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

by Noah Gordon

  Presently she set down her mug and found soap, a rag, and a towel, and slipped into the gathering darkness.

  It wouldn’t be the first time they would make love, and Shaman wondered why he felt so awkward. He undressed and went to another part of the brook to wash hurriedly, and was waiting for her between the blankets and the bison skin when she joined him; their flesh still had the chill of the water, but it warmed. He knew she had picked the location of the fire so their bed would be beyond its light, but he didn’t mind. It left only her, and their hands and mouths and bodies. They made love for the first time as man and wife, and then they lay on their backs and held hands.

  “I love you, Rachel Cole,” he said. They could see the whole sky like a bowl over the flatness of the earth. The low stars were huge and white.

  Soon they made love again. This time when they were through, Rachel got up and ran to the fire. She picked up a branch with an ember on one end and whirled it like a pinwheel until it burst into flame. Then she came back and knelt so close he could see the gooseflesh in the valley of her brown breasts, and the torchlight turning her eyes into gems, and her mouth. “I love you too, Shaman,” she said.

  The next day, the deeper they rode into Iowa, the more space there was between farms. The road moved through a piggery for half a mile, where the stink was so strong they could touch it, but then there was grassland again, and sweet air.

  Once Rachel stiffened in the saddle and raised her hand.

  “What?”

  “Howling. Can it be a wolf?”

  He thought it had to be a dog. “Farmers must have hunted down the wolves, the way they have at home. Wolves have gone the way of the bison and the Indians.”

  “Maybe before we get home we’ll see one prairie miracle,” she said. “Perhaps a buffalo, or a wildcat, or the last wolf in Iowa.”

  They passed through little towns. At noon they came to a general store and dined on soda crackers and hard cheese and canned peaches.

  “Yesterday we heered that soldiers arrested Jefferson Davis. They have him in Fort Monroe, Virginia, in chains,” the storekeeper said. He spat on his own sawdust floor. “I hope they hang the sonofabitch. Beggin your pardon, ma’am.”

  Rachel nodded. It was hard to be ladylike when she was draining the dregs of the peach juice from the can. “Did they also capture his secretary of state? Judah P. Benjamin?”

  “The Jew? No, they ain’t got him yet, far’s I know.”

  “Good,” Rachel said clearly.

  She and Shaman took the empty cans to use on the trail, and moved out to the horses. The grocer stood on his porch and looked after them as they rode down the dusty road.

  That afternoon they forded the Cedar River carefully without getting wet, only to be drenched in a sudden spring rain. It was almost dark when they came to a farm and took shelter in a barn. Shaman felt oddly pleased, remembering the description of his parents’ wedding night in his father’s journal. He braved the wet to seek permission to stay, and it was readily given by the farmer, whose name was Williams but who was unrelated to the stableman in Holden’s Crossing. When Shaman returned, Mrs. Williams was hard on his heels with half a pot of a hearty milk soup swimming with carrots and potatoes and barley, and fresh bread. She left them so quickly they were sure she knew they were newly married.

  The next morning was very clear, and warmer than it had been. In the early afternoon they reached the Iowa River. Billy Edwards had told Shaman that if they followed it northwest, they’d find the Indians. The stretch of river was deserted, and after a time they came to a cove with clear, shallow water and a sand bottom. They stopped and tethered their horses, and Shaman was quickly out of his clothes and splashing in the water. “Come in!” he urged.

  She didn’t dare. Yet, the sun was hot, and the river looked as if it never had been seen by other humans. In a few minutes Rachel went into some bushes and took off everything but her cotton shift. In the cold water she squealed, and they played like children. The wet shift clung, and soon he reached for her, but she became frightened. “Someone’s certain to come along!” she said, and ran out of the water.

  She put on her dress and hung the shift on a limb to dry. Shaman had fishhooks and line in his pack, and when he was dressed he found some worms under a log and broke a branch for a pole. He walked upriver to a likely pool and in a short time had caught a pair of half-pound spotted bass.

  They had eaten hard-boiled eggs at noon from Rachel’s copious supply, but the fish would feed them that evening. He cleaned them at once. “We’d best cook them now so they won’t spoil, and wrap them in a cloth and take them with us,” he said, and built a small fire.

  While the bass were cooking, he came to her again. This time she lost all caution. It didn’t matter to her that scrubbing with river water and sand hadn’t taken the fish smell from his hands, or that it was full daylight. He lifted her shiftless dress and they made love in their clothing on the hot, sunny riverbank grass, with the sound of the rushing water in her ears.

  A few minutes later, while she was turning the fish so they wouldn’t burn, a flatboat came around the bend in the river. In it were three bearded, barefoot men dressed only in ragged trousers. One of them lifted his hand in a lazy wave, and Shaman waved back.

  As soon as the boat had gone, she rushed to where her shift was hung like a great white signal flag of what they had done. When he came after her, she turned on him. “What is the matter with us?” she said. “What’s the matter with me? Who am I?”

  “You’re Rachel,” he told her, wrapping her into his arms. He said it with such satisfaction that when he kissed her, she was smiling.

  73

  TAMA

  Early in the morning of the fifth day, they overtook another horseman on the road. When they approached him to ask directions, Shaman saw he was dressed plainly but rode on a good horse and an expensive saddle. His hair was long and black and his skin was the color of fired clay.

  “Can you tell us the way to Tama?” Shaman asked.

  “Better than that. Going there myself. Just ride along with me, if you like.”

  “Thank you kindly.”

  The Indian leaned forward and said something else, but Shaman shook his head. “Hard for me to talk while we’re riding. I have to see your mouth. I’m deaf.”

  “Oh.”

  “My wife hears fine, though,” Shaman said. He grinned, and the man grinned back and turned to Rachel and tipped his hat. They exchanged a few words, but mostly the three of them just rode along companionably through the warm morning.

  When they came to a good pond, though, they stopped to let the horses take a small amount of water and a little grass, while they stretched their legs, and they met properly. The man shook hands and said he was Charles P. Keyser.

  “You live in Tama?”

  “No, I’ve got a farm eight miles from here. I was born Potawatomi, but raised by whites when my family all died of the fever. I don’t even speak the Indian jabber except for a few words of Kickapoo. I married a woman was half-Kickapoo, half-French.”

  He said he went to Tama every few years and spent a couple of days. “I don’t really know why.” He shrugged and smiled. “Red skin calling to red skin, I guess.”

  Shaman nodded. “Our animals had enough grass, you suppose?”

  “Oh, yes. Don’t want them mounts to blow up on us, do we?” Keyser said, and they got back on the horses and resumed the ride.

  At midmorning Keyser led them straight into Tama. Long before they reached the group of cabins clustered about in a large circle, they were being followed by brown-eyed children and barking dogs.

  Soon Keyser signaled a stop, and they dismounted. “I’ll let the chief know we’re here,” he said, and went to a nearby cabin. By the time he reappeared with a wide-built middle-aged redman, a small crowd had gathered.

  The stocky man said something Shaman couldn’t lip-read. It wasn’t in English, but the man took Shaman’s hand when it was offered
.

  “I’m Dr. Robert J. Cole of Holden’s Crossing, Illinois. This is my wife, Rachel Cole.”

  “Dr. Cole?” A young man stepped out of the crowd and peered at Shaman. “No. You’re too young.”

  “… Maybe you knew my father?”

  The man’s eyes searched him. “You the deaf boy? … That you, Shaman?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Little Dog. Son of Moon and Comes Singing.”

  Shaman felt pleasure as they clasped hands, remembering how they had played together as children.

  The stocky man said something.

  “He is Medi-ke, Snapping Turtle, chief of the town of Tama,” Little Dog said. “He wants you three to come to his cabin.”

  Snapping Turtle signaled to Little Dog that he should come too, and to the others that they should leave. His cabin was small and smelled of a recent meal of charred meat. Folded blankets showed where people slept, and a canvas hammock was slung in a corner. The dirt floor was hard and swept, and it was where they sat as Snapping Turtle’s wife—Wapansee, Small Light—served them black coffee, very sweet with maple sugar, and altered and changed by other ingredients. It tasted like the coffee Makwa-ikwa had made. After Small Light served it, Snapping Turtle spoke to her, and she left the house.

  “You had a sister named Bird Woman,” Shaman said to Little Dog. “Is she here?”

  “Dead, a long time now. I have another sister, Green Willow, the youngest. She’s with her husband on the Kansas reservation.” No one else in Tama had been with the group in Holden’s Crossing, Little Dog said.

  Snapping Turtle said through Little Dog that he was a Mesquakie. And that there were about two hundred Mesquakies and Sauks in Tama. Then he spoke a torrent of words and looked at Little Dog again.

  “He says the reservations are very bad, like big cages. We were sick with remembering former days, the old ways. We caught wild horses, broke them, sold them for what we could get. We saved every bit of money.

  “Then about a hundred of us came here. We had to forget that Rock Island used to be Sauk-e-nuk, the great town of the Sauks, and that Davenport was Mesquak-e-nuk, the great town of the Mesquakies. The world has changed. We paid white man’s money for eighty acres here, and we had the white governor of Iowa sign the deed as witness.”

  Shaman nodded. “That was good,” he said, and Snapping Turtle smiled. Evidently he understood some English, but he continued to speak in his own language, as his face grew stern.

  “He says the government always pretends it has bought our vast lands. The White Father grabs our land and offers the tribes small coins instead of big paper money. He even cheats us of the coins, giving cheap goods and ornaments and saying Mesquakies and Sauks are paid an annuity. Many of our people leave the worthless goods to rot on the earth. We tell them to say loudly that they will accept only money, and to come here and buy more land.”

  “Is there trouble with white neighbors?” Shaman said.

  “No trouble,” Little Dog said, and listened to Snapping Turtle. “He says we’re no threat. Whenever our people go to trade, white men push coins into the bark of trees and tell our men they may keep the coins if they hit them with arrows. Certain of our people say it’s an insult, but Snapping Turtle allows it.” Snapping Turtle spoke, and Little Dog smiled. “He says it keeps some of us good with the bow.”

  Small Light came back, bringing a man in a frayed cotton shirt and stained brown wool pants, and with a red kerchief tied about his forehead. He said this was Nepepaqua, Sleep Walker, a Sauk and the medicine man. Sleep Walker wasn’t a man to waste time. “She says you’re a doctor.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You will come with me?”

  Shaman nodded. He and Rachel left Charles Keyser drinking coffee with Snapping Turtle. They stopped only to get Shaman’s bag. Then they followed after the medicine man.

  Walking through the village, Shaman sought familiar sights to match his memories. He saw no tipis, but there were some hedonoso-tes beyond the cabins. The people mostly wore the shabby dress of white folks; moccasins were as he remembered, although many of the Indians wore work boots or army footwear.

  Sleep Walker brought them to a cabin on the other side of the village. Inside, a skinny young woman lay and writhed, her hands over her great belly.

  She was glassy-eyed and looked out of her mind. She didn’t respond when Shaman asked her questions. Her pulse was rapid and bounding. He was fearful, but when he took her hands in his, he felt more vitality than he would have believed.

  She was Watwaweiska, Climbing Squirrel, Sleep Walker said. His brother’s wife. The time for her first birthing had come on her yesterday morning. Earlier, she’d chosen a soft dry place in the woods, and she went there. The harsh pains came and came, and she had squatted as her mother had taught. When the waters had broken free, her legs and her dress became wet, but nothing else happened. The agony didn’t go away, the child didn’t come. At nightfall, other women had searched for her and found her, and they had carried her here.

  Sleep Walker hadn’t been able to help her.

  Shaman stripped the sweat-soaked dress away and studied her body. She was very young. Her breasts, although heavy with milk, were small, and her pelvis was narrow. The pudenda gaped, but no small head was revealed. He gently pressed the surface of her belly with his fingers, then took out his stethoscope and placed the earpieces for Rachel. When he held the bell to Climbing Squirrel’s stomach in several places, the conclusions he’d reached with his eyes and hands were confirmed by the sounds Rachel described.

  “The child is presenting wrong.”

  He went outside and asked for clean water, and Sleep Walker led him into the trees, to a brook. The medicine man watched curiously as Shaman lathered with brown soap and scrubbed his hands and arms. “It’s part of the medicine,” Shaman said, and Sleep Walker accepted the soap and imitated him.

  When they returned to the cabin, Shaman took out his jar of clean lard and lubricated his hands. He inserted one finger into the birth canal, and then another, like probing a fist. He moved upward slowly. At first he felt nothing, but then the girl went into spasm, and the tight fist was pushed open slightly. An infant foot moved onto his fingers, and around it he felt the wrapped cord. The umbilical cord was tough, but it was stretched, and he didn’t attempt to free the foot until the birth spasm had been spent. Then, working carefully with only his two fingers, he unwrapped the cord and drew the foot down.

  The other foot was higher, braced against the wall of the canal, and he was able to reach it during the next spasm and lead it down until two tiny red feet extended from the young mother. The feet became legs, and soon they could see it was a man-child. The baby’s abdomen emerged, trailing the cord. But all progress stopped when the infant’s shoulders and head jammed into the canal like a cork in the neck of a bottle.

  Shaman could draw the child no farther, nor could he reach high enough to keep the mother’s flesh from sealing the baby’s nostrils. He knelt with his hand in the canal and his mind searching for a solution, but he felt that the baby would smother.

  Sleep Walker had a bag of his own in a corner of the cabin, and from it he took a four-foot length of vine. The vine ended in what looked remarkably like the flat, ugly head of a pit viper, inset with black beady eyes and fiber fangs. Sleep Walker manipulated the “serpent” so it appeared to crawl up Climbing Squirrel’s body until the head was close to her face, weaving. The medicine man was chanting in his own language, but Shaman wasn’t trying to read his lips. He was watching Climbing Squirrel.

  Shaman could see the girl’s eyes focus on the snake and widen. The medicine man caused the snake to turn and crawl down her body until it was just over the place where the baby rested.

  Shaman felt a quivering in the birth canal.

  He saw Rachel open her mouth to protest, and he warned her off with his eyes.

  The fangs touched Climbing Squirrel’s belly. Suddenly Shaman felt a widening. The girl gave
a tremendous push, and the child came down so easily it took no effort to draw him out. The baby’s lips and cheeks were blue, but at once they began to redden. With a tremulous finger Shaman cleared mucus from the mouth. The small face screwed up in indignation, the mouth opened. Shaman could feel the child’s abdomen retract to draw in air, and he knew that the others were hearing a high, thin crying. Maybe it was in D-flat, because the belly vibrated exactly as Lillian’s piano did whenever Rachel struck the fifth black key from the end.

  He and the medicine man went back to the brook to wash. Sleep Walker looked pleased. Shaman was very thoughtful. Before leaving the cabin, he had examined the vine again to make certain it was only a vine.

  “The girl thought the snake would devour her baby, so she bore it to save it?”

  “My song said the snake was bad manitou. Good manitou helped her.”

  He realized the lesson was that science can take medicine only so far. Then it is helped tremendously if there is faith or belief in something else. It was an advantage the medicine man had over the medical man, because Sleep Walker was a priest as well as a doctor.

  “Are you a shaman?”

  “No.” Sleep Walker looked at him. “You know about the tents of knowledge?”

  “Makwa told us about seven Tents.”

  “Yes, seven. For some things, I am in the fourth Tent. For too many things, I’m in the first Tent.”

  “Will you become a shaman someday?”

  “Who will teach me? Wabokieshiek is dead. Makwa-ikwa is dead. The tribes are scattered, the Mide’wiwin is no more. When I was young and knew I wanted to be a ghostkeeper, I heard of an old Sauk, almost a shaman, in Missouri. I found him, spent two years there. But he died of the fevered pox, too soon. Now I seek old people, to learn from them, but they’re few, and mostly they don’t know. Our children are taught reservation English, and the Seven Tents of Wisdom are gone.”