The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (119 page)

In the barn he found the skates Alden had made for him and strapped them on. The track leading to the house had frozen roughly because of use, and made for difficult going, but at the end of the track was open prairie, and the windswept surface of the hardened snow was smooth as glass. He skated down gleaming moonpath, at first tentatively and then with longer and freer strokes as confidence returned, venturing far out into flatness like a vast arctic sea, hearing only the hissing of his blades and the sound of his labored breathing.

Finally, winded, he drew up and examined the strange world of the frozen prairie at night. Quite close and alarmingly loud, a wolf sounded its quavering banshee call, and the hairs lifted on the back of Rob J.’s head. If he were to fall, perhaps to break a leg, winter-starved predators would gather within minutes, he knew. The wolf howled again, or perhaps it was another; there was in the wail everything Rob didn’t want, it was a call composed of loneliness and hunger and inhumanity, and at once he began to move toward home, skating more carefully and more tentatively than he had done before, but fleeing as though pursued.

When he returned to the cabin he checked to see that neither Alex nor the baby had kicked off his covers. They were sleeping sweetly. When he got into bed his wife turned and thawed his frigid face with her breasts. She made a small purring and moaning, a sound of love and contrition, taking him into a welcoming tangle of arms and legs. The doctor was weatherbound; Grueber would be all right without him so long as Makwa was there, he thought, and gave himself to warmth of mouth and flesh and soul, to familiar
pastime more mysterious than moonlight, more pleasurable even than flying over ice with no wolves.

23

TRANSFORMATIONS

If Robert Jefferson Cole had been born in northern Britain, at birth he would have been called Rob J., and Robert Judson Cole would have become Big Rob, or just plain Rob without the initial. To Coles in Scotland, the J was retained by a first son only until he himself became the father of a first son, when it was passed on gracefully and without question. It wasn’t in Rob J.’s mind to disturb a family practice of centuries, but this was a new country for Coles, and those he loved weren’t mindful of hundreds of years of family tradition. Much as he tried to explain to them, they never turned the new son into Rob J. To Alex, at first the small brother was Baby. To Alden, he was the Boy. It was Makwa-ikwa who gave him the name that became part of him. One morning the child, a crawler then, and just beginning to mouth words, sat on the dirt floor of her
hedonoso-te
with two of the three children of Moon and Comes Singing. The children were Anemoha, Little Dog, who was three, and Cisaw-ikwa, Bird Woman, who was a year younger. They were playing with corncob dolls, but the little white boy crept away from them. In the dim light that fell through the smoke holes he saw the medicine woman’s water drum and, dropping his hand on it, produced a sound that caused every head in the longhouse to raise.

The boy crawled away from the sound, but not back to the other children. Instead, like a man on an inspection, he went to her store of herbs and stopped gravely before each pile, examining them with deep interest.

Makwa-ikwa smiled. “You are
uibenu migegee-ieh
, a little shaman,” she said.

Thereafter, Shaman was what she called him, and others quickly took up the name because somehow it seemed to fit and he answered to it at once. There were exceptions. Alex liked to call him Brother, and Alex was Bigger to him, because from the start their mother spoke to them of one another as Baby Brother and Bigger Brother. Only Lillian Geiger tried to call the child
Rob J., because Lillian had heard what her friend had said about his family’s custom, and Lillian was a great believer in family and in tradition. But even Lillian forgot and called the boy Shaman at times, and Rob J. Cole (the man) quickly gave up the struggle and retained his initial. Initialed or not, he knew that out of his hearing, certain of his patients called him Injun Cole and some called him “that fuckin Sauk-lovin sawbones.” But broadminded or bigots, they all knew him for a good doctor. When he was summoned he was content to go to them whether they loved him or not.

Where once Holden’s Crossing had been only a description in Nick Holden’s printed broadsides, now there was a Main Street of stores and houses, known to one and all as the Village. It boasted the Town Offices; Haskins’ General Store: Notions, Groceries, Farm Implements & Dry Goods; N. B. Reimer’s Feeds & Seeds; the Holden’s Crossing Institution for Savings and Mortgage Company; a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Anna Wiley, who also served meals to the public; the shop of Jason Geiger, Apothecary; Nelson’s Saloon (it was to have been an inn in Nick’s early plans for the town, but because of the presence of Mrs. Wiley’s boardinghouse, it never became anything more than a low-ceilinged room with a long bar); and the stables and smithy of Paul Williams, General Farrier. From her frame house in the Village, Roberta Williams, wife of the blacksmith, did custom sewing and dressmaking. For several years Harold Ames, an insurance man over in Rock Island, came to the Holden’s Crossing general store every Wednesday afternoon to transact business. But as the government land parcels began to be all taken up, and as some of the would-be farmers failed and began to sell their prairie holdings to newcomers, the need for a realty office became obvious and Carroll Wilk-enson came and set up as a real-estate man and insurance agent. Charlie Andreson—who, a few years later, also became the president of the bank—was elected mayor of the town in the first election and every one thereafter, for years. Andreson was generally liked, though there was nobody who didn’t understand that he was the chosen mayor of Nick Holden and at all times was in Nick’s watch pocket. The same went for the sheriff. It hadn’t taken Mort London more than a single year to discover he wasn’t a farmer. There wasn’t enough joinery work around to give him a steady living, because homesteaders did their own carpentry whenever it was possible. So when Nick offered to back him in a run for sheriff, Mort agreed eagerly. He was a placid man who minded his own business, which mostly was keeping the
drunks quiet in Nelson’s. It mattered to Rob J. who was the sheriff. Every doctor in the county was a deputy coroner, and the sheriff decided who would conduct the autopsy when a death occurred as a result of a crime or an accident. Oftentimes an autopsy was the only way a country doctor could do the dissecting that made it possible to keep surgical skills honed. Rob J. always adhered to scientific standards as rigorous as Edinburgh’s when he did a postmortem, and he weighed all vital organs and kept his own records. Fortunately, he always had gotten on well with Mort London, and he did a lot of autopsies.

Nick Holden had been returned to the state legislature three terms in a row. At times some of the citizens of the town became annoyed at his air of proprietorship, reminding one another that he might own most of the bank, and part of the mill and the general store and that saloon, and Lord alone knew how many acres, but by God he didn’t own them and he didn’t own
their
land! But generally they watched with pride and astonishment as he operated like a real politician down there in Springfield, drinking bourbon whiskey with the Tennessee-born governor and serving on legislative committees and pulling strings so fast and so skillfully that all they could do was spit and grin and shake their heads.

Nick had two ambitions, held openly. “I want to bring the railroad to Holden’s Crossing, so mebbe someday this town will become a city,” he told Rob J. one morning, enjoying a kingly cigar on the porch bench at Haskins’ store. “And I sorely want to be elected to the United States Congress. I’m not gonna get us a railroad staying down there in Springfield.”

They hadn’t pretended real warmth since Nick had tried to talk him out of marrying Sarah, but they both were friendly whenever they met. Now Rob regarded him doubtfully. “Getting into the U.S. House of Representatives will be hard, Nick. You’ll need votes from the much larger congressional district, not just from around here. And there’s old Singleton.” The incumbent congressman, Samuel Turner Singleton, known throughout Rock Island County as “our own Sammil,” was firmly entrenched.

“Sammil Singleton
is
old. And soon he’s gonna die or retire. When that time comes, I’ll make everyone in the district see that a vote for me is a vote for prosperity.” Nick grinned at him. “I’ve done all right by you, haven’t I, Doctor?”

He had to admit it was so. He was a stockholder in both the grain mill and the bank. Nick also had controlled the financing of the general store and
the saloon but hadn’t invited Rob J. to participate in those businesses. Rob understood: his roots were sunk deeply in Holden’s Crossing now, and Nick never wasted blandishments when they weren’t necessary.

The presence of Jay Geiger’s pharmacy and the steady flow of settlers into the region soon attracted another physician to Holden’s Crossing. Dr. Thomas Beckermann was a sallow middle-aged man with bad breath and red eyes. Lately of Albany, New York, he settled in a small frame house in the Village, hard by the apothecary shop. He wasn’t a medical-school graduate, and he was vague when discussing the details of his apprenticeship, which he said had been taken with a Dr. Cantwell in Concord, New Hampshire. At first Rob J. viewed his coming with appreciation. There were enough patients for two doctors who weren’t greedy, and the presence of another medical man should have meant a sharing of the long, difficult house calls that often took him far into the prairie. But Beckermann was a poor doctor and a steady, heavy drinker, and the community quickly observed both facts. So Rob J. continued to ride too far and treat too many.

This became unmanageable only in the springtime, when the annual epidemics struck, with fevers along the rivers, the Illinois mange on the prairie farms, and communicable illnesses everywhere. Sarah had nurtured the picture of herself at her husband’s side, administering to the afflicted, and the spring after her younger son’s birth she waged a strong campaign to be allowed to ride out with Rob J. and help him. Her timing was bad. That year, the troubling diseases were milk fever and measles, and by the time she began to pester him, he already had very sick people, a few of them dying, and he couldn’t pay her sufficient attention. So Sarah watched Makwa-ikwa ride out with him all through another spring, and her inner torment returned.

By midsummer the epidemics had quieted and Rob resumed the more routine pattern of his days. One evening, after he and Jay Geiger had restored themselves with Mozart’s Duet in G for violin and viola, Jay raised the sensitive question of Sarah’s unhappiness. By now they were comfortable best friends, yet Rob was taken aback that Geiger should presume to enter a world he had considered so inviolably private.

“How do you come to know of Sarah’s feelings?”

“She talks to Lillian. Lillian talks to me,” Jay said, and struggled with a moment of abashed silence. “I hope you understand. I speak out of … genuine affection … for you both.”

“I do. And along with your affectionate concern, do you have … advice?”

“For your wife’s sake, you have to get rid of the Indian woman.”

“There’s nothing but friendship between us,” he said, failing to control his resentment.

“It doesn’t matter. Her presence is the source of Sarah’s unhappiness.”

“There’s no place for her to go! There’s no place for any of them to go. The whites say they’re savages and won’t let them live the way they used to. Comes Singing and Moon are the best damn farm workers you could hope for, but no one else around here is willing to hire a Sauk. Makwa and Moon and Comes Singing keep the rest of the pack going, with what little money they earn from me. She works hard and she’s loyal, and I can’t send her away to starvation or worse.”

Jay sighed and nodded, and didn’t speak of it again.

Delivery of a letter was a rarity. Almost an occasion. One came for Rob J., sent on by the postmaster at Rock Island, who had held it for five days until Harold Ames, the insurance agent, made a business trip to Holden’s Crossing.

Rob opened the envelope eagerly. It was a long letter from Dr. Harry Loomis, his friend in Boston. When he finished reading, he went back and read it again, more slowly. And then again.

It had been written on November 20, 1846, and had taken all winter to reach its destination. Harry obviously was on the road to a fine career, a Boston career. He reported that he’d recently been appointed an assistant professor of anatomy at Harvard, and he hinted at impending marriage to a lady named Julia Salmon. But the letter was more medical intelligence than personal report. A discovery now made pain-free surgery a reality, Harry wrote with discernible excitement. It was the gas known as ether, which had been used for years as a solvent in the manufacture of waxes and perfumes. Harry reminded Rob J. of past experiments held in Boston hospitals to assess the painkilling effectiveness of nitrous oxide, known as “laughing gas.” He added roguishly that Rob might remember recreations with nitrous oxide that were conducted outside of hospitals. Rob did remember, with combined guilt and pleasure, sharing with Meg Holland a flask of laughing gas Harry had given to him for a little party. Perhaps time and distance made the memory better and funnier than it had been.