Lost Nation (26 page)

He was gambling. For the first time in years the whims or actions of other men might impact directly upon him. But Blood was not ready to quit, would not allow himself to flee. It was not pride but something else. What bothered him most was he could not say what that might be.

Sally came back in. Her face was serious, her mouth twisted, clamped shut. She carried hugged against her chest a three-gallon pottery crock with a woodstave lid. She set it on the table, got the bucket and went out and some few minutes later returned with fresh water which she sat next to the crock. She took up a tin dipper and drank it down and filled it again and drank that too. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and looked at where Blood sat at the table. She dug his list from her skirt pocket and unfolded it and passed it over to him. At the bottom of his list of things was written in a spiked uneven hand
The vinegar is a gift, the crock a loan. Get this girl some stout winter boots and heavy woolen clothing in respectable gray or brown. It’s not right to mark her so with tawdry raiment. Not suitable for her nor the other children & women
.

Blood indicated the crock. “That’s vinegar?”

“To pickle the beets. You do em in a crock. With salt.”

“I knew that.”

“Well I didn’t.” She stood, twisting a strand of hair between her fingers.

“So how was it?”

“It wasn’t nothing like you said.”

Blood thought I’ll walk up there and strangle that woman, she was cruel to this girl. He said, “How so?”

“She was grim when she saw me at the door. Shooed her children off to another room. There was one girl, nine or ten, kept peeking until she told her shut the door. Then she was kind to me. She didn’t invite me to set for tea or nothing like that but she was kind. Tight with words but they all are, these women. Asked me my business and I showed her the list and she read through it and then looked at me and asked if that was all I wanted of her and I asked about the beets. She took me into the kitchen and got the crock and vinegar, all the time talking about how to fix em. And all the while she was doing that I felt like she was trying to say something else to me. But she didn’t. She had me tell it back to her and then she set at a little desk and wrote what’s on the bottom of the list and told me give it to you. And she looked at me a minute before she handed the list back to me. At the door she stopped me. Put a hand on my arm. And told me if there was anything else I needed to know, to come to her anytime.”

Blood studied her. He said, “That don’t sound so terrible.”

“It wasn’t. It was just—”

“Just what?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head. “Peculiar someway. I sure don’t feel like I won anything.”

It was the company of women, Blood thought. Something she had never really known. Not in the everyday-world sense of things. What she knew of women was the underside, a world of women made more by the world of men than of women themselves. And thinking this, he realized the world of women was one he’d never truly known himself, that his marriage ended before he gained sufficient sense to comprehend fully the woman who had been his wife. And thus all others. He knew little of women, beyond the ever-more-vague memories of Betsey and himself before what he thought of as his troubles began—a time when
they were more children than Sally herself. He understood men, he believed, better than most. But of women he knew almost nothing. It was part of what he denied himself, save for those creatures of the underside sought only for the occasional release it seemed no man could live without. And even those times infrequent for they left him foul and rancorous for a week or more afterward. As if he’d indulged himself. This through the long score of years. Until Sally.

He sat looking at her. She stood watching him, waiting for something. He didn’t know what it was. He didn’t want to know. He was angry, some sort of fool. He stood and said, “Do you know what she wrote on the list?”

“No.”

“Do you want to know?”

“I guess.”

“You guess? Don’t guess girl. Be sure of what you want.”

She tilted her chin up a little. “What was it? What she wrote.”

“That you shouldn’t dress like a whore. That it’s bad for the children. That I should wrap you up in brown woolens. How does that sound?”

“That’s what she said?”

Blood went to the fireplace and took his hat from a peg and went to the door and stopped and looked back.

He said, “I’m going to see if I can run down Gandy. Go on, make your beet pickle.”

She said, “She hadn’t ought to’ve said such a thing.”

Blood breathed deep and easy, three times. Then said, “We need some winter clothes though. They say it gets cold enough to crack iron. So, consider what you want.”

And went out. Not liking himself very much and not quite sure why. Beyond the usual multitude. Although it would be interesting to see what sort of winter goods she decided upon.

He would’ve knocked down the man who suggested it, or even the girl herself if she were to voice it but he wasn’t sure anymore what to make of her whoring. Most nights she slept through with him but afternoons and evenings she worked when work came her way. It irked him that this bothered him; it irked him that he allowed her to continue. There was no peace.

Four

As if the weather knew the calendar the last day of August broke with a hard killing frost. Where the sun fell the world spangled, autumn arriving in glacial brilliance, almost suggesting snow over the grass and low shrubbery. Where the sun had not yet struck it was ghostly, a pewter finish over the sagging grass and wilted goldenrod stems. The pods of milkweed were brittle and broke open to release their slight spherical webs of seed onto any straggle of breeze. Smoke streamed white straight up from chimney tops and mist obscured the lake, hanging in sheets of cold vapor that disintegrated slowly from the top down as the sun came over the hills. A third-quarter moon hung against the endless fathoms of a cobalt heaven, the moon a quartzite river stone.

Blood woke early with the chill. Sally was pressed against his front but had dragged the covers over her so his backside was cold. He slid from the bed, gathered his clothing under his arm and went into the kitchen. Luther was sleeping against the door. Blood knelt and blew flames from the raked coals to kindling and then dressed. When he pulled his blouse over his head he heard a low thrum of sound coming from the dog. He looked and saw he was not asleep but was lying with his body pressed against the base of the door, his nose deep and hard against the slim crack where the bottom of the door fit the sill. The hair on his back quilled in a ridge.

When Blood approached the dog rose and circled around to be behind him. Blood took up the ox goad and slid the bar off the door and stepped out into the smoking dawn.

The pea-eating savage squatted against the side of the building. Dressed in leggings and loincloth and a rabbit-fur vest, hide-side out. His hair was oiled and hung straight onto his shoulders. There was the beginning of a new scar running down one cheekbone—a thick crusted scab of wound. Between his chin and mouth there was a broad swipe of bright yellow. An odd place for paint, Blood thought. Then saw the half-dozen broken eggshells littered between the moosehide covered toes and realized it was a simpler paint than he’d guessed. My goddamn breakfast is what he thought.

“We ran right out of peas. But there’s potatoes and other such in the garden,” Blood said. “I guess you don’t care for that rough fare. Maybe you got a delicate stomach.”

The man studied Blood a moment and then spoke a short burst of language that Blood did not know.

Blood said, “I’m not buying that. I’d bet a penny you know plenty more English than you let on. You eat that many raw eggs, you’ll get loose bowels.”

The man stood, a fluid effortless rising. He stepped close to Blood, not in menace but rather as one studying some mystery of an unknown world. A curiosity. He reached and touched Blood’s chin with his fingertips and took his hand away.

“Dead,” he said.

Blood’s bowels jellied. He said, “I guess someday. But it won’t be you brings it about.”

The Indian gazed upon Blood with a face made from the scarred stunted hardblown land itself. He was silent. A long stare. Blood stood under it.

Then the Indian turned and trotted up the rough road running north along Perry Stream. He did not look back this time.

Blood stood watching some time after the man had gone from sight. Stood out in the dull silver stilled morning, his breath visible clouding out from his mouth. Finally he bent and gathered up the eggshells and walked as far as the bridge where Perry Stream ran into the river and closed his fists on the shells and then opened his hands out over the water and let the bits go. Like fragile broken brown skin the shell-pieces drifted down to the cold riled water and were gone.

* * *

Sally was in new winter clothing ordered from a dressmaker in Wells River Vermont through the store in Canaan, the materials all in grays and browns but for one skirt of dark moss green and a heavy shawl of deep cranberry. Blood scanned these wraps with mild amusement for while she had followed the Chase wife’s advice in tone the fit of the clothes was snug and spoke clearly of her form as well as her absence from the bitter chapping work that the other women of the settlement were accustomed to. And the goods were fine, warm enough but not the rough hand-loomed apparel the other women wore. Blood supposed Sally could be set down anywhere and she would thrive. The thought was not altogether cheerful.

She had a basin of warm water set up on the table and was washing out the half-dozen sheaths of lamb intestine that she used with men, her sleeves pushed up to her elbows as she bent over the job, her hands working each sheath inside and out very gently. It was the basin he used to shave with but couldn’t say anything to her about it—what else was she to use? So he said nothing but each time she finished this weekly chore he took the basin to the river and scoured it with sand and brought it back to the house where he filled and emptied it not once but twice with boiling water from the iron kettle that hung from the crane. The thought of the crusts of other men’s sperm in his shaving water tumbled his stomach but he could not forbid her the use of the basin. If he were to regard this part of her work as so unsavory he must see it all that way. Even his scrubbing of the basin betrayed something of himself. Some hairline fault in his frank appraisal of the world.

She pressed each sheath between folds of a piece of soft old dress material, the same dress he’d brought her north in five months ago, before hanging them over the back of the single upright chair which she then positioned far from the fire and out of the sun so the sheaths would dry slowly and not become brittle. Later in the day she would work a dab of the grease from sheep fleece into each one to keep it supple and less likely to tear. He guessed the lanolin made her work more pleasant for her. Perhaps simpler as well.

Swiftly foul of spleen he said, “It’s nice work you do on the table where we sup.”

She said, “I could set on the stoop and wave them at passersby, hang them on a bush to dry if you druther. I’m not ashamed.”

“Watch your sass, girl. I’m in no mood for it.”

“Don’t vex me then. It’s a bad enough job as it is without you pestering me. A week’s worth of men groaning and heaving. In a way, it would be funny, if it weren’t me it was happening to. But at least they don’t fill my belly. What would I be worth to you then, Blood?” And she met his eyes full with her own, boring into him as if she dared to know the answer. As well as silent somewhat hostile reminder of his own refusal to wear them with her.

He turned away from her and took down his long gun from over the mantel timber and his pouches from their peg. He slung the pouches over his shoulder and turned back to her. “I’m going out. A deer or young moose is what I’m after. You keep Luther close about you, in the house or out. I don’t like the feel of the day.”

“What don’t you like about it?”

“I couldn’t say. Just stay close to the house.”

“You’re in a foul mood, Blood.”

“I am,” he agreed. “Keep an eye sharp and stick tight. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

“No,” she said. “My eyes are sharp enough. I don’t rely on you to warn me. As for sticking tight, I’m not going nowhere. Not anytime soon.”

He paused, knowing his face was sour. Then said, “It’s a burden off me. To hear that.” Then turned and left, shutting the door behind him.

She waited half an hour and went into the tavern side and poured a dram of rum and drank it down. Then reached below the counter and took up the short tapered bludgeon of smoothed pig-lead kept there and put it in the apron pocket of her skirt and went back into the house side and spoke to Luther and they went out together into the morning.

It had warmed enough so the frost was gone although passing into any shade was to go into a cavity of chill air. She went down to the road and walked over the bridge and came back up on the far side of Perry Stream where there was only a crude track to follow through the big hemlocks that bordered the stream. But fifteen minutes walking took her to a feeder brook that ran off to the west and following that another fifteen minutes she came into a wide bowl of open marsh.

Here sumacs flared and some rock maples were balls of fire and birches the yellow of butter. Cattails grew in crescents along the shorelines of open pools of slack brown water and hummocks of dry grass lay stitched together throughout the marsh and she made for one of these and sat back to survey the day. She had been here twice before, both times without Blood’s knowing, after hearing of the place in passing one night at the tavern. It was trapped out but there were big trout in the deeper pools. She wasn’t after any of that but just the stillness of the place. It was a different stillness from the quiet of the tavern mornings. This quiet was a thing all of its own. It was here without her and yet it allowed her to enter into it, to become part of it. At least to tolerate her sharing of it.