Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  “Well that’s good. It’s becoming for a woman to forget her birthday. Even though it was a little quick in your case.”

  She walked across the room and looked out the open door upon the day and turned back. “I didn’t forget. I just wasn’t awake yet. We going to eat that bird for breakfast?”

  “No we’re going to eat fried potatoes for breakfast, with some green onion cut into em. This chicken we’re going to let cool and wrap up in some clean sacking and carry with us. I thought we’d walk up Perry Stream and then go up one of the little feeder brooks until we find a nice pretty place and have our dinner there. Put up a closed sign. Take the day off. You wanted something nice. I thought a picnic might fit the bill.”

  “A picnic?”

  “Yes.”

  “I ain’t never been on a picnic.”

  “Well,” said Blood. “We’ll change that.”

  “I’m getting sick of fried potatoes.”

  Blood nodded. “A few more days, those pullets settle down, they’ll commence to lay. Then we can have eggs. Fried alone or mixed in with the potatoes. That’ll be good.”

  She said, “I never et an egg.”

  “Sally,” he said. “There’s plenty you haven’t had yet in this life. There’s no need for you to announce everything new.”

  “What if I don’t care for em?”

  “I imagine you’ll like em just fine. And if you don’t, you’ll just eat up anyway and be glad there’s hot food for your belly. Now why don’t you go wash up and get dressed.”

  “You going to be grumpy on my birthday?”

  “Not if I can help it. Go get dressed, however you please, pretty or plain. It don’t matter to anyone but you today.”

  She took up the washbasin and a rag and started for the door and then stopped and looked back at him. “Well, I want to be pretty. I want to be pretty for you. There’s no need for you to spend the day with a frump.”

  He stood and put his hands in the small of his back and stretched, kneading the muscles there. He said, “Go on now.”

  They passed a pleasant afternoon, settled in a dell of soft wild grass between the boles of ancient spruce where the headwaters of a trifling brook ran, bordered both sides with rocks mossbacked and marked with lichen both yellow and orange, the water in spurts of spatter and backsplash before running through a narrow channel into a slight pool deep enough to hold small trout. A bright circle of sunlight slid in crescent motion around the opening as the sun crossed the sky and the rest lay in dapples of shade. The air was pungent with the fernbank that grew across the brook and the scent of fresh water erupted up newborn out of the earth. They ate and lolled in the speckly shade close enough to the full sun so they were warm not hot. Blood napped a little. Luther stalked silent up the small brook after trout that flared ahead of him, some few throwing themselves into the air to scramble over rocks to the next layer up. While Blood slept Sally sat out in the heat of the sun with her dress hiked high onto her thighs and her bodice open as she leaned back on her elbows so her face was turned back for the sun full upon it. When he stirred she sat upright and did the buttons on her front but made no effort to pull the skirt down her legs. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen all of her anyway.

  Blood rose and walked a hundred feet downstream where there was a larger pool at the base of an overgrown hemlock, roots of the tree great bent knees forming the backside of the pool. He was not gone but screened. He undressed there and slid down into the water which when he was seated rose up around his belly. Then he inched back and found the place where the water ran into the pool in a thick rush between smoothed rocks and settled himself so the thrash of water struck directly on his shoulders and the back of his neck. His legs stretched straight before him; his heels dug into the fine gravel so the loosed pebbles ran and struck and fled over his toes. After a time she came down and stood looking at him. He did not move. She said something to him but all he heard was the water jargon breaking at his back. Perhaps louder than needed he told her he couldn’t hear her. She studied him a moment and then began to take her clothes off. When he saw this he stood upright in the pool, the water scarce to his knees. He made no effort to cover himself.

  He said, “There’s not room but for one. Scooch yourself up like I was so the water hits your back and shoulders. It’s the best thing. Like a hundred sweet little hammers working at every muscle.”

  He clambered out with as much grace as a naked middle-aged man could muster before the eyes of a naked girl. He shook himself and gathered his clothes.

  She said, “Don’t get too far away. I don’t want no one coming upon me here.”

  He said, “I thought I’d just go up a bit and if that dog hasn’t terrified all of em, see if I might catch a batch of these little trouts for our supper.”

  “I’m still filled up with that chicken.” Standing right next to him, naked and sunburned.

  “You set in that water a time, your appetite will come back. Go on, get in there now.” And he turned and walked a little sideways around the hemlock and paused and dressed. Heard her gasp as she settled down into the brook.

  He got his handline out of his pocket and pulled some cartilage from the chicken carcass for baits and told the dog to stay where he was sleeping in the sun, stretched out full on his side. The size of him like a prone pony, some beast of the veld. Luther raised his head and blinked at Blood. Blood tossed him the chicken carcass. The dog began to eat, champing the bones as a man might biscuit.

  Blood caught a dozen little trout no larger than the palm of his hand. He cleaned them by opening the vent and prying free the gore with the point of his knife and then dug with his finger for any missing parts. He rinsed the trout in the brook and carried them back down to the opening. He could just see the whiteness of Sally under the heavy hemlock boughs. He made a small fire and impaled each trout on a crotched twig. He sharpened the other end of each stick and ringed the fire with the upthrust fish, as if a circle of them were swimming up toward the sky. He sat and watched them cook, time to time reaching with a piece of wood to rearrange the coals or add some small dry stick to the fire. He carefully turned each fish on its stick to roast the other side. The skin of the cooked side was just black, blistered, the black still showing some residue as a shadow of the trout’s speckling.

  After a while Sally came up from the pool, her clothes settled upon her as if the effort to dress had been near too much, her gait languid, all her movements slow as if the water had drawn something from her and left something else altogether new. She squatted away from the slender smoke-rise of the fire and grinned at him.

  “You were right,” she said. “That water emptied my belly out.”

  “Eat some trout?”

  “I could.”

  “They’re ready.”

  She looked at him and said, “This was nice. This was purely nice.”

  He began to pull the cooked fish away from the fire. Without looking at her he said, “That’s good.”

  She said, “So what do we do now?”

  He turned to look at her, a savage bouquet of trout gathered in one fist. “What do you mean?”

  “Well. I guess what I mean is, I guess we eat and then walk down and get back to work. Idn’t that so?”

  He studied her a moment. He wanted to know what she wanted but hesitated.

  And abruptly recalled the date, the demon-thinking squelched thus far and the night still before him. He thought Give over and see what happens. What he said was,

  “There’ll be men thirsty for a drink after a long Sabbath afternoon I expect. And it could be a party. We could announce your birthday. How’s that sound?”

  She said, “It’s already cost a fair bit of business, this afternoon. It’s your money we’re talking about here. So that’s all right.”

  He held out the fish until she took them. Then he turned back to the fire and gathered up the remaining fish, his own supper. With his back turned he said, “But what would you like? Money asid
e. How would you like to finish this seventeenth birthday of yours?” And did not move to look at her but waited. Keeping busy with the fish.

  “You really want to know? Or you just being nice?”

  He turned. “What do you want?”

  She said, “This has been so peaceful. Just you and me and nobody wanting nothing. I’d like to hold on to it a bit more. What I’d like is to spend the evening, just the two of us, alone. Quiet. Easy. Like this.” She paused and he heard the fear in her voice as if she were asking too much. She rushed on, “I’d work extra, as long as it took, to make up the difference. I would.”

  He stripped a trout from the stick and ate it and tossed the head and bones off to Luther who’d come close in the late afternoon shadows. He wiped his lips with his hand and looked at her. She had not yet eaten. Because he had to, he said, “That’s fair.”

  Thinking, You know better. You certainly do. Blame no one else. You tempted fool.

  * * *

  That morning he’d nailed a cedar shingle to the door with the legend Closed For The Day scribed upon it. In a crude hand someone had penciled underneath To your returned Health Mr. Blood. He studied this in the thin dusk, then discarded any connection, however dim, with his own internal ravage as a vanity. He followed Sally in and shut the door. And barred the door from the inside but also left the dog out as caution against any so bold as to approach. There was nothing gained in an evening off if continual breaches were attempted. The dog would hinder any so brash.

  Not for the first time, Blood considered the nature of the beast. Eight years old, he’d been with Blood from the age of three months. The man Blood obtained him from had both the Wolfhound sire and the Mastiff dam and so Blood knew both as stouthearted bold creatures and had picked the puppy from the littermates because of his size and reserve. Luther was a dog of slow appraisal and resolute loyalty. Blood would never speak of it to another man but sometime during that first year together he realized the dog held a perceptivity of Blood’s needs, of the tenuous and changeable nature of circumstances. There was some alignment of his mind to Blood’s that allowed him to comprehend without commands what was required of him. Blood wondered if this was some aspect of his own nature, some vibratory field the dog keyed to. Blood did not know and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He had no desire to know himself through the mind of the dog. Otherwise he trusted him absolutely.

  The air inside the house was stultified from the closed-up warm day, overlaid with thickened scents of humanity, the odors of living that life itself seemed to abate but absence magnified. Sally was getting a fire going in the kitchen hearth and that would freshen the air. Blood went to her room and opened her narrow high window so air might flow into the house with the door barred. Then out into the drawing night to squat near-blind by the side of the swollen cow, milked and left the bucket outside for the dog. They would need no fresh milk until morning. He entered the enclosure where the young hens and cock had run of the stockade and flapped his arms to drive them into the hutch that was meant to keep bears from hogs and shut and bolted the heavy door. Then back to the tavern. His home, he abruptly comprehended. His first, seventeen years to the day.

  * * *

  They sat in the kitchen with a candle burning on the table. There was a single ladderback chair and a set of plank benches. The fire was small, a single log resting on a heap of coals with the slightest fingers of flames working. Blood had brought in his two good pewter mugs half filled with rum and the pitcher of water and they sat quietly talking: Blood on a bench and Sally sitting on the table beside him, her feet resting on the bench.

  He said, “You favor a high perch.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “I noticed you like to sit up atop something. The stool behind the counter or up on the hogsheads. And look at you now.”

  “I oughtn’t to set on the table I guess.” She did not move.

  “Sit where you like. It was just an observation.”

  “I like to see around me. I learned that young. It don’t mean for sure I’ll see what’s coming but it don’t hurt.”

  “Well, that’s right.”

  “You’re the same way. I seen the way you watch people. Like you’re not doing a thing at all. I know how you work.”

  “Do you?”

  “I believe so. The only real difference between you and me, Blood, is you got the bulk of a man on your side.”

  “You think that’s it?”

  “Mostly.” She sipped from her cup. “There’s men respect you and one’s don’t but there ain’t one I seen yet that don’t have a fear of you in them.”

  Blood smiled with no pleasure. He said, “And you?”

  That girl grin. A glimmer of something else. She looked away. “I’ve got no fear of you.”

  “And other men?”

  Swift, serious, she said, “I fear them all.”

  That was a good thing. He said, “There’s not one you’re a little fond of?”

  “You think I’m a fool?”

  “No. I do not think that.”

  She drank and so did Blood. She said, “I know what I am to these men. Some little bit of time they mostly feel bad about afterward. But it ain’t me they feel bad about, it’s theirselves. It’s what they need I guess. But it don’t have much to do with me. Others see it different most likely. But that ain’t me either. Do you know why I charge on top of you?”

  Blood studied her. Then said, “Everybody wants money.”

  Sally drank again and looked back at him. “No. Well, that’s part of it. But I want them to look at me while they pay. I don’t want any of em thinking every bit of me is yours, neither. I got to have some authority over em. But mostly I don’t want the first one of em thinking it’s anything but what it is. I don’t want some idjit confusing fucking with anything else. That would be the worst thing, don’t you think?”

  Blood nodded, said nothing. Considering how she’d slipped in the bit about remaining someway separate from him. A small alert perhaps except it made sense.

  She paused a moment, perhaps giving him time to sum this. Then went on.

  “But the money. You know what it truly is to me?”

  Blood drank from his mug which was near empty. He guessed hers was too. It was their one nightly dram. His mind was divided. He wanted more. Guessed she did too. He was apprehensive but mildly expansive. He said, “No, I don’t know. What is it but money?”

  She drained her mug and set it down on the tabletop with a precise thump. She peered at him. “You’re going to think I’m mad.”

  “I doubt it.”

  She craned sideways to look at the fire and then back to him. She said, “I only take coin. Silver coin. I don’t take notes, no paper money. You want to know why?”

  He waited.

  She went on. “It’s the moon. Those coins in my hand is like a piece of moonlight captured. Or more like loaned to me,” she said. “But I watch the moon. Up in the sky. And it’s all its ownself. There’s nothing there but moon. White and silver and just rolling across heaven. And it looks to me like a nice place to be. Peaceful. And the moonlight falling. Nights I look out at it and the world can be different. I see that the world is more than how it seems daytimes. And I can hold them coins in my hand. Like someplace I never been and never will go to but I know is there.”

  And she stopped.

  Blood said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

  She rose from the table to stand on the bench and stepped to the floor. She turned to him and said, “Isn’t that the worst foolishness you ever heared?”

  Blood drained off his cup and choked and coughed. His throat a blistered tube. His eyes watered. “Not the worst,” he said. “But close. Close enough.”

  He looked upon her erect up before him. Bent forward, intent upon his verdict, her face screwed tight, her arms folded over her chest.

  “Oh Sally,” he said. “Go ahead. Go right ahead. Love that moon. It’s the most faithful thing you could ask for.�
��

  Much later. A tin pitcher of rum on the table now and a bucket of water with the dipper tilted across the top. A pair of new logs on the fire and the candle had consumed itself. Outside, Luther had bayed once and that was all. She sat cross-legged on the table with her skirt pulled down over her knees. Just room for their cups between them.

  “They say you killed your wife.”

  “Is that all they say?”

  “No.”

  “I told you not to pester me with what you heard.”

  “I know.”

  They were quiet. Both drank. The firelight was grown liquid, runnels lapping and receding as the logs settled and seethed.

  “She died,” he said. “In an accident.”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It would seem so to you.”

  “Not to you.”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t you be feeling sorry for me.”

  “If it was a accident you don’t carry blame for it.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She paused then and drank, looked away from him. Then back. “So you was responsible some way for it? You caused it to happen?”

  He considered rising and ending it. He wasn’t sure he trusted himself to continue. He wasn’t sure he trusted her. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t hurt her. But he remained seated and took up his pewter cup instead, turning it in his hands, watching the light soft in the metal. Then he looked at her and said, “Not the way you think.”

  “All right.” But he heard the warble of disbelief.

  He sighed and drank and refilled it from the pitcher and drank again. He set the cup on the table, wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at the girl. Her eyes upon him the gaze of wisdom certain unto itself, the gaze of one who has witnessed most all the profusion of bad that life may offer its hostages. One whose notion of humanity extended not much further than ever-changing laws of behavior she must decode against what harm was coming her way. And Blood saw it was not redemption after all that she offered, though he’d never truly believed that. She was a tender balance against the weight of his life. Thought unobtainable and more than he’d dare hope for.