by Noah Gordon
“I intend to study the way you did, at a medical school.”
“That’s an especially bad idea. I don’t imagine a good school will take you. All kinds of shoddy medical schools are springing up everywhere, and they’ll accept you. They accept anyone with funds. But it would be a sad mistake to try to learn medicine at one of those places.”
“I don’t intend to.” Shaman asked his father to give him a list of the best medical schools within decent traveling distance of the Mississippi Valley.
Rob J. went to his study as soon as they got home and made out the list, handing it over before supper, as if wanting to erase the subject from his mind. Shaman put fresh oil in the lamp and sat at the small table in his room until well past midnight, writing letters. He took pains to make it clear that the applicant was a deaf man, not wishing any unpleasant surprises.
The horse called Bess, the former Monica Grenville, had been skinny and halt after carrying Rob J. halfway across the continent, but now she was plump and pleasant in her workless old age. But for poor blind Vicky, the horse that had been bought as Bess’s replacement, the world had turned bad. Late in the fall Rob J. rode home one afternoon and saw Vicky trembling in the pasture. Her head drooped, her skinny legs were slightly splayed, and she was as oblivious of her surroundings as any human who had ever passed, addled and weak, into sick old age.
Next morning he went to Geiger’s and asked Jay if he had a supply of morphine.
“How much do you want?”
“Enough to kill a horse,” Rob J. said.
He led Vicky out into the middle of the pasture and fed her two carrots and an apple. He injected the drug into her right jugular vein, talking to her softly and stroking her neck while she chomped the last sweet meal. Almost at once she sank to her knees and rolled over. Rob J. stayed there until she was gone, then sighed and told his sons to take care of her, and went off to make his calls.
Shaman and Alex started digging right next to her back. It took them a long time, because the hole had to be deep and wide. When it was ready, they stood and looked at the horse. “Odd, the way her incisors angle out like that,” Shaman said.
“It’s the way horses show their age, in the teeth,” Alex said.
“I can remember when her teeth were as straight as yours or mine…. She was a good old girl.”
“She farted a lot,” Alex said, and they both smiled. Still, after they tipped her into the hole, they shoveled the dirt in quickly, unable to look at her. They were sweating despite the cool day. Alex led Shaman into the barn and showed him where Alden had hidden whiskey under some sacking, and he took a long pull from the jug and Shaman took a little one.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Alex said.
“Thought you liked working the farm.”
“… Can’t get along with Pa.”
Shaman hesitated. “He cares about us, Alex.”
“Sure, he does. He’s been good to me. But … I have questions about my natural father. Nobody answers them, and I go out and raise some more hell because it makes me feel like a sure-enough bastard.”
It hurt Shaman. “You’ve got a ma and a pa. And a brother,” he said sharply. “That should be enough for anybody who isn’t a damn fool.”
“Old Shaman, always there with the common sense.” He flashed his grin. “Tell you what, let’s you and me just … go away. To Californ-i-ay. There must be some gold left out there. We can have a high old time, get rich, come back, and buy the damn town from Nick Holden.”
It was an appealing prospect, to be footloose with Alex, and the offer was more than half-serious. “Got me some other plans, Bigger. And don’t you go running off, because if you weren’t here, who’d shovel the sheep shit?”
Alex smacked into him, bore him to the ground. Whooping and grunting, each of them strained for a wrestling hold. Alden’s jug went flying, to empty gurgling and unheeded as they rolled over and over on the hay-littered barn floor. Alex was hardened by continuous labor, and strong, but Shaman was larger and stronger, and soon he had his brother in a headlock. After a while it occurred to him that Alex was trying to say something, and he held his left arm around Alex’s neck while his right hand pulled his brother’s head back to see his face.
“Give up, and I’ll let you go,” Alex managed to croak, and Shaman collapsed back into the hay, laughing.
Alex crawled to the toppled jug and looked at it mournfully. “Alden will be fit to be tied.”
“Tell him I drank it.”
“Naw. Who’d believe a thing like that?” Alex said, putting the jug to his lips and salvaging the last drops.
That fall it rained a lot, well into the season when usually there was snow. The rains fell in hard silver sheets, but intermittently, with several days of grace between storms, so that the rivers became giants that roared with fast water but kept to their banks. In the pasture the dirt on Vicky’s grave, which had been mounded high, settled until soon it was impossible to locate.
Rob J. bought a rawboned gray gelding for Sarah. They called him Boss, though when Sarah was in the saddle it was she who did the bossing.
Rob J. said he’d keep his eyes open for a likely horse for Alex. Alex was properly grateful because he wasn’t strong on thrift to begin with, and whatever money he could put by was earmarked for the purchase of a breech-loading hunting rifle.
“Seems like I’m forever looking for a horse,” Rob J. said, but he didn’t suggest he’d look for a horse for Shaman.
The mail sack came to Holden’s Crossing from Rock Island every Tuesday and Friday forenoon. Starting around Christmastime Shaman began to anticipate each mail delivery, but it wasn’t until the third week in February that the first letters came. That Tuesday he received two short, almost curt letters of rejection, one from the Medical College of Wisconsin and the other from the Medical Department of the University of Louisiana. On Friday another letter informed him his training and background appeared to be excellent, but “the Rush Medical College of Chicago has no facilities for persons who are deaf.”
Facilities? Did they think he needed to be caged?
His father knew the letters had arrived, and he understood from Shaman’s controlled demeanor that they’d been refusals. Shaman would have hated it if Rob J. had treated him gingerly or with sympathy, but that didn’t happen. The rejections smarted; no other letters appeared for the next seven weeks, and that was all right with him.
Rob J. had read the notes Shaman had made while dissecting the dog, and he found them promising, if unsophisticated. He suggested that his own files might teach Shaman about anatomical records, and Shaman studied them whenever he had time to spare. Thus it was by accident that he came upon the autopsy report on Makwa-ikwa. He felt strange as he read it, knowing that while the terrible things described in the report were happening, he’d been a little boy, asleep in the woods only a short distance away.
“She was raped! I knew she was murdered, but—”
“Raped and sodomized. It’s not the kind of thing you tell a child,” his father said.
That was true, certainly.
He read the report again and again, mesmerized.
Eleven stab wounds, running in irregular line from the jugular notch down the sternum to a position approximately two centimeters inferior to the xiphoid process.
Triangular wounds, .947 to .952 centimeters in width. Three of them reaching the heart, .887 centimeters, .799 centimeters, .803 centimeters.
“Why do the wounds have different widths?”
“It means the weapon was pointed, becoming progressively wider down the blade. The more force to the thrust, the wider the wound.”
“Do you think they’ll ever get whoever did this?”
“No, I don’t,” his father said. “There were three of them, most likely. For a long time I had people looking hard and wide for an Ellwood R. Patterson. But there isn’t a trace of him. Probably it was a false name. There was a man with him named Cough. I’ve never run across
or even heard of a man of that name. And a young fellow with a port-wine stain on his face, and a limp. I used to tense up anytime I saw someone with a facial stain or a gimpy leg. But always, either they’d have the mark or the limp. Never both.
“The authorities never cared to find them, and now …” He shrugged. “Too much time has passed, too many years.” Shaman recognized sadness in his father’s voice, but he saw that most of the anger and passion long since had been burned away.
One day in April, as Shaman and his father were riding past the Catholic convent, Rob J. turned Trude into the lane and Shaman followed on Boss.
Inside the convent house, Shaman noted that several of the nuns greeted his father by name and didn’t appear surprised to see him. His father introduced him to Mother Miriam Ferocia, who appeared to be the leader. She seated them, his father in a great leather throne and Shaman in a straight wooden chair beneath a wall crucifix from which hung a sad-eyed wooden Jesus, and one of the other nuns served them with good coffee and hot bread.
“I’ll have to bring the boy again,” his father told the mother superior. “Usually I don’t get bread with my coffee.” Shaman realized Rob J. was a man of surprising parts, and that probably he never would understand his father.
Shaman had seen nuns nursing his father’s patients from time to time, always in pairs. Rob J. and the nun talked briefly about several cases, but soon they turned to politics, and it was obvious that the visit was a social one. Rob J. glanced at the crucifix. “Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying that John Brown made his gallows as glorious as a cross,” he said.
Miriam Ferocia observed that Brown, an abolitionist zealot who’d been hanged for seizing a United States armory in western Virginia, was fast becoming a martyr in the eyes of those who opposed slavery. “Yet slavery isn’t the real cause of the trouble between the regions. It is economics. The South sells its cotton and sugar to England and Europe, and buys manufactured goods from those places instead of from the industrial North. The South has decided it has no need for the rest of the United States of America. Despite Mr. Lincoln’s speeches against slavery, that is the sore that festers.”
“I don’t know economics,” Shaman said thoughtfully. “I was to study it this year if I had returned to college.”
When the nun asked why he hadn’t returned, his father revealed he was suspended for dissecting a dog.
“Oh, dear! And was it dead at the time?” she asked.
Assured that it was, she nodded. “Ja, that is all right, then. I never studied economics either. But it is in my blood. My father started life as a carpenter who repaired hay wagons. Now he owns a wagon works in Frankfurt and a carriage factory in München.” She smiled. “My father’s name is Brotknecht. It means breadmaker, because in the Middle Ages my family were bakers. Yet in Baden, where I was a novice, there was a baker named Wagenknecht!”
“What was your name before you became a nun?” Shaman asked. He saw her hesitation and his father’s frown and realized the question was rude, but Miriam Ferocia answered him. “When I was of the world, I was Andrea.” She rose from her chair and went to a shelf to take down a book. “It may interest you to borrow this,” she said. “It is by David Ricardo, an English economist.”
Shaman stayed up late that night and read the book. Some of it was hard to understand, but he saw that Ricardo argued for free trade among the nations, which was what the South was insisting upon.
When finally he fell asleep, he witnessed Christ on the cross. As he dreamed, he saw the long aquiline nose become shorter and broader. The skin darkened and reddened, the hair turned black. Female breasts developed, dark-dugged, marked by runic signs. The stigmata appeared. In his sleep, without counting, Shaman knew there were eleven wounds, and as he watched, blood welled to trickle down the body and drip from Makwa’s feet.
44
LETTERS AND NOTES
Forty-nine lambs were born to Cole ewes in the spring of 1860, and the entire family helped with the problem births and the castrating. “The flock’s growin bigger every spring,” Alden told Rob J. with worried pride. “You’re goin to have to tell me what you want done with this bunch.”
Rob J.’s choices were limited. They could butcher only a few. Little demand for bought meat existed among their neighbors, who raised animals of their own, and of course the meat would spoil before it could be carried to the city for sale. Live animals could be transported and sold, but that was complicated and required time, effort, and money. “Fleeces are very valuable in proportion to their bulk,” Rob J. said. “The best plan is to keep building the flock and make our money from the sale of wool, the way my family’s always done in Scotland.”
“Yuh. Well, then, they’s goin to be more work than ever. That’s goin to require hirin another pair of hands,” Alden said uneasily, and Shaman wondered if Alex had said anything to the hired man about wanting to run off. “Doug Penfield’s willin to work for you part-time. Told me so.”
“You think he’s a good man?”
“Sure he is, comes from New Hampshire. That’s not same’s comin from Vermont, but it’s close.”
Rob J. agreed with him that it was, and Doug Penfield was hired.
That spring, Shaman made connection with Lucille Williams, daughter of Paul Williams, the farrier. For several years Lucille had attended the academy, where Shaman had taught her mathematics. Now Lucille was a young woman. If her blond hair, which she wore in a great knot, was more ashen than that of the yellow-maned Swedish girls of his dreams, she had a quick smile and a sweet face. Whenever he met her in the village he stopped to pass the time of day as an old friend, and to inquire about her work, which was split between her father’s stables and Roberta’s Women’s Wear, her mother’s Main Street shop. The arrangement allowed her flexibility and a certain freedom, for her parents always took her absence without question, each assuming she had gone to attend some duty for the other. Therefore, when Lucille asked Shaman if he couldn’t bring her some farm butter, to be delivered at her house at two in the afternoon next day, he was nervously excited.
She was careful to explain to him that he must tie his horse on Main Street in front of the stores, then walk around the block to Illinois Avenue, cut through the Reimers’ property behind the row of tall lilac bushes and out of sight of the house, climb over the picket fence into the Williamses’ backyard, and tap at her back door.
“So it won’t look … you know, misleading for the neighbors,” she said, dropping her eyes. He wasn’t surprised, because Alex had delivered butter to her fully a year earlier, with reports, but Shaman was apprehensive: he wasn’t Alex.
Next day, the Reimers’ lilacs were in full bloom. The fence was easy to scale, and the back door opened at once to his knock. Lucille was effusive in her appreciation of how nicely the butter was wrapped in towels, which she folded and left on the kitchen table with the dish when she brought the butter to the cold cellar. On her return she took his hand and led him into a room off the kitchen that obviously was Roberta Williams’ fitting room. Half a bolt of gingham cloth leaned against one corner, and remnants of silk and satin and drill and cotton goods were folded neatly on a long shelf. Alongside a great horsehair sofa was a dressmaker’s form of wire and cloth, and to Shaman’s fascination, it had ivory buttocks.
She offered her face for a single long kiss, and then each of them was undressing with dispatch and neatness, leaving their clothes in two fussy, well-matched little piles, their stockings in their shoes. He observed clinically that her body was out-of-balance; her shoulders were narrow and sloping, her breasts like slightly raised pancakes, each centered with a small pool of syrup and adorned with a brownish berry, while her bottom half was heavier, with wide hips and thick legs. When she turned to throw a grayish sheet across the couch (“The horsehair scratches!”), he saw that the dressmaker’s form was not for her skirts, which would be more ample.
She didn’t let down her hair. “It takes so long to pu
t it back up,” she said apologetically, and he assured her almost formally it was quite all right.
In the doing, it was easy. She made it so, and he’d listened to the boasting stories of Alex and others for so long that, if he had never been down the trail himself, he had a good idea of the landmarks. The day before, he wouldn’t have dreamed of touching the ivory buttocks of the dressmaker’s dummy, but now he dealt with warm, living flesh, and he licked the syrup and tasted the berries. Very quickly, and with great relief, he laid down the burden of chastity with a shuddering climax. Lacking the ability to hear what she panted in his ears, he utilized each of his other senses to the utmost, and she obliged by assuming any and all positions for his close inspection, until he was able to repeat the earlier experience, taking somewhat longer. He was ready to keep on, on and on, but soon Lucille glanced at the clock and bounded off the couch, saying she had to have supper ready when her mother and father came home. As they dressed, they planned for the future. She (and this empty house!) were readily available during the day. Alas, that was when Shaman worked. They agreed she would try to be at home each Tuesday and Friday at two P.M., in case he could make it to town. That way, he explained practically, he could pick up the mail.
She was just as practical, revealing as she kissed him good-bye that she loved rock candy, the pink sugary kind, not the greenish variety that was flavored with mint. He assured her he understood the difference. On the other side of the fence, walking with an unfamiliar lightness, he went back down the long line of blossom-laden lilacs, through the heavy purple scent that for the rest of his life would be a highly erotic smell.
Lucille liked the smoothness of his hands, not knowing they were soft because much of the time they were covered with lanolin-rich yolk from the fleeces. The farm took wool well into May, Shaman, Alex, and Alden doing most of the shearing, with Doug Penfield eager to learn but clumsy with the clippers. Mostly they put Doug to work picking and scouring the fleeces. He brought them news of the outside world when he came, including the intelligence that the Republicans had chosen Abraham Lincoln as their presidential nominee. By the time all the fleeces were rolled up, tied, and packed in bales, they had also heard that the Democrats had met in Baltimore and had chosen Douglas after acrimonious debate. Within weeks, Southern Democrats had called a second Democratic convention in the same city, and nominated Vice-President John C. Breckinridge to run for president, calling for the protection of their right to own slaves.