Lost Nation (37 page)

She had no doubt of Cooper’s resolve. Possible even that to achieve what he needed he’d turn her loose the first moment he had to. It was Cooper, she decided, she needed to watch.

She felt she’d left Blood but this did not have the clean terrifying feel of the jump.

Cooper came back down the road an hour later. It was all bad and the mystery was sinister. Emil and Peter Chase were gone, arrested by New Hampshire militia and transported to the Lancaster jail. Isaac Cole also. Others whose names he did not know. And men dead. A dozen. Five. Thirty. No one knew. Homes and barns burnt to flinders all over the country. At the mill had been a gaggle of women and children come in from the flung reaches, most without their men but for the wounded, the rest transported, some dead, others just gone, trailing the militia party, hid in the woods, lost, confused, frightened. The mill was not touched but the Chase house was burnt and so was Cole’s house opposite. Even as he stood listening to the women and spare handful of old men and boys, others trickled in to the mill. All on foot. Some few carrying belongings unlikely and tattered, grabbed up at the last moment. Family Bibles. A sack of meal and another of seed corn. An axe with a scorched handle. A linen sack of wool. One woman with a cooking spider
in one hand and an infant cradled in the crook of the other arm. A boy with a musket rifle so long that he held it by the muzzle with the stock dragged on the ground. When one old man with burned-away eyebrows and fire-tattered pantlegs high over bare feet thought to ask Cooper who he was and why he was there, Cooper said he was seeking Van Landt. None knew what had befallen the Dutchman. None seemed concerned, as if Van Landt was a neighbor apart. Which made sense if he was Blood’s choice. The mill was filled with crying children and sobbing women in consolation. Here and there he heard the name of his father. None outright blamed him but there was more murmur than outright question about his disappearance, his arrest into Canada just the day before. A murmur was more dangerous than accusation was how Cooper saw it. A murmur had room to seethe and grow to encompass all misfortune.

He asked once more about Van Landt, so that was what he left behind him, and stepped out from the mill and walked slow as he could down the road to the tavern.

The yard was clear of the dead dog and the door was closed. He went up and it pushed open easily. There was no one in the kitchen and the door to Sally’s room was pulled shut and he heard quiet voices and felt someway a voyeur, even if there was no intent on his part.

He lighted a candle-lantern and carried it into the tavern side and set it on the counter. He went and dropped the bar on the outer door. He checked the rifles and pouches hung fireside in the kitchen, three sets including Blood’s. Then returned to the tavern to sit behind the counter. He poured rum without measuring into a pewter cup and drew his stool close and pulled the candle-lantern up beside it and opened the tally book. He sat leaning over the entries and drank as he read. The handwriting was almost like a voice—he’d seen it before, studied it as a boy. Yet the voice had nothing to say. Items purchased, goods received. Balances due or paid off or monies paid out—a flat voice. He kept reading. One side of the pewter cup was black in shadow, the other glimmered with faint caught light. Time to time he lifted the cup and drank from it.

Outside, it wasn’t even dark yet.

In the warm closed-up room Fletcher declared himself. Sally sat on the edge of the bed, hands twisting then still in her lap as he stood before
her. It was like nothing she had ever heard and it frightened her. As if he had not only come to an understanding of himself but her as well. She wasn’t sure she liked that part. She wasn’t sure she liked any of it. It struck her as a strange time for it. Maybe that was how it was done. She didn’t know. She was pulled, and not all the pulling was from him. It was getting hard to breathe, especially when he finally stopped and stood, his brilliant eyes finally away from her. Because she didn’t know what else to do she stood within the great enfolding of his passion and silence. She stepped and kissed his cheek. When he reached for her she took his elbows. They were face to face. She said, “Fletcher.”

He heard the hesitation. And nodded as if he understood.

Blood was sweating hard by the time he made the height of land at the notch above Halls Stream, hot and sore and hungry, and he could smell the smoke as he climbed that last five hundred yards and came to the eastward view of the land. But he was still not prepared for the extent of it: the columns rising, some pale and others inky turmoils, diffuse at all points before him, rising to join into a mid-level haze that stretched over the expanse of land, midway between the rough surfaced earth and the pitch-blue sky overhead. As if the smoke of the burning would hover over this place to mark it, ghosts of what was burned below. From the spread of it, from the numbers of fires still sending streams upward to thicken the pall he could begin to estimate the amount of destruction.

He sat on a rock to cool, then knelt at the headwater seep of the brook that flowed downhill to drink. He wanted to take his shirt off and rinse it in the water, wring it and wear it again wet but the days shortened this time of year perceptibly each one after the next and he would be traveling some hours dark and cold. With no idea of what he’d discover, he started down the trail.

He’d long since given up on Van Landt and Sally. Some part of him knew they wouldn’t appear once Hutchinson revealed the true nature of the day. Still, walking the long Quebec valley to the ford at Halls Stream he scanned the road ahead for sight of the two coming horseback. For no better reason than bald hope—that and mistrusting everything Hutchinson said. There was the chance the two of them might’ve got off before the militia arrived. That notion eroded as the time passed
that they might have reached him and disintegrated altogether as he viewed the burning country. Perhaps the girl had made it to Van Landt’s early enough in the day and was safe there. Blood doubted Van Landt was the sort to become entangled in any venture that would draw attention to himself. Whoever the militia would be after it was not likely to include the Dutchman.

If the girl was still at the tavern he had little hope for her. If it was still there it would only be because the militia had taken it as a headquarters, or as simple spoils. More likely they would’ve removed what rum they could transport and fired it along with all other buildings burned. If, somehow, they had left it untouched, it would be the end of Blood altogether. Regardless of the condition of his property there remained the deal Hutchinson had brokered with Emil Chase and the others, the deal violated in all ways but by the most narrow rendering.

He stopped. He was halfway down the trail from the notch. What point to continue? He was ruined there. Could he even hope to sift in through the darkness to survey and, if anything remained at all, make off with any of it? What money he could carry would be good, if it wasn’t all with the girl, wherever she might be. Better would be his rifle, if that remained. The dog. And wherever he might go, the weather threatened—he could use his good boots and coat. All unlikely, all trivial.

Better to turn and make his way back to Canada. Or over to Vermont, to Canaan. The storekeepers there had done considerable business with him—they would take a note to fill his needs. And then? Wherever he had to go.

He stood thinking. Already the smokescreen over the valley was turned wine-colored from the angling sun. The day was failing.

A prick of conscience. Prick of something. What of the girl? Supposing she was all right, how would she fare, abandoned by him. Well enough he guessed. If he vanished it might go rough for her but that would pass. And perhaps she had his money with her, wherever that was. The money would help, if she was able to hold onto it and he guessed it would be rough going indeed for her to part with it. He considered briefly the strange boy come hanging around. No, Blood thought. He was the wrong sort for Sally. He might be smitten but he was soft. Too tender to know the use of a whore. Too tender to forgive
her otherwise. But Sally, he thought. Sally would be fine. In the run of things she would survive.

But still he stood. And having considered everything he knew he would go ahead, down this trail and then over the rough land behind Back Lake and make his way quiet as a cutpurse down through the dark and discover what he could and take what was there to be taken. Even if it proved to be nothing more than a long night of woodsrunning and hiding from any seeking him, any lying awaiting him. He knew this was a possibility. But still to take away from the place the knowledge of what remained. To never second-guess himself. The worth of that was unassailable.

Down he went into the twilight land.

Cooper stood guard just within the barn door while Fletcher tried again to milk the cow and was swatted in the face with a shitty tail but brought back a full bucket to the house. There were fresh eggs. Once all were inside the door was barred and the rifles leaned against the table while they ate. Sally boiled a pot of new potatoes from the crane over the fire and they ate those broken open with butter and milk and salt, the fried eggs on top.

Cooper said, “I can’t recall last I had a potato. They’re awful good.”

Sally said, “We had a garden this summer. Food I never had before, most of it.”

This modest statement brought home their circumstances, forgotten briefly by the pleasure of homely food. After a time Fletcher said, “So they lay blame with Blood mostly?”

Cooper said, “I didn’t probe too hard. But his name was spoken. Nobody was neat yet in their thinking. And it’s mostly women and children, a handful of old men. I ain’t sure where all the rest was. I can’t imagine all the hardy men was arrested. At least some still off in the woods or scrapping with the militia boys I’d guess.” He paused and went on. “Sooner or later there’ll be some show up here. Looking for him or what they can scavenge in place of him, I’d think.”

Fletcher stirred the last of the potato and milk broth together and lifted the plate and tipped it into his mouth. Set the plate down and said, “You think he’s still stuck there in Canada?”

Cooper took up the pewter cup he’d brought from the tavern room. He was the only one drinking. He said, “I imagine he’s struck a deal of some kind. He might’ve set waiting for this girl to ride in to rescue him but when that didn’t happen I doubt he dropped his head in his hands and gave up.”

“Sally,” Fletcher said. “Her name’s Sally.”

“I know that.”

“Then call her that. She idn’t this girl.”

Sally said, “Cooper’s right. He wouldn’t just set there.”

Fletcher said, “Maybe he ain’t got no choice.”

Cooper lifted the little pewter cup and studied it. “Father,” he said. “Father always finds a choice, always has. Even when it seemed there was none left to him.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well brother. I wouldn’t faint from surprise he smacked up against the door and commenced pounding and hollering any moment now.”

Fletcher looked at the door.

Cooper drew his belt knife and smoothed the crumbs from the table-top and dug the blade with slow concentration and scribed the letters of his name deep into the wood. A wound, fresh and white. When he was done he leaned to blow off the shavings. Then stood and said, “That’s a start. Even if he never sees it.”

Sally said, “I’m afeared. Afeared of all this.”

Fletcher looked at her, then at his brother. He said, “So what’s next? He idn’t going to show up tonight. Those British hauled him out of here with a corpse. That’s not something he can just talk his way out of. Sally said he doesn’t even have money with him.”

Cooper said, “So tomorrow we start again where we was this morning. We seek out that Dutchman. There wasn’t any news of him today up to the mill. I take that to mean he’s likely all right. We get horses if they can be got. And we go looking.” Then he took up the pewter cup and walked through into the tavern and Sally and Fletcher sat silent, not looking at each other.

When Cooper returned Fletcher said, “Thanks but no. I don’t care for none.”

“You did, you’d get it. I ain’t the host here.”

Fletcher shook his head. “It’d feel strange. Drinking his rum as if it were mine.”

Cooper studied the contents of his cup. Swallowed some of it. Then looked at his brother. He said, “That’s an odd scruple. It might be all you ever get from him.”

Sally said, “We still got his money too. Don’t forget that. We got that sock full and there’s a bundle of paper money I ain’t touched yet.”

Cooper looked at her. He drank a little.

She thought I wish he’d stop pondering me like I was trouble. She said, “I got money of my own, too.”

Cooper nodded. “Honest money.”

She said, “I earned it, if that’s what you mean.”

“I know you did.”

Fletcher said, “Cooper. Leave her be.”

Sally said, “It’s all right. He’s got the right to be mistrustful.”

“Maybe.” Fletcher stood from the bench. “But I trust you. And you can trust me, too.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t say for sure about anything just now.”

Fletcher was quiet a long pause. Then he dipped his head toward her. “Maybe you ain’t thought that through.” Then he said, “Excuse me.” And turned and went into the tavern. Cooper stood looking down at Sally. Then sat across from her. After a moment Fletcher came back with a taper and bent to light it from the one on the table and without looking at either of them went back into the tavern. There came a metallic ring as he dropped something and then quiet and after that the sound of rum filling a cup.

Cooper said, “There. That’s the drink he needs.”

“Tell the truth, I’m thinking I could use the same.”

Cooper pushed his cup across to her. He said, “Why don’t you drink this.” Looking at her as if he knew what his brother had confessed earlier, something of her reaction as well. “Could be, he wants time with his thoughts.”

She nodded. She said, “I’d be happy he was to settle his thoughts a bit right now.” Then quickly added, “Could also be he’s leaving you and me a chance to come to terms.”