The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (107 page)

The groomed fields proved to be Schroeder’s. When Rob reached the farmhouse he had to amputate the farmer’s little finger and the top joint of the third finger, agony for the patient. When he was through, he asked Schroeder’s wife about the woman in the shack, and Alma Schroeder looked a little ashamed.

“That is only poor Sarah,” she told him.

12

THE BIG INDIAN

Nights grew chill and crystal clear, with enormous stars, then for weeks in a row the sky lowered. The snow arrived, lovely and terrible, before November was old, then the wind came and carved the deep white covering, piling it into drifts that challenged but never stopped the mare. It was seeing how the quarter horse responded to the snow, with so much heart, that made Rob J. really begin to love her.

The bitter cold across the plains stayed that way through December and most of January. Making his way home one dawn after a night of sitting up in a smoky sod house with five children, three of whom had bad croup, he came upon two Indians in miserable trouble. He recognized at once the men who had listened to him playing the viola outside Nick Holden’s cabin. The carcasses of three snowshoe hares attested that they had been hunting. One of their ponies had foundered, snapping a foreleg at the fetlock and pinning its rider, the Sauk with the great hooked nose. His companion, the huge Indian, had killed the horse at once and slit its belly, and then had managed to drag the injured man free of the carcass and place him within the horse’s steaming cavity to keep him from freezing.

“I’m a doctor, maybe I can help.”

They understood no English, but the big Indian made no attempt to stop him from examining the injured man. As soon as he groped beneath the tattered fur clothing it was apparent that the hunter had suffered a posterior dislocation of the right hip and was in agony. The sciatic nerve had been damaged, because his foot hung loose, and when Rob pulled off his skin shoe and pricked him with a knife point, he was unable to move his toes. The guarding muscles had become as intractable as wood because of pain and the freezing cold, and there was no way to set the hip then and there.

To Rob J.’s annoyance, the large Indian mounted his horse and abandoned them, riding across the prairie toward the tree line, perhaps for help. Rob was wearing a moth-eaten sheepskin coat, won at poker from a lumberjack the previous winter, and he took it off and covered the patient, then opened his saddlebag and took out rag bandages that he used to tie the Indian’s legs together to immobilize the unseated hip. Presently the large Indian
returned dragging two trimmed tree limbs, stout but flexible poles. Tying them on each side of his horse as shafts, he connected them with some of his skin garments until he had a trailing litter. Onto this they lashed the injured man, who must have suffered terribly as he was trailed, though the snow gave him a smoother ride than if there had been bare ground.

A light sleet began to fall as Rob J. rode behind the travois. They traveled along the edge of the forest that bordered the river. Finally the Indian turned his horse into a break between the trees and they rode into the camp of the Sauks.

Conical skin
tipis
—there would prove to be seventeen when Rob J. had a chance to count—had been set up among the trees, where they were protected from the wind. The Sauks were warmly dressed. Everywhere was evidence of the reservation, for they wore the castoff clothing of whites as well as animal skins and furs, and old army ammunition boxes could be seen in several of the tents. They had plenty of dead wood for fires, and gray wisps rose from the smoke holes of the
tipis
. But the eagerness with which hands reached for the three skinny snowshoe hares wasn’t lost on Rob. J., nor was the pinched look in all the faces he saw, for he had witnessed starving people before.

The injured man was carried into one of the
tipis
, and Rob followed along. “Does anyone speak English?”

“I have your language.” The age was hard to determine, for the speaker wore the same shapeless bundle of fur garments as anyone else, with the head covered by a hood of sewn gray squirrel pelts, but the voice was a woman’s.

“I know how to fix this fellow. I’m a doctor. Do you know what a doctor is?”

“I know.” Her brown eyes regarded him calmly beneath the fur folds. She spoke briefly in their own language, and the others in the tent waited, watching him.

Rob J. took a few sticks from their woodpile and built up the fire. When he freed the man from his clothing, he saw that the hip was internally rotated. He raised the Indian’s knees until they were fully flexed, and then, working through the woman, he made certain that strong hands firmly held the man pinned down. Crouching, he got his right shoulder just beneath the knee of the injured side. Then he drove up with all his might, and the snap was audible as the ball found its way back into the socket of the joint.

The Indian lay as though dead. Through it all, he had scarcely grunted,
and Rob J. felt that a swallow of whiskey and laudanum was in order for him. But both medicinals were in his saddlebag, and before he could get them, the woman had poured water into a gourd and mixed it with powder from a small deerskin bag, and then had given it to the injured man, who drank it eagerly. She placed a hand on each of the man’s hips and looked into his eyes and half-sang something in their tongue. Watching her and listening, Rob J. felt the hair lift on the back of his neck. He realized she was their doctor. Or maybe some kind of priest.

In that moment the sleepless night and the snow-struggle of the past twenty-four hours caught up with him, and in a fog of fatigue he moved out of the dimly lit
tipi
into the crowd of snow-dusted Sauks waiting outside. A rheumy-eyed old man touched him wonderingly.
“Cawso wabeskiou!”
he said, and others took it up:
“Cawso wabeskiou, Cawso wabeskiou.”

The doctor-priest left the
tipi
. As the hood swung away from her face, he saw she wasn’t old. “What are they saying?”

“They call you a white shaman,” she said.

The medicine woman told him that, for reasons that were at once obvious to him, the injured man’s name was Waucau-che, Eagle Nose. The large Indian’s name was Pyawanegawa, Comes Singing. As Rob J. traveled toward his own cabin, he met Comes Singing and two other Sauks, who must have ridden back to the horse carcass as soon as Eagle Nose was brought in, in order to reach the meat before the wolves. They had cut up the dead pony and were bringing the meat back on two packhorses. They passed him single file without seeming to glance at him once, as if they were riding past a tree.

After he arrived home, Rob J. wrote in his journal and attempted to draw a picture of the woman from memory, but try as he might, all that came was a kind of generic Indian face, sexless and tight with hunger. He needed sleep, but he wasn’t tempted by his straw mattress. He knew Gus Schroeder had extra dried ears to sell, and Alden had mentioned that Paul Grueber had a little extra grain put by for a cash crop. He rode Meg and led Monica, and that afternoon he went back to the Sauk camp and dropped off two sacks of corn and one of swedes and one of wheat.

The medicine woman didn’t thank him. She just looked at the sacks of food and rapped out some orders, and eager hands hustled them inside the
tipis
, out of the cold and the wet. The wind flapped open her hood. She really was a redskin: her face was a ruddy, mordant rouge-brown. Her nose had a prominent bump on the bridge, and almost negroid nostrils. Her brown
eyes were swimmingly large and her gaze was direct. When he asked her name, she said it was Makwa-ikwa.

“What does that mean in English?”

“The Bear Woman,” she said.

13

THROUGH THE COLD TIME

The stubs of Gus Schroeder’s amputated fingers healed without infection. Rob J. visited the farmer perhaps too often, for he was intrigued by the woman in the cabin on the Schroeder place. Alma Schroeder at first was closemouthed, but as soon as she was convinced that Rob J. wanted to help, she became maternally voluble about the younger woman. Twenty-two years old, Sarah was a widow, having come to Illinois from Virginia five years before with her young husband, Alexander Bledsoe. For two springs Bledsoe had broken the stubborn deep-rooted sod, struggling with a plow and a yoke of oxen to make his fields as large as possible before the summer prairie grass sent spears higher than the top of his head. In May of his second year in the west he came down with the Illinois mange, followed by the fever that killed him.

“That next spring she tries to plow and plant, all by herself,” Alma said. “She gets in a
kleine
crop, breaks a little more sod, but she just can’t do it. Just can’t farm. That summer we come from Ohio, Gus and me. We make, what you call it? A rangement? She turns her fields over to Gustav, we keep her in cornmeal, garden sass. Wood for the fire.”

“How old is the child?”

“Two year,” Alma Schroeder said levelly. “She never said, but we think Will Mosby was the father. Will and Frank Mosby, brothers, used to live downriver. When we moved here, Will Mosby was spending lots of time with her. We were glad. Out here, a woman needs a man.” Alma sighed with contempt. “Them brothers. No good, no good. Frank Mosby is hiding from the law. Will was killed in a saloon fight, just before the baby come. Couple months later, Sarah gets sick.”

“She doesn’t have much luck.”

“No luck. She’s bad sick, says she’s dying of cancer. Gets pains in her stomach, hurts so bad she can’t … you know … hold the water.”

“Has she lost control of her bowels too?”

Alma Schroeder colored. Talk of a baby born out of wedlock was merely observation of life’s vagaries, but she wasn’t accustomed to discussing bodily functions with any man but Gus, not even a doctor.

“No. Just the water…. She wants me to take the boy when she goes. We’re already feeding five …” She looked at him fiercely. “You got medicine to give her for the hurting?”

Someone with cancer had a choice of whiskey or opium. There was nothing she could take and still look after her child. But when he left the Schroeders’, he stopped by her cabin, closed up and lifeless-looking. “Mrs. Bledsoe,” he called. He rapped on the door.

Nothing.

“Mrs. Bledsoe. I’m Rob J. Cole. I’m a doctor.” He knocked again.

“Go way!”

“I said I’m a doctor. Maybe I can do something.”

“Go way. Go way. Go away.”

By the end of winter his own cabin took on a feeling of home. Wherever he went he acquired homely things—an iron pot, two tin drinking cups, a colored bottle, an earthen bowl, wooden spoons. Some he bought. Some he accepted in payment, like the pair of old but serviceable patchwork quilts; he hung one on the north wall to cut down the drafts and used the other to comfort the bed Alden Kimball made for him. Alden also made him a three-legged stool and a low bench for in front of the hearth, and just before the snows came Kimball had rolled into the cabin a three-foot section of sycamore tree and set it on its end. He nailed a few lengths of board to it and Rob spread an old wool blanket over the planks. At this table he sat kinglike on the best piece of furniture in the house, a chair with a seat of plaited hickory bark, taking his meals or reading his books and journals before bedtime by the uncertain light of a rag burning in a dish of melted lard. The fireplace made of river stones and clay kept the small cabin warm. Over it, his rifles rested on pegs, and from the rafters he had hung bunches of herbs, braids of onions and garlic, threads of dried apple slices, and a hard sausage and a smoke-blackened ham. In a corner he accumulated tools—a hoe, an ax, a grubber, a wooden fork, all made with differing degrees of workmanship.

Occasionally he played the viola da gamba. Most of the time he was too
tired to make music all by himself. On March 2 a letter from Jay Geiger and a supply of sulfur came to the stage office in Rock Island. Geiger wrote that Rob J.’s description of the land in Holden’s Crossing was more than he and his wife had hoped for. He had sent Nick Holden a draft of money to cover the deposit on the property and he would take over future payments to the government land office. Unfortunately, the Geigers didn’t plan to come to Illinois for some time; Lillian was pregnant again, “an unexpected occurrence which, though it fills us with joy, will delay our departure from this place.” They would wait until their second child was born and was old enough to survive the jolting ride over the prairie.