The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (167 page)

“Joshua and I,” her grandmother said.

“Bubbie
, you weren’t even in the kitchen!”

“The nuts are simply delicious,” Sarah told the little girl.

“Me and Hattie got them,” Joshua said proudly.

“Hattie and I,” Lillian said.

“No,
Bubbie
, you weren’t there, it was on the Long Path and me and Hattie picked up the nuts while Momma and Shaman sat on the blanket and held hands.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Shaman has been having small difficulties with his speech,” Rachel said. “He just needs some practice. I’m helping him again, the way I used
to. We met on the wood path so the children could play nearby, but he’ll be coming to the house so we can use the piano in the exercises.”

Sarah nodded. “It will be a good thing for Robert to work on his speech.”

Lillian nodded too, but stiffly. “Yes, how fortunate you are home, Rachel,” she said, and took Shaman’s cup and refilled it with the English tea.

The next day, although he’d made no appointment with Rachel, when he returned from his home visits, he walked out on the Long Path and met her walking the other way.

“Where are my friends?”

“They were helping with fall house cleaning and missed sleepytime, so they’re having late naps.”

He turned and walked along with her. The woods were full of birds, and he saw, in a nearby tree, a cardinal issuing an imperious silent challenge.

“I’ve been quarreling with my mother. She wanted us to go to Peoria for the High Holidays, and I refused to go there and be placed on display for the eligible bachelors and widowers. So we’ll spend the holidays at home.”

“Good,” he said quietly, and she smiled. The other quarrel, she told him, was brought on because Joe Regensberg’s cousin was marrying someone else, and had made an offer to buy the Regensberg Tinware Company, since he hadn’t been able to acquire it through marriage. That was why she was going to Chicago, she confided—to sell the company.

“Your mother will calm down. She loves you.”

“I know she does. Would you like to do some exercises?”

“Why not?” He extended his hand.

This time he could detect a slight trembling of her hand as it held his. Perhaps the exertion of the house cleaning had exhausted her, or the quarreling. But he dared to hope it was more than that, and he recognized a current of awareness pass between their fingers, so that his hand involuntarily moved in hers.

They were working on the breath control necessary to adequately manage the small explosions of the letter P, and he was unsmilingly repeating a nonsense sentence about a perfect possum pursuing a perturbed partridge, when she shook her head.

“No, feel how I do it,” she said, and placed his hand on her throat.

But all he could feel beneath his fingers was Rachel’s warm flesh.

It wasn’t something he had planned; if he had thought about it, he
wouldn’t have done it. He slid his hand up to cup her face gently and bent to her. The kiss was infinitely sweet, the dreamed-about and yearned-for kiss of a fifteen-year-old boy and the girl with whom he was hopelessly in love. But they soon became a man and a woman kissing, and the mutual hunger was so shocking to him, so contradictory to the determined control of the everlasting friendship she had offered him, that he was afraid to credit it.

“Rachel … ,” he said when they broke apart.

“No. Oh, God.”

But when they came together again she planted little kisses all over his face like hot rain. He kissed her eyes, missed the center of her mouth and kissed its corner, and her nose. He could feel her body straining against him.

Rachel was struggling with shocks of her own. She placed a tremulous hand on his cheek and he moved his head until his lips pressed into her palm.

He saw her say words familiar from long ago, that Dorothy Burnham had used to signify the end of each school day. “I think that is all for today,” she said breathlessly. She turned from him, and Shaman stood and watched her walk quickly away until she disappeared around a curve in the Long Path.

That evening he began reading the last portion of his father’s journal, observing with dread and a great sadness the dwindling of Robert Judson Cole’s existence and caught up in the terrible war along the Rappahannock as his father had recorded it in his large clear hand.

When Shaman came to Rob J.’s discovery of Lanning Ordway, he sat for a time without reading. It was difficult for him to accept that, after so many years of trying, his father had made contact with one of the men who had caused Makwa’s death.

He sat up through the night, hunching over to make use of the light of the lamp in order to read on and on.

He went over Ordway’s letter to Goodnow several times.

Just before dawn he came to the end of the journal—and the end of his father. He lay on his bed fully clothed for a lonely hour. When he heard his mother in the kitchen, he went down to the barn and asked Alden to come inside. He showed both of them Ord way’s letter and told them how he had found it.

“In his journal? You read his journal?” his mother said.

“Yes. Would you like to read it?”

She shook her head. “I don’t need that, I was his wife. I knew him.”

They both saw that Alden was hung-over and poorly, and she poured coffee for the three of them.

“I don’t know what to do about the letter.”

Shaman let each of them read it slowly.

“Well, what
can
you do?” Alden said irritably. Alden was getting old fast, Shaman realized. Either he was drinking more or finding it harder to handle whiskey. His trembling hands spilled sugar as he spooned it into his cup. “Your pa tried every which way to get the law to act on what happened to that Sauk female. You think they’re gonna be any more interested now, because you have somebody’s name in a dead man’s letter?”

“Robert, when is this going to end?” his mother said bitterly. “That woman’s bones have been lying out there in our land all these years, and the two of you, your father and now you, haven’t been able to allow her to rest in peace, or any of us either. Can’t you just tear up the letter and forget all that old pain, and let the dead lie?”

But Alden shook his head. “Meanin no disrespect, Miz Cole. But this man isn’t about to listen to good sense or reason about them Indians, any more than his father could.” He blew on his coffee, held it to his face with both hands, and took a swallow that must have burned his mouth. “No, he’ll just worry this to death like a dog chokin on a bone, the way his pa used to do.” He looked at Shaman. “If my advice means anythin, which it probably don’t, you ought to go to Chicago sometime when you’re able, and look up this Goodnow, see if he can tell you somethin. Otherwise, you’re goin to work yourself into a frazzle, and us too in the bargain.”

Mother Miriam Ferocia didn’t agree. When Shaman rode to the convent that afternoon and showed her the letter, she nodded. “Your father told me about David Goodnow,” she said calmly.

“If the Reverend Goodnow was indeed the Reverend Patterson, he should be made accountable for Makwa’s death.”

Mother Miriam sighed. “Shaman, you are a doctor, not a policeman. Can you not leave this man’s judgment to God? It is as a doctor that we need you desperately.” She leaned forward and fixed him with her eyes. “I have momentous news. Our bishop has sent word that he will send us funds to establish a hospital here.”

“Reverend Mother, that is wonderful news!”

“Yes, wonderful.”

Her smile illuminated her face, Shaman thought. He recalled from his father’s journal that she had received a legacy after her father’s death and had turned it over to the church; he wondered if it was her own inheritance the bishop would send her, or part of it. But her joy wouldn’t tolerate the existence of cynicism.

“The people of this area will have a hospital,” she said, beaming. “The nursing nuns of this convent will nurse at the Hospital of Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi.”

“And I shall have a hospital to care for my patients.”

“Actually, we hope you will have more than that. The sisters are agreed. We wish you to be the hospital’s medical director.”

It silenced him for a moment. “You honor me, your Reverence,” he said finally. “But I would suggest as medical director a doctor with more experience, someone older. And you’re aware I’m not a Catholic.”

“Once, when I dared dream of this, I hoped your father would be our medical director. God sent your father to us to be our friend and physician, but your father is gone. Now God has sent you to us. You have education and skill, and already you have fine experience. You are the physician of Holden’s Crossing, and you should head its hospital.”

She smiled. “As for your lack of old age, we believe that you are the oldest young man we ever have met. It will be a small hospital, of only twenty-five beds, and we shall all grow with it.

“I should like to presume to give you some advice. Do not be reluctant to value yourself highly, for others do so. Nor should you hesitate to aspire to any goal, because God has been lavish in his gifts to you.”

Shaman was embarrassed, but he smiled with the assurance of a doctor who had just been promised a hospital. “It is always my pleasure to believe you, Reverend Mother,” he said.

64

CHICAGO

Shaman confided his conversation with the prioress only to his mother, and Sarah surprised and warmed him with the intensity of her pride. “How good
it will be to have a hospital here, and for you to direct it. How happy it would have made your father!”

He cautioned her that construction funds wouldn’t be forthcoming from the Catholic archdiocese until plans for the hospital had been made and approved. “Meanwhile, Miriam Ferocia has asked me to visit several hospitals and study their departments,” he told her.

He knew at once where he would go and what train he would take.

On Monday he rode to Moline and arranged to stable Boss for a few days. The train for Chicago stopped in Moline at 3:20
P.M
., only long enough to load the freight being shipped by the John Deere plow factory, and by 2:45 Shaman was waiting on the wooden platform.

When it arrived, he boarded at the last car and began to walk forward. He knew Rachel had taken the train in Rock Island only minutes before, and he found her three cars down, seated alone. He’d been prepared to greet her lightheartedly, to make a joke of their “chance” encounter, but the blood drained from her face when she saw him.

“Shaman … is something wrong with the children?”

“No, no, not at all. I’m going to Chicago on business of my own,” he said, annoyed at himself for not having realized this would be the result of his surprise. “May I sit with you?”

“Of course.”

But when he’d placed his suitcase next to hers on the shelf and taken the aisle seat, they were constrained.

“About the other day on the wood path, Shaman …”

“I enjoyed it very much,” he said firmly.

“I can’t allow you to get the wrong idea.”

Again
, he thought in despair. “I believed you enjoyed it very much too,” he said, and color flooded her face.

“That isn’t the point. We mustn’t indulge ourselves with the kind of … enjoyment that only serves to make reality more cruel.”

“What
is
reality?”

“I’m a Jewish widow with two children.”

“And?”

“I’ve sworn never again to allow my parents to pick a husband for me, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be sensible in my own choice.”

It stung. But this time he wouldn’t be deterred with things left unsaid. “I’ve loved you most of my life. I’ve never met a woman whose appearance or mind I’ve found more beautiful. There’s a goodness in you I need.”

“Shaman. Please.” She turned away from him and stared out the window, but he went on.

“You’ve made me promise never to be resigned or passive to life. I won’t be resigned to losing you again. I want to marry you and to be a father to Hattie and Joshua.”

She remained turned from him, watching the fields that rolled by, and the farms.

He had said what he wanted to say, and he took a medical journal from his pocket and began to read about the etiology and treatment of whooping cough. Presently Rachel removed her knitting bag from under the seat and took out her knitting. He saw she was making a small sweater of dark blue wool.

“For Hattie?”

“For Joshua.” They looked at one another for a long moment; then she smiled slightly and resumed her knitting.

The light failed before they had traveled fifty miles, and the conductor came in and lit the lamps. It was scarcely five o’clock when they became too hungry to wait any longer to eat. Shaman had brought a supper package containing fried chicken and apple pie, and Rachel had brought bread, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and four small sugar pears. They divided his pie and her eggs and fruit. He had well water in a flask.

After the train stopped at Joliet, the conductor turned down the lamps, and Rachel fell asleep for a time. When she awoke, her head was on Shaman’s shoulder and he was holding her hand. She reclaimed her hand but let her head stay on his shoulder for a few seconds. When the train slid from the prairie darkness into a sea of lights, she was sitting up fixing her hair, holding a hairpin clenched in her strong white teeth. When she was finished, she told him they were in Chicago.