The Last Crossing (38 page)

That night though, Charles showed me tender forgiveness. Just touched his lips to the bruise Titus Kelso’s fist put on my face, said, “Be at peace, dear Lucy. Be at peace.” I hid my face in his neck, and shed hot tears for raising disturbance in his mind. I believe he cried then too, glad to have me safe. Charles made me promise that I would never leave again without explaining my reasons, truthfully. I knew his precious regard for me then.

It might be high summer all about but inside me everything is fall. The lonesomeness of a sad, slow closing down, knowing frost is nigh and wind needling through the cabin chinks is just around the bend. That’s me, right now. I won’t fool myself, no matter how tight he holds to me. What I got for a season is Charles, but I’m not fool enough to think this is going to last. It’s but a short walk into winter for me, and I lose him.

For two days we moved north, then cut west to the Saskatchewan River and headed for the old ford I overheard Potts telling the Captain about. The one the Hudson Bay men used to reach Chesterfield House, a post they once had in these parts. According to the guide, the Blackfoot ran them out and burned Chesterfield House to the ground some fifty years ago, but we found the cart tracks plain in the sod, pointing to where it likely stood. Once Mr. Addington saw that, he was hot iron to locate the remains of what he called “Britain’s Troy.” Said it would be a “momentous discovery.” He sent the half-breed gallivanting about the district until Potts spied some low spots, old cellar holes sunk in the ground.

For two days the Captain set Grunewald and Barker to digging, but all they turned up was a few musket balls and lead trade tokens. I don’t know what the Captain hoped to find, but he wasn’t after musket balls. It was a disappointment to him, and he fast lost his passion for ruins. For the present, however, he’s right happy. A big herd of buffalo, the biggest we’ve seen so far, moved across to this side of the Saskatchewan. The river boiled with them when they came over the ford, you could hardly hear yourself think for the roaring, bellowing din they made. So the Captain has been chasing them over the plains, slaughtering every one he can lay his sights on. Last night, we had nothing but tongues for our supper.

Charles and me took up where the Captain left off digging, relieved Grunewald and Barker of their mattocks and shovels. They were joyful to hand them over. Charles said he wished to show his brother that at least one Gaunt could hold to a purpose and finish a thing, but I figure what he really wanted was to work off his exasperation with yet another delay at his brother’s hand. In an hour he blistered his palms,
but still he was happy as a lark, the two of us side by side, heaving ground like we were bound for China. But there was no booty found except for a blue bottle stamped
London Town
and a couple of four-foot-long, hand-forged nails for pinning logs.

We shifted to a hummock, attacked that, and uncovered a nest of crumbly buffalo bones stacked three feet high, sign of how those old-time traders once feasted their winters away.

It’s peaceful here. It pleasures me to see Charles dig the ground, draw his pictures. When he paints, he talks to me as he goes, explains the why of his lines and colours. He gives me my own paper and I try to do likewise. When I took Madge’s portrait and made to draw it, my hand failed me. I thought if I could draw my sister, it would put her in my mind more steady. My hand would help my brain remember her.

Sometimes Charles puts his fingers on mine to help move the pencil, shows me how you’re supposed to do, face close to my face. That drawing touch of his is almost as fine to me as his loving touch when we lie together at night, all soft and smooth and hot – until the muscle sob comes that Abner never gave me, the sudden clutch for Charles’s seed. After that, the autumn sadness swells up in me. Looking up at the stars, I think about how we sneak about and hide ourselves from the Captain. The secret shame I am.

In the darkness, I borrow Charles’s eyes. This is how I am in his sight. His shoes are on my feet. My hands are big-knuckled from pulling cows’ teats all my life. Nothing but two dresses to my name. One linsey woolsey, one calico. Neither store-bought. Each one as tatty as the other. I’m freckled all over my body. I never owned a china teapot. I never danced a waltz. I’ll do for the wilderness, where nobody who counts can see me. But if Charles Gaunt was to cross my path in some bustly town like St. Louis, he wouldn’t notice me for the ladies with parasols and shot-silk dresses capturing his eye. I’d disappear.

Charles is eager to get on Simon’s trail, but I’ve got nothing left to chase. It’s over for me. Hot revenge was what used to heat my heart,
but now there’s nothing to warm me but Charles Gaunt. I’m cold ashes and cinders but for him.

Dr. Bengough rises at four a.m., performs his ablutions at the wash basin cursorily, the rest of his toilet fastidiously, combing his goatee, brushing his white hair and black frock coat with the same brush, wiping his silk top hat with the bedsheet. After a bracing draft of snuff, he smooths kid gloves on his hands, takes up his medical bag, closes the door on the rented rooms that serve him both as surgery and living quarters. More than one patient has undergone the extraction of a molar in Dr. Bengough’s easy chair. There are blood stains there testifying to countless dental agonies.

Dr. Bengough is about to make a call on Custis Straw in his room above the Stubhorn. Ten days ago, Aloysius Dooley and a man called Chisholm trundled a recumbent Straw into Fort Benton on a jerry-built travois hauled by Straw’s horse. Dooley, fearing his friend had been stricken by smallpox, brought him posthaste to medical attention. Chisholm, too, fell into Dr. Bengough’s care because of a case of badly infected feet, but despite a good deal of probing for embedded cactus thorns, and dousing with alcohol, the hardy old fellow was soon up and about, a fixture at every saloon in town.

Straw is a different kettle of fish, a most perplexing case. The one thing Dr. Bengough is certain of is that Straw’s affliction is not smallpox. There has been no eruption of pustules. What there has been is a plethora of contradictory symptoms. At first, the appearance of premonitory diarrhoea suggested cholera, and Dr. Bengough immediately prescribed twenty-five drops of laudanum mixed with acetate of lead and bismuth to be administered following every movement of the bowels. The only effect of the medicine was to sink Straw into deep insensibility for fourteen hours. The incontinence continued unabated, copious amounts of blood present in the stool.

Deciding a complete, recent medical history was necessary, Dr. Bengough subjected Dooley to a thorough quizzing. The Irishman reported that Straw had been “poorly” immediately before his violent encounter with the Kelsos, but in its aftermath he had gone into a precipitous decline, the fever attacking with full force. Dooley’s opinion was that whatever had occurred between the Kelsos and Straw had “unhinged” him. “I know it was justice,” Dooley said to Dr. Bengough. “But there was a good deal of time between the first and second shot. Killing Titus was in the region of self-defence, but it troubles me to think Custis executed Joel cold-blooded. We ought to have brought the scoundrel back to Benton and turned him over to the law.”

Dr. Bengough dismissed Dooley’s conjecture about the genesis of Straw’s malady because, for a layman, the hallucinations produced by the fever could easily be mistaken for lunacy. For the first few days, Straw’s physical and mental agitation had proved so violent it was necessary to tie him to the bed to prevent him doing injury to himself or anyone attending him.

In forty-five years practising medicine, Dr. Bengough has learned that a physician is more a tactician than a strategist, that illness, like battle, is unpredictable, and that it is best to respond to every advance of a disease with an equally vigorous counter-thrust. He knows that one malady can mask a more dangerous underlying one, present confusing symptoms that lay a false trail for even the most skilful medical practitioner. After a week, he had concluded that Straw’s mental and bodily paroxysms suggested the real danger was brain fever.

The barber was summoned, and Dr. Bengough and Dooley held down Straw, kept him as still as possible while his head was shorn. Dr. Bengough had ordered a cooling bath of rubbing alcohol to be applied hourly to the denuded scalp, but after several days this course of treatment did not ameliorate the fever. Straw still continues to thrash about, bellowing, his mind seemingly enmeshed in the bloody snares of former battlefields.

Walking up the still street towards the Stubhorn, Dr. Bengough is at his wit’s end as to how to prevail against this mysterious, implacable illness. A professional aloofness in Straw’s case is impossible.
There is too great an affection between them. Of all the men in Fort Benton, Straw, despite his lack of formal education, is the most congenial and stimulating. True, he has no Latin, no Greek, and knows little of Shakespeare or Milton. Yet his intelligence is formidable. One day, halfway into a bottle of Monongahela, Straw made a telling remark during one of their philosophical debates. “I may be ignorant, Dr. Bengough, but I’m not stupid. The difference between ignorant and stupid is that ignorance can be corrected and stupidity can’t.”

Dr. Bengough had saluted Straw by raising his glass and grandly declaiming, “ ‘The rest to some slight meaning make pretence, / But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’ ”

“I don’t know Shadwell,” Straw replied. “But I’ll take your word on it.” Then he shot his friend one of his wry, knowing smiles and said, “I don’t have anything against poetry, so long as you don’t use it to put a man in his place.”

At present, Dr. Bengough wonders what he himself is about to deviate into – sense or nonsense. His medical training, commenced nearly a half-century ago, and which had immersed him in the principles of Dr. Benjamin Rush, illustrious Professor of the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, a man regarded reverently by his disciples as the “Hippocrates of American Medicine,” has returned to him. Younger physicians now have nothing but contempt for Dr. Rush’s theories of “puking and purging.” Dr. Bengough has, over the years, departed from Dr. Rush’s teaching, so as to be considered a man of science and not a contemptible old fossil.

Now he confronts a crisis. He compares his position to that of the father who has sworn never to resort to the child-rearing practices of his parents. But when driven to the brink, how do such parents behave? They reach for the belt, or buy peace with a stick of candy just as their fathers did. They resort to what they have been taught. Dr. Bengough finds himself returning to where he began, coming full circle to sit at the feet of Dr. Rush. The diagnosis of brain fever does not appear to have been correct. But he has run out of diagnoses. So last night he honed his lancets. They are in his bag. His final, desperate recourse is to open a vein.

Dr. Bengough pauses behind the Stubhorn. Dooley has not opened for business since he returned to Fort Benton, resolutely insisting on keeping vigil by his friend’s bedside. A lamp still burns in the sickroom. Dr. Bengough starts to laboriously climb the stairs, stooped, gasping stertorously. The early-morning sunlight bathes the wall in gold, and he is able to watch himself ascend, an old man’s shadow steadily creeping up to do its duty.

Dooley, asleep on the floor, immediately springs awake at the sound of the door opening. “How is he?” Dr. Bengough calmly inquires.

“Around three o’clock he stopped bellering,” Dooley responds, rising stiffly from the floor. “I think he wore himself down till he didn’t have the strength for it no more.”

Dr. Bengough quietly approaches the sickbed. Straw is asleep, head resembling a hardboiled egg sprinkled thickly with pepper, now that his hair is coming back. His respiration is subdued, the weak pulse a threnody.

“Bring me the wash basin, Aloysius,” Dr. Bengough says.

“I sponged him down after he went quiet,” reports Dooley, as if Bengough’s command is a reproof, a criticism of his nursing.

“Not for washing,” explains the physician. “To catch his blood. I must bleed him.”

Dooley hesitates.

“In my judgment, our friend passed the climacteric several hours ago. He is now embarked on the decline. ‘Kill or cure,’ Aloysius. I shall take a pint, and then we shall wait. This old dog has no more tricks.”

As Dooley holds the basin to receive the issue, Dr. Bengough cuts the vein in Straw’s arm. He notes that the blood is blackish, costive, the flow miserly. The two men stand and watch Straw’s life trickle sluggishly into the receptacle.