A HAZARD OF HEARTS

A Hazard of Hearts

Frances Burke

Copyright © 2012 Frances Burke

www.frances-burke.com

eBook design by
Tim C. Taylor

Cover art by
[email protected]

Heat swathed the cabins and outbuildings in
suffocating layers. It pressed down upon the animals, restless in their stalls,
on the mongrel panting under the wooden boardwalk just outside the bar-room
doors. In huts and lean-tos folk tossed and sweated on their blankets and
wondered who would be next to die, and hoped it would be another, and tried to
pray through lips already dry and cracked.

Further back in the hills the heat writhed
beneath canvas shelters to twine itself about the sleepers, moaning and cursing
from the depths of their fatigue. Nearby the axe heads lay buried in the hearts
of their bloodless victims, the great Australian cedars. Gums drooped, trailing
exhausted leaves in the dust, and grasses crackled under the feet of men who
sweated through the dark with their terrible loads. Creaking cartwheels covered
the sound of laboured breathing, the rumble of iron on stone. Few words would
be said over these poor remains. The town had no clergyman, while the doctor
could spare no time from the living.

The hotel, the one properly constructed building
in The Settlement, was a cavern from Hades lit by wavering lanterns and
smelling of beer and spirits seeped into the walls and floorboards. There were
other smells, biting, pungent whiffs – frighteningly medicinal: the acrid
stinks of sweat and terror, of escaped bodily fluids; the indescribable odours
of humanity in extremis, without hope.

‘Pass me the scalpel.’ The voice, harsh with
strain, came from a figure stooped over a trestle, his arms bloodied to the
elbows, and now preparing to let more blood flow.

The young woman silently handed him the
instrument then steadied the patient, a bearded, barrel-chested male lying
flaccid and quiescent, ready for the blade. It would sever him from contact
with his forearm forever. Did he know it, she wondered? At some deeply
unconscious level was he saying farewell to a part of himself, to his means of
livelihood, to his high standing amongst his fellows as the fastest killer of
trees in the colony?

Eleanor Ballard shook off her fanciful thoughts.
Lips compressed, she helped her father to clamp the bleeding vessels as he
worked to save what he could of the mangled limb. The man could count himself
lucky to be in the hands of Robert Ballard, she thought. The sweetish smell of
ether hung about the table, and the patient’s eyeballs had rolled back. He was
quite out of the world. With her foot Elly shifted the bucket into place
beneath the trestle. Savage shadows danced on the wall beside her, snaring her
attention. Voices beckoned, moaned, whimpered. She closed her eyes to rest them
for an instant, feeling the sweat sting beneath the lids.

It was monstrous, she thought, that two such
disasters should strike within such a short time. The Settlement, reeling under
the sudden blow of fever, had scarcely assimilated the danger before an
eruption of tempers in the cutters’ camp brought more trouble. Back in the
hills where the tall lovely cedars brushed the sky, in a dirt clearing dotted
with the detritus of camp life, the interminable, unbearable, implacable heat
had done its work. Beneath its goad, knives, fists and ugly emotions had gone
into frenzy. And when it had ended some lives had ebbed away into the stony
dirt, while for others life balanced on the edge, as did this man’s. His arm
now hung ludicrously foreshortened, a stumpy thing, useless for swinging an
axe. Useless for most things.

She heard someone laugh, a cracked sound.

‘Eleanor, pull yourself together!’ The surgeon turned,
his face lardy in the lamplight, the skin slick yet endlessly furrowed, the
face of Methuselah. He was forty-nine years old.

‘I’m sorry, Father.’ Elly straightened her tired
back. There were only the two of them. Earlier, some women had offered to help,
those without young children, but now even they had fallen away. There were too
many sick. And the rest huddled in the fetid huts, most likely brewing the
fever in their own veins, awaiting their turn.

She helped to move the patient onto the floor – there
were no mattresses – then wrung out a cloth to lay on another man’s brow. She
helped an emaciated figure upright to cough and sip water, a woman this time.
When the lad beside her failed to respond, she searched for his pulse then,
after a few moments, sighed and pulled a ragged shirt over the gaunt,
untenanted face, mentally adding one more to the next load to be shifted out
through the burning dark.

‘Come quickly, Eleanor!’

Alerted by his tone, she hurried to where her
father bent over yet another tormented body.

‘This man’s choking to death. Help me get him on
the table.’

Together they struggled and heaved, hampered by
the man’s whooping efforts to breathe. Then, abruptly, he fell limp. Doctor
Ballard gave one last massive thump to the back.

‘It’s no good. I can’t find any obstruction in
the throat. We must cut him.’

Together they began their well-rehearsed
routine. Tracheotomy. Elly had assisted only once before but she knew the
procedure. As she poured chloride of lime over her hands then soaked the
knives, needles and thread she went over each step, only a fraction of time
behind her father’s flying fingers.

Her father moved back from the trestle. His
hands dropped. ‘You do it Eleanor. You’re perfectly capable. I... I shall
attend to the next case.’

Her head snapped up. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

With an obvious effort, Doctor Ballard
straightened and walked away, saying over his shoulder, ‘There’s nothing wrong.
Attend to your patient at once while I attend mine.’

Obediently Elly forced aside her concern for him
and gave her attention to the man whose life immediately depended upon her.
Neck stretched hard back. No time for ether. Pull the skin tight below the
hollow of the throat, draw the blade downwards through the skin, keep to the
exact midline. Now divide the muscles. Wipe up that blood. Insert the knife tip
into the windpipe, twist delicately. Ah! Air sucked into the opening and
expelled with blood and mucous, gurgling and bubbling hideously, but the sound
of life.

Elly’s tightened shoulders relaxed as she wiped
away more blood, watching the man’s cheeks change from grey-blue to pink. Holding
the wound open, she delicately inserted forceps and withdrew a lump of wadded
material.

Her father appeared beside her and took the
forceps. He peered at them, snorted, then dropped the wad on the floor. ‘Tobacco
plug. What next! Sew him up smartly and don’t forget the piece of cotton for
drainage. I hope to Heaven the fellow hasn’t developed the fever already. He’s
got enough of a battle against sepsis under these conditions.’

Watching, he nodded approvingly as Elly cut the
final thread then stood back, her hand on the patient’s pulse, her gaze
checking her work for leakage.

‘I think the worst may be over, Father. There
were fewer cases brought in today.’ Elly washed carefully in an inch of water
in a basin then wiped clammy hands down her apron and tried to tuck back wisps
of fine blonde hair that drooped from her plaited crown. She longed desperately
for a bath, to strip off heavy petticoats and tight-sleeved bodice, to peel
away stockings and toss her boots into the corner. To feel clean water lap over
her body. What utter bliss. What idiocy, to dream of water where there was
none. With the creek-bed dry and barrels lined in living slime, and no drop of
rain in four months.

It would be Christmas in two weeks, she thought
suddenly. How terrible – a festive season lined with fresh graves and only the
half-living to toll the bells. She must be light-headed. She turned to her
father and saw him stagger.

‘Father! You’re not well. You’ve done far too
much.’

‘It’s nothing, girl. I’m weary, of course. Who
would not be?’ He shook his head angrily, a gesture at his weakness rather than
her. ‘I’ll have a drink and sit for a minute.’

When she ran forward he waved a petulant hand.
Perhaps he, too, felt a degree of helplessness, Elly thought. For all his
efforts, he’d snatched few lives from the grasp of this fever. Slumping onto a
bench, he took a long draught from a mug standing on the bar counter. Beer was
the only fluid left in The Settlement. Even the children drank it.

Elly shrugged and took a gulp from her own mug.
Just about any liquid would do to wet her throat. But her father worried her.
Always generous with his time and skill, he’d come close to giving away his
health to this motley crowd of creek dwellers and brawling timber men.

She’d never understand why he’d chosen to bury
them both here in The Settlement. There were so many other places they could
have gone to in the Colony. If he’d wanted to leave Sydney Town, there was
always Parramatta, or Liverpool, or even Bathurst over the mountain range.
There were townships with amenities such as decent houses, shops, parks,
perhaps a river running through. Why did they have to go north to the cedar
hills, to frontier country? They were not pioneers. Her father’s superlative
skills were wasted here on the few, when he could have headed a great hospital,
healing while teaching on a grand scale.

Surreptitiously, she studied her father. He was
still a relatively young man – a graduate of Edinburgh University Medical
School, a post-graduate student at the Charite in Paris, and the colleague of
such men as Professor Rokitansky in Vienna, who still corresponded and kept her
father abreast of developments in the medical world. Why had he chosen to bury
himself in this desolation? Why? The years had been so long. Twelve years since
Mother had passed away, leaving them to work out a relationship that sometimes
seemed to Elly more student to professor than daughter to father.

She sighed and sipped her warm beer, reminding
herself of her good fortune to have Doctor Robert Ballard as mentor. It was
Elly’s great grief that she had been born female. She knew women did not study
medicine, especially not women without means, buried twelve thousand miles from
the great teaching centres. But she’d worked alongside her father and had been
allowed to experiment, to gain experience as a son might have done following in
his father’s steps.

‘I’ve no time for namby pamby females,’ he’d
growled, levelling his pipe at her. ‘For a woman, you, Eleanor, are
exceptional. You have a brain and, by Jehoshaphat, I’ll see you use it!’

Her breast swelled with pride. For she had done
it. She’d slaved to prove herself as good as any son, fit to stand beside a great
surgeon and assist him in every possible way. The college training could never
be hers. The letters ‘M.D.’ would not be attached to her name. Yet there were
compensations. After a decade of the kind of intensive training few women could
hope for she’d become an experienced nurse and assistant who could think for
herself.

It was hard to understand just why nursing
should be regarded as so lowly and relegated to the unskilled and unfit in
society. There had to be a place for nursing as a profession. How many women
fretted their lives away uselessly as dutiful daughters or idle wives, when the
right training could turn them into productive members of society? In every
city there must be hundreds of kind, capable women perfectly suited to caring
for the sick. And what about those isolated on farms and sheep stations, who
had to be combined doctor, nurse and dispenser, as well as comforter of the
sick?

Elly pulled herself out of her daydream. She put
down her mug and smiled at her father. Light flickered on his nearly bald scalp
as he bent slowly towards her, a surprised expression on his face. Elly’s smile
stiffened. She rose and took two steps forward. For an endless moment her
father hung there, as though caught around the middle. Then he slipped from the
bench and fell on his face only inches from her boots.

Elly dropped down in a pool of grubby skirts.
With shaking hands she raised his head as he vomited on her and on the floor.
His congested eyes seemed to plead with her.