Джон Ирвинг – The Cider House Rules / Правила виноделов (страница 8)

“Eclampsia,” Homer Wells said to Nurse Edna.

“Doctor Larch is at the railroad station,” Homer told Nurse Edna calmly. “Someone has to call him. You and Nurse Angela should stay to help me.”

When Nurse Edna returned to the delivery room with Nurse Angela, Homer instructed the nurses to give morphine to the patient. Homer himself injected some magnesium sulphate into a vein, to lower blood pressure at least temporarily. In the interval between her last and her next convulsion, he told Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela to take the necessary tests. He asked the woman how many convulsions she had already suffered but she couldn't remember the number of convulsions. She only remembered their beginnings and their aftereffects. She also said she was expecting her baby in a month. The woman's state was very dangerous.

At the start of her next convulsion, Homer gave the woman a little ether, hoping to help her. But it didn't work though the woman's motion was slower. In the next interval, while the woman was still relaxed under the ether sedation, Homer examined the woman; labor hadn't begun. He was afraid to make the decision to start the operation; he wondered why Dr Larch didn't come.

An orphan had been told to find Larch at the railroad station; the boy returned and announced that Dr Larch had boarded the train to Three Mile Falls – in order to follow the dead body that the stationmaster had forwarded to the next stop. The stationmaster had simply refused to accept the cadaver. Larch, in a rage, had taken the next train after it.

“Oh-oh,” Nurse Edna said.

Homer gave his patient her first dose of digitalis which helped prevent the development of fluid in the lungs. While he waited with the woman for her next fit, he asked her if this was a baby that she wanted very much, or one that she didn't want.

“Do you mean it's going to die?” the woman asked.

“Of course not!” Homer said and smiled like Dr Larch; but he thought that the baby would die if he didn't deliver it soon, and the woman would die if he rushed the delivery.

The woman said that she didn't want to keep the baby – but that she wanted the baby to live.

“Right,” Homer said.

“You look very young,” the woman said. “I'm not going to die, am I?” she asked.

“No, you're not,” said Homer Wells, using Dr Larch's smile again.

But in twelve hours, when the woman was suffering her seventh fit on the operating table, Homer Wells did not smile.

He looked at Nurse Angela, who was trying to help him hold the woman, and he said, “I'm going to start her labor.“

“I'm sure you know what's best, Homer,” Nurse Angela said.

Twelve more hours passed; the contractions started. Homer Wells could never remember the exact number of convulsions the woman had in that time. He was beginning to worry more about Dr Larch than about the woman, and he had to fight with his fear in order to concentrate on his job.

Ten hours later a boy was born, in good condition. The mother felt better very soon. There were no more fits, and her blood pressure returned to normal.

In the evening Wilbur Larch – together with the rescued cadaver, soon called Clara – returned tired and triumphant to St. Cloud's. He had followed the body to Three Mile Falls, but the stationmaster there had been so frightened that the body was not unloaded from the train; it had traveled further, and Larch had traveled after it, arriving at the next, and at the next station. No one wanted Clara.

And so Clara went from Three Mile Falls to Misery Gore, to Moxie Gore, to East Moxie and so on. Larch had a terrible row with the stationmaster in Harmony, Maine, where Clara had scared everyone before she had been sent further.

“That was my body!” Larch screamed. “It is for a student of medicine who is training with me in my hospital in Saint Cloud's. It's mine!” Larch yelled. “Why are you sending it in the wrong direction? Why are you sending it away from me?”

“It came here, didn't it?” the stationmaster said. “It wasn't taken at Saint Cloud's.”

“The stationmaster in Saint Cloud's is crazy!” Larch shouted.

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn't,” said the stationmaster in Harmony. “All I know is, the body came here and I sent it on.”

“Idiots!” Larch shouted, and took the train. In Cornville (where the train didn't stop), Wilbur Larch screamed out the window at a couple of potato farmers who were waving at the train, “Maine is full of morons!”

In Skowhegan, he asked the stationmaster where the body was going. “Bath, I suppose,” the Skowhegan stationmaster said. “It came from Bath, and if nobody wants it at the other end, it's going back to Bath.”

“I want it!” screamed Wilbur Larch.

The body had been sent to the hospital in St. Cloud's from the hospital in Bath; a woman had died there, and the pathologist at Bath Memorial Hospital knew that Wilbur Larch was looking for a fresh female.

Dr Larch caught Clara in Augusta, where the stationmaster simply saw that the body was going the wrong way. “Of course it's going the wrong way!” Wilbur Larch cried.

The stationmaster was surprised. “Don't they speak English there?”

“They don't hear English!” Larch yelled.

On the long ride back to St. Cloud's with Clara, Dr Larch didn't calm down. In each of the towns that offended him he offered his opinions to the stationmasters while the train paused at the stations. “Moronville,” he told the stationmaster in Harmony. “Tell me one thing which is harmonious here – one thing!”

“Moronville!” Larch shouted out the window as the train pulled away. “Idiotsburg!”

To his great disappointment, when the train arrived in St. Cloud's, the stationmaster was not there. “He's having lunch,” someone told Dr Larch, but it was early evening.

“Do you mean supper?” Dr Larch asked. “Perhaps the stationmaster doesn't know the difference,” he said unkindly. He hired two men to bring Clara to the boys' division.

He was surprised by the disorder in which Homer Wells had left body number two. Larch went shouting through the orphanage, looking for Homer.

“Here I am, running after a new body for you – and you leave a mess like that! Homer! ” Dr Larch yelled. “Goddamn it,” he muttered to himself, “a teen-ager can't become an adult soon, a teen-ager can't accept adult responsibilities, he can't do an adult's job.” He went muttering all over the boys' division, looking for Homer Wells, but Homer had been on Larch's bed in the dispensary and had fallen into the deepest sleep. He had been awake for nearly forty hours with the patient – delivering her and her child.

Nurse Angela stopped Dr Larch before he could find Homer Wells and wake him up.

“What's happening around here?” Larch wanted to know. “Is no one interested in where I've been? And why has that boy left the body looking like a war casualty?”

And Nurse Angela told him everything.

“Homer did this?” Larch asked Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna; he was reading the report; he had examined the mother, who was fine, and the baby boy, who was normal and healthy.

“He was almost as calm as you, Wilbur,” Nurse Edna said. “You can be proud of him.”

“He is an angel, in my opinion,” Nurse Angela said.

“He did everything just right,” Nurse Edna added.

“He was as sure as snow,” Nurse Angela said.

He did almost everything right, Wilbur Larch was thinking; it was amazing. Larch thought that it was a small error that Homer hadn't recorded the exact number of convulsions during the childbirth. It was minor criticism. But Wilbur Larch was a good teacher; Homer Wells had performed all the hard parts correctly; his procedure had been perfect.

“He's not even twenty, is he?” Larch asked. But Nurse Edna had gone to bed, she was exhausted. Nurse Angela was still awake, in her office, and when Dr Larch asked her why the baby had not been named, she told Larch that it was Nurse Edna's turn and Nurse Edna had been too tired.

“Well, it doesn't matter,” said Wilbur Larch. “You name it, then.”

But Nurse Angela had a better idea. It was Homer's baby – he had saved it, and the mother. Homer Wells should name this one, Nurse Angela said.

“Yes, you're right, he should,” Dr Larch replied, filling with pride in his wonderful creation.

He had slept almost through the night. He woke only once on the dispensary bed; Larch was in the room probably looking at him, but Homer kept his eyes closed. He felt that Larch was there because of the sweet scent of ether, and because of Larch's breathing. Then he felt Larch's hand, passing very lightly over his forehead. Homer Wells, not yet twenty years old and as knowledgeable as almost any doctor lay very still, pretending to sleep.

Dr Larch bent over him and kissed him, very lightly, on his lips. Homer heard Larch whisper, “Good work, Homer.” He felt a second, even lighter kiss. “Good work, my boy,” the doctor said, and then left him.

Homer Wells felt his tears coming silently; he cried more than the last time when Fuzzy Stone had died and Homer had lied about Fuzzy to Snowy and the others. He cried and cried, but he didn't make a sound. He cried because he had received his first fatherly kisses.

Of course Melony had kissed him; Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had kissed him, but they kissed everyone. Dr Larch had never kissed him before, and now he had kissed him twice.