Lost Nation (36 page)

Then came a snapping burst of riflefire. Cooper said, “That’s something.”

Fletcher lifted his head, rising from his crouch and tilting his head back and forth to listen. He said, “Let’s get up the hill to the top. It’s gunfire all right but I’d swear it idn’t coming from where those men was riding. It’s hard to tell, the way it’s bouncing off the hills.”

Halfway to the crest they heard another burst of sound conflicting with the first and then up on the large pinnacle rock ledges amid twisted dwarfed cedars there was a third and sudden volley, most definitely from the group just passed. The three stood in the drifting yellowed needles, turning their heads one way and then the other as new reports peppered the air. Now short bursts and single responses, other scattered shots. It was clear it was coming widespread—not just the cracks sharp and immediate upstream from them but also other clusters, down the river, toward the lake and the farms and mill there, the other pitches strung out far-flung.

Fletcher was turning his head each way, nodding as if confirming.

Cooper said, “Christ. It’s everywhere idn’t it.”

None answered him but the rise and fall of gunfire, as a stuttering manifestation of the sun breaking dim light now upon the hilltop, a roundelay of distant yet close confusion, unseen, but with near as great an impact as if the rounds whistled overhead to sift broken twigs upon
them. As if there were no safe place. The danger present, absolute. The three teetered upon their hilltop safe or unsafe, unable to say for sure.

It was Cooper who spoke again first. “This idn’t a good place to be. Sooner or later those soldiers will ride back down. However it ends for them, we don’t want to be found loitering about. By them or the ones drove em off either way.”

Sally said, “We got to get on to Blood.”

Fletcher said, “Sally. This is a big business. This is the whole country been invaded, is how it sounds.”

She said, “You two can do as you please. I don’t do as he directs, at least make some effort that way, he’s likely to cut my ears off. Or worse.” She turned to Fletcher. “Hand over that sock. I got to have the money with me.”

“Sally,” said Fletcher. “Listen. Listen to the sound of that. There idn’t a way through this country you can go.” He handed her the sock. When she took it, it sagged against her side. She straightened, opposing the weight. He said, “You insist on trying, I’ll go with you. But it don’t make sense. We wait some, maybe just a couple hours, we’ll know better what we’re up against. It’s what Blood hisself would do. Can’t you see that?”

She looked at him. Looked at Cooper. “That Dutchman might not even be a part of this,” she finally said. “And you two idn’t necessarily expert on what Blood’s capable of.”

The brothers were silent.

Cooper looked off into the trees. A sputter of gunfire came from the south and west. Then another sounded just north of them. As if it was at the base of their small hill. He said, “I just can’t see it as happenstance that them other soldiers took Blood off into Canada yesterday and today now this.”

Fletcher said, “You think he’s behind it someway?”

Cooper said, “First, I don’t even know what this is. Second, as the girl knows, the last thing I’d attempt is to offer to know his mind.” He turned to Sally. “I think you ought to care a little less what that man thinks of you, of what you do or don’t do.”

“Why’s that?”

“Why because you got the two of us.”

“So far,” she said, “I can’t know if that’s a good thing or not.”

“Well,” Cooper said. “Sometimes you just got to trust.”

“I ain’t done that once in my life.”

He looked at her. “That’s too bad.” Then, as if done with her, turned to Fletcher. “I’m going to creep along the ridge here. Keep off the road. Make my way back to the camp. I can’t see a reason for anyone to come through there. Hardly a soul knows about it and not many even know we’re pitched there. It’s out of the way. I was you, I’d come along. I bet you’re going to follow wherever this girl trails. But all this going on, this is something beyond us. We need to let it settle. We both waited too long to misstep at the last moment.” He paused, looked at Sally and away. “I’m going now.”

Fletcher cleared his throat. “All right,” he said.

Cooper stepped toward one of the giant cedars and turned back. He said, “You want one last piece of advice?”

Fletcher stood silent.

Cooper nodded. Then said, “You have to, scoop that girl up and sling her over your shoulder and follow me down.” Then he turned and went down the hill, working his way along the side of the slope, moving quiet in the dead leaves and over the bracken and juniper clumps.

He wasn’t yet gone from sight when Fletcher turned to Sally and said, “He’s right, you know. We should stick together, all of us.”

Sally studied him, took her lower lip and worried it a moment. “Seems to me, the both of you maybe need me more than I need you.”

“How’s that?” Fletcher was a little grim, as if he might not like her answer, whatever it might be.

She took her time. “Because,” she said. “I know both Blood and this country better than either of you.”

“It was you come seeking us, is how I recall.”

She nodded. And said, “But things is changing faster than we can even guess.” And was quiet then, letting him read that how he would. She watched his face, her own open, giving nothing. She knew how to do that.

Then, just when she saw he was about to speak, she said, “But for the time being, your brother makes sense. We go back to the marsh and hide ourselves there a bit. Later is enough time to decide what to do.”
And saw he was growing more determined to speak his mind and so held out the sockful of money and said, “Carry that, if you will.” He reached for it, as she knew he would, and as he did she turned and followed after Cooper. Who was right around the knee of the hill. Waiting. This did not surprise her either.

They followed the rough ground of the ridgeline downstream until the land fell away before them and veered west down through alder thickets and young popples that snapped back like whips at their passing, came through a boggy ground smeared with the whitewash droppings of woodcock and found the brook and followed it up, keeping again from the faint trail that ran waterside but climbing the steep hillside, moving slowly one behind the other and often stilling their footsteps in the leaf-fallen woodsfloor to listen.

Sometimes they heard gunfire, heavy or light, and others only the sound of their own breathing. By the time they came out into the marsh it was midmorning and hot. They knelt together at the brook and drank and went on to the camp, ever more hidden as the early leaves fell and swirled onto the canvas. Even the fire-ring was filled with yellow and red leaves. As if the land would cover them.

The air moved but slightly and they could smell smoke upon it, not the faint autumnal scent of burning that sunlight stirred from dying leaves but a keen series of twisted ropes of smoke, those smells not the clear sweetness of burning wood but the bitter rank odor of houses burning, barns—of clothing, foodstuffs, furniture shellacs and varnishes, feather-bed tickings, harness leather, the dense scent of burning fodder, of haystacks, of meal or corn—the burning of human works.

And still there came the rising and falling away again of gunfire, more distant here in this bowl of moist land but joining all the same, fainter and less often as if the fighting now was someway diminished, surplus, left over. Some resistance more token than effectual. Or of final desperation.

The three crouched under the canvas. Time to time Cooper would go out to stand in the middle of the marsh on the largest of the hummocks and tilt his head around as if to detect something of the direction of the smoke. As if to learn its source.

Midafternoon they ate the remains of the stale loaf-bread carried away from the tavern that morning. The gunfire had died away and only the smoke remained, enough of it now to haze the sun. Sally was agitated.

“I ain’t setting here anymore. I got to go down to the tavern and see what they done to it. If it’s burned or looted or what.”

“Or filled up with drunken soldiers,” Fletcher said. “Might be best to wait at least til dusk.”

Sally made a grimace near on disgust. “Seems to me you two are expert at waiting. If there’s men trying to drink they’re going to be sore disappointed once they go through the little bit out in the public room. Unless they take a axe to the door of the storeroom and get into what’s there. Which is all the more reason for me to go. Blood’ll be raging I was to let that happen.”

“How can you go rescue him and still take care of things here? He idn’t going to have a reason to get angry with you. It’s all beyond your control.”

She stood up. Flipped new-fallen leaves from her hair. “I ain’t done a good job of either one. I ain’t done a bit of it. You two do what you want, I’m walking down there.”

Cooper was leaning against the front upright tentpole. He said, “I tend to agree with her. We need to poke our way down, take a look at things. Although if it’s overrun with soldiers it idn’t going to serve any of us good to go in there.” He was looking at Sally. “You understand me?”

“I can take care of myself, drunk soldiers or whatever.” She went to the other tentpole and took up Blood’s musket rifle and the pouches.

Fletcher started to speak but Cooper held up his hand. He said, “Well, I don’t doubt that. Still, let’s go cautious. Try to see what’s there fore it sees us coming. That’s all I was thinking.”

The dog Luther lay stretched in the trodden yard before the deserted tavern, a swarm of flies working at his destroyed skull, shot or bludgeoned they could not tell. A fragment of torn green cloth clenched in the remains of his jaws was mired in the dust, a grotesque tongue; even tongue-shaped, a coattail from a militia uniform. The door was open but otherwise the tavern was untouched. There was no obvious sign it had even been entered.

Sally was wild. She went down in the dirt on her knees and pulled the dog’s body onto her thighs and circled it with her arms and bent over the dead dog, sucking air, sobbing, saying Oh Oh Oh through her crying. As she pulled him onto her, her head already bent down, the dog’s head turned limp and brains slid out into the dirt. The flies teemed around her, their green and blue backs malignant jewels in the sunlight.

The boys stood back watching her. Then Cooper made sign to Fletcher and they stepped back out into the road. Up along the lake there were long drifting pales of smoke just beyond the mill. They could see the mill was unburnt but charred heaps lay where houses had stood that dawn. The road they stood upon was churned by horses.

Cooper said, “I’m going to walk up along and see what I can learn.”

“I’ll go with you. There’s no telling.”

“No. You stay here. Help that girl. Do something with that dog. We need to get her back thinking with us. She idn’t no good at all right now.”

“I don’t like it,” said Fletcher. “This place untouched, except the kilt dog.”

“I know. That’s why I thought to walk up there. Nobody connects us to Blood yet. I ain’t going to linger. Whatever’s happened here, my guess is people ain’t had the chance to collect themselves yet. But it won’t be long and some’s bound to come along down here. It’s curious, dangerous odd to me, that whoever those horseback soldiers was they’d leave such a ripe teat as this tavern untouched. And then Blood taken just yesterday by the Canadians. That idn’t going to look good for him, people get collected. It don’t even look good to me and I ain’t lost a livelihood or a loved one. That’s what I think.”

“It don’t look like just his bad luck, does it?”

Cooper looked at his brother, then passed over his weapons. He said, “I’ll be quick as I can. Get that dog buried and get that girl inside. There idn’t luck to any of this.”

Fletcher found the spade left leaned against the barn by the royal troops the day before and walked out around the tavern, paused by the dug-up garden but did not like the look of it and so went along and found a grassy level spot with a solitary young paper birch. He worked there until he had a pit deep enough so as not to appear hasty, an offering of
a grave not so much for the dog as for the girl. Back around front where she sat on her heels still rocking with the dog, her face lifted to the sky, her eyes puffed and her face dried with muddy tears. He’d left the spade by the hole but his clothes were spread with dirt and his hands crusted and he went over and crouched across from her and looked at her.

“Sally,” he said. “Oh honey.”

“You don’t know,” she said. “You don’t know. He was Blood’s dog but he gave some part of hisself to me. I could trust him. I knew he’d never let nothing harm me. I felt safe with him. I felt safer than ever in my life. Oh god damn Fletcher, he was a good dog.”

Fletcher said, “I recall how he sniffed me over. And those great brown eyes.”

“I know it,” she cried.

Fletcher paused, then said, “I found a spot. A pretty spot.”

“I can’t stand it,” she said. “I can’t stand to let him go.”

Fletcher was quiet again. Gentle he said, “You let me do the burying. You go inside, get yourself cleaned up. Then, I could come get you and show you where it is.” He waited for her, then again offered, “It’s a pretty place.”

She ran her hands over the dog. Then looked up. “He was a awful good dog.”

Fletcher stood from his crouch and without leaning extended his free hand to her. She looked at it and then eased the dog from her, reached and let him take her hand and bring her to her feet. He led her inside and turned to her and said, “Cooper went upstreet to learn what he could. To have a look and listen. It don’t look good, with all the shooting and burning yet this place left wide open untouched. We got to be careful, right now.” He leaned and touched the side of her face and said, “I’ll come for you. Soon.”

She was looking up into him. He held her eyes, gathered them into himself, and turned and went out, closing the door behind him. He’d have to drag the dog around to the grave and then come back with the spade for the brains.

She sat at the table with her head down on her crossed arms. It was not fatigue, it was not even the death of the dog although it began there.
Began there but ran through her distinct as a fracture—the course of hours just passed all gathered in upon themselves and collapsed upon her. Her head hurt with it. Failing Blood. Who, wherever he was, surely knew already of her failure. Trying to match his certain deadly anger against Fletcher and Cooper. And herself as well. Was it truly that way? Would she hold to the brothers when faced with Blood? She felt the three of them a match for near anything but then imagined Blood stepping through the door behind her this very moment and could not say. Then recalled Fletcher come searching the father who did not know him. And Cooper seeking the father who knew but abandoned him. She wondered if she herself would be so brave. She wanted to think so. But every blown leaf that scraped against the rough shingled roof overhead was the footstep of the phantom Blood on the threshold. Perhaps, she thought, I just ain’t so tough. Then realized she was, she was plenty tough enough.