Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  Then, just as Beaver Jean was about to turn his cart around, a man appeared from behind a snowdrift, and he sprinted toward the house. He was dressed in European clothing, but Beaver Jean recognized him as the blundering son of a powerful Winnebago chief to the west. The man was shouting at the woman in the window. When she saw him, she pulled back. In a few moments, the door to the house flew open and she emerged, completely nude but holding a rug over her shoulders as though it was a shawl. She ran to the Winnebago man, and he ran to her. And when they collided, he pulled out his penis and threw her down in the snow.

  “Animals,” shouted Beaver Jean. But the pair paid no mind to him. “Filthy behavior.” He tugged at Alice and turned her around. They began their slow walk to the infirmary. Beaver Jean thought all the while about how lucky it was for Lydian that he had rescued her from such a stepmother, how lucky it would be for his son to keep her away from that sort of grandmother.

  13

  The Arrival of a Blizzard

  MOTHER ST. JOHN TENDED to Eliza and the child for several days while Big Waters went to summon Father Paul. Big Waters relayed his message: he promised to come as soon as he could. Eliza’s cough, which had seemed bad enough that first night, was worse than Mother St. John first thought. Eliza’s shoulders would quake a bit as she fought to suppress a cough, but soon she’d be bent over, hacking and spitting blood into a hankie.

  Mother St. John led her into bed. Though it was only late afternoon, the sun had gone down, which made Mother St. John eager to get everyone fed and settled. She boiled chicken bones and innards with strong onion and pepper and proffered the broth to Eliza.

  Eliza sipped. She nodded toward Davis, who sat in the corner with Big Waters and the babies. “Davis is tired,” Eliza said.

  Davis’s arms were draped over the baskets in which the babies lay. The little girl curled her hand around Davis’s finger as Big Waters tended to the nappy of the baby boy.

  “Don’t worry about Davis,” said Mother St. John. “I’ll put him to bed.” She lifted the bowl to Eliza’s lips again.

  “This baby likes me,” said Davis. He shook his hand and the girl child’s fingers remained clenched around his pinkie.

  Mother St. John wiped Eliza’s mouth, then set the bowl on a table. She stood and went to him. She’d come to like Davis very much. He was bright and spoke clearly, with an intelligence far beyond his four years. “Well, why wouldn’t she?” said Mother St. John. She took his hand and led him to a cot she’d prepared on the floor beside Eliza’s bed. “Say your prayers to Saint Mary and go to sleep.” She gave him a kiss on the head. She couldn’t help it. In him, she smelled all the things that would never be hers.

  “I’m not tired,” said Davis, though he yawned and stretched his arms.

  Mother St. John turned down the lamp and left the room, carrying the bowl. She cleaned the kitchen and spooned flour into a large bowl for dough. Then she went to the children’s ward and shooed a couple of rapscallions back into bed and stoked the fire to keep the place warm. She went to the kitchen, picked up a pitcher, and was about to head to the barn to milk the cow when she thought she heard the squeaking of wagon wheels. Just then, the front door of the infirmary flew wide open and a gust of wind blew through the entry and into the kitchen, whipping flour out of the bowl.

  “What in the—” Mother St. John started. She hurried to the entry.

  Wind and snow rushed in, and a huge man filled the doorway.

  “What in the—” she said again. “Close the door!”

  From head to toe, the man was dressed in furs and skins. Though the light was dim in the infirmary, Mother St. John could see a mustache and beard, a mangled forest of coarse and matted hairs. She approached. “Close the door!” she said again.

  He did. “Pardon me,” he said. The breath that came with the words emitted a foul odor, a scent somewhere between sour meat and silage.

  The giant stomped in, shaking snow off. “It’s a blizzard,” he said.

  Mother St. John glanced to the left, toward the room where Eliza and her child rested, and then quickly caught herself and looked at the man in the doorway again.

  “Mighty fierce weather,” he said. “Been riding in it all day.” He clapped his hands and arms together. Snow fell onto the floor.

  “What in the—” she said. He must be here for them. Her heart leapt, and she prayed that little Davis would know enough to keep quiet. Then she heard the door to her room open and saw Big Waters pop her head out and then back in.

  Mother St. John lifted the lantern to her face. “We’re full,” she said.

  “I need tending,” Beaver Jean boomed. He stomped his boots on the floor to loosen the snowy clumps. “Yi! That smarts.” He unwound strands of rabbit skin from his hands. “My foot’s rotten.”

  “What?” asked Mother St. John. Her intuition, or rather a feeling she attributed to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, told her that this man was up to no good. But she’d taken vows. She couldn’t turn away a child of God in need of help, not even a child of God as hideous and smelly as this one. Didn’t Jesus touch the leprous and the dead, pull them forth from their stinking decay in a place where the dead weren’t buried but were left to petrify in humid, hot caves?

  Beaver Jean breathed into Mother St. John’s face. “My toes is like to kill me if I don’t have ’em off,” he said. “They look and feel mighty, mighty wrong.”

  Still, though, she wasn’t Jesus and could do only so much for so many. Mothers and children first. Hairy Philistines later. “I don’t have a single spare bed. Not one. Perhaps you could come back in a few days?”

  Beaver Jean untied a wolf pelt from around his neck. He tossed it to the floor. “Find me a chair,” he told Mother St. John. “I’ve got to sit and rest these bones.” He sniffed at her as an animal might. “You got a name?”

  Mother St. John went to the back of the room and drew a heavy curtain across a rope, a barrier that separated the quarters of the children and the sick from the chill of the front room on cold nights. Then she pulled a chair from the table for the man.

  “You may call me Mother St. John,” she said. “We must be quieter. Everyone is sleeping.”

  “Mother? What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “My name. I’m a sister.”

  Beaver sat down with a humph and tugged off his boot. He moaned as he stretched out his leg and wiggled his toes.

  “We nurse the sick and care for orphans,” she went on, taking a seat across from him.

  Beaver Jean pulled his foot up onto his lap. “There’s a contingent of souls who need a mighty dose of religious guidance a couple days south of here. Ye wouldn’t believe what some of them prairie folks is up to.” He rubbed life into the sole of his foot.

  “I’m afraid I have my hands full here,” said Mother St. John.

  “I’m sure ye do,” Beaver Jean said. “But my dearly departed pap used to say that having hands full was better than having them empty. Oh my toes!”

  Mother St. John sat forward on her chair and smiled. Maybe he was just another soul in need of tending.

  He jabbed his foot toward her. Even during the day, the light in the infirmary was bad in winter, shadowy and dull. She knelt and pulled the lantern close to the toes.

  “Let’s have a look then,” she said.

  He tried wiggling all of them, but only the outer two moved. The others were black and swollen, like a trio of bats. The nails were long claws.

  “That smarts mighty good.” He leaned toward Mother St. John and nodded at his toes. “These look to be spoilt.”

  “My,” she said. “Yes, they’re infected certainly.”

  From behind the curtain, from behind the door to the room where Eliza, Davis, and the twins slept, rose a mighty wail.

  Mother St. John’s breath stopped in her throat. She leaned back and smiled at the man, hoping to appear relaxed and sure of herself.

  Then Big Waters, never a woman to miss anything, slipped among t
hem, walked past the man and into the kitchen, made a milking motion with her hands to indicate she’d take care of the cow, and retrieved milk for the baby. When she passed the man again, she handed him a cloth and pointed to the mess he’d made on the floor. Then she faced Mother St. John and pinched her nose. Mother St. John nodded to her and then looked her in the eye. Big Waters slipped behind the curtain. Soon the baby was quiet.

  Beaver Jean took the cloth and set it down on the table. “That baby sounded mighty fresh to the world,” said Beaver Jean. “Sure does. Sounds like it just been borned.” He rolled up his buckskin pant leg and rubbed his calf.

  “Oh, don’t do that,” said Mother St. John. “You’ll encourage the infection to spread up the leg.” She sighed a bit, comfortable in knowing that Big Waters seemed to understand so completely without any words spoken and had the situation in hand. She gave a short prayer of thanks to the Lord. “Frostbite?” she asked.

  “Got drunk with some Indians,” he said. “Lost my boots in a card game and mighta stepped on something. Woke up in some bad weather, with my bare foot in the snow.” He folded his arms over his enormous belly and shook in laughter at the memory. Then he sighed and looked back over his shoulder. “It be a boy or girl?”

  “Hm?” said Mother St. John. She feigned serious inspection of the toes.

  “That baby that was crying.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “It be a boy or a girl?”

  “Oh. Uh. She’s a girl child.”

  “Huh,” said Beaver Jean. “I got a boy child coming pretty soon. Wife’s about to birth.” He put his foot back down. “That Indian woman looks familiar to me. Could be I know her from somewhere.”

  “Big Waters?” said Mother St. John. “I don’t think so.”

  “I’ve got to get these toes off and get sober and then go and fetch my wife back.”

  “Back from where?” She picked up the lantern and lifted it toward his face. “Are you drunk right now?”

  “Don’t know for surely,” he said. “She likes sweets. Maybe she come through here? I been drinkin’ all through this voyage to keep my bones warm through the blizzard.”

  Mother St. John thought to avoid the question by asking a different one. “She didn’t tell you where she was going?”

  “Nah,” said Beaver Jean. “She tries to run off sometimes, and I always got to go fetch her back. She been here?”

  Mother St. John took a measure of the man, the way he looked, the way he talked, his arrival on her doorstep at such a time. The way that even the weather seemed to herald his arrival with a wicked blowing and snowing.

  “No,” she said. She was surprised by how easily a lie slid off her tongue. “That baby you heard is an Indian child. Its mother died of pox.”

  He was the type of man a woman would run from, the type of man who could drive a woman to abandon children and chance bad weather and death.

  “Also, that baby is a girl,” she said. “Sickly. I don’t expect her to live.”

  Beaver Jean sighed. “That’s too bad,” he said. “Thank ye for all that information, lady.”

  Mother St. John felt sick. Maybe she’d given herself and the children away by too eagerly offering up untruths.

  “Happens, though,” said Beaver Jean. “Don’t it? Hard and cold place for anyone. Little ones specially.”

  “Yes,” she said quietly.

  “Now let’s get to this foot,” he said.

  “I’d better get some clean cloth for bandages.” She stood. “I’ll be back momentarily.” Mother St. John disappeared into the kitchen and gripped the edge of a table to steady her breath. She poured hot water from the kettle into a large bowl. Then she selected a brown bottle of ale from the shelf and stuffed it into her apron. She returned to the patient. She set the bottle on the table and placed the bowl on the floor and lifted his foot into it. Her hands were shaky.

  “Hot.” He hissed through his teeth.

  “We just need to get them clean first. You’d best keep drinking this if we’re going to take those toes off,” she said. “I’ll get you a proper drinking vessel.”

  “No need,” he said. “I been drinking plenty out of a bottle like this.” He quaffed a bit from it. Then he reached inside his coat and pulled out a paper. He unfolded it and set it on the table. “The other ones I’m lookin’ for are these two.” He tapped his finger on the paper. “Ye seen a Negress toting a pickaninny?”

  Mother St. John emitted an audible exhalation. She cleared her throat. This time when she lied, she’d be more restrained and believable.

  “What?” she said. “Why, no. Drink up. I’ve got a lot of work to do before I can rest my head on my pillow, so let’s get these taken care of quick.”

  Beaver Jean gulped down another swig. He pointed to the paper.

  “Can ye read?” he asked her. “Never mind. Ye work on that foot, and I’ll read this to ye.” He cleared his throat.

  “Hundred-dollar reward,” he began. “Eliza and child. Ran away from kind and generous Mistress Winston who wants the pair returned safely to her and unharmed if possible. Eliza, average height. Slim face and body. Comely face with black gums, snaggly teeth, and plaited hair . . . Davis, child of close to three years. Very white eyes and small teeth. Has a downcast disposition when spoken to and blinky eyed.”

  Mother St. John gently rubbed the area around the toes. “Sounds like a pair I heard about who ran off to the Dakotas.”

  “Dakotas, huh?” Beaver Jean refolded the paper and tucked it back into his pocket. “Gonna find these two here for a nice reward. Gonna buy my boy some dogs to be a tracker like me.”

  Mother St. John knelt before the man and peered into the bowl. “Seems cruel to talk of tracking human beings like animals.”

  “Tribes here been engaging in slavery forever,” said Beaver Jean. “It’s natural. Anyway, it’s not my concern. The rights and right-nots of it aren’t for ye or me to decide.”

  “There are no laws here, really,” she said. She shrugged.

  “Lady, all this thinking is mighty interesting, but could ye just tend to my toes?” He pushed closer to her. “The pain’s like to kill me any moment.” He drank some more.

  She handed the lantern to the man and showed him where to hold it. She lifted the foot from the water and turned it one way, then another. Beneath the toes, big yellow blisters grew. “I may have to take the whole foot,” she said. “Looks to be spreading.”

  “No,” he said. “Just the toes. I need the foot.” He tipped back the drink again and took a nice long pull.

  “Well,” said Mother St. John, “we can pray that the poison will come out once we take the toes, I suppose.”

  “Ye pray then. I’m sure a prayer from ye will be abided, lady.”

  “Perhaps we should say a prayer together.” She crossed herself and bowed her head. Perhaps if she got him good and drunk, he’d pass out and she could get Eliza and Davis to Father Paul before this man even woke. She could wound him enough so that he’d have to be put up here for another day or two. Though that’d be a mighty sin.

  “Never had use for it, but ye go on,” Beaver Jean said. “Dakotas, ye say?”

  Mother St. John closed her eyes, but then opened them and looked up at the man. “You don’t pray?”

  “Get on with it now before I lose my nerve.”

  “Our Father,” she began.

  “The cutting, I meant,” said Beaver Jean. “Get on with it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, then. I’ll just get the knife.”

  “Be better ye bring a hammer and chisel for the bone,” he said. “Quicker too.”

  “Yes.” She stood. “I’ll have to get them from the barn.”

  “Why don’t ye wear those black trappings most other nuns do?” He waved his hand around his face. “With the veily watchathingy where only the face peeks out?”

  Mother St. John raised her eyebrows. His eyes looked loose in his head, and his cheeks had turned red. “A habit, you mean? Impractic
al for life here,” she said. She reached up and smoothed her hair back into its bun. She replaced a pin that was coming loose.

  “I’ll be back shortly. Stay here.” She bent and picked up the bowl. “Keep drinking.”

  He relaxed in the chair and folded his hands over his gut. “Nowhere to go,” he said. “Not right this moment.”

  Mother St. John opened the door and threw the water out. She could see the path of footsteps from the window of her room to the barn. God bless Big Waters, she thought. But she’d have to do something about the tracks or pray for a more powerful storm before she could let the man go. Then she scooped up a bowlful of snow and went back inside and set it before the man. “Put your foot in there for a bit.”

  “Yep,” he said. “That’ll numb my old paw real good. Ye heard that pair run off to the Dakotas? How would they’a got a ride there? No one’s heading that way now. Not that I heard of, anyhoot.”

  “Keep drinking,” she said. “It’ll help too.”

  “Don’t need much encouragement there,” he said. He guzzled a healthy dose. “Nah. I’d a-heard something of a caravan going to the Dakotas. Less’n some missionaries goin’ that way ’scaped my attention. Maybe then.”

  “I’ve got to use the outhouse, mister.”

  “Freezin’ out there. Be quick or ye’ll freeze yer womanly parts shut.”

  “I don’t like that talk, mister.”

  “Sorry, lady. The drink’s gettin’ to me now.” He shook with laughter.

  14

  In the Barn

  MOTHER ST. JOHN WRAPPED herself in a shawl and opened the door again to the weather. “Keep that foot in the snow,” she said to the man. She took another look at him before she closed the door behind her. She heard him singing a drinking song as she walked to the barn, a sturdy thing built back in the woods a bit, out of the wind. Inside, the air was moist and warm. Big Waters had the stove going and was forking manure into a wheelbarrow. Eliza held one of the newborn twins and, hunched over, was slowly pacing and peeking out the little window, stealing glances at the infirmary. Davis was at her hem. He had his hand around the baby girl’s foot. The other baby lay curled up on a blanket, sleeping soundly in the hay, like the infant Jesus.