The Black Witch of Mexico by Colin Falconer Page B

led the way to the clinica. It was just getting on for dawn and he could make out shadows moving about the village. There was movement around the SUV parked outside the clinica , Jamie was already dressed and was getting ready to leave. She had probably hoped to slip away before he appeared.
    She said her goodbyes to Bernard and then came over - with some reluctance he thought - and held out her hand.
    “Well good luck,” she said. “I have to be getting back. It was good to meet you.”
    “Will I see you again?”
    “Hopefully not.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Let’s not get into that.” She got into SUV. The window whirred down. “Oh, and watch out for yourself.”
    “The witches?”
    “Not just any witch. You have real competition now. Don’t let the Crow steal all your patients.”
    “What’s the Crow?”
    “You’ll find out soon enough.”
    She spun the wheels, turned around and headed back down the dirt road towards San Cristobal. Adam watched her go with genuine regret. “You really screwed that up,” he said to himself and joined Bernard in the clinic for his first day as an angel of mercy.
     
     
     

Chapter 29
     
    Santa Marta wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t Beacon Hill either. There was an unreliable electrical supply and when it was working he discovered that everyone in the entire village had a television and kept it turned on at full volume from the moment they woke up until they went to bed.
    Every morning the benches in the waiting room filled up with patients; there might be an old man with pneumonia, or a farmer with a self-inflicted machete wound that had become infected, and always and an endless troupe of exhausted women with crying babies or toddlers with diarrhoea. He was on call day and night, in that first week he treated a young woman who had burned both her arms trying to start a fire with petrol, and a young man who had fallen from his horse and broken his collarbone.
    He hoped he would not be asked to treat anything much more serious. There was no CBC, no nurses to help him ventilate or take blood, not even a defibrillator. Any diagnosis was made without the benefit of a CT scan or a specialist paediatric physician; on the upside, if someone died he would not be sued, and there was no paperwork to file.
    Bernard did not charge the villagers for his services, either in the church or the clinic, but sometimes people brought them vegetables, or a chicken, or some eggs, or they would help him repair something at the clinic or the church.
    The local women all wore black woollen skirts with embroidered satin blouses. If the weather turned cold they put on shaggy woollen shawls, but winter or summer they wore open sandals on their feet. They carried the small children in a baby hammock on their backs. They called it a rebozo .
    “Don’t take photographs, whatever you do,” Bernard had warned him. “They believe the camera can capture their soul.”
    In Boston his patients always came to him; in Santa Marta he sometimes had to go to them, and Bernard kept two sorry looking nags for just this purpose. Adam hadn’t ridden a horse since college, but it was just one of an entire range of new skills he was required to learn.
    One day a man came to the clinic begging for a doctor to come and visit his sick child. Adam got through his day’s patients and prepared to leave.
    He and Luis saddled the horses and rode for a couple of hours to find his tiny edijo perched on a high bluff overlooking the valley. He wasn’t even sure it had a name, there were just a few adobe houses at the end of a long and dusty trail.
    He had to stoop to get through the door. There was a blackened stove and a few cots around the walls. As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom he became aware of a half dozen pairs of eyes staring back at him.
    The mother of this little family looked as if she was not yet out of her teens. She kept her eyes downcast. Her husband looked even younger, just a boy