The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 79

Her eyes filled, but she had yet another side to reveal to him. She faced him calmly. "They say the Indian woman lives with you. You must send her away."

" 'They say.' And 'There are those who will tell you.' Well, I will tell you something, Sarah Bledsoe. If you marry me, you must learn to tell them to go to h.e.l.l." He took a deep breath. "Makwa-ikwa is a good and hardworking woman. She lives in her own house on my land. To send her away would be an injustice to her and to me, and I won't do it. It would be the worst way for you and me to begin a life together.

"You must take my word that there is no reason for jealousy," he said. He held her hands tightly and wouldn't let her go. "Any other conditions?"

"Yes," she said hotly. "You must change the names of your mares. They're named for women you have ridden, is that not so?"

He started to smile, but there was real anger in her eyes. "One of them. The other was an older beauty I knew as a boy, a friend of my mother's. I ached for her, but she thought of me as a child."

She didn't ask which horse was named for which woman. "It's a cruel and nasty male joke. You're not a cruel and nasty man, and you must change the mares' names."

"You'll rename them yourself," he said at once.

"And you must promise, no matter what may happen between us in the future, never to name a horse for me."

"I so vow. Of course," he couldn't resist noting, "I intend to order a pig from Samuel Merriam, and ..."

Fortunately, he was still holding her hands, and he didn't let go of them until she was returning his kiss in a very good way. When they stopped, he saw she was weeping.

"What?" he said, burdened by the uneasy intimation that being married to this woman would not be easy.

Her wet eyes glowed. "Letters posted by coach will be a terrible expense," she said. "But finally I can send positive word to my brother and sister in Virginia."

21.

THE GREAT AWAKENING.

It was easier to decide on marriage than to find a clergyman. Because of this, some couples along the frontier never bothered about formal vows, but Sarah refused "to be married without being married." She had the ability to speak plainly. "I've known what it means to bear and raise a fatherless child, and it will never happen to me again," she said.

He understood. Yet autumn had arrived, and he knew that once the snows locked the prairie, it might be many months before an itinerant preacher or circuit-riding minister would make his way to Holden's Crossing. The answer to their problem appeared one day in a handbill he read at the general store, advertising a week-long revival meeting. "It's called the Great Awakening and will be held at Belding Creek township. We have to go, Sarah, because there will be no shortage of clergymen there."

When he insisted they bring Alex with them, Sarah agreed eagerly. They took the buckboard. It was a trip of a day and a morning over a pa.s.sable, if stony, road. The first night they stopped in the barn of a hospitable farmer, spreading their blankets on the fragrant new hay in the loft. Next morning Rob J. spent half an hour castrating the farmer's two bulls and removing a growth from the flank of a cow, to pay for their lodging; despite the delay, they arrived at Belding Creek before noon. It was another new community, only five years older than Holden's Crossing but already much larger. As they drove into town, Sarah's eyes widened and she sat close to Rob and held Alex's hand, for she was unaccustomed to the sight of so many people. The Great Awakening was held on the prairie next to a shady willow grove. It had attracted people from throughout the region; everywhere, tents had been pitched for protection against the midday sun and the autumn wind, and there were wagons of all types, and tethered horses and oxen. Entrepreneurs serviced the crowds, and the three travelers from Holden's Crossing drove past open fires over which vendors were cooking things that gave off mouth-watering smells-venison stew, river-fish chowder, roast pork, sweet-corn, broiled hare. When Rob J. tied the horse to a bush-she who had been called Margaret Holland, now renamed Vicky, short for Queen Victoria ("You have never ridden the young queen?" Sarah asked)-they were eager for dinner, but there was no need to spend money on vended food. Alma Schroeder had supplied the little party with a hamper so large that the wedding feast could have lasted a week, and they dined on cold chicken and apple dumplings.

They ate quickly, caught up in the excitement, staring at the crowds, listening to the cries and the babble. Then, each holding one of the little boy's hands, they walked slowly about the meeting. It was really two revival meetings in one, for there was nonstop religious warfare, compet.i.tive preaching by Methodists and Baptists. For a time they listened to a Baptist minister in a clearing within the grove. His name was Charles Prentiss Willard, and he shouted and howled, making Sarah shiver. He warned that G.o.d was writing their names in his book, who should have everlasting life and who should have everlasting death. What would win a sinner everlasting death, he said, was immoral and unchristian conduct, such as fornicating, shooting a fellow Christian, fighting and using bad language, drinking whiskey, or bringing illegitimate sp.a.w.n into the world.

Rob J. looked grim and Sarah was trembly and pale as they went out onto the prairie to hear the Methodist, a man named Arthur Johnson. He wasn't nearly so powerful a speaker as Mr. Willard, but he said salvation was possible for everybody who did good deeds and confessed their sins and asked G.o.d's forgiveness, and Sarah nodded when Rob J. asked if she didn't think Mr. Johnson could do the marrying. Mr. Johnson looked pleased when Rob approached him after the preaching. He wanted to marry them before the entire open meeting, but neither Rob J. nor Sarah wanted to become part of the entertainment. When Rob gave him three dollars, the preacher agreed to follow them outside of town, and he arranged them under a tree on the bank of the Mississippi River, with the little boy seated on the ground and looking on, and a placid fat woman Mr. Johnson introduced only as Sister Jane to serve as witness.

"I've a ring," Rob J. said, digging it out of his pocket, and Sarah's eyes widened, because he hadn't mentioned his mother's wedding band. Sarah's long fingers were slim and the ring was loose. Her yellow hair was tied back with a dark blue ribbon Alma Schroeder had given her, and she took the ribbon off and shook her hair until it fell loose around her face. She said she'd wear the ring on the ribbon around her neck until they could get it sized. She held Rob's hand tightly as Mr. Johnson led them through the vows with the ease of long practice. Rob J. repeated the words in a voice whose huskiness surprised him. Sarah's voice trembled, and she looked slightly disbelieving, as if she couldn't credit that this actually was happening. After the ceremony, they were still kissing when Mr. Johnson began trying to convince them to return to the revival, because it was at the evening meeting that the most souls came forward to be saved.

But they thanked him and said good-bye, turning Vicky in the direction of home. The little boy was soon cranky and whining, but Sarah sang lively songs and told stories, and several times when Rob J. stopped the horse she took Alex down from the buckboard and ran and jumped with him, playing games.

They shared an early supper of Alma's beef-and-kidney pies and pound cake with a sugary frosting, washed down with brook water, and then had a sober discussion regarding the kind of accommodations to seek for that night. There was an inn a few hours away, and the prospect obviously pleased Sarah, who never had had the money to stay at a hostelry. But when Rob J. mentioned bedbugs and the general uncleanliness of such establishments, she quickly agreed with his suggestion that they stop at the same barn in which they had slept on the previous night.

They reached it at dusk and, receiving ready permission from the farmer, climbed up into the warm darkness of the loft almost with the welcome feeling of returning home.

Worn out by his exertions and the lack of a nap, Alex fell at once into a sound sleep, and when he was covered they spread a blanket nearby and reached for one another before they were fully undressed. He liked it that she didn't pretend to innocence and that their hunger for one another was honest and knowledgeable. They made thrashing and noisy love and then waited for some sign that they had awakened Alex, but the little boy slept on.

He finished undressing her and wanted to see. It had grown black in the barn, but they crawled together to the little door through which the hay was hoisted into the loft. When he opened the door, the three-quarter moon threw a rectangle of light in which they examined one another at length. In the moonlight he studied gilded shoulders and arms, burnished b.r.e.a.s.t.s, a crotch-mound like the silver nest of a small bird, and pale, ghostly b.u.t.tocks. He would have made love in the light, but the air was seasonable and she feared the farmer's eyes, so they closed the door. This time they were slow and very tender, and just at the moment of the best ripe undamming he cried to her exultantly, "This will make our bairn. This!" and the sleeping little boy was awakened by his mother's rattling groans and began to cry.

They lay with Alex cuddled between them, Rob's hands stroking her lightly, brushing away bits of chaff, memorizing.

"You mustn't die," she whispered.

"Neither of us, not for a very long time."

"A bairn is a child?"

"Yes."

"You believe we've already begun a child?"

"... Maybe."

Presently he heard her swallow. "Perhaps, to make certain, we should keep on trying?"

As her husband and as her physician, he thought it a sensible notion. On his hands and knees he crawled in the blackness across the fragrant hay, following the ripe glimmer of his wife's pale flanks away from their sleeping son.

PART THREE.

HOLDEN'S CROSSING.

November 14, 1841.

22.

CURSING AND BLESSINGS.

From mid-November the air was bitter. Heavy snows came early, and Queen Victoria floundered through high drifts. When Rob J. was out in the worst weather, sometimes he called the mare Margaret and her short ears p.r.i.c.ked up at her old name. Both horse and driver knew their ultimate goals. She struggled toward heated water and a bag full of oats, while the man hurried to return to his cabin of warmth and light that came more from the woman and child than from the hearth and oil lamps. If Sarah hadn't conceived during the wedding trip, it was soon after. Wrenching morning sickness didn't quench their ardor. They waited itchily for the little boy to sleep and then clapped together, bodies almost as quickly as mouths, with an eagerness that remained constant, but as her pregnancy progressed he became a cautious and wooing lover. Once a month he took pencil and notebook and sketched her naked next to the comfort of the fire, a record of the development of the gravid female that was no less scientific because of the emotions that found their way into the drawings. He made architectural renderings too; they agreed on a house with three bedchambers, a large kitchen, and a sitting room. He drew construction plans to scale so Alden could hire two carpenters and begin the house after spring planting.

Sarah resented Makwa-ikwa's sharing a part of her husband's world that was closed to her. As warming days turned the prairie first into a quagmire and then a delicate green carpet, she told Rob that when the seasonal fevers came, she'd go with him to nurse the sick. But by the end of April her body was ponderous. Tortured by jealousy as well as pregnancy, she stayed home and fretted while the Indian woman rode out with the doctor, to return hours-sometimes days-later. Sodden with fatigue, Rob J. would eat, bathe when possible, steal a few hours of sleep, and then collect Makwa and ride out again.

By June, Sarah's last month of pregnancy, the fever epidemic had eased sufficiently for Rob to leave Makwa at home. One morning while he rode through heavy rains to tend a farmer's woman who was dying in agony, back in his own cabin his wife came to term. Makwa placed the biting stick between Sarah's jaws and tied a rope to the door and gave her a knotted end to pull on.

It was hours before Rob J. lost his struggle with gangrenous erysipelas-as he would report in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes, the fatal illness was the result of a neglected cut in the farm woman's finger, made while she chunked seed potatoes-but when he got home, his child still hadn't been born. His wife's eyes were wild. "It's splitting my body, make it stop, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she snarled as he came through the door.

Hostage now to Holmes's training, he scrubbed his hands until they were raw before approaching her. After he had examined her, Makwa followed him away from the bed. "Baby's comin slow," she said.

"Baby's coming feetfirst."

Her eyes clouded, but she nodded and returned to Sarah.

The labor went on. In the middle of the night he forced himself to take Sarah's hands, fearful of their message. "What?" she said thickly.

He could feel her vital force, diminished but rea.s.suring. He murmured of love, but she hurt too much to acknowledge words or kisses.

On and on. Grunting and screaming. He couldn't resist praying unsatisfactorily, frightening himself by not being able to bargain, feeling both arrogant and a hypocrite. If I'm wrong and you do exist, please punish me some other way than by harming this woman. Or this child struggling to escape, he added hastily. Toward dawn, little red extremities appeared, big feet for an infant, the proper number of toes. Rob whispered encouragement, told the reluctant baby all of life is a struggle. Legs emerged inch by inch, thrilled him by kicking.

The sweet little p.r.i.c.k of a man-child. Hands, the proper number of fingers. A nicely developed baby, but the shoulders stuck and he had to cut Sarah, more pain. The small face was pressed into the wall of the v.a.g.i.n.a. Worried that the boy would suffocate in maternal flesh, he worked two fingers inside her and held the ca.n.a.l wall away until the indignant little face slid into the topsy-turvy world and at once issued a thin cry.

With trembling hands he tied and cut the cord and st.i.tched his sobbing wife. By the time he rubbed her belly to contract the uterus, Makwa had cleansed and swaddled the infant and set him on his mother's breast. It had been twenty-three hours of hard labor; for a long time she slept as though dead. When she opened her eyes, he held her hand tightly. "Good job."

"He's the size of a buffalo. About the size Alex was," she said hoa.r.s.ely. When Rob J. weighed him, the scale said eight pounds, eleven ounces. "Good bairn?" she asked, studying Rob's face, and grimaced when he said it was a h.e.l.l of a bairn. "Cursing."

He put his lips to her ear. "You member what you called me yesterday?" he whispered.

"What?"

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"I never!" she said, shocked and angry, and wouldn't speak to him for almost an hour.

Robert Jefferson Cole, they named him. In the Cole family the firstborn male always was a Robert, with a middle name that began with J. Rob thought the third American president had been a genius, and Sarah considered the "Jefferson" a link with Virginia. She had fretted that Alex would be jealous, but all the older child demonstrated was fascination. He was never more than a step or two from his brother, always watching. From the start he made it clear the other two could tend the baby, feed it, change its nappies, play with it, offer it kisses and homage. But the baby was his to watch over.

In most respects, 1842 was a good year for the little family. To help build the house, Alden hired Otto Pfersick, the miller, and a homesteader from New York State named Mort London. London was a fine, experienced carpenter. Pfersick was only adequate at working wood, but he knew masonry, and the three men spent days selecting the best stones from the river and skidding them up to the house site with oxen. The foundation, chimney, and fireplaces turned out to be handsome. They worked slowly, aware they were building for permanence in a country of cabins, and by the time autumn arrived, when Pfersick had to make flour full-time and the other two men had to farm, the house was framed and closed in.

But it was a long way from finished, so Sarah was sitting in front of the cabin, snapping the ends from a potful of green beans, when the covered wagon lumbered up their track behind two tired-looking horses. She regarded the portly man in the driver's seat, noting homely features and the road dust on his dark hair and beard.

"Might this be Dr. Cole's place, ma'am?"

"Might be and is, but he's on a call. Is the patient injured or sick?"

"Isn't any patient, thank the Lord. We're friends of the doctor's, moving into the township."

From the back of the wagon a woman now looked out. Sarah saw a limp bonnet framing a white, anxious face. "You're not ... Might you be the Geigers?"

"Might be and are." The man's eyes were handsome, and a good strong smile seemed to add a foot to his height.

"Oh, you are so welcome, neighbors! You get down from that wagon this instant." Flurried, she spilled her beans when she rose from the bench. There were three children in the back of the wagon. The Geiger baby, identified as Herman, was asleep, but Rachel, who was almost four, and two-year-old David were crying as they were lifted down, and at once Sarah's baby decided to add his yowling to the chorus.

Sarah noted that Mrs. Geiger was four inches taller than her husband, and not even the fatigue of a long, hard journey could disguise the fineness of her features. A Virginia girl recognized quality. It was of an exotic strain Sarah never had seen before, but at once she began to think anxiously about preparing and serving a dinner that wouldn't shame her. Then she saw that Lillian had begun to cry, and her own interminable time in just such a wagon returned to her with a rush, and she put her arms around the other woman and found to her astonishment that she was crying too, while Geiger stood in consternation amid weeping women and children. Finally Lillian drew back from her, muttering in embarra.s.sment that her entire family was terribly in need of a safe creek for scrubbing.

"Now, that is something we can solve at once," Sarah said, feeling powerful.

When Rob J. came home he found them still with wet heads from the river baths. After the handshakes and back-pounding, he had a chance to see his farm afresh through the newcomers' eyes. Jay and Lillian were awed by the Indians and impressed by Alden's abilities. Jay agreed eagerly when Rob suggested they saddle Vicky and Bess and ride to inspect the Geiger holding. When they returned in time for a fine dinner, Geiger's eyes blazed with happiness as he tried to describe to his wife the qualities of the land Rob J. had obtained for them.

"You'll see, just wait until you see it!" he told her. After eating, he went to his wagon and returned with his violin. They couldn't bring his wife's Babc.o.c.k piano, he said, but they had paid to have it stored in a safe, dry place and hoped someday to send for it. "Have you learned the Chopin?" he asked, and in answer Rob J. gripped the viola da gamba with his knees and drew the first rich notes of the mazurka. The music he and Jay had made in Ohio was more glorious because Lillian's piano had been part of it, but the violin and the viola blended ecstatically. When Sarah finished her ch.o.r.es, she came and listened. She observed that as the men played, Mrs. Geiger's fingers moved at times, as if she were touching keys. She wanted to take Lillian's hand and make things better for her with words and promises, but instead she sat next to her on the floor while the music rose and fell and offered all of them hope and comfort.

The Geigers camped next to a spring on their own land while Jason felled trees for a cabin. They were as determined not to impose on the Coles as Sarah and Rob were to show them hospitality. The families visited back and forth. As they were sitting around the Geigers' campfire on a frosty night, wolves began to howl out on the prairie, and Jay drew from his violin a similarly long, quavering howl. It was answered, and for a time the unseen animals and the human spoke across the darkness, until Jason noticed that his wife was trembling with more than the cold, and he threw another log on the fire and put his fiddle away.

Geiger wasn't a proficient carpenter. Completion of the Cole house was delayed again, for as soon as Alden could manage to take time from the farm, he began to raise the Geiger cabin. In a few days he was joined by Otto Pfersick and Mort London. The three of them built a snug cabin quickly and attached a shed, a pharmacy to house the boxes of herbs and medicinals that had taken up most of the room in Jay's wagon. Jay nailed to the doorway a little tin tube containing a parchment lettered with a portion of Deuteronomy, a custom of the Jews, he said, and the Geigers moved in on the eighteenth of November, a few days before hard cold drifted down from Canada.

Jason and Rob J. cut a path through the woods between the Cole house site and the Geiger cabin. It quickly became known as the Long Path, to differentiate it from the path Rob J. had already cut between the house and the river, which became the Short Path.

The builders transferred their efforts to the Cole house. With the entire winter to finish its interior, they burned sc.r.a.p lumber in the fireplace to keep warm and worked in high spirits, fashioning moldings and wainscoting of quarter oak and lavishing hours on the mixing of skim-milk paint to just the proper shades to please Sarah. The buffalo slough near the house site had frozen, and Alden sometimes stopped working wood long enough to strap skates to his boots and show them skills remembered from his Vermont boyhood. Rob J. had skated every winter in Scotland and would have borrowed Alden's skates, but they were much too small for his large feet.

The first fine snow fell three weeks before Christmas. The wind blew what looked like smoke, and the minute particles seemed to burn when they touched human skin. Then the real, heavier flakes fell to m.u.f.fle the world with white, and it stayed that way. With growing excitement, Sarah planned her Christmas menu, discussing surefire Virginia recipes with Lillian. Now she discovered differences between themselves and the Geigers, for Lillian didn't share in her excitement over the coming holiday. In fact, Sarah was amazed to learn that her new neighbors didn't celebrate the birth of Christ, choosing instead to queerly commemorate some ancient and outlandish Holy Land battle by lighting tapers and cooking potato pancakes! Still, they gave the Coles holiday gifts, plum preserves they had carted all the way from Ohio, and warm stockings Lillian had knit for everyone. The Coles' gift to the Geigers was a heavy black iron spider, a frying pan on three legs that Rob had bought in the general store at Rock Island.

They begged the Geigers to join them for Christmas dinner, and in the end they came, although Lillian Geiger ate no meat outside her own home. Sarah served cream-of-onion soup, channel catfish with mushroom sauce, roast goose with giblet gravy, potato b.a.l.l.s, English plum pudding made from Lillian's preserves, crackers, cheese, and coffee. Sarah gave her family woolen sweaters. Rob gave her a lap robe of fox fur so l.u.s.trous it caused her to catch her breath and brought exclamations of appreciation from everyone. He gave Alden a new pipe and a box of tobacco, and the hired man surprised him with sharp-bladed ice skates made in the farm's own smithy-and large enough for his feet! "Snow's coverin the ice now, but you'll enjoy these next year," Alden said, grinning.

After the guests had left, Makwa-ikwa knocked on the door and left rabbitskin mittens, a pair for Sarah, a pair for Rob, a pair for Alex. She was gone before they could invite her in.

"She's a strange one," Sarah said thoughtfully. "We should have given her something too."

"I took care of it," Rob said, and told his wife he'd given Makwa a spider like the one they gave to the Geigers.

"You don't mean to tell me you gave that Indian an expensive store-bought gift?" When he didn't reply, her voice became tight. "You must think a whole lot of that woman!"

Rob looked at her. "I do," he said thinly.

In the night the temperature rose, and rain fell instead of snow. Toward morning, a soaking wet Freddy Grueber came banging on their door, a weeping fifteen-year-old. The ox that was Hans Grueber's prize possession had kicked over an oil lamp and their barn had gone up despite the rain. "Never seen nothin like it, Christ, we just couldn't put it out. Managed to save the stock, exceptin the mule. But my pa's burnt bad, his arm and his neck and both legs. You gotta come, Doc!" The boy had ridden fourteen miles in the weather and Sarah tried to give him food and drink, but he shook his head and rode for home at once.

She packed a basket with leftovers from the feast, while Rob J. gathered the clean rags and salves he would need and then went to the longhouse to fetch Makwa-ikwa. In a few minutes Sarah was watching them disappear into the rainy murkiness, Rob on Vicky, with his hood pulled over his head, his large body hunched over in the saddle against the wet wind. The Indian woman was wrapped in a blanket and riding Bess. On my horse, and going off with my husband, Sarah told herself, and then decided to bake bread because she'd never be able to return to sleep.

All day she waited for their return. When nightfall came, she sat late by the fire, listening to the rain and watching the dinner she had kept warm for him turn into something he wouldn't want to eat. When she went to bed she lay without sleeping, telling herself that if they were holed up in a tipi or a cave, some warm nest, it was her fault for driving him away with her jealousy.

In the morning she was seated at the table, torturing herself with her imagination, when Lillian Geiger came calling, missing town life and driven by loneliness to come through the wet. Sarah had dark circles under her eyes and looked her worst, but she greeted Lillian and chatted brightly before bursting into tears in the middle of a discussion of flower seeds. In a moment, with Lillian's arms about her, to her consternation she was pouring out her worst fears. "Until he came, my life was so bad. Now it is so good. If I should lose him ...

"Sarah," Lillian said gently. "No one can know what goes on in another's marriage, of course, but ... You say yourself that your fears may be groundless. I'm certain they are. Rob J. doesn't seem to be the kind of man who would practice deceit."

Sarah allowed the other woman to comfort and dissuade her. By the time Lillian left for home, the emotional storm was over.

Rob J. came home at midday.

"How is Hans Grueber?" she asked.

"Ah, terrible burns," he said wearily. "Bad pain. I hope he'll be all right. I left Makwa there to nurse him."