by Gar LaSalle
When he awoke, he was mostly deaf and had forgotten all but his name and some of the native Spanish he had known as a child. Thus, at the age of twenty-two, he began his life anew as Marano Levi, Christian convert.
The nuns developed great affection for Marano and watched over him as best they could, providing him with tasks and an allowance that would sustain him. But they worried about his ability to survive on his own, for although he seemed intelligent enough when focused on a task, he was constantly distracted by small fits that left him for several minutes with a trance-like staring affect.
He never was observed in a conniption, but more than once he was robbed of all of his possessions, including his shoes, during the quiet seizure. None of their prayers, poultices, or incantations cured him. During such episodes, he just stopped functioning altogether.
The nuns even tried a concoction provided by a well-regarded Chinese herbalist, who told them it would work only if Marano took the expensive mixture twice a day for several weeks.
He did so but without success; in fact, the fits seemed to increase in frequency.
When their order reassigned them to move from San Francisco, the sisters arranged for Marano to be attached to the service of an aging, frail French Jesuit missionary who needed an assistant for a mission assignment to convert aborigines in the savage Vancouver territory.
Six months later, Marano Levi made his way north with the black robe. The pair travelled together for eighteen months, and during that time, Marano seldom spoke.
He observed carefully, however, and came to understand his master’s compulsive devotion to Jesus. The priest awoke every morning before dawn, said his Mass, prayed for an hour afterward, ate a meager breakfast, then proceeded to travel, visiting the camps of tribes friendly enough to receive them and avoiding ones that had reputations.
Marano respected this routine and became devoted to it as well.
At the end of their eighteenth month together on the northwestern shore of Vancouver Island, the priest began coughing. Overcome during the cold night with shaking chills, by morning he could not rise from his pallet. There was no one to send for.
The priest was dead by evening.
At first, Marano continued with his normal tasks: hunting, fishing, and trapping for two mouths to feed as he always had. But by the third day, overwhelmed by the putrefaction in the tent, he buried the priest.
The next morning, after a prolonged seizure that left him disoriented and messed, he found himself preparing for the Mass in the same manner as he had done for the past two years.
When he regained his senses, he changed out of the soiled clothing and donned the priest’s cassock. As he emerged from the tent, three aborigines confronted him. They pointed muskets at him and, after gathering up the chalice and makeshift altar, motioned him to their canoe. Their tyee, Tsa ka tien’, was dying.
The trip to the chieftain’s lodge became another starting place for Marano.
After ministering as best he could to the elderly chief and applying an improvised Extreme Unction rite, Marano Levi began a new vocation as a vagrant unordained priest, performing the semblance of a Mass and, for the families that would allow him to do so, baptizing their newborn and anointing with last rites their gravely ill.
In his wanderings through the region over the next three years, he memorized a tattered Spanish Bible and, interpreting passages randomly, became convinced that the aborigines of Vancouver Island were one of the lost tribes of Israel, his Infantes desperadoes des Juda. He was inspired by repeated epiphanies, usually occurring right after a prolonged seizure, and understood in a way no one else could that God was all around and in every living twig and hard stone.
He accepted as revelation that his mission was to convert all creatures into a harmonious peace. He was passionate about his beliefs and deeply confused most of the time, speaking in a hodgepodge of English, French, Spanish, and Chinook to whomever would listen.
And because his ceremonies were a spectacle of incantations and improvised motions that infuriated any clergy, Protestant or Catholic, who happened to witness them, word spread.
Within a short time, he was shunned.
The natives left him alone, and Marano Levi became a lonely and depressed shepherd without a flock. It was in that state of mind that he found himself in the camp of Emmy Evers.
Chapter Thirty-Two
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy, Sarah and Ursa
The snow rapidly melted over the next few days under an unusually warm winter sun.
Jojo ordered the small band to break down camp in preparation for an early morning departure and asked Marano to hunt and fish to replenish their meat supplies.
In the late afternoon light, while Jojo disassembled the supply tent and packed the third canoe, Sarah and Emmy started foraging for dry wood for the night fire.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
They were not alone in the forest.
One hour before, as the late afternoon soft wind changed direction and drifted in from the water and up the hills, it had carried with it the complex smell of a downed animal.
A few miles away, a grizzly had picked up the scent and immediately moved south to the water, pushing with his big shoulders through dense undergrowth of decayed blackberry vines. Other bear and wolves would be on it soon, and the grizzly knew it might have to fight again.
This was an older bull bear that had survived every violent encounter over its many years, always emerging bolder and more confident.
Big by comparison to other grizzly in the region, it needed to feed constantly. Lean from a short hibernation, it had emerged from its den starving the week before, and since then, it had been unable to find much prey.
There were few fish in the stream. The bear knew it had to get to the dead animal first, before other predators. Last fall just before hibernation, the grizzly had been in a fight with an angry wolverine over the carcass of a moose. The disagreeable animal just wouldn’t back down and had scraped a gash through the grizzly’s right eye before the grizzly had found just the right position and swatted the wolverine with such force that it flew against a big cedar and did not get up again.
The bear gorged itself on the moose and wolverine and then settled down to sleep.
When it emerged from hibernation, it could not see from its right eye, and since then, the fighting was so much more work.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Most of the fallen timber was wet, but as Emmy and Sarah moved up a deer trail, they entered a cove with so much canopy cover that it had been protected from the snow that still blanketed much of the area.
While Sarah laid out a drag cloth to tow the wood, Emmy began stacking semidry branches into a neat pile on the cloth.
When she returned to it with a third armful, she saw a tree stump move. But it wasn’t a tree at all.
When the massive bear stood up onto its hind legs, it appeared as big as a mountain. Sarah’s back was to the bear, and when she looked up, she saw that her mother had stopped still, staring past her.
Sarah did not turn. Both of them could hear the heavy breathing of the grizzly.
Emmy held tightly onto the branches of dry wood she carried. But not tightly enough. A heavy piece slipped, then dropped and deflected off her knee onto the ground.
The huge old silverback, hovering over the decomposing remains of an elk cow, turned to the sound, and as it did so, Emmy saw that its mouth was full of bloody carrion.
The wind was with them, and it was close enough that she could smell the foul dung on its hide and see that one eye was missing.
The bear sniffed the air, sensing for the presence of an intruder. From the way it turned its ears and moved its head, Emmy knew it had not placed them yet.
She motioned to Sarah with her eyes and carefully began stepping backward, looking for a pathway
for them to escape unimpeded.
When the grizzly turned its good eye away from her, she dropped her bundle and began running, whispering loudly, “Run, Sarah. To the camp.”
The beast turned and saw the movement. Bellowing, it dropped to all fours.
Sarah screamed in a high-pitched shrill that crescendoed over the low roar of the grizzly, which had begun rushing toward the fleeing women.
As it broke through the saplings over the ridge they had crossed, the women saw movement and a flash of light off to the right.
The bear shuddered from the pain of a bullet striking its shoulder. As the bear turned toward the flash, standing fully upright and roaring loudly, Emmy and Sarah continued running in the direction of camp.
When Emmy looked back, she saw Marano Levi fifty feet away from the roaring beast. He was hurriedly reloading his musket for a second shot.
But the bear, wounded and furious, leapt the short distance in four quick, bounding strides and knocked the man to the ground.
It bit into Marano’s jaw and head. The dull, crunching sound and screams of the dying man carried loudly through the forest.
Emmy and Sarah cried out in horror. This time the bear caught their scent and turned away from Marano. It charged after them, running parallel toward the river below.
Emmy broke through the trees on the river bank first and saw a canoe beached on its side.
“Get to that boat, Sarah!”
The bear came through the trees sixty yards upstream.
She saw it stand and sniff the air, catching their scent again.
Just as they reached the vessel, it roared and charged up through the shoals toward them.
They put the boat between themselves and the animal. The canoe’s gunnels were high enough that the bear could not cross over it and, as the animal started to move around the prow to reach the other side, they both leaped into the boat.
From the opposite side, the bear crawled into the boat as well, and as it did so, its massive weight swung the craft into the water. The canoe started downstream carrying the three of them with it.
As Sarah and Emmy, still screaming, started to jump from the boat, they heard two loud reports and saw the big bear suddenly drop headfirst into the water.
It did not move again, and its weight held the canoe fixed in the shallow part of the stream.
Two men emerged from the woods, each carrying a smoking fifty-caliber rifle.
It was Marté and Cull.
“Ze girls is playing hide and go seek with the big beast, eh?” Marté said.
Cull, making his way over to the bear with a drawn knife to finish it if necessary, exhaled a deep, coarse bass cackle at Marté’s joke.
Moments later, Jojo found them. As he silently approached the canoe, he surveyed the dead grizzly and then Marté and his companion.
Taking in the smug grins of the shooters and with hands on his knives, Jojo stepped between the men and the two women.
Marté smiled. Doffing his filthy fur hat, he bowed deeply toward Emmy as if he were mimicking the formal address to royalty.
“You are most welcome, madam.”
Brushing aside his sarcastic display, Emmy wondered to herself what this might cost them.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Jojo, Emmy and Sarah found Marano Levi’s broken body and spent the rest of the afternoon burying him in the cold, hard ground. Jojo put the Spanish Bible in the lonely man’s grave.
“This was not his lucky book,” Jojo said. “But it gave him some comfort in this life. Maybe it will help him find his way in the next one.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Sarah
She had wept bitterly as they buried Marano, even more so than when they had put her stepfather into the ground.
Isaac had left with a heroic reputation that would keep him alive for many, and that had comforted her. But Marano was a different kind of hero.
Sarah had developed a fondness for the lonely man that made her feel almost motherly. He had been such a lost soul, she thought, so misunderstood. No one had bothered to try to understand Marano Levi.
In his final act when he shot the beast, he was more focused than she had ever seen him during the short time he had been with them. And the teasing to which Jojo had subjected him sometimes was mean, but it seemed not to affect Marano. She concluded that beset as he was by his seizures, Marano, nevertheless, had found a place of peace in his life. It was a place in his mind where no insults could hurt him.
As they moved upstream, Sarah wondered how men arrived at what they became. Sometimes, she observed, there were signs or marks that gave the life tale away.
On the morning after they had buried Marano, she had come back to the camp and saw the Negro, Cull, working away at butchering the beast. He had stripped away his shirt, and she saw marks all over his back and chest that had to be the raised scars of repeated whippings.
They were old scars and, except for a few on his flanks, had merged together to form an indistinct rubbery mass of flesh. Some of it was dark, and some of it was whiter than her own skin.
And after that, she knew about Cull and suddenly was no longer afraid of him.
But she had never known Marano’s story, except for what Jojo had said about him—that he was not a priest and that tribes in the region did not believe in his magic or communion with his God.
That had troubled her. She had doubted Jojo’s pronouncement on that even before Marano had saved their lives. Although Marano seldom spoke and had so many funny and strange mannerisms—going off by himself to sleep and almost always eating alone—she knew he was closer to God than any of the priests she had ever seen.
So she understood Cull and sensed that she knew Marano’s soul at least, but who was Marté?
She had watched him brazenly even, after her mother had turned away in disgust during their previous encounters with him. She sensed that he delighted in that reaction, the way many men and some women watched for a subtle sign of fear or respect or surprise when they exposed their tattoos or when the soldiers wore their medals or when some of the hired hands who came to the farm showed her notches on their belts.
It meant something to many people to be distinguishable, she had concluded. She understood that. The one time she had experimented with makeup, it had given her a sudden hope that she might be pretty after all.
Her mother had cautioned her about that conceit. Emmy never wore makeup and told Sarah that she likely never would have to do so either to be a comely woman, especially here in the Northwest where there were few females, pretty or plain.
“The power to manage one’s relationships resides inside, not outside,” Emmy had told her, and if a person worked on that, practiced finding an unflappable balance while keeping one’s senses alert, nothing could ever take that away. Certainly no man, no woman, and not the passing of time or inevitability of infirmity.
But Marté was too obvious, Sarah thought.
He was so pathetically transparent in his greed that it would seem almost comical to her, if he were not such a very desperate man. She didn’t understand him.
How did he get the way he was? Somewhere, sometime in his life, probably early on, something horrible must have happened to him, she decided.
Instead of scars like the ones Cull had on his back, perhaps they were the ones that grow deep in a person’s belly. Marté likely had been defined by the fearful memories of whatever that experience was and had never gotten over it, had never found the courage to go beyond the adaptations he had crafted to survive, so that his cowardice was firmly ensconced into his soul and bearing.
As she watched him, Sarah wondered whether Marté’s facial definition and his crouched posture were the result of a carry he had initiated at the same time and whether it had just gotten worse with each
passing day—that hunch to his back that made him appear even smaller, that forced smile that only came out on the sides of his mouth, a smirk that betrayed his contempt for others.
She wondered if people instinctively guarded themselves, prejudicially and unfairly and without provocation, against men like Marté with body and extreme facial characteristics—an unfortunate “physiognomy,” as her mother had called it. As exaggerated as Marté’s features and expressions were, Sarah concluded that most likely the little man repeatedly had been rejected in his life.
She wondered if that distrust by others had compelled Marté into some pathetic pattern of behavior, one in which he would come back over and over for approval from others, just to be pushed away each time—each rejection reaffirming his fears about himself, reinforcing his self-loathing, so that he eventually gave up on himself. Gave up on his soul. Was that what he was about, she wondered?
She would have to study him more.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Marté, Cull and Emmy
In the hour preceding total darkness, Cull had skinned and quartered the grizzly.
“Mus bin fi’teen hunded pouns, all tol,” he said, stretching the skin onto a makeshift rack.
He held out a long strip of bear backstrap to Emmy and Sarah and leered with a jack-o-lantern grin when Sarah grimaced and then shuddered.
“Sted it eat yo, yo eaten’ it,” he said, and then put the strip of flesh into his mouth.
Marté smiled at Sarah’s reaction.
Jojo knew of Rene Marté. The trapper had established himself in the Nuxalt and the Skeena River area as an opportunistic intermediary between white non-English speaking traders and various coastal tribes, including the Kwakiutl and, it was rumored, the more predatory of the northern raiders.
Somewhere, in the past few years, Jojo surmised, Marté had picked up Eben Cull as a running companion. Although Jojo had never seen that grim giant before, he had heard of him and knew he was a cold murderer with a reputation that seemed a fitting complement to that of the unctuous Frenchman.
