Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  Night fell and the men drank before settlin. But sleep wasnt no friend of mine. Some minutes after the hoot of a great horned owl, I heard footsteps. Enough drink could cause a whole camp to wake lotsa times a night. But them steps was movin in the wrong direction. I froze. I seent grizzlies, mad ones and couldnt-care-less ones, and there wasnt no way to know which was comin. I held my breath. It all got quiet again. I squinted into the dark but couldnt make nothin out. A squirrel or a fox, maybe? Wasnt none a them.

  A hand covered my face. A nother dragged me by the hairs of the fur pelt I was tucked inside of. One or two or maybe three men. Four or five or six heavy hands and one white-tongue puff a air. I caught my breath tween the slits of fingers. They tied my wrists. Tore away at my trousers. Felt like an ice bath. You ever have one of em? I got pleurisy once. Pa had left me at Blood River Post with a man they called Nan who had tits like a chubby girl. Nan was tryna save my life for days. Seemed I was slippin away when he put my four-year-old body into a wood tub a snow. I only member screamin. Felt like a skinnin, burn was so bad. I woke a day or two later to find myself under Pa’s coat. Nan had sent a message that Reardon should come back for his son’s corpse. Pa had tears in his eyes. He brushed my hair and told me for the first time I was loved. You dont forget them moments and you dont forget the feel of your young flesh rippin at the hands of men.

  IV

  Siksikaitsitapi Territory of North America

  1

  1830

  The camp was still smoldering.

  Bodies extended outward in each direction, their charred and waxen faces melted into torsos, and toes and fingers were no more. Children—the littlest ones—were laid atop mothers, knees to their chests, tiny pearls of teeth the only indication of where mouths had once been. Victor wished to leave. The odor was of smoked timber, rotted flesh, but Ma, indifferent to the smell, considered the arrangement of the camp, trying to determine which of the Siksikaitsitapi tribes had perished there.

  “A chief succumbed first.” Ma determined that the cause had been a plague. She pointed to the carcasses of ten horses next to a chief’s death lodge. Their manes, now like burnt grasses, had been clipped. “He must have been a great man to have had so many ponies escort him into the next life,” she said. “The remaining horses—there must have been many—might be in a pasture nearby, hobbled no doubt. They might all die off soon.”

  “I could return home if we had another horse.”

  “It’s been said that this plague can take a man’s mount. Many years ago, after the pox came down from the north, tribespeople swore that when they were dying the animals were dying too. Those who lived through it say it was harder to gather food.”

  The camp had been left in perfect order, as if death had cared to be tidy. Through fluttering ashes, Victor eyed a medicine bundle set atop a pelt-covered rock altar. In its corners sat two red and two black plumes. “Whoever was last here knew enough about horse medicine to believe it could heal them.” Victor told Ma he believed that someone had arranged the bodies and burned them. “Let us go.”

  As they rounded the perimeter, Ma told him the origin of one of the Siksikaitsitapi’s horse medicines. She had heard the story from a Siksikaitsitapi captive, whom many in the clan believed Ma had helped escape from camp. The girl had told Ma that a young man named Wolf Eye once had a fiery horse who liked to mix with another man’s lot. The other man, angered, told Wolf Eye that his horse should be broken and cut. Wolf Eye told the man he would do so when he was ready. The following week, the man roped Wolf Eye’s mare and tied bones to her forelock and about her neck. The man thought he had rid Wolf Eye of his troublesome horse, but that night the mare returned without the bones, again bothering the man’s lot. Embarrassed, the man threw the mare down, roached her mane, cut and tied her tail. The man was certain the horse would never return, but the next morning she was there again, her head painted in red and white clay. Wolf Eye knew nothing of this treatment until the night his horse came in a dream and spoke: “Father, tell that man to leave me. If you help me I shall give you great power that you can use all your life.” Wolf Eye stood vigil every night, and a year later the horse came again in a dream and offered Wolf Eye the secret horse dance and the healing roots that would be the Siksikaitsitapi tribes’ medicine.

  “Only stories make one world seem different from the other,” Ma said. “And then sometimes you tell the same story and it can make one world seem the same as all the others.”

  Dusk was near and the sky had taken on a grey hue so that it looked like an enormous trough of dirty water. Victor and Ma were eighteen days tired, having recently gone down into a golden valley then up around peaks that felt heavy with spirits, a feeling with no other name in Yellow-Eyes’ languages but crazy. It had been difficult travels, but Ma did not wish to stop until they’d journeyed west long enough to forget what they’d seen.

  This would not prove easy.

  “Do you see them?” Ma nodded at something near a clump of withered gumweed on an icy hill. Victor did not know until then that both he and Ma had been tracking the same moccasin prints: three women, two children. “Must be the last of them.” Ma raised her hand, signaling to them that she and Victor wished no trouble, for Apsáalooke and Siksikaitsitapi were often at odds. The women, whose shadowed faces reflected stripes of red and yellow, widened their eyes—eyes that from a distance appeared like dark holes. “Cover your face. It might catch on the wind.”

  “We must help them,” Victor said.

  “They’re already too close.” Ma directed Martinique forward. “If we believe that this sickness had once taken our horses, then perhaps it can take us too.”

  The children began to cry as they stumbled on the descending path. Ma was unsettled, disquieted in the way one becomes when one witnesses another’s pain but cannot assuage it.

  “I wish to die—I wish my children to die—in battle, like warriors, not like this,” Ma whispered.

  “A woman shouldn’t wish to die in battle.”

  “I live in a world with men, Victor, so I fight.” Ma directed his eyes to the women upon the hill. “Look at their paint. Red for war, yellow for hope. Sometimes Breath demands that you war to have her.”

  They rode for several hundred yards before Ma asked Victor to unpack the travois. The children scampered past thickets toward them, their thighs catching on branches, while the women, with knotted hair swinging like bells at their necks, came down the incline on another path, cutting off Martinique at the front. Victor noticed the sharp outline of the women’s rib cages, like horns, their hands and fingers twisted, lips parting without sound.

  “Lord,” Ma uttered, and Victor saw too their bloodied arms and gaunt feet, their skins dripping from their frames. He had thought them women but, in fact, they were girls not much older than himself. Now they pointed to the smaller children and one of them signed to Ma in a hand language Ma did not know.

  “What is she saying?”

  “They wish us to take the boy and girl,” Victor said. “She says they’ll all die if we don’t.”

  The three older girls inched closer, while the flat-faced little boy and the very petite little girl stuffed food from the travois into their tiny mouths and began to cough, to choke with pleasure and relief.

  “We will find them a horse and take them back to camp,” Victor said.

  The girls looked to the younger ones now, and Victor saw the girls’ eyes, prominent, bursting from their split faces, awaiting Ma’s agreement. Ma click-clicked from her back teeth. Martinique trotted forward, forcing the girls to uphold their hands to block her.

  “What are you doing?” Victor said. “You saw the camp. There’s no one left. They are—”

  “Sick. Yes, they are sick,” Ma said. “We cannot take them.”

  “How can we leave them? We can’t know if they have the sickness.”

  “No. We cannot,” Ma said. “If they are not sick, they will survive on what we’ve provided and they will fi
nd people to take them in.”

  “I won’t do this.”

  “Leave them your bow and arrow then. You will ensure they eat through spring.”

  Before leaving camp Victor had fastened his bow to his back. He and Father had made the pair together over many months, with two buffalo horns and a backing of sinew. That was all he had taken of home.

  “You cannot give up what you love?”

  “I would,” Victor said, “but I don’t know where we’re going, what we’ll face.”

  “Yes, the risk is too great for you too, eh?”

  Ma tossed an extra water pouch to the girls, who began to weep. They wiped their faces with the same hands they used to beg Ma to reconsider. Their cries grew wings, becoming long wails as they rushed Martinique, pulling at Ma’s moccasins, the skins of the slippers stretching beneath nails sharp like spears, nails that turned more vicious against Victor’s calves and shins. Ma kicked out her legs, fought them, but Victor thought only of the girl he’d lost in the river.

  Martinique charged with a stuttering step and cleared the girls from the path. Victor heard the girls’ cries filled with venom, then a sudden quieting as they began collecting the food.

  “This isn’t what I’ve been taught to do,” Victor said.

  “It is not. They were suffering and I turned them away.” Ma reached for her pouch and drank. She offered it to Victor, but he did not drink this time. Instead he searched behind them, inside the shadowed folds of trees, until the girls were no longer in view. “I hope those children will turn east. It is safer for them.”

  “But we’re continuing west?” Victor had never known any Apsáalooke but Father to travel so far in the direction of the sun’s sleep.

  “Yes, more beautiful and more dangerous.” Ma slowed Martinique, looking behind them one last time.

  “I heard you say once that Trinidad was also beautiful and dangerous.”

  “Yes, for different reasons, but still I think every land is this way,” Ma said. “Wherever we are, we toil in dirt that we come to think of as beautiful, we defend against hostiles, and we begin again when the earth where we settle does not provide what we need.”

  They rested for the night under a wide-bottomed larch, the needles clusters of pale green, the soil beneath them moist, and they ate fresh rabbit Victor had hunted that tasted of clover and charred chickweed. Ma rummaged through her sack and took out a pipe. She lit it, took four puffs and offered it to Victor. They had never smoked together, and for the first time on their journey he delighted in being there with her.

  The next morning as they rode out from under the larch, Victor searched the morning sky and noticed that nothing was as he expected. Ma, driving Martinique forward, appeared certain, yet something was not right: they were headed northeast.

  “You think we’re being followed?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t wish to pretend my restlessness means nothing.”

  “Lakota?” Victor said. “If we go this way, we’ll surely meet them.”

  “Maybe we will meet Lakota, maybe we will not. What I know is that either way we go we will come upon something or someone,” she said. “This is the kind of land that yields.”

  V

  Isle of Trinidad

  1

  1797

  Jeremias had been gone for a fortnight. Mamá, Eve, and even Rosa had expected Papá to cool, expected that things would settle, that he would collect Jeremias from Tío Byron’s, make arrangements for the baby’s care, and all would return to normal. Instead, Papá appeared to be forging a new way of living, a way of living without Jeremias. He had begun including Rosa more, soliciting her ideas about the crops, the horses, the designs for an addition to the barn, and all of this had made Rosa feel as if she were finally taking her rightful place in the family. If someone had asked, Rosa wouldn’t have said she was happy Jeremias was gone, but she wouldn’t have said she was unhappy either.

  For Mamá, however, Jeremias’s absence was a casualty, a dreadful miscalculation made by God Himself. A God who seemed not to take seriously her threats of spiritual abandonment. Mamá mourned Jeremias like no mourning Rosa had seen for the living, taking to her bed with confounding ailments, speaking often only in utterances and grunts. Yet the time spent in her room had little to do with healing or forbearance. Rather, it was a nasty, diabolical brew in which Mamá steeped her grief and, for good measure, threw in a pinch of resentment and bitterness, that once coalesced, needed only a willing (or unwilling, as the case was) emptor. And Mamá found him at the stable explaining the use of anvils to Rosa.

  “I should have never let you send that boy away!” Mamá’s skin was sallow and pitted. She shuffled now rather than flounced. Her hair was half pinned; wisps of curls masked her left eye as she fastened a too-short housecoat about her neck.

  Papá scanned her from scalp to slippers, expressing without words that it might be best for her to remove herself from his sight.

  “What honorable man sends his own boy from his home?” Mamá went on to suggest that bad things would come for Papá if he did not correct this misdeed. “What’s sweet in the goat’s mouth will be sour in his bamsee,” she warned.

  Mamá had sometimes joked that Papá’s stubby ears made him hard of hearing. Now Rosa wondered if there was not some truth in this, for during Mamá’s oration, Papá, despite the steady commotion only inches from his face, had turned to Rosa as though he might continue explaining the hardy hole, the step, the face of that anvil.

  “If you don’t collect him, Demas, I’ll go and get him myself!”

  Papá said nothing until Mamá, in a final act of desperation, threw her heavily steeped brew at his face. “At least I know he’ll grow to be a proper man under my brother’s care.” She looked to Rosa now, her eyebrows raised, as if expecting Rosa to add something in solidarity, but Mamá’s efforts to induce Jeremias’s return felt to Rosa as though they were meant as much to hurt Rosa as they were to soothe Mamá. Rosa couldn’t be sure what Jeremias’s return would mean for her, so she offered Mamá nothing by way of support.

  “Oh, Byron is such a proper man?” Papá said. “This is how you fool yourself, eh? Believing I’m the bad one?” As if to keep his hands under control, Papá petted the horn of the anvil, his calcined fingers gliding along the smooth surface, as though proud of their work. He had fashioned three of the same anvils, one for home, the other two for him and Jeremias to use at the shop. Only hours earlier, he had told Rosa that Jeremias no longer wished to work alongside him, and so the third anvil would be hers to practice upon. “Well, go then, Myra, if you ent want the shelter I provide. Let’s see if you remember how Byron let his wife beat you, how they treated you like one of them slaves allyuh had penned up in that yard in Martinique.”

  Mamá took to her bed again. Papá tried to ignore her groans, hoping they were mere pretense, but worry eventually gripped him and he called for the closest man the island had to a doctor.

  The short man with a mustache arrived in a tatty suit of black and white stripes and spoke with a lisp that made his top lip tremble when he issued an s. He said Mamá would return to normal in a matter of days. That what Mamá suffered was called “hytherics,” brought on by an unfavorable temperament. Papá thought the diagnosis nonsense, said if this were the cause, Mamá should have long ago died from this “hytherics” thing.

  “She doesn’t sicken like this,” Eve said to Rosa after the tatty-suit man’s departure. Eve had expressed more worry than usual, for she had been the one tending to Mamá: changing her sodden sheets, watching her knees swell into breadfruits, her fingers fatten like red bananas. Eve had only just finished feeding Mamá on a chilly Sunday afternoon when, returning to the front room, she said to Rosa, “Why don’t you tell him? He listens to you. Convince Papá that Jeremias should be brought back home. Mamá will rally if he returns.”

  Rosa ripped a corner of bread, still warm beneath cheesecloth. It tasted like bark. Like the color white. Eve’s coconut
bread didn’t even smell like coconut. Rosa missed Mamá’s cooking. “Jeremias should’ve listened to Papá. He should’ve been more loyal.”

  “You’re lecturing on loyalty? You remember it was you who turned Papá against him.” Eve slid the loaf away from Rosa as if it were a prize, setting it on the windowsill as she searched for Papá, due any moment for lunch. “You’re such a chile.”

  Rosa did not respond but felt if she could, she might’ve told Eve that she did not feel like a child when she had undertaken all of Jeremias’s tasks with no complaints, wondering every day, when she was tired and cramping, if maybe childhood was only for compliant girls with practiced smiles. But Rosa knew she would never win that debate against Eve, so instead Rosa peeked through the window and when she spotted Papá moving swiftly toward the house, his braces dangling at his hips, his arms at a full swing, a light whistle in the cloud of air before him, she thought if her childhood had had a face, it would be the loving face of her Papá.

  2

  Papá lifted Rosa to the lowest limb and remained watchful until she climbed inside the wooden lookout that he and Jeremias had built some years earlier. In an hour, at dawn, the tree limbs overhead would create striations of sunlight and the damp floor of the forest would begin to coarsen. But for now it was dark and cool, Rosa’s moonlit shadow making a long, ghostly figure on the muddied ground beneath them. Rosa settled into the hunting stand that reminded her of an enormous picnic basket. A bed of soft grasses dulled the creaking made by her adjusting body. She touched the horizontal slats that rose above her and peeked through the gaps large enough for a musket’s perch and an arrow’s sling. Papá sat across from her as she imagined he’d done with Jeremias. It had been a month since they’d seen Jeremias, and Papá had not spoken of him. Now, Rosa watched as Papá unpacked the supplies they would need for the day: water, sacks, a woolen blanket. With no rutting season in the tropics, Papá had scouted the area, the day prior, and found deer rubs, their droppings near the stream that Rosa could hear gurgling from their perch. “They’re the hardest deer in the world to hunt,” he said. “Brace yourself for a long day.”