by Noah Gordon
Contents
The Physician
Part One: Barber’s Boy
1: The Devil in London
2: A Family of the Guild
3: The Parceling
4: The Barber-Surgeon
5: The Beast in Chelmsford
6: The Colored Balls
7: The House on Lyme Bay
8: The Entertainer
9: The Gift
10: The North
11: The Jew of Tettenhall
12: The Fitting
13: London
14: Lessons
15: The Journeyman
16: Arms
17: A New Arrangement
18: Requiescat
19: A Woman in the Road
20: Caps at Table
21: The Old Knight
Part Two: The Long Journey
22: The First Leg
23: Stranger in a Strange Land
24: Strange Tongues
25: The Joining
26: Parsi
27: The Quiet Sentry
28: The Balkans
29: Tryavna
30: Winter in the Study House
31: The Wheat Field
32: The Offer
33: The Last Christian City
Part Three: Ispahan
34: The Last Leg
35: Salt
36: The Hunter
37: Reb Jesse’s City
38: The Calaat
Part Four: The Maristan
39: Ibn Sina
40: An Invitation
41: The Maidan
42: The Shah’s Entertainment
43: The Medical Party
44: The Death
45: A Murdered Man’s Bones
46: The Riddle
47: The Examination
48: A Ride in the Country
49: Five Days to the West
50: The Chatir
Part Five: The War Surgeon
51: The Confidence
52: Shaping Jesse
53: Four Friends
54: Mary’s Expectations
55: The Picture of a Limb
56: The Command
57: The Cameleer
58: India
59: The Indian Smith
60: Four Friends
Part Six: Hakim
61: The Appointment
62: An Offer of Reward
63: A Clinic in Idhaj
64: The Bedoui Girl
65: Karim
66: The Gray City
67: Two Arrivals
68: The Diagnosis
69: Green Melons
70: Qasim’s Room
71: Ibn Sina’s Error
72: The Transparent Man
73: The House in Hamadhān
74: The King of Kings
Part Seven: The Returned
75: London
76: The London Lyceum
77: The Gray Monk
78: The Familiar Journey
79: Lambing
80: A Kept Promise
81: The Circle Completed
Acknowledgments
Shaman
Part One: Coming Home
1 Jiggety-Jig
2 The Inheritance
Part Two: Fresh Canvas, New Painting
3 The Immigrant
4 The Anatomy Lesson
5 The God-Cursed District
6 Dreams
7 The Color of the Painting
8 Music
9 Two Parcels
10 The Raising
11 The Recluse
12 The Big Indian
13 Through the Cold Time
14 Ball-and-Stick
15 A Present from Stone Dog
16 The Doe Hunters
17 Daughter of the Mide’Wiwin
18 Stones
19 A Change
20 Sarah’s Suitors
21 The Great Awakening
Part Three: Holden’s Crossing
22 Cursing and Blessings
23 Transformations
24 Spring Music
25 The Quiet Child
26 The Binding
27 Politics
28 The Arrest
29 The Last Indians in Illinois
Part Four: The Deaf Boy
30 Lessons
31 School Days
32 Night Doctoring
33 Answers and Questions
34 The Return
35 The Secret Room
36 The First Jew
37 Water Marks
38 Hearing the Music
39 Teachers
40 Growing Up
41 Winners and Losers
42 The Collegian
43 The Applicant
44 Letters and Notes
Part Five: A Family Quarrel
45 At the Polyclinic
46 Heart Sounds
47 Cincinnati Days
48 The Boat Ride
49 The Contract Surgeon
50 A Son’s Letter
51 The Horn Player
52 Troop Movements
53 The Long Gray Line
54 Skirmishing
55 “When Did You Meet Ellwood R. Patterson?”
56 Across the Rappahannock
57 The Full Circle
Part Six: The Country Doctor
58 Advisers
59 The Secret Father
60 A Child With the Croup
61 A Frank Discussion
62 Fishing
63 The End of the Journal
64 Chicago
65 A Telegraph Message
66 The Elmira Camp
67 The House in Wellsburg
68 Struggling in the Web
69 Alex’s Last Name
70 A Trip to Nauvoo
71 Family Gifts
72 Breaking Ground
73 Tama
74 The Early Riser
Acknowledgments and Notes
Matters of Choice
Part One: The Throwback
1 An Appointment
2 The House on Brattle Street
3 Betts
4 Moment of Decision
5 An Invitation to the Ball
6 The Contender
7 Voices
8 A Jury of Peers
9 Woodfield
10 Neighbors
11 The Calling
12 A Brush with the Law
13 The Different Path
14 The Last Cowgirl
Part Two: The House on the Verge
15 Metamorphosis
16 Office Hours
17 David Markus
18 A Feline Intimacy
19 The House on the Verge
20 Snapshots
21 Finding Her Way
22 The Singers
23 A Gift to be Used
24 New Friends
25 Settling In
26 Above the Snow Line
27 The Season of Cold
28 Rising Sap
Part Three: Heartrocks
29 Sarah's Request
30 A Small Trip
31 A Ride Down the Mountain
32 The Ice Cube
33 Inheritances
34 Winter Nights
35 Hidden Meanings
36 On the Trail
37 One More Bridge to Cross
38 The Reunion
39 A Naming
40 What Agunah Feared
41 Kindred Spirits
42 The Ex-Major
43 The Red Pickup
44 Early Concert
Part Four: The Country Doctor
45 The Breakfast Tale<
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46 Kidron
47 Settling In
48 The Fossil
49 Invitations
50 The Three of Them
51 A Question Is Answered
52 The Calling Card
53 Sunshine and Shadows
54 The Sowing
55 Coming of Snow
56 Discoveries
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright page
Back Ads
THE PHYSICIAN
by Noah Gordon
With my love
for Nina,
who gave me Lorraine
Fear God and keep his commandments;
for this is the whole duty of man.
—Ecclesiastes 12:13
I will give thanks unto Thee,
for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
—Psalms 139:14
As to the dead, God will raise them up.
—Qu’ran, S. 6:36
They that be whole need not a physician,
But they that are sick.
—Matthew 9:12
PART ONE
Barber’s Boy
1
THE DEVIL IN LONDON
These were Rob J.’s last safe and secure moments of blessed innocence, but in his ignorance he considered it hardship to be forced to remain near his father’s house with his brothers and his sister. This early in the spring, the sun rode low enough to send warm licks under the eaves of the thatched roof, and he sprawled on the rough stone stoop outside the front door, enjoying the coziness. A woman was picking her way over the broken surface of Carpenter’s Street. The street needed repair, as did most of the small frame workingmen’s houses thrown up carelessly by skilled artisans who earned their living erecting solid homes for those richer and more fortunate.
He was shelling a basket of early peas and trying to keep his eyes on the younger children, his responsibility when Mam was away. William Stewart, six, and Anne Mary, four, were grubbing in the dirt at the side of the house and playing secret giggly games. Jonathan Carter, eighteen months old, lay on a lambskin, papped, burped, and gurgling with content. Samuel Edward, who was seven, had given Rob J. the slip. Somehow crafty Samuel always managed to melt away instead of sharing work, and Rob was keeping an eye out for him, feeling wrathful. He split the green pods one after another and scraped the peas from the waxy seedcase with his thumb the way Mam did, not pausing as he noted the woman coming directly to him.
Stays in her stained bodice raised her bosom so that sometimes when she moved there was a glimpse of rouged nipple, and her fleshy face was garish with cosmetics. Rob J. was only nine years old but a child of London knew a trollop.
“Here now. This Nathanael Cole’s house?”
He studied her resentfully, for it wasn’t the first time tarts had come to their door seeking his father. “Who wants to learn?” he said roughly, glad his Da was out seeking work and she had missed him, glad his Mam was out delivering embroidery and was spared embarrassment.
“His wife needs him. She sent me.”
“What do you mean, needs him?” The competent young hands stopped shelling peas.
The whore regarded him coolly, having caught his opinion of her in his tone and manner. “She your mother?”
He nodded.
“She’s taken labor bad. She’s in Egglestan’s stables close by Puddle Dock. You’d best find your father and tell him,” the woman said, and went away.
The boy looked about desperately. “Samuel!” he shouted, but bloody Samuel was off who-knows-where, as usual, and Rob fetched William and Anne Mary from their play. “Take care of the small ones, Willum,” he said. Then he left the house and started to run.
Those who may be depended upon to prattle said Anno Domini 1021, the year of Agnes Cole’s eighth pregnancy, belonged to Satan. It had been marked by calamities to people and monstrosities of nature. The previous autumn the harvest in the fields had been blighted by hard frosts that froze rivers. There were rains such as never before, and with the rapid thaw a high tide ran up the Thames and tore away bridges and homes. Stars fell, streaming light down windy winter skies, and a comet was seen. In February the earth distinctly quaked. Lightning struck the head off a crucifix and men muttered that Christ and his saints slept. It was rumored that for three days a spring had flowed with blood, and travelers reported the Devil appearing in woods and secret places.
Agnes had told her eldest son not to pay heed to the talk. But she had added uneasily that if Rob J. saw or heard anything unusual, he must make the sign of the Cross.
People were placing a heavy burden on God that year, for the crop failure had brought hard times. Nathanael had earned no pay for more than four months and was kept by his wife’s ability to create fine embroideries.
When they were newly wed, she and Nathanael had been sick with love and very confident of their future; it had been his plan to become wealthy as a contractor-builder. But promotion was slow within the carpenters’ guild, at the hands of examination committees who scrutinized test projects as if each piece of work were meant for the King. He had spent six years as Apprentice Carpenter and twice that long as Companion Joiner. By now he should have been an aspirant for Master Carpenter, the professional classification needed to become a contractor. But the process of becoming a Master took energy and prosperous times, and he was too dispirited to try.
Their lives continued to revolve around the trade guild, but now even the London Corporation of Carpenters failed them, for each morning Nathanael reported to the guild house only to learn there were no jobs. With other hopeless men he sought escape in a brew they called pigment: one of the carpenters would produce honey, someone else brought out a few spices, and the Corporation always had a jug of wine at hand.
Carpenters’ wives told Agnes that often one of the men would go out and bring back a woman on whom their unemployed husbands took drunken turns.
Despite his failings she couldn’t shun Nathanael, she was too fond of fleshly delight. He kept her belly large, pumping her full of child as soon as she was emptied, and whenever she was nearing term he avoided their home. Their life conformed almost exactly to the dire predictions made by her father when, with Rob J. already in her, she had married the young carpenter who had come to Watford to help build their neighbor’s barn. Her father had blamed her schooling, saying that education filled a woman with lascivious folly.
Her father had owned his small farm, which had been given him by Aethelred of Wessex in lieu of pay for military service. He was the first of the Kemp family to become a yeoman. Walter Kemp had sent his daughter for schooling in the hope that it would gain her a landowner’s marriage, for proprietors of great estates found it handy to have a trusted person who was able to read and do sums, and why should it not be a wife? He had been embittered to see her make a low and sluttish match. He had not even been able to disinherit her, poor man. His tiny holding had gone to the Crown for back taxes when he died.
But his ambition had shaped her life. The five happiest years of her memory had been as a child in the nunnery school. The nuns had worn scarlet shoes, white and violet tunics, and veils delicate as cloud. They had taught her to read and to write, to recognize a smattering of Latin as it was used in the catechism, to cut clothing and sew an invisible seam, and to produce orphrey, embroidery so elegant it was sought after in France, where it was known as English Work.
The “foolishness” she had learned from the nuns now kept her family in food.
This morning she had debated about whether to go to deliver her orphrey. It was close to her time and she felt huge and clumsy, but there was little left in the larder. It was necessary to go to Billingsgate Market to buy flour and meal, and for that she needed the money that would be paid by the embroidery exporter who lived in Southwark on the other side of the river. Carrying her small bundle, she made her way slowly down Thames Street toward London Bridge.
As usual, Thames Street was cro
wded with pack animals and stevedores moving merchandise between the cavernous warehouses and the forest of ships’ masts on the quays. The noise fell on her like rain on a drought. Despite their troubles, she was grateful to Nathanael for taking her away from Watford and the farm.
She loved this city so!
“Whoreson! You come back here and give me my money. Give it on back,” a furious woman screeched at someone Agnes couldn’t see.
Skeins of laughter were tangled with ribbons of words in foreign languages. Curses were hurled like affectionate blessings.
She walked past ragged slaves lugging pigs of iron to waiting ships. Dogs barked at the wretched men who struggled under their brutal loads, pearls of sweat gleaming on their shaven heads. She breathed the garlic odor of their unwashed bodies and the metallic stink of the pig iron and then a more welcome smell from a cart where a man was hawking meat pasties. Her mouth watered but she had a single coin in her pocket and hungry children at home. “Pies like sweet sin,” the man called. “Hot and good!”
The docks gave off an aroma of sun-warmed pine pitch and tarred rope. She held a hand to her stomach as she walked and felt her baby move, floating in the ocean contained between her hips. On the corner a rabble of sailors with flowers in their caps sang lustily while three musicians played on a fife, a drum, and a harp. As she moved past them she noted a man leaning against a strange-looking wagon marked with the signs of the zodiac. He was perhaps forty years old. He was beginning to lose his hair, which like his beard was strong brown in color. His features were comely; he would have been more handsome than Nathanael save for the fact that he was fat. His face was ruddy and his stomach bloomed before him as fully as her own. His corpulence didn’t repel; on the contrary, it disarmed and charmed and told the viewer that here was a friendly and convivial spirit too fond of the best things in life. His blue eyes had a glint and sparkle that matched the smile on his lips. “Pretty mistress. Be my dolly?” he said. Startled, she looked about to see to whom he might be speaking, but there was no one else.
“Hah!” Ordinarily she would have frozen trash with a glance and put him out of mind, but she had a sense of humor and enjoyed a man with one, and this was too rich.
“We are made for one another. I would die for you, my lady,” he called after her ardently.
“No need. Christ already has, sirrah,” she said.
She lifted her head, squared her shoulders, and walked away with a seductive twitch, preceded by the almost unbelievable enormity of her child-laden stomach and joining in his laughter.
It had been a long time since a man had complimented her femaleness, even in jest, and the absurd exchange lifted her spirits as she navigated Thames Street. Still smiling, she was approaching Puddle Dock when the pain came.