Shaman Part 29

Elysee said, "You can pull teeth, I hope, like any proper surgeon?"

Auguste shrugged. "I do have a turnkey for that. But I've never actually used it."

"The only person in town who knows anything about treating the sick is Gram Medill, the midwife," Nicole said. "Tom Slattery, the blacksmith, pulls teeth. We need a real doctor."

Auguste felt a fluttering in his stomach as he wondered when he should tell this white family of his that he wanted to leave them. Nicole was thinking, he realized, that he would stay here at Victoire.

The steel-reinforced wooden wheels of the carriage b.u.mped mercilessly over the rutted road, and Auguste hoped Nicole wasn't pregnant at the moment. The fact that his shaman's sense did not tell him reminded him that he had been too long away from the Sauk. As they began to climb the road that ran up the bluff, Nicole pointed out to Auguste that the newer houses were made of boards rather than logs, because Frank had set up a sawmill and workshop on the Peach River. Frank was now a master carpenter, with four workers to help him when there was a house to be built.

"But he'd sell the mill in a minute if printing alone would provide him with a living," she said. "That's where his heart is."

Elysee said, "Pierre and I offered Frank a regular income, so that he could give all his time to his newspaper and to printing, but he wouldn't hear of it. He got a bit haughty when I pressed him, and informed me that the system of feudal patronage is dead. I a.s.sured him that I was well aware of that, and that is why I am here and not in France."

"Frank is proud, Papa," said Nicole.

Elysee nodded. "I fear he is too often a proud papa."

Auguste roared, and Nicole, though she blushed, could not help laughing.

"The town grows bigger every year," Auguste said. Nicole nodded sympathetically; she seemed to have guessed what he was thinking: How numerous the whites were, as he had seen for himself in the East, and how inexorably they were filling up this part of the country, like a river in flood. Last year the New York papers had reported the results of the 1830 census; the United States was over twelve million, Auguste had read, a number he could not even imagine. And 150,000 of those were here in the state of Illinois, balanced against the six thousand Sauk and Fox. Black Hawk's people, the British Band, numbered only two thousand. Hopeless.

"Victor had a hundred or so people the year you came here," said Elysee.

"Now there are over four hundred. As you see, the bluff is completely covered with houses. And we have many new industries and crafts. A preacher, a Reverend Hale, has put up a church on the prairie to the east of us. I am not sure whether his work counts as an industry or a craft. There is Frank's sawmill, as Nicole said. There are also a flour mill and a brewery, and a mason works at a limestone quarry nearby. And your father is planning to set up a kiln on the estate, so we can build a new Victoire of brick."

"How sick is my father?" Auguste asked abruptly, dreading the answer he would get.

"Ah, Nicole, there are your children waiting to greet us," Grandpapa cried, as if he had not heard Auguste's question.

Where the road made a sharp turn and started upward on a higher level, stood a two-story frame building painted white. A sign over the door read, THE VICTOR VISITOR, F. HOPKINS, PUBr, PRINTING AND ENGRAVING.

CARPENTRY.

Auguste could hear the press clanking away inside the house as they approached. The three younger children, John, Rachel and Betsy, were lined up by the door, Rachel holding in her arms a baby that must be Nicole and Frank's newest. Three of the older ones, Benjamin, Abigail and Martha, leaned out a window to wave to Auguste from the second story. Auguste felt proud of himself, being able to remember all their names and which was which.

As Guichard reined up the horse and pushed the brake lever on the carriage, the sound of the press stopped and Frank came out through the open door wiping his ink-stained hands on his leather ap.r.o.n. His forehead was shiny with sweat. The oldest son, Thomas, followed him, pushing his hands down his own ap.r.o.n with the same gesture.

Auguste climbed down from the carriage and took Frank's hand, then shook with Thomas and the three little girls. The baby was Patrick, he learned. He lightly rubbed Patrick's fine hair.

"No wonder the town's population grows so fast, Aunt Nicole," Auguste said with a smile. "How many more do you think there will be for you and Frank?"

But as he spoke, his pleasure at his aunt's handsome family was dimmed by the thought that if all white families were as fertile as this, there was no hope at all for the red people.

"None, I hope," said Frank firmly. "We've got too big a tribe as it is."

Aunt Nicole's face reddened again, and Auguste reminded himself that white women were generally reluctant to talk about pregnancy and childbirth. Auguste recalled his mother, Sun Woman, speaking of a kind of tea that would keep a woman from getting pregnant. When he went back to Saukenuk he could find out more about it. He would surely come back here to visit, and then he could tell Aunt Nicole about it. If white women knew about that tea, maybe there would be fewer whites in years to come, and they would not have such a hunger for land.

As they drove on up the road to the top of the bluff, Auguste saw Nicole's face brighten, and he turned to see what she was looking at. A black buggy drawn by an old gray horse was coming toward them, having just rounded the bend in the road at the trading post palisade. Auguste caught a glimpse of blond braids under a red and white checkered bonnet.

Nicole said, "Auguste, here's a newcomer to our county. I think you'll enjoy meeting her."

"Ah yes," said Elysee. "Reverend Hale and his daughter, Mademoiselle Nancy. He came here over a year ago, Auguste, declared the town too corrupt for his church and started holding services for the farmers out on the prairie. They built him a church about five miles from town.

Painted white, with a steeple one can see for miles. Its very simplicity makes it beautiful."

Nicole said, "As much could be said for Nancy."

Curious, Auguste tried to see the face under the red and white bonnet.

Every day, and many times a day, he thought of Redbird and the joy they so briefly shared, but many of the young white women he had seen in the past six years had made his heart beat faster. Just last winter he'd gone with a group of his cla.s.smates to an elegant old house on Na.s.sau Street where he discovered that the body of a white woman, under her many-layered dress, was in all important respects as interesting as the body of a woman of his own people. Even though he planned to leave Victoire as soon as he could, he was eager to meet the new minister's daughter.

The two carriages pulled side by side, and the drivers, Guichard and the Reverend Hale, a slab-faced man dressed in black, reined up for the customary exchange of greeting.

"Reverend Hale, Miss Hale," Elysee said, "may I present my grandson, Auguste de Marion."

The reverend stared at Auguste for a moment from under bushy brows before grunting an acknowledgment. Auguste suspected he had heard about his parentage and was looking for traces of Indian blood.

_Indian._ Auguste had never heard that word before he went to live among white people. His people were the Sauk, the People of the Place of Fire.

And their allies were the Fox. And besides these there were Winnebago, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Kickapoo, Osage, Piankeshaw, Sioux, Shawnee--each a separate people. And besides these, hundreds more, whose names he did not even know. But the whites had one name for all these peoples--Indians. And that name, Grandpapa had explained to him with gentle irony, was altogether a mistake. The explorer Columbus had thought he had landed in India.

_They do not even respect us enough to call us by an honest name._

But the sight of Nancy Hale drove the bitterness from his mind. Her braids, emerging from her red and white bonnet and lying on either side of her white lace collar, were yellow as ripe corn, and her face, while too long for ideal beauty, was pink and clear. Her mouth was wide, and her teeth were white when she smiled at Nicole and Elysee. She looked straight at Auguste for an instant, then she looked down, but in that moment he saw eyes a vivid shade of blue, like the turquoise stone from the Southwest he carried in his medicine bag.

"Visiting the members of your flock, are you, Reverend?" Elysee asked.

Auguste noticed that he put the tiniest humorous inflection on the word "flock."

Hale's thick gray brows drew together as he nodded sourly. "Trying to bring the Word to that wilderness you call a town."

Here was an unhappy man, thought Auguste, whose life was dedicated to persuading those around him to be equally unhappy.

"Ah, yes," said Elysee with a broad smile. "Quite a population of sheep gone astray in Victor."

"In all of Smith County," said Hale.

_It must scandalize him to think that my mother is an Indian woman and that my father, by the lights of this man, isn't even married to her._

Auguste suddenly wanted to defy the disapproval he felt from the reverend. He jumped out of the carriage and in an instant was standing on the road beside the minister's buggy. He swept off his high-crowned hat with the flourish he'd seen in New York and bowed deeply.

"Miss Hale," he said. "Auguste de Marion. At your service."

The blood rose to Nancy Hale's cheeks.

"My pleasure, Mr. de Marion," she murmured. Her large blue eyes looked frightened and her flush deepened, but she did not take her eyes away, and his gaze was locked to hers. His heart beat as hard as it had the first time he saw the White Bear.

"The Lord's work awaits us in Victor," said the Reverend Hale loudly.

"You really must excuse us." And without waiting for a reply he snapped the reins of his buggy, and the old horse ambled off.

Auguste stood in the road waiting to see if Nancy would glance back at him. She did. Even at a distance and through dust he could see the blue of her eyes.

Elysee said, "Well, Auguste, close your mouth, put your hat back on and get back up here."