The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (161 page)

Rob J. was taken with thirty-six other wounded to a sector hospital in Fredericksburg, where he stayed for ten days. It was a former warehouse and wasn’t as clean as it might have been, but the medical officer in charge, a major named Sparrow who had practiced in Hartford, Connecticut, before the war, was a decent sort. Rob J. remembered Dr. Milton Akerson’s experiments with hydrochloric acid in Illinois, and Dr. Sparrow agreed to allow him to wash his own wound with a mild hydrochloric-acid solution from time to time. It stung, but the wound began to crystallize beautifully and without infection, and they agreed that probably it would be fruitful to try it on other patients. Rob J. was able to flex the fingers and move his left hand, though it hurt to do so. He agreed with Dr. Sparrow that it was too soon to tell how much strength and usefulness would return to the wounded arm.

Colonel Symonds came to see him when he’d been there a week. “Go home, Dr. Cole. When you’ve recovered, if you want to return to us, you’ll be welcome,” he said, although they both knew he wouldn’t be back. Symonds thanked him clumsily. “If I survive, and someday you may find yourself in Fort Wayne, Indiana, you must come to me at the Symonds Lamp Chimney Factory, and we will eat too much wonderful food and drink too well and talk too long of bad old times,” he said, and they shook hands hard before the young colonel walked away.

It took him three and one-half days to get home, over five different railroad systems, starting with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. All of the trains were behind schedule, dirty, and crammed with out-of-sorts travelers. His arm was in a sling but he was just another middle-aged civilian and on several occasions he stood in a swaying car for fifty miles or more. In Canton, Ohio, he waited half a day to change trains, and then he shared a double seat with a drummer named Harrison who worked for a large firm of sutlers that sold ink powders to the army. The man had been within hearing distance of firing several times, he confided. He was full of improbable war stories, peppered with the names of important military and political figures, but Rob J. didn’t mind, for the stories made the miles go faster.

The hot, crowded cars ran out of water. Like others, Rob J. drank what was in his canteen and then thirsted. Finally the train stopped at a way station next to an army encampment outside of Marion, Ohio, to renew its fuel and take on water from a small stream, and the passengers boiled out of the cars to fill their containers.

Rob J. was among them, but as he knelt with his canteen, something caught his eye on the other side of the stream, and with disgust he recognized at once what it was. He went up close to confirm that somebody had dumped used dressings, bloody bandages, and other hospital offal into the stream, and when a short walk revealed other nearby dumping sites, he replaced the lid on his canteen and advised the other passengers to do the same.

The conductor said there would be good water in Lima, down the line a bit, and he returned to his seat; by the time the train had resumed its way, he had fallen asleep despite the rocking of the car.

When he awoke, he learned the train had just left Lima behind. “I had wanted to get water,” he said, irritated.

“Not to worry,” Harrison said. “I have plenty now,” and passed over his flask, from which Rob J. drank deeply and gratefully.

“Was there a large crowd waiting for water in Lima?” he asked, returning the flask.

“Oh, I didn’t get it in Lima. I filled my container back at Marion, when we stopped for fuel,” the salesman said.

The man paled when Rob J. told him what he had seen in the stream at Marion. “Shall we get sick, then?”

“Can’t tell.” After Gettysburg Rob J. had seen an entire company drink four days out of a well that turned out to contain two dead Confederates, without much subsequent discomfort. He shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we both get some real diarrhea in a few days.”

“Can’t we take something?”

“Whiskey might help, had we any.”

“You leave that to me,” Harrison said, and hurried off in search of the conductor. When he returned, doubtless with a lighter purse, it was with a large bottle, two-thirds full. The whiskey was raw enough to do the job, Rob J. said upon sampling it. By the time they parted woozily in South Bend, Indiana, each was convinced the other was a fine fellow, and they shook hands with great warmth. Rob was in Gary before he realized he hadn’t learned Harrison’s first name.

He came to Rock Island in the freshness of early morning, the wind blowing in from the river. He left the train gratefully and walked through the town carrying his suitcase in his good hand. He intended to rent a horse and trap, but straightaway he met George Cliburne on the street, and the feed merchant pumped his hand and clapped him on the back and insisted on driving him to Holden’s Crossing himself, in his buggy.

When Rob J. walked through the farmhouse door, Sarah was just sitting down to her breakfast egg and yesterday’s biscuit, and she looked at him without saying a word and started to cry. They just held each other.

“Are you bad hurt?”

He assured her he wasn’t.

“You turned skinny.” She said she’d make him some breakfast, but he said he’d eat afterward. He started kissing her and he was urgent as a boy, he wanted her on the table or on the floor, but she told him it was about time he came back to his own bed, and he followed close behind her up the stairs. In the bedroom she made him wait until everything was all off. “I need a good bath,” he said nervously, but she whispered he could bathe
afterward too. All the years, and his heavy fatigue, and the pain of his wound, fell away with their clothing. They kissed and explored one another more eagerly than they had in the farmer’s barn after they were married at the Great Awakening, because now they knew what they’d been missing. His good hand found her and his fingers spoke. After a while her legs wouldn’t support her, and he winced in pain when she sagged against him. She looked at the wound without blanching, but helped him return his arm to the sling and made him lie back on the bed while she took charge of everything, and when they made love Rob J. cried out loud several times, once because his arm hurt.

There was joy, not only in returning to his wife but also in going to the barn to feed dried apples to the horses and noting that they remembered him; and in coming up to Alden, who was mending fences, and seeing terrible gladness in the old man’s face; and in walking the Short Path through the woods to the river and stopping to pull weeds from Makwa’s grave; and in just sitting with his back against a tree near where the
hedonoso-te
had been, and watching the peaceable water gliding by, with nobody coming from the other bank to scream like animals and shoot at him.

Late that afternoon he and Sarah walked the Long Path between their house and the Geigers’. Lillian, too, wept to see him, and kissed him on the mouth. Jason was alive and well when last she had heard, she said, and was steward of a large hospital on the James River.

“I was very near to him,” Rob J. said. “Only a couple of hours away.”

Lillian nodded. “God willing, he’ll be home soon too,” she said dryly, and couldn’t keep from looking at Rob J.’s arm.

Sarah wouldn’t stay there for supper, wanting him all to herself.

She was able to keep him alone with her for only two days, because by the third morning word had spread that he was back and people began to come, a few just to welcome him home, but several more to turn the conversation casually to a boil on the leg, or a heavy cough, or a pain in the stomach that wouldn’t go away. On the third day Sarah capitulated. Alden saddled Boss for him and Rob J. rode half a dozen places, dropping in on old patients.

Tobias Barr had held a clinic in Holden’s Crossing almost every Wednesday, but people had tended to go to it only for the most acute situations, and Rob J. found the same kind of problems he had discovered when first he had come to Holden’s Crossing, neglected hernias, rotted teeth, chronic
coughs. When he went to the Schroeders’ he told them he was relieved to see Gustav hadn’t lost any more fingers in farm accidents, which was true even if he said it as a joke. Alma gave him chickory coffee and
mandelbrot
, and caught him up on the local news, some of which saddened him. Hans Grueber had dropped dead in his wheatfield last August. “His heart, I suppose,” Gus said. And Suzy Gilbert, who had always insisted that Rob J. stay for heavy potato pancakes, had died in the childbed a month ago.

There were new people in town, families from New England and from New York State. And three families of Catholics, new immigrants from Ireland. “Can’t even speak der langvich,” Gus said, and Rob J. lost the fight to keep from smiling.

In the afternoon he rode into the lane of the Convent of Saint Francis Xavier of Assissi, past what was now a respectable herd of goats.

Miriam the Ferocious beamed to greet him. He sat in the bishop’s chair and told her what had happened to him. She was keenly interested to hear of Lanning Ordway and of Ordway’s letter to the Reverend David Goodnow in Chicago.

She asked his permission to copy Goodnow’s name and address. “There are those who will be anxious to receive this information,” she said.

In turn she told him of her world. The convent prospered. She had four new nuns and a pair of novitiates. Lay people came to the convent now for Sunday worship. If settlers continued to come, soon there would be a Catholic church.

He suspected she had expected a visit, for he’d been there only a while before Sister Mary Peter Celestine served a platter of fresh-baked crackers and very good goat cheese. And real coffee, the first he’d tasted in more than a year, with creamy goat’s milk to lighten it.

“The fatted calf, Reverend Mother?”

“It is good you’re home,” she said.

Each day he felt stronger. He didn’t overdo, sleeping late, eating good food with pleasure, walking about the farm. He saw a few patients every afternoon.

Still, he had to become reaccustomed to the good life. On the seventh day he was home, his arms and legs ached and his back hurt. He laughed, and told Sarah he wasn’t used to sleeping in a bed.

He was lying in the bed in the early hours of the morning when he felt the flutter in his stomach and tried to ignore it, because he didn’t want to
get up. Finally he knew he had to, and he was halfway down the stairs when he began to lurch and run, and Sarah awoke.

He didn’t make it to the outhouse, but stepped off the path and squatted in the weeds like a drunken soldier, grunting and sobbing as it burst out of him.

She had followed him downstairs and out, and he hated it that she came upon him like that. “What?” she said.

“Water … on the train,” Rob J. gasped.

He had three more episodes during the night. In the morning he dosed himself with castor oil to clean the illness from his system, and when the malady was still on him that evening, he took Epsom salts. The following day he began to burn with fever, and terrible headaches started, and he knew what ailed him even before Sarah stripped him to bathe him that evening and they saw the red spots on his abdomen.

She was resolute when he told her. “Well, we’ve nursed people with typhoid before and pulled them through. Tell me of the diet.”

It made him nauseous to think of food, but he told her. “Meat broths, cooked with vegetables, if you can get some. Fruit juices. But this time of year …”

There were still some apples in a barrel in the cellar, and Alden would crush them, she said.

She kept herself busy, preferring to work so she wouldn’t worry, but in another twenty-four hours she knew she needed help, because she had been able to sleep only a little, what with bedpans, and constantly changing him and bathing him to fight the fever, and boiling fresh laundry. She sent Alden to the Catholic convent to request the help of the nursing nuns. A pair of them came—she had heard they always worked in pairs—a young baby-faced nun by the name of Sister Mary Benedicta and an older woman, tall and long-nosed, who said she was Mother Miriam Ferocia. Rob J. opened his eyes and saw them and smiled, and Sarah went to the boys’ room and slept for six hours.

The sick chamber was kept orderly and sweet-smelling. The nuns were good nurses. When they had been there three days, Rob J.’s temperature dropped. At first the three women rejoiced, but it was the older one who showed Sarah when the stools began to get bloody, and she sent Alden riding to Rock Island for Dr. Barr.

By the time Dr. Barr arrived, the stools were almost wholly composed of blood, and Rob J. was very pale. It was eight days since the first crampy onset.

“It moved very quickly,” Dr. Barr said to him, as if they were at a meeting of the Medical Society.

“It does that at times,” Rob J. said.

“Perhaps quinine, or calomel?” Dr. Barr said. “Some believe it’s malarial.”

Rob J. indicated that quinine and calomel were useless. “Typhoid fever isn’t malarial,” he said with effort.

Tobias Barr hadn’t done as much anatomy work as Rob J., but they both knew the severe hemorrhaging meant the bowels were riddled with perforations caused by the typhoid, and the ulcers would become more pronounced, not better. It wouldn’t take many hemorrhages.

“I could leave some Dover’s powders,” Dr. Barr said. Dover’s powder was a mixture of ipecac and opium. Rob J. shook his head, and Dr. Barr understood that he wanted to be conscious as long as possible, in his own room, in his own house.

It was easier for Tobias Barr when the patient knew nothing, and he could leave hope in a bottle, with instructions about when to take it. He patted Rob J.’s shoulder and allowed his hand to stay there for a few moments. “I’ll come by tomorrow,” he said, his face composed; he had been through this so many times before. But his eyes were heavy with regret.

“Can we not help you in some other way?” Miriam Ferocia asked Sarah. Sarah said she was a Baptist, but the three women knelt for a time in the hallway outside the bedchamber and prayed together. That evening, Sarah thanked the nuns and sent them away.

Rob J. rested quietly until sometime before midnight, when he had a small bloody flow. He had forbidden her to allow the minister to visit, but now she asked him again if he would like to talk to the Reverend Blackmer.