The staff were the domestic employees of Gracetown Public Hospital, a small town hospital in New Zealand. I was working there in the May vacation of my final year in high school as a relieving porter. My introduction to wally's peculiar position of priviledge came one brisk day during that May. I was sitting alone in the staff dining room eating my lunch of roast mutton and vegetables, over-cooked en masse as only an institutional kitchen can produce them, when in walked Mr. Todd.
"Where's Wally?" he asked. "I've got one to pick up. "
"What about the others?"
"I dunno. I guess they'll be here shortly. Lunch was a bit late going out to the wards today so they were probably held up." Mr. Todd glanced at his watch impatiently then fixed me with a suspicious eye.
"Well, I suppose you'11 have to do."
My experience of death up to that time had been a dimly remembered viewing of my grandfather who had "passed on" when I was nine and the funeral of a school friend who had fallen off the back of a truck.
"Ah, Mr. Todd, Wally might be here any minute...or one of the others..."
"Nope. No time. Let's go."
I followed Mr. Todd down the highly polished corridor, lunch forgotten, appetite gone. John Toda was a short, thin man with dark, slightly greying hair.
His small head was a striking collection of projections and protuberances. A sharp nose stuck out below a pair of fiercely bushy eyebrows which he used to great effect on the likes of me. His ears were large and oddly delicate looking. They jutted straight out on either side of his head, pinkly transluscent. His hair, although a neatly cut "short back 'n' sides" as was the fashion then, managed to stick straight out from his scalp, brush-like, on the back and sides. On top it was held down by hair cream. His hands were large and perpetually grimy. Mr. Todd ran the undertaking business out of his service station in a neighbouring town.
Our destination was the dying room, a private ward which by tradition or convenience had been reserved for patients on the very verge of death or as a private place to lay out those who had already died unceremoniously in one of the larger public wards without giving the staff enough warning to move them there before. No life-light shone there, it was an inside room with no windows.
As we neared the room I glanced nervously up and down the corridor for fear of seeing Wally. Half afraid that he would suddenly heave into view, squat and indignant, and half afraid that he wouldn't.
"Come on! Haven't got all day," said Mr. Todd as he opened the door and waved me into the room.
He pulled the sheet off the still figure on the bed and bundled it onto the bedside cabinet. She was an old woman. Her eyes were closed but they had sunk back in their sockets and her jaw had dropped slightly making her upper dentures stick out as if she had buck teeth. Her hair was neatly combed and she was wearing a new night-dress.
Mr. Todd rolled a cigarette while whistling to himself. His was one of those breathy, tuneless whistles.
"Well, let's get her across. You take her feet."
He lit the cigarette, pulled the gurney up beside the bed and moved to where he could lean across to take the old woman's shoulders.
"Come on. She won't bite." A shot of ash-fell onto one of her closed eyelids.
"Oops." He chuckled and blew the ash away. This was not what I expected. I took hold of her ankles gingerly. She was wearing white cotton ankle socks.
"O.K. Ready? One, two, three, hup." He lifted his half across to the gurney easily but I was not prepared for the weight of her. For a moment she was half on, half off the gurney. In a condition of near panic I made an awkward cross between a lift and a lunge and got her bottom half across too. Mr. Todd gave another chuckle and shook his head. I nervously watched the ash hanging from his cigarette.
After covering her with the sheet that had been bundled on to the bedside table we set off for the mortuary. Our passenger rode feet first. This at least was as it should have been. A fiercely starched Scottish nursing sister had given me the rough edge of her brogue only a few days before for pushing a living patient off to surgery feet first.
I had expected that this whole process would have been more reverent and respectful towards the dear departed. But then, there were the stories they told about Mr. Todd in the staff room. The most recent was of a customer passing the time of day in Mr. Todd's office while waiting for his truck to be serviced. The topic of conversation had ranged far and wide until the subject of boots came up. Problems in the leather industry had caused a shortage of good quality work-boots. Mr. Todd told his visitor that he knew of a pair that were going cheap and that they were in the black van at the back of the garage. The customer hurried to investigate only to find that although they were very good boots indeed, they were, unfortunately, on the feet of Gordon Sutherland who had dropped dead only a few hours before while trying to get his prize Romney rams out from among his neighbour's ewes.
We rattled the gurney down the ramp outside the kitchen area, past the forty-four gallon drums in which they collected scraps for the pig farmers nearby, out past the incinerator and the gardening shed. I noticed that dead flesh felt different to push than live. It was like the difference between the feel of a beanbag and an india rubber ball - a matter of resilience.
We arrived at the little mortuary. It was set at a discrete distance from the living and the hospital proper. The windows were high, small and of frosted glass. Cream stucco walls and orange clay-tile roofing matched the main hospital buildings. But it never ever felt quite right when I walked past. If not a storage building for deadly chemicals or radioactive waste, for some reason it had to be at least a mortuary. Mr. Todd, whistling past his now dead cigarette, unlocked the door.
"I remember I once brought a chap in here - he was new like you - nervous as hell. It was in the evening and it was windy. We had trouble keeping the sheet over the bod. We got inside here and two of those windows blew in. Well - I thought I was going to have to lay the two of them out together. He went white as a ghost - thought he was going to drop right there. But he ran - full speed - thought he'd brain himself on the door-post - didn't even wait for his tip." He chuckled and we manoevered the gurney up to a narrow white table.
This time I was ready for the weight so we were able to get all of her across at once. But once across he let her head drop on the table with a thump that made me wince.
"Don't worry. She can't feel anything." He reached into his pocket and brought out a new ten shilling note. "Take the trolley back, will you."
At morning tea the following day I sat bemused with my steaming mug of tea. My experience of the day before, an uneasy night of thoughts of mortality and the ethereal nature of man plus the 6 a.m. start had combined to dull my senses otherwise I would have noticed wally's demeanour as he entered the staff room.
Wally was squat. His hands were square. His shoes seemed lower and wider than anybody else's. He had the solid look of a bulldog as if he would be very difficult to tip over. When he walked his belly led straight and steady while his short legs pumped independently beneath the over-hang. Even his face was squat. He glared across the room at me. Wally was never someone you would call light-hearted so his look did not at first cause me any real concern.
He continued to the counter where he poured his mug of tea and collected two thick slices of bread. This was part of his regular morning tea ritual. The only differences were the fierce looks cast in my direction as he moved to his table across the room from mine. They continued as he sugared his tea, buttered his bread, took his onion from his uniform pocket and sliced it onto one of the pieces of bread. He planted the other bread-slice firmly on top with the flat of his hand.
Wally's daily onion sandwich was notorious in the hospital. There were many old men who dreaded bath-time when Wally was on duty. The nurses had learned to keep their distance whenever possible. Attempts had been made to have Wally give up his sandwich but he had always declined.
"An apple a day keeps the doctor away, " he would say, "and an onion a day keeps everybody away." And he would laugh which, for Wally, was to shake almost soundlessly, red in the face, with his eyes watering. His onion sandwich was not considered serious enough by the hospital administration to warrant his dismissal because he did a good job of most things as long as he was out of breath-shot of the nurses and patients while he did them.
He propped his elbows on the table, holding the onion sandwich with both hands and, fixing me with a belligerent stare, he began to eat. By that time I had begun to realize that this was a more than ordinarily dour morning tea for Wally. He was annoyed and the subject of his displeasure was me. I could feel my face colour as I made myself smile.
"Morning Wally." He chewed on and swallowed a mouthful of hospital bread and fresh onion.
"Look, young fella, that was my job you took yesterday and it shoulda been my ten bob."
"But you weren't here."
"Everybody knows to call me at home if need be. But no, you young fancy men have got to take an old joker's job away from him."
"I'm sorry Wally, I didn't know."
"Well, Len and the others would've told you if you'd have bothered to ask."
"They weren't here."
"Well you just keep your nose outa my patch, you
young bugger." With that he dismissed me by turning his attention to the remains of his sandwich, still held squarely between his two square fists.
Wally ignored me after that but the other porters and the domestic staff ladies went out of their way to be friendly. There was the occasional elbow nudge in the ribs along with a chuckle from those who were happy to see Wally dicomfitted. I rarely saw him except for break times when we were on the same shift although he usually did take a short-cut through my ward when he came on duty for the evening shift. He worked on a ward in a different part of the hospital from mine.
As the vacation passed I settled into the hospital routines. My job was to look after several old men while helping with cleaning, bed making and delivery of the big heated meal trolleys. My old men had to be helped out of bed each morning, put to bed each evening, fed, toileted, bathed, shaved, humoured, entertained and sometimes disciplined like errant children. There were two shifts: a 6 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. and a 1.30 to 10 p.m. The early shift got them up and the late shift put them to bed.
It was a beautiful May. Perfect clear, crisp days starting with ten or twelve degrees of frost. Eggshell blue skies faded to delicate primrose, violet and smokier blue bands and layers where hills and sky met. The trees were leafless but the grass was always green.
The mornings were best when the sun shone in through the tall windows to be scattered brightly from crisply starched white bed-spreads and the highly polished floor. Then even a place such as that, full of people who had given up or had been given up on, felt less oppressive; as if there was something to look forward to in life.
The bed making was an almost joyous flapping and cracking of fresh sheets. There was the smell of the hospital-clean linen as the gleaming white new pillow-slip with its red hospital insignia on the corner, faded pink from many washings, was pulled on to the pillow which was held firmly under the chin. The precision of the "hospital corners" on the finished beds and the smoothness of the fresh bed-spreads seemed to herald a day full of things right; of things as they should be. In that warm sunshine faces glowed with health. Even the hardened veteran nurses of many wards and pains looked kindly and cheerful in that golden light on those mornings. But sunshine or not, certain routine things happened.
Mr. Dempster was a tall thin man who had spent all his life in that small town. He and his wife had raised three sons there while he worked at the ANZ bank. By the time he retired he was the bank manager and a prominent member of the borough council. About five years after he retired he started forgetting things and would turn up in the town with no idea of where he was going or where he came from. By that time his three sons had moved away to Wellington and his wife, always frail, could no longer cope with him. So he was brought to this geriatric ward where each morning he would get out of bed and would put on all the clothes he had in his chest of drawers until he ran out. Sometimes if we didn't catch him in time he would have five shirts and two or three pairs of trousers on over his pyjamas. We would have to help him take them all off and dress him properly for the day. He would grumble and weep with frustration. And then, every evening, he would get back into bed without changing into his pyjamas. I don't know what his ruined mind was thinking as he sat in his bed each evening glaring at the staff who passed, covers pulled up to his neck to hide his delinquency, because every evening it was part of the porter's routine on that ward to get Mr.
Dempster up, help him take his clothes off, put his Pyjamas on and put him back to bed. Again he would grumble and weep, stamping his feet angrily.
It was the bad tempered tough old men who lasted the longest in that place. The nice ones rarely lasted long; they faded and succumbed causing no one any trouble along the way. While they politely faded and died, the ones like Mr. Telford kept his interest in life by making the lives of the young staff miserable.
He was an embittered man. In his late forties he had been the victim of a clumsy lumbar puncture which had paralysed him from the waist down. After that, he tried to commit suicide with the aid of his brother's shotgun but had merely blown away most of his upper right arm. The limb was now withered and in a sling.
Since several inches of humerous was missing he was able to horrify new staff by folding his elbow up to his shoulder. This he did with malevolent pleasure. He was one of the most demanding patients on the ward.
And then there was Charlie Porter. He was a big man; still barrel-chested and much tatooed. Charlie had lost an eye in a pub brawl just after the second world war. He had served in three wars; the Boer, the Great and World War Two. He had even tried for the Korean war but his age and his missing eye had disqualified him, much to his disgust. He wore a black patch to cover the empty eye-socket but the other eye had gone blind. Charlie liked the smell of the nurses. He would lie in bed waiting for the sound of a starched uniform. When an unwary nurse strayed too close he would lunge and grab with an evil chuckle. He liked the feel of them, too, he told me.
There was a day lounge at the end of each ward.They were glossy high-ceiling rooms with tall, many-paned windows on three sides. There were easy chairs for patients and visitors, card tables and glass-fronted bookcases full of ancient, unread volumes.The cream coloured walls, polished floor and glass surfaces brightened the sounds that came in through the windows. A few birds in the trees outside would sound like a flock of many. In the summer the day lounges were often hot and noisy.
One afternoon during visitor's hours Charlie was sitting in the day lounge attached to our ward. There were several other men in there as well; two were sleeping and three were being visited by dutiful relatives. The conversation droned on in whispers while the sun's rays projected the tracery of the leafless tree branches on the floor. It was tea time so I was on duty alone in the ward while the others were taking their break. The tea lady had arrived with her trolley for the patients in the day lounge. I guess the sound of the tea being poured was too much for Charlie because he suddenly bellowed for help.
"Nurse! Porter! Bring me a bottle, quick!" He stood up groping awkwardly for his walking stick and knocking over an ashtray. Once upright and the focus of attention for all those in the lounge who were awake, he undid his fly, groped inside briefly and urinated noisily on the polished tile floor. The tea lady screamed. I arrived on the scene to see Charlie calmly resuming his seat in the midst of a sun dappled tableau of dismay. The only sound was the soft snoring of the two sleeping men. I turned and ran for a mop. Obviously, Charlie was going to be with us for some time.
Three days after that Mr.Wendell died. He was a gentle, polite man who made no demands. I don't ever remember him speaking. His answer to any question was a smile along with a nod or a shake of his head. He was part Maori but his brown skin had a tinge of blue; I thought because of his age but maybe it was his body preparing for death. His pointed chin, large ears and the knitted tam he wore gave him an elfin look.
Lunch was over. The dishes were cleared away and had been taken back to the kitchen for washing. Just after lunch was always a pleasant lull in the day.
Quiet chores were done while the old men dozed on their full stomachs. The morning bustle of serious cleaning and floor polishers humming was over.
I had just finished loading Mr. Ashbury's pipe for him. He was too crippled with arthritis to manage it himself. I heard a quiet choking sound. Mr. Wendell was plucking at his throat with one thin hand but gently as if adjusting his pyjama collar. As I approached his bed I noticed that his eyes were glazed and that he looked surprised.
"You okay Mr. Wendell?" I took the hand that was lying still on the bed-spread and leaned over him slightly. "Mr. Wendell?"
For a moment his eyes cleared and he looked at me. I saw fear and a puzzled look before consciousness faded. With a warm flush of alarm I realized he was dying and I was alone on the ward and didn't know what to do. I had often thought of how I would handle such a situation. In my day-dreams I would calmly apply my best St. John's Ambulance artificial respiration. After the patient had revived I would modestly accept his mute look of thanks and the admiration of the doctors and the nurses.
But here it was and all I could do was stand helplessly and watch. It didn't seem right to drag him out of bed so I could pump his chest and arms on the floor. Out of my state of shock came the thought,
"Get help!"
"Mr. Wendell, " I said leaning closer, "I'll get some...." My voice was cut off as he reached up and grasped me by the throat. His eyes cleared again and again I saw the fear. I tried to pull free. He tightened his grip. I tried to prise his hand away.
Who would have thought that one old man's hand could be so strong? It was becoming difficult to breathe. I pulled back desperately lifting his torso right off the bed. But he held on. My whole existence at that moment was made up of the sound of our choking and the sight of his bulging eyes and dying face.
Another pair of hands appeared. They were square, strong hands with black hair on the fingers. The pressure on my throat eased and as I gulped air into my starved lungs a square smiling face appeared. It was Wally. He shook soundlessly as he laughed.
They took Mr. Wendell to the dying room. He finally died peacefully, with a smile on his lips, they said, around afternoon tea time.
Wally had found me in trouble on his usual short-cut through my ward on his way to start his evening shift. He enjoyed his onion sandwich at afternoon tea that day. As soon as I walked into the staff room he snorted and snuffled and shook, red faced, as he sliced his big white onion. Every now and then he would stick his chin out, rub his short neck pointedly and shake some more.
Wally acknowledged my existence again after that. The week before my vacation ended and I was to go back to school, he invited me to help Mr. Todd with old Joseph, the three hundred pound shearer. I suppose it was a cross between a going away present and Wally's idea of a joke.
