The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (150 page)

He didn’t even think of her for seven weeks.

But one afternoon, impelled by a familiar longing, he walked to the Trent Candle factory and sought her out. The air in the interior of the candle works was hot with grease and heavy with the concentrated scent of bayberry. Hazel Melville was annoyed when she saw him. “Mustn’t have visitors, want me discharged?” But before he left, she said hurriedly that it wouldn’t be possible to see him again, because during the weeks of his neglect she had become promised to another man, someone she’d known a long time. He was a professional person, a company bookkeeper, she told Shaman, making no attempt to disguise her satisfaction.

The truth was, Shaman had less physical distraction than he would have expected. He turned everything—all yearning and desire, every hope and expectation of pleasure, his energies and his imagination—into the study of medicine. Cooke said with frank envy that Robert J. Cole had been designed to become a medical student, and Shaman felt it was so; all his life he’d been waiting for something that he had found in Cincinnati.

Midway in the term he began dropping into the dissection laboratory whenever he had a free hour, sometimes alone but more often with Cooke
or Billy Henried, to help them develop their techniques with the instruments or to drive home a fine point made by their textbook or in a lecture. Early in the A&P course, Dr. McGowan had begun asking him to help students who were having difficulty. Shaman knew his grades in his other courses were excellent, and even Dr. Meigs had been known to nod pleasantly at him when encountered in the corridor. People had become accustomed to his differentness. Sometimes, concentrating hard during a lecture or a laboratory class, he fell into his old bad habit of making humming sounds without realizing it. Once Dr. Berwyn had paused during a lecture and said, “Stop humming, Mr. Cole.” In the beginning, other students would titter, but they soon learned to touch him on the arm and give him a look that told him to be quiet. It didn’t bother him. He was confident.

He enjoyed wandering alone through the wards. One day a patient complained that he had walked past her bed unheeding although she had called his name repeatedly. After that, to prove to himself that his deafness need not hurt his patients, he developed the habit of stopping briefly at every bed, holding the patients’ hands in his own, and speaking briefly and quietly to each person.

The specter of conditional status was well behind him one day when Dr. McGowan offered him a job in the hospital during July and August, when the medical school would be on holiday. McGowan told him frankly that both he and Dr. Berwyn had considered competing for Shaman’s services, but had decided to share him. “You’d spend the summer working for us both, doing dirty work for Berwyn in the operating theater every morning, and helping me autopsy his mistakes every afternoon.”

It was a wonderful opportunity, Shaman realized, and the small salary would allow him to meet the rise in tuition. “I would like it,” he told Dr. McGowan. “But my father is expecting me home to help work the farm this summer. I’ll have to write and ask his permission to stay on here.”

Barney McGowan smiled. “Ah, the farm,” he said, dismissing it. “I predict that you are done with farming, young man. Your father is a country physician in Illinois, I believe? I have been meaning to inquire. There was a man several years ahead of me at University College Hospital in Edinburgh. Same name as yourself.”

“Yes. That was my father. He tells the identical anecdote you told our anatomy class, about Sir William Fergusson’s description of a corpse as a home from which the owner has moved.”

“I recall that you smiled when I told that story. And now I understand why.” McGowan gazed contemplatively, through narrowed eyes. “Do you know why … ah … your father left Scotland?”

Shaman saw that McGowan was trying to be discreet. “Yes. He’s told me. He got into political trouble. He was almost transported to Australia.”

“I remember.” McGowan shook his head. “He was held up to us as a warning. Everyone at University College Hospital knew of him. He was Sir William Fergusson’s protégé, with an unlimited future. And now he’s a country doctor. What a pity!”

“There is no need for pity.” Shaman wrestled with anger and ended up smiling. “My father is a great man,” he said, and with surprise he recognized that it was true. He began telling Barney McGowan about Rob J., about how he’d worked with Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston, about his trek across the country in lumber camps and as a railroad doctor. He described a day when his father had had to swim his horse across two rivers and a stream to reach the sod house where he delivered a woman of twins. He described the prairie kitchens in which his father had operated, and told of times when Rob J. Cole had performed surgery on a table moved from a dirty house into the clean sunshine. He told of his father being kidnapped by outlaws who had held a gun on him and ordered him to remove a bullet from a man who had been shot. He told of his father riding home on a night when the temperature on the plains was thirty degrees below zero, and saving his own life by slipping from his horse and, clutching the horse’s tail, running behind Boss in order to force his blood back into circulation.

Barney McGowan smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “Your father
is
a great man. And he is a fortunate father.”

“Thank you, sir.” Shaman started to move away, but then he stopped. “Dr. McGowan. In one of my father’s autopsies, a woman had been killed by eleven stab wounds to the chest, approximately .95 centimeters in width. Made by a pointed instrument, triangular in shape, all three edges ground to sharpness. Do you have any idea what instrument would make that sort of wound?”

The pathologist considered, interested. “It could have been a medical instrument. There is Beer’s knife, a three-sided scalpel used to operate for cataracts and to cut out defects of the cornea. But the wounds you describe were too large to have been made by Beer’s knife. Perhaps they were made by some kind of bistoury. Were the cutting edges of uniform breadth?”

“No. The instrument, whatever it was, was tapered.”

“I know of no such bistoury. Probably the wounds were not made by a medical instrument.”

Shaman hesitated. “Could they have been made by an object commonly used by a woman?”

“Knitting needle or some such? It’s possible, of course, but neither can I think of a housewife’s object that would make such a wound.” McGowan smiled. “Let me consider the problem for a time, and we’ll discuss it again.

“When you write to your father,” he said, “you must give him the best regards of one who came to William Fergusson a few years after he did.”

Shaman promised he would do so.

His father’s reply didn’t arrive in Cincinnati until eight days before the end of the semester, but it came in time to allow Shaman to accept the summer hospital job.

His father didn’t remember Dr. McGowan at all but expressed pleasure that Shaman was studying pathology under another Scot who had learned the art and science of dissection from William Fergusson. He asked his son to extend his respects to the professor, as well as his permission for Shaman to work in the hospital.

The letter was warm but brief, and from its lack of chattiness Shaman knew that his father’s mood was melancholy. There had been no word of the whereabouts or safety of Alex, and his father revealed that with each new round of fighting, Shaman’s mother became more fearful.

48

THE BOAT RIDE

It wasn’t lost on Rob J. that both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln had emerged into leadership by helping to destroy the Sauk nation in Black Hawk’s War. As a young army lieutenant Davis personally had taken Black Hawk and the medicine man White Cloud down the Mississippi from Fort Crawford to Jefferson Barracks, where they were imprisoned in balls and chains. Lincoln had fought the Sauks with the militia, both as a private and as a captain. Now each of these men answered when addressed as “Mr.
President,” and each was leading one half of the American nation against the other half.

Rob J. wanted to be left alone by the gibbering world, but it was too much to expect. The war was six weeks old when Stephen Hume rode to Holden’s Crossing to see him. The former congressman was frank to say he had used influence to gain a commission as colonel in the U.S. Army. He had taken leave as the railroad’s legal counsel in Rock Island in order to organize the Illinois 102nd Volunteer Regiment, and he’d come to offer Dr. Cole a job as regimental surgeon.

“It’s not for me, Stephen.”

“Doc, it’s all right to object to the idea of war in the abstract. But now we’re down to cases, there are good reasons why this war should be fought.”

“… I don’t think killing a lot of people is going to change anybody’s mind about slavery or free trade. Besides, you want someone younger and meaner. I’m a forty-four-year-old man with a thick waist.” He
had
put on weight. Back when escaped slaves came to the secret room, Rob J. had become accustomed to putting food in his pocket as he walked through the kitchen—a baked yam, a piece of fried chicken, a couple of sweet rolls—to help feed the fugitives. Now he continued to take the food, but he ate it himself in the saddle, for comfort.

“Oh, I want you, all right, fat or thin, mean or sweet,” Hume said. “What’s more, at this moment there are only ninety medical officers in the whole damn army. There’s going to be great opportunity. You’ll go in as captain, be major before you know it. Doctor like you, bound to move way up.”

Rob J. shook his head. But he liked Stephen Hume and held out his hand. “I wish you a safe return, Colonel.”

Hume smiled wryly and shook his head. A few days later Rob J. heard at the general store that Tom Beckermann had been appointed surgeon of the 102nd.

For three months both sides had been playing at war, but by July it was obvious that a large-scale confrontation was shaping up. Many people were still convinced that the trouble would be over quickly, but that first battle was an epiphany for the nation. Rob J. read the newspaper reports as avidly as any war lover.

More than thirty thousand Union soldiers under General Irvin McDowell
faced twenty thousand Confederates under General Pierre G. T. Beauregard at Manassas, Virginia, twenty-five miles south of Washington. About eleven thousand additional Confederates were in the Shenandoah Valley under General Joseph E. Johnston, squared off before another Union force of fourteen thousand, led by General Robert Patterson. Expecting Patterson to keep Johnston occupied, on July 21 McDowell led his army against the Southerners near Sudley Ford on Bull Run Creek.

It was scarcely a surprise attack.

Just before McDowell charged, Johnston slipped away from Patterson and joined his forces with Beauregard’s. The Northern battle plan was so widely known that congressmen and civil servants had streamed out of Washington, carrying their wives and children in traps and buggies to Manassas, where they ate elaborate picnic meals and prepared to watch the spectacle as though it were a celebrated footrace. Dozens of civilian drivers had been hired by the army to stand by with teams and buckboards to be used as ambulances in case there were wounded. Many of the ambulance drivers brought their own whiskey to the picnic.

While this audience gazed in fascinated pleasure, McDowell’s soldiers flung themselves at the combined Confederate force. Most of the men on both sides were untrained new troops, fighting with more zeal than art. The Confederate citizen-soldiers gave a few miles and then held fast, allowing the Northerners to use themselves up in several frenzied assaults. Then Beauregard ordered a counterattack. The exhausted Union troops gave way, and turned. Presently their retreat became a rout.

The battle wasn’t what the audience had expected; the combined sounds of the rifle fire and artillery and human noise were terrible, the sights, worse. Instead of athletics, they witnessed the transformation of living men into the disemboweled, the headless, the limbless. The myriad dead. Some of the civilians fainted, others wept. All tried to flee, but a shell blew up a wagon and killed a horse, blocking the main road of retreat. Most of the terrorized civilian ambulance drivers, the drunk and the sober, had driven off with empty buckboards. The few who tried to collect wounded found themselves marooned in a sea of civilian vehicles and rearing horses. The sorely hurt lay on the battlefield where they screamed until they died. It took some of the ambulatory wounded several days to make it into Washington.

In Holden’s Crossing the Confederate victory gave new life to Southern sympathizers. Rob J. was more depressed about the criminal neglect of the
casualties than about the defeat. By early autumn it became known that Bull Run had produced almost five thousand dead, wounded, or missing, and many lives had been thrown away through lack of care.

One evening, seated in the Coles’ kitchen, he and Jay Geiger avoided conversation of the battle. They spoke awkwardly of the news that Lillian Geiger’s cousin Judah P. Benjamin had been appointed Secretary of War for the Confederacy. But they were in complete agreement about the cruel idiocy of armies that didn’t salvage their own wounded.