Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  “You were lost here, Rosa.”

  Papá almost made her feel useless. But Rosa told herself that she’d had a purpose. And even if she hadn’t, Trinidad was still her home. “I won’t go,” Rosa said again.

  Rosa wished to tell Papá that she understood all that had happened to make things as they were. That the English had come and disrupted their lives, with their perfect mismanagement and indecision and inconsistency, with their slow unraveling terror, with their chaos that prevented sure footing, and caused Papá never to be certain of what would be his. And so the Rendóns had become stuck. Eighteen years in a state of arrest. But Rosa was certain the English would soon leave. She felt deep inside that their experiment on the island would prove a failure, that the Rendóns need only be patient.

  “I don’t want you here,” Papá said.

  “Grayson won’t hurt me. I won’t let him this time.” It was imperfect, this reasoning. But it was all Rosa had.

  “It is not for that.” Papá closed his eyes as if again in prayer. “This has all c-come at the right time.” Papá’s nose flared now, and he dug the tip of his boot into the dirt, looking down and away from Rosa. “After Eve’s wedding, I was plannin’ on tellin’ you. I wanted to wait ’til Eve was settled b-before makin’ you go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Go from my house and off my hands.” Papá drew Xs in the dirt next to Fat-Gyal-Hen. Xs that might have been tilted crucifixes, but Rosa could not be certain. “You t’ink I wouldn’t find out? Señor C-Cordoza come straight here, tellin’ me what you and Jeremias tried to do,” he said. “You hung your hat higher than you c-could reach.”

  Papá set his sight on Rosa now, letting his eyes drag across and around her face, a face everyone said was so much like his. There was nothing in Papá’s expression that Rosa had seen before. It was as if a wick had blown, and Rosa felt herself on the outside of this man who had been the only one ever to let her inside.

  “I told Jeremias no. No hice nada.” Rosa felt the tears burning her throat.

  “If you did nutting, this was the same as doing somet’ing, Rosa.” Papá dusted his hands onto his trouser legs. “If you ent agree with what Jeremias was doing, why not come to me?”

  Rosa did not believe Jeremias would have gone through with it. This was what she wished to tell Papá, but instead Rosa struck back. “We all have dirty hands, Papá.”

  Papá’s face did not register any surprise, though Rosa had surprised herself. She wanted to take them back—her words. This was her Papá.

  “This is what your brudda tell you? Well, I guess it’s really best we part ways.”

  “Papá, you cannot—”

  “I have one daughter now. She is the one I will have stay here on the island, close to me.”

  Papá scratched out the Xs with the heel of his boot, looking down into the dirt, hoping, it seemed to Rosa, to keep her from seeing his eyes now brimming with tears. Rosa thought he would give her the smile, the one he saved only for her; thought he would tell her that it would be only for a short while—this exile—and as she watched him shake his head as if to fend off something, Rosa did not know what to make of him, make of them, and so Rosa could not have foreseen what Papá said next.

  “You’ve never been worth the tr-trouble you caused me,” Papá said. “Never.”

  XVI

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  1

  Spring 1819

  Rosa woke early to bathe. Her monthly bleeding had been both unexpected and unpredictable since delivering the baby. It was a maddening flow, too often leading with a spidery, irritating bubbling of blood, only then to quickly leak down the insides of her thighs until loosing clots in thick bursts. At home, women caught monthlies with scraps of cloth that they would boil and hang to dry at night, but Rosa and Creadon had no cloth. During those months on the ship, Rosa had had to wash herself with salt water, saving fresh water for drinking, and by mid-journey, she had collected floriated clumps of an itchy, milky-colored discharge in her privates, relieved only after the one other woman on the boat had shared her stash of a most bitter red berry juice.

  Their first winter had been merciless. Creadon had taught Rosa how to make warm clothing and bedding from skins, and Rosa learned in the most distressing manner that hot water was not a summons for frozen fingers. Food had been so scarce that Rosa thought her head might never stop its spin, and an itchy rash had overtaken the folds of skin on her arms like tangled ivy. By midwinter, Creadon had grown so ill that Rosa feared he wouldn’t recover, and though he could barely speak, she made him map out a plan for her survival. When he began to recover, the roof of their small cabin, or “post,” as Creadon called it, buckled under the weight of a great white curse from the skies, burying their tools, forcing them to dig and pray for sun.

  That whole first year, Rosa longed, hungrily, for her island. For the warmth of a monogamous, unwavering sun, the displays of fruit it produced, the waters bristling with fish atop easy currents. But now, in that place Creadon called Kullyspell, the longing had receded a bit, especially when the sun began to re-warm the world. “Spring,” Creadon had called it, as if it were a wildling ready to pounce; fish drew closer to the surface, trees took on new skins like mistresses, and leaf buds, like millions of eyes, seemed to wonder if it was safe to enter.

  It was just before dawn when Rosa found herself awake before Creadon. She had fed the baby and set the boy down nose to nose with Creadon on the bed they had built together. She hurried to the lake hoping to make it before the child awakened, before the night blood insisted on its great exodus.

  Rosa dipped to beneath her chin. The lake water was frigid, like a rapacious fire singeing her flesh, and she thought then that there could be no way for comfort to find her in that place, for every single thing there existed in the cold shadows of her old life. To Rosa, comfort was Jeremias’s trousers, a well-built stable, a verandah, forged pots. Rosa’s life now was a life undressed. Lonely and stark and shriveled. It was a life that with all its colorlessness had drawn her and Creadon to each other, for in each other they had found memories, the parsing of which made for a certain sort of intimacy—a hunting and gathering sort of intimacy.

  Rosa had thought of Eve the first time Señor Rampley touched her. Eve was a thought intruder, a meddler of bliss, an invidious interloper. When they made love, Rosa thought of how Eve might have liked his lips, might have liked the way the pads of Señor Rampley’s fingers felt like the mild march of a ladybug on the soft skin between her legs. Rosa wondered if Eve would ever feel as she felt, as though she wished to break a man open, climb inside, close up the top.

  Rosa shook off the water from her skin and climbed onto a crag next to the shoreline. The warmth of the sunlight soothed the cramping in her woman parts. She thought of the talks she and Creadon had had since they’d arrived at Lake Pend d’Oreille. He would stay, he told her. And they would build a life together. Rosa had held firm with Creadon on obtaining boat passage for Martinique, and now in Kullyspell their hope was to breed horses and perhaps raise livestock.

  They had made it. Through Comanche and Mexican territories, inside the long range of arrows and metal balls, after two wretched bouts of illness and a mangy wild dog they’d been forced to smother to death, she and Señor Rampley had made it.

  But it was never easy between them. Would never be easy, though she could not know that then. Theirs was a reluctant alliance. Papá had told Rosa that Señor Rampley would get her settled, then get on with his life. That Señor Rampley would find a place free of war, where a woman like Rosa could make of her life what she wished. And after almost a year, across seas and oceans and rivers, he had. He’d brought her to Kullyspell and taught Rosa what she needed, and each day she’d dreaded waking and each night she’d dreaded sleeping, for though she knew she could probably make it alone, she also knew she wanted him there.

  Then one morning, under an ugly dust-colored sky, Creadon Rampley kissed her. Or maybe she’
d kissed him. Again. And the Eve between them became the Victor. And though Rosa should’ve known that this meant he’d stay, still she feared waking and sleeping, not so much any longer because she would miss him if he left, but rather because she was unsure a future was possible without him.

  The baby would soon wake. This is what she was thinking when she saw the men. Two tribesmen and one she could not easily make out. They were rinsing their bare feet in the lake water, splashing like naughty, unwatched children. Rosa moved slowly, rolling off the stone onto her knees, slipping back into her dress. She was scared. She had seen evidence enough in Mexico of the fight over land. The violence on that continent was a far cry from the feeble Spanish in Trinidad throwing up their hands at a minor English aggression. Her stomach tightened and a clot of blood pushed its way to the bottom of her woman part. Her breasts were tingling with milk, like baby chicks pushing out their beaks. Rosa gathered her frock up near her chin, her bottom exposed, for she was determined not to ruin her last dress, and crawled uphill, her head low, wondering if Creadon had awakened and if the baby was crying to be fed. When Rosa felt sufficiently masked by the thicket of woods, she stood, desperate to get back to the post, until a man who had hair puffed like a cloud and a scarred face that looked to have been carved from stone stood on the path before her.

  “Are you a runaway?” The man reached out his hand, speaking the words first in French, then following with English. He had a knife on his belt with a blade half as long as her baby. “You don’t have to be afraid.” His voice was like the call from an old bell chamber, the tone deep and hypnotically melodic.

  Rosa’s heartbeat quickened, for she had no idea how he could have been so far down the shoreline then suddenly standing before her. She wondered if she weren’t dreaming him and quickly searched for the other two men to assess both reality and danger.

  “I left them down aways,” the man said, as if reading her mind. “Do you live here?”

  Rosa shook her head no, then nodded, then shook for no again. She didn’t know what to make of this man with the flinty eyes and soft mouth. She felt the wetness of the milk prickling beneath her dress top and wished to be home. Not with the boy and Creadon, but that faraway home where fright didn’t feel quite the same, for the safest place, still, was home.

  “My name is Edward. Edward Rose.” The man spoke slowly, taking her elbow, for her hands were filled with the hem of her dress. It was an awkward gesture and he grinned slightly as he did so. “And you?”

  Rosa swallowed hard, watching his eyes as they followed the lump in her neck. “Rosa Rendón,” she whispered, rolling her Rs as Mamá had required she do no matter the rules of French or English.

  “Rose and Rosa.” He took care to roll his Rs for both her name and his. “You’re not from here.”

  “No,” she said. “I am from a place in the sea.”

  Edward Rose’s face brightened and his neck upreared as if she were some unbridled creature he now wished to examine. “How do you mean? You’ve been to the sea?”

  “You’ve not?”

  “I want to.” He smiled with his eyes, as if absorbing and delighting in her. Recognizing it as such pleased her. Pleased Rosa in a way she thought she should not have been pleased.

  “Do you live with someone here?” He glanced up at the post as if he knew where it stood, hidden between rickety grand firs.

  “With my … my child and husband,” she said, though she had never before thought about what to call Creadon Rampley.

  Rosa brought Edward Rose and the two tribesmen home with her. Creadon had armed himself, had hidden the baby and the Bible that Demas had given them behind the curtain on the floor of the cupboard, precisely as they had planned.

  It took more than a few moments to talk Creadon down. When finally Rosa was able to make formal introductions, she excused herself and hurried to the back of the post to tear a piece of cloth from the hem of her dress to pad her flow. When she returned she fed the baby, then served the men: corn, berries, cold kokanee salmon. Rosa remembered how much she had once resented serving visitors, but now she delighted in receiving any visitors at all.

  That midmorning, Rosa and Creadon ate under the watchful eye of Edward Rose. Edward Rose told them he was the first Negro to be welcomed into the Apsáalooke tribe. A place of honor, he said. He described himself as the most able guide and interpreter anywhere west of the Mississippi River. Said that rumor had it he’d been with Lewis and Clark for part of their first journey, but that he needn’t claim their expedition to establish his bona fides, for there were stories of him dating back to 1807 in the journals of many men. Edward Rose told stories of being captured as a slave in Arkansaw Territory, then of his escape and adventures in the Canadas and Indiana Territory. With the exception maybe of her father, Edward Rose was like no man Rosa had ever met. He had a dry humor beneath a grim, self-assured exterior. A solidness that seemed unshakable. He seemed capable, hearty, wild as untraversed land.

  “You’re not bashful, are you, Mr. Rose?” she said.

  “There is no place in this land for humility.”

  Creadon shared with him his own story of growing up within a Hudson’s Bay company, of his own father’s knowledge of the Canadas and of Rupert’s Land.

  “And after your father fell, you led your men?” Edward Rose said.

  “Only when I moved to North West Company.”

  “You were with one company your whole life and then you abandoned them?”

  Creadon looked to Rosa. He’d never explained to her any of this. “I needed a fresh start, Mr. Rose.”

  Edward Rose picked at the berries on the plate before him. He set them into his mouth one at a time. He had striking white teeth. Like Papá’s. “I remember a story of a Hudson’s Bay brigade up near the Missinipi. Some were butchered, others gunned down with their own flintlocks, all of them found hanging from ropes after a helluva windstorm. It was said that they were some of Hudson’s Bay’s best men. All the trappers up there swore it was the Cree, but there was nothing about that crime that made me believe it’d been Cree,” he said. “You remember that story?”

  Creadon looked as if deciding whether to tell what he knew of the story, surprising Rosa, who began to take note of the way he knotted his hands. “Was prolly workin’ for Thompson by then,” he said.

  Edward Rose had been watching Rosa but now turned to Creadon and slammed his cup upon the table. “David Thompson? I know of the man. Good mapmaker. The men I guide carry them. He is a careful fellow.”

  Rosa grinned, remembering when Creadon first came to Trinidad and told them of the Thompson man. Creadon had described Thompson as arrogant and careless. Now Creadon only nodded. “This was his post. Kullyspell, he called it.”

  “Yes.” Edward Rose said this as if suddenly remembering. “It has been almost five years since anyone’s been here. I used to come across here quite a bit.” Still speaking to Creadon, he looked to Rosa now. “You came here because your woman says she wished to be alone, do I have that correct?” Edward Rose beamed at Rosa. It was in that very same way that had pleased her before. “She is like the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

  The two tribesmen laughed, and Creadon shifted in his seat, searching Rosa for a reaction.

  “No, I brung her here ’cause I helped build this place,” Creadon said, hoping maybe to dampen a joke that still had embers.

  “I guess you didn’t know better.” Edward Rose shook his head, explaining to his friends in a hand language Rosa had never before seen, something about her and Creadon’s home, for the three men looked up into the ceiling beams, then at the stone fireplace.

  “Didn’t know better? I ain’t done nothin’ wrong,” Creadon said.

  Edward Rose rubbed the burn of Creadon’s mash into his chest. Creadon had been saving that drink for a special occasion. Later, he would regret thinking of Edward Rose’s visit as special. He would be angry with Rosa for bringing those men
into their home with their child. Bringing all that talk and all that chest thumping. He would tell her that Kullyspell was not Demas Rendón’s home. That strange men couldn’t come and go as they pleased in his home.

  “Harm was done here. Harm will continue to be done until men like you stop pushing west,” Edward Rose said.

  “And what ’bout men like you?”

  “If you hadn’t noticed, I am black-skinned, sir. Men who look as I look are brought here by men who look as you look,” Edward Rose said.

  “My mother was Crow.”

  “Perhaps.” Edward Rose seemed skeptical of this claim. “But what do you know of Apsáalooke? Have you lived among them? I have. And I have built forts too. Built Fort Manuel at the mouth of the Bighorns. But I didn’t go away and hide in it.”

  Rosa hadn’t expected them to be at odds. She had invited Edward Rose into their home because she’d found him compelling. “Monsieur Rose, you are an interpreter, isn’t that so?” she said now.

  Edward Rose turned to her, surprised, it seemed, that she’d interjected. She wouldn’t know until much later how Creadon would replay in his mind each successive moment at that table. How he would see this interjection as proof of her lack of faith in him.

  “Yes, I help to maintain peace,” Edward Rose said.

  “You maintain peace between those who’ve been here and those who wish to settle here?” Rosa patted the baby, trying to lull him to sleep, despite the unfamiliar voices and the charge between the men.

  “No, not who wish to settle,” he corrected her, “but with those who would do harm if they are not restrained with rules and order.”

  Rosa knew fearmongering when she saw it. “If you’d come from where I come from, you’d understand treaties to be death warrants, not meant for peace but intended to be broken so war will be necessary. Bait.” Rosa set the baby across her lap, burying the child’s face in her stomach, tapping her foot on the floor to steady him. “But I don’t blame you for not being able to see the role you are playing in the dismal future of your people. A small piece of bread can make a hungry one feel very full.”