Читать книгу The Doctor's Apprentice - Ann Walsh - Страница 7

The heavy trap door of the gallows slammed against its supports, the crowd gasped, a woman cried out. “It is done,” said a man’s voice. “He is dead, hanged as sentenced by the judge.”

The August heat covered me, thick as a wool blanket, and I felt the sweat on my face as I listened to the sounds of death. The others who had come to watch the hanging had not noticed me sitting under a tree, hidden by its branches. Nor had I been able to see what was happening, although I had heard everything.

I wanted to go home, but my legs felt too weak to carry me down the road, away from the courthouse and the newly built gallows. I could not stand. I could not move.

From behind me, someone whispered, “Ted.”

I jumped, and my heart began to beat rapidly. Who was calling my name? I leaned my face against the pine tree, feeling the roughness of its bark against my cheek, and put both my arms around its trunk. I clung tightly to the tree, refusing to look into the shadows.

“Ted,” said the voice once more.

“Who is it?” I asked, my voice so low that I could scarcely hear the words I spoke. “Who is there?”

“A friend,” he said with a threatening laugh.

That laugh. I knew it well, knew who it belonged to. Against my will my hands loosened their grip and I felt myself beginning to turn towards the person who had called my name.

A tall man stood there, his hands outstretched in front of him, reaching for me. “Master Percy,” he said. “I’ve a score that I’ve not yet settled with you.” He took a step towards me.

“No,” I said. “Leave me alone. Please…”

The words trailed away and I stood in silence, staring at the tall figure of James Barry, murderer. He took another step and once more I heard the sound of his laughter, a sound I would never forget.

I saw around his neck the thick, tightly knotted rope of the hangman’s noose. Then I began to scream.

“Theodore Percival MacIntosh, stop this. Be quiet, son. Wake up.”

“Leave him be, Ian. Harsh words will not help to quell his terrors.”

My father’s voice. My mother’s. I was home, in bed. “You were dreaming, Ted,” said my mother, bending over me. “You are clutching your blanket to your face so fiercely you can scarcely breathe. Let it loose, son.”

“Ma?” I said.

“Aye, and your father, too,” said my Pa. “Now, if you don’t mind, I shall go and try to take some rest for what is left of the night. You have a fine voice for singing, son, but I can’t say that I care to hear it echoing through the house in the dark.”

“Leave the boy alone,” said Ma. “The dreams which trouble him cause him far more pain than we suffer as a result of broken sleep.”

My father grumbled something and left the room. My mother smoothed the covers around me, tucking them firmly under the mattress.

As she pulled the thick wool blanket from my hands, I realized that in my dream the blanket had become the trunk of the pine tree to which I had clung so tightly. I let go of it reluctantly and Ma finished tidying my bed.

“Your dreams have not let you sleep in peace for many months, Ted. Will you not tell us what terrorizes you so badly that you cry out, night after night?”

I didn’t answer. I hadn’t talked to my parents about my nightmares, not ever. They had begun in October 1866, shortly after I had gone with Constable Sullivan to arrest James Barry at the suspension bridge in Alexandra. The body of a man had been found, and James Barry, suspected of the murder, was trying to escape from Barkerville, the goldfields and also from my friend Moses, who had evidence that Mr. Barry was guilty of murder.

Moses was supposed to go with Constable Sullivan and help capture Barry, but Moses had fallen ill and I had been sent in his place. Moses and I both knew only too well what James Barry looked like, but the constable had never seen his face; he relied on me to make the identification.

I had identified James Barry. He had changed his appearance, but I knew him in spite of his attempts at disguise. I had recognized his laugh, that same laugh which had so recently echoed through my dreams.

It was then, shortly after his arrest, that James Barry had said he had “a score to settle” with me. It was then that the dreams had begun.

Now it was April 1868, eight months after James Barry had been sentenced, tried and hanged, a full year and a half since Constable Sullivan and I had captured him at the Alexandra Bridge. I would be fourteen soon, and was already of a grown man’s size. Yet, I was still having childish nightmares.

“I am sorry if I woke you and Pa,” I said to my mother.

She stopped fussing with the blanket and looked at me.

“You did not answer me, Theodore. Tell me about these dreams which haunt you so.”

“I can’t, Ma,” I said, not meeting her eyes. “I can’t.”

Even though I suspected that my parents knew full well of what and whom I dreamed, I would never tell them exactly what terrors made me cry out in my sleep. Perhaps I believed that if I didn’t speak of them, the nightmares would leave and I, and my parents, could rest undisturbed once more.

I was no longer the cowering twelve-year-old who had been terrified by the bearded stranger who had walked into Moses’s barbershop one day and had so changed my life. I wasn’t a child anymore. Childish dreams and night terrors should no longer be a part of my life. The dreams must stop, I thought. They must stop.

“The dreams must stop,” said my father, echoing my thoughts. “I find it hard to tend to my work when I have had my sleep disturbed. Carpentry is a difficult trade, and when I am tired I make mistakes, costly mistakes.”

Ma and Pa hadn’t gone back to bed. Their voices were coming from the kitchen and, since Ma had neglected to close my bedroom door, I could hear their conversation clearly.

“You are too harsh on the lad, Ian,” said my mother. I heard her drop fresh kindling into the cook stove and stir up the coals to start the fire. “He is young, and he has seen and heard some frightening things. Give him time to recover from them.”

“Time?” asked my father. “Night after night, for more than a year, these dreams have torn our sleep to shreds. It has been time enough.”

“A while longer, and it will pass. I feel sure of it. Give him just a bit more time.”

“Aye, Jeannie, and while he dreams and screams, my time is wasted, as I bungle simple tasks for lack of sleep.”

“He is but a child…” began my mother.

“He is no longer a child,” said my father. I heard the heavy iron kettle clang against the stove as he moved it to catch the heat. “He will be fourteen soon, but you treat him as if he were still an infant. Most lads his age have found work in the mines of the goldfields, difficult work. Ted is not a child, Jeannie. You should not treat him so.”

“I treat him with love,” said my mother. “He may be neargrown, but he will always be my child.”

“You coddle him,” said my father. “Just now you soothed him as if he were an…”

“An infant,” said my mother. Her voice was high-pitched now, the way it gets when she is upset or angry.

“I heard you when you first said it. I disagree. I do not treat Theodore as if he were still a baby.”

There was silence for a while. I wondered if I could get out of bed and close my door quietly enough so that my parents wouldn’t hear me. Through a gap in the curtains I could see the pale grey of dawn, and realized that Ma and Pa had decided to make an early start on the day. They would not be returning to sleep.

My parents seldom argued, and I had never heard them speak so sharply to each other. I pulled the blankets over my head, hoping to block out their words.

“There must be some way to help him,” said my father. His voice was softer now, less angry. “It hurts me to see the lad so troubled. He comes with me to the carpentry shop, day after day, and he does nothing but make mistakes. Even the simplest chore seems beyond him. Just yesterday he allowed a pot of glue to boil over on the stove while he stood staring at it. His work is useless.”

“His heart is not in anything,” said my mother. She sighed. “Mr. Malanion, Ted’s music teacher, called on me last week. He says that he sees little sense in Ted continuing with his violin lessons. Although Ted tries to practise—I hear him do so—his fingers no longer do as he bids them. The music is gone from his soul, Mr. Malanion says.”

I heard a chair being pushed back as my father stood up. Ma was crying and Pa had gone to comfort her. “What shall we do?” I heard her ask.

My father didn’t answer for a while and, except for the muffled sounds of my mother’s sobs and the low whistle of the kettle, the house was silent.

“I think it is time we sought help outside our family,” my father said at last. “It is clear that neither of us can ease Ted’s mind and relieve him of the dreams which haunt him. We will ask another for help.”

“Who?” asked Ma.

“I don’t know,” replied Pa. “Let me think on it. But no matter what, those dreams must stop. And soon.”

Lying in bed with the covers tight over my head, I did fall asleep, even though I hadn’t thought I would. When I awoke for the second time, the streak of grey dawn which made its way through the curtains had brightened into full daylight.

“I have overslept,” was my first thought. “Pa will be angry that I am late.” For many months now I had been putting in a full day with my father at his carpentry shop, learning the trade which he knew so well. Once he had said that I had the hands of a craftsman and would become a talented carpenter. But then I remembered that earlier this morning he had told Ma that my work was “useless.”

Pa was right. I knew that neither my mind nor my heart were in these tasks. But I wanted to be with him. I could try harder, try to still my mind and concentrate on the job at hand. If only I weren’t so tired, I thought. If only I could sleep and not dream.

I dressed and went to the kitchen for hot water. Ma was kneading bread, her arms streaked with flour, a frown on her face as she pressed and twisted the dough. She heard me come in, but didn’t look up. “You slept late, son. I hope you feel rested.”

My mother looked anything but rested. She had dark circles under her eyes, and her face had an unhealthy pallor. I went to her and put a hand on her shoulder.

“I am so sorry that I woke you and Pa again,” I said.

“It is not important, Ted.”

“Where is Pa?” I asked, changing the subject.

Ma wearily brushed a hand across her forehead, leaving a streak of white flour. “He has gone to the shop, to work.”

“Without waiting for me?”

My mother sighed. She still did not meet my eyes.

“Your father thinks that perhaps it is best if you stay home for a few days. He feels you are too tired to be of much help to him.”

So that was why Pa hadn’t wakened me. I must have fallen asleep before my parents made this decision. My throat was suddenly tight.

Ma went back to her kneading, and I took the kettle from the stove. I returned to my room and washed, then left the house quietly by the front door, without breakfast, without saying goodbye.

Our house is on the road between Barkerville and Richfield, somewhat removed from the noise and bustle of both towns. In Barkerville there are twelve saloons, ten stores, as well as hotels, breweries, restaurants, shoemakers, blacksmiths, barbers and all the other establishments you might expect to find in a busy and prosperous town.

Word of the rich gold strikes to be found in the area had brought people from all over the world into the goldfields. More than ten thousand inhabitants now lived in the towns of Richfield, Marysville, Barkerville and Camerontown along Williams Creek. Barkerville had become a very busy and prosperous town.

The road between Richfield and Barkerville, which had been a quiet place to live when we first moved here, was now crowded with homes and cabins and was not nearly as isolated as it had once been. But from our home, even over the sounds of the rocker boxes, winches, the stage rattling by several times a day and the shouts and yells of those working their claims, I could still hear the bubbling of the creek. I always found that sound comforting, especially at night, and I missed it in the winter when the creek froze solid.

The stores and homes of Chinese people filled the upper end of the town, so Barkerville’s Chinatown was the first area I walked through on my way to Pa’s shop. The buildings here were cramped together, even more closely than they were in Barkerville’s Lower Town.

There were several stores which were full of bins and shelves of dried herbs and other mysterious things, some recognizable, some so dry and brittle that I couldn’t tell if they were animal parts or bits of roots and tubers.

One of those stores is owned by Sing Kee. He is an herbalist, and he sells medicines which are bought not only by the members of the Chinese community, but also by others in Barkerville. I had been in Sing Kee’s store many times, wondering at the goods which were for sale, and listening to him as he tried to explain to me which ailments each product cured. Some people say that Sing Kee’s medicines are the best in the goldfields, even better than those doctors offered.

Many of the Chinese miners had left their families behind when they came to the land of the “Gold Mountain,” which Pa said was the English translation of the Chinese name for North America. There were “mountains of gold” here in the goldfields, underground mountains, and rivers too, of gold. But you had to stake your claim on the right spot and dig deeply enough to find them. Some miners, like Billy Barker, the man for whom the town was named, found rich veins of gold, but others laboured for months, even years, digging deep shafts but never uncovering the blue clay, below which the gold was often hidden. Both before and after Billy Barker’s famous strike in 1862, there had been miners who found nothing but heartbreak and despair.

I walked by the Chinese Temple, the Tong building. Here the Chinese miners gathered for worship, for meetings, for companionship. They also played games, one called mah-jong, another called fan-tan. My father said that the Chinese gambled on those games and that a great amount of money had been won and lost in the Tong, enough money to build a whole new town. It was the “White Dove,” Pa told me, that people gambled on the most, a game where each day numbers printed on small white tiles were picked, and the people who had bet on those numbers won a lot of money.

Perhaps the reason that the Chinese men spent so much time in the Tong building was that they had nowhere else to go. There were very few Chinese women or children in the goldfields. It was expensive to travel here and many men came alone, waiting for the day they would find their fortune and could afford to send for their families. Pa said that most who had made the long trip from China never saw their wives or children again, but were buried here, in the land of the Gold Mountain. I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I had heard that years after a Chinese man had been buried, his bones were dug up and sent home to China, to be buried again in his own country with the bones of his ancestors. I’d never seen anyone digging up a grave in the Chinese cemetery at Richfield, because I never went near that graveyard; James Barry was buried there.

The Chinese funeral processions went right past our house, and everyone carried food to leave at the grave. I didn’t know if the food was for the spirits, or for the dead man to take into the other world with him, in case he got hungry. My friend Moses told me that sometimes miners down on their luck would go to the Chinese graveyard after a funeral and steal the food. I had never tasted any Chinese food, but I thought that a person would have to be extremely hungry to eat a meal served beside a newly dug grave. Then, just as I was thinking about graves and death, I passed by a building behind the Tong.

It was only a cabin, smaller than most of those in Barkerville, with only one tiny window and a narrow door. But this cabin was where Chinese miners went when they were very old or very sick. Here, lonely men, whose families were far away and could not look after them, went to die. Others brought them food and medicine, cared for them and made them comfortable during their last days and hours. The Chinese had a name for that cabin in their own language, Tai Ping Fong, which meant the Peace Room or the Peace House. To me it was the Death House. I looked away as I passed and walked faster.

The buildings in the lower end of Barkerville were raised on posts so that when Williams Creek was diverted, either by accident or to create a water supply for a claim so that gold could be washed from the gravel, the water stayed away from the houses and stores. Sometimes these diversions caused the creek to burst its banks and come rushing merrily down Barkerville’s streets, flooding homes and stores whose foundations were too close to ground level. Even though snow still lay deep on the hills and in the shadows of the buildings, Barkerville’s main road was thick in mud today which meant that Williams Creek had thawed and left its normal course once again.

Raising the buildings worked well, except for the fact that no two stores or homes were built at exactly the same height. Boardwalks were erected along the fronts of buildings, but walking along these boardwalks, while it kept your feet out of the mud, meant continually climbing from one level to another and back down again as the walkways followed the different heights of the buildings.

As I passed Moses’s barbershop, I realized I hadn’t seen him for a while. I stuck my head in the door and he turned to me and smiled.

“Ted. Come in, come in. Sit a spell. I’ve no customers at the moment so it’s a good time for a visit.”

“Just for a short while,” I said. “How are you, Moses?”

“I am well, if not yet wealthy,” laughed Moses. “And you, young man, have grown again.”

“Not really, Moses. It’s just that you haven’t seen me for some weeks.”

“I noticed,” said Moses. “Now that you spend so much time working with your father I see little of you.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.”

“Busy? Yes. But perhaps maybe you would also prefer to seek other friends, friends more your own age instead of someone of my advanced years.”

“You’re not old, Moses,” I said.

“Not in spirit, perhaps. But the years add up, and they seem to accumulate much faster once you pass the half-century mark.”

Neither one of us spoke for a while, and the silence felt awkward. “I guess I’d better be going,” I said. “I’m already late. Pa went without me this morning.”

“I know,” said Moses. “Your father dropped by here, just after I opened up. He told me that you had a difficult night.”

“It was just a dream, that’s all.”

Moses looked at me for a while before he spoke. “It is not good for you, Ted, to dwell on what has passed.”

“I don’t ‘dwell,’” I said. “I never think about him.”

Moses didn’t ask who I meant by ‘him.’ He knew.

“Just now you turned to look all around you,” he said.

“As if you suspected James Barry to be lurking in my barbershop. I think he is with you more than you will admit. Perhaps that is why you no longer seek my friendship— because I remind you of a time you would sooner forget.”

“That’s not true,” I said, getting angry. “I wasn’t looking for Mr. Barry, I was merely glancing around. He was only in your barbershop twice when I was present, so why would I look for him here?”

“You speak as if he still lives,” said Moses. “You carry him with you, in your heart, in your mind, as if he were still alive. That is not healthy.”

“It’s none of your concern,” I said. “I don’t care what you believe is healthy. I don’t think of James Barry and I don’t dream about him.”

“I did not speak of dreams, Ted.”

“Well, I don’t dream about him. Ever.”

For the second time that morning I left someone without saying goodbye. I almost slammed the door of the barbershop on my way out, and I didn’t look back at Moses. “I don’t dream of James Barry,” I had said.

How I wished that were the truth.