Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  Victor was certain Ma knew coyotes would not harm them. “If you didn’t have coyotes, then you didn’t have Old Man Coyote stories.”

  Ma inched back toward aspens that grew amid green-eyed buttercups as the mother coyote appeared, moving slowly toward her pups with one silver eye fixed on Ma. Her white throat appeared soft, while the rest of her showed thick and craggy, hinting of stone grey and pulpy orange. Her tail swept the insides of her hind legs like a pulsing heart.

  “We have Anansi,” Ma whispered.

  Victor remembered then that Ma had told him that Anansi stories were from Africa. Ma’s father had told her Anansi the Spider, like Old Man Coyote, was to remind children of their cleverness and wisdom when they were told they possessed neither.

  Victor remembered the night when Ma told him the first Anansi story. A small boy, he had decided that he too wished to be clever, and he had set his head upon Ma’s fleshy stomach and asked her to tell the story again and again so he could feel the words as she spoke them. “Anansi went to the queen,” she said, “and the queen told him that White Snake was the cleverest and that all clever stories would be named for White Snake unless Anansi could find a way to deliver White Snake to her. Of course, Anansi needed a plan and soon devised one. Anansi knew White Snake loved chicken, so he set a trap with a fat, delicious hen. But before Anansi could catch him, White Snake slithered across the hen’s back, over its head, and onto the path before it and swallowed the chicken whole.” Victor had giggled then, for Ma had smacked her lips in the telling. “Anansi tried and tried again, until one day he struck up a conversation with White Snake. He told White Snake that the queen believed Black Snake to be the longest snake in Trinidad. ‘I tried to tell her,’ Anansi said, ‘and I wagered on you too. Can you come with me to the queen’s so we can prove her wrong?’” Ma had shaken her head, and Victor had laughed, for he’d wanted White Snake to say yes. “White Snake was certain he was the longest snake in the land and thought the queen deserved to know the truth. ‘I will take you quickly.’ Anansi told White Snake to lie down and stretch himself as long as he could, and White Snake didn’t see what could go wrong with this plan, so he set himself down and Anansi tied him to a heavy stick and gently carried him to the queen. When they arrived, the queen sprung up with delight and laughed! White Snake was so ashamed! That day the queen declared that all stories of cleverness would henceforth be called ‘Anansi Stories,’ for Anansi had been cunning enough to get the wisest to lie himself down.”

  Victor smiled, remembering how much he loved when Ma told that story.

  “Do you think Father is cunning?”

  Ma frowned, and together they watched the pups trail their mother along the path. Victor thought Ma’s silence meant that she wished for him to swallow back down his question, reinforcing his feeling that Ma had always preferred Father over him.

  “This man we’re going to see …”

  “Creadon Rampley.”

  “Did you meet him through Father?”

  “The other way around.”

  “You met Father through him?”

  Victor could hardly believe he’d not known this before.

  “Funny,” Ma said, “I was with Creadon the first time I saw a coyote.”

  Ma told him that she and Señor Rampley had been cutting away from New Spain, heading north. It’d been over a half year of travel. A half year away from her home, and still she was heartsick, thinking of her family, thinking of the day they’d parted and all that had gone wrong. This new world she’d come to was vast, its threats plentiful, and it seemed she could not find her legs, for she shuddered at the smallest unexplained sound, grew nauseated at the sight of the unrecognized, her breaths, quick and unformed, left her always dizzy with fear.

  Ma told Victor about the first time she’d seen something called “turkeys” and how, in Campeche, she saw her first armadillo split open atop a rock smoky with heat. She spoke of the Americas as a peculiar and frightening place where one could travel months without seeing another human, and how every day she wished to return home and find life as it was. But after some time, Ma said she began to understand that this could never be, and so she wished, instead, to find this new land less strange, wished to believe that she could one day forget all she’d left behind.

  Señor Rampley rode always a pace or two ahead of her, though Ma had been the stronger rider. “Maybe two or three months more.” Señor Rampley said this as if she’d queried him. And it seemed for a moment that he would say something about where they were headed, but then Rosa noticed he’d set his sights across a field to the north. “A coyote.” He pointed to balding turf beneath the canopy of a lone canyon maple tree, where there looked to be a dog. “I could fill your ears with stories ’bout them things.”

  Rosa stared at the dog’s narrow face and angular eyes, its ears like cones, and knew she would never like this creature. “I don’t know if I would like to hear them.”

  “Nothin’ to be scared for.”

  “Any animal that watches me like that cannot be a friend.”

  “He ain’t watchin’ you,” Señor Rampley said. “He’s watchin’ that.”

  The covered wagon had two stripped wheels. It was dust covered and its base rippled as though it had once been floating in water. Rosa assumed it had been abandoned. They’d passed at least a dozen such wagons since leaving Mexico. Señor Rampley had said there weren’t enough wheelwrights in the world to fix all the brokenness they’d seen. All had been emptied, some even half torched, but for some reason Rampley and the coyote refused to turn away from this one.

  “Listen,” he whispered.

  Rosa heard a sound she could not place—something human. “We should stop.”

  “Naw, we ain’t stopping.”

  They passed the wagon and Rosa slowed, staring up into the tops of aspens and down into the white bear grass, as if to find the sound again. Rampley had galloped ahead when a man came running onto the road, rubbing kicked-up dust from his eyes. His hair was scattered like sunbaked pine needles, his shirt opened to a dark, hairy navel. “Help! A baby!”

  Señor Rampley glanced back at Rosa.

  “Only foals,” she said, answering his silent question.

  She turned now to face the man, removing her hat and exposing her perky hairs. The man balked. Rosa had seen unkind reactions to her presence before, but this felt rabid, felt personal. The man returned to the wagon, his fists tightly balled.

  “Let’s go now. We don’t go where we ain’t wanted,” Señor Rampley said.

  “He can’t speak for her.” Rosa dismounted. “Monsieur! Mister!” Rosa overheard the man telling someone he’d thought wrong, that no one was there to help. “Señor!”

  Señor Rampley called out behind Rosa, his words fighting against his teeth.

  “Wallace, who is that?” The woman’s voice was weighty, scratchy, feverish.

  Rosa was now at the backside of the wagon. “Can I help you, madame?”

  The man pinched the heavy cloth flaps to keep Rosa from entering. “We don’t need no help.”

  There was a long pause before the woman asked Rosa to come inside.

  The air was stiff and clammy and breathtaking. The woman was upon her backside, her soiled dress tucked beneath her chin, her brown-haired legs splayed, the rags beneath her soaked and darkened with blood, her pubic hair matted with sweat, pulsing with life.

  Though everything inside Rosa wished to flee, Rosa moved forward. She was with Papá now, home in the stable. Papá would have led the restless mare out from the stall, into the open, atop long grasses, beneath sunlight and inside a slight breeze, if one cared to blow. He would have reminded Rosa to wrap the mare’s tail, not too tight, and would have told Rosa to stand out of the way, for the mare knew best how to bring her baby into the world.

  “Do you have water, sir?”

  The man stood, glaring, fists still in balls, and Rosa determined he was useless. She ripped the lower half of her skirt, wiped the
woman with it, urged her not to push.

  Mares have distinct signs of foaling. Weeks beforehand Rosa and Papá would have prepared, and as the day neared, the mare would have grown irritable and restless, her tail would have swished or stiffened, and when this began, unless there was a significant problem, the foal would be birthed within an hour. The man, Wallace, told Rampley that he and his woman had been on the side of that road for six hours, that she swore she’d felt the baby’s head but told Wallace she’d pushed it back inside.

  “You must get on all fours,” Rosa said to the woman. “He’s got to find his way out.”

  “He?” the man said.

  The woman, Beverly, was brave and cooperative, and the boy, an hour or so later, was rose colored and wailing. Beverly thanked Rosa and asked Wallace to find the lavender water she’d packed in her satchel. “You’re on your way back to your missus, I suppose? She sure taught you to speak proper. You can give her this lavender water for the good work you done.”

  Señor Rampley had tried to prepare Rosa. Told her she would need to make herself small in that land. Unseen. But Rosa hadn’t been raised to be unseen and wouldn’t understand until much later that what Señor Rampley felt he needed to do was protect Rosa from Rosa. He’d wished for Rosa to do nothing to cause another to balk at her, nothing to make anyone know that there might be thought or memory or feeling or even breath in Rosa’s body, a body they should never be able to see. It was as if, in that place, Rosa had been given the most extraordinary power to control another, if she were only to sacrifice control of herself. So Rosa, not yet grasping all that he’d asked of her, nodded at the woman, smiled to say thank you, and a short time later, Señor Rampley was urging her to ride through the night as if she’d still not done it all right. “We need ’bout as much distance between us and them as we can get.”

  But Rosa was tired and wished to rest and eat and rinse her soiled clothing, and when they stopped, the same coyote watched them from downstream, and before the next evening, the tight-fisted man, Wallace, had found them. He was hatless, riding a weak mare, and begging Señor Rampley to return Rosa to his wife. Something “real bad” was happening, he said.

  “We can’t turn back,” Señor Rampley told him.

  “But you got to.”

  “We ain’t got to.”

  The man wept. His tears seemed to be of no consequence to Señor Rampley. “Have you no heart?” she whispered to Señor Rampley.

  “You don’t understand,” he said.

  “I got nobody. I left them alone,” Wallace said.

  “You shouldn’t have taken your eyes off your woman,” Señor Rampley told him.

  When they entered the wagon, Beverly was already stiff. The child to her bosom had been dragged by a predator to the middle of the wagon bed and mauled. Wallace vomited, and the flies dashed to his production, moving away from the baby’s open neck. Wallace turned to Rosa with his finger wagging, and Rosa reminded him that she was not a midwife. Rosa told him she didn’t know the reason a seemingly healthy woman and her baby would die, but—

  “But you just stood there! Let the baby come out by hisself! I ain’t never heard a no midwife just watchin’,” the man screamed. “Beverly ain’t no mare!”

  Rosa believed it was best not to speak or move or breathe any more than she had.

  Señor Rampley appeared calm and yet Rosa felt an unquieting within him, like a spider skittering across the tabletop. “Sorry for your loss. You got somebody we can send a post to when we get to the next town?”

  “You gonna leave me? Who’re you to this gal anyway?” Wallace closed the wagon as if Beverly and his dead baby boy were now too precious for them to look upon.

  Señor Rampley unholstered his pistol. Rosa had seen him provoked like this twice before and knew that for Rampley, a gesture toward violence meant he was no longer simply contemplating violence. Wallace, saying nothing more, glared at them, and though tears stained his weathered face and filled his eyes, everything about him told of a barely governable rage.

  2

  The coyote pups and their mother were now following Victor and Ma.

  “They must want more seeds pelted at them.” Ma pressed Martinique as they climbed out of a thicket of spruce and conifers on a windless morning. The birds flew high as Martinique descended into parched winding foothills. Eventually, they found themselves beside a freshet.

  “We should stop and drink,” Victor said.

  While they filled their pouches, the pups dabbled in the water beside them.

  “You never told me that story.”

  “The story of Creadon Rampley?”

  “I always thought you came here with Father. Why would you lie?”

  “Lie?” Ma seemed angry now. “I’m certain I told you. You must’ve forgotten. Just like you forget now that I am your mother.”

  Ma and Victor settled that night onto a patch of dirt beneath ponderosa pines. They ate the last of their smoked fish. The night was cold and the path before them long overgrown, and in the distance the sky brightened as if lit by a thousand torches. The rain would come. The coyotes took cover, though they watched Ma still.

  “I’m sorry,” Victor said. “About what I said before.”

  Ma lay flat against the earth, eyes closed. “You’re not sorry. You can’t be sorry when everything’s been said.” Then Ma, as if to avoid speaking further into the trouble that lay between them, told Victor the tale of the first coyote.

  Certainly, they both understood such stories were to be told only after the last storm of fall or before the first lightning of spring, but Victor knew before Ma began that everything would be different about that year.

  “Different tribes have different stories about how we came to be.” Ma moved herself closer to the fire, tossing a twig into the flames. “The Old Man, the First Maker, used to spend time with his sometimes friend, sometimes enemy, Coyote. There were no people in the world, no animals, save a few buffalo, and when Coyote went off by himself, the Old Man became very lonely. One day, the Old Man found clay and shaped bones from it and baked the bones in a fire. He took what he thought was the best of the batch, tied them together with buffalo sinews and smoothed them with fat. He then blew smoke into their eyes, noses, mouths, and soon after, the clay dolls came to life as men. The Old Man and the new men sat by the fire and smoked, all very content. When Coyote returned, he wished to know why the Old Man had tossed good bones aside. When the Old Man told him he thought them no good, Coyote convinced him that with Coyote’s cleverness, they could make something much better than those lazy creatures the Old Man had made. They set to work and Coyote made changes to the original design, and when the Old Man blew into the eyes, noses, and mouths, the new figures came to life as women. The women began to talk to one another and brought joy to the Old Man and all the other men.” Ma nodded as if satisfied. “It is said even now that when men are together, they sit and smoke and stare into the fire, and the women, when together, will talk important matters that men don’t know keep the world intact.” Ma beheld the coyote and her pups, their eyes closed, their furs glowing by the light of her fire.

  3

  That night as Ma slept and Victor kept watch over Martinique, it felt like the sky’s fire had pestled itself into his chest. He thought of home, his sisters, all that he believed lost to him, and felt his thoughts like a rope, its strands swollen and tangled, and Victor wondered if this was what the girl had felt when she’d run into that cool, sharp river water.

  “Wake up, Victor.” Ma was kneeling over him, shaking his shoulder. “You mustn’t cry in your sleep like so.” She seemed sore, like she’d seen something she hadn’t wished to see.

  Victor rubbed his eyes, startled, before realizing Ma was upset with him. “Then when, Ma? When can I feel what I’m feeling?”

  Victor thought of the coyotes, now gone, as Ma sat down, her knees to her chest, staring at him over the dying fire, in a way she’d done only when she thought he did not notice.r />
  “Something feels wrong. I need to get back home,” he said.

  “Your home is with me.”

  “What does that mean?” The way Ma spoke was never plain, the words always masks.

  “What do you think a mother does, Victor? What do you think I am?”

  “A mother.”

  “Not a mother, your mother. Your mother who drips the world into your mouth like milk from a teat. Making sure the host is healthy, making sure you don’t get too much or too little. How does that host get fed, Victor? I bring her grain; I fatten her up. You want the whole world? When you see how big and ugly it is, you’ll wish for me to break it into pieces and feed it to you so you don’t choke.”

  Victor felt heavy and tight and angry. “You said the girl was unmaking me, but you unmade me first.”

  “Enough.” Ma stood and the last of the blaze shone on her legs, her face vanished into shadows.

  “This is not Trinidad,” he said to her. “I am not a little boy in knickers, eating tea sandwiches or whatever it is you dream about that place no one has ever heard of.”

  Ma doused the last of the embers with water and settled back onto her mat. “You’re a child.”

  “A child? Then it’ll be a child returning home in the morning.”

  4

  In the days before their disagreement, they had alighted upon the Missouri River path. Its woodlands were thick with brambles and brush and fat rattlesnakes. They’d had to detour, for Shields River was bloated and impassable at each end, and mud had cascaded down the sides of the Elkhorns, trapping them from the east and from the west until rain mercifully washed away the sludge. All this they had managed with aplomb, and yet it was upon Victor’s return to his sleeping mat after relieving himself that he stumbled, like a small boy, onto a coiling, clawing branch that held on to his flesh, ripping it, as though starved.

  “Victor?”

  He bit back the pain and assured Ma all was well. But Victor couldn’t return to sleep, and at daybreak, his leg—from ankle to hip—bulged with fever. He wrapped the wound and wished not to have Ma mother him, prideful and too embarrassed to need her.