The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (138 page)

WATER MARKS

Nobody else shot at Rob J. If the incident at the barn had been a message that he should stop pressuring for an investigation of Makwa’s death, whoever had pulled the trigger had reason to believe the warning was heeded. He did nothing else because he knew of nothing else he could do. Eventually polite letters came from Congressman Nick Holden and from the governor of Illinois. They were the only officials to answer him, and their replies were
bland dismissals. He brooded, but he addressed himself to more immediate problems.

In the beginning, he was called upon only infrequently to offer the hospitality of his dugout room, but after he’d been helping slaves to run away for several years the trickle grew to a freshet, and there were times when new occupants came to the secret room often and regularly.

There was general and controversial interest in Negroes. Dred Scott had won his plea for freedom in a Missouri lower court, but the State Supreme Court declared him still a slave, and his abolitionist attorneys appealed the case to the Supreme Court of the United States. Meanwhile, writers and preachers thundered, and journalists and politicians fulminated on both sides of the slavery issue. The first thing Fritz Graham did after he was elected to a regular five-year term as sheriff was buy a pack of “nigger hounds,” because bounties had become a lucrative sideline. Rewards for the return of runaways had increased in size, and penalties for helping fugitive slaves had grown more severe. Rob J. continued to be frightened when he thought of what could happen to him if he were caught, but mostly he didn’t allow himself to think of it.

George Cliburne greeted him with sleepy politeness whenever they encountered one another by chance, as though they weren’t meeting under different circumstances in the dark of night. A by-product of the association was Rob J.’s access to Cliburne’s extensive library, and he availed himself of volumes that he regularly carried home for Shaman, and sometimes read himself. The grain broker’s book collection was heavy in philosophy and religion but light in science, which was how Rob J. found its owner.

When he’d been a Negro-smuggler for about a year, Cliburne invited him to attend a Quaker meeting and was diffident and accepting when he refused. “I thought thee might find it helpful. Since thee does the work of the Lord.”

It was on Rob’s lips to correct him, to say he did the work of man and not of God; but the thought was pompous enough without putting it to voice, and he merely smiled and shook his head.

He realized his hiding was only one link in what doubtless was a large chain, but he had no knowledge of the rest of the system. He and Dr. Barr never referred to the fact that the other physician’s recommendation had led him to become a lawbreaker. His only clandestine contacts were with Cliburne and with Carroll Wilkenson, who told him whenever the Quaker had “an interesting new book.” Rob J. was certain that when the runaways left
him they were taken north, through Wisconsin and into Canada. Probably by boat across Lake Superior. That’s the way he would route the escapes if he were doing the planning.

Once in a while Cliburne would bring a female, but most of the fugitives were men. They came in infinite variety, dressed in ragged tow cloth. Some had skins of such negritude it seemed to him the very definition of blackness, the shiny purple of ripe plums, the jet of burnt bone, the dense darkness of ravens’ wings. The complexions of others showed a dilution with the paleness of their oppressors, resulting in shades that ranged from café au lait to the color of toasted bread. Most of them were large men with hard, muscular bodies, but one was a slender young man, almost white, who wore metalrimmed spectacles. He said he was the son of a house nigger and a plantation owner in a place called Shreve’s Landing, in Louisiana. He could read and was grateful when Rob J. gave him candles and matches and back copies of Rock Island newspapers.

Rob J. felt thwarted as a physician because he kept the fugitives too short a time to treat their physical problems. He could tell that the lenses of the light-skinned Negro’s spectacles were far too powerful for him. Weeks after the youth had left him, Rob J. found a pair of eyeglasses he thought might be better. Next time he was in Rock Island he went to see Cliburne and asked if he could somehow arrange to forward the glasses, but Cliburne only stared at the spectacles and shook his head. “Thee must have better sense, Dr. Cole,” he said, and walked away without saying good day.

On another occasion a large man with very black skin stayed in the secret room for three days, more than long enough for Rob to observe that he was nervous and suffered from abdominal discomfort. Sometimes his face was gray and sick-looking, and his appetite was irregular. Rob was certain he had a tapeworm. He gave him a bottle of specific but told him not to take it until he arrived wherever he was going. “Otherwise you’ll be too weak to travel, and you’ll leave a trail of loose stool that every sheriff in the country can follow!”

He would remember each of them as long as he lived. He felt an immediate sympathy for their fears and their feelings, and it was more than the fact that once he’d been a fugitive himself; he realized that an important ingredient of his concern was his familiarity with their plight, because he had witnessed the afflictions of the Sauks.

He had long since ignored Cliburne’s orders that they weren’t to be questioned. Some were loquacious and some tight-lipped. At the very least,
he tried to get their names. Although the youth with the glasses had been named Nero, most of the names were Judeo-Christian: Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Aaron, Peter, Paul, Joseph. He heard the same names again and again, reminding him of the stories Makwa had told him about the biblical names at the Christian school for Indian girls.

He spent as much time with the talkative ones as safety would allow. One man from Kentucky had escaped once before and had been caught. He showed Rob J. the scarred stripes on his back. Another, from Tennessee, said he hadn’t been treated badly by his master. Rob J. asked why he had run in that case, and the man pursed his lips and squinted, as if searching for the answer.

“Cudden wait for Jubilee,” he said.

Rob asked Jay about Jubilee. In ancient Palestine, every seventh year agricultural land was allowed to lie fallow and replenish itself, in accordance with the dictates of the Bible. After seven sabbatical years, the fiftieth year was declared a year of jubilee, and slaves were given a gift and set free.

Rob J. suggested Jubilee was better than keeping humans in perpetual servitude but hardly the ultimate kindness, since in most cases fifty years of slavery was more than a lifetime.

He and Jay circled each other warily on the topic, having learned long ago the depth of their differences.

“Do you know how many slaves there are in the Southern states? Four million. That’s one black skin for every two white skins. Free them, and the farms and plantations that feed a lot of abolitionists up North will have to close. And then what would we do with those four million black folks? How would they live? What would they become?”

“Eventually they’d live same as anybody. If they got some education, they could become anything. Pharmacists, for instance,” he said, unable to resist.

Jay shook his head. “You simply don’t understand. The South’s very existence depends on slavery. That’s why even nonslave states make it a crime to aid runaways.”

Jay had struck a nerve. “Don’t talk to me about crime! The African slave trade’s been outlawed since 1808, but African people are still being taken at gunpoint and stuffed into ships and carried to every Southern state and sold on the block.”

“Well, that’s national law you’re talking about. Each state makes its own laws. Those are the laws that count.”

Rob J. snorted, and that was the end of that conversation.

He and Jay remained close and mutually supportive in all other things, but the slavery question raised a barrier between them that they both regretted. Rob was a man who valued a quiet talk with a friend, and he began to turn Trude into the path leading to the Convent of St. Francis whenever he was in that neighborhood.

It was hard for him to pinpoint just when he became Mother Miriam Ferocia’s friend. Sarah gave him physical passion that was unwavering and as important to him as meat and drink, but she spent more time talking with her pastor than with her husband. Rob had discovered in his relationship with Makwa that it was possible for him to be close to a woman without sexuality. Now he proved it again with this sister of the Order of Saint Francis, a female fifteen years older than he, with stern eyes in a strong cowlframed face.

He’d seen her only infrequently until that spring. The winter had been mild and strange, with heavy rains. The water table rose unnoticed until the streams and creeks suddenly were hard to cross, and by March the township paid for being on land between two rivers, because the situation already had become the Flood of ’57. Rob watched the river come over the banks on the Cole place. It swirled inland, washing away Makwa’s sweat lodge and her woman’s lodge. Her
hedonoso-te
was spared because she had built it cleverly on a knoll. The Cole house was higher than the flood reached too. But soon after the waters receded, Rob was summoned to treat the first case of virulent fever. And then another person came down sick. And another.

Sarah was pressed into service as a nurse, but she and Rob and Tom Beckermann were swiftly overwhelmed. Then one morning Rob came to the Haskell farm and found a feverish Ben Haskell already sponge-bathed and comforted by two Sisters of Saint Francis. All of “the brown beetles” were out and nursing. He saw at once and with a great thankfulness that they were excellent nurses. Each time he met them they were in pairs. Even their prioress nursed with a partner. When Rob protested to her, thinking it was a quirk in their training, Miriam Ferocia responded with cold vehemence, making it clear his objections were useless.

It came to him that they worked in pairs so they could guard one another
from lapses of faith and flesh. A few evenings later, ending the day with a cup of coffee at the convent, he put it to her that she was afraid to allow her sisters to be alone in a Protestant house. He confessed it was a puzzle to him. “Is your faith weak, then?”

“Our faith is strong! But we like warmth and comfort as well as the next. The life we’ve chosen is bleak. And cruel enough without the added curse of temptations.”

He understood. He was happy to accept the sisters under Miriam Ferocia’s terms, and their nursing made all the difference.

The prioress’s typical comment to him dripped with scorn. “Have you no other medical bag, Dr. Cole, than that shabby leather thing decorated with porky quills?”

“It’s my
Mee-shome
, my Sauk medicine bundle. The straps are made of
Izze
cloths. When I wear them, no bullets can harm me.”

She looked at him wide-eyed. “You don’t have the faith in Our Savior, but you accept protection from Sauk Indian heathenry?”

“Ah, but it works.” He told her of the shot that had been fired at him outside his barn.

“You must use extreme caution,” she admonished, pouring him coffee. The nanny goat he’d donated had dropped kids twice, supplying two males. Miriam Ferocia had traded one of the bucks and somehow had acquired three more does, dreaming of a cheese industry; but still whenever Rob J. came to the convent he had no milk for his coffee, because every nanny always seemed to be pregnant or nursing. He did without, like the nuns, and learned to love his coffee black.

Their talk turned sober. He was disappointed that her churchly inquiry had thrown no light on Ellwood Patterson. He had been considering a plan, he confided. “What if we were able to place a man within the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner? It might be possible to learn of their mischief early enough to stop it.”

“How would you do that?”

He had given it a good deal of thought. It required a native-born American who was both completely trustworthy and close to Rob J. Jay Geiger wouldn’t do, because SSSB probably would reject a Jew. “There’s my hired man, Alden Kimball. Born in Vermont. A very good person.”

She shook her head in concern. “That he’s a good person would make it worse, because you might very well sacrifice him, and yourself, with such a scheme. These are extremely dangerous men.”

He had to face the wisdom of what she said. And the fact that Alden had been showing his age. Not failing yet, but showing his age.

And he drank a lot.

“You must be patient,” she said gently. “I shall make my inquiries again. Meanwhile, you must wait.”

She removed his cup and he knew it was time to rise from the bishop’s chair and leave, so she could prepare for Night Song. He collected his quilled bullet shield and smiled at the competitive glare she directed at the
Mee-shome
. “Thank you, Reverend Mother,” he said.

38

HEARING THE MUSIC