Shaman

by Noah Gordon

  33

  ANSWERS AND QUESTIONS

  Stars and Stripes Religious Institute

  282 Palmer Avenue

  Chicago, Illinois

  May 18, 1852

  Robert J. Cole, M.D.

  Holden’s Crossing, Illinois

  Dear Dr. Cole:

  We have received your inquiry concerning the whereabouts and address of the Reverend Ellwood Patterson. We are sorry, but we cannot be of service to you in this matter.

  As you may be aware, our Institute serves both the Churches and the American Workingmen of Illinois, bringing God’s Christian Message to the honest Native-Born Mechanics of this state. Last year Mr. Patterson contacted us and volunteered to help in our ministry, which resulted in his visit to your community and its fine church. But he has since moved from Chicago and we do not have any information regarding his whereabouts.

  Rest assured that if such information should find its way to us, we shall send it to you. In the meantime, if there is some matter with which you may be helped by any of the other fine Ministers of God who are our associates—or some Theological Matter with which I may personally assist you, do not hesitate to contact me.

  I am yours in Christ,

  (signed)

  Oliver G. Prescott, D.D., Director

  Stars and Stripes Religious Institute

  The answer was more or less what Rob J. had expected. He sat down next and wrote, in the form of a letter, a factual account of the murder of Makwa-ikwa. In the letter he reported the presence of the three strangers in Holden’s Crossing. He wrote of his finding samples of human skin under three of Makwa’s fingernails during the autopsy, and of Dr. Barr’s having treated the Reverend Ellwood R. Patterson, on the afternoon of the killing, for three severe tearings on his face.

  He dispatched identical letters to the governor of Illinois in Springfield and to both his senators in Washington. Then he forced himself to send a third copy to his congressman, addressing Nick Holden formally. He asked the authorities to use their offices to locate Patterson and his two companions and investigate any connection between them and the death of the Bear Woman.

  There was a guest at the June meeting of the Medical Society, a doctor named Naismith visiting from Hannibal, Missouri. In the convivial period before the business meeting, he told of a legal suit that had been levied in Missouri by a slave suing to become a free man.

  “Before Black Hawk’s War, Dr. John Emerson was posted as surgeon here in Illinois, at Fort Armstrong. He had a Negro man named Dred Scott, and when the government opened up the former Indian lands for settlement, he claimed a section in what was then called Stephenson and is now Rock Island. The slave built a shack on the land and lived there several years in order that his master could qualify as a settler.

  “Dred Scott went to Wisconsin with Emerson when the surgeon was transferred, and then returned with him to Missouri, where the doctor died. The Negro tried to purchase his freedom from the widow, and that of his wife and two daughters. For her own good reasons, Mrs. Emerson refused to sell. Thereupon the nervy black rascal petitioned for his freedom in the courts, claiming that for years he’d been a freeman in Illinois and Wisconsin.

  Tom Beckermann guffawed. “A suing blackamoor!”

  “Well,” Julius Barton said, “seems to me his claim has merit. Slavery is illegal in both Illinois and Wisconsin.”

  Dr. Naismith continued to smile. “Ah, but of course he’d been sold and bought in Missouri, a slave state, and he had returned there.”

  Tobias Barr looked thoughtful. “What’s your opinion on the slavery matter, Dr. Cole?”

  “I think,” Rob J. said deliberately, “that it’s all right for a man to own a beast if he cares for it and provides sufficient feed and water. But I don’t believe it’s all right for a human being to own another human being.”

  Dr. Naismith did his best to remain genial. “I’m happy you’re my medical colleagues, sirs, and not attorneys or the justices of the courts.”

  Dr. Barr nodded in the face of the man’s obvious unwillingness to engage in unpleasant argument. “Have you folks seen much cholera in Missouri this year, Dr. Naismith?”

  “Not much cholera, but we’ve had a lot of what some have called the cold plague,” Dr. Naismith said. He went on to describe the apparent etiology of the disease, and the rest of the meeting was occupied with a discussion of materia medica.

  Several afternoons later Rob J. was riding past the convent of the Sisters of Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi, and without any decision aforethought, he turned his horse into their lane.

  This time his approach was spotted well in advance, a young nun scuttling out of the garden and hurrying inside. Mother Miriam Ferocia offered him the bishop’s chair with a quiet smile. “We have coffee,” she said in a way that told him this wasn’t always so. “Will you have a cup?”

  He had no desire to use up their supplies, but something in her face caused him to accept the offer with thanks. The coffee arrived black and hot. It was very strong and tasted old to him, like their religion.

  “No milk,” Mother Miriam Ferocia said cheerfully. “God has yet to send us a cow.”

  When he asked how the convent fared, she replied somewhat stiffly that they were surviving very well, indeed.

  “There’s a way to bring money into your convent.”

  “It is always wise to listen when someone speaks of money,” she said calmly.

  “You’re a nursing order without a place in which to nurse. I doctor patients who need nursing. Some of them can pay.”

  But he didn’t get a better reaction than he had the first time he’d raised the subject. The mother superior made a face. “We are sisters of charity.”

  “Some of the patients can pay nothing. Nurse them and you will be charitable. Others can pay. Nurse them and support your convent.”

  “When the Lord provides us with a hospital in which to nurse, we shall nurse.”

  He was frustrated. “Can you tell me why you won’t allow your nuns to nurse patients in their homes?”

  “No. You would not understand.”

  “Try me.”

  But she merely scowled icily, Mary the Ferocious.

  Rob J. sighed, and slurped her bitter brew. “There’s another matter.” He told her the few facts he had learned to date, and of his efforts to trace Ellwood Patterson’s whereabouts. “I wonder if you have learned anything about this man.”

  “Not about Mr. Patterson. But I have learned about the Stars and Stripes Religious Institute. An anti-Catholic organization backed by a secret-action society supporting the American party. It is called the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner.”

  “How did you learn about this … Supreme … ?”

  “Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. They call it the SSSB.” She looked at him keenly. “Mother Church is a vast organization. She has ways of gaining intelligence. We turn the other cheek, but it would be foolish not to learn from which direction the next blow is likely to come.”

  “Perhaps the church can help me find this Patterson.”

  “I sense it is important to you.”

  “I believe he killed a friend of mine. He shouldn’t be allowed to kill others.”

  “You cannot leave him to God?” she asked quietly.

  “No.”

  She sighed. “It is unlikely that you will find him through me. Sometimes an inquiry travels only a link or two in the church’s infinite chain. Often one asks, and never hears again. But I shall make inquiries.”

  When he left the convent, he rode to Daniel Rayner’s farm to deal unsuccessfully with Lydia-Belle Rayner’s sprung back, then proceeded to Lester Shedd’s goat farm. Shedd had almost died of an inflammation of the chest and was a prime example of why the nursing of the nuns would have been invaluable. But Rob J. had called upon Lester as often as possible through some of the winter and all of the spring, and with the hard work of Mrs. Shedd had eased him back into health.

  Whe
n Rob J. announced that no more visits were necessary, Shedd was relieved, but he broached the subject of the doctor’s bill uneasily.

  “Would you happen to have a good nanny in milk?” Rob J. asked. He heard himself almost in astonishment.

  “Not giving milk now. But I’ve a little beauty, just a bit young for freshening. In a couple of months I’ll throw in a proved service by one of my billies. Five months later—plenty of milk!”

  Rob J. led the protesting animal away on a rope behind his horse, just as far as the convent.

  Mother Miriam thanked him properly enough, nevertheless observing tartly that when he visited seven months hence he would have cream in his coffee, as though accusing him of making the gift out of his own selfish desires.

  But he observed that her eyes twinkled. When she smiled it lent warmth and easiness to the strong and forbidding face, so he was able to ride home in the belief his day had been spent well.

  Dorothy Burnham never had seen young Robert Cole as anything but an eager and intelligent pupil. At first she was puzzled by the record of low grades she discovered beside his name in Mr. Byers’ marking book, and then angered, because the boy had an exceptionally good mind and it was obvious he had been treated badly.

  She had absolutely no experience with deafness, but she was a teacher who gloried in an opportunity.

  When next she came to the Coles’s house to board for two weeks, she waited for the proper moment to speak with Dr. Cole in privacy. “It is about Robert’s speech,” she said, and saw as he nodded that she had his undivided attention. “We’re fortunate because he speaks clearly. But as you know, there are other problems.”

  Rob J. nodded again. “His speech is wooden and flat. I’ve suggested that he vary his tones, but …” He shook his head.

  “I believe he speaks in a monotone because more and more he’s forgotten how the human voice sounds, how it rises and dips. I think we may be able to remind him,” she said.

  Two days later, with Lillian Geiger’s permission, the teacher brought Shaman to the Geiger house after school. She stood him next to the piano with his hand on the wooden case, palm down. Striking the first key in the bass as hard as she was able, and keeping the key depressed so it would vibrate through the soundboard and case and into the boy’s hand, she looked at him and said, “Our!” Her own right hand, palm up, remained on the piano top.

  She struck the next key. “School!” Now her right hand was raised slightly.

  The next key. “Is!” And her hand went slightly higher.

  Note by note, she went up the ascending scale, with each note pronouncing part of the litany to which he’d become accustomed in class: “Our-school-is-a-pre-cious-ha-ven!” And then she went down the descending scale: “And-we-learn-to-think-and-grow-here!”

  She played the scales again and again, allowing him to become thoroughly accustomed to the differences in the vibrations that reached his hand, and making certain that he saw the gradual rising and descent of her hand with each note.

  Then she told him to sing the words she had put to the scales, not by mouthing them silently as was his custom in school, but aloud. The results were far less than musical, but Miss Burnham wasn’t looking for music. She wanted Shaman to show some control over the pitch of his voice, and after a number of tries, in response to her hand pumping frantically into the air, his voice did rise. It went up more than a single note, however, and Shaman stared transfixed as his teacher’s thumb and forefinger held a tiny measured distance before his eyes.

  Thus she pushed and bullied, and Shaman disliked it. Miss Burnham’s left hand marched across the piano, banging keys, doggedly climbing up and down the scales. Her right hand lifted one note at a time and then descended the same way. Shaman croaked out his love for his school again and again. Sometimes his face was sullen, and twice his eyes filled with tears, but Miss Burnham didn’t seem to notice.

  Finally the teacher stopped playing. She opened her arms and gathered young Robert Cole into them, holding him for a long moment and twice stroking the thick hair at the back of his head before releasing him.

  “Go home,” she said, but stopped him as he turned away. “We’ll do this again tomorrow, after school.”

  His face fell. “Yes, Miss Burnham,” he said. His voice was without inflection, but she was undismayed. She sat at the keyboard after he was gone, and played the scales one more time.

  “Yes,” she said.

  There had been a quick spring that year—a very small period of comfortable warmth, and then a blanket of oppressive heat that fell over the plains. On a torrid Friday morning in mid-June, Rob J. was stopped on Main Street in Rock Island by George Cliburne, a Quaker farmer turned grain broker. “Would thee have just a moment, Doctor?” Cliburne said politely, and by common unspoken consent they moved together out of the sun glare and into the almost sensual coolness of a hickory tree’s shade.

  “I’m told thee have a sympathy for men who are enslaved.”

  Rob J. was nonplussed by the observation. He knew the grain broker only by sight. George Cliburne had a reputation as a good businessman, said to be shrewd but fair.

  “My personal views aren’t of interest to anyone. Who could have told you that?”

  “Dr. Barr.”

  He remembered their conversation with Dr. Naismith at the Medical Society meeting. He saw Cliburne glance about to make certain they continued to have privacy.

  “Although our state has barred slavery, Illinois law officers recognize the right of those in other states to own slaves. Therefore, slaves who have run away from Southern states are apprehended here and returned to their masters. They are treated cruelly. I have seen with my own eyes a large house in Springfield which has been filled with tiny cells, each containing heavy manacles and leg irons attached to the walls.

  “Some of us … people of like mind, who agree on the evils of slavery, are working to assist those who have run away to seek liberty. We invite thee to join us in God’s work.”

  Rob J. was waiting for Cliburne to say more, and finally he realized some kind of offer had been made.

  “Assist them … how?”

  “We don’t know where they come from. We don’t know where they go from here. They are brought to us and taken away only on moonless nights. Thee need to prepare a safe hiding place large enough for one man. A root cellar, a cranny, a hole in the ground. Sufficient food for three or four days.”

  Rob J. took no time to consider. He shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

  The expression on Cliburne’s face contained neither surprise nor resentment, yet was somehow familiar. “Will thee keep the confidence of our talk?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  Cliburne breathed and nodded. “May God walk with thee,” he said, and they braced against the heat and stepped out of the shade.

  Two days later the Geigers came to the Cole house for Sunday dinner. The Cole boys loved when they came, because then dinner was lavish. At first Sarah had resented it when she had noted that whenever the Geigers dined with her they had refused her roasts, protecting their kashruth. But she had come to understand, and to compensate. When they came to dinner she always offered extras, a meatless soup, additional puddings and vegetables, and several desserts.

  Jay brought with him a copy of the Rock Island Weekly Guardian that contained a story about the Dred Scott legal case, and he commented that the slave’s lawsuit had little or no chance of success.

  “Malcolm Howard says that back in Louisiana, everybody owns slaves,” Alex said, and his mother smiled.

  “Not everybody,” she said thinly. “I doubt if Malcolm Howard’s poppa ever owned slaves or much of anything else.”

  “Did your poppa own slaves back in Virginia?” Shaman asked.

  “My poppa only had a small lumber mill,” Sarah said. “He had three slaves, but then times got hard and he had to sell the slaves and the mill both, and go to work for his poppa, who had a big farm with more’n forty slaves to wo
rk it.”

  “How about my poppa’s family in Virginia?” Alex said.

  “My first husband’s family were storekeepers,” Sarah said. “They didn’t keep slaves.”

  “Why would someone want to be a slave, anyway?” Shaman asked.

  “They don’t want to be,” Rob J. told his son. “They’re just poor unfortunate people caught in a bad situation.”

  Jay took a drink of well water and pursed his lips. “See, Shaman, it’s just the way things are, the way they’ve been in the South for two hundred years. There are radicals who write that black folks should be set free. But if a state like South Carolina turned ’em all loose, how would they live? See, now they work for the white folks, and the white folks care for ’em. A few years back, Lillian’s cousin, Judah Benjamin, had a hundred and forty slaves on his sugar plantation in Louisiana. And he looked after them real well. My father in Charleston has two house nigras. He’s owned ’em most of my life. He treats those two so kindly, I know they wouldn’t leave him even if they were driven away.”

  “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.