When I came into the house, the smell just about knocked me dead. The windows were shut tight and the stove was hot. There was no cheer in the dark and gloomy parlor. Mrs. Bontrager lay perfectly still under a pile of quilts in the parlor. Her hair had turned pure white and her skin was dry and pale as a piece of paper. Until she opened her eyes and screamed, I thought she was dead. The scream went on and on, and didn’t stop until she gasped for breath. It started again, got louder and screechier until it tailed off to a low moan.
Rachel had aged twenty years. I hardly recognized her. All that corn-shuck pretty hair was bound up in a tight braid around her head and covered with a little cap. She wore a plain long gray homespun dress, fastened up to her neck. She knelt down and whispered to her mother while Mr. Bontrager and the boys went to the barn. The shrieking stopped and Rachel’ ma opened her rheumy eyes and looked at the doctor.
“Help me, stop the pain, oh, make the pain go away,” she said in a half whisper, half moan as if it was her last breath.
Doc filled the big metal syringe with morphine sulfate and pressed the needle into her arm. She let out another shriek, then pretty soon opened her eyes like she had come back from some distant terrible place. Her voice was low, almost normal, like there wasn’t a thing in the world wrong. “Thank you,” said she.
Folks didn’t mind sickness or even death so much as they feared pain and the doctor’s most important job was to take away the pain. Doc once said that morphine was the most important medicine because it took away the worst kinds of pain. It struck me how some diseases, like the consumption that took Pa, didn’t cause much pain.
“Boil water and make a one percent solution of carbolic,” Doc said.
Rachel walked to the kitchen slow on heavy feet like she was plumb worn out. Neither of us said a word while we waited for the pan of water. I couldn’t think of a thing to say until I remembered the oranges. “These are for you. They came all the way from Floridy on the train,” said I.
“What are they?” She asked.
“Oranges. You skin ‘em and eat what’s inside.”
“They are too pretty to eat,” she said.
“I’m real sorry about your mother. I had hoped to see you again but there weren’t any chances to come this way and you don’t come to town no more.”
She sniffled; big tears rolled down her cheeks. I patted her arm but she pulled away and dabbed her eyes with a cloth. I mixed carbolic acid into the boiling water. Doc had pulled back the curtains so the room to let in some light. He opened Mrs. Bontrager’s dress and pulled down her shift. I took one look and almost was sick to my stomach. Her breast was nothing like the softest, prettiest thing every man dreamed about, but was a terrible festering, hard mass of greenish, oozing flesh. Doc touched it and shook his head. His face was sad. “The cancer broke through the skin, is infected and causes terrible pain.” He gave a big sigh and washed away the pus with a cloth soaked in the carbolic solution. “Wash away the pus every day, then cover it with a cloth soaked in the carbolic solution,” Doc said to Rachel.
He left a big bottle of morphine sulfate on the table. “Give her a tablespoon when she has pain,” he said.
It was snowing hard and the sun was down when we hitched Sam to the sleigh and headed for home. Doc took a big slug of whiskey as soon as we started. He was in a dark mood and I wasn’t feeling so good about the big change that had come over Rachel. I didn’t pay attention to the road, figuring that the horse would know the way home. It wasn’t no more than a half hour when Sam foundered in a drift. I yelled and pulled on the reins, but he kicked and went plumb crazy. The sleigh tipped over into a big snowdrift and the lantern went out. I was flat on my back in the snow, but had the sense to dig out. “Doc, you alright,” I yelled. He didn’t answer. Sam took off back the way we came, with the sleigh over on its side.
The wind was making so much noise I almost didn’t hear his low moan. I felt in the snow with my hands and found Doc. He was half buried in the snow and his face was ice cold to my touch. I slapped his face and pulled on his arm. “Doc, come on, we gotta move or freeze to death,” I said.
I got him up on his feet, slung his arm over my shoulder and followed our tracks back towards the Bontrager’s. Doc took a step and fell on his face. It took all my strength to get him up so we could stagger along the road. It seeemed like half the night until we came to the house. I banged on the door until there was a light and old man Bontrager let us in. We were both shivering hard and Doc had a big bruise on his head. I wasn’t hurt, just cold. Rachel fixed hot cider and the boys piled up quilts and blankets on the floor for us to sleep. Doc came around, but went to sleep next to the stove. I lay awake, listening to the fire crackle. Sleep still hadn’t come when I heard a board creak on the stairs and then Rachel was right beside me, with a little candle lantern. She wore a long wool robe and where it fell apart I could see the top of her flannel nightgown. I thought I was dreaming the whole thing, but she put her hand on my cheek.
“Tom, you awake?”
“Yes.”
“I ate one of the oranges. It was so good. I thought about you most every day ever since you came here for the ice cream social.”
“I wanted to come back, but your pa warned me away.”
I wondered if she was going to slip in under the quilts, but instead a big wet tear rolled down her cheek. It glistened in the candle-light, same as when sun shines on drops of melting water dripping off a roof.
I reached out both hands to pull her close, but she leaned away and wouldn’t let me touch her.
“Tom, I was baptized and betrothed. You can’t never come back again.”
“But you said you wanted to go with me.”
“I’d druther go with you but it ain’t no use. Ma don’t want me to marry so young, but I got to marry Jacob Hartzler. Pa’s got it all arranged.”
“No,” I said, “you are supposed to marry me, when I finish school and get to be a doctor.”
“I got to take care of mamma and I won’t get married as long as she’s alive, but when she passes on then there ain’t nothin’ I can do.”
“Your ma just can’t die. There’s got to be medicine for cancer. I’ll study the books and find a cure.”
She let me hold her hand for a long time while we listened to the wind and to Doc snoring on the other side of the stove. When the candle burned low, she tiptoed into the kitchen and up the back stairs. There was a big hollow, dead-like place in my middle, like when Pa died. I must have drifted off to sleep until there was another of those long shrill screams at daylight. Doc didn’t look none too good, but he went upstairs and gave Mrs. Bontrager another injection of morphine.
Rachel acted like I wasn’t even in the same room while she fixed oatmeal and sliced bread. I didn’t feel like eating and went out to the barn with Walter the youngest Bontrager boy. During the night, he had found our horse.
“Is it true Rachel’s betrothed?” I asked. “She’s going to marry Jacob Hartzler when ma passes on account of he lives on the next farm and Pa wants his land in our family.”
“It ain’t right to marry her off to an older man just so your Pa can get more land,” said I. “That is how we arrange marriages,” said Walter. . It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, but there wasn’t anything to do about it.
The ride back was cold, but it wasn’t as cold and black as my heart. “Doc, there’s got to be a medicine for cancer, or maybe an operation,” I said.
“There’s nothing to do except treat the infection. That cancer is too big to cut out and medicine doesn’t help,” said Doc.
“If I find something, would you try it?”
“That’s wishful thinking, but I would try most anything.”
“It’s too bad Rachel has to take care of her mother and do all the work. The old man and the brothers don’t do a thing to help,” I said.
We jogged along for a spell. “I’ll see if Miss Pendelton will help care for her.”
Chapter Twenty Th
ree
Pa’s books were gone and Doc didn’t have anything on cancer remedies. I was stumped until I remembered Mr. Cromwell’s natural history library. I hunted through those books every afternoon for a week, looking for healing plants. I remembered most of them from Pa’s books, but found a new one, Catharanthus Roseus. It was a periwinkle that had been transplanted from Madagascar to the West Indies. According to “Beales Natural Remedies”, the natives in Madagascar healed skin cancers with a paste made from the ground up plant. I ran all the way home to tell Doc.
“It said so, right in the book. Periwinkle heals cancer,” I said.
“Tom, herbal remedies mostly just treat symptoms. There is nothing that will cure cancer. Forget about it.”
“But you said you would try anything.”
“First of all, we don’t have Periwinkle, and second, it’s just the word of some native halfway around the world,” Doc said.
I was mad at Doc and the whole world and had that desperate feeling like when there ain’t nothing to look forward to and the sky is falling. It didn’t help when warm weather brought out buds on the trees, the daffodils sprung up and skunk cabbage was peeping out from under last year’s leaves. It was the time of the year when the sap runs and a fella should really feel good. I was all empty inside and the big black cloud hangin’ over my head wouldn’t go away. Being a doctor was somehow all tangled up with Rachel and now the whole thing was busted. I moped around and couldn’t get interested in school or anything, not even when I helped Doc with operations. There wasn’t nothin’ that looked good to eat even after Aunt Alice dosed me with rhubarb. Doc said I looked peaked and fixed a tonic with iron and strychnine but nothin’ helped the miseries.
Part of it could have been that I didn’t feel like a kid no more. Aunt Alice let out my clothes on account of I kept growing taller and my shoulders were bigger. Now, when I looked in the mirror, there was about enough fuzz on my upper lip for a razor. Maybe these changes had something to do with why I couldn’t get Rachel out of my mind. I was daydreaming about opening up the top of her nightgown when Mr. Cromwell asked a fool question about the periodic table of chemical elements. I said it didn’t make any difference and I din’t know a damn thing about it and didn’t want to. He got red in the face and made a fist, like he was going to give me a punch. Instead he said I wasn’t worth a pot to piss in, was too dumb to ever amount to anything and it wasn’t worth his trouble to teach a complete idiot. He was still raving when I left the classroom and slammed the door. Goin’ to California or Colorado and prospecting for gold looked like the onliest thing to do. There wasn’t no one in Sandy Ford, except Aunt Alice, who would remember that I was even alive.
I didn’t eat hardly anything. I held my head in both hands and imagined how sorry Rachel would be if I was killed by Indians. Doc didn’t have no pity, “Tom, you haven’t split kindling wood for two days, the horses haven’t been groomed and Mr. Cromwell said you sassed him in school today. You lay around like a sick cat that needs a double dose of castor oil.”
Doc handed me a glass of water with a spoonful of whiskey, leaned back in his chair, sipped his toddy and got that thoughtful look, like when he was thinking up ways to do an operation. “You ain’t been right ever since we called on Mrs. Bontrager and fell in the snowdrift. It’s got something to do with that girl.”
I took down about half the whisky and pretty soon my head was spinning. It was plumb uncanny how he knew what ailed people. Rachel was my secret. Billy Malone didn’t even know about my plans for getting married. I figured that no one else in the whole world felt that way about a girl. It could have been the whisky or maybe I just needed to talk. I got to blabbering. “Ain’t nothing for me here, I’m going out west to fight Indians or find gold,” said I.
“It’s even worse than I thought. You got a bad case of puppy love.”
“Puppy love? I ain’t no dog.”
“When I was about your age, I just plumb worshipped a little red haired girl and thought I was about to die when she went off with an older fellow. Then about a month later, I felt the same way about young lady who sang in the church choir. Sometimes, the first one isn’t right and you got to keep trying until you find the right woman. I still have strong feelings for that woman in New Orleans, but it doesn’t do me any good to mope around. Is Rachel the only one you love?”
That set me back a little, on account of that night in bed with Mary, but that was somehow different. I let Doc’s question slide past and nodded, like I meant to say yes.
“The Bontragers have powerful religious beliefs and mostly speak a different language. You don’t do a lot of praying and churchgoing like those folks.”
That had worried me some, especially those times when the old man spent fifteen minutes praying over every meal. “I’d go to church with Rachel.”
“You might for a while, but how long would it last? Anyway, you can’t start out for California until summer. You have some time to think it over. How would you like to go to Chicago next week? You can see the sights while I visit Rush medical school and the county hospital.”
I grumped around for a day or too and got the chores done. Doc always made good sense and going to Chicago seemed like a durn good idea. We left the next day.
When the early morning train got to Bureau Junction, the Chicago Flyer was chuffin’ and getting up steam on the next track. A Negro conductor shouted, “All aboard”. We climbed on the first class carriage that was like nothin’ I ever dreamed about. The seats were soft as a feather pillow and you could fold them back, like a bed. Some people had come all the way from San Francisco, sleeping and eating on the train. The real rich folks had rooms all to themselves with a bed and washbasin and breakfast brought right to the door. The train had no more got started when a big black man in a white coat come around and said the dining car was open for breakfast. When she had got up to top speed, it was just plumb dizzying how fast the land went by. “Some trains go forty or even fifty miles an hour on straight stretches,” Doc said.
The dining car had real tables and chairs, fastened to the floors, and believe me, no one ever saw such fine eats as they had on that train. The forks and spoons were made out of pure silver and the dishes all had little gold rims, just like the plates that kings and queens eat off of. We started out with sweet coffee, smoky ham and eggs, biscuits with gravy, and at the end, a big piece of apple pie with a slice of cheese. I was just fuller’n a tick when I finished off that meal. Doc settled in and read a medical book. The towns and rivers whizzed by the window so fast things were a blur. Everything was new and powerful interesting and we hadn’t even got to Chicago.
Most of the people on the train were men, but there were a few women. There was a Pinkerton detective with a gun in his belt on the lookout for train robbers. It struck me that ridin’ the train and saving beautiful women from being robbed would be a noble profession. All those folks had fancy clothes, fine manners and talked different from ordinary folks. They looked awful rich, like they had struck gold in Californy. It was just plumb dizzying to hear them talk about how much money they had. Things would have to look real good in Chicago before I would change my mind about going to Californy to find gold or kill Indians.
Doc had on a fine new blue coat, gray pants and a clean shirt. I was feeling a mite shabby in my homemade clothes. Aunt Alice had let out the coat but it was still tight across the shoulders and the sleeves didn’t come no more than halfway past my elbows. The pants stopped a couple of inches above my ankles. That heavy wool was built to last, but it itched something terrible.
The train slowed for road crossings and bridges when we got near Chicago. It looked like we were right in the city, but it was just the outskirts. That city just went on and on, like as if every other town in the state was all set down side by side.
I was expecting a little depot like the one in Sandy Ford, but the train slid into a dark, long tunnel under a metal roof. The depot covered a whole city block with shops and boys shi
ning shoes and peddling newspapers. There were Chinamen with pigtails that hung halfway down their backs and even red Indians in town for a show. There was a lot of jangling and noise and confusion with people running this way and that to catch trains.
It looked like just about every human being in the whole world lived in Chicago. There were more people on one block than in our whole town. We had to push our way through crowds just to get to the street. I expected to see burned houses, but there were brand new shops and stores and brick buildings everywhere you looked. Some of them were three or four floors high and there was talk of building one up to ten stories. The men all dressed like millionaires with top hats and gold watch chains. The streets were full of horses and buggies and wagons hauling most everything you could think of. The most amazing thing was to see young fellows riding on two-wheeled velocipedes about as fast as a horse. My eyeballs just about sprung out of their sockets from lookin’ at the women. They out there in the middle of the day, looking in the store windows, chattering and all dressed in bright silk and satin dresses and big hats, like they were going to a party. Their titties busted out at the top of their gowns that were so short you could see their ankles. Some of those women had heels on their shoes so high it was a wonder they could even walk. One lady with a painted face gave me a big smile. Doc said she was a trollop. I didn’t know what he meant, but she sure was pretty. I couldn’t get over the jewelry stores, cosmetic shops and places that sold female finery. It looked as if the whole city was there just to please women.
We walked down the street and signed in at the brand new Palmer House hotel. Doc left his valise, but we didn’t go up to the room. He was anxious to get out to the hospital to see an operation.
Doc hailed a horse cab and away we went flying out to the County Hospital at 18th and Arnold Street. That part of the city hadn’t been burned and old tenement houses for poor folks were still there. The hospital was built of dirty red bricks in a low marshy place with mud puddles and trash all around. There was rubbish and even a dead dog in the street by the hospital. The meatpacking houses shed a powerful stink over the whole south side of the city.
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