29
THE LAST INDIANS IN ILLINOIS
“You’ve made a mistake, Mort,” Rob J. said.
Mort London looked uncomfortable, but he shook his head. “No. We think the big sonofabitch most likely killed her.”
When Rob J. had been in the sheriff’s office only a few hours earlier, London had said nothing about planning to go to his farm and arrest one of his employees. Something was amiss; Comes Singing’s trouble was like a disease with no apparent etiology. He took note of the “we.” He knew who “we” was, and he perceived that somehow Nick Holden hoped to make political capital of Makwa’s death. But Rob handled his own anger gingerly.
“A bad mistake, Mort.”
“There’s a witness saw the big Indian in the very clearing where she was found a short time before it happened.”
Not surprising, Rob J. told him, seeing that Comes Singing was one of his hired men, and the river woods were part of his farm. “I want to put up the bail.”
“Can’t set bail. We have to wait for a circuit judge to come out from Rock Island.”
“How long will that take?”
London shrugged.
“One of the good things to come from the English was due process of law. We’re supposed to have that here.”
“Can’t hurry a circuit judge for one Indian. Five, six days. Mebbe a week or so.”
“I want to see Comes Singing.”
London rose and led the way into the two-cell lockup that adjoined the sheriff’s office. The deputies sat in the dim corridor between the cells, rifles in their laps. Fritz Graham looked as if he was enjoying himself. Otto Pfersick looked as though he wished he were back in his gristmill, making flour. One of the cells was empty. The other cell was full of Comes Singing.
“Untie him,” Rob J. said thinly.
London hesitated. They were afraid to approach their prisoner, Rob J. recognized. Comes Singing somehow had sustained an angry bruise over his right eye (from a gun barrel?). His very size was intimidating.
“Let me in there. I’ll untie him myself.”
London unlocked the cell and Rob J. went in alone. “Pyawanegawa,” he said, placing his hand on Comes Singing’s shoulder, calling him by his proper name.
He went behind Comes Singing and began to pick at the knotted rope that bound him, but the knot was cruelly tight. “It needs cutting,” he said to London. “Hand me a knife.”
“Like hell.”
“Pair of scissors, in my medical bag.”
“That ain’t hardly less of a weapon,” London grumbled, but he allowed Graham to fetch the scissors, and Rob J. was able to get the rope cut. He chafed Comes Singing’s wrists between both his hands, looking into his eyes, talking as though to his own deaf son. “Cawso wabeskiou will help Pyawanegawa. We are brothers of the same Half, the Long Hairs, the Keeso-qui.”
He ignored the amused surprise and contempt in the eyes of the listening whites on the other side of the bars. He didn’t know how much of what he had said was understood by Comes Singing. The Sauk’s eyes were dark and sullen, but as Rob J. searched them he saw a change there, the leap of something he couldn’t be certain of, that may have been fury or just may have been the tiny rebirth of hope.
That afternoon he brought Moon to her husband. She interpreted while London questioned him.
Comes Singing appeared baffled by the interrogation.
He admitted at once that he’d been in the clearing that morning. Time to get in wood for the winter, he said, looking at the man who paid him to do that. And he was hunting sugar maples, marking them in his memory for tapping when spring came.
He lived in the same longhouse as the dead woman, London observed.
Yes.
Did he ever engage in sex with her?
Moon hesitated before translating. Rob J. looked hard at London but touched her arm and nodded, and she asked her husband the question. Comes Singing answered at once and without apparent anger.
No, never.
Rob J. followed Mort London back to his office when the questioning was over. “Can you tell me why you arrested this man?”
“I told you. A witness saw him at that clearing just before the woman was killed.”
“Who is your witness?”
“… Julian Howard.”
Rob asked himself what Julian Howard had been doing on his land. He remembered the clink of dollar coins when Howard had settled up with him for the house call. “You paid him for his testimony,” he said, as if he knew it for a fact.
“I didn’t. No,” London said, flushing, but he was an amateur bad man, clumsy at summoning spuriously righteous anger.
It was Nick who would have done the rewarding, along with a liberal dose of flattery and assurances to Julian that he was a saintly fellow, just doing his duty.
“Comes Singing was where he should have been, working on my property. You might just as well arrest me for owning the land Makwa was killed on, or Jay Geiger for finding her.”
“If the Indian didn’t do it, it’ll come out during a fair trial. He lived with the woman—”
“She was his shaman. Same as being his minister. The fact that they lived in the same longhouse made sex between them forbidden, as if they were brother and sister.”
“People have killed their own ministers. And fucked their own sisters, for that matter.”
Rob J. started away in disgust, but he turned back. “It isn’t too late to set this straight, Mort. Being sheriff is only a damn job, if you lose it you’ll survive. I believe you’re a pretty good man. But you do something like this once, it’s going to be easy to do it again and again.”
It was a mistake. Mort could live with the knowledge that the whole town knew he was in Nick Holden’s pocket, so long as no one threw it up to his face.
“I read that piece of shit you called an autopsy report, Dr. Cole. You’d have a hard time makin a judge and a jury of six good white men believe that female was a virgin. Good-lookin Indian female her age, and everyone in the county knowin she was your woman. You got a nerve, preachin. Now, you get yourself the fuck out of here. And don’t you consider comin back unless you have to bother me with something that best be official.”
Moon said Comes Singing was afraid.
“I don’t believe they’ll hurt him,” Rob J. said.
She said he wasn’t afraid of being hurt. “He knows that sometimes white men hang people. If a Sauk is strangled to death, he can’t get across the river of foam, can’t ever get into the Land in the West.”
“Nobody’s going to hang Comes Singing,” Rob J. said irritably. “They have no evidence he’s done anything. It’s a political thing, and in a few days they’re going to have to let him go.”
But her fear was contagious. The only lawyer in Holden’s Crossing was Nick Holden. There were several lawyers in Rock Island, but Rob J. didn’t know them personally. Next morning he took care of the patients who needed immediate attention and then rode into the county seat. There were even more people in Congressman Stephen Hume’s waiting room than he usually saw in his own, and he had to wait almost ninety minutes before his turn came.
Hume listened to him attentively. “Why’d you come to me?” he asked finally.
“Because you’re running for reelection and your opponent is Nick Holden. For some reason I haven’t figured out, Nick is causing as much trouble as he can for the Sauks in general and Comes Singing in particular.”
Hume sighed. “Nick’s in with a rough bunch, and I can’t take his candidacy lightly. The American party’s filling the native-born workingman with hatred and fear of immigrants and Catholics. They’ve a secret lodge in every town with a peephole in the door so they can keep out nonmembers. They’re called the Know Nothing party, because if you ask any member about their activities, he’s trained to say he knows nothing about it. They promote and use violence against the foreign-born, and I’m shamed to say they’re sweeping the country, politically. Immigrants are flooding in, but at this moment seventy percent of the people of Illinois are native-born, and of the other thirty percent, most aren’t citizens and don’t vote. Last year the Know Nothings almost elected a governor in New York and did elect fortynine legislators. A Know Nothing-Whig alliance easily carried the elections in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and Cincinnati went Know Nothing after a bitter fight.”
“But why is Nick after the Sauks? They’re not foreign-born!”
Hume grimaced. “His political instincts probably are very sound. Only nineteen years ago white folks were being massacred by Indians around here, and doing plenty of massacring on their own. A lot of people died during Black Hawk’s War. Nineteen years is a mighty short time. Boys who survived Indian raids and a lot of Indian scares are voters now, and they still hate and fear Indians. So my worthy opponent is fanning the flames. The other night in Rock Island he passed out plenty of whiskey and then gave a rehash of the Indian wars, not leaving out a single scalping or alleged depravity. Then he told them about the last bloodthirsty Indians in Illinois being coddled out there in your town, and he pledged that when he’s elected United States representative, he’ll see that they’re returned to their reservation in Kansas, where they belong.”
“Can you take steps to help the Sauks?”
“Take steps?” Hume sighed. “Dr. Cole, I’m a politician. Indians don’t vote, so I’m not about to take a public stand in their individual or collective favor. But as a political matter it will help me if we can defuse this thing, because my opponent is trying to use it to win my seat.
“The two justices for the Circuit Court in this district are the Honorable Daniel P. Allan and the Honorable Edwin Jordan. Judge Jordan has a mean streak and he’s a Whig. Dan Allan is a pretty good judge and an even better Democrat. I’ve known him and worked with him for a long time, and if he sits on this case he won’t let Nick’s people turn it into a carnival to convict your Sauk friend on flimsy nonevidence and help Nick win the election. There’s no way of knowing whether he or Jordan will get the case. If it’s Allan, he’ll be no more than fair, but he’ll be fair.
“None of the lawyers in town is going to want to defend an Indian, and that’s the truth. The best attorney here is a young fella name of John Kurland. You let me have a talk with him, see if we can’t twist his arm some.”
“I’m grateful to you, Congressman.”
“Well, you can show it by voting.”
“I’m one of the thirty percent. I’ve applied for naturalization, but there’s a three-year waiting period …”
“That’ll allow you to vote next time I run for re-election,” Hume said practically. He grinned as they shook hands. “Meantime, tell your friends.”
The town wasn’t going to stay excited too long because of a dead Indian. More interesting was contemplation of the opening of the Holden’s Crossing Academy. Everyone in town would have been willing to give a small piece of land as the school site, thus ensuring easy access for their own children, but it was agreed that the institution should be in a central place, and finally the town meeting had accepted three acres from Nick Holden, which satisfied Nick, because the lot was precisely shown as the school site on his early “dream maps” of Holden’s Crossing.
A one-room log schoolhouse had been built cooperatively. Once work had begun, the project caught fire. Instead of puncheon floors, the men hauled logs six miles to be sawed for construction of a plank floor. A long shelf was built along one wall to serve as a collective desk, and a long bench was placed in front of the shelf, so pupils could face the wall while writing and swing around to face the teacher while reciting. A square iron wood stove was set in the middle of the room. It was determined that school would begin each year after harvest and would run for three twelve-week terms, the teacher to be paid nineteen dollars a term plus room and board. State law held that a teacher had to be qualified in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and knowledgeable about either geography, or grammar, or history. There were not many candidates for the job because the pay was small and the aggravations were many, but finally the town hired Marshall Byers, a first cousin of Paul Williams, the blacksmith.
Mr. Byers was a slim, pop-eyed youth of twenty-one who had taught in Indiana before coming to Illinois, and therefore knew what to expect from “boarding around,” living for a week at a time with the family of a different pupil. He told Sarah he was glad to stay at a sheep farm because he liked lamb and carrots better than pork and potatoes. “Everywhere else, when they serve meat, it’s pork and potatoes, pork and potatoes,” he said. Rob J. grinned at him. “You’ll love the Geigers,” he said.
Rob J. wasn’t taken with the teacher. There was something nasty about the way Mr. Byers grabbed covert glances at Moon and Sarah, and stared at Shaman as though the boy were a freak.
“I’m looking forward to having Alexander in my school,” Mr. Byers said.
“Shaman is looking forward to school too,” Rob J. said quietly.
“Oh, but surely that is impossible. The boy doesn’t speak normally. And how can a child who doesn’t hear a word hope to learn anything in school?”
“He reads lips. He learns easily, Mr. Byers.”
Mr. Byers frowned. He looked ready to protest further, but when he glanced at Rob J.’s face he changed his mind. “Of course, Dr. Cole,” he said stiffly. “Of course.”
Next morning, before breakfast, Alden Kimball knocked at the back door. He had been to the feed store early and was bursting with news.
“Them damnfool Indians! They done it now,” he said. “Got drunk last night and burned down the barn out at that popist nuns’ place.”
Moon denied it at once when Rob spoke to her. “I was at the Sauk camp last night with my friends, talking about Comes Singing. It’s a lie, what Alden was told.”
“Perhaps they started drinking after you left.”
“No. It’s a lie.” She sounded calm but her trembling fingers were already removing her apron. “I’ll go see the People.”
Rob sighed. He decided he’d better visit the Catholics.
He’d heard them described as “them damn brown beetles.” He understood why when he saw them, because they wore brown wool habits that looked too warm for autumn and must have been a torture in the heat of summer. Four of them were working in the ruins of the fine little Swedish barn August Lund and his wife had built with such fierce young hope. They appeared to be searching the charred remains, still smoking in one corner, for anything worth salvaging.
“Good morning,” he called.
They’d been oblivious of his approach. They had tucked the hems of their long habits into their belts to allow freedom and comfort while they worked, and now they hastened to hide four sturdy pairs of sooty white-stockinged limbs as they pulled their skirts free.
“I’m Dr. Cole,” he said, dismounting. “Your far neighbor.” They stared without speaking, and it occurred to him that perhaps they didn’t understand the language. “May I speak to the person in charge?”
“That would be the mother superior,” one of them said, her voice scarcely more than a whisper.
She made a small motion and went to the house, Rob following. Near a new lean-to shack at the side of the house, an old man dressed in black spaded a frost-killed vegetable garden. The old man showed no interest in Rob. The nun knocked twice, quiet little rappings that went with her voice.
“You may enter.”
The brown habit preceded him and curtsied. “This gentleman to see you, your Reverence. A doctor and a neighbor,” the whispery-voiced nun said, and curtsied again before fleeing.
The mother superior sat in a wooden chair behind a small table. The face within the veil was large, the nose wide and generous, the quizzical eyes a penetrating blue, lighter than Sarah’s eyes and challenging instead of lovely.
He introduced himself and said he was sorry about the fire. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
“I am confident the Lord will help.” Her English was educated; he thought the accent was German, although her accent and the Schroeders’ were dissimilar. Perhaps they were from different regions of Germany.
“Please be seated,” she said, indicating the only comfortable chair in the room, large as a throne, upholstered in leather.
“You carried this all the way in a wagon?”
“Yes. When the bishop visits us, he will have a decent place to sit,” she said, her face serious. The men had come during Night Song, she said. The community had been busy at worship and didn’t hear the first rowdy sounds and the crackling, but soon they had smelled the smoke.
“I’m told they were Indians.”
“The kind of Indians who attended that tea party in Boston,” she said dryly.
“You’re certain?”
She smiled without humor. “They were drunken white men, spewing drunken white men’s filth.”
“There’s a lodge of the American party here.”
She nodded. “The Know Nothings. Ten years ago I was at the Franciscan community in Philadelphia, newly arrived from my native Württemberg. The Know Nothings treated me to a week of rioting in which two churches were attacked, twelve Catholics were beaten to death, and dozens of Catholic-owned homes were burned. It took me a while to realize they are not all of America.”
He nodded. He noted that they had adapted one of the two rooms in August Lund’s soddy into a Spartan dormitory. The room formerly had been Lund’s granary. Now sleeping pallets were stacked in a corner. Besides her desk-table and its chair, and the bishop’s chair, the only furniture was a large and handsome refectory table and benches of new wood, and he commented on the joinery. “Were they made by your priest?”
She smiled and rose. “Father Russell is our chaplain. Sister Mary Peter Celestine is our carpenter. Would you like to see our chapel?”
He followed her into the room where the Lunds had eaten and slept and made love and where Greta Lund had died. It had been whitewashed. Against the wall was a wooden altar, and in front of it a prie-dieu for kneeling. Before the crucifix on the altar, a large tabernacle candle in a red glass was flanked by smaller candles. There were four plaster statues that seemed to be segregated by sex. He recognized the Virgin on the right. The mother superior said that next to Mary was Saint Clare, who had founded their order of nuns, and on the opposite side of the altar were Saint Francis and Saint Joseph.
“I’m told you plan to open a school.”
“You are wrongly told.”
He smiled. “And that you intend to steal children into popery.”
“Well, that is not so wrong,” she said seriously. “We always hope to save a soul through Christ, child or woman or man. We always strive to make friends, draw Catholics from the community. But ours is a nursing order.”
“A nursing order! And where will you nurse? Will you build a hospital here?”
“Ah,” she said regretfully. “There is no money. Holy Mother Church has bought this property and sent us to this place. And now we must make our way. We are certain the Lord will provide.”
He was less certain. “May I summon your nurses if they’re needed by the sick?”
“To go into their houses? No, that would never do,” she said severely.
He was uncomfortable in the chapel and started to withdraw.
“I think you are not a Catholic yourself, Dr. Cole.”
He shook his head. He was struck by a sudden thought. “If it’s necessary to help the Sauks, would you testify that the men who burned your barn were white?”
“Of course,” she said coldly. “Since it is simple truth, no?”
He realized that her novitiates must live in constant terror of her. “Thank you …” He hesitated, unable to bow to this haughty woman and call her “your Reverence.” “What is your name, Mother?”
He had been a Latinist in school, slaving to translate Cicero and accompanying Caesar through his Gallic Wars, and he retained enough to know that the name meant Mary the Courageous. But ever after, when he thought of this woman—to himself and to himself only—he would call her Ferocious Miriam.
He made the long ride to Rock Island to see Stephen Hume and was immediately rewarded, because the congressman had good news. Daniel P. Allan would preside at the trial. Because of the lack of evidence, Judge Allan saw no problem with releasing Comes Singing on bail. “Capital crime, though—he couldn’t set bail at less than two hundred dollars. For a bondsman you’ll have to go to Rockford or Springfield.”
“I’ll put up the money. Comes Singing’s not going to run out on me,” Rob J. said.
“Good. Young Kurland has agreed to represent. Best for you not to go near the jail, under the circumstances. Attorney Kurland will meet you in two hours at your bank. That’s the one in Holden’s Crossing?”
“Yes.”
“Draw a bank draft made out to Rock Island County, sign it, and give it to Kurland. He’ll handle the rest.” Hume grinned. “The case will be heard within weeks. Between Dan Allan and John Kurland, they’ll see to it that if Nick tries to make anything much of this case, he’s gonna end up looking mighty foolish.” His handshake was firm and congratulatory.
Rob J. went home and hitched up the buckboard, because he felt that Moon had to have a place in the reception committee. She sat erect in the buckboard, wearing her regular housedress and a bonnet that had belonged to Makwa, unusually silent even for her. He could tell she was very nervous. He hitched the horse in front of the bank and she waited in the wagon while he took care of getting the draft and handing it over to John Kurland, a serious young man who acknowledged his introduction to Moon with politeness but no warmth.
When the lawyer left them, Rob J. got back up into the buckboard seat next to Moon. He left the horse hitched right where it was, and they sat there and peered down the street at the door to Mort London’s office. The sun was hot for September.
They sat for what seemed to be an inordinately long time. Then Moon touched his arm, because the door had opened and Comes Singing emerged, stooping so he could get through. Kurland came right after.
They saw Moon and Rob J. at once and started toward them. Either Comes Singing reacted in joy because of his freedom and couldn’t resist running or something instinctual made him want to get away from there, but he had taken only a couple of loping strides when something barked from above and to the right, and then from another rooftop across the street there were two more reports.
Pyawanegawa the hunter, the leader, the hero of the ball-and-stick, should have gone down with majesty, like a giant tree, but he fell clumsily like other men, and his face went into the dirt.
Rob J. was out of the buckboard and to him at once, but Moon was unable to move. When he reached Comes Singing and turned him, he saw what Moon knew. One bullet had struck precisely in the nape of the neck. The other two were chest wounds in a pattern little more than an inch apart, and likely both had caused death by finding the heart.
Kurland reached them and stood in helpless horror. It took another minute for London and Holden to come from the sheriff’s office. Mort listened to Kurland’s explanation of what had happened and began to shout orders, checking the roofs on one side of the street and then on the other. Nobody seemed terribly surprised to find the roofs deserted.
Rob J. had remained on his knees next to Comes Singing, but now he stood and faced Nick. Holden was white-faced but relaxed, as if ready for anything. Incongruously, Rob was struck anew by his male beauty. He was wearing a revolver in a holster, Rob J. noted, and he knew his words to Nick might place him in danger, must be chosen with the greatest of care, yet needed to be spoken.
“I never want to have anything to do with you again. Not as long as I live,” he said.
Comes Singing was brought to the shed at the sheep farm and Rob J. left him there with his family. At dusk he went out to bring Moon and her children into the house for food and found they were gone, and so was Comes Singing’s body. Late that evening Jay Geiger discovered the Coles’ buckboard and horse tied to a post in front of his barn, and he brought Rob’s property to the sheep farm. He said Little Horn and Stone Dog were gone from the Geiger farm. Moon and her children didn’t return. That night Rob J. lay sleepless, thinking about Comes Singing probably in an unmarked grave somewhere in river woods. On somebody else’s land that once had belonged to the Sauks.
Rob J. didn’t get the news until midmorning next day, when Jay rode over again to tell him that Nick Holden’s enormous stock barn had been burned to the ground during the night. “No doubt about it, this time it was the Sauks. They’ve all run off. Nick spent most of the night keeping the flames away from his house and promising to call out the militia and the U.S. Army. He’s already lit out after them with almost forty men, the sorriest Indian fighters anyone could think of—Mort London, Dr. Beckermann, Julian Howard, Fritz Graham, most of the regulars from Nelson’s bar—half the shickers in this part of the county, and all of them thinking they’re going after Black Hawk. They’re lucky if they don’t shoot each other in the foot.”
That afternoon Rob J. rode out to the Sauk camp. The place told him they had left for good. The buffalo robes had been taken down from the doorways of the hedonoso-tes, which gapped like missing teeth. The junk of camp life littered the ground. He picked up a tin can, the raggedness of its lid telling him it had been sawed open with a knife or a bayonet. The label revealed it had contained cling peach halves from the state of Georgia. He’d never been able to make the Sauks see any value in dug latrines, and now he was kept from sentimentalizing their departure by the faint smell of human ordure that drifted to him when the wind blew in from the camp outskirts, a last shitty clue that something of value had disappeared from that place and wouldn’t be brought back by spells or politics.
Nick Holden and his group chased the Sauks for four days. They never really got close. The Indians stayed in the woodlands along the Mississippi, always heading north. They weren’t as good in the wilderness as many of the People who were now dead, but even the poorest of them was better in the woods than the white men, and they doubled back and twisted, laying false trails the whites obligingly followed.
The white men stuck to the pursuit until they were deep into Wisconsin. It would have been better if they could have returned with trophies, a few scalps and ears, but they told each other they’d scored a great victory. They paused at Prairie du Chien and took on a lot of whiskey and Fritzie Graham got into a fight with a trooper and ended up in jail, but Nick got him out, convincing the sheriff that a little professional courtesy was called for toward a visiting deputy. When they got back, thirty-eight disciples went forth and spread the gospel that Nick Holden had saved the state from the redskin menace and was a fine fellow to boot.
It was a soft autumn that year, better than summer because all the bugs were killed off by early frosts. A golden time, the leaves along the river colored by the cold nights but the days mild and pleasurable. In October the church called to its pulpit Reverend Joseph Hills Perkins. He had asked for a parsonage as well as salary, so after harvest a small log house was built and the minister moved into it with his wife, Elizabeth. There were no children. Sarah busied herself as a member of the welcoming committee.
Rob J. found gone-by lilies along the river and planted their roots at the foot of Makwa’s grave. It wasn’t Sauk custom to mark graves with stone, but he asked Alden to plane a slab of black locust, which wouldn’t rot. It didn’t seem fitting to memorialize her with English words, but he had Alden carve into the wood the runelike symbols she had worn on her body, to mark it as her place. He had a single unsatisfactory conference with Mort London in an attempt to get the sheriff to investigate both her death and Comes Singing’s, but London said he was satisfied her killer had been shot dead, probably by other Indians.
In November, all over the United States, male citizens over twenty-one went to the polls. Country-wide, workingmen reacted to the competition of immigrants for their jobs. Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Kentucky elected Know Nothing governors. Know Nothing legislatures were elected in eight states. In Wisconsin, Know Nothings helped elect Republican lawyers who proceeded to abolish the state immigration agencies. Know Nothings carried Texas, Tennessee, California, and Maryland, and ran strongly in most of the Southern states.
In Illinois they won a majority of the votes in Chicago and in the southern portion of the state. In Rock Island County, incumbent U.S. Congressman Stephen Hume lost his seat by 183 votes to the Indian fighter Nicholas Holden, who left almost immediately after the election to represent his district in Washington, D.C.