Chapter 25
JUNEAU, ALASKA
“I know it’s difficult, Mr. Clemson, but the boot has to come off!”
With her hands on her hips, Maggie eyed the old prospector sternly. He was slumped on the end of one of the hospital beds, his grimy, grizzled face lowered, his gnarled hands laced together in his lap. And he was refusing to take off his boot.
He’d come limping into St. Ann’s fifteen minutes ago, complaining of foot pain, and judging from the sour smell rolling off him that was strong enough to make Maggie want to gag, it was related to the cleanliness of his footwear.
She suspected he hadn’t changed his socks in weeks, if not months, and if they’d gotten wet, which they surely had, the foot would be a terrible sight to see.
It was a common enough complaint in these parts, especially among the prospectors who ventured up into the mountains and beyond, living in little more than a shanty and barely eking out a living looking for gold dust. Personal hygiene was rarely a priority.
“You came here for a reason,” Maggie reminded him, gentling her tone.
In her two months of working at St. Ann’s, she’d learned that many of the men who seemed tougher than old boots—this particular boot included—were as sensitive as the most delicate of fainting lilies on the inside.
No doubt the old sourdough—the term that was used for the prospectors who carried their sourdough starter in a bag around their neck, to keep it from freezing—was feeling shy.
“I know, I know,” he said, giving her an abject, apologetic smile. “But I’m feelin’ better, I surely am.”
Maggie glanced down at the foot in question.
Judging from the way his ankle was swelling above his boot, the skin an angry, shiny red and puffy besides, she feared he wasn’t feeling better at all.
If he wasn’t treated, he would likely lose his foot.
He might, Maggie knew, lose it anyway. She’d seen more than one case of foot rot since she’d arrived in Alaska, and the outcome was often amputation if it wasn’t caught in time.
Her time at St. Ann’s had provided a swift education in the ailments common in the region, many of which were frustratingly preventable.
In addition to the usual battery of coughs and colds, Maggie had seen her fair share of frostbite, foot rot and broken bones.
She’d also tended to gunshot and stab wounds, almost all of them caused by fights that broke out in the streets and saloons of the fair town.
Far worse, however, were the injuries men experienced working in the mines, from falling rock, dynamite explosions, and accidents with various pieces of heavy machinery.
Maggie had seen men with crushed arms or legs, or even entire insides, some of them too far gone to do anything about but hold their hand as their suffering came to its sorrowful end.
There was no surgical ward at St. Ann’s, and although they did amputations of fingers and toes as a matter of both necessity and urgency, if a man required anything more, he was sent to one of the hacks on Front Street who had no more than a saw and a bottle of strong whisky. It was a sorry state of affairs.
In addition, supplies such as iodine or chloroform were hard to come by; even clean bandages or the ingredients for a simple cough syrup or mustard plaster were difficult to obtain, and when they were able to be found, coming by mail order from Victoria or Seattle, they were fearsomely expensive.
“Mr. Clemson,” Maggie said again, gently. “Please, I only want to help you.”
The prospector let out a sigh that was halfway to a groan and then, wincing, he bent to unlace his boot. “All right, miss, if you say so,” he said heavily. “But I can’t yank it off by meself. It’s too tight, and it hurts too damned much.”
“I’ll help,” Maggie promised, and she bent to grip the boot, holding her breath against the truly terrible smell emanating from it.
As the boot came off, the prospector let out a scream of pain and fell back on the bed in throes of agony; Maggie soon saw why.
His sock had rotted right through, and the exposed foot was covered in painful-looking blisters and weeping ulcers, with blackened parts that were surely past saving.
He would lose all his toes at the very least, and likely most of his foot.
Maggie took a deep breath—and then wished she hadn’t. The stench was abominable.
“Let me get some disinfectant,” she murmured, and then hurried away, still holding her breath, while poor Mr. Clemson continued to groan in his misery.
Half an hour later, Maggie had done the best she could cleaning the foot and putting ointment on the blisters.
She wrapped the appendage in clean gauze and settled Mr. Clemson as comfortably as possible in his bed, looking the other way when he took a generous nip of something strong from his hip flask.
The hospital didn’t have enough morphine to offer him any pain relief; it was kept for only the truly serious cases and amputations.
A spot of whisky would dull the edges for now, Maggie hoped.
“The tissue is necrotic,” Sister Mary Zeno told Maggie later, after she’d examined the man, which was what she’d suspected all along.
Blackened skin indicated dead tissue that couldn’t be saved; the man would certainly lose most of his foot, if not all of it.
“If only he came to us sooner,” she said on a sigh.
“But they’re so stubborn, the old fools.
And they have too much pride.” She gave Maggie a sad smile.
“We do what we can. There is a Tlingit woman who is poorly, Nurse O’Halloran. Could you see to her next?”
“Of course.”
As Maggie went to the next bed, she counted her blessings, far from the first time, that she’d landed in such a welcoming haven as St. Ann’s.
Although the hospital’s circumstances were modest, and they were often struggling to find even the most basic of medicines, the nurses’ care was always competent as well as gentle, and within the four walls of the building, Maggie felt both safe and useful, grateful for the kindly tutelage of Sister Mary Zeno and the two other nuns, Sister Mary Bon Secours and Sister Mary Victor.
Outside St. Ann’s, Maggie was doing her best to navigate the rough-and-ready nature of the town she now called home.
Even after months on the Barbary Coast, she still wasn’t used to the unrestrained wildness of Juneau’s streets—the fisticuffs that broke out just about every time she ventured onto the streets, the gunshots one could hear almost every day, the sense that the whole town was teetering on the precipice of anarchy, or at least lawlessness.
It was only a few years ago, after all, that the miners had revolted and shipped all the Chinese workers out, to the futile protests of Alaska’s governor, the deputy marshal in Juneau, and the mine owner Mr. Treadwell himself.
And yet within that lawlessness, a certain order was able to be found.
Some of the miners had wives, and the local school had children; women formed benevolent aid societies and hosted tea parties, and the dance halls held perfectly polite dances where men and women waltzed together, in a manner that was entirely proper.
Maggie had yet to attend such an occasion, but she was looking forward to dancing at the next one… which made her think of Brendan.
She hadn’t seen him since she’d ushered him back to the boarding house and plied him with coffee to sober up.
He’d fallen asleep, snoring steadily until Danny and her da had stumbled in, sadly just as worse for wear as Brendan had been.
They’d been delighted to see him, and there had been a drunken reunion that Maggie had put an end to after fifteen sloppily sentimental minutes.
“You’d think you hadn’t seen each other for five years, not five minutes,” she’d declared while her father had given her a glassy-eyed grin.
“Ah, lass, it’s a fine thing for a man to have friends in a place like this.”
Maggie had held her tongue, but when she’d suggested that Brendan inquire of Mrs. Compton whether a bed could be had—and Maggie was sure that one could be—Brendan, who had sobered up considerably by that point, insisted it would be better if he stayed elsewhere.
“As you please,” Maggie had replied tartly. After helping him to force down his third cup of coffee, she’d decided she’d had enough of his noble yet woebegone theatrics. Let the man pine if he so chose. It made no difference to her; she’d make sure it wouldn’t.
Sober, however, Brendan had been determined to make a dignified exit. He’d solemnly thanked Maggie for her care, told Danny and her da that he hoped to see them again soon, and then walked slowly and carefully from the room.
It was the last time Maggie had seen him for months.
She looked for him nearly every day, in the streets of Juneau; it wasn’t a big town, after all, but she didn’t catch so much as a glimpse.
She didn’t ask her brother or father about him.
If Brendan wanted to live a life apart, well then, the least she could do was let him.
Even if it hurt, more than she’d expected or wanted it to.
Besides, there was enough to be getting on with her work at St. Ann’s, which took every spare moment she had, as well as trying to steer her father and brother on a steady course.
Upon their arrival in Juneau, her father and brother had been predictably overly optimistic, and, in Maggie’s opinion, na?ve, holding fast to the idea that they’d be able to strike out immediately for gold.
They’d soon learned from their compatriots at the various drinking saloons they frequented all too often that all the potential claims near Juneau were played out, and it was necessary to go further afield.
For that they’d need an outfit—that was, the supplies necessary for the arduous and often treacherous journey into Alaska’s arctic interior, a far cry from Juneau’s milder climes. And to afford those crucial supplies, they needed a wage.
And so, after a week of sauntering about Juneau as men about town, Danny and her da had decided to get jobs.
They’d presented themselves at Treadwell mine and were duly employed blasting tunnels through the hard rock, which both reassured and alarmed Maggie.
She was glad—very glad—they were gainfully employed, but she’d seen enough mining accidents at St. Ann’s to worry about them constantly.
Still, she told herself, at least they were keeping out of trouble.
“Now, what seems to be the worry here?” Maggie asked as she came to the next bed on the ward.
A Tlingit woman lay upon it, shivering uncontrollably.
Her long, black braids were lank, her eyes glassy and her face flushed.
She wore a thin, cotton dress that wasn’t warm enough even for this June day, and a pair of beautifully beaded moccasins that were sadly covered in mud were lined up neatly on the floor next to the bed.
With a murmur of sympathy, Maggie gently rested her hand on her forehead and then drew it away, concerned. “You’re burning up with fever,” she remarked quietly.
The woman stared at her miserably, unspeaking.
Most of the Tlingit could speak at least a little English, but this poor woman looked too sick even to try, as well as frightened.
It wasn’t easy, Maggie knew, for one of the tribe to come to the hospital for help, when just about everywhere else in the town wouldn’t welcome them.
“I’ll get a cool cloth,” Maggie told her. “Maybe it will help.”
The woman reached out to grab her, but her hand fell to her side.
“It will be all right,” Maggie soothed. “You’ll need to stay in the hospital for a few days until you recover.”
The woman made a moan that sounded pain-filled but also a protest, and Maggie hesitated by the bed.
“What is it?” she asked gently. “You can recover here, you know. It’s all right to stay here. We want to help you. If you stay, you’ll be much more likely to get better.”
The woman shook her head, a mute back and forth, her eyes filled with panic as she tried to clutch at Maggie’s hand once more, clearly trying to communicate something, although Maggie had no idea what.
“I promise…” she told her, although she knew it wasn’t a promise she could truly make. Staying in the hospital didn’t mean the poor woman would get better, but it was most likely warmer and drier than the one of the cabins built on stilts over the muddy channel where the Tlingit lived.
The woman shook her head again, and then, fear filling her dark eyes, did her best to gesture to the space by the bed next to her, one scrawny hand reaching toward Maggie.
It was only then that Maggie saw the small Tlingit child, her eyes so very wide, crouching by the side of the bed.