The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (126 page)

“Basta-a-a-rds! Ye dirty bastards!”

He wiped his eyes, realizing suddenly that those outside would have heard him screaming, knowing he was alone with Makwa-ikwa. Her upper torso was a mass of bruises and wounds, and her lower lip had been pulped, probably by a large fist.

On the floor next to the examining table was the evidence gathered by the sheriff: her torn and bloodstained dress (an old gingham dress Sarah had given her); the basket more than half-full of mints, cress, and some kind of tree leaves, he thought black cherry; and one deerskin shoe. One shoe? He looked for the other and couldn’t find it. Her square brown feet were bare; they were tough, hard-used feet, the second toe of her left foot misshapen from an old fracture. He had seen her barefoot often and had wondered how she had broken that toe, but he hadn’t ever asked her.

He looked up at her face and saw his good friend. Her eyes were open but the vitreum had lost pressure and dried and they were the deadest thing about her. He closed them quickly and weighted the lids with pennies, but felt as if she still stared at him. In death her nose was more pronounced, uglier. She wouldn’t have been pretty as she aged, but her face already had great dignity. He shuddered and clasped his hands together tightly, like a child at prayer.

“I am so sorry, Makwa-ikwa.” He had no illusion that she heard, but he drew comfort from speaking to her. He got pen and ink and paper and copied the runelike embossings on her breasts, sensing they were important. He didn’t know if anyone would understand them, because she hadn’t trained
someone to succeed her as ghostkeeper of the Sauks, believing she had many years. He suspected she had hoped one of the children of Moon and Comes Singing would come to be a suitable apprentice.

Quickly he sketched her face, the way it had been.

Something terrible had happened to him as well as to her. Just as he would always have dreams of the medical-student-cum-executioner holding aloft the severed head of his friend Andrew Gerould of Lanark, he would dream of this death. He didn’t fully understand what made for friendship, any more than he knew what made for love, but somehow this Indian woman and he had become true friends and her death was his loss. For a moment he forgot his vow of nonviolence; if those who had done this were in his power, he could have squashed them like bugs.

The moment passed. He tied a bandanna to cover his nose and mouth against the odor. Taking up a scalpel, he made quick slashes, opening her in a great U from shoulder to shoulder and then cutting between her breasts in a straight line that ran down to her navel, trisecting to form a bloodless Y. His fingers were without sensation and obeyed his mind clumsily; it was good he wasn’t cutting a living patient. Until he peeled back the three flaps, the grisly body was Makwa. But when he reached for the rib cutters to free the sternum, he forced himself into a different level of consciousness that drove everything from his mind but specific tasks, and he fell into the familiar routine and began to do the things that had to be done.

REPORT OF VIOLENT DEATH

Subject:
Makwa-ikwa

Address:
Cole Sheep Farm, Holden’s Crossing, Illinois

Occupation:
Assistant, dispensary of Dr. Robert J. Cole

Age:
Approximately 29 years

Height:
1.752 meters

Weight:
Approximately 63 kilograms

Circumstances:
Body of the subject, a woman of the Sauk tribe, was discovered in a wooded section of the Cole Sheep Farm by a passerby, midafternoon on September 3, 1851. There were eleven stab wounds, running in irregular line from the jugular notch down the sternum to a position approximately two centimeters inferior to the xiphoid process. The wounds were .947 to .952 centimeters in width. They were made by a pointed instrument, probably a metal blade, triangular in shape, all three edges ground to cutting sharpness.

Subject, who had been a virgin, was raped. Remains of the hymen indicate it was
imperforatus
, the membrane thick and grown inflexible. Probably the rapist(s) could not accomplish penetration by penis; defloration was completed by means of a blunt instrument with rough or jagged small projections, inflicting massive damage to the vulva, including deep scratches in the perineum and the labia majora and tearing and gouging in the labia minora and the vestibule of the vagina. Either before or after this bloody deflowering, subject was turned facedown. Bruises on her thighs suggest that she was held in position while sodomized, indicating that her attackers included at least two individuals, and probably more. Damage of the sodomy included the stretching and tearing of the anal canal. A quantity of sperm was present in the rectum, and marked hemorrhaging was present in the descending colon. Other contusions elsewhere on the body and on the face suggest subject was beaten extensively, probably by men’s fists.

There is evidence that subject resisted the attack. Under the nails of the second, third, and fourth fingers of her right hand were shreds of skin and two black hairs, perhaps from a beard.

The stabbings were done with sufficient force to chip the third rib and penetrate the sternum repeatedly. The left lung was penetrated twice and the right lung three times, tearing the pleura and lacerating the inner lung tissue; both lungs would have collapsed at once. Three of the thrusts entered the heart, two of them leaving wounds in the region of the right atrium, .887 centimeters and .799 centimeters in width, respectively. The third wound, in the right ventricle, was .803 centimeters in width. Blood from the lacerated heart had pooled extensively in the abdominal cavity.

Organs were unremarkable except for trauma. Weighed, the heart was found to be 263 grams; the brain, 1.43 kilograms; the liver, 1.62 kilograms; the spleen, 199 grams.

Conclusions
: Homicide following sexual assault, by a party or parties unknown.

Rob J. stayed up late that night, copying the report for filing with the county clerk and then making another copy to give to Mort London. In the morning, the Sauks came to the farm and they buried Makwa-ikwa on the
bluff near the
hedonoso-te
, overlooking the river. Rob had offered the burial site without consulting Sarah.

She was angry when she heard. “On our land? What ever were you thinking of? A grave is forever, she’ll be here for all time. We’ll never be rid of her!” she said wildly.

“Hold your tongue, woman,” Rob J. said quietly, and she turned and went away from him.

Moon washed Makwa and dressed her in her deerskin shaman’s dress. Alden offered to make her a pine box, but Moon said it was their way to bury their dead just in their best blanket. So Alden helped Comes Singing dig the grave, instead. Moon had them dig it early in the morning. That was how it was done, she said: grave dug early in the morning, burial early in the afternoon. Moon said Makwa’s feet had to point toward the west, and she sent to the Sauk camp for the tail of a female buffalo to be placed in the grave. This would help Makwa-ikwa cross safely over the river of foam that separates the land of the living from the Land in the West, she explained to Rob J.

The funeral was a meager rite. The Indians and the Coles and Jay Geiger gathered about the grave and Rob J. waited for someone to begin, but there was no one. They had no shaman. To his dismay, he saw that the Sauks were looking at him. If she had been a Christian he might have been weak enough to say some things he didn’t believe. As it was, he was totally inadequate. From somewhere, he remembered words:

The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that the winds
Were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description.

Jay Geiger stared at him as if he were mad. Cleopatra? But he realized that to him she had had a kind of dusky majesty, a royal-holy glow, a special sort of beauty. She was better than Cleopatra; Cleopatra hadn’t known all
about personal sacrifice, and faithfulness, and herbs. He would never meet her like again, and John Donne gave him other words to throw at the Old Black Knight:

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

When it became obvious it was all he was going to say, Jay cleared his throat and uttered a few sentences in what Rob J. supposed was Hebrew. For a moment he was afraid Sarah was going to bring Jesus into it, but she was too shy. Makwa had taught the Sauks some prayer chants, and now they sang one of them raggedly but together.

Tti-la-ye ke-wi-ta-mo-ne i-no-ki,
Tti-la-ye ke-wi-ta-mo-ne i-no-ki-i-i.
Me-ma-ko-te-si-ta
Ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se
.

It was a song Makwa often had sung to Shaman, and Rob J. saw that while Shaman didn’t sing, his lips moved along with the words. When the song was over, so was the funeral; that was all.

Afterward he went to the clearing in the woods where it had happened. It was a mass of hoofprints. He had asked Moon if any of the Sauks were trackers, but she said the good trackers were dead. Anyway, by that time a number of London’s people had been out there, and the ground was well-trampled by horses and men. Rob J. knew what he was searching for. He found the stick in the brush, where it had been flung. It looked like any other stick except for the rusty color on one end. Her other shoe had been thrown into the woods at the other end of the clearing, by someone with a good arm. There was nothing else that he could see, and he wrapped the two items in a cloth and rode over to the sheriff’s office.

Mort London accepted the paperwork and the evidence without comment. He was cool and a bit short, perhaps because his people had missed
the stick and the shoe when they had done their own search. Rob J. didn’t linger.

Next door to the sheriff’s office, on the porch of the general store, he was hailed by Julian Howard. “Got somethin for you,” Howard said. He rummaged in his pocket and Rob J. heard the heavy clinking of large coins. Howard handed him a silver dollar.

“No hurry, Mr. Howard.”

But Howard gestured toward him with the coin. “Pay my debts,” he said balefully, and Rob took the coin, making no mention that payment was fifty cents short, counting the medicine he had left. Howard already had turned away rudely. “How’s your wife?” Rob asked.

“Much improved. You’re not needed by her.”

That was good news, saving Rob a long and difficult ride. He went instead to the Schroeders’ farmhouse, where Alma was getting an early start on the autumn housecleaning; it was obvious that none of her ribs was broken. When he called next on Donny Baker he saw that the boy still was feverish, and the angry flesh of his foot looked as though it could go either way. Rob could do nothing but change the dressing and give him some laudanum for the pain.

From then on, a grim and unhappy morning went downhill. His last call was at the Gilbert homestead, where he found Fletcher White in deep trouble, his eyes dull and unseeing, his thin old body racked by coughing, every breath a painful labor. “He was better,” Suzy Gilbert whispered.

Rob J. knew that Suzy had a houseful of children and unending chores; she had stopped the steaming and the hot drinks too soon, and Rob wanted to curse and shake her. But when he took Fletcher’s hands he knew the old man had little time left, and the last thing he wanted was to fill Suzy with the idea that her neglect had killed her father. He left them some of Makwa’s strong tonic to ease Fletcher. He realized he had little of her tonic left. He had seen her brew it numerous times and believed he knew its few simple herbal ingredients. He would have to start trying to make it himself.

He was scheduled to hold afternoon hours in the dispensary, but when he returned to the farm the world was in chaos. Sarah was white-faced. Moon, who had remained tearless at Makwa’s death, was weeping bitterly, and all the children were terrorized. Mort London and Fritz Graham, his regular deputy, and Otto Pfersick, deputized just for the occasion, had come while Rob J. was gone. They had pointed rifles at Comes Singing. Mort had
placed him under arrest. Then they had tied his hands behind his back and put him on a rope and pulled him away behind their horses, like a tethered ox.

29

THE LAST INDIANS IN ILLINOIS

“You’ve made a mistake, Mort,” Rob J. said.

Mort London looked uncomfortable, but he shook his head. “No. We think the big sonofabitch most likely killed her.”

When Rob J. had been in the sheriff’s office only a few hours earlier, London had said nothing about planning to go to his farm and arrest one of his employees. Something was amiss; Comes Singing’s trouble was like a disease with no apparent etiology. He took note of the “we.” He knew who “we” was, and he perceived that somehow Nick Holden hoped to make political capital of Makwa’s death. But Rob handled his own anger gingerly.