Lost Nation (3 page)

“Treat me how you will,” she sang out. “I’ll not forget a bit of it.”

“I’d not think so,” he called back without turning or breaking stride.

Late afternoon found them stalled three hundred yards from the constricted top of the notch, the road here a jumble of boulders and mud-slick gravel, the cart listing off to one side, one wheel mired, the other up on a boulder. The oxen strained to hold the angled rig in place; Blood had stacked stones behind the lifted wheel to help. Now he sat off to one side in a scanty stand of scraggly spruce. Ravens barked from the ridgeline out of sight. The sun was gone although the light streamed high above them. The freed girl hunched on a nearby stone, her arms wrapped around her chest. There was a whetted wind. The axle was broken.

There was a shadow of bruise on her face where he’d slapped her when the catastrophe first occurred and she had turned striving to hide her laughter—a glee he thought edged with excitement, as if immediately she knew the pendulum had swung ever so little toward her in balance. Now she sat, her face vacant, waiting.

Blood held his head with his hands. He was tired and his head hurt. None of the remedies that occurred appealed. He knew in all likelihood in the open land beyond the head of the notch there would be a farm, perhaps more. Perhaps a forge but even if not, probably someone who could help mend the axle, fashion some sort of replacement, whatever was needed to limp onward to wherever a permanent repair could be made. Although uncertainties they struck him as being not unreasonable. The problem, most simply, was how to get here to there.

Even with his head held he knew she was watching him, knew also that if he did not speak she soon would. And silently pleaded for her own silence. He did not feel up to her.

“It’s a pickle.” Her voice almost gay, only scarcely guarded.

He said nothing, did not lift his head.

“I don’t know what’s more trouble, the load or me. But I know this: Even I wasn’t here that load would set right where it is, regardless of what you was to do. I don’t see how you could just leave it, go off for help. Someone might come along. Of course, there’s that—someone might come along, be willing to help we waited long enough.”

He looked at her now but remained silent.

“How long,” she asked, “you think before that might happen?”

After a time he spoke. Slowly. “The way it works, it’d be just a minute I was to leave it here and go after help. But then, we was to set here, we’d likely eat up both the beeves before we saw a single living soul.”

She nodded. He wondered if she really understood this, the full implications of this formula and how it applied to their peculiar circumstance. Then recalled her background and guessed likely she did. She said, “What do you figure to do?”

“I don’t like any of it.”

She nodded again. “One of us has to stay and one go on for help. That’s all there is to it. Question is, which one’s the better guard?”

“You got that calculated.”

She shrugged. “I’m tougher’n dried cod. You was to leave the dog, if
he’d stay, and leave me your rifle, I’d do just fine unless it was a passel of em and then likely it wouldn’t matter twas you or me here.”

“You could as easy see me top the ridge and strike out back the way we come. I got no idea how far it’d be to find repair even of the roughest kind.”

“But if I was the one to go after help you’d have no idea when to expect me back. You’d just be setting here. Either way you got to trust me.”

“Mind your tongue girl.”

“Listen,” she said. “I’ll whore for you cause I got no choice in it. But it seems to me, we was to work together just the least bit it might not be such a bad thing. You was to trust me some I’d trust you to watch out for me. That’s the plain truth.”

“You say that now, cold and brokedown. But you’d skedaddle first occasion you thought might be just a smidgen better.”

She studied him, raking fingers through her hair, tugging at knots and tangles, freeing bits of twig and trash. She said, “Whoever you are, you’re a fearsome man. And wherever you come from I doubt I even want to know about. But I got no choice but to trust you. And I’ll tell you this too—I might be off here in the woods set to whore for you when the chance comes but it’s still better than what I’d be up to every day back to Portland. At least this is—”

“What,” he asked. “What do you call this?”

“Well,” she said. “It’s interesting, is what it is.”

“Christ girl,” he said. “Look at you. Half naked, feet all cut up and swelled all over with the fuckin bugs and bout starved to death and you set there and tell me it’s interesting.”

She stood and stretched her arms up high over her head and he turned his eyes from her and she came and leaned her hands on her knees and brought her face close to his and said, “It takes a rough patch to get you talking, don’t it?”

He stood off the stone and stepped around her and bent once more to survey the busted axle. She squatted down beside him to look also. When he glanced to her, she said, “It don’t change much, looking at it. Does it now?”

He pushed up, his hands on his knees. She stayed where she was, her face tilted toward him. He said, “All right then. Get your clothes on, your skirt and such.”

She stood. “What for?”

He was too tired to tell her to just do it because he said to. He said, “So, if someone does come along, you look respectable.”

She stood then too. Looked at him and nodded. Then said, “Is there a name to call you?”

“Name’s Blood.”

“I mean one I can get off my tongue.”

“Get dressed.” He turned from her. “Blood’s all the name anyone needs of me.”

He worked while she knelt at the brook and washed herself. He packed more rocks around and under the cart and levered it up with a stout pole and wedged more rocks to hold it in place. He used the pole as a mallet to remove the cotters from the wheels and pulled them from the axle and then, lying on his back under the cart cursing, worked free the axle. It was near dark, the long spring twilight. He unhitched the oxen and chained one to a tree and strapped the axle across the back of the other. Then stopped and built a fire and hauled in loads of wood so there was a great pile alongside the cart and last he gave her the rifle and told her to just hold it up steady and aim at whomever she might need to and let the dog do the rest. He did not need to tell her the gun was useless after the one charge it held. The dog was called Luther. Blood bent, grunted and lifted it in his arms and placed it atop one of the rum hogs-heads and commanded it to stay. He had no idea how long he’d be gone. He took only a single piece of corncake and a moldy chunk of bacon, hoping his scanty rations would reassure her.

He left as the light went purple, not looking back at where she sat up on the other hogshead in her skirt and bodice and shawl, the rifle gripped before her like a talisman. Her feet dangled bare, too swollen to fit into her shoes. The fire burned sufficient beside the cart, the stack of wood high enough so that for the time being at least she could merely lean to feed it. He yupped the laden ox and they went up toward the last feeble light at the crotch of the mountains just above them. By the time he could see out onto the open vastness beyond he could no longer see the cart or her. Just a pale flicker high up where the firelight struck against the bare quartz rock or the last rotten embedment of ice.

* * *

There was a light far out ahead in the vast black bowl of broad long valley surrounded by the mountaintops now low hills rearing also black against the sky. But what he paid first attention to were the stars coruscating overhead, cut off midway to the horizon by a bank of rolled cloud coming from the north-northwest down upon where he stood. The wind that felt so keen down below had lost some bite so he could not say if he faced rain or snow but either way he and the girl were in for it and he hoped they were both equal to whatever came. With this study he placed himself in the otherwise measureless landscape ahead. He rested a hand on the dingy ox-shoulder beside him and yupped it again and moved forward into the night, onward toward the light. Which was soon lost from sight as they descended the valley and into the growth of hardwood and spruce and tamarack forest which surrounded them. The road underfoot firm with frost and back in the woods the snowpack, a luminescent shadow of the night itself. This land stalled in winter.

He told himself it was April and whatever the weather it would change soon. Even a heavy snow would linger but a handful of days. The girl would be all right. The important thing was the glimpsed light. It would’ve been so natural for it not to have been there at all. He could not predict this land. It was this fact, most simply, that had brought him here.

She had dragged the cowhide up onto the hogshead and had the luxury of both blankets and so was sleeping curled tight to fit the round space but more comfortably than she had since the man took her from Maine. This after supping on the rich hot black tea that he reserved for himself and great rinds of bacon that she could not slice but washed the worst of the mold in the bitter brook water before roasting so the fat spit and burned her face and what mold was left was burned clear and she ate as much for once as she wanted. Sharing the hide-rind with the dog who sat atop its hogshead watching her as if recording her transgressions with some silent stamp. Still, the dog was happy to eat the offered food. All the time with the wind funneled piercing down through the cleft above. But the fire was high and warm and there were no blackflies and she went to sleep with her belly stretched and
her mind slowed and easy. So when the enormous hound woke her with his roaring she was blear-eyed and thick-headed.

She thought at first it was the snow the dog sounded, great platelets the size of saucers in a drafty sweep down through the wavering ovoid of firelight, and was scrambling up to her knees and holding the rifle tight as she reached one hand to try and calm Luther when she saw the wolves. Three of them. She had never seen one before but there was no mistake, the nightbeasts shadowed gray against the black, the yellow rimfire eyes turned hot sideways toward her as they moved, pacing back and forth just at the edge of light, the three forms weaving past one another the way water braids through a cat-tail stand. The lone ox was bellowing now also, heaving its weight against the side of the cart as if it might join the dog and girl atop the load, the cart rocking against its terror.

The wolves still had thick winter pelts and against the new-fallen snow and the light of the burned-down fire they appeared to float. They were silent, making a half circle back and forth where the cart was lodged against the steep cliffside of the road, leaping dainty over the brook to keep as close to the cart as they could or would. The ox was down on that open side of the cart and the wolves would make slight feint as they approached and fall back again as they passed, the dog Luther stretched high and quivering on his stoop, howling, extended as far out as he could over the bulging fearful ox, his four legs bunched together, feet jammed against the cask-rim, his head lowered so that he bayed his awful roar down the side of the stricken ox and the sound flowed out toward the wolves.

Sally had her feet pulled under her and her shawl over the flintlock of the rifle although she guessed the cap was already wet from the snow but did not know enough to know what to do about it. Her hands wet and there seemed no way to check it. With her other hand she reached out and dug a hard hold of the heavy hair and fold of skin at the base of the dog’s tail and he turned and snarled at her but she gripped harder and shouted at him and he looked at her again and then turned back to the wolves. She would let the wolves eat the ox before she would let the dog off the cart. He was all she had. She thought a moment of Blood returning with a mended axle and only a single ox for a load that needed a team and wished he was here, that he’d waited until morning to set
off and then she realized that if the ox was killed they would have to go through something like this all over again and she began to shout at the wolves. At first just words yelled, Git, Git, Git Out Of Here, and then the delicious fever of release came over her and she began just to scream, the high drawn pitched cry of her soul—and her screaming seemed to enthrall the wolves. One sat on its haunches in the snow and tipped back its head and watched her and the other two slipped back a scant pace and weaved among the trees. The one seated then began to howl, its mouth agape to the night and the long cry coming as if answering her. And she screamed back and the hound and ox roared their wails as well and the night filled with this music against the silent old forbearing earth.

One of the other wolves, made bold by the sound or finding it provoking or just too hungry to wait longer made a dash in toward the ox and the ox turned and slashed with a hindfoot that struck nothing but sent the wolf back toward the dark and it was then, still screaming and not knowing what she was doing, that she raised the rifle and did not aim so much as simply hold the howling wolf with her eyes so it was secured under the barrel of the gun and she hammered back the lock and pulled the trigger and the rifle went off with a tremendous concussion that nearly threw her from the hogshead. A glut of powder-smoke sifted through the air and the falling snow was obscured for a moment. And the music was smothered. The first thing she could hear out of the ringing silence was the trifling spatter of snow against the covered ground.

On the evening of the third day Blood returned with the repaired axle, a hindquarter of young moose and a soft-tanned bearskin slung over the back of the ox, coming through the snow that had fallen that first night and most of the following day but was now shrunk back and melting under warm days and the night interval, the snow rotting from the bottom up and so running streams of water in every declivity and pooling in every hoofprint or smallest depression between stones, and found her, back in her shift with her stream-washed clothing hung to dry over a shadbush with swollen buds and the wolf carcass hanging from a tree where she had drawn it up on a length of rope to keep the
dog from attacking it, far enough from the cart so the camped ox was calm but close enough to warn off other wolves.