The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (180 page)

“Is there trouble with white neighbors?” Shaman said.

“No trouble,” Little Dog said, and listened to Snapping Turtle. “He says we’re no threat. Whenever our people go to trade, white men push coins into the bark of trees and tell our men they may keep the coins if they hit them with arrows. Certain of our people say it’s an insult, but Snapping Turtle allows it.” Snapping Turtle spoke, and Little Dog smiled. “He says it keeps some of us good with the bow.”

Small Light came back, bringing a man in a frayed cotton shirt and stained brown wool pants, and with a red kerchief tied about his forehead. He said this was Nepepaqua, Sleep Walker, a Sauk and the medicine man. Sleep Walker wasn’t a man to waste time. “She says you’re a doctor.”

“Yes.”

“Good. You will come with me?”

Shaman nodded. He and Rachel left Charles Keyser drinking coffee with Snapping Turtle. They stopped only to get Shaman’s bag. Then they followed after the medicine man.

Walking through the village, Shaman sought familiar sights to match his memories. He saw no
tipis
, but there were some
hedonoso-tes
beyond the cabins. The people mostly wore the shabby dress of white folks; moccasins were as he remembered, although many of the Indians wore work boots or army footwear.

Sleep Walker brought them to a cabin on the other side of the village. Inside, a skinny young woman lay and writhed, her hands over her great belly.

She was glassy-eyed and looked out of her mind. She didn’t respond when Shaman asked her questions. Her pulse was rapid and bounding. He was fearful, but when he took her hands in his, he felt more vitality than he would have believed.

She was Watwaweiska, Climbing Squirrel, Sleep Walker said. His brother’s wife. The time for her first birthing had come on her yesterday morning. Earlier, she’d chosen a soft dry place in the woods, and she went there. The harsh pains came and came, and she had squatted as her mother had taught. When the waters had broken free, her legs and her dress became
wet, but nothing else happened. The agony didn’t go away, the child didn’t come. At nightfall, other women had searched for her and found her, and they had carried her here.

Sleep Walker hadn’t been able to help her.

Shaman stripped the sweat-soaked dress away and studied her body. She was very young. Her breasts, although heavy with milk, were small, and her pelvis was narrow. The pudenda gaped, but no small head was revealed. He gently pressed the surface of her belly with his fingers, then took out his stethoscope and placed the earpieces for Rachel. When he held the bell to Climbing Squirrel’s stomach in several places, the conclusions he’d reached with his eyes and hands were confirmed by the sounds Rachel described.

“The child is presenting wrong.”

He went outside and asked for clean water, and Sleep Walker led him into the trees, to a brook. The medicine man watched curiously as Shaman lathered with brown soap and scrubbed his hands and arms. “It’s part of the medicine,” Shaman said, and Sleep Walker accepted the soap and imitated him.

When they returned to the cabin, Shaman took out his jar of clean lard and lubricated his hands. He inserted one finger into the birth canal, and then another, like probing a fist. He moved upward slowly. At first he felt nothing, but then the girl went into spasm, and the tight fist was pushed open slightly. An infant foot moved onto his fingers, and around it he felt the wrapped cord. The umbilical cord was tough, but it was stretched, and he didn’t attempt to free the foot until the birth spasm had been spent. Then, working carefully with only his two fingers, he unwrapped the cord and drew the foot down.

The other foot was higher, braced against the wall of the canal, and he was able to reach it during the next spasm and lead it down until two tiny red feet extended from the young mother. The feet became legs, and soon they could see it was a man-child. The baby’s abdomen emerged, trailing the cord. But all progress stopped when the infant’s shoulders and head jammed into the canal like a cork in the neck of a bottle.

Shaman could draw the child no farther, nor could he reach high enough to keep the mother’s flesh from sealing the baby’s nostrils. He knelt with his hand in the canal and his mind searching for a solution, but he felt that the baby would smother.

Sleep Walker had a bag of his own in a corner of the cabin, and from
it he took a four-foot length of vine. The vine ended in what looked remarkably like the flat, ugly head of a pit viper, inset with black beady eyes and fiber fangs. Sleep Walker manipulated the “serpent” so it appeared to crawl up Climbing Squirrel’s body until the head was close to her face, weaving. The medicine man was chanting in his own language, but Shaman wasn’t trying to read his lips. He was watching Climbing Squirrel.

Shaman could see the girl’s eyes focus on the snake and widen. The medicine man caused the snake to turn and crawl down her body until it was just over the place where the baby rested.

Shaman felt a quivering in the birth canal.

He saw Rachel open her mouth to protest, and he warned her off with his eyes.

The fangs touched Climbing Squirrel’s belly. Suddenly Shaman felt a widening. The girl gave a tremendous push, and the child came down so easily it took no effort to draw him out. The baby’s lips and cheeks were blue, but at once they began to redden. With a tremulous finger Shaman cleared mucus from the mouth. The small face screwed up in indignation, the mouth opened. Shaman could feel the child’s abdomen retract to draw in air, and he knew that the others were hearing a high, thin crying. Maybe it was in D-flat, because the belly vibrated exactly as Lillian’s piano did whenever Rachel struck the fifth black key from the end.

He and the medicine man went back to the brook to wash. Sleep Walker looked pleased. Shaman was very thoughtful. Before leaving the cabin, he had examined the vine again to make certain it was only a vine.

“The girl thought the snake would devour her baby, so she bore it to save it?”

“My song said the snake was bad
manitou
. Good
manitou
helped her.”

He realized the lesson was that science can take medicine only so far. Then it is helped tremendously if there is faith or belief in something else. It was an advantage the medicine man had over the medical man, because Sleep Walker was a priest as well as a doctor.

“Are you a shaman?”

“No.” Sleep Walker looked at him. “You know about the tents of knowledge?”

“Makwa told us about seven Tents.”

“Yes, seven. For some things, I am in the fourth Tent. For too many things, I’m in the first Tent.”

“Will you become a shaman someday?”

“Who will teach me? Wabokieshiek is dead. Makwa-ikwa is dead. The tribes are scattered, the
Mide’wiwin
is no more. When I was young and knew I wanted to be a ghostkeeper, I heard of an old Sauk, almost a shaman, in Missouri. I found him, spent two years there. But he died of the fevered pox, too soon. Now I seek old people, to learn from them, but they’re few, and mostly they don’t know. Our children are taught reservation English, and the Seven Tents of Wisdom are gone.”

He was saying he had no medical schools to send letters of application to, Shaman realized. The Sauks and the Mesquakies were a remnant, robbed of their religion, their medicine, and their past.

He had a brief terrifying vision of a green-skinned horde sweeping down on the earth’s white race and leaving only a few haunted survivors with nothing but rumors of a former civilization, and the faintest echoes of Hippocrates, and Galen, and Avicenna, and Jehovah, and Apollo, and Jesus.

It seemed as though the entire village heard of the child’s birth almost at once. They weren’t a demonstrative people, but Shaman was aware of their approval as he walked among them. Charles Keyser came to him and confided that the girl’s case was similar to the childbirth that had killed his wife the previous year. “The doctor didn’t get there in time. The only woman there was my mother, and she didn’t know any more than I did.”

“You mustn’t get to blaming yourself. Sometimes we just can’t save somebody. Did the baby die too?”

Keyser nodded.

“You have other children?”

“Two girls and a boy.”

Shaman suspected that one of the reasons Keyser had come to Tama was that he was looking for a wife. The Tama Indians seemed to know and like him. Several times people who passed them greeted him, calling him Charlie Farmer.

“Why do they call you that? Aren’t they farmers too?”

Keyser grinned. “Not my kind. My daddy left me forty acres of the blackest Iowa soil you ever did see. I till eighteen acres and plant most of it in winter wheat.

“When I first came here, I tried to show these people how to plant. Took me a while to understand they don’t want a white man’s farm. The men who sold them this land must have thought they were cheating them,
because the soil’s poor. But they pile brush and weeds and garbage on small gardens and let them rot out, sometimes for years. Then they put down seeds, using planting sticks instead of plows. The gardens give them plenty of food. The land is full of small game, and the Iowa River gives good fishing.”

“They really have the old-time life they came here looking for,” Shaman said.

Keyser nodded. “Sleep Walker says he’s asked you to do some more doctoring. It would please me to help you, Dr. Cole.”

Shaman already had Rachel and Sleep Walker to assist him. But it occurred to him that although Keyser looked like the other inhabitants of Tama, he wasn’t fully comfortable, and perhaps needed the company of other outsiders. So he told the farmer he’d appreciate his help.

The four of them made a strange little caravan as they went from cabin to cabin, but soon it was obvious they complemented one another. The medicine man gained them acceptance and chanted his prayers. Rachel carried a bag of boiled sweets and was especially good at gaining the confidence of children, and Charlie Keyser’s big hands had the strength and gentleness that enabled him to hold someone still when steadiness was required.

Shaman pulled a number of rotten teeth and was treated to the sight of patients spitting stringy blood, but smiling because a source of ongoing torture was suddenly gone.

He lanced boils, he removed a blackened infected toe, and Rachel was kept busy listening with the stethoscope to the chests of coughers. Some of them he dosed with syrups, but others had consumption, and he was forced to tell Sleep Walker there was nothing that could be done for them. They also saw half a dozen men and several women who were stuporous with alcohol, and Sleep Walker said there were others who would be drunk if they could get the whiskey.

Shaman was aware that far more red men had been wiped out by white man’s diseases than by bullets. Smallpox, especially, had laid waste to the woodland and Plains tribes, and he had brought with him to Tama a small wooden box half-filled with cowpox scabs.

Sleep Walker was plainly interested when Shaman told him he had medicine to prevent smallpox. But Shaman took great pains to explain exactly what was involved. He would scratch their arms and insert tiny pieces of cowpox scab into the wound. A red, itchy blister would develop, the size
of a small pea. It would turn into a gray sore shaped like a navel, with a large area around it that was red, hard, and hot. After the inoculations, most of the people would be ill for about three days with cowpox, a far milder and more benign disease than smallpox, but one that would provide immunity from the deadly disease. Those inoculated would most likely have headaches and fevers. After the brief illness, the sore would become larger and darker as it dried, until the scab dropped off at about the twenty-first day, leaving a pink, pitted scar.

Shaman told Sleep Walker to explain this to the people and determine if they wanted to be treated. The medicine man was gone only a short time. Everyone wanted to be protected from smallpox, he reported, and so they settled down to the task of inoculating the entire community.

It was Sleep Walker’s job to keep a line of people moving toward the white doctor and to make certain they knew what to expect. Rachel sat on a tree stump and used two scalpels to shave very small pieces from the cowpox scabs in the small wooden box. Whenever a patient reached Shaman, Charlie Keyser would take the person’s left hand and raise it, exposing the inner part of the upper arm, the place that was least likely to suffer accidental bumping or scraping. Shaman used a pointed scalpel to make shallow, scarifying cuts in the arm, and then placed a tiny bit of the scabrous material into each cut.

It wasn’t complicated, but it had to be done with care, and the line moved slowly. When finally the sun was setting, Shaman called a halt. A quarter of the people of Tama still had to be inoculated, but he told them the doctor’s office was closed and to come back in the morning.

Sleep Walker had the instincts of a successful Baptist preacher, and that night he called the people together to honor the visitors. A celebration fire was built and lighted in the clearing, and the people gathered about it, seated on the ground.

Shaman sat on Sleep Walker’s right. Little Dog sat between Shaman and Rachel, so he could translate for them. Shaman saw that Charlie was sitting with a slender smiling woman, and Little Dog told him she was a widow who had two small boys.

Sleep Walker asked that Dr. Cole tell them about the woman who had been their shaman, Makwa-ikwa.

Shaman was aware that undoubtedly everyone there knew more about the massacre at Bad Ax than he did. What had happened where the Bad Ax River met the Mississippi must have been described to them around thousands
of fires, and would continue to be. But he told them that among those killed by the Long Knives had been a man named Green Buffalo, whose name Sleep Walker translated as Ashtibugwa-gupichee, and a woman named Union-of-Rivers, Matapya. He told how their daughter of ten years, Nishwri Kekawi, Two Skies, had taken her baby brother beyond the fire of the United States Army’s rifles and cannon by swimming down
Masesibowi
while holding the soft flesh of the infant’s neck in her teeth to keep him from drowning.