Widow Walk

by Gar LaSalle

  As they turned to the house, Anah cut again deeply into the tyee’s neck and, in five quick, practiced motions, severed his head from his neck.

  The tyee’s heart, still beating rapidly, emptied itself in less than thirty seconds.

  Anah had seen this before, although not with such a big tyee. In his triumph, he lifted the tyee’s head up and turned its face toward him.

  In the cold moonlight, he saw the tyee’s head open its eyes briefly and close slowly with a look that startled Anah so much that he gasped and dropped it onto the ground, knowing he had been cursed in a way that would haunt him forever.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Emmy

  Moments after finally crawling under the covers that night, Emmy fell into a deep sleep. She had been sick all day, starting in the morning with dry heaves. She knew it was the pregnancy souring her stomach.

  The bleeding had stopped a few days before, and Doctor Edwards suggested she might just keep this one, if only she would rest and hold food and water down. The nausea made it difficult for her to prepare food for dinner because she couldn’t stand even the smallest tastes to sample her work and couldn’t concentrate on the recipes.

  After dinner, she had not participated much in the lively conversation and had excused herself to clean up the kitchen.

  She hated the political discussions and, in particular, had a difficult time tolerating the pontifications of Tom Iserson, who never would let anyone forget he had studied at a prestigious seminary in the Midwest for two years before moving west to prospect for gold and, although he wasn’t ordained by any church, had converted aborigines to his personal interpretation of Christian redemption.

  Emmy had put the children to bed shortly after dinner and, because the participants in the parlor were very loud during their impassioned conversation, she was not surprised when she checked on Jacob and Sarah. Both were awake.

  They had been listening to the adults in the parlor debate about whether Governor Stevens’s call for extermination of the aboriginal natives was evil and impractical or just plain stupid and provocative.

  “Is it true what Major Campbell said tonight — that Isaac might be nominated to run against Governor Stevens? Uncle Winfield said the same thing yesterday,” Sarah asked Emmy.

  “I’m certain a nomination is the least of your father’s concerns,” Emmy responded, smiling and hiding her concern about the implications of such a development. He would have to travel all the more.

  “Now go to sleep you two little eavesdroppers,” Emmy said, kissing Sarah and Jacob goodnight.

  By the time she had returned to the parlor, Major Campbell had opened up a bottle of English port and poured six small glasses.

  Despite her nausea, Emmy accepted the offer and sipped it politely as the conversation turned from politics to news about the gold strike on the Fraser River near Vancouver, and finally to gossip about the large Catholic family that had moved onto the southern part of the island.

  Shortly after the clock struck ten, the Campbells begged their leave, and only a few minutes later, Rebah and Tom announced they would retire as well. It was just as well because entertaining the Isersons without the genteel cushion of the Campbells would be a chore, and she was already exhausted.

  When Rowdy started barking a few hours later, Emmy was in the deepest part of her sleep, settled in a place that was comfortable and familiar.

  But it wasn’t in the Northwest. In her dream, she was visiting her family in Boston, and her father and sister were at the parlor table waiting for her to come in from the garden with Isaac, Sarah, and Jacob. She had arrived first, and Kathleen, her older sister, had that impatient, bothered expression on her face that she had always used to keep her and her younger cousins in a state of perceived inadequacy.

  Kathleen was looking past Emmy at the kitchen door, and Emmy turned to look for her little family to enter. But she could only hear the children, bickering over some silly thing.

  She waited for Isaac to correct the children and then formally present himself to her family. What was taking him so long, and why was he not attending to the children?

  As the dog’s barking grew more frantic and insistent, she incorporated that nuisance into her unfinished dream.

  She saw that Rowdy had cornered a raccoon in the big Italian plum tree that grew outside her parents’ brownstone window. He was jumping up at the treed angry creature and snapping and grabbing at the big plum, stripping pieces of bark from its trunk, as if that would somehow dislodge the hissing coon from its perch.

  She heard Isaac then, and she hoped he would shoo the pesky little bandit away quickly so she could reassure her family that she was married to a reliable man.

  But Isaac made so much noise fumbling around in the dark that she suddenly felt the hard bed and remembered she was not in Boston at all.

  She felt anger at Isaac for his inconsiderate clumsiness, waking her from the first good sleep she had had in a week. She was about to murmur a chastisement, but as she turned to him, she realized his movements conveyed anxiety.

  It was enough to rouse her.

  Still hoping to return to the colors of the dream, she pulled herself out of bed and pulled a blanket around herself, following Isaac to the stairs.

  As she stepped into the hallway, she stubbed her right great toe badly on the doorstop, peeling her toenail back.

  That wakened her fully, anger spilling out with a curse at Isaac who had already reached the bottom of the staircase and was fumbling with the lantern.

  He did not respond to her and seemed to ignore her pain and anger. When she saw him pick up a kitchen knife, trepidation replaced the pain.

  “Isaac?” she called down to him.

  The expression on his face as he looked up briefly told her he was determined, but frightened. As he opened the door and stepped out onto the porch, she immediately thought of Jacob and Sarah and rushed to their room.

  Jacob was already awake and looking outside the window when she entered. As she walked in, he gasped; she heard Rowdy yelp in pain, then silence followed by a loud jostling on the porch below.

  Jacob cried out, “Northerners!”

  Emmy was now fully functional. “Run! RUN!” she heard herself scream so loudly that Sarah awoke immediately and, without questions or protest, headed for the stairs.

  The cry awakened the Isersons, and Tom emerged from the bedroom downstairs naked, wearing only his socks, with Rebah following.

  “RUN, children, run!” Emmy cried again.

  Iserson, hearing the fighting outside, ran to the back window and, his face contorted by his uncontrolled panic, pushed up the sash and jumped out, leaving his screaming wife and everyone else behind.

  “Tom, Tom! Wait for me! Wait!” wailed Rebah, then moaning and rocking from one foot to the other, as she watched her husband disappearing into the darkness.

  Emmy grabbed and shook her, interrupting the terrified woman’s palsy.

  “Rebah! Move, Damnit!”

  The first gunshot shook the house.

  Pushing Rebah out through the open window, Emmy heard horrible, vicious screams from the porch outside and knew Isaac was fighting for his life—and for theirs.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Jacob

  Jacob, Sarah, Rebah and then, Emmy crawled out the window after Tom Iserson, who by this time had leaped the backyard fence and disappeared into the brambles up the hill and into the woods.

  The moon cut through the clouds for just a few moments, giving Jacob his bearings as his mother ushered him and sister through the blackberry thorns in a different direction, toward the small road that led up to the Crocketts’ home a mile away.

  Jacob could hear the marauders now in the house, crashing through the kitchen and overturning furni
ture, but he kept running as those sounds faded away, running, knowing that just behind him on that same path Death would be pursuing him silently and relentlessly.

  He could not see his mother or sister now — it was so dark, and Rebah kept bawling for Tom someplace off to his left by the big woods.

  Jacob heard his mother holler out in the darkness, “Run, kids. Get to the Crocketts. Run!” but he couldn’t tell where her voice was coming from.

  He was old enough to reach that destination without directions, if he could find the pathway beyond the blackberries that crossed the cattle pasture. And then he stumbled onto the path.

  As he struggled to stand back up, he heard careful footsteps behind him.

  Mother?

  The last thing he remembered about that night was the strong hands that covered his mouth.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Emmy

  After she called out, Emmy hesitated for a moment, telling herself that if there were pursuers, she would jump in to protect her children. As she reached the pasture, she saw no one on the path, but heard grunting noises that made her remember the young stud bull that was supposed to be penned up in the barn — big, stupid, unpredictable animal that protected that field, studding and crapping. Tonight it was an ironic bit of fear to add to the terror.

  The field was uneven, and each step tore at her wretched toe as she continued running toward what she hoped was the Crockett home.

  Where were the kids? Where were the kids?

  Then she heard Sarah screaming up ahead. They must have reached the Crockett’s.

  Emmy ran past several squawking geese and knew she was there too, past the small brown fence and up the stairs.

  Sarah was pounding frantically on the big oak door. When Sarah heard the footsteps behind her, she gasped, but then released her held breath when she saw it was her mother.

  They pounded on the door together, louder now, hollering out for Crockett to awaken.

  Emmy turned, looking for Jacob, Rebah, and Tom.

  “Hold on! Who the hell is it?” Ben called from inside.

  When he opened the door, he had a big knife in his hand, and Missy Crockett stood behind him with a twenty- gauge shotgun pointed at them.

  “My God, it’s Emmy and Sarah!”

  He pulled them into the house, peering past them into the darkness.

  Sarah cried out, “Northerners! Father was fighting them, and we had to run.”

  “My God!” Crockett blurted out, looking down at Emmy. “Em, you’re wounded!”

  Emmy thought he was talking about her foot and then looked down to where he was staring. Her nightgown was covered with blood from the waist down and was dripping all over the rough-hewn floor.

  Missy looked at Emmy’s white face, handed the shotgun to Crockett, and said, “Ain’t a wound, Ben.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Emmy

  The bell rang louder now. It had a name finally: “Nagger,” she wanted to call it.

  Emmy had slept hard, and it took hours, it seemed, to wake fully again.

  When she came about, the room was still, but she could hear voices quietly talking.

  Moving in the bed, she caught her wretched toe again, and the dull pain brought her back to herself. She felt a bandage covering it, dulling its sting.

  She wondered if she were dead because the morning nausea that had bothered her for the past several weeks was gone, now replaced with a weakness that went all the way down into her bones, pushing her right through to the floorboards.

  The whispers continued, heated now, it seemed, but too muffled to understand.

  Was it Northerners?

  Did they just come to pay respects and negotiate a deal for the cattle?

  Where was Isaac and her children?

  This mattress was softer than hers, and she knew from the embroidered, quilted cover that she had to be in Missy Crockett’s home, maybe her bed, even.

  She was embarrassed not to be in her own bed and felt like an intruder, like someone who, just to get a moment’s rest, might have slipped through the window in the night.

  She needed to get out of there.

  Where was Isaac, and why weren’t the children up running about and fussing as they always did?

  She was wearing a different, clean nightgown, but she was wet hot. She threw the quilt off and pulled at the gown. The bell clanged outside again, longer now.

  The bell clanged again, insistently. Nagger!

  She called out to the voices, which stopped abruptly.

  She sensed someone outside the door. After a few moments, Missy Crockett pushed it open and entered with Joseph Edwards. Both wore concerned and sad expressions that cut right to her chest.

  Missy immediately sat down at the bedside, took Emmy’s hand, and smoothed her damp hair. She was holding back tears, Emmy could tell.

  Joseph Edwards had a gruff, clumsy way of saying things for a doctor, but she always knew he meant well. He knelt down at eye level with Emmy and reached over to touch the top of her hand hesitantly.

  “Emmy, it is so good to see you awake. I was beginning to worry that the combination of the ether and sedatives I used might have been too much.” Then he touched her forehead. Turning to Missy, he said, “She’s burning up. Get some rubbing alcohol and water and wet her down.”

  He paused, seeing Emmy struggling to understand. “Dear, you lost the baby. And now you’ve got an infection that’s going to put you to the worst test you’ve ever had.”

  What was he saying? She tried to form words but her mind seemed full of cotton, then slowly, around the edges, the terror returned. Everything was coming at her at once and she wasn’t even sure where she was. The baby?

  As she stammered out “the baby?” Edwards interrupted her. “You have to preserve your strength and rest. Please drink this down,” he said, lifting a cup of apple juice to her mouth.

  Emmy then remembered she had been pregnant, and the misery pounded her down harder than when she had lost the first baby two years ago.

  Somewhere from another room she heard a man’s baritone laugh.

  Isaac?

  Edwards paused, watching her closely, “Isaac and Jacob are fine. Now rest.”

  But she hadn’t asked Edwards about Jacob, she thought, as the drift from the laudanum overcame her, she heard a crow cawing and the flutter of wings outside the window, and she was in a field by herself, counting and losing count.

  Chapter Twenty

  ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊

  Joseph Edwards

  A practitioner familiar enough with the benefits of ether surgery, Dr. Joseph Edwards had put Emmy under when her miscarriage was inevitable and she needed help clearing out the clots that followed the small stillborn fetus.

  With the bleeding stopped, he was now worried about the morbid fever that followed bloody miscarriages like this. Sometimes the woman survived, but so much depended on her residual strength. Frail ones passed in a swift night, shaking and melting away in front of the bereaved. But Emmy could beat this; he knew because of the temper of her mettle.

  He had been called on the morning of the awful attack, after Ben Crockett, Winfield Evers, and a few men from the east side of the island had ventured out together to be certain the marauders had cleared. When they went to the Evers’ homestead, they had found Isaac’s headless remains.

  Edwards had gone to the Evers home before attending to Emmy because it was on the way to Ben Crockett’s house. But just for a few minutes, because he hated violent death scenes. The men had brought the broken carcass into the ransacked house to keep the crows away.

  He had seen decapitations before. Felt it was such a robbery of a body’s dignity.

  On Elliott Bay where Edwards had first star
ted practicing, before Evers convinced him to move to Whidbey, there had been several decapitations after a twenty-five-dollar reward had been posted for the head of the Indian who had raped and killed one of the Elliott Bay settlers.

  Eighteen heads, all likely taken as retribution for miscellaneous grudges, had been brought in before the settlers realized the bounty had been a mistake. He had seen some of the heads returned to the families of the deceased. The headless bodies always seemed so much smaller and foolish looking.

  This desecration was no different than others he had seen—thumb missing, a big hole blown out of Isaac’s back from a heavy slug, likely a .54 caliber.

  The body wouldn’t have survived that wound anyway, so the missing head seemed irrelevant, except that it wasn’t.

  When the burial took place on a body rotted away from a cancer or simply dwindled into a frail carcass, he always imagined the full person in good health, no matter what.

  But this was so hard to put to rest.

  By the time he got to the Crockett’s twenty minutes later, Emmy had collapsed, and Ben had carried her unconscious, upstairs.

  She was bleeding heavily and had already passed the fetus, which Missy Crockett, a devout Catholic, had wrapped in new linen and placed next to a votive candle, lit she said, so the baby’s tiny soul could find its way to Purgatory.

  Edwards inspected the fetus and saw that the small placenta had not pulled away intact from the uterus, which meant that Emmy would continue bleeding and die unless he could evacuate the fragments along with any large clots left.

  He took a bottle of opiate from his bag and told Missy to mix a half bottle into a pitcher of water and then to arouse Emmy enough so that she drank a full tumbler.

  After Emmy ingested the mixture, he soaked a handkerchief wrapped around a large cotton ball with ether and held it over her mouth and nose.

  She didn’t struggle much. When she was limp, he began searching for the remainder of the placenta.