Scalpel, p.1
Scalpel, page 1
Scalpel
A Novel
Horace McCoy
THIS BOOK IS FOR
Leonard Rosoff, M.D. and
John Mock
Contents
Chapter 1
1.
2.
3.
4.
Chapter 2
1.
2.
3.
4.
Chapter 3
1.
2.
3.
4.
Chapter 4
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Chapter 5
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Chapter 6
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Chapter 7
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Chapter 8
1.
2.
3.
A Biography of Horace McCoy
1
1.
33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38:
Coal, yes. Coal. Hopper car after hopper car, gondola after gondola, being backed slowly across the spur. PENNSYLVANIA R.R., ERIE RAILROAD, B. & O., LEHIGH VALLEY, C. & E.I., LACKAWANNA, C.M. & ST.P., NEW YORK CENTRAL LINES, N.C. & ST. L., GREAT NORTHERN, MISSOURI PACIFIC, L. & N., A.C.L., NICKEL PLATE, K.C.S., the stenciled legends said, CAPACITY 80,000 POUNDS, fully loaded, all of them—
—a thousand tons of soft bituminous coal, raw rugged power for the blast furnaces that were glowing cadmium orange-red along the ice-edged Monongahela, coal for the strength of mighty America (and hurry, beloved land, hurry):
...39 ...40...
I got out of the automobile and stood down. The westbound traffic was piling up behind me and a few fools were banging their horns, like Miro’s dog barking at the moon. (Patience, there! This is a long train. More cars are coming, many more. All you have to do is look.)
...41 ...42 ...43 ...44:
coal, yes.
I knew about coal.
I, Thomas Owen, knew about coal.
You do not suspect that I, the man beside the cheap convertible, who has the top down on this cold March midnight, waiting, as impatiently as you are, you presume (but you are mistaken), for the coal train to clear the spur and reopen the highway, am of the United States Army. The uniform tells you that. I am a Colonel. The silver eagles tell you that. I am Medical Corps. The caducei tell you that: a doctor. I am a doctor, and now you do not wonder (if you are given to people-wonderment) about the man. The symbol of medicine has made the man ageless, as the symbol of the church has made the man ageless: this is what he is, this is what he always has been, this is what he always will be. These symbols, created by men of antiquity (and much less selfless and sublime now) have thus conditioned you, but the symbol of the church could very well hide the murderer and the coal miner (and no doubt has) as the symbol of medicine could very well hide the murderer and the coal miner (and no doubt has).
Coal. I knew about that: for four generations we had been of coal.
There are but two ways to be of coal: Above and below. Above is the comfortable way, reserved for the few who are talented; below is the uncomfortable way reserved for the many who are untalented. We Owens were below coal. For four generations, almost four, not quite, for 323/40 generations. I am the fourth generation, forty-three years old, and twenty-three years ago I pulled the string on coal and sent it boiling through our brand-new inside plumbing towards the lyrical Ohio. Twenty-three years removed from coal; twenty-three years removed from my father’s rigid bedtime inspection of my eyes and ears and teeth and neck and face and elbows and hands and feet to see if I was clean, not just clean, but as clean as Lloyd, which I never was, because Lloyd competed against me in this too, and Lloyd had a gift for getting clean.
But now I was clean. I had finally gotten the dirt from under my fingernails and the bitter black dust out of my lungs. I had finally become a gentleman. Authentic and absolute: by Act of Congress, Dec. 21, 1941. The date was there on my commission for all to see. Another Owen at last a gentleman. That would have pleased my father John and my grandfather Micah (especially Micah), and my great-grandfather. It also pleased me.
...45 ...46 ...47 ...48—
these were filled with Culm, which also is called Slack, the mixture of fine coal and dirt after all the lump has been taken out; and it used to be, when I was a boy in Coalville, that this was regarded as valueless and was dumped near the mines to accumulate in unsightly piles and, when the wind was right (which it always was), sift into all the houses below Tipple Hill. But one day Old Man Reasonover, who even then was on the way to his second million (but had not yet moved to Pittsburgh) discovered that this waste could be pulverized and forced through pipes and fuel jets, like oil, to generate steam: and after that the piles began to melt, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. I helped with the melting. I was a barrow boy, six loads an hour, forty-eight loads a day, $9.00 a week (that was where I started building the shoulders that thirteen and fourteen years later were to wreck Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Dartmouth and, one year, Cornell).
...49 ...50 ...51:
the last two were hopper cars, possum-bellied, and on their sides in big white letters was REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA. and that startled me because only a single car ago I had been thinking of Old Man Reasonover and Coalville and now here they were, inseparable, each the other, being backed slowly across my heart.
...52 ...53 ...54 ...55 ...
REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA. Gondolas, too. CAPACITY 100,000 POUNDS. Monsters. Fifty-tonners. The Pennsy’s and the Lackawanna’s and the B. & O.’s and the L. & N.’s were not big enough, not for Old Man Reasonover. He had to have his own. Buckwheat 2 and Buckwheat 3 in the last two, which is how the sizes of coal were specified: Lump, Egg, Stone, Nut, Pea, Buckwheat, Rice (which was Buckwheat 2), Barley (which was Buckwheat 3), Screenings, Run-of-the-mine, and Culm. Obscure information, completely without practical use, but when you grew up where I did this was the sort of thing you learned long before you ever heard of the Niña and the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
I remembered, I remembered ...and now I was glad that I had not tried to beat the train across the tracks. That had been my first thought when ahead down the highway I had seen the wigwag flashing. I had had an open shot at him and I had been tempted strongly to step on the gas and beat him in there before the safety jig could be lowered. I was in a hurry to get to Pittsburgh and get to the Schenley and have a shower and hit the sack. I was all in. Less than ten hours before, at 2:45 P.M., I had landed in New York from Berlin. I had had little sleep since Berlin and virtually none there, the General’s fraulein being what she was and the General being what he was not. But I consoled myself with the thought that once the plane was spread out over the Atlantic I could sleep.
This was not to be, either. The connection in Shannon was delayed just long enough for me to get mildly stinking with a Father James (he not so mildly), who was venturesome for listeners, being full of wondrous success at having just come from Rome where he had gotten an audience with the Pope for a very rich Jewish couple he had been hustling, and why not, he said: why let them stumble around and get themselves proselytized by the Christian Scientists? He was a real charmer, young and scholarly and articulate, and he talked of many things, but mostly he talked of the Jews and the glory of Judaism, which, he said, was now being forsaken by an alarming number of the rich ones (alarming, that is, to the Synagogists) for Christian Science and Catholicism, and of these prideless ones his church, he reported, was getting the greater majority. From behind a snifter of Courvoisier, he said that this was perfectly understandable: what the rich Jew was after was not solace or spiritual vitality but personal contacts with the Gentiles, hoping for eventual social acceptance, and how better could this be done than by working on the many dull and tedious charities committees? They were very good at this, he said; they were panning out fine. He knew several who already had crossed the line and were at last eligible for sit-down dinners with Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. We had a thirty-five-mile head wind all the way to Gander, which pleased him because it gave him three extra hours in which to talk; and by the time they had closed the bar, an hour out of New York, and set the glide pattern for the field at Idlewild he had convinced at least me and the nylon stocking salesman from Great Neck that when and if the Holy Father did authorize a branch of the church in Tel Aviv he was certainly the man to manage it.
New York was by air only two hours from home, but anxious as I was to get there, I was not that anxious. That was much too fast for a man who had not seen his country in ten years. After ten years there was much looking and feeling to do, and much smelling too, and these you should not hurry.
So from a little Swede in a Tyrolean hat I had rented a convertible and argued him into putting the top down: and now I had come the 350-odd miles through New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, through Harrisburg, which is the most beautiful city on the face of the earth, and down past what in my student days were the kinds of towns and villages so adored by the primitive painters but which now had been drained into geographical zombies by the sparkling dynamics of the fabulous Turnp
I had done the looking and the feeling and the smelling and now I was exhausted.
...56 ...57 ...58 ...59:
REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA... REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA... REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA... REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA...
Old Man Reasonover on the way to his thirtieth or fortieth or one-hundredth million.
Well, he’d need ’em.
When I got through with him he wouldn’t have so much money.
The bellboy had my B-4 and I was following him across the lobby of the Schenley when I felt a tentative touch on my elbow and glanced around but did not stop. It was a woman. Now I stopped: and she moved beside me, and I thought: Right here in the lobby of a high-class joint like the Schenley? Things have changed. “...some other time,” I said.
She smiled and said: “I beg your pardon, Colonel. I’ve been sent to fetch you. An old friend of yours is over there—”
She spoke in the highly regarded ever-so-slight nasal tone that comes only after assiduous practice, and now I looked at her. She was an attractive woman. She was thirty-five, maybe more. She wore a silver-blue mink coat over a white evening gown and her hair was cut short and her face, cast in a high thin mold, was without make-up save for pale lipstick. She had the style of well-bred ease with something added—hauteur. I knew something about these qualities, too. In Europe, now that the serious mending was done with and I seldom had anything more scientific or official to do than yank a tonsil or set a broken limb or give the younger officers advice on prophylaxis effectuality, one of my virtuosities had been, as befits a gentleman (Dec, 1941), the collecting of women of well-bred ease and hauteur. What I had thought about this woman when I had glanced at her was wrong now that I had looked at her. She was no hustler. Not this one. “...where?” I asked.
“Well, well, well—” a man’s voice said. He was moving towards me. He was a slender man in dinner clothes, a double-breasted jacket with a shawl collar, and he was bareheaded and the lobby lights glistened on his white hair. An old friend? I had never seen him before. We must be three other people, I thought. “Tom Owen!” he said, and took my hand.
Then I recognized him. Old Man Reasonover. That jarred me a little. The coal train, the hopper cars and the gondolas and now Old Man Coalville himself. I couldn’t get over the way things were happening. When I left Berlin I told myself: “Don’t think about this until you get home. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about this until you get home and find out the facts. Not a thing. Don’t think about what Mom’s doing to Dick and don’t think about what Lloyd was doing in the mine shaft until you get there.” But how could I help thinking about them when I was being hit in the face with all of them? “...hello, Mister Reasonover,” I said.
“Called to you, but you didn’t hear me,” he said. He shook my hand, grinning at me. “Colonel, eh? I heard about that.” He had changed. When I had last seen him, fifteen, seventeen years ago, he was a hefty man with black hair and a leathery face; and now he was slender, almost skinny, with white hair and a grayish face that had begun to take on some of the minor smoothnesses for which first-generation millionaires always do desperately strive. No wonder I had to look at him three or four times before I could make him out. Was this what thirty or forty millions did to you? “...to work for me,” he was saying to the woman. “Whole family used to work for me.” To me, he said: “Just going to have a bite of supper. Join us?”
“No. Thanks,” I said.
“My daughter. Helen Curtis,” he said.
So that’s who this woman was. Helen Reasonover-Rouffault-Hotzendorff-Curtis. I had heard of her. It was pretty hard not to have heard of her if you read the newspapers, American, English, French or Italian and, for all I knew, Yugoslav and Shereefian. She had had three husbands and it had cost her half a million each to get rid of them. I nodded to her.
“I want you to know how sorry I am about Lloyd,” she said.
“I can think of nicer ways to die, myself,” I said.
At this, some of the joy at having discovered a former employee, from a long line of former employees, went out of the Old Man’s face and a little darkness came in. “I want to talk to you, Tom,” he said.
I wanted to talk with him too, but not until I had gone home and gathered a few facts from the people on my side of the fence. “Not now,” I said. “I’ve just flown in from Berlin.”
“In that case,” Helen Curtis said, “a drink ought to be in order.”
She touched my elbow again, but not tentatively this time, smiling the thin superior smile of a woman who has never been accustomed to taking no for an answer. I had seen many of these smiles in the past five years, very many, but there was a difference here, the difference being that this one belonged to a woman who was not enfeebled, whose face was not enameled, whose name I could pronounce and whose castle, I felt sure, had unit heat and inside plumbing. “...not now,” I said to her.
“Not even one?” Her tone was bolder and more authoritative. She had obviously finished making up her mind about me. I had finished making up my mind about her too. So there was no hurry. I had a ten-day leave.
“Not even one,” I said. The expression on her face didn’t change but there was an almost imperceptible pique in her eyes, a degree of disappointment. It was a nuance that a woman can satisfactorily use only with a pro. I liked her for that. We spoke the same language. “My luck is changing,” I said. “This is the kind of charming situation that always develops on the last day of my leave—never on the first.” To the Old Man, I said: “I’m going home early in the morning. At the crack of dawn.”
“I suppose I’ll be hearing from you then,” he said, nodding slowly.
“Probably,” I said. “Good night—” I said to Helen Curtis, and walked over to the desk where the bellboy was standing with my B-4.
2.
Gray at dawn, of course, the same blunted soiled and lifeless shade of gray; spring, summer, fall and winter, always the same shade; and that was why I had got up at four o’clock in the morning and come the thirty-five miles down the Ohio, just north of where the river bends and starts southwest—to see the tipple house in the early dawn because this was how I remembered it, the only way I could remember it: trudging up the hill morning after morning, hating myself as a gutless clod for not dynamiting it in the night, as I was forever so fervently swearing to do. It had been burned into my brain like a branding iron cast in its precise silhouette and scaled to fit between the walls of my skull, burning a little deeper in the same place morning after morning until it seemed that everything since then that had fallen into my mind fell within the confines of the scar, as building materials are poured into the fixed form of a foundation. And there it was, Taygetus, Upsala, Ipalnemohuani,
on the hill
against a paling sky, a sky reluctant to pale; the tipple house, a geometrical bastard, part equilateral triangle, part trapezoid, part rhombus, part circle, part quadrangle, part polyhedra, part straight line. REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA., it said on the chute. The visibility was good. The visibility was always good. No weather ever hid the tipple house, neither sleet, snow, rain, clouds nor fog. When I was a kid I used to think the weather was afraid of Old Man Reasonover. Now I’m a grown man—and I still think so.
I parked the car on the shoulder of the road and got out and started up the hill to do to the tipple house what I had come to do. Nothing had changed. The hill was still scarred by the old strip mine and the scrub grass was dark and dirty; the path was still covered with cinders (what kid was now replenishing them after every rain, I wondered, and did he too want to lie down there and dump the blanket of grit over him and never get up?) which made the same wailing crunch as once more after these long years I trudged upward. But this time, thinking of what I would do when I got there, I felt pleased with a small kind of beatific anticipation.
“HALT!” came a boom from somewhere, and I halted as you do when without warning your consciousness explodes and only your reflexes function. The concussion of hostility that came rolling behind the boom nearly knocked me down, and I looked up.
Fifty feet away, a rifle held at the ready, a man was tromping down the path towards me. You are whistling softly and your heart beats pleasurably and on a muddy gray dawn in a world in which you are the only living creature you are on your way to gratify an insignificant ambition and all of a sudden your ears are filled with the reverberations of a boom and the crunching of cinders and your eyes are filled with an image with a rifle in his hands coming towards you and you stand rooted to the spot in cave-fright, detesting yourself because a man who can read and write and who knows a little of science has come far too far to surrender to cave-fright—but you have. He wore a badge on his black overcoat and a blue cap on his head and with every step he shoved his heels hard into the cinders, taking no chances with his footing on the treacherous surface, as if keeping his balance meant the difference between life and death. Looking beyond him, up the hill to the top, I saw something I had not noticed before, and the thought struck me that this had the convenience of inept dramaturgy, like the character who can end the play any time he speaks the solution, which nobody will permit until it is time for the audience to go home. He should have spoken before: I should have noticed before. The tipple was silent. There was no smoke from the slate heap and the beltway was stopped. The man-trip cars at the pit mouth were empty and there were no miners. But there was movement up there, one man, two, four, five, forms only against the backlight, but they had rifles too. Then I knew. These were strikebreakers. A strike was on. But why? Lloyd? Lloyd wasn’t a miner. He was a Reasonover executive. Reasonover miners didn’t strike because a Reasonover executive had died in their mine. Or did they?
