anything bad we wants the
old Doctor.”
Yes, that is it. When danger threatens we want the man we know. He has
brought us into the world, he has stood by us through life’s trouble. It
is he who must sit beside us, steadfast amid the gathering shadows, as
the soul starts forth through the darkness of the long trail, to the land
where there shall be no more night.
These country doctors! Up and down the roads they go, by night and day,
through storm and fair weather, treating everything, operating for
anything, nursing, instructing, overcoming prejudice, performing miracles
of healing despite incredible difficulties. To meet them is to come face
to face with the eternal realities. To hear them talk is to listen to a
tale that cuts down deep into the beating heart of life.