by Sara Donati
They died, as she knew they must, the oldest and youngest first. A four-month infant of a fever, the second old uncle in his sleep, the mother of the twin boys because her kidneys stopped doing their work. By the time they came to the rolling hills of the Shawnee territory they were five women and nine children.
Makes-a-Fist spoke of his father more with every day of walking. He told stories about Strikes-the-Sky in his mother's hearing, so that Walking-Woman could neither ignore his anger nor put aside her own memories. When her son's fury was hottest, she closed her eyes and saw Strikes-the-Sky dead in a hundred different ways: convulsed with fever, swollen with snake-bite, drowned in a fast river overhung with weeping trees. She imagined him on battlefields, or ambushed, or lying on a pallet among the Osage, unable to ask for water or tell them his name. She saw him shot in the heart, his throat cut, his spine severed, flayed so his skin could be carried away and tanned, an artery in his stomach pumping blood. She blinked, and saw her son beside her husband, dead on the battlefield.
Strikes-the-Sky spoke to her often. He stood just behind her, calmed by death and, it seemed to her, amused by it too. Sometimes he spoke to her of nothing important at all; he reminded her of things they had done, the day he had first seen her, the day they had started the long walk west to join his people. He always ended his visit with the same stern words.
Keep the boy safe.
Makes-a-Fist had been born with a caul. Walking-Woman had watched him appear between her thighs with eyes open wide behind the thin, pearly-white skin of the birth sack. A ghost of a child, she had thought and then he howled, a sound like a panther screaming, and she was so relieved that she might have swooned, if not for the strong hands that held her own: her sister-in-law, gone now too, killed by a soldier when she ran back to the village to get the cooking pot. Walking-Woman remembered the arc of the soldier's sword, so swift and somehow casual, like a man out for a walk, lopping the heads off nettles.
In the newborn's clenched fists they had found more of the birth sack, something that set the women to conjecturing among themselves. This one will run into battle, her uncle's wife had said with great pleasure and pride. This one will be a great hunter.
Good fortune seemed to find them on the day they came to a lake that one tribe called Goose Neck and another, Hollow Waters. It sat among the wooded hills, ringed with a marsh like the stubble on a white man's chin and frozen solid, early and quick, in a series of deep and furious frosts. The weather was clear and the sky bright overhead, with a moon like a fat berry bumping along the horizon to cast pink shadows on the snow.
Late-Harvest found a cave she remembered from her girlhood and in it, waiting for them, a small bear in its winter sleep. Light-Crow killed it with an arrow through the eye and that night every one of them ate their fill. Makes-a-Fist ate until his belly rounded, but in his face his mother saw disappointment. He could not claim any part in the kill, and so the meat was not exactly to his taste.
The food and the warm shelter put them all in good spirits and for once the women spoke among themselves with more animation. Late-Harvest told stories of her girlhood here and of her village, just a few days' walk away. She spoke of her family, who sometimes made winter camp on the shores of this lake. From the mouth of the cave they could see it, glimmering under the moon. Here her father and uncles and brothers and cousins had played bagattaway, as many as fifty of them at a time. Here they hunted and fished and celebrated midwinter.
That night Walking-Woman dreamed of a village put to the torch, the air filled with the reek of burning flesh. She woke with a start to find that her son had put his pallet down next to her for the first time since they had left Ket-tip-pe-can-nunk. His hair had fallen over his face and fluttered with every breath. Walking-Woman touched his skin to feel its warmth. She put her face next to his and slept.
They spent a second day in the cave, rendering bear fat and cooking: food enough to take them to Late-Harvest's village and to offer as a gift to the sachem. The twins went out and brought back more game: two turkeys, a brace of rabbits, a porcupine. Almost more than the women could manage, but they were so pleased and the hunting boys so proud that nothing was said to discourage them.
Walking-Woman woke the next morning with the first scream of the blizzard. She was warm and her belly was full and the snow could not find its way into the cave, and still. She sat up in the near dark and looked hard into the coals in the fire pit, irregular red hearts pulsing and pulsing, close to death now and needing to be fed.
She made herself turn her head, knowing what she would see: the boy's pallet was empty. His bow and quiver were gone and his knife and a small axe; he had taken one of the four pairs of snowshoes they had among them.
Gone to prove the words spoken over him at his birth: this one will be a great hunter.
She would have started out after him but they held her back while the blizzard screamed, all through the day. Walking-Woman did the work they put in her hands, cut strips of meat and turned them on the fire, poured fat into lengths of knotted intestine, took a little girl into her lap and rubbed snow on sore gums where a new tooth was coming. Through all of that she was casting her thoughts out into the world. She spoke to Strikes-the-Sky and he did not answer her.
Too busy looking for the boy, she thought and then: now he will turn away from me too. Now they are both angry at me.
The storm died late in the afternoon, but the wind stayed behind. It blew hard, moving snow across the lake in gusts and then back again, sending eddies swirling up into the trees. The sun showed itself, cold and serene, and played on the ice that weighed down branches, scattering rainbows for the wind to hurry away.
They went out to find her boy, the twins and two of the other women and Walking-Woman, who first searched all around the hillside looking for places where he might have taken shelter.
Then she heard the twins calling her, and in that moment something caught up in her throat. Something as hard as a bullet, something with the wet-penny taste of blood. She walked toward the sound of their voices, opened her mouth to call back and found she could not.
They were standing on the lake in the last of the light, two brown faces as alike as chestnuts. They had cleared away a dimpled spot in the new snow that blanketed the lake to find, first, a single snowshoe, then the axe and finally the truth.
Makes-a-First had chopped a hole in the ice in the shape of a moon not quite full. Just big enough to drop a fishing net; big enough to swallow a young boy blinded by a snowstorm. It was frozen over again, the new ice thinner and clearer, and caught up in it, like a fly in a piece of amber: the heron feather that Makes-a-Fist plaited into his hair.
In the end they went on without her. Walking-Woman had some clothes and furs, and they left her what they could: enough meat and bear fat to last a few weeks, a bow and some arrows, a knife and axe and whetstone, a pair of snowshoes, a few flints, some string, a little salt. Late-Harvest promised to send one of her uncles or brothers back with more supplies.
Walking-Woman stood at the mouth of the cave and watched them disappear over the next hill.
In the day she walked the lake, stopping now and then to scrape away the snow, more than three feet deep in some places and nowhere less than two, and stare into the ice and talk to the spirit of the lake, who never answered her.
When the food was gone she made herself a slingshot and began to set snares. Sometimes she found herself without a fire because she had simply forgotten to gather wood and on those nights she went to sleep wondering if she would wake up again.
The Hunger Moon came and went and Walking-Woman learned the shape of the lake by heart. The cold dug in, the kind of cold she remembered from winters in the endless forests: cold leached of color, cold that would not allow snow to fall. And still she went out every day to walk the lake. The snow had grown a crust as hard as glass, but not so fragile: she used the axe to clear a spot when she wanted to study the ice.
Toward the end of the next
moon Walking-Woman realized two things: there had been no snow for eight weeks, and her ribs had pushed out against her skin so that she could trace the shape of each of them with the tip of a finger.
It was then that Strikes-the-Sky came back and began to talk to her again as if he had never stopped. At first he only pointed out practical things that she had overlooked: fallen branches for the taking, a good place for a snare. Then, when she had been in the cave for three full moons and the cold had begun to loosen its grip, she found a doe at the mouth of the cave with crows sitting on its head. They looked at her with their sharp black eyes.
Behind her Strikes-the-Sky said, Now you will eat. Walking-Woman chased the crows away and that night she slept deeply with the taste of fat bright on her tongue.
Another moon waxed and waned. On a morning warmer than the ones before it, a morning with the first smell of spring in the air, the lake spirit took Walking-Woman. She was moving across its center, following her own tracks, when the layers of snow and ice under her feet let out a sound like a tree falling and then simply opened. One moment she was standing in the sunshine and the next she was tumbling, loose-limbed, hard snow in her mouth, waiting for the bite of the water to snap her in two.
She thought, Now I will see him, my son, and, How bright it is in the shadow lands, and then she found herself standing, breathless and dry, on the bottom of an empty lake.
It was the sound of her own harsh breathing that made her understand that she was not drowning, could not drown because the lake water had drained away over the long dry moons. Overhead the roof of ice and snow creaked and sighed like a living thing, flexing in the sun. Walking-Woman stood and listened to the ice talking while her eyes adjusted to the odd shadowy lake-cave.
She took a step, cautiously, and stumbled on a catfish frozen into the rutted lake bottom. A few more steps took her out of the light from the hole she had broken in the ice, further into the shadows. She walked until she could no longer stand, and then she crawled in the dark, over bones and fish and other things she could not name and did not like to imagine.
When she came to the first grasses she used the axe and struck at the ice, bowed her head while it fell in great chunks that would leave bruises on her shoulders and back. Then she stood up in the sunlight, ice clinging to her bearskin coat, and saw that she had walked most of the way to the shore.
For three days she searched the empty lake, carrying a torch before her where she could stand, or pushing it before her when she must crouch. The fish lined the lake bottom like Dutch tiles, the scales catching the firelight in flashing colors. She found rusted blades and fishing spears, the hull of a canoe and, inside of it, a cage of ribs. The bottom of the lake was littered with bones enough to build a city of the dead.
On the third day, when the sun was hot overhead and the ice roof groaned like a woman in travail, Walking-Woman dropped down into the lake and saw that the crows had followed her. There were a dozen of them, prying fish from the icy mud, and they paid her no attention. Enough for them all.
Late that day Walking-Woman found a snowshoe, a bow, a scattering of arrows. And then the boy. Curled like an infant on the floor of the lake, he looked like a child carved out of wax. She took him in her arms and cradled him, and thanked the spirit of the lake for returning her son to her.
When she woke the next morning the rain had come again and the lake was already filling. She had nothing with which to dig a grave in the frozen ground and so she climbed the tallest pine tree she could find and wedged the boy there among the branches.
The same day she started out for Lake in the Clouds.
Chapter 15
Dear Cousin Lily,
Your mother and father bid me write down for you the events of the last weeks. It is a task I take on out of concern for them and you, but it is neither an easy nor a pleasant one. Nor am I your mother's equal in matters of the pen, but I hope my poor efforts will serve.
On Christmas Eve, while Blacksmith Hench was busy lighting firecrackers, Cookie Fiddler's remains were discovered floating beneath the ice on the lake. And more shocking still, it was Callie Wilde and Martha Kuick who first came upon this gruesome sight.
You will remember that Mrs. Fiddler has been missing since the day late in November when Dolly Wilde was found near death on this mountain. Foul play was feared, and indeed it seems as if foul play has been done. Our first worry was for Callie, as you can well imagine. It is a very hard burden indeed for such a young lass, to lose the two women she loved best in the world in such a violent way. Martha was just as distraught as Callie herself, and the two of them clung together and wept so pitifully that it took all of Curiosity's and your mother's efforts to see them to an uneasy sleep in Curiosity's own bed, where she could watch over them in the night.
While we were busy with the lasses, Constable McGarrity and Mrs. Fiddler's sons and some of the other men had managed to retrieve her remains from the lake. I did no see her myself but Mrs. McGarrity tells me, and I have no cause to doubt her, that there was a great gash to the back of her head, it is believed made by a blunt object such as a piece of firewood.
It was midnight before the constable made his announcement. It was only by accident that I was in the trading post to hear him, where I had been sent by your mother in the hope that I might find your father. (Which I did no, for he was at that time already back at Lake in the Clouds with your sister who was, I think it is fair to say, in a state of shock. But that is another story that is best told by your mother.)
Never have I seen the trading post so crowded. The constable stood on a box with Mrs. Fiddler's two sons standing to either side of him, and all of them looking like the wrath of God. Constable McGarrity announced that he would rule Mrs. Fiddler's death (these were his words, most exactly) as “murder, by person or persons yet unknown.”
Just as he was saying this, Charlie LeBlanc came in, who had been sent to fetch Nicholas Wilde but came back instead with another story, this one as aye strange and disturbing as the rest of what had passed that night: Nicholas Wilde was nowhere to be found. There was no sign of him at hame nor in the barn nor anywhere in the orchards, and his horses and sleigh were gone, and some other things from the house that made Charlie think he had left Paradise.
You who grew up in this wee village can well imagine what kind of talk began then, some arguing that Nicholas must have killed his poor guidwife and housekeeper both, and now had run rather than wait to be hanged, leaving poor Callie behind to make her own orphaned way in the world. Others thought there must be a murderer among us who had struck again, making Mr. Wilde the newest victim. Still others claimed that it was Dolly herself had attacked Mrs. Fiddler in a fit and then wandered off to die on the mountain. Mrs. McGarrity put a stop to the worst of the talk by promising to thrash the next man wha spoke of hanging in her hearing—and no doubt she would have, too, for she waved a stout stick about her head as she said as much.
Then Mr. Hench took off his wooden leg and pounded with it on the wall to get everyone's attention and asked had anyone thought to go to the millhouse? For it turns out, or so he claims, that Claes Wilde had been courting Jemima Kuick for some weeks at least. A wild and, aye, almost violent argument followed, most of the women saying that if there was any courting being done, it was Jemima who was behind it for hadn't she been husband hunting since the day she buried her first and lost all his fortune? At that some of the men blushed and hung their heads and studied their shoes, for it turns out that Mrs. Kuick had indeed been looking for a new husband and had cast a wide and well-baited net, all without return.
And in the end the whole party marched together from the trading post to the millhouse, waving torches overhead. Their aim, they said, was to call Jemima Kuick to an accounting and perhaps more, though those words were not spoke aloud. I must admit that I went along out of naught but morbid curiosity for I would never sleep without knowing what was to happen next.
I'm sure you can imagine the crowd's disappoint
ment and—the only word that comes to mind—delight when they found the millhouse deserted and Mrs. Kuick gone. And now the talk began in earnest, a wild conjecturing that lasted for an hour or more in the cold millhouse kitchen, until Constable McGarrity shouted loud enough to be heard and said they could talk all night without getting anywhere, or they could wait until morning when the wee lasses might be able to tell what they knew.
In the moment of quiet that followed, one of the Fiddler brothers—I believe it was Zeke but it may have been Levi, I could not see very well from where I stood—said while they all stood around wondering who Jemima Southern was bedding and where, his mother lay murdered and he'd have justice or revenge or both, and he wouldn't be fussy about which came first.
He spoke in a voice that made the gooseflesh rise on my neck, low and calm and as serious as the grave, and some of the men looked at each other and shifted on their feet the way men will when they disapprove but must bide their time to say so. And then Jed said in his gentle way, justice will be done, I vow it, and then all the energy was gone from the room and people began to drift away to their beds though it was only a few hours to sunrise.
And in all this I had forgot my errand, to find your father and sister, but it was too late and truth be told I was too weary, and so I went back to the Todds' place and found a bed and went to sleep and did not wake until well into the morning.
I found your mother in the kitchen with Constable McGarrity, and she looked very relieved to see me. The constable had come to talk to Martha and Callie and wanted another witness present, for Curiosity had gone to Lake in the Clouds to see about Hannah and Ethan was sitting with his stepfather's remains and receiving visitors who called to leave their condolences. And this you must imagine: Ethan in the parlor with such a solemn purpose and in the kitchen the constable and Elizabeth and I, and two young lasses as still and white as ghosts.