Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  Edward Rose sucked a berry seed with his big white teeth, and there at the edges of his mouth, Rosa saw a little compressed smile.

  “So you were saying, Monsieur Rose,” she continued, “that you take issue with us claiming this post?”

  “No, I don’t, but others will,” he said, before looking over at the two of them again, as if remembering something more. “Rampley, did you say your name was?”

  “For as long as I knowed.”

  “I think I came across your father once. Good guide. Yes, I remember. Reddish hair, skin showing a bit at the crown?”

  Creadon cocked his head like a wild dog. “In Rupert’s Land?”

  “Couldn’t be.” Edward Rose seemed earnest in his effort to remember. “I’ve never been that far north. He must’ve traveled south.”

  “No, I don’t member ever comin south. No need to do it. We had plenty.” Creadon sat still as iced snow, waiting to hear more. “About what year?”

  “Not much more than …” Edward Rose looked then to Rosa. She must have appeared terrified of what he’d say next. “I’m sure I’m mistaken. Too many Englishmen on this land now. Easy to confuse them,” he said. “So tell me, is the sea quite nice?”

  “The most beautiful thing any man has ever seent,” Creadon said, his tone surly still.

  “Then why would one leave?”

  Rosa gathered the baby, hoping the boy would be able to nap in the room beyond. From there, she heard Creadon deflect Edward Rose’s question by asking the men to teach him how to pronounce Crow words: kaheé for “hello” and ahó for “thank you.” Then Creadon must have risen to remove from the mantel a deck of cards they’d brought with them from Mexico, for Rosa heard him next explaining the rules of poker.

  After some time, the four men began to laugh, and it was well into the afternoon when Rosa began to find it painful to be in the comforting presence of others who would soon leave.

  In the early evening, the baby began to whine. Rosa gave him to Creadon, who took him out beneath a setting sun. The men gathered their belongings.

  “Can’t say I’ve seen that before,” Edward Rose remarked.

  “It is what they both wish.” Rosa did not feel she should have to explain why it was all right to give her baby over to his father. She was sour now and knew it was because she wished for Edward Rose to stay. She walked alongside him, down the plank Creadon had built for easy access to the door. The other two Apsáalooke unhitched their now rested horses, and she heard the baby on the backside of the post, purring in Creadon’s arms.

  “Maybe one day you will tell me why you’re here.” Edward Rose handed his lead to one of his mates, pulling Rosa away from the horse, as if she might be hurt by it. “You miss your home. I see it everywhere on you. In the way your shoulders bend, in the way you search for things with your eyes. Do you ever say it? That you miss home?”

  “Yes.” She thought it all so very peculiar—this man, this sort of talk with this man. But the peculiarity did not inhibit her as much as she would’ve expected. “Where a horse is tied is where it must graze. My child is of here. Anyplace he can lay his head, I will learn to love.”

  “Your boy will need others. He will need men, other mothers; he will need to know women, a woman. That man will never be able to give your son those things. Look around.”

  Rosa searched the land past where they stood. It seemed there that clouds didn’t move away with the winds so much as stay to dip and rise. There were pines and dry brush she couldn’t yet name, soil she didn’t yet understand.

  “He will not be able to protect your son or you. He has a good heart, but that is all.” Edward Rose glanced up to see if Creadon might be coming back around. He seemed to wish for Creadon to watch him as he placed Rosa’s wrist into his hand; he seemed to wish for Creadon to see Rosa open a slit of herself and allow Edward Rose’s words to wedge themselves into that small, vulnerable place that’d been open since leaving home. “Your nose flares when you worry. It’s beautiful. So much is in your face.” He drew his pointer finger along her wrist. “I will return soon and then you will come with me, yes? I will take care of you, protect your boy, raise him as mine.”

  His words were so terribly absurd that Rosa smiled, for it was all she could do. Yet there was no humor in Edward Rose’s eyes, nothing that betrayed the sincerity of his petition.

  “Your husband ran away from these parts once before. He said it himself. He needed a ‘fresh start.’”

  2

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  1830

  Now Victor knew. More than what any boy should have known of his mother. He understood that Ma’s storytelling had been a distraction, that she’d wanted his attention away from that diary. Ma did not yet know that Victor had finished reading it.

  “You didn’t have a musket?” Victor said. “Your Papá taught you how to use one, but you didn’t carry it down to the lake the day you met Father.” Victor was on the floor before the fireplace, seated between her legs on a mat of bulrush they’d stripped and sewn together. Ma parted his hair, rubbed his scalp with oil.

  “I wasn’t accustomed to needing it. I thought of the lake as part of our land,” she said. “I learned better later.”

  Victor turned to study Ma’s face. She was beautiful, more beautiful now that he knew how much it took for the creases of pain to be smoothed from her brow. He was ashamed that he’d ever been ashamed of her. He wished he’d not read to the end of Creadon’s story. Tears pooled in his eyes.

  “I’m fine now,” she whispered. “You can live in grief or you can push grief outside of you. Papá used to say what don’t kill does fatten.”

  Victor faced forward again, finding it too hard to look upon his own mother. “I want to go back to not knowing.”

  Ma laughed, though it was not a funny laugh. “I’ve been telling you this all along. Ignorance is wasted on fools and children.”

  She took up clumps of his hair and hummed another tune he’d never heard. It was again the sort of humming one did to quiet the mind. He had never before noticed this about her.

  “I disliked when my mother sat me down like this between her legs,” she said.

  “I like it.” Victor did not wish to tell her that he had sometimes hated his hair, that it was only when he sat between her legs and felt her fingers love his wiry strands that he remembered to love them too.

  “Aah, you’re a strange child,” Ma said.

  Silence again fell between them until Ma began to tell him the story of meeting Father and deciding to leave Creadon. When she was done, she turned his shoulders so he could again see her face. “Did you think I didn’t know you would find it?” Ma tapped her foot on Creadon Rampley’s diary, and Victor felt a sort of relief.

  “You knew he was dead?”

  “No, but this was all he had to give you. He would leave it here if he thought there was any chance he wouldn’t return.”

  “He wrote that he didn’t think he would survive after you left.”

  “But he did.” Ma said the words with such sharpness that it seemed to Victor that she might have argued the point with herself many times over. “We would not have survived together.”

  “Because he couldn’t protect you?”

  “Because I knew joy before. And it was not fair to raise you without it.” Ma reached for Victor’s hand and held it against his chest. Her breath was heavy and cool. “Edward Rose became my anchor. Creadon Rampley was only a bridge.”

  CREADON RAMPLEY

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  Memberings from July 1819 to about 1820

  “Ignorance is wasted on fools and children.” It was the first thing Rosa said after it happened.

  Some days she would sit and stare at nothin. Wouldnt answer the boy when he cried, wouldnt nurse him, wouldnt cook or eat or talk. Other days she was wild like nettle. Couldnt sleep or sit or clear her head. One time she left on the boat for half a day and come back with fish. So much goddamn f
ish. She sliced them thin and long like reeds, then cooked them piece by piece. At the end of the day when the baby was hungry I took him outside and set him beside her. She aint even look at him. She was so focused on them fish, but he stopped cryin so I walked back inside and fell asleep in a chair. I woke to Rosa standin over me with my skinnin knife pitched deep under the skin of my neck. Her eyes was dead and her face like stone and I whispered to her to think about what she was doin and she twisted that knife and the pain was like a burn and I punched the knife down and away, and when she saw it clatter to the floor she went to grab it and I thought what a helluva thing it was gonna be to die by her hands like that. So I slapped her. And she stopped. And course I was sure it wasnt Rosa behind them dead eyes, but it was. And I knowed then we was too long gone.

  By the time that happened, I had only just finished hatin myself and figured it was better to hate her. At first, I aint wanna be in the same room with her. Then I just started hatin that she was still livin. That I was still livin. That that boy had kept us both livin.

  The mornin it happened, I was makin ready for a hunt. Weather was kind, ground had enough wet for easy trackin. Told Rosa I was gonna be gone only for the mornin. Nothin different than any other day. I always come home fore sundown. Always.

  Cept they come for her while the sun was bright and hot and sober.

  The sky that mornin was the bluest I ever seent. It wasnt regular ole simple blue. Like how you say “blue” and people just think a blue. No. This blue was a Trinidad blue. A layered kinda blue. Stacked like you could peel it away and find more blue behind it, inside it, under it.

  I took the boy out to sit in the grass while I prepped the runty stallion that me and her had come cross a few months earlier. Rosa come out to see me off. “I need a goat,” she said. I reached to kiss her, but she gimme her cheek. Always the cheek. Like she wanted to punish me for pushin her away the first time.

  “Be back soon,” I whispered to the boy, and handed him over to her.

  There wasnt no signs of what was comin. No dark sky, no bad dreams or ugly birds, no hesitation in my bones. I heard Demas talk about signs once, but there was nothin. I swear it. And, believe me, I woulda membered, cause in my mind, I went over and over that mornin, wonderin if I missed it, wonderin if I woulda done somethin different if I caught a whiff of it, wonderin if deep inside there wasnt a power I hadnt tapped that shoulda made me know.

  The post was empty when I got back in the late afternoon. Door was closed, windows open. Rosa always did wash on Saturdays. That was what her Mamá and Eve did. What she would do, she said. So I dont know why panic set in straightaway. I guess cause I knowed the dangers that was out there. Had talked them all through with her. I started searchin. For bear tracks, wolf tracks, man tracks, but I picked up no tracks but mine and hers. Her gun was still mounted. The boy’s favorite sealskin blanket was on the floor.

  “He doesnt need that,” she had said when I asked why she wouldnt let him carry the blanket around.

  “But he likes it.”

  “He likes you and me too, but he must learn to live without us. It is not good to be so attached to anything.”

  Rosa was a different Rosa from the younger woman I first met in Trinidad, but she still had a way of makin sensa my world. A world that only had her and that boy in it.

  “Rosa!” I was angry with her now for makin me so scared. I couldnt hear nothin but my own ragged breaths while I searched for her. In them seconds, thinkin about where she was, I got old. My legs wasnt movin fast enough, my voice wasnt screamin loud enough. “Rosa!”

  I ran down to the lake. I promised her, months earlier, that I was gonna dig a well. Gonna start it tomorrow, I thought. I wouldnt be angry that she was ignorin my calls and that there wasnt no supper. “Imma dig you a well,” I was gonna say. And she would offer me a lil of that fish broth she liked to make and gimme that half grin of hers and we would go bout our night.

  I made my way through the copse, down the incline, along the path me and her marked when we decided to stay at Kullyspell. I took her there cause Demas told me to take his child someplace safe, someplace I loved. From the moment I seent that place alongside Thompson, I loved it. And when she come close to lovin it, I knowed that if me and her could find somethin to love in the same two lands, we was gonna be all right. Funny thing is that I knowed she thought I was gonna leave her. That I was gonna drop her there and take off. But I aint never planned to leave. What she aint know was that every day after I moved into that hayloft, I needed to see her. I aint know what that feelin was but I knowed it to be true. And I knowed I was never gonna choose a life without Rosa in it.

  Now through birches and firs and aspens that I shoulda knowed from memory, none of it looked familiar. It was a foreign land without her.

  “Rosa!”

  The sun was dimmin. I cursed it, cursed all them damn mountains that hid away the sun, everything workin against me. Me, there, without a lantern or candlestick, me who couldnt member what moon was in the sky. I couldnt go back without her.

  “Rosa!”

  She is fine, I told myself. Fine. Then I membered that I thought the same when I got back to camp and couldnt find Pa. He was a real mountain man. Had once chopped through a foot-thick ice block to free himself. Had to reset bones in his arms, legs, hands and had almost bled out twice. And still he wasnt fine. I was charged with his care and there he was hidden away on a mountain sill that looked to be made just for catchin and smashin his drunken body.

  “Rosa!”

  The boy gasped loud enough for me to hear. His voice aint sound right. I found him off in a parched pool of leaves round that tight north bend steps from the shore. He looked up at me, nose wide, legs swolled from scrapes. Mud he ate was caked on his tongue and round his chin and onto his chubby neck. I reached for him. Glass eyes. Like he aint knowed what my hand wanted with his lil body. I lifted him but he wouldnt rest his head til I pressed it into my shoulder. “You tired, aint you? So, so tired.”

  I knowed somethin was really wrong then. That kinda mother dont up and leave her baby in the wild. I wanted to take the boy back to the post but I also needed to track her, needed answers for what was happenin to my life.

  “Rosa?”

  I carried the cryin boy as I walked the shore of that lake, wishin for his words but knowin that even if he could speak, I wouldnt like what he would say. The water was loud. Like it was angry that I couldnt see her layin right there in front of me.

  “Rosa.”

  She was on her stomach. Her dress ripped and bloodied. Her open legs had swirls of blood from the thighs to the backs of her knees. Her backside, her matted hair, her fingers, was covered in a thick dried skim. So much skim that I knowed it come from more than one. I aint wanna touch her. Im ashamed I aint wanna touch her. But it felt like if I touched her, it was gonna all be real.

  But it wasnt no dream.

  She was warm. But everything else spoke of death. And I knowed this cause death language was my first tongue.

  “Rosa, Imma move you now, all right?” I rolled her to me. Her breasts was sliced like them fish she liked to cut up for us to eat. The rock they used to break the skin on her face, to split open her head, to smash her neck, lay beside her, like innocence. But wasnt nothin innocent there. Not that stone, not that God who watched it happen, not that boy, not me, not even Rosa.

  It was that last thought that she read in my eyes in the days after. She told me this later. That I blamed her for bein there. For doin what she did every day. For not stayin at the post. For not fetchin water fore I left. For not fightin harder and for fightin too hard. That I blamed her for lurin me into that life with her. For lettin that man Grayson see her. For being both too much a woman and too lil of one.

  “What man would not hunt them down?” Rosa said this once when the headaches didnt stop and when she couldnt walk straight cause her eyes aint work right. “You want to blame everyone but the men responsible for this.”

  S
he was right. I was afraid to go after em, afraid when I found em and exacted the sorta revenge I done three times already in my life, that it wouldnt work no way. I knowed vengeance and it wasnt no healer. Them memories dont just up and go just cause you make pain for a nother. But you could know this only if you done it. So I hid the passin of time behind her not gettin better, tellin myself that when her headaches stopped, when her eyes seent right again, when her chest closed up, I was gonna set out to find that man, Wallace.

  “He was watching us,” she told me.

  Rosa wanted to say that he come for her cause he knowed I was weak. He told her that she aint had no right to put her hands on his wife and child, pretendin she knowed what she couldnt know, pretendin we was in too much a hurry to help him bury Beverly and his boy. Then she told me that he had watched the men he brung with him take her like …

  like she was a …

  like she aint have no …

  like I wasnt …

  I wished she hadnt told me none of it.

  We stayed there, both of us not knowin whose side to take, bringin up a boy who wouldnt know whose side to take either.

  Now, writin all this down, I wish I coulda made her trust me to take care of her again. I wish I could take back all them careful sentences I spoke that aint never have the right words in em. But I left too much unsaid, too much to undo.

  Course, I could lie and tell you that I aint knowed she was gonna leave. That I aint seent the packhorses when they come a year after his first visit. That I aint recognize them two Crows who rode up with him. But I did. I knowed that Negro would come back for her. What I aint knowed was that I was gonna feel her gone-ness so bad I was sure if I peeled away every piece a my flesh that I wouldnt suffer more pain than I suffered in them years after. What I aint knowed was that I would fight and live through all them days only cause I believed that one day she and my boy was gonna come back to me.