Crooks rose.
“Oh, and I nearly forgot. Memory's not as sharp as it used to be. We've cancelled the plans to expand the warehouse. Inventory's not as robust as we expected. So William, you can have your wheat beer and cabbages.”
THEY FOUND ALEXIS seated at the edge of the cot. When the men entered the room, he slowly began to rise, but Crooks told him to sit.
“You're the wounded man. Sit. Sit, I beg you. And my, but you've lost weight. Look at you. Practically skin and bones. Why don't we send up a few pounds of salt pork for this lad? Can we do that, Doctor?”
Beaumont nodded. “If you wish. He's taking some solid food.”
“Very well then. Teddy, see to it that we send up some salted pork for Alexis St. Martin. And some for the doctor and Elias as well.”
Alexis began to speak, but Crooks silenced him. “Not a word of protest, lad. It's a gift. You are a most fortunate man, you know that? Most fortunate.” He spoke in French for a few moments.
Alexis nodded. “Il est mon saveur.” He pointed at Beaumont.
“Yes indeed he is,” Crooks said. “Your savior. We miss you at the store, Alexis. Your singing.” Crooks turned to Beaumont and Farnham. “You know, gentlemen, he's got a talent for song? That's right. And his English isn't half bad.” He turned back to face Alexis.
“Soon as you're well enough, we'll have you back and singing. But until then, you rest and get your strength back. I've a gift for you. Un cadeau.” Crooks held out the package with two hands. Alexis reached out to take it but then winced and withdrew his hand.
“His chest's still quite sore.” Beaumont said.
Elias took the gift.
“Here now, Alexis. I'll put this back by your bedside, we can open it later.”
The four men stood gazing at Alexis. A tinkling of musical chimes broke the silence. Crooks reached into his vest pocket for his gold-cased pocket watch.
“Tempus fugit, Teddy. We must get back to the store.” He returned the watch to his vest and smiled at Alexis. “Well then, Alexis, time is money, and we've got chores to tend to. Good day to you.”
“Good day, Mr. Crooks. Thank you for the gift.”
After Crooks and Mathews left, Elias and Beaumont returned to help Alexis to his cot. Beaumont began to whistle.
“Happy, sir?” Elias asked.
Beaumont chuckled.
“The gods are answering all our prayers.”
SEVEN
ALEXIS'S ROBUST ENDURANCE in the face of pain astounded Beaumont. He could not sit up without obvious distress from the motion of the fractured ribs, and each cough sent lacerating pains through his chest. Still, his smile was warm, and his appetite was improving.
To better treat these pains, Beaumont designed, commissioned and oversaw the armorer's production of a tiny saw. Its thin brass blade had teeth as fine as sand and sharp as a lizard's teeth. Its haft was a polished mahogany that the armorer included at no extra expense, for he much admired Beaumont's ingenuity. With just three strokes of this blade, Beaumont deftly sawed away a rotting, fractured rib.
Elias Farnham cut Alexis a length of a cane from an ash sapling, and Alexis used this to steady himself as he walked across the hospital floor, the cane in one arm, the other wrapped around Elias's waist. The two of them moved like frail partners at a barn dance. In time, he stepped outdoors to sit on the bench overlooking the garden. He talked with the soldiers and voyageurs who stopped to see the miracle man. He raised his shirt to show them the wrapping of bandages. He was not shy. His collection of belongings beside and beneath his cot soon included objects he'd gathered outdoors. He took to whittling decorations along the length of his cane.
“He's got a talent there, Doctor,” Elias remarked as he displayed the complex design of rosettes, curlicues and fantastic birds.
BY EARLY OCTOBER, three months after the shooting, summer was fast vanishing. Days were shorter but the light brighter, as if the sun were burning more intensely in a futile gesture to stall the onset of winter. The agents from the American Fur Company, and the American soldiers and their officers, prepared Mackinac Island for the interminable months of frozen isolation. The brigades of voyageurs and Indians dismantled their tent and lean-to village along the lakeshore and embarked in their bateaux and canoes and paddled north to Canada or south to the Michigan Territory to take shelter in the pine and hardwood forests. The white children returned to school.
Alexis's days had settled into a routine which began when Beaumont stepped into the infirmary of the ramshackle hospital carrying his basket of medical supplies.
“Good morning, Alexis.”
He smiled as he watched Alexis yawn and rub the mount of his palms against his eyes.
“Good evening, mon Dr. Beaumont.” Alexis laughed. “Good morning. Morning.” His accented English ran hard on the d's, swallowed the r's.
Still sore from his wound, Alexis lay flat upon his back, gathered his nightshirt under his armpits, then folded over the thin blanket to reveal his abdomen swaddled with the bandages Beaumont had applied the previous evening. Beaumont took care to wrap the bandages tightly around Alexis's torso from his chest to his navel. To keep them in place, he passed a final wrapping like a Sam Browne belt, across his right shoulder. The bandages themselves revealed the progress of the wound's healing. It had been at least four weeks since the outer layer showed the ruddy stain of discharge.
As usual, Alexis gazed straight up at the ceiling, waiting patiently, blinking. “Madame Beaumont, she is well?”
“She's well. Quite well.”
Alexis nodded and smiled. “Little Sarah?”
“Very well, thank you. They wish you well too. Now please, Alexis, if you could just lie still as usual.”
Beside Alexis's cot Beaumont placed the simple brown wicker basket that held bandage rolls, his surgeon's pocket kit and a bottle of diluted muriatic acid he had gathered from the supply room. He sat on the edge of the bed, just inches from Alexis. The bed frame creaked as it always did.
Beaumont took his surgeon's kit from the basket, unrolled it on the mattress, took up his jackknife and set to work methodically cutting away the dressings. Someone whistled as he passed close to Alexis's window, and Beaumont hummed a few bars of that tune. He found himself tapping his foot to the timing of the blacksmith's hammer.
He folded away the sliced bandages to reveal a wad of carefully packed bandages the size of a tea saucer. The skin around the wound was still inflamed but no longer grossly purple. It blanched under the gentle press of Beaumont's thumb. He had not bled Alexis in over eight weeks.
He began to peel away the lint packing, and with that packing now removed, the pink ruggated puckering of the inner lining of stomach bloomed through the wound like some large rose. Alexis coughed, and the bloom expanded, glistening and covered with a limpid fluid, uniformly spreading over its whole surface and trickling to the edges of the wound. Beaumont gazed upon this display for some moments, then applied three fingers of gentle pressure to the center of the bloom, and it slowly depressed into the blackness of the space that was Alexis's stomach. An amazing sight each time he witnessed it.
Beaumont folded a clean lint bandage into a square, soaked this with muriatic acid and began to wipe the edges of the wound and the track where Alexis once had a fifth rib. In time, Beaumont thought, all in time, this wound will close, and I will have a case worthy of the Medical Recorder.
Alexis coughed again. A bit of meat, chewed, but unmistakably meat, popped out from the aperture and onto the bandages, and a slow trickle of gastric juice flowed out from the lower margin of the wound.
Beaumont picked up the meat and inspected it. He had instructed Alexis to keep an empty stomach to prevent just such soiling of the wound during morning dressing changes. Now he held in his hand the evidence that Alexis had stolen a meal some time in the early morning hours. He was disobedient to be sure, yet this clandestine meal also was another sign of his slow, but now certain recovery.
Alexis laughed and muttered in French. Beaumont had seen food in just this state before. There was nothing unique about this morning and this piece of meat.
As he held the partly digested piece between his thumb and forefinger and gazed at the wound, two facts came together for him. He felt as he had that morning some ten years past when he first stepped into his assigned hospital tent at the camp in Plattsburgh. Or when taking calls as apprentice to Dr. Chandler. It was the same sense in his guts and rush of blood to his head as when he was a boy jumping from the barn's rafters into the hay pile.
For weeks he had observed that the hole into Alexis's stomach gave off no odor or other evidence of putrefaction. Perhaps the cavity did not work as he had been taught, like a barrel to churn and ferment food, but in some other and, it seemed, more elegant manner. The action of the muriatic acid with which he painted the wound to cleanse it and stimulate healing was the same as the action of the stomach upon this piece of salt pork. The action was like a solvent upon the flesh, a solvent that affected a steady dissolution of the tissues. The stomach was perhaps not as he and so many of his colleagues had thought it to be, some grinding bag or fermenting vat. It was some manner of chemistry, like an alchemist's trick that made flesh disappear.
On this morning, an idea kindled not reason's ordered plans, but desire laid to make the taker mad.
Alexis was his patient, of course, but he could be something else too. Beaumont could not conjure the proper word, but whatever the word, on this morning he realized that this man, this wound, was his window to discovery.
Wondrous discoveries. Discoveries of the secrets of digestion and diet that would rival the work of the famous Parisian physicians. There wasn't another proper doctor within hundreds of miles, a situation conducive not only to a steady and good income but now also the discovery of this treasure. It was his, and it was simply waiting to be explored and written into a book. It was like the vast Western lands that President Jefferson purchased and captains Lewis and Clark charted and from which the American Fur Company extracted profits. The unknown was waiting to be known, and once known, rewards would follow. Promotion to surgeon secured, election to medical societies. He would erase the humility of his medical training as an apprentice and the condescension of the medical college graduates. His reputation would be solid and preserved for posthumous time.
He shook his head like a drinker who'd swallowed more than his fill.
I am a doctor, not a scientist, he thought. This was work he had no sense of how to do, where to begin or how to finish, before the wound fully healed and sealed its secrets. How would he convince Deborah of the worth of this sacrifice of time and money? And if it was ever done, whatever it really was, he had no idea how to sell it. The idea was swallowed bait, a folly even.
“Goddamn,” he muttered.
Alexis grew concerned.
“What is it? Is there problem? A type of what you call, what you call, pains. Oui?” His smile had vanished.
Beaumont tried to calm his patient. He began to quickly wrap the bandages into a wad.
“Nothing's wrong, Alexis. Nothing at all. You're doing well. Truly, yes, all is well.” He reached out and embraced Alexis. He smiled as best he could. “You're the very model of recovery.”
Alexis wrinkled his eyebrows, then relaxed and returned his doctor's smile like a moon reflecting the light of its sun but ignorant of the nature of fire that kindled that illuminating light. He spoke in unusually clear English.
“No, my Dr. Beaumont, I am your miracle.”
THAT EVENING AS BEAUMONT was writing in his notebook, Deborah, dressed in her nightshirt, slippers and cap, stepped behind him. She placed her hands tenderly upon his shoulders. Beaumont startled.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she said.
He set down his quill. “Just reviewing accounts.”
“You seem quiet tonight.”
He turned to face her.
“A bit of dyspepsia, but I'm well. Don't wait up for me.”
EIGHT
HE RETREATED TO HIS OFFICE AND HIS BOOKS and notebook. He read with his elbows on his desk, his head between his hands. Some days he read till dark.
On one of these evenings, a voice roused Beaumont. Brevet Major Hardage Thompson stood at the doorway. He held his hat in his hands. Beaumont smiled and gestured to a chair.
“Hardage, I didn't hear you enter. What is the hour?”
“It's round six. I saw your light on and wondered what has you burning midnight's oil. I see you're thoroughly absorbed over your text.”
The major was a squat-framed man, one of the oldest officers at Fort Hill, with just a few tufts of close-shorn gray hair that formed a tonsure about his round head. Among all of the officers, he was Beaumont's closest friend. A veteran of the war, like Beaumont, he shared the bond of humble origins and a reputation built solely on his own hard work. The major had risen to his rank from his enlistment some twenty-five years ago as a common private.
Thompson took his seat. Beaumont looked down upon the much-worn volume open before him. His notebook was propped open beside this by means of a stone he had gathered in his explorations of the island. The tip of his right forefinger was stained with ink. He turned a page idly.
“I was reading Brown's Elementa Medicinae on the process of digestion,” he explained. “It's truly limited. Do you know some maintain that the stomach is not a grinder and fermenter—as I've always thought—but instead that it works by a kind of chemical process?”
Thompson nodded politely. He looked about the office. “It seems only yesterday that the Frenchman was all but certain for dead. And now he walks. What you've done is nothing short of a miracle.”
Beaumont chuckled. “You sound like the Reverend James. Our good cleric seems to suggest that my skill had little influence in Alexis's recovery. Never mind my years of apprenticeship. Never mind the years at war. As if I'm some Catholic conjurer.”
“How is the lad?”
“Well, though still recovering. The wound's complicated, very complicated, and he has that hole that's slow to heal.”
“Into his stomach.”
Beaumont nodded. “Directly.”
Thompson looked at the copy of Elementa Medicinae. Beaumont followed his gaze. “It's made me curious, I confess.”
Thompson gestured to the text. “I'm sure you'll find something in there to help you close that hole up. I tell Sally often how we're so fortunate to have a surgeon of your skills and intellect at this garrison.”
“Assistant surgeon, Hardage. Assistant.” Beaumont held up the index finger of his right hand to punctuate the point. “But thank you. Truly, it's my duty, though I'm proud of what I've done. You heard about the little saw I commissioned?” He smiled.
“Aye.”
“Not bad for an apprentice-trained assistant surgeon.”
“The one before you saw his duty largely at the grog shop.”
Beaumont rubbed his eyes. He looked out the window at the shadows of the dilapidated outer buildings. “And he was a post surgeon and university trained as well. Between Captain Pearce and Ramsay Crooks a man has got to keep his wits,” he said.
“Who pays for the Frenchman's care?”
Beaumont's eyes narrowed. “You've heard something?”
“Pearce grumbles.”
“Not a surprise.” Beaumont hesitated. “You know, on the day of the shooting Crooks wanted Alexis to remain in the store, and Pearce supported him. Of course. They said that to have Alexis in the hospital would set a precedent for other fur trappers. I reluctantly agreed, but then my conscience caught up to me. Elias and I went back and took him. Pearce gave me a tongue-lashing for that.” He faced Hardage. “I'm pleased I took Alexis to the hospital. It's a decision I don't regret for a minute. If there is some good to come out of that war, it's what we learned in the care of such wounds as Alexis's. But never the mind. Whatever stain my reputation may have suffered, I'm confident subsequent events have washed it away. Pearce wi
ll forget, and Ramsay made his peace with me.”
Beaumont brightened. “Look there!” He gestured to the bottle of Madeira. “He even gave me a gift. And Reverend James himself stood in this office and told me the town has taken Alexis on as a charity case.”
“What if they refused?”
“Refused?”
“What if the town refused to support the lad? There're rumors that the money's running out. I'm sure they're afraid of having to take on others as well.”
Beaumont drummed his fingers on the desktop. “Well then, I'd hazard Alexis would be in trouble. I'd do what I could. I can take on the occasional charity case for a spell. You know, rob Peter to pay Paul for hospital supplies. Mind you, I learned my lesson with that kind of thing back when I was in private practice in New York. I nearly lost my shirt then. With Alexis, I'd hazard it's the cost of the room and board that's the rub.”
Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont Page 6