“It’s for the best, you know,” Luke said.
“I know.”
They walked in silence for a minute or so and then the young man suddenly said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” Luke hoped he wasn’t about to be questioned about the dose of opium he had given. He was sure that the daughter knew what he had been doing, but younger people sometimes had little perspective on dying.
“Are you married?”
It was such an unexpected question that Luke stopped walking and stared at the boy for a moment before he said “No. Why do you ask?”
The boy blushed. “It’s just that …well … do you know anything that will stop urges? You know … at night.”
“Urges to … oh, I see what you mean.”
Luke could feel himself blushing in turn. At medical school there had been entire lectures devoted to the dangers of onanism. Self-abuse could lead to lethargy, sapping of physical strength, blindness, madness even, they had been told. All manner of disease was ascribed to the shameful solitary act, and Luke sometimes wondered if it was responsible for his own difficulties. The professors had certainly claimed that this was so.
“Well … I’m sorry, what’s your name?”
“Caleb.”
“Well, Caleb,” he said, “sometimes cold baths help. And lots of exercise, so that you’re tired at night and fall asleep right away.” It was the standard advice given on the subject. There were some schools of thought that advocated complicated devices that would interrupt the urge with pain — rings with spikes to deter the swelling, heavy gloves designed to control the hands, electro-magnetic apparatuses that delivered a disruptive shock, but Luke thought these excessive. He couldn’t imagine applying them to himself, and was reluctant to prescribe them for anyone else. “Sometimes I’m not sure it’s so big a problem as they make it out to be,” he ventured. “It’s so common that I expect it’s probably pretty normal.”
Quackery. Blasphemy. Heretical advice of the worst sort. But he couldn’t bring himself to censure this boy so obsessed with his own failings that they concerned him even as his grandmother lay dying.
“Really?” The boy looked a little relieved. “But the church says it’s a sin.”
“Well, you know, sometimes I wonder why God gave you those urges if he didn’t intend you to do something about them.”
“I suppose.” He looked doubtful.
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“Then you’ll soon find someone. Once you’re married, your troubles will go away. Until then, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”
This seemed to be enough to set the boy’s fears to rest. His face brightened. “Thanks. I didn’t feel right asking Dr. Christie about it.”
Luke could well understand the reluctance. The crusty doctor’s response would most likely be a call to have all self-abusers trotted off to the hangman.
They had reached the small house, and when Luke went in to the parlour it was immediately clear to him that the old woman had finally breathed her last. He went through the motions of listening for a heartbeat and looking for a pulse. Then he confirmed her death and left the family to mourn.
The whole encounter left him in an unsettled mind. There had been nothing he could do for the old woman, and she was probably happy enough to leave life behind, but it had reawakened the sense of impotence that had dogged him in Kingston, where nothing he did seemed able to slow the march of bodies to the burial pits. It also reminded him of his own mother’s death, and his heart went out to the grieving family he had just left. Worst of all, his conversation with the boy had reminded him of his own frailties. Caleb would be all right eventually, Luke was sure of it, but without Ben, what was he himself going to do?
Chapter 6
The next morning, Dr. Christie asked Luke if he would mind going into the city, to Lyman and Kneeshaw’s, the apothecary shop on King Street. They had run low on antimonial powder, he said, and gauze for bandages.
“Oh, and while you’re there,” he said, as if it were an afterthought, “could you also get five packets of magnesium carbonate?”
Luke found the last request puzzling. Although the compound was useful as an antacid and laxative, it was seldom required in any quantity. Most patients took care of their own digestive problems rather than bother a doctor with them. But as he was happy enough to get away from Christie’s skeleton for a morning, and curious to see Toronto’s commercial core, he cheerfully boarded the omnibus that trundled down Yonge Street from Yorkville to the new St. Lawrence Market.
King Street still showed the effects of the devastating fire that had engulfed nearly half the city in 1849, although many of the buildings that replaced the old market square were now completed. Their dignified facades were in stark contrast to the warehouses and mills farther south that crowded the waterfront and belched their fumes of sulphur and coal smoke over the entire city whenever there was an onshore breeze.
As he walked along, Luke was able to pick out the familiar lilt of Irish voices. Irish emigrants had settled mostly on the edges of the city, he knew, their temporary shelters becoming more permanent and gradually spreading out until they formed neighbourhoods of a sort. Some of the emigrants found work in the nearby manufactories; some of them migrated into the west in search of farm work, only to wander back to the city when the harvest was over. Luke wondered if he would meet any of the people who might remember him from Kingston, but no one spoke as he walked along. He didn’t know how many Irish had found a home in Toronto. Too many, if some of the outraged citizens of Toronto were to be believed. Every issue of the newspapers featured an irate letter or two about the “drunken Irish” and their outlandish behaviour, including their practice of bathing in the Don River, their thin, pale bodies exposed for all to see. With no water available to the majority of the tenements and shacks that housed them, Luke wasn’t sure what other option they had if they wanted to stay clean.
It was not only Irish accents he heard. The street scene was a veritable Babel of voices. Irish cadence warred with the guttural tones of German immigrants, the burr of Scottish brogues, and the starchy inflections of England, all of them sounding peculiarly foreign against the flattened accent of the Canadian-born.
He soon found Lyman and Kneeshaw’s, guided by the brightly coloured glass globe in the front window, a beacon to the illiterate in search of relief. As soon as he entered the front door, he inhaled deeply, soaking up the spicy astringent smell that permeated the apothecary. Shelves on both sides of the shop were heaped with toiletries, infant feeding bottles and aids, razors and miscellaneous devices to aid the self-medicator, from enema boxes to comfort containers that could be filled with hot water or coals and placed in a bed to warm an invalid.
The items of particular interest to Luke were found at the rear of the shop, stacked on painted shelves that stretched from one side of the room to the other. At the top, large green carboys held bulk quantities of the most popular oils and tinctures. The shelves below them were filled with shop rounds, their distinctive shapes signalling their contents: narrow-necked bottles of liquid preparations, spouted stoppers for the pouring of oils, wide-necked jars for powdered substances. Along one shelf he saw the familiar labels for opium-based products, OPII, OPHO, RHOEA.
He approached the massive walnut counter with its brass scales and mortar and pestles and handed his list to one of the apothecary assistants. While he waited for his order to be filled, he idly scanned the labels of the multitude of pharmaceuticals available. Extract of belladonna, tincture of calumbra, arsenate of potassium.
When his order was completed, he directed the assistant to bill Dr. Christie’s account, and after one last look around the jumble of proprietary formulations and medical paraphernalia that filled the store, he stepped back out onto King Street.