The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice

  He tried to consult with Alex whenever a decision had to be made about the farm. Hired help still was scarce, but Doug Penfield found a man named Billy Edwards who had worked with sheep in Iowa. Shaman spoke with him and saw him to be strong and willing, and he came well-recommended by George Cliburne. Shaman asked Alex if he wanted to interview Edwards.

  “No, I don’t care to.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a good idea if you did? After all, the man will be working for you when you go back to farming.”

  “Don’t believe I’ll go back to farming.”

  “Oh?”

  “Perhaps I’ll work with you. I can be your ears, like that fellow you told me about at the Cincinnati hospital.”

  Shaman smiled. “I don’t need full-time ears. I can borrow somebody’s ears anytime I need them. Seriously, do you have an idea what you’ll want to do?”

  “… I don’t rightly know.”

  “Well, you have time to decide,” Shaman said, and was happy to let the matter rest.

  Billy Edwards was a good worker, but when he stopped work, he was a talker. He talked of soil quality and of sheep breeding, and of crop prices and the difference it made if you had a railroad. But then he talked of the return of the Indians to Iowa, and he had Shaman’s attention.

  “What do you mean, they came back?”

  “A mixed group of Sauk and Mesquakie. They left the reservation in Kansas and came back to Iowa.”

  Like Makwa-ikwa’s group, Shaman thought. “… Are they having any trouble? From the people of the area?”

  Edwards scratched his head. “No. Nobody can rightly make’m any trouble. These are smart Indians, who bought their own land, all legal. Paid good American cash.” He grinned. “Course, the land they bought is most likely the worst in the state, lots of yellow soil. But they got cabins on it, and a few fields in crops. Got a real little town. They call it Tama, after one of their chiefs, I’m told.”

  “Where is this Indian town?”

  “About a hundred miles west of Davenport. And a little north.”

  Shaman knew he wanted to go there.

  A few mornings later, he studiously avoided asking the U.S. commissioner for Indian affairs about the Sauks and Mesquakies in Iowa. Nick Holden rode to the Cole farm in a splendid new carriage with a driver. When both Sarah and Shaman thanked him for his help, Holden was polite and friendly, but it was clear he’d come to see Alex.

  He spent the morning in Alex’s room, sitting next to the bed. When Shaman had finished with his duties in the dispensary at midday, he was surprised to see Nick and his driver helping Alex into the carriage.

  They were gone all afternoon and part of the evening. When they returned, Nick and the driver assisted Alex into the house, wished everyone a polite good evening, and went away.

  Alex didn’t speak much about the events of the day. “We drove around some. We talked.” He smiled. “That is, mostly he talked and I listened. We had a good dinner at Anna Wiley’s dining room.” He shrugged. But he appeared thoughtful, and he went to bed early, fatigued by the activity of the day.

  Next morning Nick and the carriage were back. This time, Nick took Alex to Rock Island, and that evening Alex described the fancy dinner and supper they had enjoyed at the hotel.

  The third day they went to Davenport. Alex came home earlier than he had on the other two trips, and Shaman heard him wish Nick a pleasant journey back to Washington.

  “I’ll stay in touch, if I may,” Nick said.

  “By all means, sir.”

  That night when Shaman came up to bed, Alex called him into his room. “Nick wants to claim me,” he said.

  “Claim you?”

  Alex nodded. “The first day he was here, he told me President Lincoln has asked for his resignation so he can appoint somebody else. Nick says it’s time he came back here and settled down. He has no desire to marry, but he’d like a son. Said he’s always known he was my father. We spent three days driving all around the area, looking at his properties. He also owns a profitable pencil factory in western Pennsylvania, and who knows what-all. He wants me to become his heir and change my name to Holden.”

  Shaman felt a sadness, and an anger. “Well, you said you didn’t want to farm.”

  “I told Nick I had no doubt who my father was. My father was the man who took all my hell-raising and youthful shit without blinking, and who gave me discipline and love. I told him my name was Cole.”

  Shaman touched his brother’s shoulder. He was unable to speak, but he nodded. Then he kissed Alex on the cheek and went to bed.

  On the day when the artificial leg had been promised, they returned to the limb shop. Wallace had carved the foot cleverly, so it would take a stocking and a shoe. Alex’s stump fit into the socket, and the limb was fastened to his leg by means of leather straps below and above his knee.

  From the first moment Alex put on the limb, he hated it. It gave him terrible pain to wear it.

  “It’s because your stump is tender,” Wallace said. “The more you wear the leg, the sooner the stump will develop calluses. Pretty soon it won’t hurt you at all.”

  They paid for the leg and took it home. But Alex placed it in the hall closet and wouldn’t wear it, and when he walked he dragged himself along on the crutch made for him by Jimmie-Joe in the prison camp.

  On a morning in mid-March, Billy Edwards was maneuvering a wagonload of logs around the barnyard, trying to turn the team of oxen rented from young Mueller. Alden was standing behind the wagon, leaning on his cane and shouting instructions to the befuddled Edwards.

  “Back em up, boy! Back em on up!”

  Billy obeyed. It was reasonable to assume, since Alden had ordered him to back the wagon, that the older man would step out of the way. A year before, Alden might have done so easily and without incident, but now, although his mind told him to move out of harm’s way, his disease wouldn’t allow the message to pass swiftly into his legs. A log projecting out of the end of the wagon struck him on the right side of his chest with the force of a battering ram, and he was thrown several feet, to lie limply in the muddy snow.

  Billy burst into the dispensary, where Shaman was in the midst of examining a newcomer named Molly Thornwell, whose pregnancy had survived the long trip from Maine. “It’s Alden. I believe I’ve killed him,” Billy said.

  They carried Alden inside and set him on the kitchen table. Shaman cut away his clothing and examined him carefully.

  White-faced, Alex had left his room and made his own hopping way down the stairs. He looked at Shaman inquiringly.

  “He has several broken ribs. We can’t take care of him in his cabin. I’m going to put him in the guest room, and I’ll move back into our room with you.”

  Alex nodded. He moved to the side and watched as Shaman and Billy brought Alden upstairs and into the bed.

  A while later, Alex had an opportunity to be Shaman’s ears, after all. He listened intently to Alden’s chest and reported what he heard. “Will he be all right?”

  “I don’t know,” Shaman said. “His lungs appear to be undamaged. Broken ribs can be tolerated by a strong and healthy person. But at his age, and with the problems of his disease …”

  Alex nodded. “I’ll sit by him and nurse him.”

  “Are you certain? I can ask Mother Miriam for nurses.”

  “Please, I’d like to,” Alex said. “I have plenty of time.”

  So in addition to the patients who placed their faith in Shaman, he had two members of his own household who needed him. Though he was a compassionate physician, he discovered that taking care of loved ones wasn’t the same as taking care of other patients. There was a special edge and urgency to the responsibility and the daily concern. As he hurried home at the end of each day, the shadows seemed longer and darker.

  Still, there were bright moments. One afternoon, to his delight, Joshua and Hattie came to visit him alone. It was their first unescorted trip down the Long Path, and they were dignified and seriou
s as they asked Shaman if perhaps he could take the time to play. He was pleased and honored to wander off with them into the woods for an hour, to see the first bluets and the clear tracks of a deer.

  Alden was in pain. Shaman gave him morphine, but for Alden the best painkiller was distilled from grain. “All right, give him whiskey,” Shaman told Alex, “but in moderation. Is that understood?”

  Alex nodded, and he was true to his word. The sickroom came to have Alden’s characteristic whiskey smell, but he was allowed only two ounces at noon and two ounces in the evening.

  Sometimes Sarah or Lillian relieved Alex as Alden’s nurse. One evening Shaman took over, sitting next to the bed and reading a surgical journal that had arrived from Cincinnati. Alden was restless, slipping in and out of troubled slumber. When he was in a half-sleeping state he muttered and conversed with unseen persons, reliving farm conversations with Doug Pen-field, cursing at predators after the lambs. Shaman studied the old seamed face, the tired eyes, the great red nose with its hairy nostrils, thinking of Alden as he had first known him, strong and capable, the former fair fighter who had taught the Cole boys to use their fists.

  Alden quieted and slept deeply for a time, and Shaman finished an article on greenstick fractures and was just beginning to read of cataract of the eye when he looked up and saw Alden looking at him calmly, his eyes unpuzzled and hard in a brief moment of clarity.

  “I didn’t mean for him to try to kill you,” Alden said. “I just thought he’d scare you off.”

  70

  A TRIP TO NAUVOO

  Sharing their room once more, sometimes Shaman and Alex felt as if they were small boys again. Lying abed sleepless, one morning at daybreak Alex lit the lamp and described for his brother the sounds of the vernal loosening—the lush bursts of birdsong, the tinkling impatience of rivulets beginning their annual rush to the sea, the hurtling roar of the river, the occasional grinding crash as giant ice cakes collided. But Shaman’s mind wasn’t on the nature of nature. Instead, he pondered the nature of man, and he remembered things, and added the sums of occurrences that suddenly could be connected in meaningful ways. More than once in the middle of the night he rose from bed to pad through the silent house over chill floors in order to consult his father’s journals.

  And he watched over Alden with special care and a strange kind of fascinated tenderness, a new and cold vigilance. Sometimes he looked at the old hired man as if he were seeing him for the first time.

  Alden continued in a restless half-sleep. But one evening when Alex listened through the stethoscope, his eyes widened. “There’s a new sound … as if you took two locks of hair and rubbed them together with your fingers.”

  Shaman nodded. “Those sounds are called rales.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “Something’s amiss with his lungs,” Shaman said.

  On April 9, Sarah Cole and Lucian Blackmer were married in the First Baptist Church of Holden’s Crossing. The ceremony was performed by the Reverend Gregory Bushman, whose pulpit Lucian would be filling in Davenport. Sarah wore her best gray dress, which Lillian had enlivened by adding a collar and cuffs of white lace that Rachel had finished tatting only the day before.

  Mr. Bushman spoke well, obviously taking pleasure in marrying a fellow minister in Christ. Alex told Shaman that Lucian declared his vows in confident clergyman’s tones and that Sarah spoke hers in a soft and trembling voice. When the ceremony was complete and they turned, Shaman saw that his mother was smiling behind her short veil.

  After the wedding service the congregation removed to the Cole farmhouse. Most congregants came to the reception with a covered dish, but Sarah and Alma Schroeder had cooked and Lillian had baked all week in preparation. People ate and ate, and Sarah showed her happiness. “We’ve depleted the hams and sausages in the springhouse. You’ll need a spring butchering this year,” she told Doug Penfield.

  “My pleasure, Mrs. Blackmer,” Doug said gallantly, the first person to call her by that name.

  When the last guest had departed, Sarah took her packed valise and kissed her sons. Lucian drove her in his buggy to the parsonage she would leave within a few days, to move with him to Davenport.

  A short time later, Alex went to the hall closet and took out the false leg. He strapped it on without asking for help. Shaman settled down in the study, reading medical journals. Every minute or so, Alex clumped by the open door, traversing the length of the hallway with hesitant steps. Shaman could feel the impact of the false leg being raised too high and then lowered, and he knew the pain that each step brought his brother.

  By the time he entered the bedroom, Alex already had escaped into sleep. The stocking and shoe still were on the leg, and the limb stood on the floor next to Alex’s right shoe, looking as if it belonged there.

  Next morning, Alex wore the limb to church, a wedding present for Sarah. The brothers weren’t churchgoers, but their mother had asked them to attend that Sunday as part of her wedding observance, and she didn’t take her eyes from her firstborn as he walked down the aisle to the front-row pew that belonged to the minister’s family. Alex leaned on an ash walking stick that Rob J. had kept to lend out to patients. Sometimes he dragged his false foot, and sometimes he still lifted it too high. But he didn’t lurch or fall, and he made his way steadily until he reached Sarah.

  She sat between her sons, watching her new husband lead his congregation in devotions. When it was time for his sermon, he began by expressing gratitude to those who had joined in celebrating his nuptials. He said that God had led him to Holden’s Crossing and now God was leading him away, and he thanked those who had made his ministry so meaningful to him.

  He was just warming to the task of mentioning by name some of the individuals who had helped him in the Lord’s work, when a variety of sounds began to enter the church through the half-open front windows. First there was faint cheering, which quickly became louder. A woman screamed, and there were hoarse shouts. Someone on Main Street fired a shot, and there followed an entire fusillade.

  The church door opened suddenly, and Paul Williams came in. He hurried down the aisle and up to the minister, to whom he whispered urgently.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Lucian said. He seemed to be having trouble speaking. “A telegraph message has been received in Rock Island…. Robert E. Lee yesterday surrendered his army to General Grant.”

  A buzz swept the congregation. Some stood. Shaman saw that his brother leaned back in the pew, his eyes closed.

  “What does it mean, Shaman?” his mother asked.

  “It means it’s finally over and done with, Ma,” Shaman said.

  It seemed to Shaman that wherever he went for the next four days, people were drunk with peace and hope. Even the grievously ill smiled and spoke of the better days that had arrived, and there was exhilaration and laughter, as well as sorrow, because everyone knew somebody who had been lost.

  When he returned home that Thursday after making his rounds, he found Alex both hopeful and anxious, because Alden was showing signs that puzzled him. Alden’s eyes were open and he was aware. But Alex said the rales in his chest sounded heavier. “And he feels warm to me.”

  “Are you hungry, Alden?” Alex asked him. Alden looked at him, but didn’t reply. Shaman had Alex prop him up and they fed him some broth, but it was difficult because his palsy was worse. They had fed him only soup or gruel for days, because Shaman had been afraid he would aspirate food into his lungs.

  In truth, Shaman had little medicine to give him that would do any good. He poured turpentine into a bucket of boiling water and made a tent with a blanket, enclosing both the bucket and Alden’s face. Alden breathed in the fumes for a long time, and ended up coughing so copiously that Shaman removed the bucket and didn’t try that particular course of treatment again.

  The bittersweet joy of that week turned to horror on Friday afternoon, when Shaman rode down Main Street. At first glance he knew there had been news of horrible catastrophe
. People stood about in small groups and talked. He saw Anna Wiley, leaning against a post on the porch of her boarding-house, weeping. Simeon Cowan, Dorothy Burnham Cowan’s husband, sat on the seat of his buckboard with his eyes half-closed, his mouth pinched between his forefinger and his big chapped thumb.

  “What is it?” Shaman asked Simeon. He was certain peace had been called off.

  “Abraham Lincoln is dead. Shot last night in a Washington theater by some damn actor.”

  Shaman refused to accept such news, but he dismounted and received confirmation on all sides. Although everyone lacked details, it was apparent the story was true, and he rode home and shared the terrible facts with Alex.

  “The vice-president will take his place,” Alex said.

  “No doubt Andrew Johnson’s already been sworn.”

  They sat in the parlor a long time without speaking.

  “Our poor country,” Shaman said finally. It was as if America were a patient who had struggled long and hard to survive the most terrible of plagues, and now had hurtled over a cliff.

  A gray time. When he made his house calls, faces were somber. Each evening, the church bell was rung. Shaman helped Alex up onto Trude, and Alex rode out; it was the first time he’d been on a horse since before his capture. When he came back, he told Shaman the tolling of the bell drifted far out onto the prairie, a sad and lonely sound.

  Sitting alone by Alden’s bedside after midnight, Shaman looked up from his reading to see the old man’s eyes on him.

  “You want something, Alden?”

  He shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

  Shaman leaned over him. “Alden. You remember that time my father was leaving the barn and somebody took a shot at his head. And you searched the woods and couldn’t find anybody?”

  Alden’s eyes didn’t blink.

  “It was you fired a rifle at my father.”

  Alden licked his lips. “… Fired to miss … scare him quiet.”

  “You want water?”