The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (143 page)

Rob J. stared at Miriam Ferocia. “How many are they?”

She shrugged. “We don’t believe there are great numbers of men in the secret order. Perhaps a thousand. But they are the steel in the backbone of the American party.

“I give these pages to you because you oppose this group that seeks to harm my Mother Church, and because you should know the nature of those who do us evil, and for whose souls we pray to God.” She regarded him soberly. “But you must promise not to use any of this information to approach a suspected member of the order in Illinois, for to do so might place the man who wrote this report in terrible danger.”

Rob J. nodded. He folded the pages and offered them back to her, but she shook her head. “It is for you,” she said. “Along with my prayers.”

“You mustn’t pray for me!” It made him uncomfortable to talk with her regarding matters of faith.

“You cannot stop me. You deserve prayers, and I speak of you often to the Lord.”

“Just as you pray for our enemies,” he pointed out grumpily, but she was undisturbed.

Later, at home, he read the report again, scrutinizing the spidery penmanship. Someone had written it (perhaps a priest?) who was living a sham, pretending to be what he was not, risking his safety, perhaps his life. Rob J. wished he could sit and talk with that man.

Nick Holden had easily won reelection twice on his reputation as an Indian fighter, but now he was running for a fourth term and his opponent was John Kurland, the Rock Island attorney. Kurland was highly regarded by Democrats and others, and perhaps Holden’s Know Nothing support was flagging. Some people were saying the congressman might be turned out of office, and Rob J. was waiting for Nick to make a spectacular gesture designed to win votes. So he was only slightly surprised when he came home one
afternoon to hear that Congressman Holden and Sheriff Graham were gathering another volunteer posse.

“Sheriff says Frank Mosby, that outlaw, is holed up in the north county,” Alden said. “Nick’s got folks so stirred up, they’re more in a mood to lynch than to arrest, you ask me. Graham is deputizin people right and left. Alex left here all excited. He took the goose gun and rode Vicky to town.” He frowned apologetically. “Tried to talk him out of it, but …” He shrugged.

Trude hadn’t had a chance to cool, but Rob J. threw the saddle back on and rode to town himself.

Men were clustered in the street in small groups. There was loud laughter on the porch of the store, where Nick and the sheriff were holding sway, but he ignored them. Alex was standing with Mal Howard and two other youths, all of them holding firearms, their eyes bright with importance. His face fell when he saw Rob J.

“Like to talk to you, Alex,” Rob said, leading him away from the others.

“I want you to come home,” he said when they were out of earshot.

“No, Pa.”

Alex was eighteen years old, and volatile. If he felt pushed, he might just say go to hell and walk away from home for good. “I don’t want you to go. I have good reason.”

“I’ve been hearing about that good reason all my life,” Alex said bitterly. “I once asked Ma outright, is Frank Mosby my uncle? And she said he isn’t.”

“You’re a fool, to put your mother through that. It doesn’t matter if you go up there and shoot Mosby all by yourself, don’t you know that? Some people are still going to talk. What they say doesn’t matter at all.

“I could tell you to come home because it’s my gun, and because it’s my poor blind horse. But the real reason you can’t go is that you’re my boy, and I won’t let you do something that’ll eat at you the rest of your life.”

Alex shot a desperate glance to where Mal and the others were watching curiously.

“You tell them I said you had too much work waiting at the farm. And then you go get Vicky from wherever you tied her, and you come home.”

He went back and mounted Trude and rode up Main Street. Men were roughhousing in front of the church, and he could see that already there had been some drinking.

He didn’t turn around for half a mile, but when he did, he saw the horse with the prissy, uncertain trot she had developed with her bad vision,
and the figure bent over her neck like a man riding against a strong wind, the little bird gun held with its muzzle high, the way he’d taught his sons.

The next few weeks, Alex stayed out of his way, not so much angry at him as avoiding his authority. The posse stayed away two days. They found their quarry in a crumbling sod house, taking elaborate precautions before sneaking up on him, but he was asleep and unheeding. And he wasn’t Frank Mosby. He was a man named Buren Harrison who had stuck up a storekeeper in Geneseo and robbed him of fourteen dollars, and Nick Holden and his lawmen escorted him triumphantly and drunkenly to justice. Subsequently it was learned that Frank Mosby had drowned in Iowa two years before, while trying to ride his horse across the Cedar River during floodwater.

In November, Rob J. voted to send John Kurland to Congress and to return Stephen A. Douglas to the Senate. The following evening he joined the crowd of men who waited for election news in Haskins’ store, and in a display case he saw a pair of marvelous pocketknives. Each had a big blade, two smaller blades, and a little scissors, all of tempered steel, a case of polished tortoiseshell, and caps of gleaming silver on both ends. They were knives for men who weren’t afraid to whittle life with thick shavings, and he bought them to give to his sons at Christmas.

Just after dark, Harold Ames rode in from Rock Island with the election returns. It had been a day for incumbents. Nick Holden, Indian fighter and upholder of the law, had narrowly defeated John Kurland, and Senator Douglas also would be going back to Washington.

“That’ll teach Abraham Lincoln not to tell people they can’t keep slaves,” Julian Howard chortled, shaking his fist in triumph. “That’s the last we’ll hear from
that
son of a bitch!”

42

THE COLLEGIAN

Inasmuch as Holden’s Crossing wasn’t on the railroad, Shaman’s father drove him the thirty-two miles to Galesburg in the buckboard, with his trunk in
back. The town and the college had been planned a quarter-century before in New York State, by Presbyterians and Congregationalists who came and built houses on streets laid out in a precise checkerboard pattern around a public square. At the college, the dean of students, Charles Hammond, said that since Shaman was younger than most of the others enrolled, he should not live in the dormitory. The dean and his wife took a few boarders into their white frame house on Cherry Street, and it was there, in a room at the rear of the second floor, that Shaman was housed.

Outside his room, stairs went down to a door that led to the backyard pump and the privy. In the room on his right were a pair of pale Congregational divinity students who preferred to talk only with one another. In the two rooms across the hall lived the short, dignified college librarian and a senior student named Ralph Brooke, who had a freckled, cheerful face, and eyes that always seemed slightly amazed. Brooke was a student of Latin. At breakfast the first morning, Shaman saw that he carried a volume of Cicero. Shaman’s father had schooled him well in Latin.
“Iucundi acti labores”
he said: Accomplished labors are pleasant.

Brooke’s face lighted like a lamp.
“Ita vivam, ut scio”:
As I live, I know. Brooke became the only person in the house whom Shaman regularly talked to, with the exception of the dean and his skinny white-haired wife, who tried to mutter a few dutiful words daily.

“Ave!”
Brooke greeted him each day.
“Quomodo te habes hodie, iuvenis?”
How are you on this morning, young fellow?

“Tarn bene quam fieri possit talibus in rebus, Caesar
.” As well as can be expected, under these circumstances, O Caesar, Shaman always said. Every morning. Their little joke.

At breakfast Brooke stole biscuits and was continually yawning. Only Shaman knew why. Brooke had a woman in the town and he stayed out very late, and very often. Two days after Shaman moved in, the Latinist convinced him to steal down the stairs and unlock the back door after all the others were abed, so Brooke could sneak in undetected. It was a service Brooke frequently would call upon.

Classes began each day at eight. Shaman took physiology, English composition and literature, and astronomy. To Brooke’s awe, he passed an examination in Latin. Forced to study an additional language, he chose Hebrew over Greek, for reasons he wouldn’t contemplate. His first Sunday in Galesburg, Dean and Mrs. Hammond took him to the Presbyterian church, but after that he told the Hammonds he was a Congregationalist and he told the
divinity students he was a Presbyterian, and every Sunday morning he was free to walk about the town.

The railroad had reached Galesburg six years before Shaman did, and had brought prosperity and a boomtime mixture of people. In addition, a cooperative colony of Swedes had failed at nearby Mission Hill, and a lot of its members had come to Galesburg to live. He loved to watch the Swedish women and girls, with their light yellow hair and lovely skin. When he took steps to make certain he didn’t stain Mrs. Hammond’s sheets at night, his fantasy females were Swedish. Once on South Street he was stopped short by the sight of a darker head of female hair he was certain he knew, and for a moment he was unable to breathe. But it turned out that the woman was a stranger. She smiled at him quickly when she saw him staring, but he put down his head and hurried away. She looked to be at least twenty. He didn’t want to get to know any older women.

He was homesick and lovesick, but both maladies soon diminished to become bearable pains, like toothaches that were not excruciating. He made no friends, perhaps because of his youth and his deafness, which resulted in good scholarship because mostly he studied. His favorite courses were astronomy and physiology, although physiology was a disappointment, being a mere listing of body parts and components. The closest Mr. Rowells, the instructor, came to discussing processes was a lecture on digestion and the importance of regularity. But in the physiology classroom was a wired-together skeleton suspended from a screw in the top of the skull, and Shaman spent hours alone with it, memorizing the name, shape, and function of each of the old bleached bones.

Galesburg was a pretty town, its streets lined with elm, maple, and walnut trees that had been planted by the first settlers. Its inhabitants were proud of three things. Harvey Henry May had invented a steel self-scouring plow there. A Galesburger named Olmsted Ferris had developed good popcorn; he had gone to England and popped it in front of Queen Victoria. And Senator Douglas and his opponent, Lincoln, debated at the college on October 7, 1858.

Shaman went to the debate that night, but when he arrived at Main Hall there already was a crowd, and he realized that from the best seat available he wouldn’t be able to read the candidates’ lips. He left the hall and climbed the stairs until he reached the door to the roof, where Professor Gardner, his astronomy teacher, maintained a small observatory at which each student in his class was required to study the heavens for several hours
each month. Tonight Shaman was alone, and he peered into the ocular of Professor Gardner’s pride and love, a five-inch Alvan Clark refracting telescope. He adjusted the knob, shortening the distance between the eyepiece and the convex front lens, and the stars sprang straight at him, two hundred times larger than a moment before. A cold night, clear enough to reveal two of the rings of Saturn. He studied the nebulae of Orion and Andromeda, then began moving the telescope on its tripod, searching the heavens. Professor Gardner called this “sweeping the sky,” and said a woman named Maria Mitchell had been sweeping the sky and had won lasting fame by discovering a comet.

Shaman discovered no comets. He watched until the stars seemed to wheel, enormous and glittering. What had formed them up there, out there? And the stars beyond? And
beyond
?

He felt that each star and planet was part of a complicated system, like a bone in a skeleton or a drop of blood in the body. So much of nature seemed organized, thought out—so orderly, yet so complicated. What had made it so? Mr. Gardner had told Shaman that all anyone needed to become an astronomer were good eyes and mathematical ability. For a few days he’d considered making astronomy his life’s work, but then he changed his mind. The stars were magical, but all you could do was watch them. If a heavenly body went awry, you couldn’t ever hope to make it well again.

When he went home for Christmas, somehow Holden’s Crossing was different than it had been before, lonelier than his room in the dean’s house, and at the end of the holiday he returned to the college almost willingly. He was delighted with the knife his father had given him, and he bought a small whetstone and a tiny vial of oil and sharpened each blade until it could cut a single hair.

Second semester, he took chemistry instead of astronomy. He found composition difficult.
You have told me
BEFORE
, his English professor scribbled crankily,
that Beethoven wrote much of his music while deaf
. Professor Gardner encouraged him to use the telescope whenever he pleased, but the night before a chemistry examination in February he sat on the roof and swept the sky instead of learning Berzelius’ table of atomic weights, and he received a poor grade. After that, he managed less star-watching but he did very well in chemistry. When he went back to Holden’s Crossing again for the Easter holiday, the Geigers invited the Coles for dinner, and Jason’s interest in
chemistry made the ordeal less awkward for Shaman because Jay kept asking him questions about the course.