Shaman (Cole)

by Noah Gordon

  Subject, who had been a virgin, was raped. Remains of the hymen indicate it was imperforatus, the membrane thick and grown inflexible. Probably the rapist(s) could not accomplish penetration by penis; defloration was completed by means of a blunt instrument with rough or jagged small projections, inflicting massive damage to the vulva, including deep scratches in the perineum and the labia majora and tearing and gouging in the labia minora and the vestibule of the vagina. Either before or after this bloody deflowering, subject was turned facedown. Bruises on her thighs suggest that she was held in position while sodomized, indicating that her attackers included at least two individuals, and probably more. Damage of the sodomy included the stretching and tearing of the anal canal. A quantity of sperm was present in the rectum, and marked hemorrhaging was present in the descending colon. Other contusions elsewhere on the body and on the face suggest subject was beaten extensively, probably by men’s fists.

  There is evidence that subject resisted the attack. Under the nails of the second, third, and fourth fingers of her right hand were shreds of skin and two black hairs, perhaps from a beard.

  The stabbings were done with sufficient force to chip the third rib and penetrate the sternum repeatedly. The left lung was penetrated twice and the right lung three times, tearing the pleura and lacerating the inner lung tissue; both lungs would have collapsed at once. Three of the thrusts entered the heart, two of them leaving wounds in the region of the right atrium, .887 centimeters and .799 centimeters in width, respectively. The third wound, in the right ventricle, was .803 centimeters in width. Blood from the lacerated heart had pooled extensively in the abdominal cavity.

  Organs were unremarkable except for trauma. Weighed, the heart was found to be 263 grams; the brain, 1.43 kilograms; the liver, 1.62 kilograms; the spleen, 199 grams.

  Conclusions: Homicide following sexual assault, by a party or parties unknown.

  (signed)

  Robert Judson Cole, M.D.

  Associate Coroner

  County of Rock Island

  State of Illinois

  Rob J. stayed up late that night, copying the report for filing with the county clerk and then making another copy to give to Mort London. In the morning, the Sauks came to the farm and they buried Makwa-ikwa on the bluff near the hedonoso-te, overlooking the river. Rob had offered the burial site without consulting Sarah.

  She was angry when she heard. “On our land? What ever were you thinking of? A grave is forever, she’ll be here for all time. We’ll never be rid of her!” she said wildly.

  “Hold your tongue, woman,” Rob J. said quietly, and she turned and went away from him.

  Moon washed Makwa and dressed her in her deerskin shaman’s dress. Alden offered to make her a pine box, but Moon said it was their way to bury their dead just in their best blanket. So Alden helped Comes Singing dig the grave, instead. Moon had them dig it early in the morning. That was how it was done, she said: grave dug early in the morning, burial early in the afternoon. Moon said Makwa’s feet had to point toward the west, and she sent to the Sauk camp for the tail of a female buffalo to be placed in the grave. This would help Makwa-ikwa cross safely over the river of foam that separates the land of the living from the Land in the West, she explained to Rob J.

  The funeral was a meager rite. The Indians and the Coles and Jay Geiger gathered about the grave and Rob J. waited for someone to begin, but there was no one. They had no shaman. To his dismay, he saw that the Sauks were looking at him. If she had been a Christian he might have been weak enough to say some things he didn’t believe. As it was, he was totally inadequate. From somewhere, he remembered words:

  The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,

  Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold,

  Purple the sails, and so perfumed that the winds

  Were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,

  Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

  The water which they beat to follow faster,

  As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,

  It beggar’d all description.

  Jay Geiger stared at him as if he were mad. Cleopatra? But he realized that to him she had had a kind of dusky majesty, a royal-holy glow, a special sort of beauty. She was better than Cleopatra; Cleopatra hadn’t known all about personal sacrifice, and faithfulness, and herbs. He would never meet her like again, and John Donne gave him other words to throw at the Old Black Knight:

  Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

  Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

  For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

  Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

  When it became obvious it was all he was going to say, Jay cleared his throat and uttered a few sentences in what Rob J. supposed was Hebrew. For a moment he was afraid Sarah was going to bring Jesus into it, but she was too shy. Makwa had taught the Sauks some prayer chants, and now they sang one of them raggedly but together.

  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

  Ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se.

  It was a song Makwa often had sung to Shaman, and Rob J. saw that while Shaman didn’t sing, his lips moved along with the words. When the song was over, so was the funeral; that was all.

  Afterward he went to the clearing in the woods where it had happened. It was a mass of hoofprints. He had asked Moon if any of the Sauks were trackers, but she said the good trackers were dead. Anyway, by that time a number of London’s people had been out there, and the ground was well-trampled by horses and men. Rob J. knew what he was searching for. He found the stick in the brush, where it had been flung. It looked like any other stick except for the rusty color on one end. Her other shoe had been thrown into the woods at the other end of the clearing, by someone with a good arm. There was nothing else that he could see, and he wrapped the two items in a cloth and rode over to the sheriff’s office.

  Mort London accepted the paperwork and the evidence without comment. He was cool and a bit short, perhaps because his people had missed the stick and the shoe when they had done their own search. Rob J. didn’t linger.

  Next door to the sheriff’s office, on the porch of the general store, he was hailed by Julian Howard. “Got somethin for you,” Howard said. He rummaged in his pocket and Rob J. heard the heavy clinking of large coins. Howard handed him a silver dollar.

  “No hurry, Mr. Howard.”

  But Howard gestured toward him with the coin. “Pay my debts,” he said balefully, and Rob took the coin, making no mention that payment was fifty cents short, counting the medicine he had left. Howard already had turned away rudely. “How’s your wife?” Rob asked.

  “Much improved. You’re not needed by her.”

  That was good news, saving Rob a long and difficult ride. He went instead to the Schroeders’ farmhouse, where Alma was getting an early start on the autumn housecleaning; it was obvious that none of her ribs was broken. When he called next on Donny Baker he saw that the boy still was feverish, and the angry flesh of his foot looked as though it could go either way. Rob could do nothing but change the dressing and give him some laudanum for the pain.

  From then on, a grim and unhappy morning went downhill. His last call was at the Gilbert homestead, where he found Fletcher White in deep trouble, his eyes dull and unseeing, his thin old body racked by coughing, every breath a painful labor. “He was better,” Suzy Gilbert whispered.

  Rob J. knew that Suzy had a houseful of children and unending chores; she had stopped the steaming and the hot drinks too soon, and Rob wanted to curse and shake her. But when he took Fletcher’s hands he knew the old man had little time left, and the last thing he wanted was to fill Suzy with the idea that her neglect had killed her father. He left them some of Makwa’s strong tonic to ease Fletcher. He realized he had little of her tonic left. He had seen her brew it numerous times and believed h
e knew its few simple herbal ingredients. He would have to start trying to make it himself.

  He was scheduled to hold afternoon hours in the dispensary, but when he returned to the farm the world was in chaos. Sarah was white-faced. Moon, who had remained tearless at Makwa’s death, was weeping bitterly, and all the children were terrorized. Mort London and Fritz Graham, his regular deputy, and Otto Pfersick, deputized just for the occasion, had come while Rob J. was gone. They had pointed rifles at Comes Singing. Mort had placed him under arrest. Then they had tied his hands behind his back and put him on a rope and pulled him away behind their horses, like a tethered ox.

  29

  THE LAST INDIANS IN ILLINOIS

  “You’ve made a mistake, Mort,” Rob J. said.

  Mort London looked uncomfortable, but he shook his head. “No. We think the big sonofabitch most likely killed her.”

  When Rob J. had been in the sheriff’s office only a few hours earlier, London had said nothing about planning to go to his farm and arrest one of his employees. Something was amiss; Comes Singing’s trouble was like a disease with no apparent etiology. He took note of the “we.” He knew who “we” was, and he perceived that somehow Nick Holden hoped to make political capital of Makwa’s death. But Rob handled his own anger gingerly.

  “A bad mistake, Mort.”

  “There’s a witness saw the big Indian in the very clearing where she was found a short time before it happened.”

  Not surprising, Rob J. told him, seeing that Comes Singing was one of his hired men, and the river woods were part of his farm. “I want to put up the bail.”

  “Can’t set bail. We have to wait for a circuit judge to come out from Rock Island.”

  “How long will that take?”

  London shrugged.

  “One of the good things to come from the English was due process of law. We’re supposed to have that here.”

  “Can’t hurry a circuit judge for one Indian. Five, six days. Mebbe a week or so.”

  “I want to see Comes Singing.”

  London rose and led the way into the two-cell lockup that adjoined the sheriff’s office. The deputies sat in the dim corridor between the cells, rifles in their laps. Fritz Graham looked as if he was enjoying himself. Otto Pfersick looked as though he wished he were back in his gristmill, making flour. One of the cells was empty. The other cell was full of Comes Singing.

  “Untie him,” Rob J. said thinly.

  London hesitated. They were afraid to approach their prisoner, Rob J. recognized. Comes Singing somehow had sustained an angry bruise over his right eye (from a gun barrel?). His very size was intimidating.

  “Let me in there. I’ll untie him myself.”

  London unlocked the cell and Rob J. went in alone. “Pyawanegawa,” he said, placing his hand on Comes Singing’s shoulder, calling him by his proper name.

  He went behind Comes Singing and began to pick at the knotted rope that bound him, but the knot was cruelly tight. “It needs cutting,” he said to London. “Hand me a knife.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Pair of scissors, in my medical bag.”

  “That ain’t hardly less of a weapon,” London grumbled, but he allowed Graham to fetch the scissors, and Rob J. was able to get the rope cut. He chafed Comes Singing’s wrists between both his hands, looking into his eyes, talking as though to his own deaf son. “Cawso wabeskiou will help Pyawanegawa. We are brothers of the same Half, the Long Hairs, the Keeso-qui.”

  He ignored the amused surprise and contempt in the eyes of the listening whites on the other side of the bars. He didn’t know how much of what he had said was understood by Comes Singing. The Sauk’s eyes were dark and sullen, but as Rob J. searched them he saw a change there, the leap of something he couldn’t be certain of, that may have been fury or just may have been the tiny rebirth of hope.

  That afternoon he brought Moon to her husband. She interpreted while London questioned him.

  Comes Singing appeared baffled by the interrogation.

  He admitted at once that he’d been in the clearing that morning. Time to get in wood for the winter, he said, looking at the man who paid him to do that. And he was hunting sugar maples, marking them in his memory for tapping when spring came.

  He lived in the same longhouse as the dead woman, London observed.

  Yes.

  Did he ever engage in sex with her?

  Moon hesitated before translating. Rob J. looked hard at London but touched her arm and nodded, and she asked her husband the question. Comes Singing answered at once and without apparent anger.

  No, never.

  Rob J. followed Mort London back to his office when the questioning was over. “Can you tell me why you arrested this man?”

  “I told you. A witness saw him at that clearing just before the woman was killed.”

  “Who is your witness?”

  “… Julian Howard.”

  Rob asked himself what Julian Howard had been doing on his land. He remembered the clink of dollar coins when Howard had settled up with him for the house call. “You paid him for his testimony,” he said, as if he knew it for a fact.

  “I didn’t. No,” London said, flushing, but he was an amateur bad man, clumsy at summoning spuriously righteous anger.

  It was Nick who would have done the rewarding, along with a liberal dose of flattery and assurances to Julian that he was a saintly fellow, just doing his duty.

  “Comes Singing was where he should have been, working on my property. You might just as well arrest me for owning the land Makwa was killed on, or Jay Geiger for finding her.”

  “If the Indian didn’t do it, it’ll come out during a fair trial. He lived with the woman—”

  “She was his shaman. Same as being his minister. The fact that they lived in the same longhouse made sex between them forbidden, as if they were brother and sister.”

  “People have killed their own ministers. And fucked their own sisters, for that matter.”

  Rob J. started away in disgust, but he turned back. “It isn’t too late to set this straight, Mort. Being sheriff is only a damn job, if you lose it you’ll survive. I believe you’re a pretty good man. But you do something like this once, it’s going to be easy to do it again and again.”

  It was a mistake. Mort could live with the knowledge that the whole town knew he was in Nick Holden’s pocket, so long as no one threw it up to his face.

  “I read that piece of shit you called an autopsy report, Dr. Cole. You’d have a hard time makin a judge and a jury of six good white men believe that female was a virgin. Good-lookin Indian female her age, and everyone in the county knowin she was your woman. You got a nerve, preachin. Now, you get yourself the fuck out of here. And don’t you consider comin back unless you have to bother me with something that best be official.”

  Moon said Comes Singing was afraid.

  “I don’t believe they’ll hurt him,” Rob J. said.

  She said he wasn’t afraid of being hurt. “He knows that sometimes white men hang people. If a Sauk is strangled to death, he can’t get across the river of foam, can’t ever get into the Land in the West.”

  “Nobody’s going to hang Comes Singing,” Rob J. said irritably. “They have no evidence he’s done anything. It’s a political thing, and in a few days they’re going to have to let him go.”

  But her fear was contagious. The only lawyer in Holden’s Crossing was Nick Holden. There were several lawyers in Rock Island, but Rob J. didn’t know them personally. Next morning he took care of the patients who needed immediate attention and then rode into the county seat. There were even more people in Congressman Stephen Hume’s waiting room than he usually saw in his own, and he had to wait almost ninety minutes before his turn came.

  Hume listened to him attentively. “Why’d you come to me?” he asked finally.

  “Because you’re running for reelection and your opponent is Nick Holden. For some reason I haven’t figured out, Nick is causing as much t
rouble as he can for the Sauks in general and Comes Singing in particular.”

  Hume sighed. “Nick’s in with a rough bunch, and I can’t take his candidacy lightly. The American party’s filling the native-born workingman with hatred and fear of immigrants and Catholics. They’ve a secret lodge in every town with a peephole in the door so they can keep out nonmembers. They’re called the Know Nothing party, because if you ask any member about their activities, he’s trained to say he knows nothing about it. They promote and use violence against the foreign-born, and I’m shamed to say they’re sweeping the country, politically. Immigrants are flooding in, but at this moment seventy percent of the people of Illinois are native-born, and of the other thirty percent, most aren’t citizens and don’t vote. Last year the Know Nothings almost elected a governor in New York and did elect fortynine legislators. A Know Nothing-Whig alliance easily carried the elections in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and Cincinnati went Know Nothing after a bitter fight.”

  “But why is Nick after the Sauks? They’re not foreign-born!”

  Hume grimaced. “His political instincts probably are very sound. Only nineteen years ago white folks were being massacred by Indians around here, and doing plenty of massacring on their own. A lot of people died during Black Hawk’s War. Nineteen years is a mighty short time. Boys who survived Indian raids and a lot of Indian scares are voters now, and they still hate and fear Indians. So my worthy opponent is fanning the flames. The other night in Rock Island he passed out plenty of whiskey and then gave a rehash of the Indian wars, not leaving out a single scalping or alleged depravity. Then he told them about the last bloodthirsty Indians in Illinois being coddled out there in your town, and he pledged that when he’s elected United States representative, he’ll see that they’re returned to their reservation in Kansas, where they belong.”