Fiction - Herman's Heart by Brooke Biaz

Herman’s Heart

by Brooke Biaz

Herman got a new heart. He got it in an operation that lasted seventeen hours. That was one hoot of an operation. Some folks say it was the longest operation ever undertaken. But that’s not true. There’s been longer ones. Take the case of Lucille Fewkes, for example, whose operation to replace her liver ran for almost a whole day. Of course, Lucille didn’t last five minutes before that liver gave her trouble. Up and down in the evenings and so forth. Pains in the gut. Trouble with the waterworks. Until, finally, that new liver packed it in. Fortunately, for Herman, things have improved since then.

Herman lives out in Freshwater. That’s half way between Coralville and Mook’s Crossing. Not a bad place. Sure, I wouldn’t rate it as upscale as Oakford. They got cement kerbing out there, and one of those deep-pan pizza joints. And it’s hardly a blue hound’s bark on the lustre of Mount Cecil. All that white glowing hull-work of the Mount Cecil Marina. But, hey, Freshwater’s alright. At least, it’s alright for ordinary folks like Herman.

Frankly, not so far back, it didn’t look like Herman was going to get that new heart of his in time. Doctors in Coralville said he had what’s known as a congenital condition. Them congenital conditions don’t bear thinking about. Seems anyone can have one and, given that pure medical fact, there’s not much to be done for it. Likewise, there was a suggestion, though they didn’t make it so loud that an inattentive man might have known about it, that Herman had not helped himself much in the lifestyle he’d chosen and the folks he’d hung around with.

Now that’s an unfair comment. So what if Herman liked the old style Freshwater? If he liked the Freshwater before it became a suburb and was just a little place at the end of a river, up against the ocean, where most folks made a living out of fishing or boat-building or the like, and took a drink to be sociable and rolled-their-own tobacco and thought nothing of a fair size fried fricassee. So what if he liked that old Freshwater and not the new one that was attached to the city like a knitted bean hat on a guy wearing one of them striped suits? That’s hardly any reason to tell him to go off and die.

So Herman got his new heart. But, because of the place he was in, and this congenital condition of his, so-called, he got it in kind of a rush.

One minute he’s just walking around, telling folks how tired he is, explaining to people how the doctors have been saying that he’s got this heart condition and that maybe he’ll need a new one some time, maybe soon even. The next thing he’s being rushed off down Freshwater Road with all those lights flashing and a police vehicle out front and kids falling off their bikes to get out of the way and the fish co-operative flat-bed diving almost right into the silver brush just to let the dang thing through.

Not a real dignified exit. Not for Herman. And not, come to think on it, for that old heart of his. That heart that grew up around here. The original, I mean.

I remember Herman there in the Freshwater Bait Shop talking about catching an amberjack near three and one half feet long. Kind of dreaming about it. How he reeled it in over the backwater with the sea rushing up against his big brown boots and his head flung back and his arms, which were aged pretty much even then, rippling at the hard tugging and the fish fighting like Hell, until he dragged it flipping up onto the sand and manhandled that suicide hook right out of its lips like it was no more sharp than a butter-knife.

That was Herman’s old heart. So it seemed a bit of an affront, actually, the way those doctor’s rushed it off, without proper regard, to meet up that morning with his new one.

At the Base Hospital in Coralville the team was readying. Surgeons. An anaesthetist. Pretty much the usual. I wonder if, at that point, they gave two thoughts to Herman himself. If they thought at all of the folks of Freshwater who, in a sense, Herman was representing, rushing in there in that ambulance with the lights flashing and the siren screaming. Making a mockery of those signs that say ‘Cows Cross’ all along the roads here. Ignoring the blind turn around Bruxter’s Bend, which has caught plenty of folks right out over the years, or the tight hairpin around the Ludwell property, which is merciless, frankly. Or were they, maybe, off somewhere else?

Off at some conference, in their minds? Something to do with ‘The State of the Health Service’ or ‘The Effects of Phenotypic Plasticity on Genetic Correlations’ or ‘A New Hydrogen Hypothesis for the first Surgical Eukaryote’? And so didn’t give one thought to Herman who was lying back in that ambulance, breathing now through a plastic mask, taking in that bottled oxygen in big, fat and sort of ugly gulps, trying not to think about catching an amberjack or a nice big krasse or a fine sea mullet that jumps as the hook goes in, and takes a fair ol’ tug to bring back down to the sea, that mullet figuring maybe if it acts like a bird, and not like a fish, it might just get away. Herman was trying not to think about those fish but only about his new heart, which was waiting for him in at the Coralville Base Hospital. Waiting like a fine GM engine hanging from the rafters of a workshop for the arrival of a smoking, but faithful, ol’ 4x4.

Yes, regardless of what that medical team was thinking, Herman was on the way and things, from that point, were unstoppable.

The Coralville Base Hospital is truly fine. Tall and sandy coloured. All its many balconies looking out onto the River Cecil like the hospital’s been placed there to keep an eye on the regular changing of the tide. The place was built not much more than ten years back when the government figured, I guess, that with the towns around here being linked up to the city, and folks kind of stuck in their old ways of living, and the need to bring industry into the area, an area, that is, that had largely been concerned with boats and fish, that folks were certainly going to need good medical care.

They got that for sure.

Nobody around here dies anymore. Well, not hardly. Not even if they are bitten by a rout or stung real bad by a sea-wasp. The fact is, you can pretty much expect to survive if you fall under your tractor and catch your leg up a little in the drive train. Your kids have a chance if they catch tetanus from playing, though you told them Lord knows how many times not to, and swore you were going to kill them next time you saw them down there, in the copper mine workings around Piper’s Ridge. Kids up-chucking like Vesuvius, hallucinating even; thinking, because of the tetanus, that they just climbed the rocky escarpment behind Mount Cecil and can see Heaven from up there or something. Even those kids have got a chance now.

All this comes about because of the building of the Coralville Base Hospital.

Herman’s ambulance pulled up on the hospital’s blue gravel drive, and they rushed him inside.

Without having been there it is difficult to say how he looked. But I imagine him looking much like a caught amberjack himself, his chest rising and falling in steady but labouring effort, his eyes the size of hubcaps, his head turning this way and that to check out the team, who were not the surgeons themselves at that point but only nurses and orderlies who, wearing green masks and draped in green cover-alls, might well have been mistaken for some kind of annual gardening convention.

Seventeen hours.

It’s a long time. Marci Ludwell wasn’t in labour that long with her last kid. Her seventh. Lowell Rutherford didn’t take that long to build the fence around Abel Baker’s place, though the soil out around the Rutherford’s is not a cropper’s dream, that’s for sure. Seventeen hours is long like a day in summer when the wind catches the warm currents on the outgoing sea and melts them into the air of the sandstone rocks of the break-wall and spins itself along the seafront until even the green, un-salted grass on the down side of Freshwater Hill is hot and wet and smells of dog piss. On those days the sun doesn’t seem ready to set, until the next day is already hinting its on the way, snowy egrets awakening in the mangroves and so forth, wolf spiders the size of cats lumbering down silk, back into the dark crooks of silky oaks.

A lot can happen in seventeen hours. It’s no blink of the eye. That’s the point.

Herman came out of the anaesthetic around midnight. The moon on the ocean. The tide on the turn. His head as heavy as stone.

He was not, at that point, truly with us. Not back to the real world, you could say. Only awake. Only revived. His new heart in there, but the monitors monitoring and so forth. In between life and death. A whole bunch of who knows what drugs surging around in his system. Cyclosporins and whatnot, apparently. Digoxins. The first to prevent rejection, and second to get that new heart muscle of his going. He was running on that stuff. And folks were running on him running. There were a lot of expectations.

Out on the long reach around Pearl Reef, Linton McMorran and his deckhand, Galvin, hunting for a big school of mackerel, were certainly thinking about how ol’ Herman was doing. How he was going, way back there at those lights. Those tiny lights they could just make out now flickering in the night. The lights of the Coralville Base Hospital.

And Marci Ludwell, who was awake in the heat feeding her latest, was thinking too. Her big bruise-coloured breasts hung there on her belly; that new kid of hers guzzling like a Brown Swiss heifer. And Orton who runs the Bait Shop, lying awake, not doing figures on how many beach worms he’s sold this week, not thinking about whether the mullet gut is going off in that runty battered freezer of his that is always breaking down, but thinking of poor ol’ Herman and his amberjack and his fishing and his heart.

‘How is he doin’?’ Orton was thinking.

Nobody was getting much sleep.

Summer comes long and hard to Freshwater. It is in this season that we make our living. During which we make that packet that has to last us the whole year. That season of Herman’s heart was no different. The tourists coming over in droves from all around and about. Their caravans appearing like tin breadboxes blown like tornado trash brightly down Freshwater Road. Their rods like flagpoles erected all along the break-wall. Both the Freshwater Bakery and the Newsagency running out of sliced bread three times in that first week. The sea going so quiet and still, as it always does around that time of year. And Herman coming out of that hospital with that big dumb grin on his face.

Crying: ‘Hey-ho!’ from the front seat of Linton McMorran’s rattling pick-up, coming into town.

Installing himself back in his place so that folks could go around and visit. Maybe take a pie or something. Or tell him how they missed him down on the break some mornings, skimming for flathead. Or how the Spring had been particularly mild that year and the prawns therefore had not washed down the river and maybe next year would be better entirely on that account, and they’d be happy to see him netting again, in all probability. Some of them asking what the food was like in the Base Hospital; because rumour had it those hospital cooks overlooked just about every darn thing. Some folks just sitting on Herman’s porch with him, looking out over the beach, not saying anything much.

At least, that was what it was like at first.

I don’t think the change came on our part. I don’t believe we were responsible. But it came nevertheless.

Herman seen out walking in the mornings. Those new white gym shoes of his like something straight off the yoga spot on Good Morning with Gloria. Herman at a class on ‘Rockery Gardening’ that some fruit from Coralville Community College franchised into the Freshwater Memorial Hall that summer. Herman lawn bowling. Smooth faced and clean as a whistle.

Some folks say that seventeen hours under the knife was too long for anyone and maybe Herman’s head has gone. That maybe Herman is two sandwiches short of a full picnic basket these days. Maybe they gave him too much gas.

That’s one avenue of thought.

Others reckon it’s the heart itself. That they’ve given Herman a heart that doesn’t suit him. That, as much as it works fine enough, it belongs to someone else. Someone different. Someone not at all from Freshwater. And has no right to be in Herman’s body. No right to be in our town. That all of us would be better off if that ol’, tired heart of his just upped and came home.

‘At least we’d have the real Herman back,’ Marci Ludwell says.

But Marci seems to be missing the point. Maybe she’s affected by all those kids of hers. All that worry she has about tetanus and so on. All those lives in her hands. The fact is, Marci, Herman’s got a new heart. I figure we got an obligation to make it welcome.

Brooke Biaz is co-director of the UK Centre for Creative Writing (Research Through Practice) and holds the National Book Council Award for New Fiction, the Premier's Award for New Fiction, and the first doctorate in creative writing awarded in Australia. A recipient of grants and awards from the National Endowment, the Arts and Humanities Board and the British Academy, Brooke is currently working on a new novel and can be contacted, eeeeelly, on g.harper@bangor.ac.uk