The Good Doctor (18 page)

He nods at the reporters, receives a murmur from one, a sad smile from the other, and a bowed head from the third. They accompany him closely now as he makes his way down the path, rolling tundra in all directions—a ghostly landscape, especially as the wind tugs a solitary bush in the distance. Grenfell feels the spirits of his three hundred reindeer, forever diseased and coughing out their last after all the herders returned to Norway. A piece of distant scrub waves at him, dust flying in its shadow. A failed experiment, some newspapers said. Did they mean the reindeer, or his career? But now he sees it, rising improbably over the barrens and the small community—the hospital,
his
hospital, a white mausoleum, walls solid and defiant like any large government-run hospital in an imperial outpost.

It's a sense of legacy he has always sought. Former Indian governors look at the railways that snake all over the vast peninsula; institutions, modelled on British counterparts, they await the hands which will inevitably inherit. He has his hospital and his people.

The ground becomes more solid under his feet as they spill out of their homes to greet him now, the women's handkerchiefs catching the sun. Timorously they form themselves into a welcoming garland around the nearest home's entrance, feet shuffling as they wait to line the final steps of his journey, handkerchiefs, like palms, lining the way. Only when close does he see the women are crying for him, eyes reddened in brown and windblown flesh. Even little Maggie Evans, whose mother once doubted his story, even she wears a smile of inexpressible sadness at the scene she has witnessed. Small feminine hands touch under his elbows, leading, supporting him through the threshold. The men hold back, physically, eyes cast down like a congregation hearing the liturgy.

“A cup of tea, Doctor.” The suggestion comes like a blessing, and the women move around him, ministering angels in the muted interior light, guiding him to a soft chair.

“A good doctor”—he catches the whispered phrase, perhaps from Maggie, who holds some standing as the daughter of his former housekeeper. All suspicions, it seems, have died with Mrs. Evans and her husband. All that is left is the bricks and mortar of progress, and hushed gratitude.

Cup and saucer are lowered into his hands.

“With your permission, Doctor, ladies,” says the
Evening Telegram
reporter.

Grenfell nods, and a flash follows, white and startling.

A triumph, after all, but tears scorch his eyes.

— C
hapter Twenty-Six
—

1940: Massachusetts

***

T
he garden has come alive
in that mysterious way that often occurs in the last weeks of summer. A robin's call spirals over the tick of the clock and the hum of the refrigerator. Florence looks at the young woman before her, watches her edge the notebook along the table toward her—such an apologetic act, as though she is returning a Christmas present to a respected great-aunt. The poor girl talked about cynicism being a cloak and, of course, she was talking about herself.

The reverie into which Florence sank lasted seconds, perhaps, but has taken her through so many years, and it has left her as weightless as Lady Grenfell's dust. Empathy is natural to her, her strength and—no doubt some would say—her downfall. She can't unknow Willy Grenfell any more than she can unlove her brief memory of him. It is her version of Willy, a half-truth at least. She has imagined his life before, and always with that sense of sadness at a life made slave to ambition. But he, like her husband, is her brother; she is keeper to them both. She thinks of Lady Grenfell's ashes once more and can't help but feel Willy's pain.

Miss Agar is busy with her satchel. Florence coughs away an emotion quickly and stands, making the poor girl rise as though to attention.

Miss Agar smiles apologetically, fingering her satchel strap.

“It's time to leave,” she says.

— Ch
apter Twenty-Seven
—

G
renfell's note lies on the
white leather passenger seat beside Judy. Its spidery blue writing draws her glances more often than any flesh-and-blood travelling companion could have done. On each side of the road dust spirals rise, teased by a wind that seems to tumble over itself in this stretch of open farmland. The drifting dust reminds her of the stories Florence told of starving itinerant farmhands, broken-down shacks, droughts, and bad harvests.

The doctor and Florence both came as far as the gate to see her off. At first it seemed embarrassing and unbusinesslike, as though she had stepped awkwardly into the role of a family member. An onlooker might have presumed this much had they watched her step into the car and seen the old couple leaning into each other as though for support—Florence, with her bone-thin ankles, the doctor with his tweeds, baggy over his shrunken frame. The doctor wanted to press the scrapbook into her hands, and Judy knew, from her prior conversation with Florence, that this must have been planned in advance, perhaps as soon as
Polar Adventures
contacted them about an interview.

Florence whispered to her husband. He nodded, turned his back, opened the scrapbook, and slipped something out. Facing her again, he handed the yellowed sheet to her with the indulgent smile of an old man handing a banknote to his granddaughter.

Judy took it uncertainly, but with quiet thanks. It was only when she turned the wheel to loop around the lane, pebbles popping under her tires, that she realized the fond goodbye at the gate was not for her, but for Grenfell's note, a relic of the past that had followed them since the day of their engagement. The thought entered her head that one, or both, of them was dying. Why else would people gladly part with their own history?

She raised her hand to the window and, quite unexpectedly, felt the tug of separation—the doctor and Florence separating from their past, and perhaps from each other. They waved also as she drew away.

***

She knows she can't use
the note, not with
Polar Adventures
, and probably not anywhere. War in Europe has cast an oblique and contradictory shadow over everything. All the myths of straightforward virtue, strength, honesty, and courage have never been more in vogue on radio and in print. In motion pictures, Technicolor magic has enveloped the English-speaking world—
The Adventures of Robin Hood
,
The Wizard of Oz
,
Gone with the Wind
. The darker the reality, the frothier must be the escape.

Judy passes a scarecrow. A rusted metal pitchfork sticks out from its chest, and straw pokes from its sleeves and from under its hat. Pulling open the glove compartment, Judy slips out a cigarette and, steering one-handed, lights up. It's been a hard day's work for a story that can't be told.

Smoke fills the car with the first long exhale, and Judy winds down the driver's side window an inch to catch the honk of a passing car as she swerves toward the centre of the road. It happens before she's aware: Grenfell's note has slipped from the seat and flown out through the window.

Judy slows, moves onto the hard shoulder. Stones crunch under her tires as she comes to a stop. She winds down the driver's side window completely and stares out. Behind her is nothing but trees, bushes, and fields of rolling wheat under a cloudless blue sky. Perched on the horizon, the scarecrow stands jagged, straw hands splayed in a gesture of mock innocence.

A fresh breeze scatters leaves and tiny stones around the car. She gets out, slams the door, and takes a long draw on her cigarette. Grenfell's note could be in a ditch by now, or up in the branches of a tree half a mile distant. She blows out a puff of smoke which disappears in the breeze. It's a fairy tale, she thinks, unaware whether she means Grenfell's story of the ice pan and the dogs or the tale of Florence and her husband. Leaning back against the car, the thought strikes her that it hardly matters. The times dictate which of the versions are acceptable as fact and which would be dismissed as fantasy. Frothy unreality, however, is on Grenfell's side for now, and perhaps for the foreseeable future.

A sudden gust of breeze shakes the scarecrow on the horizon. Judy lets her cigarette butt drop on the road, skewers it with her foot, and climbs back into the car.

— A
uthor's Note
—

S
o who, in recorded history,
was Wilfred Grenfell?

Between his arrival in St. Anthony in 1892 and his death in 1940, Wilfred Thomason Grenfell carved himself into the landscape of his adopted home on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, and wove himself deeply into the history of the future Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador.

Physically brave, stoical, of charitable disposition, but emphasizing the need for pride and self-sufficiency, the “good doctor,” as he became known, embodied the missionary zeal and adventurous spirit of his age.

The legacy that commands such attention derives from his work initially with the Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, a British organization, through which he set up nursing stations on the Labrador coast, staffed a hospital ship, and later established a fully-equipped modern hospital in St. Anthony. To many who heard of Grenfell's work, he represented a beacon of civilization and compassion travelling into the darkness of hunger and want. In 1912, he broke away from the mission and set up the International Grenfell Association.

Praise for Grenfell reached a crescendo sometime between the two world wars. He was knighted by Great Britain in 1928, and in the same year the US publication the
North American Review
described him as “the most beloved missionary in the world.”

More than a decade into the twenty-first century, Grenfell—though a controversial figure to some—still looms large in Newfoundland society. The Corner Brook campus of Memorial University of Newfoundland was named Sir Wilfred Grenfell College when founded in 1975 and is still called Grenfell Campus. One of the province's regional health service providers is called the Labrador Grenfell Health Authority. A statue of Grenfell, with heavy overcoat and doctor's bag, overlooks Newfoundland and Labrador's legislature in St. John's, lending his figure a prominence rivalling that of Newfoundland's European discoverer, the fifteenth century explorer John Cabot.

But the essential romance fuelling his fame relies not so much upon medical services, or increments of social change, as upon stirring adventures. The first of these, told many times in his own words, is Grenfell's conversion under the tent of evangelist D. L. Moody in the East End of London in 1883. A Church of England minister's son, Grenfell describes how the words of Moody called him to his future work, making him see beyond the “sham and externals of religion . . . a vital call in the world for things that I could do.” A second, even more memorable, incident involved an attempted journey through cracking spring ice from St. Anthony to remote Brent Island in 1908. On his way to save a boy sick of blood poisoning, Grenfell became stuck along with his dog team on a drifting piece of ice.

To save himself in the freezing temperatures, he tells how he stabbed three of his beloved dogs—Moody, Watch, and Spy—to death, wrapped their hides around his shoulders for warmth, and made windbreaks out of their carcasses. Spotted from the shore and rescued, the doctor, wrapped in bloody animal hides, cut a startling image to those who witnessed his return. His account of the event,
Adrift on an Ice-Pan
(1909), became, not surprisingly, an international bestseller. Grenfell became the ultimate emblem of “muscular Christianity” espoused by Charles Kingsley, priest and author of
Westward Ho!

***

When one person, like Grenfell,
writes a memoir there are many constraints. Not least of these is the knowledge that he is planting his own legacy. One eye is on the obvious question what will people think, and the writer is hauled irresistibly into the role of politician.

The Good Doctor
is intended as a tale that should run like an underground river beneath the accepted story of Wilfred Grenfell. Or perhaps it is a story that runs beneath the tale. It's curious how language conspires to question any claim to objective truth. Story and tale: any series of events, seen through somebody's eyes, is described with one of those two simple words that imply creation.

And so it should be.

— Acknowledgements —

Sincere thanks to everyone at Flanker Press, including Garry Cranford for having faith in this novel, Jerry Cranford for his editing and production work, and Margo Cranford also for her valuable input. Thanks to publicist Laura Cameron and to Graham Blair for his swift and imaginative interpretation of story into cover image. Thanks, as always, to my ever supportive family, my wife, Maura Hanrahan, and livewire daughter, Jemma Butler.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Butler is the author of several critically acclaimed novels including
Titanic Ashes
,
Cupids
,
Hero
,
1892
,
NaGeira
,
Easton's Gold
,
Easton
, and
Stoker's Shadow
. His work has appeared on the judges' lists for Canada Reads, the Relit Longlist for three consecutive years, and he was a winner in the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards four times between 2003 and 2008 at which time he retired from the competition to be literary representative, and then chair, of the Arts and Letters Committee. A graduate of Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre, Butler has written for the
Globe and Mail
, the
Beaver
,
Books in Canada
,
Atlantic Books Today
, and
Canadian Geographic
, and has also contributed to CBC Radio, local and national. He presently lives in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, where he works as an editor, runs online writing workshops, and holds an annual writing contest. His website is
www.paulbutlernovelist.wordpress.com
.