The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (98 page)

The book he had brought was
Hospital Sketches
, by a Massachusetts woman named Alcott who had been nursing the wounded since the beginning of the war, and whose picture of the agony and terrible conditions in army hospitals was creating a stir in medical circles. Reading it made things worse, because it caused him to imagine the suffering that might be facing his brother Bigger, who was missing in action as a Confederate scout. If, indeed, he reflected, Bigger wasn’t among the nameless dead. That kind of thinking led him directly back to Pa over a road of choking grief, and he began looking about him desperately.

Near the front of the car, a skinny little boy started to vomit, and his mother, sitting white-faced among piles of bundles and three other small children, leapt to hold his forehead in order to keep him from soiling their belongings. When Shaman reached her, she had already started the unpleasant cleaning up.

“Maybe I can help him? I’m a doctor.”

“No money to pay thee.”

He waved it aside. The boy was sweating after the paroxysm of nausea but was cool to the touch. His glands weren’t swollen and his eyes seemed bright enough.

She was Mrs. Jonathan Sperber, she said in answer to his questions. From Lima, Ohio. Going to join her husband, homesteading with other Quakers in Springdale, fifty miles west of Davenport. The patient was Lester,
eight years old. Wan, but with color returning, he didn’t appear to be gravely ill.

“What’s he been eating?”

From a greasy flour sack her reluctant hands took a homemade sausage. It was green, and his nose confirmed what his eyes told him. Jesus.

“Uh … did you feed this to all of them?”

She nodded, and he looked at her other young ones with respect for their digestions.

“Well, you can’t feed it to them anymore. It’s gone way too high.”

Her mouth became a straight line. “Not so high. It’s well-salted; we’ve eaten worse. If it’s that bad, the others would be sick and so would I.”

He knew enough about homesteaders of whatever religious persuasion to hear what she was really saying: the sausage was all there was, they ate spoiled sausage or nothing. He nodded and walked back to his own seat. His food was in a cornucopia twisted from sheets of the Cincinnati
Commercial
, three thick sandwiches of lean beef on dark German bread, a strawberry-jam tart, and two apples that he juggled for a few moments to make the children laugh. When he gave the food to Mrs. Sperber, she opened her mouth as though to protest, but then she closed it. A homesteader’s wife needs a healthy dose of realism. “We are obliged to thee, friend,” she said.

Across the aisle, the blond woman watched, but Shaman was trying the book again when the conductor came back. “Say, I know you, it just come to me. Doc Cole’s boy, from over to Holden’s Crossing. Right?”

“Right.” Shaman understood it was his deafness that had identified him.

“You don’t recall me. Frank Fletcher? Used to grow corn out there on the Hooppole road? Your daddy took care of the seven of us for more’n six years, till I sold out and joined the railroad and we moved into East Moline. I member sometimes when you was just a shadder you’d come with him, behind him on the horse, holdin on for dear life.”

House calls had been the only way his father could spend time with his boys, and they had loved making house calls with him. “I do recall you now,” he told Fletcher. “And your place. White frame house, red barn with a tin roof. The original sod house, you used for storage.”

“That was it, all right. Sometimes you came with him, sometimes your brother, what’s his name?”

Bigger. “Alex. My brother Alex.”

“Yeah. Where’s he at now?”

“Army.” Not saying which one.

“Course he is. You studyin to be a minister?” the conductor said, eyeing the black suit that twenty-four hours earlier had hung on a rack in Seligman’s Store in Cincinnati.

“No, I’m a doctor too.”

“Lordy. Hardly seem old enough.”

He felt his lips tighten, because his age was harder to deal with than the deafness. “I’m old enough. Been working in a hospital in Ohio. Mr. Fletcher … my father died on Thursday.”

His smile faded so slowly, so completely, there was no mistaking the power of his sadness. “Oh. We losin all the best ones, ain’t we? The war?”

“He was home at the time. The telegraph message said typhoid.”

The conductor shook his head. “Will you kindly tell your momma the prayers of a whole lot of folks are with her?”

Shaman thanked him and said she’d appreciate that. “… Will vendors be getting on the train at any of the stations up ahead?”

“No. Everybody brings food on.” The trainman looked at him worriedly. “You won’t have a chance to buy the least thing until you change trains in Kankakee. Lord’s sake, didn’t they tell you that when you bought your ticket?”

“Oh, sure, I’m fine. I was just curious.”

The conductor touched the brim of his cap and went away. Presently the woman across the aisle stretched to reach the luggage rack and take down a good-sized oak splint basket, showing an attractive line from bosom to thigh, and Shaman went across the aisle and took it down for her.

She smiled at him. “You must share mine,” she said firmly. “As you can see, I’ve enough for an army!” He disagreed, but allowed perhaps she had enough for a platoon. Soon he was eating baked chicken, pumpkin bannock, potato pie. Mr. Fletcher, coming back with a battered ham sandwich he had begged someplace for Shaman, grinned and declared that Dr. Cole was better at foraging than the Army of the Potomac, and left again with the avowed intention of eating the sandwich himself.

Shaman ate more than he talked, shamed and astonished by his hunger in the face of grief. She talked more than she ate. Her name was Martha McDonald. Her husband, Lyman, was sales agent in Rock Island for the American Farm Implements Company. She expressed regrets at Shaman’s loss. When she served him, their knees brushed, a pleasant intimacy. He had long since learned that many women reacted to his deafness by being
either repelled or aroused. Perhaps those in the latter group were stimulated by the prolonged eye contact; his eyes never left their faces while they spoke, a necessity caused by the fact that he had to read their lips.

He had no illusions about his looks. But if he wasn’t handsome, he was large without being clumsy, he exuded the energy of young maleness and excellent health, and his regular features and the piercing blue eyes that had come to him from his father at least made him attractive. At any rate, none of this mattered where Mrs. McDonald was concerned. He made it a rule—as inviolable as the necessity to scrub his hands before and after surgery—never to become involved with a married woman. As soon as he could manage it without adding insult to rejection, he thanked her for a fine lunch and moved himself back across the aisle.

He whiled away most of the afternoon with his book. Louisa Alcott wrote of operations done without agents to deaden the pain of the cutting, of men dying of poisoned wounds in hospitals reeking of filth and corruption. Death and suffering never ceased to make him sad, but needless pain and unnecessary death made him mad as hell. Late in the afternoon Mr. Fletcher came by and announced that the train was traveling at forty-five miles per hour, three times the speed of a running horse, and without tiring! A telegraph message had told Shaman of his father’s death the morning after it happened. He wonderingly considered that the world was hurtling into an era of swift transport and swifter communication, of new hospitals and methods of treatment, of surgery without torture. Tiring of grand thoughts, he covertly undressed Martha McDonald with his eyes and spent a pleasant, cowardly half-hour imagining a medical examination that progressed to seduction, the safest, most harmless violation of his Hippocratic oath.

The diversion didn’t last. Pa! The closer he came to home, the more difficult it was to contemplate reality. Tears prickled behind his eyelids. Twenty-one-year-old physicians shouldn’t cry in public. Pa … Night fell blackly, hours before they changed trains at Kankakee. Finally, and too soon, scarcely eleven hours after they had left Cincinnati, Mr. Fletcher announced the station as “Ro-o-ock I-I-I-sla-a-and!”

The depot was an oasis of light. As he left the train, Shaman saw Alden at once, waiting for him under one of the gas lamps. The hired man patted his arm, giving him a sad smile and a familiar greeting. “Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.”

“Hello, Alden.” They lingered for a moment under the light, in order to talk. “How is she?” Shaman asked.

“Well, you know. Shit. Hasn’t really struck her yet. She hasn’t had much of a chance to be alone, with all the churchfolk, and the Reverend Blackmer right there in the house with her all day.”

Shaman nodded. His mother’s inflexible piety was a trial to them all, but if the First Baptist Church could help them through this, he was grateful.

Alden had guessed correctly that Shaman would carry only one bag, allowing him to bring the trap, which had good springs, instead of the buckboard, which had none. The horse was Boss, a gray gelding his father had liked a lot; Shaman rubbed his nose before getting up into the seat. Once they were under way, conversation became impossible, for in the darkness he couldn’t see Alden’s face. Alden smelled the same, of hay and tobacco and raw wool and whiskey. They crossed the Rocky River on the wooden bridge and then followed the road northeast at a trot. He couldn’t see the land on either side, but he knew every tree and rock. In some places the road was hard to use because the snow was almost gone and the melt had turned it to mud. After driving for an hour, Alden reined up to breathe the horse where he always did, and he and Shaman got down and pissed on Hans Buckman’s wet lower pasture and then walked a few minutes to get the kinks out. Soon they were crossing the narrow bridge over their own river, and the scariest part for Shaman came when the house and the barn loomed into view. Up to now it hadn’t been unusual, Alden picking him up in Rock Island and driving him home, but when they arrived, Pa wouldn’t be there. Not ever again.

Shaman didn’t go right into the house. He helped Alden unhitch and followed him into the barn, lighting the oil lantern so they could talk. Alden reached into the hay and pulled out a bottle that was still about one-third full, but Shaman shook his head.

“You become Temperance up there in Ohio?”

“No.” It was complicated. He was a poor drinker, like all Coles, but, more important, a long time ago his father had explained to him that alcohol drove away the Gift. “Just don’t use it very much.”

“Yeh, you’re like him. But tonight, you should.”

“Don’t want her to smell it on me. I’ve got enough trouble with her without fighting about that. But leave it, will you? I’ll come and get it on my way to privy, after she’s gone to bed.”

Alden nodded. “You be a little patient with her,” he said hesitantly. “I know she can be hard, but …” He froze in astonishment as Shaman came
and put his arms around him. That wasn’t part of their relationship; men didn’t hug men. The hired man patted Shaman’s shoulder self-consciously. In only a moment Shaman had mercy on him and blew out the lantern and went through the dark yard to the kitchen, where, all others departed, his mother was waiting.

2

THE INHERITANCE

Next morning, although the level of brown liquid in Alden’s bottle had gone down only a couple of inches, Shaman’s head throbbed. He had slept poorly; the old rope mattress hadn’t been tightened and reknotted for years. He cut his chin shaving. At midmorning, none of those things mattered. His father had been buried quickly because he’d died of typhoid, but the service had been postponed until Shaman’s return. The small First Baptist Church was jammed with three generations of patients who had been doctored by his father, delivered, or treated for diseases, gunshot wounds, stabbings, groin rash, broken bones, and who only knew what else. The Reverend Lucian Blackmer delivered the eulogy—warmly enough to forestall the animosity of those in attendance, yet not so warmly that anyone might get the notion it was all right to die as Dr. Robert Judson Cole had done, without having had the good sense to join the one true church. Shaman’s mother several times had expressed her gratitude that, out of respect for her, Mr. Blackmer had allowed her husband to be interred in the church burying ground.

All afternoon the Cole house was filled with people, most of them bringing dishes of roasts, forcemeats, puddings, and pies, so much food the occasion took on an almost festive quality. Even Shaman found himself nibbling on slices of cold baked heart, his favorite meat. It had been Makwa-ikwa who had taught him to fancy it; he had thought it an Indian delicacy, like boiled dog or squirrel cooked with the innards, and it had been a happy discovery that many of his white neighbors also cooked the heart after butchering a cow or killing a deer. He was helping himself to another slice when he looked up to see Lillian Geiger crossing the room purposefully toward
his mother. She was older and more worn, but she was still attractive; it was from her mother that Rachel had inherited her looks. Lillian had on her best black satin dress, with a black linen overdress and a folded white shawl, the little silver Star of David swinging against her fine bosom on its chain. He noticed she was careful whom she greeted; there were some who might reluctantly give polite greetings to a Jewess, but never to a Copperhead. Lillian was cousin to Judah Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of state, and her husband, Jay, had departed for his native South Carolina at the beginning of the war and joined the Army of the Confederacy with two of his three brothers.