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

by Noah Gordon

As he entered Singleton’s home, Thomas Beckermann was leaving; Beckermann told him that Tobias Barr also had examined Congressman Singleton. “He needs a whole lot of medical opinions, don’t he?” Beckermann said sourly.

  It indicated the extent of Sammil Singleton’s fear, and as Rob J. examined the congressman, he realized the fear was well-founded. Singleton was seventy-nine, a short man, almost entirely bald, with flabby flesh and a huge assault of stomach. Rob J. listened to his heart wheeze and gurgle and sputter, struggling to beat.

  He took the old man’s hands in his own and looked into the eyes of the Black Knight.

  Singleton’s assistant, a man named Stephen Hume, and his secretary, Billy Rogers, sat at the foot of the bed. “We’ve been in Washington all year. He has speeches to make. Fences to mend. He’s got piss-all to do, Doc,” Hume said accusingly, as if it were Rob J.’s fault Singleton was indisposed. Hume was a Scots name, but Rob J. didn’t warm up to him.

  “You’re to stay in bed,” he told Singleton bluntly. “Forget about speeches and fences. Go on a light diet. Drink alcohol sparingly.”

  Rogers glared. “That’s not what the other two doctors told us. Dr. Barr said anyone would be worn out after travelin from Washington. That other fella from your town, Dr. Beckermann, he agreed with Barr, said all the congressman needs is home cookin and prairie air.”

  “We thought it’d be a good idea to call in several of you fellas,” Hume said, “in case there was difference of opinion. Which is what we’ve got, ain’t we. And the other docs disagree with you, two to one.”

  “Democratic. But this isn’t an election.” Rob J. turned to Singleton. “For your own survival, I hope you do what I advise.”

  The old, cold eyes were amused. “You’re a friend of State Senator Holden’s. His business partner in several ventures, if I have it right.”

  Hume chortled. “Nick’s a little impatient for the congressman to retire.”

  “I’m a doctor. I don’t give a damn about politics. You sent for me, Congressman.”

  Singleton nodded, shot a messaged glance at the other two men. Billy Rogers led Rob out of the room. When he tried to emphasize the gravity of Singleton’s condition, he got a secretary’s nod, a politician’s oily sentence of thanks. Rogers paid his fee as if tipping a stableboy, and he was quickly and smoothly eased outside the front door.

  A couple of hours later, riding Vicky down Main Street in Holden’s Crossing, he saw that Nick Holden’s intelligence system was working. Nick waited on the porch of Haskins’ Store, his chair tipped back against the wall, one boot up on the porch rail. When he spotted Rob J. he gestured him to the hitching post.

  Nick led him quickly into the store’s back room and made no attempt to hide his excitement.

  “Well?”

  “Well, what?”

  “I know you’ve just come from Sammil Singleton.”

  “I talk about my patients with my patients. Or sometimes with their loved ones. You one of Singleton’s loved ones?”

  Holden smiled. “I like him a whole lot.”

  “Liking him doesn’t do it, Nick.”

  “Don’t play games, Rob J. I only have to know one thing. Will he have to retire?”

  “You want to know, you ask him.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Holden said bitterly.

  Rob J. stepped carefully around a baited mousetrap as he left the storeroom. Nick’s rage followed after him along with the odor of leather harness and rotting seed potatoes. “Your trouble, Cole, is you’re too dumb to know who your goddam real friends are!”

  Probably Haskins had to be careful at day’s end to tuck away the cheese, cover the cracker barrel, things like that. Mice could play havoc with food merchandise at night, he reflected as he walked through the front of the store; and no way you could avoid having mice when you were this close to the prairie.

  Four days later, Samuel T. Singleton was seated at a table with two selectmen from Rock Island and three selectmen from Davenport, Iowa, explaining the tax position of the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad, which was proposing to build a railroad bridge across the Mississippi between their two towns. He was discussing rights of way when he gave a small sigh, as if in exasperation, and slumped where he sat. By the time Dr. Tobias had been sent for and arrived in the saloon, everyone in the neighborhood knew Sammil Singleton had died.

  It took the governor a week to appoint his successor. Immediately following the funeral, Nick Holden had left for Springfield to try to snare the appointment. Rob could imagine the arm-twisting in which he engaged, and no doubt there was effort expended by Nick’s sometime drinking friend, the Kentucky-born lieutenant governor. But evidently the Singleton organization had drinking friends of its own, and the governor appointed Singleton’s aide, Stephen Hume, to fill the unexpired eighteen months of the term.

  “Nick’s goose is cooked,” Jay Geiger observed. “Between now and the end of the term, Hume will dig in. He’ll run next time as the incumbent, and he’ll be next to impossible for Nick to beat.”

  Rob J. didn’t care. He was engrossed with what was happening within the walls of his own home.

  After two weeks he stopped tying his son’s hands. Shaman no longer attempted to sign, but he didn’t speak either. There was something dead and gray in the little boy’s eyes. They hugged him a lot, but the boy was only momentarily comforted. Whenever Rob looked at his child, he felt self-doubt and helplessness.

  Meanwhile, all those around him followed his directions as though he were infallible in the treatment of deafness. When they talked to Shaman, they spoke slowly and enunciated distinctly, first pointing to their mouths when they had gained his attention, encouraging him to read their lips.

  It was Makwa-ikwa who thought of a new approach to the problem. She told Rob how she and the other Sauk girls had been taught to speak English so quickly and effectively at the Evangelical School for Indian Girls: they had not been passed anything at mealtimes unless it was requested in English.

  Sarah exploded with anger when Rob discussed it with her. “It was one thing to truss him like a slave. Now you will starve him too!”

  But Rob J. didn’t have many things to try, and he was growing desperate. He talked long and earnestly to Alex, who agreed to cooperate, and he asked his wife to make a special meal. Shaman had a passion for sweet-and-sour, and Sarah prepared stewed chicken with dumplings, and hot rhubarb pie for dessert.

  That evening, when the family was seated around the table and she brought in the first course, the sequence was much as it had been for several weeks. Rob lifted the cover from a steaming bowl and let the mouth-watering scent of the chicken, dumplings, and vegetables waft across the table.

  He served Sarah first, and then Alex. He waved his hand until he had gained Shaman’s attention, and then he pointed to his own mouth. “Chicken,” he said, holding up the serving bowl. “Dumplings.”

  Shaman stared at him silently.

  Rob J. placed food in his own plate, and sat.

  Shaman watched his parents and his brother eating busily, and he lifted his empty plate and grunted in annoyance.

  Rob pointed to his own mouth and lifted the serving bowl. “Chicken.”

  Shaman held out his plate.

  “Chicken,” Rob J. said again. When his son remained silent, he set down the bowl and resumed eating.

  Shaman began to sob. He looked at his mother, who, forcing herself to eat, had just finished her portion. She pointed to her mouth and held out her plate to Rob. “Chicken, please,” she said, and he served her.

  Alex, too, asked for a second helping and was given it. Shaman sat and shook with grief, his face screwed up against this fresh assault, this new terror, deprivation of his food.

  The chicken and dumplings eaten, the plates were removed, and then Sarah carried in the dessert, hot from the oven, and a pitcher of milk. Sarah was proud of her rhubarb pie, made from an old Virginia recipe, lots of maple sugar bubbling together with the tart juices of the rhubarb
to caramelize on top as a hint of the pleasure contained under the crust.

  “Pie,” Rob said, and the word was repeated by Sarah and Alex.

  “Pie,” he said to Shaman.

  It hadn’t worked. His heart was breaking. He could not, after all, permit his son to starve, he told himself; better a mute child than a dead child.

  Morosely he cut himself a piece.

  “Pie!”

  It was a howl of outrage, a blow against all the injustices of the world. The voice was familiar and beloved, a voice he hadn’t heard for a while. Still, he sat for a moment stupidly, trying to make certain it hadn’t been Alex who had shouted.

  “Pie! Pie! Pie!” Shaman screamed, “PIE!”

  The small body shook with fury and frustration. Shaman’s face was wet with tears. He pulled away from his mother’s attempt to wipe his nose.

  Niceties didn’t matter at this moment, Rob J. thought; “please” and “thank you” could come later too. He pointed to his own mouth.

  “Yes,” he told his son, nodding and cutting a huge piece at the same time. “Yes, Shaman! Pie.”

  27

  POLITICS

  The flat tall-grass section of land south of Jay Geiger’s farm had been bought from the government by a Swedish immigrant named August Lund. Lund spent three years breaking thick sod, but in the spring of his fourth year his young wife sickened and died quickly of cholera, and her loss poisoned the place for him and brought on a darkness of spirit. Jay bought his cow and Rob J. bought his harnesses and some tools, both of them overpaying because they knew how desperately Lund wanted to get away from there. He returned to Sweden, and for two seasons his newly broken fields remained bleak as a deserted female, struggling to return to what they once were. Then the property was sold by a land broker in Springfield, and several months later a two-wagon caravan arrived bringing a man and five women to live on the land.

  Had they been a pimp and his whores they would have caused less excitement in Holden’s Crossing. They were a priest and nuns of the Roman Catholic Order of Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi, and word sped throughout Rock Island County that they’d come to open a parochial school and lure young children into popery. Holden’s Crossing needed both a school and a church. Each project most likely would have remained in the talking stages for years, but the arrival of the Franciscans stirred up a frenzy. After a series of “social evenings” in farmhouse parlors, a building committee was named to raise funds for a church structure, but Sarah was irked.

  “They simply can’t agree, like squabbling children. Some want just a log cabin, to be economical. Others want wood frame, or brick, or stone.” She favored a stone building herself, with a bell tower, a steeple, and stained-glass windows—a real church. All through the summer, fall, and winter there were arguments, but by March, faced with the knowledge that the townspeople also had to pay for a schoolhouse, the building committee decided on a simple wooden church, the walls planked up and down instead of clapboarded, and painted white. The controversy over the architecture paled next to the cold-eyed debate regarding affiliation with a denomination, but there were more Baptists in Holden’s Crossing than any other group, and the majority prevailed. The committee contacted the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Rock Island, which helped with advice and a little seed cash in order to get a new sister church off to a start.

  Money was subscribed, and Nick Holden dazzled everyone with the largest gift, five hundred dollars. “It’ll take more than philanthropy to get him elected to Congress,” Rob J. told Jay. “Hume has worked hard and has the nomination of the Democratic party sewed up.”

  Evidently Holden thought so too, for soon it became general knowledge that Nick had broken with the Democrats. Some expected him to seek the support of the Whigs, but instead he declared himself a member of the American party.

  “American party. That’s a new one on me,” Jay said.

  Rob enlightened him, remembering the anti-Irish sermons and articles he’d seen everywhere in Boston. “It’s a party that glorifies the native-born white American and stands for suppression of Catholics and the foreign-born.”

  “Nick plays to whatever passions and fears he can find,” Jay said. “The other evening, on the porch of the general store, he was warning folks about Makwa’s little group of Sauks as though they were Black Hawk’s band. Got some of the men all worked up. Said that if we don’t watch out there’s going to be bloodshed, farmers with their throats cut.” He made a face. “Our Nick. Ever the statesman.”

  One day a letter came for Rob J. from his brother, Herbert, in Scotland. It was an answer to a letter sent by Rob eight months before, describing his family, his practice, the farm. His letter had painted a realistic picture of his life in Holden’s Crossing, and in return he had asked Herbert to send him news of those he loved in the old country. Now his brother’s letter conveyed dread information that wasn’t unexpected, for when Rob had fled Scotland he’d known his mother’s life was winding down. She had died three months after his departure, Herbert wrote, and was buried next to their father in the mossy “new yard” of the kirk in Kilmarnock. Their father’s brother, Ranald, had died the following year.

  Herbert wrote that he’d expanded the flock and built a new barn, using stone hauled from the base of the cliff. He mentioned these things gingerly, obviously pleased to let Rob know he was doing well with the land but carefully avoiding any discussion of prosperity. There must be times when Herbert feared his return to Scotland, Rob realized. The land had been Rob J.’s birthright as the elder son; the night before he left Scotland he had dazed Herbert, who passionately loved sheep farming, by signing the holding over to the younger brother.

  Herbert wrote that he’d married Alice Broome, daughter of John Broome, who judged at the Kilmarnock Lamb Show, and his wife, Elsa, who had been a McLarkin. Rob remembered Alice Broome vaguely, a thin mouse-haired girl who had kept one hand covering her uncertain smile because her teeth were long. She and Herbert had three children, all daughters, but Alice was bearing again and this time Herbert hoped for a son, for the sheep croft was growing and he needed help.

  The political situation having quieted, will you be thinking of coming home?

  Rob could sense the tension of the question in Herbert’s cramped writing, the shame over the sweat and apprehension. He sat at once and composed a letter to erase his brother’s fears. He wouldn’t return to Scotland, he wrote, unless in a healthy and prosperous retirement someday he might visit. He sent his love to his sister-in-law and his nieces, and commended Herbert for the success he was making; it was clear, he wrote, that the Cole farm was in proper ownership.

  When he finished the letter, he went for a walk along the river path, all the way to the stone pile marking the end of his land and the beginning of Jay’s. He knew he wouldn’t leave here. Illinois had captured him, despite its blizzards and destructive tornadoes, and its wild extremes of temperature, high and low. Or maybe because of those things and a lot more.

  This Cole farm was better land than the keeping in Kilmarnock, deeper loam, more water, fatter grass. Already he felt responsible for it. He had memorized its smells and sounds, loving the way it was in the hot, lemony mornings of summer when the wind made the tall grasses whisper, and in the brutal, cold embrace of deep-drifted winter. It was his land, for a fact.

  A couple of days later, in Rock Island to attend a meeting of the Medical Society, he dropped by the courthouse and filled out a document declaring his desire for naturalization.

  Roger Murray, the court clerk, read the application fussily. “A three-year delay, you know, Doctor, before you can become a citizen.”

  Rob J. nodded. “I can wait. Not going anywhere,” he said.

  The more Tom Beckermann drank, the more lopsided the practice of medicine became in Holden’s Crossing, the load falling on Rob J., who cursed Beckermann’s alcoholism and wished a third doctor would move to town. Steve Hume and Billy Rogers added to his problem by whispering f
ar and wide that Doc Cole had been the only medico to warn Sammil Singleton about how sick he really was. If Sammil had only listened to Cole, they said, he might be here today. Rob J.’s legend grew, and new patients sought him out.

  He worked hard at reserving time to be with Sarah and the boys. Shaman amazed him; it was as if a plant organism had been interrupted and endangered but then had responded with a burst of growth, green tendrils every-where. He developed before their eyes. Sarah, Alex, the Sauks, Alden, everyone who lived on the Cole place practiced lip-reading with him long and faithfully—indeed, almost hysterically, so great was their relief at the end of his silence—and once the boy began to speak, he talked and talked. He had learned to read a year before the onset of his deafness, and now they were hard pressed to keep him in books.

  Sarah taught her sons what she was able, but she’d finished only a sixgrade rural school and was aware of her limitations. Rob J. drilled them in Latin and arithmetic. Alex did well; he was bright and worked hard. But it was Shaman who stunned with his quickness. Something in Rob ached when he observed the boy’s natural intelligence.

  “He’d have been some doctor, I know it,” he told Jay regretfully one hot afternoon as they sat on the shady side of the Geiger house and drank ginger water. He admitted to Jay that it was built into a Cole to hope that his man-child would grow to be a physician.

  Jay nodded sympathetically. “Well, there’s Alex. He’s a likely lad.”

  Rob J. shook his head. “It’s the damnedest thing—Shaman, the one who won’t ever be a doctor because he can’t hear, is the one who’s keen to go on house calls with me. Alex, who can be anything when he grows up, chooses to follow Alden Kimball around the farm like a shadow. He’d rather watch the hired man put in a fencepost or slice off some feisty lamb’s balls than anything I can do.”

  Jay grinned. “And wouldn’t you, at their age? Well, maybe the brothers will farm together. They’re both fine boys.”

  Inside the house, Lillian was practicing Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto. She was very serious about her fingering and it was excruciating to hear her play the same phrase until it had exactly the right color and expression; but when she was satisfied and let the notes run, it was music. The Babcock piano had arrived perfect in function, but a long, shallow scrape, origin unknown, marred the oiled perfection of one of the sleek walnut legs. Lillian had wept to see it, but her husband said the scratch would never be repaired, “so it’ll remind our grandchildren how we traveled to get here.”