The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (146 page)

44

LETTERS AND NOTES

Forty-nine lambs were born to Cole ewes in the spring of 1860, and the entire family helped with the problem births and the castrating. “The flock’s growin bigger every spring,” Alden told Rob J. with worried pride. “You’re goin to have to tell me what you want done with this bunch.”

Rob J.’s choices were limited. They could butcher only a few. Little demand for bought meat existed among their neighbors, who raised animals of their own, and of course the meat would spoil before it could be carried to the city for sale. Live animals could be transported and sold, but that was complicated and required time, effort, and money. “Fleeces are very valuable in proportion to their bulk,” Rob J. said. “The best plan is to keep building the flock and make our money from the sale of wool, the way my family’s always done in Scotland.”

“Yuh. Well, then, they’s goin to be more work than ever. That’s goin to require hirin another pair of hands,” Alden said uneasily, and Shaman wondered if Alex had said anything to the hired man about wanting to run off. “Doug Penfield’s willin to work for you part-time. Told me so.”

“You think he’s a good man?”

“Sure he is, comes from New Hampshire. That’s not same’s comin from Vermont, but it’s close.”

Rob J. agreed with him that it was, and Doug Penfield was hired.

That spring, Shaman made connection with Lucille Williams, daughter of Paul Williams, the farrier. For several years Lucille had attended the academy, where Shaman had taught her mathematics. Now Lucille was a young woman. If her blond hair, which she wore in a great knot, was more ashen than that of the yellow-maned Swedish girls of his dreams, she had a quick smile and a sweet face. Whenever he met her in the village he stopped to pass the time of day as an old friend, and to inquire about her work, which was split between her father’s stables and Roberta’s Women’s Wear, her mother’s Main Street shop. The arrangement allowed her flexibility and a certain freedom, for her parents always took her absence without question, each assuming she had gone to attend some duty for the other. Therefore, when Lucille asked Shaman if he couldn’t bring her some farm butter, to be delivered at her house at two in the afternoon next day, he was nervously excited.

She was careful to explain to him that he must tie his horse on Main Street in front of the stores, then walk around the block to Illinois Avenue, cut through the Reimers’ property behind the row of tall lilac bushes and out of sight of the house, climb over the picket fence into the Williamses’ backyard, and tap at her back door.

“So it won’t look … you know, misleading for the neighbors,” she said, dropping her eyes. He wasn’t surprised, because Alex had delivered butter to her fully a year earlier, with reports, but Shaman was apprehensive: he wasn’t Alex.

Next day, the Reimers’ lilacs were in full bloom. The fence was easy to scale, and the back door opened at once to his knock. Lucille was effusive in her appreciation of how nicely the butter was wrapped in towels, which she folded and left on the kitchen table with the dish when she brought the butter to the cold cellar. On her return she took his hand and led him into a room off the kitchen that obviously was Roberta Williams’ fitting room. Half a bolt of gingham cloth leaned against one corner, and remnants of silk and satin and drill and cotton goods were folded neatly on a long shelf. Alongside a great horsehair sofa was a dressmaker’s form of wire and cloth, and to Shaman’s fascination, it had ivory buttocks.

She offered her face for a single long kiss, and then each of them was undressing with dispatch and neatness, leaving their clothes in two fussy, well-matched little piles, their stockings in their shoes. He observed clinically that her body was out-of-balance; her shoulders were narrow and sloping, her breasts like slightly raised pancakes, each centered with a small pool of
syrup and adorned with a brownish berry, while her bottom half was heavier, with wide hips and thick legs. When she turned to throw a grayish sheet across the couch (“The horsehair scratches!”), he saw that the dressmaker’s form was not for her skirts, which would be more ample.

She didn’t let down her hair. “It takes so long to put it back up,” she said apologetically, and he assured her almost formally it was quite all right.

In the doing, it was easy. She made it so, and he’d listened to the boasting stories of Alex and others for so long that, if he had never been down the trail himself, he had a good idea of the landmarks. The day before, he wouldn’t have dreamed of touching the ivory buttocks of the dressmaker’s dummy, but now he dealt with warm, living flesh, and he licked the syrup and tasted the berries. Very quickly, and with great relief, he laid down the burden of chastity with a shuddering climax. Lacking the ability to hear what she panted in his ears, he utilized each of his other senses to the utmost, and she obliged by assuming any and all positions for his close inspection, until he was able to repeat the earlier experience, taking somewhat longer. He was ready to keep on, on and on, but soon Lucille glanced at the clock and bounded off the couch, saying she had to have supper ready when her mother and father came home. As they dressed, they planned for the future. She (and this empty house!) were readily available during the day. Alas, that was when Shaman worked. They agreed she would try to be at home each Tuesday and Friday at two
P.M
., in case he could make it to town. That way, he explained practically, he could pick up the mail.

She was just as practical, revealing as she kissed him good-bye that she loved rock candy, the pink sugary kind, not the greenish variety that was flavored with mint. He assured her he understood the difference. On the other side of the fence, walking with an unfamiliar lightness, he went back down the long line of blossom-laden lilacs, through the heavy purple scent that for the rest of his life would be a highly erotic smell.

Lucille liked the smoothness of his hands, not knowing they were soft because much of the time they were covered with lanolin-rich yolk from the fleeces. The farm took wool well into May, Shaman, Alex, and Alden doing most of the shearing, with Doug Penfield eager to learn but clumsy with the clippers. Mostly they put Doug to work picking and scouring the fleeces. He brought them news of the outside world when he came, including the intelligence that the Republicans had chosen Abraham Lincoln as their presidential nominee. By the time all the fleeces were rolled up, tied, and packed
in bales, they had also heard that the Democrats had met in Baltimore and had chosen Douglas after acrimonious debate. Within weeks, Southern Democrats had called a second Democratic convention in the same city, and nominated Vice-President John C. Breckinridge to run for president, calling for the protection of their right to own slaves.

Locally, the Democrats were more united, and had once again chosen John Kurland, the Rock Island attorney, to challenge Nick Holden for his congressional seat. Nick was running as the nominee of both the American party and the Republicans, and he was stumping hard for Lincoln, hoping to ride in on the presidential bandwagon. Lincoln had welcomed Know Nothing support, and it was why Rob J. declared that he couldn’t vote for the man.

Shaman found it hard to concentrate on politics. In July he heard from the Cleveland Medical College, another refusal, and by summer’s end he’d also been rejected by the Ohio College of Medicine and the University of Louisville. He told himself he needed only one acceptance. The first week in September, on a Tuesday when Lucille waited in vain, his father rode home with the mail and handed him a long brown envelope whose return address said it came from the Kentucky School of Medicine. He took it out to the barn before he ripped it open. He was glad to be alone, because it was another failed application, and he lay back in the hay and tried not to succumb to panic.

There was still time to go to Galesburg and enroll in Knox College as a third-year student. It would be safe, a return to a routine in which he’d survived, in which he’d done well. Once he had his baccalaureate degree, life could even be exciting, because he could go east to study science. Maybe even go to Europe.

If he didn’t go back to Knox, and he couldn’t enter medical school, what would his life be?

But he made no move to go to his father and ask to be returned to college. He lay in the hay a long time, and when he got up, he took a shovel and the barrow and began to muck out the barn, an act that in itself was a kind of answer.

Politics were impossible to avoid. In November Shaman’s father freely admitted that when he went to the polls he’d voted for Douglas, but it was Lincoln’s year, because the Northern and Southern Democrats split the party with their separate candidates, and Lincoln won easily. It was small consolation
that Nick Holden finally had been turned out of office. “At least Kurland will make us a good congressman,” Rob J. said. In the general store, folks wondered if Nick would come back to Holden’s Crossing now, and resume the practice of law.

The question was put to rest within a few weeks, when Abraham Lincoln began to announce some of the upcoming appointments that would be made under the new administration. The Honorable Congressman Nicholas Holden, hero of the Sauk wars and ardent supporter of Mr. Lincoln’s candidacy, had been named United States Commissioner of Indian Affairs. He was charged with the task of completing treaties with the Western tribes, and furnishing them with suitable reservations in return for peaceful conduct and forfeit of all other Indian lands and territories.

Rob J. was cranky and depressed for weeks.

It was a tense and unhappy time for Shaman personally, and a tense and unhappy time for the nation, but much later Shaman would look back at that winter with nostalgia, remembering it as a precious country scene carved by skilled and patient hands and then frozen in a crystal: the house, the barn. Icy river, snowy fields. The sheep and horses and milch cows. Each individual person. All of them safe and together in their proper place.

But the crystal had been knocked from the table and already was falling.

Within days of the election of a president who had run on the premise that they shouldn’t own slaves, the Southern states began moving toward secession. South Carolina was hotly first, and United States Army forces that had occupied two forts in Charleston harbor moved into the larger of the two, Fort Sumter. At once they were under siege. In quick succession, state militias in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Mississippi seized United States installations from outnumbered peacetime federal forces, sometimes after fighting.

Dear Ma and Pa,

I’m going off with Mal Howard to join up with the South. We don’t know exactly what state we’ll enlist in. Mal kind of would like to go to Tennessee, to serve with his kinfolk. It don’t matter much to me, unless I can get to Virginia and say hello to our own kin.

Mr. Howard says it’s important for the South to field a whopper army to show Lincoln they won’t be trifled with. He says there’s not to be a war, it’s just a family quarrel. So I’ll be back in plenty time for spring lambing.

Meantime, Pa, maybe I’ll be given a horse and gun of my own!

Your loving son,
Alexander Bledsoe Cole

Shaman found another note in his room, scrawled on a torn piece of brown wrapping paper and weighted down on his pillow with the mate to the pocketknife his father had given him:

Little Brother,

Take care of this for me. I wouldn’t want to lose it. See you directly.

Bigger

Rob J. went at once to Julian Howard, who admitted in uneasy defiance that he’d driven the boys to Rock Island in his buckboard the previous evening, right after chores. “No need to get all riled, for goodness’ sake! They’re grown-up lads, and it’s just a small adventure.”

Rob J. asked him at what river wharf he had left them. Howard saw how Rob J. Cole stood close to him at his full bulky height, and felt the chill and contempt in the uppity doctor’s voice, and he stammered out that he had left them off near the Three-Star Freight Transport pier.

Rob J. rode straight there, against the slim chance he could bring them home. If there had been the low temperatures of some other winters, perhaps he’d have had more luck, but the river wasn’t icebound and traffic was heavy. The manager of the freight company looked at him in amazement when he asked if the man had noticed two youths looking to work on one of the flatboats or rafts heading downstream.