Eutopia by David Nickle Page A

Elmore Waggoner announced that he would be putting a year’s profits in the Connecticut livery company he founded towards sending his oldest boy to France to study at the Paris School of Medicine. Andrew would not be the first or even the second Negro to lift a scalpel in the United States. But he would be consigned, they predicted, to ministering to the ill in Harlem or other similar neighbourhoods in big cities. To try and find a place in a surgery—a surgery where white men’s wives and children might one day lie down under the scalpel—would be throwing good money away, they said. And not helping his boy a whit.
    But Elmore was stubborn, and because he had some money he could put behind that stubbornness, he was able to send his boy on a boat to France, and welcome him back with a medical certificate from one of the finest schools of medicine in the world.
    Who was right? As the sun climbed past the scope of his one window and the room fell into cool, grey shadow, Andrew thought it might be time to congratulate those sceptical uncles of his. Them, and Nurse Annie Rowe.
    Andrew was ready to call for some morphine after all, when a knock came at his door, a face draped in shadow poked around the edge of it, and a familiar voice boomed out.
    “Dr. Andrew Waggoner! Bless me, it is grand to find you well!”
    When they first met in the autumn of ’10, Garrison Harper had insisted that Andrew dine with him and his wife at the sprawling mansion he’d had built overlooking the town. That meal was sumptuous—roast beef in a thick burgundy sauce with good French wine, a sugar loaf soaked in rum, followed by Napoleon brandy in wide snifters and cigars imported from Cuba at the end of it. The meal he brought with him today was simpler: mashed potatoes, some greens from Mrs. Harper’s garden and a breast of well-cooked chicken already cut into bite-sized chunks. He carried the plate in himself, withdrawing the silver cover with a flourish, then called out to the hallway when it developed that someone had forgotten to provide any silverware.
    “We are,” said Mr. Harper, “a hospital in an Idaho logging town, and not a fine restaurant in Boston. I must remind myself of this daily. Is there a chair in here?”
    “Beside the bureau,” said Andrew. “Thank you, Mr. Harper. This looks delicious.”
    Mr. Harper scooted the chair over beside Andrew’s bed, and settled into it. Garrison Harper was not a fat man, not by any means. But he was tall—well over six feet—and he had complained to Andrew on that first night: “The years add weight to both the soul and the waist.” The combined weight made the chair creak precipitously, and that and the memory made Andrew smile.
    Mr. Harper was like that, always joking with the help. Andrew understood that behaviour to be an affectation—a rich man’s hollow conscience at work. But his own father was the same way, walking through the stables and calling out the men who worked for him by name, sharing a joke or asking after their wives, acting like he was one of them. Andrew couldn’t begrudge it.
    “Go,” said Mr. Harper, passing the fork from the nurse who brought it, to Andrew. “Eat a bit. You have to get your strength back.”
    Andrew ate. He was famished, but he restrained himself. If he took this too fast it would come up just as fast.
    “I am ashamed,” said Mr. Harper at length.
    Andrew set down his fork.
    “Sir, do not trouble yourself,” he said. “I will find other work.”
    “What on earth are you talking about?” Harper gaped.
    “Other work, sir. After I take my leave.”
    “Do you imagine I am here to—to dismiss you?”
    “There is no need,” said Andrew. “It is done.”
    Andrew explained what had transpired between himself and Dr. Bergstrom that morning. Mr. Harper listened quietly, and when it was done, he said simply, “No.”
    “Sir,” said Andrew, “I am bound to remind you that with my right arm as it is, I will be of limited use in the