Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  The girl approached the clearing that led to the front of the infirmary. And then suddenly, she faced Clement where he knelt in prayer under the pine. She drifted nearer. In his mind, sun shone through the tree canopy, bathing the top of the girl’s head in light. She glided closer. She was glorious. Her back was straight. Her hair knotted. Her limbs long. Her eyes ringed. She was pale and she was dark. She was small and she was huge. Old and young. And he knew her.

  She saw him. Her dark eyes met his. She stopped. She on foot. He on knees. “Hello,” she said.

  Clement’s heart opened and a flock of hopeful birds took flight. He stood and ran off into the woods.

  28

  The Hatterbys

  WITH HER MOTHER’S RETURN, Angel’s stomach ailments and confinement to bed resumed. Through all of it, Angel could think only of all she had learned and seen while her mother was away. She thought of the school and of the nun and of the boy.

  On her better days, Angel would lie in her big bed, with its velvet coverlet and plush pillows. She would set up her porcelain-faced dolls and imagine they were all at the school. And though she liked it when her father would come and check on her, letting her search in his pockets for the little treats he hid there, she wanted to go outside, she wanted to play, she wanted to have friends, and she wanted very, very much to go to school.

  “Father, will you send me to school?” she whispered. “Please, Father.”

  Mr. Hatterby patted her head and hugged her close. “Girls don’t need school, Angie. Girls need pretty dresses and dolls and shiny slippers to wear.”

  Angel climbed onto his lap and tugged on his ear. “Father, please. I want to go and see the children.” She begged him desperately but knew her mother would protest, and she didn’t want to upset her. It was hard to decide whether to protect her mother’s feelings or voice her own desires. Angel had never felt such a strong feeling inside herself. She had never thought about one thing over and over again. She kept on with him, begging, “Father, I want to run and play and learn with all the other children.”

  Her father wiggled his mustache, which always made Angel laugh when she was a small child. She refused to laugh now. “Angie,” he said, “you are a persistent little girl. I shall talk with your mother about this matter and do my best to be stern with her, but you know how she is. In the meantime, you be a good girl so as not to give her any reason to say no.” He kissed her on the forehead and plopped her back on her bed. “How’s your tummy these days? Are you well enough to go to school?”

  “I am perfect, Father. I will be uncomplaining and very well if I can go to school and play with the children and learn to read too,” said Angel.

  “Learn to read!” He laughed. “Such big ambitions, Angie. I will speak to Mother. Play now, and rest.”

  The next day, she heard her father tell her mother that in September, Angel would go to school. She heard her mother protest and say that she was too sick, too frail. But her father pressed her mother with ideas about school, and every day her protests grew weaker. With that, Angel’s determination to be strong, to be well, strengthened. Finally, her mother relented.

  But within a week, though she tried to hold it back, for she knew what it meant, Angel retched uncontrollably over the side of her bed into the chamber pot. Her nightgown clung to her bony body, drenched with her own sweat. Her wet hair snaked around her pale face. Her stomach seemed to be trying to come out of her mouth. On the precipice of death, as delirium swirled, she again had visions of the boy emerging out of the trees. Where are you? he asked. I can’t see you. I want to see you. How are you talking to me?

  “I’ll try and see you soon,” Angel said.

  “See,” said Mrs. Hatterby to her husband, tending Angel like the best of mothers. “She’s too sickly. And delirious.” She put a rag in the water basin, wrung it out, and dabbed her daughter’s forehead. “Mother will take good care of you, my darling Angel.”

  29

  Beaver Jean’s Bad Luck Along the Bad River

  MEN LIKE BEAVER JEAN bowed to the weather’s whims, roamed with the river beaver, hitched themselves to phases of the moon, tethered themselves to wandering buffalo cows, and listened to the switching seasonal winds. In this way, men like Beaver Jean had forged the way west and written the maps. He intended, of course, to find the runaway pair, to locate his wife, and to rear his child up right. But he was patient as time passed and accepted it when new adventures or interesting tributaries moved him in different directions. He didn’t panic when, a few days after arriving at the fort, his horse, Alice, lay down in the dirt, kicked her skinny legs a bit, shook her head, expelled great air from her hind end, moaned sadly, and died, leaving Beaver Jean and his wives stranded with a cart full of furnishings, worthless beaver pelts, a couple of copper pots, steel knives, some sugar and coffee, and a barrel of hard apple cider.

  “Well, ye women,” he’d said. “Looks like we’re stranded in the fort for a term. Look around at yer new home.”

  In the Trees danced around like a girl, thrilled to be among so many she knew. “I can see your happiness, In the Trees, which makes me happy too,” said Beaver Jean. “Ye are often unbearable in yer antics, but ye do have a round, comely face that does lighten my heart now and again.”

  The Girl with Friend Eyes unpacked the poles. In the Trees unrolled the skins and darted off occasionally to chat with people she knew. Beaver Jean dug a sorry hole outside the walls of the fort for his Alice. The ground was hard and gray and crumbly, not at all like the black, moist, fragrant earth near Stillwater, the type of earth one could imagine eating up the corpse of a horse and turning it into something useful. Beaver Jean wondered what would happen to his horse’s body in this kind of earth. Someone loaned Beaver Jean a horse and cart and they wrangled Alice’s carcass onto it. Beaver Jean led the procession through the fort and out the gate to the gravesite, a spot chosen for its clear view of flat endless land to the west. He cried unbridled, like a newborn, as he tied a rope around Alice’s hooves, walked to the opposite side of the hole, and with the borrowed horse tugged her toward it.

  “I feel mighty winded, ol’ Alice, ye dead nag,” said Beaver Jean. “Ye seems more portly in death than ye were in life.” Beaver Jean heaved the horse again toward the hole. She slid off the cart a bit. Beaver Jean bent over and breathed deeply, trying to cough up and spit out a bit of phlegm that had been clogging his wind. Then he surged all his might into one final pull. The horse’s back end fell into the hole, but in death she had stiffened and thus didn’t fold over nicely into the grave the way Beaver Jean had hoped. Her top half poked straight up out of the grave. She looked to be rearing up, as in life, and Beaver Jean cried some more at the sight of her looking so lively.

  Beaver Jean collapsed onto the ground to rest. “Oh Alice, ye always were a stubborn animal.” Sweat gathered on his forehead, and he felt it dripping through his chest hairs. He stood up again and then knelt at the lip of the grave. He pushed on Alice’s head and neck to get her in. He sat on his bottom and kicked at her until she tumbled down.

  “It doesn’t surprise me one bit that I had to reinjure my wrecksome toes in a last act of kindness toward ye,” he said.

  Beaver Jean then remembered his pappy and wondered what he might say about the way Beaver Jean buried his horse. “That looks mighty wrong indeed,” Beaver Jean imagined his pappy saying, “the wrong way is the way ye deposed that poor animal. That wrong-way grave wouldn’t be a proper resting place to bury a cross-eyed cat.”

  Beaver Jean looked around. The words were so clear that he wondered if the ghost of his pappy had come down to earth to help Beaver Jean through this niggling time. But as far as Beaver Jean looked and looked, he saw nothing but slow, low hills and those clouds coming in fast. He blinked a time or two. It seemed to him that his vision was becoming spotty. He felt hot and cold at the same time.

  “I sure do wish ye were breathing yet, Alice. We rode out many a bad weather, the two of us together,” he s
aid into the wind. “I was countin’ on ye having a good many miles left in yer legs to help me find my wife and boy. Now it gives me a powerful sorrow to think of teaching that boy to ride on a different horse.” Bulbous clouds rolled in, casting a cool shadow over the grave scene. “Looks to be a spring storm coming this way.” A soft lone snowflake landed on his nose. Beaver Jean’s sight failed him. His knees buckled, and he fainted at the grave of his horse.

  Between dumping his horse in the hole beneath the clouds and opening his eyes in a steamy tent with a flapping canvas, Beaver Jean remembered nothing. He opened his eyes and had a feeling familiar from the time he awoke on the nun’s floor. He wiggled his toes, trying to determine how many he had on each foot.

  “Don’t move!” a voice shouted. The monsignor leaned over him.

  Beaver Jean smacked his lips and moved his tongue around. “Do ye practice healing as well as priesting?” Beaver Jean whispered. He coughed and tried to remember the last thing he could remember. Alice.

  “You have devil breath,” said the priest. “My God. Open up. You must have a rotten tooth in there.”

  Beaver Jean blinked his eyes. “Am I still at the fort?”

  “I suppose you didn’t suffer any loss of wit since you appear to be as intelligent now as before you nearly froze to death in the spring snowstorm after burying a horse halfway,” said the monsignor. He stood and pulled a small, dry tuber from a cord strung across the tent. He turned to Beaver Jean’s wives, who appeared as smiley and compliant as he’d ever seen the pair, and said, “Boil this in water. Add pepper. Bring it to me when it’s ready.” They took the tuber and scrambled out of the tent and into a warm afternoon.

  “Musta warmed up sudden,” said Beaver Jean.

  “Nah,” said the priest. “You been dying, recovering, talking nonsense, and sleeping for three weeks or more. After that last late blizzard, spring’s here for good now.”

  Beaver Jean tried to get up, but his head felt like a boulder.

  “You lie back down, you big dummy,” said the priest. “You’re not going anywhere for a long while, I says.”

  “Who says?”

  “I says, you dummy,” yelled the priest. “You are hereby quarantined with the rest. None of us is going anywhere till we’re dead or this godforsaken disease is long gone.”

  “I got work to tend to,” said Beaver Jean. “I gotta locate my wife and boy, for one.”

  “You sired a child?” asked the priest. “Good Lord.” Then the priest seemed to resign himself to it. “Well, it’ll have to wait. We can’t spread the pox beyond this fort. Do you want to wipe out the entire population of America?”

  “I’ve made it a point not to abide the bristly laws of the religious.”

  “Don’t you dare debate with me, traveler. Before I turned from my wicked ways and made my vows to the Church, I led a force of Choctaw warriors under the advisement of General Andrew Jackson. You know who he is, don’t you?”

  Beaver Jean thought hard. “I believe he was president for a time.”

  “You’re damn-tootin’ he was!” yelled the monsignor. “And he owes me a favor! And I’ll tell you what. If you try going after those two you’re after or try leaving this fort before I tell you you can, I will send a letter to Mr. Jackson, and you don’t want to know what will be in it.”

  “Would you ask him to imprison me?”

  “Maybe worse. Now lie down and stay there.”

  Beaver Jean rolled onto his side and attempted to sit up, but he fainted and fell back again.

  Beaver Jean slept for the better part of a month and tried not to aggravate the blisters erupting on his arms and chest. The monsignor told him he was lucky, that the pox was often worse, and deadly. When Beaver Jean regained his strength, the monsignor put him to work finding food for the fort.

  “You call yourself a trapper? Get out there and find us some food without getting yourself killed in the process!”

  At first Beaver Jean went for short walks out onto the prairie. He took along one of his wives to lean against when the weakness came to his knees or he ran out of breath. Coming back to full health was an exercise in patience. He trapped little rabbits and ground squirrels.

  “These can’t feed one child,” the monsignor shouted at him. “Get out there and find something substantial.”

  Beaver Jean couldn’t help but notice some similarities between the monsignor and his pappy, but he found himself liking the monsignor nevertheless. He yelled a lot, but he worked hard and could tell a good story too.

  Beaver Jean soon found he desired to please the little priest. Luckily, he was able to shoot a buffalo with a lame leg. With the help of his wives and some women from the tribe, they butchered and brought the meat back to the monsignor’s camp. Upon receiving the meat, the monsignor reached his hand up and put in on Beaver Jean’s shoulder. “Now that’s a good boy. You’ve done a real good thing here.”

  Beaver Jean had a feeling in his chest that he hadn’t had since he was a youth at his mother’s skirt. He resolved to remember the act and the words and impress them upon his own son someday, after he found him. He tried to keep the exact inflection of the priest’s voice intact: Now that’s a good boy.

  Later that day, a soldier came and offered Beaver Jean a nice sum of money for the buffalo pelt, which the soldier thought he’d take with him on his way to Texas, which had been annexed by the United States.

  “What do ye mean, ‘Texas, which had been annexed’?” asked Beaver Jean.

  “The United States has annexed Texas, sir,” said the soldier.

  Beaver Jean turned the word over and over in his mind. Annexed. It sounded interesting and terrible at the same time. “What do ye mean, ‘annexed’?” asked Beaver Jean.

  The soldier looked nervous and blinked. “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “That’s just what I heard before I received orders that my company was to get down there and help clear the wilds of some surly Indian tribes.”

  Beaver Jean smelled an opportunity. His missing Negress and child now had too much of a head start on him to be worth the trouble and cost of finding them. He needed a new venture. The word annexed sounded exciting and mysterious. He had to get down there and see what it meant. He perked up and felt more virile than he had in weeks. “Do ye think them Indian nations will be in need of supplies while the army removes them to their new homes?”

  “Oh, I’m sure of it, sir,” said the soldier. “From what I hear, they’re a sorry sight to be seen.”

  “Would ye mind terribly if my wives and I accompanied you United States army men to Texas, which has been annexed by the United States?”

  “You’ll have to take your query to the company’s captain and to the monsignor, sir,” said the soldier. “No one goes anywhere without his say-so.”

  “I will do that, young gun,” said Beaver Jean. Then he put his hand on the soldier’s shoulder and told him he was doing a good job. “Now, can ye point me in a way where a man might make a trade for a good horse?”

  He dreamt that night of Lydian. She was running wild, with her red hair flapping behind her like a flag in front of a small clay building. Cowboys and rancheros cheered her on, and she danced wilder and wilder until she fell to the dusty ground, laughing. In the dream, Beaver Jean turned to the man beside him and asked, “Where is this?”

  “Texas!” the man responded. “Texas, which has been annexed by the United States!”

  When he woke in the morning, Beaver Jean talked with the monsignor.

  “I have amended the purpose of my journeys. Now I will like to go to Texas, which has been annexed by the United States.”

  “And what, pray tell, do you intend to do there?” asked the monsignor.

  “I will make dealings with the Indian nations, which will be in want of supplies on the reservations the United States has set up for them. Often, the Indians can’t make do with what’s on their reservation to feed their entire people and are in need of a good trader to bring them provisi
ons and other necessities for living in rough and barren lands.”

  “Beaver Jean, given the right education, you could have been an orator,” the monsignor said. Beaver Jean was quiet. “This goddamn country,” the monsignor continued. He seemed to be thinking of some great and oppressive burden. Then he sighed. “You are allowed to go, Beaver Jean, but if I hear of you cheating one Indian or hunting down one black soul, I will send that letter to President Jackson, who will order you shot and quartered.”

  “There will be no need for such measures, Monsignor. I have been an honest trader and trapper in most dealings and intend to proceed the same. I thank ye for the good care ye took in nursing me whilst I was ill and whilst my two wives proved fairly useless. Though this trip has not produced the intended effects, I am glad to have come on this adventure and glad to meet ye and will count ye a friend.”

  Beaver Jean packed up his things and attempted to saddle his new horse, Charlemagne, which snorted at him in grave disdain and high-stepped his back legs in poor cooperation.

  “Ye best not have an uppity posture with me, Charlemagne. Ye is a beast of burden and will behave as such.”

  Charlemagne stamped at the ground.

  Beaver Jean intended to get a head start on the army, shoot a couple of deer or buffalo, and sell the army the meat once they caught up. Before he took leave of the fort, the blacksmith he’d encountered on that first day in the fort accosted him once more.

  “I sees yull still got that nasty beard on yull face,” he said. He pulled a red-hot horseshoe from the coals and dipped it in water. It sizzled and fizzed and steamed.

  Beaver Jean walked to the blacksmith, put his hand on his shoulder, and said, “Ye are completing that job the right way. Good work.”