The Physician

by Noah Gordon

  “Eh? Why is that?”

  “I’ll tell that to Mary Cullen.” Rob appraised him and saw a man who was still young, but weathered and grizzled and as watchful as the dog. “Who are you?”

  The Scot stared back at him, seeming undecided about whether he wanted to answer. “Craig Cullen,” he said finally.

  “My name is Cole. Robert Cole.”

  The shepherd nodded, appearing neither surprised nor welcoming. “Best follow,” he said, and started off afoot. Rob hadn’t seen him signal the dog but the beast held back and trailed close behind the horse, so that he came in between the man and the dog, delivered like a stray thing they had found in the hills.

  The house and barn were of stone, well-laid long ago. Children stared and whispered as he rode in, and it took him a moment to realize his sons were among them. Tam spoke quietly to his brother in the Erse.

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘Is that our Da?’ I said you was.”

  Rob smiled and wanted to gather them up, but they shrieked and scattered with the rest of the children when he swung from the saddle. Tam still hobbled but was able to run with ease, Rob noted gladly.

  “They’re just shy. They’ll be back,” she said from the doorway. She kept her face averted and wouldn’t meet his eyes; he thought she wasn’t glad to see him. Then she was in his arms, where she felt so fine! If she had another man, right there in the barnyard they gave him something to think about.

  Kissing her, he discovered she was missing a tooth, to the right of the middle of her upper jaw.

  “I was struggling to get a cow into the pen and fell against her horns.” She was crying. “I am old and ugly.”

  “I didn’t take a damned tooth to wife.” His tone was rough but he touched the gap with a gentle fingertip, feeling the wet, warm springiness of her mouth as she sucked his finger. “It wasn’t a damned tooth I took to my bed,” he said, and though her eyes still glittered, she smiled.

  “To your wheat field,” she said. “Right down in the dirt next to mice and crawling things, like a ram doing a ewe.” She wiped her eyes. “You’ll be worn and hungry,” she said, and took his hand and led him into a kitchen house. It was strange for him to see her so at home here. She gave him oat cakes and milk and he told her of the brother he had found and lost, and about fleeing London.

  “How strange and sad for you… If it hadn’t happened, would you have come to me?”

  “Sooner or later.” They kept smiling at one another. “This is a beautiful country,” he said. “But hard.”

  “Easier with warmer weather. Before we know, it will be plowing time.”

  He could no longer swallow the oat cakes. “It is plowing time now.”

  She still colored easily. It was a thing that would never change, he noted with satisfaction. As she led him to the main house they tried to keep hold of one another but it led to tangled legs and bumped hips, so that soon they were laughing so hard he feared it would interfere with the lovemaking, but that didn’t prove to be a problem.

  79

  LAMBING

  Next morning, both with a child before them in the saddle, she led him through the enormous, hilly holding. Sheep were everywhere, lifting black faces, white faces, and brown faces from the new grass when the horses passed. She took him a distance, showing everything proudly. There were twenty-seven small crofts on the outskirts of the large farm. “All the crofts-men are my kin.”

  “How many men are there?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “Your entire family is gathered here?”

  “The Cullens are here. The Tedders and the MacPhees are our kinsmen too. The MacPhees live a morning’s ride away, through the low hills to the east. The Tedders live a day’s ride to the north, through the clough and across the big river.”

  “With the three families, how many men do you have?”

  “Perhaps a hundred and a half.”

  He pursed his lips. “Your own army.”

  “Yes. It is a comfort.”

  There seemed to him to be unending rivers of sheep.

  “Fleeces and hides are why we keep the flocks. The meat spoils quickly, so we all eat it. You will grow weary of mutton.”

  He was pulled into the family business that morning. “Spring birthings already have begun,” Mary said, “and night and day everyone must help the ewes. Some of the lambs have to be killed in the third to tenth day of life, when the pelts are finest.” She turned him over to Craig and left him. By midmorning the shepherds had accepted him, observing that he was cool during problem births and knew how to whet and use knives.

  He was dismayed by their method of altering newborn male lambs. They bit off the tender gonads and spat them into a bucket.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked.

  Craig grinned at him with a bloody mouth. “Gotta take the balls. Can’t have too many rams, can ye?”

  “Why not use a knife?”

  “This is the way ‘twas always done. Fastest way, and causes the lambs t’least pain.”

  Rob went to his pack and took out the scalpel of patterned steel, and soon Craig and the other shepherds grudgingly acknowledged that his way also was efficient. He didn’t tell them he had learned to be fast and skillful in order to spare pain to men in the process of turning them into eunuchs.

  He saw that the shepherds were independent men, and with indispensable skills.

  “No wonder you wanted me,” he told her, later. “Everyone else in this bloody country is kin.”

  She flashed a tired smile, for they had been skinning all day. The room stank of sheep but also of blood and flesh, not uncomfortable smells for him because they were reminders of the maristan and the hospital tents in India.

  “Now that I’m here, you’ll need one less shepherd,” he said to her, and her smile faded.

  “Whisht,” she said sharply. “Are you crazy?”

  She took his hand and led him out of the skinning room to another stone outbuilding. Inside were three whitewashed rooms. One was a study. One clearly had been set up as an examining room, with tables and cabinets duplicating the room he had used in Ispahan. In the third room there were wooden benches on which patients would sit while waiting to see the physician.

  He began to learn about the people as individuals. A man named Ostric was the musician. A skinning knife slipped and sliced into an artery in Ostric’s forearm, and Rob halted the bleeding and closed the wound.

  “Shall I be able to play?” Ostric said anxiously. “It’s the arm that bears the weight of the pipes.”

  “A few days will make all the difference,” Rob assured him.

  Several days later, walking through the tanning shed where the pelts were cured, he saw Craig Cullen’s old father Malcolm, cousin to Mary. He stopped and studied the man’s clubbed and swollen fingertips and saw how his fingernails had curved strangely as they grew.

  “For a long time you’ve had a bad cough. And frequent fevers,” he told the old man quietly.

  “Who has been telling you?” Malcolm Cullen said.

  It was a condition Ibn Sina had called “Hippocratic fingers,” and it always meant lung disease. “I can see it in your hands. Your toes are the same way, are they not?”

  The old man nodded. “Can you do ought for me?”

  “I don’t know.” He placed his ear against the chest and heard a crackling sound such as made by boiling vinegar.

  “You’re full of fluid. Come to the dispensary some morning. I’ll drill a small hole between two ribs and tap that water, a little at a time. Meanwhile, I’ll study your urine and watch the progress of the disease, and I’ll give you fumigations and a diet to dry up your body.”

  That night Mary smiled at him. “How have you bewitched old Malcolm? He is telling everyone you have magical powers of healing.”

  “I’ve done nothing for him yet.”

  Next morning he was the only one in the dispensary; there was no Malcolm or any other living soul. Nor
the morning after that.

  When he complained, Mary shook her head. “They won’t come until after lambing is done, it’s their way.”

  It was true. No one came to him for ten days more. Then it was the quieter time between the lambing and the labor of shearing, and one morning he opened the dispensary door and the benches were filled with people and old Malcolm wished him a fine day.

  After that they came readily each morning, for word spread in the cloughs and vales among the hills that Mary Cullen’s man was a true healer. There never had been a physician in Kilmarnock and he recognized that he would spend years trying to undo some of the self-doctoring. In addition, they led their ailing animals or, if they could not, they weren’t bashful about summoning him to their barns. He became well acquainted with foot rot and sore mouth. When opportunity arose, he dissected a cow and some sheep so he could know what he was doing. He found them nothing like a pig or a man.

  In the darkness of their bedchamber, where these nights they were willingly employed in the task of starting another child, he tried to thank her for the dispensary, which, he’d been told, was the first thing she had done on returning to Kilmarnock.

  She leaned over him. “How long would you stay with me without your work, Hakim?”

  There was no sting in the words, and she kissed him as soon as she said them.

  80

  A KEPT PROMISE

  Rob took his boys into the forest and the hills and searched out the plants and herbs he wanted, and the three of them gathered the medicinals and brought them back, drying some and powdering others. He sat with his sons and taught them carefully, showing them each leaf and each flower. He told them about the herbs—which was used to cure the headache and which for cramp, which for fever and which for catarrh, which for bleeding nose and which for chilblains, which for quinsy and which for aching bones.

  Craig Cullen was a spoonmaker and turned his craft toward the fashioning of covered wooden boxes in which the pharmacy herbs could be kept safe and dry. The boxes, like Craig’s spoons, were decorated with carved nymphs and sprites and wild creatures of every sort. Seeing them, Rob was inspired to draw some of the pieces that made up the Shah’s Game.

  “Could you make something like these?”

  Craig looked at him quizzically. “Why not?”

  Rob drew likenesses of each piece and the checkered board. With very little guidance Craig carved everything, so that presently Rob and Mary once again spent some of their hours at a pastime taught him by a dead king.

  Rob was determined to learn Gaelic. Mary owned no books but set out to teach him, beginning with the eighteen-letter alphabet. By now he knew what must be done to learn a strange language and all through the summer and autumn he labored, so that by early winter he was writing short sentences in the Erse and trying to speak it, to the amusement of the shepherds and his sons.

  As he had supposed, winter there proved hard. The bitterest cold came just before Candlemas. After that was the time of the huntsmen, for snowy ground helped them track venison and fowl and hunt down catamounts and wolves that harried the flocks. In the evenings there were always people gathered in the hall in front of a great fire. Craig might be there whittling, others would sit and repair harness or accomplish whatever homely tasks could be done in warmth and company. Sometimes Ostric played his pipes. They made a famous woollen cloth at Kilmarnock, dying their best fleeces the colors of heather by steeping them with lichens picked from the rocks. They wove in privacy but congregated in the hall for waulking, the shrinking of the fabric. The wet cloth, which had been soaked in soapy water, was passed around the table while each woman pounded and rubbed it. All the while they sang waulking songs, and Rob thought that their voices and Ostric’s pipes made a singular sound.

  The nearest chapel was a three-hour ride and Rob had believed it wouldn’t be difficult to avoid priests, but one day in his second spring in Kilmarnock there appeared a small, plump man with a tired smile.

  “Father Domhnall! It is Father Domhnall!” Mary cried, and hastened to bid him welcome.

  They clustered about him and greeted him warmly. He spent a moment with each, asking a question with a smile, patting an arm, dropping a word of encouragement—like a good earl walking among his churls, Rob thought sourly.

  He came to Rob and looked him over. “So. You are Mary Cullen’s man.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you a fisher?”

  The question disconcerted him. “I fish for trouts.”

  “I’d have wagered so. I would take you after salmon tomorrow in the morning,” he said, and Rob said he would go.

  Next day they walked in gray light to a small, rushing river. Domhnall had brought two massive poles that were surely too heavy, and stout line and long-shanked feathered lures with barbs hidden treacherously in their handsome centers. “Like men I know,” Rob observed to the priest, and Domhnall nodded, regarding him curiously.

  Domhnall showed him how to fling the lure and bring it back through the water in little surges that resembled the darting of a small fish. They did it again and again with no result, but Rob didn’t care, for he was lost in the rush of the water. Now the sun was up. High overhead he watched an eagle floating on nothing, and somewhere nearby he heard the cry of a grouse.

  The big fish took his lure at the surface with a slash that sent a spout of water into the air.

  It began to run upstream at once.

  “You must go toward him or he’ll break the line or tear out the hook!” Domhnall shouted.

  Rob was already splashing into the river, clattering after the salmon. Expending its first surge of strength the fish almost did him in, for he fell several times in the frigid water, following over the stony bottom and floundering in and out of deep pools.

  The fish ran again and again, taking him up and down the river. Domhnall had been shouting instructions, but once Rob looked up at the sound of a splash and saw that Domhnall now had troubles of his own. He had hooked a fish and was in the river too.

  Rob fought to keep the fish in the middle of the stream. Eventually the salmon seemed under his control, though it felt dangerously heavy at the end of his line.

  Soon he was able to skid the feebly struggling fish—so big!—into shingled shallows. As he grasped the shank of the lure, the salmon gave one last convulsive leap and the hook tore free, bringing with it a strip of bloody tissue from within the fish’s throat. For a moment the salmon lay motionless on its side and then, as Rob saw a thick haze of blood rise darkly from its gills, it flipped into deep water and was gone.

  He stood trembling and disgusted, for the blood cloud told him he had killed the fish, and now it had been wasted.

  Moving more by instinct than out of hope, he walked downstream, but before he had taken half a dozen steps he saw a silvery patch in the water ahead and splashed toward it. He lost the pale reflection twice as the fish swam or was moved by the river. Then he saw he was right on top of it. The salmon was dying but not quite dead, pressed against the upstream side of a boulder by the strong current.

  He had to immerse himself in the numbing water to take it in both arms and carry it to the bank, where he ended its pain with a rock. It weighed at least two stone.

  Domhnall was just landing his fish, which wasn’t nearly as large.

  “Yours is enough flesh for us all, eh?” he said. When Rob nodded, Domhnall returned his salmon to the river. He held it carefully to let the water do its work. The fins moved and waved as languorously as if the fish were not struggling to maintain its existence, and the gills began to pump. Rob saw the quiver of life run through the fish, and as he watched it move away from them and disappear into the current, he knew that this priest would be his friend.

  * * *

  They took off their sodden garments and spread them to dry, then lay near them on a huge sun-warmed rock.

  Domhnall sighed. “Not like catching trouts,” he said.

  “The difference between picking a flow
er and felling a tree.” Rob had half a dozen bleeding cuts on his legs from falling in the river, and innumerable bruises.

  They grinned at one another.

  Domhnall scratched his round little belly, white as any fish’s, and lapsed into silence. Rob had expected questions, but he perceived it was this priest’s style to listen intently and wait, a valuable patience that would make him a deadly opponent if Rob should teach him the Shah’s Game.

  “Mary and I are not married in the Church. Do you know that?”

  “I had heard something.”

  “Well. We have been truly wed, these years. But it was a hand-held union.”

  Domhnall grunted.

  He told the cleric their story. He didn’t omit or make light of his troubles in London. “I would like you to marry us, but I must warn that perhaps I’ve been excommunicated.”

  They dried lazily in the sun, considering the problem.

  “If this auxiliary bishop of Worcester could have done, he would gloss it over,” Domhnall said. “Such an ambitious man would rather have a missing and forgotten brother than close kin scandalously driven from the Church.”

  Rob nodded. “Suppose he could not cover it over?”

  The priest frowned. “You have no sure proof of excommunication?”

  Rob shook his head. “But it is possible.”

  “Possible? I cannot run my ministry according to your fears. Man, man, what do your fears have to do with Christ? I was born in Prestwick. Since ordination I have never left this mountain parish and I expect I will be pastor here when I die. Other than yourself, never in all my life have I encountered anyone from London or from Worcester. I have never received a message from an archbishop or from His Holiness, but only from Jesus. Can you believe it is the will of the Lord that I not make a Christian family of the four of you?”

  Rob smiled at him and shook his head.

  All their lives the two sons would remember the wedding of their parents, and describe it to their own grandchildren. The Nuptial Mass in the Cullen hall was small and quiet. Mary had a dress of light gray stuff and wore a silver brooch and a roeskin belt studded with silver. She was a composed bride, but her eyes shone as Father Domhnall declared that ever more and in sanctified protection she and her children were irreversibly joined to Robert Jeremy Cole.