Lost Nation (8 page)

“That’s a shitty deal.”

“I didn’t bring you here to pamper you.”

“I’m not asking for nothing like that.”

“I’ve got no intention to be cruel to you either, you don’t demand it. You shouldn’t trouble me with this sort of thing. I got enough to worry over. And I’m not as young as you. I’m a tired man tonight. I get back in I plan to make up a bed one side of the chimney and let that heat seep into my bones. You can sleep the other side of the chimney or up in the
loft, I don’t care. Either way will be better than anything either of us has had in a while. But right now I want you to stand by the door. I won’t be long, so long’s there’s nothing to trouble me out there. After that, we can sleep and worry about the rest of it tomorrow. All right?”

She sat a long moment and then rose and came around the table and stood near. She was so small and he felt her shaking so close to him. Not a fear but some other pulse. As if she would give him something. She said, “You’re a strange man, Mister Blood.”

He said, “You’re the most recent in a long line to make that cipher. There’s no help for it, none wanted nor needed. I am who I am and that’s not a matter for human eyes to see or judge. But you mean a kindness, Sally. You’re a good girl.”

“That’s not something I’ve been called before.”

“Like I told you, you can’t expect what life will bring.”

She nodded. Did not move away from him. He was sweating. It was the first time he’d been warm in weeks. He didn’t want to leave it but needed the sudden sharp clarity of the cold one last time for the night. He paused and ran his hand over his face, squeezing the muscles, to try and let his eyes open a little wider. To see more clearly.

“By Jesus,” he said, “I feel like I been trampled by an elephant.”

She stepped back. Then reached one finger out, a delicate tenuous impact that touched just the tip of her chipped and chewed nail to his skin where his linen blouse opened down from his throat onto his chest. Took her hand away and held it with her other before her breast. She said, “What’s a elephant?”

Two

High summer. Days carved by the heat, explicit, exact, the world as if new each day. Nights so short as to be little more than a single dream, if the day’s labor left any dream room to work. Winter altogether vacant from the land save for the short gnarled trees and the bitter bite of spring water, river water, lake water. As if winter slept in the water.

A man called the Deacon lived in a collapsed cabin built by some long-forgotten departed trapper in the bog up on Coon Brook, dwelt there on the meager rations provided by his negligent god, living his days to a calendar unknown to other men and so his Sabbath day fell not by a simple cycle of seven but according to some reckoning of his strident parched soul. This Sabbath not a single day either but a pilgrimage of however many days and nights without stopping it took him to tramp the rough circuit of dwellings of the Indian Stream country, those hundreds of miles surrounding the four Connecticut lakes.

Regardless of the hour of arrival he’d stand outside and hold forth, his harangue particular and directed, as if the log or frame walls themselves gave forth knowledge of the infirmities of the souls within. It was a mystery what he knew for otherwise he did not venture from his miserable den and would not speak of the everyday when encountered on his rounds. More than once he’d been shot at, not yet with any intent to kill but only to drive him off, the gunner wanting his sleep or dinner in peace. Even if the Deacon’s words rang a bright shade too close to true
he was tolerated as a nuisance child: not imbecilic but touched, and in such a place this gift was not important but neither was it scorned. Only the Papist Saint Francis Indians avoided him. When he would come upon their trapping encampments, regardless if day or pitch night, they would leave him ranting to rouse and pile their gear and goods onto hand sleds and drag them off into the woods, leaving him with his head tilted to the sky, his words trailing after them as if it were nothing to him if they heard him or not; he was speaking for them. He made no effort to follow them. As if this was not necessary for his commission.

The Deacon came to Blood’s door one midmorning. Not his first visit there but the first so public. A gang of men gathered inside and out in the shade of the rock maple relaxing after the morning scythe when the sun burned dry the dew that let the blades cut clean. Men lounging in linen shirts black with sweat, some seated upright, backs against the outside wall with legs splayed full out before them, the blithe exhaustion of work well done. The air steady as water in a bucket. Pewter and tin cups of rum. Clay pipes, smoke a blue pleasant blur to the air, fragrant as the spruce from up hillside. Meadowlarks crying from Blood’s own uncut meadow.

Blood himself was inside, in the dim cool, seated high on the stool he’d fashioned from the top of a powder keg and three peeled-pole legs. Behind his plank counter, a tally sheet beside him, a quill and well with ink ground and mixed just that morning. So it was the farmer Cole who spied the figure surging up the road raising his own small devil of dust, a scarecrow in rough linsey-woolsey the burnt black of a dead crow, pantlegs and coat-arms too short so his scabrous wrists and ankles were displayed, the boneyard glimpse calling all to view their own future.

Cole in slow motion was sharpening the blade of his scythe, spitting to whet the stone. His pewter noggin secure against his inner thigh. He said, “Bless the day. Here comes something lively.”

One of the Canadian habitants, Laberge, said, “One good swipe that throat be stopped for good.”

Cole said, “You Papist bastard, it idn’t his fault he puts the fear of God to you. Do you good to mind the Deacon.”

“Plenty fear in me, plenty God too. But my business, that’s mine. Not his.”

Cole grinned at his neighbor. “It do make you uneasy don’t it? The way he knows what he hadn’t ought. It ain’t like nobody talks to him.”

“The Devil.” Laberge spat and rinsed his throat.

“Oh, I don’t reckon so. I guess when he’s not out spouting he’s shut up in that shack listening to voices you and me can’t hear. Or maybe just slipping around with his ear pressed up against walls, doing the same thing. It’s one or the other I guess. But he’s harmless, less you let him get to you. There ain’t no hiding from the Deacon.”

“Something wrong with that man.”

“Why sure there is. But that ain’t a reason to cut his throat or we’d all be dead.”

“It be a hard travel to find a priest to hear my confession. So maybe only one two times a year I get before a true man of God. The rest of the time surrounded by heathens. So it is. But I got nothing to hide. Pure is me, pure before God.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Cole. “Ain’t we all.”

Blood heard this from inside and frowned. It didn’t matter that the men made light of the Deacon—he saw the man as bringing trouble. As if the man gave voice to those few who by nature or some garnered sense of the appropriate had aligned themselves against Blood from his arrival. Mostly women but he did not discount the power of women over their men. Even, perhaps especially, those men who flaunted their wives and came to Blood’s for what they would anyway. Blood licked clean the quill tip and laid it atop the tally sheet and waited for the first words to issue from that parchment throat. Both hands flat on the counter but he did not realize he was leaning forward until there came the swift urgent cries from the back of the store, from the log room built onto the domicile end of the house with a single door, from the inside. Sally at work with the young pitch-holder Bacon who’d arrived only days after them to start his work, his wife and children left behind this first season down-river at her parents’ home in Bath. Blood didn’t blame Sally. She knew what took a man over the top, could gauge it in each and every one of them. But he regretted the timing.

So he rose, pushing himself up with his hands, wiped them on his breeches although they were clean enough, went around the plank counter to stand in the shadow of the open door and watched the shabby devout come on toward the group of men, he alone in his ragged black not arrested by the fierce urging of the girl. But ploughing through the road dust, a filament extended out from him.

The Deacon came to a stop before the group as she sang out. One of the men snorted phlegm-choked laughter. A short bark of wet sound. Then all was quiet.

“Whore-master,” cried the Deacon. “The rest of you also. I speak to you all. For what one man provides and another embraces, the second man is as guilty as the first. Nay, I say even more so, for in his taking, in his embracing, by his allowing the supplies of evil to flourish, he makes possible the existence of the first man. So. All should heed. But Whore-master. How come you to this wilderness? What brings you here to this spot near barren of every kind thing needed for simple human sustenance? Why would you descend upon these good people, these people come forth onto this hard land to try to make a simple life for themselves and their families. I speak not of the criminals among them—they know who they are and they know I know it also—it’s no mystery to any of us why they are here, beyond the reach of law. That is what they believe. But there is a greater law and all men know this in their hearts. So tell us now, Whore-master, why choose this place to defile with your demons of ruin, your drink, your whore? We’ll speak not of that child. Not now. That poor little deformed pretty child you pervert to the lust of any man with a bit of the devil’s own coin. We’ll not speak of her. But of you, Whore-master. Tell us, tell your new neighbors, tell us all where it is you come from and why. Tell us what has brought you among us?”

Blood stood without moving in the doorway. He heard Sally come into the room behind him. He studied the insane unrestrained eyes of the phantasm stalled now before the group in the yard. The farmers silent, unmoving. None looked at Blood and most looked down or away from the Deacon. Blood said, “She is pretty, idn’t she?”

One of the farmers sniggered. Another, out at the edge under the maple shade, stepped off and away around the corner of the store. Blood wondered what he didn’t want revealed.

The Deacon said, “Look about you good men. Look sharp neighbors. It’s not his drink, not his taking your goods in usurious trade, nor even the corruption of your flesh with the bought services of that poor child, no, it is not these things you should tend to. Although they be enough, and not a man among you knows different, to make you tremble for your measly mortal souls, for your immortal perishment within those same souls. But look to this man before you. Walk up close to him and sniff if you so dare. It is the reek of his bedfellow you’ll detect. I promise it as the Lord promises the new day. Who is that bedfellow you might ask? Well yes indeed brothers that is the question before you. Who is that bedfellow?”

Blood stepped down into the scabby yard. Did not look away from the derelict but could feel the eyes of his customers upon him. Appraising, no doubt. Some merely waiting the next step. Which Blood was considering.

One of the farmers, Peter Chase, brother of the immaculate and in-corruptible miller, spoke up. “Why yes, I can smell him from here. It’s that same sweet stink of sulphur water, ain’t it now.”

“Yes,” said Blood. “I am found out. It’s the devil himself visits me every night. Although there is no bed-pleasure. I’m no sodomite. It’s been one long card game though, I can tell you that. You see boys, he ain’t won my soul yet and it just frustrates the bejesus out of him. Wears me right out, I can tell you. Up night after night after a long day doing my business the best I can. But we’re even so far fellers. In fact”—and here he paused and looked around the ring of men, taking each one in his eyes for the briefest of tenures—“in fact, right now I’m one lick ahead in the game.”

Laughter. Some few lifted their drinks and sipped, as if no longer caring for the figure out before them in the dust. As if they had been awaiting for someone among them to take this game up and play it with the pious lunatic. As if Blood had stilled what trifling doubts any felt before the Deacon.

Who threw back his head and roared at the heavens. “O Lord deliver us. The Stench and the cloven hoof is loosed upon this blighted land.”

One of the men interrupted. “We most all got oxen.”

The Deacon did not avert his eyes where he gazed direct it seemed into the sun as if daring it to blind him. “Lord,” he implored. “Give these
men eyes so they can see. O Lord smite this attendant of the devil. Save these men, Lord, save these lost men.”

“Shit,” said Cole. “I ain’t lost. I know exactly where I am.”

Another spoke. “What that poor fool needs is a drink. I ain’t cheap, I’ll stand him one.”

This was enough for Blood. As if a weathercock indicated his customers. So he strode forward toward the Deacon and took the man by his decrepit coat-front and shook him until he looked at Blood. His eyes rolled, but there was no way for Blood to know if this was fear or sunstroke. Blood then held him still and without turning his head called out. “Sally.”

She came out from the store and through the group of men and stood by Blood’s side. Wearing her one skirt and bodice, now worn thin from washing with hard soap. She smelled fresh to Blood, as if her work with young Bacon had not even raised a sweat on her. Blood stepped now to one side of the Deacon, still clamped to one scrawny elbow. So Sally was before them both. Blood lifted his other hand up and covered the back of the Deacon’s head, hair thin and meager, as if the skin over the bone was too poor to produce hair of any substance. Held the head thus to direct his gaze.

Blood said, “Sally, take down your bodice.”

She looked at him.

The lounging men heard this and rose and closed upon them, a half-circle not too near but all of them there.

After a moment studying him Sally reached up and opened the buttons so her skin showed from the base of her throat in a long white strip down her breastbone and the swell of her navel to the waistband of her skirt. She looked at Blood.

“Take it off your shoulders.”