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

by Noah Gordon

  The First Church of Holden’s Crossing was dedicated late enough in June so the celebration spilled over into the Fourth of July. Both Congressman Steven Hume and Nick Holden, a candidate for Hume’s office, spoke at the dedication. Rob J. thought Hume seemed relaxed and comfortable, while Nick sounded like a man desperate with the knowledge that he was running far behind.

  The Sunday after the holiday, the first of what would be a long series of visiting preachers conducted the sabbath service. Sarah admitted to Rob J. that she felt nervous, and he knew she was remembering the Baptist preacher at the Great Awakening who had called down hellfire upon women who bore children out of wedlock. She would have preferred a gentler shepherd, like Mr. Arthur Johnson, the Methodist minister who had married her to Rob J., but the choice of a clergyman would be made by the entire congregation. So all summer long, preachers of every type came to Holden’s Crossing. Rob went to several services to offer his wife support, but mostly he stayed away.

  In August a printed flier tacked up outside the general store proclaimed the coming visit of one Ellwood R. Patterson, who would deliver a lecture entitled “The Tide That Threatens Christendom” at the church on Saturday, September 2, at seven P.M., and then would conduct the service and preach on Sunday morning.

  On that Saturday morning a man appeared at Rob J.’s dispensary. He sat patiently in the small parlor that served as waiting room while Rob dealt with the middle finger of Charley Haskins’ right hand, which had been pinched between two logs. The son of the storekeeper, twenty-year-old Charley was a woodcutter by trade. He was in pain and annoyed at himself for the carelessness that had led to the accident, but he had a brashly uninhibited mouth and irrepressible good humor.

  “Well, Doc. This going to keep me from getting married?”

  “You’ll use the finger as well as ever, eventually,” Rob said dryly. “You’re going to lose the nail, but it’ll grow back. Now, get out of here. And return in three days so I can change the dressing.”

  Still grinning, he brought in the man from the waiting room, who introduced himself as Ellwood Patterson. The visiting preacher, Rob realized, remembering the name from the fliers. He noted a male of perhaps forty years, overweight but erect, with a large arrogant face, black hair cut long, a florid complexion, and small but prominent blue veins on his nose and cheeks.

  Mr. Patterson said he suffered from boils. When he removed the clothing from the upper part of his body, Rob J. saw on his skin the pigmented spots of healed areas interspersed with a dozen open sores, pustular eruptions, scabby and granulated vesicles, and soft gummy tumors.

  He looked at the man with sympathy. “You know you have a disease?”

  “I’m told it’s syphilis. Someone at the saloon said you’re a special doctor. I thought I’d see if there wasn’t something you could do.”

  Three years ago, a whore in Springfield had done him the French way and subsequently he’d developed a hard chancre and a swelling behind the balls, he told Rob. “I went back to see her. She won’t be giving a dose to anyone else.”

  A couple of months later he was plagued by fever and copper-colored body sores, as well as severe pains in his joints and in his head. Every symptom went away on its own and he thought he was all right, but then these sores and lumps appeared.

  Rob wrote his name on a record sheet, and next to it, “tertiary syphilis.” “Where are you from, sir?”

  “… Chicago.” But his patient had hesitated just long enough for Rob J. to suspect he was lying. It didn’t matter.

  “There’s no cure, Mr. Patterson.”

  “Yeah … what happens to me now?”

  It wouldn’t serve him to dissemble. “If it infects your heart, you’ll die. If it goes to your brain, you’ll go insane. If it enters your bones or your joints, you’ll be crippled. But often none of these awful things happens. Sometimes the symptoms just go away and don’t come back. What you have to do is hope and believe you’re one of the lucky ones.”

  Patterson grimaced. “So far the sores haven’t been visible when I’m dressed. Can you give me something to keep them off my face and neck? I lead a public life.”

  “I can sell you some salve. I don’t know as it’ll work on this kind of sore,” Rob said gently, and Mr. Patterson nodded and reached for his shirt.

  Next morning a boy in bare feet and ragged pants came on a mule just after dawn and said: Please, suh, but his mammy was doin poorly and could the doctor kindly come? He was Malcolm Howard, eldest son of a family that had come up from Louisiana only a few months ago and settled in bottomland six miles downriver. Rob saddled Vicky and followed the mule over rough trails until they came to a cabin that was only slightly better shelter than the chicken coop leaning against it. Inside he found Mollie Howard with her husband, Julian, and their brood gathered about her bed. The woman was deep in the throes of malaria but he saw that she wasn’t badly off, and a few cheerful words and a good dose of quinine eased the patient’s concern, and the family’s.

  Julian Howard made no move toward payment, nor did Rob J. ask for it, seeing how little the family had. Howard followed him outside and engaged him in conversation about the latest action by their U.S. senator, Stephen A. Douglas, who had just successfully pushed through Congress the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established two new territories in the West. Douglas’ bill called for allowing the territorial legislatures to decide whether the areas should have slavery, and for that reason public opinion in the North was running strongly against the bill.

  “Them goddamn northerners, what do they know about nigras? Some of us farmers is gettin together a little organization to see that Illinois smartens up and allows a man to own slaves. Mebbe you’d like to join with us? Them dark-skinned people was meant to work a white man’s fields. I see you all got you a coupla red nigras workin your place.”

  “They’re Sauks, not slaves. They work for wages. I don’t believe in slavery myself.”

  They looked at one another. Howard reddened. He was silent, doubtless constrained from setting Rob straight by the fact that the uppity doctor hadn’t charged for his services. For his part, Rob was happy to turn away.

  He left more quinine and was able to ride back home without delay, but when he got there he found Gus Schroeder waiting in a panic because Alma, in cleaning out the stall, had foolishly gotten in between the wall and the big brindle bull they were so proud of. The bull had nudged her and knocked her down just as Gus entered the barn. “Then the Gott-dam thing won’t move! Just stants over her, dropping his horns, until I had to take the hayfork and jap him to get him away. She says she’s not bad hurt, but you know Alma.”

  So, still without breakfast, he went to the Schroeders’. Alma was all right, if pale and shaken. She winced when he pressed the fifth and sixth ribs on her left side, and he didn’t dare take a chance on not binding her up. He knew it mortified her to undress in front of him, and he asked Gus to tend to his horse so her husband wouldn’t witness her humiliation. He had her hold up her own big floppy blue-veined breasts and touched her fat white flesh as little as possible while he bound her, keeping up a steady conversation about sheep and wheat and his wife and children. When it was over, she managed to smile at him and went into the kitchen to make a fresh pot, and then the three of them sat over cups of coffee.

  Gus told him that Ellwood Patterson’s Saturday “lecture” had been an ill-disguised campaign speech for Nick Holden and the American party. “Folks figger Nick arranged for him to come.”

  The “Tide That Threatens Christendom,” according to Patterson, was the immigration of Catholics into the United States. The Schroeders had skipped church that morning for the first time; both Alma and Gus had been raised Lutherans, but they had had enough of Patterson at the lecture; he had said that the foreign-born—and that meant the Schroeders—were stealing the bread of American workmen. He had called for the waiting period for naturalization as a citizen to be changed from three years to twenty-one years.

 
Rob J. grimaced. “I wouldn’t want to wait that long,” he said. But all three of them had work to do that Sunday, and he thanked Alma for the coffee and went on his way. He had to ride five miles upriver to the homestead of John Ashe Gilbert, whose elderly father-in-law, Fletcher White, was down with a bad cold. White was eighty-three and a tough old bird; he’d weathered bronchial problems before, and Rob J. was confident he would again. He had told Fletcher’s daughter Suzy to pour hot drinks down the old man’s throat and boil kettle after kettle so Fletcher could breathe in the steam. Rob J. checked on him more often than was necessary, probably, but he especially valued his aged patients, because there were few of them. Pioneers were likely to be strong young folks who left the old folks behind them when they traveled west, and old men who made the trip were rare.

  He found Fletcher much improved. Suzy Gilbert gave him a lunch of fried quail and potato pancakes and asked him to stop at the house of her near neighbors, the Bakers, where one of the sons had an infected toe that needed to be opened. He found Donny Baker, age nineteen, very badly off, feverish, in intense pain from a terrible infection. Half the sole of the boy’s right foot was blackened. Rob amputated two toes and opened the foot and inserted a wick, but he had real doubts about whether the foot could be saved, and he had seen numerous cases in which this kind of infection couldn’t be stopped with only the amputation of a foot.

  It was late afternoon when he headed home. He was halfway there when he heard a halloo on the trail and pulled up Vicky so Mort London could catch up to him on his big chestnut gelding. “Sheriff.”

  “Doc, I …” Mort took off his hat and irritably whacked at a buzzing fly. He sighed. “Damnedest thing. Afraid we got need of a coroner.”

  Rob J. felt irritable too. Suzy Gilbert’s potato pancakes sat heavy in his stomach. If Calvin Baker had gotten word to him a week earlier, he could have taken care of Donny Baker’s toe with little trouble. Now there was going to be big trouble, and perhaps tragedy. He was wondering how many of his patients out there were in harm’s way without letting him know it, and he determined to try to check up on at least three of them before nightfall. “You’d better get Beckermann,” he said. “I have lots to do today.”

  The sheriff turned the brim of his hat in his hands. “Uh. You might want to do this yourself, Dr. Cole.”

  “One of my patients?” He started to run down the list of possibilities.

  “It’s that Sauk female.”

  Rob J. looked at him.

  “Indian woman been workin for you,” London said.

  28

  THE ARREST

  He told himself it was Moon. It wasn’t that Moon was expendable, that he didn’t like her and value her, but only two Sauk women worked for him, and if it wasn’t Moon, the alternative was unthinkable.

  But, “The one helps you with your doctorin,” Mort London said. “Stabbed,” he said, “lots of times. Whoever did it beat her up some, before. Clothes ripped off. I believe she was raped.”

  For a few minutes they traveled in silence. “Might have been a few fellas gave it to her. A shitload of hoof marks in the clearing where she was found,” the sheriff said. Then he was quiet and they just rode.

  When they got to the farm, Makwa already had been brought into the shed. Outside, a small group had gathered between the dispensary and the barn, Sarah, Alex, Shaman, Jay Geiger, Moon and Comes Singing and their children. The Indians weren’t mourning aloud but their eyes betrayed their grief and futility, their knowledge that life was bad. Sarah was weeping quietly and Rob J. went to her and kissed her.

  Jay Geiger walked him away from the others. “I found her.” He shook his head as if to drive away an insect. “Lillian had sent me riding over to your place with some peach preserves for Sarah? Next thing I knew, I saw Shaman sleeping under a tree.”

  That shocked Rob J. “Shaman was there? Did he see Makwa?”

  “No, he didn’t. Sarah says Makwa took him out this morning to collect herbs in the river woods, the way she sometimes did. When he wore out, she just let him take a nap in the cool shade. And you know that no noises, shouts or screams or whatever, would disturb Shaman. I figured he wasn’t out there alone, so I just let him sleep and rode on a bit, into that clearing. And I found her …

  “She’s very bad to see, Rob. It took me a few minutes to get hold of myself. I went back and woke up the boy. But he didn’t see anything. I brought him here with me, and then I rode over to get London.”

  “It seems you’re forever bringing my boys home.”

  Jay peered at him. “You going to be all right?”

  Rob nodded.

  Jay, on the other hand, looked pale and miserable. He grimaced. “I guess you have work to do. The Sauks are going to want to clean her up and bury her.”

  “Keep everybody away for a while,” Rob J. said, and then he went into the shed alone and closed the door behind him.

  She was covered with a sheet. It wasn’t Jay or any of the Sauks who had brought her in. More likely a couple of London’s deputies, because they had dropped her almost carelessly onto the dissecting table, on her side, like some inanimate object of little worth, a log or a dead Indian woman. What he saw at first glance when he threw back the sheet was the rear of her head and her naked back, buttocks, and legs.

  The lividity showed she’d been on her back when she’d died; her back and flattened buttocks were purpled with pooled capillary blood. But in the violated crena ani he saw a crust of redness and a dried white smear that had been stained scarlet where it had met bleeding.

  Gently he turned her on her back again.

  There were scratches on her cheeks made by twigs when her face had been pushed into the forest floor.

  Rob J. had great tenderness for the female hind. His wife had discovered that early. Sarah loved to offer herself up to him, her eyes pressed into the pillow, her breasts mashed against the sheet, her slender, elegantly arched feet splayed, the split pear-shaped meniscuses riding white and pink above the golden fleece. An uncomfortable position, but one she took at times because his sexual excitement set off her own passion. Rob J. believed in coition as a form of love and not merely as a vehicle for procreation, therefore he didn’t hold a single orifice to be sacred as a sexual vessel. But as a physician he had observed that it was possible for the anal sphincter to lose elasticity if abused, and it was easy, when he made love to Sarah, to choose acts that would do no harm.

  Some person had shown no such consideration for Makwa.

  She had had the work-honed body of a woman a dozen years younger than what her age must have been. Years before, he and Makwa had come to terms with their physical attraction for one another, always held carefully in check. But there had been times when he had thought of her body, imagined what it would be like to make love to her. Now death had already begun its ruin. Her abdomen was swollen, her breasts flattened by the breakdown of tissue. There was considerable muscular stiffening, and he straightened her legs at the knees while it still was possible. Her pubes were like black wire wool, quite bloodied; perhaps it was a mercy she hadn’t lived, because her medicine would have been gone.

  “Basta-a-a-rds! Ye dirty bastards!”

  He wiped his eyes, realizing suddenly that those outside would have heard him screaming, knowing he was alone with Makwa-ikwa. Her upper torso was a mass of bruises and wounds, and her lower lip had been pulped, probably by a large fist.

  On the floor next to the examining table was the evidence gathered by the sheriff: her torn and bloodstained dress (an old gingham dress Sarah had given her); the basket more than half-full of mints, cress, and some kind of tree leaves, he thought black cherry; and one deerskin shoe. One shoe? He looked for the other and couldn’t find it. Her square brown feet were bare; they were tough, hard-used feet, the second toe of her left foot misshapen from an old fracture. He had seen her barefoot often and had wondered how she had broken that toe, but he hadn’t ever asked her.

  He looked up at her face and saw
his good friend. Her eyes were open but the vitreum had lost pressure and dried and they were the deadest thing about her. He closed them quickly and weighted the lids with pennies, but felt as if she still stared at him. In death her nose was more pronounced, uglier. She wouldn’t have been pretty as she aged, but her face already had great dignity. He shuddered and clasped his hands together tightly, like a child at prayer.

  “I am so sorry, Makwa-ikwa.” He had no illusion that she heard, but he drew comfort from speaking to her. He got pen and ink and paper and copied the runelike embossings on her breasts, sensing they were important. He didn’t know if anyone would understand them, because she hadn’t trained someone to succeed her as ghostkeeper of the Sauks, believing she had many years. He suspected she had hoped one of the children of Moon and Comes Singing would come to be a suitable apprentice.

  Quickly he sketched her face, the way it had been.

  Something terrible had happened to him as well as to her. Just as he would always have dreams of the medical-student-cum-executioner holding aloft the severed head of his friend Andrew Gerould of Lanark, he would dream of this death. He didn’t fully understand what made for friendship, any more than he knew what made for love, but somehow this Indian woman and he had become true friends and her death was his loss. For a moment he forgot his vow of nonviolence; if those who had done this were in his power, he could have squashed them like bugs.

  The moment passed. He tied a bandanna to cover his nose and mouth against the odor. Taking up a scalpel, he made quick slashes, opening her in a great U from shoulder to shoulder and then cutting between her breasts in a straight line that ran down to her navel, trisecting to form a bloodless Y. His fingers were without sensation and obeyed his mind clumsily; it was good he wasn’t cutting a living patient. Until he peeled back the three flaps, the grisly body was Makwa. But when he reached for the rib cutters to free the sternum, he forced himself into a different level of consciousness that drove everything from his mind but specific tasks, and he fell into the familiar routine and began to do the things that had to be done.