The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  “He has two hands. And before he came here, he escaped from another camp and was recaptured.”

  Shaman tried to use reason. “Isn’t it what you’d have done? What any honorable man might do?”

  But the sergeant shook his head. “We got our rules.”

  “May I bring him a few things?”

  “Nothing sharp or made of metal.”

  “Is there a boardinghouse nearby?”

  “There’s a place, eighth of a mile west of the main gate. They rent out rooms,” the sergeant said, and Shaman thanked him and picked up his bags.

  As soon as Shaman was in his rented room and rid of his landlord, he removed $150 from his money belt and placed the bills in his coat pocket. There was a handyman who was happy to drive the new boarder to town for a fee. At the telegraph office Shaman sent a message to Nick Holden in Washington: Alex gravely ill. Must secure his release or he will die. Please help.

  There was a large stable and livery, where he rented a horse and a flatbed wagon.

  “By the day or the week?” the stableman asked. Shaman rented by the week, and paid in advance.

  The general store was larger than Haskins’, and he filled his rented wagon with things for the men in Alex’s tent: firewood, blankets, a dressed chicken, a side of sound bacon, six loaves of bread, two bushels of potatoes, a sack of onions, a crate of cabbages.

  The sergeant’s eyes widened when he saw the “few things” Shaman had brought for his brother. “You’ve already used today’s ninety minutes. Just unload that plunder and get out.”

  At the tent, Alex was still sleeping. But for the others, it was like Christmas in good times. They called in their neighbors. Men from a dozen tents came in and got wood and vegetables. Shaman had meant the things to make a real difference to the men of tent Eight-C, but they had chosen to share most of the things he had brought.

  “Do you have a pot?” he asked Buttons.

  “Yessir!” Buttons produced a very large and battered tin can.

  “Cook a soup of chicken meat, onions, cabbage, potatoes, and some of the bread. I’m counting on you to get as much hot soup into him as possible.”

  “Yessir, we will,” Buttons said.

  Shaman hesitated. An alarming amount of food already had disappeared. “I’ll bring more tomorrow. You must try to keep some of it for those in this tent.”

  Westmoreland nodded somberly. They both knew the unspoken condition that had been laid down and accepted: above all, Alex must be fed.

  When he went to the camp the next morning, Alex was asleep, and Jimmie-Joe was watching him. Jimmie-Joe said he had taken a good amount of soup.

  When Shaman adjusted the blankets, Alex awoke with a start, and Shaman patted his shoulder. “It’s all right, Bigger. It’s only your brother.” Alex closed his eyes again, but in a moment he spoke. “Is old Alden still alive?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Good! …” Alex opened his eyes and caught sight of the stethoscope peeping out of the medical bag. “What you doin with Pa’s bag?”

  “… I borrowed it,” Shaman said hoarsely. “I’m a doctor now myself.”

  “You’re never!” Alex said, as if they were children telling whoppers.

  “Yes, I am,” he said, and they smiled at one another before Alex fell back into a sound sleep. He took Alex’s pulse and didn’t care for it one bit, but there was nothing he could do about it just then. Alex’s unwashed body stank generally, but when Shaman uncovered the stump and bent to sniff it, his heart sank. Long exposure to his father and then to Lester Berwyn and Barney McGowan had given him the knowledge that there was nothing good about what less-enlightened surgeons welcomed as “laudable pus.” Shaman knew that pus in an incision or wound often meant the onset of blood poisoning, abscesses, or gangrene. He knew what had to be done, and he knew it couldn’t be done in the prison camp.

  He covered his brother with two of the new blankets and sat there and held his hands and studied his face.

  When the soldier kicked him out of the prison camp after an hour and a half, Shaman drove the rented horse and wagon southeast along the road that followed the Chemung River. The country was more hilly than Illinois, and more wooded. About five miles beyond the town line he came to a general store whose sign said it was Barnard’s. Inside, he bought some crackers and a piece of cheese for his lunch, and then had two slices of good apple pie and two cups of coffee. When he asked the proprietor about accommodations in the area, the man gave him directions to Mrs. Pauline Clay’s a mile down the road, outside the village of Wellsburg.

  The house proved to be small and unpainted, and surrounded by woods. Four rosebushes were wrapped with flour sacks against the cold, and tied with baling cord. A small sign on the picket fence said “ROOMS.”

  Mrs. Clay had an open, friendly face. She sympathized at once when he told her about his brother, and showed him through the place. Her sign should have been singular, he saw at once, because there were only two bedrooms. “Your brother could have the guest room, and you could have mine. I often sleep on the couch,” she said.

  She was clearly taken aback when he said he wanted to rent the entire house.

  “Oh, I’m afraid …” But her eyes widened when he disclosed what he was willing to pay. She said frankly that a widow who had struggled for years couldn’t refuse such generosity, and that she could move into her sister’s house in the village while the Cole brothers were in her place.

  Shaman went back to Barnard’s store and loaded up on foodstuffs and supplies, and while he moved them into the house that afternoon, Mrs. Clay was moving out.

  The following morning, the sergeant was grumpy and decidedly cool, but obviously the army had heard from Nick Holden, and perhaps from some of his friends.

  The sergeant gave Shaman a printed sheet that was a formal parole, promising that, in return for Alex’s freedom, “the undersigned shall not again bear arms against the United States of America.”

  “You have your brother sign this, and you can take him.”

  Shaman was worried. “He might not be well enough to sign.”

  “Well, the rule is, he has to give his parole or he isn’t released. I don’t care how sick he is, if he doesn’t sign, he doesn’t go.”

  So Shaman brought ink and a pen to tent Eight-C, and he had a quiet conversation with Buttons outside the tent. “Will Alex sign this thing if he’s able?”

  Westmoreland scratched his chin. “Well, some are willing to sign it in order to get out of here, and some consider it a disgrace. I don’t know how your brother feels.”

  The box the cabbages had come in was on the ground near the tent, and Shaman overturned it and placed the paper and the ink on it. Dipping the pen, he quickly wrote on the bottom of the page: Alexander Bledsoe.

  Buttons nodded in approval. “That’s right, Dr. Cole. You get his arse out of this hellish place.”

  Shaman told each of Alex’s tentmates to write the name and address of one of his loved ones on a piece of paper, and he promised to write and tell them the men were alive.

  “You reckon you can get the letters through the lines?” Buttons Westmoreland asked.

  “I believe I can, once I get back home.”

  Shaman worked fast. He left the parole with the sergeant, and he hurried to the boardinghouse for his suitcase. He paid the handyman to fill the wagon with loose straw, and then he drove back to the camp. A Negro sergeant and a private oversaw the prisoners as they loaded Alex into the wagon and covered him with blankets.

  The men of tent Eight-C gripped Shaman’s hand and made their good-byes.

  “So long, Doc!”

  “Good-bye, ole Bledsoe!”

  “Give em hell!”

  “Get well, now!”

  Alex, whose eyes remained closed, gave them no response.

  The sergeant waved them off, and the private clambered up and took the reins, driving the horse as far as the main gate of the camp. Shaman studied his dark and serious fac
e and smiled, remembering something from his father’s journal.

  “Jubilee day,” he said. The soldier looked startled, but then he smiled, showing fine white teeth.

  “I believe you right, suh,” he said, and handed over the reins.

  The wagon springs were poor; lying in the straw, Alex was jostled. He cried out in pain and then groaned as Shaman drove through the gates and turned onto the road.

  The horse moved the wagon past the observation tower, past the end of the wall around the prison. From the catwalk a soldier with a rifle watched them intently as they moved away.

  Shaman kept the horse under tight rein. He could make no speed without torturing Alex, but he moved slowly also because he wanted to call no attention to themselves. However irrationally, he felt that at any moment the long arm of the United States Army would reach out and pluck his brother back, and he didn’t begin to breathe evenly until the walls of the prison camp were far behind them and they had passed beyond the town line, out of Elmira.

  67

  THE HOUSE IN WELLSBURG

  Mrs. Clay’s house felt friendly. It was so small there was very little to learn about it, and it quickly became familiar, as if Shaman had lived in it for many years.

  He built a roaring fire in the stove that soon turned the iron of the firebox a fierce cherry red; then he heated water in Mrs. Clay’s largest cooking pots and filled the bathtub, which he’d placed next to the warmth.

  When Alex was set into the water like a babe, his eyes widened with pleasure.

  “When’s the last time you had a real bath?”

  Alex slowly shook his head. Shaman knew it had been so long ago, he couldn’t remember. He didn’t dare let Alex sit and soak, lest he catch a chill as the water cooled, so he washed him with a soapy rag, trying to ignore the fact that Alex’s ribs felt like a washboard beneath the cloth, and taking care to be as gentle as possible with the mortified left leg.

  When he took his brother out of the tub, he set him down on a blanket in front of the stove and toweled him dry, then put a flannel nightshirt on him. A few years ago, carrying him upstairs would have been a challenging task, but Alex had lost so much weight it wasn’t difficult.

  Once Alex had been placed in the bed in the guest room, Shaman went to work. He knew exactly what needed to be done. There was no sense in waiting, and delay might result in a good deal of danger.

  He removed everything from the kitchen but the table and one chair, stacking the other chairs and the dry sink in the parlor. Then he scrubbed the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the table, and the chair with hot water and strong soap. He washed the surgical instruments and laid them out on the chair, within easy reach of the table. Finally he trimmed his fingernails short and scrubbed his hands.

  When he carried Alex down again and placed him on the table, his brother looked so vulnerable that for a moment Shaman was shaken. He was very certain about what he was doing, except for this part. He had brought chloroform with him, but he wasn’t certain how much to use, because the trauma and malnutrition had left Alex so weak.

  “What?” Alex complained drowsily, confused by all the carrying.

  “Breathe deeply, Bigger.”

  He spilled chloroform and held the cone over Alex’s face as long as he dared. Please, God, he thought.

  “Alex! You hear me?” Shaman pinched Alex’s arm, slapped him lightly on the cheek, but he slept deeply.

  Shaman didn’t need to think or plan. He had done his thinking at length, and he had planned carefully. He forced all emotion from his mind and set about to do what was needed.

  He wanted to keep as much of the limb as possible, while at the same time taking enough to make certain that the amputated portion would include all the infected bone and tissue.

  He made the first circular incision at a place six inches below the insertion of the hamstring muscle, and prepared a good flap for the stump to come, stopping the cutting only to tie off the great and small saphenous veins, the tibial veins, and the peroneal vein. He sawed through the tibia with the same motions as a man cutting kindling. He proceeded to saw through the fibula, and the infected portion of the limb was free—a neat, clean job.

  Shaman bandaged tightly with clean dressings, to make a well-shaped stump. With that done, he kissed the still-unconscious Alex and then carried him back to bed.

  For a time he sat by the bed and watched his brother, but there was no sign of trouble, no nausea or vomiting, no cries of pain. Alex slumbered like a laborer who deserved his rest.

  Eventually Shaman carried the severed piece of leg out of the house in a towel, along with a spade he’d found in the cellar. He went into the woods behind the house and attempted to bury the amputated section of tissue and bone, but the ground was deeply frozen, and the spade skittered along the icy surface. Finally he gathered wood and made a pyre to give the piece of leg a Viking’s funeral. He placed the flesh-log on wood and heaped more wood on it, and sprinkled a little lamp oil. When he struck a match, the fire flared. Shaman stood near it with his back against a tree, dry-eyed but filled with terrible emotion, convinced that in the best of worlds, a man shouldn’t have to cut off and burn his big brother’s leg.

  The sergeant in the orderly room at the prison camp was familiar with the noncommissioned hierarchy in his region, and he knew this fat barrel-chested sergeant major wasn’t stationed in Elmira. Ordinarily he would ask a soldier coming from elsewhere to identify the unit to which he was attached, but this man’s demeanor, and especially his eyes, said clearly that he was looking to garner information, not to give it.

  The sergeant knew that sergeant majors weren’t deities, but he was acutely aware that they ran the army. The few men who were the army’s highest possible noncoms could arrange for someone to get a good assignment or a punishment posting to an isolated fort. They could get a man in or out of military trouble, and they could make or break careers. In the sergeant’s real world, a sergeant major was more intimidating than any commissioned officer, and he hastened to be accommodating.

  “Yessir, Sarn Majuh,” he said smartly after examining the records. “You’ve missed him by little more’n a day. This fella’s real sick. Has only the one foot left, you see. His brother’s a doctor, name of Cole. Took him away in a wagon just yesterday morning.”

  “Which direction they go?”

  The sergeant looked at him and shook his head.

  The fat man grunted, spat on the clean floor. Leaving the orderly room, he mounted his beautiful brown cavalry mare and rode through the main gate of the prison camp. One day’s start was nothing, when the brother was toting an invalid. There was just the one road; they could have taken only one direction or the other. He chose to turn northwest. From time to time, whenever he passed a store, or a farmhouse, or another traveler, he stopped and made inquiry. In that way, he passed through the village of Horseheads, and then through the village of Big Flats. Nobody he talked to had seen the men he was looking for.

  The sergeant major was an experienced tracker. He knew that when a trail was this invisible, most likely it was the wrong trail. So he turned his horse and began to ride in the other direction. He rode past the prison camp, and through the town of Elmira. Two miles down the road, a farmer remembered seeing their wagon. A couple of miles past the Wellsburg town line, he came to a general store.

  Inside, the proprietor smiled to see the fat soldier crowd close to his stove. “A cold one, ain’t it?” When the sergeant major asked for coffee, black, he nodded and served it.

  He nodded again when the man asked his question.

  “Oh, certainly. They’re boarding at Mrs. Pauline Clay’s, I’ll tell you how to find it. Awfully nice feller, Dr. Cole. He’s been in to buy groceries and such. Friends of yours, are they?”

  The sergeant major smiled. “It will be good to see them,” he said.

  The night following the operation, Shaman sat in a chair next to his brother’s bed, and kept the lamp burning throughout the long night. A
lex slept, but his slumber was pain-ridden and restless.

  Toward daybreak, Shaman drifted into sleep for a brief time. When he opened his eyes in the gray light, he saw Alex looking at him.

  “Hey, Bigger.”

  Alex licked dry lips, and Shaman brought water and supported his head while he drank, allowing him only a few small sips.

  “Wondering,” Alex said finally.

  “What?”

  “How I can ever … kick your ass again … without falling on my face.”

  How good it was for Shaman to see his crooked grin!

  “You whittled away more of my leg, didn’t you?” Alex’s gaze was accusatory, which stung the exhausted Shaman.

  “Yes, but I saved something else, I think.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your life.”

  Alex considered, and then he nodded. In a moment he went back to sleep.

  That first postoperative day, Shaman changed the dressings twice. Each time, he sniffed the stump and studied it, terrified lest he detect the stink or sight of corruption, because he’d seen many die of infection within a few days of amputation. But there was no smell, and the pink tissue above the stump appeared to be sound.

  Alex had almost no fever, but he had little energy, and Shaman had no confidence in his brother’s recuperative powers. He began to spend time in Mrs. Clay’s kitchen. Midmorning he fed Alex a small amount of gruel, and at midday a coddled egg.

  Shortly after noon, large white flakes began to fall thickly outside. Snow soon covered the ground, and Shaman took an uneasy account of the supplies he had put in, and decided he would take the wagon to the general store once more, in case they should be snowed in. During an interval in which Alex was awake, he explained what he was going to do, and Alex nodded that he understood.

  It was pleasant, driving through the silent, snowy world. The real reason he had come was to get a soup fowl; to his disappointment, Barnard hadn’t a fowl to sell, but he had some decent beef that would make nourishing soup, and Shaman told him that would have to do.