The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (105 page)

The satisfaction was almost like pain. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed music. When they finished they sat and grinned at one another. Geiger hurried out to put a Closed sign on the door of his shop, Lillian went to check on her child and to place a roast in the oven, Rob unsaddled and fed poor patient Monica. When they came back, it turned out the Geigers knew nothing by Marin Marais, while Rob J. had memorized none of the works of that Polish fellow, Chopin. But they all three knew Beethoven’s sonatas. All afternoon they constructed for themselves a shimmering, special place. By the time the wailing of the hungry infant interrupted their play, they were drunk with the heady beauty of their own sounds.

The pharmacist wouldn’t hear of his leaving. The evening meal was pink lamb tasting faintly of rosemary and garlic and roasted with little carrots and new potatoes, and a blueberry compote. “You will sleep in our guest room,” Geiger said.

Drawn toward them, Rob asked Geiger about opportunities for physicians in the area.

“Lots of people hereabouts, Columbus being state capital, and a number of doctors already are here to take care of em. It’s a good place for a pharmacy, but we’re going to be leaving Columbus ourselves when our baby is old enough to survive the trip. I want to be a farmer as well as an apothecary, and I want land to leave to my children. Farmland in Ohio is just too damned high. I’ve been making a study of places where I can buy fertile land I can afford.”

He had maps, which he opened on his table. “Illinois,” he said, and pointed out to Rob J. the part of the state that his investigations had indicated
the most desirable, a section between the Rocky River and the Mississippi. “A good supply of water. Beautiful woods lining the rivers. And the rest of it is prairie, black earth that’s never felt a plow.”

Rob J. studied the maps. “Maybe I ought to go there myself,” he said finally. “See if I like it.”

Geiger beamed. They spent a long time hunched over the maps, marking the best route, arguing good-naturedly. After Rob went to bed, Jay Geiger stayed up late and by candlelight copied the music of a Chopin mazurka. They played it next morning after breakfast. Then the two men consulted the marked map one more time. Rob J. agreed that if Illinois proved to be as good as Geiger believed, he would settle there and write at once to his new friend, telling him to bring his family to the western frontier.

9

TWO PARCELS

Illinois was interesting right from the start. Rob entered the state in late summer, when the tough green stuff of the prairie was dried and bleached from too many long days in the sun. At Danville he watched men boiling down the water from saline springs in big black kettles, and when he left, he carried with him a packet of very pure salt. The prairie was rolling and, in places, adorned with low hills. The state was blessed with sweet water. Rob came to only a few lakes but saw a number of marshes feeding streams that merged into rivers. He learned that when people in Illinois spoke of the land between the rivers they most likely meant the southern tip of the state that lay between the Mississippi and the Ohio. It had deep, rich alluvial soils from both great rivers. Folks called the region Egypt, because they thought it was as fertile as the fabled soil of the great Nile delta. On Jay Geiger’s map Rob J. saw that there were a number of “little Egypts” between rivers in Illinois. Somehow, during his brief encounter with Geiger the man had earned his respect, and he kept on traveling toward the region Jay had told him was the likeliest one for settlement.

It took him two weeks to work his way across Illinois. On the fourteenth day the trail he was on entered a fringe of woods, offering blessed coolness
and the smell of moist growing things. Following the narrow track, he heard the sound of a lot of water, and presently he emerged on the eastern bank of a good-sized river that he guessed to be the Rocky.

It was dry season but the current was strong, and the great rocks that gave the river its name created white water. Riding Monica along the bank, he was trying to pick out a place that appeared fordable when he came to a deeper, slower section. Between two huge tree trunks on the opposite banks, a thick rope cable was suspended. An iron triangle and a piece of steel were hung from a branch next to a sign that read:

HOLDEN’S CROSSING
Ring for Ferry

He clanged the triangle vigorously and, it seemed to him, for a long time before he saw a man leisurely making his way down the far bank, where the raft was moored. Two stout vertical posts on the raft ended in great iron rings through which passed the suspended hawser, allowing the raft to slide along the rope as it was poled across the river. By the time the raft was mid-river, the current had pulled the rope downstream, so that the man moved the raft over an arc instead of making a straight crossing. In the middle, the dark oily waters were too deep to pole, and the man pulled the raft along slowly by hauling on the rope cable. The ferryman was singing, and baritone lyrics carried clearly to Rob J.

One day I was walkin, I heerd a complainin,
An saw a old woman the picture of gloom.
She gazed at the mud on her doorstep (’twas rainin)
An this was her song as she wielded her broom.

Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble,
Beauty’ll fade an riches’ll flee,
Pleasures they dwindle an prices they double,
An nothin is as I would wish it to be….

There were many verses, and long before they ended, the rafter was able to start poling again. As the raft drew closer, Rob could see a muscular man, perhaps in his thirties. He was a head shorter than Rob and looked very much a native of the land, with heavy boots on his feet, brown linseywoolsey
pants that were too heavy for the weather, a blue cotton shirt with a heavy collar, and a sweat-stained leather hat with a wide brim. He had a mane of black hair he wore long, and a full black beard, and prominent cheekbones balanced on either side of a thin curved nose that might have given cruelty to his face except for his blue eyes, which were cheerful and welcoming. As the distance between them closed, Rob felt the wariness, the expectation of affectation, that resulted from seeing a perfectly beautiful woman or a too-handsome man. But there appeared to be little affectation in the ferryman.

“Howdy,” he called. One final shove on the pole sent the raft grinding into the sandy bank. He held out his hand. “Nicholas Holden, at your service.”

Rob shook his hand and identified himself. Holden had taken a dark, moist plug from his shirt pocket and cut himself a chaw with his knife. He held it out to Rob J., who shook his head. “How much to ride across?”

“Three cents for you. Ten cents, the horse.”

Rob paid as requested, thirteen cents in advance. He tethered Monica to rings set in the floor of the raft for that purpose. Holden gave him a second pole, and the two of them grunted as they put their backs to it.

“Looking to settle in these parts?”

“Might be,” Rob said cautiously.

“Not a farrier, by chance?” Holden had the bluest eyes Rob had ever seen on a man, saved from femininity by a piercing glance that made him appear secretly amused. “Damn,” he said, but seemed unsurprised at Rob’s headshake. “Sure would like to find me a good blacksmith. Farmer, are you?”

He perked up visibly when Rob told him he was a doctor. “Thrice welcome, and welcome again! We need a doctor in the township of Holden’s Crossing. Any doctor can ride this ferry for free,” he said, and paused in his poling long enough to count three cents solemnly back into Rob’s palm.

Rob looked at the coins. “What about the other ten cents?”

“Shit, I don’t suppose the horse is a doctor too?” When he grinned, he was likable enough to make you think he was ugly.

He had a tiny cabin of squared-off logs chinked with white clay, near a garden and a spring and set on a rise overlooking the river. “Just in time for dinner,” he said, and soon they were eating a fragrant stew in which Rob identified turnip and cabbage and onion but was puzzled by the meat. “Got
me an old hare and a young prairie chicken this morning, and they’re both in there,” Holden said.

Over refilled wooden bowls they told enough about themselves to make things comfortable. Holden was a country lawyer from the state of Connecticut. He had big plans.

“How come they named the town after you?”

“They
didn’t. I did,” he said affably. “I got here first and set up the ferry. Whenever someone comes to settle, I tell them the name of the town. Nobody’s argued yet.”

In Rob’s opinion, Holden’s log house wasn’t the equal to a snug Scots cottage. It was dark and stuffy. The bed, too close to the smoky fireplace, was covered with soot. Holden told him cheerfully that the only good thing about the place was the homesite; within a year, he said, the cabin would be razed and a fine house built in its place. “Yessir, big plans.” He told Rob J. of the things that would soon come—an inn, a general store, eventually a bank. He was frank about his desire to sell Rob on settling in Holden’s Crossing.

“How many families live here now?” Rob J. asked, and smiled ruefully at the answer. “A doctor can’t make a living taking care of only sixteen families.”

“Well, course not. But homesteaders are going to be coming in here more eager than a man on a cunt. And those sixteen families live within the township. Beyond the town line, there’s no doctor between here and Rock Island, and there’s lots of farms scattered through the plains. You’d just have to get yourself a better horse and be willing to travel a bit to make a house call.”

Rob remembered how frustrated he had felt because he had been unable to practice good medicine in the teeming population of District Eight. But this was the other side of the coin. He told Nick Holden he would sleep on it.

He slept that night in the cabin, wrapped in a quilt on the floor, while in the bed Nick Holden snored. But that was no hardship to someone who had spent the winter in a bunkhouse with nineteen farting, hawking lumberjacks. In the morning Holden cooked breakfast but left Rob to clean the dishes and frypan, saying he had something to tend to and would be back.

It was a clear, fresh day. Already the sun was hot, and Rob unwrapped the viola and sat on a shaded rock in the clearing between the rear of the
cabin and the tree line of the woods. Next to him on the rock he spread the copy of Chopin’s mazurka that Jay Geiger had transcribed for him, and painstakingly he began to play.

For perhaps half an hour he worked on the theme and the melody until it began to be music. Glancing up from the page, he looked into the woods and saw two Indians on horseback watching him from just beyond the edge of the clearing.

He was alarmed, because they restored his confidence in James Fenimore Cooper, being hollow-cheeked men with bare chests that looked hard and lean, shiny with some kind of oil. The one closer to Rob wore buckskin pants and had a great hooked nose. His shaved head was divided by a gaudy scalplock of stiff, coarse animal hair. He carried a rifle. His companion was a big man, as tall as Rob J. but bulkier. He had long black hair held back by a leather headband, and wore a breechclout and leather leggings. He carried a bow and Rob J. could clearly see a quiver of arrows hanging from his horse’s neck, like a drawing in one of the books on Indians in the Boston Athenaeum.

He didn’t know if there were others in the woods behind them. If their intent was hostile, he was lost, because the viola da gamba is a poor weapon of choice. It occurred to him to resume playing, and he placed the bow back onto the strings and began, but not with the Chopin; he didn’t want to look away from them to gaze at the score. Without thinking about it, he played a seventeenth-century piece he knew well,
Cara La Vita Mia
, by Oratio Bassani. He played it all the way through, and then halfway through again. Finally he stopped, because he couldn’t sit and play music forever.

Behind him he heard something and half-turned quickly to see a red squirrel skittering off. When he turned back, he was both vastly relieved and enormously regretful because the two Indians were gone. For a moment he could hear their horses moving off; then the only sound was the soughing of the wind in the leaves of the trees.

Nick Holden tried not to show how upset he was when he returned and was told. He made a quick inspection tour, but said nothing seemed to be missing.

“The Indians hereabouts were Sauks. They were driven across the Mississippi into Iowa nine or ten years back, with fighting that folks have come to call Black Hawk’s War. A few years ago, all the Sauks who were still alive were moved onto a reservation in Kansas. Last month we heard that about forty braves with their women and children had lit out from the
reservation. They were rumored to be heading toward Illinois. I doubt that even they are stupid enough to give us any trouble, that small a bunch. I think they’re just hoping we’ll leave them alone.”

Rob nodded. “If they’d wanted to give me trouble, they could have done it easily enough.”

Nick was eager to change the subject away from anything that might cast Holden’s Crossing in a poor light. He had spent the morning looking at four parcels of land, he said. He wanted to show them, and at his urging Rob saddled up the mare.