The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 78

So the youngest and strongest departed the reservation, and she with them. By autumn they were in country that gladdened their spirits and made their hearts sore at the same time. It was hard to avoid the white man as they traveled; they made wide circuits around settlements. Hunting was poor. Winter caught them ill-prepared. Wabokieshiek had died that summer, and Prophetstown was deserted. She couldn't go to white people for help, remembering what the Prophet had taught her about never placing her faith in a whiteskin.

But when she had prayed, the manitous had sent survival in the form of help from the white doctor called Cole, and despite the Prophet's ghost, she had come to feel he could be trusted.

So when he rode into the Sauk camp and told her that now he needed her help to perform his medicine, without hesitation she was able to agree to go with him.

18.

STONES.

Rob J. tried to explain to Makwa-ikwa what a bladder calculus was, but he couldn't tell if she believed that Sarah Bledsoe's illness really was caused by stones in her bladder. Makwa-ikwa asked him if he would suck out the stones, and as they talked it became apparent that she expected to witness a sleight-of-hand humbug, a kind of juggling trick to make his patient believe he had removed the source of her trouble. He explained several times that the stones were real, that they existed painfully in the woman's bladder, and that he would go inside Sarah's body with an instrument and remove them.

Her puzzlement continued when they got to his cabin and he used strong brown soap and water to wash down the table Alden had made for him, on which he would operate. They called for Sarah Bledsoe together, in the buck-board. The little boy, Alex, had been left with Alma Schroeder, and his mother was waiting for the doctor, her eyes large in her pinched white face. On the return trip Makwa-ikwa was silent and Sarah Bledsoe nearly dumb with terror. He tried to ease the situation with small talk but had little success.

When they reached his cabin, Makwa-ikwa leapt lightly from the buck-board. She helped the white girl down from the high seat with a gentleness that surprised him, and she spoke for the first time. "Once I was called Sarah Two," she told Sarah Bledsoe, only Rob J. thought she said "Sarah too."

Sarah wasn't an accomplished drinker. She coughed when she tried to swallow the three fingers of sourmash whiskey he gave her, and she gagged on the additional inch or so he added to her mug for good measure. He wanted her subdued and dulled to pain but able to cooperate. While they waited for the whiskey to work, he set up candles around the table and lighted them despite the heat of the summer, for the daylight in the cabin was dim. When they undressed Sarah, he saw that her body was red from scrubbing. Her wasted b.u.t.tocks were small as a child's, and her blue-skinned thighs looked almost concave in their thinness. She grimaced as he inserted a catheter and filled her bladder with water. He showed Makwa-ikwa how he wanted her knees held, then he greased the lithotrite with clean lard, taking care not to get any on the little jaws that would have to grasp the stones. The woman gasped as he slid the instrument into her urethra.

"I know it hurts, Sarah. It's painful as it goes in, but ... There. Now it will be better."

She was accustomed to far worse pain, and the groaning dwindled, but he was apprehensive. It had been several years since he had probed for stones, and then under the careful eyes of a man who undoubtedly was one of the best surgeons in the world. The day before, he had spent hours practicing with the lithotrite, picking up raisins and pebbles, picking up nuts and cracking their sh.e.l.ls, practicing with the objects in a small tub of water, with his eyes closed. But it was quite another thing to poke around within the fragile bladder of a living being, aware that to thrust carelessly or to close the jaws on a wrinkle of tissue rather than on a stone might result in a tear that would bring terrible infection and painful death.

Since his eyes could do him no good, he closed them now, and moved the lithotrite slowly and delicately, his whole being fused into one nerve that functioned at the end of the instrument. It touched something. He opened his eyes and studied the woman's groin and lower abdomen, wishing he could see through flesh.

Makwa-ikwa was watching his hands, studying his face, missing nothing. He brushed at a buzzing fly and then ignored everything but the patient and the task and the lithotrite in his hand. The stone ... Lord, he could tell at once that it was large! Perhaps the size of his thumb, he estimated as he maneuvered and manipulated the lithotrite ever so slowly and carefully.

To determine if the stone would move, he tightened the jaws of the lithotrite onto it, but when he put the slightest backward pressure on the instrument the woman on the table opened her mouth and screamed.

"I have the biggest stone, Sarah," he said calmly. "It's too large to come out in one piece, so I'll try to break it." Even as he spoke, his fingers were moving to the handle of the screw at the end of the lithotrite. It was as though each turn of the screw tightened the tension within him as well, because if the stone wouldn't break, the woman's prospects were dismal. But blessedly as he continued to turn the handle there was a dull crunching, the sound of someone grinding a shard of pottery beneath his heel.

He broke it into three segments. Although he worked with great care, when he removed the first piece he hurt her. Makwa-ikwa wet a cloth and wiped Sarah's sweaty face. Rob reached down and unclenched her left hand, peeling the fingers back like petals, and dropped the piece of the stone into her white palm. It was an ugly calculus, brown and black. The middle piece was smooth and egg-shaped, but the other two were irregular, with little needle points and sharp edges. When she held all three in her hand, he inserted a catheter and rinsed the bladder, and she voided a lot of the crystals that had broken from the stone when he had crushed it.

She was exhausted. "That's enough," he decided. "There's another stone in your bladder, but it's small and should be easy to remove. We'll take it from you another day."

In less than an hour she had begun to glow with the fever that followed quickly after almost every surgery. They force-fed her liquids, including Makwa-ikwa's efficient willow-bark tea. Next morning she was still slightly febrile but they were able to take her back to her own cabin. He knew she was sore and torn up but she made the jolting trip without complaint. The fever wasn't gone from her eyes but there was another light there, and he was able to recognize it as hope.

A few days later, when Nick Holden invited him to go off on another doe hunt, Rob J. agreed warily. This time they caught a boat upstream to the town of Dexter, where the two LaSalle sisters were waiting at the tavern. Although Nick had described them with roguish masculine hyperbole, Rob J. recognized at once that they were tired wh.o.r.es. Nick chose the younger, more attractive Polly, leaving for Rob an aging woman with bitter eyes and an upper lip on which caked rice powder couldn't hide the dark mustache-Lydia. Lydia was openly resentful of Rob J.'s emphasis on soap and water and his use of Old h.o.r.n.y, but she carried out her part of the transaction with professional dispatch. That night he lay next to her in the room that contained the faint olfactory ghosts of past paid pa.s.sions and wondered what he was doing there. From the next room there were angry voices, a slap, a woman's hoa.r.s.e shouting, ugly but unmistakable thuds.

"Jesus." Rob J. knocked his fist against the thin wall. "Nick. Everything all right in there?"

"Dandy. Dammit, Cole. You just get yourself some sleep now. Or whatever. You hear?" Holden called back, his voice thick with whiskey and annoyance.

Next morning at breakfast Polly had a red swelling on the left side of her face. Nick must have paid her very well for her beating, because her voice was pleasant enough when they said good-bye.

On the boat going home, the incident couldn't be evaded. Nick placed his hand on Rob's arm. "Sometimes a woman likes a bit of the rough stuff, don't you know it, ol' buck? Practically begs for it, to get her juices flowing."

Rob regarded him silently, aware that this was his last doe hunt. In a moment Nick took his hand from Rob's arm and began telling him about the upcoming election. He had decided to run for state office, to stand for the legislature from their district. He knew it would be helpful, he explained earnestly, if Doc Cole would urge folks to vote for his good friend whenever he made a house call.

19.

A CHANGE.

Two weeks after ridding her of the large stone, Rob J. was ready to remove the smaller calculus from Sarah's bladder, but she had become reluctant. The first few days after the removal of the stone, she had pa.s.sed more small crystals with her urine, sometimes accompanied by pain. Ever since the last bits of crushed stone had left her bladder, she had been symptom-free. For the first time since the onset of her illness she didn't have crippling pain, and the absence of the spasms had allowed her to regain control of her body.

"You still have a stone in your bladder," he reminded her.

"I don't want it removed. It doesn't hurt." She looked at him defiantly but then dropped her eyes. "I'm more afraid now than I was the first time."

He noted that already she was looking better. Her face was still drawn with the suffering of a long affliction, but she had gained enough weight to make inroads against the gauntness. "That big stone we removed was once a little stone. They grow, Sarah," he said gently.

So she agreed. Again Makwa-ikwa sat with her while he removed the small calculus-about one-fourth the size of the other stone-from her bladder. There was a minimum of discomfort, and when he was through, a sense of triumph.

But this time when the postoperative fever arrived, her body became fiery. He recognized impending disaster early and cursed himself for having given her the wrong advice. Before nightfall her foreboding had been justified; perversely, the easier procedure to remove the smaller stone had resulted in a ma.s.sive infection. Makwa-ikwa and he took turns sitting next to her bed for four nights and five days, while inside her body a battle raged. Holding her hands in his, Rob could feel the waning of her vitality. Now and again Makwa-ikwa seemed to stare at something that wasn't there and chanted quietly in her own language. She told Rob she was asking Panguk, the death G.o.d, to pa.s.s this woman by. There was little else they could do for Sarah except to bathe her with wet cloths, support her while they held cups of liquid to her mouth and urged her to drink, and dress her cracked lips with grease. For a time she continued to fail, but on the fifth morning-was it Panguk, or her own spirit, or perhaps all the willow tea?-she began to sweat. Her nightshirts became sodden almost as quickly as they could be changed. By midmorning she had fallen into a deep and relieved sleep, and that afternoon when he touched her forehead it felt almost cool, a temperature that nearly matched his own.

Makwa-ikwa's expression didn't change much, but Rob J. was beginning to know her, and he believed she was pleased by his suggestion, even if at first she didn't take it seriously.

"Work with you. All the time?"

He nodded. It made sense. He'd seen that she knew how to look after a patient and didn't hesitate to do as he asked. He told her it could be a good arrangement for each of them. "You can learn some of my kind of medicine. And you have so many things to teach me about the plants and herbs. What they cure. How to use them."

They discussed it first in the buckboard after bringing Sarah home. He didn't press the idea on her. He just kept quiet and allowed her to think about it.

A few days later he stopped by the Sauk camp and they talked again over a bowl of rabbit stew. The thing she liked least about the offer was his insistence that she had to live close by his cabin, so he could fetch her quickly in times of emergency.

"I have to be with my people."

He had pondered about the Sauk band. "Sooner or later some white man will file with the government for every piece of land you folks might want to use for a village or a winter camp. There's going to be no place for you to go except back to that reservation you ran away from." What they must do, he said, was learn to live in the world as it had become. "I need help on my farm, Alden Kimball can't do it all. I could use a couple like Moon and Comes Singing. You could build cabins on my land. I'd pay the three of you in United States money, as well as found from the farm. If it works out, maybe other farms would have jobs for Sauks. And if you earned money and saved, sooner or later you'd have enough to buy your own land according to white man's custom and law, and n.o.body could ever order you from it."

She looked at him.

"I know it offends you to have to buy back your own land. White men have lied to you, cheated you. And killed a whole lot of you. But red men have lied to one another. Stolen from one another. And the different bands have always killed one another, you've told me that. Color of skin doesn't matter, all kinds of people are sonsab.i.t.c.hes. But not everybody in the world is a sonofab.i.t.c.h."

Two days later she and Moon and Comes Singing, along with Moon's two children, rode onto his land. They built a hedonoso-te with two smoke holes, a single longhouse that the shaman would share with the Sauk family, large enough to accommodate the third child who already swelled Moon's belly. They raised the lodge on the riverbank a quarter of a mile downstream from Rob J.'s cabin. Nearby they built a sweat lodge and a women's lodge to be used during menstruation.

Alden Kimball walked around with wounded eyes. "There's white men out there looking for work," he told Rob J. stonily. "White men. Never occurred to you I might not want to work with d.a.m.n Indians?"

"No," Rob said, "it never did. Seems to me if you'd come across a good white worker, you'd have told me to hire him long since. I've gotten to know these people. They're really good people. Now, I know you can quit on me, Alden, because any body'd be a fool not to grab you if you were available. I'd hate to have that happen, because you're the best man I'm ever going to find to run this farm. So I hope you'll stay."

Alden stared at him, confusion in his eyes, pleased by the praise but smarting because of the clear message. Finally he turned away and began to load fenceposts onto the buckboard.

What tipped the scales was the fact that Comes Singing's prodigious size and strength, coupled with his agreeable disposition, made him a wonderful hired hand. Moon had learned to cook for white people as a girl in the Christian school. For single men living alone it was a treat to have hot biscuits and pies and tasty food. Within a week it was obvious that although Alden remained aloof and would never acknowledge surrender, the Sauks had become part of the farm.

Rob J. experienced a similar small rebellion among his patients. Over a cup of cider Nick Holden warned him, "Some of the settlers have started calling you Injun Cole. They say you're an Indian lover. They say you must have some Sauk blood yourself."

Rob J. smiled, in love with the notion. "Tell you what. If anybody complains to you about the doctor, just hand them one of those fancy hand-bills you're so fond of pa.s.sing around. The ones that tell how fortunate the township is to have a physician of Dr. Cole's training and education. Next time they're bleeding or sickly, I doubt many of them will object to my alleged ancestry. Or the color of my a.s.sistant's hands."

When he rode out to Sarah's cabin to see how she was recuperating, he noted that the path leading from the trail to her door had been edged, smoothed, and swept. New beds of woodland plantings softened the outer contours of the little house. Inside, all the walls were whitewashed, and the only smells were of strong soap and the pleasant scents of lavender, and pennyroyal, sage, and cicely hung from the rafters.

"Alma Schroeder gave the herbs to me," Sarah said. "It's too late to plant a garden this season, but next year I'll have my own." She showed him the garden patch, part of which she had already cleared of weeds and brambles.

The change in the woman was more astounding than the transformation of the place. She had begun to do her own cooking every day, she said, instead of depending on occasional hot dishes carried over by the generous Alma. A regular diet and improved nutrition already had replaced her wan boniness with a graceful femininity. She bent to pick a few green onions that had volunteered in the garden tangle, and he studied the pink nape of her neck. Soon it would be hidden, for her hair was growing back like a yellow pelt.

A small blond animal, her little boy scuttled behind her. He too was clean, though Rob took note of Sarah's chagrin as she tried to brush clay stains from her son's knees.

"You can't keep a boy from getting messy," he told her cheerfully. The child looked at him with wild and fearful eyes. Rob always carried a few boiled sweets in his bag to help him make friends with little patients, and now he took one and unwrapped it. It took him almost half an hour of quiet talking before he could edge close enough to little Alex to hold out the sweet. When the small hand finally took the candy, he heard Sarah's released breath and looked up to see her watching his face. She had wonderful eyes, full of life.

"I've made a venison pie, if you want to share our dinner."

It was on his lips to refuse, but the two faces were turned to him, the little boy sucking in bliss on the candy, the mother serious and expectant. The faces seemed to be asking him questions he couldn't understand.

"I do love venison pie," he said.

20.

SARAH'S SUITORS It made good medical sense for Rob J. to stop and see Sarah Bledsoe several times in the next week while returning from house calls, for each time he could do so by going out of his way only a little, and as her physician he had to make certain her recovery was smooth. Indeed, it was a wonderful recovery. There was little to discuss about her health, except to observe that her skin tone had changed from a deadly white to a pink-peach that was most becoming and that her eyes glowed with alertness and an interesting intelligence. One afternoon she gave him tea and cornbread. The following week he stopped by her cabin three times, and twice he accepted her invitation to stay for meals. She was a better cook than Moon; he couldn't get enough of her cooking, which she said was Virginian. He was aware that her resources were meager, so he took to bringing a few things, a sack of potatoes, a small ham. One morning a settler who was short of cash gave him four fat, freshly shot grouse in partial payment, and he rode to the Bledsoe cabin with the birds hanging from his saddle.

When he got there he found Sarah and Alex seated on the ground near the garden, which was being double-dug by a perspiring shirtless hulk of a man with the bulging muscles and tanned skin of one who earns his living out-of-doors. Sarah introduced Samuel Merriam, a farmer from Hooppole. Merriam had come from Hooppole with a cartful of pig dung, half of which already had been dug into the garden. "Finest stuff in the world for growing things," he told Rob J. cheerfully.

Next to the princely gift of a wagonload of pig s.h.i.t, applied, Rob's little birds were a meager present, but he gave them to her anyhow, and she seemed genuinely grateful. He made a polite refusal to her invitation that he might join Samuel Merriam as her dinner guest, and instead dropped in on Alma Schroeder, who waxed enthusiastic about what he had accomplished in curing Sarah. "Already it's a suitor down there, isn't it?" she said, beaming. Merriam had lost his wife the previous autumn to the fever and needed another woman without delay to take care of his five children and help with the pigs. "A good chance for Sarah," she said sagely. "Although, women so scarce on the frontier, she'll have lotsa chances."

On Rob's way home, he drifted by the Bledsoe cabin again. He rode up to her and sat in the saddle looking at her. This time her smile was puzzled, and he could see Merriam pause at his work in the garden and stare speculatively. Until Rob opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wanted to tell her.

"You yourself must do as much of the work as possible," he said severely, "because the exercise is necessary to your full recovery." Then he tipped his hat and rode crankily home.

Three days later, when next he stopped at the cabin, there was no sign of a suitor. Sarah was struggling to separate a big old rhubarb root into sections for replanting, and finally he solved her problem by chopping it apart with her ax. Together they dug the holes in the loam and planted the roots and covered them with the warm soil, a ch.o.r.e that pleased him and earned him a share of her dinner of red-flannel hash washed down with cool spring water.

Afterward, while Alex napped in the shade of a tree, they sat on the riverbank and tended her trotline, and he spoke to her of Scotland and she told him she wished there was a church nearby, so her son could be taught to have faith. "Often now I think of G.o.d," she said. "When I believed I was dying and Alex would be left alone, I prayed, and He sent you." Not without trepidation, he confessed to her that he didn't believe in the existence of G.o.d. "I think G.o.ds are the inventions of men and that it has always been so," he said. He could see the shock in her eyes and feared he had sent her into a life of piety on a piggery. But she abandoned talk of religion and spoke of her early life in Virginia, where her parents owned a farm. Her large eyes were such a dark blue as to be almost purple; they didn't sentimentalize, but in them he saw the love for that easier, warmer time. "Horses!" she said, smiling. "I grew up loving horses."

It allowed him to invite her to ride out with him next day to visit an old man who was dying of consumption, and she made no attempt to hide the eagerness with which she agreed. Next morning, on Margaret Holland and leading Monica Grenville, he called for her. They left Alex with Alma Schroeder, who fairly beamed with delight at the fact that Sarah was "riding out" with the doctor.

It was a good day for a ride, not too hot for a change, and they allowed the horses to walk, taking their time. She had packed bread and cheese in her saddlebag, and they had a picnic in the shade of a live oak. In the sick man's house she stayed in the background, listening to the rattling breathing, watching Rob J. hold the patient's hands. He waited until water warmed at the fireplace and then bathed the skinny limbs and administered a dulling draft, teaspoon by teaspoon, so sleep would make the waiting merciful. Sarah overheard him telling the stolid son and the daughter-in-law that the old man would die within hours. When they left she was moved and spoke little. To try to regain the easiness they had shared earlier, he suggested they switch horses on the way back, because she was a fine horsewoman and could handle Margaret Holland without trouble. She enjoyed riding the friskier mount. "Both the mares are named after women you have known?" she asked, and he acknowledged it was so.

She nodded thoughtfully. Despite his effort, they were quieter on the way home.

Two days later, when he went to her cabin, there was yet another man, a tall, cadaverously thin peddler named Timothy Mead, who regarded the world out of mournful brown eyes and spoke respectfully when introduced to the doctor. Mead left her a gift of four colors of thread.

Rob J. took a thorn out of Alex's bare foot and noted that summer was coming to an end and the boy didn't have proper shoes. He took a tracing of the feet and next time he was in Rock Island stopped at the shoemaker's and ordered a pair of child's boots, taking great pleasure in the errand. The following week, when he delivered the small footwear, he saw that the gesture fl.u.s.tered Sarah. Still, she was a puzzle to him; he couldn't tell if she was gratified or annoyed.

The morning after Nick Holden was elected to the legislature he rode into the clearing by Rob's cabin. In two days' time he would travel to Springfield to make laws that would help the growth of Holden's Crossing. Holden spat contemplatively and turned the conversation to the common knowledge that the doctor was riding out with the Widow Bledsoe. "Ah. There are things you should know, old buck."

Rob looked at him.

"Well, the child, her son. You're aware he's a wood's colt? Born almost two years after her husband's death."

Rob stood. "Good-bye, Nick. You have a good trip to Springfield."

There was no mistaking his tone, and Holden clambered to his feet. "I'm just trying to say it's not necessary for a man-" he began, but what he saw in Rob J.'s face made him swallow the words, and in a moment he swung into his saddle, said a discomfited farewell, and rode away.

Rob J. saw such a puzzling mixture of things in her face: pleasure at seeing him and being in his company, tenderness when she would allow it, but also at times a kind of terror. The evening came when he kissed her. At first her open mouth was soft and glad and she pressed against him, but then the moment went bad. She twisted away. To h.e.l.l, he told himself, she didn't care for him, and that was that. But he forced himself to ask her gently what was the matter.

"How can you be attracted to me? Haven't you seen me wretched, in a beastly condition? You have ... smelled my filth," she said, her face aflame.

"Sarah," he said. He looked into her eyes. "When you were ill, I was your doctor. Since then, I've come to see you as a woman of charm and intelligence, with whom it gives me great pleasure to exchange thoughts and share my dreams. I've come to desire you in every way. You're all I think about. I love you."

Their only physical contact was her hands in his. Her grip tightened, but she didn't speak.

"Perhaps you could learn to love me?"

"Learn? However could I not love you?" she asked wildly. "You, who handed me back my life, as if you were G.o.d!"

"No, d.a.m.n you, I'm an ordinary man! And that's how I need to be-"

Now they were kissing. It went on and on, and it wasn't enough. It was Sarah who prevented what might easily have followed, pushing him roughly, turning away and arranging her clothing.

"Marry me, Sarah."

When she didn't answer, he spoke again. "You weren't meant to slop hogs all day on a pig farm or to stumble about the countryside with a peddler's pack on your back."

"What is it I was meant for, then?" she asked in a low, bitter voice.

"Why, to be a doctor's wife. It's very plain," he said gravely.

She didn't have to pretend to be serious. "There are those who will rush to tell you about Alex, about his lineage, so I want to tell you about him myself."

"I want to be Alex's father. I'm concerned about him today, and tomorrow. I don't need to know about yesterday. I've had terrible yesterdays too. Marry me, Sarah."