The Spirit Keeper (33 page)

And so we delayed.

~27~

I
WISH I REMEMBERED
every tiny detail of the days which followed, but alas, I do not. My memories are a blur of bouts of unbridled passion interspersed with periods of recovery from and build-up to e’en more passion. We traveled slowly through those glorious days of autumn. We tried to move quickly, for Hector was still determined to reach a certain village before the full force of winter set in, but no matter how determined we were to get an early start or to keep paddling as long as possible, our impulsive natures frequently got the better of us.

One thing I remember is that he did, finally, teach me to say his name. It took a great deal of coaching and laughing and trying again as we rolled together naked, but eventually I could replicate the sounds exactly as he made them. Thereafter, all I need do to start a fire in his loins was whisper his name. Because of this reaction, I continued to call him “Hector” most of the time, saving his other name for special moments. E’en if I could write a rough equivalent of his name in English—which I cannot—I would not do it, for his name is far too precious to sully it with ink.

I remember, too, how much I missed just talking with him. I had enjoyed talking with Hector so much after our long period of silence, but after marrying we entered into a new period of silence. It was not that we did not want to talk; it was just that whene’er we were not paddling, hunting, cooking, or cleaning, we were too entangled with each other to talk. In a peculiar way, I missed Hector. No matter how intimate we were physically, I wanted more and more and more of him—his words, his thoughts, his feelings, his soul.

We still understood so very little about each other.

At one point, shortly after we married, I complained it wasn’t fair I had to sit in the front of the canoe because I must turn if I wanted to see him. The river was smooth and easy at that point, so I twisted ’round and played at paddling backwards. Hector smiled at my silliness, but replied I had it easy—it was far more difficult, he said, to sit in the back of the canoe, as he must do. “I stare at your hair, your arms, your back,” he said wistfully, “and at times it has taken all my strength not to reach for you. I do not know why we have not run into more rocks!”

I stopt playing with my paddle and stared at him, surprised. “Is that so? Since when have I distracted your paddling?”

“Since the moment you got into my canoe.”

I sat there watching him paddle for a while, knowing I was distracting him, but I was too hungry for the mere sight of him to stop. Thereafter I was oft a distraction for him. Once I insisted on sitting in the back of the canoe with him, the way we did when we escaped from Three Bulls. I leant against him, so happy, surrounded by his strong arms as they pulled through the water again and again. After a short time of this sort of stimulation, however, I found myself insane with desire, unable to do anything but insist we pull over and yield to my rabid need immediately or I would die. Hector was surprised by the extremity of my passion, but he obliged me without complaint. Afterwards, I apologized for the delay, saying I guessed I could not sit in the back of the canoe with him. He laughed and said I had the appetite of a man—which I’m sure he attributed to the Spirit I kept. Concerned, I asked if it was bad for a woman to be so lustful. Hector grinned at the sky and said, “Not for me!”

Unfortunately, I found the more I had of him, the more I wanted, and I swear if I could have crawled inside his skin and bedded down like a parasite amidst his internal organs, I still would’ve wanted to get closer to him somehow, to have more of him, to become more inseparably intertwined.

Occasionally I felt guilty, horrendously guilty. I hated the fact that everything about our relationship was based on a lie, a miserable mistake, but I simply saw no way to undo what had been done. I knew, sooner or later, I must tell Hector the truth, and I thought of a million ways to say Syawa had not given me his Spirit and I was not, in fact, a Spirit Keeper, but long before I could push any explanation to my tongue, every single word withered in my brain and washed away in my pulsing blood. I couldn’t tell him. How could I tell him? I simply could not tell him. Not yet. Not whilst I needed him so desperately. And so I learnt to live with my horrific guilt the same way I learnt to live with my insatiable lust.

 • • •

One evening as we lolled naked together, Hector asked what had caused a scar above my knee. He had been touring my scars—which are many—asking about each one, and when he came to this one, I smiled. “That’s my brother’s mouth,” I said and proceeded to tell the tale.

A girl who lived near us in Boston had been born with a club-foot, causing her to walk with a considerable limp. The girl was older than I—perhaps twelve to my eight—but she was frail and easily frightened and rarely left her house save when her mother sent her to the market with eggs. Then a gang of little boys would follow after her, cruelly mocking her uneven gait.

I could see the boys were a torment to her, and tho’ the girl meant nothing to me, I despised bullying, especially since two of those boys were my own little brothers. One day when the girl passed by, out the boys ran, and I marched out behind them to demand they have done. Tho’ the other lads ran off, my brothers were not inclined to take orders from me, reckoning, of course, they had me outnumbered. I had righteous indignation on my side, however, so when fists began to fly, I gave as good as I got, and in a moment I was sitting atop one brother whilst holding the other by his arm and slapping his face. With both my hands busy, the brother below took the opportunity to sink his teeth into my leg just above the knee, and when I jumped up to shake him loose, both boys escaped.

In the meantime, the crippled girl cowered in a doorway, terrified by the sudden flurry of violence. I dusted myself off and walked her to market, tho’ I fear anyone who saw us must’ve thought I was mocking her as much as the boys had been, for my bleeding knee made me limp. We laughed about that, and, thereafter, ’til we moved away a year or so later, I walked her to the market many times.

Hector listened to this story with a fond glow in his eyes, telling me afterward he wisht he could have been there to fight beside me. He said he could just see me as a little girl, my red curls bouncing as I battled my brothers. Then he got a sort of faraway look in his eye, saying he also could not abide bullies. “Someone must defend those who cannot defend themselves,” he said with conviction.

We went on to discuss other scars, and that was the end of that.

But the next morning I awoke with a start, my ragged gasp bringing Hector to my side in a heartbeat. “What is it?” he asked, far more concerned, I thought, than a simple gasp deserved.

“Just a dream,” I mumbled. “But such a strange one . . .”

He wanted to know what I dreamt, but, like most dreams, it was fragmented and fuzzy. “We were somewhere, you and I, where there were people. Boys. A gang of little boys. And they were picking on me, mocking me about something. They called me names—they chanted. One threw something . . . and you . . . you came out of nowhere. You pushed the bullies back. You hit them. It was strange, because it was you, like you are now, but you were younger than those children somehow, and there were so many. They piled on top of you. I wanted to help you, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t . . . then someone was coming, and the boys ran away. You were on the ground, blood on your face. That’s when I woke up.”

It was a silly dream, clearly caused by the story I had told the evening before, but that was not how Hector saw it. When I looked at him, he was sitting back as if I had pushed him, his face ashen, his eyes haunted. “Hector?” I said. He did not seem to hear me, so I sat up and touched his arm. “Hector—it was just a dream!”

But when he turned his face to me, I saw that odd look he got when he spoke of Syawa. “It wasn’t a dream,” he said, his voice shaky. “That truly happened. Exactly as you described. Except, it wasn’t you—it was him. The others picked on him. Because he was small. Always. They followed him, chanting. They never did it when parents could see, but they did it whenever they could.”

“And you defended him,” I prompted gently, for Hector was lost in the memory.

“Yes. One boy always hated him. He led the others. That boy threw dirt in his face, just as you said. I stopt him. I stopt them all.” I saw Hector’s face transfigured by the same sort of rage he’d felt for Three Bulls. I felt the muscles of his arm tighten.

I remembered what I’d seen in my dream—was it possible I was sharing Syawa’s memory, as Hector assumed? Preposterous! It seemed obvious my dream was sparked by my own memories, by the conversation we’d had, and by my obsessive closeness to my husband, both emotionally and physically. But it was peculiar, I’ll own to that.

Then I thought about what it must’ve been like for the two of them as kids—Syawa, small but smart, endowed with incredible insight and perhaps e’en supernatural gifts—and Hector, younger but fearless, willing to do whate’er it took, fighting in spite of the fact his culture frowned upon fighting, risking not only his own well-being but also his personal reputation and his father’s respect, all to defend someone who needed defending. I thought I loved Hector before, but now, seeing him as the champion of the downtrodden, my love for him swelled ’til I feared my heart might explode.

Once again I felt the awful enormity of the loss he suffered when Syawa died, and tho’ I was certain my dream was just a dream into which he was once again reading things that were not there, I was not about to snatch whate’er comfort he derived from believing his lifelong friend lived on inside me.

“I wish I had been there to fight beside you,” I said gently, and Hector took me in his arms. We held each other for an infinite moment before our passions once again o’ercame us.

 • • •

Thereafter I sensed something troubling Hector. He said nothing, but I could feel it—a barrier between us, some sort of obstruction I could not get ’round. It occurred to me he might feel odd about bedding me now that I’d reminded him of the Spirit I purportedly kept, but our passionate encounters continued as enthusiastically as before. Still, something was troubling him.

On occasion he e’en grew testy.

Since teaching me to swim, he had required me to join him each morning, but I ne’er enjoyed the water, e’en after our swimming turned into aquatic coupling. My problem was that when my hair got wet, it stayed wet, and so I slept always with damp hair. This was not a problem when the nights were warm, but now that the evenings were increasingly cool, I needed to keep my hair dry.

When I awoke one morning to find my hair covered with frost, I told Hector I would no longer dunk my head. He argued, insisting his people regularly broke through ice to swim, but I pointed out my hair was not like his, as my skin was not like his, and he must make allowances for the differences between us. He grumbled at me, then turned his grumbling on the frost, which, he said, was a warning. It was just as well I would not swim, he snapt, because we must pick up our pace in order to reach our winter destination.

A day or two after this disagreement, we passed a fairly large village, and I was surprised when Hector put his head down and kept paddling. I saw people on the shore pointing and shouting, and soon a large canoe was following us, the four men inside paddling with deep, hard strokes. As I looked back at the pursuing canoe, I saw Hector’s face was stone.

The larger canoe easily o’ertook us. The men seemed friendly enough—concerned, even. They remembered Hector and were eager to renew their friendship. With broad, welcoming gestures, they invited us back to their village, but Hector responded with short, impatient signs, telling them he was sorry, but he must push on to a certain village before the snow came. They reluctantly accepted his explanation, but kept looking at me. When they finally asked who I was, Hector bristled like a dog with a bone, saying he had said all he was going to say.

The men were shocked by Hector’s rudeness, as was I. After they left and we set off, I paddled without looking back. Something was very wrong.

We spoke not a word all day, my imagination running wild. Why did Hector refuse to tell those men I was his wife? Was he ashamed of me? I kept going back to the fact that he had not asked me to marry him in the first place—what if he had changed his mind about the whole thing?

When Hector speared a fish late in the afternoon, he pulled it into the canoe and said we must keep going. We paddled ’til almost dark. After we camped, Hector worked on fish spears as I prepared our meal, but as soon as it was cooking, I turned to ask the question I’d been asking myself all day. “Why did we not stop at that village?”

Hector froze, his eyes on the ground, his lips tight, his nostrils flaring.

I continued: “It’s been a month since we stopt. We’ve skipt at least one other village, haven’t we?” The accusation hit him like a slap in the face. “That’s what I thought. So all day I’ve been wondering, asking myself why. It’s not that we’re in such a hurry. We’ve always been in a hurry, yet we’ve always stopt. The only difference now is that we’re married.”

The fish spear fell, forgotten, onto the riverbank. “It’s not what you think,” he mumbled.

“Indeed? How would you know? Can you hear my thoughts?”

His eyes shot up to my face. “I want to explain it to you,” he began, then stopt, looking pained. “But it’s . . . complicated!”

Complicated. Aaaaaah, yes. How well I knew that frustration, that inability to explain a concept because it was so complicated it simply could not be translated. I sighed. “This is a problem we have, you and I. Our worlds are very different. But no matter how hard your thoughts are to explain, you must try. I will try to understand.”

He nodded, his arms on upraised knees, his head hanging between them. I could see him swallow hard as he considered. “It’s his Vision,” he said in a meek voice.

“His Vision?”