I sighed. “Yes—you talk. Well. Then I ask you something. You now . . .” I paused, considering carefully how to word my thoughts. “You believe in his Vision—same as before, without him?”
Hector did not hesitate. “Yes.”
“But I think . . . I think you not like me.” I was not coyly fishing for compliments, and I knew Hector would not take it that way. “If you believe I am one he sees in Vision, then how you not like me?”
“It is not for me to like or dislike. You are not what I expected.”
“What you expect?”
Hector looked at the fire and pursed his lips, considering. “Someone like . . . White Buffalo Woman maybe, or maybe the Corn Maiden.”
I waited for him to continue, but he was finisht. I thought for a moment, then smiled and said, “I see. You expect someone not stink, someone not stupid.”
Hector raised his chin and lowered his eyelids, staring at me in a calculating way. “I expected someone who doesn’t cry all the time.”
I tipt my head apologetically. “You expect story-woman. You get crying girl.”
Hector tossed several of the berries into his mouth and chewed for a moment before shrugging and saying, “Not anymore.”
I held my breath. Was he talking about my not crying so much anymore or about my being Syawa’s Spirit Keeper? Either way, this topic was too charged for me, so I steered the conversation in a new direction, to a question I had been dying to ask. “You remember my family house?”
“Of course.”
“I saw man at bottom of . . .” I pantomimed stairs, Hector gave me the word, and I repeated it. “Yes, stairs. I saw dead man at bottom of stairs. You kill that man?”
“Yes.”
“But men you are with know that man! He one of them. You not afraid you kill him, they kill you?”
Hector finished the berries, wiped his hand on his leg, and shrugged. “The Seer said I must kill that man. He said it was part of his Vision. I did as he told me.”
I numbly watched as Hector unrolled his sleeping fur. “I owe you my life,” I said quietly.
He grunted an affirmation as he lay down on his fur. He started to wrap himself up, then stopt to look at me. “Are we done talking?”
I grunted a mocking affirmation and watched as he curled up under his covers. I added wood to the fire and picked up the hatchet before sitting down to ponder what I’d just heard. Only slowly did I perceive the full import of Hector’s words: Syawa had given me an awesome power. Hector always did whate’er the Seer told him to do and he would continue to do whate’er the Seer told him, only now the commands would have to come to him through me.
I wondered—was this, then, why Syawa set me up as his Spirit Keeper? So that I could make Hector do my bidding? ’Twas possible. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it did not matter where my newfound power came from. E’en if this strange situation was naught but a curious side-effect of a gross misunderstanding, the end result was the same.
I needn’t be afraid of Hector anymore.
~21~
AS WE PADDLED WEST on the Misery River, we stopt at a few—but by no means all—of the villages along the way. They blend together in my mind now, for they were all small and similar, nothing like the large towns east of the Great River. The people, too, were different. Whilst the Indians of Pennsylvania were warriors, the people along the Misery were mostly fishermen who had little to do with the world beyond their small stretch of riverbank. They were all, needless to say, astonished by me.
We stopt at these places because Syawa and Hector had stopt on their journey eastward, and Hector felt duty-bound to let the people know how their Journey turned out. At each place, he gestured a summary of Syawa’s Vision, then reviewed the adventures the two of them had on their way to my family’s farm. From that point, I gestured a description of our hike through the forest and a brief explanation of what happened after we crossed the Great River. I was compelled to tell the villagers the Seer gave me his Spirit, because if I didn’t, Hector would. At least if I told them, I could keep the story short and simple.
Tho’ my white skin, red hair, and blue eyes were viewed as wonders in the Indian world, it was the fact that I was a Spirit Keeper which inspired the greatest awe. I disliked the pretense, but saw no graceful way out of it. The benefit to being a Spirit Keeper was that most Indians were deathly afraid of me, which meant they left me alone, and because no one seemed to know what sort of supernatural powers a person with two souls might possess, any odd behavior on my part was always excused as “being the sort of thing a Spirit Keeper might do.”
Whereas I had, at first, been uneasy about stopping in strange villages, I soon realized the advantages. Indian villages were islands of safety and security in the midst of the vast, ominous wilderness, places where people could watch out for each other, love one another, and live comfortable lives. They could also entertain each other, which is where Hector and I came in. As traveling storytellers with a real-life drama to share, we were welcomed and celebrated like royalty. Not only were we given ready-to-eat food in payment for our story, but both Hector and I were able to sleep the whole night without worrying about taking turns at watch.
In addition to food and lodging, we were also given gifts at every place we stopt, but because we gave most of these gifts to other villagers in exchange for gifts they gave us, we mostly just recirculated the wealth of each community. Thanks to these exchanges, I acquired two soft deerskins and thereafter spent my hours at night-watch huddled by the fire, sewing new garments.
For the top I made a laced bodice with roomy armholes for ease of paddling, but because of my fear of sunburn, I left broad shoulder flaps draping o’er my arms like wings. For my lower half I saw no choice but to make breeches like my father’s, tied at both the waist and calf to keep the sun off my legs and the mosquitoes away from my nether regions. I knew my outfit, once completed, would be strange to everyone who saw it, but most people I met were mostly naked most of the time, and Hector rarely spoke to me, so was unlikely to comment on my appearance.
The land we paddled through as we headed west on the Misery was as different from the eastern woodland as were the Indians. Instead of huge, dark forests, we passed scrubland, then open meadows, then more and more wide, rolling grasslands. The grains in the fields were ripening at this time, so one night I made a stuffing for our fish. When Hector, unprompted, said the stuffing was good, I almost fainted from shock. Thereafter we spent many evenings walking the meadows, stripping seeds, which we stored in skin sacks.
During one of these walks I encountered a snake slithering on the ground and nigh jumped out of my skin. I screamed, dropt my seedbag, and ran back to the canoe in the time it took Hector to blink. I was certain he would be disgusted by my cowardice, but he gathered up what I spilt and brought it back to camp where I was cowering. “I will stay closer to you,” he said quietly, “and make sure you see no more snakes.”
Pretty much the only time Hector initiated a conversation was when we were in a village and he needed to confer with me. I found it curious that when we were with others he made it very clear we were a team, a partnership, but when it was just the two of us, we were completely separate, isolated, alone. The breakthrough came one evening when I was preparing dinner and had to ask Hector something—just what, I cannot recall. At any rate, I said, “Hector?” and asked my question, which he answered before adding quietly, “And that is not my name.”
I jumped on the opportunity to start a conversation. I apologized for still not being able to pronounce his name, but pointed out he ne’er used any name at all when addressing me. If he wanted my attention, he usually just grunted. I told him my name was “Katie,” not “Huh!”
He almost smiled at that, but caught himself in time.
Seeing an opening, I told him that “Hector” was actually a famous name amongst my p
eople, an honorable name, the name of one of the greatest warriors of all time. He looked me full in the face for a moment, his interest clearly piqued. “Tell me,” he said, lifting his chin.
I smiled to myself, pleased I had broken through the formidable wall of silence. “It is a long, long, long story,” I warned.
Hector nodded as he returned his gaze to the fire. “We have a long, long, long way to go.”
• • •
I must have been about ten when Father made us read the Iliad aloud. It took the entire winter because he made the boys read the passages in Greek after we girls read them in English. Times were hard for my family, but listening to the trials and tribulations of the ancients somehow made our troubles more bearable. ’Twas comforting to know the same sorts of jealousies, quarrels, and misfortunes that plagued us had been plaguing people for thousands of years and would no doubt continue to plague people for thousands of years to come.
With Hector waiting expectantly, I feared the story of the Trojan War was too complicated, full of abstract concepts which would be difficult to translate. I looked at him doubtfully. “I not speak well. You must help with words.” He shrugged and nodded at the same time, still looking into the fire.
I started by describing the strategically placed city of Troy and the group of city-states that was ancient Greece. I told about King Priam, and his sons Hector and Paris. Then I ran into trouble, because I must explain the involvement of the Greek gods in the lives of men, but Hector readily accepted the notion of powerful beings in some other realm who affected things in our world. Thereafter I had to stop many times to describe objects or ideas I knew no words for, but the challenge became almost a game, with Hector trying to figure out what I was talking about so he could supply the word. He oft corrected my pronunciation or changed my phrasing, but he did so politely, gently, reluctant to break the flow of the story.
After we ate, I explained how Aphrodite rewarded Paris with the love of Helen, a woman already married to someone else, and Hector nodded, saying he knew of a situation where a man from one village stole the wife of a man from another village and the resulting discord led to a big fight. “That’s exactly what happened in Troy!” I exclaimed.
That’s about as far as I got the first night. The next night Hector bade me continue, so, with his help, I explained how the Greeks gathered together, got into big canoes, and went to besiege Troy. There I ran into trouble again. I could explain the concept of “besiege” well enough, but I knew no number-words in Hector’s language. I counted in English on my fingers. Then I picked up some pebbles on the riverbank and counted them out. “Give me the words,” I said to Hector.
He was puzzled. I counted my fingers again. I counted the stones. I counted some sticks. I counted some leaves. Hector finally got it, telling me the words in his language as I counted. I repeated his words, but once we got to ten, the numbers became mere equations—eleven was ten-one, twelve was ten-two, and so on. There were new words for twenty, thirty, forty, etc., but the term for one hundred was simply “ten-ten.” All words beyond that were mere sums of previous numbers.
I frowned, frustrated. Somehow I needed to get Hector to understand a much larger number. I went to the river to gather more pebbles and rocks. I made ten piles of ten, counting each pebble with the words he had given me. He watched closely, curious. When I reached one hundred, I gestured at all the rocks and said “ten-ten” in his language. Hector nodded. I took a bigger rock and gestured to the ten piles of pebbles. “Ten-ten!” I said again, referring to the larger rock. He nodded again.
I collected ten of the larger rocks and lined them up before him. “Ten ten-ten!” I said. “That’s how many canoes the Greeks sent to Troy!” Hector’s eyebrows shot up. I went on to explain the Greek canoes were much, much larger than ours, each holding more than “ten-ten” warriors. “Ten-ten warriors in ten ten-ten canoes!” I said, pushing all my pebbles into one pile with the ten larger rocks. “That’s ten-ten, ten-ten-ten men!”
I lost him. He looked amused as he stared at the rock piles. “No village could gather that many warriors!” he said, clearly convinced I was exaggerating.
I sighed and held my chin on my hand as I stared into the fire. “This war happened many, many years ago,” I said quietly. “Maybe five ten-ten-ten years ago. There are many, many more men in that land now. Many, many more. And there are many, many other lands in that world, each with many, many, many more men than that. They are like leaves on the trees, Hector. They are like stars in the sky.”
Our eyes met and held for a moment. Syawa’s words echoed in my brain, and I had to look away to keep Hector from seeing my tears. He could not understand why I was suddenly upset, but he could see that I was. “That is enough,” he said, trying to make light of it. “You need not talk to me if it is too hard to make me understand. I am not smart, like you.”
“Oh, Hector—the fault is mine, not yours. I just . . . I remember something . . . something he told me. But I want talk—I need talk.”
Hector nodded, managing a feeble smile. “Talk more tomorrow, then. For now, I leave you to your memories.”
• • •
For many evenings thereafter I plodded through the tale of the Trojan War, explaining how the Trojan Hector held off the massive Greek force for nine long years, and how his name became synonymous with loyalty, courage, and steadfastness e’en in the face of certain defeat. I hesitated to tell the end of the Trojan’s story for fear the ignominious death he suffered might offend the man I called Hector, but my fears proved unfounded. My Hector concluded Achilles had an unfair advantage and was, therefore, not an honorable warrior. He also thought the mutilation of the Trojan’s body, tho’ shameful, was the sort of thing men do in war, which was why war was best avoided, and, of course, he was glad to hear Achilles eventually paid for his deeds.
All in all, the story was the perfect ice-breaker, not only because it forced Hector to teach me many new words and phrases, but also because it gave us something to talk about that wasn’t charged with painful personal emotions. Knowing I must speak his language in order to learn it, I was delighted I’d finally found a way to get him to talk with me. But the best part of telling this story came when, after weeks of my halting, garbled delivery, my companion sat staring into the fire, nodding thoughtfully, and after a long pause he said he guessed he didn’t mind if I called him Hector.
• • •
The day after I finished telling the tale of the Trojan War, my monthly returned and, once again, we camped in silence.
Hector and I worked on our separate tasks, near one another but entirely alone. I don’t know how things seemed to him, but for me, at least, the silence felt very different than it did the previous month. It was less strained, less miserable. As I sat sewing, I marveled how quickly time passed—it was already six weeks since Syawa died. I mourned the steady passage of days pulling me farther and farther away from him. Six weeks gone—and the total time of my life with him not twice that. Yet those precious days had changed everything for me, and the six weeks since . . . well, I assumed that e’en if I lived to be a hundred, I would still be trying to figure out exactly what happened during those glorious days I spent with the Seer.
Shortly after my monthly we came to a place where the river looped in an enormous oxbow. To paddle the loop, Hector explained, would consume more than a day, time we could save by carrying the canoe o’er land. He steered our craft to the shore.
By this time my arms and shoulders were strong, but the canoe, filled with our things, was heavy. On the other hand, I had long since decided not to argue with Hector if I could help it, so we got out and began lugging our load o’er a well-trodden path. ’Twas not an easy haul for me, as we walked for a couple of hours, the land sloping steadily upwards the whole way. I tried to keep a steady pace, but before we were done I was calling for a rest every few minutes. I knew the frequent stops we
re frustrating Hector, but, to his great credit, he said not a word.
During one of our breaks, I saw a flock of ducks in a marshy area, sitting on a grassy hillock, watching us walk by. “Look!” I said, hoping to distract Hector from my repeated need to rest. “Those ducks are like the ones Coyote tricked when he was carrying his grass bundle. They watch us now as they watched him. Shall we sing for them, to see if they’ll dance?”
Hector half-smiled at the ducks, and I silently congratulated myself for having gotten a response from him. Then he picked up the front of the canoe and I stooped to pick up the rear.
Suddenly he stopt and dropt the canoe, nearly jerking me off my feet. I dropt my end as well, assuming he must’ve stumbled, but he had turned and was staring at me with a very peculiar look on his face. “How do you know about Coyote and the ducks?” he asked in a strained voice.
I reflected. “He told that story—remember?”
“I remember exactly when he told that story, the only time he told that story in your hearing. It was right after we found you, when we were with your family on our way to the warriors’ village.”
I lifted my face, remembering. “I think you are right. That was when I heard it.”
Hector stared at me, his eyes frightened. “But you could not speak then! You could not understand our words. Do you share his memories?”
I looked down at the rocky pathway, inhaling slowly and deeply. I shrugged as I looked sheepishly up at him. “I . . . I dream of him. Every single night since . . . well. I dream it all over and over—every gesture, every word. That’s how I know the story. He tells it in my head.”
After studying me with narrowed eyes, Hector nodded curtly and turned to pick up the canoe. I did the same, feeling a huge wave of guilt. I knew he was interpreting my knowledge of this story as further proof I was Syawa’s Spirit Keeper, but to me it was merely evidence that I was mentally unstable, fanatically obsessed with a dead man. Either way, this was not a conversation I was eager to pursue.
The Spirit Keeper Page 18