by Noah Gordon
In most respects, 1842 was a good year for the little family. To help build the house, Alden hired Otto Pfersick, the miller, and a homesteader from New York State named Mort London. London was a fine, experienced carpenter. Pfersick was only adequate at working wood, but he knew masonry, and the three men spent days selecting the best stones from the river and skidding them up to the house site with oxen. The foundation, chimney, and fireplaces turned out to be handsome. They worked slowly, aware they were building for permanence in a country of cabins, and by the time autumn arrived, when Pfersick had to make flour full-time and the other two men had to farm, the house was framed and closed in.
But it was a long way from finished, so Sarah was sitting in front of the cabin, snapping the ends from a potful of green beans, when the covered wagon lumbered up their track behind two tired-looking horses. She regarded the portly man in the driver’s seat, noting homely features and the road dust on his dark hair and beard.
“Might this be Dr. Cole’s place, ma’am?”
“Might be and is, but he’s on a call. Is the patient injured or sick?”
“Isn’t any patient, thank the Lord. We’re friends of the doctor’s, moving into the township.”
From the back of the wagon a woman now looked out. Sarah saw a limp bonnet framing a white, anxious face. “You’re not … Might you be the Geigers?”
“Might be and are.” The man’s eyes were handsome, and a good strong smile seemed to add a foot to his height.
“Oh, you are so welcome, neighbors! You get down from that wagon this instant.” Flurried, she spilled her beans when she rose from the bench. There were three children in the back of the wagon. The Geiger baby, identified as Herman, was asleep, but Rachel, who was almost four, and two-year-old David were crying as they were lifted down, and at once Sarah’s baby decided to add his yowling to the chorus.
Sarah noted that Mrs. Geiger was four inches taller than her husband, and not even the fatigue of a long, hard journey could disguise the fineness of her features. A Virginia girl recognized quality. It was of an exotic strain Sarah never had seen before, but at once she began to think anxiously about preparing and serving a dinner that wouldn’t shame her. Then she saw that Lillian had begun to cry, and her own interminable time in just such a wagon returned to her with a rush, and she put her arms around the other woman and found to her astonishment that she was crying too, while Geiger stood in consternation amid weeping women and children. Finally Lillian drew back from her, muttering in embarrassment that her entire family was terribly in need of a safe creek for scrubbing.
“Now, that is something we can solve at once,” Sarah said, feeling powerful.
When Rob J. came home he found them still with wet heads from the river baths. After the handshakes and back-pounding, he had a chance to see his farm afresh through the newcomers’ eyes. Jay and Lillian were awed by the Indians and impressed by Alden’s abilities. Jay agreed eagerly when Rob suggested they saddle Vicky and Bess and ride to inspect the Geiger holding. When they returned in time for a fine dinner, Geiger’s eyes blazed with happiness as he tried to describe to his wife the qualities of the land Rob J. had obtained for them.
“You’ll see, just wait until you see it!” he told her. After eating, he went to his wagon and returned with his violin. They couldn’t bring his wife’s Babcock piano, he said, but they had paid to have it stored in a safe, dry place and hoped someday to send for it. “Have you learned the Chopin?” he asked, and in answer Rob J. gripped the viola da gamba with his knees and drew the first rich notes of the mazurka. The music he and Jay had made in Ohio was more glorious because Lillian’s piano had been part of it, but the violin and the viola blended ecstatically. When Sarah finished her chores, she came and listened. She observed that as the men played, Mrs. Geiger’s fingers moved at times, as if she were touching keys. She wanted to take Lillian’s hand and make things better for her with words and promises, but instead she sat next to her on the floor while the music rose and fell and offered all of them hope and comfort.
The Geigers camped next to a spring on their own land while Jason felled trees for a cabin. They were as determined not to impose on the Coles as Sarah and Rob were to show them hospitality. The families visited back and forth. As they were sitting around the Geigers’ campfire on a frosty night, wolves began to howl out on the prairie, and Jay drew from his violin a similarly long, quavering howl. It was answered, and for a time the unseen animals and the human spoke across the darkness, until Jason noticed that his wife was trembling with more than the cold, and he threw another log on the fire and put his fiddle away.
Geiger wasn’t a proficient carpenter. Completion of the Cole house was delayed again, for as soon as Alden could manage to take time from the farm, he began to raise the Geiger cabin. In a few days he was joined by Otto Pfersick and Mort London. The three of them built a snug cabin quickly and attached a shed, a pharmacy to house the boxes of herbs and medicinals that had taken up most of the room in Jay’s wagon. Jay nailed to the doorway a little tin tube containing a parchment lettered with a portion of Deuteronomy, a custom of the Jews, he said, and the Geigers moved in on the eighteenth of November, a few days before hard cold drifted down from Canada.
Jason and Rob J. cut a path through the woods between the Cole house site and the Geiger cabin. It quickly became known as the Long Path, to differentiate it from the path Rob J. had already cut between the house and the river, which became the Short Path.
The builders transferred their efforts to the Cole house. With the entire winter to finish its interior, they burned scrap lumber in the fireplace to keep warm and worked in high spirits, fashioning moldings and wainscoting of quarter oak and lavishing hours on the mixing of skim-milk paint to just the proper shades to please Sarah. The buffalo slough near the house site had frozen, and Alden sometimes stopped working wood long enough to strap skates to his boots and show them skills remembered from his Vermont boyhood. Rob J. had skated every winter in Scotland and would have borrowed Alden’s skates, but they were much too small for his large feet.
The first fine snow fell three weeks before Christmas. The wind blew what looked like smoke, and the minute particles seemed to burn when they touched human skin. Then the real, heavier flakes fell to muffle the world with white, and it stayed that way. With growing excitement, Sarah planned her Christmas menu, discussing surefire Virginia recipes with Lillian. Now she discovered differences between themselves and the Geigers, for Lillian didn’t share in her excitement over the coming holiday. In fact, Sarah was amazed to learn that her new neighbors didn’t celebrate the birth of Christ, choosing instead to queerly commemorate some ancient and outlandish Holy Land battle by lighting tapers and cooking potato pancakes! Still, they gave the Coles holiday gifts, plum preserves they had carted all the way from Ohio, and warm stockings Lillian had knit for everyone. The Coles’ gift to the Geigers was a heavy black iron spider, a frying pan on three legs that Rob had bought in the general store at Rock Island.
They begged the Geigers to join them for Christmas dinner, and in the end they came, although Lillian Geiger ate no meat outside her own home. Sarah served cream-of-onion soup, channel catfish with mushroom sauce, roast goose with giblet gravy, potato balls, English plum pudding made from Lillian’s preserves, crackers, cheese, and coffee. Sarah gave her family woolen sweaters. Rob gave her a lap robe of fox fur so lustrous it caused her to catch her breath and brought exclamations of appreciation from everyone. He gave Alden a new pipe and a box of tobacco, and the hired man surprised him with sharp-bladed ice skates made in the farm’s own smithy—and large enough for his feet! “Snow’s coverin the ice now, but you’ll enjoy these next year,” Alden said, grinning.
After the guests had left, Makwa-ikwa knocked on the door and left rabbitskin mittens, a pair for Sarah, a pair for Rob, a pair for Alex. She was gone before they could invite her in.
“She’s a strange one,” Sarah said thoughtfully. “We should have given her
something too.”
“I took care of it,” Rob said, and told his wife he’d given Makwa a spider like the one they gave to the Geigers.
“You don’t mean to tell me you gave that Indian an expensive store-bought gift?” When he didn’t reply, her voice became tight. “You must think a whole lot of that woman!”
Rob looked at her. “I do,” he said thinly.
In the night the temperature rose, and rain fell instead of snow. Toward morning, a soaking wet Freddy Grueber came banging on their door, a weeping fifteen-year-old. The ox that was Hans Grueber’s prize possession had kicked over an oil lamp and their barn had gone up despite the rain. “Never seen nothin like it, Christ, we just couldn’t put it out. Managed to save the stock, exceptin the mule. But my pa’s burnt bad, his arm and his neck and both legs. You gotta come, Doc!” The boy had ridden fourteen miles in the weather and Sarah tried to give him food and drink, but he shook his head and rode for home at once.
She packed a basket with leftovers from the feast, while Rob J. gathered the clean rags and salves he would need and then went to the longhouse to fetch Makwa-ikwa. In a few minutes Sarah was watching them disappear into the rainy murkiness, Rob on Vicky, with his hood pulled over his head, his large body hunched over in the saddle against the wet wind. The Indian woman was wrapped in a blanket and riding Bess. On my horse, and going off with my husband, Sarah told herself, and then decided to bake bread because she’d never be able to return to sleep.
All day she waited for their return. When nightfall came, she sat late by the fire, listening to the rain and watching the dinner she had kept warm for him turn into something he wouldn’t want to eat. When she went to bed she lay without sleeping, telling herself that if they were holed up in a tipi or a cave, some warm nest, it was her fault for driving him away with her jealousy.
In the morning she was seated at the table, torturing herself with her imagination, when Lillian Geiger came calling, missing town life and driven by loneliness to come through the wet. Sarah had dark circles under her eyes and looked her worst, but she greeted Lillian and chatted brightly before bursting into tears in the middle of a discussion of flower seeds. In a moment, with Lillian’s arms about her, to her consternation she was pouring out her worst fears. “Until he came, my life was so bad. Now it is so good. If I should lose him …
“Sarah,” Lillian said gently. “No one can know what goes on in another’s marriage, of course, but … You say yourself that your fears may be groundless. I’m certain they are. Rob J. doesn’t seem to be the kind of man who would practice deceit.”
Sarah allowed the other woman to comfort and dissuade her. By the time Lillian left for home, the emotional storm was over.
Rob J. came home at midday.
“How is Hans Grueber?” she asked.
“Ah, terrible burns,” he said wearily. “Bad pain. I hope he’ll be all right. I left Makwa there to nurse him.”
“That’s good,” she said.
While he slept through the afternoon and evening, the rain ceased and the temperature plunged. He awoke in the middle of the night and dressed in order to go outside and slip and slide to the outhouse, because the rain-soaked snow had frozen to the consistency of marble. After he had relieved his kidneys and returned to bed, he couldn’t sleep. He had hoped to return to the Gruebers’ in the morning, but now he suspected that his horse’s hooves wouldn’t find a purchase in the icy surface that covered the ground. He dressed again in the dark and let himself out of the house, and he discovered that his fears were correct. When he stomped on the snow as strongly as he was able, his boot couldn’t break through the hard white surface.
In the barn he found the skates Alden had made for him and strapped them on. The track leading to the house had frozen roughly because of use, and made for difficult going, but at the end of the track was open prairie, and the windswept surface of the hardened snow was smooth as glass. He skated down gleaming moonpath, at first tentatively and then with longer and freer strokes as confidence returned, venturing far out into flatness like a vast arctic sea, hearing only the hissing of his blades and the sound of his labored breathing.
Finally, winded, he drew up and examined the strange world of the frozen prairie at night. Quite close and alarmingly loud, a wolf sounded its quavering banshee call, and the hairs lifted on the back of Rob J.’s head. If he were to fall, perhaps to break a leg, winter-starved predators would gather within minutes, he knew. The wolf howled again, or perhaps it was another; there was in the wail everything Rob didn’t want, it was a call composed of loneliness and hunger and inhumanity, and at once he began to move toward home, skating more carefully and more tentatively than he had done before, but fleeing as though pursued.
When he returned to the cabin he checked to see that neither Alex nor the baby had kicked off his covers. They were sleeping sweetly. When he got into bed his wife turned and thawed his frigid face with her breasts. She made a small purring and moaning, a sound of love and contrition, taking him into a welcoming tangle of arms and legs. The doctor was weatherbound; Grueber would be all right without him so long as Makwa was there, he thought, and gave himself to warmth of mouth and flesh and soul, to familiar pastime more mysterious than moonlight, more pleasurable even than flying over ice with no wolves.
23
TRANSFORMATIONS
If Robert Jefferson Cole had been born in northern Britain, at birth he would have been called Rob J., and Robert Judson Cole would have become Big Rob, or just plain Rob without the initial. To Coles in Scotland, the J was retained by a first son only until he himself became the father of a first son, when it was passed on gracefully and without question. It wasn’t in Rob J.’s mind to disturb a family practice of centuries, but this was a new country for Coles, and those he loved weren’t mindful of hundreds of years of family tradition. Much as he tried to explain to them, they never turned the new son into Rob J. To Alex, at first the small brother was Baby. To Alden, he was the Boy. It was Makwa-ikwa who gave him the name that became part of him. One morning the child, a crawler then, and just beginning to mouth words, sat on the dirt floor of her hedonoso-te with two of the three children of Moon and Comes Singing. The children were Anemoha, Little Dog, who was three, and Cisaw-ikwa, Bird Woman, who was a year younger. They were playing with corncob dolls, but the little white boy crept away from them. In the dim light that fell through the smoke holes he saw the medicine woman’s water drum and, dropping his hand on it, produced a sound that caused every head in the longhouse to raise.
The boy crawled away from the sound, but not back to the other children. Instead, like a man on an inspection, he went to her store of herbs and stopped gravely before each pile, examining them with deep interest.
Makwa-ikwa smiled. “You are uibenu migegee-ieh, a little shaman,” she said.
Thereafter, Shaman was what she called him, and others quickly took up the name because somehow it seemed to fit and he answered to it at once. There were exceptions. Alex liked to call him Brother, and Alex was Bigger to him, because from the start their mother spoke to them of one another as Baby Brother and Bigger Brother. Only Lillian Geiger tried to call the child Rob J., because Lillian had heard what her friend had said about his family’s custom, and Lillian was a great believer in family and in tradition. But even Lillian forgot and called the boy Shaman at times, and Rob J. Cole (the man) quickly gave up the struggle and retained his initial. Initialed or not, he knew that out of his hearing, certain of his patients called him Injun Cole and some called him “that fuckin Sauk-lovin sawbones.” But broadminded or bigots, they all knew him for a good doctor. When he was summoned he was content to go to them whether they loved him or not.
Where once Holden’s Crossing had been only a description in Nick Holden’s printed broadsides, now there was a Main Street of stores and houses, known to one and all as the Village. It boasted the Town Offices; Haskins’ General Store: Notions, Groceries, Farm Implements & Dry Goods; N. B. Reimer’s Feeds
& Seeds; the Holden’s Crossing Institution for Savings and Mortgage Company; a boardinghouse run by Mrs. Anna Wiley, who also served meals to the public; the shop of Jason Geiger, Apothecary; Nelson’s Saloon (it was to have been an inn in Nick’s early plans for the town, but because of the presence of Mrs. Wiley’s boardinghouse, it never became anything more than a low-ceilinged room with a long bar); and the stables and smithy of Paul Williams, General Farrier. From her frame house in the Village, Roberta Williams, wife of the blacksmith, did custom sewing and dressmaking. For several years Harold Ames, an insurance man over in Rock Island, came to the Holden’s Crossing general store every Wednesday afternoon to transact business. But as the government land parcels began to be all taken up, and as some of the would-be farmers failed and began to sell their prairie holdings to newcomers, the need for a realty office became obvious and Carroll Wilk-enson came and set up as a real-estate man and insurance agent. Charlie Andreson—who, a few years later, also became the president of the bank—was elected mayor of the town in the first election and every one thereafter, for years. Andreson was generally liked, though there was nobody who didn’t understand that he was the chosen mayor of Nick Holden and at all times was in Nick’s watch pocket. The same went for the sheriff. It hadn’t taken Mort London more than a single year to discover he wasn’t a farmer. There wasn’t enough joinery work around to give him a steady living, because homesteaders did their own carpentry whenever it was possible. So when Nick offered to back him in a run for sheriff, Mort agreed eagerly. He was a placid man who minded his own business, which mostly was keeping the drunks quiet in Nelson’s. It mattered to Rob J. who was the sheriff. Every doctor in the county was a deputy coroner, and the sheriff decided who would conduct the autopsy when a death occurred as a result of a crime or an accident. Oftentimes an autopsy was the only way a country doctor could do the dissecting that made it possible to keep surgical skills honed. Rob J. always adhered to scientific standards as rigorous as Edinburgh’s when he did a postmortem, and he weighed all vital organs and kept his own records. Fortunately, he always had gotten on well with Mort London, and he did a lot of autopsies.
