Shaman

by Noah Gordon

  But … There was something.

  He stood and fought the impulse, for a while. Then he located true northwest and began to walk from the grave, counting his steps.

  When he had gone ten paces, he was in the middle of the ruins of the hedonoso-te. The longhouse had deteriorated through the years and now was a low, uneven pile of narrow logs and strips of moldering tree bark, with cordgrass and wild indigo poking through.

  It didn’t make sense, he told himself, to spruce up the grave, move the sweat lodge, and leave this unsightly heap. He walked down the path to the barn, where there was a large crock of lamp oil. It was almost full, and he carried it back and emptied it. The material in the pile was wet with dew but his sulfur match caught the first time he tried, and the oil ignited and flared.

  In a moment the entire hedonoso-te was being consumed by leaping blue and yellow flames, and a column of dark gray smoke rose straight up and then was bent by the breeze and swept out over the river.

  An acrid eruption of black smoke spewed like a bursting boil, and the first demon, the one who was awake, surged upward and away. Shaman imagined a lonely furious demonic screaming, a hissing cry. One by one, the other three creatures of wickedness, so rudely awakened, lifted off like hungry birds of prey abandoning delectable flesh, watawinonas roiling elsewhere on wings of smoky rage.

  From the nearby grave Shaman sensed something like a sigh.

  He stood close and felt the lick of the heat, like the fire in a Sauk celebration ceremony, and imagined what this place had been like when young Rob J. Cole saw it for the first time, unbroken prairie running all the way to the woods and the river. And he thought of others who had lived here, Makwa, and Moon, and Comes Singing. And Alden. As the fire burned lower and lower, he sang in his mind: Tti-la-ye ke-wi-ta-mo-ne i-no-ki-i-i, ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se. Ghosts, I speak to you now, send your blessings to me.

  Soon it was a thin layer of residue from which wisps of smoke rose. He knew the grass would move in, and there would be no trace of where the hedonoso-te had been.

  When it was safe to leave the fire, he returned the crock to the barn and started back. On the Long Path he met a small grim figure looking for him. She was trying to walk away from a little boy who had fallen and scraped his knee. The little boy limped after her doggedly. He was crying, and his nose was running.

  Shaman used his handkerchief on Joshua’s nose and kissed his knee next to the bloody part. He promised he’d make it better when they got home. He seated Hattie behind his neck with her legs over his shoulders, and he scooped Joshua up and began to walk. These were the only imps in the world that mattered to him, these two good imps who had claimed his soul. Hattie tugged at his ears to make him go faster, and he trotted like Trude. When she yanked his ears so hard they hurt, he pinned Joshua against her legs so she wouldn’t fall off, and he began to canter like Boss. And then he was galloping, galloping, in time to a perfectly hidden melody—fine and glorious new music only he was able to hear.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND NOTES

  Sauks and Mesquakies still live in Tama, Iowa, on land they own. Their original eighty-acre purchase has been added to considerably. Some 575 Native Americans now live on 3,500 acres along the Iowa River. In the summer of 1987 I visited the settlement at Tama with my wife, Lorraine. Don Wanatee, then the executive director of the Tribal Council, and Leonard Young Bear, a noted Native American artist, answered my questions patiently. In subsequent conversations, so did Muriel Racehill, current executive director, and Charlie Old Bear.

  I have tried to present the events of Black Hawk’s War as close to history as possible. The warrior leader known as Black Hawk—the literal translation of his Sauk name, Makataime-shekiakiak, is Black Sparrow Hawk—is a historic figure. The shaman Wabokieshiek, White Cloud, also was a living man. In this book he evolves into a fictional character after he meets the girl who is to become Makwa-ikwa, the Bear Woman.

  For much of the Sauk and Mesquakie vocabulary utilized in this novel, I relied heavily on a number of early publications of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology.

  The early days of the charitable organization known as the Boston Dispensary were much as I have depicted them. I have exercised an author’s license in the matter of the salaries of the visiting physicians. Although the pay scale is authentic, compensation didn’t begin until 1842, several years after Rob J. is shown as salaried to attend the poor. Until 1842, being a physician at the Boston Dispensary was a kind of unpaid internship. Conditions among the impoverished were so difficult, however, that the young doctors rebelled. First they demanded payment, and then they refused to continue visiting patients in the slums. Instead, the Boston Dispensary moved into quarters and became a clinic, the patients coming to the doctors. By the time I covered the Boston Dispensary in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s as science editor of the old Boston Herald, it had grown into an established hospital-clinic and was in a loose administrative association with the Pratt Diagnostic Clinic, the Floating Hospital for Infants and Children, and Tufts Medical School, as the Tufts-New England Medical Center. In 1965 the component hospitals were united and absorbed into the present distinguished institution known as the New England Medical Center Hospitals. David W. Nathan, former archivist at the medical center, and Kevin Richardson of the medical center’s Department of External Affairs furnished me with information and historical material.

  While writing Shaman, I found an unexpected lode of information and insights right at home, and I am grateful to close friends, neighbors, and fellow townspeople.

  Edward Gulick talked with me about pacifism and told me about Elmira, New York. Elizabeth Gulick shared thoughts about the Society of Friends and allowed me to read some of her own writings about Quaker worship. Don Buckloh, a resource conservationist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, answered questions about early Midwestern farms. His wife, Denise Jane Buckloh, the former Sister Miriam of the Eucharist, OCD, gave me details about Catholicism and the daily life of a convent nun.

  Donald Fitzgerald lent me reference books and presented me with a copy of the Civil War diary of his great-grandfather John Fitzgerald, who at sixteen had walked from Rowe, Massachusetts, to Greenfield, twenty-five miles down the Mohawk Trail, to enlist in the Union Army. John Fitzgerald fought with the Twenty-seventh Massachusetts Volunteers until captured by Confederates, and he survived several prison camps, including Andersonville.

  Theodore Bobetsky, a lifelong farmer whose land abuts ours, gave me information about butchering. Attorney Stewart Eisenberg discussed with me the system of bail utilized by nineteenth-century courts, and Nina Heiser allowed me to borrow her collection of books on Native Americans.

  Walter A. Whitney Jr. gave me a copy of a letter written April 22, 1862, by Addison Graves, to his father, Ebenezer Graves Jr., of Ashfield, Massachusetts. The letter is an account of Addison Graves’s experience as a volunteer nurse on the hospital ship War Eagle, which carried Union wounded from Pittsburg, Tennessee, to Cincinnati. It was the basis for Chapter 48, in which Rob J. Cole serves as a volunteer surgeon on the hospital ship War Hawk.

  Beverly Presley, map and geography librarian at Clark University, calculated the distance traveled during the voyages of the historic and fictional hospital ships.

  The faculty of the Classics Department at the College of the Holy Cross assisted me with several Latin translations.

  Richard M. Jakowski, VMD, associate professor in the Department of Pathology at the Tufts-New England Veterinary Medical Center, in North Grafton, Massachusetts, answered my questions about the anatomy of dogs.

  I am grateful to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for continuing to grant me faculty privileges to all of its libraries, and to Edla Holm of the Interlibrary Loans Office at that university. I thank the American Antiquarian Society, in Worcester, Massachusetts, for giving me access to its collections.

  I received help and materials from Richard J. Wolfe, curator of rare books and manuscripts
and Joseph Garland Librarian at the Countway Medical Library of Harvard Medical School, and I enjoyed long-term loans from the Lamar Soutter Library of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, in Worcester. I also thank the reference staffs of the Boston Public Library and the Boston Athenaeum for their help.

  Bernard Wax, of the American Jewish Historical Society at Brandeis University, supplied me with information and research regarding Company C of the eighty-second Illinois, “the Jewish company.”

  In the summer of 1989 my wife and I visited several Civil War battlefields. In Charlottesville, Professor Ervin L. Jordan Jr., archivist at the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia, showed me the hospitality of that library and provided me with information about the hospitals of the Confederate Army. Civil War medical conditions, battles, and events in Shaman are based on history. The regiments with which Rob J. Cole served are fictitious.

  My resource concerning the Yiddish language was my mother-in-law, Dorothy Seay.

  During much of the writing of this book, Ann N. Lilly was a staff member at both the Forbes Library in Northampton and the Western Massachusetts Regional Library System in Hadley, Massachusetts. She often conducted title searches for me, and hand-carried books from both institutions to her Ashfield home. I also thank Barbara Zalenski of the Belding Memorial Library of Ashfield, and the staff of the Field Memorial Library of Conway, Massachusetts, for their help with research.

  The Planned Parenthood Federation of America sent me material about the manufacture and use of condoms during the 1800’s. At the Center for Disease Control, in Atlanta, Georgia, Robert Cannon, M.D., gave me information about the treatment of syphilis during the period of my story, and the American Parkinson Disease Association, Inc., furnished me with information about that disease.

  William McDonald, a graduate student in the Department of Metallurgy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me about metals used to make instruments during the Civil War era.

  Jason Geiger’s analysis of what would have happened if Lincoln had allowed the Confederacy to break away from the Union without war, as expressed in Chapter 72, is based on the opinion of the late psychographer Gamaliel Bradford in his biography of Robert E. Lee (Lee the American, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1912).

  I thank Dennis B. Gjerdingen, president of the Clarke School for the Deaf, in Northampton, Massachusetts, for granting me access to the staff and library of that school. Ana D. Grist, former librarian at the Clarke School, allowed me to borrow books for long periods of time. I am especially grateful to Marjorie E. Magner, who has spent forty-three years teaching deaf children. She provided me with a number of insights and also read the book manuscript to ensure its accuracy about deafness.

  Several Massachusetts physicians have been generous in helping me with this book. Albert B. Giknis, M.D., the medical examiner of Franklin County, Massachusetts, discussed rape and murder with me at length, and allowed me to borrow his pathology texts. Joel F. Moorhead, M.D., outpatient medical director at the Spaulding Hospital and clinical instructor in rehabilitation medicine at Tufts Medical School, answered questions about injury and disease. Wolfgang G. Gilliar, D.O., program director for rehabilitation medicine at the Greenery Rehabilitation Center and instructor in rehabilitation medicine at Tufts Medical School, talked with me about physical medicine. My family internist, Barry E. Poret, M.D., gave me information and made available his own medical books. Stuart R. Jaffee, M.D., senior urologist at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, and assistant professor of urology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, answered my questions about lithocenosis and read the book manuscript for medical accuracy.

  I am grateful to my agent, Eugene H. Winick of McIntosh & Otis, Inc., for his friendship and enthusiasm, and to Dr. Karl Blessing, Geschaftsführer at the Droemer Knaur Publishing Company in Munich. Shaman is the second book in a projected trilogy about the Cole medical dynasty. Dr. Blessing’s early faith in the first book of the trilogy, The Physician, helped it to become a best-seller in Germany and other countries and energized me during the writing of Shaman.

  For their efforts on behalf of this book I thank Peter Mayer, Elaine Koster, and Robert Dreesen of Penguin Books USA. Raymond Phillips did a wonderful job of copy editing.

  In many ways, Shaman was a family project. My daughter Lise Gordon edited Shaman before it reached my publishers. She is meticulous, tough even with her own father, and wonderfully encouraging. My wife, Lorraine, helped me prepare the manuscript and, as usual, gave me her love and total support. My daughter Jamie Beth Gordon, a photographer, eased my fear of the camera during a special and hilarious shoot, when she took my pictures for use on the book’s jackets and in publishers’ catalogs. She buoyed me with her notes and cards. And the frequent long-distance calls from my son, Michael Seay Gordon, invariably came when I needed the lift he always brings.

  These four people are the most important part of my life, and they have increased, at least tenfold, my joy in finishing this novel.

  Ashfield, Massachusetts

  November 20, 1991

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Noah Gordon has had outstanding international success. The Physician, soon to be a motion picture, has been called a modern classic, and booksellers at the Madrid Book Fair voted it “one of the 10 best-loved books of all time.” Shaman was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Both of these books, and five of the author’s other novels—The Rabbi, The Death Committee, The Jerusalem Diamond, Matters of Choice, and The Winemaker—are published in digital formats by Barcelona eBooks and Open Road Integrated Media. Gordon’s novel, The Last Jew, will also be published digitally in the near future. He lives outside of Boston with his wife, Lorraine Gordon.