The Weeping River

Chapter 2: Wreckage

2000 hours, 9th August

The sun is still out. Or should I say, it's still light out, since we can't exactly see the sun. Everything's just a big grey soup. It's been four hours since the skies changed, maybe fifteen minutes since we got back from the beach, meaning that it should be nightfall. It's the least of my concerns right now.

Doctor Klein just finished his assessment of O'Hara. I caught the last few minutes of it. That yahoo who thought it was a good idea to try and pull the arrow out of him really made a mess of everything. The arrow is barbed. If you try to tug it out, it would rip up his insides quite terribly. And unfortunately for O'Hara, someone went and did it. It was easy enough to cut the wooden shaft off, but the arrowhead isn't going anywhere without some more involved intervention. I'm going to help Doctor Klein with the extraction in a minute, just have to wait for him to brew his cup of joe. Christ. You'd think he was still operating in that tiny clinic in Fresno by how urgently he took to everything.

0100 hours, 10th August

We managed to get the arrowhead out.

I used callipers to part the flesh around the arrowhead while Doctor Klein slotted a pair of forceps into the base. Once the forceps were in, he opened them up in order to grip onto the arrowhead and carefully ease it out. O'Hara was screaming the whole time, even with the morphine in him. That was the good news. The bad news is that the darn thing really did make minced meat of O'Hara's innards. There was too much haemorrhaging and the stomach was shredded. There was only one thing to be done.

Klein is well-trained, but he's young and inexperienced. When it comes to book smarts, he's one of the best surgeons I've seen. The other side of the job though, where we have to deal with tough circumstances, that is something he struggles with. Not because he's too compassionate, no. He's too cold. Doesn't give a damn about anything. I had him leave the room while I sat down with O'Hara. In his heavily medicated state, he said to me, 'Fancy seeing you here, dollface'. Real charming.

I held his hand and smiled the way I usually do. We talked for a while about things. He ran a general store with his folks in Wisconsin. Had a knack for dealing with people apparently. When he asked about what I used to do, I told him I'd been an ER nurse at Manhattan General for a decade and had a fella waiting for me back home. O'Hara scoffed and said, 'What, he some sort of coward? How in the blue blazes could a man sit on his rear while his woman left to serve his country like that?'

It made me laugh. Then I told him, 'Well as a matter of fact, Mister O'Hara, my Harry happened to have lost his legs in the Somme when he was twenty-five years young. If you keep talking about him like that, maybe you'll be losing your legs too.'

Instead of apologising, he said the most arrogant, uniquely male thing I've ever heard. With a smirk, he said, 'Lost his legs? You'd have to be a fool to misplace those.'

Eventually, he started to doze off thanks to the drugs. I could hear how hard it was for him. The simple act of breathing that we all take for granted.

When he was fast asleep, I gave him enough morphine to make sure he never woke up.

I came to the bridge after that. I couldn't stay another second in that infirmary. Not tonight. There are only two men at their stations at this time; Lieutenant Jackson, the helmsman, was guiding the Respite along the coastline as Ensign Mendez mapped it out on a piece of paper. They're being kind enough not to pester me as I'm just loafing around writing this all down. It's highly irregular, but I suppose they heard what happened. Maybe they're just pitying me.

Now I'm upset that we didn't get to retrieve those other bodies from the beach. O'Hara and a few others that passed during the last day or so are going to be needing burial at sea. I don't think anyone wants to set foot on that blasted island again, even for a burial detail. It would've been nice for the others to be part of it, but I suppose it just wasn't in God's plan.