Authors: Jeffrey Lent
And everywhere, over everything, as if boiled out of the mud by the sun, the swarms of gnats and blackflies, no-see-ums, clouds in the open bogs like silver glistening screens, lit by the sun, prismatic. Over all open skin and in ears and nostrils and eyes and mouth. As if the land was not enough but the air must join to fight against their traveling. Blood cut a square of cloth from one of the bolts and folded it into a triangle and tied it over his face, just below his eyes. He offered nothing to the girl.
He had purchased her from a gin-sot bawd in Portland in the small hours of a cold early April night, raining there in Maine, the cobbles wet and slick from offal and garbage, rats rampant off the harbor ships, the alleys littered with glass shards that glistened when chance lamplight struck against them. The rain windblown, salt laden, the shifting and supplications rising off the wharf-fettered ships long groans in the night. This Anna far gone with gin hallucination, having lost her night’s earnings to him. Blood sat across from her with his toddy of rum, the cards greasy and blunt edged and he chose his moment well, interrupting her keening over her misfortune and offering the eagles back for the girl over one more hand. Anna gathered the cards and spilled them and shuffled them and spilled them again and dealt them out, Blood taking his time studying his own as if unsure of his game and the woman suddenly animate, swift and avaricious, her eyes pouched and ruined in red glare, watching while Blood drew and studied and drew again, all the while Anna holding her first draw and Blood called and turned out a straight and the girl and coin were his. By the time they’d roused the sleeping girl Anna was sobbing, bereft, breathless and beseeching. The girl was her daughter. The girl, dressed, stood mute before the spectacle of her mother and the silent ruffian man. As if this had someway already happened to her. Anna was pleading.
Blood said, “Have gratitude woman. A girl is naught but trouble for a mother. She’ll fare as well with me as here with you.”
Thinking Anna had already paid twice for the girl, the once unknowingly begetting the child and again now, losing all she had been willing to stake. He led the girl out by the hand and she walked yet silent beside him, taking no leave of her mother. They went through the dead-dawn streets to the stable where his cart was already laden and where by lantern light he cut the tether for the girl and goaded up the oxen from the dirty litter and yoked them and spoke to the big mastiff/wolfhound and together the five of them went out through the port onto the turnpike road inland, away from the coast, toward the small towns and the mountains beyond. Still raining and the drizzle held back the dawn so they were well out into the countryside by the time some indeterminate shadowed light filmed over them and the rain turned to sleet and the caulked shoes of the oxen chipped against the hard road, the pods of urine-stained ice and packed bleak snow mired in frozen mud. So the first day passed and they did not speak. Blood had nothing to say to the girl and she was frightened by her prospects or of him. Perhaps she even was dumb—either way it did not matter to him.
At night they camped in a riverside glen of elms away from the road and fed on cold boiled bacon and ship-biscuit crackers and made their bed under the cart, the cowhide serving as a groundsheet and damp wool blankets over them and the cold bore down upon them and the girl pressed up against him.
“They call me Sally,” she said. He could smell and feel her breath, sour after the long day. “I’ll work to please you.”
He pushed her away from him. “Sleep then,” he commanded.
They traveled through the bleak time when the winter has exhausted itself but still holds the land for near three weeks when they stopped at Conway and he first sold her out to whomever had the coin and was willing to lie with her beneath the cart. Just some feet away in the woods Blood kept a fire going and drank black tea. After the last night of it there, when they were going ahead into the first warm day and the road was softening and Blood’s head was lifted to study the mountains still well west and north of them but inevitable as a fist of god, she spoke up, calling from where she walked barefoot leashed to the back of the cart.
“That last one, he used me hard. Where he hadn’t ought.”
He did not look back although the great beast of a dog paused and cocked its head back at her, one foot arrested up before it turned forward again. After a time Blood said, “Some men will.” Still not looking back.
The next day he took her skirt and bodice from her and wrapped them in her woolen shawl and set them along with her boots down into a crevice of the cart and left her in her linen shift and he did not need to tell her that it was to save them. It was warm enough with the rough walking to keep her well. But in the muck and mire of the road her feet turned softer even as they tried to blister and toughen and were stabbed through with the spikes of dead branches buried in the road and bruised on hidden stones so that by the end of the first day they were swollen and raw, punctured gruesome things. After she washed them clean in a snowmelt rill he knelt and portioned her a dab of axle grease from the pot suspended under the cart, which she worked into her feet. And each evening he allowed this. She did not know if this was kindness or prudence on his part and only wished that he’d allow her to re-dress her feet also before the start of each day but he did not offer and she did not ask. So far, he had not touched her and she knew enough to know this meant that if he should it would not be a manner she would want or welcome and so intended to keep it that way.
Anyway it was just her feet and the mud wouldn’t last forever or the road either. Although she did not allow herself to think about where the end of the road might be. She still bled when she shat. But that would pass and her feet would toughen. The days warmed more although the nights stayed cool. She did not know if they were less cold or if she was getting used to it. They began to climb into the mountains and afternoons she sweated through her shift; then came the blackflies and midges and she ceased her worries over their destination and more than once found herself thinking kindly of Portland until she caught herself, knowing that if nothing else Blood represented prospects as yet unknown, whereas what lay behind her was all too clearly limned. She believed she could endure anything if there was hope for change and she knew that walking with this brooding
quick-paced broadbacked man was the best hope for change that had come her way. If pressed she would not have been able to say what exactly she hoped for. But each step forward was one toward that possible unclear clinging thread. Blackflies after all just blackflies and while she could see how a man might lose his mind attempting to get away from them she knew it was a lesser man than Blood was, or herself for that matter. She had no education but a quick mind and saw already that she had learned something from Blood. She was fifteen years old as best she knew.
They passed through a settlement called Errol, a plankbuilt tavern and store and rough log houses. They did not pause there but Sally watched as a woman in clothing as crude as her own came to a raw-timbered door and studied her with open disdain and she thought Women is the same everywhere if they don’t know better. They crossed over the Androscoggin River by rude ferry and then for some miles had decent road, the corduroy of logs with bark yet on them firm atop the ground and that afternoon made good time toward the cleft of mountains before them. At dusk Blood clubbed a partridge that stood motionless studying the approaching apparition as if for the bird such strangeness could only be curious and not danger. It was the first fresh meat since he’d bought lean tough pork in Conway, although each day the dog would disappear into the woods and return hours later with blood on his muzzle and the sweet reek of raw meat about him, a smell that overwhelmed her, filled her mouth with saliva that she swallowed over and over as if to find succor there. And now this partridge. When the dusk was all gone to dark but for pale green light off within the trees they made camp and Blood threw the bird for her to pluck while he gathered wood, dead branches broken off the lower reaches of spruce and tamarack, and for the first time made a fire of consequence and roasted the bird. As if he’d passed an invisible line in his mind, a point where some sense of safety gained upon him. Not quite ease but something she could not name. Anyway, the fire was pleasure enough without parsing Blood. Whatever it was she knew it was more than the simple river crossing of the noontime.
The ship-biscuit crackers were gone but there was a sack of wormy meal that she mixed with water and patted into flat cakes to roast on stones
turned against the fire. While above the bird dripped and spat grease and blackened on the thick ramrod spit from his rifle. The smell unbearable.
When they finally ate she burned the roof of her mouth on the first hank of breast torn from her half of the bird. Blood had split the carcass evenly and she considered if this was kindness or if he was simply maintaining his investment. For the moment she was happy to be maintained. The corncakes were dry and hard but also hot and she sat on the ground with her legs curled under her to one side and felt for the first time as if, things turned right, she might sometime prosper.
They woke some time of the night to horrific ascending unending screams seemingly rods away in the woods surround. The fire burned down to nothing, a scant mask of color over heaped dead coals. The oxen stamping, trodden beasts chained in place, low moans from them as if they scented their own death. The dog paced the dim rim of light, its hair hackled in a sharp quilled ridge. Blood spoke a low command to the dog, locking it in place even as the girl rolled over and grappled Blood, against and then over him, pressed tight, her hands locked in hard knots that grasped through his linen blouse to clutch the curls of his chest hair and wrapped both her legs in a hard cramp around one of his, it feeling to Blood like her legs encircled his times beyond counting. He was pinned, constrained, snared all ways. Her teeth grazed his neck, terror all through her, a possession absolute, and through her pants of fear her voice choked, begging to be saved.
“It’s a cat, girl.” His hands up pushing against her shoulders’ writhe. “A catamount is all.”
“It’s after us idn’t it? It smells us idn’t that right?”
“It’s not after nothing. They scream like that.”
“No. It’s coming. Screaming to scare us witless is what it’s doing.”
He paused. He’d heard the screams before and always took them to be because the cats could—they could curdle the night and freeze up all living creatures—but he’d never considered it might be for hunting. It was the first rule—the notion of not alerting your prey in any way. But for a moment he reflected on the child logic laid before him. And Sally took that moment to harden her hold of him and his hands were ineffectual
against her and so they grappled and he did not hear the cat cry again. But could suddenly smell himself reflected against the girl and could smell her as well, no fresher than himself but still the deep emission of an other, and could taste also the girl of her, the woman, the bitter salt of her skin and the roasted meat breath and the other, the smell of the ocean sea she was born beside. And then got his free leg up, his knee raised as he pulled his heel up for purchase against the ground and he threw her up and not off him for that was not possible and no longer wanted but over where he followed down on top of her and the breath went out of her as her back struck the earth hard and he raised himself and tore up her shift and unbuttoned his flies and sank back against her and he jerked into her but also into the night, into the very earth itself, and the small sounds that came from her were not her child’s voice but some other voice altogether as she locked around him and he pressed harder against her, harder to try and drive away the sound of that voice, to drive it out of her. And could do that no more than he could drive it from his own brain. As she spoke, her voice stretched and drawn, that one word Oh Oh Oh over and over and it might have been, surely was, No No No and he would never know how she knew, how it came from her but it burst through him and ran heat through his spine and the tendons of his legs and arms and a scree of chill over him and he clenched his eyes shut and finished in her, already again just the girl Sally. Already back exactly where he was. By a cold dead fire on a cold spring night in the deep north woods, the mountains with names he did not know, the place he was aiming for and did not know either; all this again before him. He lifted himself from her and stepped away, pulling up his breeches as he went.
He went out into the dark and stood there. The dog came up and sniffed and marked a tree and Blood went around to the oxen and tugged the ring in each nose to settle them and he saw there was faint light in the east and turned back to see the girl up, scraping open the fire with a stick and then feeding wood onto the flaring coals. Her shift was on the ground where they had joined and when she bent over the fire her small breasts stayed high and tight against the bones of her ribcage shown in the firelight as bars of orange and black. Her hair down loose shrouding her face, the slight swell of her hips where she squatted.
Blood’s groan inaudible to her.
* * *
Midmorning she walked up beside him, a short dangle of the tether displayed from her wrist, the end gnawed and wet. They were climbing into the notch now and the sliced sides of the mountains overshadowed even the thin wedge of sky, far up the slopes bare of trees where sunlight struck off white quartz. The brook alongside the road was overflowing, snowmelt water jammed in the narrow confines of boulder and ledge. The brook was all they could hear, that and the ever-anguishing creak of the cart.
“See,” she said, her wrist held up for inspection. “There idn’t no need to tie me like a beast. I’m not going nowhere you ain’t anyhow.”
He called up the team and the oxen stood blowing, heads dragged earthward. He sighed and took up her hand and studied the strap still around her wrist; then he released her and unrolled the cowhide from the cart and cut a new, longer strip while she stood watching him. He made a loop in one end of the thong and caught up both of her hands and bound them together fast so the leather cut into her skin and tied her again to the rear of the cart. He paused a moment and then took up his knife once more and cut off the remnant of the first strap and pitched it into the shadbush growing between the road and the brook and walked back past the cart and took up the goad leaned against the cart wheel and spoke up the oxen and the mean conveyance lurched and ground forward again.