Praise.” The doctor lay on his side in his bunk, his skin the same shade as his khaki shorts, his eyes screwed shut. “Doctor,” she said, hesitating, “are you also with fever?”
When he tried to look at her, his eyeballs rolled like marbles on a tilting plate. He turned and retched over a fire-bucket, missed it, which didn't matter, as the bucket was full to the brim. Sister Mary Joseph Praise rushed forward and felt his brow. It was cold and clammy, not at all feverish. His cheeks were hollowed, and his body looked as if it had shrunk to fit the tiny cabin. None of the passengers had been spared seasickness, but the Englishman's affliction was severe.
“Doctor, I am wanting to report a fever that has affected five patients. It comes with rash, chills, and sweats, a slow pulse and loss of appetite. All are stable except for Sister Anjali. Doctor, I am most worried about Anjali …”
She felt better once it was off her chest, even though other than letting out a moan the Englishman made no response. Her eyes fell on a catgut ligature that was looped around a bed rail near his hands and that displayed knot thrown on top of knot, ten-score of them. The knots were so plentiful that the thread stood up like a gnarled flagpole. This was how he had logged the hours, or kept track of his bouts of emesis.
She rinsed out the bucket and put it back within his reach. She mopped the mess on the floor with a towel, then she rinsed the towel out and hung it up to dry. She brought water to his side. She withdrew, wondering how many days it had been since he'd eaten anything.
By evening he was worse. Sister Mary Joseph Praise brought sheets, towels, and broth. Kneeling, she tried to feed him, but the smell of food triggered dry heaves. His eyeballs had sunk into their orbits. His shriveled tongue looked like that of a parrot. She recognized the room's fruity odor as the scent of starvation. When she pinched up a skin fold at the back of his arm and let go, it stayed up like a tent, like the buckled deck. The bucket was half full of clear fluid. He babbled about green fields and was unaware of her presence. Could seasickness be fatal, she wondered. Or could he have a
But she knew how to nurse. And she knew how to pray. So, praying, she eased off his shirt which was stiff with bile and spit, and she slid down his shorts. As she gave him a bed bath, she was self-conscious, for shed never ministered to a white man, or to a doctor for that matter. His skin displayed a wave of goose bumps at the touch of her cloth. But the skin was free of the rash shed seen on the four passengers and the one cabin boy who had come down with fever. The sinewy muscles of his arms bunched together fiercely at his shoulder. Only now did she notice that his left chest was smaller than his right; the hollow above his collarbone on the left could have held a half cup of water, while that on the right only a teaspoon. And just beyond and below his left nipple, extending into the armpit, she saw a deep depression. The skin over this crater was shiny and puckered. She touched there and gasped as her fingers fell in, not meeting bony resistance. Indeed, it appeared as if two or perhaps three adjacent ribs were missing. Within that depression his heart tapped firmly against her fingers with only a thin layer of hide intervening. When she pulled her fingers away, she could see the thrust of his ventricle against his skin.
The fine, translucent coat of hair on his chest and abdomen looked as if it had drifted up from the mother lode of hair at his pubis. She dispassionately cleaned his uncircumcised member, then flopped it to one side and attended to the wrinkled and helpless-looking sac beneath. She washed his feet and cried while she did, thinking inevitably of her Sweet Lord and His last earthly night with His disciples.
In his steamer trunks she found books dealing with surgery. He had penned names and dates in the margins, and only later did it occur to her that these were patients’ names, both Indian and British, mementos to a disease hed first seen in a Peabody, or a Krishnan. A cross next to the name she took as a sign the patient had succumbed. She found eleven notebooks filled with an economical handwriting with slashing down-strokes, the text dancing just above the lines and obeying no margin save for the edge of the page. For an outwardly silent man, his writing reflected an unexpected volubility.
Eventually she found a clean undershirt and shorts. What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books? Turning him first this way and then that, she changed the sheets beneath him and then dressed him.
She knew his name was Thomas Stone because it was inscribed inside the surgical textbook hed placed at his bedside. In the book she found little about fever with rash, and nothing about seasickness.
That night Sister Mary Joseph Praise negotiated the heaving passageways, hurrying from one sickbed to the next. The mound where the deck had buckled resembled a shrouded figure and she averted her eyes. Once she saw a black mountain of a wave, several stories high, and the
In the middle of the tempestuous ocean, groggy from lack of sleep, facing a terrible medical crisis, her world had become simplified. It was divided into those with fever, those with seasickness, and those without. And it was possible that none of these distinctions mattered, for very soon they might all drown.
She awoke from where she must have drifted off next to Anjali. In what seemed like the next instant she awoke again, but this time in the Englishman's cabin where she'd fallen asleep kneeling by his bed, her head lolling on his chest, his arm resting on her shoulder. In the time it took her to recognize this, she was asleep again, waking at daybreak finding herself on the bunk, but on its very edge, pressed against Thomas Stone. She hurried back to Anjali to find her worse, her respirations now sighing and rapid. There were large confluent purple patches showing on Anjali's skin.
The anxious faces of the sleepless crew and the fact that one fellow had knelt before her and said “Sister, forgive my sins!” told her that the ship was still in danger. The crew ignored her pleas for help.
Frantic and frustrated, Sister Mary Joseph Praise retrieved a hammock from the common room because of a vision she had in that fugue state between wakefulness and sleep. She strung it in his cabin between porthole and bedpost.
Dr. Stone was a dead weight and only the intercession of St. Catherine allowed her to drag him from bunk to floor, then feed him, one body part at a time, onto the hammock. Answering more to gravity than to the roll of the ship, the hammock found the true horizontal. She knelt beside him and prayed, pouring her heart out to Jesus, completing the Magnificat which had been interrupted the night the deck had buckled.
Color returned first to Stone's neck, then his cheeks. She fed him teaspoons of water. In an hour he held down broth. His eyes were open now, the light coming back into them, and the eyeballs tracking her every movement. Then, when she brought the spoon up, sturdy fingers encircled her wrist to guide the food to his mouth. She remembered the line shed sung moments before: “He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich He hath sent empty away.”
God had heard her prayers.
A pale and unsteady Thomas Stone came with Sister Mary Joseph Praise to where Sister Anjali lay. He gasped at the sight of the wide-eyed and delirious nun, her face pinched and anxious, her nose sharp as a pen, the nostrils flaring with each breath, seemingly awake and yet completely oblivious to her visitors.
He knelt over her, but Anjali's glassy gaze passed right through him. Sister Mary Joseph Praise watched the practiced way he pulled down Anjali's lids to examine her conjunctivae, and the way he swung the flashlight in front of her pupils. His movements were smooth and flowing as he bent Anjali's head toward her chest to check for neck stiffness, as he felt for lymph nodes, moved her limbs, and as he tapped her patel-lar tendon using his cocked finger in lieu of a reflex hammer. The awkwardness Sister Mary Joseph Praise had sensed in him when she had seen him as a passenger and then as a patient was gone.
He stripped off Anjali's clothes, unaware of Sister Mary Joseph Praise's assistance as he dispassionately studied the patient's back, thighs, and buttocks. The long sculpted fingers that probed Anjali's belly for the spleen and liver seemed to have been created for this purpose— she couldn't imagine them doing anything else. Not having his stethoscope, he applied his ear to Sister Anjali's heart, then her belly. Then he turned her to one side and pressed his ear against her ribs to listen to the lungs. He took stock, then muttered, “Breath sounds are diminished on the right … parotids enlarged … she has neck glands—why? … Pulse is feeble and rapid—”
“It was a slow pulse when the fever started,” Sister Mary Joseph Praise offered.
“So you mentioned,” he said sharply. “How slow?” He didn't look up.
“Forty-five to fifty, Doctor.”
She felt he had forgotten his illness, forgotten even that he was on a ship. He had become one with Sister Anjali's body, it was his text, and he sounded it for the enemy within. She felt such confidence in his being that her fear for Anjali vanished. Kneeling by his side, she was euphoric, as if she had only at that moment come of age as a
