by Noah Gordon
In Rob’s opinion, Holden’s log house wasn’t the equal to a snug Scots cottage. It was dark and stuffy. The bed, too close to the smoky fireplace, was covered with soot. Holden told him cheerfully that the only good thing about the place was the homesite; within a year, he said, the cabin would be razed and a fine house built in its place. “Yessir, big plans.” He told Rob J. of the things that would soon come—an inn, a general store, eventually a bank. He was frank about his desire to sell Rob on settling in Holden’s Crossing.
“How many families live here now?” Rob J. asked, and smiled ruefully at the answer. “A doctor can’t make a living taking care of only sixteen families.”
“Well, course not. But homesteaders are going to be coming in here more eager than a man on a cunt. And those sixteen families live within the township. Beyond the town line, there’s no doctor between here and Rock Island, and there’s lots of farms scattered through the plains. You’d just have to get yourself a better horse and be willing to travel a bit to make a house call.”
Rob remembered how frustrated he had felt because he had been unable to practice good medicine in the teeming population of District Eight. But this was the other side of the coin. He told Nick Holden he would sleep on it.
He slept that night in the cabin, wrapped in a quilt on the floor, while in the bed Nick Holden snored. But that was no hardship to someone who had spent the winter in a bunkhouse with nineteen farting, hawking lumberjacks. In the morning Holden cooked breakfast but left Rob to clean the dishes and frypan, saying he had something to tend to and would be back.
It was a clear, fresh day. Already the sun was hot, and Rob unwrapped the viola and sat on a shaded rock in the clearing between the rear of the cabin and the tree line of the woods. Next to him on the rock he spread the copy of Chopin’s mazurka that Jay Geiger had transcribed for him, and painstakingly he began to play.
For perhaps half an hour he worked on the theme and the melody until it began to be music. Glancing up from the page, he looked into the woods and saw two Indians on horseback watching him from just beyond the edge of the clearing.
He was alarmed, because they restored his confidence in James Fenimore Cooper, being hollow-cheeked men with bare chests that looked hard and lean, shiny with some kind of oil. The one closer to Rob wore buckskin pants and had a great hooked nose. His shaved head was divided by a gaudy scalplock of stiff, coarse animal hair. He carried a rifle. His companion was a big man, as tall as Rob J. but bulkier. He had long black hair held back by a leather headband, and wore a breechclout and leather leggings. He carried a bow and Rob J. could clearly see a quiver of arrows hanging from his horse’s neck, like a drawing in one of the books on Indians in the Boston Athenaeum.
He didn’t know if there were others in the woods behind them. If their intent was hostile, he was lost, because the viola da gamba is a poor weapon of choice. It occurred to him to resume playing, and he placed the bow back onto the strings and began, but not with the Chopin; he didn’t want to look away from them to gaze at the score. Without thinking about it, he played a seventeenth-century piece he knew well, Cara La Vita Mia, by Oratio Bassani. He played it all the way through, and then halfway through again. Finally he stopped, because he couldn’t sit and play music forever.
Behind him he heard something and half-turned quickly to see a red squirrel skittering off. When he turned back, he was both vastly relieved and enormously regretful because the two Indians were gone. For a moment he could hear their horses moving off; then the only sound was the soughing of the wind in the leaves of the trees.
Nick Holden tried not to show how upset he was when he returned and was told. He made a quick inspection tour, but said nothing seemed to be missing.
“The Indians hereabouts were Sauks. They were driven across the Mississippi into Iowa nine or ten years back, with fighting that folks have come to call Black Hawk’s War. A few years ago, all the Sauks who were still alive were moved onto a reservation in Kansas. Last month we heard that about forty braves with their women and children had lit out from the reservation. They were rumored to be heading toward Illinois. I doubt that even they are stupid enough to give us any trouble, that small a bunch. I think they’re just hoping we’ll leave them alone.”
Rob nodded. “If they’d wanted to give me trouble, they could have done it easily enough.”
Nick was eager to change the subject away from anything that might cast Holden’s Crossing in a poor light. He had spent the morning looking at four parcels of land, he said. He wanted to show them, and at his urging Rob saddled up the mare.
It was government property. As they rode, Nick explained that the land had been platted by federal surveyors into parcels of eighty acres. Private property was selling at eight dollars an acre or more, but government land was priced at $1.25 an acre, an eighty-acre section for one hundred dollars. One-twentieth of the purchase price had to be put down at once to hold the land, and twenty-five percent had to be paid within forty days, the remainder being due in three equal installments at the end of two, three, and four years from the date of entry. Nick said it was the best homesteading land anybody was going to find, and when they came to the land, Rob believed him. The parcels ran along almost a mile of the river, offering a deep fringe of riverbank forest that contained several pure springs and timber for building. Beyond the woods lay the fertile promise of the unplowed plain.
“Here’s my advice,” Holden said. “I wouldn’t look on this land as four eighty-acre parcels, but as two hundred-and-sixty-acre pieces. Just now, the government is letting new settlers buy as much as two sections, and that’s what I’d do, were I you.”
Rob J. grimaced and shook his head. “It’s nice land. But I just don’t have the necessary fifty dollars.”
Nick Holden looked at him thoughtfully. “My future is tied up in this might-be town. If I can attract settlers, I’ll own the general store, I’ll own the mill, I’ll own the inn. Settlers flock to a place where there’s a doctor. To me, it’s money in the sock to have you living in Holden’s Crossing. Banks are lending money at two-and-one-half-percent interest per annum. I’ll let you have the fifty dollars as a loan at one and one-half percent, to be paid back within eight years.”
Rob J. looked around, drew a breath. It was nice land. The place felt so right to him that he had to struggle to control his voice as he accepted the offer. Nick shook his hand warmly and brushed off his gratitude: “Just good business.” They rode slowly over the property. The southernmost double parcel was bottomland, virtually flat. The northern section was rolling, with several rises that could almost be described as small hills.
“I’d take the southern pieces,” Holden said. “The soil’s better, and easier to plow.”
But Rob J. already had made up his mind to buy the northern section. “I’ll keep most of it in grass and raise sheep, that’s the kind of agriculture I understand. But I already know somebody anxious to be a dirt farmer, and maybe he’ll want the southern pieces.”
When he told Holden about Jason Geiger, the lawyer grinned with pleasure. “A pharmacy in Holden’s Crossing? Wouldn’t that be icing on the cake? Well, I’ll put a deposit on the southern section to reserve it in Geiger’s name. If he doesn’t want it, it won’t be hard to turn over land this good.”
The following morning the two men rode into Rock Island, and when they left the United States Land Office, Rob J. was a landowner and a debtor.
In the afternoon he rode back to his property alone. He tethered the mare and explored the woods and the prairie on foot, studying and planning. As in a dream, he walked along the river, throwing stones into the water, unable to believe all this was his. In Scotland, land was enormously difficult to come by. His family’s sheep holding in Kilmarnock had been handed down for many centuries, generation to generation.
That evening he wrote a letter to Jason Geiger describing the 160 acres that had been reserved next to his own property, and he asked Geiger to let him know as soon as
possible whether he wanted to assume permanent possession of the land. He also asked Jason to ship him an ample supply of sulfur, because Nick reluctantly had told him that in the spring there were always outbreaks of what folks called the Illinois mange, and the strong administration of sulfur was the only thing that seemed to work against it.
10
THE RAISING
Word got around at once about a doctor’s presence. Three days after Rob J. arrived in Holden’s Crossing he was summoned sixteen miles to his first patient, and after that he never stopped working. Unlike the settlers of southern and central Illinois, most of whom came from southern states, the farmers settling northern Illinois came from New York and New England, more every month, by foot, horseback, or prairie schooner, sometimes driving a cow, a few hogs, some sheep. His practice would cover a huge territory—prairie rolling between great rivers, crisscrossed by small streams, broken by wooded groves, and marred by deep, muddy sloughs. If patients came to him, he charged seventy-five cents per consultation. If he made a home call, he charged a dollar, and if it was at night, $1.50. His working day consisted mostly of time in the saddle, because the homesteads were so far apart in this strange countryside. Sometimes by nightfall he was so travel-weary all he could do was fall onto the floor and into deep sleep.
He told Holden he’d be able to pay something toward his debt at the end of the month, but Nick smiled and shook his head. “Don’t hurry. In fact, I think I’d better lend you a little more. Winters are hard and you’re going to need a stronger animal than that horse you ride. And with all your doctoring, you don’t have time to raise yourself a cabin before snowfall. Best let me look around for someone who can build one for you, for pay.”
Nick found a cabin builder named Alden Kimball, a whipcord-thin tireless man with yellowed teeth from constantly smoking a stinking corncob. He had grown up on a farm in Hubbardton, Vermont, and more recently was a reprobate Mormon from the town of Nauvoo, Illinois, where folks were known as Latter-day Saints and men were rumored to have as many wives as they wanted. When Rob J. met him, Kimball said he’d had a disagreement with the church elders and just lit out. Rob J. wasn’t inclined to question him too closely. It was enough for him that Kimball used an ax and an adz as if they were part of his body. He felled and trimmed logs and worked them flat on two sides where they lay, and one day Rob rented an ox from a farmer named Grueber. Rob somehow knew that Grueber wouldn’t have trusted his valuable ox to him if Kimball hadn’t been along. The fallen saint patiently insisted that the ox bend to his will, and together the two men and the beast in a single day snaked the shaped logs to the building site Rob had chosen on the riverbank. As Kimball joined the foundation logs with wooden pegs, Rob saw that the single great log that would support the north wall had a bad crook in it about a third of the way down its length, and he called it to Alden’s attention.
“Be all right,” Kimball said, and Rob went away and let him work.
Visiting the site a couple of days later, Rob saw that the walls of the cabin had risen. Alden had chinked the logs with clay dug from a place in the riverbank, and was whitewashing the clay strips. On the north side, all the logs had a crookedness that almost exactly matched the foundation log, giving the entire wall a slight bend. It must have taken Alden a lot of time to search out logs with exactly the right defect, and, indeed, two of the logs had had to be worked with the adz to make them conform.
It was Alden who told him about a quarter horse Grueber had for sale. When Rob J. confessed he didn’t know much about horseflesh, Kimball shrugged. “Four-year-old, still puttin on height and bone. Sound, nothin wrong with her.”
So Rob bought the quarter-horse mare. She was what Grueber called a blood bay, more red than brown, with black legs, mane, and tail, and black spots like freckles all over her forehead, fifteen hands high, with a serviceable body and an intelligent look in her eyes. Because the freckles reminded him of the girl he’d known in Boston, he called her Margaret Holland. Meg for short.
He could see that Alden had an eye for animals, and one morning he asked if Kimball would care to stay on as hired man after the cabin was finished, and work the farm.
“Well … what kind of farm?”
“Sheep.”
Alden made a face. “Know naught about sheep. Always worked with milch cows.”
“I grew up with sheep,” Rob said. “Not much to watching them. Sheep tend to flock up, they can be handled easily on the open prairie by one man and a dog. As for the other chores, castrating and shearing and the like, I could show you.”
Alden appeared to consider, but he was just being polite. “Truth to tell, don’t care much for sheep. No,” he said finally. “Thank you kindly, but suppose not.” Perhaps to change the subject, he asked Rob what he intended to do with his old horse. Monica Grenville had carried him west, but she was an exhausted mount. “Don’t figger to get much for her if you sell without bringin her back to condition. Plenty of grass on the prairie, but you’d have to buy hay for winter feed.”
That problem was solved a few days later, when a farmer who was short of cash paid for a birthing with a wagonload of hay. After consultation, Alden agreed to extend the cabin roof out over the southern wall, supporting the corners with poles to create an open barn for the two horses. A few days after it was finished, Nick stopped by to look it over. He grinned at the attached animal shelter and avoided Alden Kimball’s eyes. “Makes for kind of a queer-looking cabin, you have to admit.” And he lifted his eyebrows at the cabin’s north end. “The damn wall is crooked.”
Rob J. rubbed his fingertips admiringly over the bend in the logs. “No, it was built that way on purpose, that’s the way we like it. That’s what makes it different from other cabins you’re likely to see.”
Alden worked in silence for about an hour after Nick left; then he stopped hammering pegs and walked over to where Rob was currying Meg’s coat. He knocked the dottle out of his pipe against his boot heel. “Guess I’m able to learn to handle sheep,” he said.
11
THE RECLUSE
For his starter herd, Rob J. decided to get mostly Spanish merinos, because their fine wool would make a valuable crop, and to cross-breed them with a long-wool English breed, as his family had done in Scotland. He told Alden he wouldn’t buy the animals until spring, to save the expense and effort required to keep them during winter. In the meantime, Alden labored at stockpiling fenceposts, building two lean-to barns, and putting up a cabin in the woods for himself. Fortunately, the hired man was capable of working unsupervised, because Rob J. was occupied. Those who lived nearby had gotten along without a doctor, and he spent his first few months trying to correct the effects of neglect and home remedies. He saw patients with gout and cancer and dropsy and scrofula, and too many children with worms, and people of all ages with consumption. He grew tired of pulling rotten teeth. He felt the same way about pulling teeth as he did about amputating limbs, hating to take away something he was never going to be able to put back.
“Wait until spring, that’s when everybody around here comes down with some kind of fever. You’ll make your fortune,” Nick Holden told him cheerfully. His calls took him onto remote, almost nonexistent trails. Nick offered the loan of a revolver until he could buy one. “Travel is dangerous, there are bandits like land pirates, and now those damned hostiles.”
“Hostiles?”
“Indians.”
“Has anyone else seen them?”
Nick scowled. They had been sighted several times, he said, but admitted against his will that they had molested no one. “So far,” he added darkly.
Rob J. bought no handgun, nor did he wear Nick’s. He felt secure on the new horse. She had great endurance, and he enjoyed the surefooted way she could scramble up and down steep riverbanks and ford swift streams. He taught her to accept being mounted from either side, and she learned to trot to him when he whistled. Quarter horses were used for herding cattle, and she had already been taught by Grueber
to start, stop, and turn instantly, responding to the slightest shift of Rob’s weight or a small movement of the reins.
One day in October he was summoned to the farm of Gustav Schroeder, who had gotten two fingers of his left hand crushed between heavy rocks. On the way, Rob became lost, and he stopped to ask directions at a sorry-looking shack that stood next to well-tended fields. The door opened just a crack but he was assailed by the worst of odors, stinks of old body wastes, rotten air, putrefaction. A face peered out and he saw red swollen eyes, dank, dirt-plastered witch’s hair. “Go away!” a hoarse female voice commanded. Something the size of a small dog scuttled in the room beyond the door. Not a child in there? The door slammed like a blow.
The groomed fields proved to be Schroeder’s. When Rob reached the farmhouse he had to amputate the farmer’s little finger and the top joint of the third finger, agony for the patient. When he was through, he asked Schroeder’s wife about the woman in the shack, and Alma Schroeder looked a little ashamed.
“That is only poor Sarah,” she told him.
12
THE BIG INDIAN
Nights grew chill and crystal clear, with enormous stars, then for weeks in a row the sky lowered. The snow arrived, lovely and terrible, before November was old, then the wind came and carved the deep white covering, piling it into drifts that challenged but never stopped the mare. It was seeing how the quarter horse responded to the snow, with so much heart, that made Rob J. really begin to love her.
The bitter cold across the plains stayed that way through December and most of January. Making his way home one dawn after a night of sitting up in a smoky sod house with five children, three of whom had bad croup, he came upon two Indians in miserable trouble. He recognized at once the men who had listened to him playing the viola outside Nick Holden’s cabin. The carcasses of three snowshoe hares attested that they had been hunting. One of their ponies had foundered, snapping a foreleg at the fetlock and pinning its rider, the Sauk with the great hooked nose. His companion, the huge Indian, had killed the horse at once and slit its belly, and then had managed to drag the injured man free of the carcass and place him within the horse’s steaming cavity to keep him from freezing.
