The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (124 page)

Rob pointed to his own mouth and lifted the serving bowl. “Chicken.”

Shaman held out his plate.

“Chicken,” Rob J. said again. When his son remained silent, he set down the bowl and resumed eating.

Shaman began to sob. He looked at his mother, who, forcing herself to eat, had just finished her portion. She pointed to her mouth and held out her plate to Rob. “Chicken, please,” she said, and he served her.

Alex, too, asked for a second helping and was given it. Shaman sat and shook with grief, his face screwed up against this fresh assault, this new terror, deprivation of his food.

The chicken and dumplings eaten, the plates were removed, and then Sarah carried in the dessert, hot from the oven, and a pitcher of milk. Sarah
was proud of her rhubarb pie, made from an old Virginia recipe, lots of maple sugar bubbling together with the tart juices of the rhubarb to caramelize on top as a hint of the pleasure contained under the crust.

“Pie,” Rob said, and the word was repeated by Sarah and Alex.

“Pie,” he said to Shaman.

It hadn’t worked. His heart was breaking. He could not, after all, permit his son to starve, he told himself; better a mute child than a dead child.

Morosely he cut himself a piece.

“Pie!”

It was a howl of outrage, a blow against all the injustices of the world. The voice was familiar and beloved, a voice he hadn’t heard for a while. Still, he sat for a moment stupidly, trying to make certain it hadn’t been Alex who had shouted.

“Pie! Pie! Pie!”
Shaman screamed, “
PIE
!”

The small body shook with fury and frustration. Shaman’s face was wet with tears. He pulled away from his mother’s attempt to wipe his nose.

Niceties didn’t matter at this moment, Rob J. thought; “please” and “thank you” could come later too. He pointed to his own mouth.

“Yes,” he told his son, nodding and cutting a huge piece at the same time. “Yes, Shaman! Pie.”

27

POLITICS

The flat tall-grass section of land south of Jay Geiger’s farm had been bought from the government by a Swedish immigrant named August Lund. Lund spent three years breaking thick sod, but in the spring of his fourth year his young wife sickened and died quickly of cholera, and her loss poisoned the place for him and brought on a darkness of spirit. Jay bought his cow and Rob J. bought his harnesses and some tools, both of them overpaying because they knew how desperately Lund wanted to get away from there. He returned to Sweden, and for two seasons his newly broken fields remained bleak as a deserted female, struggling to return to what they once were. Then the property was sold by a land broker in Springfield, and several months later
a two-wagon caravan arrived bringing a man and five women to live on the land.

Had they been a pimp and his whores they would have caused less excitement in Holden’s Crossing. They were a priest and nuns of the Roman Catholic Order of Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi, and word sped throughout Rock Island County that they’d come to open a parochial school and lure young children into popery. Holden’s Crossing needed both a school and a church. Each project most likely would have remained in the talking stages for years, but the arrival of the Franciscans stirred up a frenzy. After a series of “social evenings” in farmhouse parlors, a building committee was named to raise funds for a church structure, but Sarah was irked.

“They simply can’t agree, like squabbling children. Some want just a log cabin, to be economical. Others want wood frame, or brick, or stone.” She favored a stone building herself, with a bell tower, a steeple, and stained-glass windows—a real church. All through the summer, fall, and winter there were arguments, but by March, faced with the knowledge that the townspeople also had to pay for a schoolhouse, the building committee decided on a simple wooden church, the walls planked up and down instead of clapboarded, and painted white. The controversy over the architecture paled next to the cold-eyed debate regarding affiliation with a denomination, but there were more Baptists in Holden’s Crossing than any other group, and the majority prevailed. The committee contacted the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Rock Island, which helped with advice and a little seed cash in order to get a new sister church off to a start.

Money was subscribed, and Nick Holden dazzled everyone with the largest gift, five hundred dollars. “It’ll take more than philanthropy to get him elected to Congress,” Rob J. told Jay. “Hume has worked hard and has the nomination of the Democratic party sewed up.”

Evidently Holden thought so too, for soon it became general knowledge that Nick had broken with the Democrats. Some expected him to seek the support of the Whigs, but instead he declared himself a member of the American party.

“American party. That’s a new one on me,” Jay said.

Rob enlightened him, remembering the anti-Irish sermons and articles he’d seen everywhere in Boston. “It’s a party that glorifies the native-born white American and stands for suppression of Catholics and the foreign-born.”

“Nick plays to whatever passions and fears he can find,” Jay said. “The
other evening, on the porch of the general store, he was warning folks about Makwa’s little group of Sauks as though they were Black Hawk’s band. Got some of the men all worked up. Said that if we don’t watch out there’s going to be bloodshed, farmers with their throats cut.” He made a face. “Our Nick. Ever the statesman.”

One day a letter came for Rob J. from his brother, Herbert, in Scotland. It was an answer to a letter sent by Rob eight months before, describing his family, his practice, the farm. His letter had painted a realistic picture of his life in Holden’s Crossing, and in return he had asked Herbert to send him news of those he loved in the old country. Now his brother’s letter conveyed dread information that wasn’t unexpected, for when Rob had fled Scotland he’d known his mother’s life was winding down. She had died three months after his departure, Herbert wrote, and was buried next to their father in the mossy “new yard” of the kirk in Kilmarnock. Their father’s brother, Ranald, had died the following year.

Herbert wrote that he’d expanded the flock and built a new barn, using stone hauled from the base of the cliff. He mentioned these things gingerly, obviously pleased to let Rob know he was doing well with the land but carefully avoiding any discussion of prosperity. There must be times when Herbert feared his return to Scotland, Rob realized. The land had been Rob J.’s birthright as the elder son; the night before he left Scotland he had dazed Herbert, who passionately loved sheep farming, by signing the holding over to the younger brother.

Herbert wrote that he’d married Alice Broome, daughter of John Broome, who judged at the Kilmarnock Lamb Show, and his wife, Elsa, who had been a McLarkin. Rob remembered Alice Broome vaguely, a thin mouse-haired girl who had kept one hand covering her uncertain smile because her teeth were long. She and Herbert had three children, all daughters, but Alice was bearing again and this time Herbert hoped for a son, for the sheep croft was growing and he needed help.

The political situation having quieted, will you be thinking of coming home?

Rob could sense the tension of the question in Herbert’s cramped writing, the shame over the sweat and apprehension. He sat at once and composed a letter to erase his brother’s fears. He wouldn’t return to Scotland, he wrote, unless in a healthy and prosperous retirement someday he might visit. He sent his love to his sister-in-law and his nieces, and commended Herbert for
the success he was making; it was clear, he wrote, that the Cole farm was in proper ownership.

When he finished the letter, he went for a walk along the river path, all the way to the stone pile marking the end of his land and the beginning of Jay’s. He knew he wouldn’t leave here. Illinois had captured him, despite its blizzards and destructive tornadoes, and its wild extremes of temperature, high and low. Or maybe because of those things and a lot more.

This Cole farm was better land than the keeping in Kilmarnock, deeper loam, more water, fatter grass. Already he felt responsible for it. He had memorized its smells and sounds, loving the way it was in the hot, lemony mornings of summer when the wind made the tall grasses whisper, and in the brutal, cold embrace of deep-drifted winter. It was his land, for a fact.

A couple of days later, in Rock Island to attend a meeting of the Medical Society, he dropped by the courthouse and filled out a document declaring his desire for naturalization.

Roger Murray, the court clerk, read the application fussily. “A three-year delay, you know, Doctor, before you can become a citizen.”

Rob J. nodded. “I can wait. Not going anywhere,” he said.

The more Tom Beckermann drank, the more lopsided the practice of medicine became in Holden’s Crossing, the load falling on Rob J., who cursed Beckermann’s alcoholism and wished a third doctor would move to town. Steve Hume and Billy Rogers added to his problem by whispering far and wide that Doc Cole had been the only medico to warn Sammil Singleton about how sick he really was. If Sammil had only listened to Cole, they said, he might be here today. Rob J.’s legend grew, and new patients sought him out.

He worked hard at reserving time to be with Sarah and the boys. Shaman amazed him; it was as if a plant organism had been interrupted and endangered but then had responded with a burst of growth, green tendrils every-where. He developed before their eyes. Sarah, Alex, the Sauks, Alden, everyone who lived on the Cole place practiced lip-reading with him long and faithfully—indeed, almost hysterically, so great was their relief at the end of his silence—and once the boy began to speak, he talked and talked. He had learned to read a year before the onset of his deafness, and now they were hard pressed to keep him in books.

Sarah taught her sons what she was able, but she’d finished only a sixgrade
rural school and was aware of her limitations. Rob J. drilled them in Latin and arithmetic. Alex did well; he was bright and worked hard. But it was Shaman who stunned with his quickness. Something in Rob ached when he observed the boy’s natural intelligence.

“He’d have been
some
doctor, I know it,” he told Jay regretfully one hot afternoon as they sat on the shady side of the Geiger house and drank ginger water. He admitted to Jay that it was built into a Cole to hope that his man-child would grow to be a physician.

Jay nodded sympathetically. “Well, there’s Alex. He’s a likely lad.”

Rob J. shook his head. “It’s the damnedest thing—Shaman, the one who won’t ever be a doctor because he can’t hear, is the one who’s keen to go on house calls with me. Alex, who can be anything when he grows up, chooses to follow Alden Kimball around the farm like a shadow. He’d rather watch the hired man put in a fencepost or slice off some feisty lamb’s balls than anything I can do.”

Jay grinned. “And wouldn’t you, at their age? Well, maybe the brothers will farm together. They’re both fine boys.”

Inside the house, Lillian was practicing Mozart’s Twenty-third Piano Concerto. She was very serious about her fingering and it was excruciating to hear her play the same phrase until it had exactly the right color and expression; but when she was satisfied and let the notes run, it was music. The Babcock piano had arrived perfect in function, but a long, shallow scrape, origin unknown, marred the oiled perfection of one of the sleek walnut legs. Lillian had wept to see it, but her husband said the scratch would never be repaired, “so it’ll remind our grandchildren how we traveled to get here.”

The First Church of Holden’s Crossing was dedicated late enough in June so the celebration spilled over into the Fourth of July. Both Congressman Steven Hume and Nick Holden, a candidate for Hume’s office, spoke at the dedication. Rob J. thought Hume seemed relaxed and comfortable, while Nick sounded like a man desperate with the knowledge that he was running far behind.

The Sunday after the holiday, the first of what would be a long series of visiting preachers conducted the sabbath service. Sarah admitted to Rob J. that she felt nervous, and he knew she was remembering the Baptist preacher at the Great Awakening who had called down hellfire upon women who bore children out of wedlock. She would have preferred a gentler shepherd, like Mr. Arthur Johnson, the Methodist minister who had married her
to Rob J., but the choice of a clergyman would be made by the entire congregation. So all summer long, preachers of every type came to Holden’s Crossing. Rob went to several services to offer his wife support, but mostly he stayed away.

In August a printed flier tacked up outside the general store proclaimed the coming visit of one Ellwood R. Patterson, who would deliver a lecture entitled “The Tide That Threatens Christendom” at the church on Saturday, September 2, at seven
P.M
., and then would conduct the service and preach on Sunday morning.

On that Saturday morning a man appeared at Rob J.’s dispensary. He sat patiently in the small parlor that served as waiting room while Rob dealt with the middle finger of Charley Haskins’ right hand, which had been pinched between two logs. The son of the storekeeper, twenty-year-old Charley was a woodcutter by trade. He was in pain and annoyed at himself for the carelessness that had led to the accident, but he had a brashly uninhibited mouth and irrepressible good humor.