by Noah Gordon
“Touching?”
“Here,” she said, placing her hand on the upper front of her blue coat. Shaman was at a loss about the proper reaction to such a disclosure, since it was very far beyond his experience. “What can we do?” he asked, more of himself than of her.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” To his horror, Rachel began to sob again.
“I’ll have to kill him,” he decided quietly.
It drew her complete attention, and she stopped crying. “That’s silly.”
“No. I’m going to do it.”
The snow was falling harder. It collected on her hat and hair. Her brown eyes, their thick black lashes still blinking back tears, were wondering. A large white flake melted on a smooth cheek that was darker than his, somewhere in between his mother’s fairness and the swarthiness that had been Makwa’s. “You would do that for me?”
He tried to consider it fairly. It would be nice to get rid of Mr. Byers for himself, but her problems with the teacher were a weight that tipped the balance, and he could nod with conviction. Her smile, Shaman discovered, made him feel very good in a new way.
She touched his chest solemnly, in the very area she had declared forbidden to Mr. Byers on her own person. “You’re my steadfast friend, and I am yours,” she said, and he realized it was so. When they resumed walking he was amazed when the girl’s mittened hand found its way into his. Like her blue mittens, his red ones had been made by her mother, who always made mittens to give to Coles on their birthdays. Through the wool her hand sent an amazing amount of warmth halfway up his arm. But presently she stopped again and faced him.
“How will you … you know … do it?”
He waited before retrieving out of the cold air an expression his father used on numerous occasions. “That will take considerable thought,” he said.
31
SCHOOL DAYS
Rob J. enjoyed the meetings of the Medical Society. Sometimes they were educational. More often they offered an evening in the company of other men who had shared similar experiences and with whom he spoke a common language. At the November meeting Julius Barton, a young practitioner from the north county, reported on snakebites and then reminisced about some bizarre animal bites he had treated, including a case in which a woman had been bitten on her plump buttock with sufficient force to draw blood. “Her husband said it was the dog, which made it an especially rare case, because it was apparent from the bite that their dog had human teeth!”
Not to be outdone, Tom Beckermann told of a cat lover with clawed testicles that may or may not have been the work of a cat. Tobias Barr said that sort of thing wasn’t uncommon. Just a couple of months back he had treated a man for a ruined face. “He said he’d been clawed by a cat too, but if so, that cat had only three claws and they were broad as a human pussy’s,” Dr. Barr said, provoking more laughter.
He started at once on another anecdote, and he was annoyed when Rob Cole interrupted to ask if he could remember exactly when he had treated the patient with the clawed face.
“Nope,” he said, and went back to his story.
Rob J. cornered Dr. Barr after the meeting. “Tobias, that patient with the scratched face. Could you have treated him on Sunday, September 3?”
“Don’t rightly know. Didn’t write it down.” Dr. Barr was defensive about not keeping records, aware that Dr. Cole practiced a more scientific sort of medicine. “No need to record every freakin little thing, is there, for God’s sake? Especially with a patient like this, traveling preacher from out-of-county, just passing through. Probably I’ll never see him again, much less have to treat him.”
“Preacher? Remember his name?”
Dr. Barr wrinkled his forehead, thought hard, shook his head.
“Patterson, perhaps,” Rob J. said. “Ellwood R. Patterson?”
Dr. Barr stared.
The patient hadn’t left an exact address, to Dr. Barr’s recollection. “I believe he said he was from Springfield.”
“He told me Chicago.”
“Came to you about his syphilis?”
“Tertiary stage.”
“Yes, tertiary syphilis,” Dr. Barr said. “He asked me about that after I dressed his face. The kind of man who wants as much as he can get for his dollar. If he’d had a corn on his toe, would have asked me to remove it for him so long as he was in the office. I sold him some salve for the syphilis.”
“So did I,” Rob J. said, and they both smiled.
Dr. Barr looked puzzled. “He skipped out owing you money, did he? That why you’re looking for him?”
“No. I did an autopsy on a woman who was murdered the day you examined him. She’d been raped by several men. There was skin under three of her fingernails, probably from where she’d scratched one of them.”
Dr. Barr grunted.
“I remember that two men waited for him outside my office. Got off their horses and sat on my front steps. One of them was big, built like a bear before hibernation, a good layer of fat. The other was kind of skinny, younger. Port-wine stain on his cheek, under his eye. I think the right eye. I never heard their names, and I don’t recall much else about them.”
The Medical Society president was inclined to professional jealousies and could be pompous on occasion, but Rob J. always had liked him. He thanked Tobias Barr and took his leave.
Mort London had calmed down since their last meeting, perhaps because he felt insecure with Nick Holden off in Washington, or maybe he’d realized it didn’t pay for an elected official to be unable to bridle his tongue. The sheriff listened to Rob J., took notes regarding the physical descriptions of Ellwood R. Patterson and the other two men, and silkily promised to make inquiries. Rob had the distinct impression that the notes would go into the wastebasket just as soon as he left London’s office. Given a choice between Mort angry or smoothly diplomatic, Rob preferred him angry.
So he made his own inquiries. Carroll Wilkenson, the real-estate and insurance agent, was chairman of the church’s pastoral committee, and he had arranged for all the guest preachers before the church had called Mr. Perkins to its pulpit. A good businessman, Wilkenson kept files on everything. “Here it is,” he said, pulling out a folded flier. “Picked it up at an insurance meeting in Galesburg.” The flier offered Christian churches a visit from a preacher who would deliver a guest sermon on God’s plans for the Mississippi River Valley. The offer was made at no cost to the accepting church, and all expenses of the preacher would be borne by the Stars and Stripes Religious Institute, 282 Palmer Avenue, Chicago.
“I wrote a letter and gave them three open Sunday dates. They sent word back that Ellwood Patterson would preach September 3. They took care of everything.” He acknowledged that Patterson’s sermon hadn’t been wildly popular. “Mostly, it was warning us against the Catholics.” He smiled. “Nobody minded that very much, you want the truth. But then he got onto folks who came to the Mississippi Valley from other countries. Said they were stealing jobs from the native-born. People who hadn’t been born here were sore as a boil.” He had no forwarding address for Patterson. “Nobody gave a thought to asking him back. Last thing a new church like ours needs is a preacher bent on dividing the congregation one against th’other.”
Ike Nelson, the saloonkeeper, remembered Ellwood Patterson. “They’s here late into Saturday night. He’s a bad drunk, that Patterson, and so were them other two fellas he had with him. Easy with the money, but more trouble than they was worth. The big one, Hank, kept yellin at me to go out and bring back some whores, but right away he got drunk, forgot all about women.”
“What was his last name, this Hank?”
“Funny name. Not Sneeze … Cough! Hank Cough. The other fella, the little skinny younger one, they called him Len. Sometimes Lenny. Never heard his last name that I remember. He had this purple mark on his face. Walked with a limp, like one leg mebbe was shorter than the other one.”
Toby Barr hadn’t mentioned a limp; probably he hadn’t seen the man walk,
Rob realized. “Which leg did he limp on?” he said, but the question only brought a puzzled stare from the barkeep.
“Did he walk like this?” Rob said, favoring the right leg. “Or like this?” favoring the left.
“Less of a limp, his was barely noticeable. I don’t know which side. All I know, they all three had hollow legs. Patterson popped a good-sized roll of money on the bar, told me to keep pourin and help myself. End of the evenin, I had to send for Mort London and Fritzie Graham, give them a few dollars off the roll to bring them three to Anna Wiley’s boardinghouse and pour them into bed. But I’m told that next day in church Patterson was cool and holy as anyone might want.” Ike beamed. “That’s my kind of a preacher!”
Eight days before Christmas, Alex Cole came to school with Alden’s permission to fight.
At recess Shaman watched his brother walking across the schoolyard. To his horror, he could see that Bigger’s legs were shaking.
Alex walked directly to where Luke Stebbins stood with a cluster of boys who were practicing running broad jumps into the soft snow of the unshoveled portion of the yard. Fortune shone upon him, for Luke already had made two lumbering runs that had ended in barely creditable jumps, and to gain an advantage had taken off his heavy cowskin jacket. Had he kept the jacket on, to have punched it would have been like slamming a fist into wood.
Luke thought Alex wanted to join the jumping game, and he prepared to have a little bullying fun. But Alex walked up and looped a right into his grin.
It was a mistake, the beginning of a clumsy contest. Alden had given careful instructions. The first surprise blow was to have been to the stomach, hopefully to knock out Luke’s wind, but terror drove reason from Alex’s mind. The punch pulped Luke’s lower lip, and he came after Alex in a fury. Luke charging was a sight that would have frozen Alex with fear two months before, but he’d become accustomed to Alden rushing at him, and now he got out of the way. As Luke went by, he delivered a stinging left jab to the already insulted mouth. Then, as the larger boy checked his momentum, before he could get set, Alex delivered two more jabs to the same hurtful place.
Shaman had begun to cheer at the first blow, and pupils quickly ran toward the fighters from all corners of the yard.
Alex’s second major error was to glance toward Shaman’s voice. Luke’s large fist caught him just below the right eye and sent him careening to the ground. But Alden had done his job well, and even as Alex went down he began his scramble and was quickly on his feet and facing Luke, who rushed in again heedlessly.
Alex’s face felt numb and his right eye immediately began to swell and close, but amazingly, his legs steadied. He gathered his wits and settled into what had become routine during his daily training. His left eye was all right, and he kept it pinned where Alden had instructed, right on Luke’s chest, so he could see which way his body was turning, which hand he was going to throw. He tried to block only one flailing punch, which numbed his entire arm; Luke was too strong. Alex was tiring, but he bobbed and weaved, ignoring the damage Luke could do if one of his punches landed again. His own left hand flicked out, punishing Luke’s mouth and face. The strong initial punch that had opened the fight had loosened one of Luke’s front teeth, and the steady tattoo of jabs finished the job. To Shaman’s awe, Luke gave a furious headshake and spat the tooth into the snow.
Alex celebrated by jabbing again with the left and then throwing a clumsy right cross that landed smack on Luke’s nose, bringing more blood. Luke raised his hands to his face in bewilderment.
“The Stick, Bigger!” Shaman screamed. “The Stick!” Alex heard his brother, and he drove his right hand into Luke’s stomach as hard as he was able, bending Luke over and making him gasp. It was the end of the fight, because the watching children were already scattering before the wrath of the teacher. Fingers of steel twisted Alex’s ear, and Mr. Byers was suddenly glaring down at them and declaring recess at an end.
Inside the school, both Luke and Alex were exhibited before the other pupils as very bad examples—beneath the big sign reading “PEACE ON EARTH.” “I will not have fighting in my school,” Mr. Byers said coldly. He took the rod he used as a pointer and punished both fighters with five enthusiastic stripes upon the open hand. Luke blubbered. Alex’s lower lip trembled when he received his own punishment. His swollen eye already was the color of an old eggplant and his right hand was tormented on both sides, the knuckles skinned from fighting, the palm red and swollen from Mr. Byers’ switching. But when he glanced at Shaman, the brothers were suffused with an inner fulfillment.
When school let out and the children left the building and began to walk away, a group clustered about Alex, laughing and asking admiring questions. Luke Stebbins walked alone, morose and still stunned. When Shaman Cole ran at him, Luke thought wildly that the younger brother now was going to take his turn, and he raised his hands, the left a fist, the right open almost in supplication.
Shaman spoke to him kindly but firmly. “You call my brother Alexander. And you call me Robert,” he said.
Rob J. wrote to the Stars and Stripes Religious Institute and told them he would like to contact Reverend Ellwood Patterson about an ecclesiastic question, requesting that the institute forward Mr. Patterson’s address.
It would take weeks for a reply to reach him, even if they answered. Meanwhile, he told nobody of what he had learned or of his suspicions, until one evening when he and the Geigers had finished playing “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.” Sarah and Lillian were chatting in the kitchen, preparing tea and slicing pound cake, and Rob J. unburdened himself to Jay. “What shall I do, if I should find this preacher with the scratched face? I know Mort London won’t go out of his way to bring him to justice.”
“Then you must make a noise and a smell that will be noticed in Springfield,” Jay said. “And if the state authorities won’t help, you’ve got to appeal to Washington.”
“Nobody in power has been willing to exert any effort because of one dead Indian woman.”
“In that case,” Jay said, “if there’s evidence of guilt, we’ll have to gather about us some righteous men who know how to use guns.”
“You’d do that?”
Jay looked at him in astonishment. “Of course. Wouldn’t you?”
Rob told Jay of his vow of nonviolence.
“I have no such scruples, my friend. If bad people threaten, I’m free to respond.”
“Your Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”
“Hah! It also says, ‘Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ And, ‘He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death.’ ”
“‘Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.’ ”
“That isn’t from my Bible,” Geiger said.
“Ah, Jay, that’s the trouble, too damn many Bibles and they each claim to hold the key.”
Geiger smiled sympathetically. “Rob J., I would never try to dissuade you from being a freethinker. But I leave you with one more thought. ‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.’ ” And the conversation turned to other things as their women carried in the tea.
In the time that followed, Rob J. thought often of his friend, sometimes resentfully. It was easy for Jay. Several times a day he wrapped himself in his fringed prayer shawl and it covered him with security and reassurance about yesterday and tomorrow. All was prescribed: these things are allowed, these things are forbidden, directions clearly marked. Jay believed in the laws of Jehovah and of man, and he had only to follow ancient edicts and the statutes of the Illinois General Assembly. Rob J.’s revelation was science, a faith less comfortable and far less comforting. Truth was its deity, proof was its state of grace, doubt was its liturgy. It held as many mysteries as other religions and was beset with shadowy trails that led to profound dangers, terrifying cliffs, and the deepest pits. No higher power shed a light to illuminate the dark and murky way, and he had only his own frail judgment with which to choose the paths to safety.
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On the seasonably frigid fourth day of the new year of 1852, violence came to the schoolhouse again.
That morning of intense cold, Rachel was late for school. When she arrived, she slipped silently onto her place in the bench without smiling at Shaman and mouthing a greeting, as was her custom. He saw with surprise that her father had followed her into the schoolhouse. Jason Geiger walked up to the desk and looked at Mr. Byers.
“Why, Mr. Geiger. A pleasure, sir. What can I do for you?”
Mr. Byers’ pointer lay on the desk and Jay Geiger picked it up and whacked the teacher across the face.
Mr. Byers jumped to his feet, overturning his chair. He was a head taller than Jay but ordinary of build. Ever after it would be remembered as comical, the short fat man going after the tall younger man with the teacher’s own rod, his arm rising and falling, and the disbelief on Mr. Byers’ face. But that morning nobody laughed at Jay Geiger. The pupils sat straight, scarcely breathing. They couldn’t credit the event any more than Mr. Byers could; it was even more unbelievable than Alex’s fight with Luke. Shaman mostly watched Rachel, noting that her face had been dark with embarrassment but had become very pale. He had the feeling she was trying to make herself as deaf as he was, and blind as well, to everything that was going on around them.
“What the hell are you doing?” Mr. Byers held his arms up to protect his face and squealed in pain as the pointer landed on his ribs. He took a threatening step toward Jay. “You damn idiot! You crazy little Jew!”
Jay kept hitting the teacher and backing him toward the door until Mr. Byers bolted through and slammed it. Jay took Mr. Byers’ coat and flung it through the door onto the snow, and then he came back, breathing hard. He sat in the teacher’s chair.
“School is dismissed for the day,” he said finally, then collected Rachel and took her home on his horse, leaving his sons David and Herman to walk home with the Cole boys.
It was really cold outside. Shaman wore two scarves, one around his head and under his chin, the other around his mouth and nose, but still his nostrils frosted closed for a moment every time he breathed.