The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (173 page)

He took his brother’s hand and placed it on his own leg. “When you hear that he’s in the room, squeeze,” he said, and Alex nodded.

Alex’s single boot was on the floor. Shaman shifted the gun to his right hand and bent and picked up the boot, then blew out the lamp flame.

It seemed a very long time. There was nothing to do but wait, frozen in darkness.

Finally the cracks around the bedroom door changed from yellow to black. The intruder had reached the lamp in the hallway wall and had snuffed it so he wouldn’t be silhouetted in the doorframe.

Trapped in his familiar world of perfect silence, Shaman sensed when the man had opened the door, informed by the flow of frigid air from the opened window.

And Alex’s hand squeezing his leg.

He threw the boot across the room, to the far wall.

He saw the twin yellow blossomings, one after the other, and tried to aim the heavy Colt to the right of the spurts of flame. When he pulled the trigger, the revolver bucked savagely in his hand, and he used both hands to hold the gun as he pulled the trigger again and again, feeling the blasts, blinking at each flare, smelling the devil’s breath. When the gun was finished, feeling more naked and more vulnerable than ever before, Shaman stood and waited for the smashing bite of return fire.

“You all right, Bigger?” he called at last, like a fool, unable to hear any reply. He fumbled for the matches on the table and finally lighted the lamp with unsteady hands.

“All right?” he said to Alex again, but Alex was stabbing with his finger toward the man on the floor. Shaman was a poor gunfighter. Had the man been able, he might have shot both of them, but he wasn’t able. Shaman approached him now as if he were a hunted bear whose mortality was uncertain. His own wild marksmanship was evident, because there were holes in the wall, and a splintered floor. The intruder’s shots had missed the shoe but had ruined the upper drawer of Mrs. Clay’s maple dresser. The man lay on his side as if sleeping, a fat soldier with a black beard, a look of surprise on the dead face. One of the shots had nicked him in the left leg, at just the point where Shaman had cut off Alex’s limb. Another had hit him in the
chest, directly over his heart. When Shaman palpated his carotid artery, the flesh of his throat was still warm but there was no pulse.

Alex had no resources left, and he quickly fell apart. Shaman sat on the bed and held his brother in his arms, rocking him like a child while he trembled and wept.

Alex was certain that if the death were discovered, he’d go back to prison. He wanted Shaman to take the fat man into the woods and burn him, the way he’d burned Alex’s leg.

Shaman comforted him and patted his back, but he was thinking clearly and coldly.

“I killed him, you didn’t. If anyone’s in trouble, it isn’t you. But this man will be missed. The storekeeper knows he was coming here, and maybe so do others. This room is damaged and needs a carpenter, who would talk about it. If I hide or destroy his body, I can hang. We’re not going to touch his body again.”

Alex calmed. Shaman sat with him and they talked until the gray light of day came into the room and he was able to extinguish the lamp. He carried his brother downstairs to the parlor and laid him on the sofa under warm blankets. He filled the stove with wood and reloaded the Colt and set it on a chair next to Alex. “I’ll be back with the army. For God’s sake, don’t shoot anyone until you make certain it isn’t us.”

He looked into his brother’s eyes. “They’re going to question us, again and again, apart and together. It’s important that you tell the exact truth about everything. That way, they can’t twist what we tell them. You understand?”

Alex nodded, and Shaman patted him on the cheek and left the house.

The snow was knee-deep and he didn’t take the wagon. There was a halter hanging in the barn and he put it on the horse and rode her bareback. Well past Barnard’s store, it was slow going over the snowy ground, but after the Elmira line the snow had been packed down by rollers, and he made better time.

He felt numb, and not from the cold. He had lost patients he thought he should have saved, and that always bothered him. But he had never killed a human before.

He reached the telegraph office early and had to wait until it opened at seven
A.M
. Then he sent a message to Nick Holden:

Have killed soldier in self-defense. Please send civil, military authorities in Elmira your endorsements at once regarding my character and that of Alex Bledsoe Cole. Gratefully, Robert J. Cole.

He went directly to the office of the sheriff of Steuben County and reported a homicide.

68

STRUGGLING IN THE WEB

In a short time, Mrs. Clay’s little house was crowded. The sheriff, a stocky gray-haired man named Jesse Moore, suffered from morning dyspepsia, and he frowned occasionally and belched often. He was accompanied by two deputies, and his message to the army had quickly summoned five soldiers: a first lieutenant, two sergeants, and a pair of privates. Within half an hour Major Oliver P. Poole arrived, a swarthy bespectacled officer with thin black mustaches. Everyone deferred to him—clearly he was in charge.

At first the soldiers and civilians spent their time viewing the body, going in and out of the house, clumping up and down the stairs in their heavy boots, and conversing privately, with their heads close together. They wasted whatever heat was in the house and tracked in snow and ice that made a disaster of Mrs. Clay’s waxed wooden floors.

The sheriff and his men were watchful, the military men were very serious, and the major was coldly polite.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Major Poole examined the bullet holes in the floor, the wall, the bureau drawer, and the body of the soldier.

“You can’t identify him, Dr. Cole?”

“I never saw him before.”

“Do you suppose he wanted to rob you?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea. All I know is, I threw that boot at the wall in a dark room, and he shot at the sound, and I shot at him.”

“Have you looked in his pockets?”

“No, sir.”

The major proceeded to do so, placing the contents of the fat soldier’s
pockets on the blanket at the foot of the bed. There wasn’t much: a can of Clock-Time snuff; a bunched-up and snot-encrusted handkerchief; seventeen dollars and thirty-eight cents; and an army furlough that Poole read and then passed to Shaman. “Does the name mean anything to you?”

The furlough had been made out to Sergeant Major Henry Bowman Korff, Headquarters, U.S. Army Eastern Quartermaster Command, Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Shaman read it and shook his head. “I never saw or heard that name before,” he could say honestly.

But a few minutes later, as he started to descend the stairway, he realized that the name had produced troublesome echoes in his mind. Halfway down the stairs, he knew why.

Never again would he have to speculate, as his father had until he died, regarding the whereabouts of the third man who had fled Holden’s Crossing the morning Makwa-ikwa was raped and killed. He no longer had to search for a fat man named “Hank Cough.” Hank Cough had found him.

Presently the coroner came to declare the deceased legally dead. His greeting to Shaman was cool. All the men in the house displayed open or reserved antagonism, and Shaman understood its source. Alex was their enemy; he’d fought against them, probably killed Northerners, and until lately had been their prisoner of war. And now Alex’s brother had killed a Union soldier in uniform.

Shaman was relieved when they loaded the ponderous dead man onto a litter and laboriously carried him down the stairs and out of the house.

That was when the serious questioning began. The major sat in the bedroom in which the shooting had taken place. Near him, on another kitchen chair, one of the sergeants sat and took notes of the interrogation. Shaman sat on the edge of the bed.

Major Poole asked about his affiliations, and Shaman told him the only two organizations he’d ever joined were the Society for the Abolition of Slavery while he was in college, and the Rock Island County Medical Society.

“Are you a Copperhead, Dr. Cole?”

“I am not.”

“You don’t have even the slightest sympathy for the South?”

“I don’t believe in slavery. I want the war to end without additional general suffering, but I’m not a supporter of the Southern cause.”

“Why did Sergeant Major Korff come to this house?”

“I’ve no idea.” He had decided almost immediately not to mention the long-ago murder of an Indian woman in Illinois, and the fact that three men and a covert political society had been implicated in her violation and death. It was all too remote, too arcane. He understood that to open it up would be to invite the incredulity of this unpleasant army officer, and a myriad of dangers.

“You’re asking us to accept that a sergeant major in the United States Army was killed attempting an armed robbery.”

“No, I’m not asking you to accept anything. Major Poole, do you believe that I issued an invitation to this man to break a window in my rented house, enter it illegally at two o’clock in the morning, and come upstairs and into my brother’s sickroom, firing a gun?”

“Then why did he do it?”

“I don’t know,” Shaman said, and the major frowned at him.

While Poole questioned Shaman, in the parlor the lieutenant questioned Alex. At the same time, the two privates and the sheriff’s deputies were conducting a search of the barn and the house, inspecting Shaman’s luggage, emptying bureau drawers and closets.

From time to time there was a break in the questioning while the two officers conferred.

“Why didn’t you tell me your mother is a Southerner?” Major Poole asked Shaman after one such pause.

“My mother was born in Virginia but has lived in Illinois more than half her life. I didn’t tell you because you didn’t ask me.”

“These were found in your medicine bag. What are they, Dr. Cole?” Poole laid out on the bed four pieces of paper. “Each has a person’s name and address. A Southern person.”

“They’re the addresses of kinfolk of my brother’s tentmates in the Elmira prison camp. Those men cared for my brother and kept him alive. When the war is over, I’ll write to determine whether each of them made it through. And, if so, thank them.”

The questioning droned on and on. Often Poole duplicated questions he’d asked before, and Shaman repeated his former answers.

At midday the men departed to get food at Barnard’s store, leaving the two privates and one of the sergeants in the house. Shaman went into the kitchen and cooked a gruel, bringing a bowl to Alex, who looked dangerously exhausted.

Alex said he couldn’t eat.

“You must eat, it’s your way of continuing to fight!” Shaman told him fiercely, and Alex nodded and began to spoon the pasty stuff into his mouth.

After lunch, the interrogators exchanged places, the major questioning Alex, the lieutenant directing his queries at Shaman. Midafternoon, to the irritation of the officers, Shaman called a halt in the proceedings and took his time changing the dressing on Alex’s stump, before an audience.

To Shaman’s amazement, Major Poole asked him to accompany three of the soldiers to the place in the woods where he had burned the amputated section of Alex’s leg. When he had pointed out the place, they dug away the snow and grubbed in the charcoal remains of the fire until they had recovered some bits of whitened tibia and fibula that they placed into a kerchief and took away. The men departed by late afternoon. The house felt blessedly uncrowded, but insecure and violated. A blanket had been tacked over the broken window. The floors were muddy, and the air retained the odor of their pipes and their bodies.

Shaman heated the meat soup. To his pleasure, Alex suddenly displayed real hunger, and he gave his brother ample portions of beef and vegetables as well as broth. It stimulated his own hunger as well, and following the soup they ate bread and butter with jam, and applesauce, and he brewed fresh coffee.

Shaman carried Alex upstairs and placed him in Mrs. Clay’s bed. He tended to his brother’s needs and sat by his side until late, but finally he went back into the guest room and fell exhausted into the bed, trying to forget that there were bloodstains on the floor. That night, they slept little.

Next morning, neither the sheriff nor his men appeared, but the soldiers were there before Shaman had cleaned up after breakfast.

At first it appeared that the day was to be a repeat of the preceding one, but the morning was still early when a man knocked at the door and announced himself to be George Hamilton Crockett, an assistant United States commissioner for Indian affairs, stationed in Albany. He sat with Major Poole and conferred at length, transferring to the officer a sheaf of papers to which they referred several times in the course of their conversation.

Presently the soldiers gathered up their things and put on their coats. Led by the sullen Major Poole, they went away.

Mr. Crockett remained for some time, talking with the Cole brothers.
He told them they had been the subject of a large number of telegraph messages from Washington to his office.