Long since gone now is the grave at the roadside, indicated by the second of Captain Donovan’s three maps, on the spot where Sarah Ferguson, wife of David, said those words, and where she was buried together with a boy of ten who had died within the hour along with her. This was done at the bereaved mother’s suggestion and with the bereaved husband’s concurrence. In this alien and lonely place, remote from kith and kin, woman and child would forevermore have each other for company.
It was a time for tears, but the time was short, just as the grave was shallow. Here where people, benumbed by hardship, had ceased to be persons and been dehumanized, death had lost its sting, and the loss was felt as the ultimate deprivation.
The old man and the boy marched no faster now that they were no longer held back by the old woman. The pull of still another place, a part of themselves, tugged at their steps.
After the allowance of a few days privacy, Noquisi revisited his grandfather’s mind. As though on tiptoe, having timidly knocked and gotten no answer, he peered inside. He drew back from what he found and quietly beat his retreat.
To make sure he had not just happened in on a passing thought, he returned several times over the succeeding days. Always it was the same, still and silent, dominated by one image: that of his wife’s grave. For the boy’s sake, his body marched on, but his spirit had stayed behind with hers, and there it would always remain.
The time came when they could go no farther. Too many were too sick. They made camp and settled in. A hospital camp it was.
Captain Donovan armed able-bodied men and sent them to hunt game for fresh meat. He combed the countryside and at large farms commandeered livestock and stores. He paid for them, but he commandeered them, and he named his price—a fair price. He sent wagons to towns within a radius of fifty miles with orders to come back loaded. “Buy whatever you can find. We need everything.” If the town was one big enough to support a chemist, he sent a shopping list of Dr. Warren’s needs. It was seldom fully filled, although—or perhaps because—the remedies he prescribed were of the commonest. Captain Donovan bought out whole dry-goods stores and issued the cloth for as far as it went. An ironically gaudy assortment of tents and tepees it made, in stripes, dots and flowers, like a gypsy encampment. He shocked all, yet won their practical endorsement, by forbidding the dead to be buried wrapped in their blankets. He would have stripped them of their clothes, he told the Reverend Mackenzie, but, fearing that such a barbarity might provoke an uprising, he stopped short of that. The blankets were redistributed among the living, who, in their dire necessity, overrode their superstitious objections and slept in them.
The doctor and his assistant went their rounds from tent to tent, both those of the emigrants and those of the sick soldiers. More than one disease was loose among them but the most prevalent and the deadliest were cholera and typhus. They bundled their patients in blankets with heated stones inside to sweat the poison from their systems—the same remedy as the exorcist’s but with a different explanation for it—a white man’s explanation—a similarity not lost upon the boy. They dispensed calomel.
Then the doctor came down sick. The boy nursed him. He felt himself responsible for the health of the one responsible for the health of all. On him the calomel had no effect. Or rather, it had its effect: it hastened, if it did not cause, the man’s death, as on a distant day—a man well past middle age by then and long since known by another name—Noquisi would learn from his reading. (He maintained a lifelong interest in medicine, owing to his brief juvenile career at it, and in secret loving memory of his real father, the doctor.)
“Ai!” he cried, holding his finger on the doctor’s pulseless wrist. Back from out of the darkness, echoes of his own, from all over the camp, came the wail, “Ai!” Roused to join in the chorus was the pack of wolves encamped nearby.
Said the Captain after the funeral, “Looks like you’re our doctor now, son.”
“I’m not off to a very good start,” he said, looking at the grave of his first patient. “But I reckon I’m about as near to one as we’ve got—Lord help me and help us all! I’ll do my best, sir.”
“Spoken like a trooper,” said the Captain.
He had the feeling that to Captain Donovan his youth and inexperience were not disqualifications. It hardly mattered who their doctor was, so little was any able to help them. The post was mainly ceremonial. He himself thought that too. He would do what little he could, but his main worth, he suspected, would be to give dying people the comfort of thinking that somebody was busying himself trying to do something for them. Many would expect of him just what they would expect of a witch doctor whom they called upon in extremity despite knowing that profession’s record of failure and because at least they did no harm. He was saved from feeling like an imposter by his own modest estimate of his worth, and sustained by the sense that he was of some worth at least.
Actually, he would tell his grandson all those years later, disclaiming the boy’s admiration for his taking on, at age fifteen, the job of doctor to some seven hundred people (that was what they were down to) there was not all that much to know about the profession back then. To be sure, it was a lot more than he knew; still it was pitifully little in sum. In fact, he was already more of a doctor than many of his more backward patients had ever consulted. They believed that medicine was white man’s magic, and he did nothing to discourage them from believing that he, the son of a doctor, had inherited it.
And so indeed he had. His father had always explained to him what the symptoms were that had led to his diagnosis and what the treatment prescribed for the illness was. If the demands upon his attention were too pressing at the time, then he described the anatomy of an injury and the procedure for dealing with it afterwards on their way home. The uses of the herbs they gathered and grew were known to the boy by heart. He was a walking pharmacopoeia.
True, his apprenticeship with his father had been short, his experience limited, but to make up for what he did not know he now had the book.
The late Dr. Warren’s formal education had been supplemented by study of the one volume comprising his medical library. It was entitled The Doctor’s Vade-Mecum. It was some three hundred pages long. It contained the whole art and science of medicine, human and veterinarian. That it had been closely read was evidenced by its thoroughly thumbed condition, and that it had been consulted often in haste and anxiety at times of emergency—especially its index—by the drug stains and the bloody fingerprints on its pages. It became the boy doctor’s bible.
He had not yet reached the chapter on fractures when a child who had fallen out of a wagon was brought to him with a broken arm. However, he had once watched his father set a similar break and listened to his explanation. He knew he would need splints, bandages, the flannel ones used also to bind the fetlocks of horses, and a sling.
As he had seen done for children with teething pains, he made a cloth sugar-tit, soaked it with whiskey, and gave it to the child to suck. On second thought he gave the unhappy father a shot of the whiskey too. Then, both to nerve himself to inflict the pain he must, and to seem more of a man, he took a shot of it himself. When he gave the arm the first wrench the little girl passed out. The father, unable to watch, withdrew. He was then able to work on an unconscious patient and without an anxious observer.
“That was as good as your father could have done,” said Agiduda, just before the boy threw up.
But though the old man was proud of his grandson, he feared for his safety in exposing himself to contagion. For soon there were a dozen tents segregated from the rest, with people in them suffering from a variety of communicable diseases, if the boy was right in his diagnoses.
“I must do what I can, Agiduda,” he said. “I am my father’s son. He would do it if he was here.” As he said that he wondered where his father was, whether he was alive. “He would expect me to do what I can. I’m better suited than anybody else we’ve got, though not by much, I admit. But I’m learning fast.�
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He made his rounds carrying Dr. Warren’s black bag morning and evening, in between times reading the book, often in search of clues to cases he had just examined, and having his grandfather, text in hand, quiz him. Often he would identify a set of symptoms accurately, and name the specific prescribed for treatment, only to have to say of the latter, “But there isn’t any more of that. It’s been all used up.” Or that he never had had any.
One of the tents contained half a dozen children with whooping cough. Their convulsions racked them, bent them double, turned them blue in the face. They had every appearance of suffocating, of drowning on their phlegm. They sweated profusely. They ruptured vessels and bled at the nose. He dosed them with ipecac and sulphur, belladonna, a sweetened elixir of dilute nitric acid, as recommended by the book. Their mothers nursed them—their older sisters in the mothers’ absence.
Having had the disease as a child, as he learned from her family, and being now immune to it, a young woman was placed in this tent to recuperate from her latest fit of the falling sickness. She had frothed at the mouth, had convulsed violently. Her tongue had had to be held by hand to keep her from swallowing it and choking. She lay in a comatose sleep for two days. Awake, she lay in a daze, corpselike, staring, too weak when spoken to to answer, deaf to the whooping and wailing going on around her, regaining her shattered strength. Possible causes of the falling sickness, according to the book, were “fright, distress of mind, passion, worms, and many more.” He had seen dogs with worms slathering at the mouth, contorting, running in circles and biting their tails. He gave his patient the vermifuge wormwood. Before she could be discharged from the tent she had another fit, as severe as the first.
That sick people worsened and died before their time despite doctors’ help he knew, and now from the book he learned why. He learned it over and over. For so many maladies there was no cure nor even any treatment. For all its leather binding, its Philadelphia imprint, its woodcuts, its learned tone, there were times when his book was no more help than the witch doctor’s rattle.
One morning on his rounds he reached the tent in which were two women and a girl whom he was treating for pneumonia. The evening before he had thought that all were improving. Now he thought that all were asleep—that deep sleep they fell into after long bouts of fevered sleeplessness. To check her temperature he felt the girl’s forehead. He drew his hand back as though it had been burned—what it had been was chilled. Both the women also were dead. There came over him then, and would come over him afresh later while serving in his other capacity as the Reverend Mackenzie’s graveside interpreter, a desolating sense of his inadequacy, a crushing sense of responsibility too big for him, a frightening sense of the imperfection of mankind’s means in its war against disease and death.
After the funeral Captain Donovan said to the boy, “I know it must be discouraging, Cap, but don’t let it get you down. You did your best and nobody could have done better. You went by the book. You must have seen your father lose patients too. When this is all over with and you rejoin him, you’ll have nothing to be ashamed of.”
You did not have to be a Cherokee to thought-read.
“Cap” was short for “Captain,” the boy’s latest acquired name. It derived from the old tunic, its tails descending to his knees, its cuffs turned back, one of his own that Captain Donovan had given him.
“What is the rest of life to be for someone who has already seen what that one has seen?” said the Reverend Mackenzie. What he did not say, but what he wrote, was his fear that the boy’s day-to-day involvement with death and the unfairness of his competition with it might so disillusion and dishearten him as to turn him doubtful of the verities, even cynical. He knew how great that temptation was.
The two of them, boy doctor and minister, were often teamed at sickbeds, the one striving with his meager means to save lives, and then when he had failed, the other taking over from him and striving to save souls. This made theirs something of an uneasy partnership—or so at least the Reverend Mackenzie suspected. He felt his presence to be a discouragement to the boy, a forecast from the start that his efforts were expected to fail. The boy was alone, he himself had the mightiest of allies, God and His ally death. He confides to his diary his feeling of having become almost a demon, an ogre, of the sight of him at their bedsides terrifying these already frightened people, reducing them to hopelessness, and thus perhaps undoing whatever good the boy might be doing them. He wondered whether he might not actually have hastened the end of some of them, a black-clad messenger of despair with that book in hand containing, in a tongue which to many of them was a dark mystery in itself, a collection of spells, almost of invocations to death. Life everlasting was what he offered, but it could be attained only by losing this one, the one that even people in these straits clung to so tenaciously. He felt sometimes as though he was God’s recruitment officer in His insatiable levy of souls, and that not Captain Donovan, leading the way to life in The Territory, but he, leading the way to the afterlife, was the marshal of the march.
Yet, he notes hopefully, reversing the adage “In the midst of death we are in life.”
In giving birth, Cherokee women normally did it without help. Midwifery as a profession was hardly known among them. Sometimes an older woman, herself a mother, stood by in attendance, but most often it was done as Kanama had done it with her Usdi in the detention camp, by themselves. It was regarded as no big matter. Usually the mother was back at her work the same day. There had been several births on the march. So seldom was a doctor called in that only twice had Noquisi assisted his father at a delivery. So when he was sent for in this case he feared that things were not going well. When the messenger asked the Reverend Mackenzie to come, too, his fears increased.
But the messenger was young, perhaps overly alarmed, and at least he had seen it done twice, both difficult times, and that was twice more than any other man in the camp.
“You are the son of your father,” said Agiduda. “May his hand guide yours. I will be praying for you.”
“Thank you. Pray also for the woman and the child.”
“That is for our clansman, Reverend Mac. My prayers will be for you.”
As Noquisi drove them to the scene in the dispensary wagon, the Reverend Mackenzie refreshed the boy’s memory by reading to him from the book.
“‘An examination with the finger is to be made to learn the presentation, that is, to learn which part of the child comes first into the mouth of the womb. If the head present, the labor will probably go on without the need of medical aid. But in all labors there is a liability to dangers from unforeseen accidents, which renders the attendance of an intelligent physician highly prudential.’
“‘If the breech present, do not pull down the feet; let the child come double; it will make more room for the head. If the feet present, let there be no pulling on them to hasten the birth of the breech.’
“‘After the feet and breech have fully cleared the external orifice, the delivery may be judiciously hastened for the purpose of preventing the death of the child from pressure on the umbilical cord before the head is brought to the air and the act of breathing thus permitted. For after the pulsations of the cord cease, the child must either breathe or die.’”
Like Kanama, this young woman had gone into seclusion when her time came and had suspended herself in squatting position by a rope from an overhead limb. Her husband waited within hearing. He waited and waited, listening to her cries—finally to her silence. Ashamed of her inability to do this common thing, not wanting to create a fuss nor to alarm anybody on her account, assuring herself that all would soon be well, that such contractions as she was experiencing could not possibly go on much longer without producing their result, answering her husband’s calls that everything was all right, she had allowed her labor to grow so protracted that when finally he sought help she had to be cut down, half conscious, and brought by litter to a tent.
Outside the tent a woman chan
ted the spell, “Little man, come out! Hurry! Little woman, come out! Hurry!” The lying-in, with its mounting threat of danger, had drawn an anxious crowd, among them a woman with her newborn in her arms.
“You,” said the boy to her. “Come with me.” Here was firsthand experience at his side.
The patient, little more than a girl in years, lay wrapped in a blanket. After sending the husband—who was not much older than himself—outside, Noquisi unwrapped her. She was young, but just as he himself was now a man—a role for which suddenly he felt himself unready—so she was fully a woman. He had thought about women’s unclothed bodies during the inactivity of the detention camp and the mindless monotony of the march. The instinct was insistent enough to be felt even at those untimely times. He had thought about it when looking at the anatomical plates in Dr. Warren’s book. This one in its distortion and pain, brought on by the act of pleasure he had imagined, was not what he had in mind. What he was seeing now reproached him for his idle thoughts, or rather for his thoughtlessness of the consequences for the woman. It made him feel beholden for being male.
“When this is over,” said the Reverend Mackenzie, “she will be a mother, something you and I can never know. Then it will all have been worth it. She will be proud of what she has been through.”
It was another instance of the power of a white man to thought-read.
As the boy was making his examination the Reverend Mackenzie was reading the section of the book pertaining to breech delivery. He was not reading aloud but to himself.
“What do you feel?” he now asked.
“I think it must be the head.”
To himself the Reverend Mackenzie said, “I hope you’re right!”
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