The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 80

"That's good," she said.

While he slept through the afternoon and evening, the rain ceased and the temperature plunged. He awoke in the middle of the night and dressed in order to go outside and slip and slide to the outhouse, because the rain-soaked snow had frozen to the consistency of marble. After he had relieved his kidneys and returned to bed, he couldn't sleep. He had hoped to return to the Gruebers' in the morning, but now he suspected that his horse's hooves wouldn't find a purchase in the icy surface that covered the ground. He dressed again in the dark and let himself out of the house, and he discovered that his fears were correct. When he stomped on the snow as strongly as he was able, his boot couldn't break through the hard white surface.

In the barn he found the skates Alden had made for him and strapped them on. The track leading to the house had frozen roughly because of use, and made for difficult going, but at the end of the track was open prairie, and the windswept surface of the hardened snow was smooth as gla.s.s. He skated down gleaming moonpath, at first tentatively and then with longer and freer strokes as confidence returned, venturing far out into flatness like a vast arctic sea, hearing only the hissing of his blades and the sound of his labored breathing.

Finally, winded, he drew up and examined the strange world of the frozen prairie at night. Quite close and alarmingly loud, a wolf sounded its quavering banshee call, and the hairs lifted on the back of Rob J.'s head. If he were to fall, perhaps to break a leg, winter-starved predators would gather within minutes, he knew. The wolf howled again, or perhaps it was another; there was in the wail everything Rob didn't want, it was a call composed of loneliness and hunger and inhumanity, and at once he began to move toward home, skating more carefully and more tentatively than he had done before, but fleeing as though pursued.

When he returned to the cabin he checked to see that neither Alex nor the baby had kicked off his covers. They were sleeping sweetly. When he got into bed his wife turned and thawed his frigid face with her b.r.e.a.s.t.s. She made a small purring and moaning, a sound of love and contrition, taking him into a welcoming tangle of arms and legs. The doctor was weatherbound; Grueber would be all right without him so long as Makwa was there, he thought, and gave himself to warmth of mouth and flesh and soul, to familiar pastime more mysterious than moonlight, more pleasurable even than flying over ice with no wolves.

23.

TRANSFORMATIONS.

If Robert Jefferson Cole had been born in northern Britain, at birth he would have been called Rob J., and Robert Judson Cole would have become Big Rob, or just plain Rob without the initial. To Coles in Scotland, the J was retained by a first son only until he himself became the father of a first son, when it was pa.s.sed on gracefully and without question. It wasn't in Rob J.'s mind to disturb a family practice of centuries, but this was a new country for Coles, and those he loved weren't mindful of hundreds of years of family tradition. Much as he tried to explain to them, they never turned the new son into Rob J. To Alex, at first the small brother was Baby. To Alden, he was the Boy. It was Makwa-ikwa who gave him the name that became part of him. One morning the child, a crawler then, and just beginning to mouth words, sat on the dirt floor of her hedonoso-te with two of the three children of Moon and Comes Singing. The children were Anemoha, Little Dog, who was three, and Cisaw-ikwa, Bird Woman, who was a year younger. They were playing with corncob dolls, but the little white boy crept away from them. In the dim light that fell through the smoke holes he saw the medicine woman's water drum and, dropping his hand on it, produced a sound that caused every head in the longhouse to raise.

The boy crawled away from the sound, but not back to the other children. Instead, like a man on an inspection, he went to her store of herbs and stopped gravely before each pile, examining them with deep interest.

Makwa-ikwa smiled. "You are uibenu migegee-ieh, a little shaman," she said.

Thereafter, Shaman was what she called him, and others quickly took up the name because somehow it seemed to fit and he answered to it at once. There were exceptions. Alex liked to call him Brother, and Alex was Bigger to him, because from the start their mother spoke to them of one another as Baby Brother and Bigger Brother. Only Lillian Geiger tried to call the child Rob J., because Lillian had heard what her friend had said about his family's custom, and Lillian was a great believer in family and in tradition. But even Lillian forgot and called the boy Shaman at times, and Rob J. Cole (the man) quickly gave up the struggle and retained his initial. Initialed or not, he knew that out of his hearing, certain of his patients called him Injun Cole and some called him "that f.u.c.kin Sauk-lovin sawbones." But broadminded or bigots, they all knew him for a good doctor. When he was summoned he was content to go to them whether they loved him or not.

Where once Holden's Crossing had been only a description in Nick Holden's printed broadsides, now there was a Main Street of stores and houses, known to one and all as the Village. It boasted the Town Offices; Haskins' General Store: Notions, Groceries, Farm Implements & Dry Goods; N. B. Reimer's Feeds & Seeds; the Holden's Crossing Inst.i.tution for Savings and Mortgage Company; a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Anna Wiley, who also served meals to the public; the shop of Jason Geiger, Apothecary; Nelson's Saloon (it was to have been an inn in Nick's early plans for the town, but because of the presence of Mrs. Wiley's boardinghouse, it never became anything more than a low-ceilinged room with a long bar); and the stables and smithy of Paul Williams, General Farrier. From her frame house in the Village, Roberta Williams, wife of the blacksmith, did custom sewing and dressmaking. For several years Harold Ames, an insurance man over in Rock Island, came to the Holden's Crossing general store every Wednesday afternoon to transact business. But as the government land parcels began to be all taken up, and as some of the would-be farmers failed and began to sell their prairie holdings to newcomers, the need for a realty office became obvious and Carroll Wilk-enson came and set up as a real-estate man and insurance agent. Charlie Andreson-who, a few years later, also became the president of the bank-was elected mayor of the town in the first election and every one thereafter, for years. Andreson was generally liked, though there was n.o.body who didn't understand that he was the chosen mayor of Nick Holden and at all times was in Nick's watch pocket. The same went for the sheriff. It hadn't taken Mort London more than a single year to discover he wasn't a farmer. There wasn't enough joinery work around to give him a steady living, because homesteaders did their own carpentry whenever it was possible. So when Nick offered to back him in a run for sheriff, Mort agreed eagerly. He was a placid man who minded his own business, which mostly was keeping the drunks quiet in Nelson's. It mattered to Rob J. who was the sheriff. Every doctor in the county was a deputy coroner, and the sheriff decided who would conduct the autopsy when a death occurred as a result of a crime or an accident. Oftentimes an autopsy was the only way a country doctor could do the dissecting that made it possible to keep surgical skills honed. Rob J. always adhered to scientific standards as rigorous as Edinburgh's when he did a postmortem, and he weighed all vital organs and kept his own records. Fortunately, he always had gotten on well with Mort London, and he did a lot of autopsies.

Nick Holden had been returned to the state legislature three terms in a row. At times some of the citizens of the town became annoyed at his air of proprietorship, reminding one another that he might own most of the bank, and part of the mill and the general store and that saloon, and Lord alone knew how many acres, but by G.o.d he didn't own them and he didn't own their land! But generally they watched with pride and astonishment as he operated like a real politician down there in Springfield, drinking bourbon whiskey with the Tennessee-born governor and serving on legislative committees and pulling strings so fast and so skillfully that all they could do was spit and grin and shake their heads.

Nick had two ambitions, held openly. "I want to bring the railroad to Holden's Crossing, so mebbe someday this town will become a city," he told Rob J. one morning, enjoying a kingly cigar on the porch bench at Haskins' store. "And I sorely want to be elected to the United States Congress. I'm not gonna get us a railroad staying down there in Springfield."

They hadn't pretended real warmth since Nick had tried to talk him out of marrying Sarah, but they both were friendly whenever they met. Now Rob regarded him doubtfully. "Getting into the U.S. House of Representatives will be hard, Nick. You'll need votes from the much larger congressional district, not just from around here. And there's old Singleton." The inc.u.mbent congressman, Samuel Turner Singleton, known throughout Rock Island County as "our own Sammil," was firmly entrenched.

"Sammil Singleton is old. And soon he's gonna die or retire. When that time comes, I'll make everyone in the district see that a vote for me is a vote for prosperity." Nick grinned at him. "I've done all right by you, haven't I, Doctor?"

He had to admit it was so. He was a stockholder in both the grain mill and the bank. Nick also had controlled the financing of the general store and the saloon but hadn't invited Rob J. to partic.i.p.ate in those businesses. Rob understood: his roots were sunk deeply in Holden's Crossing now, and Nick never wasted blandishments when they weren't necessary.

The presence of Jay Geiger's pharmacy and the steady flow of settlers into the region soon attracted another physician to Holden's Crossing. Dr. Thomas Beckermann was a sallow middle-aged man with bad breath and red eyes. Lately of Albany, New York, he settled in a small frame house in the Village, hard by the apothecary shop. He wasn't a medical-school graduate, and he was vague when discussing the details of his apprenticeship, which he said had been taken with a Dr. Cantwell in Concord, New Hampshire. At first Rob J. viewed his coming with appreciation. There were enough patients for two doctors who weren't greedy, and the presence of another medical man should have meant a sharing of the long, difficult house calls that often took him far into the prairie. But Beckermann was a poor doctor and a steady, heavy drinker, and the community quickly observed both facts. So Rob J. continued to ride too far and treat too many.

This became unmanageable only in the springtime, when the annual epidemics struck, with fevers along the rivers, the Illinois mange on the prairie farms, and communicable illnesses everywhere. Sarah had nurtured the picture of herself at her husband's side, administering to the afflicted, and the spring after her younger son's birth she waged a strong campaign to be allowed to ride out with Rob J. and help him. Her timing was bad. That year, the troubling diseases were milk fever and measles, and by the time she began to pester him, he already had very sick people, a few of them dying, and he couldn't pay her sufficient attention. So Sarah watched Makwa-ikwa ride out with him all through another spring, and her inner torment returned.

By midsummer the epidemics had quieted and Rob resumed the more routine pattern of his days. One evening, after he and Jay Geiger had restored themselves with Mozart's Duet in G for violin and viola, Jay raised the sensitive question of Sarah's unhappiness. By now they were comfortable best friends, yet Rob was taken aback that Geiger should presume to enter a world he had considered so inviolably private.

"How do you come to know of Sarah's feelings?"

"She talks to Lillian. Lillian talks to me," Jay said, and struggled with a moment of abashed silence. "I hope you understand. I speak out of ... genuine affection ... for you both."

"I do. And along with your affectionate concern, do you have ... advice?"

"For your wife's sake, you have to get rid of the Indian woman."

"There's nothing but friendship between us," he said, failing to control his resentment.

"It doesn't matter. Her presence is the source of Sarah's unhappiness."

"There's no place for her to go! There's no place for any of them to go. The whites say they're savages and won't let them live the way they used to. Comes Singing and Moon are the best d.a.m.n farm workers you could hope for, but no one else around here is willing to hire a Sauk. Makwa and Moon and Comes Singing keep the rest of the pack going, with what little money they earn from me. She works hard and she's loyal, and I can't send her away to starvation or worse."

Jay sighed and nodded, and didn't speak of it again.

Delivery of a letter was a rarity. Almost an occasion. One came for Rob J., sent on by the postmaster at Rock Island, who had held it for five days until Harold Ames, the insurance agent, made a business trip to Holden's Crossing.

Rob opened the envelope eagerly. It was a long letter from Dr. Harry Loomis, his friend in Boston. When he finished reading, he went back and read it again, more slowly. And then again.

It had been written on November 20, 1846, and had taken all winter to reach its destination. Harry obviously was on the road to a fine career, a Boston career. He reported that he'd recently been appointed an a.s.sistant professor of anatomy at Harvard, and he hinted at impending marriage to a lady named Julia Salmon. But the letter was more medical intelligence than personal report. A discovery now made pain-free surgery a reality, Harry wrote with discernible excitement. It was the gas known as ether, which had been used for years as a solvent in the manufacture of waxes and perfumes. Harry reminded Rob J. of past experiments held in Boston hospitals to a.s.sess the painkilling effectiveness of nitrous oxide, known as "laughing gas." He added roguishly that Rob might remember recreations with nitrous oxide that were conducted outside of hospitals. Rob did remember, with combined guilt and pleasure, sharing with Meg Holland a flask of laughing gas Harry had given to him for a little party. Perhaps time and distance made the memory better and funnier than it had been.

"On October 5 just past," Loomis wrote, "another experiment, this time with ether, was scheduled to take place in the operating dome of the Ma.s.sachusetts General Hospital. Past attempts to kill pain with nitrous oxide had been complete failures, with galleries of students and doctors jeering and calling out 'Humbug! Humbug!' The attempts had taken on a tone of hilarity, and the scheduled operation at the Ma.s.sachusetts General promised to be more of the same. The surgeon was Dr. John Collins Warren. I'm certain you'll remember that Dr. Warren is a crusty, hardened cutter, more known for his swiftness with the scalpel than for his patience with fools. So a number of us flocked to the surgical dome that day as if attending an entertainment.

"Picture it, Rob: the man delivering the ether, a dentist named Morton, is late. Warren, vastly annoyed, uses the delay to lecture on how he will proceed to cut a large tumor from the cancerous tongue of a young man named Abbott, who already sits in the red operating chair, half-dead with terror. In fifteen minutes Warren runs out of words and grimly takes out his watch. The gallery already has started to t.i.tter, when here arrives the errant dentist. Dr. Morton administers the gas and presently announces the patient is ready. Dr. Warren nods, still in fury, rolls up his sleeves, and selects his scalpel. Aides pull open Abbott's jaw and grasp his tongue. Other hands pin him to the operating chair so he won't thrash. Warren bends over him and makes the first swift, deep slash, a lightning motion that brings blood trickling from a corner of young Abbott's mouth.

"He doesn't stir.

"There is utter silence in the gallery. The slightest sigh or groan will be heard. Warren bends back to his task. He makes a second incision, and then a third. Carefully, quickly, he excises the tumor, sc.r.a.pes it, applies st.i.tches, presses a sponge to control bleeding.

"The patient sleeps. The patient sleeps. Warren straightens up. If you can credit it, Rob, the eyes of that caustic autocrat are wet!

" 'Gentlemen,' he says, 'this is no humbug.' "

The discovery of ether as a surgical painkiller has been announced in the medical press of Boston, Harry reported. "Our Holmes, ever quick off the mark, already has suggested that it be called anaesthesia, from the Greek word for insensibility."

Geiger's Pharmacy didn't stock ether.

"But I'm a fair chemist," Jay said thoughtfully. "I can make it, probably. I'd have to distill grain alcohol with sulfuric acid. I couldn't use my metal still, because the acid would burn right through it. But I own a gla.s.s coil and a big bottle."

When they searched his shelves, they found lots of alcohol but no sulfuric acid.

"Can you make sulfuric acid?" Rob asked him.

Geiger scratched his chin, clearly enjoying himself. "For that, I'll need to mix sulfur with oxygen. I've plenty of sulfur, but the chemistry is a mite complicated. Oxidize sulfur once and you get sulfur dioxide. I'll need to oxidize the sulfur dioxide again, to make sulfuric acid. But ... sure, why not?"

In a few days, Rob J. had a supply of ether. Harry Loomis had explained how to a.s.semble an ether cone out of wire and rags. First Rob tried the gas on a cat who remained insensible for twenty-two minutes. Then he deprived a dog of consciousness for more than an hour, such a long time that it became obvious ether was dangerous and must be treated with respect. He administered the gas to a male lamb before castration, and the gonads came off without a bleat.

Finally he instructed Geiger and Sarah in ether's use, and they gave it to him. He was unconscious for only a few minutes, because nervousness made them miserly with the dose, but it was a singular experience.

Several days later, Gus Schroeder, already down to eight and one-half fingers, got the index finger of his good hand, the right hand, caught under his stone boat and ground to a pulp. Rob gave him the ether, and Gus woke up with seven and one-half fingers and asked when the operating would begin.

Rob was stunned by possibilities. He felt as though he had been given a glimpse of the limitless stretches beyond the stars, aware at once that ether was more powerful than the Gift. The Gift was shared by only a few members of his family, but every doctor in the world now would be able to operate without causing torturous pain. In the middle of the night Sarah came down to the kitchen and found her husband sitting alone.

"Do you feel all right?"

He was studying the colorless liquid in a gla.s.s bottle, as if memorizing it.

"If I'd had this, Sarah, I wouldn't have hurt you, those times I operated."

"You did very well without it. Saved my life, I know."

"This stuff." He held up the bottle. To her it looked no different from water. "It will save lots of lives. It's a sword against the Black Knight."

Sarah hated when he spoke of death as a person who might open the door and walk into their house at any moment. She hugged her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s with her white arms and shivered with the night chill. "Come to bed, Rob J.," she said.

Next day Rob began to contact doctors in the region, inviting them to a meeting. It was held a few weeks later in a room above the feed store in Rock Island. By that time Rob J. had used ether on three other occasions. Seven doctors and Jason Geiger a.s.sembled and listened to what Loomis had written, and Rob's report of his own cases.

Reactions ranged from great interest to open skepticism. Two of those present ordered ether and ether cones from Jay. "It's a pa.s.sing fad," Thomas Beckermann said, "like all that nonsense about hand-washing." Several of the doctors smiled, because everyone was aware of Rob Cole's eccentric use of soap and water. "Maybe metropolitan hospitals can spend time on such things. But no bunch of doctors in Boston should try to tell us how to practice medicine on the western frontier."

The other doctors were more discreet than Beckermann. Tobias Barr said he liked the experience of meeting with other physicians to share ideas, and he suggested that they form the Rock Island County Medical Society, which they proceeded to do. Dr. Barr was elected president. Rob J. was elected corresponding secretary, an honor he couldn't refuse, because everyone present was given an office or the chairmanship of a committee that Tobias Barr described as being of genuine importance.

That was a bad year. On a hot, sticky afternoon toward the end of summer, when the crops were reaching ripeness, very quickly the sky became heavy and black. Thunder rumbled and lightning cleaved the roiling clouds. Weeding her garden, Sarah saw that far out on the prairie a slim funnel extended earthward from the cloud ma.s.s. It twisted like a giant snake and emitted a serpentine hissing that became a loud roar as its mouth reached the prairie and began to suck up dirt and debris.

It was moving away from her, but still Sarah ran to find her children and bring them down into the cellar.

Eight miles away, Rob J. had watched the tornado from afar too. It was gone in a few minutes, but when he rode up to Hans Buckman's farm he saw that forty acres of prime corn had been leveled. "As if Satan wielded a great big scythe," Buckman observed bitterly. Some farmers lost both corn and wheat. The Muellers' old white mare was sucked up into the vortex and spat out lifeless in an adjoining pasture a hundred feet away. But no human lives had been lost, and everyone knew that Holden's Crossing had been lucky.

People were still congratulating themselves when epidemic broke out in the autumn. It was the season when the cool crispness of the air was supposed to guarantee vigor and good health. The first week of October eight families came down with a malady Rob J. couldn't put a name to. It was a fever accompanied by some of the bilious symptoms of typhoid, yet he suspected it wasn't typhoid. When he began to hear of at least one new case every day, he knew they were in for it.

He had started toward the longhouse to tell Makwa-ikwa to prepare to ride out with him, but he changed directions and walked to the kitchen of his own house.

"People are beginning to get a nasty fever, and it'll spread, for certain. I may be out there for weeks."

Sarah was nodding gravely, to show she understood. When he asked if she wanted to come with him, her face came alive in a way that dispelled his doubts.

"You'll be away from the boys," he cautioned.

"Makwa will care for them while we're gone. Makwa's really good with them," she said.

They left that afternoon. This early in an epidemic, it was Rob's way to ride to any house where he heard the disease was present, trying to put out the fire before it became a conflagration. He saw that each case started the same way, with sudden high temperature or with inflamed throat followed by the fever. Usually there was diarrhea early, with lots of yellow-green bile. In every patient the mouth became covered with small papillae, regardless of whether the tongue was dry or moist, blackish or whitish.

Within a week Rob J. knew that if the patient had no additional symptoms, death was coming. If the early symptoms were followed by chills and pain in the extremities, often severe, the patient probably would recover. Boils and other abscesses, erupting at the end of the fever, were favorable signs. He had no idea how to treat the disease. Since the early diarrhea often broke the high fever, he sometimes tried to encourage its onset by administering physic. When the patients shook with chills, he gave them Makwa-ikwa's green tonic doctored with a little alcohol, to induce sweating, and blistered them with mustard plasters. Soon after the epidemic began, he and Sarah met Tom Beckermann riding out to fever victims.

"Typhoid, for sure," Beckermann said. Rob didn't think so. There were no red spots on the abdomen, and no one was hemorrhaging from the a.n.u.s. But he didn't argue. Whatever was striking people down, calling it by one name or another wouldn't make it any less scary. Beckermann told them two of his patients had died the previous day, following copious bleeding and cupping. Rob did his best to argue against bleeding a patient to fight fever, but Beckermann was the kind of physician unlikely to follow any treatment recommended by the only other doctor in town. They didn't spend more than a few minutes with Dr. Beckermann before saying good-bye. Nothing bothered Rob J. more than a bad physician.

At first it felt strange to have Sarah with him instead of Makwa-ikwa. Sarah couldn't have tried harder, hastening to do whatever he asked. The difference was that he had to ask and he had to teach, whereas Makwa had come to know what was needed without his telling her. In front of patients or riding between houses, he and Makwa had maintained long and comfortable silences; at first Sarah talked and talked, happy for a chance to be with him, but as they treated more patients and exhaustion became the rule, she turned quieter.

The disease spread quickly. Usually, if someone in a household became sick, all the other family members caught it. Yet Rob J. and Sarah went from house to house and didn't come down with anything, as if they wore invisible armor. Every three of four days they tried to return home for a bath, a change of clothing, a few hours of sleep. The house was warm and clean, full of the smell of the hot food Makwa prepared for them. They held their sons for a little while, then packed the green tonic Makwa had brewed while they were gone and had mixed with a little wine at Rob's instruction, and they rode out again. In between visits home, they slept huddled together wherever they could drop, usually in haylofts or on the floor in front of somebody's fire.

One morning a farmer named Benjamin Haskell walked into his barn and became pop-eyed at the sight of the doctor with his arm up his woman's skirt. That was the closest they came to making love during the entire epidemic, six weeks. The leaves had been turning color when it began, and there was a dusting of snow on the ground when it ended.

The day they came home and realized it was unnecessary for them to ride out again, Sarah sent the children in the buckboard with Makwa to Mueller's farm to fetch baskets of winter apples for making sauce. She took a long soak in front of the fire and then boiled more water and prepared Rob's bath, and when he was in the tin tub she came back and washed him very slowly and gently, the way they had washed patients, yet very different from that, using her hand instead of a washcloth. Damp and shivering, he hastened after her through the chill house, up the stairs, under the warm bedcovers, where they stayed for hours, until Makwa was back with the boys.

Sarah was briefly with child a few months later, but she miscarried early, frightening Rob because her blood splashed, fairly leaping out of her before the hemorrhages finally ceased. He realized it would be dangerous for her to conceive again, and after that he took precautions. He watched anxiously for signs of black shadows settling over her, as often happened after a woman aborted a fetus, but aside from a pale pensiveness that manifested itself in long periods of thought with her violet eyes closed, she appeared to recover as quickly as could be hoped.

"No daughter," she said one night after he had banked the fire, taking his hand and placing it on her flat stomach.

"No. But," he pointed out, "come spring, you'll be able to ride out with me to fight the fevers," and she allowed that that was so.

24.

SPRING MUSIC.

So, often and for long periods, the Cole boys were left in the care of the Sauk woman. Shaman became as accustomed to Makwa-ikwa's crushed-berries smell as he was to the white odor of his natural mother, as accustomed to her darkness as to Sarah's milky blondness. And then, more accustomed. If Sarah walked away from mothering, Makwa accepted the opportunity eagerly, holding the man-child, the son of Cawso wabeskiou, to the warmth of her bosom and finding a fulfillment she hadn't experienced since she had held her own infant brother, He-Who-Owns-Land. She cast a love spell over the little white boy. Sometimes she sang to him: Ni-na ne-gi-se ke-wi-to-se-me-ne ni-na,

Ni-na ne-gi-se ke-wi-to-se-me-ne ni-na,

Wi-a-ya-ni,

Ni-na ne-gi-se ke-wi-to-se-me-ne ni-na.

I walk with you, my son,