The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman, and Matters of Choice (181 page)

Shaman told how the girl Two Skies had found her sister Tall Woman, and how the three children had hidden in the brush like hares until the soldiers had discovered them. And how a soldier had taken the bleeding baby away and he had never been seen again.

And he told them that the two Sauk girls were carried off to a Christian school in Wisconsin, and that Tall Woman had been impregnated by a missionary and was last seen in 1832, when she was taken to become a servant in a white farm beyond Fort Crawford. And that the girl named Two Skies had escaped from the school and made her way to Prophetstown, where the shaman White Cloud, Wabokieshiek, had taken her into his lodge and guided her through the Seven Tents of Wisdom and given her a new name, Makwa-Ikwa, the Bear Woman.

And that Makwa-ikwa had been the shaman of her people until she was raped and murdered by three white men in Illinois in 1851.

The people listened soberly, but nobody wept. They were accustomed to stories of horror about those they loved.

They passed a water drum from hand to hand until it reached Sleep Walker. It wasn’t Makwa’s water drum, which had disappeared when the Sauks had left Illinois, but Shaman saw that it was similar. They had passed a single stick along with the drum, and now Sleep Walker knelt in front of the drum and began to beat it, in bursts of four rhythmic strokes, and to chant.

Ne-nye-ma-wa-wa
,

Ne-nye-ma-wa-wa
,

Ne-nye-ma-wa-wa
,

Ke-ta-ko-ko-na-na
.

I beat it four times,

I beat it four times,

I beat it four times,

I beat our drum four times.

Shaman looked around and saw that the people sang with the medicine man and that many of them were holding gourds in both hands and shaking them in time to the music, the way Shaman had shaken the marble-filled cigar box in music class when he was a boy.

Ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se lye-ya-ya-ni,

Ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se lye-ya-ya-ni,

Me-to-se-ne-ni-o lye-ya-ya-ni,

Ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se lye-ya-ya-ni
.

Bless us when you come,

Bless us when you come,

The people, when you come,

Bless us when you come.

Shaman leaned over and placed his hand on the water drum just below the hide cover. When Sleep Walker struck it, it was like holding thunder between his palms. He watched Sleep Walker’s mouth and saw with pleasure that the chant was now one he knew, one of Makwa’s songs, and he sang along with them,

… Wi-a-ya-ni
,

Ni-na ne-gi-se ke-wi-to-se-me-ne ni-na.

… Wherever you are going,

I walk with you, my son.

Someone came with a log and threw it on the fire, sending a column of yellow sparks swirling into the black sky. The radiance of the fire mingled with the heat of the night and made him dizzy and faint, ready to see visions. He looked for his wife, concerned for her, and saw that Rachel’s mother would have been furious at her appearance. She was bareheaded, her hair was mussed and awry, her face was shiny with sweat, and her eyes were gleaming with delight. She had never seemed more womanly to him, more human, or more desirable. She saw his glance and smiled as she leaned past
Little Dog to speak. A hearing person would have lost her words in the booming of the drum and the chanting, but Shaman had no trouble in reading her lips.
It’s as good as seeing a buffalo!

The next morning, Shaman slipped away early without waking his wife and bathed in the Iowa River while swallows swooped to feed and tiny fingerlings with dull gold bodies darted in the water at his feet.

It was a little after sunup. Children already called and hooted to one another in the village, and as he went past the houses he saw barefoot women and a few men planting their garden patches in the morning cool. At the edge of the village he came face-to-face with Sleep Walker and the two of them stood comfortably and conversed like a pair of country squires meeting during their morning constitutionals.

Sleep Walker asked him questions about Makwa’s burial and grave. Shaman wasn’t comfortable about answering. “I was only a boy when she died. I don’t remember a lot,” he said. But from his reading of the journals he was able to say that Makwa’s grave had been dug in the morning, and she’d been buried in the afternoon, in her best blanket. Her feet had pointed west. The tail of a buffalo cow had been buried with her.

Sleep Walker nodded approvingly. “What is located ten steps northwest of her grave?”

Shaman stared. “I don’t remember. I don’t know.”

The medicine man’s face was intent. The old man in Missouri, the one who had been almost a shaman, had taught him about the deaths of shamans, he said. He explained that wherever a shaman is buried, four
watawinonas
, the imps of wickedness, take up residence ten steps northwest of the grave. The
watawinonas
take turns being awake—one imp is always awake while the other three sleep. They can’t harm the shaman, Sleep Walker said, but while they are allowed to remain there, she can’t use her powers to aid living people who ask for her help.

Shaman stifled a sigh. Perhaps if he’d grown up believing these things, he could summon more tolerance. But during the night he had been awake wondering what was happening to his patients. And now he wanted to finish his work here and start home early enough so they could camp for the night at the good river cove where they had camped on the way up.

“To drive away the
watawinonas,
” Sleep Walker said, “you have to find their sleeping place and burn it.”

“Yes. I’ll do that,” Shaman said shamelessly, and Sleep Walker appeared relieved.

Little Dog came by and asked if he could take Charlie Farmer’s place when the arm-scratching resumed. He said Keyser had left Tama the night before, right after the fire had been allowed to die.

Shaman was disappointed Keyser hadn’t said good-bye. But he nodded to Little Dog and said that would be fine.

They began early to do the rest of the inoculations. It went a little faster than the day before, because Shaman had grown adept with practice. They were almost finished when a pair of bay horses pulled a farm wagon into the village clearing. Keyser was driving, and there were three children in the back of the wagon, gazing at the Sauks and the Mesquakies with great interest.

“I’d appreciate it if you’d scratch them against the pox too,” Charlie said, and Shaman said he’d be glad to.

When the rest of the people and the three children had been inoculated, Charlie helped Shaman and Rachel gather up their things.

“I would like to bring my children to visit the shaman’s grave sometime,” he said. Shaman told him they’d be welcome.

It took little time to pack Ulysses. They received a gift from Climbing Squirrel’s husband, Shemago, the Lance, who came with three large whiskey jugs full of maple syrup, which they were happy to receive. The jugs were tied together with the same kind of vine that had made Sleep Walker’s snake. When Shaman lashed them to Ulysses’ pack, it appeared that he and Rachel were on their way to an enormous celebration.

He shook hands with Sleep Walker and told him they’d return the following spring. Then he shook hands with Charlie, and with Snapping Turtle, and with Little Dog.

“Now you are
Cawso wabeskiou,
” Little Dog said.

Cawso Wabeskiou
, the White Shaman. It gave Shaman pleasure, because he knew that Little Dog wasn’t simply using his nickname.

Many of the people raised their hands, and so did Rachel and Shaman as they and the three horses went down the road along the river, out of Tama.

74

THE EARLY RISER

For four days after they reached home, Shaman paid the price exacted of physicians who have taken a holiday. His dispensary was crowded with patients every morning, and each afternoon and evening he visited the home-bound patients who were his responsibility, to return to the Geiger house late at night, and tired.

But by his fifth day home, a Saturday, the tide of patients had ebbed until he was more or less normally busy, and on Sunday morning he awoke in Rachel’s room to the delicious realization that he had a breathing space. As usual, he was up before anyone else, and he gathered his clothes and carried them downstairs, where he dressed quietly in the parlor before letting himself out the front door.

He walked down the Long Path, stopping in the woods where Oscar Ericsson’s laborers had cleared a site for the new house and barn. It wasn’t the spot where Rachel had stood as a girl and yearned; unfortunately, the dreams of young girls don’t take drainage into account, and Ericsson had inspected that site and shaken his head. They’d settled on a more suitable place a hundred yards away, which Rachel declared was close enough to her dream. Shaman had asked permission to buy the building lot, and Jay insisted it was a wedding gift. But he and Jay were treating one another with warmth and exquisite consideration these days, and the matter would be settled gently.

When he reached the site of the hospital, he saw that the cellar hole was almost completely dug. Surrounding it, piles of dirt made a landscape of giant anthills. The hole looked smaller than he had imagined the hospital building, but Ericsson had said that the hole always looked smaller. The foundation would be of gray stone quarried beyond Nauvoo, taken up the Mississippi on flatboats, and brought here from Rock Island by oxcart, a dangerous prospect that made Shaman fret, but which the contractor faced with equanimity.

He walked down to the Cole house, which Alex soon would leave. Then he took the Short Path, trying to imagine it being used by patients who would come to the clinic by boat. Certain changes had to be made. He contemplated the sweat lodge, which suddenly was in the wrong place. He
decided to make a careful sketch of the placement of each flat rock, and then take up the rocks and rebuild the sweat lodge behind the new barn, so Joshua and Hattie would have the experience of knowing what it was like to sit in the remarkable heat until it was impossible not to run into the redeeming waters of the river.

When he turned to Makwa’s grave, he saw that the wooden marker had become so cracked and weather-bleached that the runelike markings no longer could be detected. The inscriptions were preserved in one of the journals, and he determined to get a more permanent marker and to place some sort of barrier around the grave, so it wouldn’t be disturbed.

Spring weeds had made inroads. As he pulled bluestem grass and prairie dock that had worked its way between the clumps of day lilies, he found himself telling Makwa that some of her people were safe in Tama.

The cold anger that he’d felt here, whether or not it had come from deep within himself, was gone. All he could feel now was quietude.

But … There was something.

He stood and fought the impulse, for a while. Then he located true northwest and began to walk from the grave, counting his steps.

When he had gone ten paces, he was in the middle of the ruins of the
hedonoso-te
. The longhouse had deteriorated through the years and now was a low, uneven pile of narrow logs and strips of moldering tree bark, with cordgrass and wild indigo poking through.

It didn’t make sense, he told himself, to spruce up the grave, move the sweat lodge, and leave this unsightly heap. He walked down the path to the barn, where there was a large crock of lamp oil. It was almost full, and he carried it back and emptied it. The material in the pile was wet with dew but his sulfur match caught the first time he tried, and the oil ignited and flared.

In a moment the entire
hedonoso-te
was being consumed by leaping blue and yellow flames, and a column of dark gray smoke rose straight up and then was bent by the breeze and swept out over the river.

An acrid eruption of black smoke spewed like a bursting boil, and the first demon, the one who was awake, surged upward and away. Shaman imagined a lonely furious demonic screaming, a hissing cry. One by one, the other three creatures of wickedness, so rudely awakened, lifted off like hungry birds of prey abandoning delectable flesh,
watawinonas
roiling elsewhere on wings of smoky rage.

From the nearby grave Shaman sensed something like a sigh.

He stood close and felt the lick of the heat, like the fire in a Sauk celebration ceremony, and imagined what this place had been like when young Rob J. Cole saw it for the first time, unbroken prairie running all the way to the woods and the river. And he thought of others who had lived here, Makwa, and Moon, and Comes Singing. And Alden. As the fire burned lower and lower, he sang in his mind:
Tti-la-ye ke-wi-ta-mo-ne i-no-ki-i-i, ke-te-ma-ga-yo-se
. Ghosts, I speak to you now, send your blessings to me.

Soon it was a thin layer of residue from which wisps of smoke rose. He knew the grass would move in, and there would be no trace of where the
hedonoso-te
had been.

When it was safe to leave the fire, he returned the crock to the barn and started back. On the Long Path he met a small grim figure looking for him. She was trying to walk away from a little boy who had fallen and scraped his knee. The little boy limped after her doggedly. He was crying, and his nose was running.