Page 48 of A New World for the Irish Daughter

“And you don’t have it,” Maggie retorted tartly. “Trust me, Brendan, you don’t have one bit of it, and neither will you have it when you have a splitting head later.”

His response was another shake of his head, and now she was the one to groan.

“This is a small town, Brendan, and it’s not big enough for your self-pityorpride,” she told him. “Or mine, either, for that matter. I’m sorry I came to Alaska and ruined things for you, and I’m especially sorry that you feel you can’t evenlookat me anymore.” She heard the hurt in her voice and took a breath to steady herself. “But it would be better for us both if we could find some way to get along, if only from a distance. I don’t want to pester you, and I will do my best not to make myself a nuisance, but it’s not good for a man to be all on his own here. Danny and Da are your friends, and I’d… I’d like to think I’m your friend, too.”

She waited, hoping,longing, for a reply, and after several endless moments she finally got one.

Brendan was snoring.

CHAPTER 25

JUNEAU, ALASKA

June 1895

“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 thanold 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 andamputations. 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.