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

by Noah Gordon

  2

  THE INHERITANCE

  Next morning, although the level of brown liquid in Alden’s bottle had gone down only a couple of inches, Shaman’s head throbbed. He had slept poorly; the old rope mattress hadn’t been tightened and reknotted for years. He cut his chin shaving. At midmorning, none of those things mattered. His father had been buried quickly because he’d died of typhoid, but the service had been postponed until Shaman’s return. The small First Baptist Church was jammed with three generations of patients who had been doctored by his father, delivered, or treated for diseases, gunshot wounds, stabbings, groin rash, broken bones, and who only knew what else. The Reverend Lucian Blackmer delivered the eulogy—warmly enough to forestall the animosity of those in attendance, yet not so warmly that anyone might get the notion it was all right to die as Dr. Robert Judson Cole had done, without having had the good sense to join the one true church. Shaman’s mother several times had expressed her gratitude that, out of respect for her, Mr. Blackmer had allowed her husband to be interred in the church burying ground.

  All afternoon the Cole house was filled with people, most of them bringing dishes of roasts, forcemeats, puddings, and pies, so much food the occasion took on an almost festive quality. Even Shaman found himself nibbling on slices of cold baked heart, his favorite meat. It had been Makwa-ikwa who had taught him to fancy it; he had thought it an Indian delicacy, like boiled dog or squirrel cooked with the innards, and it had been a happy discovery that many of his white neighbors also cooked the heart after butchering a cow or killing a deer. He was helping himself to another slice when he looked up to see Lillian Geiger crossing the room purposefully toward his mother. She was older and more worn, but she was still attractive; it was from her mother that Rachel had inherited her looks. Lillian had on her best black satin dress, with a black linen overdress and a folded white shawl, the little silver Star of David swinging against her fine bosom on its chain. He noticed she was careful whom she greeted; there were some who might reluctantly give polite greetings to a Jewess, but never to a Copperhead. Lillian was cousin to Judah Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of state, and her husband, Jay, had departed for his native South Carolina at the beginning of the war and joined the Army of the Confederacy with two of his three brothers.

  By the time Lillian made her way to Shaman, her smile was strained. “Aunt Lillian,” he said. She wasn’t his aunt at all, but the Geigers and the Coles had been like kinfolk when he was growing up, and this was the way he’d always addressed her. Her eyes softened. “Hello, Rob J.,” she said, in the old, tender way; no one else called him that—it was what they called his father—but Lillian seldom had called him Shaman. She kissed him on the cheek and didn’t bother to say she was sorry.

  From what she heard from Jason, she said, which was rare, because his letters had to come across the lines, her husband was healthy and didn’t seem to be in danger. An apothecary, he had been made steward of a small military hospital in Georgia when he had joined up, and now was commandant of a larger hospital on the banks of the James River in Virginia. His last letter, she said, contained the news that his brother, Joseph Reuben Geiger, a pharmacist like the other males in his family, but one who had turned cavalryman, had been killed in the fighting under Stuart.

  Shaman nodded soberly, also not voicing the regrets people had come to take for granted.

  And how were her children?

  “Fine as fine. The boys have grown so, Jay won’t know them! They eat like tigers.”

  “And Rachel?”

  “She lost her husband, Joe Regensberg, last June. He died of typhoid fever, like your father.”

  “Oh,” he said heavily. “I heard typhoid fever was common in Chicago last summer. Is she all right?”

  “Oh, yes. Rachel is very well, as are her children. She has a son and a daughter.” Lillian hesitated. “She is seeing another man, a cousin of Joe’s. Their engagement will be announced after her year of mourning has been completed.”

  Ah. Surprising it should still matter so, twist in so deeply. “And how do you enjoy being a grandmother?”

  “I like it very much,” she said, and, separating herself from him, passed on into quiet conversation with Mrs. Pratt, whose land adjoined the Geiger place.

  Toward evening, Shaman heaped a plate with food and took it up to Alden Kimball’s stuffy little cabin that always smelled of wood smoke. The hired man sat on the bunk in his underwear, drinking from a jug. His feet were clean, he had bathed in honor of the funeral service. His other woolen undersuit, more gray than white, was hung to dry in the middle of the cabin, suspended by a cord tied between a nail in a beam and a stick placed between the shoulders.

  Shaman shook his head when offered the jug. He sat in the single wooden chair and watched Alden eat. “Been up to me, I’d have buried Pa on our own land, overlooking the river.”

  Alden shook his head. “She wouldn’t of stood for it. Be too close to the Injun woman’s grave. Before she was … killed,” he said carefully, “folks talked enough about them two. Your ma was somethin-awful jealous.”

  Shaman was itching to ask questions about Makwa and his mother and father, but it didn’t feel right to gossip about his parents with Alden. Instead he waved good-bye and made his departure. It was dusk when he walked down to the river, to the ruins of Makwa-ikwa’s hedonoso-te. One end of the longhouse was intact, but the other end was fallen in, the logs and branches rotting, a certain home for snakes and rodents.

  “I’m back,” he said.

  He could feel Makwa’s presence. She had been dead a long time; what he felt for her now was regret that paled against his sorrow over his father. He wanted comfort, but all he felt was her terrible anger, so certainly that the hair rose on the back of his neck. Not far away was her grave, unmarked but carefully tended, the grass cut, the border transplanted with wild yellow day lilies that had been taken from a nearby patch along the riverbank. The green shoots were already spiking through the wet earth. He knew it must have been his father who had taken care of the grave, and he knelt and pulled a couple of weeds from among the flowers.

  It was almost dark. He fancied he could feel Makwa trying to tell him something. It had happened before, and he always half-believed that was why he could feel her rage, because she couldn’t tell him who had killed her. He wanted to ask her what he should do next, with Pa gone. The wind made ripples on the water. He could see the first pale stars, and he shivered. There was a lot of winter’s cold left, he thought as he went back to the house.

  Next day he knew he should hang around the house in case there were laggard visitors, but he found he couldn’t. He put on working clothes and spent the morning dipping sheep with Alden. There were new lambs and he castrated the males among them, Alden claiming the prairie oysters to fry with eggs for his dinner.

  In the afternoon, bathed and again wearing the black suit, Shaman sat in the parlor with his mother. “Best go through your father’s things and decide who’s to have what,” she said.

  Even with her blond hair mostly gray, his mother was one of the most interesting women he had ever seen, with her beautiful long nose and sensitive mouth. Whatever it was that always got in their way was still there, but she could sense his reluctance. “It has to be done sooner or later, Robert,” she said.

  She was getting ready to bring empty dishes and plates to the church, where they would be picked up by visitors who had brought food to the funeral, and he offered to take them over for her. But she wanted to visit with Reverend Blackmer. “You come too,” she said, but he shook his head, knowing it would entail a long session of listening to why he should allow himself to receive the holy spirit. Continually the literalness of his mother’s belief in heaven and in hell astonished him. Remembering her past arguments with his father, he knew she must be suffering special anguish now, because it had always tortured her that her husband, having refused baptism, wouldn’t be waiting for her in paradise.

  She held up her hand
and pointed to the open window. “Somebody comin on a horse.”

  She listened for a while and gave him a bitter grin. “Woman asked Alden if the doctor’s here, says her husband’s hurt over to their place. Alden told her the doctor died. ‘Young doctor?’ she asks. Alden says, ‘Oh, him, no, he’s here.’”

  Shaman thought it was funny too. Already she’d gone straight to where Rob J.’s medical bag waited in its customary place by the door, and she handed it to her son. “Take the wagon, it’s all hitched up. I’ll go to church later.”

  The woman was Liddy Geacher. She and her husband, Henry, had bought the Buchanan place while Shaman was away. He knew the way well, it was only a few miles. Geacher had fallen from the haymow. They found him still lying where he’d landed, breathing in shallow, painful gasps. He groaned when they tried to undress him, so Shaman cut away his clothing, careful to separate the seams so Mrs. Geacher could sew the garments together again. There was no blood, just nasty bruising and a puffed-up left ankle. From the bag Shaman took his father’s stethoscope. “Come here, please. I want you to tell me what you hear,” he said to the woman, and fitted the pieces into her ears. Mrs. Geacher’s eyes widened when he placed the bell to her husband’s chest. He let her listen for a good long time, holding the bell in his left hand while he felt the man’s pulse with the fingertips of his right hand.

  “Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump!” she whispered.

  Shaman smiled. Henry Geacher’s pulse was fast, and who could blame him? “What else you hear? Take your time.”

  She listened at length.

  “No soft crackling, like someone was crumpling dry straw?”

  She shook her head. “Thump-thump-thump.”

  Good. No broken rib had pierced a lung. He relieved her of the stethoscope and then went over every inch of Geacher’s surface with his hands. With no hearing, he had to be more careful and observant with every one of his other senses than most doctors. When he held the man’s hands, he nodded in satisfaction at what the Gift told him. Geacher had been lucky, landing on enough old hay to make the difference. He’d banged up his ribs, but Shaman couldn’t find any sign of a bad fracture. He thought the fifth through the eighth ribs probably were cracked, and possibly the ninth. When he bound the ribs, Geacher breathed easier. Shaman strapped up the ankle and then took a bottle of his father’s painkiller from the bag, mostly alcohol with a little morphia and a few herbs. “He’s going to hurt. Two teaspoonfuls every hour.”

  A dollar for the house call, fifty cents for the dressings, fifty cents for the medicine. But only part of the job was done. The Geachers’ nearest neighbors were the Reismans, a ten-minute ride away. Shaman went there and talked to Tod Reisman and his son Dave, who agreed they could pitch in and keep the Geacher farm going a week or so, till Henry was back on his feet.

  He drove Boss slowly on the way home, savoring spring. The black earth was still too wet to plow. That morning in the Cole pastures he’d seen that the low flowers were arriving, bird’s-foot violet, orange puccoon, pink prairie phlox, and in a few weeks the plains would be alive with taller color at its brightest. With pleasure, he breathed in the familiar heavy sweetness of manured fields.

  When he got home, the house was empty and the egg basket was missing from its hook, which meant his mother was in the henhouse. He didn’t seek her out. He examined the medical bag before replacing it by the door, as though he were seeing it for the first time. The leather was worn, but it was good cowhide and would last and last. Inside, the instruments, dressings, and medications were as his father’s own hands had arranged them, neat, in order, ready for anything.

  Shaman went to the study and began a methodical inspection of his father’s belongings, rummaging through desk drawers, opening the leather chest, separating things into three categories: for his mother, first choice of all small objects that might hold emotional value; for Bigger, the half-dozen sweaters Sarah Cole had knitted from their own wool to keep the doctor warm on cold night calls, their father’s fishing and hunting equipment, and a treasure new enough so Shaman saw it for the first time, a Colt .44-caliber Texas Navy revolver with black-walnut grips and a nine-inch rifled barrel. The gun was a surprise and shock. Even though his pacifist father had agreed, finally, to treat Union troops, it was always with the clear understanding that he was a noncombatant who wouldn’t bear arms; why, then, had he purchased this obviously expensive weapon?

  The medical books, the microscope, the medical bag, the pharmacy of herbs and drugs, would go to Shaman. In the chest under the microscope case was a collection of books, a number of volumes of stitched ledger paper.

  When Shaman looked through them, he saw that they were his father’s lifetime journal.

  The volume he picked at random had been written in 1842. Leafing through it, Shaman found a rich, haphazard collection of medical notes, pharmacology, and intimate thoughts. The journal was sprinkled with sketches—faces, anatomical drawings, a full-length nude drawing of a woman; she was, he realized, his mother. He studied the younger face and stared fascinated at forbidden flesh, aware that beneath the unmistakably pregnant belly there had been a fetus that would become himself. He opened another volume that had been written earlier, when Robert Judson Cole was a young man in Boston, fresh off the boat from Scotland. It too contained a female nude, this time with a face unknown to Shaman, the features indistinct but the vulva drawn in clinical detail, and he found himself reading of a sexual affair his father had had with a woman in his boardinghouse.

  As he read the entire account, he grew younger. The years fell away, his body regressed, the earth reversed its spinning, and the fragile mysteries and torments of youth were restored. He was a boy again, reading forbidden books in this library, looking for words and pictures that would reveal every one of the secret, base, perhaps thoroughly wonderful things men did with women. He stood and trembled, listening lest his father should emerge through the door and find him there.

  Then he felt the vibration of the back door being firmly closed as his mother came in with her eggs, and he forced himself to close the book and replace it in the chest.

  At supper he told his mother he had begun to go through his father’s belongings and would carry an empty box down from the attic in order to pack away the things that would go to his brother.

  Between them hung the unspoken question of whether Alex was alive to return and use them, but then Sarah made up her mind to nod. “Good,” she said, obviously relieved that he was getting to the task.

  That night, sleepless, he told himself reading the journals would make him a voyeur, an intruder into his parents’ lives, perhaps even into their bedroom, and that he must burn the books. But logic told him his father had written them to record the essence of his life, and now Shaman lay in the sagging bed and wondered what the truth had been about how Makwa-ikwa had lived and died, and worried lest truth might contain grievous dangers.

  Finally he got up and lighted the lamp, carrying it down the hall stealthily so as not to awaken his mother.

  He trimmed the smoking wick and turned the flame up as high as it would go. That produced a light barely adequate for reading. The study was uncomfortably cold, this time of night. But Shaman took the first book and started to read, and presently he was unaware of the illumination or the temperature, as he began to learn more than he had ever wanted to know about his father and about himself.

  PART TWO

  FRESH CANVAS, NEW PAINTING

  March 11, 1839

  3

  THE IMMIGRANT

  Rob J. Cole first saw the New World on a foggy spring day as the packet Cormorant—a clumsy ship with three squat masts and a mizzen sail, but the pride of the Black Ball Line—was sucked into a commodious harbor by the incoming tide and dropped its hook in the choppy swells. East Boston wasn’t much, a couple of rows of ill-built wooden houses, but from one of the piers, for three pence he took a little steamboat ferry that threaded its way through an impressive array of shipping,
across the harbor to the main waterfront, a sprawl of tenements and shops smelling reassuringly of rotting fish, bilges, and tarred rope, like any Scots port.

  He was tall and broad, larger than most. When he walked the crooked cobblestoned streets away from the water, it was hard going because the voyage had made him bone weary. On his left shoulder he bore his heavy trunk, while under his right arm, as if he carried a woman by the waist, was a very large stringed instrument. He absorbed America through his pores. Narrow streets, scarcely allowing room for wagons and carriages. Most buildings of wood or constructed of very red brick. Shops well-supplied with goods, flaunting colorful signs with gilded letters. He tried not to ogle the females entering and leaving the shops, although he had an almost drunken urge to smell a woman.

  He peeked into a hotel, the American House, but was intimidated by chandeliers and Turkish carpets, knowing its rates were too high. In an eating house on Union Street he had a bowl of fish soup and asked two waiters to recommend a boardinghouse that was clean and cheap.

  “Make up your mind, lad, it’ll either be one or the other,” one of them said. But the other waiter shook his head and sent him to Mrs. Burton’s on Spring Lane.

  The one available room had been built as servants’ quarters and shared the attic with the rooms of the hired man and the maid. It was tiny, up three flights of stairs to a cubby under the eaves, certain to be hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There were a narrow bed, a little table with a cracked washbowl, and a white chamber pot covered by a linen towel embroidered with blue flowers. Breakfasts—porridge, biscuits, one hen’s egg—came with the room for a dollar and fifty cents a week, Louise Burton told him. She was a sallow widow in her sixties, with a direct stare. “What is that object?”