by Noah Gordon
“What the hell are you doing?” Mr. Byers held his arms up to protect his face and squealed in pain as the pointer landed on his ribs. He took a threatening step toward Jay. “You damn idiot! You crazy little Jew!”
Jay kept hitting the teacher and backing him toward the door until Mr. Byers bolted through and slammed it. Jay took Mr. Byers’ coat and flung it through the door onto the snow, and then he came back, breathing hard. He sat in the teacher’s chair.
“School is dismissed for the day,” he said finally, then collected Rachel and took her home on his horse, leaving his sons David and Herman to walk home with the Cole boys.
It was really cold outside. Shaman wore two scarves, one around his head and under his chin, the other around his mouth and nose, but still his nostrils frosted closed for a moment every time he breathed.
When they got home Alex ran inside to tell their mother what had happened in school, but Shaman walked past the house, down to the river, where he saw that the ice had cracked in the cold, which must make a wonderful sound. The cold had split a big cotton wood tree too, not far from Makwa’s snow-covered hedonoso-te; it looked as though it had been exploded by lightning.
He was glad Rachel had told Jay. He was relieved that he didn’t have to murder Mr. Byers and that now most likely he wouldn’t ever have to be hanged. But something pestered at him like a rash that wouldn’t go away: if Alden thought it was all right to fight when you had to, and if Jay thought it was all right to fight to protect his daughter, what was wrong with his father?
32
NIGHT DOCTORING
Within hours after Marshall Byers had fled Holden’s Crossing, a hiring committee was appointed to find a new teacher. Paul Williams was named to it, to demonstrate that nobody blamed the blacksmith because his cousin, Mr. Byers, had turned out to be a bad apple. Jason Geiger was named to it, to show that folks trusted he had behaved correctly in driving Mr. Byers away. Carroll Wilkenson was named to it, which was fortunate, because the insurance agent had just paid off a small life-insurance policy that John Meredith, a storekeeper over in Rock Island, had had on his father. Meredith had mentioned to Carroll how grateful he was to his niece, Dorothy Burnham, for leaving her schoolteaching job in order to nurse his father through his last days. When the hiring committee interviewed Dorothy Burnham, Wilkenson liked her for her homely face and the fact that she was an unmarried spinster in her late twenties, and so was unlikely to be taken from the school by marriage. Paul Williams endorsed her because the sooner they hired someone, the quicker people were going to forget his damned cousin Marshall. Jay was drawn to her because she spoke of teaching with a quiet confidence, and with a warmth that indicated a calling. They hired her for $17.50 a term, $1.50 less than Mr. Byers because she was a woman.
Eight days after Mr. Byers ran from the schoolhouse, Miss Burnham was the teacher. She kept to Mr. Byers’ seating arrangement because the children were accustomed to it. She’d taught at two previous schools, one in the village of Bloom that was a smaller school than this one, and the other a larger school in Chicago. The only handicap she’d encountered previously in a child was lameness, and she was keenly interested that there was a deaf boy in her charge.
In her first conversation with young Robert Cole she was intrigued that he could read her lips. To her annoyance, it took her almost half a day to comprehend that from his seat on the bench he couldn’t see what most of the other children were saying. There was one chair in the schoolhouse for visiting adults, and Miss Burnham now made that Shaman’s, placing it in front of the bench and off to the side so he could see her lips as well as his schoolmates’.
The other big change for Shaman occurred when it was time for music. As had become his custom, he started to take out the stove ashes and bring in the firewood, but this time Miss Burnham stopped him and told him to resume his seat.
Dorothy Burnham gave her pupils the pitch by breathing into a small round tone pipe, and then taught them to put words to the ascending scale: “Our-school-is-a-pre-cious-ha-ven!”, and to the descending scale: “And-we-learn-to-think-and-grow-here!” By the middle of the first song it was clear she hadn’t done the deaf boy a good turn by including him, for young Cole simply sat and watched, and soon his eyes were dulled by a patience she found unendurable. He should be given an instrument through whose vibrations he might “hear” the rhythm of the music, she decided. Perhaps a drum? But the noise of a drum would destroy the music made by the hearing children.
She gave the problem some thought and then she went to Haskins’ General Store and begged a cigar box, placing into it six red marbles, the kind used by boys to play knuckles-down in the spring. The marbles made too much noise when their container was shaken, but when she glued soft blue cloth from a discarded chemise to the inside of the box, the results were satisfactory.
Next morning during music, while Shaman held the box, she shook it to keep time with each note as the pupils sang “America.” He caught on, reading the teacher’s lips to time his box-shaking. He couldn’t sing, but he became acquainted with rhythm and timing, mouthing the lyrics of each song as sung by his classmates, who soon were accustomed to the soft thudding of “Robert’s box.” Shaman loved the cigar box. Its label bore a picture of a dark-haired queen with a prominent chiffon-covered bosom and the words Panatellas de la Jardines de la Reina, and the imprint of the Gottlieb Tobacco Importing Company of New York City. When he lifted the box to his nose he could smell aromatic cedar and the faint odors of Cuban leaf.
Miss Burnham soon had every boy take turns coming to school early to take out the ashes and bring in the firewood. Although Shaman never thought about it in those terms, his life had been dramatically changed because Marshall Byers had been unable to refrain from stroking adolescent breasts.
At the frigid beginning of March, with the prairie still frozen hard as flint, patients crowded Rob J.’s waiting room at the house every morning, and when his office hours were over he pushed himself to make as many calls as possible, because in a few weeks the mud would make travel torturous. When Shaman wasn’t in school, his father allowed him to make home visits with him, because the boy looked after the horse and allowed the doctor to hurry inside to his patient.
Late one leaden afternoon they were on the river road, having just been to see Freddy Wall, who had the pleurisy. Rob J. was debating whether to go on to visit Anne Frazier, who had been poorly all winter, or to let it go until the next day, when three horsemen moved their mounts out of the trees. They were bundled in clothing and tie-cloths against the cold, as were the two Coles, but Rob J. didn’t miss the fact that each of them wore a sidearm, two of the guns in belts worn outside their bulky coats, the third in a holster attached to the front of a saddle.
“You the doc, ain’tcha.”
Rob J. nodded. “Who are you?”
“We got a friend needs doctorin bad. Little accident.”
“What kind of accident? Break any bones, you think?”
“No. Well, don’t know for certain. Mebbe. Shot. Up here,” he said, stroking his left arm near the shoulder.
“Losing much blood, is he?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ll come, but I’ll drop the boy at home first.”
“No,” the man said again, and Rob J. looked at him. “We know where you live, other side of the township. We got a long ride to our friend, this direction.”
“How long a ride?”
“Most of an hour.”
Rob J. sighed. “Lead away,” he said.
The man who had done the talking did the leading. It wasn’t lost on Rob J. that the other two men waited until he had followed and then rode well behind, boxing in the doctor’s horse.
In the beginning they rode northwest, Rob J. was certain of that. He was aware they doubled back and twisted against their own route from time to time, the way a hounded fox is supposed to. The stratagem worked, for he was soon confused and lost. In half an hour or so they came to a stretch of woo
ded hills that rose between the river and the prairie. Between the hills were sloughs; frozen passable now, they would be impregnable mud moats when the melt came.
The leader stopped. “Gotta blindfold you.”
Rob J. knew better than to protest. “Just a moment,” he said, and turned to face Shaman. “They’ll cover your eyes, but don’t you be afraid,” he said, and was gratified when Shaman nodded. The bandanna that blinded Rob J. was none too clean and he hoped Shaman’s luck was better, hating the thought of a stranger’s sweat and dried snot against his son’s skin.
They put Rob J.’s horse on a lead. It seemed a long while that they rode on between the hills, but probably time passed more slowly for him while blindfolded. At length he felt the horse beneath him begin to climb one of the slopes, and presently they drew up and came to a halt. When the blindfold was removed he saw they were in front of a small structure, more shack than cabin, beneath large trees. Daylight was fading, and their eyes quickly adjusted. He saw his child blinking. “You doing fine, Shaman?”
“Just fine, Pa.”
He knew that face. Searching it, he saw Shaman was sensible enough to be quite scared. But as they stamped their feet to bring back their circulation and then entered the shack, Rob J. was half-amused to see that Shaman’s eyes gleamed with interest as well as fear, and he was furious at himself because he hadn’t somehow found a way to leave the boy behind, out of harm’s way.
Inside, there were red coals in the fireplace and the air was warm but very bad. There was no furniture. A fat man lay on the floor propped against a saddle, and by the firelight Shaman could see he was bald but had as much coarse black hair on his face as most men have on their heads. Rumpled blankets on the floor indicated where others had slept.
“Took you long enough,” the fat man said. He was holding a black jug, and he took a swallow from it and coughed.
“Didn’t tarry any,” the man who had ridden the lead horse said sullenly. When he took off the scarf that had protected his face, Shaman saw he had a small white beard and looked older than the others. He put his hand on Shaman’s shoulder and pushed. “Sit,” he said as if talking to a dog. Shaman squatted not far from the fire. He was content to stay there because he had a good view of the wounded man’s mouth, and his father’s.
The older man took his pistol from its holster and pointed it at Shaman. “You better fix up our friend real good, Doc.” Shaman was very frightened. The hole at the end of the barrel looked like an unblinking round eye that stared directly at him.
“I don’t do anything while somebody holds a gun,” his father said to the man on the floor.
The fat man appeared to consider. “You get out,” he told his men.
“Before you go,” Shaman’s father told them, “bring in wood and build up the fire. Put water on to boil. You have another lamp?”
“Lantern,” the old man said.
“Get it.” Shaman’s father put his hand on the fat man’s forehead. He unbuttoned the man’s shirt and drew it aside. “When did this happen?”
“Yesterday morning.” The man looked at Shaman out of hooded eyes. “This is your boy.”
“My younger son.”
“The deef one.”
“… Appears you know a few things about my family.”
The man nodded. “It’s the older one some say is my brother Will’s get. Anything like my Willy, he’s already a damn hellion. You know who I am?”
“I can make a good guess.” Now Shaman saw his father lean forward just an inch or two and fix the other man with his eyes. “They’re both my boys. If you’re talking of my elder son—he’s my elder son. And you’re going to stay away from him in the future, just as you have in the past.”
The man on the floor smiled. “Now, why shouldn’t I claim him?”
“Most important reason is he’s a fine, straight boy with every chance for a decent life. And if he was your brother’s, you don’t ever want to see him where you are right now, lying like some hurt and hunted animal in the dirt of a stinking little hideout pigsty.”
They looked at one another for a long moment. Then the man moved and grimaced, and Shaman’s father began to doctor him. He took away the jug, got the man’s shirt off.
“No exit wound.”
“Oh, the bastard’s in there, coulda told you that. Gonna hurt like hell when you probe, I reckon. Can I have another jolt or two?”
“No, I’ll give you something, put you to sleep.”
The man glared. “I ain’t goin to sleep so you can do whichever the hell you want, and me helpless.”
“Your decision,” Shaman’s father said. He gave the jug back and let the man drink while he waited for the water to finish heating. Then with brown soap and a clean rag from his medical bag he washed the area around the wound, which Shaman couldn’t see clearly. Dr. Cole took a thin steel probe and slipped it into the bullet hole; and the fat man froze and opened his jaw and stuck out his big red tongue as far as it would go.
“… It’s in there almost at the bone, but there’s no fracture. Bullet must have been nearly spent when it hit.”
“Lucky shot,” said the man. “Sumbitch was a good distance away.” His beard was matted with sweat and his skin was gray.
Shaman’s father took a foreign-body forceps from his bag. “This is what I’ll use to remove it. It’s a lot thicker than the probe. It’s going to hurt a lot more.
“Best trust me,” he said simply.
The patient turned his head and Shaman couldn’t see what he said, but he must have asked for something stronger than the whiskey. His father took an ether cone from his bag and motioned to Shaman, who had watched ether being administered several times but never before had helped. Now he held the cone carefully over the fat man’s mouth and nose while his father dripped the ether. The bullet hole was larger than Shaman had expected, with a purple rim. When the ether had taken, his father worked the forceps in very carefully, a little bit at a time. A bright red drop appeared at the edge of the hole and spilled over to run down the man’s arm. But when the forceps were withdrawn, they gripped a lead slug.
His father rinsed it clean and dropped it on the blanket for the man to find when he came around.
When his father called the men in out of the cold, they brought in a pot of white beans they’d been keeping frozen on the roof. After they thawed it on the fire, they gave some to Shaman and his father. It had bits of something in it that maybe was rabbit, and Shaman thought it would have profited from molasses, but he ate it hungrily.
After supper his father heated more water and commenced to wash clean his patient’s entire body, which the other men at first regarded with suspicion and then with boredom. They lay down and one by one drifted off, but Shaman stayed awake. Soon he was watching the patient’s awful retching.
“Whiskey and ether don’t mix happily,” his father said. “You go to sleep. I’ll tend to it.”
Shaman did, and gray light was coming through the cracks in the walls when his father shook him awake and told him to put on his outside clothes. The fat man was lying there watching them.
“It will give you a fair amount of pain for two, three weeks,” his father said. “I’m leaving you some morphine, not much, but all I have with me. Most important thing is to keep it clean. If it begins to mortify, you call me and I’ll come back right away.”
The man snorted. “Hell, we’re gonna be long gone from this place afore you can come back.”
“Well, if you have trouble, you send for me. I’ll come to wherever you are.”
The man nodded. “You pay him good,” he told the man with the white beard, who took a wad of bills from a pack and handed them over. Shaman’s father peeled off two singles and dropped the rest on the blanket. “Dollar and a half for the night home visit, fifty cents for the ether.” He started to leave but turned back. “You fellas know anything of a man named Ellwood Patterson? Sometimes travels with a man named Hank Cough and a younger man named Lenny?”<
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Their faces looked at him blankly. The man on the floor shook his head. Shaman’s father nodded, and they went out, into air that smelled of nothing but trees.
This time only the man who had ridden lead came with them. He waited until they were mounted before he fixed the neckerchiefs over their eyes again. Rob J. could hear his son’s breathing become faster and wished he had spoken to the boy while Shaman could see his lips.
His own ears were working overtime. Their horse was being led; he could hear the hooves ahead of him. There were no hooves behind. Still, it would be easy for them to have someone waiting on the trail. All he would have to do was let them ride past, lean forward, place a gun only a few inches from a blindfolded head, and pull the trigger.
It was a long ride. When finally they stopped, he knew if a bullet was going to come, it would be now. But their blindfolds were pulled off.
“You just keep riding that way, hear? Presently you’ll come to landmarks you know.”
Blinking, Rob J. nodded, not telling him he already recognized where they were. They rode off in one direction, the gunman in another.
Eventually Rob J. stopped in a copse so they could relieve themselves and stretch their legs.
“Shaman,” he said. “Yesterday. Did you watch my conversation with that fellow who was shot?”
The boy nodded too, looking at him.
“Son. Did you understand what we were talking about?”
Nodded again.
Rob J. believed him. “Now, how come you understand talk like that? Has somebody been saying things to you about …” He couldn’t say “your mother.” “… your brother?”
“Some boys in school …”
Rob J. sighed. An old man’s eyes in such a young face, he thought. “Well, Shaman, here’s the thing. I think what happened—our being with those people, treating that man who was shot, and especially what he and I talked about—I think those things should be our secret. Yours and mine. Because to tell your brother and your mother about it, that could hurt. Cause them anxiety.”