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

by Noah Gordon

After supper he brought the jug to Alden’s cabin, a peace offering. He even poured a little for himself into one of the jelly glasses, knowing Alden didn’t like to drink alone when somebody was with him. He waited until Alden had had several drinks before deliberately turning the conversation to the farm. “Why is it you and Doug Penfield are having such a hard time keeping up with the work this year?”

  The words sprang forth. “This has been building up for a long time! We hardly ever sell a critter, except a spring lamb or two to a neighbor for Easter dinner. So every year the flock grows, and there are more animals to dip and shear and provide closed-off pasture for. I tried to get your pa to look at things straight before he went to the army, but I never could.”

  “Well, let’s you and me talk about it right now. What are we getting per pound of fleece?” he asked, taking his notebook and pencil out of his pocket.

  For almost an hour they sat and talked of wool grades and prices, and what the market was likely to be after the war, and the estimated area of range needed per sheep, and days of labor, and costs per day. When they finished, Shaman had a notebook full of scribbles.

  Alden was mollified. “Now, if you can tell me Alex will be back soon, it would change the picture, because that boy is a worker. But the truth is, he may be dead someplace down there in the hot country, and you know that’s right, Shaman.”

  “Yeah, it’s right. But unless I hear differently, I’m thinking of him as alive.”

  “Well, God, yes. But you’d best not figger him in when you’re doin your plannin, is all.”

  Shaman sighed, and stood to go. “Tell you what, Alden. I have to ride out again tomorrow afternoon, but I’ll spend the morning on the Osage orange,” he said.

  Next morning he was out in the fields early, in work clothes. It was a good day to work outside, dry and breezy, with a big sky full of rainless clouds. He hadn’t done physical labor for a long time, and he could feel his muscles knotting tight before he finished digging the first hole.

  He had set only three plants when his mother came riding out onto the prairie on Boss, followed by a Swedish beet farmer named Par Swanson, whom Shaman knew slightly.

  “It’s my daughter,” the man yelled before he had reached Shaman. “I think she’s broke her neck.”

  Shaman took the horse and the medical bag from his mother and followed after the farmer. It was a ride of about twelve minutes to the Swanson house. From the brief description, he dreaded what he would find, but when they arrived he soon established that the girl was alive and in a lot of pain.

  Selma Swanson was a little towhead, less than three years old. She liked to ride the manure-spreader with her father. That morning her father’s team had startled a big hawk that was feeding on a mouse in the field. The hawk flew up suddenly, terrifying the horses. As they jolted forward, Selma had lost her balance and fallen off. Fighting to control the animals, Par saw that his daughter had been struck by the corner of the spreader as she fell. “Looked to me, it got her in the neck,” he said.

  The little girl was holding her left arm against her chest with her right hand. Her left shoulder was pushed forward. “No,” Shaman said after he’d examined her. “It’s her collarbone.”

  “Broken?” her mother said.

  “Well, bent some, and maybe a little cracked. Don’t you worry. It’d be serious if it were you or her father. But at her age bones bend like green twigs and they heal really fast.” The clavicle was injured not far from where it joined the scapula and the sternum. With rags supplied by Mrs. Swanson he fashioned a small sling for Selma’s left arm and then tied the slinged arm to her body with another rag, to keep the clavicle from moving.

  The child had quieted by the time he finished the coffee Mrs. Swanson had hot on her stove. He was a short ride from several of the people he had to see that day, and it made no sense for him to ride all the way home and then ride out again, so he just started out on his calls.

  A woman named Royce, the wife of one of the new settlers, gave him meat pie for lunch. It was late afternoon before he got back to the sheep farm. As he rode past the field where he had started to work that morning, he saw that Alden had put Doug Penfield on the barrier planting, and a long, admonishing line of green Osage-orange shoots already stretched out into the prairie.

  59

  THE SECRET FATHER

  “God forbid,” Lillian whispered.

  None of the Geigers showed any sign of having contracted typhoid fever, she said. Shaman thought Lillian’s face showed the strain of running her farm and household and family without her husband. While the apothecary business had suffered, she even continued some aspects of Jason’s pharmaceutical trade, importing drugs for Tobias Barr and Julius Barton.

  “The problem is, Jay used to get so much material from his family’s pharmaceutical company in Charleston. And of course, South Carolina is shut off from us now by the war,” she told Shaman, pouring his tea.

  “Have you heard from Jason lately?”

  “Not lately.”

  She seemed ill-at-ease whenever he asked questions about Jason, but he could understand that she would be reluctant to speak too much about her husband lest she reveal something that could hurt Jason, or reveal military information, or endanger her family. It was difficult for a woman to live in a Union state while her husband worked in Virginia with the Confederates.

  Lillian was more at ease when they discussed Shaman’s medical career. She was familiar with his progress at the hospital and with the promises that had been made to him there. Obviously Shaman’s mother shared the news that came in his letters.

  “Cincinnati is such a cosmopolitan place,” Lillian said. “It will be wonderful for you to establish your career there, to teach in the medical school, and to have a fine practice. Jay and I are extremely proud of you.” She cut thin, unbroken slices of coffee cake, and kept his plate filled. “Do you have any idea when you will be returning there?”

  “I’m not certain.”

  “Shaman.” She placed her hand over his and leaned forward. “You came back when your father died, and you have taken care of things very well. Now you must begin thinking of yourself, and of your career. Do you know what your father would want you to do?”

  “What is that, Aunt Lillian?”

  “Your father would want you to return to Cincinnati and pick up your career. You must return there as soon as possible!” she said solemnly.

  He knew she was right. If he was going to go, it would be best if he went without delay. Every day he was summoned to different houses as people reached out, responding to the fact that there was a doctor in Holden’s Crossing again. Each time he treated someone, it was as if he were bound by another gossamer thread. It was true that such threads could be broken; when he left, Dr. Barr could take over the treatment of anyone who still required medical help. But his interest in his patients added to his feeling that there were things he didn’t want to leave unfinished here.

  His father had kept a list of names and addresses, and Shaman went through it carefully. He wrote of his father’s death to Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston, and to the Uncle Herbert he’d never seen, and who wouldn’t have to worry ever again that his older brother would return to Scotland to reclaim his land.

  Every free moment, Shaman spent reading the journals, captivated by glimpses of his father that were exciting and unfamiliar. Rob J. Cole had written of his son’s deafness with anguish and tenderness, and Shaman felt the warmth of his love as he read. His father’s pain in describing Makwa-ikwa’s death, and the subsequent deaths of Comes Singing and Moon, reawoke deep-buried feelings. Shaman reread his father’s report of Makwa-ikwa’s autopsy, asking himself if he had missed something in previous readings, and then trying to determine whether his father had missed anything during his examination, and whether he would have done anything differently if he had been conducting the autopsy himself.

  When he reached the volume that covered 1853, he was astounded. In his father’s d
esk drawer he found the key to the locked shed behind the barn, and he took the key to the barn and opened the big lock and went inside. It was just the shed, a place he had been hundreds of times before. Wall shelves held stores of drugs, tonics, and medicinals, and bunches of dried herbs hung from the rafters, Makwa’s legacy. There was the old wood stove, not far from the wooden autopsy table where he had assisted his father so many times. Drainage pans and pails hung from nails in the walls. From another nail in a tree-trunk post, his father’s old brown sweater still drooped.

  The shed hadn’t been dusted or swept out for several years. There were spiderwebs everywhere, but Shaman ignored them. He went to the place in the wall that he thought was about right, but when he tugged at the board, it held firm. There was a pry bar in the front part of the barn, but it wasn’t necessary to get it, because when he tried the next board it pulled out easily, and so did several others.

  It was like looking into the mouth of a cave. It was too dark in the shed; there was gray natural light only from one small, dusty window. First he opened the shed door wide, but the light was still poor, and he took down the lantern, which still contained a little oil, and lit it.

  When he held it to the opening, it threw flickering shadows into the secret room.

  Shaman crawled inside. His father had left it clean. It still contained a bowl, a cup, and an old neatly folded blanket Shaman recognized as one they had had for a long time. It was a small space, and Shaman was a big man, as large as his father had been.

  Certainly some of the runaway slaves had been large men too.

  He blew out the lantern, and it was dark in the secret space. He tried to imagine that the entrance was boarded up and that the world outside was a baying hound hunting him. That the choice was between being a work animal and being a hunted animal.

  When he crawled out in a little while, he took the old brown sweater from the nail and put it on, although the day already was warm. It had his father’s smell.

  All that time, he thought, all through the years when he and Alex had lived in the house and had quarreled and been boisterous, and caught up in their own needs and wants, his father had carried this enormous secret, had lived this experience alone. Now Shaman felt an overwhelming need to talk with Rob J., to share the experience, to ask him questions, to convey his love and admiration. In his room at the hospital he had wept briefly when he had received the telegraph message about his father. But he had been stolid on the train and stalwart during and after the funeral, for his mother’s sake. Now he leaned back against the barn wall next to the secret room and slid down until he was seated on the dirt floor like a child, and like a child calling for his father, he gave himself up to grief in the knowledge that his silence was always going to be lonelier than it had been before.

  60

  A CHILD WITH THE CROUP

  They were blessed. There was no additional typhoid fever in Holden’s Crossing. Two weeks had gone by, yet no rash had appeared on Tilda Snow’s body. Her fever had broken early, without hemorrhage or even sign of bloody flux, and one afternoon Shaman came to the Snow farm and she was out swilling the pigs. “It was a bad grippe, but she’s over it,” he told her husband. If Snow had wanted to pay him for his services then, he’d have accepted money, but instead the farmer gave him a brace of fine geese he had killed, hung, cleaned, and plucked just for Shaman.

  “I’ve an old hernia givin me trouble,” Snow said.

  “Well, let me take a look at it.”

  “Don’t want to start with it while I’m gettin in the first cut of hay.”

  “When will you be done? Six weeks?”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “Come see me then, at the dispensary.”

  “What, you’ll still be here?”

  “Yes,” he said, and grinned at Snow, and that was how he decided to stay for good, quietly and without anguish, without even knowing he had made up his mind.

  He gave his mother the geese and suggested they invite Lillian Geiger and her sons to dinner. But Sarah said it wasn’t a convenient time for Lillian to come to dinner just then, and she thought it would be good if they ate the birds alone, just the two of them and the two hired men.

  That night Shaman wrote separate letters to Barney McGowan and Lester Berwyn, expressing appreciation for what they’d done for him at medical school and in the hospital, and explaining that he was resigning his position at the hospital in order to take over his father’s practice in Holden’s Crossing. He also wrote to Tobias Barr in Rock Island, thanking him for contributing his Wednesdays to Holden’s Crossing. Shaman wrote that he would be in Holden’s Crossing full-time from now on, and he asked Dr. Barr to sponsor his application to the Rock Island County Medical Society.

  He told his mother as soon as he had written the letters, and he saw her pleasure and relief that she wouldn’t be alone. She went to him quickly and kissed him on the cheek. “I’ll tell the women of the church,” she said, and Shaman smiled, knowing there was no practical need for any other kind of announcement.

  They sat and talked and planned. He would use the dispensary and the barn shed just as his father had, keeping morning hours in the dispensary and making house calls every afternoon. He would retain the same schedule of fees his father had used, because it wasn’t excessive, yet it always had kept them in comfort.

  He had given thought to the problems of the farm, and Sarah listened as he outlined his suggestions to her; then she nodded in agreement.

  Next morning, he sat in Alden’s cabin and drank terrible coffee while he explained that they had decided to reduce the size of the farm’s flock.

  Alden listened intently, his eyes on Shaman while he sucked at and relit his pipe. “You understand what you’re sayin, do you? You know the price of wool is goin to stay high as long as the war goes on? And that a reduced flock will give you fewer profits than you now enjoy?”

  Shaman nodded. “My mother and I understand that our only other choice is to have a larger business requiring more help and more management, and neither of us wants that. My business is doctoring, not sheep farming. But we don’t ever want to see the Cole farm without sheep, either. So we’d like you to go through the flock and separate out the best fleece producers, and we’ll keep those, and breed them. We’ll cull the flock every year to produce better and better wool, and that will ensure that we continue to get good prices. We’ll keep just the number of sheep you and Doug Penfield are able to take care of.”

  Alden’s eyes gleamed. “Now, that’s what I call a wonderful decision,” he said, and refilled Shaman’s mug with the vile coffee.

  Sometimes it was very hard for Shaman to read the journal, too painful to creep into his father’s brain and emotions. There were times when he pushed it away for as long as a week, but always he returned to it, needing to read the next pages because he knew they would be his last contact with his father. When the journal was completely read, he’d have no new information about Rob J. Cole, only memories.

  It was a rainy June and a queer summer, with everything early, crops as well as fruit trees, and plants in the woodlands. The population of rabbits and hares exploded, and the ubiquitous animals nibbled grass close to the house and ate the lettuce and flowers of Sarah Cole’s garden. The wet made haying difficult, with whole fields of fodder rotting on the ground, unable to dry, and it ensured a bountiful crop of insects that bit Shaman and sucked his blood as he rode on his calls. Despite that, he found it wonderful to be the physician of Holden’s Crossing. He had enjoyed being a doctor at the hospital in Cincinnati; if he had needed help or reassurance from an older physician, the entire staff had been right there at his beck and call. Here he was all alone and had no idea from day to day what he was going to confront. It was the essence of the practice of medicine, and he loved it.

  Tobias Barr told him the county medical society was defunct because most of its members were off to the war. He suggested that in its absence he and Shaman and Julius Barton should meet one ev
ening a month for dinner and professional talk, and they had the first such evening with mutual enjoyment, the main topic of discussion being measles, which had begun to break out in Rock Island but not in Holden’s Crossing. They agreed that it should be stressed to both young and old patients that the pustules mustn’t be scratched and broken, no matter how irritating, and that treatment should consist of soothing salves, cooling drinks, and Seidlitz powders. The other two men were interested when Shaman told them that at the Cincinnati hospital, treatment had included alum gargles whenever there was respiratory involvement.

  Over dessert the talk turned to politics. Dr. Barr was one of many Republicans who felt that Lincoln’s approach to the South was too soft. He applauded the Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, which called for severe punitive measures against the South when the war ended, and which the House of Representatives had passed despite Lincoln’s objections. Encouraged by Horace Greeley, dissident Republicans had gathered in Cleveland and agreed to nominate their own presidential candidate, General John Charles Fremont.

  “Do you think the general could possibly beat Mr. Lincoln?” Shaman asked.

  Dr. Barr shook his head gloomily. “Not if there is still a war. There is nothing like a war to get a president reelected.”

  In July the rains finally stopped but the sun was like brass, and the prairie steamed and toasted and turned brown. The measles finally reached Holden’s Crossing, and Shaman began to be called out of bed to attend some of its victims, although it wasn’t as violent an outbreak as had occurred in Rock Island. His mother told him that measles had swept through Holden’s Crossing the previous year, killing half a dozen people, including several children. Shaman thought that perhaps a severe onslaught of the disease somehow served to produce partial immunity in subsequent years. He thought of writing to Dr. Harold Meigs, his former professor of medicine in Cincinnati, and asking if there could be value in the theory.