The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (135 page)

He was very careful, taking the barrow into the woods and digging leaf mold that he spread in the gully to disguise the new earth.

Then, next morning, he rode into Rock Island and had a brief but meaningful talk with George Cliburne.

35

THE SECRET ROOM

That fall the world began to change for Shaman, not an abrupt and startling alteration such as had occurred with the disappearance of his hearing, but a complex shifting of poles that was no less transforming for its gradualness. Alex and Mal Howard had become closest friends, and their laughing, boisterous companionship shut Shaman out much of the time. Rob J. and Sarah frowned on the friendship; they knew that Mollie Howard was a whining
slattern and her husband, Julian, was shiftless, and they hated their son to be spending time at the crowded, messy Howard cabin, to which a good portion of the local population made its way to buy the home concoction Julian double-distilled from corn mash with great seriousness in a hidden evaporator with a rusty cover.

Their feelings of unease were given focus that Halloween when Alex and Mal sampled some of the whiskey that Mal thoughtfully had misplaced while jugging his father’s production. Thus inspired, they proceeded to create a path of pushed-over outhouses that extended through half the township before Alma Schroeder crawled out of her tipped privy, screaming, and Gus Schroeder ended their wet-cheeked hilarity by appearing with his buffalo gun.

The incident set off a series of grim conversations between Alex and his parents that Shaman did his best to wish away, because after watching the initial exchanges he couldn’t bring himself to read their lips. A meeting of the boys, their fathers, and Sheriff London, was even more unpleasant.

Julian Howard spat and said it was “a lot of fuss over a couple of young’uns raisin a little hell on Halloween.”

Rob J. tried to forget his antipathy for Howard, whom he would have bet was a member of the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner if there was one in Holden’s Crossing, and capable of raising a good deal of trouble on his own. He agreed with Howard that the boys weren’t murderers or thugs, but because his work treated human digestion seriously he was inclined not to share the general point of view that anything and everything involved with shit was funny, including the destruction of outhouses. He knew Sheriff London came armed with half a dozen complaints against the boys and would act on them because he didn’t like either of their fathers. Rob J. suggested that Alex and Mal be made responsible for setting things right. Three of the outhouses had splintered or come apart. Two shouldn’t be set over the same holes, which were full. To make amends, the boys should dig holes and repair privies. If new lumber was needed, Rob J. would pay for it and Shaman and Mal could work off their debt to him on the farm. And if they failed to live up to the bargain, Sheriff London could take action.

Mort London reluctantly admitted he could find nothing wrong with the plan. Julian Howard was against it until he learned that both his son and the Cole boy would also be responsible for their usual chores, and then he agreed. Neither Alex nor Mal was given an opportunity to refuse, so over the next month they became expert in the rehabilitation of latrines, doing
the digging first, before deep winter froze the ground, and performing the carpentry with hands that were numb with cold. They built well; all of
their
privies would last for years, except the one behind the Humphreys’ house, which would be splintered by a twister that leveled the house and barn in the summer of sixty-three, killing Irving and Letty Humphrey in the bargain.

Alex was irrepressible. Late one night he came into the bedroom he shared with Shaman, carrying the oil lamp, and announced with deep contentment that he’d done it.

“Done what?” Shaman said, blinking the sleep from his eyes so he could see his brother.

“You know. I’ve done it. With Pattie Drucker.”

Shaman was awake. “You never. You damn liar, Bigger.”

“No, I did, with Pattie Drucker. Right there in her father’s house, with her family off to her uncle’s.”

Shaman gazed at him in delighted agony, unable to believe, yet excruciatingly tempted to do so. “If you did, what was it like?”

Alex smiled at him smugly and addressed himself to the question. “When you push your dingus in past the hair and everythin, it’s warm and cozy. Very warm and cozy. But then it makes you all excited, somehow, and you move back and forth because you’re so happy. Back and forth, just like the ram does the ewe.”

“Does the girl move back and forth too?”

“No,” Alex said. “The girl lies there real happy, lets you do the movin.”

“Then what happens?”

“Well, your eyes cross. The gizzum shoots outta your dick like a bullet.”

“Wow, like a bullet! Does it hurt the girl?”

“No, you fool, I meant fast like a bullet, not hard like a bullet. It’s softer than puddin, just like when you pull your own. Anyway, by then things are pretty much over.”

Shaman had been convinced by a plethora of detail such as he’d never encountered. “Does this mean Pattie Drucker’s your girl?”

“No!” Alex said.

“You sure?” Shaman said anxiously. Pattie Drucker already was almost as large as her pasty-faced mother and had a laugh like a bray.

“Too young to understand,” Alex muttered, worried and disgruntled, and blew out the lamp to cut the conversation short.

Shaman lay in the dark and thought about what Alex had said, equally excited and worried. He didn’t like the eye-crossing part. Luke Stebbins had
told him that if you played with yourself, you could go blind. Deaf was enough, he didn’t want to lose any more of his senses. He could already have started to go blind, he told himself, and next morning he walked around in extreme anxiety, testing his vision on objects near and far.

The less time Bigger spent with him, the more time Shaman spent with books. He ran through books quickly and begged them shamelessly. The Geigers had a good library and allowed him to borrow. Books were what he received on his birthday and Christmas, fuel for the fire he burned against the cold of loneliness. Miss Burnham said she never had seen such a reader.

She worked him mercilessly to improve his speech. During school vacations she received free room and board at the Cole house, and Rob J. saw to it that her efforts on behalf of his son were rewarded, but she didn’t work with Shaman for personal gain. His clear speech had become her personal goal. The drills with his hand on the piano went on and on. She was fascinated to see that from the beginning he was sensitive to the difference between the vibrations, and before long he was able to identify the notes as soon as she struck them.

Shaman’s vocabulary grew because of the reading, but he had trouble with pronunciation, being unable to learn correct usage by listening to other voices. For example, he pronounced “cathedral” as “cath-a-
dral
”, and she realized that part of his difficulty was ignorance of where to place emphasis. She used a rubber ball to demonstrate the problem to him, bouncing it softly to show ordinary stress and harder to demonstrate emphasis. Even that took time, for the ordinary activity of catching a bounced ball gave him great difficulty. Miss Burnham realized that she was prepared to catch the ball by the sound it made as it struck the floor. Shaman had no such preparation, and so had to learn to catch by memorizing the exact amount of time it took the ball to reach the floor and rebound to his hand when thrown with a given force.

Once he had come to identify the bouncing ball as representing emphasis, she worked out a series of drills with slate and chalk, printing words and then drawing small balls over syllables that received ordinary vocal stress, and larger balls over syllables to be accented:
.

Rob J. joined the effort by teaching Shaman to juggle, with Alex and Mal Howard often joining in the lessons. Rob had sometimes juggled for their entertainment, and they were amused and interested, but the skill came
hard. Nevertheless, he encouraged them to keep at it. “In Kilmarnock, all the Cole children are taught to juggle. It’s an old family custom. If they can learn it, so can you,” he said, and they found he was right. To his disappointment, the Howard boy turned out to be the best juggler of the three, soon able to handle four balls. But Shaman was close behind, and Alex stuck to his practicing doggedly until he could keep three balls aloft with aplomb. The purpose was not to produce a performer but to give Shaman a sense of varying rhythms, and it worked.

One afternoon, while Miss Burnham was at Lillian Geiger’s piano with the boy, she took his hand from the piano box and placed it on her own throat. “As I speak,” she said, “the cords in my larynx vibrate, like the wire strings of the piano. Do you feel the vibrations, how they change with different words?”

He nodded raptly and they smiled at one another. “Oh, Shaman,” Dorothy Burnham said, taking his hand from her throat and holding it in hers. “You’re making such fine progress! But you need constant drilling, more than I can afford to give when school’s in session. Is there anyone who might be able to help?”

Shaman knew his father was busy with his practice. His mother occupied herself with her church work, and he sensed a reluctance on her part to deal with his deafness, puzzling to him but not imagined. And Alex was off with Mal whenever freed from his chores.

Dorothy sighed. “Whom can we find who is able to work with you regularly?”

“I’ll gladly help,” a voice said at once. It came from a large horsehair wing chair that sat with its back to the piano, and to Dorothy’s astonishment, she saw Rachel Geiger rise quickly from the chair and approach them.

How often, she wondered, had the girl sat undetected and listened to them at their drills and exercises?

“I know I can do it, Miss Burnham,” Rachel said somewhat breathlessly.

Shaman appeared to be pleased.

Dorothy smiled at Rachel and squeezed her hand. “I’m certain you will do splendidly, my dear,” she said.

Rob J. had heard not a word from any of the letters he had sent out regarding Makwa’s death. One night he sat down and transferred his frustration to paper, another letter with a sharper tone, trying to stir up the sticky mud.

“… The crimes of rape and murder have been easily ignored by representatives
of government and the law, a fact that raises the question of whether the State of Illinois—indeed, of whether the United States of America—is a realm of true civilization or a place where men are allowed to behave like the lowest beasts with perfect impunity
.” He mailed the letters to the same authorities he had already contacted, hoping that the new sharpness of tone would bring some results.

Nobody communicated to him about anything, he thought sulkily. He had dug the room off the shed almost in a frenzy, but now that it waited, he heard nothing from George Cliburne. At first, as days turned into weeks, he spent time pondering how word would be sent to him, then began to wonder why he was being ignored. He put the secret room out of his mind and gave himself up to the familiar shortening of the days, the sight of a long V of geese knifing southward through the blue air, the rushing sound of the river turning crystalline as the water grew colder. One morning he rode into the village and Carroll Wilkenson left a chair on the general-store porch and ambled to where Rob J. was dismounting from a small droop-necked pinto.