by Noah Gordon
Rob would have liked to move the hired man away from the shed. In the dugout room on the other side of the door was a middle-aged Negro with a slight asthmatic wheeze when he breathed. Rob J. suspected that at times the wheeze became pronounced, and he wasn’t certain the sound couldn’t be heard from where he and Alden were talking. But Alden wasn’t going anywhere; he hunkered down on his heels and showed how a champion drank whiskey, finger through the handle, jug swung onto his elbow, elbow raised just high enough to send the proper amount of raw liquor into his mouth.
“Trouble sleeping nowadays?”
Alden shrugged. “Most nights I go right off, tired from work. When I don’t, little drink helps me sleep.”
Alden had looked a lot more worn ever since Comes Singing had died. “Ought to get another man to help you work the farm,” Rob J. said, for perhaps the twentieth time.
“Hard to find good white man willin to hire out. Wouldn’t work with a nigger,” Alden said, and Rob J. wondered how well sound traveled in the other direction, into the shed. “Besides, got Alex workin with me now, and he’s doin real good.”
“Is he?”
Alden stood erect, somewhat shakily; he must have had a lot of varmint juice before he’d run out. “Damn,” he said deliberately. “Doc, you never do give them pore young boogers their due.” Holding his jug carefully, he made his way back toward his own cabin.
One day near the end of that summer a middle-aged Chinese, name unknown, drifted into Holden’s Crossing. Refused service in Nelson’s Saloon, he hired a prostitute named Penny Davis to buy a bottle of whiskey and take him to her shack, where next morning he died in her bed. Sheriff Graham said he didn’t want any whore in his town who’d share her chink with a Chink and then peddle it to white men, and he personally arranged for Penny Davis to leave Holden’s Crossing. Then he had the corpus put in the back of a wagon and delivered to the nearest coroner.
That afternoon, Shaman was waiting for his father when Rob J. approached his shed.
“Never seen an Oriental.”
“This one happens to be dead. You know that, don’t you, Shaman?”
“Yes, Pa.”
Rob J. nodded and unlocked the shed door.
There was a sheet covering the body, and he folded it and placed it on the old wooden chair. His son was pale but composed, intently studying the figure on the table. The Chinese was a small man, thin but muscular. His eyes had been closed. His skin color fell somewhere between the paleness of whites and the redness of Indians. His toenails, horny and yellow, needed cutting; seeing them through his son’s eyes, Rob was moved.
“Have to do my work now, Shaman.”
“Can I watch?”
“You’re sure you want to?”
“Yes, Pa.”
Rob took his scalpel and opened the chest. Oliver Wendell Holmes had a flamboyant style of introducing death: Rob’s own way was to be simple. He warned that the insides of a man stank worse than any hunting prey the boy had dressed, and advised Shaman to breathe through his mouth. Then he noted that the cold tissue was no longer a person. “Whatever it was that made this man alive—some call it his soul—has left his body.”
Shaman’s face was pallid but his eyes were alert. “Is that the part goes to heaven?”
“I don’t know where it goes,” Rob said gently. As he weighed the organs, he allowed Shaman to record the weight, a help to him. “William Fergusson, who was my mentor, used to say that the spirit leaves the body behind like a house that’s been emptied, so we have to treat it carefully and with dignity, out of respect for the man who used to live here.
“This is the heart, and here’s what killed him.” He removed the organ and placed it in Shaman’s hands so he could study the darkened dead circle of tissue that ballooned out from the muscle wall.
“Why’d that happen to him, Pa?”
“I don’t know, Shaman.”
He replaced the organs and closed the incisions, and by the time they washed up together, color had returned to Shaman’s face.
Rob J. was impressed by how well the boy had done. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Would you like to study with me out here, from time to time?”
“I would, Pa!” Shaman said, his face alight.
“Because it occurs to me you might want to get a degree in science. You could earn your living teaching, maybe even in a college. Think you’d like that, son?”
Shaman looked at him soberly, his face burdened again as he considered the question. He shrugged.
“Maybe,” he said.
39
TEACHERS
That January Rob J. put extra blankets in the dugout room because runaways from the deep South suffered grievously from the cold. There was less snow than usual, but enough to cover the cultivated fields and make them look like prairie in winter. Sometimes as he traveled home from a house call in the middle of the night he would pretend that at any moment he’d be able to look up and see a long file of red men riding good horses across the white glitter of unbroken plains, following their shaman and chiefs; or massive humpbacked creatures moving out of the darkness at him, hoarfrost clinging to their shaggy brown fur and the moon gleaming on curved horns with wicked silvered tips. But he never saw anything, because he believed in ghosts even less than he believed in God.
When spring came, the runoff was light and the rivers and streams kept to their banks. Maybe that had something to do with the fact that he treated less fever that season; but for some reason, more of the people who came down with fever died. One of the patients he lost was Matilda Cowan, whose husband, Simeon, raised half a section of corn in the northern township, very good land even if slightly dry. They had three small daughters. When a young woman died leaving children, it was expected her husband would remarry quickly, but when Cowan proposed to Dorothy Burnham, the schoolteacher, it surprised a lot of people. He was accepted at once.
At the breakfast table one morning, Rob J. chuckled as he told Sarah that the school board was upset. “We thought we could count on Dorothy being a spinster forever. Cowan’s smart. She’ll be a good wife.”
“She’s a fortunate woman,” Sarah said dryly. “Considerably older than he is.”
“Oh, Simeon Cowan’s but three or four years younger than Dorothy,” Rob J. said, buttering a biscuit. “That’s not such a difference.” And he grinned in astonishment to see his son Shaman nodding in agreement, joining in on the gossip about his teacher.
On Miss Burnham’s last day at the academy, Shaman lingered until the others had left for the day and then went to say good-bye.
“I guess I’ll be seeing you around the town. I’m glad you didn’t decide to go to some other place to get married.”
“I’m glad too, that I’ll be living in Holden’s Crossing, Robert.”
“Want to thank you,” he said clumsily. He knew what this warm and homely woman had meant to his life.
“You’re welcome, my dear.” She had informed his parents that she wouldn’t be working on his speech anymore, what with the farm and a new husband and three children to see for. “I’m sure you and Rachel will be able to do wonderfully without me. Besides, you’ve reached the point where voice drills might be dispensed with.”
“You think I sound like other people when I talk?”
“Well …” She treated the question seriously. “Not exactly. When you’re tired, you’re still guttural. You have become very aware of how words should sound, so you don’t slur your speech as much as some people. So there’s a slight difference.” She saw that this troubled him, and she took his hand and squeezed it. “It is a very charming difference,” she said, and was happy to see his face clear.
He’d bought her a small gift in Rock Island with his own money, handkerchiefs edged in pale blue lace. “I have something for you too,” she said, and gave him a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets. “When you read them, you are to think of me,” she ordered. “Except for the romantic ones, of course!” she added daringly,
and then laughed with him in the freedom of knowing that Mrs. Cowan would be able to do and say things that poor Miss Burnham the schoolteacher wouldn’t have dreamed of.
With all the spring river traffic, there were drownings up and down the Mississippi. A young crewman fell from a barge and was lost upstream, his body snatched deep by the currents and not given up until he was in the jurisdiction of Holden’s Crossing. The bargemen didn’t know where he had come from or anything else save that his name had been Billy, and Sheriff Graham delivered him to Rob J.
Shaman watched his second autopsy and recorded organ weights again in his father’s notebook, and learned what happened to the lungs when somebody drowned. This time it was harder for him to watch. The Chinese man had been separated from him by age and exotic origins, but this was a youth only a few years older than his brother, Bigger, a death that spoke to Shaman of his own mortality. Still, he managed to put all that out of his mind, well enough to observe and learn.
When they were through with the autopsy, Rob J. began to dissect below Billy’s right wrist. “Most surgeons live in horror of the hand,” he confided to Shaman. “It’s because they never spent enough time studying it. If you become a teacher of anatomy or physiology, you must know the hand.”
Shaman could understand why they would fear to cut the hand, because it was all muscles and tendons and hinged joints, and he was amazed and terrified when they completed the dissection of the right hand and his father told him to dissect the left hand by himself.
His father smiled at him, seeming to know exactly what he was feeling. “Don’t worry. Nothing you can do will hurt him.”
So Shaman spent much of that day cutting and probing and witnessing, memorizing the names of all the tiny bones, learning how the joints were enabled to move in the hands of the living.
Several weeks later the sheriff brought Rob J. the body of an old woman who had died in the county’s poor farm. Shaman was eager to resume his lessons, but his father barred his way into the shed.
“Shaman, have you ever seen a woman without her clothes on?”
“… Saw Makwa once. She took me into the sweat lodge with her, sang songs to try to get my hearing back.”
His father stared in amazement, and then felt constrained to explain. “The first time you saw a woman’s body, I didn’t think she should be old and ugly and dead.”
He nodded, feeling the heat in his face. “It’s not the first time, Pa. Makwa wasn’t old or ugly.”
“No, she was not,” his father said. He patted Shaman on the shoulder, and they both went into the shed and shut the door.
In July the school committee offered Rachel Geiger the position of teacher at the academy. It wasn’t unusual for one of the older pupils to be given an opportunity to teach at a school when a faculty opening existed, and the girl had been enthusiastically recommended by Dorothy Burnham in her resignation letter. Besides, as Carroll Wilkenson pointed out, they could get her for a beginner’s salary and she already lived at home so she wouldn’t have to be boarded.
The offer created anguished indecision in the Geiger household, and earnest, low-toned conversations between Lillian and Jay. “We’ve already put things off too long,” Jay said.
“But a year as a teacher would be a genuine asset for her, help her to make a finer match. A teacher is such an American thing to be!”
Jason sighed. He cherished his three sons, Davey, Herm, and Cubby. Good, loving boys. All three played the piano like their mother, with varying degrees of skill, and Dave and Herm wanted to learn wind instruments, if ever they could find a teacher. Rachel was his only daughter and his firstborn, the child he had taught to play the violin. He knew the day would come when she would have to go out of his home, to live for him mostly in rare letters, to be seen only briefly in infrequent visits from or to a faraway place.
He decided to be selfish and keep her in the bosom of the family for a while longer. “All right, let her be a teacher,” he told Lillian.
It had been several years since the floods had washed away Makwa’s sweat lodge. All that remained were two stone walls, six feet long, three feet high, and two and one-half feet apart. In August Shaman began to build a hemisphere of bent saplings over the walls. He worked slowly and clumsily, weaving green willow withes between the saplings. When his father saw what he was doing he asked if he could help, and the two of them, working for almost two weeks in their spare time, managed to approximate what the sweat lodge had looked like when Makwa had built it in a few hours with the help of Moon and Comes Singing.
Using more saplings and withes, they built a man-size basket crib and set it inside the lodge, across the tops of the stone walls.
Rob J. owned a tattered buffalo robe and a single deerskin. When they stretched the skins over the framework, a big section remained uncovered.
“Mebbe a blanket?” Shaman suggested.
“Better use two, a double layer, or it won’t hold steam.”
They tried out the lodge on the first frosty day in September. Makwa’s sweatbath stones were right where she’d left them, and they built a wood fire and set the stones in it to become very hot. Shaman entered the lodge wearing only a blanket that he dropped outside; shivering, he lay down in the basket crib. Rob J. brought in the hot stones, using forked sticks to handle them, and placed them below the crib, then doused them with pails of cold water and tightly closed the lodge. Shaman lay in the rising steam, feeling the moisture bloom, remembering how frightened he’d been the first time, how he had burrowed into Makwa’s arms against the heat and the murk. He recollected the strange marks on her breasts, how the scars had felt against his cheek. Rachel was thinner and taller than Makwa, and had heavier breasts. Thinking about Rachel made him hard and he became anxious lest his father come back and see him. He forced himself to think of Makwa again, remembering the quiet affection she had exuded, as comforting as the first warmth of the steam. It was strange to be in the lodge where she had been so many times. Her memory grew more indistinct with every year, and he wondered why anyone would kill her, why there were bad people. Almost without knowing it, he began singing one of the songs she had taught him, “Wi-a-ya-ni, Ni-na ne-gi-seke-wi-to-seme-ne ni-na…” Wherever you are going, I walk with you, my son.
In a little while his father brought more hot rocks and doused them with cold water, and the steam absolutely filled the lodge. He endured it as long as he could, until he lay gasping and in a profuse sweat, then jumped from the crib and ran out through the chill air to plunge into the cold river. For a moment he thought he had died a very clean death, but as he splashed and swam the blood beat through his body, and he yipped like a Sauk as he left the water and ran to the barn, where he briskly rubbed himself dry and dressed in warm clothes.
Obviously he had revealed too much enjoyment, because when he came out of the barn his father was waiting to try the sweat lodge, and it was Shaman’s turn to heat and carry the stones and pour the water to make steam.
They finally reached the house glowing and grinning, to find they’d sweated right through suppertime. Shaman’s mother, greatly put out, had left their plates on the table, and the food was cold. He and his father went without soup and had to scrape congealed fat off the mutton, but they agreed it was worth it. Makwa really had known how to take a bath.
When school opened, Rachel found it not at all difficult to become the teacher. The routine was so familiar: the lessons, the classwork, the songs, the home assignments. Shaman was better than she at mathematics and she asked him to give the classes in arithmetic. Although he got no pay, Rachel praised him to parents and the school board, and he enjoyed working with her in planning the lessons.
Neither of them mentioned Miss Burnham’s opinion that perhaps his vocal exercises no longer were necessary. Now that Rachel was teacher, they did his drills at the academy after the children left for the day, except for the exercises that needed her mother’s piano. Shaman liked sitting close to her on the piano bench, but enjo
yed more being alone with her in the schoolhouse, the intimacy.
The pupils had always laughed over the fact that Miss Burnham never seemed to need to pee, and now Rachel exercised the same discipline, but as soon as the others were gone, she couldn’t wait to rush out to the privy. Waiting for her to come back, he did a good deal of speculation about what she wore under her skirts. Bigger had told Shaman that when he did it with Pattie Drucker he had to help her out of an old holey suit of her father’s underwear, but Shaman knew most women either wore whalebone crinolines or horsehair shifts that were itchy but warmer. Rachel wasn’t partial to the cold. When she came back inside she’d hang her cloak on its peg and then hurry to the stove to toast first her front side and then her back.
She’d been a teacher only a month when she had to go to Peoria with her family for the Jewish holidays, and Shaman was substitute teacher for half of October, for which he was paid. The pupils already were accustomed to his teaching them arithmetic. They knew he had to see their lips to understand them, and on the first morning Randy Williams, the blacksmith’s youngest son, said something smart when his back was turned to the teacher. Shaman nodded easily when the children laughed, and asked Randy if he wanted to be held by his heels for a little bit. He was bigger than most of the men they knew, and the smiles disappeared as Randy said somewhat shakily that no, he didn’t want that to happen. For the rest of the two weeks, teaching them wasn’t hard.
The first day Rachel was back in school, she was subdued. That afternoon, when the children were gone, she came back from the outhouse shivering and crying.
Shaman came and put his arms around her. She made no protest, just stood between him and the stove with her eyes closed. “I loathe Peoria,” she said quietly. “Hateful, meeting so many people. My mother and father … they placed me on display.”