Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

by Jason Karlawish

  Deborah stared at her husband.

  “I had never known of this, William,” she whispered.

  Beaumont composed himself.

  “I know,” he said. “I always thought I should not burden you with something I felt unable to change, until now. Because now I can change it.”

  “By your accounts do we have the money for this?”

  “We can cover his expenses, yes. I see no reason to pay him for his work. That'll be fair compensation for his care, room and board. In time, Deborah, with this investment and my promotion to surgeon, we'll have the money we need for our house and land.”

  “What does he say?”

  “Say?”

  “About this plan?”

  “I should expect he'd be grateful for our charity. When you consider his wound and his poverty, what choice does he have?”

  She looked around their small and crowded room. “Yes, what choice.” She nodded. “When does he move in?”

  “I'm not sure, but I'd hazard any day now. Pearce returned his bills to me and wrote that he wants him gone by July. But of course, who we take into our house is a private matter.”

  She lowered her eyes. “As you wish. We'll need a place for the child by the winter. We could perhaps move Sarah here to the front room. But enough. I don't want to talk any more about this. I trust you.”

  He took Sarah into his arms and stepped closer to Deborah.

  “Please don't despair. It was luck that brought us together, and now much good will come. He will continue to heal, and in time I'll have the recognition I require for promotion.”

  “How much time?”

  “Time?” He considered her question. “That, Deborah, I just don't know. A few months, perhaps. Perhaps more.”

  TWELVE

  ON JULY 1, 1823, ALEXIS ST. MARTIN was settled into the slope-roofed back room of the Beaumont household. Convincing Alexis to accept this plan proved easy. After Beaumont explained it to Alexis, Alexis stammered in a confused garble of French and English. Beaumont heard words like “home” and “Canada.” He raised his hand as if to signal a halt. Alexis swallowed.

  “And who will care for your wound?”

  Alexis gazed at his bandaged torso.

  “Who?” Beaumont insisted.

  Alexis shrugged. Beaumont sat beside him.

  “Be sensible, Alexis. You know what I have done for you for many months, and am still wishing to do for you to see that healed. But you can't remain in this hospital. Ramsay Crooks and his people, the town, they won't permit it.”

  Beaumont reached out and placed the length of his right arm upon Alexis's shoulders.

  “Trust me, Alexis. I know what it's like to be alone in the world with little prospect for advancement. I know what it's like to be hungry, to fret whether you can afford even a crust. When I was a young man, about your age, Dr. Chandler took me in as an apprentice. In three years time, I'd grown up and gained a valuable skill. Now I'm older and you're here and you need help, and I want to help you.”

  “You were shot too?”

  “No, no, I was well, but like you I had little more than debts.” He took a deep breath. “Alexis, you're like a son to me. I, we—my wife and I—we'll take good care of you.”

  The young man nodded.

  In time, the days' routines developed. They began just after sunrise with Beaumont changing Alexis's dressings as Deborah prepared breakfast. Alexis would splash water over his face from a bucket he kept in his room, run water through his hair, comb it with his fingers and dress in knee breeches and an old flannel shirt of Beaumont's that fit him like a smock. He set to his chores, restocking the woodbin, all the while whistling, then took his seat, arms crossed upon the tabletop, his hair shiny black and pulled back flat over his skull. He ate quickly, using only a knife and his fingers, smacking his lips, tipping his bowl to drink whatever liquid remained. He licked his knife, wiped the plate clean with a thick slice of bread or boiled potato he'd saved for the task.

  As Alexis ate, Deborah straightened the house and set away the previous evening's dishes, and Beaumont sat at his worktable reviewing his visitation log as he drank his coffee. The infant Sarah clung to her mother's skirts, staring wide-eyed at the new man in the house. While the Beaumonts ate, Alexis would carry in pails of water from the well to refill the pitchers, carry out the breakfast scraps, his oddly wide feet slapping upon the hearthstones. After the meal, he scoured the dishes.

  He occupied the remainder of the day with routine chores, a nap and an afternoon walk about the garrison and village. He was clever at some simple tasks, scraping out the ashes while still keeping the cooking fire kindled, scrubbing a pot, sweeping a floor and carrying the waste out on a shingle. He was handy not only with whittling but with wood chopping as well, and within weeks had set to splitting rounds of wood with a slow determination. It became his habit to see Beaumont off to the hospital and then walk out to the side of the Beaumonts' cottage with ax, mallet and wedge and set to work upon the logs.

  Deborah kept him out of the sitting room, and in all his time in Mackinac he never once, at least to her knowledge, entered their bedroom. Their kitchen, his slope-roofed back room and the yard were the extent of his domain. In time, his range extended to the island and the camps along the beach as well.

  ONE AFTERNOON, as Deborah dandled Sarah upon her knee while Alexis swept out the kitchen, she told Alexis that he needed a haircut. He stopped his sweeping, folded his hands atop the broom handle and smiled at her. She held her fore and middle fingers into a V shape and ran them scissor wise through her own hair.

  “Haircut,” she repeated. “It's gotten rather long.” She held a lock of her own hair out to demonstrate.

  “Yes, yes,” he nodded, as he pushed back his black locks from his face. “A haircut.”

  Within the hour she had him outdoors seated on a chair beneath a shade tree, a gray sheet wrapped around him like a high-collared dress, his black locks falling as she worked her shears. Sarah sat before them constructing piles with stacks of short straight sticks he had whittled smooth for her to play with, and Rex lay upon his side, his thick tail thumping the ground.

  In the evenings, after Alexis returned from his afternoon wanderings, he would find Deborah preparing the evening meal, and he would attend to Sarah as her mother cooked. He had by now accumulated a small set of carvings of various creatures that he amused Sarah with. He sang her songs in French. Supper done, Deborah would serve Alexis alone as she read to him from the Bible while waiting for Beaumont to return from his patients.

  “You read different books,” he said to her. “Not the one Madame Sally read.”

  “It is the best book,” she said. “Swallow a bit before you speak, Alexis.”

  He looked confused.

  She indicated her mouth.

  “Don't speak with a mouth full of food.”

  He looked at his plate, then looked at Deborah. He was blushing.

  At the pace he ate, the reading would end within ten minutes.

  The summer grew unusually hot. By August, the heat was so intense and unremitting it drove families to sleep outdoors beneath canopies of bug netting. Work slowed, and people lingered under the trees along the lakeshore, fanning themselves. The women wrapped their skirts about their hips and waded into the lake and splashed water over their heads. Some gave up all pretension and walked out into the lake far enough that their skirts rose up about them as though their torsos were at the center of great blossoms. Some men simply sat in the water. Others wandered out as deep as their shoulders. Ramsay Crooks was seen floating upon his back, a great berg dressed in trousers and a cotton blouse.

  Alexis regularly walked with Rex trotting beside. He had befriended several of the clerks, voyageurs and Indians who gathered about the shacks and outer buildings surrounding the dock. The men passed long hours lying in the afternoon shade, and at night, they sat around fires on the beach. They roasted what meat they could purchase or trade for. They drank anyth
ing that came from a bottle. By the close of summer, people began talking of the man with the hole in his side and his appetite for whiskey and song and his talent with a carving knife. Rumors began to circulate of his complicity in acts of petty vandalism, his instigation of fights. Deborah begged her husband to discipline him.

  HAVING ALEXIS IN THE HOUSE afforded Beaumont easy access to observe the process of digestion. Within a month, Beaumont began more frequent and sometimes extended periods of observation and careful note taking. These required removing and reapplying new bandages to keep the stomach contents from spilling out. Alexis was ordered to lie without even shifting. He became a living cadaver.

  The rigors of these observations and the failure of the wound to close began to frustrate Alexis. One long summer afternoon, as Beaumont was observing the effect of the gastric digestion on a piece of raw beef he'd dangled into the cavity by means of a silk string, Alexis reached down and began to pull at the thread. Beaumont swept Alexis's hand away.

  “Alexis, stop that!” he ordered. “What are you doing?”

  Alexis' face was twisted with anger. “Putain, ça craint! Suffit! That's enough,” he cried. “Enough! This is not working. Whatever it is you try to do to me, it is not working.”

  Beaumont stared at Alexis.

  “When will I be healed?” Alexis demanded.

  “Healed?”

  “Closed up for good so I can go. Go,” he yelled. “As you promised.”

  “Calm down, Alexis. It's healing slowly, boy. You have to be patient.”

  Alexis stared at Beaumont. His pupils were dilated, and his lips quivered. “It was a year.” He began speaking, but then he stopped.

  The two men stared at each other.

  “You've got to be patient.”

  “Why's it not closed?”

  “Honestly, Alexis, these sorts of wounds take time. Trust me. I took care of such things in the war. You're fortunate to be alive. Be patient.”

  “Why's it not closed?” Alexis insisted.

  Beaumont straightened his frame. “Why? I don't know why. But if you insist, well then, I could try sewing it closed.”

  “Try?”

  “With a needle. Sew it closed.” Beaumont mimicked the action of sewing.

  Alexis considered the idea.

  “Now?”

  “No, not immediately, but after your meal digests.”

  Alexis grabbed a wad of bandages and held it over the hole. He straightened himself up upon the edge of his cot.

  “Why didn't you do that before?”

  “Before?”

  “Why have you waited to sew it up?”

  Beaumont's eyes narrowed. “I have not waited, Alexis. I've thought it wise to let Nature take its course of healing. But if you insist, I can try to sew it up. It will require several stitches to bring the margins together, sort of like a purse. Of course, I can guarantee nothing. But if you insist.”

  He made to raise his hand to once again mimic the act of stitching, but it was trembling, and so he clasped his hands together as if he was kneading something small and pliant.

  “Will it hurt?” Alexis asked.

  Beaumont snorted a laugh. “Of course.”

  Alexis slapped his bed frame. “Why didn't you sew it closed when it first happened?”

  Beaumont regarded Alexis.

  “Are you, are you actually questioning my medical methods? Is that what you're doing, after all I have done for you, now, to have this conversation here, here in my house?”

  Alexis lowered his eyes.

  “No docteur, no sir.”

  “I'll see fit to sew the wound up, when the wound is fit for sewing up. My prescribed treatment is to let Nature follow its course of healing by my careful ministrations, and that has done quite well for you. Now be a good patient, and please lie back.” Beaumont patted the surface of the mattress. “And while we're on this matter of your healing, let me assure you that intoxication will not aid in your healing.”

  Alexis looked confused.

  “Drinking to the point of silliness, Alexis, will not aid in closing up that hole. If you fail to maintain a robust constitution, that hole won't close up. Moreover, think of your reputation and mine as well. It upsets Mrs. Beaumont. She thinks of you as a son, as do I.”

  Alexis gazed at his doctor. “I'm sorry,” he mumbled, and then he slowly lowered himself upon his back.

  THIRTEEN

  THE FIRST WEEKS OF SEPTEMBER BEGAN with drenching rains that carved rivulets into the roads followed by days so warm that men walked about at noon in their shirtsleeves. The Reverend James's roses produced a new set of blooms, and women sweated before their kitchen fires. Still, the soldiers and company men set to repairing the island's rickety buildings and packing the storehouses with supplies. The pause in these labors came with the autumn dance.

  The Beaumonts and Sally and Hardage Thompson left the dance before nightfall. Deborah's pregnancy exhausted her. As the four of them were making their way home along the path, Beaumont spied Alexis in the company of a group of voyageurs. He excused himself from his wife and friends and called Alexis over to him.

  “Allo, Doctor,” Alexis sang. He was swaying and grinning with drink. His hair was matted with sweat, and he was dressed like the other voyageurs in a kind of loose white pantaloons and a red kerchief about his neck. Beaumont reached out and set his hands upon the young man's shoulders. His breath smelled of liquor.

  “Alexis, take care tonight. People are watching you, watching us. Please? Remember what I said about reputation.”

  “But of course,” he laughed. “We are like dishes. Easily cracked.” And then he loped off into the night.

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER, a hard knocking upon the front door roused Beaumont from his shallow sleep. Deborah stirred, but she did not awaken. He slipped out from under the quilt, stepped past his daughter's crib and felt his way blindly to the front door. He opened it to face the silhouettes of two men, their uniforms visible in sharp silhouette. He leaned with one arm against the frame and kept his other arm crooked over his brow to shield his eyes against the glare of their lantern.

  “Lower that, can you not?”

  “Pardon, Doctor.” The man holding the lantern set it upon the ground. The circle of light shimmered and settled.

  Beaumont looked at the men, squinting. “What is it?”

  “Cap'n Pearce sent us, sir. There's been a stabbing. One of the voyageurs is cut up bad.”

  Beaumont looked back into the darkness of his small house. Nothing was visible save the glow of the kitchen coals and the exaggerated shadows of the iron cooking wares suspended above that feeble light.

  “Alexis?” he asked the darkness.

  “I don't know, sir, but you'd best come quick. We've laid him out in one of the warehouses. He bleeds heavy despite bandages.”

  “Give me a minute to dress, and one of you fetch Elias Farnham. I've a lantern here I can use.” He turned back to the soldiers. “Go then now!”

  BEAUMONT FOUND THE WOUNDED MAN laid out on a cot with his head turned aside to better accommodate a cabbage-sized wad of bloody dressings that covered the wound. He recognized the voyageur from the St. Louis brigade. The man spoke little English, and the bits he did speak were incomprehensible.

  Elias Farnham arrived, and he and Beaumont set to work peeling away the bandages. The man's lips were pale and his skin the color of old flour. The wound described a clean downward cutting motion along the length of his neck, angled from the back of his left ear to the tip of the collarbone, engaging the strap muscles, several veins and a knick to an artery that sprayed a small fountain of blood. Blood ran over the man's cheek, through his hair, over his chest and down the back of his neck. In time, they discovered another wound. A clean slash into the abdomen.

  Beaumont and Farnham worked on the man for over an hour, stitching and packing the wounds, until they had his abdomen and the whole of his neck and head, with apertures for his mouth and nose, wrapped in gauze dress
ings. The area around the neck was stained a crimson gorgelet.

  It was when they were washing their instruments and scraping the blood from beneath their fingernails, that the sound of boots came heavy upon the floor. Captain Pearce stood at the foot of the cot. He still wore his dress uniform from that evening's dance. He rested his right hand on the pommel of his sword.

  “Well?”

  “The man's lost a lot of blood. A lot. Still, I've managed to staunch most of the bleeding. The wound to the abdomen may have nicked bowel.”

  Pearce swayed a bit at his place where he stood. “Has he said anything? Said who did it?”