There was ice on the river. ’Twas thin, but I felt it crack against my face as I desperately swam the hundred feet or so to the sandbar. I was floundering in the rushes before I dared turn to see if the man was following me, but as soon as I did, I could see I was safe. Hector had been roused by my screams and was fighting with the man at the river’s edge. Their silhouettes loomed large in the wavering light from the fires, the steaming clouds of their breath roiling ’round them. Hector must have taken the knife from the half-breed, for, as I watched in dismay, he thrust that knife deep into the belly of the man who had dragged me. He pushed the blade up, then pulled it down and gutted the man like a fish.
From my hiding place amidst the chattering rushes in the icy water, I vomited forcefully, heaving ’til I thought I had gutted myself. As soon as I could manage, I looked back up to see Hector standing alone on the littered bank, the knife still in his hand, the clouds of his breath swirling in hysterical circles as he panted and drunkenly surveyed his surroundings. The flickering flames of the firelight made it seem as if the shadows were doing a wild dance ’round him.
He shouted for me. I was too terrified to respond. I had just seen him kill two men for no apparent reason and I do not believe it was strange for me to think he might, in his drunken madness, kill me. He shouted again and again, his tone growing frantic. He dropt the knife and dug through the buffalo robe under the canoe, then crawled out and fell down a few times as he stumbled ’round the fire, looking everywhere, shouting my name. He staggered into the river, screaming my name like a lamentation, splashing ’round in the water as if he feared he would find me floating there, face down.
I was trembling so violently I almost couldn’t speak, but I knew I must say something or he would, in all probability, do himself harm. How could I just sit there and watch my husband die? “I’m here!” I called, and he looked up so suddenly that he fell over again.
“Where are you?” he wailed from the lapping water at the river’s edge, and I yelled for him to stay where he was, that I would come to him.
The very last thing I wanted to do in all the world was swim back across that ice-cold channel, but I had no choice. It was either do it or watch Hector drown. At this point the water was warmer than the air anyway, so I plunged in.
The first time I swam I was filled with fear and driven to survive, so I was strong. But the second time I was numb, depleted, exhausted, and terrified of what awaited me on the other side. I sank into the depths several times and spluttered and coughed before slowly continuing to make my way across. I might not have made it had not Hector spotted me and met me near the middle. E’en in his state of inebriation he was a better swimmer than I, and so he grabbed my arm and pulled me the rest of the way back to camp.
We crawled out of the water, both on hands and knees. I slowly stood up, but he stayed down, saying, “Something is wrong with me. Everything is moving.”
I called him every foul name I’d e’er heard in English, pacing back and forth as I yelled at him. He tried to look up at me, but fell over in the process and just lay there in the lapping water, clearly unable to rise. I raised my face to the black sky and screamed. That roused him, and I grabbed his arm and pulled him ’round to push his face into the river. “Drink!” I shrieked at him in his language, determined to purge him of the rum. “Drink the water, you dog!”
He obeyed me without question, drinking/inhaling enough river water to achieve the effect I desired—he was soon vomiting up the contents of his stomach right there beside the bloody fragments of the belly of the man he’d disemboweled. I held his head up, remembering all the family members whose heads I’d seen held thus at one time or another. When he was done, I washed his face with river water, then grabbed his arm and dragged him, moaning, the way the man had dragged me, stopping beside our fire. I dug under the canoe for the bearskin, but as I rolled Hector into it, I heard a noise from the other fire and whirled ’round.
The half-breed was not dead.
He was still on his belly, but either he had moved or Hector had moved him when he crawled out from under him, for he was not where he had been before. I walked slowly over to have a look and saw the hatchet was embedded in his spine a good two inches, but, with a sick feeling in my empty stomach, I realized the wound was not necessarily a fatal blow. With proper care, this man could survive, tho’ with his spine severed he would probably ne’er walk again.
What was I to do? I stood there looking down at him, at the dark pool of blood spreading out and deepening exactly like the one I’d seen ’round the deer, the one I’d crawled from, the one that spooked me into getting lost. I looked down at that blood pool and recognized it and wondered about it—could that have been a Vision? Was it a sign I should just let this poor man lie here and bleed to death?
He must’ve heard me, because he whimpered something in a language I did not know. I was already shivering violently because of the cold, but upon hearing his torment, I shivered in another sort of way. For a moment I numbly watched the blood pool seeping out across the muddy snow. Then I turned and went back to Hector.
When he felt my touch, he moaned and mumbled and tried to get up, but I told him to stop struggling and go to sleep. He obeyed me instantly. With him taken care of, I knew I had to get myself warmed up or I was very likely going to freeze to death.
I added wood to the fire, then crawled under the canoe and wrapt myself in the buffalo robe. Hours passed before I stopt shivering severely enough to make my bones ache. I cried endlessly, and for much of that time the half-breed cried with me. At one point he began begging me in French to help him, but I knew there was naught I could do save put him out of his misery, which I just could not bring myself to do. I covered my ears with my hands and cried louder, to drown him out.
It snowed all night, tapering off at dawn. By then the half-breed had finally fallen silent, but I was still suffering immeasurably, thinking about what I’d done. I kept remembering how excited the young man had been to prove himself to his father. Now he was dead, by my bloody hand. And why? Why? I didn’t understand anything that had happened. I just couldn’t figure it out.
I coughed now and then through the night because of all the icy water I’d inhaled, and when I got up shortly after dawn to add wood to the fire, my fit of coughing woke Hector. He moaned and tried to sit, then clutched his head and fell backwards, moaning some more. I knew exactly how he felt, because I myself have been stumbling drunk a time or two, but I had little sympathy for him. He tried to tell me he was sick; I assured him it was the bad water. I told him he must sip some good water now—slowly, just a bit. He crawled to the river and did as I advised.
It took a while for him to be able to look ’round, but when he finally did, sitting at the river’s edge, he had a baffled look on his face. “What happened?” he asked, gaping at the bloodbath all ’round.
I stood fully enwrapt within the buffalo robe and told him it mattered little—what was done, was done. The important thing, I said, was what we were going to do next.
“Well,” he mumbled, rising stiffly to his feet, “we must go.”
I was flabbergasted. Here we were, in the midst of a carnage he himself had created, and Hector not only had no remorse, no contrition, no sympathy, but apparently not the slightest concern at all. Just a few weeks earlier he had been rackt with guilt because he believed he had somehow wisht his friend dead, but now he cared not a whit about people he had viciously slaughtered in cold blood! When I pointed this out to him, he shrugged and said they had clearly threatened us, and so forfeited their lives. They were, he said, responsible for their own deaths.
As Hector and I argued, he packed things up. I remained motionless, encased in the buffalo robe, hurling invectives at him every time he walked by. At some point he glanced at me and the light was strong enough by then that he could see inside the buffalo robe. He dropt what he was carrying to come grab my shoul
ders, but I gasped and shrank from him, which stung him far more than any of my angry words had done. My movement caused the buffalo robe to fall away from my face, and the blood drained from Hector’s. E’en when Syawa died, Hector was not so stricken, so shocked, so destroyed.
I’m sure I looked awful. I had a split lip, which was swelling e’er larger, and the whole right side of my face was a swollen mass of dried blood and bruises. I couldn’t open my right eye, the socket of which was no doubt blackened, and I had a large knot on my head. I didn’t e’en mention the awful pain in my side I believed was a crackt rib.
But I was so angry I wouldn’t let him look at my wounds. I jerked out of his grasp and said that by putting me in danger he had forfeited his right to touch me. He stood there with an open mouth, his eyes devastated. Glaring with my good eye, I watched as his face turned to stone. Then he lifted his chin and went to gather the rest of our things.
As he finisht breaking camp, I dug through the trader’s packs. Hector told me to leave their things alone, but I ignored him. Considering all the fighting I’d done recently, I decided I needed more weapons than just a hatchet, so I took a hide bundle of knives, a sword, some tools, and a pouch full of metal arrow and spear points. I don’t know why, but I also pulled out the leather satchel containing the beaverskin-wrapt ledgers. I guess I felt bad about killing that poor man and because the ledgers meant so much to him, I just couldn’t leave them to rot on the riverbank. It was bad enough I had to leave him.
When Hector asked about the satchel, I told him it was something he was too stupid to understand. His delicious lips compressed into a bitter line, and I lifted my own chin, glad I had hurt him.
Before we left, I insisted on doing something about the bodies. Hector said wolves would take care of them, but I would not get into the canoe ’til he dragged the corpses into the river. I’m sure it was foolish on my part, but I was inordinately worried about someone finding the carnage and coming after us to hang us as murderers. I reckoned if the dead men were in the river, at least our crimes would be more difficult to trace. Besides—it seemed appropriate to me their misery should end in the Misery.
Pulling the eviscerated man into the water took Hector only a moment, and the flathead, too, was soon swallowed by the current. But when he went to the half-breed and saw the hatchet in his back, he stopt and stared. He looked up at me, his eyes narrowed. I met his gaze unhappily, accusatively, and he turned to drag the body to the river. He cleaned off the hatchet and packed it away without meeting my eyes again.
Hector and I got into the canoe and set off in silence.
~30~
THE SKY WAS DULL gray and my hair was still quite damp. By afternoon the wind picked up again, and e’en inside the buffalo robe I was numb from head to toe. When my hands grew so numb I dropt my paddle, Hector grabbed it from the water, pulled the canoe to shore, started a fire, and bade me sit under the canoe behind the flames. “I know you do not want me to touch you,” he said in a strained voice, “but you must allow me to warm you.” He took off his shirt and wrapt his body ’round mine before pulling the buffalo robe ’round us both.
I leaned the uninjured side of my face against his chest, sucking in his body heat the way a chimney sucks up smoke. “I want you to touch me,” I whimpered. “I was just so frightened . . .”
“Of me?” he asked, incredulous.
“Yes.”
Saying he could remember little from the night before, he asked me to tell him what happened. I told him what I knew, his fingers gently exploring the swollen parts of my face. When I described the way the man dragged me, Hector’s hand stopt in mid-air and began to shake. Suddenly he writhed out of the buffalo robe and crawled across the riverbank to vomit. After he finally stopt heaving, he remained on his knees with his head in his hands, saying he had failed me and could never, ever ask me to forgive him.
And then a very strange thing happened, a thing I ne’er imagined, a thing I could not believe e’en as it was happening to me. I suddenly understood my mother.
All those times she forgave my father, all the times she took him back—I always thought she was insane. But now I understood. There was nothing else she could do. She needed him, and, what was worse, she actually wanted him. When he was sober he was charming, smart, funny, fun. Of course she wanted him. She loved him. And so she forgave him. Time and time and time again. Just the way I was going to forgive Hector. Just the way I must, sooner or later, finally forgive my mother.
I was so much worse than she had e’er been. Her husband did what—made drunken threats, blustered, bullied, lost a few fortunes? Mine snapt people’s necks and tore out their intestines. My father had turned my mother into a screaming harpy who beat and tormented defenseless children. My husband had turned me into a loathsome murderer. But none of this mattered. I still loved him. I still wanted him. And I would forgive him, whether he asked me to or not.
Because just like my mother, I had no choice.
I begged Hector not to dwell on my injuries. “I’ve been beaten more times than I can remember,” I reminded him. “It truly means nothing to me.” He moaned that it meant everything, everything to him, and he would not look at me, he would not come back to me ’til I said that seeing him suffer this way hurt me much more than any beating. At that he looked up sharply, nodded, and went to wash his face and get a long, slow drink. As he came back to wrap himself ’round me again, I told him he must not blame himself for what happened—it was all because of the bad water.
In a raspy voice punctuated with coughs, I told him how the intoxicating spirits had devastated my life long before I was born. I told him about my father and my mother and my brothers and myself and all the ways demon rum had tormented us. He listened silently, his cheek against my hair, his hand absent-mindedly rubbing my arm. Whilst I talked, I couldn’t stop thinking about how those gentle hands which touched me now so tenderly could snap my neck as easily as they had snapt the neck of that flathead. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he had been prepared to accept permanent exile when he thought he broke some petty rule, but he evinced not a flicker of remorse or regret after eviscerating another human being. I understood so little about this man, and yet here I was, commending myself entirely into his hands, body and soul.
What a leap of faith is love.
When I, at long, long last, exhausted myself in talking, Hector quietly asked why my people made the bad water if they knew it was bad. I sighed. It was a reasonable question. “I wish I knew. It’s almost as if we must make it now, as if . . . as if it makes us make it somehow. It makes us do so many things we do not mean to do . . .”
Hector nodded, saying that was the way of Evil Spirits. If he had known the water contained an Evil Spirit, he said, he would have tossed it in the fire.
By this time my shivering had subsided, tho’ my chest was beginning to burn and my cough was getting thick. Hector left me rolled in the buffalo robe as he went to heat some of our dried meat. He warmed water in the drinking horn with hot rocks, then tossed in shredded bark. Nothing e’er tasted better to me than that warm beverage, but I wasn’t much interested in the meat. I ate enough to satisfy Hector, then lay down and closed my eyes as darkness settled in.
Suddenly I was a child again, sick in bed with some combination of my siblings. Throughout my childhood, one or another of us was always sick, and as bad as it was for us to fight each other when we were well, it was much worse to struggle against one another when we were ill. One disease after another, year after year, left us perpetually rolling back and forth in alternate chills and fevers, trying to create a space for ourselves in the crowded bed so we could lie in our own bodily fluids instead of those of someone else.
The worst was the pox. This was, far and away, the most traumatic memory of my early years, the most wretched experience I’d known before that fateful day in May some ten years later. I was in the sickbed with four or fiv
e others, somewhere in the middle of the straw ticking, which was ne’er a comfortable place to be, filled as it was with elbows, knees, and feet kicking from both sides. I was gruesomely ill, but for me, at least, the burning pox were confined mostly to my hands and feet, with only a few erupting on my face. My sister Ellie was not so lucky—her face literally bubbled with the vile pustules. Ellie was seven to my five, and we had formed an alliance against the others, fighting always as a team, side by side. Now we fought the illness together, and I held her close e’en tho’ it made me feel sicker each time I looked at her pox-covered countenance.
Day after day we petted each other and murmured loving encouragements. After moaning and tossing in feverish dreams for more than a week, I dissolved into delirium, regaining my senses a day or two later when my fever finally broke. I awoke in a prodigious pool of sweat and immediately felt bad about befouling the bed. I turned my head to look at Ellie to commiserate, but she was lying on her side, staring at me with vacant, glassy eyes. The curled hand beside her cheek was like a door latch, the ice-cold fingers stiff and hard. I screamed and screamed.
As I lay under a canoe somewhere in the middle of a wild continent, I found myself, once again, face-to-face with the cold cadaver of my dead sister. Her eyes were icy blue, exactly the same as mine, but hers were empty, dead, abandoned, and the pustules on her face bubbled, burst, and oozed; from every one of those popping pox an evil liquid dript and from every sizzling drop of evil liquid a Demon Spirit erupted and writhed and danced. I screamed and screamed, trying to get away, but the flood of dancing demons had fallen upon me, pinning me to the ground. I screamed and kicked and rolled helplessly under the weight of them, which felt like the entire universe of stars sitting on my chest. Then I realized it was the buffalo robe I was kicking and it was Hector I was trying to get away from as he hovered o’er me, his face pale with fear. He said a string of things I could not understand and my head flopt back and forth because I could not keep my eyes open, I could not make myself wake up, and I was hot, hot, so hot with fever. I heard a sob—from Hector or Ellie, I knew not which—and then there was only silence and softness and nothing . . .
The Spirit Keeper Page 29