Healing Hands

On the Doctors couch she buttoned her sleeve and swung her legs over the side. He stood with his back to her as he quickly soaped and dried his hands. 

The tang of the freeze spray hung in the air as he pressed the slides together and wrote her name. A neighbour in the same Square, he stood at her door in his shirtsleeves two days later when the results came back marked Priority.

It was her Father who mentioned The Deacon.

 He had a vague memory of his address from when he had a skin tag removed from his neck, where it had chafed under the shirt and tie he wore daily to work.

There is a trinity of them at the farm gate as they wonder whereabouts The Deacon is. 

 On a sweltering Sunday afternoon, as the hedges filled with furze, they drove to the isolated farmhouse.  His wife, wiping her floury hands on a floral house-coat, informs them that he is in the far field cutting sceachs. 

The nimble figure belies his age as he brings the curved tool down again and again, the sunlight flashing on its blade. He finally hears the faint calls and turns and walks down the hill to greet them.

In the cool shaded parlour he takes her to the window to examine the proffered wrist. He holds the hand up to the light and bends to sniff it.

“T’is a cancer wart alright” he nods.

He bids them wait while he makes up the remedy. Her eyes are drawn to the multitudes of jars and bottles on shelves and bookcases all over the room. It is like a museum of illness and rotting things and she is mesmerized by the pale floating lumps in liquids.

He comes back in with the top of a cereal box and a small wooden spoon from an ice-cream tub, and mixes the bright yellow paste.  She watches his large hands with the arc of soil under the ridged crescent of his nails, carefully applying the homemade salve to the small pink lump on her right wrist.

“Give her nothing that a doctor would give” says he, as he wraps the gauze bandage tightly around it.  

“No matter WHAT happens do not remove this bandage for 14 days and nights” he warns all three of them. In an undertone at the door, as her Father passes over the small bundle of paper notes, she hears him say “Introduce her to John Jameson when the plucking starts”

On the drive home she examines the tight bandage, the bulge of the small hand nestled in its blanket of cloth.   Almost as soon as they are inside the door of the tall town house, the pain begins.

She watches her Mother slice ham and boil the kettle for tea and tells herself she is just being ridiculous. It could not hurt like this a mere hour after the treatment had begun.  

But it does. 

 By the time the plates are washed she is in agony.

She could not describe the pain when asked. It seemed to be coming from in her and around her.

“Offer it up” her Mother said, as she dried the crockery with a soft cloth.

When the film came on after the late news she was beside herself in a paroxysm of tantrum and irritability.

“14 days me eye, I can’t stick it” she announced slamming the living room door and flouncing up the stairs.

Her Father lowered the newspaper a fraction and glanced over at his wife as she sat quietly hemming her sons’ school pants.

“It’s not going to be aisy, you know” says he.

“Don’t I know it” she responds biting off the thread and smoothing the grey pleats.

As the days passed the whole house was in an uproar. 

Tears and tirades and plaster falling from the ceiling as the house shook with the reverberation of her outpouring of anger and angst.

“Jesus Christ Almighty, this is insufferable” she screams as she looks at the hand becoming bigger and bigger.

 “There is no way to hold this that doesn’t hurt. Take it off me, take it OFF!”

They danced to her tune while they walked on eggshells around her.

On the ninth day, she leaned against her Mother as she soaped the rings gently off her fingers at the stainless steel kitchen sink, when the whole hand had swollen to twice its normal size.  The bandage was stretched tight across the joint of the wrist and a soft lump was raising itself up from the mound.

Late that night as his wife applied  moisturiser to her face and neck  in the dressing-table mirror,  and he dropped his shoes to the floor one by one, her Father remarks that it was a tough oul’ station.

“It doesn’t help that you and she are lick alike” she laughed.

“Trot Mare, trot foal.”

In the morning the Doctor took one look at her bandaged hand and remonstrated   “What in the name of God have you done?”

He foostered with the papers on his desk and found the pink admission form which had been returned unsigned from Beaumont Hospital.

“I can’t treat you now, you know. I’m sorry but it’s out of my hands.”

After a huddled tete a tete she hears her Father lift the receiver of the hall telephone and have a brief conversation that ends with “Tomorrow? Thank you.”

On the return journey to The Deacon, she sits in the back seat cradling her whole arm from one elbow in the crook of the other and feels like bursting into pathetic tears. She would give him a right pook for himself if she was able. Her bravado disappeared when she was inside and he was being called

 to come in from scattering feed to the Rhode Island Reds.  He strode in pleasantly and walked straight across to her.

“Pluckin’ you is she?” he enquired. “What’s the pain like?”

“It feels like it has been broken and sprained, and stabbed and set on fire, all at the same time, ALL the time” she declared.

He glanced at the Kellistown Meats calendar on the wall with a smile.

“It’s  11 days now” says he. “Sure, we’ll give it a look”.

The only sound in the room is the ticking of the mantel clock as he slowly and gently unhooked the clasp and began to unwind the bandage carefully. As he came nearer and nearer to unwrapping the thing itself all the heads bent together to look. The last of the elastic bandage was removed and discarded and then there was only the stained cotton wool pad. What had been flat was now elevated, and raised so high it looked like a small mountain. All around it was a ring of bright red angry skin that was so stretched it looked fit to burst.   With a finger and thumb he eased up the sticky pad and finally revealed what was growing out of her arm.

She was repulsed. 

It looked like a cross between a giant mushroom and a seed potato, and on closer inspection had tiny ridges through it like the serrated head of a cauliflower.

“Christ Almighty, take it OUT” she cried.

The Deacon grew solemn.

“Now, me lady,” says he “this can’t be rushed nor forced, and it must not be pulled. If the progress of this is halted in any way - if it is dragged impatiently while it is coming, it will grow again some other place, do you hear me?”

She nodded.

“Now Mammy,” says he “this will be your job. I want you to poultice this with boiling water and a pap of white bread in a muslin cloth every 4 hour for the next 14 days. Go aisy at it and don’t mind the roars of her.”

He dressed the hand again with a milky paste and re-wrapped it as tight as before.

“The poultice is your only man at this stage, bring it back to me if it comes away before I see you in a fortnight. I keep them here.”

“Is that what all those things in the jars are?” she asked in horror.

“Them are they” he said wiping his hands on his overalls. She looked at a colossal one the size of a marmalade orange. He follows her eyes.

“I took that one off the tongue of a woman from up Glenbrien way” he stated matter of factly.

Over the next period of days both women grew to dread the sound of the kettle boiling and the horrendous smell of the white bread clumping. In fascination they viewed the growth as it changed and grew, becoming larger and more complex with an intricate series of tubers and roots similar to a tulip bulb pulled from soft damp soil. The routine continued every four hours come hell or high water and even through the night, her meticulous Mother stood in the silent kitchen cutting cloth and shredding bread, before she called her daughter to come down from her attic bedroom.

“Look away and count to ten” her Mother advised.  Her daughter took a swig of the whiskey from the bottle and gritted her teeth.

“Cool it a bit” she yelped as the steaming bread was laid on the growth.

 “As hot as you can bear it, hun. That’s what he said.”

Bizarrely, the first half hour after the poultice was applied there was a window of ease. A lessening of the constant white hot pain into a kind of shocked numbness, and a hiatus of peace reigned - albeit temporarily- in the home.  

Other nights she would go out and meet friends and make light of what they were now fascinated with.

“But what does it look like?” said Kathy eyeing herself in the bar mirror as she sipped Rum & Coke through a straw.

It was on such a night when she had come home late, banging through the house, that her Mother picking  up the bedside clock and thinking – “That one would give last to nobody” -that the end came. She belted her pale blue dressing gown and stuffed her feet into slippers and quietly descended the stairs. In the kitchen the kettle was boiling and her daughter was unwrapping the bad hand with her left, a small trail of stained bandage hanging down over the sink as she stared into it.

“Mam, look!” she whispered.

It had all come away and was lying on the pad.  This fleshy jellyfish of a growth, this monstrous thing that smelt, this painful bane of her life for a month, was removed from its covert bed and now afforded a view of white bone and blood. The two women stood together at the sink and stared in silence at what lying before them. In a spontaneous gesture that later she could barely recollect making, let alone defend, her Mother took it up in her hands and bore it aloft on its blanket of gauze, and hurled it onto the red embers of the fire.

“Bad cess to you and begone” her Mother says.

It sizzled and burnt, first fiercely and red, then slower,   then only a wisp of black smoke spiraled up the chimney and finally  -   it was gone.

“Suffering  Christ” the daughter said. “We were supposed to keep that to give   The Deacon “

“He’ll be grand, as long as he knows it came away by itself” her Mother answered, relieved and suddenly exhausted now that it was all over.

“Holy  Mother of God ” -   the daughter exclaimed as they made their way unsteadily  up the stairs when the wound had been dressed and the bottle drained – “We were supposed to keep that to show Dad”.

“Ssssshhhhh!”

 And then, one looking at the other, framed in the early dawn light filtering through the landing curtains, they began to shake with at first silent -  then unrestrained -  higs of  laughter.

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M.D.M.  2013