THE END OF THE JOURNAL
“We are invited to have tea this afternoon at the Geigers’,” Shaman’s mother told him. “Rachel says we must come. Something to do with the children, and filberts?”
So that afternoon they walked the Long Path and sat in the Geigers’ dining room. Rachel brought in a new fall cloak of soft forest-green wool to show Sarah. “Spun from Cole fleeces!” Her mother had made it for her because her year of mourning was over, she said, and everyone complimented Lillian for fashioning a lovely garment.
Rachel observed that she would wear it the following Monday on a trip to Chicago.
“Will you be there long?” Sarah asked, and she said no, she would be gone only a few days.
“Business,” Lillian said in a tone that spoke volumes of disapproval.
When Sarah remarked hurriedly on the fulsome flavor of the English tea, Lillian sighed and said she felt fortunate to have it. “There’s almost no coffee in the entire South, and no decent tea. Jay says either coffee or tea sells for fifty dollars a pound in Virginia.”
“Then you’ve heard from him again?” Sarah asked.
Lillian nodded. “He reports he is well, thank God.”
Hattie’s face beamed when her mother carried in the bread, still warm from the oven. “We made it!” she announced. “Momma put in the things and stirred them up, and Joshua and me poured in the nuts!”
“Joshua and I,” her grandmother said.
“Bubbie, you weren’t even in the kitchen!”
“The nuts are simply delicious,” Sarah told the little girl.
“Me and Hattie got them,” Joshua said proudly.
“Hattie and I,” Lillian said.
“No, Bubbie, you weren’t there, it was on the Long Path and me and Hattie picked up the nuts while Momma and Shaman sat on the blanket and held hands.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Shaman has been having small difficulties with his speech,” Rachel said. “He just needs some practice. I’m helping him again, the way I used to. We met on the wood path so the children could play nearby, but he’ll be coming to the house so we can use the piano in the exercises.”
Sarah nodded. “It will be a good thing for Robert to work on his speech.”
Lillian nodded too, but stiffly. “Yes, how fortunate you are home, Rachel,” she said, and took Shaman’s cup and refilled it with the English tea.
The next day, although he’d made no appointment with Rachel, when he returned from his home visits, he walked out on the Long Path and met her walking the other way.
“Where are my friends?”
“They were helping with fall house cleaning and missed sleepytime, so they’re having late naps.”
He turned and walked along with her. The woods were full of birds, and he saw, in a nearby tree, a cardinal issuing an imperious silent challenge.
“I’ve been quarreling with my mother. She wanted us to go to Peoria for the High Holidays, and I refused to go there and be placed on display for the eligible bachelors and widowers. So we’ll spend the holidays at home.”
“Good,” he said quietly, and she smiled. The other quarrel, she told him, was brought on because Joe Regensberg’s cousin was marrying someone else, and had made an offer to buy the Regensberg Tinware Company, since he hadn’t been able to acquire it through marriage. That was why she was going to Chicago, she confided—to sell the company.
“Your mother will calm down. She loves you.”
“I know she does. Would you like to do some exercises?”
“Why not?” He extended his hand.
This time he could detect a slight trembling of her hand as it held his. Perhaps the exertion of the house cleaning had exhausted her, or the quarreling. But he dared to hope it was more than that, and he recognized a current of awareness pass between their fingers, so that his hand involuntarily moved in hers.
They were working on the breath control necessary to adequately manage the small explosions of the letter P, and he was unsmilingly repeating a nonsense sentence about a perfect possum pursuing a perturbed partridge, when she shook her head.
“No, feel how I do it,” she said, and placed his hand on her throat.
But all he could feel beneath his fingers was Rachel’s warm flesh.
It wasn’t something he had planned; if he had thought about it, he wouldn’t have done it. He slid his hand up to cup her face gently and bent to her. The kiss was infinitely sweet, the dreamed-about and yearned-for kiss of a fifteen-year-old boy and the girl with whom he was hopelessly in love. But they soon became a man and a woman kissing, and the mutual hunger was so shocking to him, so contradictory to the determined control of the everlasting friendship she had offered him, that he was afraid to credit it.
“Rachel … ,” he said when they broke apart.
“No. Oh, God.”
But when they came together again she planted little kisses all over his face like hot rain. He kissed her eyes, missed the center of her mouth and kissed its corner, and her nose. He could feel her body straining against him.
Rachel was struggling with shocks of her own. She placed a tremulous hand on his cheek and he moved his head until his lips pressed into her palm.
He saw her say words familiar from long ago, that Dorothy Burnham had used to signify the end of each school day. “I think that is all for today,” she said breathlessly. She turned from him, and Shaman stood and watched her walk quickly away until she disappeared around a curve in the Long Path.
That evening he began reading the last portion of his father’s journal, observing with dread and a great sadness the dwindling of Robert Judson Cole’s existence and caught up in the terrible war along the Rappahannock as his father had recorded it in his large clear hand.
When Shaman came to Rob J.’s discovery of Lanning Ordway, he sat for a time without reading. It was difficult for him to accept that, after so many years of trying, his father had made contact with one of the men who had caused Makwa’s death.
He sat up through the night, hunching over to make use of the light of the lamp in order to read on and on.
He went over Ordway’s letter to Goodnow several times.
Just before dawn he came to the end of the journal—and the end of his father. He lay on his bed fully clothed for a lonely hour. When he heard his mother in the kitchen, he went down to the barn and asked Alden to come inside. He showed both of them Ord way’s letter and told them how he had found it.
“In his journal? You read his journal?” his mother said.
“Yes. Would you like to read it?”
She shook her head. “I don’t need that, I was his wife. I knew him.”
They both saw that Alden was hung-over and poorly, and she poured coffee for the three of them.
“I don’t know what to do about the letter.”
Shaman let each of them read it slowly.
“Well, what can you do?” Alden said irritably. Alden was getting old fast, Shaman realized. Either he was drinking more or finding it harder to handle whiskey. His trembling hands spilled sugar as he spooned it into his cup. “Your pa tried every which way to get the law to act on what happened to that Sauk female. You think they’re gonna be any more interested now, because you have somebody’s name in a dead man’s letter?”
“Robert, when is this going to end?” his mother said bitterly. “That woman’s bones have been lying out there in our land all these years, and the two of you, your father and now you, haven’t been able to allow her to rest in peace, or any of us either. Can’t you just tear up the letter and forget all that old pain, and let the dead lie?”
But Alden shook his head. “Meanin no disrespect, Miz Cole. But this man isn’t about to listen to good sense or reason about them Indians, any more than his father could.” He blew on his coffee, held it to his face with both hands, and took a swallow that must have burned his mouth. “No, he’ll just worry this to death like a dog chokin on a bone, the way his pa used to do.” He looked at Shaman. “If my advice means anythin, which it probably don’t, you ought to go to Chicago sometime when you’re able, and look up this Goodnow, see if he can tell you somethin. Otherwise, you’re goin to work yourself into a frazzle, and us too in the bargain.”
Mother Miriam Ferocia didn’t agree. When Shaman rode to the convent that afternoon and showed her the letter, she nodded. “Your father told me about David Goodnow,” she said calmly.
“If the Reverend Goodnow was indeed the Reverend Patterson, he should be made accountable for Makwa’s death.”
Mother Miriam sighed. “Shaman, you are a doctor, not a policeman. Can you not leave this man’s judgment to God? It is as a doctor that we need you desperately.” She leaned forward and fixed him with her eyes. “I have momentous news. Our bishop has sent word that he will send us funds to establish a hospital here.”
“Reverend Mother, that is wonderful news!”
“Yes, wonderful.”
Her smile illuminated her face, Shaman thought. He recalled from his father’s journal that she had received a legacy after her father’s death and had turned it over to the church; he wondered if it was her own inheritance the bishop would send her, or part of it. But her joy wouldn’t tolerate the existence of cynicism.
“The people of this area will have a hospital,” she said, beaming. “The nursing nuns of this convent will nurse at the Hospital of Saint Francis Xavier of Assisi.”
“And I shall have a hospital to care for my patients.”
“Actually, we hope you will have more than that. The sisters are agreed. We wish you to be the hospital’s medical director.”
It silenced him for a moment. “You honor me, your Reverence,” he said finally. “But I would suggest as medical director a doctor with more experience, someone older. And you’re aware I’m not a Catholic.”
“Once, when I dared dream of this, I hoped your father would be our medical director. God sent your father to us to be our friend and physician, but your father is gone. Now God has sent you to us. You have education and skill, and already you have fine experience. You are the physician of Holden’s Crossing, and you should head its hospital.”
She smiled. “As for your lack of old age, we believe that you are the oldest young man we ever have met. It will be a small hospital, of only twenty-five beds, and we shall all grow with it.
“I should like to presume to give you some advice. Do not be reluctant to value yourself highly, for others do so. Nor should you hesitate to aspire to any goal, because God has been lavish in his gifts to you.”
Shaman was embarrassed, but he smiled with the assurance of a doctor who had just been promised a hospital. “It is always my pleasure to believe you, Reverend Mother,” he said.