Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  A big fire—the logs crisscrossed waist-high—had already been laid inside a circle of stones. Hawkes fell to his knees, struck sparks from a flint and steel onto a bit of birchbark tinder, blew the tinder into flame, and placed it carefully at the center of the fire. Soon the whole wigwam of wood was ablaze in the hot evening, and the travelers moved away from it.

  Ash unhitched the litters from the horses and laid them side by side on the ground. Rose opened one of her trunks and rummaged through it. Hawkes sat down near her on the moss and began to eat, dipping two fingers and a thumb into a sack and stuffing whatever was inside rapidly into his mouth. Then he chewed, very deliberately, for a long time.

  Betsy put a pot on the coals and stirred it with a wooden spoon. She had carried porridge all the way across the grassland. The flames made a lot of red light in the dark woods, reflecting from the trees to create the illusion that they were in a cave.

  “What is this stuff?” Ash asked.

  “Nocake,” Hawkes said. He turned his slow eyes to Fanny. He reached into the sack with his eating fingers, pulled out a big pinch of nocake, and offered it to her.

  She put it into her mouth and chewed. It was tasteless and so dry that Fanny wondered how it would be possible to swallow it.

  “What’s it made of?” Oliver asked.

  “Indian corn,” Hawkes said, watching Fanny as she chewed. “It swells up inside you if you drink water before and after. Keeps hunger away.”

  “It’s too dry to swallow,” Fanny mumbled.

  “Work some spit into it,” Hawkes said. “It’ll go down all right.”

  Fanny chewed, forcing saliva out of the roof of her mouth. The nocake, made of parched kernels of maize that had been pounded in a stone mortar and mixed with salt and molasses, doubled and trebled in mass as it absorbed saliva and became chewy and even pleasant to the taste. Hawkes watched, nodding in approval.

  Fanny swallowed.

  “Have some water,” Hawkes said. “Now you know how to do it in case you’re captured by the Indians.”

  Hawkes tied up his sack of nocake, put it back into the big pocket in his homespun shirt, and lay down at the spring to drink. When he rose to his feet, he went off into the darkness without a word, followed by his dogs. He didn’t come back that night.

  One by one, the party stretched out on the moss and went to sleep. Fanny thought that she might never fall asleep. Rose, wrapped in her cloak, lay beside her on the moss groaning with a stomachache. She had eaten too many strawberries. Every few minutes she would jump to her feet, grasp Fanny’s hand, and pull her along with her as she ran into the forest.

  “Ah, Fanny, my poor, poor stomach,” she moaned, holding her skirts under her arms and looking fearfully into the darkness. “Even the strawberries are poison in this horrible place.”

  Finally Rose fell asleep, whimpering in her dreams. She was afraid of Indians; they all were. Betsy gasped with fear even in her sleep. Ash sat with his back against a tree and Fanny could not tell if he was asleep or if he was watching her again. Oliver had brought his pistols and he slept with them crossed on his chest. The fire shifted, sending sparks crackling upward. They died long before they reached the roof of the forest, and soon the fire died down to a dull red glow.

  A half-moon hung in the sky, suffusing the woods with a skimmed light that was strong enough to silhouette the boles of the ancient oaks and chestnuts and maples for several hundred feet in all directions. An owl hooted.

  Fanny got up and walked away from the camp, looking over her shoulder as she went to make sure that she could still see the glow of the coals behind her. Ash sat against his tree like a dead man, sound asleep.

  Fireflies blinked among the shadowy trees. Watching them, Fanny stumbled into a brook, the continuation of the stream that flowed out of the spring, and fell to her knees in the shallow water. She climbed out, removed her shoes and stockings, and wrung the water from her soaked skirt. She walked on with the wet cloth slapping against her bare legs. This made her calves itch. There seemed to be a place ahead where there was more light. She walked on and came to a small meadow. It was filled with deer, fifteen or twenty animals, some with antlers in velvet. All the heads were up, rounded ears quivering, eyes glimmering like gilt. Hundreds of fireflies flickered among the deer. When Fanny appeared at the edge of the wood, the deer froze for a moment, and then they bolted all together, bounding away into the darkness with the fireflies swirling behind them and their white tails and rumps flagging as they went.

  It was a spectacle of almost unbearable beauty, and Fanny, who had not cried since Henry died, began to sob. What if Henry was looking down on this scene from heaven, instead of rotting by the Thames in a grave full of filthy water?

  She had seen herself only once, while drowning in the harbor at Honfleur. Even now she could summon the picture of herself, or Fanchon, whichever girl it had been, and the swirl of hair and cloth and limbs and escaping breath. Had her father seen her as she drew close?

  She had been ready to die. Perhaps she had died and America was the other world. Since coming here she had thought of nothing but the dead, and had lived only among the dead: Oliver, who died with Henry; Rose, who had never been alive in the first place; Betsy, who had lost every power except grief; Ash, who cared nothing for life on earth; the Americans, who had no past.

  Biting her lips, Fanny leaned back against a tree, crushing her head and body into its rough bark.

  In the delirium aboard the Pamela she had often been under the water with Philippe. He seized the drowning girl, who was amazed by his strength, he drew her up into the air, he let her breathe again, he drove the water out of her lungs with an embrace, he looked at her with love. He had feared her death. In those dreams, he never spoke.

  “Why so silent?” she whispered now.

  She knew that she would never see him again. She gazed at the field where the deer had been, barely able to believe that they had ever existed.

  11

  When Betsy Ash woke on the first morning in the forest and saw the Indians, she did not scream or try to run away. She was very calm; her mind worked its way from one possibility to the next. She wondered why Hawkes’s dogs weren’t barking, and then remembered that Hawkes had gone away.

  The men were asleep. The camp was defenseless. Had death come for her, or did her foreboding about kidnapping mean that the Indians were going to capture her and her unborn child with her? Seeing the Indians standing on the rocks above the camp in the vaporous light of early dawn, three squat figures with brown faces and wrinkled brown paunches, she realized that they could easily have killed everyone in the camp in their sleep. Yet they had not done so. This was an important fact. Betsy found herself thinking very clearly. Perhaps Indians did not kill people while they were asleep. They had strange religious beliefs, and this could be one of them.

  The Indians were incredibly alert. They had known at once that Betsy was awake. The tiny movement of her eyelids, the small change in her breathing, were enough to warn them. The instant her eyes opened, they stared at her, ignoring everything and everyone else. They were still staring at her. Transfixed, she stared back. Betsy, who had imagined this scene so many times before it became reality, felt a deep calm take hold of her mind and body.

  One of the Indians held something in his hand, half-hidden behind his back. The light was not strong enough to see exactly what it was. As abruptly as they had begun, the Indians had stopped looking at Betsy. They just lost interest in her, and turned their six black eyes on Ash, who was sound asleep with his back against the tree and his chin on his chest. The light was growing brighter, but because it was behind the Indians, Betsy could not see them very well. She became aware of movement elsewhere in the camp. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that Fanny was awake and sitting up. Rose was still asleep beside her with her flaxen hair half in and half out of the cloak in which she had wrapped herself.

  Fanny did not see the Indians. Betsy did not warn her or make any
sign that she herself was awake. She lay absolutely still and watched. The Indians were going to do something. They did not speak to each other or even move, but some sort of current passed among them. Betsy sensed it.

  The Indian in the middle stepped forward until he was at the very edge of the high rock. He still held the long object in his hands. Stiff-armed, he held it well away from his body. Was it a bow, a spear, some other kind of Indian weapon? Would they fire arrows into the sleeping men? Betsy could not make it out; the light was still too dim. The Indian leaned forward again, peering at Ash. He seemed to be judging the distance between himself and the sleeping Englishman.

  Suddenly the Indian rocked back on his heels, swung the object around his head like a sling half a dozen times, and threw it at Ash. It made a whirring sound as it passed through the air. Betsy watched its blurry flight with interest. The Indians were watching too, leaning forward and looking up at the flying object as if they wanted to memorize its every detail. It never occurred to Betsy to warn her husband or to interfere in any other way. Whatever happened was meant to happen.

  The Indians paid no attention to her. Ash woke up. The blacksnake the Indian had thrown at him landed on his shoulder and wrapped itself around his neck. It was at least six feet long and as big around as Ash’s forearm. The blacksnake, a placid eater of rodents, is perfectly harmless. Ash did not know that. He did not see the Indians; he thought the snake must have dropped from the trees and he looked up in terror, thinking that the whole canopy of branches might be alive with them, that it might start raining snakes. How could there be just one snake in a place where wild things always came in thousands? Ash ceased to be one of the most learned men of his time and became, in an instant, the first man seeing the first snake.

  He leaped to his feet, shrieking in his extraordinary voice. The Indians hopped up and down when they heard him and whooped in reply. Everyone who was still asleep woke up at once. Ash whirled about in a mad dance and fell over Oliver. The snake was still cold after the long night, so it was very sluggish in addition to being confused by being whirled around the Indian’s head and thrown fifty feet through the air. It tried to get away, undulating its thick body.

  Ash thought that it was trying to coil itself around his neck. He was gripping it about midway down its body. As the serpent squirmed in its frantic effort to escape, it slipped through Ash’s sweaty hands, growing ever longer, as if it had the power to slither upward on thin air. Three feet, then four feet of snake protruded from his fists. Ash stared in horror at its flat head with its eyes like yellow seeds and its flickering vermilion forked tongue.

  The portion of the snake that waved in the air in front of Ash’s face was now longer than Ash’s arms. It could bite him whenever it wished. Ash was certain that he was going to die, but he could not let go. He ran through the dead fire, struggling with the snake. Oliver saw that Ash must have help; he knew that he, Oliver, was strong enough to control the snake, even kill it, if he could get his hands on it. He ran after Ash, shouting, and when Ash stopped in his tracks, he crashed into him. The two men and the snake fell down together in a powdery explosion of wood ashes. By now Ash was holding the snake by the last foot or so of its tail. It escaped at last and wriggled away toward the rocks.

  “Kill it!” Ash cried. “Kill it!”

  He scrambled toward Oliver’s pistols, lying a few feet away. But the snake disappeared into a fissure in the rocks.

  On top of the rock, the three Indians danced up and down, laughing uproariously and slapping each other loudly on the bare skin.

  Hawkes had come back. He was laughing too.

  “Nipmucks,” he said, looking up at the giggling Indians. “Silly bastards. But they sure woke Ash up in a hurry.”

  Now Oliver saw the point and began to laugh. He looked at Ash to share the joke, but Ash was still breathing hard and staring wildly at the crack in the ledge into which the blacksnake had fled. Dusted with ashes, he was grayer than ever.

  12

  The most intense sexual memories often involve uncompleted acts. So it was with Edward Ash when he recalled his moments with Fanny in the cabin of the Pamela. His mind insisted on reliving this scene. It had stored every detail: the violent trembling of Fanny’s limbs, the lips cracked by fever, the eyes brightened by it, the heavy damp hair, the water running out of the twisted cloth over the little golden breasts with their dark foreign areolas, the parted knees, the odor of vinegar. After the bath, Fanny stood up again, too innocent to understand shame, and lifted her arms over her head, but this time …

  He had prayed in order to overcome his sexual obsession for Fanny, but praying to be freed of the haunting image of her feverish body lying in the bath aboard the Pamela only made the image form again, even more vividly, in his mind, so that his flesh overcame his spirit even as he prayed to be vouchsafed the opposite effect. As he walked westward through the great wood, Ash repeated, in time with his footsteps, the same silent phrase over and over again: Turn from that girl your lustful thoughts.… Turn from that girl your lustful eyes.…

  This was, of course, a form of prayer, though by now Ash had otherwise ceased praying altogether. His voice had not been heard in the night at the Williamses’; it was not heard in the forest. What had been difficult for him aboard ship became impossible as soon as he set foot in America, as though crossing the water had separated him from the man he had been in England, creating a new, diminished version of himself.

  He did not doubt that this new Ash was destined to be tested in some unexpected way in the wilderness, and that his passion for Fanny was part of the test. Accordingly, Ash accepted his new status as a mute, as he had accepted his old powerful gift for prayer, as an example of God’s work. By these baffling signs the Lord must be instructing him to leave off praying for a while and occupy his mind with other interests. That is what Ash’s reason told him. But he knew very well that he was putting his immortal soul in hazard by continuing to prefer the memory of a girl’s body to the image of Christ. That the two were very much alike did not occur to him.

  Ash reverted to the remedies of adolescence. He took cold baths, he exercised, he talked about football with Oliver and discussed witchcraft with Rose. In his struggle with his own lust for Fanny, he was blind to Rose’s passion for him. There was something soothing about Rose’s stupidity; her clumsy questions exasperated him, and when he was exasperated he could think of nothing else, not even sex. Rose mistook his exasperation for interest, so he avoided her as much as possible. Nevertheless she would find him and he would hear her voice behind him.

  “What does God say about magic?”

  Sometimes, while he was quoting the inventory of the black arts from Deuteronomy (“There shalt not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of the times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer”) or explaining how evil existed by God’s design in order to strengthen the good, Fanny would appear with her dark hair rippling around her slender form, and Ash’s eyes would snap away from Rose’s spellbound face.

  At such moments, he would talk all the louder for a moment in an unconscious effort to drown out his thoughts as an agonized look came over his face, and then he would stop speaking and turn away. Rose thought that he was affected, as Oliver and so many other men had been, by her own beauty. Afterward, Ash would be silent and withdrawn, marching along through the filtered light with a stern, composed expression that made him look, Rose thought, more like a Roman than ever.

  Ash did not suffer all the time. He found moments of peace—usually in the form of a religious idea. Ash was, of course, exceptionally susceptible to such ideas. Even his passion for Fanny was a religious idea: self-denial. In the Nipmuck Indians, Ash found an unexpected opportunity for philosophical speculation. Almost from his first moments in America, he was deeply interested in Indians. He had not expected this to happen
; savages had never before played any part in the life of his mind. He regarded them as falling somewhere below the Jews and the Mohammedans in the order of beings that existed between Christians and the animals. Those who did not know Christ, and know Him truly, as He was portrayed in the Scriptures, were of little interest to Ash. Yet on the mountain in Galilee, Jesus had said to His disciples, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them.”

  Were the Indians a nation, and if they were, was that somehow the reason for Ash’s painful journey to America? Did it explain the temptation that had drawn him here? Was it possible that his lust for Fanny was a sign from heaven that some great work—even the conversion of the savages—awaited him here? Was this torment of the body the means by which God wished him to understand His will, by overcoming it?

  Lebbaeus Williams, who was fond of quoting the Boston divine Cotton Mather, who was an in-law of the Williamses’, had told Ash that Mather believed that the great epidemic that ravaged the Indians a year or two before the Pilgrims arrived had been a sign of God’s plan to prune the wilderness of inferior growth in order to make room for a hardier one—the English Christians who were then getting ready to sail for New England.

  What epidemic? asked Ash. What were the victims’ symptoms? Williams had not known the details.

  Now, in the forest, the three Nipmucks who had tossed the blacksnake at Ash stood near the fire, chewing bacon. Ash had quickly forgiven them, and then made friends with them by chirping them close, as if they were strange dogs, and rewarding them with bits of food when they approached. He discovered that they loved fat and salt, and every night now they turned up by the campfire to be fed. By day they drifted among the trees, just within sight of the English, keeping pace without actually making contact.