The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (108 page)

Rob J. read the letter with mixed feelings. He was delighted that Jay trusted his recommendation about the land and someday would be his neighbor. Yet he despaired because that day wasn’t in sight. He would have given a lot to be able to sit with Jason and Lillian and make music that comforted him and transported his soul. The prairie was a huge, silent prison, and most of the time he was alone in it.

He told himself he should look for a likely dog.

By midwinter the Sauks were lean and hungry again. Gus Schroeder wondered aloud why Rob J. wanted to buy two more sacks of corn, but didn’t press the matter when Rob offered no explanation. The Indians accepted the additional gift of corn from him silently and without visible emotion, as before. He brought Makwa-ikwa a pound of coffee and took to spending time by her fire. She eked out the coffee with so much parched wild root that it was different from any coffee he’d ever had. They drank it black; it wasn’t good but it was hot and somehow Indian-tasting. Gradually they learned about one another. She had four years of schooling in a mission for Indian children near Fort Crawford. She could read a little and had heard of Scotland, but when he assumed she was a Christian, she set him right. Her people worshiped Se-wanna—their top god—and other
manitous
, and she told them how to do it, in the old ways. He saw she was as much a priestess as anything, which helped her be an effective healer. She knew all about the botanical medicines of that place, and bunches of dried herbs hung from her tent poles. Several times he watched her treat Sauks, beginning by squatting at the sick Indian’s side and softly playing a drum made from a pottery jar filled two-thirds with water and with a thin cured skin stretched over its mouth. She rubbed the drumhead with a curved stick. The result was a low-pitched thunder that eventually had a soporific effect. After a while, she put both her hands on the body part that needed healing and
talked to the sick person in their tongue. He saw her ease a young man’s sprung back that way, and an old woman’s tortured bones.

“How do your hands make the pain go away?”

But she shook her head. “I can’t splain.”

Rob J. took the old woman’s hands in his. Despite the fact that her pain had been driven away he felt the ebbing of her forces. He told Makwa-ikwa the old woman had only a few days to live. When he returned to the Sauk camp five days later, she was dead.

“How did you know?” Makwa-ikwa asked.

“Death that’s coming … some people in my family can feel it. A kind of gift. I can’t explain.”

So each took the other on faith. He found her tremendously interesting, completely different from anyone he had known. Even then, physical awareness was a presence between them. Mostly they sat by her small fire in the
tipi
and drank coffee or talked. One day he tried to tell her what Scotland was like and was unable to determine how much she comprehended, but she listened and now and then asked a question about wild animals or crops. She explained to him the tribal structure of the Sauks, and now it was her turn to be patient, for he found it complicated. The Sauk Nation was divided into twelve groups similar to Scottish clans, only instead of McDonald and Bruce and Stewart they had these names:
Namawuck
, Sturgeon;
Muc-kissou
, Bald Eagle;
Pucca-hummowuck
, Ringed Perch;
Macco Pennyack
, Bear Potato;
Kiche Cumme
, Great Lake;
Payshake-issewuck
, Deer;
Pesshe-peshewuck
, Panther;
Waymeco-uck
, Thunder;
Muck-wuck
, Bear;
Me-seco
, Black Bass;
Aha-wuck
, Swan; and
Muhwha-wuck
, Wolf. The clans lived together with no competition, but every Sauk male belonged to one of two highly competitive Halves, the
Keeso-qui
, Long Hairs, or the
Osh-cush
, Brave Men. Each first man-child was declared a member of his father’s Half at birth; each second boy became a member of the other Half, and so forth, alternating so that the two Halves were represented more or less equally within each family and within each clan. They competed in games, in hunting, in making children, in counting coup and other deeds of bravery—in every aspect of their lives. The savage competition kept the Sauks strong and courageous, but there were no blood feuds between Halves. It struck Rob J. that it was a more sensible system than the one with which he was familiar, more civilized, for thousands of Scots had died at the hands of rival clansmen during many centuries of savage internecine strife.

Because of the short rations and a queasiness toward trusting the Indians’
food preparation, at first he avoided sharing Makwa-ikwa’s meals. Then, on several occasions when the hunters were successful, he ate her cooking and found it palatable. He saw that they ate more stews than roasts and, given a choice, would take red meat or fowl over fish. She told him about dog feasts, religious meals because the
manitous
esteemed canine flesh. She explained that the more the dog was valued as a pet, the better the sacrifice at a dog feast and the stronger the medicine. He couldn’t hide his revulsion. “You don’t find it strange to eat a pet dog?”

“Not so strange as to eat blood and body of Christ.”

He was a normal young man, and sometimes, even though they were bundled against the cold by many layers of clothing and furs, he became painfully horny. If their fingers touched as she handed him coffee, he felt a glandular shock. Once he took her cold square hands in his and was shaken by the vitality he felt surging in her. He examined her short fingers, the roughened red-brown skin, the pink calluses in her palms. He asked if she would come sometime to his cabin, to visit. She looked at him silently and reclaimed her hands. She didn’t say she wouldn’t visit his cabin, but she never came.

During mud season Rob J. rode out to the Indian village, avoiding the sloughs that had sprung up everywhere as the spongelike prairie was unable to absorb all the bounty of the melted snows. He found the Sauks breaking their winter camp and followed them six miles to an open site where the Indians were replacing their snug winter
tipis
by building
hedonoso-tes
, longhouses of interwoven branches through which the mild breezes of summer would blow. There was a good reason for moving camps; the Sauks knew nothing about sanitation, and the winter camp stank of their shit. Surviving the harsh winter and moving to the summer camp obviously had lifted the Indians’ spirits, and everywhere Rob J. looked he saw young men wrestling, racing, or playing at ball-and-stick, a game he had never witnessed before. It utilized stout wooden staffs with leather webbed bags at one end, and a buckskin-covered wooden ball. While running at full speed, a player hurled the ball out of his netted stick and another player caught it deftly in his net. By passing it to one another they moved the ball considerable distances. The play was fast and very rough. When a player carried the ball, the other players felt free to try to dislodge it from his net by lashing out with their sticks, often landing wicked blows on their opponents’ bodies or limbs, with contenders tripping and crashing. Noting the fascination with which Rob was following the
action, one of the four Indian players beckoned and handed over his stick.

The others grinned and quickly made him part of the game, which seemed to him to be more mayhem than sport. He was larger than most of the other players, more muscular. At first opportunity, the man with the ball flicked his wrist and sent the hard sphere hurtling toward Rob. He stabbed at it ineffectually and had to run to claim it, only to find himself in the midst of a wildcat fight, a clashing of long sticks that mostly seemed to land on his flesh. The long passing baffled him. Full of rueful appreciation of skills he didn’t possess, he soon handed the stick back to its owner.

While he ate stewed rabbit in Makwa-ikwa’s longhouse, the medicine woman told him quietly that the Sauks wished him to do them a service. All through the hard winter they had taken pelts in their traps. Now they had two bales of prime mink, fox, beaver, and muskrat. They wanted to trade the furs for seed to plant their first summer’s crop.

It surprised Rob J., because he hadn’t thought of Indians as farmers.

“If we brought the furs to a white trader ourselves, we would be cheated,” Makwa-ikwa told him. She said it without rancor, the way she would tell him any other fact.

So one morning he and Alden Kimball led two packhorses laden with fur pelts, and another horse without a pack, all the way to Rock Island. Rob J. traded hard with the storekeeper there and in exchange for the furs came away with five sacks of seed corn—a sack of small early corn, two sacks of a larger, flinty, hard-kerneled corn for hominy, and two sacks of a large-eared soft-kerneled meal corn—and three sacks each of bean, pumpkin, and squash seeds. In addition, he received three United States twenty-dollar gold pieces to give the Sauks a small emergency fund for other things they might need to buy from the whites. Alden was full of admiration for his employer’s shrewdness, believing Rob J. had arranged the complicated trading deal for his own profit.

That night they stayed in Rock Island. In a saloon Rob nursed two glasses of ale and listened to the bragging reminiscences of old Indian fighters. “This whole place belonged to either the Sauk or the Fox,” said the rheumy-eyed barkeep. “The Sauk called themselves the Osaukie and the Fox called themselves Mesquakies. Together they had everthin between the Mississippi on the west, Lake Michigan on the east, the Wisconsin on the north, and the Illinois River on the south—fifty million damned acres of the best farmland! Their biggest village was Sauk-e-nuk, a regular town with streets and a square. Eleven thousand Sauks lived there, farmin twenty-five hundred
acres between the Rock River and the Mississippi. Well, it didn’t take us very long to stampede them red bastards and put that good land to use!”

The stories were anecdotes of bloody fights with Black Hawk and his warriors, in which the Indians always were demonic, the whites always brave and noble. They were tales related by veterans of the Great Crusades, mostly transparent lies, dreams of what might have been if those telling them had been better men. Rob J. recognized that most white men didn’t see what he did when he looked at Indians. The others talked as if the Sauks were wild animals who had been righteously hunted down until they had fled, leaving the countryside safer for human folk. Rob had been searching all his life for the spiritual freedom he recognized in the Sauks. It was what he had been seeking when he wrote the handbill in Scotland, what he’d thought he had watched die when Andrew Gerould had been hanged. Now he had discovered it in a bunch of ragtag red-skinned exotics. He was not romanticizing; he recognized the squalor of the Sauk camp, the backwardness of their culture in a world that had passed them by. But nursing his mug of drink, trying to pretend interest in the alcoholic stories of disembowelments, of scalpings, of looting and rapine, he knew that Makwa-ikwa and her Sauks were the best thing that had happened to him in this place.

14

BALL-AND-STICK

Rob J. came upon Sarah Bledsoe and her child the way one surprises wild creatures in rare moments of ease. He’d seen birds drowsing in the sun with just such rapt contentment after dusting themselves and preening. The woman and her son were sitting on the ground outside her cabin, their eyes closed. She’d done no preening. Her long blond hair was dull and snarled, and the wrinkled dress that covered her skinny body was filthy. Her skin was puffy and her drawn white face reflected her illness. The little boy, who was asleep, had fair hair like his mother’s, equally matted.

When Sarah opened her blue eyes and looked into Rob’s, everything rushed into her face—surprise, fear, dismay, and anger—and without a word she swept up her son and bounded into the house. He went up to the cabin
entrance. He’d come to hate his periodic attempts to talk to her through this slab of wood.

“Mrs. Bledsoe, please. I want to help you,” he called, but her only answer was a grunt of effort and the sound of the heavy bar falling across the door.

The Indians didn’t bust the sod with plows, the way white homesteaders would. Instead, they looked for thin places in the grass cover and poked through to the soil, dropping seeds into the drills left by their sharpened planting sticks. They covered the toughest areas of grass with brush piles that would cause the sod to rot out in a year, so there would be more planting area in which to sow their seeds the following spring.

When Rob J. visited the Sauks’ summer camp, the corn planting was done and celebration was in the air. Makwa-ikwa told him that after planting came the Crane Dance, their most joyous festival. Its first event was a great ball-and-stick game in which every male participated. There was no need to recruit teams, it was Half against Half. The Long Hairs had half a dozen fewer men than the Brave Men. It was the big Indian called Comes Singing who brought about Rob’s undoing, for while he stood and talked with Makwa-ikwa, Comes Singing came and spoke with her.