Clement pulled a tin of sardines from his pocket and dangled a small fish toward the swan. The bird considered him. Clement knelt slowly until they were eye to eye.
“Here,” he said. “Here you go. Come and get the fish.”
The swan turned and swam away from him, toward its nest, but in a sideways, coy way. Clement Piety lowered his arm. He tossed the sardine into the water, watched that silver, flickering fish float toward the swan. The bird dipped its black beak into the water and snapped up the sardine.
“Pretty good, yes?” said Clement. The swan paddled in circles. He dumped out the rest of the tin before he stood and returned to the search for the key log.
Clement Piety had been working for St. Croix Valley Lumbering for five months. He was employed as a river pig. After the winter cuttings when most loggers headed home to farms or to the towns to spend their money, Clement and the rest of the river pigs herded the logs on the river, guiding them with pike pole and peavey to the boomsites. He spent all the working day soaked to his skeleton.
Angel’s husband had given him this job, and Angel had warned him not to make a mess of it. Clement despised Angel’s husband, Thomas Lawrence, for his warlike assault on the trees Clement loved so much. The man didn’t deserve the money he made or the wife he had. He didn’t appreciate the beauty he destroyed in the landscape or in her.
But for now, Clement kept his mouth shut and did his work. If he ever found himself in the position to care for Angel, he’d need money. He was a good worker, better than most, with his wiry build and quick thinking and knowledge of the river currents. These qualities, thought Clement, should have earned him a foreman’s position, whereby he could exert some control over the sweeping clearings and lead the men toward saving a stand here and there to grow and seed. But no promotion came, nor would come. So the forests came down wherever Thomas Lawrence turned his eye.
As Clement walked away from the bird, he nearly tripped over the top of a log wedged straight up and down in the tangle. Though it appeared to be stuck tight, when Clement touched the top of it and put his ear to it, he could feel and hear tension. Though it looked taut, it was humming against the strain, vibrating like a railroad track as a distant train approached. And just like that, Clement knew he’d found it. This was the one. This was the key log.
His heart pounded. Clement stepped back and looked. In his mind he speculated how, once it was broken, the adjacent log would untangle, and then the next one would curl around it, and then the one to the side would bob but then straighten out and flow downstream. It was the one that, once busted, would free up this whole mess. Clement jumped and climbed over the other logs between him and the bank. He grabbed his ax and went back to the log. He put his hand on the end of it. Then he backed up. He swung the ax up and then back down, landing a perfect blow. Another and another. The swan glided over to see what he was doing.
“Better go away,” he said to it. “Shoo.”
It did.
Clement swung and pecked and chipped for half an hour. Finally the log was halved.
Nothing happened. He bent to look closer. The swan came back too and gave him what he took to be a smug look.
Had he been wrong? Was there a deeper log keeping it stuck? Clement lay on his stomach and peered down through the entanglement.
Then the log split an inch more. Water trickled through the opening. Clement heard a creak. Then he saw a thicker band of the river current coax its way between the pine log’s two halves, which pushed the top half up, making a space just big enough for a larger rush of water. What was, at first, a moaning of log pushing against log and a slow trickle of water between became an explosion of white pine, tamarack, water, and foam. Clement scrambled to his knees, but he had no time to get off the jam.
When the gridlock ceased to be, Clement Piety was lofted into the sky, battered in the chest by a tamarack, grazed in the face by a birch branch, and flushed in the mouth and nose with river water. His arms cycled in the air, like the wings of a teetering swan coming in to roost, and as he approached the bank, he put his hands out in front of him to soften the fall.
He landed on the bank of the river, face-down in the mud. The air left his body. He groaned. And then he heard ringing in his ears and tasted iron in his mouth. Blood trickled down his throat and, for a moment, he thought he was back in Union blues at Edward’s Ferry. Clement opened his eyes to see the river racing past and roaring happily. He tried to sit up, and pain came in his chest, and he relaxed. With the relaxation came more pain and the awareness of where he was and where he was not.
“Dummy,” he whispered. He moaned and turned onto the side that didn’t hurt. “Ohh,” he whined. He gazed up at the blue sky and oriented himself in time: 1863, not 1861. In space: Stillwater, not Edward’s Ferry. In event: a logjam, not a war, not a cannonball explosion.
“OK,” he whispered to himself. “Time to sit up.” Clement sat, coughed, and spat out blood and the fragments of a tooth. His chest hurt. He couldn’t breathe deeply. He ran his tongue over a jagged incisor. “Shit,” he said. He thought intently about his sister.
Help me, Angel, he thought. Please come help me. Angel sometimes had shown a comforting knack for materializing at the moment he needed her. Please come now too, he thought. He hoped. Was it silly to believe in such supernatural communication, to think that one twin could call for the other through a mere thought and expect the other to hear? But didn’t the religious call to their guardian angels? Didn’t the braves call to their ancestors? I need help, he thought again. I’m hurt.
Clement sat for a while and waited. Though he was all wet, he felt parched. After a few more minutes, he crawled to the river’s edge and lay on the ground. He lifted his head and watched the logs untangling and floating down, just as he had imagined it before he chopped the key log. The river moved freely. He had done it. He reached in with his hands to cup water and splashed his face. Clement pushed himself up and sat back.
Where was Angel? Was she so mad at him that she wouldn’t help him now? She was very stubborn. And also wrathful. If she were in a fresco in St. Mary’s Basilica, she’d be an angel with a halo, cradling a dove in one hand and wielding a sword in the other.
Clement decided to rest awhile before trekking back toward the other loggers. He had the feeling, again, of being watched. He looked around, but he saw no one there. His head hurt. One arm hung corrupted. It might be broken, but Clement felt no pain from it yet. But his chest hurt him strongly. I’m in a bad way, thought Clement. But at least I am alive.
Once the ringing in his ears dulled, Clement heard the faint sound of a bird. He turned his ear toward it and filtered out the rumble of the water, the alarm of other birds, and the knocking of log against log. He listened again. A peep. Again. Clement’s eyes followed the sound to the river’s bank. Wedged among the reeds of the shore, the swan’s nest rested in a precarious position, close to the current. One side of the nest had broken apart and succumbed to the flow already, but the two eggs remained in the center, though one was crushed entirely. He could see the broken baby, dead. From a hole in the other egg poked the gray head of a cygnet, with beady black eyes that watched him. He looked around but saw no sign of the white mother swan. Clement watched as the river took another few strands of the nest, and he was reminded of what happens when one thread is pulled from the cloth.
“All right,” Clement whispered. He swallowed. He pushed himself up and stood. “Where’s your mama, huh?” Clement waded into water up to his knees. He steadied himself against the current. He parted the reeds and grabbed the egg with the cygnet head sticking out of it.
“Hi there,” he said to the baby. “You’re not even fully hatched yet.” He patted it on the head with his finger. As he peeled away the eggshell, he forgot about how his body hurt. He felt like sharing what he had found. He looked up and around. He was sure he could feel Angel nearby, but there was something else too.
3
The Death Blow
&
nbsp; BEAVER JEAN WAS AN OLD man, minutes from death, though he didn’t know it. He’d been watching Clement Piety from the scrub brush along the shore and had seen him fly through the air. Now he walked to where he thought the boy might have landed.
Beaver Jean’s killer lurked near the shore as well. She was tiny and pushed aside bushes as she dragged an ax through the mud. Angel watched him with her soil-colored eyes, considered his shambling gait and crooked back. He would be easily smote, she thought, and not make trouble for her, her brother, her husband, her children.
All his life, Beaver Jean had been a tracker and trapper of animals and humans. From the time he was small until this moment, Beaver Jean had hunted. He had caught all kinds of creatures, beaked and sharp-toothed, four-legged and upright, winged and weighted, slow and dumb or smart and fleeting. Beaver Jean had rarely lost a mark. He guessed the creatures’ diversions and could predict their aggressions and smell their hiding places. He anticipated leaps and thwarted dives into underground holes and defended attacks. But being hunted was something new, and for it Beaver Jean was unprepared.
His eyes were bad. His hearing, not too good. He was oblivious to the murderous fate that now crept toward him. The lifelong predator had turned sad old prey.
In Beaver Jean’s hand was the Union army’s lengthy list of deserters, with rewards next to their names, posted in all the post offices and sheriff’s departments and army forts. Most of them went yellow and curled with disregard. The whole country was tired of the war.
Clement Piety’s name was hidden in the middle, with a brief but efficient description: Smallish man. No remarkable features. One eye blue and one eye brown.
When Beaver Jean had first taken the list of deserters, he’d resolved to bring in a couple of wayward soldiers for the bounty and buy his wives a new copper pot and a hairbrush, as the pair fought over those things, to his never-ending discontentment. He’d skimmed through many of the entries but stopped cold when he read about the mismatched eyes. The description sent a twisting ice auger up his back. That particular anatomical anomaly was one Beaver Jean remembered well but hadn’t seen since he was a young child.
Beaver Jean had been following Clement Piety for a week, trying to get a good look at him. On this day, Beaver Jean thought to finally confront him and introduce himself. In his mind, the young man would be initially startled, but he would soon be happy to finally meet Beaver Jean and they would shake hands and perhaps embrace each other in a hug. The young man would tell Beaver Jean that he’d been waiting for him all these years. Beaver Jean imagined all the good advice he’d give the boy: early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise; a man is the king of his castle; you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink; children should be seen, not heard; a penny saved is a penny earned. He had just broken into a smile when he heard the explosion of water and logs. He hurried in his old man way, all knock-kneed and belly-led, toward the noise.
Then he saw Clement Piety, knee-deep in the river. Already Beaver Jean could sense that this meeting was not going to go as he imagined. Clement Piety was cradling a bird. The river frothed and rumbled all around him. Beaver Jean thought hard about what to say at this, their first meeting.
“Watchee got there?” Beaver Jean yelled.
Clement startled. He jerked his head toward the shore and the giant with a scraggly beard, and he shielded his eyes from the sun’s glare. “Who are you?” Clement asked.
Beaver Jean wondered how he should answer. Should he shout “A bounty hunter”? No. That would scare the young man, and he just might try to swim for it. How about “Your long-lost father”? No. That too might be too surprising. He searched his mind and saw Clement’s eyebrows lower and shoulders cower in suspicion as he waited for an answer.
“Just a body who heard the rumble,” shouted Beaver Jean. “Are ye all right?”
Clement put his hand down and touched his sore ribs. “I saw you yesterday,” he responded. “You been following me?”
Beaver Jean stepped carefully toward Clement. “Come on out of there,” said Beaver Jean. He pointed his cane at Clement. “I wanna talk to ye.” He waved the paper clenched in his fist.
“You a bounty hunter?” asked Clement. “I served enough time. I only signed up for three months, but the army tricked me into serving three years.” Clement cupped the cygnet to his chest and searched up and down the shore for a place to advance out of the reach of the man.
“Yep,” said Beaver Jean. “Boy ye. That blast was something.”
Clement said nothing.
“Think I saw a log a rod and a furlong up in the air,” said Beaver Jean. “I heard about that scam they ran on ye First Minnesota recruits. Pretty dirty.” He picked a few more careful steps closer.
“Yes, it was,” said Clement. “You let me be then, if we understand each other. I got dysentery in Maryland and lice in Virginia.” Clement looked up and down the shore. Where is Angel? he wondered. “Got used as target practice at Malvern Hill and Antietam,” he went on. “Never got the glory they promised us.” His voice quieted, but he kept talking to the old man.
“Lost my best friend at Edward’s Ferry too,” said Clement. He was again sure he felt Angel’s presence nearby, but then wondered if he was only confusing a sad memory with a present sensation. His eyes blurred.
“Them’s your natural eyes?” Beaver Jean yelled. “Come out of there before yer get swept away or hit by a log.” The river ran fast, sweeping random logs down-current.
“No one’s enforcing those desertion laws,” said Clement. His voice got stronger. “You’re not taking me in. All right?” Clement picked a careful route through the water toward the bank. His chest pained him fiercely. It hurt to talk, but he couldn’t stop.
“Let me help ye there,” Beaver Jean offered.
“Are my eyes how you knew me? They got a description on paper about my eyes?”
“They do got paper on ye,” said Beaver Jean. “But I’m not taking ye in.” He reached out his cane toward Clement and tried to get a look, but the sun and the water and the tears played with the young man’s eyes, so Beaver Jean couldn’t see clearly.
Clement put the cygnet in the hand on the sore side of his body. He reached for the cane with the other. “I served brave enough in that danged war,” said Clement. “Ate hardly nothing.”
“Now, grab on so I can help ye up,” Beaver Jean said. “I’m an old man and can’t be standin’ crouched over like this for so long.”
“Got paid hardly nothing. Slept on the ground. Got shot at. Shot down some gents I didn’t even know and who never did nothing to me. I preserved the Union, all right.”
“I’m sure ye did,” said Beaver Jean. “Put down that bird and pull yourself up.”
“I want it,” said Clement. “I’m keeping it. My sister will like it.” Holding the cane end, Clement pulled himself up toward the shallows.
“Sister?” asked Beaver Jean. He pulled hard on the cane. “Yer mama get a husband?”
Clement stopped pulling himself up and dropped his end of the cane. “What do you know about my mother?”
Beaver Jean blinked. He tried to remember that long-ago wife, round and burdened with his child, tried to recall exactly what she looked like. He was surprised to realize that all he remembered of her was red hair. “Don’t know nothin’,” said Beaver Jean. He shook the cane at him.
Clement stood below him on the bank, in Beaver Jean’s own shadow. In that way, Beaver Jean saw clearly the eyes, the blue one and the brown. “I’ll be damned,” Beaver Jean said.
Clement raised his eyebrows. “You gonna pull me up or not?”
“I only knowed one other person with eyes like that. Up ye go.” He heaved Clement out of the water, and they both fell onto the shore.
“Goddammit,” moaned Clement. “My chest hurts.” Clement coughed and cleared his throat of water and blood. “I’ve got a twin sister, but her eyes are brown. Both of them.”
“
Ye ought not to talk that way,” said Beaver Jean. “Probably got some broke ribs. Feel like ye can’t get a full, whole breath?”
“Yeah,” said Clement. “Like I can’t.” The cygnet peeped. Clement smiled at it.
“Ye gonna fry him up or something?” asked Beaver Jean. He leaned over to look at what kind of bird it was. “I ate swan meat a couple times but never them young ones. So ye got a twin, huh?”
“Yes, a twin. But no, I’m not going to eat it,” said Clement. “So you think my ribs are broken?”
“Without a doubt, but ribs heal up quick,” said Beaver Jean. “She with yer mama?”
“No,” Clement said. “I’m going to save this swan. It’ll die otherwise, with no mother.” He picked the piece of shell from the bird.
Beaver Jean and Clement sat for a bit. They watched the river go by, the logs floating on down the way they ought to. They heard men hooting and hollering. On the opposite bank, downriver a ways, some men were waving their hats. Beaver Jean wondered if, when those men looked at Clement Piety and himself, they thought they looked like father and son. He hoped so. Then the men wandered away.
Clement had a strange desire to sit close to the man. The same leathery smell he’d noted in his room came to him now. He wasn’t repulsed by it. Rather, he felt intrigued.
Clement looked at Beaver Jean. Who was he? he wondered. But as soon as that thought passed, he felt he already knew. Clement swallowed. All these years he’d been thinking about his mother and had rarely, if ever, wondered about his father. He had always thought about how he’d embrace his mother and forgive her for abandoning him and Angel. He’d never imagined the man. Still, he couldn’t bring himself to ask and be sure, though he felt certain. He turned and regarded the old man.
Stillwater Page 2
