Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  Beaver Jean stared back. Mist from the roaring river condensed on his black-and-gray beard and on the whiskers of the young man. They shared a high brow and the familiar furrows. They were both sure now. Neither said a word and neither made a move until a shadow fell over them both. Clement looked up and Beaver Jean turned his head toward the figure standing behind him.

  Beaver Jean saw a flash of silver descend as if out of heaven and felt a heavy strike on the top of his head. Then he saw white. He heard the young man say, “Angel!” He felt something warm pouring down his face. He said, “Humph,” and toppled over on the grassy bank.

  Upon the delivery of the deathblow, Beaver Jean was surprised to find a convergence of all the religious beliefs about the afterlife he’d ever heard of. To this point, he’d been an unbeliever. As his brain swelled inside the cranium and slowly cut his blood supply, he wondered if it was too late to change his mind about God and to offer a proclamation of belief. He wondered if God required a public statement or if thinking his allegiance to Him might be enough. Beaver Jean had the sense that he could come back to the regular world if he wanted to and take care of the declaration properly, so that there’d be no mistake about it when his time came. He had the feeling he could stop the death process, turn from the path he was on, and come back to the right world. He had the dim feeling of being tethered to the two people who now stood over him. He felt a desire to roll his eyes back properly into their sockets, sit up, and ask the pair if they were from the womb of Lydian, the little girl wife he’d lost all those years ago.

  But in the center of his being, Beaver Jean was and had always been a voyager, and he could not turn from this most important journey, a unique crossing. The desire to go forward was stronger than the desire to go back. The desire to chart a new way, forge a new path was more urgent than the desire to return to the known.

  At the onset of this journey, Beaver Jean saw the light that his minister pappy had always described. True to the man’s sermons, Beaver Jean understood he should go toward it. The long path some of the Indians promised lay before him. While minutes passed on the shore of the St. Croix River, running wild and fast now, while his son and daughter stared gape-eyed at each other, Beaver Jean sank into a weightless and painless place where he saw his own mother waiting in the light at the end of a long wooded lane. On either side of him, brown tree trunks rose to green foliage, and above that, stars. He had the sense of falling backward and going forward at the same time, like leaning back in a canoe as it glided ahead. He saw all the waterways he’d traveled, the rapid ones with boulders and falls and the smooth ones, quiet and mirroring. He saw all the wildernesses he’d hunted, the animals he’d trapped. He saw again the bear he killed, the one that had swiped his thigh before landing in his lap, dead. He smelled again the animal’s sour fur, like the odor from the underside of tree bark. He saw the women he’d loved. There’d been so many. But he lingered on his three wives; first, the two moon-faced squaws. He heard again how they bickered when he first brought the Lakota one to meet the Ojibwe one. He saw again the spritely girl Lydian, with the distended belly full of his seed, her red hair dancing away from his grip. And though he hadn’t been there, he was able to see the babies knotted together in a cradle as though he had been. Oh, dying is a marvelous adventure, he thought.

  Beaver Jean floated on ripples of earth toward his cooing mother, beautiful with her dark hair and lines around her eyes, with all their love and wisdom. Beaver Jean had always loved the wrinkles around his mother’s eyes and was pleased to see them again. As he got closer he realized that the light was coming from them, that the wrinkles were like rays of the sun. The trees stretched their branches like arms and passed him along gently down the lane. Toward her. Finally toward her. “Mother?” he said. If this was heaven, it was good enough. She reached out her arms, and he could see her eyes, one blue, one brown, and was then sure. “Mother,” he said. Then everywhere, fireflies.

  4

  Clement’s Fall

  ANGEL UNCURLED ONE FINGER at a time, slowly releasing the handle of the ax that was planted in the man’s head. Her hands hung as if ready to grab it again, should he leap up and need another whack. When she was sure the ax and the man would remain still, she stood up straight. My God, she thought, I put an ax in a man’s skull. I am a murderer. I have now become more like my mother than I ever wanted to be. She felt a headache coming on, and her eyes blurred. But where Mother is selfish and cruel, thought Angel, I am only protecting my family. That must make a difference. She cleared her throat and swallowed a sour taste.

  Clement’s mouth opened and closed like a baby bird’s.

  “I didn’t know those axes were so heavy,” said Angel. She put a hand to her mouth. “It took every ounce of strength I’ve got.” Her voice was shaky from nerves and hissy from trying to speak without opening her mouth very much. “I’ve got to get home to the girls.” Saying that felt natural and true. She conjured an image of her plump, healthy little girls, which calmed her. She tried to dust droplets of blood off her skirt, but they smeared. “Oh darn,” she said. She tried to think of normal things. “Would you look at this mess?” The skirt, pure lavender silk, had cost her husband ten dollars, a mighty sum.

  Clement, still seated, leaned away from the old man. Finally, he stood. He stepped back from the victim. He searched Angel’s face. He had tried to hear exactly what she said, but she spoke with her hand over her mouth and often mumbled, making it difficult to understand her. Had she said something about her messy skirt? He observed her as she licked a finger and scratched at a drop of blood. Then he watched her catch a glimpse of his own face, which was contorted in horror, no doubt. Then he saw her expression change from wide-eyed shock to the lowered eyelids and clenched jaw of serious displeasure. This was always how she looked after she had done something wrong and was about to shiver off the blame, like a fowl shaking the water off. “What did you do?” he asked her. “Why did you do this?” His voice was high and hoarse, which he knew would bother Angel. He had wanted those words to come out firm and deep. He knew she hated it when he sounded weak or behaved as if he was.

  “That noise,” she said. She put her hands to her ears as though recalling the sound of the logjam explosion. “It was something, wasn’t it? Did you get hurt? Hit by a log? What do you mean, why did I do this?” she said. She laughed, a forced sound that came from the back of her throat. Her voice was steady now, and she was pleased by that. She hated it when Clement displayed the slightest vulnerability, and she thought to teach him how to be strong. “Oh, him?” she said. “I did this for you, dear brother.” She smiled at him, but her face was tight. “That’s what you want, after all. For me to do something for you. To prove my sisterly devotion.” She had learned that the best way to avoid getting into trouble was to make an accusation. “Isn’t that right?” Her lips whitened. “I did this,” she said. She waved at the man on the ground. “So you wouldn’t have to go to some military prison like that awful Camp Sumter, or worse, face the firing squad. You know they shoot deserters, don’t you?” There was some truth to that, she was sure.

  Clement sneezed. His eyes and throat burned from the water he’d inhaled and swallowed. Water from the river ran out of his nose. “Angel, they wouldn’t send me to a Confederate military prison, and no one’s enforcing—” He stopped. Trying to explain anything to her was futile once she’d decided that she was in the right.

  She continued to brush at the blood on her skirt. She looked down as she spoke. “Well, how should I know that?” she asked. Then she looked at him again, at his eyes, and suddenly disliked them. “What? Now I’ve come to save you, and you’re not grateful?” She placed her hands on her dainty hips. She inflated her chest and raised her chin. She wondered what would happen to her if anyone found out she had been here, if her husband heard she’d been talking to a laborer, if he asked her about it.

  She wondered if Clement would finally reveal her as the pauperous mutt that she was. She
couldn’t let that happen. She smiled at him in her charming way. She put her hand on his shoulder and pulled him toward her. “Oh Clement,” she whispered. “I just wanted to keep you safe. I didn’t want that big brute to arrest you and have you in the big stony prison.”

  Those were the kinds of words Clement always hoped to hear from his sister. He wished she’d offer to take him home and fix up his wounds, but she didn’t and wouldn’t. He wasn’t allowed near the Lawrence mansion, come what may. “He was about to tell me something about our mother,” Clement said. He pulled away from Angel and spit out a mouthful of saliva and blood. His sheared tooth was beginning to sting.

  Angel fought the desire to run away and go back home and lock her doors. She wondered what the man had told Clement, how much he already knew, whether he’d meander the saloons telling this new bit of his story, their story, to anyone who’d listen. Clement was a terrible nuisance. She hoped she’d quieted the trapper in time, so that no one would know that Clement was his child, that she was his child, that she wasn’t a natural child of the Hatterbys, that she didn’t have the pedigree to be married to a man like Thomas Lawrence, that her children’s blood was soiled with the filth of a fur trapper and his witless child bride. Angel touched his head. “Are you going to be sick?” she asked him. “Take a deep breath.” She took out her hankie and wiped the corner of his mouth. She smiled again. She hated it when he, when any man, was sick or hurt. She despised it when men trumped up the slightest of aches or illnesses.

  Clement wanted desperately to lay his head in her lap. He wanted Angel to dab his forehead and cheeks with her hankie for hours. He craved her tenderness. But he shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said. He thought of what else a strong man might say. “It hardly hurts at all.” Then he knelt and touched the chest of the old man. “He knew our mother,” he said to Angel. And then, trying hard to warp his voice so that it was at once low and quiet and serious, he added, “I think this is our father.”

  Angel scoffed at him. “My father is the attorney general of Minnesota,” she said. Then she laughed again. Here they were, standing over a murdered man, possibly minutes from discovery and arrest, and all Clement could think of was his sad old story, his wretched pitiful abandonment. He’d said, “I think,” which meant he didn’t know for sure. “And you don’t have a father. Now stop with that nonsense, would you?” she said. “That’s ridiculous. Look at him.” She did and was repulsed.

  Clement was getting teary again.

  “For God’s sake,” she said, “you’re twenty-three years old.” How could he be so sentimental? Where were his will and his courage and his stoicism? The urge to lift the ax one more time flared across her brain.

  “But, our mother, she could still be alive or—”

  “Our mother was probably a whore,” Angel snapped. Anger rose in her throat. “In any case,” she spit, “she didn’t want us, and it’s best to forget about her.” This man was her brother, her twin, but he seemed so foreign now, so unlike her. How could they have had the same mother? Though once she loved him more than any other, now she recoiled at the sight of him. A man should not be so weak.

  Clement’s lips turned down. “You don’t know that,” he said.

  Angel turned away from him. She thought of her own daughters. She had to get back to them. Whenever she was apart from them, she felt unsettled, dark, and worried. She resented Clement for pulling her from her children, for not understanding that she was a mother now. She resented him for threatening her marriage, which in turn threatened the safety of her girls, his own nieces. She resented his attachment to the past, his desire to fix it or return to it or hold on to it. Even his devotion to her, rooted in fantasies and glorified memories of their childhood, seemed pathetic and silly.

  Clement watched Angel turn fidgety, noted the way she wouldn’t look him in the eye and the way she drummed her fingers on her hips as if impatient, all signs that she was about to leave. He couldn’t let her. Clement shook the old man a bit. He was stiffening. “Well, what are we going to do about him?” he asked her.

  Angel gestured toward the river. “Push him in. If he turns up, people will think he got hurt in the log explosion.” She turned to go.

  Clement couldn’t believe it. She was going to leave Clement like this, hurt, next to the man she killed. “But there’s an ax in his head,” he called after her. His voice was high and squeaky again.

  Angel was already stepping away. “Pull it out,” she said.

  Clement looked at the dead man, at the whites of his eyes and the ax in his head. The cygnet peeped. “Could you at least take care of this little guy?” he said.

  This was always his way: to nag her into turning around after she’d already determined to go, to beg her to stay another minute or two, to commence vacuous talk that lengthened her time with him. She wanted to sprint away. But Angel turned and walked back to her brother. She tried to keep calm. “Here,” she said. “Let me have him.” She reached out her hand.

  Clement handed the cygnet to Angel. She took it. Clement was about to say, “Careful,” but he could see the writhing annoyance beneath her controlled countenance, so he didn’t. “Thanks,” he said to her.

  “Get him in the water before someone comes,” she said.

  “I can’t push him in the river,” he said. “It’s not right.”

  The noise of approaching loggers fell upon the pair. “You’d rather I go to jail?” She raised her eyebrows and then tried to make her eyes water and voice quaver. “Is that what you want? To see me in prison?”

  “Of course not,” Clement whispered to her, and waited until she seemed calm. “But I can’t treat him that way. You could go talk to your father.”

  “Don’t even think about my doing that,” she said. She looked around. “People are coming, Clement,” she hissed. “Push him in the goddamn water.” And then she added, “You spineless weakling.”

  Clement’s shoulders hunched. He hung his head. He’d asked too much of her and now she was angry with him again. He wanted to slap her and embrace her at the same time. He inhaled. “You go,” he said. “I’ll figure this out.” How was he going to bury the body and prove to Angel that he was brave? Why couldn’t she see it? Hadn’t he been a soldier? Hadn’t he risked his life for the lives of countless others? Why was she so cold to him? So icy? He was the only real family she had. What was it going to take to make her see? Resolve took him over. “I would do anything for you, Angel. You remember that.”

  “I know,” she said. She spun around and hurried away without looking back. Her skirt flapped behind her like a magician’s cape. Clement searched the riverbank for a place to hide the body until nightfall, when he could return and bury it proper. But in another minute he looked up and saw the boys whose hooting and hollering he and Angel had heard. They were standing on the opposite shore, pointing at him.

  At the trial a couple of months later, Clement’s appointed lawyer, an ambitious man from the East who’d come to Minnesota hoping to represent escaped slaves, drummed up a couple of river workers as witnesses. They claimed to have seen a woman near the scene. Some said she was young and well dressed. Others said she was old and small, with slumped shoulders. Clement claimed ignorance of these apparitions and seemed resigned to go to prison. He gave his lawyer little to work with. He confessed. “The man had been following me,” Clement said. “The man threatened to arrest me for desertion,” he said. “I had my ax. I swung it in his head.”

  To the judge, the list found on Beaver Jean’s person seemed to confirm this. The judge had no legal education, nor did he enjoy legal wrangling. He lit a cigar and waved away Clement’s lawyer even as the lawyer wondered how, with several broken ribs, a cracked arm, and severe bruising, Clement Piety could have done the murderous deed.

  “This act,” the lawyer argued, “would have required a person’s full strength. An upright stance. A full swing. This man, Clement Piety, could not have done it. I plead to the court.”

&
nbsp; “He confessed!” shouted the judge. He threw his arms this way and that. The smoke from his cigar wafted up and curled in the humid air. “It wouldn’t matter if he was paralyzed from the neck down. He confessed and that’s good enough for me! Now close your argument, sir!”

  “But what if he’s taking the onus for someone else?” the lawyer asked. “What if this confession is nothing more than theatrics?”

  The judge relaxed in his chair and reached one hand up his sleeve to scratch his armpit. “You better watch your mouth, son.” Under his sleeve, he herked and jerked his hand, removed it from his sleeve, and studied an extracted coarse black hair before he dropped it on the table. “In any case, that’s not the concern of this court. Now close your argument! I’m not going to tell you again without consequence.” He yawned.

  “Then God save the corrupt courts of Minnesota, which do not remember the toils of the men now embroiled in the noble cause of righteousness and freedom and who fight and die daily, nor give representation to the vulnerable and weak—”

  “You can quit your preaching. Everyone’s sick to death of that war and war talk. I’m cousin-in-law to Mary Todd Lincoln. My employment here is secure, young gun. And your words don’t play on me.” He slammed his gavel and turned to the sheriff, who sat picking a wart on his finger with the blade of a small knife. “Sheriff, take the man, this murderer, this cowardly deserter, to the warden and task him to find a nice warm cell and some good labor to busy this prisoner’s idle hands and redeem his wayward acts. Tell this prisoner about what’s happened to the rest of his good, brave company at Gettysburg and tell him to enjoy his rest on his cot and be thankful to God he isn’t right now splaying his innards to the crows of Pennsylvania.” Then the judge turned to Clement. “Eighty percent casualties among the First Minnesota regiment, boy. You keep that in mind when you’re sleeping on a clean cot tonight.”