The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (104 page)

He took care of his patients with his usual attentiveness, but in between each case his mind was racing. Finally he sat on a wooden stoop on Broad Street and contemplated the past, the present, and his future.

For the second time he had escaped a terrible fate. He felt he had received a warning that his existence must be carefully, more respectfully used.

He thought of his life as a large painting in progress. Whatever happened to him, the finished picture would be of medicine, but he sensed that if he stayed in Boston the painting would be rendered in shades of gray.

Amelia Holmes could arrange what she called “a brilliant match” for him, but having escaped an unloving impoverished marriage, he had no desire to cold-bloodedly seek out an unloving rich one or to allow himself to be sold on Boston society’s marriage market, medical meat at so much per pound.

He wanted his life to be painted with the strongest colors he could find.

When he was through with his work that afternoon, he went to the Athenaeum and reread the books that had so captured his interest. Long
before he finished them, he knew where he wanted to go and what he wanted to do.

That night as Rob lay in his bed, there was a familiar small signal at the door. He stared up at the darkness without moving. The scratching knock sounded a second time, and then a third.

For several reasons he wanted to go to the door and open it. But he lay without moving, frozen into a moment as bad as any of those in the nightmares, and eventually Margaret Holland went away.

It took him more than a month to make his preparations and resign from the Boston Dispensary. In lieu of a farewell party, on a brutally cold December evening he, Holmes, and Harry Loomis dissected the body of a Negro slave named Delia. She had labored all her life and the body had remarkable musculature. Harry had demonstrated a genuine interest and talent in anatomy and would replace Rob J. as docent at the medical school. Holmes lectured as they cut, showing them that the fimbriated end of the Fallopian tube was “like the fringe of a poor woman’s shawl.” Every organ and muscle reminded one of them of a story, a poem, an anatomical pun, or a scatological joke. It was serious scientific work, they were meticulous about every detail, yet while they worked they roared with laughter and good feeling. Following the dissection they repaired to the Essex Tavern and drank mulled wine until closing. Rob promised to stay in touch with both Holmes and Harry when he arrived at a permanent destination, and to call on both of them with problems if the need should arise. They parted in such fellowship that Rob was regretful about his decision.

In the morning he walked to Washington Street and bought some roasted chestnuts, bringing them back to the house on Spring Street in a twist of paper torn from the Boston
Transcript
. He stole into Meggy Holland’s room and left them under the pillow of her bed.

Shortly after noon he climbed aboard a railroad car, which presently was pulled out of the train yards by a steam locomotive. The conductor who collected his ticket looked askance at his luggage, for he had declined to put either his viola da gamba or his box into the baggage car. In addition to his surgical instruments and clothing, the trunk now contained Old Horny and half a dozen bars of strong brown soap, the same kind Holmes used. So though he had little cash, he was leaving Boston far wealthier than when he had arrived.

It was four days before Christmas. The train glided past houses in which wreaths decorated doors and Yule trees could be glimpsed through windows along the track. Soon the city was left behind. Despite a lightly falling snow, in less than three hours they made Worcester, the terminus of the Boston Railroad. Passengers had to transfer to the Western Railroad, and in the new train Rob sat next to a portly man who promptly offered him a flask.

“No, thank you kindly,” he said, but accepted conversation to take the sting from the refusal. The man was a drummer of wrought nails—clasp, clinch, double-headed, countersunk, diamond, and rose, in sizes ranging from tiny needle nails to huge boat spikes—and showed Rob his samples, a good way to while away the miles.

“Traveling west! Traveling west!” the salesman said. “You too?”

Rob J. nodded. “How far do you go?”

“Just about the end of the state! Pittsfield. You, sir?”

It gave him an inordinate amount of satisfaction to answer, so much pleasure that he grinned and had to restrain from shouting for all to hear, as the words played their own music and shed a fine romantic light in every corner of the rocking railroad car.

“Indian country,” he said.

8

MUSIC

He progressed through Massachusetts and New York via a series of short railroads connected by stagecoach lines. It was hard traveling in the winter. At times a stage had to wait while as many as a dozen oxen dragged plows to clear drifts or packed down the snow with great wooden rollers. Inns and taverns were expensive. He was in the forest of the Allegheny Plateau in Pennsylvania when he ran out of money and deemed himself lucky to find work in Jacob Starr’s timber camp, doctoring lumberjacks. When there was an accident, it was likely to be serious, but in between there was little for him to do, and he sought out labor, joining the crews in hewing down white pines and hemlocks that had lived more than two hundred and fifty years. Usually he manned one end of a “misery whip,” or two-man saw. His body
hardened and thickened. Most camps didn’t have a doctor, and the lumberjacks knew how valuable he was to them, and protected him as he worked at their dangerous trade. They taught him to soak his bleeding palms in brine till they toughened. In the evenings he juggled in the bunkhouse to keep his callused fingers dexterous for surgery, and he played his viola da gamba for them, alternating accompaniments of their raunchy bellowed songs with selections by J. S. Bach and Marais, to which they listened raptly.

All winter they stockpiled huge logs on the banks of a stream. On the back of every single-bitted ax head in camp, raised in steel, was a large five-pointed star. Each time a tree was felled and trimmed, the men reversed their axes and slammed the embossed star into the fresh-cut butt, marking it as a Starr log. When the spring melt came, the stream rose eight feet, carrying the logs to the Clarion River. Huge log rafts were assembled, and on them were built bunkhouses, cookhouses, and supply shacks. Rob rode the rafts downriver like a prince, a slow, dreamlike journey interrupted only when the logs jammed and piled up, to be unsnarled by the skilled, patient boom-men. He saw all manner of birds and animals, drifting down the serpentine Clarion until it joined the Allegheny, and riding the logs down the Allegheny all the way to Pittsburgh.

In Pittsburgh he said good-bye to Starr and his lumberjacks. In a saloon he was hired as physician to a track-laying crew of the Washington & Ohio Railroad, a line seeking to compete with the state’s two busy canals. With a work crew he was taken into Ohio, to the beginning of a great openness bisected by two shining rails. Rob was given living quarters with the bosses aboard four railroad cars. Springtime on the great plain was beautiful, but the world of the W&O RR was ugly. The track layers, graders, and teamsters were immigrant Irish and Germans whose lives were regarded as a cheap commodity. Rob’s responsibility was to ensure that the last ounces of their strength were available for laying track. He welcomed the pay, but the job was doomed from the start, for the superintendent, a dark-visaged man named Cotting, was a piece of nastiness who wouldn’t spend money on food. The railroad employed hunters who killed plenty of wild meat, and there was a chicory drink that passed for coffee. But save at the table shared by Cotting, Rob, and the managers, there were no greens, no cabbage, no carrots, no potatoes, nothing to supply ascorbic acid except, as a very rare treat, a pot of beans. The men had scurvy. Though anemic, they had no appetites. Their joints were sore, their gums bled, their teeth were falling out, and their injuries wouldn’t heal. They were literally being murdered by malnutrition
and heavy work. Finally Rob J. broke into the locked supply car with a crowbar and passed out crates of cabbages and potatoes until the bosses’ own foodstuffs were gone. Fortunately, Cotting didn’t know his young physician had taken a vow of nonviolence. Rob’s size and condition and the cold contempt in his eyes made the superintendent decide it was easier to pay him off and be rid of him than to fight him.

He’d earned barely enough money from the railroad to buy a slow old mare, a used twelve-gauge muzzle-loading rifle and a light little goose gun with which to hunt smaller game, needles and thread, a fishline and hooks, a rusty iron frying pan, and a hunting knife. He named the horse Monica Grenville, in honor of a beautiful older woman, his mother’s friend, whom for years he had dreamed of riding during the fevered fantasies of his adolescence. Monica Grenville the horse allowed him to work his way west on his own terms. He shot game easily after discovering that the rifle pulled to the right, and caught fish if there was opportunity, and he earned money or goods wherever he came to people who needed a doctor.

The size of the country stunned him, mountain and valley and plain. After a few weeks he became convinced he could go on as long as he lived, riding Monica Grenville ploddingly and eternally in the direction of the setting sun.

He ran out of pharmaceuticals. It was hard enough performing surgery without the aid of the few inadequate palliatives that were available, but he had neither laudanum nor morphine nor any other drug and had to rely on his swiftness as a surgeon and whatever rotgut whiskey he was able to buy as he went along. Fergusson had taught him a few helpful tricks that he remembered. Lacking tincture of nicotine, given by mouth as a muscle relaxant to slacken the anal sphincter during an operation for fistula, he bought the strongest cigars he could find and inserted one into the patient’s rectum until the nicotine was absorbed from the tobacco and relaxation took place. Once in Titusville, Ohio, an elderly citizen happened upon him overseeing a patient who was bent over a wagon shaft, the cigar protruding.

“Do you have a match, sir?” Rob J. asked him.

Later, at the general store, he heard the old man tell his friends solemnly, “You would never believe how they was smokin em.”

In a tavern in Zanesville, he saw his first Indian, a crushing disappointment. In contrast to James Fenimore Cooper’s splendid savages, the man was a soft-fleshed, sullen drunkard with snot on his face, a pitiful creature taking abuse while begging drinks.

“Delaware, I guess,” the saloonkeeper said when Rob asked him the Indian’s tribe. “Miami, mebbe. Or Shawnee.” He shrugged contemptuously. “Who cares? The mizzable bastards is all a same to me.”

A few days later, in Columbus, Rob discovered a stout black-bearded young Jew named Jason Maxwell Geiger, an apothecary with a well-stocked pharmacy.

“You have laudanum? You have tincture of nicotine? Potassium iodide?” No matter what he requested, Geiger answered with a smile and a nod, and Rob wandered happily among the jars and retorts. Prices were lower than he would have feared, for Geiger’s father and brothers were manufacturers of pharmaceuticals in Charleston, and he explained that whatever he couldn’t make himself, he was able to order from his family at favorable terms. So Rob J. put in a good supply. It was when the pharmacist helped carry his purchases to the horse that Geiger saw the wrapped bulk of the musical instrument and turned at once to his visitor. “Surely it’s a viol?”

“Viola da gamba,” Rob said, and saw something new enter the man’s eyes, not exactly cupidity, but a wistful yearning so powerful as to be unmistakable. “Would you care to see it?”

“You must bring it into the house, show it to my wife,” Geiger said eagerly. He led the way to the dwelling behind the apothecary shop. Inside, Lillian Geiger held a dish towel across her bodice as they were introduced, but not before Rob J. had noticed the stains from her leaking breasts. In a cradle slept their two-month-old daughter, Rachel. The house smelled of Mrs. Geiger’s milk and fresh-baked
hallah
. The dark parlor contained a horsehair sofa and chair and a square piano. The woman slipped into the bedroom and changed her dress while Rob J. unwrapped the viol; then she and her husband examined the instrument, running their fingers over the seven strings and ten frets as if they were stroking a newly recovered family icon. She showed him her piano, with its carefully oiled dark walnut wood. “Made by Alpheus Babcock of Philadelphia,” she said. Jason Geiger brought another instrument to light from behind the piano. “It was made by a brewer of beer named Isaac Schwartz who lives in Richmond, Virginia. It’s just a fiddle, not good enough to be called a violin. Someday I hope to own a violin.” But in a moment, when they were tuning up, Geiger drew sweet sounds.

They regarded one another warily lest they prove to be musically incompatible.

“What?” Geiger asked him, giving the visitor the courtesy.

“Bach? Do you know this prelude from
The Well-Tempered Clavier?
It’s
from Book II, I forget the number.” He played them the opening, and at once Lillian Geiger joined in and, nodding, so did her husband.
The twelfth
, Lillian mouthed. Rob J. cared nothing about identifying the piece, for this kind of playing was not to entertain lumberjacks. It was at once apparent that the man and woman were accomplished and accustomed to accompanying one another, and he was certain he’d make an ass of himself. Wherever their music progressed, his followed tardily and jerkily. His fingers, instead of flowing along the musical path, seemed to make spastic leaps, like salmon fighting their way up a falls. But halfway through the prelude he forgot his fear, for the habits of many long years of playing overcame the clumsiness caused by lack of practice. Soon he was able to observe that Geiger played with his eyes closed, while his wife wore on her face a look of glazed pleasure that was at the same time sharing and intensely private.