The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (164 page)

They sat and talked and planned. He would use the dispensary and the barn shed just as his father had, keeping morning hours in the dispensary and making house calls every afternoon. He would retain the same schedule of fees his father had used, because it wasn’t excessive, yet it always had kept them in comfort.

He had given thought to the problems of the farm, and Sarah listened as he outlined his suggestions to her; then she nodded in agreement.

Next morning, he sat in Alden’s cabin and drank terrible coffee while he explained that they had decided to reduce the size of the farm’s flock.

Alden listened intently, his eyes on Shaman while he sucked at and relit his pipe. “You understand what you’re sayin, do you? You know the price of wool is goin to stay high as long as the war goes on? And that a reduced flock will give you fewer profits than you now enjoy?”

Shaman nodded. “My mother and I understand that our only other choice is to have a larger business requiring more help and more management, and neither of us wants that. My business is doctoring, not sheep farming. But we don’t ever want to see the Cole farm without sheep, either. So we’d like you to go through the flock and separate out the best fleece producers, and we’ll keep those, and breed them. We’ll cull the flock every year to produce better and better wool, and that will ensure that we continue to get
good prices. We’ll keep just the number of sheep you and Doug Penfield are able to take care of.”

Alden’s eyes gleamed. “Now, that’s what I call a wonderful decision,” he said, and refilled Shaman’s mug with the vile coffee.

Sometimes it was very hard for Shaman to read the journal, too painful to creep into his father’s brain and emotions. There were times when he pushed it away for as long as a week, but always he returned to it, needing to read the next pages because he knew they would be his last contact with his father. When the journal was completely read, he’d have no new information about Rob J. Cole, only memories.

It was a rainy June and a queer summer, with everything early, crops as well as fruit trees, and plants in the woodlands. The population of rabbits and hares exploded, and the ubiquitous animals nibbled grass close to the house and ate the lettuce and flowers of Sarah Cole’s garden. The wet made haying difficult, with whole fields of fodder rotting on the ground, unable to dry, and it ensured a bountiful crop of insects that bit Shaman and sucked his blood as he rode on his calls. Despite that, he found it wonderful to be the physician of Holden’s Crossing. He had enjoyed being a doctor at the hospital in Cincinnati; if he had needed help or reassurance from an older physician, the entire staff had been right there at his beck and call. Here he was all alone and had no idea from day to day what he was going to confront. It was the essence of the practice of medicine, and he loved it.

Tobias Barr told him the county medical society was defunct because most of its members were off to the war. He suggested that in its absence he and Shaman and Julius Barton should meet one evening a month for dinner and professional talk, and they had the first such evening with mutual enjoyment, the main topic of discussion being measles, which had begun to break out in Rock Island but not in Holden’s Crossing. They agreed that it should be stressed to both young and old patients that the pustules mustn’t be scratched and broken, no matter how irritating, and that treatment should consist of soothing salves, cooling drinks, and Seidlitz powders. The other two men were interested when Shaman told them that at the Cincinnati hospital, treatment had included alum gargles whenever there was respiratory involvement.

Over dessert the talk turned to politics. Dr. Barr was one of many Republicans who felt that Lincoln’s approach to the South was too soft. He applauded the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, which called for severe punitive
measures against the South when the war ended, and which the House of Representatives had passed despite Lincoln’s objections. Encouraged by Horace Greeley, dissident Republicans had gathered in Cleveland and agreed to nominate their own presidential candidate, General John Charles Fremont.

“Do you think the general could possibly beat Mr. Lincoln?” Shaman asked.

Dr. Barr shook his head gloomily. “Not if there is still a war. There is nothing like a war to get a president reelected.”

In July the rains finally stopped but the sun was like brass, and the prairie steamed and toasted and turned brown. The measles finally reached Holden’s Crossing, and Shaman began to be called out of bed to attend some of its victims, although it wasn’t as violent an outbreak as had occurred in Rock Island. His mother told him that measles had swept through Holden’s Crossing the previous year, killing half a dozen people, including several children. Shaman thought that perhaps a severe onslaught of the disease somehow served to produce partial immunity in subsequent years. He thought of writing to Dr. Harold Meigs, his former professor of medicine in Cincinnati, and asking if there could be value in the theory.

On a still, sultry evening that ended in a thunderstorm, Shaman went to bed feeling the vibrations of an occasional thunderclap of heroic proportions, and opening his eyes whenever the room was transformed by the white illumination of lightning. Finally his weariness transcended the natural disturbances and he slept, so deeply that when his mother shook his shoulder it took him several seconds to realize what was happening.

Sarah held her lamp to her face so he could see her lips. “You must get up.”

“Someone with measles?” he asked, already pulling on his outer clothing.

“No. Lionel Geiger is here to fetch you.”

By that time he had slid into his shoes and was outside. “What is it, Cubby?”

“My sister’s little boy. Choking. Tries to suck up air, makes a bad sound, like a pump can’t send up water.”

It would have taken too long to run over the Long Path through the woods, too long to hitch the buggy or saddle one of his own animals. “I’ll take your horse,” he told Lionel, and did so, galloping the animal down their lane, up the quarter of a mile of road, and then up the Geigers’ lane, clutching the medical bag so he wouldn’t lose it.

Lillian Geiger waited by the front door. “In here.”

Rachel. Seated on the bed in her old room, with a child in her lap. The little boy was very blue. He kept weakly trying to bring in air.

“Do something. He’s going to die.”

In fact, Shaman believed the boy was close to death. He opened the child’s mouth and stuck his first and second fingers into the small throat. The back of the child’s mouth and the opening of his larynx were covered by a nasty mucous membrane, a killing membrane, thick and gray. Shaman stripped it away with his fingers.

At once the child pulled great shuddering breaths into his body.

His mother held him and wept. “Oh, God. Joshua, are you all right?” Her night-breath was strong, her hair was disheveled.

Yet, incredibly, it was Rachel. An older Rachel, more womanly. Who had eyes only for the child.

The little boy already looked better, less blue, his normal color flooding back as oxygen reached his lungs. Shaman placed his hand on the child’s chest and held it there to feel the strength of the heartbeat; then he took the rate of the pulse and for a few moments held a small hand in each of his own large ones. The little boy had started to cough.

Lillian took a step into the room, and it was to her that Shaman spoke.

“What does the cough sound like?”

“Hollow, like a … a barking.”

“Is there a wheeze?”

“Yes, at the end of each cough, almost a whistle.”

Shaman nodded. “He has a catarrhal croup. You must start boiling water and give him warm baths for the rest of the night, to relax the respiratory muscles of his chest. And he has to breathe steam.” He took one of Makwa’s medicines from his bag, a tea of black snakeroot and marigold. “Brew this and let him drink it sweetened and as hot as possible. It will keep his larynx open, and help with the cough.”

“Thank you, Shaman,” Lillian said, pressing his hand. Rachel didn’t appear to see him at all. Her bloodshot eyes looked crazed. Her gown was smeared with the child’s snot.

As he let himself out of the house, his mother and Lionel came walking down the Long Path, Lionel carrying a lantern that had attracted an enormous swarm of mosquitoes and moths. Lionel’s lips were moving, and Shaman could guess what he was asking.

“I think he will be all right,” he said. “Blow out the lantern and make sure the bugs are gone before you go into the house.”

He went up the Long Path himself, a route he had taken so many times the dark wasn’t a problem. Now and then the last of the lightning flickered and the black woods on both sides of the path sprang at him in the brightness.

When he was back in his room, he undressed like a sleepwalker. But when he lay on his bed, he was unable to sleep. Numb and confused, he stared up at the murky ceiling or at the black walls, and wherever he looked, he saw the same face.

61

A FRANK DISCUSSION

When he went to the Geigers’ house next morning, she answered the door wearing a new-looking blue housedress. Her hair was neatly combed. He smelled her light, spicy fragrance as she took his hands.

“Hello, Rachel.”

“… Thank you, Shaman.”

Her eyes were unchanged, wonderful and deep, but he noticed they were still raw with fatigue. “How is my patient?”

“He appears to be better. His cough isn’t as frightening as before.” She led him up the stairs. Lillian sat next to her grandson’s bed with a pencil and some sheets of brown paper, entertaining him by drawing stick figures and telling stories. The patient, whom Shaman had seen only as an afflicted human being the night before, this morning was a small dark-eyed boy with brown hair and freckles that stood out in his pale face. He looked about two years old. A girl, several years older but with a remarkable resemblance to her brother, sat at the foot of his bed.

“These are my children,” Rachel said, “Joshua and Hattie Regensberg. And this is Dr. Cole.”

“How do you do,” Shaman said.

“Ha do.” The boy regarded him warily.

“How do you do,” Hattie Regensberg said. “Mama says you don’t hear
us, and we must look at you when we speak, and say our words stinctly.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Why don’t you hear us?”

“I’m deaf because I was sick when I was a little boy,” Shaman said easily.

“Is Joshua going to be deaf?”

“No, Joshua definitely isn’t going to be deaf.”

In a few minutes he was able to assure them that Joshua was much better. The baths and steam had broken his fever, his pulse was strong and steady, and when Shaman positioned the stethoscope bell and told Rachel what to listen for, she could hear no rales. Shaman placed the earpieces in Joshua’s ears and let him hear his own heart beating, and then Hattie took a turn with the stethoscope and placed the bell on her brother’s stomach, announcing that all she heard was “guggles.”

“That’s because he’s hungry,” Shaman said, and advised Rachel to put the boy on a light but nourishing diet for a day or two.

He told Joshua and Hattie their mother knew some very good fishing spots along the river, and he invited them to visit the Cole farm and play with the lambs. Then he said good-bye to them, and to their grandmother. Rachel walked him to the door.

“You have beautiful children.”

“They
are
, aren’t they!”

“I’m sorry about your husband, Rachel.”

“Thank you, Shaman.”

“And I wish you good luck in your impending marriage.”

Rachel appeared startled. “What impending marriage?” she asked, just as her mother came down the stairway.

Lillian passed through the foyer quietly, but the high color in her face was like an advertisement.

“You have been misinformed, I have no marriage plans,” Rachel said crisply, loud enough for her mother to hear, and her face was pale when she said good-bye to Shaman.

That afternoon as he was riding Boss toward home, he overtook a solitary female figure trudging along, and when he drew closer he recognized the blue housedress. Rachel wore stout walking shoes and an old bonnet to guard her face from the sun. He called out to her, and she turned and greeted him quietly.

“May I walk along with you?”

“Please do.”

So he swung down from the saddle and led the horse.

“I don’t know what got into my mother, to tell you I was to be married. Joe’s cousin has shown some interest, but we won’t marry. I think my mother is pushing me toward him because she’s so anxious for the children to have a proper father again.”

“There seems to be a conspiracy of mothers. Mine neglected to tell me you were back, purposely, I’m sure.”

“It’s so insulting of them,” she said, and he saw tears in her eyes. “They assume that we’re fools. I’m aware I have a son and a daughter who need a Jewish father. And certainly the last thing you’re interested in is a Jewish woman who has two children and is in mourning.”

He smiled at her. “They’re very nice children. With a very nice mother. But it’s true, I’m not an infatuated fifteen-year-old anymore.”