by Jane Toombs
Before they arrived at the house, he told Liisi all he knew about himself.
"Speak in what you believe is your true tongue," she asked when he finished.
"Su da vol's't'v'i im," he said. "With pleasure."
Liisi frowned. "I don't understand the language but that sounds like Russian to me. Say some more words." Excited by the sudden hope he'd learn more about his past, Nick told her in the same language how beautiful she was.
"Yes, I'm certain that's Russian," Liisi confirmed with a grimace. "I don't like Russians--no true Finn does." Elated by her identification, he grinned at her. "What does it matter? We're both Americans now." He kept his pleasure hidden, not wanting to provoke her by admitting how happy he was to learn the name of the country he might have come from.
Russia. A huge territory on the maps. If he was Russian, where in that vast country had he lived? Even if he sailed across the ocean to Russia, without knowing his true name he'd have no idea where to begin looking. Simply knowing Russian was his native tongue wasn't enough.
"It is true we are Americans," Liisi said. "I have no more desire to return to Finland than your little Mima would have to return to the land of her ancestors, Africa."
"I'm fond of Mima," he said. "She'll always have a home with me."
"Don't worry, she and I will get along," Liisi told
him. "Once Mima understands I'm as much concerned for your safety as she is, she'll accept me. I've never met anyone who could foresee the future. Perhaps Mima can help me try to do it and I'll teach her what I can."
"She's a bit afraid of you."
Liisi shook her head. "That will pass. Mima has nothing to fear from me. As for your missing past--what a burden not to know your origins. No wonder I couldn't learn more about you that stormy day in the woods. A noita must know a person's real name and, since you've forgotten yours perhaps I never will discover all your secrets."
"I have no secrets I'm aware of; I've told you everything."
"Every man, woman and child has secrets, Nick. We can't help ourselves."
"Come to think of it, I omitted one thing," he admitted. "I have land in California. It's not valuable since my acreage is in the foothills of the mountains away from all settlements and no gold has been found there. I once dreamed of building a house for myself there and living all my days alone. But now--" He smiled at her.
"I have never been to California," she said. "Is it so very different from here?"
He tried to explain what it was about the state that fascinated him but wasn't sure he succeeded. "But I can't go back," he finished. "The Californios have long memories." "Nevertheless, you must keep the land."
He shrugged, secretly pleased at her words. Even if he never set foot on it, the fact he owned California land satisfied some yearning deep within him.
Nick and Liisi's hasty wedding was the talk of Nogadata. "Me and the missus hope she settles down and don't go wandering off in the woods no more," Lindenblatt told Nick. "'Tweren't fit for a grown woman."
"I'm so glad you brought her back," Toivi Lindenblatt said. "But you could have told me what you both were up to." Mima didn't say anything, just watched Liisi from the corners of her eyes and hardly spoke to her except to answer a direct question. Nick finally took Mima aside, showed her the amulet and explained that, thanks to Liisi, he now had control over his shifting.
"You're my friend, Mima. You always will be. Your home is with me and always will be." He smiled at her. "Unless when you grow up you decide to get married and go off to live with your husband."
Mima shook her head. "Me, I don't get married. I stay with you."
"With me and Liisi," Nick said. "Don't be afraid of her. She can teach you how to use your energy."
Mima thought this over. "Me, I want to heal sick folk like you do," she said finally.
Nick nodded. "I can teach you about the human body but I don't know how to show you the way to use your energy to heal. Ask Liisi for help."
Somewhat to his surprise, Mima did just that.
Months passed. Unused to peace and happiness, Nick worried at first that something would happen to destroy both. He learned the Finnish chant and found Liisi's prediction correct--he didn't shift, even without wearing the amulet. Mima gradually acquired a small menagerie of animals-- ones she'd healed herself, with Liisi's help. Besides the horses and the pony, the barn housed an ornery nanny goat, a half-grown lamb, three hens and a rabbit. The two dogs were allowed limited use of the spacious new house Nick had built for the three of them.
Months turned into years. Eleven years. Mima grew.
She spoke a more educated English and had learned to read, write and do sums. Though she remained slender, her body changed into a woman's. Some of the young townsmen eyed her with interest but Mima never gave them a second glance. Nick wondered if she might act differently if a man of her own race wooed her but there were no Negro men in Nogadata.
Even though two other doctors settled in the community, Nick's practice thrived, along with the town. A sawmill was built and, because trees were cut to feed the insatiable saws, the woods receded.
Liisi stayed the same and yet not quite. After many sessions with Mima, she began casting stones to foretell the future. Some of her stones were gathered or purchased locally, others came from the trunks she'd brought from Finland. And every year she mingled less with the townspeople.
Sometimes the urge to try to trace his origins in Russia took hold of Nick, making him restless but whenever he discussed the matter with Liisi she convinced him such a search would be futile without more information than he possessed. He knew she was right and yet a nagging sense of dissatisfaction, a vague feeling he should be doing more than he was, kept him from being truly happy.
In March of 1861, in Washington D.C., Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as President. Not exactly of the United States, since seven states had seceded from the Union. And in March the first of the monsters was born in Nogadata--a two-headed calf to one of the Zweig cows. The poor creature lived for a week. By the time it died, most of the Zweig chickens were producing double-yolked eggs.
"Mrs. Zweig says they've been hexed," Mima reported. "She'll eventually blame me," Liisi said. "Mrs. Zweig has never approved of me."
"Not liking you has nothing to do with blaming you for double-yolked eggs," Nick said.
"Wait," Liisi insisted. "You'll see that I'm right."
He didn't take her words seriously.
In April, soon after South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter, Phil Jenkins, though now an old man crippled with rheumatism, answered President Lincoln's call for militiamen by helping to form a Monroe cavalry unit.
"It's hell to get old," he confided to Nick. "But if I can't sit a horse and fight like I used to, I can damn well train others to do it." He looked Nick up and down. "Men like you."
"But I'm a doctor," Nick protested.
"The Army's sure as hell gonna need doctors, too."
Nick shook his head. This wasn't his fight.
"An old man don't forget the past, son," Phil went on. "The first time I met you and your little black gal, I recall how you told ma and me that in your opinion slavery was evil." Phil smiled grimly. "Still think so? Mima's free enough but what about them that ain't? The South's chock full of slaves and likely to stay that way less'n we raise ourselves up an army and show them Confederates who's boss." Phil's words echoed in Nick's mind as he rode back to Nogadata. For the first time in years he thought about Gauthier and how horribly he'd treated his Le Noir slaves. While all slave owners couldn't be as twisted as Gauthier, owning human beings was wrong. Was evil.
He'd rescued Mima. One out of how many? Though he'd heard accounts of the Underground Railroad and knew Detroit had an active branch, he hadn't offered to help escaped slaves. For eleven years he'd done nothing about their plight. He'd enjoyed his life and forgotten their misery. He, who knew how terrible slavery could be. Hadn't he been a slave himself to the beast within him until his wonderfu
l Liisi set him free?
Who would set the Southern slaves free?
An army, Phil had said. An army made up of men. Men like Nick Deplacer. Here was a chance to resolve his dissatisfaction with his life.
How could he justify staying home?
Chapter 17
Nick found Liisi and Mima in the kitchen making soup. "The Army?" Liisi cried, after he explained about Phil Jenkins' Monroe cavalry unit. "Are you telling me you mean to go to war? Mima, do you hear what he's saying? He wishes to leave us and ride off to get himself shot and killed by the Confederates."
Two sets of eyes, one pair gray, the other sable brown stared accusingly at him.
"I don't plan on being killed," he muttered. They both knew he'd be hard to kill--why were they so upset? Mima, at least, should understand his reason for wanting to take arms against the South.
Mima touched Liisi's arm. "Might be we can try a foreseeing?"
Liisi flipped the long, sharp knife she'd been using to cut up rutabaga so its point stuck into the pine top of the work table. Her father had taught her as a child to toss knives at targets and she'd never lost her skill.
"Come," she ordered Nick. "I'll cast the stones. If you won't listen to me, perhaps you'll heed the stones."
Nick followed the women upstairs to the room Liisi had set aside for her noita belongings. He didn't like this room with its faded tapestries of ancient Finnish heroes performing obscure deeds and never entered unless Liisi asked him to.
When the house was first built the room was no different from the other bedrooms but once Liisi hung the tapestries and scattered other noita paraphernalia about it became her room, taking on an ambience that made the hair rise on his nape.
Liisi lifted the fur bag of stones from a small chest and sat Indian fashion in the exact center of the room on a round blue silk rug. After Nick and Mima sat facing her, she undid the fastening on the bag and took out eight stones, roughly equal in size, each about as large as a quail's egg. Nick knew them by heart: Granite, for eliminating errant energy; crystal to focus the summoned energy; agate to stabilize; amethyst to promote foreseeing; coral for wisdom; obsidian for strength of purpose; turquoise to protect; and malachite for strength of will.
The ninth stone was a ruby, for luck, set into a gold ring. Liisi opened the velvet-lined ring case and passed it to Mima. Mima breathed on the ring and handed the case to Nick who also breathed on the ruby before returning the case to Liisi. Liisi slipped the ring onto her left forefinger and set the case aside.
One by one Liisi passed the stones for them to breathe on. When she had them all gathered again in her lap, she closed her eyes and held out her hands. Nick took one and Mima the other, then they joined their hands to form a circle. Liisi chanted under her breath in Finnish, slowly at first, then faster and faster, the words not quite comprehensible.
Nick concentrated on linking his energy with both Mima and Liisi. Suddenly, without any movement on Liisi's part, the stones flew from her lap and fell onto the blue carpet. He didn't always participate when Liisi cast the stones but, when he did, it always startled him when the stones flung themselves from her lap.
Liisi opened her eyes and released their hands, bending over the stones to read their pattern. He didn't pretend to understand how she did it.
"Turquoise has chosen to protect you," she said to Nick. "You are fortunate. But granite blocks crystal so there will be danger. Coral touches amethyst, warning of change for the worse. Malachite and agate are separated by obsidian--" Liisi paused, her brow furrowing. "Strife," she whispered at last. She glanced at Mima. "Gather the stones," she ordered.
Mima picked them up in the order Liisi had named them, cupping the stones in her hands and closing her eyes. Long moments passed. Though the day was warm for March, a cold wind seemed to slither into the room and coil hazy tendrils around Mima.
"I see a man with hair as red as flame," Mima intoned. "I see fire, burning, burning. Blood. Death."
A chill ran along Nick's spine. A dreadful foreseeing. Nevertheless, his mind was made up--he'd go to war.
Before he had the chance to enlist, Liisi took to her bed--Liisi, who was never sick. Despite all the remedies he tried, she not only failed to get well, she grew weaker. As the months passed, he became desperate.
"Since nothing works, this must be an ill-wishing," Mima told him in late October. "Some enemy wished Liisi ill and found a way to send his evil past her guards. Did you notice the mountain ash she planted in the front?"
He nodded. "Dying."
Nick hadn't before associated the dying tree with Liisi's illness but now he wondered. Liisi called the mountain ash a rowan tree and had planted it, she'd claimed, to protect the house and all within.
"To cure her, we first find out who her enemy is," Mima went on. "Then we find a way to turn the ill-wish back on him."
Nick recalled Liisi complaining about Mrs. Zweig disliking her and saying the woman would blame her for the two-headed calf. He hadn't paid much attention at the time and there'd been no more animal monsters born. Six months ago, though, in Monroe, one of the married Zweig daughters, Greta, had been delivered of an anencephalic baby, an infant born without most of its brain. The poor deformed creature was still alive.
"The baby," he muttered. "Can it be because of Greta's baby?" He thought of stout, red-faced Mrs. Zweig, the most respectable of matrons and shook his head. It was equally impossible to imagine her husband involved in any witchcraft--hexing, as the Germans called it.
No, not the elder Zweigs. And not placid Greta, either. But what about the man she'd married?
"Do you know Greta Zweig's husband?" he asked Mima.
She scowled. "Him! Guntar Rilke caught me in the woods when I was twelve, meant to take me just like Monsieur Gauthier took my sister. He didn't know Liisi was with me. She came running, pointed her finger and that man, he couldn't move." Mima smiled grimly. "Liisi, she told him if he ever came near me again she'd turn him into the fat pig he looked like."
Shocked, Nick stared at her. "Why didn't you tell me at the time?"
Mima shrugged. "Liisi, she said better not, you'd beat him and have all the Zweigs on your neck. Besides, she scared him off for good."
Liisi was right, as usual, Nick thought. If he'd known, he might very well have killed the bastard. He drew his lips back from his teeth. He damn well would kill Rilke if he turned out to be responsible for Liisi's illness.
"You look like the beast when you do that," Mima said. "I feel like him." He spoke through his teeth.
She frowned. "Don't go to thinking you'll let the beast hunt down Guntar Rilke. You risk your own life and, even if Guntar dies, Liisi will still be sick. If he hexed her, we have to undo the hexing to make her better."
Calming himself with an effort, Nick tried to order his thoughts. Guntar had a reason to hate Liisi but did he have the ability to hex? That was witchcraft and he'd never noticed any blue crackle around the man.
"I think I'll have a talk with Lindenblatt," he said. "First, you and me, we must try to heal the mountain ash," Mima said.
Just under the soil line they found knife gashes through the bark of the small tree, the slashes girdling the trunk and cutting off its lifeline of sap. Mima placed her hands on the gashes and Nick covered her hands with his, willing healing energy into the tree, hoping they'd succeed.
"Gonna dig her up, are you?" Lindenblatt's voice jarred Nick from his near-trance. "She sure don't look like she'll make it."
Nick took away his hands and stood, leaving Mima with the tree. "She won't die!" He spoke so vehemently that Lindenblatt blinked.
Nick tried to force a smile and failed. "I need to ask you a few questions," he said. "Mind coming inside?"
He didn't mention Liisi's name or her illness but he could tell from Lindenblatt's uneasiness that the man had a fair idea of why he was being questioned about hexing.
After insisting he didn't believe in such nonsense as sticking pins in wax dolls, Lindenbla
tt finally admitted there was a hex witch in Monroe. "They call her Sister Wenda and she lives on Grindstone Lane down by the river," he finished. "I stay away from her--it ain't safe to mix with witches."
Tempted to ride into Monroe immediately and confront the woman, Nick held back. He couldn't afford to make a mistake. Since he couldn't shield his energy--Liisi had tried unsuccessfully to teach him--he was unable to prevent the witch from recognizing his power before he reached her door. But what good was his healing power against her evil? How could he outwit her?
He had but one possibility.
Four nights later, Nick rode into Monroe on his black stallion, Ombre. He left the horse at Jenkins' and walked
to Grindstone Lane. Nick remembered the lane from when he'd first come to Monroe. Jenkins had taken him down it to the River Raisin to show him the site of the massacre in January of 1813, during America's war with the British.
"Where we was, Doc and me, down in New Orleans," Jenkins told him, "weren't no Injuns allied with them redcoats. But up along the frontier in Michigan, the British had the Shawnees, Ottawa and Potawatomi tribes on their side on account of Tecumseh convincing them to trust the redcoats." Tecumseh. The Indian leader Cump had been named for. "What happened here at River Raisin was the fault of
an American general," Jenkins went on. "Old Winchester weren't half the man Andy Jackson was--General Jackson wouldn't've stood for no massacre, no sirree. How it happened, first there was a fight and the redcoats won. The redcoat officer marched off with his prisoners and left the wounded behind at Frenchtown--what this was called in the old days afore it got named after President Monroe.
"Them Injun redcoat allies, they stays on, camping in the woods by the river whooping 'er up in celebration and drinking rotgot. Well, now, rotgut curdles the brain of any man but, if he's an Injun, he goes stark raving mad--200 or so drunken Injuns, without Tecumseh or the redcoats around to stop 'em. They swoops down on Frenchtown and all them poor wounded soldiers and whatever settlers was left, murdering and scalping. Just to make sure nothing's left alive, they burns the houses."
