An Undisturbed Peace (14 page)

“It was the most glorious moment of my young life,” she told Abe, her gaze beyond him, focused on the golden past. “A great emptiness had been inside me and now, with that one kiss, it was filled up, no, more than that, it overflowed with warm, honeyed love. …”

He could tolerate her rapture no longer. Jealousy ate at him from his toes to his scalp. “And what about Lulu?” he asked to hurt her. Her eyes turned to him slowly, as if she'd just noticed he was there. He watched with satisfaction as her mouth tightened. “What about his wife? What happened to her?”

“I don't know exactly.” Her voice had gone quiet and low.

He twisted a knife of his own. “Why?”

“That very night, he took their wedding blanket and ripped it in half. ‘You're divorcing me?' she asked him, and he told her yes. She packed up her belongings immediately and left their quarters in the big house for the communal ones of unmarried slaves. Maybe she knew what was between us. She never asked him another question. She just left.”

“You said before something happened to her. That you have guilt over it.”

“I …” She sat on the bed as if suddenly weakened.

“Tell me!”

She bit her lip and continued. “They say she was brokenhearted and allowed herself to be much abused by the slave men and by the Cherokee also. Eventually, she ran away. One of our hunters found her bloodied dress on the banks of a river. Hanks of her hair were scattered nearby along with two fingers, chomped and bled dry. We all assumed she'd either been eaten by some beast or murdered by some white man or both.”

She paused and lowered her head. When she raised it, her eyes were freshly damp.

“My friend,” she said, unaware perhaps that her next words would stab him quick through the heart. “I must go to him. He is alive! Oh, what a miracle! Everyone told me he was killed in battle. But he was not! I must be reunited with him, my one, my only love.”

My only love.
With that phrase, Dark Water demolished his world. All his plans for their future crashed into the fiery pit that was her eternal, burning love for a hideous old slave. Abe could not understand the why of it. Why was Jacob his triumphant rival, the thief of his paradise? How could she choose him over me? he wondered. How could she leave me for that wreck, that monster? Abe had given up everything for her. He'd rejected a sparkling future in Greensborough. He'd wounded his mother. He would die without Dark Water. He must stop her somehow. But how could he do that? There was only one way. He must trot out the biggest Mile End Lie of all.

“But he's not alone,” he lied. “Lulu isn't dead. She lives in Chota with Jacob. They seemed happy. Oh, yes. A devoted couple, you might say.”

Dark Water's mouth fell open. She stared at him in silence while the lie sunk in. Without a word, she rose and dressed. Hunting bow and arrows over her shoulder, she left the cabin, mounted her mare, and walked her into the woods. Abe was too ashamed to call after her. What was wrong with him? Why had he said such a thing? He sat for a bit, hating himself, then went to her larder and gathered victuals, thinking he'd make her a good dinner and confess on her return. When she understood he'd only lied out of a desire to keep her, a wrong one, yes, but one as powerful as any desire she shared with Jacob, she'd have to forgive him. The meal grew cold without her.

For days, he waited for her return, plagued by regret. He milked her goats, he ground her corn, he stood by her front door under the moon and the stars begging the heavens to forgive his selfishness and make her appear, there, by the tree line, game slung over the mare's withers. He rehearsed the confessions he would make at her feet, if only she came back. He swore to his God that he would never again pursue finding out if it were Lord Geoffrey who killed himself over her, or why Jacob slaughtered Teddy Rupert's son, if only he could see her again. Days without her became weeks.

During those weeks, he searched for her in all the places she had shown him. He came across the corpses of the marauders she'd killed, flesh gone, picked to the bone. Their scalps hung from nearby trees, dry as pods of milkweed in autumn. He found her fields, where wireworm and rot had overtaken the bounty she'd nourished for years. Hard frost had seized their roots and showed no signs of letting go. Standing there in that frigid ruin, all but the last drop of his hope in finding her died. More startling was what he found near the brook where she liked to bathe. Locked in a thin sheet of ice near the shore was her quiver of arrows, identifiable by the signature cluster of feathers attached to their ends. Just beyond, the brook joined a swift river. Heart in his mouth, he followed the river along the shoreline until he came to a doeskin boot, just her size, lying there awaiting discovery. The boot was drenched in frozen blood gone crimson-black with age. There was a trail of small puddles of black blood that led into the brush before they vanished, erased by time and incident. Abe assumed the worst. Certainly she was dead. If she'd an ounce of life left, he reasoned, she would never have abandoned her fields and her animals. Given her absence, the blood, the boot, there was no other explanation possible. Grief married guilt in his heart. His great love was dead and his rash jealousy had killed her.

For seven days he mourned her as Jews mourn. He ripped his sleeve, sat on a stool in his stocking feet, and recited
kaddish
for her. Every day was a day of weeping, of blaming himself, of begging Marian's shade for forgiveness. He ate only bits of dry bread he found in her stores and put a layer of sharp stones under the coverings of the bed to mortify his flesh while he slept. On the eighth day, he circled the cabin three times on foot, then saddled his horse and rode out of the foothills, taking Marian's goats and most of her weaponry with him. Just before he left, on wild, tearful impulse, he took a knife and cut Lord Geoffrey's portrait of Marian out of its frame, rolled it up, and stuck it in a pocket of his saddlebag to have a piece of her with him always. He traveled to Tobias Milner's farm that he might leave the goats there and wander the wilderness, ready to submit to whatever punishing fate a life without Marian had in store for him.

Tobias Milner's Farm and, Eventually, Greensborough

T
hough only a handful of months had passed since his last visit, Abe found the Milner family changed. The eldest girl, the plump, pretty Bekka, no longer lived with her parents and sisters, having married a settler some eighty miles off, a man who'd advertised for a wife in the very issue of the
Carolina Patriot
Abe had last brought them. Her mother had arranged a meeting and although the gentleman was fifteen years older than the girl, he possessed a sizeable farm, he was Lutheran, clean, well mannered, and, as a special bonus, German. The wedding took place within a fortnight of their initial meeting. Her first child was already on the way.

Judith, the second girl, was pledged to marry a schoolteacher from Asheville, which suited her notions of intellectualism and poetry. Her father told him Judith's fiancé was a short, lumpen man with a shirt full of food stains, but he excused him these flaws as he made her happy. Their courtship was whirlwind, the wedding imminent. Abe did not see more than a whisper of Judith during the several days he spent at the Milner home, as she was occupied with preparations for her future life. When he did see her, he found her much self-satisfied.

The youngest daughter, Hannah, had finished growing up. Her cheeks were more pronounced, as was the point of her chin. Her waist was narrower, her hips rounder. No more an impetuous girl reaching toward the future with both hands outstretched, clawing at possibility, she had witnessed her sisters' intoxication with domesticity and sensibly withdrawn. No man would have her out of scarcity of supply. She would rather die a spinster, a servant to her aging parents' needs, than attach herself to the first convenient man who came along. She told Abe as much on his first night back with them. They sat on the rear porch of her father's house, a place her parents had quit minutes before with much pointed yawning, thinking it might be provident to leave the young ones alone for a bit. As safeguard, their bedroom was on the floor above, directly over the porch, where they could easily keep an ear on them.

“You see what they're doing,” Hannah whispered as soon as they were gone. “I've nothing to do with it, I promise you. You're a charming man, Mr. Sassaporta, smart, handsome, and very successful too, they say. Indeed, successful enough to be generous! Who else gives away a little herd of goats found by the wayside? But I'll not take the first man that comes along. No matter how Mama and Papa push.”

Abe raised an eyebrow. His heart was heavy and sore. Since he'd arrived at Tobias Milner's farm, he'd tried to mask the deep melancholy that pervaded his being. It was a heroic task. Each falling leaf, each withered vine that caught his eye brought him fresh pangs of loss and guilt. That night the air was crisp. Winter felt a breath away. All of nature seemed to coalesce in mortal imagery to underscore his misery. Daily, he unfurled Marian's portrait and spoke to it, asking her shade for a sign of hovering near him in the netherworld. When none occurred, he rolled it up again and, with much grave ceremony, tucked it away. He imagined his future as that of a frontier bachelor consumed by trade, that in finding no other pastime now that love's door had slammed in his face, he would wind up much like his uncle. But the ripe young woman next to him was one he'd imagined in the past quite liked him. She'd extracted promises from him, addressed him by his given name. Just hours before, en route, he'd decided he would be kind if condescending to Hannah in order to discourage what he anticipated were her expectations. Now, by her own unvarnished word, she rejected him out of hand. It was a sharp, unexpected blow, so quick on the heels of Marian's rejection. He played the role of ardent lover to soften it.

“Miss Hannah!” he said. “I have no doubt that even in this backwater suitors will find your door as the hound unerringly finds the soft, beating breast of tender quail. You are, if I may be so bold, delectable. A prize.” He stopped to register her blush. An inadvertent clattering from the second floor dispelled the evening's mood. Hannah went her way, Abe went his.

Over the next few days, he intensified his pursuit of a woman he did not love but, falling victim to his own palaver, realized he quite desired. After losing Marian, he needed a woman who might love him, someone through whom he might find redemption, out of his devotion and fidelity. The lovely Hannah fit the bill. Her head, at first turned against him, slowly swiveled in his direction until at last she faced him full-on. She was irresistible. He uttered pledges and begged the same from her. When she acquiesced, her skin warm, her breath short and quick, her eyes downcast, he clutched her to his chest, fondling what he might, and vowed to marry her come the following spring. They decided to keep their plans secret for a time so as not to overshadow Judith's big day.

“It's not such a bad idea,” he told Hart on their way to Uncle Isadore's camp. “Life is long, a man must live. She may not be Marian, but she's quick-witted, pretty, and good. I can make a life with her. I'll be a model husband. It won't be a chore.”

The horse snuffled in what might have been either agreement or derision. Once he drew far from the Milner farm, Abe was left with his own thoughts and found them drifting to Marian, not Hannah, although the use of such daydreams escaped him. If he had a switch, he'd have flagellated himself to get his mind back to where it belonged, to a future he might actually possess, not one marred by the absence of feminine affection and filled with suffocating guilt, but one bursting with the affection of a young bride, a mother-in-law's goodwill, and perhaps, given time, the worship of daughters. With no penitential instrument at hand, longing for Marian continued to bedevil him. What if she were not dead? Where had she gone? he wondered. The best image he conjured was of a wounded Marian secreting herself deep in some woodland lair, bathing in waterfalls, sleeping in caves, until she recovered. The worst was that she'd gone to Chota, perhaps to make amends to the wronged Lulu. On arriving there, not only would she be reunited with Jacob—the passion she'd expressed would surely overlook his deformities, perhaps even deepen itself—but she would learn she'd been deceived in the matter of Lulu's residence there. She would never know how deeply Abe regretted his lies or of the insurmountable temptation to base envy that provoked them. She would hate him forever. When the latter scenario implanted itself in his mind, he made rigorous efforts to envision the former but reflection on the idea of Marian bathing in waterfalls, streams of water coursing down her breasts to her loins, provided torment of a different kind. He assured himself he was right the first time—his Cherokee lover was dead. He then forced his thoughts in Hannah's direction. Sometimes it worked and his tension eased.

By the time he reached Uncle Isadore's camp town, Abe felt too drained to face his family straightaway. It was the end of the day. A cold, biting rain kept the streets deserted. Abe rode undetected to the stables, where he dried his horse's dripping coat with a scraper made of bone and brushed him down. Finding a free stall, he settled him in it, providing him hay and water. He bid Hart good night, slung his saddlebag over his shoulder, and prepared to retire to the peddlers' barracks. Head down, he ran, head to chest, into O'Hanlon the stable master, just as he had his first day as novice mounted salesman. Each man stepped back and regarded the other.

“Ah, laddie,” O'Hanlon said, “you look like shite.”

Abe's mouth twitched, his eyes narrowed. He had no energy for banter.

“It's been a rough day's ride,” he said, and made to brush past the taller man. O'Hanlon put out a hand to stop him.

“It's been a rough number of months since we've seen you,” he said. “Your mam's been frantic. Rumors of you scalped and rotting in a ditch came to us a week or more ago. In two days' time a search party was to take the dogs out to look for you. And all the while, you've not been dead with your eyes picked out by buzzards, but by the looks and stench of you, livin' the rollickin' forest life. With whom, I wonder?” He stuck out his nose for a dramatic sniff of Abe's shirtfront. “Must be that wanton Cherokee sprite I hear so much about.”

Abe's pent-up grief, frustration, and guilt melted into a hot fury. He growled in anger, leaned forward, and went up on his toes as if he might in the next second throw a hothead's sucker punch. In a flash, his hands were caught in the Irishman's great red claws. They were given a single, irresistible twist and Abe's back was pressed against the man's chest, his left hand pulled up between his shoulder blades. A muscular arm locked around his neck. “Now, now, laddie, no need for violence,” O'Hanlon said, setting him loose with a push forward so that Abe knocked into the stable's brick wall. “Fine thing for you to say,” Abe muttered back at him, massaging an elbow that had hit the wall hard. O'Hanlon put a gentler arm around his shoulders. Ignoring Abe's flinch away, he gave the peddler a brief squeeze, a manly hug. “Now, you're the one who looked to be comin' at me first, weren't you?” he said. “Look. I understand how a man might get his head turned 'round by a pair of pretty hips, but to vex a sweet woman like your mam, oh, that takes a hard heart. Don't blame me for risin' to her defense. Come to me rooms. We'll share a drop and call each other friends.” Abe had nothing better to do. He might as well drown his troubles.

The stable master's quarters were Spartan, clean and poor in ornament. Freshly polished bridles gleamed from hooks on the wall. Spotless spurs were lined up in sparkling pairs on a bench underneath. The place smelled of leather and woodsmoke. There was another scent in the air, familiar yet illusive. He could not identify it. Short glasses were filled, raised, drained, and refilled. Rain beat steadily against the roof. Abe felt oddly cosseted, comfy under O'Hanlon's wing despite the room's bare design and their tussle in the stable aisle, feelings he attributed to the whiskey and his host's mellowed temper, which grew expansive and sentimental by the third glass.

“Abrahan,” he said, giving him a moist, mawkish grin, “I know you gave your mam the best of you before you came to the New World. Then gone you were, young and on your own. A man's got to choose his own path and here's the place to do it, 'tis true. But now Susanah's come across the wide sea. She too has her desires and, God bless her, they're simple ones. She wants to rest her weary soul within the bosom of a family, she wants grandchildren. I ask you, lad. Does not this good and giving woman deserve a daughter-in-law she can at least converse with? What can she say to a Cherokee raised from the mud up? Surely you can devise a way to keep your wild love at arm's length, if you know what I mean, and find some lady hereabouts to soothe a mother's heart. I happen to have it on the best authority those native girls don't mind sharin' at all.”

Aghast, Abe didn't speak for quite some time as he absorbed the mysteries of O'Hanlon's speech. Why had he called him Abrahan? These days only his mother and uncle did so. Even the Milners had adopted use of his American name. And when had O'Hanlon and his mother come to a first-name relation? He'd called her Susanah, had he not? Why would his mother confide her hopes and dreams to this big, ham-fisted Irishman who presumed to give him instruction in the deception of a wife? What was the smell that nagged at his nostrils? The drink made his head loll about while he worked to identify the scent. At last he had it. It was piripiri sauce, that piquant pepper recipe that flavored the most common of his mother's dishes, made from the spice mixture she'd brought with her, ground up and dried, in little vials all the way from London. What was it doing lingering within the walls of a stable master's quarters? His mind buzzed with the implications his imagination inspired. Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no, he thought. He had chased after romantic reverie rather than stay home to guard his mother's virtue. And here, in this crude place, she'd been compromised. Fresh guilt flooded his brain, tears sprang to his eyes. He pushed himself away from the table where they sat, nearly knocking both chair and table over. He struggled to his feet, fists raised, and blurted out, “What's going on here? What have you done to my mother, you giant bastard! I don't care how much bigger you are than me! If you've defiled her, I will kill you!”

O'Hanlon stood also, towering over him. He patted the air with his hands. “Now, now. Calm yourself, my boy. Your mam and I have become friends, yes, but that's all there is to it, more's the pity. I don't deny I would die a happy man if there were more, but there's not. Your uncle has moved to Greensborough permanently to take care of that new store of his. Your mother stays here waiting your return. Nothing could move her on that. Each day she prays for your safe return, even in the face of the vilest reports. Three times a week, I drive her back and forth to Greensborough that she may assist your uncle in the running of the store and keep the spot he'd planned for you open, so to speak, by tending his books and inventory, reminding him that nothing is better than family in business, a fact of life I agree with wholeheartedly. During those transports, we talk. Talk! Where's the harm in that?”

Abe felt there was plenty of harm in it, but the whiskey clouded his wits and tied his tongue. They had another drink, then parted, barely comprehending each other's farewells. Abe staggered to the barracks and collapsed. When he woke, his first thought was not the demon hammering at his temples but his mother. How ashamed she would be if she knew he'd developed a habit of getting drunk with slaves and Irishmen! After a stop at the bathhouse, he changed into his freshest clothes before heading to his uncle's office, where O'Hanlon assured him his mother was in residence. Once there, he knocked on the door rather than walk right in. He felt his appearance would be less of a shock that way. The door opened. His mother stood just inside the threshold. Immediately, her eyes grew large and wet, her hands slapped her cheeks, and she cried out thanksgiving to her God and clasped him to her bosom, rocking him back and forth as if he were yet a child at the breast. At last she pulled him into the building and shut the door behind him. Her first words were “You have returned alone? Your wanton Cherokee sprite is not with you?”