The Cunning Man

by Robertson Davies

  Dr. Ogg was not an ornament of the medical profession, and he was rarely called to our house except in extreme emergencies. Dr. Ogg was a drunk and a failure. His wife had run away long ago to pursue a life of shame in Winnipeg, which must certainly have been more lively than life with Dr. Ogg. Since her departure the doctor had declined into dirt and moral squalor. His livelihood was earned chiefly by writing prescriptions for bottles of gin, whisky, and brandy, required regularly by the few hundred citizens of the village for ailments that Dr. Ogg identified. This was an era when the sale of intoxicating liquors was forbidden by law in Canada, but a qualified physician could prescribe them when they were imperatively needed, and qualified physicians regularly did so, though rarely on the scale of Dr. Ogg. As there was no pharmacy in the village he kept the stocks in his own professional premises, and thus had the advantage of being able to sell them at his own prices. He was, in fact, a bootlegger, raggedly cloaked in a physician’s gown, but when there was an emergency it was still remembered that he was also a doctor.

  Dr. Ogg appeared at my bedside, smelling strongly of disinfectant and brandy. He was reasonably sober, for he feared my father, who could have made trouble for him if he had become too much of a local disgrace. He examined me, and sniffed at me (I have never forgotten that), and beckoned my mother out of the room, to tell her that I had scarlet fever, probably in the form of scarlatina miliaris, and that it was an extremely dangerous disease. For the present there was nothing to be done except to keep me as comfortable as possible, and let the fever take its course.

  When he left, he went to my father’s office at the mine, and told him that it would be necessary to quarantine our house. Everybody had forgotten the fact, but Dr. Ogg was Medical Officer of Health in our district, and this was part of his duty. If the disease got to the Indians, he said, there would be hell to pay, because they had no resistance to it, and the consequences would be frightful. So, some telegraphing was done, and next day the east-bound train brought several red placards from Winnipeg, which were duly tacked on all the doors of our house, warning the public to keep its distance, because something not too remote from the plague lurked inside.

  My father, deeply reluctant, had to move out and camp in his office at the mine. Inside the house remained my mother, the Indian girl who served as “hired help,” and myself. My mother was my nurse, living in an adjacent room. Dr. Ogg visited us twice a day, and became more and more depressed and despondent. Why did not my mother and Dr. Ogg get the disease to which they were daily exposed? Why have I, in all my years of practice, never “caught” anything from a patient? I think I know but my theory would not look well in a medical journal.

  My temperature went from 103 to 105 and stayed there for several days. I was twice daily put in a “cold pack”—a sheet soaked in cold water, enclosed in a blanket—to reduce the fever, but without success. At last the thermometer rose to 106, and Dr. Ogg told my parents that I was not likely to live overnight.

  What happened then I know only because of what my mother told me many years later. As evening fell on the day when Dr. Ogg gave the bad news, some Indians began to appear on our lawn, outside my bedroom window; they made a clearing in the snow and set up a tent, a simple affair of poles leaning inward and bound together at the top—a tepee, or wigwam, covered in skins. My mother did not understand what was happening, and it was my father who told her, when he came for his usual sundown visit. She talked to him out of a window.

  “They’ve sent for Elsie Smoke,” said my father.

  My mother knew who Elsie Smoke was—a “wise woman,” a herbalist who sold charms against various misfortunes, and mixed some tonics and lenitives from stuff she gathered in the woods, and now and then applied mouldy bread to axe-cuts or serious injuries of the sort. This was before the discovery of penicillin, and Elsie’s remedy seemed to people like my mother to be dirty, irrational, and, if efficacious, it must be because of luck rather than any knowledge of the healing powers of mould.

  “What are they going to do?” said my mother. “We can’t have Elsie Smoke here. You know what Ogg said. I’ve got enough to bear without some sort of interference like this. Tell them to go away.”

  “I don’t think we should do that, Lily,” said my father. “I told you how grateful they were that you’re doing your best to keep the infection in our house and away from the reserve people. They want to help, if they can. It would be mean-spirited to turn them away. Not that I’m sure they’d go,” he added, remorsefully. Like my mother he had faced the fact that I was virtually certain to die, and that for both of them this would be a cruel blow. It is a measure of the confidence and love between them that my mother did not insist further, that Elsie Smoke and whatever came with her should be driven away.

  Of this, as I have said, I knew nothing, and my recollection of what happened subsequently is a mixture of what my mother told me and some phantasmagorical recollections of my own, in which she had no part. The tent was completed, and about seven o’clock at night Elsie Smoke made her appearance, carrying a number of objects my mother could not identify, and went into the tent, without nodding to or in any way recognizing the Indians who stood about, and who shortly afterward went off to their own homes. Not a sound or a sign of life came from the tent, until about ten o’clock, when bird-calls began to be heard from time to time. Bird-calls, on a night in the dead of winter; what could that be? After a time the bird-calls were intermingled with low animal cries, in which the howl of a wolf, not at full strength but low and as if at a great distance, was predominant. And then the tent began to shake, and it shook and it shook as if it would fly into the air. The bird-calls and animal voices gradually tapered off, and a very low drum-beat was heard in their place, and this went on, and on, until my mother said it seemed to be hypnotic, for she at last allowed her weariness to overcome her—she had been nursing me night and day for at least three weeks—and she laid herself down on her bed, partly dressed, in case I should call out in the night.

  I heard none of this, for I was in what I now know was a coma, and perhaps approaching death, for my fever was at its worst. But about midnight, I somehow became aware of the drum-beat and, although I had been most strictly commanded not to get out of bed, and although I was so weak and feverish that I could barely drag, I managed to creep to the window and look out at the shaking tent. The window did not fit perfectly, because no windows ever did so in those days, and some cold draughts crept through the crevices at the sides; I snuffed them up eagerly, although they almost made me vomit, in the condition I had reached. And there, I cannot tell for how long, I huddled on my knees, in my nightshirt, staring at the shaking tent and listening to the drum-beat which, as my mother said, was truly hypnotic.

  When my mother came in at six o’clock the next morning, I was lying on the floor by the window. She gave a shriek, for she was sure I was dead, but I was nothing of the sort, and was quickly huddled back into bed and—oh, how often this happened during that illness!—my temperature was taken, in my armpit as I could not bear to have anything for long in my swollen and painful mouth. To my mother’s astonishment it had dropped to 104 and by the time Dr. Ogg came at nine o’clock it was 102. I was sweating profusely.

  Ogg was delighted and quick to claim credit. “The crisis has passed,” he declared; “that’s what I had hoped for.”

  “But you said—”

  “I know, Mrs. Hullah, but I thought it best to prepare you for the worst. But I never gave up hope. Not personally, that’s to say. That has been my watchword, always. Never give up hope.”

  It was then that my mother thought to look out of the window. The tent was gone, and the only sign that it had been there—and what a sign!—was a patch of sere grass where the tent had stood. Not less than two feet of snow and ice had melted away beneath it.

  My mother told Ogg what had happened, though she had no idea of what importance might be attached to it. But Ogg had, and was very angry.

  “Damned inte
rfering old slut,” he said, with a very red face. “Her and her shaking tent and her damn-fool rubbish! I’d have her run out of this place if she wasn’t on the reserve and a little bit outside the law. She just keeps up superstition and gets in the way of the advance of science.”

  The good news was quickly taken to my father. The important Ogg did that, to gain whatever credit he could for my improvement, although he warned that too much significance should not be attached to my drop in temperature.

  It continued to drop, however, though not so dramatically, and in about a week it was normal or a tittle or so above, and I was able to embark on the long course of egg-nogs, very lightly flavoured with rum, with which my mother was determined to bring back my strength.

  It was ten weeks, however, before I was in any real sense recovered. There was a long and disgusting period when I had to scurf off the brown flakes of skin that were left behind by the fever. Ogg had a fine word for that. “Desquamation,” he called it, and insisted that I be gently brushed down while standing on a square of newspaper; and that every flake be gathered and burned, as it was still infectious, as was I. My mother was to wear a mask, so as not to inhale any of my body-dust.

  All this time my poor father was sleeping in his office, but at last I was able to wave to him out of the window of my room. As soon as I was declared non-infectious, Ogg demanded that the whole of our house be disinfected, which at that time meant plentiful swabbing and daubing with carbolic acid in solution. It ruined the finish on the furniture and of course it destroyed all the wallpapers, but my father was so delighted that he promised my mother a jaunt to Toronto for a complete refurnishing.

  This could not take place until after my mother’s illness. Ogg was officious about that, but it was perfectly plain that she was worn out with anxiety and nursing, and needed “building up” with one of Ogg’s most powerful tonics. It was an era of medicine when great faith was still reposed in tonics, which were chiefly composed of iron and a few bitter herbs mixed with cheap sherry. My father added tonics of his own, admirable wines from his cellar. He had always been a keen lover of wine since his student days in Montreal, and had plentiful stocks that saw him happily through the rigours of Prohibition. Ogg was sure his nostrums “made blood.” My father was equally sure his wines “made blood” and he even extended his theory to include me, and I had plenty of wine diluted with water every day, forming a taste that I have never lost. But of course this was “medicinal” and only incidentally pleasurable.

  Thus I suppose something like four or five months passed to include my convalescence and my mother’s, before my parents, armed with measurements of all sorts, took the train to Toronto to refurbish our house. It was decided—O joy beyond all telling!—that I should accompany them. They thought, kind folk, that after my brush with death I deserved a treat.

  It was thus that at the age of nine-going-on-ten I made my first descent upon the city that has enveloped my life and which I hold in great affection. London is romantic and historically splendid; Paris is infinitely beautiful and has an air of louche aristocracy; Vienna has an ambiguity of spirit—a bittersweet savour—which enchants me. But Toronto—flat-footed, hard-breathing, high-aspiring Toronto—has a very special place in my heart, like a love one is somewhat ashamed of but cannot banish. I was lucky to visit it first in spring, when the trees were coming into leaf, for it is a city of trees and they are its chief beauty, all through the year. If ever it loses its trees it will be like a woman who has lost her hair.

  We stayed at the King Edward Hotel and, while my parents spent long days in Eaton’s, choosing wallpapers and hangings, I was left in the hotel library, where various hotel people kept an eye on me. But I was up to no mischief; the library was the usual characterless hotel assemblage of books, except that somebody had furnished a tall shelf with a long run of the Illustrated London News extending back into the eighties and nineties, over which I pored in a kind of enchantment, forming a totally erroneous idea of the appearance and life of the capital city of the British Empire. Best finds of all were pictures and accounts of the first appearance of many of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, and to me they were as if written yesterday. We made one memorable visit to the theatre, the Princess on King Street, long gone to make room for University Avenue, where we saw Fritzi Scheff in Mlle. Modiste, and I experienced my first conscious stirrings of sex as I gazed at her beautiful legs. I had never been in a theatre before, and to this day even the most heavy-breathing drama of degradation and social injustice has a certain glamour for me; I always hope that a leg may appear to lighten the darkness.

  By far the most significant part of this swoop upon civilization was a visit to an eminent physician, Dr. James Robb, who was to look me over and pronounce on my condition. He took a long time about it, and I now recall him as a thorough and expert diagnostician. Not much of a psychologist, however, for when he had listened and probed and punched me, he proceeded to tell my parents what he had discovered, while I was still in the room, standing by my mother’s chair. I was, he said, “delicate” and must be treated accordingly; scarlet fever had left me with a somewhat dubious heart and a considerable loss of hearing in my left ear. All things considered, I had come off lightly from my encounter with a dangerous and insidious disease, but I must under no circumstances be overtaxed.

  This was of utmost importance to my future, because whoever declares a child to be “delicate” thereby crowns and anoints a tyrant.

  (7)

  School was the problem. How was I to get any sort of education? I was already ten and had never been to school in my life. The local school was a Catholic mission school where the nuns spent all of each morning teaching prayers and the Catechism. That would never do for my parents, who never went to church, even when that was possible, but whose Protestant prejudices were unimpaired. There was no school on the reservation; the Ojibwa could attend the mission school if they wished, and they did not wish. The only solution was for my parents to teach me.

  Not a bad solution, as it happened. My father was a good mathematician, in the engineering mode, and algebra and geometry were at his fingers’ ends. With them, he mingled some science, as it related to engineering, which was much more practical than any science I learned later at Colborne. More interesting to me were his demonstrations, on our walks, of the essentials of geology. My mother took on geography and Latin, and they united on history (my father was greatly concerned about Napoleon’s campaigns), and literature, which meant unlimited reading and much memorizing of poetry. Every morning I had lessons; every afternoon I was free to read, or play, or roam.

  If I roamed, however, it had to be under the care of Eddu, and I loathed and despised Eddu, who reciprocally loathed and despised me.

  He was a Métis lad, about thirteen, I suppose, who had a bad leg because long ago he had been caught in a trap in the woods. Mrs. Smoke had given him her bread-mould treatment, but he still walked with a hirpling gait locally called the string-halt. His disability was supposed in some mysterious way to create a sympathy for me, the delicate child, but it did nothing of the kind. There was a notion that I would learn some French from Eddu, but at its best his French was a patois and when he wanted to tease or humiliate me it retreated into a muddle of French, English, Ojibwa, and a dash of Gaelic that was called Bungee, or Red River dialect, which baffled me. Eddu’s real name was Jean-Paul, but he was called Eddu for no reason I ever heard.

  My dislike for him might be called snobbish and fastidious, but in my experience snobbery sometimes means no more than a rejection of what is truly inferior, and if mankind had never been fastidious I do not suppose that haute cuisine would ever have displaced hunks of meat parched over a smoky fire. I did not like Eddu because he suffered from the most overwhelming adolescent sexual erethism I have ever encountered. Put more bluntly, Eddu was unappeasably horny.

  The very first day that Eddu, officially charged with the guardianship of my delicacy, took me into the woods, he stopped as
soon as we were among the trees and showed me his penis, which was in a high state of excitability. He demanded that I should show him mine, which I refused to do, less because of modesty than from fear of where this might lead. Not that I had any notions as to where it might lead, but I sensed that this was dangerous business. He jeered at me, and said I probably had nothing to show. He wanted me to touch his, to test its heat and rigidity, and I did so tentatively and without enthusiasm. He was like that all the time, he said, and it explained his somewhat stooped and loping walk. The girls in the village and on the reserve all knew about him and some of them permitted him the favour of a “feel,” so that he was an expert on the subject of local female adolescence or, as he said, “How they was comin’ along.” There were others who allowed him an intimacy he called “stink-finger.” As described by Eddu this game seemed as prolonged and ecstatic as anything in the Kama Sutra. I could watch him with the girls, if I liked. I did not like. Without knowing precisely how or why trouble would come of that, I had a deep intuition that I should keep clear of it.

  I was not ignorant of sex. I had read a good deal about it in the works of Sir Walter Scott. Love, I knew, was a very fine thing, and for me it took the form of an idealization of Fritzi Scheff. Like any country child I had seen animals “at it” and vaguely discerned what it was they were at, but I did not make the leap from the animal to the human experience because animals were, after all, animals and we were not. My parents never said anything about this matter, assuming perhaps that I was too delicate to know about it, and anyhow, what was the good of putting ideas in a boy’s mind, where they would occur in plenty of time. About Eddu they had no inkling whatever.

  I very quickly reached an arrangement with Eddu; I would go my way and he would go his, and he could collect his dollar a week for guarding me without any fear that I would tattle on him. I have never since thought of Eddu as an exemplar of natural man; he was not like an animal because animals have a sexual restraint that Eddu lacked, and they have their chief business to attend to, which is getting enough to eat to keep them healthy. Eddu was a product of civilization, which has made it possible for a man to devote his whole attention to sex, to make a primary pastime and hobby of it, and indeed to live for it. Eddu’s future, I know now, would have been happiness as he understood it until he was about eighteen, after which he would spread syphilis among his male and female companions, and would be barking mad before he was thirty, This is not nature: this is civilization gone askew.