by Gar LaSalle
That reoriented him, and with that nightly exercise, he found the courage to resist.
He was not going to be afraid of that man.
He was not going to be afraid of the old woman or the old man either. Or any of them.
He knew he could escape when the right moment came. And if any of them had hurt his father or any of his family—the flush and anger built up and made him breathe so fast that he got dizzy—he would kill them.
“I will kill them,” he told himself repeatedly.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Four days later, a southern Kwakiutl trading party canoed into the encampment. Little Raven had always been careful to keep raids away from these particular Kwakiutl villages—a prudent decision because more than once the Kwakiutl had given him important information as well as valuable outlets for trade.
After exchanging lead, powder, and sugar, the traders told Anah details about the upcoming off-season Tsimshian potlatch up the Skeena River. Ksi Amawaal, a wealthy and powerful tyee, had extended a generous and broad invitation, sending message sticks to surrounding tribes, the Kwakiutil told him. They also told him that the family of a white tyee from the south was seeking a kidnapped child and was asking questions at the British fort.
Anah wondered whether the child being sought was the white boy in his camp.
Anah knew the danger inherent in making a long trip upriver, but enough trading would occur in that gathering that he could exchange slaves for many things. Still, he would have to be careful to disguise himself as Kwakiutl or Skidegate.
It would be unlikely that he would be recognized, in any case, because, even as far flung as his reputation as “Black Wind” had become, almost all his predation against other tribes had been against coastal, rather than inland villages. And he had seldom left witnesses alive to identify him.
He also understood that enslaved humans were commodities that had never lost their value, and he had many to trade. Even after the Brits and French had stopped directly authorizing any form of slavery by their citizenry, they ignored the practice of slave trading by non-whites in the region, thus condoning its continued use as a currency.
He exchanged three muskets for the message stick bearing the invitation that had been sent to the Kwakiutl.
He would make this trip up into the Tsimshian country, Anah decided. Come spring, when he could again rendezvous with intermediaries like Marté and Cull, who had a convenient connection to ocean-bound buyers like the Portuguese and Russians, a raid into the south Puget Sound waters again would bring him enough women to buy another cannon.
He would make this trip. And he would bring his slaves with him, including the Little Wolverine boy, if he could keep him contained. And he would study the boy to take his power.
Chapter Thirty
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy
Emmy was not afraid of the cold. Each winter, passed over the years under the dull and sulking skies of the Oregon territory, had presented to her new problems that she had to bridle quickly. She knew that if she did not prepare properly, the deterioration of everything touched by the withering, relentless rain would deplete her strength and ultimately run her down and over. She had watched others succumb.
But she repeatedly had succeeded in besting the challenges of the elements, had endured because she held to hope and purpose — and that process had hardened her to the perennial coming of the cold, personified in her mind as a wretched and angry misanthropist. And when she reemerged into its presence, when its piercing, aching grasp reintroduced itself to her fingers and nose and cut to her core, she was prepared to defiantly withstand and survive.
And on the cold came that week, seven days into their trek east, first with a flurry of pea-sized hail that started in the early afternoon, followed by a torrent of freezing rain that lasted all night. The rain turned to snow by morning, stuck quickly, and within a few hours was five inches deep.
Emmy listened with considerable anxiety to Jojo’s recommendation that they prepare to wait. She did not want to lose time. She needed to find Jacob. She knew he would be there. She turned to Marano Levi.
“Marano, you said the weather is usually milder in the valley of the Three Spirits.”
Levi, who had said little during the trip thus far, nodded warily, as he watched for Jojo’s reaction to his opinion.
“Si, Señora. The valley is protected by the mountains that surround it. We could keep traveling.“
Jojo scoffed, angrily shaking his head at Levi’s recommendation. “That is too dangerous, Missus Evers! If the weather stops us, it will do the same to others who are coming east,” Jojo reasoned, staring down Levi as he did so. “We have to stay here at least until the snow stops. If it doesn’t get cold again, then we can go on.”
Emmy waited for Levi to counter Jojo’s recommendation. But Levi said no more.
Emmy nodded, grimly accepting Jojo’s argument, looking at the gray horizon, hoping for a change in the weather.
But the snow continued for another day, and then a cold hard freeze set in. Ice began to form on the river below their camp. So they stayed put, going through half of their provisions in the next week.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
On the second day, Jojo, anticipating a long and boring wait, brought the primer to Emmy for his first lesson.
He opened the book and pointed to the pictures of common objects with their titles on the first few pages. “Raven?” he asked.
Emmy shook her head. “No. Bird,” she said, pointing to the word.
“Noburd,” Jojo repeated.
Emmy shook her head again.
“Bu-ir-da.”
Jojo nodded and repeated, “Buirda.”
Emmy smiled and nodded. “Bird!”
Jojo repeated the word with the exact emphatic affirmative intonation. And then Emmy knew that Jojo was a perfect mimic.
Within a few hours, Jojo had mastered five pages of pictures and script.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Every night and into the bitter mornings that week, Emmy dreamed.
One night she found herself in bed waiting for someone, a man, to come through her door, and she knew it wasn’t Isaac. She waited, felt herself holding her breath, for whomever he was to be bold enough to push his way in. The dream, and the arousal it provoked, continued until she awoke to the first light. She ran outside and buried her face in the snow to calm herself before Sarah awakened.
On two nights, she dreamt she was following a spirit who looked like a version of her first husband, John Tern, Sarah’s father, a hard-pressing, driven man, who had changed from charming to angry within a few months after arriving in Olympia.
“Why did you marry the man who was Sarah’s father?” Jojo had asked the night before, as they huddled around the small campfire.
The question surprised Emmy. She was quiet for a few minutes, thinking about events that had occurred so very long ago, it seemed.
“He was a big dreamer, Jojo. A story teller. Painted bold pictures about this land. Ambitious, like Isaac, Jacob’s father. I believed him. So did my family. I was sixteen when I married him.”
She paused again, looking to be certain Sarah was asleep.
“He turned violent after we moved out here. Not so much on me, but on others. I hoped that Sarah’s birth would soften him. Didn’t.”
She stopped talking, listening as two coyotes howled a duet far off in the distance.
Staring out at the dark river running below, Emmy thought about those days. She was fifteen when Tern had come into town to raise money for a speculative enterprise, far from civilization, out in the far Northwest—one that would bring huge fortunes to the down-in-their-luck Boston Brownstone patrimony, most of whom believed in getting something for nothing.
Tern told of an enterprise involving San Francisco provisions
in exchange for Northwest gold, furs, and lumber. He had painted a grand vision, and she had been swept away by the romance of living in a foreign, savage land.
He had fooled Emmy all the way, and yet she stayed with him, even as they became more estranged.
She thought about her mother’s advice—to marry someone much older, preferably a man who was beyond roaming eyes. She was twenty-five years younger than him.
In a short time, as Tern’s temper worsened, she experienced a growing, despairing loneliness much stronger than the frustrated solitude that had driven her into his arms in the first place.
By her pregnancy with his child, she had faintly hoped for a softening.
It did not come.
And then he was dead — taken by the whiplash of a falling tree on a very muggy morning when, as it turned out, all she could think about was how mistaken she had been to marry that man, and how much more foolish it was to be continuing in that relationship.
But she had felt no guilt. It just was Providence’s answer to unasked prayers.
“I don’t know why I married him,” she told Jojo.
Jojo waited, thinking about her response. He looked at the sturdy white woman, wondering why she married again if she had been so unhappy.
“Why did you marry Jacob’s father?
Emmy paused again, then continued, “Because I loved him. That is something I am trying to understand now that he is gone...why it doesn’t hurt more. But as we lived through our time together . . . .”
She looked up and saw that Sarah was now awake and listening.
Emmy shook her head. She had said enough of her private thoughts to this young man whom she believed would never understand.
In the pause, the fire crackled as the moist wood it burned steamed and popped.
Emmy turned the inquiry on Jojo.
“Tell me about Captain Pickett. And your sister.”
Jojo seemed to blush, Emmy noted as she watched him in the fire’s light.
“Morning Mist was beautiful. Like you and your daughter. She was fifteen, like you say you were when you moved away from the Boston-man land. Maybe she wanted to get away, see new things. Like you did.”
Emmy saw that Sarah was leaning forward now, as Jojo continued.
“She came home one time with him when she was with child.”
Jojo paused, looking out into the darkness. “I never saw her again.”
Sarah looked at Jojo, who was now quiet.
“What was she like?” she asked.
“We played when we were young. She knew how to do things, climb a big tree and catch a small bird on the perch, just for a moment, and let it fly again. She taught me to do that. I made her laugh, and she made me want to make her laugh because it was… such a pretty laugh. She loved Pickett George very much.”
“Did Pickett George love her?” Sarah asked.
Jojo glanced at Emmy and saw her leaning forward now.
“Yes.” He looked away, glancing again at Emmy as he did so.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
That night Emmy dreamed of riding on a horse next to George Pickett. They were going someplace important. Inspecting. He wore his field cape and sword and stayed at an even pace with her.
On the fifth night, she listened to Marano Levi talking to himself, walking through the snow in the darkness away from the campfire they shared for dinner.
He was chanting an obscure Catholic office in Latin. When he was out of earshot, Jojo repeated the entire vesper perfectly and then cackled in delight when he received a chastising look from Sarah. The laughter was so disarming that Sarah’s disapproval evaporated.
When Levi the chanter returned to camp a short while later, Jojo spoke to him in the exact same tenor, imitating with the perfect nuance of Levi’s ramblings in Latin.
Emmy saw a conspiratorial glance pass between Sarah and Jojo, but Levi did not seem to notice, or at least did not pay attention to Jojo’s teasing. Levi was likely used to it, she assumed. Then she saw Sarah turn to Levi and, after a brief pause, speak to him with some concern and a tinge of tender affection.
“You know, Marano, you will catch your death out there in this cold. Please have some of this porridge.”
Marano continued his chanting for a few more minutes, seeming to ignore the offer, but then closed his missal and quietly sat down next to Sarah.
She put a bowl of hot soup into his hands.
Jojo, now quiet, nodded at Sarah’s kindness to Levi.
There was no more talking in the camp that night.
On the ninth day, it began to rain again, melting away the snow and much of the ice. On the tenth, the sun came out and the sky stayed blue all day.
And the next.
So they prepared to strike camp. Emmy and Sarah moved with an anxious urgency. Too much time had been lost.
Chapter Thirty-One
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Marano Levi
Marano Levi was born Ignatio Hortensio Ramonez-Basillon into a family of clever, multitalented Castilian merchants. As a fifth son, however, he was penniless after the death of his father, so he knew at a young age that his opportunities were limited to serving at the beneficence of his oldest brother, an arrogant man who showed little kindness.
Although he had been baptized as Catholic, as had three previous generations before him, the young Ignatio learned by chance, while looking through old ledgers in his grandmother’s house, the secret that his family was, in fact, Hebrew, with the surname Levi.
This hidden stigma made him sensitive to the words he heard in church, equally condemnatory of Jews and Muslims, and by the time he turned fourteen he had developed a painful resentment of his family and its history of capitulation to the deadly ultimatums of the Castilian Catholic clergy.
Increasingly critical of what he perceived as an ignorant cowardice, he left home for the new world, cursed by his family for abandoning his obligation to subservience. As he walked the streets of Castile for the last time, he decided he would adopt the ancient Levi family surname and thereafter call himself “Marano,” which was a insulting term reserved by the Castilians for Jews who covertly maintained their heritage, despite the dangerous brand they had been given as Christ-killers.
The curse bestowed on him by his family increased his resolve to never return to the repressed, dark, and angry milieu of that small hilltop home.
He walked all the way to Barcelona, determined to make a new life for himself. After a year of enterprising hard work, he saved enough to buy passage on a trading ship to Veracruz, Mexico. There he applied his energy and bargaining skills, again saving carefully so that he might ultimately purchase his own land to farm north in the rich and fertile American Texas territory.
Before he could save enough to do so, however, he found himself conscripted along with thousands of less industrious but equally hapless men into Santa Anna’s new army. He could not buy his way out from the servitude.
Fortunately, because he had learned to cook in Spain and could do many other things well such as repair shoes, tame horses, and cut beautiful carvings from the abundant indigenous mesquite, he caught the attention of one of Santa Anna’s staff orderlies and became a valued member of the generalissimo’s officers’ camp.
That was a comfortable position, and within a few months, he had been promoted to the rank of corporal. The advantage proved short lived, for a few weeks later the entire army began a long, exhausting forced march to northern Mexico to confront Winfield Scott’s American army. Five thousand men perished in that brutal trek across the barren plains of central Mexico, and an exhausted army prepared itself for battle against a smaller but well-equipped and well-fed American force.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
In the 1847 battle of Cerro Gordo, as the result of a brilliant tactical exploration by a young captain name
d Robert E. Lee, Winfield Scott’s dragoons flanked Santa Anna, forcing the Mexican hidden artillery to fire prematurely, revealing their positions to Scott’s frontal assault forces. Scott thereby successfully flushed Santa Anna’s well-ensconced army from a high ground position, and panic turned to bloody pandemonium.
With his defeated army in disarray, Santa Anna narrowly escaped, leaving behind in his haste all his personal effects including his best wooden leg—one which Marano had been entrusted to repair.
Seizing this as his only opportunity to survive a merciless slaughter, Marano stripped off his uniform and, speaking in the wayfarer English he had taught himself while working in a Veracruz cantina, showed the ornately carved prosthesis to a young Illinois lieutenant. Thus, carrying the carving held high before him, Marano was escorted through the American lines to the headquarters of Scott, to whom he surrendered the trophy.
In the confused jubilation of the victorious American camp, Marano was able to make his way out of the territory, safely distancing himself from both armies.
A week later, riding a wild mustang he had lassoed, he crossed the Rio Grande and wisely kept heading north, thus avoiding the Comanche territory he knew many Mexican army refugees would attempt to transverse.
When he reached the Missouri River, he attached himself to a wagon train headed west for California, where gold had been discovered.
His luck changed there again—for while working atop a flag pole during a tempestuous San Francisco spring storm, he was struck by lightning. He remained in a coma for three weeks, cared for by two Irish Catholic Dominican nuns who saw the incident and, finding papers on him that identified him as Marano Levi, apostate Jew, baptized him back into Christianity.
