LaRose(59)
Finally, in its ecstasy to live, the being seized her. It sank hot iron knives into her bones. Snipped her lungs into paper valentines. Wolfred spooned into her mouth the warmed fat of any game he brought down. He still made her rest, wrapped her carefully every night, and set hot lake rocks around her feet. Every night she said good-bye, tried to die before morning, was disappointed to awaken. He arranged a plaster of boiled mashed nettles between strips of canvas, and lowered it onto her chest. She improved, gained strength, but was herself for only a month. On a cool late summer day with insects loud in the hay field, tangled song in the birch trees, she folded herself again into the grass. Staring up into a swirl of brilliant sky, she saw an ominous bird. Wolfred wrapped LaRose in quilts and laid her on a bed of cut reeds in the wagon bed. The children had piled the bed thick and high. They had covered the boards with two heavy horse blankets, then with their quilts. LaRose saw this bed they had made for her and stroked their faces.
Take back your blankets, she said, in a horror that she would spread what ate her.
Air them out, she cried. Air out the house. For a time, sleep in the barn.
They touched her, tried to calm her.
I am warm, she smiled, though she wasn’t.
Wolfred heard there was a doctor in newly built St. Paul who had a treatment for the disease. He took LaRose overland in the wagon. There, after a two-week journey that nearly killed her, she met Dr. Haniford Ames.
In an immaculate examining room, the mild, pale doctor took her pulse with calm fingers, listened to her breathe, and explained what he’d learned from a southerner, Dr. John Croghan. In a great cavern in Kentucky, he had originated cave therapy for consumption, or phthisis. The purity and mineral health of the air in caves was curative. Dr. Haniford Ames had hollowed out and built four stone huts in the Wabasha caves of St. Paul, and there he kept his patients, feeding them well and making certain that their surroundings were clean and beneficial. When he met LaRose, the doctor was at first opposed to bringing her into the treatment regimen. Because she was an Indian, he was certain she could not be cured, but Wolfred was adamant. They waited eight days. A patient died and Wolfred handed over all the money they possessed. She was admitted. Her whitewashed stone room was tiny, with space just for a pallet and washstand. The front opened onto an expansive rock ledge where she would lie all day watching the untamed, torrential Mississippi River. LaRose smiled when Wolfred set her on the soft, fresh mattress. From the bed she could see across the river to the horizon, to the east, where bold pink clouds urgently massed.
Her brain seethed with fever; she was excited, alert. She asked for paper, quills, and ink. For two nights Wolfred slept at the foot of her bed, rolled in a blanket. All patients slept on this long stone outcrop of a porch because Ames believed that night air, also, strengthened the lungs. LaRose wrote and wrote. When he went home, Wolfred took the papers, which were stories, admonitions, letters to her children.
They had messages from her whenever there was a post rider. She was eating. She was resting. Dr. Haniford Ames was using the latest science to govern her treatment. He was judicious with the laudanum, was considering surgery. The doctor had lost a sister and a brother to the white plague. Though he’d been ill right along with them, he was now recovered. If he could have dissected himself to find out what had caused him to live, he would have. When he found the eastern doctors too conservative in their thinking, he packed his entire laboratory and headed west. There, he would have the freedom to pursue a cure. He would find out what had saved him while his loved ones wrackingly died. As far as he could tell, there was nothing unusual about him. He was not robust. His only exercise was walking, in all weathers, to set his thoughts at peace. His diet was slothful—he ate whatever he could, gorged on sweets. He even smoked. No, there was nothing outwardly special. Everything about him was uncolorful, unprepossessing. There must be something inside of himself that he could not quantify. His brother had been a mountain climber, ropey and long limbed. His sister had been a great beauty, who swam in the Atlantic waters off Cape Cod and rode intractable horses. She had had a mystical belief in herself and it had surprised her very much to die. It had surprised Haniford as well, and because of it he had been resigned to his own death. To be alive still startled him.
When he met LaRose, he met another conundrum that would shape his life. Disease was rampant among her people, and nearly every disease was lethal. He believed in science, not this idea of manifest destiny, which kept appearing in the newspapers. He was upset when pious land-grabbers declared that the Will of God was somehow involved in so effectively destroying Indians who squatted in the path of progress.
Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.
Some found him offensive. He did not care. He had ability, he had life, he would put both to use.
Because no Indians were ever cured of the disease, he doubted that LaRose would survive. Because as he came to know her, LaRose reminded him of his sister, he decided that he would cure her anyway, and threw himself into her case.
From her bed on the stone promontory, LaRose watched the weather change. Dr. Ames had eaten fish in cream sauce when he was ill. LaRose ate fish in cream sauce. He had walked, so she walked, though up and down the cave’s short stone corridor was all she could manage. When Wolfred left, she was already improved. Dr. Ames wrote to say that she was responding well to the experimental collapse of one lung—he had some hope. Her letters told Wolfred that she was stronger, that she was allowed to walk twice a day now, that she was still eating fish in cream sauce. Then a letter arrived in which she told Wolfred she had seen Mackinnon.