by Noah Gordon
“Exactly,” Sarah said. Rob J. opened his mouth, then closed it again and passed the peas and carrots to Rachel. Sarah went out to the kitchen and came back bearing a gigantic potato pudding baked to Lillian Geiger’s recipe, and Jay groaned that he was full, but passed his plate anyway.
When the Geigers took their children home, Jay urged Rob J. to come also, so Lillian could join them in playing trios. But he told Jay he was tired.
The truth was, he was feeling unsociable, snappish. To shake the mood, he stalked down to the river for the breeze. At Makwa’s grave he noted weeds and made short work of them, pulling savagely until they were gone.
He realized why the expression on George Cliburne’s face had been familiar. It was identical to the expression that had been on Andrew Gerould’s face the first time he had asked Rob to write the broadside against the English administration and had been refused. The features of both men had been captive to a mixture of feelings—fatalism, stubborn strength, and the uneasiness of knowing that they had made themselves vulnerable to his character and his continued silence.
34
THE RETURN
On a morning when the dawn mist hung like heavy steam over the river and clung to the strip of woodland, Shaman wandered out of the house and bypassed the outhouse to piss languidly into the larger flow. An orange disk was burning through the upper reaches of the fog and turning the lower layers into pale dazzle. The world was new and cool and smelled good, and what he was able to see of the river and woods matched the permanent peace in his ears. If fishing was going to be done that day, it would have to be early, he told himself.
The boy turned from the river. Between him and the house was the grave, and when he saw the figure through the tatters of fog he felt no fear, only a quick struggle between disbelief and an overwhelming rush of the sweetest kind of happiness and thanksgiving. Ghost, I call you today. Ghost, I speak to you now. “Makwa!” he called joyfully, and moved forward.
“Shaman?”
When he reached her, his first crushing realization was that it wasn’t Makwa.
“Moon?” he said, the name a question because she looked so bad.
Behind Moon, then, he saw two other figures, two men. One was an Indian he didn’t know, and the other was Stone Dog, who had worked for Jay Geiger. Stone Dog was bare-chested and wore deerskin pants. The stranger wore homespun pants and a ragged shirt. Both men had on moccasins, but Moon wore white man’s work boots and an old and dirty blue dress, torn at the right shoulder. The men were carrying things Shaman recognized, a cloth of cheese, a smoked ham, an uncooked leg of mutton, and he realized they had broken into the springhouse.
“Get whiskey?” Stone Dog said, motioning toward the house, and Moon said something sharply in Sauk and then sagged.
“Moon, you all right?” Shaman asked.
“Shaman. So big.” She looked at him with wonder.
He knelt by her. “Where you been? Are the others here too?”
“No … others in Kansas. Reservation. Left children there, but …” She closed her eyes.
“I’m going to get my father,” he said, and the eyes opened.
“They did us so bad, Shaman,” she whispered. Her hands scrabbled for his, hung on tight.
Shaman felt something pass from her body into his mind. As if he could hear again and thunder had clapped, and he knew—somehow, knew—what was going to happen to her. His hands tingled. He opened his mouth but couldn’t yell, couldn’t warn her. He was frozen by a fear that was entirely new to him, more savage than the terror of new deafness, far worse than anything he had experienced in his life.
Finally he was able to thrust her hands away.
He fled toward the house as if it was his only chance.
“Pa!” he screamed.
Rob J. was accustomed to being awakened to deal with emergency, but not by his son’s hysteria. Shaman kept babbling that Moon was back and she was dying. It took several minutes to comprehend his story and to persuade him to focus on their mouths so his parents could ask him questions. When they understood that Moon actually had returned and was very sick, lying on the ground down by the river, they hurried out of the house.
The mist was disappearing fast. There was more visibility, and they could see very clearly that now no one was there. His parents questioned Shaman closely and repeatedly. Moon and Stone Dog and another Sauk had been there, he insisted. He went over what they were wearing, what they had said, how they looked.
Sarah hurried away when she heard what the Indians were carrying, and she came back angry because the springhouse had been violated and certain hard-earned foodstuffs were missing. “Robert Cole,” she said crankily, “did you take those things yourself because of some mischief, and then make up that story about the Sauks being back?”
Rob J. walked up the riverbank and then downstream, calling Moon’s name, but nobody answered.
Shaman was weeping uncontrollably. “She’s dying, Pa.”
“Well, how can you know that?”
“She was holdin on to my hands, and she …” The boy shuddered.
Rob J. stared at his son and sighed. He nodded. He went to Shaman and put his arms around him and hugged him hard. “Don’t you be frightened. It’s not your fault, what happened to Moon. I’m going to talk to you about this, and try to explain. First, though, I think I’d better try to find her,” he said.
He searched on horseback. All morning he concentrated on the thick fringe of forest along the riverbanks, because if he were fleeing and wanted to hide, the woods were where he’d have gone. He rode north first, toward Wisconsin, and then came back and rode south. Every little while he’d call her name, but he never heard an answering shout.
It was possible he came close to them as he searched. The three Sauks could have waited in nearby undergrowth, letting Rob J. ride by, perhaps several times. In the early afternoon he admitted to himself that he didn’t know how fugitive Sauks would think, because he wasn’t a fugitive Sauk. Perhaps they’d left the river right away. There was summer’s-end growth on the prairie, tall grasses that would mask the progress of three people, and cornfields where the crops were grown a foot taller than a man’s head, providing perfect cover.
When finally he gave it up, he went home and found Shaman, whose disappointment was evident when he learned his father’s search had been fruitless.
He sat alone with the boy under a riverside tree and told him about the Gift, how it had come to some in the Cole family for as long as anyone remembered.
“Not to everybody. Sometimes it’ll skip a generation. My father had it, but not my brother or my uncle. It comes to some Coles when they’re really young.”
“Do you have it, Pa?”
“Yes I do.”
“How old were you, when … ?”
“It didn’t come to me until I was almost five years older than you are now.”
“What is it?” the boy said faintly.
“Well, Shaman … I don’t really know. I know there’s nothing magical about it. I believe it’s a kind of sense, like seeing or hearing or smelling. Some of us are able to hold a person’s hands and be able to tell if they’re dying. I think it’s just an extra sensitivity, like being able to feel the pulse when you touch different parts of the body. Sometimes …” He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s a knack that comes in handy if you’re a doctor.”
Shaman nodded shakily. “I guess it’ll come in handy when I become a doctor myself.”
Rob J. faced the fact that if the boy was old enough to learn of the Gift, he was mature enough to face other things. “You’re not going to be a doctor, Shaman,” he said gently. “A doctor has to be able to hear. I use my hearing every day in treating patients. I listen to their chests, I listen to their breathing, I listen to the quality of their voices. A doctor has to be able to hear a call for help. A doctor simply needs all five senses.”
He hated the way his son looked at him.
“Then what will I do when I’
m a man?”
“This is a good farm. You can farm it with Bigger,” Rob J. said, but the boy shook his head.
“Well, then, you can become some kind of businessman, maybe work in a store. Miss Burnham says you’re about the brightest pupil she’s ever taught. You might want to teach school yourself.”
“No, I don’t want to teach school.”
“Shaman, you’re still a boy. There are several years before you have to decide. Meantime, keep your eyes peeled. Study different men, their occupations. There are lots of ways to earn a living. You can choose anything.”
“Except,” Shaman said.
Rob J. wouldn’t allow himself to open the boy to unnecessary heartache by holding out the possibility of a dream he truly didn’t believe could be realized.
“Yes. Except,” he said firmly.
It had been a sorry day that had left Rob J. with an anger at life’s unfairness. He hated to kill his child’s bright and good dream. It was as bad as telling someone who loves life that there is no use making long-term plans.
He wandered about the farm. Near the river the mosquitoes were bad, contesting him for the shade of trees, and winning.
He knew he’d never see Moon again. He wished he could have said good-bye. He’d have asked her where Comes Singing had been buried. He would have wanted to bury them both properly, but by now Moon, too, perhaps had been abandoned in an unmarked grave. Like burying dogshit.
It made him savage to think about it, and guilty, because he was part of their problems and so was this farm. Once the Sauks had had rich farms, and Villages of the Dead in which the graves were marked.
They did us so bad, she had told Shaman.
There was a good Constitution in America, and he had read it carefully. It gave liberty, but he recognized that it worked only for people in skins whose color ran from pink to tan. People with darker skins might as well have fur or feathers.
All the time he wandered around the farm, he was searching. He didn’t know it at first, and then when he recognized what he was doing, he felt a wee bit better, but not very much. The place he wanted should not be located in the fields or woods where Alden or one of the boys, or even a poaching hunter, could stumble on it. The house itself was unsuitable because he’d need to maintain secrecy from the others in the family, something that bothered him greatly. His dispensary was sometimes deserted, but when it was in use it was crowded with patients. The barn was frequented too. But …
At the back of the barn, separated from the milking parlor by a closed wall, was a long narrow shed. Rob J.’s shed. It was the place where he stored drugs, tonics, and other medicinals. Along with all the hung herbs and shelves full of bottles and jars, he kept a wooden table here, and an extra set of drainage pans, because when he was called upon to autopsy, he did the dissecting in the shed, which had a stout wooden door and a strong lock.
The narrow north wall of the shed, like the entire north wall of the barn proper, was built into a ridge. In the shed, part of the wall was ledge, but a section was earthen.
The following day was used up by a crowded dispensary and too many home visits, but the morning after that Rob J. was able to break free of his practice. It proved a fortuitous day, because both Shaman and Alden were repairing fence and building a lean-to feeding station in the far section, and Sarah was working on a project at the church. Only Kate Stryker, whom Sarah had hired as part-time house help after Moon had left, was in the house, and Kate wouldn’t disturb him.
He carried in a pick and shovel as soon as the others had departed the area, and went right to work. It had been a little time since he had done extended physical labor, and he paced himself. The soil had rocks in it and was as heavy as most of the other soil on the farm, but he was strong and the pick loosened it with no difficulty. He shoveled it into a barrow from time to time and wheeled it a good distance from the barn, into a small gully. He had guessed that perhaps the digging would take several days, but by early afternoon he ran into ledge. The rocky wall jogged off to the north, so the excavation that resulted was only three feet deep at one end and more than five feet deep at the other, and less than five feet wide. The resultant space was scarcely large enough to lie down in, especially if food and other supplies were stored there, but Rob J. knew it would serve. He covered the opening with one-inch vertical planks that had been stacked outside for almost a year, so they appeared as old as the rest of the barn. He used an awl to make some of the nail holes a little too large, and he oiled the nails that fit into the holes, so that several of the planks could be removed and replaced easily and without noise.
He was very careful, taking the barrow into the woods and digging leaf mold that he spread in the gully to disguise the new earth.
Then, next morning, he rode into Rock Island and had a brief but meaningful talk with George Cliburne.
35
THE SECRET ROOM
That fall the world began to change for Shaman, not an abrupt and startling alteration such as had occurred with the disappearance of his hearing, but a complex shifting of poles that was no less transforming for its gradualness. Alex and Mal Howard had become closest friends, and their laughing, boisterous companionship shut Shaman out much of the time. Rob J. and Sarah frowned on the friendship; they knew that Mollie Howard was a whining slattern and her husband, Julian, was shiftless, and they hated their son to be spending time at the crowded, messy Howard cabin, to which a good portion of the local population made its way to buy the home concoction Julian double-distilled from corn mash with great seriousness in a hidden evaporator with a rusty cover.
Their feelings of unease were given focus that Halloween when Alex and Mal sampled some of the whiskey that Mal thoughtfully had misplaced while jugging his father’s production. Thus inspired, they proceeded to create a path of pushed-over outhouses that extended through half the township before Alma Schroeder crawled out of her tipped privy, screaming, and Gus Schroeder ended their wet-cheeked hilarity by appearing with his buffalo gun.
The incident set off a series of grim conversations between Alex and his parents that Shaman did his best to wish away, because after watching the initial exchanges he couldn’t bring himself to read their lips. A meeting of the boys, their fathers, and Sheriff London, was even more unpleasant.
Julian Howard spat and said it was “a lot of fuss over a couple of young’uns raisin a little hell on Halloween.”
Rob J. tried to forget his antipathy for Howard, whom he would have bet was a member of the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner if there was one in Holden’s Crossing, and capable of raising a good deal of trouble on his own. He agreed with Howard that the boys weren’t murderers or thugs, but because his work treated human digestion seriously he was inclined not to share the general point of view that anything and everything involved with shit was funny, including the destruction of outhouses. He knew Sheriff London came armed with half a dozen complaints against the boys and would act on them because he didn’t like either of their fathers. Rob J. suggested that Alex and Mal be made responsible for setting things right. Three of the outhouses had splintered or come apart. Two shouldn’t be set over the same holes, which were full. To make amends, the boys should dig holes and repair privies. If new lumber was needed, Rob J. would pay for it and Shaman and Mal could work off their debt to him on the farm. And if they failed to live up to the bargain, Sheriff London could take action.
Mort London reluctantly admitted he could find nothing wrong with the plan. Julian Howard was against it until he learned that both his son and the Cole boy would also be responsible for their usual chores, and then he agreed. Neither Alex nor Mal was given an opportunity to refuse, so over the next month they became expert in the rehabilitation of latrines, doing the digging first, before deep winter froze the ground, and performing the carpentry with hands that were numb with cold. They built well; all of their privies would last for years, except the one behind the Humphreys’ house, which would be splintered by a twiste
r that leveled the house and barn in the summer of sixty-three, killing Irving and Letty Humphrey in the bargain.
Alex was irrepressible. Late one night he came into the bedroom he shared with Shaman, carrying the oil lamp, and announced with deep contentment that he’d done it.
“Done what?” Shaman said, blinking the sleep from his eyes so he could see his brother.
“You know. I’ve done it. With Pattie Drucker.”
Shaman was awake. “You never. You damn liar, Bigger.”
“No, I did, with Pattie Drucker. Right there in her father’s house, with her family off to her uncle’s.”
Shaman gazed at him in delighted agony, unable to believe, yet excruciatingly tempted to do so. “If you did, what was it like?”
Alex smiled at him smugly and addressed himself to the question. “When you push your dingus in past the hair and everythin, it’s warm and cozy. Very warm and cozy. But then it makes you all excited, somehow, and you move back and forth because you’re so happy. Back and forth, just like the ram does the ewe.”
“Does the girl move back and forth too?”
“No,” Alex said. “The girl lies there real happy, lets you do the movin.”
“Then what happens?”
“Well, your eyes cross. The gizzum shoots outta your dick like a bullet.”
“Wow, like a bullet! Does it hurt the girl?”
“No, you fool, I meant fast like a bullet, not hard like a bullet. It’s softer than puddin, just like when you pull your own. Anyway, by then things are pretty much over.”
Shaman had been convinced by a plethora of detail such as he’d never encountered. “Does this mean Pattie Drucker’s your girl?”
“No!” Alex said.
“You sure?” Shaman said anxiously. Pattie Drucker already was almost as large as her pasty-faced mother and had a laugh like a bray.
“Too young to understand,” Alex muttered, worried and disgruntled, and blew out the lamp to cut the conversation short.