by Noah Gordon
To determine if the stone would move, he tightened the jaws of the lithotrite onto it, but when he put the slightest backward pressure on the instrument the woman on the table opened her mouth and screamed.
“I have the biggest stone, Sarah,” he said calmly. “It’s too large to come out in one piece, so I’ll try to break it.” Even as he spoke, his fingers were moving to the handle of the screw at the end of the lithotrite. It was as though each turn of the screw tightened the tension within him as well, because if the stone wouldn’t break, the woman’s prospects were dismal. But blessedly as he continued to turn the handle there was a dull crunching, the sound of someone grinding a shard of pottery beneath his heel.
He broke it into three segments. Although he worked with great care, when he removed the first piece he hurt her. Makwa-ikwa wet a cloth and wiped Sarah’s sweaty face. Rob reached down and unclenched her left hand, peeling the fingers back like petals, and dropped the piece of the stone into her white palm. It was an ugly calculus, brown and black. The middle piece was smooth and egg-shaped, but the other two were irregular, with little needle points and sharp edges. When she held all three in her hand, he inserted a catheter and rinsed the bladder, and she voided a lot of the crystals that had broken from the stone when he had crushed it.
She was exhausted. “That’s enough,” he decided. “There’s another stone in your bladder, but it’s small and should be easy to remove. We’ll take it from you another day.”
In less than an hour she had begun to glow with the fever that followed quickly after almost every surgery. They force-fed her liquids, including Makwa-ikwa’s efficient willow-bark tea. Next morning she was still slightly febrile but they were able to take her back to her own cabin. He knew she was sore and torn up but she made the jolting trip without complaint. The fever wasn’t gone from her eyes but there was another light there, and he was able to recognize it as hope.
A few days later, when Nick Holden invited him to go off on another doe hunt, Rob J. agreed warily. This time they caught a boat upstream to the town of Dexter, where the two LaSalle sisters were waiting at the tavern. Although Nick had described them with roguish masculine hyperbole, Rob J. recognized at once that they were tired whores. Nick chose the younger, more attractive Polly, leaving for Rob an aging woman with bitter eyes and an upper lip on which caked rice powder couldn’t hide the dark mustache—Lydia. Lydia was openly resentful of Rob J.’s emphasis on soap and water and his use of Old Horny, but she carried out her part of the transaction with professional dispatch. That night he lay next to her in the room that contained the faint olfactory ghosts of past paid passions and wondered what he was doing there. From the next room there were angry voices, a slap, a woman’s hoarse shouting, ugly but unmistakable thuds.
“Jesus.” Rob J. knocked his fist against the thin wall. “Nick. Everything all right in there?”
“Dandy. Dammit, Cole. You just get yourself some sleep now. Or whatever. You hear?” Holden called back, his voice thick with whiskey and annoyance.
Next morning at breakfast Polly had a red swelling on the left side of her face. Nick must have paid her very well for her beating, because her voice was pleasant enough when they said good-bye.
On the boat going home, the incident couldn’t be evaded. Nick placed his hand on Rob’s arm. “Sometimes a woman likes a bit of the rough stuff, don’t you know it, ol’ buck? Practically begs for it, to get her juices flowing.”
Rob regarded him silently, aware that this was his last doe hunt. In a moment Nick took his hand from Rob’s arm and began telling him about the upcoming election. He had decided to run for state office, to stand for the legislature from their district. He knew it would be helpful, he explained earnestly, if Doc Cole would urge folks to vote for his good friend whenever he made a house call.
19
A CHANGE
Two weeks after ridding her of the large stone, Rob J. was ready to remove the smaller calculus from Sarah’s bladder, but she had become reluctant. The first few days after the removal of the stone, she had passed more small crystals with her urine, sometimes accompanied by pain. Ever since the last bits of crushed stone had left her bladder, she had been symptom-free. For the first time since the onset of her illness she didn’t have crippling pain, and the absence of the spasms had allowed her to regain control of her body.
“You still have a stone in your bladder,” he reminded her.
“I don’t want it removed. It doesn’t hurt.” She looked at him defiantly but then dropped her eyes. “I’m more afraid now than I was the first time.”
He noted that already she was looking better. Her face was still drawn with the suffering of a long affliction, but she had gained enough weight to make inroads against the gauntness. “That big stone we removed was once a little stone. They grow, Sarah,” he said gently.
So she agreed. Again Makwa-ikwa sat with her while he removed the small calculus—about one-fourth the size of the other stone—from her bladder. There was a minimum of discomfort, and when he was through, a sense of triumph.
But this time when the postoperative fever arrived, her body became fiery. He recognized impending disaster early and cursed himself for having given her the wrong advice. Before nightfall her foreboding had been justified; perversely, the easier procedure to remove the smaller stone had resulted in a massive infection. Makwa-ikwa and he took turns sitting next to her bed for four nights and five days, while inside her body a battle raged. Holding her hands in his, Rob could feel the waning of her vitality. Now and again Makwa-ikwa seemed to stare at something that wasn’t there and chanted quietly in her own language. She told Rob she was asking Panguk, the death god, to pass this woman by. There was little else they could do for Sarah except to bathe her with wet cloths, support her while they held cups of liquid to her mouth and urged her to drink, and dress her cracked lips with grease. For a time she continued to fail, but on the fifth morning—was it Panguk, or her own spirit, or perhaps all the willow tea?—she began to sweat. Her nightshirts became sodden almost as quickly as they could be changed. By midmorning she had fallen into a deep and relieved sleep, and that afternoon when he touched her forehead it felt almost cool, a temperature that nearly matched his own.
Makwa-ikwa’s expression didn’t change much, but Rob J. was beginning to know her, and he believed she was pleased by his suggestion, even if at first she didn’t take it seriously.
“Work with you. All the time?”
He nodded. It made sense. He’d seen that she knew how to look after a patient and didn’t hesitate to do as he asked. He told her it could be a good arrangement for each of them. “You can learn some of my kind of medicine. And you have so many things to teach me about the plants and herbs. What they cure. How to use them.”
They discussed it first in the buckboard after bringing Sarah home. He didn’t press the idea on her. He just kept quiet and allowed her to think about it.
A few days later he stopped by the Sauk camp and they talked again over a bowl of rabbit stew. The thing she liked least about the offer was his insistence that she had to live close by his cabin, so he could fetch her quickly in times of emergency.
“I have to be with my people.”
He had pondered about the Sauk band. “Sooner or later some white man will file with the government for every piece of land you folks might want to use for a village or a winter camp. There’s going to be no place for you to go except back to that reservation you ran away from.” What they must do, he said, was learn to live in the world as it had become. “I need help on my farm, Alden Kimball can’t do it all. I could use a couple like Moon and Comes Singing. You could build cabins on my land. I’d pay the three of you in United States money, as well as found from the farm. If it works out, maybe other farms would have jobs for Sauks. And if you earned money and saved, sooner or later you’d have enough to buy your own land according to white man’s custom and law, and nobody could ever order you from it.”
She looked at him.
“I know it offends you to have to buy back your own land. White men have lied to you, cheated you. And killed a whole lot of you. But red men have lied to one another. Stolen from one another. And the different bands have always killed one another, you’ve told me that. Color of skin doesn’t matter, all kinds of people are sonsabitches. But not everybody in the world is a sonofabitch.”
Two days later she and Moon and Comes Singing, along with Moon’s two children, rode onto his land. They built a hedonoso-te with two smoke holes, a single longhouse that the shaman would share with the Sauk family, large enough to accommodate the third child who already swelled Moon’s belly. They raised the lodge on the riverbank a quarter of a mile downstream from Rob J.’s cabin. Nearby they built a sweat lodge and a women’s lodge to be used during menstruation.
Alden Kimball walked around with wounded eyes. “There’s white men out there looking for work,” he told Rob J. stonily. “White men. Never occurred to you I might not want to work with damn Indians?”
“No,” Rob said, “it never did. Seems to me if you’d come across a good white worker, you’d have told me to hire him long since. I’ve gotten to know these people. They’re really good people. Now, I know you can quit on me, Alden, because any body’d be a fool not to grab you if you were available. I’d hate to have that happen, because you’re the best man I’m ever going to find to run this farm. So I hope you’ll stay.”
Alden stared at him, confusion in his eyes, pleased by the praise but smarting because of the clear message. Finally he turned away and began to load fenceposts onto the buckboard.
What tipped the scales was the fact that Comes Singing’s prodigious size and strength, coupled with his agreeable disposition, made him a wonderful hired hand. Moon had learned to cook for white people as a girl in the Christian school. For single men living alone it was a treat to have hot biscuits and pies and tasty food. Within a week it was obvious that although Alden remained aloof and would never acknowledge surrender, the Sauks had become part of the farm.
Rob J. experienced a similar small rebellion among his patients. Over a cup of cider Nick Holden warned him, “Some of the settlers have started calling you Injun Cole. They say you’re an Indian lover. They say you must have some Sauk blood yourself.”
Rob J. smiled, in love with the notion. “Tell you what. If anybody complains to you about the doctor, just hand them one of those fancy hand-bills you’re so fond of passing around. The ones that tell how fortunate the township is to have a physician of Dr. Cole’s training and education. Next time they’re bleeding or sickly, I doubt many of them will object to my alleged ancestry. Or the color of my assistant’s hands.”
When he rode out to Sarah’s cabin to see how she was recuperating, he noted that the path leading from the trail to her door had been edged, smoothed, and swept. New beds of woodland plantings softened the outer contours of the little house. Inside, all the walls were whitewashed, and the only smells were of strong soap and the pleasant scents of lavender, and pennyroyal, sage, and cicely hung from the rafters.
“Alma Schroeder gave the herbs to me,” Sarah said. “It’s too late to plant a garden this season, but next year I’ll have my own.” She showed him the garden patch, part of which she had already cleared of weeds and brambles.
The change in the woman was more astounding than the transformation of the place. She had begun to do her own cooking every day, she said, instead of depending on occasional hot dishes carried over by the generous Alma. A regular diet and improved nutrition already had replaced her wan boniness with a graceful femininity. She bent to pick a few green onions that had volunteered in the garden tangle, and he studied the pink nape of her neck. Soon it would be hidden, for her hair was growing back like a yellow pelt.
A small blond animal, her little boy scuttled behind her. He too was clean, though Rob took note of Sarah’s chagrin as she tried to brush clay stains from her son’s knees.
“You can’t keep a boy from getting messy,” he told her cheerfully. The child looked at him with wild and fearful eyes. Rob always carried a few boiled sweets in his bag to help him make friends with little patients, and now he took one and unwrapped it. It took him almost half an hour of quiet talking before he could edge close enough to little Alex to hold out the sweet. When the small hand finally took the candy, he heard Sarah’s released breath and looked up to see her watching his face. She had wonderful eyes, full of life.
“I’ve made a venison pie, if you want to share our dinner.”
It was on his lips to refuse, but the two faces were turned to him, the little boy sucking in bliss on the candy, the mother serious and expectant. The faces seemed to be asking him questions he couldn’t understand.
“I do love venison pie,” he said.
20
SARAH’S SUITORS
It made good medical sense for Rob J. to stop and see Sarah Bledsoe several times in the next week while returning from house calls, for each time he could do so by going out of his way only a little, and as her physician he had to make certain her recovery was smooth. Indeed, it was a wonderful recovery. There was little to discuss about her health, except to observe that her skin tone had changed from a deadly white to a pink-peach that was most becoming and that her eyes glowed with alertness and an interesting intelligence. One afternoon she gave him tea and cornbread. The following week he stopped by her cabin three times, and twice he accepted her invitation to stay for meals. She was a better cook than Moon; he couldn’t get enough of her cooking, which she said was Virginian. He was aware that her resources were meager, so he took to bringing a few things, a sack of potatoes, a small ham. One morning a settler who was short of cash gave him four fat, freshly shot grouse in partial payment, and he rode to the Bledsoe cabin with the birds hanging from his saddle.
When he got there he found Sarah and Alex seated on the ground near the garden, which was being double-dug by a perspiring shirtless hulk of a man with the bulging muscles and tanned skin of one who earns his living out-of-doors. Sarah introduced Samuel Merriam, a farmer from Hooppole. Merriam had come from Hooppole with a cartful of pig dung, half of which already had been dug into the garden. “Finest stuff in the world for growing things,” he told Rob J. cheerfully.
Next to the princely gift of a wagonload of pig shit, applied, Rob’s little birds were a meager present, but he gave them to her anyhow, and she seemed genuinely grateful. He made a polite refusal to her invitation that he might join Samuel Merriam as her dinner guest, and instead dropped in on Alma Schroeder, who waxed enthusiastic about what he had accomplished in curing Sarah. “Already it’s a suitor down there, isn’t it?” she said, beaming. Merriam had lost his wife the previous autumn to the fever and needed another woman without delay to take care of his five children and help with the pigs. “A good chance for Sarah,” she said sagely. “Although, women so scarce on the frontier, she’ll have lotsa chances.”
On Rob’s way home, he drifted by the Bledsoe cabin again. He rode up to her and sat in the saddle looking at her. This time her smile was puzzled, and he could see Merriam pause at his work in the garden and stare speculatively. Until Rob opened his mouth, he had no idea what he wanted to tell her.
“You yourself must do as much of the work as possible,” he said severely, “because the exercise is necessary to your full recovery.” Then he tipped his hat and rode crankily home.
Three days later, when next he stopped at the cabin, there was no sign of a suitor. Sarah was struggling to separate a big old rhubarb root into sections for replanting, and finally he solved her problem by chopping it apart with her ax. Together they dug the holes in the loam and planted the roots and covered them with the warm soil, a chore that pleased him and earned him a share of her dinner of red-flannel hash washed down with cool spring water.
Afterward, while Alex napped in the shade of a tree, they sat on the riverbank and tended her trotline, and he spoke to her of Scotland and she told him s
he wished there was a church nearby, so her son could be taught to have faith. “Often now I think of God,” she said. “When I believed I was dying and Alex would be left alone, I prayed, and He sent you.” Not without trepidation, he confessed to her that he didn’t believe in the existence of God. “I think gods are the inventions of men and that it has always been so,” he said. He could see the shock in her eyes and feared he had sent her into a life of piety on a piggery. But she abandoned talk of religion and spoke of her early life in Virginia, where her parents owned a farm. Her large eyes were such a dark blue as to be almost purple; they didn’t sentimentalize, but in them he saw the love for that easier, warmer time. “Horses!” she said, smiling. “I grew up loving horses.”
It allowed him to invite her to ride out with him next day to visit an old man who was dying of consumption, and she made no attempt to hide the eagerness with which she agreed. Next morning, on Margaret Holland and leading Monica Grenville, he called for her. They left Alex with Alma Schroeder, who fairly beamed with delight at the fact that Sarah was “riding out” with the doctor.
It was a good day for a ride, not too hot for a change, and they allowed the horses to walk, taking their time. She had packed bread and cheese in her saddlebag, and they had a picnic in the shade of a live oak. In the sick man’s house she stayed in the background, listening to the rattling breathing, watching Rob J. hold the patient’s hands. He waited until water warmed at the fireplace and then bathed the skinny limbs and administered a dulling draft, teaspoon by teaspoon, so sleep would make the waiting merciful. Sarah overheard him telling the stolid son and the daughter-in-law that the old man would die within hours. When they left she was moved and spoke little. To try to regain the easiness they had shared earlier, he suggested they switch horses on the way back, because she was a fine horsewoman and could handle Margaret Holland without trouble. She enjoyed riding the friskier mount. “Both the mares are named after women you have known?” she asked, and he acknowledged it was so.