No Resting Place (25 page)

That sick people worsened and died before their time despite doctors' help he knew, and now from the book he learned why. He learned it over and over. For so many maladies there was no cure nor even any treatment. For all its leather binding, its Philadelphia imprint, its woodcuts, its learned tone, there were times when his book was no more help than the witch doctor's rattle.

One morning on his rounds he reached the tent in which were two women and a girl whom he was treating for pneumonia. The evening before he had thought that all were improving. Now he thought that all were asleep—that deep sleep they fell into after long bouts of fevered sleeplessness. To check her temperature he felt the girl's forehead. He drew his hand back as though it had been burned—what it had been was chilled. Both the women also were dead. There came over him then, and would come over him afresh later while serving in his other capacity as the Reverend Mackenzie's graveside interpreter, a desolating sense of his inadequacy, a crushing sense of responsibility too big for him, a frightening sense of the imperfection of mankind's means in its war against disease and death.

After the funeral Captain Donovan said to the boy, “I know it must be discouraging, Cap, but don't let it get you down. You did your best and nobody could have done better. You went by the book. You must have seen your father lose patients too. When this is all over with and you rejoin him, you'll have nothing to be ashamed of.”

You did not have to be a Cherokee to thought-read.

“Cap” was short for “Captain,” the boy's latest acquired name. It derived from the old tunic, its tails descending to his knees, its cuffs turned back, one of his own that Captain Donovan had given him.

“What is the rest of life to be for someone who has already seen what that one has seen?” said the Reverend Mackenzie. What he did not say, but what he wrote, was his fear that the boy's day-to-day involvement with death and the unfairness of his competition with it might so disillusion and dishearten him as to turn him doubtful of the verities, even cynical. He knew how great that temptation was.

The two of them, boy doctor and minister, were often teamed at sickbeds, the one striving with his meager means to save lives, and then when he had failed, the other taking over from him and striving to save souls. This made theirs something of an uneasy partnership—or so at least the Reverend Mackenzie suspected. He felt his presence to be a discouragement to the boy, a forecast from the start that his efforts were expected to fail. The boy was alone, he himself had the mightiest of allies, God and His ally death. He confides to his diary his feeling of having become almost a demon, an ogre, of the sight of him at their bedsides terrifying these already frightened people, reducing them to hopelessness, and thus perhaps undoing whatever good the boy might be doing them. He wondered whether he might not actually have hastened the end of some of them, a black-clad messenger of despair with that book in hand containing, in a tongue which to many of them was a dark mystery in itself, a collection of spells, almost of invocations to death. Life everlasting was what he offered, but it could be attained only by losing this one, the one that even people in these straits clung to so tenaciously. He felt sometimes as though he was God's recruitment officer in His insatiable levy of souls, and that not Captain Donovan, leading the way to life in The Territory, but he, leading the way to the afterlife, was the marshal of the march.

Yet, he notes hopefully, reversing the adage “In the midst of death we are in life.”

In giving birth, Cherokee women normally did it without help. Midwifery as a profession was hardly known among them. Sometimes an older woman, herself a mother, stood by in attendance, but most often it was done as Kanama had done it with her Usdi in the detention camp, by themselves. It was regarded as no big matter. Usually the mother was back at her work the same day. There had been several births on the march. So seldom was a doctor called in that only twice had Noquisi assisted his father at a delivery. So when he was sent for in this case he feared that things were not going well. When the messenger asked the Reverend Mackenzie to come, too, his fears increased.

But the messenger was young, perhaps overly alarmed, and at least he had seen it done twice, both difficult times, and that was twice more than any other man in the camp.

“You are the son of your father,” said Agiduda. “May his hand guide yours. I will be praying for you.”

“Thank you. Pray also for the woman and the child.”

“That is for our clansman, Reverend Mac. My prayers will be for you.”

As Noquisi drove them to the scene in the dispensary wagon, the Reverend Mackenzie refreshed the boy's memory by reading to him from the book.

“‘An examination with the finger is to be made to learn the presentation, that is, to learn which part of the child comes first into the mouth of the womb. If the head present, the labor will probably go on without the need of medical aid. But in all labors there is a liability to dangers from unforeseen accidents, which renders the attendance of an intelligent physician highly prudential.'

“‘If the breech present, do not pull down the feet; let the child come double; it will make more room for the head. If the feet present, let there be no pulling on them to hasten the birth of the breech.'

“‘After the feet and breech have fully cleared the external orifice, the delivery may be judiciously hastened for the purpose of preventing the death of the child from pressure on the umbilical cord before the head is brought to the air and the act of breathing thus permitted. For after the pulsations of the cord cease, the child must either breathe or die.'”

Like Kanama, this young woman had gone into seclusion when her time came and had suspended herself in squatting position by a rope from an overhead limb. Her husband waited within hearing. He waited and waited, listening to her cries—finally to her silence. Ashamed of her inability to do this common thing, not wanting to create a fuss nor to alarm anybody on her account, assuring herself that all would soon be well, that such contractions as she was experiencing could not possibly go on much longer without producing their result, answering her husband's calls that everything was all right, she had allowed her labor to grow so protracted that when finally he sought help she had to be cut down, half conscious, and brought by litter to a tent.

Outside the tent a woman chanted the spell, “Little man, come out! Hurry! Little woman, come out! Hurry!” The lying-in, with its mounting threat of danger, had drawn an anxious crowd, among them a woman with her newborn in her arms.

“You,” said the boy to her. “Come with me.” Here was firsthand experience at his side.

The patient, little more than a girl in years, lay wrapped in a blanket. After sending the husband—who was not much older than himself—outside, Noquisi unwrapped her. She was young, but just as he himself was now a man—a role for which suddenly he felt himself unready—so she was fully a woman. He had thought about women's unclothed bodies during the inactivity of the detention camp and the mindless monotony of the march. The instinct was insistent enough to be felt even at those untimely times. He had thought about it when looking at the anatomical plates in Dr. Warren's book. This one in its distortion and pain, brought on by the act of pleasure he had imagined, was not what he had in mind. What he was seeing now reproached him for his idle thoughts, or rather for his thoughtlessness of the consequences for the woman. It made him feel beholden for being male.

“When this is over,” said the Reverend Mackenzie, “she will be a mother, something you and I can never know. Then it will all have been worth it. She will be proud of what she has been through.”

It was another instance of the power of a white man to thought-read.

As the boy was making his examination the Reverend Mackenzie was reading the section of the book pertaining to breech delivery. He was not reading aloud but to himself.

“What do you feel?” he now asked.

“I think it must be the head.”

To himself the Reverend Mackenzie said, “I hope you're right!”

“I'm pretty sure it's the head.”

Again the Reverend Mackenzie said to himself, “I hope and pray you're right!” For of breech delivery what the book said was, “In this type of presentation the child's life is in great danger.”

The examination stimulated a contraction. The woman gave a groan as the child's black hairy head began emerging slowly, like that of a turtle from its shell.

As the Reverend Mackenzie watched amazed, the boy poked his finger in the child's mouth. With all the professional offhandedness he could summon, he said, “Helps them get started breathing.”

Then with that same finger hooked in the child's mouth, he drew the head out fully. Then he grasped it in both hands and pulled on it. You could pull quite hard so long as you pulled straight. A twist could break the neck. But though he pulled as hard as he dared, the shoulders remained wedged. He was getting no help from the mother. Her strength was spent.

He could never have brought himself to do what he did next without having seen it done. Saying, “You can't help without hurting”—oft-spoken words of his father's to him—he gave the woman's abdomen a blow of his fist. The child issued forth. The mother's screams subsided into sobs.

The boy pinched the cord shut. “You do this to keep the baby's blood from draining back into the mother,” he said, repeating his father's words to him. The sense was strong upon him that his father was looking over his shoulder, his hands guiding his own. He felt confident, competent, in command. All was going as it should go. With his free hand he lifted the child by its heels and slapped its back. With its first breath it uttered its first cry.

Crying in protest against their narrow passage and the inhospitality of their new element was the first thing all infants did, of every race and rank, the Reverend Mackenzie comments in his account, but this one, he adds, was born to do more cying than most.

The Reverend Mackenzie resumed his reading. He read silently. He felt himself to be a prompter. It was as though he were following with the script a performance he was watching. Now no prompting from him was needed, all was going according to the script. With the other woman pinching the cord for him, the boy was wiping the mucus from the child's eyes, its nose and its mouth. Now he laid it down, tied the two strings and snipped the cord between them.

“It's a girl,” he said. The others could see for themselves that it was. It was not to them but to himself that he spoke. His self-wonder was enhanced by its being not one of the same sex as himself but one the opposite of him that he had brought forth. Now that it was all over and the fruit of it crying lustily, his part in the transaction made him feel as though he were the prime mover, as though the child were his creation.

“A girl,” he said again. And with that he cut the cord joining him and her. It made her real, not a doll, and a being especially to be pitied. Latest born of Eve's daughters, she must one day undergo the same pain that had produced her.

He turned his attention to the mother. All was not over, as he knew. There was more to come. What he did not know, until the Reverend Mackenzie read it to him, was that it must come “promptly,” and that if it did not it must be “expedited.”

“‘If the afterbirth be not promptly expelled it must be expedited by the application of judicious pressure on the abdomen in the region of the womb.'”

Wondering just how much was “judicious,” the boy pressed, and it was expelled, though he had to tug to free it.

He had once helped his father, now with the Reverend Mackenzie helping him he raised the woman and bandaged her with cloth soaked in cold water to contract the womb and stanch the bleeding. Within minutes the bandage was soaked. He changed it and within minutes the second one was soaked.

“Did you bleed like that?” he asked the other woman, who was now holding both babies.

“I bled,” she replied. “But not like that.”

“What does the book say?” he asked.

The Reverend Mackenzie was at that moment reading about hemorrhage. “It says the most common cause is failure to expel all of the afterbirth.”

“What does it say to do about it?”

“It says to insert your hand. This will stimulate the womb to contract and it will be expelled.”

This he did, but nothing more was expelled, and the bleeding continued as before.

It continued for an hour and through three more changes of bandage. The other woman placed her baby on the dying mother's breast. She did not accept it. Her face grew paler by the moment, her breath was labored, and the pupils of her eyes dilated.

All this while the Reverend Mackenzie was silently praying. Never before had he pleaded so fervently. He was praying not for the woman's soul but for her life. As he admits, it was as much for the boy's sake and his own as for hers. He feared that he might fail this test of his faith and that the boy might lose all faith in himself, in life. He should be confessing her, absolving her in what time she had left and preparing her to meet her maker. By delaying he was imperiling her immortal soul. But he could not bring himself to terrify her dying moments. Let her drift off thinking that it was into her rest after her travail. A spirit of challenge had been aroused in him by this taking of one so young and blameless in the act of birthing a soul for God. Let Him turn her away from the gates of His kingdom if He would because in this outpost of misery on His earth the formalities had gone unobserved.

“She is in heaven at this moment,” he said when the end came. “If anybody is.”

The boy's look alarmed him.

“Don't blame yourself,” he said. “You did all that anybody could. Your father could not have done more.”

This time the Reverend Mackenzie misread his thoughts. He was undergoing the final stage of his own painful passage into the big world. In this woman's death he was experiencing also that of another, she, too, a mother, in a place behind them on this tearful trail.