Ma looked startled. Other than her children, Ma’s most cherished possession was her mare, Martinique. No one in the clan owned a horse but Ma. Horses belonged to the collective. But when Father brought Ma to live with him, he asked the elders to make an exception for her, this woman who had traveled across seas and many lands with this beloved horse. Martinique had been named after the place where Ma’s mother was born. She was a graceful old gal with a faded black coat and oversized hooves, and she was as steady and as charming as any. Ma would not keep Victor from leaving if it was on Martinique’s behalf.
“Is it bad?”
“No, I would tell you.” Victor motioned with his hands for her to remain calm. “As soon as I’m finished, I’ll find you and we’ll go together and fix her up. I’ll be quick,” Victor said.
Victor hurried to the boulder where he and the girl were to meet. She emerged from behind him, said she’d been there too long. Her eyes were distant.
“I had to finish my work.” He told her Like-Wind planned to meet them, that he would take her to him and they rode together across the shallowest part of the river and up the left bank, climbing a rocky path until they came to the chokecherry where Bluegrass said they were to wait. The girl was excited, and though Victor felt guilty, he knew that once Like-Wind had a chance to put her down, he would be there to mend her heart.
“What do you think he will say?” she said.
“I don’t know. He sent the message with my sisters. Little girls don’t remember such things.”
“You should’ve asked them again.” The girl knelt in the soppy earth and when she looked up at him, she began to laugh, the sound like a tongue smacking erupting from her soft mouth as though she were a coyote devouring fresh liver. “Are you scared of me?” she said.
He was, indeed, scared of something within her, but also he wished to feel her lips pressed into his, to have her hips dance atop his fingertips. Nothing felt the way he thought it might feel anymore. Even his thoughts did not feel like his own.
“On dirait que tu es un bébé?” The girl smirked at his surprise. “The King of France used to own the Arkansaw River. French is that river’s language.” The girl crossed her arms over her bosom and leaned into the tree as if the jagged bark at her back were feathers.
“I speak this language too,” Victor said, wondering if the girl knew that he understood, understood she had called him a baby.
“Yes, I heard your mother the day she pulled you away from the fire.” The girl pitched clumps of muck from beneath her fingernails toward him, then said, “I was scared when we crossed the river today. The water was loud.”
“The rain has made it wild. If it doesn’t rain again, it will calm in a few days,” he said. “But where we crossed was shallow.”
The girl searched the land around them. The clouds bloomed and hung low atop the muddied hills, and small patches of green stood stark against drowsy grasses. “How long will Like-Wind be?”
When she spoke Like-Wind’s name, something inside Victor rose up. A wave of remorse, perhaps, for Like-Wind was his closest friend, and Victor knew he should have asked Like-Wind for his blessing, but Victor also knew that to ask a question, one must be prepared for any answer. And Victor wished only for an answer that would clear the path for his desire.
He and the girl moved closer to the river, for the trees were obstructing their view of the valley. It was chilly—a spring kind of chilly—and the skin on the girl’s horribly notched back shone more brittle. Victor wondered what kind of beating could break skin in that way. And he wondered if what he felt for her wasn’t tied to what he didn’t know of her.
“Are we in the correct place?” she said.
Victor took off his moccasins and sat down. He loved the feel of the cold earth between his toes. Loved to listen to Little Bighorn’s currents thrash against stodgy parties of boulders before hurrying away. “Yes, of course.”
The girl spent the better part of the next two hours surveying the empty banks, searching for the oval crown of Like-Wind’s head in breaks between grassy knolls, sighing at the river’s grumblings, disappointed in the land’s failure to present Like-Wind.
“Did you lie to me?” she said.
The accusation surprised Victor, and it made him nervous though he had no reason to be. Yet he too wondered where Like-Wind could be.
“I know your kind. You are lying,” she said. “I want to return to camp. Now.”
“My kind?” he said. “I told you he’ll come.” Victor wanted to wait. He was certain the conversation between Like-Wind and the girl would be short. They need only be patient. “We will wait just a bit longer.”
“I don’t wish to be here in the darkness with you.”
Misunderstanding her meaning, thinking the girl was worried about impending nightfall, Victor said, “I could never get lost here.”
“I know why you brought me to be alone with you. Take me back.”
Victor was angry now. The accusation, the insinuation, her tone. He wished to punish her, to make her wait until near dusk, so she would know he was not to be her footman.
She began to walk away, while he remained seated, watching her as she moved down the bank’s decline. The big sky, rife, looked prepared to drop its clouds, and the river water, having yet to reach spring temperatures, spewed frigid bursts of pellets, its music deafening.
“Don’t,” he said quietly, not wanting to beg, not wanting her to think he would run behind her again. “Just wait.”
Victor thought that maybe the girl could not hear him, for she moved rapidly, her shins and knees now covered in froth. She must have been cold. She turned back toward him and he stood so she could see his mouth form big circles of sound.
“I’ll take you back,” he said. “The water is deeper here.”
“You’re lying. You told me it was shallow!”
The water swooshed about the girl’s waist now, splashing along her back and rib cage, disturbing her balance enough to trouble Victor. He watched as her eyes bloomed like two mounds of dry dust in wind, as though surprised that the water flushed about her in that way, and she cinched her shoulders as if to keep her arms from falling away. Victor slipped on his moccasins and turned quickly to loose the stallion, but when he looked again toward the river, he saw in the girl’s movements, a vile fearfulness, the kind of fearfulness Victor knew too well.
“Come out!” Victor dropped the lead, noticing the whirlpools and ovals forming around her, and knew that one wrong step would send the girl downriver. He hoped the waters would still themselves long enough for him to reach her and prayed that his forward motion would not panic her, and so he smiled a smile so gaping he could have been crying. And when she saw it, the girl outstretched her arms, and those gnawed lips went pouty, and Victor thought for a moment that the girl was laughing. And so he laughed. And he hoped that the laughter would cut a hole in the thick slab of fear crushing his chest as he watched her lose her footing and wobble upon one solid leg. He felt the waters part for him, as if they remembered him; felt the sturdy rocks beneath his feet, and when he reached for her, she fell from his grip, her head slamming into the one boulder that shouldn’t have been there, the one that had urged the rushing water to go around it, and Victor saw the girl’s eyes close and saw that pouty mouth snarl like the day she bared her gums at him, and her blood made tiny rainbows in the water’s froth before the currents carried her away.
Like-Wind had told Victor her name once, but the girl had told Like-Wind never to speak it. That her name was only for her mother’s tongue. Victor called it out now. “Under Foot!” And he wondered what kind of mother would give her child a name meant to both implore and dismiss, and he wondered about a father who would allow his son to be known by Victor rather than Circles the Earth with His Toe, and he felt he had been right about the two of them needing each other.
Victor plunged beneath the plane. The mighty force of the currents roiled beneath the surface and Victor saw nothing t
hrough the darkened muddied waters. He resurfaced, shivering, panicked, and scrambled out to get a clearer look downriver. He saw the girl’s head bubbling along the surface, and he dodged around boulders and trampled over wet, gummy leaves, running faster, his arms pumping, the pea gravel and shale stabbing the soles of his feet. “Hold on!” The girl’s arm slammed into what looked to be a boulder bridge—one that perhaps she could grasp until he reached her. He swore he could hear her fighting for her breath, her blood pounding inside his ears, her tears crackling like dry twigs in fire. She went beneath again, until her arm broke the water’s surface once more, only to be swallowed again by the currents. Victor threw himself at her, splitting the icy tide ringlets in halves, again and again, until he reached that arm, which revealed itself as a rotted branch.
4
It was nearing sunset, and the ice hung in the air like fine thorns on Victor’s still-wet skin. The men searched along the stony banks, halfhearted but undeterred, while the women whispered that the girl had gotten her medicine, that dying had been her fate, and that spilling tears for her would be proof of callowness.
Ma called Victor into the lodge. The other women and children, who had earlier convened, left them alone. Victor and Ma watched each other in the quiet.
“Are you all right?” Ma searched his eyes, but Victor knew how not to let her in. “I’ve asked Bluegrass to request a meeting for me with the Chiefs’ Council.”
“For what reason? They didn’t call us to sit.” Victor had set his moccasins to dry next to the flame Ma had started. He gathered them now. They were damp still, the sinew glistening.
“You must know this isn’t yours to carry,” she said. “You must hear it from someone other than me.”
Outside, the clan’s members began moving toward the nightfires. The twins entered the lodge expecting Ma to join them. When they saw Victor, they rushed to him, pressing their cold noses against his, promising him that the First Maker would find the girl.
“Let us go,” Ma said.
Victor followed Ma along the dirt path. The newly lit torches were like dull eyes in the light of dusk. Victor did not yet know how he should feel. Whether he should grieve when he believed it possible that the girl had made it to land or whether he should allow himself to remember how he’d let her walk into the water knowing she could not swim.
The twins ran ahead with Eagle Foot, while Ma and Victor waited outside the council tent. Hours passed, and as the night descended, the stars pocked the sky like a plague of silver, and the moon shone as just a sliver of its old self. Victor felt sorrow like a terrible itch, and as he sat on a stone seat, watching Ma pace to the beat of drums that cracked the air like lashing branches, he wondered how he would stand before the council chiefs with their skeptical, rutted brows and explain something he could not.
Of course, Victor should have expected to see Like-Wind. But Victor had given little thought to Like-Wind after returning from the river. And Ma, with her ears to the skin of the council chiefs’ tent, did not notice Like-Wind coming from behind them, swinging a wooden club with such force that Victor was thrown from his seat. When Victor scrambled from the dirt, he felt his bones throbbing, the pain so vivid his teeth clenched, and when he turned to see Like-Wind with his hair pulled from his reddened face, Victor thought for the first time that he might very well like to see his best friend dead.
Victor searched for the right stone while Ma shouted, the drums from the nightfires swallowing her words. Victor knew he’d done everything wrong, and yet still he didn’t believe he deserved to be punished more. Not then, not when his heart felt heavy. He was tired of having to prove himself worthy, tired of failing to do so. So Victor threw the stone, larger than his own head, at Like-Wind and watched Like-Wind’s neck wrench back and blood run into Like-Wind’s eyes, watched as Like-Wind swiped the blood away and reached for the knife on his belt, fending off Victor, cutting through the night air, Like-Wind’s hair loose again, flapping across his shoulders as the strands painted themselves in blood.
Victor dodged the blade each time it drew closer. At some point he must have come out of his damp moccasins, for his feet were bare as he worked to keep his breath ahead of him. He heard Ma, closer; heard her tell him Like-Wind was his brother. That one must not betray one’s brother. He felt in her words incrimination, for all that had gone wrong. He believed she had blamed him before. For the tension between he and Father. For not succeeding at his quest. For loving the girl when it seemed natural he would do so.
Victor reached for Like-Wind’s knife. The bone blade pierced Victor’s hand as if his skin were made of wet clay, and there was something about the pain that felt relieving. Like-Wind recoiled at the knife dangling from Victor’s open palm, and Victor knew then that Like-Wind had never wished for it to go that far.
Bluegrass exited the council tent; the expression upon his face was one of surprise and disappointment. He hadn’t heard the commotion from inside. He told Victor to stay put and asked Like-Wind to follow him, lecturing him as he escorted him back to their lodge. Ma ripped the lower half of her tunic, pulled the knife from Victor, and wrapped the hole in Victor’s hand. Victor felt the blood soak the cloth, but still he did not feel pain. When Bluegrass returned he glanced at Ma and frowned, and Ma grimaced, for between them there was shared frustration at what their children had undone.
“The council will see me now?” Ma said.
Bluegrass shook his head, as if an explanation was not needed. He told Victor they would make offerings together with Like-Wind the next morning. Ma moved forward, as if ready to implore Bluegrass to return inside and urge the council to reconsider her request, but Victor spoke first:
“You told me to take her there. To wait for Like-Wind,” he said to Bluegrass. “He never came.”
Bluegrass looked again to Ma, a quizzical expression upon his face, and Ma looked to Victor, surprised to be surprised that she knew none of this.
“Me? I did not tell you to take that girl anywhere. Why would I send Like-Wind to be with her?” Bluegrass shook his head and quickly disappeared into the dark.
When Victor turned to Ma, incredulous, Ma bared her teeth, which shone like polished bone; her chiseled face glowed red in the torchlights. “Didn’t I tell you there’d be trouble?”
5
Victor could not sleep. He decided as he lay that he would find Like-Wind in the morning. Tell him he never meant for things to be this way. He would speak to Bluegrass too. Ask him if it was because Ma was present that he had denied saying what clearly he’d said. Victor would make everything right. Or make things as right as they could be. Yet each time he thought of returning to what had been, he remembered the girl. Saw her face so clear in his mind’s eye that it felt as though he could touch her—touch her in the way she would never have allowed him to do before, touch her in a careful way that would not cause her to flinch or curl her lip or make him feel that way that he found too hurtful to describe.
Victor closed his eyes and promised himself he would search again for the girl when morning light rose from the sky. Up and down the banks of Little Bighorn River. He would search for her tracks, for evidence of her having clawed her way out of that awful water, for he knew she must have crossed rivers before. She was a hearty girl. Rugged. Father had said so himself, that she was brave. Brave girls don’t die, he thought. Victor fell asleep with those four words on his dried lips, like a chant, and it seemed only minutes later that Ma woke him, whispering something about needing to take him away.
“Let us go,” she said.
He got up from his sleeping robe, and she urged him to quiet his steps. As they walked out beneath night-clouds snarled like wet matted grasses, he saw that Ma had already packed the parfleche and travois with goods and provisions to last them at least twenty days: dried berries, strips of venison and buffalo fat, blankets, an extra robe, a small clay pot. It was colder than previous nights, and Victor’s sliced hand felt numb, the fresh bandage damp with new blood.
“Drink this, there’s no time to eat.” Ma gave him a pouch filled with a warm, bitter root tea he had never before tasted.
“Where are we going?”
It seemed Ma didn’t wish to answer, but then said, “Those who eat their own death will eat another’s life.” She mounted Martinique and held Victor’s favorite mare steady for him. “I will explain later,” she whispered. “Now it’s time to ride.”
II
Isle of Trinidad
1
1796
Rosa felt her bonnet’s loose ribbons grazing her cheeks seconds before they were used to wring her neck.
Jeremias dragged Rosa to the rear of the stable, the cords tightening until her gulps backed into her ears. She gasped, and the stallion Maravilloso roused, a hoof tapping the stall over and again, until Jeremias let loose the ribbons and shushed the horse, spraying Rosa with his spumy, liquored breath.
“You’re always such a bloody mutton-shunter!” Jeremias’s words fell heavy from his tongue, the nouns enunciated with teeth. He stood a foot taller than Rosa, but in the darkness, Rosa saw nothing of her brother’s pale baby face or the oft-matted sandy-colored curls he’d inherited from Mamá. She felt only the heel of his vexed palm pinning her against the wood.
“Stop or I’ll scream!” she said, the words only coarse whispers.
Jeremias quickly removed his hand and propped himself next to her. She heard him swallow and wished to move away but didn’t feel she could.
“Scream for what? I did nothing to you,” he said. “You want him to hate me, is all.”
She had never been fond of her brother. Rosa was told that this sort of ambivalence between siblings was normal, but Rosa did not feel disdain to be normal.
“If you don’t want Papá to hate you, why disobey him so much?”
Rosa had heard Papá warn Jeremias that the neighbor, Monsieur DeGannes, was an immoral man. A Frenchman even the French did not want. “What man offers a twelve-year-old boy hot spiced rum?” Papá had said. “Or teaches him how to cheat at poker and insert swears into the cracks of perfectly fine sentences?” Monsieur DeGannes was a powerful man. Papá had told Jeremias that no man became powerful in the West Indies without soiled hands, and so Papá made Jeremias promise to keep his distance and he had monitored Jeremias’s whereabouts every day, until Jeremias took to leaving after all were sleeping.
Book of the Little Axe Page 4
