by Gar LaSalle
Because of the dog, the couple did not advance farther than the fence and asked Emmy if they could borrow a hammer and some nails so they could repair their canoe down on the beach. They seemed surprised when Isaac came around the house to see who was talking.
The old man, sturdily built with a hard and pock-marked face, turned his attention to Isaac. Both visitors looked at Isaac carefully from foot to head, as if measuring him, Emmy noticed.
The old woman, weather-beaten and almost toothless, repeated her request to Emmy, adding that she wanted to buy some sugar or molasses and coffee.
Emmy sensed a nervous, stilted manner in their speech and heard a dry sticking hesitancy in the man’s enunciation of the Chinook trading jargon.
Isaac paused, glancing over at Emmy, then told the couple they did not have a hammer or nails nor did they have any food supplies to spare.
The couple turned and left quietly without a word.
Rowdy finally stopped barking when they were out of sight down the pathway to the beach.
Isaac thought no more about it. Natives and wayfarers occasionally stopped, and none had ever created problems.
Emmy thought the couple was odd but turned her attention to the dinner she was preparing.
A few hours later, the guests arrived, including Tom Iserson, his wife Rebah, Major Robert Campbell, and his wife Thomasina. The company ate two full helpings of Emmy’s roast beef; shucked and cob corn; a fine spiced, late summer squash compote; warm bread with freshly churned butter; and the clove-spiked pear pies from a recipe Emmy had brought with her from her grandmother in Boston.
The major introduced some decent English port imported through San Francisco, and all partook, offering a pagan libation to the change of seasons, followed by a brief prayer of thanks to God for sparing Isaac from harm on his recent journey.
They talked about many things, including the dispute with the Brits that was heating up over the ownership of San Juan Island to the north, and the perennial congressional strife over the Negro slavery question. Campbell and his wife, originally from Alabama, expressed strong sentiment for allowing new states to determine their own rulings on that matter. Iserson, always the “wiggling Whig-turned-Republican,” as Rebah liked to refer to him, believed new states should be accepted into the union only if they agreed to be free from the evil curse of slavery.
Despite entrenched positions on the matter, and Tom Iserson’s somewhat irritating, sanctimonious pontifications, the discussion remained civil and quiet. The two sides held onto their positions, and the discussion ended as each agreed on the other’s right to disagree.
By half past ten, the Campbells begged their leave, noting they had early morning chores, including completing repairs on a roof that had started to leak in the past week. The Isersons lived too far away to trek up island in the dark, so they excused themselves to the guest bedroom in the back.
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Getting into bed that night, watching Emmy pull her brush through her hair, Isaac thought about all the things he had witnessed during the past several weeks and how rapidly events changed in this world, teeter-tottering, it seemed, from pain to fortune, and how much that had benefited him and his family. If he could persist, surviving the challenges that Providence had in store, he would keep moving upward, he knew, being righteous in the presence of the Lord on his judgment day. He just had to endure the sufferings because God would balance it all.
That was the plan and the pathway.
And it was working.
Only a short while ago, he had been a penniless gold miner looking for opportunity in uncharted territory. Then, using the surveying skills he had learned in Ohio, he’d mapped out the inland lake east of Elliott Bay and later, on Whidbey, had acquired the best piece of land in the Puget Sound region.
Certainly he’d had his pain, losing his first wife, Rebecca, to a tumor that had grown in her breast and had just eaten her away in less than a year. He couldn’t watch her in those last few weeks—the seepage and smell of rot, seeing her suffering, weeping out of her mind until she just didn’t recognize him or anyone else, blind and wasted.
But he had found Emmy not long after and moved her up from Olympia where she had been stranded by the carelessness of her late husband, who had allowed himself to get whipsawed by a falling tree near the big mill he had constructed in Tumwater.
Isaac, visiting Olympia as a north Puget Sound representative, had seen her at the funeral and, from that first moment, knew he had to have her.
For a very young woman of twenty-one, she carried herself with repose and dignity, and she was absolutely stately in black.
From a discreet inquiry, he learned that she was a well-born Boston Irish, who had rounded the Horn with her new husband, an ambitious, wealthy, and extravagant dreamer, twenty-five years her senior. The gossip was that they had shown little affection for each other, and some thought she was lonely out here in the cold, wet green, despite the wealth his venture had brought. She would head home after this, taking her infant child back to a wealthy civilization.
So, Isaac did what he had learned worked for him when he needed something badly. He took a gamble, sending a card to her the following week, asking to speak with her.
Emmy came to the door at the cedar-clad home by the mill she now had to dispose of, expecting another solicitation for purchase of its fallow equipment.
Instead, Isaac, hat in hand, offered her a large bouquet of white roses and told her, “My name is Isaac. I live up north on Whidbey Island where I have staked out the prettiest, most fertile land in this entire Northwest. I am a strong, prosperous man. Please. Please do not return to Boston. Stay here. With me.”
That was the hardest and most insane thing he had ever done in his life. But it was the best thing he had ever done as well, because she took the roses.
Watching Emmy’s quiet movements, he tried to remember the fragrance of those roses as he closed his eyes, knowing he was drifting off now and, because he was so very tired, he would sleep well for the first time in many nights.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
About two o’clock in the morning, Isaac awakened from a dream that left him in a cold sweat.
In the dream, he was running down a long beach after a woman. It was Emmy. She had turned and looked at him in horror.
“Wait, Emmy. Can’t you see it’s me? Wait!”
Then she got that look only she could have. Fierce. Resolute. That was all he could remember as the scene faded away.
It was then that he heard Rowdy barking, behind the late October night wind that had started up again. Sometimes Rowdy would holler at raccoons or deer wandering up from the beach. But this time it was persistent and anxious in a way that frightened Isaac fully awake.
He reached over for his shotgun and remembered he had lent it to Tom Iserson for his watch last week and Tom had brought it back with a broken hammer.
So, stuffing his nightshirt into his pants, he picked up a large walking stick and felt for the bedroom door.
Emmy was awake then, asking after him.
“Isaac?”
“Rowdy is making a lot of noise,” he said, descending the stairs to the front door.
He looked out the window onto the porch.
“Visitors,” he said.
He lit a lantern, picked up a knife from the kitchen table, then opened the door and stepped out onto the porch.
Chapter Fourteen
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Anah
Jim Thomas was almost finished mending his fish net when the old Indian man and woman came down the path from Isaac’s house. They walked fast and passed him without words or thanks, pushed their small cedar canoe into the light surf, and turned it about, heading north.
They were out of sight within a few minutes, and Jim thought nothing more of it as he gathered u
p his thread and netting. Only a few days were left to get into the water before the cold November swells would be too big to fight.
Three miles from the beach, out of sight of the small settlement, the Indian couple turned shoreward and found a quiet cove, not dissimilar from the one Isaac had settled. There they met up with a medium-sized war canoe, ten warriors, and Anah.
The old man and woman beached the canoe, stripped off their long pants and shirts, and reclaimed their jerkins and furs.
Anah and the warriors intently watched the old man—Klixuatan, the clan’s shaman—who seemed in no hurry to impart news. Then the old woman, his remaining wife, started to chant, and Klixuatan began a song and did a small five-step dance.
They were singing to the raven god for a new special strength, and then all the warriors knew they had found the big tyee. A few minutes later, the sun dipped below the Olympic Mountains, casting a red hue onto the water.
Anah knew the omen was good. Blood on the water.
Over the next five hours, they chanted quietly to a clan song led by Klixuatan, “Moon bird running quick, bringing back the day and all our children. Water giving moon a second life.”
When the half-moon showed itself, Anah and four of the warriors stripped naked and painted themselves with bear grease and red ochre from head to their ankles. They pulled the ornaments from their labrets, whet their knives on beach stones, rechecked their powder, and then pushed off southward in the larger canoe.
The cold would keep them alert.
They did not sing any of their clan songs en route, instead, each warrior had his own private song that he hummed to himself, synchronized by Klixuatan, who tapped the side of the canoe with each dip of his oar.
Anah had moved into a trance during this part of the journey, and while he paddled, the ugly events of the past year rushed past him. Forging the coalition with other tribes had proven more difficult than he had anticipated, partly because so many of them also had been devastated by the smallpox scourge, but also because, under his leadership, his own clan’s predatory actions over the past ten years had diminished the number of aboriginal tribes willing to deal with him. In the grand wake of events, with incoming settlers, aggressive actions of the British and U.S. governments, inventions and addicting conveniences that had to be assimilated, and new diseases that had to be endured, aboriginal groups were suffering severely throughout the entire Northwest. Some groups assimilated, many were extinguished altogether.
Anah also felt alone as he never had when he was younger.
Over the previous twelve months, with the loss of so many companions and then Little Raven, his past and the map it provided had been torn away from him. With the deaths of so many of his children, it was as if his horizon had disintegrated, as well.
He thought of this as he beat his syncopated rhythm against the side of the canoe. He knew that each warrior in the canoe carried the same burden. He would regain all of the hope for future bounty that rightfully belonged to them and snatch happiness back from the white intruders who had stolen it so viciously.
He would cleanse away the shame.
Anah had never been afraid of Death because it was always around him from the time he was a small child. Instead, he played with it as if it were a curious friend that hid behind every living thing and showed itself when he called it forth, when Anah cut into the flesh hard and deep enough.
Over the years, he had killed enough men, women, and children to know well the measure of another human’s proximity to death.
And, as he came to understand that his special friendship with Death made him an exception to all other men — accepting that he had been given a privilege that had to be revered and honored, he had attempted to visit Death several times on his own, off away from where there was movement or noise, deep in the forest, away from the interference of other spirits. Knowing he could only really speak with Death if he offered himself, he beckoned to it with his own blood and starvation. It always ended with him alone again, the conversation incomplete.
But each time he understood more. On a few traumatic occasions, he had been impulsively driven there, as when he had received Little Raven’s wrecked body and when he beheld the charred bodies of his children in the smoking remains of his burned-out village.
In his grief, he had run as fast as he could into the forest hoping to catch Death, knowing that in so doing, he might look one more time at the spirits of his loved ones. But he was never fast enough.
As a complement to his companionship with Death, in a lesson he learned on many journeys with Little Raven, he always had the comfort of others like him who understood. The ferocity of their every action was a language that endured and resonated universally with all creatures.
All who followed him understood this. By their clan’s actions, they defined and marked out their close proximity to Death and their status as its favorite companion. His actions in a fight, and those of the few who were privileged to learn from him, were direct, immediate, and instinctively centered on an opponent’s most vulnerable weakness.
He knew his foes would invariably expose it by their protective actions. And then Anah would immediately counter with vicious decisiveness. Anyone who hesitated to think, aim, or react was simply swept away. The deliberating actions of the whites, in particular, were cumbersome compared to his own instinctive tactics, so none of his lumbering opponents ever survived. Such was the ability of Anah, who lived with Death as an ally.
They reached Isaac and Emmy’s beach as the moon reached its zenith, darting in and out from a cobweb of blue-black clouds. They pulled the canoe far up the beach because the tide was coming in and left Klixuatan to guard it and protect their passage away from this tyee’s magic. Each man draped himself with an otter skin nooksack and, carrying their rifles, clubs, and knives, moved up the beach to the pathway that Klixuatan had indicated led the way to the Isaac and Emmy’s home. It took ten minutes to traverse the pathway onto the plateau.
The Evers’ home was first, prominently perched looking over the entire plain from a short, cresting, north-facing hillock. In the moonlight, intermittently revealing the harvest stubble of the manicured land, several cabins were visible in the distance, but no lantern light or fires.
As they drew closer, a dog began to bark from behind a white picket fence. Closer still, and then a light came on inside the house, and a tall, powerfully built man came out onto the porch.
Anah knew it was the tyee he had come to kill.
Chapter Fifteen
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Isaac and Anah
When they saw each other at that moment, eyes locked in the pale moonlight, each man knew the world had stopped around them to watch a death dance. No sound, no movement, just the focus of equals carried quietly over several heartbeats.
Anah knew in that instant, because of an aura of vibrant life surrounding his opponent and this homestead, that he was now closer to Death than he ever had been before. It would come rushing forward eagerly, he knew, and take one or both of them.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Isaac knew he was staring into the face of his own personal exterminating angel, and from that realization, he thought of protecting his family. Before he could call out a warning, the tall, naked savage moved first, leaping over the picket fence, clubbing Rowdy aside, then bounding up the steps to the long porch, aiming with his ball club for a finishing blow to Isaac’s left temple.
Isaac, watching his attacker’s fierce eyes, saw the blow coming and ducked away.
From a stooped position, he thrust his heavy walking stick’s butt with an upward blow into the man’s sternum, knocking him off balance. As the attacker staggered back, Isaac followed with a roundhouse swipe with his knife that caught the man’s left pectoral chest, cutting deeply into the muscle. But not deeply enough, Isaac knew.
He saw that the pain from th
e laceration seemed to energize his assailant. Isaac saw him spin away and reclaim his balance, then move forward onto the deck.
His attacker swung again, but lower now, at Isaac’s neck.
Isaac ducked again, but this time the attacker’s heavy ball club, razor-sharp spikes jutting from three sides, struck him with a bone-crushing thud on his left temple.
The blow carried him over the rail onto the yard below. He hit the wet sod, wrenching his neck and left shoulder, but quickly pulled himself back up, still holding the heavy walking stick.
As he righted himself, preparing for the man’s next blow, two younger warriors he hadn’t seen simultaneously discharged their muskets at him.
One musket ball struck Isaac in the chest, fracturing his clavicle, and the second blew off the thumb of his left hand.
Isaac was thrown back, but kept his feet. Holding his bloodied hand to his punctured head, he stumbled toward the ocean-facing side of the house.
As soon as the bullets hit, despite a numbing confusion and a searing pain that pushed deeply into the back of his head and down into his neck, Isaac knew he would not survive this fight. That one thought defined the rest of his existence.
In his confusion, he had lost his sense of direction, but somehow stumbled to the side of the house where there was no door.
As the big aborigine and the four others rushed at him, Isaac struggled to hold up the heavy walking stick to ward them off and detain them a few moments longer. But he knew he had done his duty. His family might escape from the other side of the house.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Anah was upon the white tyee and this time used his knife in a jabbing movement to the tyee’s neck, cutting directly and deeply into the wound made by the musket shot.
The knife severed first the jugular vein and then the carotid artery.
Anah’s foe collapsed and fell forward, his hand still holding his head, eyes rolling up at his heaven.
Anah took a handful of the white tee’s long, blond hair and pulled his head back, then cut his throat in one swift motion, at the same time motioning to his companions to break into the house.
