Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  “So I should keep it all secret?”

  “There aint nobody who can manage this property better than you.” I wasnt just sayin them words. I knew them to be true. “Your father aint gonna leave this place to Jeremias.”

  “No, he may not. But Im not getting it either. You are. You will have it because even though you come from nowhere and my blood is in this soil, you mean more than I do to the people who decide what I can have and who I can be. My father took an oath, swore not to turn his back on this island, and yet it is this allegiance that makes him prey. And I have to look at him now, weakened, and pretend like I dont know that trying to hold on to this place has eaten him half to death. Pretend like it is bearable after what he has been through to just put it in your name, like this doesnt feel like its own kind of death.”

  “If Im here, aint nobody gonna make you leave,” I said.

  Then there was the glance and that strange charge. She looked soft. Her farhead and lips, her shoulders and course, them dark eyes. I could hear the rain purrin on the roof when she set herself against me, like she wanted a hug. I smelled lavender on her neck and inhaled it, wonderin if I could somehow keep it, when suddenly Rosa reared back. I thought I done somethin wrong til she fell into me again, pressed her lips, soft like flour, onto mine, and I thought she wasnt herself, couldnt be herself since I aint feel like myself neither. It was the first time I ever kissed a woman. First time bein kissed by a woman. Felt like a fire was growin inside me. Like it was gonna burst through and roast my toes and fingers and hairs. I been there for almost two years tryin every day to figure out what it was about her that always made me hope she was gonna notice me. What it was about me that needed that from her.

  I nudged Rosa away and she wiped her lips hard like they was stained and I left that barn. I had to tell Demas that I found her.

  XII

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  1

  1830

  Margaret had come for a tooth key. She hoped to find the one she said Rampley possessed, but when she and Ma were unable to find it, Ma, instead, offered them the last of the overcooked whitefish.

  When they were gone, Ma hummed in the front room the way one does when one does not wish to think. Victor, on the bed with the diary set upon his chest, heard Ma arranging and rearranging things as if the post were a refined Victorian home and she were expecting a cadre of gentlewomen. The tune she hummed Victor did not know, and he found himself all the more upset that Ma knew a tune she hadn’t taught him. It was unreasonable, yes, but what then was reasonable on a day such as that?

  “You lived here with him?”

  Ma was at the threshold, watching Victor with sad eyes.

  “He is my father, isn’t he?”

  She stood motionless.

  “You took me away?”

  Motionless, save for the flush across her face.

  “He is dead now?”

  Victor had overheard Gerard and Margaret telling Ma that there was nothing left to believe about Creadon Rampley’s prolonged absence. Victor did not know what to feel for Ma, did not know what to feel for himself.

  “You’re asking answers,” Ma said.

  “Then tell me the rest. Please.”

  Ma removed her moccasins and her robe, and shook out her hair. She took Creadon Rampley’s diary from Victor’s chest and sat in the chair with it. “Only he can tell his story and only I can tell mine. Yours isn’t written yet.”

  “Mine isn’t written because I did not know the truth,” Victor said. “I’ve been looking into another man’s face trying to understand why I didn’t see myself in it. It was all untruths.”

  “You are not an untruth.”

  “No? I am a Negro boy living among Apsáalooke. I have people I didn’t know until reading that book.” Victor took the diary from Ma, feeling as if she did not deserve to have it. “My father isn’t my father. My mother—”

  “Watch me good.” Ma pointed her finger. “Stop.”

  “You just can’t say you were wrong, can you?”

  That night, after Ma had fallen asleep, Victor threw open the window and looked upon her by the dim light of the moon. He wished to be angry with her, but there was so much worry in her puckered brow, in her breaths that were deep and loud, that he found himself aching on her behalf. He had unmasked his mother. And for that he felt regretful though he did not think he ought to feel this way. As he lay watching Ma sleep upright in a chair positioned to overlook him, he came to believe that perhaps mothers should not be unmasked by their children.

  The next morning, Ma woke with a start, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “We have to go on a hunt.”

  They had been sustaining themselves on fish, small rabbits, deer, but Victor understood her that morning to mean buffalo. “We are staying through winter?” he said.

  They’d been at Kullyspell since mid-June and it was now nearing October. Their days had been long but the months short. They had hunted and gathered, sealed the small boat Creadon had set in the storehouse, built Ma’s tub, and for much of that time worked earnestly to heal Victor. They had made arrowheads, chopped wood, produced oils from fat and foraged honey for both medicine and Ma’s insatiable sweet tooth. And when Ma needed herbs and roots, they’d sometimes searched for days for just the right ones. There had been nothing taken for granted, save that the sun would rise and the moon would take its place in the sky. It had been, for both Victor and Ma, a respite from worrying about an inevitable raid, yet in many ways it had been more difficult than being at camp, for they had only themselves, and every good day depended on both being healthy and firm and willing.

  “The chiefs have instructed me not to return to camp. Not now,” Ma said.

  “In a dream?”

  “Yes. I dream like my Mamá.” Ma washed her face in the bowl then removed her pouch from the sack on the floor. In her damp palm, she held a clump of white flowers and leaves shaped like parsley. Bear root.

  “Let us offer our prayers to God, the First Maker, before we set out.”

  The sky spoke through a smoke screen of wispy grey clouds. The chill in the air mentioned the coming of winter, for the hairs on Victor’s bare legs felt deadened. It was an unusually windy morning when they came upon a herd grazing in a valley of short tan grasses. Ma checked the direction of the breeze, for though buffalo did not see well, their noses were keen, and thinking they’d caught wind of their approach, Ma hurried them farther north, where there seemed more still in the air. They watched the herd from afar, the buffalos’ heads bowed, their great tufts of fur halos of maroon.

  Ma turned to face Victor, and she must have seen something in his expression that gave it all away. Victor had been on buffalo hunts. Many. But when all the other boys had taken up their arrows, Father hadn’t permitted Victor to do so. Father had told him that only when he behaved like a warrior would Father allow him to hunt like a warrior. Victor had never told Ma this.

  Now Victor’s throat burned and his temples warmed. He was more fearful of failure than death, for he had tasted the bitterness of failure.

  Ma directed Martinique into the valley and steadied her as they drove toward the bull of Victor’s choosing, a bull that had not yet noticed them moving toward it. Victor peered into the sky and saw a rough-legged hawk with a white breast, gliding fancifully from lanose clouds. He heard Ma’s breaths slow, and thus he readied his lance.

  Ma circled the bull, while the bull’s valley mates retreated, leaving it to fend off Ma and Victor alone. The ground shook and the bull raised its head, and Victor saw its dark eyes narrowing into slender twigs. Its tail stiffened and Ma released her breath. Victor’s refused to be let. He tightened his shins around Martinique’s flank and watched the bull’s head dip, poised for a charge. The dry in Victor’s throat gave way to a dusty tickle, and he prayed for both his cough and his heart to still.

  “Victor! Now!” Ma called.

  They turned a sharp left, causing the bull to slip and redire
ct itself. Victor pressed into Ma, both hands gripping his lance. It was the correct angle. The correct moment. He plunged it into the bull’s side, penetrating through its thick pad of hair and into its flesh, and there was a great deep grunt. With the top half of the lance poised upright and rigid, Victor reached into his quiver. He would finish off the bull with an arrow between its eyes.

  “Good,” Ma said, exhaling as the bull stumbled forward.

  But then the bull rose again.

  Ma pulled back. The bull grunted and charged, its eyes widening now. Victor set the arrow into his bow, but it fell to the ground in a plumy flutter. It had been his one and only. He couldn’t tell Ma that he had wished to be like the great hunters who required only one blow to fell a bull, that he had brought only one arrow and one lance to prove to himself and to Ma that he could do the same as Father. Ma ran them from the bull, then turned quickly again and came up behind it. Victor felt her tensing, waiting for him to finish.

  “Closer. Please closer,” he said.

  They were too close now. The heat from the bull was loud and vulgar. Victor tightened his shins around Martinique once more and Ma felt slack in the seat before him. Martinique inched past the bull, and Victor reached for the lance still in the bull’s flank. Ma steadied him with one of her hands upon his knee and steered them around the bull with the other. Victor, with all his weight and might and hope, forced the lance down and in and under and deep. The bull groaned. Its front right knee buckled. Its head smashed into the still-dewy grasses, flattening the fur across its great brow.

  When they dismounted, Ma issued another quiet prayer toward the sky. They stood at some distance and watched the bull. His runty legs fluttered, his burnished blood seeped into the glebe around him, as Ma’s and Victor’s flickering shadows pressed into him.

  “I am sorry about Like-Wind,” Ma said. “I have asked God for forgiveness, but I must seek it also from you. I brought you pain. And I have brought Like-Wind’s mother and father great pain.”

  Ma removed her knives from the sack while Victor knelt beside her, not knowing if he had the right words. The wind streaked again, and the bull’s top fur blew like reeds in a marsh, its underside, bloody and fleshy, made Victor think of the man Creadon and his father had put to death, made Victor remember Like-Wind’s ruined body. Oh, how he wished to see Like-Wind as himself again, how he wished to elbow Like-Wind’s ribs in laughter, to find again that oval head and see Like-Wind pull at the sheets of his hair.

  Ma cut away the skin along the inside of the bull’s legs and using two knives, followed the lead of the spine to split the bull in half and tear across to the rib. She handed Victor the bull’s liver, warm, laced with thin ribbons of yellow fat, and Victor dug the toe of his moccasin into the grass before asking Ma to set his aside for later.

  That night, Victor saw a woman in his dream. He would not be able to describe her, would not remember if she’d spoken; he would remember only that she’d tied a horsehair rope about her waist and directed him with a hand as large as any god’s to pull the other end. He remembered, as he walked backward with cautious, deliberate steps, that he could see beneath him land he did not know and feel the wetness on his feet of black waters in which he’d never swum, and he was frightened, for he could not know what dangers lay behind him. Then his mother appeared with the pointed feathers of a prairie hen catching light in her hair, and she stood between him and the woman, while he continued to move away, the distance between all three growing. Ma held the rope with both hands, gripping it as if to keep him from falling, telling him that the first step had been his hardest, urging him to move faster, to an end he still could not see. An end he believed, when he woke at dawn, that he had reached.

  A week or so after the hunt, Ma and Victor had finished the slicing, the salting, the drying of cuts beneath a not-always cooperative sun, and Ma told Victor they were finally going home.

  It had been a fortnight since Victor had read any pages of the diary. In some ways Victor felt it had served its purpose—Ma had told him more than she would have if she’d not been competing with Creadon Rampley’s telling, more than she ever thought she’d remembered.

  “We were passing over one of those little rivers that came from the heart of ‘Hakhwata, what the Yellow-Eyes like to call the ‘Colorado River,’ when we came to rest.” Ma had remembered a story about her journey with Creadon Rampley, and one night as they grilled the bull’s tongue she told him about the path through New Spain into Missouri Territory.

  It had been a trying time through the most dangerous land Ma believed ever existed. She said it was not so much the terror of traveling that had made her feel as if she would give up so much as what she had left behind. The grief, Ma said, had felt like Papá’s grindstone wheel, wearing down her dammed body, scraping and grazing and cutting, a wild rush of agonizing longing every day, every hour, a weight that made her feel she carried them all, for she could smell them on the wind—Papá, Mamá, Eve, Jeremias, François, and oh, the sweet sweaty-haired scent of Pierre. It was too heavy, this grief, this longing, and so Ma said she’d wound it up into a barely containable ball and set it way down into the pit of her belly, and when she and Creadon had come to the banks of that sublime baby river, where she was to have just a small moment of rest and fresh air, to look upon the frenzy of its gliding waters, they saw just behind them, in a cluster of broadleaf trees with their flat-faced leaves and soils littered with seeds, the bodies of five men hanging like woody cones.

  “I ain’t never heard of this happening this far west,” Señor Rampley had said.

  Rosa held her nose but did not wish to close her eyes. She wanted to remember the place she had come to, wanted to remind herself of the kind of terror she’d face in a land where men would let others wither on a rope so that a stranger should pass by and find them there as though that stranger didn’t deserve better; as though that stranger had never had a name, a true place, a Papá or a Mamá, as if being “this far west” was the only impediment there should be to a stranger coming upon such a dreadful thing.

  “What kinda place is this you’ve brought me to?” Rosa had said to Señor Rampley.

  Now, Ma put her knees to her chin, leaning forward in the chair.

  “Have we done what’s needed?” Victor said.

  “I think.”

  “Is it because Creadon Rampley was Apsáalooke that we had to make this journey?”

  “Creadon Rampley was not—could not have been Apsáalooke.”

  “But—”

  “He looked like part tribesman, no denying that, but what tribe I am sure his father didn’t know. I’m sure his father didn’t care to know,” Ma said. “Creadon was writing himself into the world.” Ma kneaded her fingers across her knees. “When Father first introduced me to the tribe, he told the chiefs the truth—that I left Creadon here alone.” She rocked now, as if soothing herself. “He was not a man who deserved to be left alone. He was a fine man, and I believe the chiefs wished for you to know this about him. And now that you do, I expect your vision will come.”

  “Edward Rose knows I am not his son?”

  Both Ma and Victor searched through the naked branches at the back of the post before Ma answered. The lake appeared flat, as if it were waiting for something to move it.

  “Yes,” Ma said.

  “Everyone knew this but me?”

  Ma set her mouth upon her kneecap and with her eyebrows raised, she said, “You knew.”

  As angry as Victor wished to be, he wasn’t sure if he, in fact, was angry. And he wasn’t sure if he hadn’t, indeed, known all along.

  2

  Isle of Trinidad December 1814

  Rosa observed a spindly and uneasy draft horse hitched to a post near the stable when she overheard Papá and Grayson settling the bill.

  “Damn fine work.” Grayson laughed, and Rosa thought it a pleasant laugh, the laugh of a man who could be kind. “You’ll bring it ’round to my cart, then. And I’ll need two hundr
ed more,” Grayson said. “I’ll return for them in a few weeks.”

  “I will not be able to make m-more by then, sir. The ironmonger is not due back to port until after Christ-Christmas.”

  “You can find a way.”

  “I do not have a way, sir.”

  “You’d be surprised how resourceful one can be.”

  “It is quite a busy time, sir. I won’t—won’t be able to see my way to it.”

  “It won’t stay busy very long if you continue to refuse me service. Do—do—do I have to speak to DeGannes about this?” he said, mocking Papá.

  Grayson noticed Rosa’s shadow before she could make herself scarce. Papá, bent at the waist, was reaching for Grayson’s crate, his brow lined as if it had on it a written recitation of all the words he would’ve spoken to Grayson if Papá were not what he was, where he was, if the world hadn’t been as it was. Then Rosa heard Papá mutter words she’d never heard spoken:

  “Chelu nu. Onye nzuzu. Uchu gba gi!” Papá said.

  Grayson did not know any more than Rosa the meaning of such words, and yet they both understood the sentiment. Rosa found herself frightened by what she saw in Papá.

  “Fucking Babylon.” Grayson’s glare, familiarly unpleasant, moved from Papá to Rosa, and Rosa found herself, in her mind’s eye, scanning her own face, questioning its acceptability as she had questioned Papá’s secret language.

  “That,” he said to Papá, nodding at Rosa, “I can have if I wish it.”

  Rosa turned to leave, but not before she noticed Papá looking through her, making it seem as though the man, Grayson, had been speaking of something other than his daughter.

  But each of them knew.

  3

  January 1815

  Señor Rampley leaned against the rail of the verandah, refusing to be looked upon though Rosa tried more than once. She could not stop going over in her mind what she’d done, and yet she didn’t wish to take it back. Rosa thought that maybe she had acted impetuously but knew she hadn’t. There had been something in the act that offered a certain kind of knowing—knowing how it felt to put her lips upon his, knowing that he’d wanted her too—and if Rosa mined her heart long enough she might have discovered that the passion had been there all along, scavenging like baby cockroaches in the dark of the night, their scurrying and harvesting barely discernible until they grew into something she felt beyond her control.