Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Instinctively she pressed her feet together and held her arms stiff against her sides. Like two knives, Fanny thought, their naked bodies fell side by side down the gray face of the cliff. Fanny’s hair, falling more slowly, streamed above her. The descent took place in less than a second, but Fanny nevertheless saw Philippe smiling beside her, saw the high waterfall, saw the birds wheeling above the birches and recognized them as swallows, felt the spray on her skin.

  She struck the water feet-first, having glimpsed Philippe as he cleaved the surface an instant before her, and then plunged into the bone-chilling water, sinking to the bottom. There she met Philippe, who looked at her solemnly through the greenish water and took her hand again. Her hair floated all around her. They pushed against the bottom and shot to the surface.

  It was only two or three strokes to the black rock. The granite was bathed in sunlight, and the smooth heated surface seemed warmer than it really was against Fanny’s skin. They began kissing while they were still wet, but soon they were dry.

  A moment later Fanny gave one little sharp gasp of surprise. Philippe paused. She opened her eyes and lifted herself toward him, hearing the roar of the water, smelling the oil in his skin coming back to the surface, touching his hair and his scars, seeing his face change, then become itself again, then change back.

  He throbbed within her like a heart. Fanny changed too.

  8

  Because the muscles of her abdomen were so strong, Rose’s pregnancy did not begin to show until the sixth month. Even then, the presence of Used to be Bear’s child in her womb could only be detected when she was undressed. Rose was not surprised by this; during her two pregnancies by Robert her belly had been so flat that her husband had only believed that she was pregnant when he felt the fetus moving.

  This new child, on whom Rose’s whole future depended, was late to quicken, but kicked more lustily than either of her stillborn girls had ever done.

  “I’m quite sure it is a boy,” Rose told Oliver when she informed him of her condition. “It is very lusty.”

  She had come into Oliver’s bedchamber in her nightclothes. Standing beside his bed, she opened her robe, lifted his hand, and placed it firmly on her bare stomach. The baby’s foot thumped against his palm. Rose put Oliver’s unresponsive hand back on his chest where she had found it and gave him a tender look. This was the first time they had touched each other since the accident with the musket, and only the third or fourth time they had spoken since Rose returned from captivity. Rose was unchanged by her adventures and her pregnancy except that her complexion appeared to be somewhat more luminous.

  “Virgin birth agrees with you,” Oliver said.

  “We’re so fortunate that it happened before your injury,” Rose said. “I know that we’ll never be husband and wife, in the old way again after what has happened. You’re right to blame me; I should never have been so upset about a cat, but you know I hate all cats. At least you’ll have a son to carry on in Alamoth.”

  By now, six months after the burning of Alamoth, Oliver’s stump was nearly healed. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. One of them ended in a big bunioned foot, the other halfway up the shin in a withered purply stub. Rose turned her face away.

  “Are you saying,” Oliver said, pointing to the small mound beneath the silk dressing gown, “that whatever it is you’re carrying around in there belongs to me? Look at me, Rose.”

  “Please cover yourself before I do,” Rose said, tugging at his coverlet. “The child will be marked.”

  “How in God’s name did you manage it?” Oliver asked.

  Rose opened her eyes. Oliver was counting on his fingers. A look of comprehension came into his face. He began to guffaw.

  “The Indians!” he cried. “Which one was it? Or was it all of them?”

  Rose’s eyes glistened. “How could you?” she asked, biting her fist. “How could you?”

  Oliver’s own eyes were merry. “Ten little Indians,” he said. “By God, Rose, it must have been something to see. Pinned at last.”

  “Oh, how can you be so cruel?” Rose said. “How can you laugh? If what you’re saying was true, instead of a filthy lie, it would be even crueler to say it. You’ve spewed all over me often enough, horrible sticky stuff.”

  “Not on this side of the ocean,” Oliver said. “You’ll have to scrub the paint off it before you have it baptized.”

  Oliver shouted for Hawkes, who slept in the passageway with half a dozen other refugees from the burned town. Six months after the disaster, the Manor was still packed with homeless men, women, and children. They spent their nights on the floor, all mixed in together, so that even during the day, when they were working in the fields, the house smelled of sweat and dung and the pungent fluids of copulation.

  By the time Hawkes appeared, Oliver was standing on one leg beside his bed. “I’m giving you this room, Gus,” he said. “Guard Missis Barebones well; she’s had a terrible ordeal. With your help, I’m moving with all my worldly goods to a safer place. First me, then the worldly goods.”

  Oliver threw his arm around Hawkes’s shoulder and hopped past Rose’s immoble figure and down the stairs.

  “I want all the rum brought to the hiding room,” Oliver said. “Then send me my nurse.”

  Supplied by Hawkes with plenty of rum and food, quills and ink and paper, and the companionship of Hepzibah, Oliver remained below ground. He wrote to Fanny nearly every day, although he had no means of sending the letters and nobody was sure that she was alive.

  As his physician, Ash disapproved of this arrangement. It was damp and dark in the stone chamber, and as Ash knew better than anyone, night and day were the same to the person inside.

  While Ash examined Oliver’s stump, Oliver sipped rum from the bottle. He drank a quart of the stuff every day, a sip at a time, so that he was never insensible, but always just one dram short of falling down unconscious.

  “If you go on drinking rum in this way you will die,” Ash said, rolling the healed but still-tender stump between his palms.

  Ash had done a splendid job; the stump was curing perfectly. There would be no need to operate again or scrape dead tissue from the bones, as often happened in cases of this kind.

  Oliver was not bothered by Ash’s warning. He held Hepzibah on his lap and a bottle of rum in his hand.

  “Die of drink, will I?” he said. “That must be the Almighty’s design. He sent His Indians to burn and smash everything in Alamoth except the kegs of rum.”

  He pulled the bodice of Hepzibah’s dress outward and peeked down it to observe the quivering flesh beneath.

  “It’s been days since you’ve seen sunlight,” Ash said. “It’s nearly Midsummer. The farmers are haying, the carpenters are building. It would put heart into them to have you outside watching and encouraging.”

  “Yes, they’d all say, ‘There’s the toadstool come up through the ground.’ I’d rather come up down here where it’s nice and dark.”

  Hepzibah flushed and giggled. Guffawing, Oliver lifted her large left breast, closing one eye in concentration as if guessing its weight.

  “Does he eat?” Ash asked Hepzibah.

  Hepzibah shook her head. A bowl of food stood on the table, untouched. Ash wrapped up Oliver’s stump and laid it back down on the stool. Oliver grinned at him.

  “Will the foot grow back by next Shrove Tuesday?” he asked.

  “No,” Ash said. “Not as soon as that.”

  “Fanny told me you’d buried my foot so I’d have it in the next world. Is that so?”

  Ash did not reply. It was the first time Fanny’s name had been mentioned to him in weeks, and he was overcome by strong feeling. Oliver did not notice; he was frowning and shaking his head in bafflement as he tried to overcome the effects of the rum and remember exactly what he had intended to say. At last it came back to him.

  “Something about Fanny,” he said. “Wait, I have this letter from Joshua. He’s bringing the Pamela to Boston to
see if I want to go to Canada to fetch Fanny home.”

  “For certain she’ll be very welcome,” Hepzibah said.

  Ash gave Hepzibah a stern look. She gazed saucily back at him. Oliver pushed her off his lap.

  “Get out,” he said. “Bloody lies. I saw the savages steal her—saw them. She was screaming. Get out!”

  Hepzibah left. Slanderous talk about Fanny infuriated Oliver. Her supposed treachery was still the talk of the village: the papist whore, the spy, the secret Catholic, the child-thief.

  “I can’t go to sea on one foot,” Oliver said. “It will have to be you. Ransom, that’s what the Frogs want.”

  Oliver swayed on his stool. Ash tried to take the rum bottle out of his hand, but Oliver closed his fingers tightly around it and swung it out of reach.

  “About Fanny,” Oliver said. “I’ve sent Hawkes to Boston for another paper from the lawyer. I’ll sign it and then you can sail to Canada and give it to her.”

  “What paper?” Ash asked.

  “The deed to the ship. I’m giving Fanny my share in the Pamela,” he said. “Then she can do as she likes, marry or not, go or stay, be mistress to the Prince of Wales or take holy orders. She must go back to England. These Christian bastards in Alamoth want to kill her.”

  “What about yourself? Your wife is with child. What will they do if you give everything away?”

  “That’s nothing to do with me.”

  Oliver’s face, shiny from drink, was a mask of indifference.

  “Wait until you see the child before you burn every bridge,” Ash said. “It’s only two more months.” “Wait? What for?”

  “You may love it more than you think possible,” Ash said.

  9

  Philippe sensed that the buck was coming, and so he looked for the last time at the place where he knew the deer was going to be and drew the bowstring back to his right ear. Then he closed his eyes. Now he was absolutely motionless. Fanny lay beside him on the powdery floor of the forest and fixed her eyes on a patch of sunlight a few paces farther down the hill-side. Earlier, a doe had passed through it. Off to their left, Philippe had explained in signs, a buck was circling, following the sexual musk secreted by the glands located in the split between of the female’s hooves.

  The buck came into sight. It was still some distance from the patch of light. The animal froze, one forefoot raised high, and smelled the air. The wind was blowing across its nostrils from left to right; Philippe and Fanny were on its right, so it did not detect them. Its long ears twitched and swiveled. In another place it might have heard the hunters breathing, but the roar of the river muffled sound.

  The buck was a fairly big animal, well-fleshed and young, with a wide rack of antlers. The horns were just out of velvet; in recent days Philippe and Fanny had been hearing the rattle of antlers as rutting bucks fought over does. As the buck moved along the contour of the hillside, walking a few steps, then stopping, it vanished and reappeared repeatedly as its coat and antlers blended with the foliage. A fallen tree blocked the trail. The deer collapsed its splindly legs, laid its antlers back along its spine, and slipped beneath the trunk like a dog wiggling under a fence. On the other side of the barrier the buck paused, stepped, sniffed the trail, froze again, and walked into the patch of sunlight.

  Philippe released the arrow. Then he opened his eyes. The deer saw the two minute flecks of white that were the balls of Philippe’s eyes, saw the vibration of the straightening bow, and heard the twang of the bowstring because the arrow that severed a carotid artery in his withers did not kill it instantaneously.

  With the arrow still in its flesh, it leaped straight up into the air to the height of its own head, came down, looked around alertly as if it expected to go on living. It bounded along the hillside in five or six prodigious jumps that resembled an attempt to fly, and fell down dead.

  Philippe was already running after the animal with another arrow fitted to the bowstring, but by the time he reached it, nearly all the blood had run out of it. He pricked the buck’s moist eye with the arrow to make sure it was dead, then rolled the warm carcass over onto its back and began to skin it.

  Fanny crouched down to watch; she did not yet know how to do this. Philippe went slowly, demonstrating. Working with his left hand because his right was trembling violently from the strain of holding the bow, he cut around the anus, slicing off the scrotum, turning the knife edge upward and slitting open the belly from vent to breastbone. As he made this cut, his whole hand disappeared inside the deer to protect the viscera from the knife point. He pulled out the guts, wrapping the liver and the heart in ferns.

  Then he drew his bloody forefingers along the lines of his cheeks and across the bridge of his nose and did the same to Fanny. The fresh blood, which was slightly warmer than her skin, itched a little and smelled of salt.

  “You shot before you opened your eyes,” Fanny said.

  “Did I?” Philippe said. “Be careful not to let the hair of the deer touch the meat. It spoils it.”

  Philippe sliced off a strip of liver and ate it raw. Fanny shook her head no when he offered some to her. She had not smelled blood since Rose showed her Used to be Bear’s corpse. Philippe grunted like an Abenaki as he chewed up the last of the liver.

  “Tell me about shooting arrows with your eyes closed,” Fanny said.

  “The deer can see your eyes if they’re open, so you must close them when you hunt.”

  “Then how do you see the deer?”

  “With your eyes closed.”

  Philippe kissed her. He tasted of the deer he had killed. He lay back, carrying her with him in his arms, looking into her eyes with great seriousness as if her existence had made it possible to invent the act of love. He was always like that. He held her face between his hands and kissed her lips, delicately tracing their outline with his own lips, then tasting her tongue.

  “It’s a useful trick,” Philippe said, “seeing things with your eyes closed.”

  Fanny tasted nothing now but the familiar flavor of her husband’s mouth. They were lying on a bed of moss. Philippe stood up and got undressed. So did Fanny. Sunset bathed the tops of the beeches, tinting the small fluttering leaves with salmon and violet lights. Lying on their clothes, which Fanny had spread over the moss (after a summer together they could wait the extra moments), the tastes and odors of their bodies altered.

  Philippe lifted Fanny up and fitted her onto himself. She crossed her ankles behind him, and as she was drawn toward the center of their marriage she smelled on his skin the earlier sleep-blurred scent of their morning love-making, in which, feeling Fanny’s lips, Philippe woke to find his wife’s head in his hands and then drew her into his arms, tasting salt on her tongue and then tasting the tongue beneath the salt and feeling her skin and the grip of her body as she had been the night before and all the times before that.

  Ah, Fanny whispered as she always did as it began again, body joining to body, thinking, How can this be true, how did I always know these mysteries that we have taught each other, how can I ever live for a day without this, what if he dies like all the others?

  Reading her mind, Philippe told her silently, Stop thinking. He closed his eyes. What did he see?

  Fanny listened to the river in the Gorge and thought about the deer, slowly, from the beginning, watching it approach the pool of sunlight, watching Philippe with the bow drawn and the gray mottled feathers of the Abenaki fletching against his tanned skin, the thumb and forefinger pinching the arrow and holding back the whole force of the bow, the tendons taut on the back of the hand, the raised muscles in the forearm, the buck with his hoof drawn up ready to spear the earth, the pool of sunlight waiting, the buck and the sunlight in Philippe’s mind, the animal sensing the man, knowing the danger but knowing it too late, and then with its wonderful eyes seeing the arrow in flight, seeing the eyes of the hunter as they opened just as the arrow struck.

  Fanny shuddered and cried out, the deer flew upward in her memory and disso
lved. Philippe opened his eyes. He looked down into Fanny’s face with such sympathy that Fanny thought, when she opened her own eyes again, that perhaps he did not love her after all, that she was like the deer, something he had imagined in its innocence and beauty and then made real by killing it.

  He touched her cheek and put his finger to her lips. She kissed it, tasted salt, and realized that her face was wet with tears, as it always was when she thought that she would die of love.

  Now that the beechnuts were beginning to fall, Philippe carried the jaeger rifle again. He was on the watch for bears, but never again observed them in a flock as he and Used to be Bear had done when they were boys. All the same, the grove of beeches was a paradise for bears, and Philippe warned Fanny to be careful; she already was.

  In strawberry time she had seen individual bears grazing in the meadows along the bluff, and later, while raspberrying, she heard one gobbling fruit and snorting on the other side of the bush. She backed away slowly, and after taking four or five steps she was able to see the bear. It was standing on its hind legs, salivating; the white patch on its chest was stained pink by berry juice. One of its ears had been chewed off.

  The bear lifted its hoglike snout and swung it from side to side. Fanny was menstruating. The bear smelled the blood and gave her a slow puzzled look with its weak eyes. Fanny kept on walking backward, slowly and steadily. The thorny branches of the raspberry bush were tangled in the animal’s fur. The bear attempted to crash forward through the bush, but the springy branches held it back. It rose to its hind legs once more, gave Fanny another look of deep puzzlement, and decided to ignore her.

  Once she was out of the bear’s sight, Fanny broke into a run, arriving at the cave sweaty and out of breath. Philippe listened to her story. He did not know why the bear had not attacked. Possibly the bear had never smelled a human being before, he said, or perhaps it had never smelled the combination of blood and human scent.

  “This bear has only one ear,” Fanny said.