The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (139 page)

The educational pattern in Holden’s Crossing was for a family to send children to the academy for a semester or two of schooling, so they could read a little and do simple sums and write a painstaking hand. Then the schooling was over, and the children began their lives as full-fledged farm workers. When Alex was sixteen he said he’d had enough school. Despite Rob J.’s offer to finance higher education, he went to work with Alden full-time on the sheep farm, and Shaman and Rachel were left as the oldest pupils in the academy.

Shaman was willing to keep on learning, and Rachel was thankful to drift along in the even flow of her days, clutching her unchanging existence as if it were a lifeline. Dorothy Burnham was aware of her good fortune in having even one such pupil come into a teacher’s life. She treated the pair like treasures, lavishing everything she knew on them and pushing herself to keep them challenged. The girl was older than Shaman by three years and had more schooling, but soon Miss Burnham was teaching them as a class of two. It was natural for them to spend a good deal of time studying together.

Whenever their schoolwork was done, Rachel went directly to Shaman’s speech training. Twice a month the two young people met with Miss Burnham and Shaman ran through his routine for the teacher. Sometimes Miss Burnham suggested a change or a new exercise. She was delighted with his
progress, and happy that Rachel Geiger had been able to do him so much good.

As their friendship ripened, sometimes Rachel or Shaman would allow the other some small inner glimpse. Rachel told him how she dreaded having to go to Peoria every year for the Jewish High Holidays. He awoke her tenderness by revealing to her, without putting it into so many words, his anguish that his mother treated him coldly. (“Makwa was more of a mother to me than she is, and she knows it. It gripes her, but it’s plain truth.”) Rachel had noticed that Mrs. Cole never referred to her son as Shaman, the way everyone else did; Sarah called him Robert—almost formally, the way Miss Burnham did in school. Rachel wondered if it was because Mrs. Cole didn’t like Indian words. She’d heard Sarah telling her mother that she was glad the Sauks were gone forever.

Shaman and Rachel worked on his vocal exercises anywhere they happened to be, floating in Alden’s flatboat or sitting on the riverbank while fishing, picking watercress, hiking across the prairie, or peeling fruit or vegetables for Lillian on the Geigers’ Southern-style veranda. Several times a week they found their way to Lillian’s piano. He could experience her vocal tonality if he touched her head or her back, but he especially liked to place his hand on the smooth warm flesh of her throat while she talked. He knew she must be able to feel his fingers trembling.

“I wish I could remember the sound of your voice.”

“Do you remember music?”

“I don’t really remember it … I heard music the day after Christmas, last year.”

She stared at him, puzzled.

“Dreamed it.”

“And you
heard
the music in the dream?”

He nodded. “All I could see was a man’s feet and legs. I think they must have belonged to my father. You remember how sometimes our parents would put us to sleep on the floor while they played? I didn’t see your mother and father, but I heard their violin and piano. I don’t remember what they played. I just remember the …
music!”

She had trouble speaking. “They like Mozart, maybe it was this,” she said, and played something on the piano.

But after a while he shook his head. “It’s just vibrations, to me. The other was real music. I’ve been trying ever since to dream of it again, but I can’t.”

He noticed that her eyes glittered, and to his amazement she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. He kissed her back, something new, very much like a different kind of music, he thought. Somehow his hand held her breast, and when they stopped kissing, it stayed there. Perhaps everything would have been all right if he’d taken his hand away at once. But, like the vibration of a musical note, he was able to sense the firming, and the small movement of her hardened bud. He pressed, and she drew back her hand and smashed him on the mouth.

Her second blow landed below his right eye. He sat dumbly and made no attempt to defend himself. She could have killed him if she’d wanted to, but she only hit him once more. She’d grown up doing farmwork and was strong, and she struck out with her closed fist. His upper lip was mashed and blood was trickling from his nose. He saw her crying raggedly as she sprang away.

He trailed after her into the front hall; it was fortunate no one was home. “Rachel,” he called once, but he couldn’t tell if she answered, and he didn’t dare follow her upstairs.

He let himself out of her door and walked to the sheep farm, snuffling to keep the blood out of his handkerchief. As he moved toward the house he met Alden coming out of the barn.

“Weeping Christ. Who happened to you?”

“… In a fight.”

“Well, I can see. What a relief. I’se beginning to think Alex is the onliest Cole boy has any spunk. What’s t’other scoundrel look like?”

“Terrible. Much worse than this.”

“Oh. That’s good, then,” Alden said cheerfully, and departed.

At supper Shaman had to endure several long lectures against brawling.

In the morning the younger children studied his battle wounds with respect, while they were pointedly ignored by Miss Burnham. He and Rachel barely spoke to one another during the day, but to his surprise when school let out she waited for him outside as usual, and they walked together in glum silence toward her house.

“You tell your father I touched you?”

“No!” she said sharply.

“That’s good. I wouldn’t want him to horsewhip me,” he said, and meant it. He had to watch her to talk with her, so he was able to observe how she looked with color rising, but to his confusion he also saw that she was laughing.

“Oh, Shaman! Your poor face. I’m really sorry,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“Me too,” he said, although he wasn’t quite certain what he was apologizing for.

At her house, her mother gave them ginger cake. When they’d eaten it, they sat across the table from one another and did their school work. Then they went into the parlor again. He shared the piano bench with her but took care not to sit too close. What had happened the previous day had changed things, as he’d feared, but to his surprise, it wasn’t a bad feeling. It simply rested warmly between them as something private to them alone, like a shared cup.

A legal paper summoned Rob J. to the courthouse in Rock Island “on the twenty-first day of June, in the year of Our Lord one thousand, eight hundred, fifty and seven, for the purpose of naturalization.”

The day was clear and warm, but the windows in the courtroom were closed because the Honorable Daniel P. Allan was on the bench and didn’t appreciate flies. The legal traffic was light, and Rob J. had every reason to believe he’d be out of there swiftly, until Judge Allan started to administer the oath.

“Now, then. Do you pledge that you hereby renounce all foreign titles and allegiances to any other country?”

“I do,” Rob J. said.

“And do you pledge to support and defend the Constitution, and to bear arms on behalf of the United States of America?”

“Well, no sir, your Honor, I do not,” Rob J. said firmly.

Startled out of his torpor, Judge Allan stared.

“I don’t believe in killing, your Honor, so I won’t ever practice war.”

Judge Allan appeared annoyed. At the clerk’s table next to the bench, Roger Murray cleared his throat. “Law says, Judge, cases like this, candidate has to prove he’s a conscientious objector whose beliefs prevent him from bearing arms. Means he has to belong to some group like the Quakers, that make it generally known they won’t fight.”

“I know the law and what it means,” the judge said acidly, furious that Murray couldn’t ever seem to find a less public way to instruct him. He peered over his spectacles. “You Quaker, Dr. Cole?”

“No, your Honor.”

“Well, what the hell are you, then?”

“Not affiliated with any religion,” Rob J. said, and saw that the judge looked as if he’d been personally insulted.

“Your Honor, may I approach the bench?” someone said from the back of the court. Rob J. saw it was Stephen Hume, who’d been a railroad lawyer ever since Nick Holden had won his seat in the Congress. Judge Allan signaled him to approach. “Congressman.”

“Judge,” Hume said with a smile. “Like to personally vouch for Dr. Cole? One of the most distinguished gentlemen in Illinois, serves the people night and day as a physician? Everybody knows his word is gold. If he says he can’t fight in a war because of his beliefs, that’s all the proof a reasonable man should need.”

Judge Allan frowned, uncertain whether or not a politically connected lawyer before his bench had just called him unreasonable, and decided the safest thing was to glare at Roger Murray. “We’ll proceed with the naturalization,” he said, and without any more fuss, Rob J. became a citizen.

On the ride back to Holden’s Crossing he had a few strange, regretful memories of the Scots homeland he’d just renounced, but it felt good to be an American. Except that the country had more than its share of troubles. The U.S. Supreme Court had just decided for good and all that Dred Scott was a slave because it wasn’t legal for Congress to exclude slavery from the territories. At first Southerners rejoiced, but already they were furious again, because the Republican party leaders said they wouldn’t accept the court decision as binding.

Neither would Rob J., even though his wife and his elder son had become hot-blooded Southern sympathizers. He’d sent dozens of runaway slaves through the secret room to Canada, and in the process had had several close calls. Alex told him one day that he’d met George Cliburne the night before on the road about a mile from the sheep farm. “There he was, sitting on top of a wagonload of hay at three o’clock in the morning! Now, what do you make of that?”

“I guess you have to work hard to get up earlier than an industrious Quaker. But what were you doing coming home at three in the morning?” Rob J. said, and Alex was so busy getting away from the subject of his late-night drinking and tomcatting with Mal Howard that George Cliburne’s strange work ethic wasn’t brought up again.

In the middle of another night Rob J. was closing the padlock on the
shed door when Alden had come along. “Couldn’t sleep. Ran outta varmint juice, and remembered I had this stashed in the barn.” He lifted the jug and proffered it. Though Rob J. seldom craved a drink and knew alcohol diminished the Gift, he wanted to share something with Alden. He uncorked the jug, took a swallow, and coughed. Alden grinned.

Rob would have liked to move the hired man away from the shed. In the dugout room on the other side of the door was a middle-aged Negro with a slight asthmatic wheeze when he breathed. Rob J. suspected that at times the wheeze became pronounced, and he wasn’t certain the sound couldn’t be heard from where he and Alden were talking. But Alden wasn’t going anywhere; he hunkered down on his heels and showed how a champion drank whiskey, finger through the handle, jug swung onto his elbow, elbow raised just high enough to send the proper amount of raw liquor into his mouth.

“Trouble sleeping nowadays?”

Alden shrugged. “Most nights I go right off, tired from work. When I don’t, little drink helps me sleep.”

Alden had looked a lot more worn ever since Comes Singing had died. “Ought to get another man to help you work the farm,” Rob J. said, for perhaps the twentieth time.

“Hard to find good white man willin to hire out. Wouldn’t work with a nigger,” Alden said, and Rob J. wondered how well sound traveled in the other direction, into the shed. “Besides, got Alex workin with me now, and he’s doin real good.”

“Is he?”

Alden stood erect, somewhat shakily; he must have had a lot of varmint juice before he’d run out. “Damn,” he said deliberately. “Doc, you never do give them pore young boogers their due.” Holding his jug carefully, he made his way back toward his own cabin.

One day near the end of that summer a middle-aged Chinese, name unknown, drifted into Holden’s Crossing. Refused service in Nelson’s Saloon, he hired a prostitute named Penny Davis to buy a bottle of whiskey and take him to her shack, where next morning he died in her bed. Sheriff Graham said he didn’t want any whore in his town who’d share her chink with a Chink and then peddle it to white men, and he personally arranged for Penny Davis to leave Holden’s Crossing. Then he had the corpus put in the back of a wagon and delivered to the nearest coroner.

That afternoon, Shaman was waiting for his father when Rob J. approached his shed.

“Never seen an Oriental.”

“This one happens to be dead. You know that, don’t you, Shaman?”

“Yes, Pa.”

Rob J. nodded and unlocked the shed door.

There was a sheet covering the body, and he folded it and placed it on the old wooden chair. His son was pale but composed, intently studying the figure on the table. The Chinese was a small man, thin but muscular. His eyes had been closed. His skin color fell somewhere between the paleness of whites and the redness of Indians. His toenails, horny and yellow, needed cutting; seeing them through his son’s eyes, Rob was moved.

“Have to do my work now, Shaman.”

“Can I watch?”

“You’re sure you want to?”

“Yes, Pa.”

Rob took his scalpel and opened the chest. Oliver Wendell Holmes had a flamboyant style of introducing death: Rob’s own way was to be simple. He warned that the insides of a man stank worse than any hunting prey the boy had dressed, and advised Shaman to breathe through his mouth. Then he noted that the cold tissue was no longer a person. “Whatever it was that made this man alive—some call it his soul—has left his body.”

Shaman’s face was pallid but his eyes were alert. “Is that the part goes to heaven?”

“I don’t know where it goes,” Rob said gently. As he weighed the organs, he allowed Shaman to record the weight, a help to him. “William Fergusson, who was my mentor, used to say that the spirit leaves the body behind like a house that’s been emptied, so we have to treat it carefully and with dignity, out of respect for the man who used to live here.