The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (177 page)

“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.”

Jason nodded.

“I’ve loved her all my life. Thank God I’m no longer a boy … Jay, I know what you fear.”

“No, Shaman. With due respect, you will never know. Those two children have the blood of high priests. They must be raised as Jews.”

“They will be. We’ve talked at length. Rachel won’t give up her beliefs. Joshua and Hattie can be taught by you, the man who taught their mother. I’d like to learn Hebrew with them. I had a little in college.”

“You’ll convert?”

“No … actually, I’m thinking of becoming a Quaker.”

Geiger was silent.

“If your family were locked away in a town of your own people, you
might expect the kind of matches you want for your children. But you led them into the world.”

“Yes, I take responsibility. Now I must lead them back.”

Shaman shook his head. “They won’t go. They can’t.”

The expression on Jay’s face didn’t change.

“Rachel and I will marry. And if you wound her mortally by draping your mirrors and chanting the prayer for the dead, I’ll ask her to take the children and go with me, far away from here.”

For a moment he feared the legendary Geiger temper, but Jay nodded. “She told me this morning she’d go.”

“Yesterday you said my father was closer in your heart than your brothers. I know you love his family. I know you love me. Can’t we love each other for what we are?”

Jason was pale. “It seems we must try,” he said heavily. He stood and held out his hand.

Shaman ignored the hand and swept him up in a great embrace. In a moment he felt Jason’s hand rising and falling on his back, bestowing comforting pats.

In the third week of April, winter came back to Illinois. The temperature dropped, and it snowed. Shaman worried about the tiny buds on the peach trees. Work ceased on the building site, but he and Ericsson walked through the Cole house and determined where the contractor would build shelves and instrument cases. Happily they agreed that very little structural work would have to be done to convert the house into a clinic.

When the snow stopped, Doug Penfield took advantage of the cold to do some spring slaughtering, as he had promised Sarah. Shaman passed the outdoor abattoir behind the barn and saw three pigs, tied and hung from a high rail by their rear legs. He realized three were too many; Rachel wouldn’t be using hams or smoked shoulder in their house, and he smiled at this evidence of the interesting complexities his life was beginning to assume. The pigs already had been bled, gutted, dipped into vats of boiling water, and scraped. They were pink-white, and as he passed them he was stopped short by three small, identical openings in the large veins of their throats, by which they had been bled.