by Sara Donati
Then the old woman came to a stop, and gestured with her chin. Elizabeth was almost afraid to look. She thought that her fear would be obvious, but Ohstyen’tohskon stood impassively, with her eyes averted. As Elizabeth turned, she disappeared into the shadows.
He was asleep, as she had sometimes imagined him to be. And thin, his face so terribly thin. They had shaved his face. Behind his head and shoulders was a rolled bearskin, lifting him very slightly. His face was turned toward her, his arms crossed on his belly. The wound was hidden in shadow, and Elizabeth was glad of it.
Carefully, quietly, she went down on both knees beside the sleeping platform. Putting her face next to his, she inhaled his smells, all healthy: clean sweat tinged with something herbal, something she almost recognized. Elizabeth leaned closer to feel his heat, and kept herself suspended just so, her face within inches of his. Every muscle in her ached with it, but she stayed, breathing in the breath that he exhaled, until the trembling of her arms threatened to wake him. She sat back on her heels.
He opened his eyes then. A smile flitted across his face, and he closed them again.
“Boots,” he said softly. “I see you.”
His voice, and the pleasure of it.
“Sleep,” she said, touching one fingertip to the corner of his mouth. His hand came up and caught her wrist, and she inhaled sharply.
“Come,” he said, and drew her up onto the platform beside him.
She hesitated. “Your wound,” she whispered.
But he hushed her, pulling gently until she had slid over him and he could tuck her between himself and the wall. He had broken out in a sweat, but then so had she. She put her face into the curve of his throat.
“I thought I would never see you again.” Her fingers curled around his arm, pressing with new strength, pressing hard. Hard enough to make him flinch; hard enough to mark him with five small angry-blue moons.
“I never doubted you,” he whispered, holding her as tightly as he dared. “Never for a moment.”
XL
He did not sleep well. Coasting on the tide of his dreams, sometimes frantic, sometimes resigned, Nathaniel rose and fell and rose again to assure himself that she was there. Whole, and healthy, if not unmarked. She slept with her mouth slightly open, and her brow creased in concentration, as if this were another task set before her to prove her worth.
The sun rose and found its way through the smoke vents into the high, arched ceiling of the longhouse, and with it he could see more of her. Old bruises, faded to the yellow-green of a cyclone sky. Overlapping, they arched across her cheekbones in the shape of a hand. Nathaniel counted the livid center of each bruise, and was overcome with a numbing anger, more disabling and deeper than any he had ever known. This she had endured for him. This and more, for he could see the healing cuts high on her chest.
There were not many men in the bush, and he knew them all. It was not unknown for a man to go out of his head with loneliness, or vicious with greed. But the man who had put his hands on Elizabeth had not been lonely; he had just liked his work. There was only one person who could be responsible, and Nathaniel groaned inwardly to think that he had sent her off on her own, worried about every danger except the one that she had met, and somehow, escaped. There was a story here, and one that would be hard for her to tell. And harder to listen to. Give me a tenth of her strength, he thought.
At his back, the sounds of the longhouse rose gradually. Women’s voices, coaxing, impatient, amused. Hungry children, men murmuring in half-sleep. The scraping of the mortar as the daylong task of grinding corn began. Nathaniel liked the long-house in the early mornings, the routine and comfort of it, but right now he wished for the most rudimentary shelter in the bush, where he would have his wife to himself, and he could talk to her free of curious ears and eyes. Where he could really look at her, and learn what he feared: the full extent of what she had suffered.
He heard a shuffling behind him, and saw from the corner of his eye that He-Who-Dreams stood there, watching them. The weight of the faith keeper’s gaze was not so heavy that Nathaniel had to turn, and after a while he went away. Nathaniel felt a twinge of regret, for he liked the old man and owed him many favors, but now there was Elizabeth. Elizabeth with her bruised face and the shuddering that shook her even in her sleep. The faith keeper’s curiosity would have to wait.
There was a harsh clearing of a throat behind him: the clan mother, with her bitter tea, and her hard black eyes that were beginning to fail her. Now he did turn, for there was no denying her. This was Falling-Day’s mother and his own daughter’s great-grandmother, and in her face he saw what his first wife might have become with old age. She cleared her throat again, and he sat up, knowing that he could not escape her vigilance, or her tongue.
He took the bowl from her hands and drank it in two hasty swallows, grimacing. Beside him, Elizabeth stirred, and he saw the old woman squinting at her. Then she met his gaze, and her mouth hardened.
“You are not yet healed,” she said, not bothering to lower her voice.
“But with your help I will heal, Grandmother,” he said, hoping to work a small opening in her resistance. Elizabeth’s arrival did not please her; he had anticipated that. But then, nothing much did please her.
She grunted, and narrowed her eyes at him. Poked a hard finger in the direction of his wound, so that he twitched.
“Breathe deep!” she hissed at him. “Or your lung will rot like a bad plum, and you will drown in your own fluids.”
Nathaniel did as he was told. She watched him for three breaths, and then smiled sourly as he coughed, shaking her head.
“I will send your food,” she said, turning away. And then, over her shoulder: “And clothes for her.”
“Her name is Elizabeth,” Nathaniel called after her.
She turned back. “Erisavet.” The old woman’s mouth twisted around the unfamiliar sounds, and she shook her head. “You gave her the name Bone-in-Her-Back?”
“Chingachgook gave it to her.”
“Ah. Well, the biggest bone that one has is in her head. Stubborn as the sun in the summer sky.” And she went off.
He turned back to Elizabeth, and found her eyes fixed on him.
“Bone in my head?” she asked sleepily. “Bone-Head. Yes, it feels appropriate right now.” For a moment the look on her face was much the same as the one the old woman had given him. Then she sat up and with quick hands she touched his forehead, his cheek, his shoulder, ran her fingers down his arms and then gently touched his chest. Her gaze fixed there, at the wound.
He leaned back on his hands so she could see and watched the emotions moving over her face, pressing her lips hard together. He was taken up by the strong urge to gather her to him and rock her until she could smile at him again.
“Richard told them I shot you and ran away,” she said, her voice hoarse with anger.
“I told them otherwise.”
“But they believed him.” She glanced up at him, and away. He caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger and brought her gaze back to his own.
“They did not believe him,” he corrected her. “They were testing you.”
“She doesn’t trust me,” Elizabeth said. “The old woman—Ohstyen’tohskon.”
“Made-of-Bones,” Nathaniel translated. “And she doesn’t trust anybody. She nursed me well,” he added. “So she couldn’t dislike me too much.”
“Nathaniel …,” Elizabeth began, and then her voice trailed away.
He put a finger to her mouth, shaking his head very slightly. “Not here,” he said. “Not now. First we eat—you can’t afford to miss a meal, Boots, from what I can see. And then we’ll go down to the river—is Robbie here?”
Elizabeth nodded. “And Otter. And—” She almost smiled. The relief of this, her almost smile, took away a little of the surprise at Otter’s presence.
“And the red dog,” she said. “I call her Treenie.” He watched her thoughts moving across her face, and
the small promise of a smile fade away.
Nathaniel leaned toward her, brushed her mouth with his own, felt her start and then come to him. “The world will be right again,” he said. “Together we will make it right.”
It was a busy time in the village, Nathaniel told her as she discarded the ragged clothes she wore and dressed in the buckskin overdress and leggings a young woman had brought her. The moccasins were very fine, decorated with beadwork and porcupine quills; Elizabeth took it as a sign that the clan mother was not completely set against her.
Elizabeth found herself wondering about her pack, and provisions, and the weather and the trails, and then she remembered, with something between relief and disappointment, that they would not be on the trail today. She had completed her task, she had found him, and for the moment they were not going anywhere.
She walked with Nathaniel, and looked at the things he pointed out. The new crops in the fields demanded a great deal of attention, and it seemed that every woman was there with a hoe, many of them working stripped to the waist. Elizabeth wondered if the ability to be shocked had been taken from her for all time, or if it simply required more energy than she could spare.
Nathaniel walked very slowly, and his breathing was labored at times so that he would stop, as if taken by some unexpected thought. She stopped then, too, and watched him. Content that he was in fact mending, Elizabeth felt herself beginning to relax.
“Richard?” she asked, although she meant not to. The thought of him, and what he had said to these people about her, would make her go pale with anger, if she let it.
Nathaniel shrugged. “He is still pretty bad off, I think. I don’t see him. They keep him over there—” He jerked with his chin toward the last of the longhouses, where boys played with small baggataway sticks in a noisy game.
“They saved his life.”
“Not yet, they haven’t. I don’t think he’s cooperating much, but then he never thought to come back here. That much I know.”
Elizabeth stopped. “Here? This is where he was brought as a child?”
“I thought you realized,” Nathaniel said. “I thought Otter would have told you. He was adopted into the Bear clan. They mourned him when he ran away.”
“No,” Elizabeth said thoughtfully. “Otter said nothing of this. He mentioned Richard very little.”
Nathaniel looked concerned. “The boy bears watching,” he said finally. “Stone-Splitter wouldn’t be pleased if he took vengeance on Todd, not here and now.”
“I made Richard a promise,” she said, more to herself than to Nathaniel.
He grunted, as if to save himself the trouble of disagreeing.
Pausing while he caught his breath, Elizabeth had time to look around her. The village was as large and ordered a community as any farming village in England, with every adult she could see at work. A trio of young girls about Hannah’s age were clustered together under a young birch tree, stripping dried corn from cobs, each of them working with what looked to be the jawbone of a deer, teeth intact. They had been chattering with great abandon, but when Elizabeth and Nathaniel came into hearing distance they giggled, and fell still.
“Nathaniel!” Otter materialized out of a crowd of young men examining a gun—Elizabeth saw with some discomfort that it was Lingo’s rifle—and came at them at a trot. Robbie was just behind him, his great rosy face beaming and Treenie at his side. The dog greeted Elizabeth with great joy, took unenthusiastic note of Nathaniel, and then calmly positioned herself on Elizabeth’s free side.
“You see?” she asked him. “The red dog.”
He grinned at her. “Aye, Boots. I see plain enough.”
“By God, man,” Robbie said, clapping him on a shoulder. “Ye canna be left alone wi’oot callin’ a’ the trouble i’ the world doon on your thick heid.”
For the moment Elizabeth was content to stand and listen as Otter spoke of home, and how he had left them. She saw Nathaniel’s concentration and his slowly growing alarm as he listened to Otter’s story of how he came to be in the bush at all, but Elizabeth was suddenly very sleepy and could not concentrate on this involved tale of an Indian called Little-Turtle who lived to the west.
She stifled an expansive yawn.
“Did ye need mair sleep, lass?” Robbie asked, and then produced one of his blushes. It occurred to Elizabeth that his Kahnyen’kehàka name had something to do with the blossoming of flowers, and she felt a great wave of affection for the man, which she showed by brushing some of the accumulated muck from his sleeve.
“Nathaniel and I thought to go down to the river.”
“Ach, weel,” said Robbie, slapping Otter on the back. “We mun be on our way. Tae see aboot a canoe. Or wad ye rather walk back tae Paradise, experienced woodswoman that ye are?” He winked at Elizabeth and turned away without waiting for a response, whistling for Treenie to follow. The dog trotted off with an apologetic glance at Elizabeth.
Otter hesitated. “I won’t be going back with you.”
Nathaniel grimaced. “That’s a discussion for another time,” he said. “Right now Elizabeth and I have business.”
Elizabeth looked down to find a very young boy tugging on the long fringe which bordered her overdress. He gulped hard and giggled a high, sweet tone. Then, seeing that Elizabeth was not in a frame of mind to eat him whole or otherwise bewitch him, he rattled off what seemed to be a question in a torrent punctuated by the soft whistle of his breath.
“I don’t understand.” Elizabeth shrugged her shoulders at him regretfully.
Nathaniel shooed the child off with a few words and then he took Elizabeth’s hand. The rope burns on her wrist were scabbed over, and Nathaniel looked hard at them.
“He wanted to see the ghost coin,” he said evenly. Elizabeth could see in his eyes that he knew most of what she would tell him. When she tried to look away, he pulled her closer, and leaned down to speak into her ear. “Come on, then,” he said softly. “Let’s get it done with. It won’t go away on its own.” He lifted her hand higher, turned it this way and that.
“Your wedding ring.”
“He took it.” Her tone was hollow, but there was a flash in her eyes: anger, and desperation. “Lingo took it, and I couldn’t find it—after.”
“We’ll get another one,” Nathaniel said.
“No.” She shook her head. “I don’t want another one. I want that one.”
And she walked off toward the river with her husband close behind, to tell him what he needed to know.
Otter and Robbie spent their morning negotiating with Aweryahsa about the cost of the fine birch bark canoe he had just begun to build, and having come to an understanding, Otter went to fetch Nathaniel and Elizabeth to get their approval.
“You can come see it. If you’ve got the inclination,” Otter added, politely looking away. He had found them stretched out in the sun on the riverbank, Elizabeth asleep with her head in Nathaniel’s lap and her face blotchy and streaked with tears.
Nathaniel looked up at him, this young man he had known all of his life. He had had a hand in the raising of him, and at this moment, he was especially proud to be able to claim that.
“We’ll be up directly,” he said quietly.
Otter nodded, and turned to go.
“Wait.” Nathaniel looked out over the flowing river, seeking the words he needed there.
“What you did for her I can’t ever repay,” he said. “Although I will surely do my best.”
“I didn’t do anything for her you wouldn’t have done yourself,” Otter pointed out. “Nothing I wouldn’t have done for my sister.”
Nathaniel was silent. He watched Elizabeth breathing for a long minute.
“She would have made it on her own,” he said. “She’s that tough. But she wouldn’t have had a chance to heal, and now she does.”
Otter looked thoughtful. “She is not proud of what she did,” he said, and Nathaniel knew this was more of a question than a statement. Often he was called on t
o explain the way that white people thought and acted, when their ways mystified the Kahnyen’kehàka. Otter was watching him, wanting to understand how this woman could take anything but pride in killing a stronger enemy. But Nathaniel could not explain this to him in any way that he would understand, and after a while the younger man went away, as thoughtful and quiet as Nathaniel had ever seen him.
After he watched her sleep for a few more minutes, counting her breaths and measuring them against his own, Nathaniel woke Elizabeth. She was disoriented and flushed, but the silence between them was an easy one. When he told her about the canoe, she managed a smile.
“We can go home,” she said. “When?”
“The canoe will need a good week,” he said, brushing his knuckles across her cheek. “And I’ll be stronger then, too.”
“A week,” she echoed, looking uncertain.
“Sitting still for a week goes against the grain, I know,” he said. “If it can be managed in less, we’ll do that.”
“I suppose I shall cope,” Elizabeth said.
“Aye.” Nathaniel nodded. “I know that you will.”
She sighed, and started up the riverbank. “Let us go look at this wondrous canoe, then.”
Nathaniel caught her by the arm, and turned her to him.
“Elizabeth.”
The gray of her eyes seemed lighter now that her skin had darkened in the sun. He traced the outline of her face, touched the dimple in her chin. Cupped her cheek, and then the back of her neck. “None of it would have mattered if you hadn’t come back to me,” he said, hearing the catch in his voice. And saw by some miracle that he had found the words to comfort her.
On a small stream a short walk away from the longhouses, they found the canoemaker and his apprentices hard at work, their naked upper bodies and legs streaked with grime and sweat. One of the boys alternately fed the fires and stirred a great kettle of what looked like a coiled mass of stringy rope.