Lost Nation (11 page)

Two mornings following he awakened early to the smell of tobacco smoke. The night had only begun to slip back, nearby trees mere dim presence, gray shadows. No more than quarter past three. The rain had passed and the weather cleared and so was cool, chill with the dew and mist off the lake this time of day and so he dressed fully and stepped to the door where the hound lay, wide awake and silent, his head tipped up and his hairline raised. Blood knelt and whispered the dog to Stay and opened the door and stepped out, letting the door settle back into the frame but not shut tight.

A pair of Indians sat against the side of the store, hunkered with their knees up before them, their thighs bunched muscles against their ankles. Naked but for loincloths and moosehide moccasins and the straps and pouches of some considerable arsenal. Both had muskets and huge Canadian hunting knives in soft-worn sheaths, and the rest of their accoutrement consisted of supplies for the muskets. One was smoking a short-handled clay pipe and the other sat with a handful of the not-quite-ripe English peas from the garden, slitting the pod with a thumbnail and then running his thumb back up to free the small fruits and tip them into his mouth as a powder off a paper. A pile of empty
peapods lay between his feet. Blood had been watching these peas ripen. He stood before the wild men and said nothing. When the pea-eater was done with his handful he rose and spoke to Blood in a tongue Blood did not know.

Blood asked if they spoke English.

They looked at him.

He tried again, this time in French.

They looked at him, faces immutable.

Then he considered and after a moment of recollection asked twice more, first in Latin and then Greek. Not only for the small pleasure of the recall but more to impress; if he did not know their tongue they also did not know the variety he occupied.

They said nothing more to him. The pipe-smoker rose and leaned forward and staggered a short distance down the road, his free arm stretched taut behind him, a rudder for a ship gone aground. Then he turned abruptly and, full upright, slashed his free hand against his throat. Looked at Blood with nothing quizzical in his gaze, as if knowing Blood held the answer he sought.

Blood nodded. Then held up two fingers and passed them in the air in a small circle. Two days. Then pointed down the road.

The pipe-smoker stepped and came close to Blood and stood looking at him. Blood shook his head. The pipe-smoker waited a long beat and then nodded. He started to turn and his companion caught his arm and delayed him. The pea-eater then looked at Blood and raised his hand in a drinking gesture. Blood did not move, did not change expression. Only looked at the man. Then slowly shook his head. The pipe-smoker turned again and again the pea-eater caught his arm. This time Blood spoke. “Luther.”

The hound nosed the door and stood looking out at them. The savages looked at the beast and back to Blood. This time Blood smiled a moment before he shook his head once more.

The pipe-smoker bobbed his head once at Blood. Then stepped out of the hold of his fellow and turned and went at a slow lope down the road the way Blood had pointed, his pouches and powder flask bouncing in even motion as he went. The pea-eater watched his partner a moment and then followed, not looking at Blood until he was a hundred feet or so down the road when he flashed his face back once over
his shoulder. As if to tell Blood something. Perhaps to warn of possible return.

Blood spoke as if the man were still next to him. “You do it, bastard. But give it another week so what’s left of those peas’ll be ripe.”

Blood’s measurements were good ones. The bundle of new clothes arrived and fit Sally well. In this place of drab linsey-woolsey she was an indigo bunting, a scarlet tanager, a bluebird among the sparrows and wrens of the women residing. If this raiment marked her more clearly to those same women she did not care; she had no friends among them and expected none. If they saw her as some broken vision conjured by the worst of what dwelt in their men she saw herself otherwise—as beyond all men, all time, all places or situations. She understood herself to be free of all that bound those women to this place. Even as she herself was bound in other ways to Blood. They were partners was how she saw it. Even if she was not equal to him in their partnership. What woman was? She could pick and choose whom she took into her bed. She might wear what she wanted, as little or much of it as pleased her. She slept in, ate when she wanted of what there was and took pleasure in the late nights of the store which more and more clearly to Blood was becoming a tavern and not a store at all. His bolts of impetuous cloth lay uncut.

Twice a week early morn, though it meant a short night of sleep, she gardened. She found that she enjoyed the mild work, the stretch and strain of her muscles in the cool damp summer dawns, the dig of her toes in the soft crumbling earth, took pleasure in how tending the plants produced fresh sweet food. Was as amazed as Blood had forewarned with the rich steaming broken-open new potato, a taste that she thought of as the earth itself passed through some invisible hands to render it this sweet white flesh. And most simply loved the quiet time of it where her body and mind folded all to one without her ever having to consider the needs or desires of another. And so learned the grace of simple work. And the attendant grace of solitude. A child of a whorehouse, a simple garden was not some chimera of paradise—it was wholly and directly what it was. A place where things grew and she the mistress of this. A garden of food. Among all the other things it allowed her to understand appetite. She who had only known hunger.

She wore her old shift to garden in. The sun would be up when she finished and she would carry whatever she had picked to the kitchen table and then go out again up through the meadow intervale of swale hay to the curve of the stream to bathe, walking back down drying inside her rough smock, going into her small room to dress then for the day. And come out to drink the sweet milk still warm from the cow and eat lightbread spread with the butter she’d finally learned to churn and be seated there, a sight for the men coming in for their early morning tots of rum. To remind them she was there. As if any had forgotten.

She implored Blood until he finally consented and cut her a small window high up in her room. Before this, she would swelter there on summer afternoons and into the long evenings. The window was cut high and narrow, to blunt any attempt at spying upon her, perhaps also to make impossible her taking any illicit trade. She did not complain. It let in air and some light. Lying under the shudder and spasm of one man or another it gave her a tender slice of sky to gaze toward. Alone at the end of the night she could look out upon the stars. A narrow rectangle of moonlight would track over her bed.

The time had arrived to fortify against all unforeseen possibilities—Blood expected and desired no troubles but it had not been whim that caused him to bring the small cannon north with him. And from the first morning when he scanned the miller’s house and saw the double shutters and gun slits he’d known his impulse had been correct. It was winter he feared, a hard time in this place and when any number of men might grow mad as the season ground on and their own supplies fell short and lucid thought was replaced with more outlandish schemes or notions.

So he buttressed the loft from below with posts of peeled whole trees and then built in the loft a rude carriage for the swivel gun and mounted it there. He cut a narrow three-foot-long section from the roof that allowed the muzzle of the gun to look out upon the yard of the tavern, end to end. He fashioned a tight shutter to fit the gap, the shutter secured by a double length of gut that ran back taut to a rafter above the gun carriage so it could be cut to fall open. He laid beside the gun a supply of charges. He had no cannonballs and wanted none. Among the supplies
was a keg of musket balls and each charge would take a double-handful of them. As badly as he wanted to see how wide a swath one charge would cut in the trampled yard he resisted the urge to testfire. There was no reason to doubt that the damage would be considerable. Beyond that, he counted on the terror such a surprise would provide.

Simon Crane’s body was found high up alongside a brook that fed east into Indian Stream by a new settler making his pitch far up the Stream, found when the man was seeking a wandered cow soon to freshen. A crew of ravens alerted him. He feared a wolf-killed newborn calf. He forgot directly the cow and came down to report and seek help—to have other men see what he saw. Blood did not go with the party and they brought no body out with them, burying Crane there deep in the woods but Blood heard plenty about it.

Crane had been bound hand and foot, his arms tight to his sides, and buried up to his neck in a small beaver bog that was boiling with mosquitoes and deerflies. Very precisely his eyelids had been cut away. Not the sort of wounds that would allow a man to lose consciousness. Not anytime soon at least. The load of stinking furs was nearby. No one mentioned another head and Blood did not ask. Whoever had put Crane in the bog had taken Wilson with them.

The men overflowed the room, milling in the yard. When the long twilight deepened they prevailed upon Blood and built a bonfire in the road. Early on, after the initial party had returned, two men had ridden horseback to find the cabin and seek Wilson, to either inform him or see if he had disappeared. Blood let them go. Among his reasons was his curiosity to learn what the rest of Wilson was up to.

The horsemen were back soon after dark to tell of Wilson decomposed but upright in a chair, lashed in place with old rawhide, the lacings ineffectual sutures against the spillage of his insides from being cleaved from his throat to his scrotum. His head was gone. The men had left him there. It would take more than two men to bury him and other than a cart or sled there was no way to bring him in—already he was falling apart like an overcooked chicken.

Blood was behind the counter, leaned forward with his forearms on the rum-run boards to listen. Sally sat up on the stool nearby, mute, unnoticed
by the men. Emil Chase arrived, his first time inside the tavern although he’d twice delivered orders of sawn timber daytimes. He came to the center of the room and removed his hat and held it before him as either a vessel or to ward off something of the room and said, “What do we have here.” It was not quite a question. He already knew as much as the others.

Cole, one of the riders, said, “Somebody killed them two trappers. Each one different but each one horrible.”

Gandy spoke up. “You got to consider that whoever killed Crane was not certain the same as killed Wilson.”

“Why?” Chase said.

“Well. First off, I knowed them two. They made a strange pair. They was partners and had been some time but you couldn’t say they liked each other. Whenever I seen em they was bickering about one thing or another. Worse than two old women they was. Except, there was a meanness between em. Plus, you got to wonder where Wilson’s head is at.”

Chase said, “It was not on him?”

Cole said, “It wasn’t nowhere that we saw.”

John Burt, another of the summer’s new pitch holders said, “Someone ought to send down to Lancaster for the Coos high sheriff.”

Chase turned to him and said, “You think so.”

“Well it’s a heinous thing.”

Chase said, “I don’t know you.”

Burt introduced himself.

Chase said, “That doesn’t mean anything to me. John Burt. And there’s nothing to stop you from being the one to ride to Lancaster and find Sheriff Hutchinson and he’d be plenty pleased to ride up here and poke around. Maybe poke a little further than even you might like, John Burt. Or if not you then maybe some of your neighbors. For that matter, you want to fetch a New Hampshire sheriff in here then you might as well go on over to Saint-Hereford or whatever-it’s-called there in Canada and talk to the magistrate they got. We be somewhere between Canada and New Hampshire you know. Just where is pretty much left up to each man every day to decide. Some would have it one way, some the other. Some have good strong reasons for their choice. You might think on that too, John Burt.”

Cole said, “We don’t need anybody from outside in this. It’s trouble enough.”

Another man said, “They was just a pair of crusty old sons-a-bitching trappers anyhow, God rest their souls.”

Cole said, “It sure wasn’t Wilson buried Crane in that bog. Wilson has been right where he is some ripe time, I can tell you that.”

Gandy said, “Wilson run with some Indians time to time. True savages from I don’t know where. Mohawks from over to York State I think.”

Emil Chase turned his hat over and looked in it and looked back at Gandy. “You think they killed Wilson?”

Gandy drank off his rum and set the tin cup on the counter and Blood refilled it. Gandy left it sitting. His expertise was rare. He shoved his hands under the waistband of his breeches and said, “They could of. I’d suspect that type capable of anything. But then you got to wonder two things.”

Chase was irritable. He was terse. “What’s that?”

“Well, like I said, you got to consider his head ain’t there. And if they killed Wilson why’d they lead or track poor Simon Crane all the way to hell and gone before they done him. Now, Wilson, that sort of killing, that could’ve been done by any simpleton. But the way Crane was killed, there’s a talent to that.”

Chase said, “So you think Crane killed Wilson and what may or may not have been Indians killed Crane?”

Gandy thought a moment before committing, sensing Chase was near done with him. The circle of men all leaning toward him. He took up his cup and sipped and nodded. “It was Indians all right that killed Crane. And I’m betting it was him that done in Wilson. After all, there was that sled of furs setting not ten feet from where they sank poor Simon into the marshland up to his neck.” Then paused and in the lowered voice of the punchline added, “Right where he could keep an eye on em.”

The new man John Burt spoke up. “So what do we do? Do we go after em?”

Chase turned to look at Burt. Cole said, “Go after em where? Where do you propose we go looking for em?”