Lost Nation (31 page)

“I did what I could to save him. It was self-defense on his part.”

The officer gazed with interest upon Blood, as a man would a stranger’s child caught in mild mischief.

Blood said, “You’re out of your country. Nothing compels me to go with you.” He looked at Chase and Cole. They were intent upon a pair of boys coming up the road from the river dadewater with a pole they dragged between them. The pole sagged, heavy with dead geese. Blood looked back at the officer.

Quigley said, “Dead, you’d be useless for questioning. Otherwise, your physical condition is of little concern to the magistrate.”

Blood did not even bother eyeing the troopers but kept his gaze on the officer. After a moment he said, “There could be considerable havoc short of me dead.”

The officer lifted his eyes to gaze toward some horizon. Mildly he said, “I’ve the men for it.”

Blood drew breath and waited. The officer looked back at him. Blood said, “Resistance would be naught but loss for me but I see little gain in going freely—with no assurance of what waits.”

“What waits you Mister Blood is not my consideration,” Quigley said. His voice had clicked up to just short of command. Blood heard this and felt as much as saw the troopers gather themselves. Quigley said, “I’m charged with bringing the body as well as you. There is family awaiting.”

Blood paused a long moment and then sighed. “I’m not digging him up.”

The officer leaned sideways a little to study Blood. “But, as a Christian man, you’ll be inclined to accompany men of my company to your burying ground and point out the grave. Yes?”

Blood said, “Shit.”

“Sir?”

“It wasn’t me killed him. It wasn’t me strung him up. Left to their druthers, the ones who did would’ve left him hang till he turned black and rotted. So I buried him best I could. A Catholic—he’d never been allowed in the cemetery.”

The officer sat his horse and glanced at Cole and Chase then back to Blood.

“So,” he said. “Where did you bury him?”

“I wanted him gone. I was trying to do the right thing for him, best’s I could.”

“And so?”

Blood felt his shoulders give. “He’s in the garden.”

The officer glanced around the packed bare earth before the tavern as if he might discover a bed of flowers. Then he looked back at Blood. “The garden?”

Blood paused, knowing whatever authority or goodwill might have once been his was as good as gone. “It’s round back of the building,” he said.

When the party of three royal soldiers came around the corner of the tavern their breeches were stained with dirt and they carried Laberge as three men might a short length of log along their sides. The body was wrapped in heavy canvas and belted with hemp rope crisscrossed along its length. They did not look at Blood. They loaded the body onto a blueroan mule that stood throughout as if its life-job was to have dead men strapped over its back. Again without speaking, the three went to the stream and washed their hands and came back up to the party and remounted their horses. Sometime while they were gone on their digging, Chase and Cole had ridden off up the road, at the easy gait of a late summer afternoon, as if their only job in the world might be to catch up to the boys with the geese and get their share. Their observation and departure bothered Blood as much as whatever adventure lay ahead in Canada. Perhaps more.

Blood said, “I’ve this public house here. I’ll lose trade.”

The officer regarded him for the first time since he’d sent the regulars off with the spade. The intervening time he’d sat with one long boot hooked up over the pommel of his saddle while he smoked a pipe, gazing with mild disinterest at the hills around the lake. He’d said nothing when Cole and Chase went.

“If your records are meticulous you may petition His Majesty’s government for what custom you may lose.” He spoke mildly, as if uttering drollery.

Blood said, “It’s not that. I’ve a girl’ll tend things. I’d speak to her though, so she knows where I’m off to.”

“Call her out.”

Blood stepped to the open door and spoke her name. She came onto the threshold and without looking behind him Blood stopped her there. Swiftly he caught the thong around his neck and brought forth the pouch from under his blouse and handed it to her.

His voice low, he said, “You heard?”

She nodded.

“The small key in the pouch is to the strongbox under the counter. Go up this afternoon and find Van Landt. Don’t dicker with him but make him name a price. Don’t let him see any money first. What you got to do is get him to ride over with you to Hereford tomorrow and you bring the rest of the money with you. Make sure he comes with you. Don’t trust nobody, least of all Isaac Cole or them Chases. You got no choice but to leave the house open but move the rum into the storeroom. The other key fits that lock. And leave Luther shut in. Make sure you bring an extra horse so I don’t have to walk home. And listen. I don’t want nobody but Van Landt. There’s nobody can be trusted at all. But he understands money like none of the rest of these do. Is that clear?”

She nodded. Looking from him to the king’s troopers and back.

Blood said, “Sally. I ain’t got time to go over it twice.”

She said, “I can’t ride.”

“You just make sure you and Van Landt are in Hereford tomorrow noon. Not first thing in the morning and not at dusk. You understand me?”

“You trusting me with all that money?”

“I am.”

“You never did pay me that wolf bounty.”

“Jesus,” he said. “This ain’t the time for jests, Sally.”

“I weren’t jesting.” Then she nodded. “But if I break my neck trying to ride a horse to rescue you, you have the decency to put up a good stone for me, you hear?”

“Christ,” he said.

“Sally Blood,” she said. “No fancy words.”

“You ain’t going to break your neck. Or nothing else. At least as long as you’re in Hereford by noontime.”

“You got to promise.”

He looked over his shoulder at the officer who was smoking again. But this time watching the two of them.

Blood lowered his voice. “I promise.”

“You have no horse?”

“I do not.”

“You’ll have to ride pillion on the mule then.”

“It’s some load he’s got already. I’m not sure he’d want me up there.”

The officer smiled. “He’s a mule. The two of you aren’t the worst he’s carried before. The question is, do we tie you on or do you mount yourself?”

Blood on muleback surrounded by the troopers on their black or gray or bay horses—the horses on short reins so they moved in a shifting sideways trot, the essence of controlled dreadful power, the war-horses and their riders groomed spotless, all leather and metal to highest polish so they moved through the day as bright spangling alert precise machines of annihilation- and Blood on the blue mule that marched as if blind to the display about itself, whose only job was to convey whatever cumber was laid upon it and this day it was the wrapped body of a dead man hanging down head and feet on either side and perched behind that burden was the heavy short man who had no choice but to wrap his hands in the shroud-lacings and ride with his knees spread to nudge against the sides of the body before him. Blood riding thinking not so much of what was before him but trying to discern what lay behind.
Chase and Cole lounging horseback the least of it. They were simply witness to what was ordained. So the question was not so much who had informed upon him but to what purpose? Not so he would name names, which was most certainly what the magistrate in Quebec would expect of him. And so, for what? He did not know. The mule’s backbone dug at his scrotum. For the moment there was no divining what design consigned him to this ride. The only probability seemed to be regardless of what he did or said in Hereford, his own words might be used to drive him from the country later. But to the peril of how many other men? Who would risk that? None of them, he was sure of that. Least of all the men who’d strung his riding partner from the rock maple. There was no sense to be seen in it. Yet there had to be, for here Blood rode along. What mind appointed Blood this role? He did not know. So he rode, the mute mule his only guide for the moment. The rest awaited.

He wondered if he could trust Sally. He thought so. He listened to the high far-distant geese.

It was an awful pile of money. Took both hands just to struggle the lockbox off the shelf below the counter and hug it against her chest to heave onto the plank countertop. This after barring the door and lighting a pair of candles in tin holders on the counter. She dug the smaller key from the pouch and opened the box. It was mostly filled with coins and a small sheaf of banknotes and a larger stack of promissory notes. She could tell the difference. The banknotes were in different colors and sizes but they were printed and engraved. The promise notes were handwritten on scraps of various papers. She set those aside first and then the banknotes. Then scooped out by the handful the assortment of specie. All she knew were dollars and their bits. There were more of those than she could count. As well as a jumbled pile of other coins of copper and silver and the mysterious gold, some round and some with many short flat edges to suggest roundness. Stamped with the heads of men or women and some had numbers raised on their surfaces and all had some legend running around their edges or in bold letters straight across the surface and she knew they were mostly foreign but had no knowledge of their worth. The whores in Portland had talked of such monies, debating
the values of such pieces as if value was in constant flux and not of any steady account at all and she wished she’d paid more attention but hadn’t. All she knew was it was an awful pile of money.

She sat a time and moved the coins to stacks, the dollars first and then the others, by color and then by size, then back to color again. The least stack was gold. She’d not seen gold before but there was no mistaking it. It was a curious metal. Almost soft to the touch. When she closed her hand over one of the pieces it seemed to grow warm in her hand. She touched it to her cheek—it was still warm. As if something from her body ran out into the metal and stayed there. Soft to the skin but when she brought her teeth against it the metal was of a peculiar density, fooling her by its warmth and the softness to the touch. Her teeth struck another metal altogether, something hard and unforgiving.

Her first inclination was to take it and run. It was enough so she could go anywhere, do anything she wanted once she got there. But when she tried to picture where that would be all she could come up with was Portland. The only place she knew and the last place she wanted to return to. No money in the world would change her life there. Once she understood this the rest tumbled apart easily enough. Most apparent was that whatever his predicament Blood would one way or another work his way out of it and the very first thing he’d do was hunt her. And however far she might get in however much time she had would not be far enough. She thought I ain’t that stupid, just ignorant. But that’s enough. Whatever else he was, Blood was not ignorant.

She poured herself the smallest of drams. Sat on her stool and drank it in sips. So she couldn’t run. Not yet anyhow. What she wanted was some help. Some advice over how to proceed. Not yet ready to progress immediately to Van Landt. So she took three of the gold pieces and knotted them in a rag and put them in her apron pocket. Took a fourth and tucked it down inside her high shoe. Gathered the rest of the money and put it back in the lockbox. She used the other key and opened the fortress-storeroom and staggered in with the box of money and set it on the first powder keg inside. Considered Blood’s directive to remove the tavern rum to this room and out loud said I guess not and locked the room and hung the pouch of keys around her neck, down between her breasts.

She took down Blood’s rifle and the pouches of powder and balls and checked the charge and went to the door. The dog was beside her. She
put a hand flat on his head and told him to stay. And stepped into the afternoon.

Peter Chase was squatting under the rock maple, the dry sunlight splintering down onto him through the inflamed leaves. He grinned when he saw her.

“Ain’t you open for business?”

“I got other things to do.”

“Didn’t Blood leave you to run things?”

“Blood left me with work to do.”

“You ain’t got a quarter hour for me? Before you go off on your business and leave the house open to all? Seems to me you’d want someone kind to watch things.”

She turned and spoke to Luther. “Anyone comes through this door ain’t me, you rip his throat out, you good dog you.” She pulled the door shut and turned again to Peter Chase.

“You can set there and watch the afternoon or you can walk down the road. It don’t matter to me. But you move toward me once I’ll blow your peckerheaded head off.” She swung the long gun toward him.

He kept his grin. He said, “You’re one riled bitch, idn’t that so?”

Sally brought the rifle to her shoulder and held the barrel without waver upon Chase. She said, “Riled idn’t the half of what I am. Now you get.” And stood there until Chase rose slow and laborious and moved out to the road and she followed him all the way with the steady swing of the barrel. Once on the road he paused and looked back at her.

He said, “Your friends can change all the sudden. Enemies too.”

She let the long gun down to her side, still pointed in an easy way at him. She said, “I got no friends, Peter Chase. Least of all the likes of you.”

She came up along the brook out of the woods into the open ground of the marsh and redwing blackbirds swarmed up out of the tall grasses and cattails, the birds thrusting up and then turning as one so the sun caught against their underbodies and they were silverblue a moment against the sky before they were gone over the woods, their cries hollow splinters of challenge against her intrusion. She walked among the hummocks and pools hot from her trek as disappointment surged to anger that he was not here. He had misled her or worse had left the
country without returning once to see her, already what she thought she’d believed of him twisting over against herself—that she should have expected anyone would see her as anything but what she was, that what grace she believed had extended from him had been some other thing altogether. Sympathy for her was what she thought it must’ve been. Some pity for her that caused him to be kind, a false kindness she now saw. At best he’d felt some curiosity about her and had misunderstood that as attraction until he got close enough to see the taint upon her and then repulsed had covered himself with some peculiar effort of courtesy. Perhaps only for himself, so he might walk away feeling he’d not further despoiled her. And she saw herself thus and was bitter with self-hatred, a loathing so pure it had a taste. She was some rare kind of fool.