by Noah Gordon
One morning a farmer named Benjamin Haskell walked into his barn and became pop-eyed at the sight of the doctor with his arm up his woman’s skirt. That was the closest they came to making love during the entire epidemic, six weeks. The leaves had been turning color when it began, and there was a dusting of snow on the ground when it ended.
The day they came home and realized it was unnecessary for them to ride out again, Sarah sent the children in the buckboard with Makwa to Mueller’s farm to fetch baskets of winter apples for making sauce. She took a long soak in front of the fire and then boiled more water and prepared Rob’s bath, and when he was in the tin tub she came back and washed him very slowly and gently, the way they had washed patients, yet very different from that, using her hand instead of a washcloth. Damp and shivering, he hastened after her through the chill house, up the stairs, under the warm bedcovers, where they stayed for hours, until Makwa was back with the boys.
Sarah was briefly with child a few months later, but she miscarried early, frightening Rob because her blood splashed, fairly leaping out of her before the hemorrhages finally ceased. He realized it would be dangerous for her to conceive again, and after that he took precautions. He watched anxiously for signs of black shadows settling over her, as often happened after a woman aborted a fetus, but aside from a pale pensiveness that manifested itself in long periods of thought with her violet eyes closed, she appeared to recover as quickly as could be hoped.
“No daughter,” she said one night after he had banked the fire, taking his hand and placing it on her flat stomach.
“No. But,” he pointed out, “come spring, you’ll be able to ride out with me to fight the fevers,” and she allowed that that was so.
24
SPRING MUSIC
So, often and for long periods, the Cole boys were left in the care of the Sauk woman. Shaman became as accustomed to Makwa-ikwa’s crushed-berries smell as he was to the white odor of his natural mother, as accustomed to her darkness as to Sarah’s milky blondness. And then, more accustomed. If Sarah walked away from mothering, Makwa accepted the opportunity eagerly, holding the man-child, the son of Cawso wabeskiou, to the warmth of her bosom and finding a fulfillment she hadn’t experienced since she had held her own infant brother, He-Who-Owns-Land. She cast a love spell over the little white boy. Sometimes she sang to him:
Ni-na ne-gi-se ke-wi-to-se-me-ne ni-na,
Ni-na ne-gi-se ke-wi-to-se-me-ne ni-na,
Wi-a-ya-ni,
Ni-na ne-gi-se ke-wi-to-se-me-ne ni-na.
I walk with you, my son,
I walk with you, my son,
Wherever you are going,
I walk with you, my son.
Sometimes she sang to protect him:
Tti-la-ye ke-wi-ta-mo-ne i-no-ki,
Tti-la-ye ke-wi-ta-mo-ne i-no-ki-i-i.
Me-ma-ko-te-si-ta
Ki-ma-ma-to-me-ga.
Ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se.
Ghost, I call you today,
Ghost, I speak to you now.
One who is greatly in need
Will worship you.
Send your blessings to me.
Soon these were the songs Shaman hummed as he dogged her steps. Alex followed along glumly, watching as still another adult claimed part of his brother. He obeyed Makwa, but she recognized that the suspicion and dislike she sometimes saw in his young eyes were a son’s reflections of Sarah Cole’s feelings toward her. It didn’t matter to her much. Alex was a child, and she would work to win his trust. As for Sarah—so long as Makwa could remember, Sauks had had enemies.
Jay Geiger, busy with his pharmacy, had hired Mort London to plow the first section of his farm, a slow and brutal task. It had taken Mort from April to the end of July to break the deep, tough sod, a process made more expensive by the fact that the turned-over clods had to be allowed to rot for two or three years before the field was fit to be replowed and planted, and because Mort had caught the Illinois mange, which afflicted most men who ripped open the prairie. Some thought the rotting sod released a miasma that carried the illness to the farmer, while others said the sickness came from the bites of tiny insects disturbed by the plowshare. The ailment was unpleasant, the skin breaking out in little sores that itched. Treated with sulfur, it could be contained as an annoyance, but if it was neglected it could develop into a fatal fever such as the one that had killed Alexander Bledsoe, Sarah’s first husband.
Jay insisted that even the corners of his field should be carefully plowed and sown. In accordance with ancient Jewish law, at harvesttime he left the corners unreaped, to be gleaned by the poor. When Jay’s first section started producing good crops of corn, he was ready to prepare the second section to plant wheat. But by that time Mort London was sheriff, and none of the other homesteaders was willing to work for wages. It was a time when Chinese coolies didn’t dare quit the railroad gangs because they were likely to be stoned if they made it to the nearest town. Occasionally an Irishman or the rare Italian, escaping from the near-slavery of digging the Illinois and Michigan Canal, wandered into Holden’s Crossing, but papists were viewed with alarm by a majority of the population, and these interlopers were hurried on their way. Jay had developed a passing acquaintance with some of the Sauks because they were the poor whom he had invited to glean his corn. Finally he bought four bullocks and a steel plow and hired two of the warriors, Little Horn and Stone Dog, to break the prairie for him.
The Indians knew secrets about slicing the plains and turning it over to expose its flesh and blood, the black earth. As they worked they apologized to the earth for cutting it, and they sang songs in order to imprecate the proper ghosts. They knew the white men plowed too deep. When they set the plowshare for shallow cultivation, the root mass below the plowed earth actually rotted away faster, and they cultivated two and one-quarter acres a day instead of a single acre. And neither Little Horn nor Stone Dog caught the mange.
Marveling, Jay tried to share their method with all his neighbors, but he found no willing listeners.
“It’s because the ignorant bastards consider me a foreigner, even though I was born in South Carolina and some of them were born in Europe,” he complained hotly to Rob J. “They don’t trust me. They hate the Irish and the Jews and the Chinese and the Italians, and God knows who all, for coming to America too late. They hate the French and the Mormons on general principles. And they hate the Indians for being in America too early. Who the hell do they like?”
Rob grinned at him. “Why, Jay … they like themselves! They think they are just right, having had the sensibility to arrive at exactly the correct time,” he said.
In Holden’s Crossing, being liked was one thing, being accepted was another. Rob J. Cole and Jay Geiger gained grudging acceptance because their professions were needed. As they became prominent patches in the community quilt, the two families continued to be close, drawing support and stimulation from one another. The children became accustomed to the works of great composers, lying in bed of an evening and listening to music that rose and fell with the beauty of stringed instruments played with love and passion by their fathers.
The year Shaman was five years old, the major spring illness was measles. The invisible armor protecting Sarah and Rob disappeared, and so did the luck that had kept them unscathed. Sarah brought the disease home and became mildly ill, as did Shaman. Rob J. thought anyone was lucky to catch a light dose, because in his experience measles didn’t strike twice in one lifetime; but Alex caught the disease in all its terrible power. Whereas his mother and brother had been feverish, he burned. While they had itched, his body ran bloody from frenzied scratching, and Rob J. wrapped him in wilted cabbage leaves and bound his hands for his own protection.
The spring after that, the prevailing illness was scarletina. The Sauk band caught it, and Makwa-ikwa from them, so that Sarah had to stay home full of resentment and nurse the Indian woman instead of riding out as her husband’s assistant. Then both boys came down. This time Alex drew the gen
tler version of the disease, while Shaman burned, vomited, screamed with the earache, and suffered a rash so damaging that in places his skin peeled off like a snake’s.
When the disease had run its course, Sarah opened the house to the warm May air and declared that the family needed a holiday. She roasted a goose and let the Geigers know their presence would be appreciated, and that evening, music reigned where it hadn’t been heard for weeks.
The Geiger children were put to bed on pallets next to the bunks in the Cole boys’ room. Lillian Geiger slipped into the room and gave each child a hug and a kiss. At the door she paused and wished them good night. Alex wished her good night in return, as did her own children, Rachel, Davey, Herm, and Cubby, who was too young to be saddled with his real name, which was Lionel. She noticed that one child hadn’t answered. “Good night, Rob J.,” she said. There was no reply, and Lillian saw that the child looked straight ahead, as if lost in thought.
“Shaman? My dear?” In a moment, when there was no reply, she clapped her hands sharply. Five faces looked toward her, but one did not.
In the other room, the musicians were doing the Mozart duet, the piece they played together best, the one that made them shine. Rob J. was amazed when Lillian stood before his viola and put her hand out, stopping his bow during a phrase he especially loved.
“Your son,” she said. “The little one. He doesn’t hear.”
25
THE QUIET CHILD
All his life Rob J., struggling to salvage people from the afflictions that bring about physical and mental failures, was surprised at how much it hurt him when the patient was someone he loved. He cherished all those he treated, even the ones made mean by their sickness, even the ones he knew had been mean before they’d become sick, because by seeking his help, somehow they became his. As a young physician in Scotland he’d seen his mother fail and move toward death, and it had been a special, bitter lesson in his ultimate powerlessness as a doctor. And now he felt a raw hurt because of what had befallen the strong, chunky little boy, large for his age, who had come from his own seed and soul.
Shaman appeared dazed as his father clapped his hands, dropped heavy books to the floor, stood before him shouting.
“CAN … YOU … HEAR … ANYTHING? SON?” Rob yelled, pointing to his own ears, but the little boy only stared in puzzlement. Shaman was profoundly deaf.
“Will it go away?” Sarah asked her husband.
“Perhaps,” Rob said, but he was more frightened than she, because he knew more, had seen tragedies whose possibilities she only sensed.
“You’ll make it go away.” She had absolute faith in him. As once he had saved her, now he would save their child.
He didn’t know how, but he tried. He poured warm oil into Shaman’s ears. He soaked him in hot baths, he applied compresses. Sarah prayed to Jesus. The Geigers prayed to Jehovah. Makwa-ikwa tapped her water drum and sang to the manitous and the ghosts. No god or spirit paid attention.
In the beginning, Shaman was too baffled to be frightened. But within hours he began to whimper and scream. He shook his head and clawed at his ears. Sarah thought the terrible earache had returned, but Rob soon felt it wasn’t that, because he had witnessed this before. “He’s hearing noises we can’t hear. Inside his head.”
Sarah blanched. “There is something in his head?”
“No, no.” He could tell her what the condition was called—tinnitus—but he couldn’t tell her what was causing the sounds that were so private to Shaman.
Shaman didn’t stop crying. His father and mother and Makwa took turns lying on the bed hugging him. Later Rob would learn that his son heard a variety of din, sounds of crackling, ringing, thunderous roaring, hissing. All of it was very loud, and Shaman was continually terrified.
The internal barrage disappeared after three days. Shaman’s relief was profound and the returned silence was comforting, but the adults who loved him were tortured by the desperation in the small white face.
That night Rob wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston, asking for advice about how to treat the deafness. He also asked Holmes, in case nothing could be done regarding the condition, to forward information that would instruct him how to raise a deaf son.
None of them knew how to treat Shaman. While Rob J. cast about for a physician’s solutions, it was Alex who assumed responsibility. Although stunned and frightened by what had happened to his brother, Alex adapted swiftly. He took Shaman’s hand and didn’t let go. Where the older boy walked, the younger followed. When their fingers cramped, Alex crossed to his brother’s other side and switched hands. Shaman quickly became accustomed to the security of Bigger’s sweaty, often dirty grasp.
Alex guarded him closely. “He wants more,” he would remark at the table during meals, taking Shaman’s empty bowl and holding it out to his mother so it could be refilled.
Sarah watched her two sons, observing how each of them suffered. Shaman stopped talking, and Alex chose to join him in his muteness, speaking hardly at all, communicating with Shaman in a series of exaggerated gestures while the two sets of young eyes locked with one another earnestly.
She tortured herself with imagined situations in which Shaman faced a variety of terrible fates because he couldn’t hear her agonized screams of warning. She made the boys stay close to the house. They grew bored and sat on the ground and played stupid games with nuts and pebbles, drawing pictures in the dirt with sticks. Incredibly, at times she heard them laughing. Not being able to hear his own voice, Shaman was apt to speak too softly, so they’d have to ask him to repeat what he mumbled, and he wouldn’t understand them. He took to grunting instead of speaking. When Alex became exasperated, he forgot about reality. “What?” he shouted. “What, Shaman!” And then he remembered the deafness and resorted to gestures again. He developed an unfortunate habit of grunting like Shaman to emphasize something he was trying to explain with his hands. Sarah couldn’t stand the growling-snorting sound, which made her sons seem like animals to her.
She fell into an unfortunate habit of her own, testing the deafness too often by coming up behind them and clapping her hands, or snapping her fingers, or saying their names. Inside the house, if she stamped her foot the vibrations in the floor caused Shaman to turn his head. At all times, only Alex’s scowl noted her interruption.
She had been an on-again, off-again mother, choosing to ride out with Rob J. at every opportunity instead of taking care of her children. She admitted to herself that her husband was the most important thing in her life, just as she acknowledged that medicine was the prime force in his life, even more important than his love for her; that’s just the way things were. She’d never felt for Alexander Bledsoe, or for any man, what she felt for Rob J. Cole. Now that one of her sons was threatened, she turned her love back to her boys full force, but it was too late. Alex wouldn’t relinquish any part of his brother, and Shaman had become accustomed to depending on Makwa-ikwa.
Makwa didn’t discourage the dependence; she took Shaman into the hedonoso-te for long periods of time, and she watched his every move. Once Sarah saw her hurry to where the boy had passed water against a tree and scoop some of the wet earth from the ground and take it away in a little cup, as if she was collecting the relic of a saint. Sarah thought the woman was a succubus who tried to claim the part of her husband he valued most about himself, and who now claimed her child. She knew Makwa was casting spells, singing, performing savage rituals whose very thought made her skin crawl, but she dared not object. As desperately as she wanted someone—anyone, anything—to succor her child, she couldn’t resist a feeling of self-righteous vindication, an affirmation in the one true faith, when day after day passed and the heathen nonsense brought no improvement to her son’s condition.
At night Sarah lay awake, tormented by thoughts of deaf mutes she’d known, remembering in particular a feebleminded and slovenly woman whom she and her friends had followed through the streets of their Virginia village, taunting the poor creatu
re for her obesity and her deafness. Bessie, her name, Bessie Turner. They’d thrown sticks and pebbles, hilarious to see Bessie respond to physical insults after being able to ignore the horrible things they had shouted. She wondered if cruel children would follow Shaman through the streets.
Slowly it dawned upon her that Rob—even Rob!—didn’t know how to help Shaman. He left every morning and rode out on his house calls, absorbed with other people’s ills. He wasn’t abandoning his own family. It only seemed that way to her sometimes because she remained with her sons day after day, witness to their struggle.
The Geigers, seeking to be supportive, issued several invitations for the kind of evening the families had shared so often, but Rob J. declined. He no longer played his viola da gamba; Sarah believed he couldn’t stand to make music that Shaman wouldn’t hear.
She threw herself into the work of the farm. Alden Kimball double-dug a new plot for her and she undertook her most ambitious vegetable garden. She foraged the riverbank for miles to find lemon day lilies and transfer them to a bed at the front of the house. She helped Alden and Moon herd small groups of blatting sheep onto a raft and take them out into the middle of the river and push them off so they had to swim ashore, cleansing their wool before the shearing. After castrating the spring lambs, Alden looked askance when she claimed the bucket of prairie oysters, his favorite delicacy. Sarah stripped them of their stringy wrapping, wondering if that’s how a man’s gonads were under the wrinkled skin. Then she cut the tender little balls in half and fried them in bacon grease along with wild onion and a sliced puffball mushroom. Alden ate his share eagerly, declared it prime, and stopped moping.
