The summer went by without much happening in the medical line and I slacked off studying. Doc said I should cut open a cat to study the organs. There were plenty of cats in the barn, but Aunt Alice wouldn’t hear of hurting one. She always set out food for those critters. I did a little swimmin’ and fishin’ and just tom-foolin’ on the river.
A steamboat with a minstrel show and a band stayed for a whole week over the fourth of July. We sneaked in to see the show. Gosh, it sure was fine. A pretty girl who sang about every song ever written and a man with painted on blackface told a lot of jokes, mostly about farmer’s daughters. People laughed until the tears came. Nothin’ much cheered me up for very long. On Saturdays I moped around downtown, hopin’ to see Rachel, but she never came to town.
I had gone to the Sandy Ford school every term since I was six years old and lerned to read, write and do numbers. The teachers taught a little history, geography and we read McGuffey’s Readers. Mostly, the teachers thought we should learn to write a good hand but my handwriting looked like chicken tracks. The terms were for six months, so farm boys could get in the harvest before school started. There wasn’t any high school to speak of, but the girls kept on for another year or so to learn how to teach school. What with studying Doc’s books and the work I had to do around the house, there wouldn’t be no time for more school, until I was ready for medical college. I got up at five o’clock every morning to get the fires lit and chop enough kindling for the day. After that, I fed and watered the horses, then came back to the house and washed up for breakfast. If Doc had to go out on a call, I hitched one of the horses to the trap and if he needed help, I went along out in the country. It seemed like I learned the most when I watched Doc and listened to what he told the patients. From what I had learned from Pa, most of it sounded like ordinary common sense.
Doc taught me how to give ether when he set bones or dislocated joints. One day, he said I did a fine job and I felt real good for a while. On other days, I filled medicine bottles, made flaxseed poultices and cleaned the instruments. When there was time, I read his books and tried to unravel the fine points of human architecture.
Toward the end of summer, Doc and Mr. Birt decided that I needed more formal education before medical college. I didn’t have no say in the matter, when they decided on the Christian Missionary Academy. Mr. Philip Cooper, a rich Easterner, had made a bundle of money from railroads and decided to educate boys who would Christianize the Indians instead of ‘sterminating them. He built schools for ordinary boys, like the sons of farmers and preachers so they could get into regular colleges and learn to convert the heathen. Two men from Yale College started the Academy on a piece of property at the edge of town. The main building had two whole stories for classrooms, a basement and a bell tower on top. It was about the finest brick building in the whole county. There were lots of windows, so each room had plenty of light. Right next door was a hall with a kitchen and dining room for students from out of town. On the other side of the school building were houses for the professors. The students were ‘young gentlemen’ who weren’t allowed off the grounds for fear they would fall in with bad company in the town. I guess they figured that people like me and Billy Malone would be a bad influence. There wouldn’t be much fun in that place.
Doc explained to the headmaster that I wanted to be a doctor and didn’t care for missionary work. They weren’t going to let me in until Doc agreed to take care of the teachers and students for free. I would take classes in the morning and wouldn’t have to pay tuition and do Bible study. They agreed I could take Latin and science but had to attend chapel at seven o’clock in the morning. The professor hoped that after listening to his sermons, I would give up medicine and go convert the heathen.
The next morning, after chores, I slipped into the back row of the chapel a minute or so late. I had on the same rough clothes I wore to muck out the stable and might have smelled a little ripe. The professor stopped his sermon in mid-sentence and gave me a mean look; some of the boys snickered and one held his nose. There were about twenty boys from twelve to twenty years of age and every single one wore a necktie and a coat. It wasn’t a good start. Instead of slinking out like a beat dog, I stuck it out and went to Professor Wilson’s Latin class right after chapel.
Phineas Wilson, the headmaster was a big man with a totally bald head. He wore eye glasses that set on his nose and were attached by a string around his neck. With the eyeglasses and a long brown tweed frock coat and a gold watch chain around his middle, he looked like a professor. He was portly and must have been fifty years old. You might have thought that he had been a working man on account of he had gnarly hands like a pair of hams. He had gone right from Yale College to convert the Musselmen in the Holy Land. When they burned his house and killed his wife and child, he tried his hand at converting the Egyptians, but that didn’t work either. He must have decided that front line missionary work was too hot and it would be safer to teach someone else to do the dirty work. He taught us boys with religious fervor as if an education could turn a red savage into a regular American, an African into a saint or a drunkard into a Sunday school teacher.
There were ten other boys, all younger than me, in the beginning Latin class. We set on hard chairs at a long table, facing the professor. At first, it was pretty interesting. He put up a big map and showed how a thousand or so years ago, the old Romans had spread the Latin language to Africa and all over Europe as far away as England. It looked like it would be pretty easy if all we had to do was memorize a string of Latin words. Instead, he went off about how it was so important to learn grammar. Right away, he began using Latin words like nomen and pronomen and verbum and how to tack on endings, so we could tell if the word was masculine or feminine or something in between. It didn’t make no sense on account of any dumb fool shouldn’t have any trouble telling males from females. About all I got out of that first lesson was that a puella was a girl. The other young gentlemen hung onto every word and furiously wrote in their notebooks. I sorta drowsed off and was thinking of Rachel until the professor whacked my knuckles with a birch switch. When he asked me to decline the verb “to love” in the present tense I turned every shade of red but decided right then and there to buckle down and learn Latin.
Things didn’t get much better in the next class, which was about trigonometry.
Thaddeus Cromwell, a little Englishman who taught Mathematics and Science had a violent temper, but never laid a hand on a boy. He used sarcasm, ridicule and hard words to flay the skin off anyone who didn’t know about angles and cosines or sines. He wasn’t as high on religion as the professor and wore a bright yellow vest, like he was a riverboat gambler. When two big old farm boys got to making fun of the English Queen, Mr. Cromwell took them outside and stripped down to his long underwear. He straightened his back and put up his fists up next to his chest and invited the boys to take him down. He laid out the first one with an uppercut to the chin and the second with a straight punch to the gut. After that we were real respectful and learned that the sum of the angles of the hypotenuse equals a right angle. I never did figure out what difference it made.
After a while, I got more comfortable with school, but couldn’t spend as much time with Gray’s Anatomy or the other medical books.