The Adventures of Oliver Button

Chapter Four

Con’s dream had come true before he had even reached the colonies. Even better than her dreams—she was apprenticed to the surgeon aboard the navy ship Duchess. Surgeons were indispensable, so Con felt certain that she could get a medical job in the colonies when she arrived, or at least on another ship. All her worries about employment were over.

Of course, she still worried about Biddy.

But Con had no control over what happened to Biddy now, so she focused on what was before her: a man with a leg wound.

He had hurt himself a week before while working, a nasty, deep gash in his thigh. The surgeon and Con had done their best to clean and bandage it so he would be able to keep the leg, but he had developed a fever and red spots had appeared on his now pale legs, so the surgeon had told Con that they would have to amputate the sailor’s leg. Con had told the sailor what would happen to him, and now, a couple bottles of rum later, he was here. The Duchess hadn’t seen any battles yet, but the surgeon would already amputate a leg.

The sailor lay on the table with a rag in his mouth and a terrified expression in his eyes. His body was full of rum he’d drunk an hour before, but it could only help him so much—Con knew he would scream. She didn’t need surgical experience to know that. The worst part, though, wouldn’t be the pain—it would be living the rest of his life without his leg.

The surgeon finished washing his hands and picked up a saw.

“This will be very quick,” he said. “Oliver, you must hold down his upper body while I do this. Then, when I’ve finished, you will bring that tourniquet and bandage to me as fast as you can and we’ll put them on. You remember how we practiced.”

The surgeon had a clipped way of speaking, which Con found admirable as well as peculiar.

“Now, go, boy, we must begin.”

Con stood over the injured, drunken sailor and pressed her forearms onto his chest, bracing herself.

The doctor sawed. The sailor screamed into his rag and thrashed on the table. Con used all her weight to keep him down. Blood pooled on the table, but as the surgeon had said, he finished sawing in less than half a minute.

“Come, Oliver,” the surgeon said, and Con ran to the bandages and then to the surgeon. They worked quickly to stop the bleeding and bandage the wound. The sailor continued to scream and moan, but soon it was all over. The surgeon and Con stood back and surveyed their work: the moaning sailor, the bloody table, saw, and floor below, the infected leg separated from the now bandaged stump that he would call his. Their own arms up to the elbow in blood.

“Let us wash,” the surgeon said, and Con rushed to get a bucket of water in the corner of the room, “And then we’ll bring him away.” Con set the bucket on the table and the surgeon and Con dipped their arms in and washed the blood off.

Con had stained her only shirtsleeves. As they brought the sailor away, that thought ran in her head. Now she would always have a bloody shirt, until she could find another one. She looked at the surgeon. He had a certain shirt just for this purpose. Red stains covered most of the front and the sleeves.

They set the moaning sailor in his hammock, where his friends greeted him with more rum. The amputee would be dropped off in the colonies, Con thought, and what would he do then? He would be paid for his injury, but he would be jobless. Con and the surgeon walked back to their room and their table and set to work cleaning up.

She hadn’t minded the amputation. She hadn’t minded treating little things, or treating the sailor’s bigger gash, or amputating his leg. She felt sorry for the man, but she had not felt sick or horrified holding him down, watching the surgeon cut through his leg until his saw hit the table. She sort of liked the work.

She felt shocked realizing this, but then she wondered why. She was helping the man when she and the surgeon cut off his leg. They were saving his life. They were doing what needed to be done, and it was good work.

They had finished cleaning their tools and mopping up the blood on the table, and the surgeon insisted they wash their hands again, which was a policy Con appreciated, since they were once again bloody. She grabbed a bowl and filled it with some clean water from another bucket—seawater, of course—and they washed the blood off their hands again. Then Con dumped the water into the first bucket of bloody water, took them to the deck, and dumped them over the side of the ship.

“Poor man,” a sailor on deck murmured. He had said the same thing when Con and the surgeon had thrown the leg overboard. Con went back down below decks.

The surgeon left to tend to the amputee while Con set to work washing out the bloody rags they had used to clean up, and her shirt sleeves. Once again, she had time to think. Think about Biddy. Think about what she might be doing now.

No. Think about the future. It had possibly been a stupid, sentimental idea on her part to name herself Oliver Button when she boarded the Duchess, since the name had been exposed as a fraud in Southampton, but she had done it, and no one had questioned her. Now she would make it an honest name in the colonies. She would be a doctor there, and make good money, and when she wasn’t doctoring, she could be a fine lady, and maybe go to dances and meet gentlemen. One or two would especially catch her attention, and in time she would court and marry one, and she would stop doctoring and have a normal, happy, honest life. That was what she wanted: a happy, honest life.

But she didn’t mind surgery. She wondered, as she scrubbed the blood out of the rags, if she could somehow continue her doctoring after she married…maybe her husband would let her, or while he was working at his own job, she could…

No, that wasn’t honest. What was she thinking? She would be happy with that life when she got to it, she was sure. She had always wanted her own family and honest, happy life. She could clean the blood out of her shirtsleeves just for now.