The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

by Noah Gordon

  The Geigers, seeking to be supportive, issued several invitations for the kind of evening the families had shared so often, but Rob J. declined. He no longer played his viola da gamba; Sarah believed he couldn’t stand to make music that Shaman wouldn’t hear.

  She threw herself into the work of the farm. Alden Kimball double-dug a new plot for her and she undertook her most ambitious vegetable garden. She foraged the riverbank for miles to find lemon day lilies and transfer them to a bed at the front of the house. She helped Alden and Moon herd small groups of blatting sheep onto a raft and take them out into the middle of the river and push them off so they had to swim ashore, cleansing their wool before the shearing. After castrating the spring lambs, Alden looked askance when she claimed the bucket of prairie oysters, his favorite delicacy. Sarah stripped them of their stringy wrapping, wondering if that’s how a man’s gonads were under the wrinkled skin. Then she cut the tender little balls in half and fried them in bacon grease along with wild onion and a sliced puffball mushroom. Alden ate his share eagerly, declared it prime, and stopped moping.

  She could almost have been content. Except.

  Rob J. came home one day and told her he had conferred with Tobias Barr about Shaman. “A school for the deaf was recently established in Jack-sonville, but Barr knows little about it. I could travel there and look it over. But … Shaman is so young.”

  “Jacksonville is one hundred and fifty miles away. We would scarcely ever see him.”

  He told her that the Rock Island physician had confessed to an ignorance about how to treat deafness in children. In fact, some years before, he had given up on a case involving an eight-year-old girl and her six-year-old brother. Ultimately the children had been sent away as wards of the state, to the Illinois Asylum in Springfield.

  “Rob J.,” she said. Through the open window came the guttural grunting of her sons, a mad sound, and she had a sudden mental picture of Bessie Turner’s vacant eyes. “To send a deaf child to be shut up with crazy people … that is wicked.” The thought of wickedness chilled her, as usual. “Do you think,” she whispered, “that Shaman is being punished for my sins?”

  He took her in his arms and she drew on his strength the way she always did.

  “No,” he said. He held her a long time. “Oh, my Sarah. You must never think it.” But he didn’t tell her what they could do.

  One morning while the two boys sat in front of the hedonoso-te with Little Dog and Bird Woman, stripping willow withes of bark Makwa would boil to make her medicine, a strange Indian rode a bony horse out of the riverbank woods. He was an apparition of a Sioux, no longer young, as skinny as his horse, as shabby and tattered. His feet were bare and dirty. He wore leggings and a loincloth of deerskin and a tattered fragment of a buffalo skin around the upper part of his body like a shawl, held in place by a knotted rag belt. His long graying hair had been carelessly tended, with a short braid at the back and two longer braids at the sides of his head, wrapped with strips of otter skin.

  A few years earlier, a Sauk would have greeted a Sioux with a weapon, but now each of them knew they were surrounded by a common enemy, and when the horseman greeted her in the sign language used by the Plains tribes whose native tongues are dissimilar, she returned the greeting with her fingers.

  She guessed he had ridden through the Ouisconsin, following the fringe of forest along Masesibowi. His signs told her he came in peace and followed the setting sun to the Seven Nations. He asked her for food.

  The four children were fascinated. They giggled and mimicked the eat sign with their small hands.

  He was a Sioux, so she couldn’t simply give him anything. He traded a plaited rope for a plate of squirrel stew and a big piece of corncake, and a small bag of dried beans for the trail. The stew was cold but he dismounted and ate it with obvious hunger.

  He saw the water drum and asked if she was a ghostkeeper, and looked uneasy when she indicated it was so. They didn’t give each other the power of learning their names. When he’d eaten, she warned him not to hunt the sheep or the white men would kill him, and he got back on the skinny horse and rode away.

  The children were still playing at the game with their fingers, making signs that didn’t mean anything; except that Alex was making the eat sign. She broke off a piece of corncake and gave it to him, and then showed the others how to make the sign, rewarding them with nibbles of cake when they had got it right. The intertribal language was something the Sauk children should be taught, so she gave them the signs for willow, including the white brothers as a kindness until she saw that Shaman seemed to pick up the signs easily, and she was struck by an exciting thought that caused her to concentrate on him more than the others.

  In addition to eat and willow, she taught them the signs for girl, for boy, for wash, and for dress. That was enough for the first day, she thought, but she set them to practicing them again and again, a new game, until the children knew the signs perfectly.

  That afternoon, when Rob J. came home, she brought the children to him and demonstrated what they had learned.

  Rob J. watched his deaf son thoughtfully. He saw that Makwa’s eyes gleamed with accomplishment, and he praised them all and thanked Makwa, who promised to continue to teach them the signs.

  “What earthly good is it?” Sarah asked him bitterly when they were alone. “Why would we want our son to be able to talk with his fingers so only a bunch of Indians will understand him?”

  “There’s a sign language like that for the deaf,” Rob J. said thoughtfully. “Invented by the French, I think. When I was in medical school, I myself saw two deaf people conversing with one another easily, using their hands instead of their voices. If I send for a book of these signs, and we learn it with him, we can talk to Shaman and he can talk to us.”

  Reluctantly she agreed it was worth a try. In the meantime, Rob J. decided that learning the Indian signs would do the boy no harm.

  A long letter came from Oliver Wendell Holmes. With typical thoroughness he had searched the literature at the Harvard Medical School library and had interviewed a number of authorities, giving them the details Rob J. had supplied concerning Shaman’s case.

  He held out very little hope for a reversal of Shaman’s condition. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “hearing will return to a patient in whom total deafness has occurred as an aftermath of a disease such as measles, scarlet fever, or meningitis. But often, massive infection during illness scars and damages tissues, destroying sensitive and delicate processes that cannot be restored by healing.

  “You write that you inspected both external auditory canals visually, using a speculum, and I commend your ingenuity in focusing the light of a candle into the ears by means of a hand mirror. Almost certainly the damage occurred deeper than you were able to examine. Having dissected, you and I are aware of the delicacy and complexity of the middle and inner ear. Whether young Robert’s problem lies in the eardrums, the auditory ossicles, the mallei, the incudes, the stapes, or perhaps the cochleae, doubtless we shall never know. What we do know, my dear friend, is that if your son still is deaf by the time you read this, in all likelihood he will be deaf for the remainder of his life.

  “The problem to be considered, then, is how best to raise him.”

  Holmes had consulted with Dr. Samuel G. Howe of Boston, who had worked with two deaf, mute, and blind pupils, teaching them to communicate with others by finger spelling the alphabet. Three years before Dr. Howe had toured Europe and had seen deaf children who were taught to talk clearly and effectively.

  “But no school for the deaf in America teaches children to speak,” Holmes wrote, “instead instructing every pupil in the language of signs. If your son is taught the language of signs, he will be able to communicate only with other deaf persons. If he can learn to speak and, by watching the lips of others, to read what they are saying, there is no reason why he can’t live his life among people in general society.

  “Therefore, Dr. Howe recommends that your son
be kept at home and educated by you, and I concur.”

  The consultants had reported that unless Shaman was made to talk, gradually he would go dumb through lack of use of the organs of speech. But Holmes warned that if speech was to be accomplished, the Cole family must use no formal signs to young Robert, and they must never accept a single sign from him.

  26

  THE BINDING

  At first, Makwa-ikwa didn’t understand when Cawso wabeskiou told her to stop teaching the signs of the nations to the children. But Rob J. explained to her why the signs were bad medicine for Shaman. The boy already had learned nineteen signs. He knew the gesture with which to indicate hunger, he could ask for water, he could indicate cold, heat, illness, health, could signify appreciation or displeasure, could greet and bid farewell, describe size, comment on wisdom or stupidity. For the other children, the Indian signing was a new game. To Shaman, cut off from communication in the most puzzling way, it was renewed contact with the world.

  His fingers continued to speak.

  Rob J. forbade the others to participate, but they were only children, and when Shaman flashed a sign, sometimes the impulse to respond was irresistible.

  After he witnessed several instances of signing, Rob J. unwound a soft rag strip Sarah had rolled for bandages. He lashed Shaman’s wrists together, and then tied his hands to his belt.

  Shaman screamed and wept.

  “You treat our son … like an animal,” Sarah whispered.

  “It may already be too late for him. This may be his only chance.” Rob took his wife’s hands in his and tried to comfort her. But no amount of pleading changed his mind, and his son’s hands remained trussed, as if the child were a small prisoner.

  Alex remembered how he had felt when he had the terrible itch from the measles and Rob J. had tied his hands so he couldn’t scratch. He forgot how his body had bled and remembered only the unrequited itching and the terrors of being bound. At first opportunity he found the sickle in the barn and cut his brother’s bonds.

  When Rob J. confined him to the house, Alex disobeyed. He took a kitchen knife and went out and freed Shaman again, then took his brother’s hand and led him away.

  It was midday when their absence was noted, and everybody on the farm stopped all work and joined in the search, spreading out into the woods and over the prairie pastures and along the riverbanks, calling the names only one of the boys would be able to hear. Nobody mentioned the river, but that spring two Frenchmen from Nauvoo had been in a canoe that overturned when the water was at crest. Both men had drowned, and now the menace of the river was very much on everyone’s mind.

  There was no evidence of the boys until, as light was beginning to fade at day’s end, Jay Geiger rode up to the Cole place, Shaman in front of him in the saddle, Alex riding behind. He told Rob J. he’d found them in the middle of his cornfield, sitting on the ground between rows, still holding hands and all cried out.

  “If I hadn’t gone in to check for weeds, they’d be sitting there still,” Jay said.

  Rob J. waited until the tearstained faces were washed and the boys fed. Then he walked Alex out along the river path. The current rippled and sang over the stones along the shore, the water darker than the air, reflecting the coming night. Swallows soared and swooped, sometimes touching the surface. High up, a crane plowed along as purposefully as a packet boat.

  “You know why I’ve brought you out here?”

  “Gonna whup me.”

  “Never whipped you yet, have I? Not going to start now. No, I want to consult with you.”

  The boy’s eyes regarded him with alarm, uncertain if being consulted was any better than being whipped. “What’s that?”

  “You know what it is to swap?”

  Alex nodded. “Sure. I’ve swapped things, lots of times.”

  “Well, I want to swap ideas with you. About your brother. Shaman’s lucky to have a big brother like you, someone who takes care of him. Your mother and I … we’re proud of you. We thank you.”

  “… You treat him mean, Pa, tying his hands and all.”

  “Alex, if you do any more signs with him, he’s not going to need to speak. Pretty soon he won’t remember how to speak, and you’ll never hear his voice. Ever again. You believe me?”

  The boy’s eyes were large, full of burden. He nodded.

  “I want you to leave his hands tied. I’m asking you never to use signs with him again. When you talk to him, first point to your mouth, so he looks at it. Then speak slowly and distinctly. Repeat what you’re saying to him, so he’ll begin to read your lips.” Rob J. looked at him. “You understand, son? Will you help us teach him to talk?”

  Alex nodded. Rob J. pulled him into his chest and hugged him. He stank like a ten-year-old boy who had sat all day in a manured cornfield, sweating and crying. As soon as they got home, Rob J. would help him carry water for baths.

  “I love you, Alex.”

  “… you, Pa,” Alex whispered.

  Everybody was given the same message.

  Get Shaman’s attention. Point to your lips. Speak to him slowly and distinctly. Speak to his eyes instead of to his ears.

  In the morning, as soon as they were up, Rob J. tied his son’s hands. At mealtimes Alex untied Shaman so he could eat. Then he tied his brother’s hands again. Alex saw to it that none of the other children signed.

  But Shaman’s eyes grew more harried in a face that was pinched and closed off to the rest of them. He wasn’t able to understand. And he didn’t speak at all.

  If Rob J. had heard of someone else who kept his boy’s hands tied, he’d have done everything in his power to rescue the child. Cruelty wasn’t one of his talents, and he saw the effect of Shaman’s suffering on the others in his household. It was an escape for him to take his bag and ride out to do his doctoring.

  The world beyond his farm went on, unaffected by the Cole family’s troubles. Three other families were building new wood-frame homes to replace sod houses in Holden’s Crossing that summer. There was a lot of interest in putting up a schoolhouse and hiring a teacher, and both Rob J. and Jason Geiger supported the idea strongly. Each taught his own children at home, sometimes filling in for one another during an emergency, but they agreed it would be better for the children to go to a regular school.

  When Rob J. stopped at the apothecary, Jay was bursting with a piece of news. Finally he blurted out the fact that Lillian’s Babcock piano had been sent for. Crated in Columbus, it had been carried more than a thousand miles by raft and riverboat. “Down the Scioto River to the Ohio, down the Ohio to the Mississippi, and up the goldurned Mississippi to the pier of the Great Southern Transport Company in Rock Island, where it now awaits my buckboard and oxen!”

  Alden Kimball had asked Rob to treat one of his friends who was sick in the abandoned Mormon town of Nauvoo.

  Alden came with him as guide. They bought a ride for themselves and their horses on a flatboat, getting downriver the easy way. Nauvoo was a spooky, largely deserted town, a gridwork of wide streets laid out on a pretty bend in the river, with handsome, substantial houses, and in the middle, the stone ruins of a great temple that looked as if it had been built by King Solomon. Only a handful of Mormons still lived there, Alden told him, old folks and rebels who had broken with the leadership when the Latter-day Saints had moved to Utah. It was a place that attracted independent thinkers; one corner of the town had been rented to a small colony of Frenchmen who called themselves Icarians and lived cooperatively. Alden led Rob J. right through the French quarter, disdain in the erectness with which he sat his saddle, and eventually to a house of weathered red brick by the side of a pleasant lane.

  An unsmiling middle-aged woman answered his knock and nodded in greeting. She nodded also to Rob J. when Alden introduced her as Mrs. Bidamon. A dozen people sat or stood in the parlor, but Mrs. Bidamon led Rob up the stairs to where a sullen boy of about sixteen lay abed with the measles. It wasn’t a severe case. Rob gave his mother ground mustar
d seed and directions about how to mix it into the boy’s bath water, and a packet of dried elderberry blossoms to be used as tea. “I don’t think you’ll need me again,” he said. “But I want you to send for me at once if it causes him an infection of the ears.”

  She preceded him downstairs and must have said a reassuring word to the people in her parlor. As Rob J. walked through to the door, they were waiting with gifts, a jar of honey, three jars of preserves, a bottle of wine. And a babble of gratitude. Outside the house, he stood, his arms full, staring at Alden in bewilderment.

  “They’re grateful to you for treating the boy,” Alden said. “Mrs. Bidamon, she was the widow of Joseph Smith, the Prophet of the Latter-day Saints, the man who founded the religion. The boy is his son, also named Joseph Smith. They believe the youngling’s a prophet too.”

  As they rode away, Alden regarded the town of Nauvoo and sighed. “This was a right good place to live. All ruint because Joseph Smith couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants. Him and his polygamy. Called em spiritual wives. Nothin spiritual about it, he just liked poontang.”

  Rob J. knew the Saints had been driven from Ohio, Missouri, and finally Illinois, because rumors of their plural marriages had inflamed local populaces. He had never intruded upon Alden with questions of his former life, but now he couldn’t resist. “You had more than one wife yourself?”

  “Three. When I broke with the church, they were parceled out to other Saints, along with their young’uns.”

  Rob didn’t dare ask how many children. But a demon drove his tongue to one more question. “Did that bother you?”

  Alden considered, and then he spat. “The variety was right interestin, I shan’t deny it. But without em, the peace is wonderful,” he said.

  That week Rob went from treating a young prophet to treating an old congressman. He was summoned to Rock Island to examine U.S. Representative Samuel T. Singleton, who’d been taken by spells while returning to Illinois from Washington.