by Aaron Gwyn
A panic started to hum through her breast, but she slapped herself very hard across the cheek.
“Stop it,” she hissed. “You just stop.”
It’s not dry enough. That’s all it is.
She balanced the spindle atop the parcel of cedar shavings and lay down. She didn’t see how she’d sleep with her heart going like this, thinking about Robert, where in the world he might be, the smooth slopes of his baby-fat cheeks and his calm green eyes—his father’s eyes, though not the color, not the same color at all; she could always picture the exact shade of Sam’s eyes so vividly; she might have painted them if she’d known how.
She started awake in the late morning light. Birds were calling to each other. The first thing she did was check the spindle, though she couldn’t tell how damp it was; her hands were wet with sweat. She untied the pouch of cedar shavings, laid the spindle atop them and spread the square of fabric in a patch of sunlight. Maybe the sun would dry it faster.
Not fast enough, a voice inside her said, but it was cut off by a robin’s song, up in a tree not a dozen yards away. She sat there watching the bird in its nest, its orange breast and bright blue cap. It occurred to her that there might be eggs in the nest. She waited several hours for the bird to fly away, and when it did, she sprang to her feet so quickly, specks swam before her eyes.
She shinnied a length of trunk until she could take hold of the lowest limb, then climbed branch to branch until there, like treasure, lay five green-blue eggs in the robin’s nest. She carried them down in the woven bowl and then sat cracking the eggs over her open mouth like a bird herself, dripping the warm yolks onto the cup of her tongue. The last egg contained the body of an unhatched bird and this she swallowed whole, holding the nest in her lap, the taste so rich her eyes watered.
She spent the day shaping the cedarwood spindle, whittling it down with her knife, making it thinner, it needed to be much thinner. She set it in the sun to dry again and began making new notches in her fireboard.
Why didn’t I practice this when he was here to help me? With him standing here to watch.
She hadn’t realized just how skillful Sam was with fire—he could get a coal anywhere, it seemed like; she’d seen him get a coal with drizzle falling and only the branches of an evergreen as cover, rubbing the spindle between his hands, the fireboard seeming to smoke almost instantly. The sickness of his death washed over her again: this man with his God-given genius for the working of things.
She carved the spindle to clear her head. The wood would feel dry and then she’d carve to find there was still moisture in it—what was the word: resin. The resin that made it such fine tinder. The resin that Sam worried about, seeping from the cedar logs of the cabin. She set it back in the sunlight and looked at the cabin down there, smoke trailing from the chimney. She wished she’d been able to hang onto Davy’s rifle, but there was no help for it, and who knew if she’d have been able to hit anything with it anyway?
Another thing Sam might have taught her, if she’d known what was coming for them.
If course, if I’d known that, I’d have kept at him till he couldn’t stand it and saved us from this hell.
She reached over, took the spindle, anchored the fireboard with her heel, and began rubbing the spindle between her palms, picturing Sam as she did, how his hands would start at the top of the shaft and work down. He did it so smoothly, as if there was no effort in it at all.
But when she did it, her palms got so raw. Her forearms burned from the effort. Or her shoulders. Or her back. The spindle-tip wouldn’t stay in place, slipping out of the fireboard. It seemed to be the hardest thing she’d ever tried, and after an hour, her palms split and bled. She didn’t mind the pain of it, but she feared the blood would dampen the wood. The stickiness made the task impossible. She worked all day without making anything but blisters, and when night came, she set the spindle aside and soon she was asleep.
* * *
She was in the cedars for what seemed like weeks, practicing with the spindle and fireboard, ranging deeper into the woods to forage. In addition to chaparral berries, she ate amaranth leaves. She found a clump of cattails down by the stream; she’d heard you could boil these somehow, but she couldn’t boil anything. She cut several dry stalks to use as spindles and crept back to her perch.
The berries and plants were a blessing to her, but even so, she was starving. The best thing about her situation was the creek. She didn’t lack for water. At least there was that.
One morning, she woke from her slumber to a pattering sound, and looking out from her perch, saw the sky was dark with clouds, darker in the west where sheets of rain raked the prairie. Drops of rain touched dry leaves here and there, and she started praying to the same God she often cursed these days, asking Him to steer the storm away from the cabin. If the rain soaked her kindlers, it would cost her several weeks of labor, and those were weeks she didn’t have.
But the storm passed by, angling to the north. She watched it go, the clouds sweeping over the earth, blue sky behind. She knelt there on the ground and pressed her forehead to the dirt, giving thanks, weeping into the dead leaves, and when she raised her eyes she saw that Juan stood in front of the cabin with the bucket in hand. He was staring off to the north as well.
She spread a handful of dry leaves on the ground and placed the fireboard atop them. She took up the cattail spindle, fit the tip of it to the fireboard and began spinning it between her palms. The skin on the insides of her fingers was raw in places, calloused in others, but she set the pain aside and worked, thinking of how Sam had looked when he did this, how natural it had seemed.
All the things you take for granted, she thought. They come back to visit you. They come again and again until what’s left isn’t his beautiful face or his blue eyes burning, but all of what you didn’t stoop down and smother with kisses.
The smell of smoke drew a veil across her mind. Her heart jumped up in her throat. There was the scent of smoke—it was there and then gone—and she wondered if she’d only imagined it. She lifted the spindle and touched the tip of it and it was so hot she jerked her finger away and put it in her mouth. Her heart was humming. She tried to calm herself, fitting the spindle back in place, taking it between her palms.
“Alright, now,” she said.
She was able to get smoke twice more that evening, several times the next day. She’d lie there sleeping, then wake, watch the cabin a few minutes, then set up the spindle and board. How much had Sam practiced this? she wondered. Did his father teach him? Or was he just able to do it like he did everything else, having never been told he couldn’t?
Her first coal came a few days later, sitting there one morning working the spindle between her calloused hands—one of the spindles; she had several now, several fireboards too. The smoke was rising steady and then she looked and saw a speck of orange sitting atop the blackened dust in the fireboard’s notch. It smoldered a few moments, then turned to ash.
She sat there staring. She now knew she’d need to place something under the notch to catch the next coal she got and transfer it to the nest. A dry leaf would likely do. She’d have to have everything just so.
She spent the rest of that day foraging for wild currant berries, balled under the leaves of the little shrubs like drops of bright blood. She ate the leaves of a linden tree and then the buds. Then she stripped the bark and began to eat that too, as Sam had once shown her.
He is feeding me even now, she thought, the sour-sweet juice of the currant berries bursting between her teeth. She closed her eyes and thought of that day he’d brought in meat from the black bear and she missed him so badly.
When evening came, she was sitting there cross-legged with her fireboard and spindle, a currant leaf under the notch like a saucer, the nest of tinder she’d prepared at her knee, and a bundle of twigs and kindlers she’d tied together with a strip of cloth she’d
torn from her dress. She waited till the first stars winked on. Then she set the tip of the spindle in place, positioned her hands and swallowed.
But she didn’t start rubbing her palms. Not just yet. Instead, she prayed.
“Samuel,” she said, “I’m lonely for you something awful.
“I don’t know where Robert’s gotten to. Whatever you have to give me, you best go ahead and give it. If you were still here, you’d do all this yourself, but now it’s only me. If I’m fixing to join you, that’s fine too.”
Then she opened her eyes and began to work, rubbing the spindle between her hands, the scabbed-over blisters on her palms and the insides of her fingers covered in scabs, working down the shaft and when she reached the bottom, working her way back up, thinking the whole time of that first night outside Natchitoches, thinking, My hands are your hands; make my hands yours.
Something occurred to her she’d never considered and she bent down and rested her forehead on the spindle top, pressing it harder into the fireboard. She knew it wouldn’t take long for the stalk of mullein to worry through her skin, but she didn’t care about her skin. She closed her eyes against the pain, rubbing her hands together, the spindle hissing in its notch.
Her forehead had been bleeding several minutes when she smelled it. She opened her eyes and saw the tendrils of smoke rising, just the slightest twists of it, and she pressed harder and bore down, panting now, growling a little, the smoke coming thicker.
Do I pick the spindle up and look?
You do not pick up the spindle.
How will I see a coal if I don’t? I’ll have to pick it up.
She did. A few drops of blood spattered the fireboard and she bent closer and saw an ember, smoking. She put the spindle aside, removed the fireboard, and there was a coal atop a little pile of black dust. She picked up the leaf and tipped the coal into the nest of tinder, then closed the nest together in both hands like a prayer. For a moment she thought it had gone out and her breath escaped her mouth before she could catch it, but then a thin trail of smoke rose from the nest and she recalled Sam lifting his bundle of tinder and blowing into it. She lifted the nest as if it contained her life; maybe by this time it did—maybe my entire world has become this spark in a poor bird’s home—blowing into it, smoke puffing out the other side. She inhaled deeply and blew again and the nest burst into yellow flame.
* * *
Later, she’d wonder what she must have looked like walking downhill toward the cabin that evening, a wasted woman in a worn-out dress with a burning tinder-nest in one hand and her bundles of wood in the other. She thought that if the Spaniard had been watching, he might have easily walked outside and put a pistol ball through her head.
But he wasn’t watching. She steered for one corner of the cabin, setting the little fire she carried against its crook, then squatting and feeding it twigs and branches from her bundle. She still wasn’t sure if the cabin would even catch. By the time she had a good fire going, she knew if she didn’t see to the door, it wouldn’t matter: he’d smell the smoke and come out and that would be that.
She took up the cedar wedges she had carved and fetched around until she found a fist-sized stone. Her heart was kicking at the wall of her chest and her vision narrowed down. When she rounded the corner and approached the door she’d help Samuel hang, the insides of her thighs went wet and urine splashed the tops of her feet. She wasn’t worried about that, just the dribbling sound it made. She didn’t know how loud anything was with the blood pumping in her ears.
Then she was kneeling in front of the door. Everything came in flashes. There was still time for her to bolt. She heard a whippoorwill calling. She heard a crackling noise she realized was her fire. She drew a breath and began pushing the cedar wedges into the gap between the bottom of the door and the packed dirt, starting at one end and working her way down, pressing them with the heel of her hand as tight as she could get them. She sat there a moment. As soon as she started banging them in with the rock, there’d be no turning back.
Is this it? she asked Sam. Is this what I do?
Something told her to check the fire. She rose and walked around and saw it was going good; the logs were starting to blacken where the flames from her fire licked them, and she fed several more branches into it, then got down on her hands and knees and began blowing into it like she’d blown into the nest. Fire went trailing up the side of the cabin and she knew that it was time; this would either work or it wouldn’t; there was no other way.
She walked back to the door, squatted, and began hammering at the wedges, driving them in her rock, and she’d barely gotten to the second one when she heard the Spaniard say, “Quien es?”
Her heart climbed up on the back of her tongue and there was no moisture in her mouth at all. She moved to the next wedge and hammered and then she hammered the one beside it. She was working at the last one when he first tried the door; it didn’t budge. The second time he tried it, it only shivered. She knew that soon he’d commence throwing himself against it. She went back around the corner to pitch the rest of her kindling into the fire, but there was no need: the entire eastern wall of the cabin was engulfed in flames. She stood there in wonderment, watching as the fire leapt toward the cedar shingle roof. She heard Juan lambasting the door with his fists. She began to back away from the cabin, watching the door shudder in its frame as the man hurled himself against it; or kicked it with his boots; or tried to shoulder it open. Her main worry had been that the wedges wouldn’t hold, but it seemed that Juan’s attempts to force the door only set them deeper.
And still she was backing away. Ten yards. Twenty. Even at the distance, she could already feel the heat on her face—the evening was lit up like a second sun. One goes down, another comes up. The roof was now smoking, flames dancing up the shingles, black smoke billowing toward the stars. The fire was roaring loud enough she couldn’t hear Juan beating on the door, and then she realized the door no longer shuddered.
He is burnt up already, she thought.
Which was when she heard the sound of glass breaking and her eyes went to the window where a rifle butt had just burst through. Then it had vanished and was shattering another of the panes, sending bright shards scattering.
The stupidity of her error knocked the wind out of her.
For how many weeks have you sat in your perch staring at the same window you used to stare out yourself, and it never once occurred to you how easy it would be to crack and climb out of? Now you will die. He will come through it and shoot you and you’ll never see Robert in this world.
She might have turned to run, but what was the point? She was so angry with herself she felt like she deserved her punishment. The glass was mostly out of the window, Juan was scraping the bottom of the sill with his rifle butt, smoothing away the sharp edges that jutted like broken teeth. He threw out the rifle, then placed his hands on the window sill to hoist himself over.
They’ve been right about you all along, she thought. You are a little fool.
Then something strange happened. The flames atop the roof leapt higher for a moment, then seemed to suck downward; a rush of smoke came pouring out the window just as Juan was climbing through it, followed by a huff of red fire. One moment, he was a man in filthy homespun and the next he was a screaming torch.
Like blowing on the nest, she thought.
The flames seemed to push Juan out into the yard, his clothes burning and his beard on fire. He struck the ground, rose and sprinted a dozen steps and then pitched onto his belly. He hadn’t stopped wailing; he was gasping and howling all at once.
The smell hit her, like charcoal and copper.
Don’t you turn away, she told herself. Don’t you dare.
Juan struggled to his feet and lurched for her, but she sidestepped him. He looked like something out of the Poem, his beard burnt down to bare skin, the lower half of his face a blac
k and bleeding mask. He fell again, rose again. She backed away. She wasn’t even sure he could see her; the fire seemed to have damaged his eyes.
He went down on his hands and knees and began crawling like a beast, no longer howling; he seemed to be unable to catch his breath.
She stood several feet away, following him as he crept along the ground.
And wasn’t Odysseus a murderer at the end of things? Hadn’t he painted his own halls with blood?
Then the Poem spoke inside her, saying, You dog! Not fearing my return, you have sheared my substance, headless of revenge. But death is on the wing for you. Death for everyone.
The Spaniard’s smell was terrible. He left bits of himself behind, clumps of fat and steaming flesh in the grass. He made it twenty feet or so before collapsing a final time.
She walked over and stood watching him a moment. She saw he was still breathing, his back going up and down, his wind coming in a ragged wheeze.
“My boy,” she said, and her voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. “What’ve you done with him?”
Juan didn’t answer, just lay there, hissing.
She looked around for a fallen branch. She located one, then came back over, worked it underneath his chest and levered him onto his back. When he rolled over, she saw that his bottom lip was dangling from his mouth; he’d bitten completely through it.
“Can you hear me?” she said.
He lay staring up at her, though he had no choice as his eyelids had burned away.
It’s too much, she thought. You burned him too much.
She put the sole of her foot on his chest. The flesh was hot, like mud baking in the sun. She put some weight on it and the blackened skin slid under her foot, baring a strip of pink, steaming flesh.
He howled to the stars.
“My boy!” she shouted.