After about a week, I could curry the horse, chop wood, stoke the fires and sweep the kitchen. Neither one of us was much of a hand at cooking. Doc fried bacon, eggs and potatoes, but mostly we ate at the Camp house. One night Mr. Birt said Aunt Alice was still in the poorhouse. The next morning while Doc and I were eating eggs that had been fried too hard I had an idea. “It’d sure be nice if Aunt Alice could do our cooking,” said I.
“I couldn’t pay her,” said Doc.
“She would cook and clean like she done for Pa and me if you gave her room and board,” said I.
The very next day, he drove the buggy to the poor house in Columbia, signed some papers and brought Aunt Alice to stay with us.
We hugged and cried out of pure happiness. Aunt Alice settled into her own room on the second floor and went to work with lye soap until the place was sparkly clean. I felt a whole lot better and gained weight on Aunt Alice’s cooking. After about a month, the pains in my neck went away and I could walk almost as good as ever. Sleep was hard on account of almost every night I had those nightmares.
Folks had started coming to Doc with their complaints but after word got around that he had brought “that darky woman” into the house no one came. It was hard to believe they could be so close-minded, but there were always folks who liked to stir up trouble. People forget that he had cured Mr. Birt and churchgoers didn’t like his drinking and card playing at the Camp House. Sometimes a whole day went by without a patient. Doc was down at the mouth and things looked pretty bleak. I mixed tonics and elixirs, like iron chloride in gin and wild cherry for nervous women and root of elecampane with molasses for coughs and asthma. The work wasn’t much different than what I had done for Pa. I figured that if things got any worse, I could still go west. Doc made me read Gray’s Anatomy two hours a day. There were times, though, when all I did was daydream about Rachel and sometimes, I even thought about that night I had snuggled up close to Mary.
One afternoon, Doc Evans fell down his office steps. People said he was drunk but Doctor Steele said the old doctor was paralyzed on his left side from a stroke. There wasn’t a whole lot to do but Mrs. Evans told everyone in town how Dr. Steele had visited twice a day and kept him from choking to death. People figured they could trust him and we had more patients.
Another case made Doc famous as far away as Chicago. There was a tough little saloon on the river about ten miles out of town on the line between two counties where there wasn’t much law. Dirty Dick Olsen made his own corn likker and a steamboat man or a sharper could always find a game of dice or poker and sometimes there were women in the upstairs rooms.
One night someone banged on the door. “Tom, get the horse hitched. We got work to do,” said Doc.
I put on my clothes in no time at all, got a lantern and went to the stable. The light spooked Jesse and she danced around the stall. I whacked her a good lick across the shoulders with the harness and she let me hitch her to the buggy. By that time, Doc was there with his bags and ready to go.
“Follow that man,” he said.
It was getting on to April and we had a spell of nice weather. Even though the moon was about half gone, there was plenty of light to see the horse and rider. We went out of town on a dirt road that led off to the north-east, next to the river on top of the bluffs. After a few miles there was a turnoff, leading back to the river. When we got there, the saloon was quiet and dark. It was plumb spooky. Doc ran into the saloon with his bulls eye lantern, while I hitched Jesse to the post. The Beaver, a packet boat that did the mail run from Ottawa to Peoria was tied up at the rickety dock. This was no mail stop or even a regular landing but before I could think why she was here, Doc called from inside the Saloon. I carried the instrument case inside, where the floor was slippery with blood, the mirror behind the bar was splattered. The bartender was out cold on the floor back of the bar, clutching an empty whisky bottle. A half-dressed red-haired woman slumped over a table toward the back. We figured she was just drunk. The feller who led us to the place rode off at a fast gallop and we never did find out his name. The man stretched out on the floor in a pool of blood looked like he was dead, except he made a gargly sort of moan. Doc got down on his knees and felt his wrist. “His a pulse is weak and he’s about a goner.”
I took his feet and with Doc at his shoulders, we heaved him up on the card table. He was limp as a dishrag. A slash across his throat went plumb from one side of his neck to the other. Doc kicked the bartender a couple of times but he didn’t come awake. We found candles and another coal oil lamp that shed enough light so we could see to work. The cut went from the muscles at the side of his neck, across his windpipe and over to the other side. Blood and air bubbled up out of a hole in his windpipe.
Doc felt put his finger in the cut. “It missed his carotid arteries and the deep jugular veins or he would be dead. All this blood came from the external jugular veins.”
I stood there, kinda dumb, until something clicked and I could see the picture from the anatomy book in my mind, clear as a bell. The external jugular veins ran from the angle of the jaw just beneath the skin down to behind the clavicle bone. They weren’t real big veins, but could bleed real bad.
“Tom! Stop daydreaming. Soak the needles, thread, artery forceps and bandages in whiskey. There isn’t much time.”
It was the first time Doc ever raised his voice. There wasn’t clean water for a carbolic solution so I spread the instruments and sutures out on a clean cloth and poured a whole quart of rotgut booze over the clamps and sutures.
When Doc went to work, time slowed down. If it hadn’t been for the bubbling and gurgling of air and blood out of his windpipe, I would have sworn the man was deader’n a mackerel. I held the edges of the skin apart with one of his special hooks so he could see inside the wound. The bleeding stopped when he clamped the vein. He tied the veins with linen threads, mopped the wound with bandages soaked in whiskey and sewed the muscles back together. When that was finished, he stitched the skin, but left it open over the hole in the windpipe. When we were done the man was still unconscious, with a weak pulse. It was almost daylight outside.
The bartender was still out cold back of the bar and the woman was in the exact same place. Doc slapped the bartenders face with a wet bar rag, but he didn’t move.
The woman raised her head off the table. “Come here,” she whispered.
Doc poured himself a little glass of whiskey and carried it over to the woman’s table. I went along and noticed for the first time that she was pale as a sheet and that the lower part of her dress was soaked with blood. The blood had even pooled on the floor under her chair.
“Why didn’t you say you were hurt?” Doc asked.
“Wouldn’t make no difference. He put a knife through my stomach. I come here with Captain Bart Daniels. That’s him over there, near dead. Him and me came on the boat for a little party. We were talking and drinking when a passenger from Chicago horned in. Bart gave him a shove, but he got mean, pulled a knife and tried to cut Bart’s head off. When I busted him with a bottle, he rammed the knife into my belly.”
Her eyes rolled back, she went limp and fell forward on the table. She was stone cold dead.
Doc looked at the hole in her belly and shook his head. The knife had gone clean through her. Later, the bartender, Dirty Dick Olsen said Captain Daniels tied up the boat just after sundown because of boiler trouble. Later, it come out that there wasn’t no trouble with the boiler. He had done this before and every time, he and the red haired woman spent the night in one of the upstairs rooms. A passenger who said he was from Chicago also got off the boat. After he watched her for a while, he claimed he was a Pinkerton detective, hired by the woman’s husband. The Pinkerton drank some of the rotgut whiskey and tried to take the woman away from the saloon. Captain Daniels hit the Pinkerton and the detective slashed at the captain with a Bowie knife. He missed and the knife went through the woman. The captain tried to draw a pistol, but the Pinkerton man came near to cutting Bart’s head off. I never knew if that story was right, but it got in all the newspapers. They never found the passenger and some folks claim that Dirty Dick didn’t exactly tell the whole story.
There wasn’t anything we could do for the woman and the steamboat crew had skedaddled away in a rowboat.
We carried the captain to the buggy and got him arranged so that only his feet hung out over the side and headed for home. The horse plodded along without me giving him any direction. I was excited and sort of broody, too, wondering why anyone could hurt such a pretty woman.
“Doc, was that was just about the hardest operation you ever did?”
“It wasn’t a hard operation, it was mostly knowing the anatomy. Mainly, he was lucky. If he would have been cut a half inch deeper, he would be dead. Did you learn anything?” Doc asked.
“I see now how important it is to study anatomy. There’s something I been a wondering about. Are the muscles and such the same in Indians and Negroes as white folks?”
“We are all the same under the skin. You can’t tell the insides of one man from another,” said Doc.
I pondered that for a while. It was surprising, but if Doc said it was so it must be true.
“How come a man would want to hurt a pretty woman like that?”
Doc didn’t answer for a spell. The buggy went over a rut and our patient let out a gargling sort of cry. Leastwise, we knew he was still alive.
“That isn’t a medical question and it doesn’t have any good answer. Some men just naturally go crazy over women. Maybe it’s on account of the full moon. Then again some doctors claim everything is related to how we got along with our mothers.”
I pondered that one all the way back to town. There might be something to that, on account of my mother sometimes got tangled up with Rachel in my dreams. I just couldn’t even think about hurting a hair on Rachel’s head, no matter what happened.
When we drove up Main Street, people were stirring around and before we knew it, the news was all over town. The town marshal and the vigilante committee went to the saloon and after a while, the sheriff came with his deputies. News of the “Sandy Ford Massacre” went out on the telegraph and pretty soon reporters were all over town. Captain Daniels woke up later that day but couldn’t talk because of the hole in his windpipe. The next morning, he sat up and took some of Aunt Alice’s soup.
Mr. Birt came up to the house and tried to get a story, but the captain couldn’t talk.
Later, it came out that the woman was the wife of a big shot state politician from Peoria. She was supposed to have been visiting her sister in Chicago. Big city reporters tramped all over the saloon and took pictures of the blood and the bar and the exact spot where the woman died. They tried to see the captain, but Doc wouldn’t let them in the house. Some said that the whole thing was done by Indians that still lived in the swamps. Sheriff Brewer blamed the colored folks. The case fizzled out until the telegram came from General Grant. Bart Daniels was the captain of a steamboat that sneaked up the Yazoo River and helped defeat the Rebs at Vicksburg. He was a genuine war hero and one of Grant’s drinking buddies. Reporters from as far away as Chicago swarmed all over the house, trying to get a story. You would think Doc would want the publicity, but every time one of those reporters came around, he went out to the stable, or in his room. Never once did he show his face to the newspaper people.
Even so Doc was famous in Sandy Ford all of a sudden folks developed imaginary ailments just to get in to see him and maybe see Captain Daniels, a war hero. Doc listened, gave advice and sometimes prescribed a tonic or stimulant or some other nostrum. The quarters clinked in the cash box and even the church people stopped talking about his drinking and gambling. Pretty soon every one called him “Doc” just like they had old Dr. Evans. The captain and the Doc got to be pretty good friends and when his voice came back, they spent a lot of time talking about the war. Nothing much was said about how he had come to have his throat cut.
Doctors all over the country told the newspapers that the captain would surely die from all the bad air that got into his body through the hole in his windpipe. Doc Steele said the hole would close by itself, and durned if he wasn’t right. After about two weeks, the skin over the hole just gradually closed up until the captain was just as good as new. He went back to steam-boating and told everybody up and down the river that Doc Steele had saved his life. The captain paid enough that we didn’t have to worry about money. That case made a big impression on me. What we did or what Doc did was about as close to raising someone from the dead as you could ever see. I studied harder than ever.