Book of the Little Axe

by Lauren Francis-Sharma

  “Mamá just did this for fun,” Rosa cautioned.

  Eve cracked the first egg carefully, allowing the loose white to fall over its shell and into a bowl. She set the bowl on the sill and handed Rosa the shell that still held its bright orange yolk, which Eve would later use for a cake. “You do the next one.”

  Rosa cracked the egg just as Eve had done and set her bowl next to Eve’s.

  “Let’s hope for a strong sun so that at noon we can take the reading.” Eve was more excited than Rosa had seen her in some time.

  Just before noon, Rosa heard Eve calling her from the rear door. When she arrived, the house was fragrant with the odors of boiled callaloo and fried plantains. Eve hurried to the sill and brought the bowls to the table where Rosa waited. Rosa remembered Mamá doing this only once before, when Rosa was very young, and she recalled how her insides had churned when Mamá looked up from the bowl, her color blanched, and told Rosa and Eve that she thought she would die before she grew old. When Rosa began to cry, Mamá laughed and told Rosa it was only a joke, that “Mamá would never leave her babies.”

  “You called me away from my work for this?” Rosa said.

  “Shh …,” Eve said, “let me concentrate on the pictures.”

  Eve stood for some time looking into her bowl, her eyes searching, tight and watering, until finally she looked up at Rosa, disappointed. “Mine didn’t take.” Rosa, though relieved, felt sorry for her. “Let’s look at yours.” Again, Eve’s eyes tightened, but it took only a few moments until they alighted upon something she urged Rosa to view. “Look there.” Eve pointed, and Rosa shifted the bowl to the left and right but saw nothing save egg whites.

  “Right there.” Eve pointed with more urgency. “You see it? The ship.”

  Yes, Rosa could see the sails of a ship, but it also resembled a school of fish, wild tulips, a heavy cloth sack.

  “Get ready for an adventure!” Eve laughed for the first time since Papá fell. She walked outside to the clothesline, and Rosa followed, hoping but also not hoping Eve might say more about this “adventure.”

  “Mamá would have loved that reading,” Eve said.

  “Papá wouldn’t have.”

  Eve smiled.

  “Isn’t it strange how Papá calls out for Mamá now? They could scarcely stand each other when she was alive,” Rosa said.

  “That’s not true. You can’t see clear into husband-and-wife business.” Eve reached for the clothes peg. “Mamá was his only friend.” Eve examined Papá’s undergarments, holding them to the sunlight and Rosa began to leave when Eve added, “Jeremias would like to see Papá.”

  “You’ve seen Jeremias?”

  “Oui, I ran into him.”

  “And you spoke to him?”

  “Oui, I told him to come home this afternoon.”

  6

  Rosa awaited his arrival. She felt sure of herself when Jeremias and the boys came down off the wagon dressed in their Sunday clothes. Jeremias moved sheepishly as he climbed the steps of the verandah, the boys a few steps ahead. Eve had been with Papá much of the afternoon. He’d been giving Eve trouble with drinking the tea. He said it made him nauseated, made him piss himself, and he told Eve that no man wished to piss himself. Rosa heard Papá’s voice rising in anger as she stepped out onto the verandah.

  “Pépé is not feeling well.” Rosa embraced the boys, then reached for Pierre’s face to hold it a bit longer and examine it as she always had, as if it were the first time taking in the easy expression upon his handsome face—a face that had narrowed since she’d last seen it, that had grown faint hairs over lips that still managed to retain the blush color of a small boy’s. “Go to the back and see Carlos. You haven’t met him yet. And be sure to be polite to Señor Rampley.”

  The boys left, and Rosa was alone with Jeremias, who stood close enough that she could smell his breath. She remembered how it had soured to unbearable after his visits with Monsieur DeGannes.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” Rosa said.

  “Eve said I was welcome.”

  Rosa pulled the door closed. “Eve is in charge of Papá, I am in charge of this land.”

  “None of this is my fault, you know.”

  “Truly, you’re saying those words? Did you forget I was there that night? Eve was not.”

  “Let me speak to Eve.”

  “She’s tending to Papá.”

  Jeremias moved forward. His belly spread firmer now and he pushed it into her. “Let me speak to Eve,” he said again.

  “Or you’ll push me down?”

  “Call her or I will.” Jeremias took a step back, then puffed out his chest. Rosa heard Papá inside, heard Eve’s voice rising, as Jeremias shouted, “Eve!”

  “You’re making a scene,” Rosa said. “The boys will come. And you will have to explain what you did to their Pépé.” Rosa bit down on her back teeth, steadying herself, hoping Jeremias cared enough about what his sons thought of him. “Or maybe I’ll explain it to them.”

  Jeremias peered toward the stone steps, and Rosa thought she heard François laughing. “I don’t know what kinda horrible woman you’ve become,” he said, as he left.

  An hour later, Eve was searching for one more bowl, muttering to herself. Some of Mamá’s dishes had cracked, some had been unsalvageable, and Eve had kept the shame of it to herself until then. “We have only five now. But Papá can eat from my bowl.” Eve told Rosa that she planned to bring Papá to the table before Jeremias arrived. Papá had only recently begun again to hold his spoon, to drink from a cup. Eve wished for Jeremias to see Papá looking well. “We’ll need another setting if Jeremias brings Francine.”

  “Jeremias came and went,” Rosa said.

  Eve set down the short stack of bowls. “What do you mean?” She wiped her fingertips on the rag slung over her left shoulder. “Did he bring the boys?”

  Rosa nodded.

  “You sent them away? Papá needed to see those boys!” Eve struck the table with the cloth. The force of it surprised Rosa. “You don’t do anyt’ing without speaking to me.”

  Rosa felt the previous familial hierarchy mattered little now. “You couldn’t manage this place without me,” she said.

  “Señor Rampley is here. We could manage.”

  “Oh, you think he’s doing this alone? I am inside this house helping you and I am also outside helping him,” Rosa said. “I am working as hard as three now.”

  “Oh yes, you’re always working so hard.” Eve shook her head, her eyes flitting upward. “We all work hard, Rosa.”

  Mamá would have said it to her in this way too.

  Rosa thought to leave then, thought she would set her bowl back into the cupboard and go out with the horses, except when Rosa looked upon the table, she realized Eve had left her place un-set. “We wouldn’t have to work as hard if it weren’t for you.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Before Papá fell, you allowed Jeremias to come and go as he pleased. And you knew it upset Papá.”

  “Mamá would’ve wanted that,” Eve said. “Papá enjoyed having his grandsons here.”

  Eve pushed back strands of hair. She tightened her bun as she stood behind Mamá’s chair, looking as though nothing Rosa said would make any bit of difference. Eve seemed resigned to remain calm, resigned to state facts. But Rosa did not want Eve’s calm, did not want Eve’s facts. Rosa wanted someone to be guiltier than her. She had been the one to turn away from the underbelly of her father as he writhed on the floor of that stable. “Papá hasn’t said a word to Jeremias in ten years. The only thing those visits did was stir the bitterness between them. And make Jeremias believe he had the right to come here and take what was ours.”

  “We need Jeremias back home,” Eve said. “You said it yourself. You’re working three times as hard. We all are.” There were those facts again. Eve spoke them with impunity. “He says he’s willing to help until Papá gets better.”

  “I will not have it. Jeremias could try
to hurt Papá again.”

  “That’s mad talk,” Eve said. “If this place falls apart, it will be too hard to catch up. The horses need more attention; they mustn’t get sick. The crops need tending to. You know what can happen. And Papá doesn’t want you back out working the land.”

  “Yes, yes, and you think if you have to suffer in here, then I must too.” It had been there all along—Rosa’s wrong body and mind betraying what was in the best interest of them all. “Papá as we know him is never coming back,” Rosa said. “If you want to be in charge, go ahead and have Jeremias come home. But when you miss me, know I am gone.”

  XI

  Kullyspell, Oregon Country

  1

  1830

  Ma told Victor what she thought he needed to know. She seemed lightened by the telling, but Victor knew she had not told him everything. And yet, sometimes he wondered if it wasn’t best to leave her to believe that he knew only what she wished him to know.

  “You’ll not believe that I found cured lumber in the storehouse!” Ma was almost running when she’d come to tell Victor this. “I’ve always wanted a bathtub!” She had only just returned from setting out Martinique. It had rained the previous few days, so her moccasins were muddied and she smelled of horse lather and manure.

  “There is a lake just there,” Victor said. “That isn’t a big enough bathtub?”

  “Aah, but it will soon grow too cold,” she said. “Let’s make a tub so we can sit in warm water. What do you think?”

  Though Victor was not yet in perfect condition, he felt he couldn’t say no. He helped Ma sort lumber, searching for cedar with the fewest knots, taking turns with Creadon’s handsaw, sawing lumber into staves of three-by-threes and other boards for the floor of the tub in four-by-fours. Ma taught Victor mortise and tenon construction, told him that her Papá had taught her to build. While they worked she chatted, beginning with the story of the night she followed her brother to a neighbor’s house, laughing at the audacity of that little girl who had threatened her much bigger brother.

  “I vexed Jeremias so,” she said.

  When they finished with the tub floor, they used trench cuts to connect the staves. This required steady hands and earnest finger work, and Ma spent many nights under the lantern, turning pieces, carving and shaving to get the cuts just so. She was patient with herself, patient most especially with Victor, which became most evident when they realized that Victor had forgotten to add a drain hole.

  “We could just keep the dirty water,” she said.

  Victor laughed. “Have you smelled yourself?”

  Victor, who found the woodworking and hand sawing oddly exciting, devised a plan for adding the drain: he would carve a hole and fashion a wood plug that would certainly leak, but would do so slowly enough that one would still be able to enjoy a soak.

  As Ma and Victor formed a circle with the rough-hewn staves, Ma told him about her short time at the schoolhouse. How the teacher, Señora Cecilia, had beaten her twice, leaving her with scratches and a bruised eye; how her Mamá had gone to the schoolhouse and threatened to return the favor to Señora Cecilia’s face until Papá intervened on the schoolhouse steps. Then Mamá herself had had to teach Rosa to read, to do arithmetic. Ma told Victor that though she was stubborn, she had been a focused learner, and that Mamá had told her she was the hardest worker in the house, save, of course, Mamá herself.

  “Only after Mamá was gone did we know how hard she worked for us,” she said. “She used to say, ‘You’ll never know the worth of water ’til the well runs dry.’”

  It was a little over two weeks when Ma declared the tub complete. They hauled water from the lake on Martinique’s backside, and Ma boiled pot after pot until the tub was filled.

  “Turn so I can undress,” Victor said to her.

  “I helped you with the chamber pot—you think I ent seen your bamsee and your lil pecker?!”

  Ma turned, still chuckling, and Victor threw his clothes to the ground and climbed inside.

  “How is it?” Ma said.

  Victor smiled, for he had never known anything quite as wonderful as that warm wash. “I could kiss your face.”

  Ma laughed, returned inside, and Victor sat in the quiet of the late afternoon as the sun fell into clouds like a bee upon a bloom. He listened to trees fill their lungs with sweet air and thought that it was a captivating land, that there seemed never a more true place.

  “I’m taking Martinique to the lake and will soon return.” Ma began walking away then glanced back at him again. “Was that your belly making that noise? Eh-eh, no bubbles in my tub!” Victor laughed and Ma had an expression of ease as she watched the top of his head sink down.

  Inside the tub, Victor examined his legs. The cuts and bruises had healed well and all that remained were the fresh scars atop old scars, marks of a boy who’d grown up in a home that stretched like the wild. Victor had not thought much about his quest since they’d arrived, but now he wondered if it would ever happen, if perhaps the girl had been correct about him—that because he did not have Apsáalooke blood, no spirit would come, no ancestor would lead him.

  As Victor began to sleep, he heard the stirring of brittle fall leaves. He thought Ma had returned, and when one brazen gust of wind blew more frigid than the others, Victor wondered if Ma wouldn’t be able to add more warm water to the tub.

  “Ma, would you please pour more?”

  Victor heard her clanging the pot and so he waited. But Ma did not come.

  “Ma?”

  Victor sat up, allowing his sight to set over the ridged cedar lip. He rested his chin on the edge of the tub only for it to be met by an enormous brown and furry face.

  Victor bit his lip, trying to dissuade terror from overtaking him, and slid slowly down into the water. He thought his heart might tear from his chest and float up to meet the bear, who stared down at him, its face dangling, saliva heavy on its lips, its left paw gripping the edge of Ma’s tub, the arc of its long claws like that of the best hunter’s bow. Victor remained as still as any person ever had, remembering not to make eye contact, reminding himself that he must not concede to death, that he must fight bravely, until suddenly he found his resolve firmed and felt himself ready for whatever inevitability might come, and so he rose from the water and the bear fell to all fours, and when Victor set his chin upon the lip of the tub once more, he caught sight of the bear fleeing with his clothes!

  Victor did not know when Ma had returned. When she peeked over the edge, her eyes showed relief at seeing Victor nakedly whole and shivering in a tub that had lost much of its water through Victor’s patchy drain hole.

  “Ha!” she laughed. “I just saw a bear wearing your robe!”

  Ma laughed until Victor swore her sides would split open, and she laughed until darkness fell, and Victor would have sworn that even after she was asleep in her chair, she had stirred twice in the night, just to laugh more.

  As Ma slept, Victor carried the book into the front room and, beneath the glow of the lantern, with the smell of the place now all theirs, he learned of Rampley’s retreat from New Spain—the raging noon heat that was Mexico; the fat black buzzards circling churchyards. He read of Rampley’s journey to the West Indies—the wretched sea baptism in a vessel that had consumed more water than Creadon; the malodorous mules eating slop above, while below, hollow and mysterious cries rang out. And in those pages, Victor eventually found what he’d been searching for: the girl named Rosa Rendón.

  Victor fell asleep thinking of Trinidad, of that Rosa riding horses on a magical land that pushed and pulled brown bodies from its coral shores.

  “Victor!”

  Who was this Victor Rosa called out for?

  “Victor!”

  The walls of Victor’s chest thumped and he woke with cherry-red birds and blue waters in his mind’s eye. He reached for the book, but it, along with the dream, was gone.

  “What is this?” Ma had snatched the diary from the table.


  “I just found it.”

  Ma flipped through the pages, her eyes catching the English words she’d taught Victor as a little boy. Victor knew she’d always been proud of his command of languages—Apsáalooke, Spanish, English, French, the hand language of plains tribes—often telling him he could move about the world as he wished. Ma covered her mouth with her hand, perhaps glimpsing her name somewhere in the middle of Creadon Rampley’s life. “How long have you had this?”

  “I just found it,” Victor said again.

  Ma tucked the diary under her arm and slapped Victor’s head. She walked to the rinse bowl, put down the book before splashing her face clean. “Walk with the spear,” she said.

  Victor followed her, certain she’d return later to burn the book. They walked along the dirt path, leaves twirling like chubby dancing children, and Ma spoke no words.

  The cloudy sky rendered the surface of the lake’s water a dull grey and the rocks Victor spied closest to shore were a beaten brown.

  “Water’s cold,” he yelled to Ma, who watched him from atop a grey boulder. Ma had told him that the boulder and the lake had been formed by ice ten thousand years earlier. He wondered if her icy expression had been formed in the same way.

  The two cutthroat and four whitefish dangled from the tip of Victor’s spear. Ma walked ahead, spitefully picking up her pace, knowing well Victor could not keep up. An antelope doe and her fawn, with long hooked noses and white underbellies, waited beside the path for them to pass. Ma frightened them off when she raised her voice to tell Victor they didn’t have enough wood. “You’ll need to take a tree!”

  The storage house had been filled only days before. Victor remembered then that the privilege of a mother was to dole out penalties whenever she wished.

  Except Victor was not accepting penalties.

  “He’s dead!” Victor said. “That diary is all that’s left of him.”

  Ma pointed to a young cottonwood tree farther down shore. “When you’re done taking that down, you’ll cook the fish,” she said. “And be quick. I need to eat.”