Mattie

by Judy Alter

  We entered a dark room, medium-sized, with a great open gabled ceiling, at least ten feet at its peak. The rafters were exposed, and cheesecloth had been tacked to their underside to keep falling dirt out of the soup and stew, as Will Henry explained to me. The floor and walls were covered with rough boards, and cheesecloth had been tacked over the walls. I could, they said, choose whatever wallpaper I wanted, and they would put it up.

  Many families lived in one-room soddies in those days, but those two men had built me a second room, a sort of lean-to affair with a much lower roof, to serve as a bedroom.

  They had worked hard in the month since I had told them I was moving and had even dug a well about twenty-five yards from the house. Will Henry told me later how they did it by putting a two-by-four post in each of the four corners. As they dug the dirt out, the corner posts slowly traveled down. Then side boards were set between them. When it got too deep to shovel, the dirt was loaded into a carrying bucket and hauled out by a windlass.

  Will Henry and Jim had even stocked my pantry with coffee, salt, flour and canned goods. There was enough for me to make a meal for us, though it was much different from the kitchen in Omaha. Still, while they unloaded the wagon, I fixed supper. I pointed out the dish barrel first and got out enough utensils for three people. Then I opened some cans and was just getting ready to crack the eggs they had brought as a housewarming gift when I realized I had nothing to cook on. A Franklin cast-iron stove, they told me, was being shipped. They hadn’t wanted me to buy it in Omaha because they were afraid I wouldn’t know anything about buying cookstoves and would not buy one that could use the coal of the prairie, cow chips, corncobs and hay. Of course, they were right, but it would be several days before I could cook. We had a cold supper of canned tomatoes, coffee, crackers and that staple of the frontier, sardines. Never did like those fishy things.

  By dark, they had me settled in. I never felt so welcomed in my life. And as they rode away, promising to be back first thing in the morning, I never felt so alone. All night, I lay in bed and listened to the wind blow across the prairie and wondered whatever I had done.

  “Wake up, wake up!”

  “Come on, Mattie. Is the coffee ready?”

  “I can’t make coffee without a stove,” I called from the bedroom, where I had been brushing my hair. “I didn’t expect you so early.”

  “It’s not early,” Will Henry protested. “Must be near eight o’clock.”

  “I don’t have a clock,” I reminded him.

  “Put it on your shopping list. We’re taking you to town this morning to the general store so you can meet folks and get whatever you need.”

  “I don’t even know what I need. How can I?” I smoothed my gabardine skirt, tucked in the crumpled white shirt and appeared in the doorway.

  “Mattie, you sure do look professional. Everybody’s going to know you’re the best doctor around. Course, you’re also the only doctor around.”

  “Thanks, Jim,” I said, laughing a little at his partial compliment. “I wonder when I’ll have my first patient.”

  “Word will travel; just you wait. You’ll be called on before you know it. Come on now, we got to get to town before you do have a patient.”

  Town was a cluster of four houses, three of them sod and one frame, a general store which carried everything from groceries to overalls and fabric, and a one-room schoolhouse.

  “How many children are in the school?” I asked, incredulous that there could be enough children to fill the classroom.

  “Seems like they have about ten this spring,” said Jim. “Two families live here in Benteen so the children can go to school. Means the fathers commute to their claims. Then the rest of them kids, they ride in whenever they can. Weather’s not bad, they aren’t needed to work, then they can come to school.”

  I thought about Sara and the regularity with which she attended her large school.

  Jim had pulled the wagon up in front of the general store, a wooden structure with a large front display window broken into several small panes, all dirty and dusty. Peering through them, I could make out only a hodgepodge of things—canned goods, a sad iron, some dishes and several pairs of work boots.

  Inside, the store smelled of coffee and spices, dried fruit, old tobacco, vinegar, cheese, pickles and ham, all blended together in a rare mixture that existed only in old general stores out in the midst of nowhere. No city store ever smelled like that, and I miss the aroma still.

  “Whittaker, I want you to meet my stepdaughter, Dr. Mattie Armstrong.” Jim threw one of his huge hands around my shoulder and beamed with pride. I offered my hand to the middle-aged man who stood behind the counter, an apron over a large midsection on which his hands rested. He was bald, with a fringe of hair around his head and a round, cheerful face. Right now, though, he had a puzzled look on his face, which clearly indicated he hadn’t expected me.

  “Dr. . . . uh, how do you do? We . . . we were expecting you, well, sort of, that is . . . Jim, you didn’t tell me the doctor was a woman!” His eyes shot up nearly to the top of his head, and he turned accusingly toward Jim.

  Jim grinned and ducked his head. “I told you it was my wife’s oldest child, didn’t I?”

  “Jim!” I was indignant and a little bit embarrassed. “Have you brought me out here on false pretenses?”

  “Now, Mattie, calm down. It don’t make no difference. I just didn’t want to get folks all stirred up before you arrived.”

  “Jim,” Whittaker broke in, “don’t get upset. It doesn’t matter. You just should’a told me. I mean, I wasn’t . . . well, hell, I wasn’t expecting a woman.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Whittaker, I am a competent physician. I graduated at the top of my class at the medical school in Omaha a year ago, and I—”

  “Land’s sake, what’s all the ruckus about?” Sally Whittaker, a pleasant lady with graying brown hair and an expanded middle to match her husband’s, bustled into the room. “Why are you all yelling at each other? Oh, hello.” When she noticed me, she turned directly and introduced herself. “I’m Sally Whittaker . . . And you must be . . .”

  “Mattie Armstrong. Jim’s stepdaughter, and your new doctor, I hope.”

  “How wonderful! A woman doctor! Oh, Ralph, what a surprise. I declare, this is the nicest thing that’s happened in a month of Sundays.” Her face brightened with a grin, and she came to put an arm around my waist with a squeeze. “Welcome to Benteen, my dear. We’re really glad you’re here.”

  After that, it was all confusion and smiles as I gathered up the items on my list—chintz for curtains, the only flowered wallpaper they had, matches, a clock and a list of small things that I had either forgotten or not known I needed until Will Henry and Jim made their suggestions. After all my careful planning, I had, for instance, forgotten needle and thread.

  Another woman came into the store while we were there and was introduced as the wife from one of the two families who lived in town. She was cordial and glad I had moved to the area, and as we left, laden down with packages, I had an optimistic feeling.

  “Now, you let us know if we can help,” Sally Whittaker called. “Don’t you let Jim and Will Henry scare you any about life out here. You’re going to love it.”

  “I’m sure I will,” I called back, adding my thanks.

  “They liked you,” Jim said on the way back to the soddie

  “Good. I liked them.”

  “Not everybody’s going to, you know.” He stared straight ahead, hands on the reins, eyes on the horses.

  “Aw, come on, Jim, everybody’ll like Mattie,” Will Henry protested as though he were trying to protect my feelings.

  But I knew what Will Henry didn’t. “Because I’m a woman?”

  “Yep.”

  “Jim, I know that doctors aren’t that popular . . . or maybe respected is the word I want . . . and the idea of a woman doctor is still fairly new in these parts. But the only thing I can do is show them that I’m capable. It will
all depend on whether or not I can take care of people when they need me.” This was a problem I’d given a lot of thought to, and I saw no easy answer, nothing except patience, doing the very best I could and waiting for people to accept me. Since I never was a patient person, the waiting part might be hard, I knew.

  “Well, I hope you get your chance to prove it,” he said, still without expression.

  “Why did you encourage me to come out here if you don’t think I’ll have patients?” I was indignant again, but my indignation only drew a smile from him.

  “Because Will Henry and I can look after you. Couldn’t keep my promise to your ma if you were in Omaha and we were clear out here.”

  “I don’t need looking after,” I said primly. “I can take care of myself.”

  But he just smiled at me and looked sideways, and I wondered if he suspected more about Dr. Dinsmore than I had told him. Jim Reeves wasn’t a stupid man by any means, and he would have guessed that there was some reason behind my move other than the sudden and total change of mind I had lamely offered as my reason for joining them.

  My chance to prove myself as a doctor did not come with any sudden dramatic event, though sometimes I thought an epidemic or major accident would be a blessing in disguise, allowing me to perform some outstanding, miraculous act of healing that would forever endear me to my neighbors. Of course, I knew better than even to wish tragedy on someone else just so I could show off how smart I was, but the thought did flit through my mind once or twice. Later, when I did have a dramatic case or two, I regretted even the thought.

  But in the first months I was on the prairie, I treated a fairly steady stream of minor ailments, using mostly the contents of my medicine chest that I had brought from Omaha—calomel as a cathartic, a solution of tartar to induce vomiting in a child supposed to have eaten poisonous berries, lemon and honey for a spring cough that wouldn’t go away. Remembering Dr. Dinsmore’s advice on medicines, I always used them sparingly, sometimes diluting them with water to minimize their impact on the human system.

  “Why’s this medicine so watery?” asked one old man who had come to me for a catarrh.

  “Because I put water in it. It’s too strong as it is,” I replied.

  “Water!” he snorted. “Never heard of making medicine weaker. Always thought it should be stronger, the stronger the better. Suppose you used that river water out there.”

  “No,” I laughed. “I used fresh water from my well.”

  But that was how my “river water” cures got known, and folks talked about them for years afterward. I still hear someone mention them now and again.

  Summer came, and with it the endless burning sun, the heat that seems to blanket the prairie and suffocate you. Omaha had hot summers, of course, being a river town, but it had hills and water and trees, and that, I found, made all the difference. There’s no way now to make a summer in a soddie real to someone who hasn’t lived through it. Oh, the soddie, with its thick walls, did stay some cooler, but I think if we’d had today’s garden hoses and could have wet it down periodically, it would have been all that much cooler. Of course, we didn’t have that kind of water, and I never tried it. At night, the prairie breezes would be cool and lovely, and you’d never think it could be so awful hot during the day. But the next day, there it was again.

  I treated some heat exhaustion those days, and snakebite, and lost only one patient, a woman who had simply lived out her life span. She wasn’t old, maybe fifty, but she was worn out with work and hard living, and she just lay down in her bed and died. The family understood and accepted.

  “Folks like you,” Jim said one evening as he sat at my kitchen table.

  “I knew they would,” proclaimed my young champion, Will Henry.

  “I like them. I’ve not met anybody who was reluctant to be treated by a woman doctor. Well, not too reluctant, anyway.” I grinned as I thought of the old man who had christened my river water cures.

  “Learning your way around, aren’t you?”

  “Day before yesterday I must have gone three miles southeast of here across the prairie. I thought I’d get lost, but I did as you told me, kept track of the landmarks. It’s amazing to me that there are so many things to go by out there on the prairie, because when you first look, it’s all the same.”

  “You’re learning, though, Mattie. No two inches of that prairie is the same. I’m almost ready to turn you loose on it.”

  Jim had carved himself out a big job in teaching me to go alone on the prairie. First he had to teach me to ride a horse.

  “Never knew a girl that couldn’t ride,” he exploded when he found out I’d never been near a horse, except to pat other people’s horses on the nose when they were tied up at a hitching post.

  “Jim, there was no horse around when we were kids. You know that.”

  “Will Henry knew how to ride. Not very well, but he knew.”

  I glanced at my brother and found him looking determinedly the other way. I knew but wouldn’t tell that he had probably never been on a horse until the first time Jim Reeves put him on one, but he’d lied and pretended he knew how to ride. Out of sheer determination, he’d managed his bluff. And now he rode better than he walked.

  “You’re gonna have to learn to ride astride. None of this sidesaddle stuff. You was to get in a hurry to get somewhere, you’d slide right out of that sidesaddle. Here, I brought you a pair of pants to practice in. Go on, put them on. They’re clean.”

  “I know they’re clean,” I laughed. “But how will I make them stay up?”

  “Use pins or something. Come on, Mattie, we don’t want to spend all day on your first riding lesson.”

  Pretty soon I found myself mounted on the oldest and calmest of Jim’s horses, a mare that he loudly proclaimed wasn’t much good for anything but kids and timid lady doctors. I knew a touch of Will Henry’s determination, though, and before long I was riding, having listened carefully to every bit of advice Jim gave me. Soon I graduated from Belle, who really did plod along, to Brownie, a frisky but well-broken gelding.

  I rode with Jim almost daily, and as we rode, he taught me how to “read” the prairie, so that I wouldn’t get lost.

  “See that buffalo wallow? Remember that’s on your left as you go out, so you want to come back to the right of it, and you want to begin to angle back north just after you pass it. Course you can kind of tell if you keep track of the time and the position of the sun,” he said wryly.

  “Thanks,” I said with equal dryness. “I can pretty well figure that out.”

  “Well, that’s good. Least you won’t be like the feller I heard about who thought he was headed north and ended up in Texas.”

  “I’m glad you think I’m a little better than that, Jim.”

  “Some,” he said, and I took it as a compliment.

  I did get called to various noddies to treat patients before Jim judged I was safe to send out alone, and he either went with me or sent Will Henry. It meant that one or the other of them was at my soddie most of the time, and I enjoyed the company.

  “Let’s go to the baseball game,” Jim said one night when they had both come for supper. I’d fixed one of my less imaginative meals—red beans and beef—but they seemed to relish it, and I’d given only a fleeting thought to a delicately sautéed piece of chicken, cooked in wine, the way Dr. Dinsmore liked it. Sometimes I truly did miss Omaha so much it was hard to bear.

  “A baseball game? Out here? You’re teasing me again, Jim Reeves.”

  “No he’s not, Mattie. They really do play baseball. In fact, I’m going to play on the team this summer.” Will Henry never understood the teasing between Jim and me, and he always rushed to the defense of one or the other of us.

  “Will Henry, you play? That’s wonderful. Of course I want to go.”

  We hitched up the wagon and horses. Jim made me do most of the hitching as part of my continuing learning process, but he admitted I was getting pretty good. Will Henry glowered a lit
tle, from jealousy I think.

  “Okay, Mattie, take us to town.” Jim leaned back in the bed of the wagon, pretending to take a nap. “Don’t know if I can sleep or not. You won’t take us to Texas, will you?”

  “Careful, or I’ll take you back to Missouri!” I warned.

  “No, not that.” He pretended alarm, and before I could stop myself, I turned solemn for a moment.

  “You’re right, not that. Anyplace but Princeton, Missouri.”

  Jim knew when to lighten the moment, change the subject, move on to the future. “Go on,” he said. “You gonna let those horses sit there all night and make Will Henry miss his game?”

  I got them to Benteen fine, in plenty of time for the game. Will Henry got to bat once and struck out, but it was his first attempt, and we praised him highly. I was surprised at the number of people the game attracted. Oh, there weren’t quite two full teams, though the rivals from a town not too far up the river had eight on their team, while Benteen had only seven. Each man seemed to have brought his family, so there was quite a crowd, and I found myself the center of some attention.

  “You’re the new doctor, aren’t you? Pleased to meet you.” A strong hand was thrust at me, and I looked into a bearded face, wrinkled with exposure but not really old. The man stood with his hand on the head of a bright, towheaded boy about eight who smiled at me, exposing great gaps in his teeth.

  “Dr. Armstrong, remember me? I’m Billy, the kid that carried your stuff out of the store last week.”

  “Sure, Billy, I remember. And I’m glad to meet your family.”

  Billy’s mother spoke up then. “We’re glad you’re here, but of course, we hope we don’t have to see you.” She smiled nervously at her own joke. She was pale and looked to be old beyond her years, with dull brown hair hanging limply behind her ears and a tired look in her gray eyes which failed to come alive even as she tried to joke. With a nervous gesture, she pushed her hair back. Billy looked healthy enough, but I suspected his mother would be my patient at one time or another.