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

by Noah Gordon

  Shaman went to the debate that night, but when he arrived at Main Hall there already was a crowd, and he realized that from the best seat available he wouldn’t be able to read the candidates’ lips. He left the hall and climbed the stairs until he reached the door to the roof, where Professor Gardner, his astronomy teacher, maintained a small observatory at which each student in his class was required to study the heavens for several hours each month. Tonight Shaman was alone, and he peered into the ocular of Professor Gardner’s pride and love, a five-inch Alvan Clark refracting telescope. He adjusted the knob, shortening the distance between the eyepiece and the convex front lens, and the stars sprang straight at him, two hundred times larger than a moment before. A cold night, clear enough to reveal two of the rings of Saturn. He studied the nebulae of Orion and Andromeda, then began moving the telescope on its tripod, searching the heavens. Professor Gardner called this “sweeping the sky,” and said a woman named Maria Mitchell had been sweeping the sky and had won lasting fame by discovering a comet.

  Shaman discovered no comets. He watched until the stars seemed to wheel, enormous and glittering. What had formed them up there, out there? And the stars beyond? And beyond?

  He felt that each star and planet was part of a complicated system, like a bone in a skeleton or a drop of blood in the body. So much of nature seemed organized, thought out—so orderly, yet so complicated. What had made it so? Mr. Gardner had told Shaman that all anyone needed to become an astronomer were good eyes and mathematical ability. For a few days he’d considered making astronomy his life’s work, but then he changed his mind. The stars were magical, but all you could do was watch them. If a heavenly body went awry, you couldn’t ever hope to make it well again.

  When he went home for Christmas, somehow Holden’s Crossing was different than it had been before, lonelier than his room in the dean’s house, and at the end of the holiday he returned to the college almost willingly. He was delighted with the knife his father had given him, and he bought a small whetstone and a tiny vial of oil and sharpened each blade until it could cut a single hair.

  Second semester, he took chemistry instead of astronomy. He found composition difficult. You have told me BEFORE, his English professor scribbled crankily, that Beethoven wrote much of his music while deaf. Professor Gardner encouraged him to use the telescope whenever he pleased, but the night before a chemistry examination in February he sat on the roof and swept the sky instead of learning Berzelius’ table of atomic weights, and he received a poor grade. After that, he managed less star-watching but he did very well in chemistry. When he went back to Holden’s Crossing again for the Easter holiday, the Geigers invited the Coles for dinner, and Jason’s interest in chemistry made the ordeal less awkward for Shaman because Jay kept asking him questions about the course.

  His answers must have been satisfactory. “What do you plan to do with your life, old Shaman?” Jay asked.

  “I don’t know yet. I’ve thought … perhaps I can work in one of the sciences.”

  “If you’d like pharmacy, I’d be honored to apprentice you.”

  He could see on his parents’ faces that the offer pleased them, and he thanked Jay clumsily and said he’d certainly like to think about that; but he knew he didn’t want to be a pharmacist. He kept his eyes on his plate for a few minutes and missed some of the conversation, but when he looked up again he saw that Lillian’s face was shadowed with grief. She was telling his mother that Rachel’s child would have been born in five months, and for a while thereafter they talked about losing babies.

  That summer Shaman worked with the sheep and read philosophy books borrowed from George Cliburne. When he returned to college, Dean Hammond allowed him to escape from Hebrew, and he elected to study Shakespeare’s plays, advanced mathematics, botany, and zoology. Only one of the divinity students had come back to Knox for another year, but so had Brooke, with whom Shaman continued to converse like a Roman, keeping his Latin fresh. His favorite teacher, Professor Gardner, taught the zoology course but was a better astronomer than a biologist. They dissected only frogs and mice and little fishes, making a lot of diagrams. Shaman didn’t have his father’s artistic talent, but being a child around Makwa had given him a head start in botany; he wrote his first project on the anatomy of flowers.

  That year the debate about slavery waxed hot at the college. Along with other students and faculty members, he joined the Society for the Abolition of Slavery, but there were many at the college and in Galesburg who identified with the Southern states, and at times the debate became ugly.

  Mostly, people left him alone. The townspeople and students had become accustomed to him, but to the ignorant and superstitious he had become a mystery, a local legend. They didn’t understand about deafness, and about how deaf people could develop compensating sensitivities. They had quickly established that he was stone deaf, but some thought he had occult powers, because if he was studying alone and someone came in quietly behind him, he always detected a presence. They said he had “eyes in the back of his head.” They didn’t comprehend that he was reached by the vibrations of approaching steps, that he could feel the coolness from the opened door, or see the flicker of air movement in the paper he held in his hand. He was happy none of them would ever witness his ability to identify notes played on a piano.

  He knew they referred to him sometimes as “that strange deaf boy.”

  On a soft early-May afternoon he had been walking about the town, observing the progress of the flowers in the yards, and at South Street and Cedar a railroad lorry pulled by four horses came around the corner too fast. Though he was spared the thunder of hooves and the yipping, he saw the small furry shape narrowly miss disaster from the front end, only to be caught by the right rear wheel that carried the dog around through almost a full rotation before finally it was flung clear. The lorry lumbered away, leaving the dog flopping in the dust of the street, and Shaman hurried closer.

  The critter was a nondescript yellow female with stubby legs and a white-tipped tail. Shaman thought there was some terrier in her. She was writhing on her back, and a thin trickle of red ran from the corner of her mouth.

  A couple who had been walking nearby came and stared.

  “Disgraceful,” the man said. “Mad drivers. It could as easily have been one of us.” He held out a warning hand as he saw that Shaman was about to kneel. “I wouldn’t. It’s sure to bite you in its pain.”

  “Do you know who owns her?” Shaman asked.

  “No,” the woman said.

  “Just a street cur, this one,” the man said, and he and the woman walked away.

  Shaman knelt and patted the dog warily, but the animal licked his hand. “Poor dog,” he said. He checked all four limbs, and they didn’t appear broken, but he knew the bleeding was a bad sign. Nevertheless, after a moment he took his jacket off and wrapped it around the dog. Holding her in his arms like an infant or a bundle of laundry, he carried her back to the house. No one looked out the side windows and noticed him bearing his burden into the backyard. He met nobody on the back stairs. In his room he put the dog on the floor and then took his underwear and stockings out of the bottom drawer of his bureau. From the hall closet he helped himself to some of the rags Mrs. Hammond kept for housecleaning. They made a kind of nest in the drawer, and he put the dog there. When he inspected his jacket, he saw there was only a little blood on it. Besides, it was on the inside.

  The dog lay in the drawer, panting, and regarded him.

  When it was time for supper, Shaman went out. In the corridor, Brooke watched in astonishment as he locked the door to his room, something nobody did who was going to be elsewhere in the house. “Quid vis?” Brooke said.

  “Condo parvam catulam in meo cubiculo.”

  Brooke’s eyebrows rose in astonishment. “You have …” He didn’t trust his own Latin. “… Hidden a little bitch in your room?”

  “Sic est.”

  “Haw!” Brooke said in disbelief, and slap
ped Shaman on the back. In the dining room, it being Monday, there was leftover Sunday roast. Shaman slipped several small pieces from his plate into his pocket, Brooke observed with interest. When Mrs. Hammond went into the pantry to see about the dessert, he took half a cup of milk and left the table while the dean was engrossed in conversation about the book budget with the librarian.

  The dog wasn’t the least bit interested in the meat, nor would she lap the milk. Shaman took some milk on his fingers and put it on her tongue, as if he were feeding a motherless lamb, and that way he got a little nourishment into her.

  For several hours he studied. At the end of the evening he stroked and petted the listless dog. Her nose was hot and dry. “Go to sleep, there’s a girl,” he said, and blew out the lamp. It was strange having another living creature in the room, but he liked it.

  In the morning he went straight to the dog and found that her nose was cool. In fact, her whole body was cool, and stiff.

  “Damnation,” Shaman said bitterly.

  Now he would have to think of how to get rid of her. Meantime, he washed and dressed and went to breakfast, locking his room again. Brooke was waiting for him in the hall.

  “I thought you were joking,” he said fiercely. “But I could hear her crying and whimpering half the night.”

  “Sorry,” Shaman said. “You won’t be bothered again.”

  After breakfast, he went up and sat on his bed and looked at the dog. There was a flea on the lip of the drawer, and he tried to crush it but kept missing. He would have to wait until everyone left for the morning and carry the dog out then, he thought. There must be a shovel in the cellar. It would mean he would miss his first class.

  But he realized eventually that this was an opportunity to do a postmortem investigation.

  The possibility intrigued him, but presented problems. Blood, for one. From helping his father during autopsy he knew that blood coagulated somewhat after death, but there would still be bleeding …

  He waited until almost everyone had left the house, then went to where the large metal bathtub hung from a nail on the wall of the back hall. He carried it to his room and set it by the window, where the light was good. When he put the dog in the tub on her back, with her paws in the air, she looked as though she was waiting to have her tummy rubbed. Her toenails were long, like a neglected person’s, and one was broken. She had four claws on her hind feet and an extra, smaller claw above each of her front feet, like thumbs that somehow had wandered upward. He wanted to see how the joints of the limbs compared to human joints. He snapped up the small blade of the pocketknife his father had given him. The dog had loose long hairs and thicker short hairs, but the fur on the underside didn’t impede at all, and the flesh parted easily as the knife opened her.

  He didn’t go to classes or stop for lunch. All day he dissected and made notes and rough diagrams. Late in the afternoon, he’d finished with the internal organs and several of the joints. He still wanted to study and draw the spine, but he returned the dog to the bureau and closed the drawer. Then he poured water into his washbasin and scrubbed long and hard, using lots of brown soap, and emptied the basin into the tub. Before going down to supper, he put on fresh clothing from the skin out.

  Still, they were scarcely on soup when Dean Hammond wrinkled his fleshy nose.

  “What?” asked his wife.

  “Something,” the dean said. “Cabbage?”

  “No,” she said.

  Shaman was happy to escape when the meal was over. He sat in his room in a sweat, dreading lest someone should decide to take a bath.

  No one did. Too nervous to be sleepy, he waited an exceptionally long time, until it was so late that everyone else would have gone to bed. Then he carried the tub from his room, down the stairs, and out into the soft air of the backyard, and emptied the bloody slops into the lawn. The pump seemed especially noisy as he worked the handle, and there was always the danger that someone would come out to use the privy, but no one did. He scrubbed the tub with soap several times and rinsed it well, then took it back inside and hung it on the wall.

  In the morning he faced the fact that he wouldn’t be able to dissect the spine, because the room had grown warmer and the scent was heavy. He kept the drawer closed and piled his pillow and bedclothes around it, hoping to seal in the smell. But when he went down to breakfast, the faces around the table were grim.

  “A mouse, dead in the walls, I expect,” the librarian said. “Or perhaps a rat.”

  “No,” Mrs. Hammond said. “We found the source of the stench this morning. It seems to be coming from the ground around the pump.”

  The dean sighed. “I hope we shall not have to dig a new well.”

  Brooke looked as if he had gone sleepless. He kept looking nervously away.

  Numb, Shaman hurried off to his chemistry class, to give them a chance to clear out of the house. When chemistry was over, instead of going to Shakespeare he hastened home, eager to take care of things. But when he climbed the back stairs he found Brooke and Mrs. Hammond and one of the town’s two policemen standing in front of his door. She held her key.

  They all looked at Shaman. “Something is dead in there?” the policeman asked.

  Shaman found he couldn’t answer.

  “He told me he hid a woman in there,” Brooke said.

  Shaman found his voice. “No,” he said, but the policeman had taken the key from Mrs. Hammond and unlocked the door.

  Inside, Brooke started to look under the bed, but the policeman saw the pillow and the bedding and went directly to open the drawer. “A dog,” he said. “All cut up, like.”

  “Not a woman?” Brooke said. He looked at Shaman. “You said a bitch.”

  “You said a bitch. I said catulam,” Shaman told him. “Dog, feminine gender.”

  “I don’t suppose, sir,” the policeman said, “that there is anything else dead and hidden here? On your honor, now?”

  “No,” Shaman said. Mrs. Hammond looked at him but didn’t say a word. She hurried out and down the stairs, and at once they heard the front door open and slam.

  The policeman sighed. “She’ll be going straight to her husband’s office. I expect that is where we should go too.”

  Shaman nodded and followed him out past Brooke, whose eyes were regretful above the handkerchief held against his mouth and nose.

  “Vale,” Shaman said.

  He was evicted. Less than three weeks remained of the semester, and Professor Gardner allowed him to sleep on a cot in his garden shed. Shaman spaded the garden and planted thirty-two feet of potatoes out of appreciation. A snake that lived under some pots gave him a start, but when he ascertained that it was a only a small milk snake, they got on well.

  He received excellent grades, but he was given a sealed letter to deliver to his father. When he reached home, he sat in the study and waited while his father read it. Shaman pretty much knew what it said. Dean Hammond had told him he’d earned two years of college credits but was suspended for a year, to allow him to mature sufficiently to fit into an academic community. When he returned, he would have to find other lodging.

  His father finished reading the letter and regarded him. “Did you learn anything from this little adventure?”

  “Yes, Pa,” he said. “A dog is surprisingly similar to a human being, inside. The heart is much smaller, of course, less than half the size, but it looked very much like the human hearts I’ve seen you remove and weigh. The same mahogany color.”

  “Not quite mahogany …”

  “Well … reddish.”

  “Yes, reddish.”

  “The lungs and intestinal tract are similar too. But not the spleen. Instead of being round and compact, the spleen was like a big tongue, a foot long, two inches wide, an inch thick.

  “The aorta was ruptured. That’s what killed her. I guess she hemorrhaged most of her blood. A whole lot was pooled in the cavity.”

  His father regarded him.

  “I took notes. If yo
u’d be interested in reading them.”

  “I would be very interested,” his father said thoughtfully.

  43

  THE APPLICANT

  At night Shaman lay in the bed with the rope springs that needed tightening, staring at walls so familiar that from the variations of the sunrise light on them he could tell the season of the year. His father had suggested that he spend the time of his suspension at home. “Now that you’ve learned some physiology, you can be more useful to me when I do an autopsy. And you’re an extra pair of steady hands on a house call. In between,” Rob J. said, “you can help with the farm.”

  Soon it seemed as if Shaman never had left at all. But for the first time in his life, the silence that enwrapped him was acutely lonely.

  That year, with the bodies of suicides and derelicts and kinless indigents as his textbooks, he learned the art of dissection. In the homes of the ill and the injured, he prepared instruments and dressings and watched how his father rose to meet the demands of each new situation. He knew his father was watching him too, and he worked hard at staying alert, learning the names of the instruments and splints and dressings so he could have them ready even before Rob J. asked for them.

  One morning when they’d stopped the buggy by the river woods to relieve their bladders, he told his father he intended to study medicine instead of going back to Knox College when his year of suspension was over.

  “The hell,” Rob J. said, and Shaman felt the sour lurch of disappointment, because he could see in the face before him that nothing had altered his father’s mind.

  “Don’t you understand, boy? I’m trying to save you from hurt. It’s clear you have a real talent for science. Finish college, and I’ll pay for the best graduate education you can find, anywhere in the world. You can teach, do research. I believe you have it in you to do great things.”