We will be as quick as we can, Dorrigo Evans said. copyright procedure. The key here is to keep bleeding to an absolute minimum. Hold him, he said, turning to Jimmy Bigelow and Wat Cooney. Spoon ready? he asked Squizzy Taylor. Taylor raised the now bent spoon in a mock salute.
Charge the windmill, Dorrigo Evans said.
He took a deep breath. Taylor pushed the spoon head gently but with growing firmness into the base of Jack Rainbow’s wasted belly.
Torch, Dorrigo Evans said. Jimmy Bigelow came forward and shone the torch on the stump.
There was noise from the general hospital huts but it was almost immediately drowned out by Jack’s screaming as Dorrigo Evans began cutting away his leg stump. The stench of the dead flesh was so powerful it was all he could do not to vomit. But Jack Rainbow’s screams confirmed to Dorrigo Evans that he was doing what he had to do: cut into living flesh.
An orderly came running into the operating hut.
What do you want? Dorrigo Evans asked, not looking up.
The Goanna’s taken Darky Gardiner out of the hospital.
What?
We couldn’t stop him. They dragged him out by his arms. Something about men missing up on the Line. There’s a tenko happening now. They’re going to punish him.
Later, Dorrigo Evans said, his face down almost at the level of Jack Rainbow’s stinking remnant of leg, concentrating on the job at hand.
Major Menadue said only you can stop them.
Later.
When he severed the femoral artery it bled badly, but not wildly.
Clamps, Dorrigo Evans said. Nothing I can do about it at the moment. Fucking yellow bastards. Clamps? Bastards. Clamps!
He clamped the femoral artery but the tissue just broke away and the fleshy tube spat blood out over the table and then continued pumping blood.
Push harder, he said to Taylor. He was thinking how he should have been there to stop such an outrage. He thought also of the broken still, the need to buy more anaesthetic from the Thai traders, and how in future he must always make the first amputation as low as possible to allow for such future horrors as this.
He clamped the femoral artery a second time, and for a second time it fell away, and he had to push up into the stinking dead flesh and clamp again. He stopped, waited. This time it held.
Okay, he said, okay.
He cut away more flesh. Within a minute he had cut off the rest of the rotting meat. There was bleeding, but Taylor was right, it was not too much, there had been enough leg left, just enough to amputate. For the first time in an hour he relaxed a little.
Spoon away? Taylor asked.
Not yet, Dorrigo Evans said. Pointing to the rotting meat on the table, he said to Jimmy Bigelow, Get rid of it, for Christ’s sake.
Next Evans flensed enough skin to form a flap to cover the final wound. Then he neatly filleted the living leg muscles back from the bone, so that he could remove the bone higher up and the flesh could in time heal below and around it to form a tolerable stump.
Saw, he said.
An orderly handed him the kitchen meat saw. It was hard to get the traction he needed, so he worked with gentle small strokes, scoring the upper thighbone, seeking to avoid splinters and any further damage to the flesh. And soon enough a piece of bone the length of a finger dropped away.
The three men were now intensely focused on the operation. Dorrigo Evans set to work sewing up the femoral artery with a gut twine Van Der Woude had improvised out of a pig’s intestine casings. These had been cleaned, boiled and pared into threads, then cleaned and boiled again, then boiled a third time before the operation. Compared to surgical ligatures, they were coarse, but they held. But this time he was sewing into nothing, wetness, a blur of tissue and blood. The torchlight was dimming, and he concentrated with all his being on getting each suture in exactly the right place.
And then the bleeding stopped.
He had done it. He had managed to suture the artery, and Jack Rainbow would live. He realised he was breathing heavily. He smiled. He began to prepare the rest of the muscles and skin flap for binding over the bone stump. He looked up at Squizzy.
Spoon away, Major. Gently.
Squizzy Taylor lifted the spoon. Dorrigo Evans kept working, more slowly now, more carefully. Jack would live. He would save this man’s life. There was the recuperation to get through, the chance of infection. But his chances were now good. Not great, perhaps, but still good. He concentrated on doing the best job he could now, imagining a middle-aged Jack Rainbow with children, his stump on a cushion. Alive. Loved. And he knew that what he did was not pointless, without reason; that he had not failed.
Torch off, he said.
He was finished.
He stood up straight, rubbed his back, winked at Jimmy Bigelow and looked back down at the stump. It was a surprisingly neat job. He felt proud of his handiwork. He noticed a small seep of blood where he had just stitched the flaps of flesh together, but the orderly was cleaning the stump and wiped it away.