The Covenant of Water

1936, Saint Bridget’s

Digby has landed on an alien planet. After weeks living at high altitude at AllSuch, the heat and humidity of the lowlands add to his dislocation. He is a guest in Rune’s cozy bungalow. On his first day, Rune leads him through well-tended gardens to his clinic, chatting in Malayalam with residents they meet. Digby brings his hands together stiffly to return their greeting. His experience with leprosy is limited to seeing street beggars in Madras. He has too many other worries to worry about contracting leprosy; it helps that Rune seems unconcerned.

In what looks like an orthopedic cast room, the big Swede vigorously massages and stretches Digby’s hands, gauging the degree of contracture. The inhabitants of Saint Bridget’s crowd around the open windows like gawkers at a carnival’s freak show, intrigued by this sight. When Digby yells with pain, the audience breaks into excited murmurs. “Well, you’ve convinced them you don’t have leprosy,” Rune says. “They scream for many reasons, but never from pain.” Rune readies a syringe. “Your right needs a lot more flexibility in the wrist before I think of operating. But the left? That we make right today, okay?” He is like an overgrown child, Digby thinks, laughing uproariously at his own pun. Rune sketches for Digby on a paper what he plans to do. “I thought I invented this. But a Frenchman claimed it before me. He called it the ‘mèthode de pivotement.’ I call it the mark of Zorro. It makes this horizontal scar into a vertical one and creates space. Yes?”

Not waiting for an answer, Rune injects local anesthetic over the nerves in two spots at Digby’s wrist as well as directly into the thick horizontal scar. He scrubs the palm with antiseptic, and then draws on it with a surgical pen, making use of a protractor and ruler. By the time Rune walks Digby down a hallway to the small operating theater, all sensation in his palm is gone. Rune puts on gloves and a mask and makes the long, horizontal incision along his pen mark, right through the middle of the scar. From the ends of this long cut, he makes two smaller cuts at sixty degrees, resulting in a . Digby observes as if from outside of his own body. Rune, using forceps and scalpel, raises triangular flaps from the two corners by undermining the skin. Then he transposes them, swinging the bottom wedge up and the top one down, suturing them in place. The has now become a , creating slack in the scar. Digby sees his fingers already straightening out.

“Voilà!” Rune says, stripping off his gloves. “The mark of Zorro!”

Every morning and evening Rune works to loosen Digby’s right wrist, torture sessions that leave Digby sweating. The Swede seems to enjoy having a houseguest to talk to, even if the conversations are one-sided. One evening, as Rune comes into the house, his face looks ashen, his right hand on his chest while he leans on the doorframe. Digby rises automatically to go to him but Rune waves him off. “I just need to catch my breath . . . I get this . . . nuisance sometimes in my chest. When it is hot and I walk uphill from the clinic to the house. It passes.” And it does.

Ten days after Digby’s arrival, Rune says, “No dinner for you tonight, Digby. We operate tomorrow on your right hand. This time we put you to sleep.” Digby is astonished when Rune describes what he has in mind.

Once the ether takes hold, Rune preps and cleans Digby’s right hand and does the same for the skin over Digby’s left breast. Using scalpel and forceps, he laboriously picks away at the back of Digby’s right hand, removing Digby’s pinch grafts as well as the intervening scar. “Don’t feel bad, my friend,” Rune mutters. “Your grafts helped a little. Without them, your tendons would be fixed in cement. Now they are just being strangled by weeds.” It takes over an hour before the back of the hand from the wrist to the knuckles is exposed, raw, and bleeding, with the tendons laid bare but moving freely. The cocked wrist flattens out when Rune presses down.

Rune positions Digby’s right hand, palm facing down, on the left side of his chest. Then he traces its outline on the chest with a surgical pen, the tip dipping down in between the spread fingers.

Putting the hand aside, covered with sterile towels, he makes a vertical incision just to the left of Digby’s breastbone, corresponding to the wrist of the tracing of the hand. He tunnels under the skin through this incision by inserting and spreading the blades of closed scissors till he has created a pocket wide enough to admit Digby’s hand. Then, with the inked handprint as his guide, he makes five stab incisions on the chest corresponding to the base of each finger. Now he feeds Digby’s denuded hand into the skin pocket he just created, pulling each finger out through its stab incision. When he’s done, Digby’s hand sits tucked under a skin pouch on his chest, only the intact fingers peeking out, as though from a fingerless glove. My young Bonaparte, Rune thinks. He applies a plaster of Paris cast from above the shoulder to the elbow, and extending round the trunk, ensuring there can be no movement.

The next day, a groggy Digby walks the grounds, his hand imprisoned in his own marsupial pocket, his elbow, encased in plaster, winging out. As he passes the woodshop all work stops when the residents spot him. They emerge, and their lopsided smiles and headshakes say, We’ve seen this trick before. But Digby hasn’t. It’s not in any textbook. They invite him inside, and chattering away in Malayalam, his hobbling escorts show him the lathe, the drill, the saw, and the unvarnished chair and table that their carpentry has produced; they hold up hands and feet to display Rune’s carpentry on their flesh. He’s struck by the generous reception. It isn’t deference to his profession, since he no longer has one. Is it because he’s Rune’s guest? Because he’s white? No, it’s because he’s one of them, wounded, winged, and disfigured. And they want him to witness their usefulness, even if the world has no use for them. He expresses with facial and left-handed gestures his awe, his admiration. He is overwhelmed by their scarred, skewed faces, their stiff, deformed limbs; he ponders his own situation. He wonders if he’s avoided his fate or found it.

Over the next few days, he tackles a task he couldn’t face before: he writes to Honorine, with messages for Muthu and Ravi. The act of printing with his left hand is nowhere near as hard as expressing his contrition.

Twenty days after the first surgery, Rune decides that the blood vessels in the skin of Digby’s chest have had enough time to put down roots in the garden that is his denuded hand. With his patient under ether anesthesia, Rune cuts the skin all around the entrapped hand until it comes free, but now sporting its new, puffy, living skin-coat. He covers the raw wound left on Digby’s chest with thin, shaved rectangles of skin from his flank. Unlike the pinch grafts that Digby attempted, these longer strips won’t shrink as much as they fill in the shield-shaped defect on the chest.

Digby wakes retching from the anesthetic. A face hovers over him, a warm hand supporting his head, the voice familiar. He thinks he’s dreaming. He has searing pain in his flank, but senses the liberation of his right hand from its prison. He drifts off. When he is fully awake it is dusk. Honorine looks down tenderly. With his left hand he touches her face to see if she’s real. Then, tears he didn’t know he could make trickle into his ears. He closes his eyes, too ashamed to look at her.

“There, there. Shhh, stop. Look at me! It’s all right, pet. It’s all right.” She holds his head to her bosom until he calms down. “Digby, we’re going to walk you back to Rune’s; nothing wrong with your legs. Then you can sleep. We have plenty of time to catch up.”

In the morning, he feels groggy but restored. He’s thrilled by the sight of his right hand with its new skin cover; it makes the stinging pain on both his chest and flank bearable.

“Ah, we’re awake, are we?” Honorine says, coming in with a tray. “Feel all right, then, pet?” He tries to stammer out an apology. “Oh hush, would you? Yes, you had us worried sick. Thought you might do something silly to yourself. Good thing yer Muthu couldn’t keep secrets from me. I knew you’d reach out when you were ready. Now eat something.”

He wolfs down the omelet and has two pieces of Rune’s homemade buttered bread and jam. Honorine sits by his bed and brushes back his stubby hair with her fingers.

“Dear Digby. What a job you had to write that letter! Had me in tears, you did. I had to come have a see me’self. I had no idea about your surgery.”

“I’m such a fool, Honorine—no, please, hear me out. It’ll do me good. Celeste and I only became lovers after Jeb died. That’s the truth. I’d met her twice before, socially. I fell for her the first time I met her. Maybe because I knew nothing would come of it.” He laughs bitterly. “And nothing would have come of it, except she came to warn me that Claude planned to name me in a divorce suit. He didn’t care that it was untrue, or that it besmirched her name!” The hypocrisy of his indignant tone sinks in. He flushes. “Well, on that visit, Claude’s lie became the truth.”

Honorine has been fidgeting, and she interrupts. “Digby, why dredge it all up? Yes, you made a terrible mistake. With tragic consequences. Yes, us was mad at you. Disappointed. I won’t make any bones about it. But I got over it long before I got your letter. Yer human! Flawed. Ya’ think you’re alone. You deserve to be forgiven. We all do. I don’t know if you will ever forgive yourself, but you must try. I wanted you to hear that from me.”

Digby is anxious to know about Celeste’s children, but Honorine has heard little. There wasn’t time for them to come for the funeral. Digby wonders what it was he hoped to hear. That they’d sworn to avenge her death? Did they know of their mother’s misery in the marriage? Would they judge her only in light of her affair with him? Celeste’s ghost is always with him, but never more so than now.

Honorine is surprised that he hasn’t heard about the inquiry concerning Jeb’s death. But Digby has been hiding from the world.

“I thought it’d be a sham, given everything,” Honorine says. “Claude looked terrible, more the drink than grieving— Aye, it’s not charitable of us. He lied, Digs. It wasn’t pretty. He blamed you. Said you were betraying him with her from the moment you arrived. And the Jeb thing was you trying to sabotage him professionally, despite the hours he’d labored to teach you surgery! Yes.” Digby laughs bitterly. “Said Jeb’s death was unfortunate, but a known complication of an abscess that can weaken the artery. The outside pathologist shot it down, saying there was no abscess, just necrosis above the aneurysm. Said that Claude’s cutting into the aneurysm killed Jeb. The aneurysm might have ruptured without treatment, but not on that day.” Her voice tightens. “Then it was my turn. I says you summoned us to the theater because we knew Jeb and also you didn’t think it was an abscess and that Arnold wouldn’t take kindly to your opinion. I described what I saw. And that far from learning from Claude, who hardly ever operated, you’d been learning from Ravichandran at General Hospital. Ravi was there and everyone looked his way. Ravi stands up uninvited and says it was true, and he’d have trusted you to operate on him or anyone in his family, you are that good. Yes, you are, Digby.”

The damning part of Honorine’s testimony was Claude’s paralysis in the face of the torrential bleeding. Digby and she stepped in and did their best.

“The hospital superintendent had to bring in the theater and ward registers for Claude. You and I knew. But it was still shocking to see them blank pages. The committee has yet to issue its final judgment. God knows why it should take so long. But they did recommend Claude’s suspension at once. Not medical leave, but suspension. You’re on indefinite medical leave too, by the way. That was automatic when you were admitted with burns.”

Honorine departs the next evening. In the ensuing days, Digby’s hands aren’t ready for anything but the gentlest massage and stretching. He must bide his time, the one thing he has in abundance.

Digby has been living with Rune for over a month. He worries about the Swede, a man more than twice his age. More than once he has seen him come to a stop while walking, waiting for a “catch” in his chest to pass. As the two men sit together in the living room one evening, Digby broaches the subject but Rune deflects him. So Digby keeps silent, watching Rune work the pipe cleaner, fill and tamp down the tobacco, and finally circle the two matches around the bowl. The ease of the coordinated, complex, and largely automatic movements Digby thinks might be forever beyond his abilities. Sweet-scented tobacco plumes fill the air.

Rune studies his young colleague, a man soon to turn thirty, born just before the Great War. Rune was already in his late thirties when he landed in India. He feels paternal toward the young Scot who was walled in by silence when they first met. Gradually, the walls have come down. One can witness a spirit heal, Rune thinks, just as much as one can see a wound heal.

“So, Digby. You like our Saint Bridget’s?”

“I do.” Digby had thought of Saint Bridget’s as a way station on his journey, but not the destination. Inexplicably, in the time he has been here, enduring his surgeries and the subsequent pain, and waiting to heal, it has begun to feel like home. He’s a pariah in a community of pariahs. “I feel I’m with my tribe here, Rune.”

“What! You’re Swedish and never said?”

Digby’s laugh sounds more human.

“I’m Glaswegian. From the wrong side of the tracks.”

“I’ve been to Glasgow. Is there a right side?”

Digby refills their glasses using both hands. “You understand what I mean. Every hand I see here is related to mine. The ‘flock,’ as you call them, they are . . . my brothers and sisters.” He stops, embarrassed.

“They are, Digby. Mine too.” Rune drains his glass and smacks his lips. “Hands are a manifestation of the divine,” Rune says. “But you must use them. You can’t let them sit idle like a clerk in the land registrar’s office, God help us. Our hands have thirty-four individual muscles—I’ve counted. But the movements are never isolated. It’s always collective action. The hand knows before the mind knows. We need to free your hands, Digby, by getting you started on natural, everyday movements—especially the right hand. So, what do you enjoy doing with your hands?”

“Operating.” Digby cannot help the bitterness in his voice.

“Yes. And what else? Needlepoint?”

“Well . . . a lifetime ago, I liked drawing, painting.”

“Excellent! God knows these walls and doors need some freshening up.”

“Watercolors. Charcoal.”

“Ah, wonderful! That’s what we will do. The best rehabilitation is doing what the brain and the hand are familiar with; it’s good for both. And I have just the teacher for you.”