The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (118 page)

“Baby’s coming feetfirst.”

Her eyes clouded, but she nodded and returned to Sarah.

The labor went on. In the middle of the night he forced himself to take Sarah’s hands, fearful of their message. “What?” she said thickly.

He could feel her vital force, diminished but reassuring. He murmured of love, but she hurt too much to acknowledge words or kisses.

On and on. Grunting and screaming. He couldn’t resist praying unsatisfactorily, frightening himself by not being able to bargain, feeling both arrogant and a hypocrite.
If I’m wrong and you do exist, please punish me some other way than by harming this woman. Or this child struggling to escape
, he added hastily. Toward dawn, little red extremities appeared, big feet for an infant, the proper number of toes. Rob whispered encouragement, told the reluctant baby all of life is a struggle. Legs emerged inch by inch, thrilled him by kicking.

The sweet little prick of a man-child. Hands, the proper number of fingers. A nicely developed baby, but the shoulders stuck and he had to cut Sarah, more pain. The small face was pressed into the wall of the vagina. Worried that the boy would suffocate in maternal flesh, he worked two fingers inside her and held the canal wall away until the indignant little face slid into the topsy-turvy world and at once issued a thin cry.

With trembling hands he tied and cut the cord and stitched his sobbing wife. By the time he rubbed her belly to contract the uterus, Makwa had cleansed and swaddled the infant and set him on his mother’s breast. It had been twenty-three hours of hard labor; for a long time she slept as though dead. When she opened her eyes, he held her hand tightly. “Good job.”

“He’s the size of a buffalo. About the size Alex was,” she said hoarsely. When Rob J. weighed him, the scale said eight pounds, eleven ounces. “Good bairn?” she asked, studying Rob’s face, and grimaced when he said it was a hell of a bairn. “Cursing.”

He put his lips to her ear. “You member what you called me yesterday?” he whispered.

“What?”

“Bastard.”

“I
never!”
she said, shocked and angry, and wouldn’t speak to him for almost an hour.

Robert Jefferson Cole, they named him. In the Cole family the firstborn male always was a Robert, with a middle name that began with J. Rob thought the third American president had been a genius, and Sarah considered the “Jefferson” a link with Virginia. She had fretted that Alex would be jealous, but all the older child demonstrated was fascination. He was never more than a step or two from his brother, always watching. From the start he made it clear the other two could tend the baby, feed it, change its nappies, play with it, offer it kisses and homage. But the baby was his to watch over.

In most respects, 1842 was a good year for the little family. To help build the house, Alden hired Otto Pfersick, the miller, and a homesteader from New York State named Mort London. London was a fine, experienced carpenter. Pfersick was only adequate at working wood, but he knew masonry, and the three men spent days selecting the best stones from the river and skidding them up to the house site with oxen. The foundation, chimney, and fireplaces turned out to be handsome. They worked slowly, aware they were building for permanence in a country of cabins, and by the time autumn arrived, when Pfersick had to make flour full-time and the other two men had to farm, the house was framed and closed in.

But it was a long way from finished, so Sarah was sitting in front of the cabin, snapping the ends from a potful of green beans, when the covered wagon lumbered up their track behind two tired-looking horses. She regarded the portly man in the driver’s seat, noting homely features and the road dust on his dark hair and beard.

“Might this be Dr. Cole’s place, ma’am?”

“Might be and is, but he’s on a call. Is the patient injured or sick?”

“Isn’t any patient, thank the Lord. We’re friends of the doctor’s, moving into the township.”

From the back of the wagon a woman now looked out. Sarah saw a limp bonnet framing a white, anxious face. “You’re not … Might you be the Geigers?”

“Might be and are.” The man’s eyes were handsome, and a good strong smile seemed to add a foot to his height.

“Oh, you are
so
welcome, neighbors! You get down from that wagon this instant.” Flurried, she spilled her beans when she rose from the bench. There were three children in the back of the wagon. The Geiger baby, identified as Herman, was asleep, but Rachel, who was almost four, and two-year-old David were crying as they were lifted down, and at once Sarah’s baby decided to add his yowling to the chorus.

Sarah noted that Mrs. Geiger was four inches taller than her husband, and not even the fatigue of a long, hard journey could disguise the fineness of her features. A Virginia girl recognized quality. It was of an exotic strain Sarah never had seen before, but at once she began to think anxiously about preparing and serving a dinner that wouldn’t shame her. Then she saw that Lillian had begun to cry, and her own interminable time in just such a wagon returned to her with a rush, and she put her arms around the other woman and found to her astonishment that she was crying too, while Geiger stood in consternation amid weeping women and children. Finally Lillian drew back from her, muttering in embarrassment that her entire family was terribly in need of a safe creek for scrubbing.

“Now, that is something we can solve at once,” Sarah said, feeling powerful.

When Rob J. came home he found them still with wet heads from the river baths. After the handshakes and back-pounding, he had a chance to see his farm afresh through the newcomers’ eyes. Jay and Lillian were awed by the Indians and impressed by Alden’s abilities. Jay agreed eagerly when Rob suggested they saddle Vicky and Bess and ride to inspect the Geiger holding. When they returned in time for a fine dinner, Geiger’s eyes blazed with happiness as he tried to describe to his wife the qualities of the land Rob J. had obtained for them.

“You’ll see, just wait until you see it!” he told her. After eating, he went to his wagon and returned with his violin. They couldn’t bring his wife’s Babcock piano, he said, but they had paid to have it stored in a safe, dry place and hoped someday to send for it. “Have you learned the Chopin?” he asked, and in answer Rob J. gripped the viola da gamba with his knees and drew the first rich notes of the mazurka. The music he and Jay had made in Ohio was more glorious because Lillian’s piano had been part of it, but the violin and the viola blended ecstatically. When Sarah finished her chores, she came and listened. She observed that as the men played, Mrs. Geiger’s fingers moved at times, as if she were touching keys. She wanted to take Lillian’s hand and make things better for her with words and promises,
but instead she sat next to her on the floor while the music rose and fell and offered all of them hope and comfort.

The Geigers camped next to a spring on their own land while Jason felled trees for a cabin. They were as determined not to impose on the Coles as Sarah and Rob were to show them hospitality. The families visited back and forth. As they were sitting around the Geigers’ campfire on a frosty night, wolves began to howl out on the prairie, and Jay drew from his violin a similarly long, quavering howl. It was answered, and for a time the unseen animals and the human spoke across the darkness, until Jason noticed that his wife was trembling with more than the cold, and he threw another log on the fire and put his fiddle away.

Geiger wasn’t a proficient carpenter. Completion of the Cole house was delayed again, for as soon as Alden could manage to take time from the farm, he began to raise the Geiger cabin. In a few days he was joined by Otto Pfersick and Mort London. The three of them built a snug cabin quickly and attached a shed, a pharmacy to house the boxes of herbs and medicinals that had taken up most of the room in Jay’s wagon. Jay nailed to the doorway a little tin tube containing a parchment lettered with a portion of Deuteronomy, a custom of the Jews, he said, and the Geigers moved in on the eighteenth of November, a few days before hard cold drifted down from Canada.

Jason and Rob J. cut a path through the woods between the Cole house site and the Geiger cabin. It quickly became known as the Long Path, to differentiate it from the path Rob J. had already cut between the house and the river, which became the Short Path.

The builders transferred their efforts to the Cole house. With the entire winter to finish its interior, they burned scrap lumber in the fireplace to keep warm and worked in high spirits, fashioning moldings and wainscoting of quarter oak and lavishing hours on the mixing of skim-milk paint to just the proper shades to please Sarah. The buffalo slough near the house site had frozen, and Alden sometimes stopped working wood long enough to strap skates to his boots and show them skills remembered from his Vermont boyhood. Rob J. had skated every winter in Scotland and would have borrowed Alden’s skates, but they were much too small for his large feet.

The first fine snow fell three weeks before Christmas. The wind blew what looked like smoke, and the minute particles seemed to burn when they touched human skin. Then the real, heavier flakes fell to muffle the world
with white, and it stayed that way. With growing excitement, Sarah planned her Christmas menu, discussing surefire Virginia recipes with Lillian. Now she discovered differences between themselves and the Geigers, for Lillian didn’t share in her excitement over the coming holiday. In fact, Sarah was amazed to learn that her new neighbors didn’t celebrate the birth of Christ, choosing instead to queerly commemorate some ancient and outlandish Holy Land battle by lighting tapers and cooking potato pancakes! Still, they gave the Coles holiday gifts, plum preserves they had carted all the way from Ohio, and warm stockings Lillian had knit for everyone. The Coles’ gift to the Geigers was a heavy black iron spider, a frying pan on three legs that Rob had bought in the general store at Rock Island.

They begged the Geigers to join them for Christmas dinner, and in the end they came, although Lillian Geiger ate no meat outside her own home. Sarah served cream-of-onion soup, channel catfish with mushroom sauce, roast goose with giblet gravy, potato balls, English plum pudding made from Lillian’s preserves, crackers, cheese, and coffee. Sarah gave her family woolen sweaters. Rob gave her a lap robe of fox fur so lustrous it caused her to catch her breath and brought exclamations of appreciation from everyone. He gave Alden a new pipe and a box of tobacco, and the hired man surprised him with sharp-bladed ice skates made in the farm’s own smithy—and large enough for his feet! “Snow’s coverin the ice now, but you’ll enjoy these next year,” Alden said, grinning.

After the guests had left, Makwa-ikwa knocked on the door and left rabbitskin mittens, a pair for Sarah, a pair for Rob, a pair for Alex. She was gone before they could invite her in.

“She’s a strange one,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “We should have given her something too.”

“I took care of it,” Rob said, and told his wife he’d given Makwa a spider like the one they gave to the Geigers.

“You don’t mean to tell me you gave that Indian an expensive store-bought gift?” When he didn’t reply, her voice became tight. “You must think a whole lot of that woman!”

Rob looked at her. “I do,” he said thinly.

In the night the temperature rose, and rain fell instead of snow. Toward morning, a soaking wet Freddy Grueber came banging on their door, a weeping fifteen-year-old. The ox that was Hans Grueber’s prize possession
had kicked over an oil lamp and their barn had gone up despite the rain. “Never seen nothin like it, Christ, we just couldn’t put it out. Managed to save the stock, exceptin the mule. But my pa’s burnt bad, his arm and his neck and both legs. You gotta come, Doc!” The boy had ridden fourteen miles in the weather and Sarah tried to give him food and drink, but he shook his head and rode for home at once.

She packed a basket with leftovers from the feast, while Rob J. gathered the clean rags and salves he would need and then went to the longhouse to fetch Makwa-ikwa. In a few minutes Sarah was watching them disappear into the rainy murkiness, Rob on Vicky, with his hood pulled over his head, his large body hunched over in the saddle against the wet wind. The Indian woman was wrapped in a blanket and riding Bess. On my horse, and going off with my husband, Sarah told herself, and then decided to bake bread because she’d never be able to return to sleep.

All day she waited for their return. When nightfall came, she sat late by the fire, listening to the rain and watching the dinner she had kept warm for him turn into something he wouldn’t want to eat. When she went to bed she lay without sleeping, telling herself that if they were holed up in a
tipi
or a cave, some warm nest, it was her fault for driving him away with her jealousy.

In the morning she was seated at the table, torturing herself with her imagination, when Lillian Geiger came calling, missing town life and driven by loneliness to come through the wet. Sarah had dark circles under her eyes and looked her worst, but she greeted Lillian and chatted brightly before bursting into tears in the middle of a discussion of flower seeds. In a moment, with Lillian’s arms about her, to her consternation she was pouring out her worst fears. “Until he came, my life was so bad. Now it is so good. If I should lose him …

“Sarah,” Lillian said gently. “No one can know what goes on in another’s marriage, of course, but … You say yourself that your fears may be groundless. I’m certain they are. Rob J. doesn’t seem to be the kind of man who would practice deceit.”

Sarah allowed the other woman to comfort and dissuade her. By the time Lillian left for home, the emotional storm was over.

Rob J. came home at midday.

“How is Hans Grueber?” she asked.

“Ah, terrible burns,” he said wearily. “Bad pain. I hope he’ll be all right. I left Makwa there to nurse him.”

“That’s good,” she said.

While he slept through the afternoon and evening, the rain ceased and the temperature plunged. He awoke in the middle of the night and dressed in order to go outside and slip and slide to the outhouse, because the rain-soaked snow had frozen to the consistency of marble. After he had relieved his kidneys and returned to bed, he couldn’t sleep. He had hoped to return to the Gruebers’ in the morning, but now he suspected that his horse’s hooves wouldn’t find a purchase in the icy surface that covered the ground. He dressed again in the dark and let himself out of the house, and he discovered that his fears were correct. When he stomped on the snow as strongly as he was able, his boot couldn’t break through the hard white surface.