The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (131 page)

Alex celebrated by jabbing again with the left and then throwing a clumsy right cross that landed smack on Luke’s nose, bringing more blood. Luke raised his hands to his face in bewilderment.

“The Stick, Bigger!” Shaman screamed. “The Stick!” Alex heard his brother, and he drove his right hand into Luke’s stomach as hard as he was able, bending Luke over and making him gasp. It was the end of the fight, because the watching children were already scattering before the wrath of the teacher. Fingers of steel twisted Alex’s ear, and Mr. Byers was suddenly glaring down at them and declaring recess at an end.

Inside the school, both Luke and Alex were exhibited before the other pupils as very bad examples—beneath the big sign reading “
PEACE ON EARTH
.” “I will not have fighting in my school,” Mr. Byers said coldly. He took the rod he used as a pointer and punished both fighters with five enthusiastic stripes upon the open hand. Luke blubbered. Alex’s lower lip trembled when he received his own punishment. His swollen eye already was the color of an old eggplant and his right hand was tormented on both sides, the knuckles skinned from fighting, the palm red and swollen from Mr. Byers’ switching. But when he glanced at Shaman, the brothers were suffused with an inner fulfillment.

When school let out and the children left the building and began to walk away, a group clustered about Alex, laughing and asking admiring questions. Luke Stebbins walked alone, morose and still stunned. When Shaman Cole ran at him, Luke thought wildly that the younger brother now was going to take his turn, and he raised his hands, the left a fist, the right open almost in supplication.

Shaman spoke to him kindly but firmly. “You call my brother Alexander. And you call me Robert,” he said.

Rob J. wrote to the Stars and Stripes Religious Institute and told them he would like to contact Reverend Ellwood Patterson about an ecclesiastic question, requesting that the institute forward Mr. Patterson’s address.

It would take weeks for a reply to reach him, even if they answered. Meanwhile, he told nobody of what he had learned or of his suspicions, until one evening when he and the Geigers had finished playing “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” Sarah and Lillian were chatting in the kitchen, preparing tea and slicing pound cake, and Rob J. unburdened himself to Jay. “What shall I do, if I should find this preacher with the scratched face? I know Mort London won’t go out of his way to bring him to justice.”

“Then you must make a noise and a smell that will be noticed in Springfield,” Jay said. “And if the state authorities won’t help, you’ve got to appeal to Washington.”

“Nobody in power has been willing to exert any effort because of one dead Indian woman.”

“In that case,” Jay said, “if there’s evidence of guilt, we’ll have to gather about us some righteous men who know how to use guns.”

“You’d do that?”

Jay looked at him in astonishment. “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”

Rob told Jay of his vow of nonviolence.

“I have no such scruples, my friend. If bad people threaten, I’m free to respond.”

“Your Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

“Hah! It also says, ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ And, ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.’ ”

“‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”

“That isn’t from
my
Bible,” Geiger said.

“Ah, Jay, that’s the trouble, too damn many Bibles and they each claim to hold the key.”

Geiger smiled sympathetically. “Rob J., I would never try to dissuade you from being a freethinker. But I leave you with one more thought. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ ” And the conversation turned to other things as their women carried in the tea.

In the time that followed, Rob J. thought often of his friend, sometimes resentfully. It was easy for Jay. Several times a day he wrapped himself in his fringed prayer shawl and it covered him with security and reassurance about yesterday and tomorrow. All was prescribed: these things are allowed, these things are forbidden, directions clearly marked. Jay believed in the laws of Jehovah and of man, and he had only to follow ancient edicts and the statutes of the Illinois General Assembly. Rob J.’s revelation was science, a faith less comfortable and far less comforting. Truth was its deity, proof was its state of grace, doubt was its liturgy. It held as many mysteries as other religions and was beset with shadowy trails that led to profound dangers, terrifying cliffs, and the deepest pits. No higher power shed a light to illuminate the dark and murky way, and he had only his own frail judgment with which to choose the paths to safety.

On the seasonably frigid fourth day of the new year of 1852, violence came to the schoolhouse again.

That morning of intense cold, Rachel was late for school. When she arrived, she slipped silently onto her place in the bench without smiling at Shaman and mouthing a greeting, as was her custom. He saw with surprise that her father had followed her into the schoolhouse. Jason Geiger walked up to the desk and looked at Mr. Byers.

“Why, Mr. Geiger. A pleasure, sir. What can I do for you?”

Mr. Byers’ pointer lay on the desk and Jay Geiger picked it up and whacked the teacher across the face.

Mr. Byers jumped to his feet, overturning his chair. He was a head taller than Jay but ordinary of build. Ever after it would be remembered as comical, the short fat man going after the tall younger man with the teacher’s own rod, his arm rising and falling, and the disbelief on Mr. Byers’ face. But that morning nobody laughed at Jay Geiger. The pupils sat straight, scarcely breathing. They couldn’t credit the event any more than Mr. Byers could; it was even more unbelievable than Alex’s fight with Luke. Shaman mostly watched Rachel, noting that her face had been dark with embarrassment but had become very pale. He had the feeling she was trying to make herself as deaf as he was, and blind as well, to everything that was going on around them.

“What the hell are you doing?” Mr. Byers held his arms up to protect his face and squealed in pain as the pointer landed on his ribs. He took a threatening step toward Jay. “You damn idiot! You crazy little Jew!”

Jay kept hitting the teacher and backing him toward the door until Mr. Byers bolted through and slammed it. Jay took Mr. Byers’ coat and flung it through the door onto the snow, and then he came back, breathing hard. He sat in the teacher’s chair.

“School is dismissed for the day,” he said finally, then collected Rachel and took her home on his horse, leaving his sons David and Herman to walk home with the Cole boys.

It was really cold outside. Shaman wore two scarves, one around his head and under his chin, the other around his mouth and nose, but still his nostrils frosted closed for a moment every time he breathed.

When they got home Alex ran inside to tell their mother what had happened in school, but Shaman walked past the house, down to the river, where he saw that the ice had cracked in the cold, which must make a wonderful sound. The cold had split a big cotton wood tree too, not far from
Makwa’s snow-covered
hedonoso-te;
it looked as though it had been exploded by lightning.

He was glad Rachel had told Jay. He was relieved that he didn’t have to murder Mr. Byers and that now most likely he wouldn’t ever have to be hanged. But something pestered at him like a rash that wouldn’t go away: if Alden thought it was all right to fight when you had to, and if Jay thought it was all right to fight to protect his daughter, what was wrong with his father?

32

NIGHT DOCTORING

Within hours after Marshall Byers had fled Holden’s Crossing, a hiring committee was appointed to find a new teacher. Paul Williams was named to it, to demonstrate that nobody blamed the blacksmith because his cousin, Mr. Byers, had turned out to be a bad apple. Jason Geiger was named to it, to show that folks trusted he had behaved correctly in driving Mr. Byers away. Carroll Wilkenson was named to it, which was fortunate, because the insurance agent had just paid off a small life-insurance policy that John Meredith, a storekeeper over in Rock Island, had had on his father. Meredith had mentioned to Carroll how grateful he was to his niece, Dorothy Burnham, for leaving her schoolteaching job in order to nurse his father through his last days. When the hiring committee interviewed Dorothy Burnham, Wilkenson liked her for her homely face and the fact that she was an unmarried spinster in her late twenties, and so was unlikely to be taken from the school by marriage. Paul Williams endorsed her because the sooner they hired someone, the quicker people were going to forget his damned cousin Marshall. Jay was drawn to her because she spoke of teaching with a quiet confidence, and with a warmth that indicated a calling. They hired her for $17.50 a term, $1.50 less than Mr. Byers because she was a woman.

Eight days after Mr. Byers ran from the schoolhouse, Miss Burnham was the teacher. She kept to Mr. Byers’ seating arrangement because the children were accustomed to it. She’d taught at two previous schools, one in the village of Bloom that was a smaller school than this one, and the other
a larger school in Chicago. The only handicap she’d encountered previously in a child was lameness, and she was keenly interested that there was a deaf boy in her charge.

In her first conversation with young Robert Cole she was intrigued that he could read her lips. To her annoyance, it took her almost half a day to comprehend that from his seat on the bench he couldn’t see what most of the other children were saying. There was one chair in the schoolhouse for visiting adults, and Miss Burnham now made that Shaman’s, placing it in front of the bench and off to the side so he could see her lips as well as his schoolmates’.

The other big change for Shaman occurred when it was time for music. As had become his custom, he started to take out the stove ashes and bring in the firewood, but this time Miss Burnham stopped him and told him to resume his seat.

Dorothy Burnham gave her pupils the pitch by breathing into a small round tone pipe, and then taught them to put words to the ascending scale: “Our-school-is-a-pre-cious-ha-ven!”, and to the descending scale: “And-we-learn-to-think-and-grow-here!” By the middle of the first song it was clear she hadn’t done the deaf boy a good turn by including him, for young Cole simply sat and watched, and soon his eyes were dulled by a patience she found unendurable. He should be given an instrument through whose vibrations he might “hear” the rhythm of the music, she decided. Perhaps a drum? But the noise of a drum would destroy the music made by the hearing children.

She gave the problem some thought and then she went to Haskins’ General Store and begged a cigar box, placing into it six red marbles, the kind used by boys to play knuckles-down in the spring. The marbles made too much noise when their container was shaken, but when she glued soft blue cloth from a discarded chemise to the inside of the box, the results were satisfactory.

Next morning during music, while Shaman held the box, she shook it to keep time with each note as the pupils sang “America.” He caught on, reading the teacher’s lips to time his box-shaking. He couldn’t sing, but he became acquainted with rhythm and timing, mouthing the lyrics of each song as sung by his classmates, who soon were accustomed to the soft thudding of “Robert’s box.” Shaman loved the cigar box. Its label bore a picture of a dark-haired queen with a prominent chiffon-covered bosom and the words
Panatellas de la Jardines de la Reina
, and the imprint of the Gottlieb
Tobacco Importing Company of New York City. When he lifted the box to his nose he could smell aromatic cedar and the faint odors of Cuban leaf.

Miss Burnham soon had every boy take turns coming to school early to take out the ashes and bring in the firewood. Although Shaman never thought about it in those terms, his life had been dramatically changed because Marshall Byers had been unable to refrain from stroking adolescent breasts.

At the frigid beginning of March, with the prairie still frozen hard as flint, patients crowded Rob J.’s waiting room at the house every morning, and when his office hours were over he pushed himself to make as many calls as possible, because in a few weeks the mud would make travel torturous. When Shaman wasn’t in school, his father allowed him to make home visits with him, because the boy looked after the horse and allowed the doctor to hurry inside to his patient.

Late one leaden afternoon they were on the river road, having just been to see Freddy Wall, who had the pleurisy. Rob J. was debating whether to go on to visit Anne Frazier, who had been poorly all winter, or to let it go until the next day, when three horsemen moved their mounts out of the trees. They were bundled in clothing and tie-cloths against the cold, as were the two Coles, but Rob J. didn’t miss the fact that each of them wore a sidearm, two of the guns in belts worn outside their bulky coats, the third in a holster attached to the front of a saddle.

“You the doc, ain’tcha.”

Rob J. nodded. “Who are you?”

“We got a friend needs doctorin bad. Little accident.”