The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (179 page)

They needed an animal to pack their supplies and bedding. Paul Williams had a big good-natured gray gelding in his stable, and Shaman rented him for eleven days. Tama, the Indian town, was about one hundred miles
away. He figured four days or so traveling time each way, and a couple of days for the visit.

A few hours after they were married they rode away, Rachel on Trude, Shaman on Boss and leading the packhorse, whose name Williams had said was Ulysses, “no disrespect to General Grant.”

Shaman would have stopped for the day by the time they got to Rock Island, but they were dressed for rough travel, not for a hotel, and Rachel wanted to spend the night on the prairie. So they brought the horses across the river by ferry and rode about ten miles beyond Davenport.

They followed a narrow dusty road between great plowed expanses of black soil, but there were still patches of prairie between the cultivated fields. When they reached a stretch of unbroken grass, and a brook, Rachel rode close and waved her hand to gain his attention. “Can we stop here?”

“Let’s find the farmhouse.”

They had to ride about another mile. Closer to the house, the grass became cultivated field that doubtless would be planted to corn. In the barnyard a yellow dog lunged at the horses, barking. The farmer was putting a new bolt on the share of his plow, and he frowned with suspicion when Shaman asked permission to camp by the brook. But when Shaman offered to pay, he waved his hand. “Gonna build a fire?”

“I had thought to. Everything’s green.”

“Oh, yes, it won’t spread. Brook’s drinkable. Follow it a ways, there’s dead trees where you can get wood.”

So they thanked him and rode back to a good spot. They took off the saddles together and unloaded Ulysses. Then Shaman made four trips to carry wood, while Rachel laid out the camp. She spread an old buffalo robe that her father had bought years ago from Stone Dog. Brown leather showed through where it was missing clumps of fur, but it was just the thing to have between them and the earth. Over the buffalo robe she spread two blankets woven of Cole wool, because summer was a month away.

Shaman piled wood between some rocks and lit a fire. He put brook water and coffee into a pot and set it on to brew. Sitting on the saddles, they ate cold leftovers from their wedding feast—pink sliced spring lamb, brown potatoes, candied carrots. For a sweet they ate white wedding cake with whiskey frosting, and then they sat near the fire and drank their coffee black. The stars showed up as night fell, and a quarter-moon lifted itself above the flat land.

Presently she set down her mug and found soap, a rag, and a towel, and slipped into the gathering darkness.

It wouldn’t be the first time they would make love, and Shaman wondered why he felt so awkward. He undressed and went to another part of the brook to wash hurriedly, and was waiting for her between the blankets and the bison skin when she joined him; their flesh still had the chill of the water, but it warmed. He knew she had picked the location of the fire so their bed would be beyond its light, but he didn’t mind. It left only her, and their hands and mouths and bodies. They made love for the first time as man and wife, and then they lay on their backs and held hands.

“I love you, Rachel Cole,” he said. They could see the whole sky like a bowl over the flatness of the earth. The low stars were huge and white.

Soon they made love again. This time when they were through, Rachel got up and ran to the fire. She picked up a branch with an ember on one end and whirled it like a pinwheel until it burst into flame. Then she came back and knelt so close he could see the gooseflesh in the valley of her brown breasts, and the torchlight turning her eyes into gems, and her mouth. “I love you too, Shaman,” she said.

The next day, the deeper they rode into Iowa, the more space there was between farms. The road moved through a piggery for half a mile, where the stink was so strong they could touch it, but then there was grassland again, and sweet air.

Once Rachel stiffened in the saddle and raised her hand.

“What?”

“Howling. Can it be a wolf?”

He thought it had to be a dog. “Farmers must have hunted down the wolves, the way they have at home. Wolves have gone the way of the bison and the Indians.”

“Maybe before we get home we’ll see one prairie miracle,” she said. “Perhaps a buffalo, or a wildcat, or the last wolf in Iowa.”

They passed through little towns. At noon they came to a general store and dined on soda crackers and hard cheese and canned peaches.

“Yesterday we heered that soldiers arrested Jefferson Davis. They have him in Fort Monroe, Virginia, in chains,” the storekeeper said. He spat on his own sawdust floor. “I hope they hang the sonofabitch. Beggin your pardon, ma’am.”

Rachel nodded. It was hard to be ladylike when she was draining the dregs of the peach juice from the can. “Did they also capture his secretary of state? Judah P. Benjamin?”

“The Jew? No, they ain’t got him yet, far’s I know.”

“Good,” Rachel said clearly.

She and Shaman took the empty cans to use on the trail, and moved out to the horses. The grocer stood on his porch and looked after them as they rode down the dusty road.

That afternoon they forded the Cedar River carefully without getting wet, only to be drenched in a sudden spring rain. It was almost dark when they came to a farm and took shelter in a barn. Shaman felt oddly pleased, remembering the description of his parents’ wedding night in his father’s journal. He braved the wet to seek permission to stay, and it was readily given by the farmer, whose name was Williams but who was unrelated to the stableman in Holden’s Crossing. When Shaman returned, Mrs. Williams was hard on his heels with half a pot of a hearty milk soup swimming with carrots and potatoes and barley, and fresh bread. She left them so quickly they were sure she knew they were newly married.

The next morning was very clear, and warmer than it had been. In the early afternoon they reached the Iowa River. Billy Edwards had told Shaman that if they followed it northwest, they’d find the Indians. The stretch of river was deserted, and after a time they came to a cove with clear, shallow water and a sand bottom. They stopped and tethered their horses, and Shaman was quickly out of his clothes and splashing in the water. “Come in!” he urged.

She didn’t dare. Yet, the sun was hot, and the river looked as if it never had been seen by other humans. In a few minutes Rachel went into some bushes and took off everything but her cotton shift. In the cold water she squealed, and they played like children. The wet shift clung, and soon he reached for her, but she became frightened. “Someone’s certain to come along!” she said, and ran out of the water.

She put on her dress and hung the shift on a limb to dry. Shaman had fishhooks and line in his pack, and when he was dressed he found some worms under a log and broke a branch for a pole. He walked upriver to a likely pool and in a short time had caught a pair of half-pound spotted bass.

They had eaten hard-boiled eggs at noon from Rachel’s copious supply,
but the fish would feed them that evening. He cleaned them at once. “We’d best cook them now so they won’t spoil, and wrap them in a cloth and take them with us,” he said, and built a small fire.

While the bass were cooking, he came to her again. This time she lost all caution. It didn’t matter to her that scrubbing with river water and sand hadn’t taken the fish smell from his hands, or that it was full daylight. He lifted her shiftless dress and they made love in their clothing on the hot, sunny riverbank grass, with the sound of the rushing water in her ears.

A few minutes later, while she was turning the fish so they wouldn’t burn, a flatboat came around the bend in the river. In it were three bearded, barefoot men dressed only in ragged trousers. One of them lifted his hand in a lazy wave, and Shaman waved back.

As soon as the boat had gone, she rushed to where her shift was hung like a great white signal flag of what they had done. When he came after her, she turned on him. “What is the matter with us?” she said. “What’s the matter with
me?
Who am I?”

“You’re Rachel,” he told her, wrapping her into his arms. He said it with such satisfaction that when he kissed her, she was smiling.

73

TAMA

Early in the morning of the fifth day, they overtook another horseman on the road. When they approached him to ask directions, Shaman saw he was dressed plainly but rode on a good horse and an expensive saddle. His hair was long and black and his skin was the color of fired clay.

“Can you tell us the way to Tama?” Shaman asked.

“Better than that. Going there myself. Just ride along with me, if you like.”

“Thank you kindly.”

The Indian leaned forward and said something else, but Shaman shook his head. “Hard for me to talk while we’re riding. I have to see your mouth. I’m deaf.”

“Oh.”

“My wife hears fine, though,” Shaman said. He grinned, and the man grinned back and turned to Rachel and tipped his hat. They exchanged a few words, but mostly the three of them just rode along companionably through the warm morning.

When they came to a good pond, though, they stopped to let the horses take a small amount of water and a little grass, while they stretched their legs, and they met properly. The man shook hands and said he was Charles P. Keyser.

“You live in Tama?”

“No, I’ve got a farm eight miles from here. I was born Potawatomi, but raised by whites when my family all died of the fever. I don’t even speak the Indian jabber except for a few words of Kickapoo. I married a woman was half-Kickapoo, half-French.”

He said he went to Tama every few years and spent a couple of days. “I don’t really know why.” He shrugged and smiled. “Red skin calling to red skin, I guess.”

Shaman nodded. “Our animals had enough grass, you suppose?”

“Oh, yes. Don’t want them mounts to blow up on us, do we?” Keyser said, and they got back on the horses and resumed the ride.

At midmorning Keyser led them straight into Tama. Long before they reached the group of cabins clustered about in a large circle, they were being followed by brown-eyed children and barking dogs.

Soon Keyser signaled a stop, and they dismounted. “I’ll let the chief know we’re here,” he said, and went to a nearby cabin. By the time he reappeared with a wide-built middle-aged redman, a small crowd had gathered.

The stocky man said something Shaman couldn’t lip-read. It wasn’t in English, but the man took Shaman’s hand when it was offered.

“I’m Dr. Robert J. Cole of Holden’s Crossing, Illinois. This is my wife, Rachel Cole.”

“Dr. Cole?” A young man stepped out of the crowd and peered at Shaman. “No. You’re too young.”

“… Maybe you knew my father?”

The man’s eyes searched him. “You the deaf boy? … That you, Shaman?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Little Dog. Son of Moon and Comes Singing.”

Shaman felt pleasure as they clasped hands, remembering how they had played together as children.

The stocky man said something.

“He is Medi-ke, Snapping Turtle, chief of the town of Tama,” Little Dog said. “He wants you three to come to his cabin.”

Snapping Turtle signaled to Little Dog that he should come too, and to the others that they should leave. His cabin was small and smelled of a recent meal of charred meat. Folded blankets showed where people slept, and a canvas hammock was slung in a corner. The dirt floor was hard and swept, and it was where they sat as Snapping Turtle’s wife—Wapansee, Small Light—served them black coffee, very sweet with maple sugar, and altered and changed by other ingredients. It tasted like the coffee Makwa-ikwa had made. After Small Light served it, Snapping Turtle spoke to her, and she left the house.

“You had a sister named Bird Woman,” Shaman said to Little Dog. “Is she here?”

“Dead, a long time now. I have another sister, Green Willow, the youngest. She’s with her husband on the Kansas reservation.” No one else in Tama had been with the group in Holden’s Crossing, Little Dog said.

Snapping Turtle said through Little Dog that he was a Mesquakie. And that there were about two hundred Mesquakies and Sauks in Tama. Then he spoke a torrent of words and looked at Little Dog again.

“He says the reservations are very bad, like big cages. We were sick with remembering former days, the old ways. We caught wild horses, broke them, sold them for what we could get. We saved every bit of money.

“Then about a hundred of us came here. We had to forget that Rock Island used to be Sauk-e-nuk, the great town of the Sauks, and that Davenport was Mesquak-e-nuk, the great town of the Mesquakies. The world has changed. We paid white man’s money for eighty acres here, and we had the white governor of Iowa sign the deed as witness.”

Shaman nodded. “That was good,” he said, and Snapping Turtle smiled. Evidently he understood some English, but he continued to speak in his own language, as his face grew stern.

“He says the government always pretends it has bought our vast lands. The White Father grabs our land and offers the tribes small coins instead of big paper money. He even cheats us of the coins, giving cheap goods and ornaments and saying Mesquakies and Sauks are paid an annuity. Many of
our people leave the worthless goods to rot on the earth. We tell them to say loudly that they will accept only money, and to come here and buy more land.”