The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 76

He knew nothing of being toted back to their camp like a sack of grain. When he opened his eyes it was dark of night. He smelled bruised gra.s.s. Roasted meat, perhaps fat squirrel. The smoke of the fire. The femaleness of Makwa-ikwa, who leaned over him and watched him with young-ancient eyes. He didn't know the question she was asking, aware only of a terrible pain in his head. The smell of the meat nauseated. Apparently she antic.i.p.ated it, for she was holding his head over a wooden bucket and enabling him to vomit.

When he was finished, and weak and gasping, she gave him a potion to drink, something cool and green and bitter. He thought he detected mint, but there was a stronger and less agreeable taste. He tried to turn his head in refusal, but she held him firmly and forced him to swallow as if he were a child. He was annoyed with her, angry. But soon after, he slept. From time to time he awakened and she force-fed him the bitter green liquid. And in this way, sleeping, semiconscious, or suckling at Mother Nature's odd-tasting teat, he pa.s.sed almost two days.

On the third morning the lump on his head was down and the headache was gone. She agreed he was getting better but dosed him just as heavily, and he slept again.

All around him, the festival of the Crane Dance continued. Sometimes there were the mutterings of her water drum and of voices singing in their strange and guttural language, and the near and far-off noises of games and races, the shouts of the Indian spectators. Late in the day he opened his eyes in the dimness of the longhouse and saw Makwa-ikwa changing her costume. He focused on her womanly b.r.e.a.s.t.s, puzzling to him because there was enough light to reveal what appeared to be welts and scars forming strange symbols, runelike markings that ran from her chest wall to the areolae of both nipples.

Although he didn't move and made no sound, somehow she sensed his wakefulness. For a moment as she stood before him, their eyes met. Then she faced away from him, turned her back. Not, he felt, to hide the dark, tangled triangle so much as to protect from him the mysterious symbols on the priestly bosom. Sacred b.r.e.a.s.t.s, he told himself wonderingly. There was nothing sacred about her hips and b.u.t.tocks. She was large-boned but he wondered why she was called Bear Woman, for in her face and suppleness she was more like a powerful cat. He couldn't guess her age. He was afflicted by a sudden vision of taking her from behind while grasping in each hand a thick braid of greased black hair, like riding a sensual human horse. He contemplated with amazement the fact that he was planning to be the lover of a red-skinned female savage more wonderful than any James Fenimore Cooper had been able to imagine, and became aware of a vigorous physical response. Priapism could be an ominous sign, but he knew the manifestation was caused by this woman and not by an injury, and therefore presaged his recovery.

He lay quietly and watched as she put on a fringed garment of deerskin. From her right shoulder she hung a strap composed of four strands of colored thongs, ending in a leather pouch painted with symbolic figures and a circlet of large bright feathers from birds unfamiliar to Rob, the pouch and circlet falling on her left hip.

In a moment she had slipped outside. Soon, as he lay there, he heard her voice rising and falling, certainly in prayer.

Heugh! Heugh! Heugh! they answered her in unison, and she sang some more. He didn't have the slightest idea what she was saying to their G.o.d, but her voice gave him chills and he listened hard, peering up through the smoke hole of her lodge at stars like chunks of ice that somehow she had set on fire.

That night he waited impatiently for sounds of the Crane Dance to end. He dozed, awoke to listen, fretted, waited some more, until the sounds were done, the voices dwindled and fallen silent, the festivities over. Finally he was alerted by the sound of someone entering the longhouse, of the rustling of clothing removed and dropped. A body settled beside him with a sigh, hands reached out and found him, his hands discovered flesh. All was accomplished in silence save for indrawn breaths, an amused grunt, a hiss. He needed to do little. If he wanted to prolong pleasure, he could not, for he had been too long celibate. She was experienced and deft, he was urgent and quick, and afterward, disappointed.

... Like biting into wonderful fruit to find it not what he had hoped.

Taking inventory in the dark, it now seemed to him that the b.r.e.a.s.t.s drooped more than he remembered, and under his fingers their walls were smooth and scarless. Crawling to the fire, Rob J. took a stick and waved the glowing end to cause it to burn.

When he crept back to the mat with the torch, he sighed.

The broad flat face that smiled up at him was in no way unpleasant, only he had never seen the woman before.

In the morning, when Makwa-ikwa returned to her longhouse, she wore again her customary shapeless costume of faded homespun. Clearly the Crane Dance festival finally was over. While she prepared the hominy to break their fast, he was sullen. He told her she must never send a woman to him again, and she nodded in a bland, noncommittal way she doubtless had learned as a girl when the Christian teachers had talked to her severely.

The female she had sent him was named Smoke Woman, she said. As she cooked, she told him without emotion that she herself couldn't lie with a man, for to do so would be to lose her medicine.

b.l.o.o.d.y aborigine nonsense, he thought in despair. Yet obviously she believed it.

But he considered it as they ate, her harsh Sauk coffee tasting more bitter than ever to him. In fairness, he acknowledged how quickly he would shun her if slipping his p.e.n.i.s into her would mean an end to his doctoring.

He was forced to admire the way she had handled the situation, making certain the fires of his ardor had been banked before telling him simply and honestly where things stood. She was a most unusual woman, he told himself, not for the first time.

That afternoon, Sauks crowded into her hedonoso-te. Comes Singing spoke briefly, addressing the other Indians instead of Rob, but Makwa-ikwa translated.

"I'neni'wa. He is a man," the big Indian said. He said that Cawso wabeskiou, the White Shaman, ever more would be a Sauk and a Long Hair. For all their days all Sauks would be the brothers and sisters of Cawso wabeskiou.

The Brave Man who had hit Rob on the head after the ball-and-stick game had been won was pushed forward, grinning and shuffling. He was a man named Stone Dog. Sauks didn't know about apologies, but they knew about reparations. Stone Dog gave him a leather pouch similar to the one Makwa-ikwa sometimes wore, only decorated with wood-pig quills instead of feathers.

Makwa-ikwa said it was to hold his medicine bundle, the collection of sacred personal articles called a Mee-shome, never to be shown to anyone, from which every Sauk draws strength and power. To allow him to wear the pouch, she gave him a gift of four dyed sinews-a brown, an orange, a blue, and a black-fastening them to the pouch like a strap so he could wear it from his shoulder. The cords were called Izze cloths, she said. "Wherever you wear them, bullets can't hurt you, and your presence will help the crops and cure the sick."

He was moved, yet embarra.s.sed. "I am happy to be a brother to the Sauks."

He had always had a hard time expressing appreciation. When his uncle Ra.n.a.ld had spent fifty pounds to buy him the post of dresser at University Hospital so he could gain surgical experience while a medical student, he had scarcely been able to utter thanks. Now he didn't do better. Fortunately, the Sauk were not given to displays of grat.i.tude either, or to farewells, and n.o.body made anything of it when he went out and saddled his horse and rode away.

Back at his own cabin, at first he made a game of selecting objects for his sacred medicine bundle. Several weeks before, he had found a tiny animal skull, white and clean and mysterious, on the floor of the woods. He thought it was a skunk's, it seemed the right size. All right, but what else? The finger of a birth-strangled child? Eye of newt, toe of frog, wool of bat, tongue of dog? Suddenly he wanted to a.s.semble his medicine bundle with great seriousness. What were the objects of his essence, the clues to his soul, the Mee-shome wherein Robert Judson Cole derived his power?

He placed in the pouch the prize heirloom of the Cole family, the blue steel surgeon's knife that the Coles called Rob J.'s scalpel and that always went to the oldest son who became a physician.

What else could be drawn from his early life? It wasn't possible to put the cold air of the Highlands in a bag. Or the warm security of family. He wished he owned a likeness of his father, whose features he had long forgotten. His mother had given him a Bible when they had said good-bye, and for that reason he treasured it, but it wouldn't go into his Mee-shome. He knew he wouldn't see his mother again; perhaps she was already dead. It occurred to him to try to put her likeness to paper while it was still familiar. When he tried, a sketch came easily except for her nose, then it took anguished hours of failure until finally he had her right, and he rolled up the paper and tied it and placed it in the pouch.

He added the score that Jay Geiger had transcribed so he would be able to play Chopin on the viola da gamba.

A bar of strong brown soap went in, symbol of what Oliver Wendell Holmes had taught him about cleanliness and surgery. That started him thinking along new lines, and after some reflection he removed everything from the pouch but the scalpel and the soap. Then he added rags and dressings, an a.s.sortment of drugs and medicinals, and the surgical instruments he needed when he made house calls.

When he was done, the pouch was a medicine bag that carried the supplies and tools of his art and craft. Therefore it was the medicine bundle that gave him his powers, and he was extremely happy with the gift the blow to his hard head had won from the White Paint named Stone Dog.

16.

THE DOE HUNTERS.

It was an important event when he bought his sheep, because the blatting was the last detail needed to make him know he was at home. At first he worked the merinos with Alden, but it was apparent that Kimball was as capable with sheep as with other animals, and soon Alden was docking tails, castrating male lambs, and watching out for scab all by himself, as though he'd been a shepherd for years. It was well Rob wasn't needed on the farm, because as word spread about the presence of a good doctor, patients summoned him to ride greater distances. Soon, he knew, he'd have to limit the area of his practice, because Nick Holden's dream was working, and new families kept arriving in Holden's Crossing. Nick rode over one morning to inspect the flock and p.r.o.nounce it odoriferous, and stayed "to let you in on something promising. A grist mill."

One of the new arrivals was a German named Pfersick, a miller from New Jersey. Pfersick knew where he could buy milling equipment, but he had no capital. "Nine hundred dollars should do it. I'll put up six hundred for fifty percent of the stock. You put up three hundred for twenty-five percent-I'll advance what you need-and we'll give Pfersick twenty-five percent for running the business."

Rob had paid back less than half the money he owed Nick, and he hated debt. "You're putting out all the money, why not just take seventy-five percent?"

"I want to feather your nest until its so soft and rich you won't be tempted to fly. You're as much a commodity to a town as water."

Rob J. knew it was true. When he and Alden had gone to Rock Island to buy sheep, they'd seen a handbill Nick had distributed, describing the many advantages of settling in Holden's Crossing, among which the clinical presence of Dr. Cole had been prominent. He couldn't see that going into the grist-mill business would compromise his position as a physician, and in the end he nodded.

"Partners!" Nick said.

They shook hands on the deal. Rob refused a huge celebratory cigar-using stogies to administer nicotine a.n.a.lly had dampened his appet.i.te for tobacco. When Nick lit up, Rob said he looked the perfect banker.

"That'll come sooner than you expect, and you'll be among the first to know." Nick blew smoke at the sky in satisfaction. "I'm going doe hunting in Rock Island this weekend. Care to join me?"

"Deer hunting? In Rock Island?"

"Not deer. People of the female persuasion. What do you say, old buck?"

"I stay away from brothels."

"I'm talkin about choice private goods."

"Sure. I'll join you," Rob J. said. He had tried to speak casually, but doubtless something in his voice revealed he didn't treat such matters lightly, because Nick Holden grinned.

The Stephenson House reflected the personality of a Mississippi River town where nineteen hundred steamboats docked annually and where rafts of logs a third of a mile long often floated past. Whenever rivermen and lumberjacks had money, the hotel was noisy and sometimes violent. Nick Holden had made arrangements that were both expensive and private, a two-bedroom suite separated by a sitting-dining room. The women were cousins, both named Dawber, pleased by the fact that their patrons were professional men. Nick's was Lettie, Rob's was Virginia. They were small and pert, like sparrows, but they shared an arch manner that set Rob's teeth on edge. Lettie was a widow. Virginia told him she'd never married, but that night when he became familiar with her body, he saw she'd borne children.

Next morning when the four of them met at breakfast, the women whispered together and giggled. Virginia must have told Lettie about the sheath Rob called Old h.o.r.n.y, and Lettie must have told Nick, because as they rode homeward, Nick mentioned it and laughed. "Why bother with those blamed things?"

"Well, disease," Rob said mildly. "And to ward off fatherhood."

"Spoils the pleasure."

Had it been all that pleasurable? He acknowledged that his body and spirit had been eased, and when Nick said he had enjoyed the companionship, Rob said so had he, and agreed that they must go doe hunting again.

The next time he rode past the Schroeders' place he saw Gus in a meadow wielding a scythe despite the amputated fingers, and they exchanged salutes. He was tempted to go right on past the Bledsoe cabin, because the woman had made it clear she considered him an intruder and the thought of her put him out of sorts. But at the last moment he turned the horse into the clearing and dismounted.

At the cabin he held his hand back before his knuckles could strike the door, because he could plainly hear from within the wailing of the child and hoa.r.s.e adult screams. Bad sounds. When he tried the door, he found it unlocked. Inside, the smell was like a blow and the light was dim, but he could see Sarah Bledsoe on the floor. Next to her the baby sat, his wet face screwed up in terror so great at this final blow, the sight of a huge stranger, that no sound came from his open mouth. Rob J. wanted to pick up the child and comfort him, but as the woman screamed again, he knew his attention must go to her.

He knelt and touched her cheek. Cold sweat. "What is it, madam?"

"The cancer. Ah."

"Where does it hurt, Mrs. Bledsoe?"

Her hands, long fingers spread, went like white spiders to her lower abdomen on both sides of her pelvis.

"A sharp or a dull pain?"

"Stabbing! Piercing! Sir. It's ... terrible!"

He feared her urine spilled from her through a fistula caused by child-bearing. If so, he could do nothing to help her.

She closed her eyes, for the evidence of her constant incontinence was in his nose and lungs with every breath.

"I must examine you."

Doubtless she'd have objected, but when she opened her mouth, it was to cry out in fresh pain. She was stiff with tension but tractable as he molded her into a semip.r.o.ne position on her left side and chest, her right knee and thigh drawn up. He could see that there was no fistula.

He had in his bag a small container of fresh white lard that he used as lubricant. "You must allow yourself no distress. I'm a physician," he told her, but she wept more from humiliation than discomfort as the middle finger of his left hand slid into her v.a.g.i.n.a while his right hand palpated her abdomen. He tried to make the tip of his finger an eye; at first it could see nothing as he moved and probed, but as it came close to the pubic bone he found something.

And then another.

Gently he withdrew and gave her a rag to wipe herself, and went out to the brook to wash his hands.

In order to talk to her, he led her blinking into the harsh sunshine outside, and seated her on a stump with the cosseted child in her arms.

"You don't have cancer." He wished it could stop there. "You suffer from bladder-stone."

"I shan't die?"

He was held to truth. "With cancer you'd have little chance. With bladder-stone there's decent chance." He explained to her about the growth of mineral stones in the bladder, caused perhaps by unchanging diet and prolonged diarrhea.

"Yes. I had diarrhea for a long time after his birth. Is there a medicine?"

"No. No medicine to dissolve the stones. The little stones sometimes pa.s.s from your body with the urine, and often they have sharp edges that can tear tissue. I believe that's why you've experienced b.l.o.o.d.y urine. But you have two large stones. Too large to pa.s.s."

"Then will you cut me? For G.o.d's sake ..." she said unsteadily.

"No." He hesitated, deciding how much she had to know. Part of the Hippocratic Oath he had taken said: I will not cut a person who is suffering from a stone. Some butchers ignored the oath and cut anyway, slicing deep into the perineum between the a.n.u.s and the v.u.l.v.a or s.c.r.o.t.u.m to open the bladder and get at the stones, leaving a few victims who eventually recovered, and many who died of peritonitis, and others who were maimed for life because an intestine or bladder muscle had been severed. "I'd go into the bladder with a surgical instrument through the urethra, the narrow ca.n.a.l through which you pa.s.s water. The instrument is called a lithotrite. It has two little steel pincers, like jaws, with which to remove or crush the stones."

"Would there be pain?"

"Yes, mostly when I inserted the lithotrite and removed it. But the pain would be less than what you now suffer. If the procedure should succeed, you could be totally cured." It was difficult admitting the greatest danger was that his skill might prove inadequate. "If, in trying to grasp the stone in the jaws of the lithotrite, I were to pinch the bladder and break it, or if I should tear the peritoneum, likely you would die of infection." Studying her drawn face, he saw flashes of a younger, prettier woman. "You must decide if I am to try."

In her agitation she held the baby too tightly and the boy began to cry again. Because of that, it took Rob J. a moment to realize what the word was that she had whispered.

Please.

He knew he'd need help while he performed the lithocenosis. Remembering the rigidity of her body during examination, he felt instinctively that his a.s.sistant should be a woman, and when he left Sarah Bledsoe he rode straight to the nearby farmhouse and had a talk with Alma Schroeder.

"Oh, I cannot, no never!" Poor Alma blanched. Her consternation was made worse by her genuine feeling for Sarah. "Gott im Himmel! Oh, Dr. Cole, please, I cannot."

When he saw it was so, he a.s.sured her it didn't diminish her. Some just couldn't stand to see surgery. "It's all right, Alma. I'll find someone else."

Riding away, he tried to think of a female in the district who might a.s.sist him, but he rejected the few possibilities, one by one. He had had enough of weeping; what he required was an intelligent woman with strong arms, a woman with a spirit that would allow her to remain steadfast in the face of suffering.

Halfway home, he turned the horse and rode in the direction of the Indian village.

17.

DAUGHTER OF THE MIDE'WIWIN When Makwa allowed herself to think on it, she remembered a time when only a few of the people had white man's clothing, when a ragged shirt or a torn dress was strong medicine because everyone wore buckskin cured and worked and chewed soft, or animal furs. When she was a child in Sauk-e-nuk-she was called Nishwri Kekawi, Two Skies, then-at first there were too few white people, mookamonik, to affect their lives. There was an army garrison on the island, established after officials in St. Louis got some Mesquakies and Sauks drunk and coerced them into signing a paper whose contents they couldn't read sober. Two Skies' father was Ashtibugwa-gupichee, Green Buffalo. He told Two Skies and her older sister, Meci-ikwawa, Tall Woman, that when the army post was built, the Long Knives destroyed the People's best berry bushes. Green Buffalo was of the Bear gens, a proper birth for leadership, but he had no desire to be a chief or a medicine man. Despite his sacred name (he was named after the manitou), he was a simple man, respected because he got good yields from his fields. When he was young he fought the Iowas and counted coup. He wasn't like some, always boasting, but when her uncle Winnawa, Short Horn, died, Two Skies learned about her father. Short Horn was the first Sauk she knew who drank himself to death on the poison the mookamon called Ohio whiskey and the People called pepper water. Sauks buried their dead, unlike some tribes, who simply raised a body into the crotch of a tree. When they lowered Short Horn into the ground, her father had struck the grave's edge with his pucca-maw, wielding the battle club savagely. "I have killed three men in war, and I give their spirits to my brother who lies here, to serve him as slaves in the other world," he said, and that was how Two Skies learned her father was once a warrior.

Her father was mild, a worker. First he and her mother, Matapya, Union-of-Rivers, farmed two fields of corn, pumpkins, and squash, but when the Council saw he was a good farmer they gave him two more fields. The trouble began in Two Skies' tenth year, when a mookamon named Hawkins came and built a cabin in the field next to one her father had in corn. The field Hawkins settled on had been abandoned after its farmer, Wegu-wa, Shawnee Dancer, had died, and the Council hadn't gotten around to rea.s.signing the land. Hawkins brought in horses and cows. The crop fields were separated only by brush fences and hedgerows, and his horses got into Green Buffalo's field and ate his corn. Green Buffalo caught the horses and brought them to Hawkins, but next morning the animals were back in his cornfield. He complained, but the Council didn't know what to do, because five other white families had come and settled on Rock Island too, on land that had been farmed by Sauks for more than one hundred years.

Green Buffalo resorted to tethering Hawkins' livestock on his own land instead of returning them, and at once he was visited by the Rock Island trader, a white named George Davenport. Davenport had been the first white to live among them, and the People trusted him. He told Green Buffalo to give the horses back to Hawkins or the Long Knives would imprison him, and Green Buffalo did as his friend Davenport advised.

That fall, the autumn of 1831, the Sauks went to their winter camp in Missouri, as they did each year. When they came back to Sauk-e-nuk in the spring, they found that additional white families had come and homesteaded on Sauk fields, breaking down fences and burning longhouses. Now the Council no longer could avoid action, and it consulted with Davenport and Felix St. Vrain, the Indian agent, and Major John Bliss, the leader of the soldiers in the fort. The meetings dragged on, and in the meantime the Council a.s.signed other fields to the tribesmen whose land had been usurped.

A short, stocky Pennsylvania Dutchman named Joshua Vandruff had appropriated the field of a Sauk named Makataime-shekiakiak, Black Hawk. Vandruff began selling whiskey to the Indians from the hedonoso-te Black Hawk and his sons had built with their own hands. Black Hawk wasn't a chief, but for most of his sixty-three years he'd fought against Osage, Cherokee, Chippewa, and Kaskaskia. When war between the whites had broken out in 1812, he'd gathered a force of fighting Sauks and offered their services to the Americans, only to be rebuffed. Insulted, he had extended the same offer to the English, who treated him with respect and gained his services throughout the war, giving him weapons, ammunition, medals, and the red coat that marked a soldier.

Now, as he neared old age, Black Hawk watched whiskey being sold from his home. Worse, he witnessed the corruption of his tribe by alcohol. Vandruff and his friend B. F. Pike got Indians drunk and cheated them out of furs, horses, guns, and traps. Black Hawk went to Vandruff and Pike and asked them to stop selling whiskey to Sauks. When he was ignored, he returned with half a dozen warriors who rolled all the casks from the long-house, staved them in, and poured the whiskey into the ground.

Vandruff at once packed his saddlebags with provisions for a long journey and rode to Bellville, home of John Reynolds, governor of Illinois. He swore in a deposition to the governor that the Sauk Indians were on a rampage that had resulted in a stabbing and much damage to white homesteads. He gave Governor Reynolds a second pet.i.tion signed by B. F. Pike that said "the Indians pasture their horses in our wheatfields, shoot our cows and cattle, and threaten to burn our homes over our heads if we do not leave."

Reynolds was newly elected and had promised the voters that Illinois was safe for settlers. A governor who was a successful Indian fighter might dream of the presidency. "By Jesus, sir," he told Vandruff emotionally, "you're asking the right man for justice."

Seven hundred horse soldiers came and camped below Sauk-e-nuk, their presence causing excitement and unease. At the same time, a steamship belching smoke chugged up the Rocky River. The ship grounded on some of the rocks that gave the river its name, but the mookamonik freed it and soon it was anch.o.r.ed, its single cannon pointed directly at the village. The war chief of the whites, General Edmund P. Gaines, called a parley with the Sauks. Seated behind a table were the general, the Indian agent St. Vrain, and the trader Davenport, who interpreted. Perhaps twenty prominent Sauks came.