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

by Noah Gordon

  Alden didn’t answer. Then, “How you come to know?”

  “You said something while you were sick that made me understand a lot of things. Like why you urged me to go to Chicago and find David Goodnow. You knew he was hopelessly insane, and mute. That I wouldn’t learn a thing.”

  “… What else you know?”

  “I know that you’re involved in this thing. Up to your damn neck.”

  Again the tiny nod. “I didn’t kill her. I …” Alden was gripped by a long and terrible paroxysm of coughing, and Shaman held a basin for him and allowed him to spit out a quantity of gray mucus, pink-tinged. When he stopped coughing he was white and spent, and he closed his eyes.

  “Alden. Why did you tell Korff where I’d gone?”

  “You wouldn’t let it be. Shook em bad in Chicago. Korff sent someone to see me, day after you left. I told em where you went. I thought he’d just talk to you, scare you. Way he scared me.”

  He was panting. Shaman had questions crowding his tongue, but he knew how sick Alden was. He sat and struggled between his anger and the oath he had sworn. In the end he watched, and swallowed his words, while Alden lay with his eyes closed, now and then coughing up a little blood or twitching with the palsy.

  Almost half an hour later, Alden started speaking on his own.

  “I lead the American party here….

  “That morning, I helped Grueber … butcher. Left early to meet them three. In our woods. I got there, they’d already … had the woman. She’s just lyin there, heard them talkin with me. I started yellin. Said, how could I stay here now? Told em they were leavin, but the Indian’d get me in terrible trouble.

  “Korff never said a word. Just grabbed up the blade, killed her.”

  Shaman couldn’t ask him anything just then. He could feel himself trembling with anger. He wanted to scream like a child.

  “They just warned me not to talk, and they rode away. I went home, packed a few things in a box. Figgered I’d have to run … didn’t know where. But nobody paid me any mind or even asked me any questions after they found her.”

  “You even helped bury her, you misery,” Shaman said. He couldn’t help himself. Perhaps it was his tone of voice that reached Alden more than his words. Alden’s eyes closed, and he began to cough. This time, the coughing wouldn’t let up.

  Shaman went to fetch quinine and some black root tea, but when he tried to give it, Alden choked and sprayed, wetting his nightshirt so it had to be changed.

  Several hours later, Shaman sat and remembered the hired man as he’d known him all his life. The artisan who made fishing poles and ice skates, the expert who taught them to hunt and fish. The irascible drunkard.

  The liar. The man who had abetted in rape and murder.

  He got up and took the lamp and held it over Alden’s face. “Alden. Listen to me. What kind of knife did Korff stab her with? What was the weapon, Alden?”

  But the eyelids remained closed. Alden Kimball gave no sign that he heard Shaman’s voice.

  Toward morning, whenever he touched Alden he felt fever in the upper range. Alden was unconscious. When he coughed, the discharge was foul, and now the sputum was a brighter red. Shaman put his fingers to Alden’s wrist and the pulse ran away from him, 108 beats per minute.

  He undressed Alden and was sponging him with alcohol when he looked up and saw that daylight had broken. Alex was peering through the door.

  “God. He looks awful. Is he in pain?”

  “I don’t think he can feel anything anymore.”

  It was hard for him to tell Alex, and harder still for Alex to hear what he was told, but Shaman left nothing out.

  Alex had worked closely with Alden a long time, sharing the cruel and dirty daily work of the farm, being instructed in a hundred homely tasks, and depending on the older man for stability during the time when he’d felt like a fatherless bastard and had rebelled against Rob J.’s parental authority. Shaman knew Alex loved Alden.

  “Will you report to the authorities?” Alex appeared calm. Only his brother would know the extent to which he was disturbed.

  “There’s no point. He has pneumonia, and it’s moving quickly.”

  “He’s dying?”

  Shaman nodded.

  “For his sake, I’m glad,” Alex said.

  They sat and discussed the chances of notifying survivors. Neither of them knew the whereabouts of the Mormon wife and children the hired man had deserted before he came to work for Rob J.

  Shaman asked Alex to search Alden’s cabin, and he went to do so. When he returned, he shook his head. “Three jugs of whiskey, two fishing poles, a rifle. Tools. Some harness he was repairing. Dirty laundry. And this.” He held a paper in his hand. “A list of local men. I think it must be the membership of the American party in this town.”

  Shaman didn’t take it. “Best burn it.”

  “You’re certain?”

  He nodded. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life here, taking care of them. When I go into their homes as their doctor, I don’t want to know which of them is a Know Nothing,” he said, and Alex nodded and took the list away.

  Shaman sent Billy Edwards to the convent with the names of several patients who needed to be checked at home, and asked Mother Miriam Ferocia to make the house calls for him. He was asleep when Alden died at midmorning. By the time he was awake, Alex already had closed Alden’s eyes, and washed him, and dressed him in clean clothing.

  When Doug and Billy were told, they came and stood by the side of the bed for a few moments, and then they went to the barn and began to build a box.

  “I won’t have him buried here, on the farm,” Shaman said.

  Alex was silent for a moment, but then he nodded. “We can take him to Nauvoo. I think he still had friends among the Mormons there,” he said.

  The casket was brought to Rock Island in the buckboard, and placed on the deck of a flatboat. The Cole brothers sat nearby on a crate of plowshares. That day, while a train began to bear the body of Abraham Lincoln on a long, slow journey west, the hired man’s body was floated down the Mississippi.

  At Nauvoo, the coffin was unloaded at the steamboat landing, and Alex waited near it while Shaman went into a warehouse and explained their errand to a clerk named Perley Robinson. “Alden Kimball? Don’t know him. You’ll have to get permission from Mrs. Bidamon to bury him here. Wait. I’ll go ask her.”

  He was back presently. The widow of Prophet Joseph Smith had told him she knew Alden Kimball as a Mormon and a former settler in Nauvoo, and that he could be buried in the cemetery.

  The small cemetery was inland. The river was out of sight, but there were trees, and someone who knew how to use a scythe kept the grass cut. Two stalwart young men dug the grave, and Perley Robinson, who was an elder, read unendingly from the Book of Mormon while the afternoon shadows lengthened.

  Afterward Shaman settled up. The funeral costs came to seven dollars, including $4.50 for the plot. “For another twenty dollars I’ll see he has a nice stone,” Robinson said.

  “All right,” Alex said quickly.

  “What year was he born?”

  Alex shook his head. “We don’t know. Just have them engrave it, ‘Alden Kimball, Died 1865.’ “

  “Tell you what. Under that I can tell them to put ‘Saint.’ “

  But Shaman looked at him and shook his head. “Just the name and the date,” he said.

  Perley Robinson said a boat was due. He put out the red flag so it would come in, and soon they were sitting in chairs on the port deck while the sun sank toward Iowa out of a bleeding sky.

  “What made him end up with the Know Nothings?” Shaman said finally.

  Alex said he wasn’t surprised. “He always knew how to hate. He was bitter about a lot of things. He told me several times that his father had been born in America and died a hired man in Vermont, and he was going to die a hired man too. It used to gall him to see foreigners owning farms.”

  “What stopped him? Pa would
have helped him get his own place.”

  “It was something inside. We thought better of him, all those years, than he thought of himself,” Alex said. “No wonder he drank. Think of what the poor old bastard had to live with.”

  Shaman shook his head. “When I think of him, I’ll remember him laughing secretly at Pa. And telling my whereabouts to a man he knew was a murderer.”

  “It didn’t stop you from taking good care of him after you knew,” Alex observed.

  “Yes, well …” Shaman said bitterly. “The truth is, for the second time in my life, I wanted to kill someone.”

  “But you didn’t. You tried to save him instead,” Alex said. He looked at Shaman. “… In the camp at Elmira, I took care of the men in my tent. When they were sick, I tried to think what Pa would have done, and then I did it for them. It made me happy.”

  Shaman nodded.

  “Do you think I could become a physician?”

  The question stunned Shaman. He made himself pause a long moment before he answered. Then he nodded. “I do, Alex.”

  “I’m not nearly the student you are.”

  “You’re brighter than you’re ever willing to admit. You didn’t care to study much in school. But if you worked hard now, I believe you could do it. You could apprentice with me.”

  “I’d like to work with you as long as it takes to prepare in chemistry and anatomy and whatever else you think I need. But I’d rather go to a medical school, the way you and Pa did. I’d like to go East. Maybe study with Pa’s friend Dr. Holmes.”

  “You have it all planned. You’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”

  “Yeah. And I’ve never been so scared,” Alex said, and they both smiled for the first time in a number of days.

  71

  FAMILY GIFTS

  On their way back from Nauvoo, they went to Davenport and found their forlorn mother sitting in the midst of unpacked boxes and crates in the small brick parsonage next to the Baptist church. Lucian already was out on pastoral calls. Shaman saw that Sarah’s eyes were reddened.

  “Something wrong, Ma?”

  “No. Lucian is the kindest man, and we dote on one another. This is where I want to be, but … it’s a real change. It’s new and frightening, and I let myself get silly.”

  But she was happy to see her sons.

  She wept again when they told her about Alden. She couldn’t seem to stop. “I’m crying as much from guilt as for Alden,” she said when they tried to comfort her. “I never liked Makwa-ikwa, nor was I nice to her. But …”

  “I believe I know the way to cheer you up,” Alex said. He began to unpack her boxes, and so did Shaman. In a few minutes she dried her eyes and joined them. “You don’t know where anything should go!”

  While they unpacked, Alex told her of his decision to go into medicine, and Sarah responded with awed pleasure. “It would have made Rob J. so happy.”

  She showed them through the small house. The furniture was in poor shape, and there wasn’t enough of it. “I’m going to ask Lucian to move a few pieces into the barn, and we’ll bring some of my things from Holden’s Crossing.”

  She made coffee and sliced an applesauce cake one of “her” churchwomen had brought. While they ate it, Shaman scribbled some figures on the back of an old bill.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah asked.

  “I have an idea.” He looked at them, not knowing how to start, and then simply asked the question. “How would you feel about donating a quarter-section of our land to the new hospital?”

  Alex had been about to eat a forkful of cake, and he stopped the fork in midair and said something. Shaman pushed the fork down with his hand so he could see his brother’s mouth.

  “One-sixteenth of the entire farm?” Alex said again.

  “By my figuring, if we gave the land, the hospital could have thirty beds instead of twenty-five.”

  “But, Shaman … twenty acres?”

  “We’ve cut the flock. And there would be plenty of land left to farm, even if we should ever want to enlarge the flock again.”

  His mother frowned. “You’d have to be careful not to place the hospital too close to the house.”

  Shaman drew a breath. “The house is in the quarter-section I’d give to the hospital. It could have its own dock on the river, and a right-of-way to the road.”

  They simply looked at him.

  “You’ll be living here now,” he said to his mother. “I’m going to build Rachel and the children a new house. And,” he said to Alex, “you’ll be away for years, studying and training. I’d turn our house into a clinic, a place where patients not sick enough to be hospitalized would come and see a doctor. We’d have additional examining rooms, waiting rooms. Perhaps the hospital office and a pharmacy. We could call it the Robert Judson Cole Memorial Clinic.”

  “Oh, I like that,” his mother said, and when he looked into her eyes he knew he had her.

  Alex nodded.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes,” Alex said.

  It was late when they left the parsonage and took the ferry across the Mississippi. Night had fallen by the time they collected the horse and buck-board from the stable in Rock Island, but they were intimately familiar with the road and drove home in the dark. When they reached Holden’s Crossing, it wasn’t an hour when Shaman could think of calling at the Convent of Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi. He knew he wouldn’t sleep that night, and that he would go there early next morning. He couldn’t wait to tell Mother Miriam Ferocia.

  Five days later, four surveyors moved over the quarter-section with their transits and steel measuring tapes. There was no architect in the area between the rivers, but the building contractor with the best reputation was a man named Oscar Ericsson, from Rock Island. Shaman and Mother Miriam Ferocia met with Ericsson and talked at length. The contractor had built a town hall and several churches, but mostly he had raised homes and stores. This was his first opportunity to build a hospital, and he listened closely to what they told him. When they studied his rough sketches, they knew they had found their builder.

  Ericsson began by mapping the site and suggesting the routes of driveways and paths. A walk between the clinic and the steamboat landing would go right past Alden’s cabin. “You and Billy had best dismantle it, and cut the logs for firewood,” Shaman told Doug Penfield, and they started on it at once. By the time Ericsson’s first labor crew arrived to clear the hospital building site, it was as if the cabin never had existed.

  That afternoon Shaman was in the buggy, driving Boss to house calls, when he met the hackney rig from the Rock Island stables coming the other way. There was a man sitting in the seat with the driver, and Shaman waved at them as they passed. It took him only seconds before it registered in his mind who the passenger was, and he turned Boss in a sweeping U and hurried to overtake them.

  When he did, he waved the driver to a stop, and he was out of his buggy in a moment. “Jay,” he called.

  Jason Geiger climbed down too. He had lost weight; it wasn’t any wonder he hadn’t been recognized at a glance. “Shaman?” he said. “My God, it is.”

  He had no suitcase, just a cloth bag with a drawstring, which Shaman transferred to his own buggy.

  Jay sat back in the seat and seemed to breathe in the scenery. “I’ve missed this.” He glanced at the medical bag and nodded. “Lillian wrote that you’re a doctor. I can’t tell you how proud I was to hear. Your father must have felt …” He didn’t go on.

  Then he said, “I was closer to your father than to my brothers.”

  “He always felt fortunate you were his friend.”

  Geiger nodded.

  “Do they expect you?”

  “No. I only knew a few days ago. Union troops came to my hospital with their own medical people and just said we could go home. I put on civilian dress and got on a train. When I reached Washington, somebody said Lincoln’s body was in the Capitol rotunda, and I went there. You never witnessed
such a crowd. I stood in the line all day.”

  “You saw his body?”

  “For a few moments. He had great dignity. You wanted to pause and say something to him, but they moved you along. It occurred to me that if some of those in the crowd could have seen the gray uniform in my bag, they’d have torn me limb from limb.” He sighed. “Lincoln would have been a healer. Now I’m afraid those in power will use his killing to grind the South into the dust.”

  He broke off, because Shaman had turned the horse and buggy into the track leading from the road to the Geiger house. Shaman drove Boss to the side door the family used.

  “Will you come in?” Jay asked. Shaman smiled and shook his head. He waited while Jay took his bag from the buggy and walked stiffly up the steps. It was his house and he walked in without knocking, and Shaman clucked softly to Boss and drove away.

  Next day, Shaman waited until after he’d finished with the patients in the dispensary, then walked down the Long Path to the Geiger house. When he knocked, the front door was opened by Jason, and Shaman took one look at his face and understood that Rachel had talked to her father.

  “Come in.”

  “Thank you, Jay.”

  It didn’t make things any better that the two children recognized Shaman’s voice from those few words and came hurtling from the kitchen, Joshua to grasp one of his legs and Hattie to seize the other. Lillian came rushing after, and pried them away from him, at the same time nodding hello. She took them back to the kitchen, while they complained.

  Jay led the way into the parlor and pointed to one of the horsehair chairs, which Shaman took obediently.

  “My grandchildren are afraid of me.”

  “They don’t know you yet. Lillian and Rachel told them about you all the time. Grandpa this and Zaydeh that. As soon as they link you up with that nice Grandpa, they’ll be fine.” It occurred to him that Jay Geiger might not appreciate being patronized about his own grandchildren under these circumstances, and he sought to change the subject. “Where’s Rachel?”

  “She went for a walk. She is … upset.”

  Shaman nodded. “She told you about me.”