‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘Keep movin’, boy.’
Anabet wrenched her head back and screamed, ‘I took nothing! He means to kill me dead!’
At once the greasy, calloused hand clamped over her mouth again, mashing her lips against her teeth. Her head banged against the wall of the storage shack behind her. She saw flashing stars. Tasted coppery blood along the edges of her tongue.
‘Now see here,’ the young Jew said, taking his first timid step into the alley. Then another. ‘By all means, unhand that young lady.’
‘I said shove, half-pecker. ’Less you want it whittled down to a nub.’
‘See here!’ The man with the curls gave the drunken trader three firm whaps across his broad back with the flat of his palm. ‘Please leave that young lady be.’
The trader made a sound deep in his chest like a bear waking early in its cave. He turned slowly.
The young man saw the knife and raised his gloved hands. ‘Sir. I assure you that I am unarmed.’
Quick as lightning, the trader thrust out his free hand, grabbing this newcomer by the throat until the much smaller man balanced precariously on the toes of his ragged boots.
‘I tell you what,’ the trader said, ‘they mighta clipped the tip, but they musta left every bit of them balls. ’Cause ya got yerself a pair on you, boy. Aintcha?’
The young Jew’s hat tumbled to the snow as he pawed at the man’s stout arm. His eyes bulged. Spittle flew from his lips as he attempted to make words.
‘Eh? Speak up! I got me an infected ear.’
‘You’re … choking … me.’
‘Right observant fella, too.’ The trader flicked the big blade of his skinning knife, deftly separating the young Jew’s curlicue payes from the left side of his head. He flicked the knife again, bringing symmetry to the arrangement. Then he released his grip.
The young Jew collapsed to his hands and knees, hatless and defiled. He collected the limp strands of his payes as he struggled to his feet, gasping for breath, eyes streaming with tears. ‘Now … see … here,’ he wheezed, stepping bravely forward again, brandishing his severed locks like an accusation.
The trader’s low, malignant chuckle sounded like a bucket of corn slop dumped in a trough. He pounded the center of the young Jew’s forehead with the butt of his knife as though hammering a handbill to a tree. The young man’s chin snapped up, and his eyes rolled back; he wobbled in place for a moment, arms flung out wide. Blood streamed from the gashed purple knot already rising from his bare, freshly shorn head.
‘Back on yer knees, boy,’ the trader growled, ramming a ham-sized fist into the defenseless man’s midsection. ‘Lemme hear ya pray Jesus.’
The young Jew dropped into a bent-limbed pile like a marionette snipped from its strings. The burly trader had stomped the poor dazed man nearly half to death by the time Anabet spied the flat-bladed coal shovel leaning up against the side of the blacksmith’s shed. The shovel made a sound like a muffled church bell as she brought it down with all the force she could muster atop the drunken trader’s skull.
Her cold hands went instantly numb at the vibration of the impact, which seemed to travel from the shovel’s smooth handle all the way up her arms and into her teeth. The trader grunted once, stumbled forward, then pitched over sideways, sprawling on the dirty snowpack like an overturned feed wagon.
By this time, both the smith and the stable owner had charged into the alley, followed at some remove by a tentative scattering of bystanders.
‘What in all holy hell’s goin’ on out here?’ the blacksmith hollered. He was short and thick-bodied, with scorch marks decorating his leather apron and steam rising up from his hard, bare arms.
The livery man stood a head taller but narrower by perhaps two stone, even in his heavy barn coat. He took one look at the unconscious men on the ground, then at Anabet.
‘I know you,’ he said. ‘You’re with them bunch camped out by Brush Creek.’
Anabet dropped the shovel to the frozen ground with a clang. ‘The big one was attacking the little one,’ she said, pointing to her attacker and her savior in turn.
‘So you figured you might oughta hit the both of ’em with yonder shovel?’
‘Only him,’ she said, pointing again. ‘He had a knife. The little one had nothing.’
‘Well, hell,’ the blacksmith said. ‘That’s Jacques Degarmo. Shoulda hit the sumbitch harder. And with the short edge.’
The taller one said, ‘That other one’s my stable boy.’
‘He’ll be late for work, I ’spect.’
‘Tarnation. Didn’t even hardly recognize him without his lop-ears.’
‘That boy’s mother wouldn’t recognize him. Either one of ’em alive?’
As if in answer, the stable boy released a low, plaintive moan.
‘Fair enough,’ said the smith, turning a skeptical eye toward Anabet. ‘I thought I heard a woman screamin’. Sure that wasn’t you, young miss?’
Anabet spat blood and shook her head quickly, pointing at the stable boy. ‘I only heard him.’
‘Then why you bleedin’?’
‘I think I bit my tongue.’
‘The hell you doin’ back here in the alley, anyhow?’
‘Just cutting through.’
‘Never mind how she got here,’ the stable owner said. ‘We best get these two the hell somewhere’s else before big hoss wakes up.’
‘Soon as young miss here figures out how she’s gonna pay me for damages,’ said the smith, stooping to retrieve his shovel. He raised the implement to inspect its noticeably misshapen blade. ‘That was my good scoop.’
‘Oh, pipe down, Guthrie. You can pound the durn thing back into shape if you like it so much. What am I supposed to do?’ The livery man nudged the blood-covered fellow with one manure-caked boot. ‘That’s my good stable boy.’
‘My grandmother does our doctoring,’ Anabet said. ‘I’ll take responsibility for his care.’
The blacksmith smirked at the stable owner. ‘That right?’ he said. ‘And how ya plannin’ on that, young miss? Figure on carryin’ him out to Brush Creek on your back?’
The stable owner sighed. ‘I got a wagon. My sister’s boy’s inside. He’ll take you.’
Anabet lowered her eyes. ‘I thank you for your kindness, sir. I’ll return with payment for both of you.’
‘You just bring Silas back in one piece, and sooner the better,’ the stable owner said. ‘My sister’s boy ain’t worth a fart in a high wind.’
The smith harrumphed and returned to his shop, bent shovel on his shoulder. The stable man planted his fists on his hips and surveyed the job on the ground at his feet.
Silas.
That was the young Jew’s name.
He awoke three days later, during a snowfall, in the tent Anabet shared with her grandmother near the south bank of the frozen creek.
They’d settled here for winter, her small clan, in a community of humble bender tents arranged around the vurdon, their living wagon. Beneath the low-hanging promise of a hard gray sky, the camp prepared for the coming storm. Women and children gathered water and firewood. A party of able-bodied men had gone afield to check the rabbit snares, while others set about repairing and reinforcing the shelters to withstand the weight of a heavy snow. The younger boys fed and bedded the three aging mules. Anabet stayed behind, in the warmth of the tent, where she attended to the mending while she watched and learned.
Never did she tire of watching her grandmother’s crooked, long-practiced hands doing their business. The old woman prepared a bolus of yarrow and meadowsweet for the fevered young Jew called Silas, who continued to surprise all in the camp by not dying. Finally, on this morning, he surprised his two caregivers further still, suddenly coughing, then groaning, then sitting bolt upright upon the straw mat that had served these past days as his bed.
‘The stone,’ he mumbled, feebly patting at his pockets like a drunken man
searching for his money clip. ‘My stone …’
Anabet set down her stitching and came to Silas’s side. From her pocket she retrieved the unusual object for which she knew, at once, he must be searching – a totem of some kind, she’d surmised.
But not quite a stone, as he’d called it. Rather, something like a stone, shaped from some manner of clay. The clay appeared to have been smoothed by hand and hardened by sun or by fire. It was flat like a river stone, slightly larger than the cup of her palm, with a surprising heft for its size. It smelled vaguely unpleasant to her nose, even in the cold. It had been engraved with what appeared to be a single word in his given Hebrew, which Anabet recognized, but could not translate:
א מ ת
She pressed the stone into his clammy palm as she stroked his sweat-slick brow. ‘I found it in your pocket,’ she whispered. ‘It didn’t look comfortable to sleep on.’
‘My stone.’
‘Yours again.’
She smiled at him, but the young Jew called Silas didn’t seem to notice. He closed his eyes and sagged back to the mat, clutching the stone to his breast.
‘He spoke,’ she said, patting the back of his hand. ‘He must be gaining.’
Her grandmother clucked her displeasure as she worked her bolus into a finger-shaped lozenge. She disapproved of a gaje in her tent. Or in the camp. Or, indeed, anywhere within range of her failing sight, let alone her granddaughter’s caring hand. But for his actions in the alley, as Anabet had described them (and Anabet had described them just as they’d occurred, despite the bitter tongue-lashing she’d be bound to receive for venturing about alone in the town – doubly for venturing about alone in the town after sunset), she owed this particular outsider a debt.
So she peeled the young Jew’s upper lip away from his teeth and tucked the medicinal wad into the pocket between lip and gum, just above his prominent eye-tooth.
‘The stone,’ Anabet mused, wringing a cloth and dabbing Silas’s brow. ‘What must it mean?’
The old woman clucked again.
‘Mamio? Have you no idea?’
The old woman grumbled a short phrase before she brushed her hands together over the brave young man – a brief gesture of riddance as she turned away.
She spoke no English, of course. Unlike Anabet, the old woman had no desire to learn. But if she had spoken the tongue of this new country, Anabet knew what she would have said instead:
This one is cursed.
v. The Witch
All through that winter, Silas spent as much time in the Gypsy camp as in his own meager home, which seemed somehow colder and emptier to him now than it had before.
His intentions, of course, were transparent even to the children. But little by little, his devotion earned Silas a modest yet rarified esteem in the camp. The wages he didn’t lose to the men and their good-natured bujo – the beguiling riddles and clever tricks and impossibly crafty games of chance that had given them their misinformed (yet not entirely undue) reputation amongst Silas’s fellow gajo – he spent on the food, supplies, and trinkets for the youngsters he brought with him on his regular visits. They placed great value in a name, these Roma, and seemed to appreciate Silas’s pride in his own. So whenever he shared their company, Silas Wasserman always made a special point of making at least one trip down to the frozen creek with two of their odd, square-shaped wooden pails in each hand. To carry their water.
Anabet – already regarded as practically a spinster amongst her own kind, even at her glowing twenty-two years – had a word for his standing among them: pash-ta-pash. The word meant Gypsy friend, she explained. It applied to any trusted outsider and entitled him to the hospitality of the camp. It did not, Silas was gratified to learn, apply easily, or often.
Nor was it – to his abiding chagrin – a sentiment shared by the old woman who had restored him to health.
More than once, Silas questioned the wisdom in his attempts to win her favor, which only seemed to make matters worse. In fact, the old woman seemed to despise him more the harder he tried. Long ago, she had renounced her nav gajikano – the name all Roma used for themselves in their interactions with outsiders. Silas had learned the imprudence in attempting to pronounce (or, indeed, to utter) her nav romano. And he dared not follow Anabet’s manner in addressing her as Mamio. So he had no way of thinking of her except as ‘the old woman’ – a stooped assemblage of wrinkles and sinew, with eyes as dark and watchful as a hawk on the wing.
‘Mamio is of the old world,’ Anabet reassured him, always with the same playful grin – that grin which caused her eyes to twinkle and Silas’s heart to stutter in his chest. ‘But I am of the new.’
Ironically, the old woman reminded him, in so many ways, of Rabbi Loew, who remained the closest thing to family that poor, orphaned Silas Wasserman could claim. Especially when he learned the other word the children in camp used for her:
Choxani.
That one meant witch.
As fascinated as her sweet, silly Silas seemed to be with the Rom and their ways, Anabet was every bit as curious to know all he could tell her about his world. But nothing intrigued her more than the one thing he seemed so reluctant to explain.
He called it his Shepherd Stone, and he claimed it meant nothing. But Anabet could see that the strange-smelling stone with the even stranger markings was never further than his pocket (or, during those times when his pockets were elsewhere, an arm’s reach from his hand).
One day, he brought snowshoes with him from town. Using them, in the days and weeks that followed, he and Anabet were able to take even longer walks amidst the winter-bare trees. Eventually, they discovered a spot of their own, at the base of a limestone bluff, an hour’s travel upcreek: a natural dugout in the rock that gave shelter from the wind and warmed nicely with a fire.
It was here that Anabet, those long months in the prairie cold, came to know Silas as a wife knows her husband. It was here that she pleaded with him to travel on with them after the thaw. And it was here, finally, that Silas unburdened to her his soul.
‘The body of the creature,’ he said, once he’d finished telling her his incredible tale, holding the Shepherd Stone between them in the dancing light of the fire. He showed her the thin scar tracing the lifeline of his palm. ‘The blood of the shepherd. That’s me.’ He turned the stone over. ‘Emet.’
Anabet traced the stone’s inscription with her finger, softly repeating back the name of each character as Silas spoke them aloud: aleph, mem, tav. ‘What does it mean?’
‘It means truth,’ he said, holding her finger to each letter in turn. ‘Breath of God: aleph. Water: mem. And faith: tav. First letter, middle letter, and last letter of our alphabet. All things, beginning to end.’
Anabet took the stone from his hand. It felt cold. ‘Emet,’ she whispered.
‘And so you see why I cannot go with you,’ Silas told her, openly weeping by then. ‘Should the creature awaken, my duty is here.’
It was the shepherd’s job, he explained, to prevent the mindless creature from wreaking unintended havoc on the people and places in its path. And only the shepherd, armed with the stone, held the power to terminate the mission if things went irretrievably awry.
It seemed that nobody had imagined a shipwreck on the prairie placing the creature out of reach entirely.
‘We’ll find this man Wolcott ourselves, then,’ Anabet said. ‘Before the thaw. I’ll hit him with a shovel.’
He choked on his own sweet laugh. ‘Rabbi Loew’s magic could not account for the possibility that Wolcott might be slain by another hand. Or by illness. Or by any other means.’ He sighed. ‘It was among the reasons he needed a shepherd in the first place. If I’d arrived to discover Wolcott already dead, I was to use the stone to send the creature back to the earth.’
Anabet felt confounded by the foolishness of the idea. ‘And what if you had died while traveling? What if the creature had arrived with no shepherd at all?’
To this, Silas had no
answer.
She pressed him further. ‘And if Wolcott had passed his blood to another? If he’d sired children?’
Again, Silas could offer no response.
It seemed there were many things that Beecher and Loew, in their righteous wisdom, had not bothered to consider.
‘And if you die tomorrow? Before the creature wakes?’
She’d never seen such sadness in his eyes. ‘Then my failure will be complete.’
His failure!
Anabet could not understand, no matter how he tried to explain. Had Silas Wasserman destroyed a steamboat? Had Silas created the monster that slept in this river even now? If this preacher and this rabbi stopped making monsters and went back to sending rifles instead, would it be Silas Wasserman’s duty to catch every stray bullet before innocents could be harmed?
Shepherd. Water carrier. Duty. Anabet saw none of these things before her now.
She saw only Silas. Her Silas.
And so she finally took him by the hands, meaning only to comfort him, to make him see her in return. But she recoiled with a gasp. ‘Silas!’ For it was not, she discovered, merely his eyes that wept.
Somehow, as they sat together in the last of the warmth from their dwindling fire, the scar on his palm – long sealed and faded – had begun to ooze droplets of blood.
‘Oh dear,’ he said, staring at his own hand as if it belonged to somebody else. ‘I … I must have … how very strange.’
Without hesitation, Anabet followed an impulse. She retrieved a thin shard of limestone from the ground, drawing its edge along her own lifeline. When she saw red fill the shallow new channel in her freshly separated flesh, she pressed their palms together and said, ‘If you must stay, then let your duty be my duty. Let your burdens be mine. Let us stay here by your river and fail together.’
It was only then that they discovered – as Silas held her gaze with a yearning so pure that it warmed Anabet more deeply than the fire – that they were no longer alone.
‘Anabet,’ a voice behind her croaked.
Anabet spun her head to find her grandmother’s silhouette at the mouth of their hideaway, stark against the snow glare outside. It was almost as if a gnarled, stunted tree had quietly grown there as they’d whiled away their afternoon.
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