“I’ll go,” Carlos said. “You must stay, for Ruth’s sake.”
“For Ruth’s sake.” Alex nodded, watching as this handsome young priest darted after her youngest daughter.
Chapter 43
“You’re in love with her,” Alex said, unstrapping the peg.
“I can’t be in love with her. I’m a priest,” Carlos snapped. He was in a foul mood, having quarrelled with the Chisholms before riding over, Robert pointing out that his flock was not at Graham’s Garden, was it?
“Oh, and being ordained a priest emasculates you? Lie still!” Alex frowned down at his stump.
“I care for her,” Carlos said.
“Of course, you do. That’s why your eyes glue onto her the moment you see her.”
“I’ll leave,” he said, struggling to sit against her hand.
“If you move again before I tell you to, I’ll slap you,” she threatened, spreading a thin layer of something green and fragrant on his skin. “And you can’t leave, not now. You’re the only person she turns to.”
“I have to,” he groaned. “I can’t put my immortal soul at risk.”
“So you admit it then: you love her.”
“¡Si!” he exploded, glaring at her. “Yes, I do, and God help me, because I have no idea what to do!”
“And running away seems a good, proactive solution to your little dilemma.”
“I have nothing to offer her. I’m a priest, wedded to my Church. I can never undo those vows.” It was his father’s blood, contaminated and weak, that led him to even consider an alternative to remaining in Holy Orders. Blood will tell, as Uncle Raúl at times would say.
“But you weren’t exactly given a choice in life, were you?” Alex tied the poultice into place. She motioned for him to lie down. “I’ll be back in an hour to take it off.” With his wooden peg under her arm, she left the room, ignoring his loud protests.
*
Alex was still holding Carlos’ peg when a commotion broke out outside. Whoops of joy, repeated calls for Samuel, and she was out like a flash, running towards her son. By a scant yard, she beat Matthew to their son, and then Samuel was in her arms, and she was hugging him close, breathing in his scent, feeling how his long hair tickled her nose.
“Mama,” Samuel protested. She sat back on her heels to look him over in detail, releasing him so that he could greet his father and the rest of the family.
“He’s whole,” Qaachow’s voice assured her.
“I can see that,” Alex replied, taking in this stranger that was her son. Gone was anything that had been soft, replaced by long, sinewy muscles, expanses of skin that glowed with health and sun. Beside him, David looked almost puny, despite being half a head taller, and the younger Graham boys stared at Samuel with a mixture of awe and fear.
Her son was clearly uncomfortable being the centre of all this attention. He fingered the knife that hung at his side, said something in a low voice to Little Bear, and took a step towards him. Little Bear raised his fingers to him, and Samuel set his own fingertips to meet those of his foster brother. Little Bear tilted his head, said something, and Samuel nodded, eyes flashing for an instant in Alex’s direction.
“Will you stay and eat with us?” Matthew asked.
Qaachow bowed his head, and led his men to sit below the oak, accepting food and drink. All the time, he kept a vigilant eye on Samuel, smiling whenever his foster son met his eyes for guidance, which was often. Each and every one of those fleeting glances Alex noted, and it was as if a metal hand had closed around her heart. She waved her premonitions away, set pies and cake on the table, touched Samuel at every possible moment, but all the time there was a pressure in her chest. When she met Matthew’s eyes, she saw her worry mirrored there, and that made it all so much worse.
“The Burleys?” Matthew asked Qaachow once the trestle tables were cleared away.
“Ah.” Qaachow glanced at Sarah, eyes lingering for an instant on her waist. “With child?”
Matthew’s jaw tightened, just like it always did when someone reminded him of his daughter’s condition.
Alex placed a comforting hand on his shoulder, gave it a little squeeze. “Are they dead?” she asked, requiring some kind of confirmation that neither Philip nor Walter would be coming back any time soon.
“She didn’t want them dead,” Qaachow said, “and so they are not.”
“They’re not?” She plunked down to sit, staring at him. “But they must be! How else are we to sleep safe?”
Qaachow’s lips thinned into a cold smile. “They will not be coming back. I doubt they’ll survive the winter. Besides, I’ve sold them well to the west of here.”
“What…?” Alex cleared her throat but however gruesome, she needed to hear this. “What did you do to them?”
Qaachow hitched a shoulder: no tongues, no balls, the odd missing toe, and reduced to walking about in nothing but their own skin – just like Sarah had wanted it.
Alex ran her tongue over her teeth, pressed it against the roof of her mouth. “No tongues?” Was it at all possible to speak without a tongue?
“They deserved it,” Matthew said viciously.
Well yes, maybe they did, but still…
“They paid,” Qaachow said, “for what they did to your daughter, to your man, to countless other innocents, many of whom were women of my tribe.” He nodded in the direction of Samuel. “He was there all the time.”
“He’s a boy.” Alex looked at her son. “He shouldn’t have to witness things like that.”
“To us, he is nearly a man,” Qaachow said.
*
As they were making their farewells, Qaachow drew Samuel aside.
“In one moon,” he said.
“One moon,” Samuel echoed, swallowing deeply.
“It is your choice, White Bear.”
Samuel swallowed, torn in two. Was he Samuel or was he White Bear? He looked over to where Little Bear was standing.
“I know, Father,” he replied, “but that does not make it easier.”
Qaachow rested a hand his shoulder. “Men make choices all the time,” he said before slipping into the dusk.
Mama was overjoyed to have him back. Those first few days, she was like a leech, always touching, hugging. Samuel was made uncomfortable by her behaviour, so at odds with how he recalled her, and he was even more disconcerted by how she ate him with her eyes – blue, blue eyes that assessed his every gesture, his every facial expression.
It was getting to the point where he began to avoid her, but then, one day, he came into the house halfway through the morning and heard a muffled sound from the parlour. He tiptoed over to the door, and there was Mama, rocking back and forth in her chair with Jacob’s herbal clutched to her chest. She was weeping, and he had no notion what to do, so he slipped away on silent bare feet and went to find his brother.
“She does that a lot lately,” David said with a little shrug. “Da says it is terrible for any parent to lose a child, but perhaps most for the mother.”
“Mmm.” Samuel kicked at the ground, inundated by the image of his weeping mother, grieving for her son. They made their way up to the little graveyard and stood for some moments by Jacob’s grave. Samuel caressed the stone, wondering what it felt like to be dead. David moved over to sit on the bench, and Samuel followed.
“I saw him dead.” Samuel suppressed a shiver when a gust of wind rushed through the trees. Despite Mama’s nagging, Samuel had refused to put on any more clothes than what he came in some days ago, and so he sat half-naked by his brother.
“So did I,” David said. “Mama says he died bravely, rushing at those evil men to try to save our sister.”
Samuel didn’t reply. His Indian father said that it was a fool that charged armed men alone, brave but foolish, not at all a warrior. Qaachow had stood looking down at Jacob’s still white face for a long time before pulling the blanket back to cover him.
“Life is something you only get once,” he h
ad said to his two sons. “It is not something to be squandered on futile gestures. To die while in battle is honourable and at times unavoidable, and all men must face their death with courage, no matter in which shape it comes, but to throw it away, no, that is wrong.”
Samuel had flown in heated defence of his dead brother, and Qaachow had listened to him before placing a hand on his head. “He lies dead, and what did he achieve by it? Nothing.”
When they had found Da next morning, Samuel was prone to agree. Had Jacob bided his time and held his temper in check, none of what had been done to Da would have happened.
“Does it feel the same?” David asked, breaking through Samuel’s memories.
“What?”
“Being back home.”
Samuel hitched his shoulders, and pulled up his legs beneath him, scratching at a scab on his knee.
“I don’t know. I no longer know what is home.”
He tried. Pathetically, Samuel tried to find his place among his family again, but something indefinable had changed in him, and he had the sensation of standing outside himself and watching as the lad that was Samuel tried to find his way back to the surface.
He was shy around his brothers, preferring the company of the younger children who were content to just sit beside him in silence, their legs swinging in rhythm with his own. He called out that this time it was he that should be d’Artagnan, tussling with David over the wooden sword, but his heart wasn’t in this game of make-believe, not now that he was nearly a man.
He did his share of the hard threshing work, and didn’t notice until it was too late that, while the other lads were flagging, he was keeping up with the men, submerged in his own internal beat. David gave him a long look, took off his shirt and tightened his grip on his flail, and suddenly it was a serious competition that Samuel allowed his older brother to win.
He sat in the midst of his large, boisterous family over meals, and one part of him was happy to be there, reaching for bread warm from the oven, butter and cheese, while the other wished himself back to gourds of spiced squash stews, to Thistledown’s low voice as she told her sons of the mysteries of the wilderness that surrounded them. He’d go to bed with David and Adam, but somewhere through the night, he’d slide out of bed to lie on the floor, close enough to the window that he could see the skies. And, all the time, he was aware of Mama’s eyes, a silent, imploring gaze that was averted the moment he turned towards it.
“You can’t go around like that anymore,” David told Samuel a few weeks into September. The days were still agreeably warm, but mornings and evenings were tinged with the promise of autumn, raising goose pimples on Samuel’s uncovered skin. “You’re no Indian, you’re a white man.”
Samuel regarded his scant clothes and looked back at his brother. “I am as much Indian as white.”
“Nay, you’re not!” David snorted. “You’re white, like me, and soon you will be coming with me and Malcolm to Providence and attend school there. In breeches and shirt, mind.”
“No, I won’t be going to Providence. I won’t live away from the woods.” Samuel’s eyes flew in panic to the surrounding wilderness.
“Aye, you will,” David said. “It’s what Da wants.”
“No!” Samuel swivelled on his toes and ignoring David’s calls, rushed headlong into the wooded slopes that embraced the Graham home.
He was sitting in the clearing that had once housed an Indian village, but that now was a place of utter destruction and desolation, when Da found him. Samuel sneaked him a look: Da was limping, face set as he approached him.
“What happened here?” Samuel asked.
“I did that,” Matthew said, “after Qaachow took you away, last year.”
Samuel looked at him with astonishment.
“I nearly died, I got trapped beneath yon tree.”
“For me? You did all this because of me?” Samuel took in the demolished barrows, the uprooted saplings.
“Aye, for the loss of you. It tore at me, to see you carried away from me, and I raged that I couldn’t stop it from happening, that I didn’t do something to keep you safe from that promise I gave so many years ago.” He gave Samuel a perceptive look and sighed profoundly. “I gave you to him for a year, but he has stolen you from me, hasn’t he?”
Samuel’s tongue lay heavy and useless in his mouth. He didn’t know how to explain, not without hurting them both, and yet he had to. Men make choices all the time, he reminded himself, and he was eleven, halfway to being a man. In less than two years, his hair would be shorn into a crest, his body decorated with tattoos to show he was a man, an Indian man. A hunter, a warrior, a man who roamed free in the woods, not a man tied to one place by fields and beasts.
“I’m one of them,” he finally said, “and I’m one of you too.” He tore at the moss beneath his bare soles. “At first, I wept for you. Every night, I wept for you, and I was forbidden to think of you or utter your names or even say my prayers. And when I did, I was punished, and my Indian father spoke for hours about the new me, White Bear. I was led to spend nights all alone in the dark, without a fire or a blanket or anything to eat. I was told not to sleep but to listen for the sounds in the dark, to allow the spirit of He That Creates Everything to descend on me.”
“You must have been very frightened,” Da said.
Samuel shrugged. “Aye, I was. And then, one day, Qaachow told me to follow him, and we walked for several hours, and it was very cold, and there was snow in the air, and my fath…Qaachow told me how I was to stay three nights by myself, and that then I had to find my way back on my own. I began to cry, but he said how men don’t weep. Children do and women, but men they don’t weep, and was I not more of a man than a child?” He hunched together at the memory of those horrible winter nights, a slight shiver flying up his spine. “And then he left me. And I was forbidden to leave until three nights had passed, so I didn’t.” He smiled fleetingly at Da.
“Little Bear told me afterwards how our mother berated our father for leaving me out in weather such as that, but that our father had said that either I came back or I didn’t. And I did, and he was so proud of me.”
“The priest was still there at the time, and he was in a poorly way. They didn’t much like it when he spoke to them of God, and even less they liked it when he spoke to me in English, seeing as I was forbidden to talk that tongue. Not that it helped much. Every evening, before I fell asleep, I would lie and tell you all about my day, in English. I was that scared I’d forget it otherwise.” He fell silent, his hand fingering the knotted string of twine around his neck: 365 knots, one for each day away from them.
“Qaachow was worried the priest would die, so we brought him back, and Mama saw me, and I thought she would die in the swollen, icy river, so I disobeyed my father and threw myself in the water, and he was very angry with me afterwards. She was quite something,” he continued, turning to look at Da. “Mama, throwing herself in the waters for my sake.”
“Aye, she was. A fool, mostly,” Da said, but Samuel could hear the pride in his voice.
They shared a common smile, and Samuel reclined against him, liking the way Da’s arm came round him to hold him close.
“It began to change sometime after that.” Samuel retook his story. “There would be days when I didn’t think once of you, and at times I struggled remembering the words of the Lord’s Prayer. But I never forgot to tie the knot, nor did I forget your names. But I was more White Bear than Samuel, brother of Little Bear, son of Qaachow and Thistledown, brother to the newborn baby who still is nameless. At least once a month, we were taken out into the woods, all of us lads, to spend one or more nights on our own, and I would sit and hear the Only One talk to me, filling me with his spirit and strength.”
He bent his head to fiddle with his amulet pouch, very aware of how green Da’s eyes were, and of the moisture that shone in them.
“I am one of them now, Da. My blood runs with them. I don’t feel comfortable in my own skin he
re.” He looked pleadingly at Da. “I can’t live behind doors and walls. I can’t stay with you, nor go to school in Providence with David. It would make me die inside. I want to go back out there, to the forests that are my people’s home.”
The silence went on and on. Da stared straight ahead, his throat working repeatedly, and it came to Samuel that Da was working hard not to weep. Da’s free hand trembled where it lay on his thigh, and Samuel had no idea where to look or what to say.
At last, Da cleared his throat. “You know that I can say no and you must obey. I can send you off as an apprentice to Providence or Jamestown, and you must go, for you are my son, not his.”
Samuel nodded, biting down on his wobbling lower lip. Men don’t weep, he reminded himself.
“And you will bide by my decision, you hear? If I say no, then you stay here.”
Samuel nodded again.
*
“I told you.” Mrs Parson sighed, setting down a brimming mug of ale in front of Matthew before joining him and Alex at the kitchen table. “A lad that young to be given into the keepings of the Indians…” She shook her head.
Alex had her face hidden in her hands, watching with distraction as slow tears plopped down on the table surface.
“Bloody annus horribilis this is turning out to be. One son dead, one son deciding he wants to go native, and our daughter…” Alex had known the moment she saw him so changed – hell, she’d known already back in May – and these last few weeks had only served to underline that her Samuel was in fact permanently lost, submerged into White Bear, no longer hers. She wanted to hit someone, to kick and shriek, but what would it help? Curse you, Qaachow, she thought. Damn you for wriggling your way into my son’s heart and stealing him away from me forever.
“My son, my wee lad lost to me, and all because of that rash promise…” Matthew looked shell-shocked. Alex took his hand, and it lay limp and unresponsive in hers. She wiggled her fingers to braid them with his and squeezed. He turned unseeing eyes her way, eyes that were uncommonly dark.
Revenge and Retribution (The Graham Saga) Page 36
