Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont

by Jason Karlawish

  The boy looked confused.

  “Finish it. The man I studied. Alexis St. Martin.”

  “The Frenchman. Mama says he was ungrateful despite all that you did for him.”

  Beaumont regarded his son. “She did? When?”

  “She told me just after we moved to St. Louis. Sarah had inquired about him, when he was coming to stay with us as he did in Plattsburgh. Mother said that we should not speak of the man, for it upset you how he treated you despite all that you did for him. What did he do?”

  Beaumont nodded his head slowly. “Your mother's a good woman, Israel. A very good woman. A better man than I.”

  The young man laughed. “What do you mean, a man? Father, have I done something? Is mother cross with me?”

  “No, no. Nothing's amiss. Your mother's a good woman. A very good woman. She's suffered much, but now, now all is well. This isn't a matter to concern her.

  “I have something to tell you about that man. Alexis was just a man, like any man, an amalgamation of the good and the bad, the wise and the foolish. I was young, and I was perhaps overly hungry with ambition. I certainly could have managed affairs with more, more . . . care.”

  He told his son the story of Alexis St. Martin. When he finished, Israel scratched at the fuzz of black stubble on his chin, his jaw moved, he made to speak but then he stopped.

  “These kinds of affairs are complicated,” his father said. “Israel, I need to get the man back here, to complete the experiments and make my name. Our name.”

  “Father your name is famous. You're the most famous doctor in St. Louis.”

  “I'm a mere celebrity.”

  The young man looked confused. “What's the difference?” he asked.

  “Never the mind. Perhaps there is none. I need Alexis back with me so all the world can see how I was, and am, and ever shall be his physician and that we continue in our mutual scientific labors. The book is the book. Time will make its truths as frail as dried husks. It is the man who made the book they will ask of, and when they find their answers, I fear and tremble over what they will say. Vicious lies. Exaggerations. Rumors made truth. History is cruel.”

  “Father?”

  “Pray, let me finish. You're my only son. My father left me only debts. I shall leave you wealth. And I shall also leave you my name. You will carry my name to your grave. And so shall your children. Our family's name.” Beaumont raised his right hand and gestured to his son with the length of his index finger. “Reputation, reputation, reputation, Bud. It is the immortal part of ourselves. Crack it, and it's like china, never well mended. Lose it, and what remains is positively bestial.”

  Beaumont fell silent. He gazed at the window. “The wisdom of the world teaches us that it's better for reputation to fail in a conventional fashion than to succeed unconventionally. I didn't know that. I wish I did.” He swallowed hard and then he looked back at his son. “Now you do.

  “I've an errand for you, and it's only for you. We have to get Alexis back, and once we have him here with us, that is the end of the book. I must retrieve my past ignorance, my imbecility and professional remissness of a quarter of a century. You mustn't tell anyone of this. Not your mother. Not Captain Hitchcock. No one. Can you promise me that?”

  Israel nodded firmly. “Yes father, I promise.”

  “That's good. Now listen to me, I have a plan to bring him back. When he returns, all St. Louis will know, they'll see how the man with the hole in his side is still loyal, still my patient. You will go to Canada by way of Plattsburgh. There is an attorney there, a Mr. Woodward. I've worked with him several times, and just this week he replied to my latest inquiry that he awaits my command. He will draw up articles of agreement. I'll supply you too with a letter and a promissory note. Alexis responds to money, and I confess I've been cheap with my funds. That's been my mistake. That and foolish pride.”

  He leaned closer to his son.

  “It's important that you see the value of an investment. To make money you have to spend money. That's a valuable lesson and one that I wish my father had taught me when I was your age. You're the only one I trust in this matter. He'll insist on his family coming, and I'll see that this is granted under favorable conditions. Once he's here, no one will doubt the propriety of the work and the value of the results. The unvarnished truth.”

  Beaumont had been thumping his desktop as he made each point. He relaxed the hand, and he rubbed its calloused palm against its other. He sat back in his chair.

  “So then, son, I trust all is clear?”

  Israel nodded. “And what shall we tell Mama?”

  “That you are to inspect our properties in Green Bay and Plattsburgh, which you will do, of course, as they are along the way and it is time you acquaint yourself with that business. If you fail, and you won't, she will never know.”

  YOUNG BUD TRAVELED. In those months, his father worked in quiet desperation. The Darnes-Davis Affair had heightened his notoriety. He had more cases than he had hours in his days, and even raising his fees did not slow the demands for his time. He sold a tonic. He named a pill after himself. They entertained and attended dinners and receptions, a party for Anna Dinner in honor of her Floral Years. Sarah's recital of Chopin's etudes at the St. Louis Lyceum received a favorable review in the Weekly Reveille, and Deborah's garden was among those featured in the spring tours.

  Five months later, Israel Beaumont returned. He was no longer a boy but a lean and hard young man, skilled with money and cards, fond of drink and possessed by a certain tempered calm that made older men pause and women blush and lower their eyes. He carried a note for his father.

  Dear Dr. Beaumont,

  I regret that my farm keeps me from travel for I would travel to see you as I do miss you and your family and would welcome the journey and the reunion, but my land keeps me and I am poor and I am sick.

  Your loyal servant,

  Alexis

  Beaumont read the Bible, made his will, received communion in the Unitarian church, and he began to sort his papers.

  In March 1853, an ice storm turned the trees into heavy crystal sculpture, the rocks became obscene diamonds, crocuses froze like sherbet balls. Shrubs were bent-over supplicants under the weight of their branches.

  A skinny Negro child wrapped in oversized woolens appeared at the door of Gambler Place and handed Dr. Beaumont a note. Captain Robert E. Lee's wife was beside herself with a violent, unremitting dyspepsia.

  She's not slept in a week. Come quick. Your expertise is needed.

  They wrapped the shivering boy in a blanket, sat him before the kitchen fire and gave him hot chocolate and a corn biscuit.

  “I must go,” Beaumont told Deborah. He walked alone into town.

  AT DUSK, the chill penetrated to his very marrow as he made his way home from Captain Lee's house. The slick ground moved from beneath him, and the sky fell through the trees, and the last he saw was the darkening oblivion of the unbounded heavens. The edge of an iron boot scrape cracked his skull like a nutshell.

  The constable found him some two hours later, a somnambulant wandering along the riverfront, the blood in his hair frozen like old paint. His trousers soiled. His surgeon's kit and billfold long missing. The riverfront denizens must have taken him for a drunkard or a madman. The constable brought him home in the mayor's barouche.

  Deborah sat at his bedside. He lay in and out of consciousness, feverish and shivering. On the seventh day he grew quiet. Deborah recalled the surgeon. He concluded that he had done all that could be done. Nature would have its course.

  She lay beside him. She whispered stories of their tender months of courtship, of the sociables in Mackinac with the Crooks' punch bowl the size of a baby's bath, the canoe trip along the Fox River where Sarah saw the bear catch a fish. She read him scripture. She stroked his head. She kissed his brow. She told him she loved him.

  On the twelfth day William Beaumont's eyes turned inward to gaze upon his still-beating heart, his organs colla
psed upon his spine, his chest rose up like a mountain, and then fell, and his tongue slid back onto his throat, and the little breath that remained rattled as it fast dissipated out into the world.

  EPILOGUE

  ISRAEL BEAUMONT SAT ON THE PORCH OF GAMBLER PLACE and finished the last of his cigar as he watched the heat-shimmering image of a man riding a sway-backed donkey along the road from St. Louis. The man halted at the front gate. The donkey lowered its square nose, and the gate swung open. The man rode right up to the foot of the paint-chipped stairs. He wrapped the frayed rope reins about his left hand, and with his right hand, he shielded his eyes from the sun and managed a small bow.

  “Hello, Israel.”

  Israel closed his eyes, and then he opened them again. He tossed the butt of the cigar into the dusty white gravel.

  “Hello, Alexis.”

  “Did you hear I was coming?”

  Israel shook his head slowly.

  Alexis looked Israel up and down. “You're even bigger than when you came to fetch me in Canada. What was that, fifteen, twenty years ago?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Time passes.”

  Israel nodded. “It does. Won't you come in? Please.”

  Israel stepped aside to allow Alexis to ascend the creaking stairs of Gambler Place, then followed him into the great hall. The place smelled like a shed, and the canvas that covered several of the windows let in only a pale light that made the room resemble a crypt. Dust rose like incense.

  “Such a grand property you have.”

  “You'll excuse the condition of things. I'm preparing to sell Gambler Place.”

  “It's a handsome home. Just as I've imagined.”

  “Father loved Gambler Place, but it's too big for me to maintain. It's the land that's valuable. I'm selling the lots.”

  Alexis gazed up at the chandelier.

  “You Beaumonts have done well.”

  “My father was a hardworking man,” Israel said matter-of-factly. “I'm sure you know that.”

  “He was.”

  The two men stood for several minutes.

  “You're a doctor too, like your father?”

  Israel shook his head. “No, medicine was not my calling. Though father wished otherwise.” He chuckled. “By God, he tried to gain me an appointment into West Point. Me.” Israel gazed at the ceiling. “He was a man in a hurry, and I suppose I wasn't. Never the mind, I'm busy. I manage our properties here and in town. The few that remain.” He reached out and put his hand on Alexis's shoulder. “Are you well?”

  “I am alive. No more drink. It's still there, of course. Do you want to see it?” He gestured to his left side.

  Israel shook his head. “No. No, I don't. Let's walk.”

  Alexis stayed for several hours. Israel toured him about the property he was soon to sell to a group of investors from Boston. They concluded at the house. It was late in the afternoon when they stepped into William Beaumont's study. They lifted off the great cobwebs of cheesecloth coverings that draped the furniture. Alexis recognized copies of several of the textbooks and the doctor's trunk. He reached into one of the cabinets and took out the jar of gallstones taken from the banker's corpse.

  “I remember these in Mackinac.”

  Israel stepped closer and took up the jar. The little stones rattled.

  “Father once told me their story, but I've long forgotten.”

  “They came from a banker. Perhaps these were part of your father's fee? I remember the first time I saw this jar of green stones. I was sitting before his desk in the hospital in Mackinac Island. It was the day your father told me I had a gift and that I owed that gift to the world.”

  “Alexis, I know my father meant no harm to come to you. He told me he offered to sew the hole closed but that it was a dangerous operation. He was only trying to make the best of a tragic accident.”

  Alexis was still gazing at the stones.

  “I remember that day before his desk. It was when I realized that he had heard my prayer, and now he was coming back to collect his fee.”

  Israel frowned.

  “Fee? Father always said he paid you.”

  “Oh, he did. He did. And I drank all that money. Before that, I mean. You see, I had a debt to pay, and I knew that someday I'd have to pay it, that someday God would come to collect his half of the deal I struck with him.”

  “Deal?”

  “When I was shot, they left me in a dark storeroom. I prayed that if I lived, I would do anything God commanded of me. Anything. And then your father came and took me from that storeroom and saved me. God did. He took me into his house, and he bound me to him. I tried to bargain with him, and then to escape him, and failing that I wished I was dead. I stopped praying. I drank. But I had to go on living. For my wife. My children. And now here, even after his death, I am back in his house to tell you that I am free of the man who saved my life.”

  The two men stood for several minutes listening to the futile buzz and tap of a fly against the glowing yellow window. From somewhere in the fields, crows called. Israel returned the jar to its shelf. He surveyed the bookshelves and the collection of boxes and trunks.

  “All these things, these notebooks, the letters, he saved every letter, even the drafts. The books. I shall box them all up and send them to the medical society. Let them have them for their museum, for their historical records. I think that best, don't you?”

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  WE READ HISTORY FOR THE FACTS AND FICTION for the truth. Open Wound is a novel, not a history, and yet many of the events occurred as the histories record them. In June 1822, Alexis St. Martin, a French-Canadian fur trapper, did in fact suffer an accidental shotgun wound in the American Fur Company store on Mackinac Island, and Dr. William Beaumont nursed him back from near death. Many other characters in this book were also true historical figures, including Ramsay Crooks, Colonel Zachary Taylor, Captain Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Vice President Martin Van Buren, Robley Dunglison, and Captain Robert E. Lee. Beaumont was reprimanded for his “treatment” of Lieutenant Griswold and humiliated at the trial of William Darnes for the murder of Andrew Davis. A decade after Alexis's injury, Beaumont published Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion.

  Sources for this book are listed below. Among these, I found Horsman's Frontier Doctor quite well researched and written. It is the definitive history of William Beaumont. In some instances, words spoken or written by Beaumont and others, and descriptions of events, are adapted from the text of letters, journals and newspaper reports reprinted by Horsman, as well as from Meyer's Life and Letters of Dr. William Beaumont, Miller's transcription of Beaumont's notebook, Schoolcraft's memoirs of his life among the Indian tribes, Beaumont's Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the archives I researched.

  Ramsay Crooks's remarks on science and astronomy in part I are adapted from a passage in Philip St. George Cooke's memoir of his service as an officer in the U.S. Army from the 1820s to the 1840s, Scenes and Adventures in the Army; or, Romance of Military Life. The list of trinkets traded with the Indians is taken, albeit in an edited form, from Candi Horton's “The American Fur Company and Chicago.”

  In some instances, I have reordered the sequence of events. Alexis first fled from Beaumont not in the cover of night, via a steamship from Mackinac Island harbor, but when he was traveling with the Beaumont family in northern New York State, near the Canadian border. Regardless of the locale, he ran away. The experiments spooked him, and he was eager to be once again among his own family.

  In 1826, President John Quincy Adams—not James Monroe in 1823—reprimanded Assistant Surgeon William Beaumont for his behavior in the case of Lieutenant Griswold. I changed the date, and thus the presidents, to move the story along. Chronology aside, the point still stands that the commander in chief disapproved of Beaumont's medical practice and that his reprimand devastated Beaumont.

  The trial of William Darnes occurred in 1840,
not 1849 as I write it, and the defense attorney Henry Geyer did not invoke the Griswold affair. Repositioning the event allowed me to wrap up the end of the story, and invoking Beaumont's treatment of Lieutenant Griswold tied together the two public judgments on the character of William Beaumont. I am quite confident that had Mr. Geyer known of the presidential rebuke, he would have included it in his summation to the jury.

  In some cases, I have made up events. No evidence supports that Beaumont met Dred Scott and his owner, Dr. John Emerson, but history does record that Emerson and Scott traveled as master and slave through the Prairie du Chien region, at the same time that Beaumont was experimenting on Alexis in Fort Crawford. I have no doubt that Beaumont, some fifteen years later, then living in St. Louis, would have heard about the Dred Scott case as it began its passage from the St. Louis courts to the U.S. Supreme Court. I confess that these coincidences were too good to pass up.