25

THE QUIET CHILD

All his life Rob J., struggling to salvage people from the afflictions that bring about physical and mental failures, was surprised at how much it hurt him when the patient was someone he loved. He cherished all those he treated, even the ones made mean by their sickness, even the ones he knew had been mean before they’d become sick, because by seeking his help, somehow they became his. As a young physician in Scotland he’d seen his mother fail and move toward death, and it had been a special, bitter lesson in his ultimate powerlessness as a doctor. And now he felt a raw hurt because of what had befallen the strong, chunky little boy, large for his age, who had come from his own seed and soul.

Shaman appeared dazed as his father clapped his hands, dropped heavy books to the floor, stood before him shouting.

“CAN … YOU … HEAR … ANYTHING? SON?” Rob yelled, pointing to his own ears, but the little boy only stared in puzzlement. Shaman was profoundly deaf.

“Will it go away?” Sarah asked her husband.

“Perhaps,” Rob said, but he was more frightened than she, because he knew more, had seen tragedies whose possibilities she only sensed.

“You’ll make it go away.” She had absolute faith in him. As once he had saved her, now he would save their child.

He didn’t know how, but he tried. He poured warm oil into Shaman’s ears. He soaked him in hot baths, he applied compresses. Sarah prayed to Jesus. The Geigers prayed to Jehovah. Makwa-ikwa tapped her water drum and sang to the manitous and the ghosts. No god or spirit paid attention.

In the beginning, Shaman was too baffled to be frightened. But within hours he began to whimper and scream. He shook his head and clawed at his ears. Sarah thought the terrible earache had returned, but Rob soon felt it wasn’t that, because he had witnessed this before. “He’s hearing noises we can’t hear. Inside his head.”

Sarah blanched. “There is something in his head?”

“No, no.” He could tell her what the condition was called—tinnitus—but he couldn’t tell her what was causing the sounds that were so private to Shaman.

Shaman didn’t stop crying. His father and mother and Makwa took turns lying on the bed hugging him. Later Rob would learn that his son heard a variety of din, sounds of crackling, ringing, thunderous roaring, hissing. All of it was very loud, and Shaman was continually terrified.

The internal barrage disappeared after three days. Shaman’s relief was profound and the returned silence was comforting, but the adults who loved him were tortured by the desperation in the small white face.

That night Rob wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes in Boston, asking for advice about how to treat the deafness. He also asked Holmes, in case nothing could be done regarding the condition, to forward information that would instruct him how to raise a deaf son.

None of them knew how to treat Shaman. While Rob J. cast about for a physician’s solutions, it was Alex who assumed responsibility. Although stunned and frightened by what had happened to his brother, Alex adapted swiftly. He took Shaman’s hand and didn’t let go. Where the older boy walked, the younger followed. When their fingers cramped, Alex crossed to his brother’s other side and switched hands. Shaman quickly became accustomed to the security of Bigger’s sweaty, often dirty grasp.

Alex guarded him closely. “He wants more,” he would remark at the table during meals, taking Shaman’s empty bowl and holding it out to his mother so it could be refilled.

Sarah watched her two sons, observing how each of them suffered. Shaman stopped talking, and Alex chose to join him in his muteness, speaking hardly at all, communicating with Shaman in a series of exaggerated gestures while the two sets of young eyes locked with one another earnestly.

She tortured herself with imagined situations in which Shaman faced a variety of terrible fates because he couldn’t hear her agonized screams of warning. She made the boys stay close to the house. They grew bored and sat on the ground and played stupid games with nuts and pebbles, drawing pictures in the dirt with sticks. Incredibly, at times she heard them laughing. Not being able to hear his own voice, Shaman was apt to speak too softly, so they’d have to ask him to repeat what he mumbled, and he wouldn’t understand them. He took to grunting instead of speaking. When Alex became exasperated, he forgot about reality. “What?” he shouted. “What, Shaman!” And then he remembered the deafness and resorted to gestures again. He developed an unfortunate habit of grunting like Shaman to emphasize something he was trying to explain with his hands. Sarah couldn’t stand the growling-snorting sound, which made her sons seem like animals to her.

She fell into an unfortunate habit of her own, testing the deafness too often by coming up behind them and clapping her hands, or snapping her fingers, or saying their names. Inside the house, if she stamped her foot the vibrations in the floor caused Shaman to turn his head. At all times, only Alex’s scowl noted her interruption.

She had been an on-again, off-again mother, choosing to ride out with Rob J. at every opportunity instead of taking care of her children. She admitted to herself that her husband was the most important thing in her life, just as she acknowledged that medicine was the prime force in his life, even more important than his love for her; that’s just the way things were. She’d never felt for Alexander Bledsoe, or for any man, what she felt for Rob J. Cole. Now that one of her sons was threatened, she turned her love back to her boys full force, but it was too late. Alex wouldn’t relinquish any part of his brother, and Shaman had become accustomed to depending on Makwa-ikwa.

Makwa didn’t discourage the dependence; she took Shaman into the hedonoso-te for long periods of time, and she watched his every move. Once Sarah saw her hurry to where the boy had passed water against a tree and scoop some of the wet earth from the ground and take it away in a little cup, as if she was collecting the relic of a saint. Sarah thought the woman was a succubus who tried to claim the part of her husband he valued most about himself, and who now claimed her child. She knew Makwa was casting spells, singing, performing savage rituals whose very thought made her skin crawl, but she dared not object. As desperately as she wanted someone—anyone, anything—to succor her child, she couldn’t resist a feeling of self-righteous vindication, an affirmation in the one true faith, when day after day passed and the heathen nonsense brought no improvement to her son’s condition.

At night Sarah lay awake, tormented by thoughts of deaf mutes she’d known, remembering in particular a feebleminded and slovenly woman whom she and her friends had followed through the streets of their Virginia village, taunting the poor creature for her obesity and her deafness. Bessie, her name, Bessie Turner. They’d thrown sticks and pebbles, hilarious to see Bessie respond to physical insults after being able to ignore the horrible things they had shouted. She wondered if cruel children would follow Shaman through the streets.

Slowly it dawned upon her that Rob—even Rob!—didn’t know how to help Shaman. He left every morning and rode out on his house calls, absorbed with other people’s ills. He wasn’t abandoning his own family. It only seemed that way to her sometimes because she remained with her sons day after day, witness to their struggle.

The Geigers, seeking to be supportive, issued several invitations for the kind of evening the families had shared so often, but Rob J. declined. He no longer played his viola da gamba; Sarah believed he couldn’t stand to make music that Shaman wouldn’t hear.

She threw herself into the work of the farm. Alden Kimball double-dug a new plot for her and she undertook her most ambitious vegetable garden. She foraged the riverbank for miles to find lemon day lilies and transfer them to a bed at the front of the house. She helped Alden and Moon herd small groups of blatting sheep onto a raft and take them out into the middle of the river and push them off so they had to swim ashore, cleansing their wool before the shearing. After castrating the spring lambs, Alden looked askance when she claimed the bucket of prairie oysters, his favorite delicacy. Sarah stripped them of their stringy wrapping, wondering if that’s how a man’s gonads were under the wrinkled skin. Then she cut the tender little balls in half and fried them in bacon grease along with wild onion and a sliced puffball mushroom. Alden ate his share eagerly, declared it prime, and stopped moping.

She could almost have been content. Except.

Rob J. came home one day and told her he had conferred with Tobias Barr about Shaman. “A school for the deaf was recently established in Jack-sonville, but Barr knows little about it. I could travel there and look it over. But … Shaman is so young.”

“Jacksonville is one hundred and fifty miles away. We would scarcely ever see him.”

He told her that the Rock Island physician had confessed to an ignorance about how to treat deafness in children. In fact, some years before, he had given up on a case involving an eight-year-old girl and her six-year-old brother. Ultimately the children had been sent away as wards of the state, to the Illinois Asylum in Springfield.

“Rob J.,” she said. Through the open window came the guttural grunting of her sons, a mad sound, and she had a sudden mental picture of Bessie Turner’s vacant eyes. “To send a deaf child to be shut up with crazy people … that is wicked.” The thought of wickedness chilled her, as usual. “Do you think,” she whispered, “that Shaman is being punished for my sins?”

He took her in his arms and she drew on his strength the way she always did.

“No,” he said. He held her a long time. “Oh, my Sarah. You must never think it.” But he didn’t tell her what they could do.

One morning while the two boys sat in front of the hedonoso-te with Little Dog and Bird Woman, stripping willow withes of bark Makwa would boil to make her medicine, a strange Indian rode a bony horse out of the riverbank woods. He was an apparition of a Sioux, no longer young, as skinny as his horse, as shabby and tattered. His feet were bare and dirty. He wore leggings and a loincloth of deerskin and a tattered fragment of a buffalo skin around the upper part of his body like a shawl, held in place by a knotted rag belt. His long graying hair had been carelessly tended, with a short braid at the back and two longer braids at the sides of his head, wrapped with strips of otter skin.

A few years earlier, a Sauk would have greeted a Sioux with a weapon, but now each of them knew they were surrounded by a common enemy, and when the horseman greeted her in the sign language used by the Plains tribes whose native tongues are dissimilar, she returned the greeting with her fingers.

She guessed he had ridden through the Ouisconsin, following the fringe of forest along Masesibowi. His signs told her he came in peace and followed the setting sun to the Seven Nations. He asked her for food.

The four children were fascinated. They giggled and mimicked the eat sign with their small hands.

He was a Sioux, so she couldn’t simply give him anything. He traded a plaited rope for a plate of squirrel stew and a big piece of corncake, and a small bag of dried beans for the trail. The stew was cold but he dismounted and ate it with obvious hunger.

He saw the water drum and asked if she was a ghostkeeper, and looked uneasy when she indicated it was so. They didn’t give each other the power of learning their names. When he’d eaten, she warned him not to hunt the sheep or the white men would kill him, and he got back on the skinny horse and rode away.

The children were still playing at the game with their fingers, making signs that didn’t mean anything; except that Alex was making the eat sign. She broke off a piece of corncake and gave it to him, and then showed the others how to make the sign, rewarding them with nibbles of cake when they had got it right. The intertribal language was something the Sauk children should be taught, so she gave them the signs for willow, including the white brothers as a kindness until she saw that Shaman seemed to pick up the signs easily, and she was struck by an exciting thought that caused her to concentrate on him more than the others.

In addition to eat and willow, she taught them the signs for girl, for boy, for wash, and for dress. That was enough for the first day, she thought, but she set them to practicing them again and again, a new game, until the children knew the signs perfectly.

That afternoon, when Rob J. came home, she brought the children to him and demonstrated what they had learned.

Rob J. watched his deaf son thoughtfully. He saw that Makwa’s eyes gleamed with accomplishment, and he praised them all and thanked Makwa, who promised to continue to teach them the signs.

“What earthly good is it?” Sarah asked him bitterly when they were alone. “Why would we want our son to be able to talk with his fingers so only a bunch of Indians will understand him?”

“There’s a sign language like that for the deaf,” Rob J. said thoughtfully. “Invented by the French, I think. When I was in medical school, I myself saw two deaf people conversing with one another easily, using their hands instead of their voices. If I send for a book of these signs, and we learn it with him, we can talk to Shaman and he can talk to us.”

Reluctantly she agreed it was worth a try. In the meantime, Rob J. decided that learning the Indian signs would do the boy no harm.

A long letter came from Oliver Wendell Holmes. With typical thoroughness he had searched the literature at the Harvard Medical School library and had interviewed a number of authorities, giving them the details Rob J. had supplied concerning Shaman’s case.

He held out very little hope for a reversal of Shaman’s condition. “Sometimes,” he wrote, “hearing will return to a patient in whom total deafness has occurred as an aftermath of a disease such as measles, scarlet fever, or meningitis. But often, massive infection during illness scars and damages tissues, destroying sensitive and delicate processes that cannot be restored by healing.

“You write that you inspected both external auditory canals visually, using a speculum, and I commend your ingenuity in focusing the light of a candle into the ears by means of a hand mirror. Almost certainly the damage occurred deeper than you were able to examine. Having dissected, you and I are aware of the delicacy and complexity of the middle and inner ear. Whether young Robert’s problem lies in the eardrums, the auditory ossicles, the mallei, the incudes, the stapes, or perhaps the cochleae, doubtless we shall never know. What we do know, my dear friend, is that if your son still is deaf by the time you read this, in all likelihood he will be deaf for the remainder of his life.

“The problem to be considered, then, is how best to raise him.”

Holmes had consulted with Dr. Samuel G. Howe of Boston, who had worked with two deaf, mute, and blind pupils, teaching them to communicate with others by finger spelling the alphabet. Three years before Dr. Howe had toured Europe and had seen deaf children who were taught to talk clearly and effectively.

“But no school for the deaf in America teaches children to speak,” Holmes wrote, “instead instructing every pupil in the language of signs. If your son is taught the language of signs, he will be able to communicate only with other deaf persons. If he can learn to speak and, by watching the lips of others, to read what they are saying, there is no reason why he can’t live his life among people in general society.

“Therefore, Dr. Howe recommends that your son be kept at home and educated by you, and I concur.”

The consultants had reported that unless Shaman was made to talk, gradually he would go dumb through lack of use of the organs of speech. But Holmes warned that if speech was to be accomplished, the Cole family must use no formal signs to young Robert, and they must never accept a single sign from him.