But his fever raged. Victor slept and woke and saw the girl in his dreams reaching for a fat spider. “Under Foot?” he called to her, but she wouldn’t answer. “Under Foot?” Then he saw Ma beside a hearth, resting on a rock and pointing at pin dots of lightning. Dots with brown babies that crawled across Ma’s face.
“Sickness has but one intention,” Ma muttered.
A breeze blew, sprinkling ice onto his cheeks as Ma propped her musket against a tree trunk. She scooped up his leg and set it under her armpit. The leg was plump and shiny, and Ma didn’t seem to like it. She wanted to hurt it. For being so shiny.
“What are you doing?” Victor thrashed and pushed Ma back into her musket, which tipped and slithered inside a brittle clump of leaves. Ma gripped his leg again as if it was a growing threat. “No! Ma, just tell it not to shine!”
Ma choked it. With her clay pot. Told it to quiet down.
It was early the next morning and still Ma suctioned Victor’s leg, leaving a trail of bruised ovals atop the shiny. By dusk, the shiny dulled and Victor’s head regained its weight, and when he could think clearly again, Ma shoved a cut of sheepskin into his mouth and sliced open his thigh until the blood stood raised and stiff like tomato seeds forced to applaud her.
She lifted his head to the pouch filled with another bitter tea. Her eyes were shadowed, and she slouched like an empty, twisted sack before him. “Drink up,” she said.
“Is this your Mamá’s tea?”
“No, I don’t have what I need for my mother’s tea.”
“Why don’t you ever talk much about your home?”
“Because children use your words against you. Like tea sandwiches and knickers.”
Victor grinned, but he knew he’d hurt her.
“The way you spoke to me—I would never have spoken to my Mamá like that,” she said.
“I am sorry. I am.” Victor watched her expression, trying to discern if she was open to another question, but could not be certain. “Why did you leave home?” he asked.
Ma wiped the lip of the pouch with a worn hemp cloth and placed her hand across his forehead, flipping it over, hoping, it seemed, that at least one side of her hand would register the relief she desperately sought. “I left because there could be no more dignity. Without dignity, living becomes unworthy of life.” She avoided his eyes, placing the cloth back onto her waist, storing the pouch in the sack she would forget later to haul into the branches of a tree.
The smoke from the fire still billowed as the sun broke through like a gorged udder. It was the fourth day of their delay. Victor had been awake for some time, watching Ma’s lips move in her sleep as though in prayerful recitation. She woke panicked, smothered the ember chicks, checked him for fever. “We may have to stay here one more night.”
They had left to eat only a small bit of wild rice, and Ma, who never wished to be without at least one day’s supply of food, was growing concerned. That morning, Victor told her she could hunt, that he would be fine, and though Ma, at first, hesitated, she decided, after surveying the area, that it was best to leave while the world still felt quiet beneath them.
Victor slept and dreamt, awakening on occasion to slap critters licking sweat from his collarbone. When Martinique first began to stir, Victor did not open his eyes, but the old gal was persistent, and finally when Victor sat upright, he saw that Martinique, who stood some distance from him, had pinned her ears and held her head cocked at some sound.
“I’m listening now,” he whispered to her.
Dead branches bit at the earth. Their teeth clacked. Victor’s bow and arrow lay in a sack upon Martinique. He wouldn’t be able to reach them in time.
Clack-clack.
Victor had heard stories of close calls with bears. There’d always been a great deal of laughter over how foolish men became when face-to-face with a two-leggings: screaming fools, running fools, crying fools. Victor didn’t wish to be a fool.
He had told Ma that he thought it was a bad idea to cut through those woodlands. But she had convinced him it was best. Now Victor peered up into the grandfather fir’s canopy. Its branches were colossal spider’s legs, with sharp angles and plunging slopes. This is what Ma must have noticed when she chose it to shelter them during their delay. Climb it. He thought this as he pushed himself up from a ground blooming cream-colored mushrooms. Martinique’s ears twitched like parchment fans in the wind. Maybe Ma had changed her mind, he thought. Victor listened for the lilting rhythm of Ma’s stride, upright on her toes, the walk of a farmgirl who knew of the sea. But it was not Ma coming.
Victor climbed as high as his leg would permit, hoping the raining needles wouldn’t give him away. How could he be injured now? What god served this upon him? A woodpecker flew off, while down below Martinique watched two men in dust-colored shirts and loose trousers ride toward her atop inferior mongrels. They stopped beside her, beneath the tree adjacent Victor’s, and chatted softly in French. Victor watched as they kicked at the still-warm firepit and rummaged through Ma’s pack, stuffing everything of value into theirs.
“Look.” They spoke to another man in the distance. One of the men—a puckered-skinned one—lifted Victor’s pouch, held it out to the third man, who now moved toward them. “Bilé.” They laughed. “Isn’t that how you people say water?”
Bilé. It was an Apsáalooke word.
The third man inspected the pouch. Victor gaped at the top of his oval-shaped head and found the way that the dark hair snaked like a winding river familiar, the broad shoulders so well-known that he was certain of their next motion. Victor felt his heart din, heard the acute thrum in his ears, and knew he wouldn’t be able to blink away the tears that scorched his throat. Like-Wind picked up Victor’s pouch, dusting the soil from it, sniffing it as though it might speak to him. “You said she was a dark Negress and the boy the color of a mulatto?” the puckered-skinned one said to Like-Wind.
Victor searched for reticence in Like-Wind’s stance, hoped to see him tousle his hair, but there were no clear signs. “Le cheval de la mère. Près.” Victor had taught him those French words. Horse. Mother. Near. And now Like-Wind spoke them with a sureness, like a chief in making.
Like-Wind reached for Martinique’s lead, but Martinique became stiff-backed, planting her feet, ears flapping, for Martinique knew she was not to be separated from Ma. Ma had never allowed Martinique to be set out to pasture at nights. She kept her close always, made sure to send her off when raiders attacked, certain Martinique would find her way home. Like-Wind understood the relationship between Ma and Martinique, understood it because Victor had shared everything with him. He’d tracked them by following Martinique’s unique prints, her hooves trimmed in the particular way Ma had taught Victor to do.
“There’s only one horse here,” the puckered-skinned one said. “We ain’t stupid. You want us back at your mountain?”
“Two horses,” Like-Wind said. “You do not see.” Like-Wind must’ve known there were not two sets of fresh prints, but Victor now could be certain Like-Wind had led those men there.
The Yellow-Eyes remounted. “Let’s finish. No use waiting.”
Victor remembered when Father had decided that Victor showed no promise on the hunts, when he told Ma that Victor was “a poor marksman with no instincts for the kill.” Years before Victor was born, an Apsáalooke man and woman had been ambushed by Minnetarees, and when Apsáalooke warriors gave chase, the Minnetarees sheltered themselves. Father, who had been leading the charge, told his men, “If you are afraid, let me borrow your shields,” and with their shields, he rushed alone into the Minnetaree den. He told Ma later that the only way he could get his men not to run away was to call them “delicate.” This was what Father called Victor that last time he took him out. Delicate. And Victor had begun to believe it about himself, embarrassed each time Bluegrass and the other uncles returned boasting of the progress made by all the young warriors but him. So Ma took Victor out alone. She analyzed his errors, corrected the
m, reminded Victor of the importance of patience and persistence. “A too-speedy horse falls down just before the finish line. Take your time and wait out your prey,” she would say. It was Ma who taught him to climb high and to wait. It was Ma who taught him the doe bleat, the buck grunt. “Suave, louder, harder,” she’d say.
Victor was in that grandfather tree, an excellent huntsman, an excellent climber, a man still being made, safe and unseen, because of Ma. He was sorry he’d made her think otherwise.
Victor wet his lips and held his breath before releasing a soft vibration. He felt it rising from a sprouting seed in his stomach. The bleat soared over the pines, over the detection of the men below, and if the First Maker was with them, he hoped to wherever Ma stood. Let her run. Run away fast.
The men conferred for several minutes before Like-Wind mounted Martinique. The old mare pitched him and the Frenchmen laughed, but both Victor and Like-Wind knew the mare had behaved as such because she had spotted Ma.
Victor followed Martinique’s eyes to a thicket of tree trunks and vines. He narrowed his scope to make out Ma’s red-painted fringed buckskin tunic and moose hair leggings. She had two bloodstained rabbits strung on a vine rope across her shoulders: one just slightly bigger than a bunny, calm faced as if sleeping; the other, stout, with its eyes sprung open. Ma’s chest rose and fell as if she’d been running. The tip of her bow dangled by her waist. There were only two arrows remaining in her quiver. He hoped she would turn and run, but instead Ma searched the earth behind the men, looked toward the base of the tree where she’d left her musket. Even if she could see it hidden among the leaves, Victor knew she would never get past those men—men who had their own rifles raised, men who gaped, men who commanded her to set down the bow and arrows and her string of rabbits whose muted colors matched the sky above them.
“I’ll be damned,” the puckered-skinned one said. “It sure is a Negress redskin.” He turned to his friend, laughing. “I ain’t got that girl and her momma, but he’ll give me top dollar for this one, don’t you think? Be good if we can find her lil bastard.”
Victor had felt that something terrible would come. He’d tempted fate and now was on this journey he didn’t understand, wondering when he might go home again. He watched Ma as they inspected her. He didn’t wish to see her as they did. He told himself that his Ma was exquisite, splendid, different from them, yes, but not what he saw clouding their eyes. Father had once told Ma that she was like “volcanic obsidian, iridescent, luminous, smooth, like all the earth’s foes had drawn a truce to make her.” Victor recalled Ma, laughing, saying that Father had never seen volcanic obsidian, and yet the tender way Father had looked at her mellowed Ma, as though his words had been a salve for a great gaping wound.
And Ma was beautiful. Her hair stood tall, sometimes defying gravity and sometimes not; her lips were fleshy and full like a spring bloom; and she was thoughtful, charitable, fiercely loyal. It shamed Victor that he could only now see this about her.
They grunted as they stripped her. Profound prehistoric grunts. Like men whose goal was to be drowned in exhilaration. They pulled at her tunic until the pelt bled, powdering their peculiar rawhide boots with fleecy fuzz. They tossed Ma between them, back and forth, forth and back, and Ma looked to be swept inside the currents of a mad bloated river or like a child’s favorite toy molested by some vile god’s fingertips. One of her breasts had thwarted the disrobing, while the other seemed to resist resistance, instead loosening itself, flailing, wilting like a leaf deprived of sun and water, much the same as Ma, who did not fight, who did not shout, who did not punch or scratch or grab. As Victor watched Ma, it seemed Breath had taken its leave of her. The puckered-skinned Frenchman held Ma by the arms and spit onto her chest; a wad of foamy white slaver coursed its way down to her belly button, and he kneaded some of the spume atop her breast and up onto her naked shoulder with his leaden thumb. Exhilaration. Ma’s eyes flitted to the treetops. Treetops masking a limp, impotent, sunless sky. Treetops masking a limp, impotent, hopeless son. Victor wondered if she knew he was there hiding, unable or unwilling to do something, witnessing, as he had witnessed the girl.
Like-Wind, below, hid his face behind the thick black strands of his hair as the two Frenchmen mounted Ma like studs. Victor didn’t know his friend to be a cowardly man, didn’t know himself to be that kind of man either.
“If I live, you live.” Victor wished to remind Like-Wind of their pact. Wished to tell Like-Wind that he would rather die than watch his mother suffer.
Victor released the breath he’d been holding and fell away from that limp, impotent, sunless sky that sat broad and heavy upon his shoulders. He heard his own perfectly fine bones shatter when he landed atop the second Frenchman, heard the breath whisk out of the man before the man’s neck snapped, before the mongrel horses ran off.
The pruned Frenchman, pressed into Ma, turned to see what had happened, offering Ma the narrowest chance to throw him off. Victor lay certain he would never feel anything as excruciating as that pain, yet he hoped with everything in him that Ma had escaped.
Minutes later—perhaps only seconds—Victor heard the explosion of iron igniting.
Like-Wind’s body thumped like a rotted sapling, his hair splayed like a drenched spring bloom. Ma was blowing into the priming pan for another shot when prune-face stumbled over his own pack, begging Ma, his hands in an uproar about his head. “S’il vous plait, s’il vous plait!”
Ma had forced Victor to learn that curious language. “French,” she told him, “must be spoken in the mornings.” It was the language that reminded her of her Mamá, she’d said.
“I wished only for you to leave us alone, nous laisser seuls,” Ma said.
Ma loosed her grip on the musket, as if undecided about what to do next. Victor tried to call out to her, but the pain was everywhere, deeper than everywhere. He felt lost. Like-Wind was dead, his chest open like a peeled and pulpy fruit. He had been Victor’s friend, the boy by whom Victor measured himself, and Victor didn’t know yet how to feel, so he turned again to observe the Frenchman, who now served up a half grin to Ma, as though suddenly she’d become more human, for she spoke his language, their common language, and it seemed he believed this made them one people.
“I’ll leave you and le garçon.” The man studied Victor, then squinted, further scrutinizing Victor’s face, and seemed comforted by what he saw, for suddenly he began inching again toward Ma. Ma’s remaining clothes were ravaged, her arms and face scraped, the skin on her rib cage peeled and wisped. Ma’s musket was now lowered, and she held her body again like an empty, twisted sack. And it seemed by her expression, terrible and deadened, that Breath needed to be wary of an absconding. The man took small steps, looking to Victor, then to Ma, surveying the carnage—his dead friend and Like-Wind, his guide—relieved, it seemed, that he’d survived this woman’s wrath.
“Ma.” Victor didn’t know how he’d found his voice. Maybe he understood that Breath needed affirmation, maybe he needed affirmation. “Ma,” he whispered again.
Ma glanced up as if from a dream to find the man closing in on her.
“Je vais partir.” The man again said he’d leave and made the turn toward Like-Wind’s horse, and Ma could have let him go.
“Le musket ne comprend pas français,” Ma said.
Like-Wind’s horse unloosed itself at the sound of the musket’s issue. Victor was surprised by the precision of death’s trouncing as he surveyed the three bodies before him and thought how death was both remarkable and yet so ordinary. Much the same as its forbear, Breath. He watched as Ma searched the perimeter before reclaiming her goods and packing away the Frenchmen’s valuables—powder, traps, steel knives, and a hatchet.
“I’m sorry,” Victor whispered.
He didn’t think he said enough, had ever said enough, but also he didn’t know what more he could say.
“You see? A little axe can cut down a big tree.” Ma touched Victor’s nose with her fingertip. “B
ut your work is to reach up—reach up always for Breath. She is now your mother.”
VII
Isle of Trinidad
1
1803
What Rosa would learn much too late and what Papá did not say the afternoon Jeremias came with Pierre, was that his meeting with Señor Cordoza had been far less than pleasurable.
Cordoza, now living as a new bachelor of sorts, invited Papá to ride out with him to inspect a swath of land that his father-in-law, still in Spain, promised to purchase for Cordoza, if Cordoza put an end to his relationship with the obeah woman.
Señor Cordoza told Papá that that would not be so easy, and yet he was in excellent spirits that day, sitting upon one of Maravilloso’s colts that Papá had had to sell, wearing new trousers and boots that looked to be of supple leather. Papá had heard that after Cordoza pledged his oath of allegiance to the Crown, he turned over to the authorities two Spaniards for publicly expressing discomfort with English rule. The two men, who had once been his friends, were expelled from the island within days and shipped to Venezuela, and the English demonstrated their earnest appreciation by allowing Cordoza first rights to purchase the men’s land. Cordoza promptly bought and sold such parcels for a handsome profit.
“Ay, it seems tables turn quite suddenly on this strange island we inhabit here,” he said. Then Señor Cordoza told Papá the news of the Cathedral of Saint Joseph’s impending restoration and also that the English had found a new way to thwart the abolitionists.
“They are now bringing slaves under the guise of domestic service. As if one man needs fifty house servants! They bring them in scores, one to sweep, another to clip nose hairs, two footmen for each child, and when the Englishmen don’t have offspring, they write on the papers that a servant must attend to each hunting dog. They must think they’re Barbadians!”
Book of the Little Axe Page 16
