“Get it out!” the man bellowed again, thrashing. Mr. Lowell nearly lost his grip.
Dr. Lawrence turned to the woman and murmured something with a nod of his head toward the door. He pried her fingers up so slowly Jane wanted to scream along with the patient, but when he was free, the woman disappeared back into the hallway.
He crossed the floor to where she stood, as behind him Mr. Lowell and the volunteer assistant hoisted the bleeding man onto the table.
Trembling, Jane draped the apron over Dr. Lawrence’s head, and he turned so she could fasten it down the sides. Then he took her by the hand and pulled her over to a filled basin.
“Antiseptic. Wash your hands, Miss Shoringfield. Thoroughly. Rub under your nails, too.”
She did as she was told, then tuned back to the table. Mr. Lowell had strapped the patient down at the chest, wrists, and legs. The volunteer who’d helped carry the patient stared as the man thrashed and howled. Mr. Lowell pulled a protective cover off an array of tools.
“Mr. Rivers,” the doctor said, and the volunteer dragged his gaze away from the patient. “Please step outside. Miss Shoringfield, with me.” Dimly, she realized she hadn’t thought to grab an apron for herself, but one look at the patient told her why the doctor hadn’t reminded her.
They didn’t have time.
Through the sodden, gaping fabric of the man’s shirt, Jane could see that his belly was split open. A makeshift bandage had been wrapped around it, but he had torn at it, pressing the ragged edges inside the flesh. Dr. Lawrence surveyed it in barely two seconds.
“Miss Shoringfield, I need your hands,” he said. Before she could question him, he took one of her hands in his, clamping it over one side of the slit in the patient’s belly, fingers around the separated flesh. She held on even as the man gave another bellow and the slippery skin heaved in her grip. Dr. Lawrence guided her other hand to the other side. “Hold the wound open. Mr. Lowell, wash your hands, then get me a flushing bulb.”
He grabbed up a pair of shears and made quick work of the patient’s shirt, then cleared the rest of the bandage away from the wound. Jane’s fingers trembled. Blood covered her hands, seeping beneath her nails, and it stank. Spirits take her, but it stank. She’d never seen this much blood in her life, and it was slippery, and hot, and more of it forced against her hands and pooled in the too-large gap in the patient’s skin with every rapid, desperate pulse of his heart. He was still conscious beneath her hands, still screaming, still moving, and every heaving breath he took made the inside of his wound rise and fall with it.
Mr. Lowell returned to the table and passed Dr. Lawrence a glass tube with a rubber balloon set above it. Dr. Lawrence squeezed the balloon and water surged into the wound, diluting the blood and forcing it from its pool.
Beneath it, she saw gleaming multihued ropes. Ropes, like sausage casings. Bile rose in her throat.
She hadn’t known what a man looked like on the inside, before. He looked like meat. Brutal, horrible meat.
“He’s cut all the way through.” Dr. Lawrence did not curse, and did not stop with horror. He spoke with what could have been cold detachment in another man, but in him it was an attentive declaration, a statement of truth that helped orient and ground Jane in the moment.
He could fix this.
He had to fix this.
The doctor left her side, moving to the patient’s head and pressing a cloth soaked with ether to his nose and mouth, the fumes burning her nostrils even where she stood. The thrashing lessened, and the howls that had become an unending, unchanging background noise turned to low, vague moans. Dr. Lawrence lifted the cloth and looked directly at her.
He is going to ask if I can handle this, Jane thought. Please, do not ask that of me. If he did, the answer would be no. As long as he kept silent, as long as he presumed she was capable, she would follow where he led.
He gave her a little nod, then returned to her side.
“Mr. Lowell, retractors,” Dr. Lawrence said, his voice quiet, but the room was quiet now, too, all their breaths held. Mr. Lowell passed him two gleaming pieces of metal bent back upon themselves at one end. The doctor slid them each under the skin Jane clung to, then eased her fingers over them instead. Her hands slipped at first, and the metal was shockingly cold after the burning heat of the patient’s flesh, but not feeling fresh blood on her hands was a relief. She held them firm and at the doctor’s direction, spread the wound open a little further.
“What in the world—?” he murmured.
Jane, despite herself, leaned in.
His way cleared, Dr. Lawrence reached inside the man’s belly, gently pushing the pearlescent ropes of the man’s bowels aside. He eased forward a thicker section, tangled up in much same way as everything else around it. No—no, she was mistaken. It looked as convoluted, but where it folded back onto itself, it seemed to go inside itself, though there was no perforation she could see. The flesh simply melded together, and a faint shape moved beneath the surface, a form beneath a shroud. She could not keep it oriented in her mind’s eye; it seemed to slide and twist.
“What did you do to yourself?” Dr. Lawrence whispered.
For the first time, she heard uncertainty.
But his hands did not falter as he grimly set about cutting the mess of twisted flesh away from the surrounding tissues, exposing more of the larger organ until it ran even and smooth. “It’s a miracle, perhaps, that he was driven to cut himself open—had this gone unnoticed, he would have died of septicemia within the week.” He lifted the tangled mass from the patient and set it aside carefully, almost tenderly. Jane stared at it as Dr. Lawrence took up needle and thread. It still looked vital. Alive. Blood coated it, and she thought she saw it move.
“Miss Shoringfield, please keep tension on the retractors,” Dr. Lawrence said.
She forced herself to look down again, to watch as he stitched up a lower reach of disrupted gut, then fed the freshly cut section of bowel through the gash the patient had carved in himself. She removed the retractors when he indicated and watched, transfixed, as Dr. Lawrence miraculously closed membranes up, and then the man’s skin, his stitches precise. He worked like a master craftsman, like an artist, and the confidence in every line of him bewitched her.
The patient moaned and the spell was broken. Her body threatened revolt.
“Grab a cloth and soak it in antiseptic, then wipe down his skin. Get him as clean as you can. It will speed recovery,” the doctor said, calmly redirecting her.
Tasks. Tasks helped. She got her cloth and began with the bottom of the man’s rib cage, then gently blotted the margins of the wound. When it was clean, she moved to the man’s hands, pulling the scraps of fiber from under his blunted nails. He was sleeping now, face drawn from pain and exhaustion, but otherwise peaceful.
Wiping a bit of grime from his brow, she looked up at the doctor. He was bent over the man’s torso, quickly cleaning and stitching up other small lacerations. He spared one glance up at her, as if he could feel her eyes on him.
“We have done good work here,” he said, smiling. “You have helped save his life.”
Golden warmth bloomed in her chest, and she realized she’d begun to shake, for the first time since he’d placed her hands on the man’s bleeding gut. “Oh,” she said.
Dr. Lawrence soaked a sponge in fresh antiseptic, then set it over the opening still left in the man’s stomach, where the hole of the bowel protruded. A few more minutes, and he was done, stepping away from the table and going to the sink. She trailed after him, unsure of what else to do.