Lost Nation (28 page)

Rain began during the night and sometime before dawn turned to sleet and then ice so when the light came paltry and sullen over the land the body of Laberge was a swollen polished figure of encased darkness hanging from the rock maple outside the tavern. The body did not swing or twist but was inert as the light. Only the sheen of ice over it. Blood waited until the ice turned back to rain and cut the body down and hauled it by the feet down to the garden and dug a trench where the peas had been and buried the man there. He finished the work and turned to find Sally wrapped in her new shawl watching him.

“You think I’m going to garden there come next spring with that in the ground?”

He was breathing from the shovel-work. “What makes you so sure,” he said. “We’ll even still be here come spring?”

She looked at him awhile. Drew her shawl tighter about her throat. She said, “You ain’t going nowhere Blood.”

He watched her walk back toward the tavern, watched her go around the corner out of sight. Just like that he knew she would bar him from her room again this evening. As if she blamed him for the violence around them. Or, he considered, there was something else at work within her. He was suddenly greatly fatigued. His hands were caked and raw, clublike with cold mud on the spade handle.

He went that afternoon for the funeral of young Bacon. The rain had stopped and the clouds were quilted inkstains over the sky which the wind ripped sideways. The lake was a churned frothing. He climbed the hill to stop between the uprights of the granite entry posts. The funeral group was at the far side of the meager plot and he realized he was late for the service; men worked in turn to fill the grave. He did not advance but watched as a visible ripple went through the group and they turned one by one blank baleful faces upon him.

Blood understood they conferred accountability upon him for the fate of young Bacon—these the same men now hungover, their shame turned outward to anger—who the night before had brutally taken up the unconscious Laberge and carried him into the darkness and called for rope. When Blood would not supply it some one of them took a candle-lantern into Blood’s barn and cut the length they wanted and brought it back. Blood had stood in the doorway watching. Silent. Several bad throws until the rope end went over the limb and then they noosed Laberge and held him upright while one man threw a bucket of water hard against Laberge’s face and he stuttered into consciousness as the group of men took up the free end of the rope and hoisted him off the ground. They tied the rope to an iron ring set into a stone post beyond the tavern door and all stood then watching silent as Laberge kicked his feet angry into the empty air, watched in the sputtering lantern light as the hanging man fought with his fingers against the clamp of hempen fiber choking him. Stood until the motion was over, the last spasmodic absurd antic drifted to stillness. The rain had started. Blood had gone
inside and barred the door. He expected some among them to hammer upon it, to call out for drink but the men went away noiseless in the rain. Morning first thing Blood found the candle-lantern on the single stoop. The pierced tin sheathed in ice.

He did not enter the cemetery but turned back and walked home. It was time to build fires. He’d let them go out that morning, feeling there was no reason for him to be warm. If Sally wanted warmth, let her kindle them. She’d spent the day locked within her room. He’d not seen her since he’d finished his own burying in the garden that morning. Cold as he’d been then he’d not wanted a fire. Disgusted with himself, with his failure to act the night before. Even as he knew it wasn’t for him to intervene—his place in the community now fully relegated to the suspect position of witness. It was the service he brought that saved him and that only so long as he stood clear. If he’d tried to stop them, the men of the night-mob wouldn’t have paused long before stringing him as well. Blood still sure he wasn’t deficient of courage—he just wasn’t stupid—there had been nothing left to save anyway. He’d scrubbed in the ice-rimmed water of the stream. Inside, chilled, had used the same cold water and meal sacking to halfway clean the bloodstain from the tavern floor, thinking it not a bad idea to leave some reminder for those same now righteous men. His heart was not in the job.

But it was time to build fires. Look at him as they would, he knew that as night fell the small log and plank houses would grow too close to contain all that had happened. The single men would leave their solitude grown too close, the married ones under bald pretense and all come to the one other place there was. So he came down the road and saw the smoke boiling from both center-chimney flues and he thought There, she’s up out of her gloom now. He discovered his door barred and had the wry pleasure of pounding for entry and hearing his own dog bellow dire from within and other than that only silence. The wind was hard upon him and he was truly cold now, cold beyond the vehement deserved chill of the morning. And Blood stood a long moment. Loathe to call out to plead entrance. As if his voice before his own door would someway verify his lessened standing to himself. Calling for Sally. And some small spit of thought wondering what she was up to that she would bar him out.

So he called out to Luther. Once, loudly commanding silence. After a beat of pause calling again as if speaking not so much to Sally or the dog but perhaps the house itself, a mild query if all was well.

And still he stood some time more on his own step. It began to rain again, a hard slantwise rain that stung his face and wet him through behind. He stood there as a forlorn penitent before the sanctuary that would not admit him. With his head tipped down and sideways a little to let the rain strike him. And saw down off the stoop where the water fell from the eaves a small trench filled to a small canal from which water struck and pocked up off the surface. And recalled his daughter Sarah Alice not quite two years old squatting beside a puddle in the rain and reaching trying to snatch those drops fighting upward. Her face a glower, unable to fathom the way they seemed to disappear in the air inches from her face, her swiping hand. Scowling at him as if she blamed him for this failure.

Sally opened the door wrapped in a blanket. Steam boiled out around him. He stood looking at her. Behind her he saw the heavy pot hung from the cradle swung out into the room off the fire. The floorboards swashed with water stains. He could smell the hard lye soap and also the scented rose-soap that someone—he’d not asked who—had given her. Her hair was wet and her face was pink. Water ran drops down her legs and outlined her bare feet. She waited a moment and then said, “You going to just stand there letting out all the warmth or you going to step inside and dry yourself?”

“What’s all this,” he asked.

“I was washing myself.”

“Washing yourself.”

She frowned at him. “That’s right. It’s something people do time to time. Something might not harm you, you was to try it.”

“What for?” His brain suddenly thick, as if all the night and day had curled there and gone to sleep.

She shook her head. Stepped back and said, “What’s wrong with you Blood?” Then went right on, “No. Don’t tell me a thing. There idn’t nothing more I want to know. But I worked too hard to get clean and warm to stand here. You want to come in, come in. I’m getting dressed. I’ll push the kettle back over the flame. It’s most full if you want it.” And turned from the opening.

* * *

It rained on. Hard rain that popped against the shingles, but there were no leaks. It was a sound roof. Well after nightfall a few men came in, then a few more. They stood silent drinking or seated on the benches against the wall conversing in low sporadic utterance. Three sat at the hogshead-top table dealing softened cards, playing with a dour trifle of discussion. Blood ignored this moderate ostracism but sat behind the counter with a reeking smoking tallow stub lighting the sheets of his tally book. There was nothing to update beyond the night before but he went over the entire last week, not looking at previous final figures but doing the work all over again. He was not a man who ever had to add twice so there was no satisfaction in the work beyond the appearance of business. If he was reminding anyone in this silent way that his life held some portion of theirs then he was happy to be doing so. Let them be averse to him if they chose. Tomorrow as tonight they would need his rum, his powder and lead. The girl. Who sat motionless on her stool pushed far back from the counter against the back wall and was not hostile to those few who this evening chose to speak to her so much as vacant. He watched her without obvious effort. She was pretty in her moss skirt and gray bodice and gray shirt-waist with the cranberry shawl slipped back loose upon her shoulders. Her hair seemed to be the one spot in the room where all light chose to gather. He could smell her, even this eight or ten feet away. She sat straight with her back against the wall and her eyes nowhere at all that he could tell. As if she looked out upon some other place altogether. He poured her a pewter cup a third full of rum and without ceremony or words of any sort carried it down and set it beside her.

Several hours after dark two young men Blood did not know came in. They paused overlong near the door as they brushed water from their stained and roughened good clothes, studying the layout of things. Without any discussion they moved along the walls of the room to a free spot on the benches where the light was not so good and they sat. One had a young man’s beard and he leaned to place his forearms on his knees and tipped his head to the floor as if greatly fatigued. Their clothes were dappled with mud and he guessed whoever they were they were camped rough. But, curiously, the other men in the room glanced up at the strangers and some looked longer than others but all seemed to discount them. As if they knew something of them that Blood did not.

After a moment the one with the shaven face rose and came to the counter, not directly across from Blood but a foot or two down from him. But the youth looked upon Blood. Blood glanced up and met his eye and went back to his figures and completed another useless column and stood off the stool and pressed his shoulders back and cracked his neck.

He said, “Rum.”

The young man looked at Blood for a pause. A short moment but those eyes were filled with tremendous length. He nodded, “Two of em.”

Blood turned for a pair of dented tin cups and poured from the pitcher and while turning back saw Sally looking at the boy. When Blood swung her way she looked up toward the smoked ceiling beams. Blood turned back and set the cups on the counter. He said, “Is this it, or will you settle later?”

The boy ran his tongue swift over his lips. Without taking his eyes from Blood. “I believe, if it please you, we’ll settle when we’re done.”

Blood nodded. Then said, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before.”

The boy took up the cups. “No,” he said. “I don’t imagine you have.”

Blood watched him cross the room to hand one cup to the other boy who took it and held it on his knee with his fingers wrapped around it. The first boy sat and sipped and leaned to say something to the other. The other lifted his cup and drank and while he did his eyes landed square upon Blood a moment, then away and he turned and said something to the first boy. Blood was staggered by the look. Brief as it was it was a purity of hatred gathered and winnowed to a nugget. No man had ever looked at Blood quite so—there was no mistaking it. This was no general emotion but something pointed, specific, distilled. Blood took his eyes away from the bearded boy. And saw Sally look away from him and back toward the boys as if she’d seen something of all just transpired.

Blood went to where his tally book lay open and finished the page he’d been working and the figures did not match. He circled the lower one but did not re-add the columns. After a time he closed the book and snuffed the tallow stub between thumb and forefinger and took pause, was considering a drink even though it was early for him, when Sally rose to go around the counter to the fireplace. She pokered the fire level before adding a pair of logs. It was something most always done by one
man or another, whichever among them felt some chill. When she finished Blood watched her turn to sweep the room, her eyes going across the two boys and the one with no beard was waiting for that look and grinned at her. The bearded boy ignored her. Sally did not respond but continued her spin and came back to her perch. She took up the cup Blood had set out for her and drank from it. To anyone but Blood she’d seem bored.

Peter Chase was across the counter from Blood, propped on his elbows, eyes upon some distant pale in the woodgrain of the countertop. Blood leaned. Just enough motion to edge shadow upon Chase’s gaze. He looked up at Blood.

Blood said, “You know those two boys against the wall? They ain’t been in before.”

Chase swung his eyes without moving his head, already knowing of whom Blood spoke. “They ain’t up to nothing. Couple boys from way downcountry come for a summer in the woods. Isaac Cole talked to em. The morning after you shot the savage it was. They come down off Magalloway Mountain and along the road by the mill. Just a couple of greenhorn boys was what Cole decided.”

“Where they pitched?”

Chase nodded. He said, “Don’t know. They’re well soaked but wet’s it been they could be near or not.”

Blood nodded. After a time he said, “They from downstate, you said.”

Peter Chase thought a moment. Then shook his head. “Further than that. Connecticut maybe. Massachusetts. One of them places. Half-baked city boys. All their gear was new, Cole said. There’s nothing to worry over with them two. They don’t know the first thing about Hutchinson nor any of his doings. Cole talked about it with Emil. Nothing for you to be concerned with, long as they put their bits down like anybody else. The way I see it, one morning soon they’re going to wake to a snow-squall and that’ll be the last we see of em. Boys on a summer lark. Maybe they chose a bad summer for it but that idn’t their fault.”

Blood considered Peter Chase a moment. Then said, “I guess.”

The boys sat on the bench, working slowly at the tin cups. The bench was a great comfort after three weeks of squatting or seated on rocks. Their
wet clothes chafed and then warmed and steamed and fit again easy to their bodies. After half his drink Cooper sat back a little and slid one boot up to rest over the other knee. This allowed him to view more easily the room while providing the mild disguise of akimbo arms and legs, his chin lowered toward his chest. He’d unbound his brown hair and now it had dried and hung about his face, lank twists around his new beard. His beard was darker, in this dim light near black. He tasted the cup, set it on his knee and locked his fingers around the kneecap. He looked sideways at Fletcher who was bent forward a little at the waist. As if to leap or spring.