The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 92

Her menstruation came late. Her mother had asked her casual questions from time to time, revealing her concern that it hadn't happened yet; and then one afternoon while Rachel was in the kitchen helping to make wild-strawberry jam, with no warning cramps made her double over. Her mother told her to look, and the blood was there. Her heart had pounded, but it wasn't unexpected, nor had it happened while she was off alone somewhere. Her mother was with her and spoke soothingly, and showed her what to do. Everything was all right until her mother kissed her cheek and told her that now she was a woman.

Rachel began to cry. She couldn't stop. She wept for hours and was inconsolable. Jay Geiger came into his daughter's room and lay down on her bed with her as he hadn't done since she was little.

He stroked her head and asked what was the matter. Her shoulders shook in a way that broke his heart, and he had to ask her again and again.

Finally she whispered, "Poppa. I don't want to be married. I don't want to leave you, or my home."

Jay kissed her cheek and went to talk with his wife. Lillian was very troubled. Many girls were married at thirteen, and she thought it would be better for her daughter if they arranged her life through a good Jewish union than if they indulged her foolish terror. But her husband pointed out that when he had been matched with Lillian she had been past her sixteenth birthday, not a young girl. What was good for the mother would be good for the daughter, who needed a chance to grow up and become accustomed to the thought of marriage.

So Rachel had a long reprieve. At once, her life was better. Miss Burnham reported to her father that she was a natural student and would benefit greatly from continuing her education. Her parents decided that she should stay in the academy instead of working full-time in the house and on the farm, as might have been expected, and they were gratified by her pleasure, and by the way life returned to her eyes.

She had an instinctive kindness that was part of her nature, but her own unhappiness had made her particularly sensitive to those trapped by circ.u.mstances. She had always been as close to the Coles as if they were related by blood. When Shaman was a toddler, once he had been placed in her bed and had lost control of his bladder, and it had been Rachel who had comforted him and eased his embarra.s.sment, and protected him from the teasing of the other children. The illness that had stolen his hearing had unsettled her, because it was the first incident in her life that indicated to her the presence of unknown and unsuspected dangers. She had watched Shaman's struggles with the frustration of someone who wanted to make things better but was powerless to do so, and she witnessed each improvement that he achieved with as much pride and gladness as if he were her brother. During the period of her own development she'd seen Shaman change from a little boy to a large youth, easily outstripping his brother, Alex, in size. Because his body matured early, in the first years of growth he was often clumsy and b.u.mbling, like a puppy with new growth, and she regarded him with a special tenderness.

She had sat undetected in the wing chair several times and marveled at Shaman's courage and tenaciousness, listening in fascination to Dorothy Burnham's skill as a teacher. When Miss Burnham had wondered who could help him, Rachel had reacted instinctively, eager for the chance. Dr. Cole and his wife had been grateful for her willingness to work with Shaman, and her own family had been pleased by what they considered a generous gesture. But she understood that, at least in part, she wanted to help him because he was her steadfast friend, because once, in perfect seriousness, a little boy had offered to kill a man who was doing her harm.

The basis of Shaman's remedial work was long hours piled upon long hours, in which weariness had to be disregarded, and he was quick to test Rachel's authority in ways he wouldn't have tried with Miss Burnham. "No more today. I'm too tired now," he said the second time they met alone, after Miss Burnham had accompanied Rachel through Shaman's drills half a dozen times.

"No, Shaman," Rachel had said firmly. "We're not nearly finished." But he had escaped.

The second time it happened, she'd given in to anger that had merely made him smile, and reverted to their playmate days, calling him names. But when it happened again the next day, tears sprang into her eyes and he was undone.

"Let's try it again, then," he'd told her reluctantly.

Rachel was grateful, but she never yielded to the temptation of controlling him in that way, sensing he would benefit more from a steelier approach. After a while, the long hours became routine for them both. As the months pa.s.sed and Shaman's capabilities were expanded, she adapted Miss Burnham's drills and they went beyond them.

They spent a long time practicing how meaning could be changed by accenting different words in an otherwise unchanged sentence: Sometimes Rachel held his hand and squeezed it to show him where emphasis belonged, and he enjoyed that. He'd come to dislike the piano exercise in which he identified the note by the vibrations he felt in his hand, because his mother had seized upon it as a parlor trick and sometimes called upon him to perform. But Rachel continued to work with him at the piano, and she was fascinated when she played the scale in a different key and he was able to detect even that subtle change.

Slowly he graduated from feeling the notes of the piano to discerning the other vibrations in the world around him. Soon he could detect somebody knocking at the door, although he didn't hear the knocking. He was able to feel the footsteps of someone mounting a stairway, although they were unnoticed by hearing people nearby.

One day, as Dorothy Burnham had done, Rachel took his large hand and placed it at her throat. At first she spoke to him loudly. Then she moderated the sonority of her voice and dropped it into a whisper. "Do you feel the difference?"

Her flesh was warm and very smooth, delicate yet strong. Shaman could feel muscles and cords. He thought of a swan, and then of a tinier bird as the beat of her pulse fluttered against his hand in a way that hadn't happened when he'd held Miss Burnham's thicker, shorter neck.

He smiled at her. "I do," he said.

37.

WATER MARKS.

n.o.body else shot at Rob J. If the incident at the barn had been a message that he should stop pressuring for an investigation of Makwa's death, whoever had pulled the trigger had reason to believe the warning was heeded. He did nothing else because he knew of nothing else he could do. Eventually polite letters came from Congressman Nick Holden and from the governor of Illinois. They were the only officials to answer him, and their replies were bland dismissals. He brooded, but he addressed himself to more immediate problems.

In the beginning, he was called upon only infrequently to offer the hospitality of his dugout room, but after he'd been helping slaves to run away for several years the trickle grew to a freshet, and there were times when new occupants came to the secret room often and regularly.

There was general and controversial interest in Negroes. Dred Scott had won his plea for freedom in a Missouri lower court, but the State Supreme Court declared him still a slave, and his abolitionist attorneys appealed the case to the Supreme Court of the United States. Meanwhile, writers and preachers thundered, and journalists and politicians fulminated on both sides of the slavery issue. The first thing Fritz Graham did after he was elected to a regular five-year term as sheriff was buy a pack of "n.i.g.g.e.r hounds," because bounties had become a lucrative sideline. Rewards for the return of runaways had increased in size, and penalties for helping fugitive slaves had grown more severe. Rob J. continued to be frightened when he thought of what could happen to him if he were caught, but mostly he didn't allow himself to think of it.

George Cliburne greeted him with sleepy politeness whenever they encountered one another by chance, as though they weren't meeting under different circ.u.mstances in the dark of night. A by-product of the a.s.sociation was Rob J.'s access to Cliburne's extensive library, and he availed himself of volumes that he regularly carried home for Shaman, and sometimes read himself. The grain broker's book collection was heavy in philosophy and religion but light in science, which was how Rob J. found its owner.

When he'd been a Negro-smuggler for about a year, Cliburne invited him to attend a Quaker meeting and was diffident and accepting when he refused. "I thought thee might find it helpful. Since thee does the work of the Lord."

It was on Rob's lips to correct him, to say he did the work of man and not of G.o.d; but the thought was pompous enough without putting it to voice, and he merely smiled and shook his head.

He realized his hiding was only one link in what doubtless was a large chain, but he had no knowledge of the rest of the system. He and Dr. Barr never referred to the fact that the other physician's recommendation had led him to become a lawbreaker. His only clandestine contacts were with Cliburne and with Carroll Wilkenson, who told him whenever the Quaker had "an interesting new book." Rob J. was certain that when the runaways left him they were taken north, through Wisconsin and into Canada. Probably by boat across Lake Superior. That's the way he would route the escapes if he were doing the planning.

Once in a while Cliburne would bring a female, but most of the fugitives were men. They came in infinite variety, dressed in ragged tow cloth. Some had skins of such negritude it seemed to him the very definition of blackness, the shiny purple of ripe plums, the jet of burnt bone, the dense darkness of ravens' wings. The complexions of others showed a dilution with the paleness of their oppressors, resulting in shades that ranged from cafe au lait to the color of toasted bread. Most of them were large men with hard, muscular bodies, but one was a slender young man, almost white, who wore metalrimmed spectacles. He said he was the son of a house n.i.g.g.e.r and a plantation owner in a place called Shreve's Landing, in Louisiana. He could read and was grateful when Rob J. gave him candles and matches and back copies of Rock Island newspapers.

Rob J. felt thwarted as a physician because he kept the fugitives too short a time to treat their physical problems. He could tell that the lenses of the light-skinned Negro's spectacles were far too powerful for him. Weeks after the youth had left him, Rob J. found a pair of eyegla.s.ses he thought might be better. Next time he was in Rock Island he went to see Cliburne and asked if he could somehow arrange to forward the gla.s.ses, but Cliburne only stared at the spectacles and shook his head. "Thee must have better sense, Dr. Cole," he said, and walked away without saying good day.

On another occasion a large man with very black skin stayed in the secret room for three days, more than long enough for Rob to observe that he was nervous and suffered from abdominal discomfort. Sometimes his face was gray and sick-looking, and his appet.i.te was irregular. Rob was certain he had a tapeworm. He gave him a bottle of specific but told him not to take it until he arrived wherever he was going. "Otherwise you'll be too weak to travel, and you'll leave a trail of loose stool that every sheriff in the country can follow!"

He would remember each of them as long as he lived. He felt an immediate sympathy for their fears and their feelings, and it was more than the fact that once he'd been a fugitive himself; he realized that an important ingredient of his concern was his familiarity with their plight, because he had witnessed the afflictions of the Sauks.

He had long since ignored Cliburne's orders that they weren't to be questioned. Some were loquacious and some tight-lipped. At the very least, he tried to get their names. Although the youth with the gla.s.ses had been named Nero, most of the names were Judeo-Christian: Moses, Abraham, Isaac, Aaron, Peter, Paul, Joseph. He heard the same names again and again, reminding him of the stories Makwa had told him about the biblical names at the Christian school for Indian girls.

He spent as much time with the talkative ones as safety would allow. One man from Kentucky had escaped once before and had been caught. He showed Rob J. the scarred stripes on his back. Another, from Tennessee, said he hadn't been treated badly by his master. Rob J. asked why he had run in that case, and the man pursed his lips and squinted, as if searching for the answer.

"Cudden wait for Jubilee," he said.

Rob asked Jay about Jubilee. In ancient Palestine, every seventh year agricultural land was allowed to lie fallow and replenish itself, in accordance with the dictates of the Bible. After seven sabbatical years, the fiftieth year was declared a year of jubilee, and slaves were given a gift and set free.

Rob J. suggested Jubilee was better than keeping humans in perpetual servitude but hardly the ultimate kindness, since in most cases fifty years of slavery was more than a lifetime.

He and Jay circled each other warily on the topic, having learned long ago the depth of their differences.

"Do you know how many slaves there are in the Southern states? Four million. That's one black skin for every two white skins. Free them, and the farms and plantations that feed a lot of abolitionists up North will have to close. And then what would we do with those four million black folks? How would they live? What would they become?"

"Eventually they'd live same as anybody. If they got some education, they could become anything. Pharmacists, for instance," he said, unable to resist.

Jay shook his head. "You simply don't understand. The South's very existence depends on slavery. That's why even nonslave states make it a crime to aid runaways."

Jay had struck a nerve. "Don't talk to me about crime! The African slave trade's been outlawed since 1808, but African people are still being taken at gunpoint and stuffed into ships and carried to every Southern state and sold on the block."

"Well, that's national law you're talking about. Each state makes its own laws. Those are the laws that count."

Rob J. snorted, and that was the end of that conversation.

He and Jay remained close and mutually supportive in all other things, but the slavery question raised a barrier between them that they both regretted. Rob was a man who valued a quiet talk with a friend, and he began to turn Trude into the path leading to the Convent of St. Francis whenever he was in that neighborhood.

It was hard for him to pinpoint just when he became Mother Miriam Ferocia's friend. Sarah gave him physical pa.s.sion that was unwavering and as important to him as meat and drink, but she spent more time talking with her pastor than with her husband. Rob had discovered in his relationship with Makwa that it was possible for him to be close to a woman without s.e.xuality. Now he proved it again with this sister of the Order of Saint Francis, a female fifteen years older than he, with stern eyes in a strong cowlframed face.

He'd seen her only infrequently until that spring. The winter had been mild and strange, with heavy rains. The water table rose unnoticed until the streams and creeks suddenly were hard to cross, and by March the township paid for being on land between two rivers, because the situation already had become the Flood of '57. Rob watched the river come over the banks on the Cole place. It swirled inland, washing away Makwa's sweat lodge and her woman's lodge. Her hedonoso-te was spared because she had built it cleverly on a knoll. The Cole house was higher than the flood reached too. But soon after the waters receded, Rob was summoned to treat the first case of virulent fever. And then another person came down sick. And another.

Sarah was pressed into service as a nurse, but she and Rob and Tom Beckermann were swiftly overwhelmed. Then one morning Rob came to the Haskell farm and found a feverish Ben Haskell already sponge-bathed and comforted by two Sisters of Saint Francis. All of "the brown beetles" were out and nursing. He saw at once and with a great thankfulness that they were excellent nurses. Each time he met them they were in pairs. Even their prioress nursed with a partner. When Rob protested to her, thinking it was a quirk in their training, Miriam Ferocia responded with cold vehemence, making it clear his objections were useless.

It came to him that they worked in pairs so they could guard one another from lapses of faith and flesh. A few evenings later, ending the day with a cup of coffee at the convent, he put it to her that she was afraid to allow her sisters to be alone in a Protestant house. He confessed it was a puzzle to him. "Is your faith weak, then?"

"Our faith is strong! But we like warmth and comfort as well as the next. The life we've chosen is bleak. And cruel enough without the added curse of temptations."

He understood. He was happy to accept the sisters under Miriam Ferocia's terms, and their nursing made all the difference.

The prioress's typical comment to him dripped with scorn. "Have you no other medical bag, Dr. Cole, than that shabby leather thing decorated with porky quills?"

"It's my Mee-shome, my Sauk medicine bundle. The straps are made of Izze cloths. When I wear them, no bullets can harm me."

She looked at him wide-eyed. "You don't have the faith in Our Savior, but you accept protection from Sauk Indian heathenry?"

"Ah, but it works." He told her of the shot that had been fired at him outside his barn.

"You must use extreme caution," she admonished, pouring him coffee. The nanny goat he'd donated had dropped kids twice, supplying two males. Miriam Ferocia had traded one of the bucks and somehow had acquired three more does, dreaming of a cheese industry; but still whenever Rob J. came to the convent he had no milk for his coffee, because every nanny always seemed to be pregnant or nursing. He did without, like the nuns, and learned to love his coffee black.

Their talk turned sober. He was disappointed that her churchly inquiry had thrown no light on Ellwood Patterson. He had been considering a plan, he confided. "What if we were able to place a man within the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner? It might be possible to learn of their mischief early enough to stop it."

"How would you do that?"

He had given it a good deal of thought. It required a native-born American who was both completely trustworthy and close to Rob J. Jay Geiger wouldn't do, because SSSB probably would reject a Jew. "There's my hired man, Alden Kimball. Born in Vermont. A very good person."

She shook her head in concern. "That he's a good person would make it worse, because you might very well sacrifice him, and yourself, with such a scheme. These are extremely dangerous men."

He had to face the wisdom of what she said. And the fact that Alden had been showing his age. Not failing yet, but showing his age.

And he drank a lot.

"You must be patient," she said gently. "I shall make my inquiries again. Meanwhile, you must wait."

She removed his cup and he knew it was time to rise from the bishop's chair and leave, so she could prepare for Night Song. He collected his quilled bullet shield and smiled at the compet.i.tive glare she directed at the Mee-shome. "Thank you, Reverend Mother," he said.

38.

HEARING THE MUSIC.

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 cla.s.s 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 s.p.u.n.k. 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.