Doc turned the skull over in his hands and dusted away some dirt. “It’s a perfect specimen. Look here, there are twenty two separate bones in the skull, all fitted together with these sutures that allow the skull to grow. These holes where the cranial nerves come out of the skull. This big one is the foramen magnum, where the spinal cord passes from the brain into the spinal canal.”
I couldn’t keep my eyes open and fell plumb asleep until he shook me awake. “Get on to bed, but starting tomorrow, study the skull.”
I slept late on Sunday morning and forgot all about promising to go to church and Sunday school. The whole thing seemed like a bad dream until I went downstairs and found Doc matching up the holes in the skull with Gray’s Anatomy. It looked like he had never gone to bed. “Find the auditory canals,” said he.
I turned the skull from one side to another and tried to forget it belonged to a five year old boy but his strands of light colored hair clung to the bone. There were missing teeth and the lower jaw bone was loose and his deep eye sockets stared at me. I was scared but figured out which were the ear canals. “It’s these two deep holes on each side,” I said.
“That’s right. This bump behind the canal is the mastoid process with spongy spaces that fill with pus from an infected ear.” Doc touched the bump behind my ear. “We can make an incision through the skin here, then drill through the bone into the mastoid space and let out the pus,” he said.
He made me study all day until I knew the Latin names like the foramen magnum and the foramen rotundum for all the holes and the separate bones like the occiput and the sphenoid and ethmoid.
The next morning he sawed the top off the skull and chiseled a hole just behind the ear canal into the mastoid. It looked just like the picture in the book and Doc said he could drain pus when infection spread from the ear.
That same week, Mr. Malone and the vigilante committee rode out to the corral. There were tracks and empty bean cans but Murphy and his gang had taken off. Almost every farmer in the county had lost cattle and a lot of poor folks took off for Kansas. The sheriff cleared farmers off their land when they couldn’t pay the mortgage to Mr. Farnum’s bank. Mr. Birt got the newspaper out the week after the fire. He wrote a story about the sheriff and his deputies. The next night, someone threw a brick through the front window of the newspaper office. On Saturday night, we had dinner at the Camp House and Doc had one of Isaiah’s toddy’s. “Is the gang bothering your people?” Doc asked. “No sah, we keepin’ a close watch. One of the boys stays up all night, lookin out,” said Isaiah.
I got so I liked the Academy, especially when Mr. Cromwell turned a magnet inside a copper coil with a hand crank to make electricity flow through wires and showed us how a telegraph worked. I got a hard jolt when I held the wires. I even thought of studying science instead of doctoring when everyone in town came down with pneumonia at the same time and I had to make poultices with flannel and menthol in grease to put on folk’s chests.