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

by Noah Gordon

  “Traveling west! Traveling west!” the salesman said. “You too?”

  Rob J. nodded. “How far do you go?”

  “Just about the end of the state! Pittsfield. You, sir?”

  It gave him an inordinate amount of satisfaction to answer, so much pleasure that he grinned and had to restrain from shouting for all to hear, as the words played their own music and shed a fine romantic light in every corner of the rocking railroad car.

  “Indian country,” he said.

  8

  MUSIC

  He progressed through Massachusetts and New York via a series of short railroads connected by stagecoach lines. It was hard traveling in the winter. At times a stage had to wait while as many as a dozen oxen dragged plows to clear drifts or packed down the snow with great wooden rollers. Inns and taverns were expensive. He was in the forest of the Allegheny Plateau in Pennsylvania when he ran out of money and deemed himself lucky to find work in Jacob Starr’s timber camp, doctoring lumberjacks. When there was an accident, it was likely to be serious, but in between there was little for him to do, and he sought out labor, joining the crews in hewing down white pines and hemlocks that had lived more than two hundred and fifty years. Usually he manned one end of a “misery whip,” or two-man saw. His body hardened and thickened. Most camps didn’t have a doctor, and the lumberjacks knew how valuable he was to them, and protected him as he worked at their dangerous trade. They taught him to soak his bleeding palms in brine till they toughened. In the evenings he juggled in the bunkhouse to keep his callused fingers dexterous for surgery, and he played his viola da gamba for them, alternating accompaniments of their raunchy bellowed songs with selections by J. S. Bach and Marais, to which they listened raptly.

  All winter they stockpiled huge logs on the banks of a stream. On the back of every single-bitted ax head in camp, raised in steel, was a large five-pointed star. Each time a tree was felled and trimmed, the men reversed their axes and slammed the embossed star into the fresh-cut butt, marking it as a Starr log. When the spring melt came, the stream rose eight feet, carrying the logs to the Clarion River. Huge log rafts were assembled, and on them were built bunkhouses, cookhouses, and supply shacks. Rob rode the rafts downriver like a prince, a slow, dreamlike journey interrupted only when the logs jammed and piled up, to be unsnarled by the skilled, patient boom-men. He saw all manner of birds and animals, drifting down the serpentine Clarion until it joined the Allegheny, and riding the logs down the Allegheny all the way to Pittsburgh.

  In Pittsburgh he said good-bye to Starr and his lumberjacks. In a saloon he was hired as physician to a track-laying crew of the Washington & Ohio Railroad, a line seeking to compete with the state’s two busy canals. With a work crew he was taken into Ohio, to the beginning of a great openness bisected by two shining rails. Rob was given living quarters with the bosses aboard four railroad cars. Springtime on the great plain was beautiful, but the world of the W&O RR was ugly. The track layers, graders, and teamsters were immigrant Irish and Germans whose lives were regarded as a cheap commodity. Rob’s responsibility was to ensure that the last ounces of their strength were available for laying track. He welcomed the pay, but the job was doomed from the start, for the superintendent, a dark-visaged man named Cotting, was a piece of nastiness who wouldn’t spend money on food. The railroad employed hunters who killed plenty of wild meat, and there was a chicory drink that passed for coffee. But save at the table shared by Cotting, Rob, and the managers, there were no greens, no cabbage, no carrots, no potatoes, nothing to supply ascorbic acid except, as a very rare treat, a pot of beans. The men had scurvy. Though anemic, they had no appetites. Their joints were sore, their gums bled, their teeth were falling out, and their injuries wouldn’t heal. They were literally being murdered by malnutrition and heavy work. Finally Rob J. broke into the locked supply car with a crowbar and passed out crates of cabbages and potatoes until the bosses’ own foodstuffs were gone. Fortunately, Cotting didn’t know his young physician had taken a vow of nonviolence. Rob’s size and condition and the cold contempt in his eyes made the superintendent decide it was easier to pay him off and be rid of him than to fight him.

  He’d earned barely enough money from the railroad to buy a slow old mare, a used twelve-gauge muzzle-loading rifle and a light little goose gun with which to hunt smaller game, needles and thread, a fishline and hooks, a rusty iron frying pan, and a hunting knife. He named the horse Monica Grenville, in honor of a beautiful older woman, his mother’s friend, whom for years he had dreamed of riding during the fevered fantasies of his adolescence. Monica Grenville the horse allowed him to work his way west on his own terms. He shot game easily after discovering that the rifle pulled to the right, and caught fish if there was opportunity, and he earned money or goods wherever he came to people who needed a doctor.

  The size of the country stunned him, mountain and valley and plain. After a few weeks he became convinced he could go on as long as he lived, riding Monica Grenville ploddingly and eternally in the direction of the setting sun.

  He ran out of pharmaceuticals. It was hard enough performing surgery without the aid of the few inadequate palliatives that were available, but he had neither laudanum nor morphine nor any other drug and had to rely on his swiftness as a surgeon and whatever rotgut whiskey he was able to buy as he went along. Fergusson had taught him a few helpful tricks that he remembered. Lacking tincture of nicotine, given by mouth as a muscle relaxant to slacken the anal sphincter during an operation for fistula, he bought the strongest cigars he could find and inserted one into the patient’s rectum until the nicotine was absorbed from the tobacco and relaxation took place. Once in Titusville, Ohio, an elderly citizen happened upon him overseeing a patient who was bent over a wagon shaft, the cigar protruding.

  “Do you have a match, sir?” Rob J. asked him.

  Later, at the general store, he heard the old man tell his friends solemnly, “You would never believe how they was smokin em.”

  In a tavern in Zanesville, he saw his first Indian, a crushing disappointment. In contrast to James Fenimore Cooper’s splendid savages, the man was a soft-fleshed, sullen drunkard with snot on his face, a pitiful creature taking abuse while begging drinks.

  “Delaware, I guess,” the saloonkeeper said when Rob asked him the Indian’s tribe. “Miami, mebbe. Or Shawnee.” He shrugged contemptuously. “Who cares? The mizzable bastards is all a same to me.”

  A few days later, in Columbus, Rob discovered a stout black-bearded young Jew named Jason Maxwell Geiger, an apothecary with a well-stocked pharmacy.

  “You have laudanum? You have tincture of nicotine? Potassium iodide?” No matter what he requested, Geiger answered with a smile and a nod, and Rob wandered happily among the jars and retorts. Prices were lower than he would have feared, for Geiger’s father and brothers were manufacturers of pharmaceuticals in Charleston, and he explained that whatever he couldn’t make himself, he was able to order from his family at favorable terms. So Rob J. put in a good supply. It was when the pharmacist helped carry his purchases to the horse that Geiger saw the wrapped bulk of the musical instrument and turned at once to his visitor. “Surely it’s a viol?”

  “Viola da gamba,” Rob said, and saw something new enter the man’s eyes, not exactly cupidity, but a wistful yearning so powerful as to be unmistakable. “Would you care to see it?”

  “You must bring it into the house, show it to my wife,” Geiger said eagerly. He led the way to the dwelling behind the apothecary shop. Inside, Lillian Geiger held a dish towel across her bodice as they were introduced, but not before Rob J. had noticed the stains from her leaking breasts. In a cradle slept their two-month-old daughter, Rachel. The house smelled of Mrs. Geiger’s milk and fresh-baked hallah. The dark parlor contained a horsehair sofa and chair and a square piano. The woman slipped into the bedroom and changed her dress while Rob J. unwrapped the viol; then she and her husband examined the instrument, running their fingers over the seven strings and ten fret
s as if they were stroking a newly recovered family icon. She showed him her piano, with its carefully oiled dark walnut wood. “Made by Alpheus Babcock of Philadelphia,” she said. Jason Geiger brought another instrument to light from behind the piano. “It was made by a brewer of beer named Isaac Schwartz who lives in Richmond, Virginia. It’s just a fiddle, not good enough to be called a violin. Someday I hope to own a violin.” But in a moment, when they were tuning up, Geiger drew sweet sounds.

  They regarded one another warily lest they prove to be musically incompatible.

  “What?” Geiger asked him, giving the visitor the courtesy.

  “Bach? Do you know this prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier? It’s from Book II, I forget the number.” He played them the opening, and at once Lillian Geiger joined in and, nodding, so did her husband. The twelfth, Lillian mouthed. Rob J. cared nothing about identifying the piece, for this kind of playing was not to entertain lumberjacks. It was at once apparent that the man and woman were accomplished and accustomed to accompanying one another, and he was certain he’d make an ass of himself. Wherever their music progressed, his followed tardily and jerkily. His fingers, instead of flowing along the musical path, seemed to make spastic leaps, like salmon fighting their way up a falls. But halfway through the prelude he forgot his fear, for the habits of many long years of playing overcame the clumsiness caused by lack of practice. Soon he was able to observe that Geiger played with his eyes closed, while his wife wore on her face a look of glazed pleasure that was at the same time sharing and intensely private.

  The satisfaction was almost like pain. He hadn’t realized how much he had missed music. When they finished they sat and grinned at one another. Geiger hurried out to put a Closed sign on the door of his shop, Lillian went to check on her child and to place a roast in the oven, Rob unsaddled and fed poor patient Monica. When they came back, it turned out the Geigers knew nothing by Marin Marais, while Rob J. had memorized none of the works of that Polish fellow, Chopin. But they all three knew Beethoven’s sonatas. All afternoon they constructed for themselves a shimmering, special place. By the time the wailing of the hungry infant interrupted their play, they were drunk with the heady beauty of their own sounds.

  The pharmacist wouldn’t hear of his leaving. The evening meal was pink lamb tasting faintly of rosemary and garlic and roasted with little carrots and new potatoes, and a blueberry compote. “You will sleep in our guest room,” Geiger said.

  Drawn toward them, Rob asked Geiger about opportunities for physicians in the area.

  “Lots of people hereabouts, Columbus being state capital, and a number of doctors already are here to take care of em. It’s a good place for a pharmacy, but we’re going to be leaving Columbus ourselves when our baby is old enough to survive the trip. I want to be a farmer as well as an apothecary, and I want land to leave to my children. Farmland in Ohio is just too damned high. I’ve been making a study of places where I can buy fertile land I can afford.”

  He had maps, which he opened on his table. “Illinois,” he said, and pointed out to Rob J. the part of the state that his investigations had indicated the most desirable, a section between the Rocky River and the Mississippi. “A good supply of water. Beautiful woods lining the rivers. And the rest of it is prairie, black earth that’s never felt a plow.”

  Rob J. studied the maps. “Maybe I ought to go there myself,” he said finally. “See if I like it.”

  Geiger beamed. They spent a long time hunched over the maps, marking the best route, arguing good-naturedly. After Rob went to bed, Jay Geiger stayed up late and by candlelight copied the music of a Chopin mazurka. They played it next morning after breakfast. Then the two men consulted the marked map one more time. Rob J. agreed that if Illinois proved to be as good as Geiger believed, he would settle there and write at once to his new friend, telling him to bring his family to the western frontier.

  9

  TWO PARCELS

  Illinois was interesting right from the start. Rob entered the state in late summer, when the tough green stuff of the prairie was dried and bleached from too many long days in the sun. At Danville he watched men boiling down the water from saline springs in big black kettles, and when he left, he carried with him a packet of very pure salt. The prairie was rolling and, in places, adorned with low hills. The state was blessed with sweet water. Rob came to only a few lakes but saw a number of marshes feeding streams that merged into rivers. He learned that when people in Illinois spoke of the land between the rivers they most likely meant the southern tip of the state that lay between the Mississippi and the Ohio. It had deep, rich alluvial soils from both great rivers. Folks called the region Egypt, because they thought it was as fertile as the fabled soil of the great Nile delta. On Jay Geiger’s map Rob J. saw that there were a number of “little Egypts” between rivers in Illinois. Somehow, during his brief encounter with Geiger the man had earned his respect, and he kept on traveling toward the region Jay had told him was the likeliest one for settlement.

  It took him two weeks to work his way across Illinois. On the fourteenth day the trail he was on entered a fringe of woods, offering blessed coolness and the smell of moist growing things. Following the narrow track, he heard the sound of a lot of water, and presently he emerged on the eastern bank of a good-sized river that he guessed to be the Rocky.

  It was dry season but the current was strong, and the great rocks that gave the river its name created white water. Riding Monica along the bank, he was trying to pick out a place that appeared fordable when he came to a deeper, slower section. Between two huge tree trunks on the opposite banks, a thick rope cable was suspended. An iron triangle and a piece of steel were hung from a branch next to a sign that read:

  HOLDEN’S CROSSING

  Ring for Ferry

  He clanged the triangle vigorously and, it seemed to him, for a long time before he saw a man leisurely making his way down the far bank, where the raft was moored. Two stout vertical posts on the raft ended in great iron rings through which passed the suspended hawser, allowing the raft to slide along the rope as it was poled across the river. By the time the raft was mid-river, the current had pulled the rope downstream, so that the man moved the raft over an arc instead of making a straight crossing. In the middle, the dark oily waters were too deep to pole, and the man pulled the raft along slowly by hauling on the rope cable. The ferryman was singing, and baritone lyrics carried clearly to Rob J.

  One day I was walkin, I heerd a complainin,

  An saw a old woman the picture of gloom.

  She gazed at the mud on her doorstep (’twas rainin)

  An this was her song as she wielded her broom.

  Oh, life is a toil and love is a trouble,

  Beauty’ll fade an riches’ll flee,

  Pleasures they dwindle an prices they double,

  An nothin is as I would wish it to be….

  There were many verses, and long before they ended, the rafter was able to start poling again. As the raft drew closer, Rob could see a muscular man, perhaps in his thirties. He was a head shorter than Rob and looked very much a native of the land, with heavy boots on his feet, brown linseywoolsey pants that were too heavy for the weather, a blue cotton shirt with a heavy collar, and a sweat-stained leather hat with a wide brim. He had a mane of black hair he wore long, and a full black beard, and prominent cheekbones balanced on either side of a thin curved nose that might have given cruelty to his face except for his blue eyes, which were cheerful and welcoming. As the distance between them closed, Rob felt the wariness, the expectation of affectation, that resulted from seeing a perfectly beautiful woman or a too-handsome man. But there appeared to be little affectation in the ferryman.

  “Howdy,” he called. One final shove on the pole sent the raft grinding into the sandy bank. He held out his hand. “Nicholas Holden, at your service.”

  Rob shook his hand and identified himself. Holden had taken a dark, moist plug from his shirt pocket and cut himself a chaw with
his knife. He held it out to Rob J., who shook his head. “How much to ride across?”

  “Three cents for you. Ten cents, the horse.”

  Rob paid as requested, thirteen cents in advance. He tethered Monica to rings set in the floor of the raft for that purpose. Holden gave him a second pole, and the two of them grunted as they put their backs to it.

  “Looking to settle in these parts?”

  “Might be,” Rob said cautiously.

  “Not a farrier, by chance?” Holden had the bluest eyes Rob had ever seen on a man, saved from femininity by a piercing glance that made him appear secretly amused. “Damn,” he said, but seemed unsurprised at Rob’s headshake. “Sure would like to find me a good blacksmith. Farmer, are you?”

  He perked up visibly when Rob told him he was a doctor. “Thrice welcome, and welcome again! We need a doctor in the township of Holden’s Crossing. Any doctor can ride this ferry for free,” he said, and paused in his poling long enough to count three cents solemnly back into Rob’s palm.

  Rob looked at the coins. “What about the other ten cents?”

  “Shit, I don’t suppose the horse is a doctor too?” When he grinned, he was likable enough to make you think he was ugly.

  He had a tiny cabin of squared-off logs chinked with white clay, near a garden and a spring and set on a rise overlooking the river. “Just in time for dinner,” he said, and soon they were eating a fragrant stew in which Rob identified turnip and cabbage and onion but was puzzled by the meat. “Got me an old hare and a young prairie chicken this morning, and they’re both in there,” Holden said.

  Over refilled wooden bowls they told enough about themselves to make things comfortable. Holden was a country lawyer from the state of Connecticut. He had big plans.

  “How come they named the town after you?”

  “They didn’t. I did,” he said affably. “I got here first and set up the ferry. Whenever someone comes to settle, I tell them the name of the town. Nobody’s argued yet.”