“Eli lives under the stairs,” she told him. “He’s harmless, mostly. Just moon-touched crazy. Sees things that aren’t there. Carries on conversations with invisible people. But you tell him to clean the floor? He pitches in and cleans and cleans. No letup until it’s spotless. If I tell him to comb the carpets in the salon, or dust the shelves, it’s done. And best of all, he’s never pestering the girls for as much as a yank on his johnson.”
“How did this happen?” Doc indicated the gangrenous lower leg.
“Moving a new cast-iron cookstove into the kitchen. Eli’s not the strongest of men. He was on the downstairs end. Dropped it.” She quickly added, “He wouldn’t countenance the notion of having someone look at it. Didn’t know how bad it really was till we cut his shoe off the next morning. Should have called for a physician then. But he insisted we leave him be. That it would heal.”
“It might not have made any difference, as badly as his foot is crushed.”
She raised an expressive eyebrow. “He kept insisting it was getting better, and I had more important things to do than keep track of his foot.”
Doc’s quick hands cut the last of the ligaments, and he caught the deadweight of the severed limb. He gently lowered it into a bucket placed conveniently beneath the table. One that had no doubt caught many an unwanted fetus.
A muffled bang, as if from a pistol shot, carried from the street. Then another and another. Meg stepped to the door, opened it a crack, and called, “Hattie? Go see what the commotion is about. If it’s a fight, lock our front door.”
“Yes’m.”
The lower leg looked oddly forlorn where it canted in the bucket. “Well, there you go, Eli. The leg’s gone, and the world is just the same as it was before.”
Meg grunted. “I guess I can’t very well order Eli to carry his own leg out, can I?”
“I’ll see to it,” Doc told her as he slipped silk suture over his tenaculum, the surgical hook. He used it to fish the arteries from the surrounding muscle. Sliding the surgical silk down, he carefully used it to ligate each of the major blood vessels.
She pursed her lips as if the notion were just sinking in. “How long until he can work again?”
“Maybe a month if there are no complications. The stump will have to heal. Keep him quiet and immobilized in a well-aired room to prevent the development of noxious effluvia. Expect fever for the next week or so. Dressings will need to be changed until the pus stops draining. It should be clear. You’ll know from the smell if anything goes amiss. At the end of the month, you’ll have to fit him with a prosthesis to—”
“A what?”
“A peg leg.”
Her lips soured. “But he can still work?”
Doc pulled the flap taut and began to suture. “Physically he’ll be a little slower. Expect him to be clumsy for the next six months. It takes a while to learn to balance and move with a prosthesis.”
She turned her thoughtful gaze on him. “That was quickly done. I didn’t know a leg could come off that fast.”
“I grew up on a farm. Butchering pigs, deer, sheep, and cattle. Paw had me learning anatomy from a medical book, cutting up critters and comparing their innards with human internal organs.” He smiled, delighted with himself. She apparently had no idea how nervous he’d been. “There’s not that much difference.”
“You thinking of staying in New Orleans? Having just lost our old physician to the yellow fever, I’d be willing to offer you regular work here, checking the girls, dealing with our … special needs?”
Me? Service a bawdy house? Never again.
He finished his last knot. Bent down. Studied his suture. After wiping his hands on his apron, he slowly began unscrewing the tourniquet. A faint weeping of blood oozed along the incision’s margins. This was the critical moment. Would the ligated arteries hold?
“Let me guess,” Meg said tartly. “Your mother also taught you how to sew?”
“My father, actually. Harnesses, moccasins, and such. Life beyond the frontier taught him the skill, and he swore no son of his would ever be in a position where he couldn’t ‘repair his possibles’ should the need arise.”
Doc made quick work bandaging Eli’s stump.
“Quite the man, this brigand father you so despise. Returning to my query. My girls are in need of a new physician. Young and handsome as you are—”
“I’m honored by your offer,” he lied.
I’ll see myself in hell before I lower myself to working in a brothel!
He’d never so much as set foot in a whorehouse before—and before God and the angels, he’d be damned if he’d ever do so again. That was Paw’s realm, after all.
He began picking caked blood from his fingers, still alert for the sudden rush should one of his ligatures fail. “Hopefully, I’m only going to be in New Orleans long enough to find a boat headed upriver. With the uncertainty of secession, I’d like to see my family again. It’s been more than four years.”
Then he added, “Assuming, that is, that Father’s not home. Which, I must admit, is a high probability given his affinity for being anywhere else.”
She smiled faintly, an amused look on her face. “But Arkansas?”
“Even worse, western Arkansas.” Doc paused at her expression. “And it’s true: as appalling as travel is in Arkansas, the politics are, indeed, even worse. Now, if someone could bring me a pan of water, I’d like to clean my instruments and hands.”
“Of course.” She opened the door, calling to someone out of sight. Then she turned back. “So that’s it? Off to wild Arkansas to become a surgeon? They don’t pay. Not even in Little Rock with its … what? Three thousand people? New Orleans, especially with the secession, will become the most powerful city in the Confederacy. Probably even become the capital as soon as this asinine notion of placing it in Montgomery over in
