Free Each Man's Son by Hugh Maclennan Page B

whatever he had tried to do. In the early days of his practice he had ranged over the whole of Cape Breton, and it was said with truth that he had once known every family in the island. The story of his three-year assault on the smallpox had already become a legend. He had traveled by carriage, by horseback and by boat until he had visited every village and outpost to vaccinate the children, and it had taken all his force, all his volume of character, to persuade some of the parents to let him do so. His physical size had helped him. MacKenzie was six feet four and broad in proportion. His feet were so big hisboots were made to order, and now, with the whole length and breadth of them exposed on the mantel, the toes wide, boxed and glistening with polish, they looked to Ainslie like a pair of bear cubs winking down at him in the light.
    â€œTired?” MacKenzie said, looking sideways at Ainslie.
    â€œNot particularly.”
    â€œWhy not admit once in a while that you’re human? It would do you good.”
    â€œI’m human enough. Did Miss MacKay tell you about the amputation I did tonight?”
    â€œShe did, indeed!”
    â€œThat upset me. They’re such fools!”
    â€œOf course they are.” MacKenzie’s strong white teeth showed in a smile as he took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket. “At that, it’s better than it was in the old days when we were a novelty to them. I well remember an old farmer near Cape North who never forgave me for telling him that the only reason why he was plagued with boils was that he ate nothing but porridge and pork and beans. He lived all alone with his Bible and he was convinced he was the Chosen of the Lord. The boils made him a latter-day Job.” MacKenzie chuckled. “Man’s trouble isn’t what he does or doesn’t do, it’s what he dreams. That old fellow was dead in a few months without a boil on his body. I changed his diet and I probably killed him by telling him the truth.”
    Ainslie watched MacKenzie’s large, lined thumb pressing the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe, and he wondered as he had often wondered before how a man with such huge hands had been able to perform thousands of careful, precise operations. He saw the long mustache, drooping at the ends, making its white splash against the ruddy cheeks, and thought about the change in MacKenzie’s personality in recent years. When Ainslie had first met him, Dr. MacKenzie had been consciously the chief, a silent, earnest listener who was so absorbedin medicine he never seemed able to give a moment’s thought to anything else. After giving up practice in the colliery to which he had been attached, he had remained as chief surgeon and director of the hospital which owed its existence to his energy and determination. At one time or another all the doctors in Cape Breton had come under his influence. But now he lived alone, and in his partial retirement he had taken to reading with the same quiet thoroughness he had once given to his work. It was the reading that had made him more talkative and self-revealing, less clinical and more given to speculation. There had been a time when Ainslie had believed MacKenzie to be a genius, but he knew now that the old man’s mind was one which understood, rather than discovered.
    â€œI suppose I ought to be going home,” MacKenzie said without moving from his chair. “Since Janet died and the children went away that house of mine gets on my nerves. Some day you’ll know what it’s like to be afraid of going home in the dark.”
    MacKenzie’s rich bass voice broke into a laugh and Ainslie watched the tobacco smoke rising in clouds over his stiff white hair. It was the head of an old Highland chief, but it was also the face of a man who had worked with Lister in the Old Country and against Lister’s advice had deliberately chosen to return to his isolated island. That choice, and the