She took a deep breath and lifted the lid back up. Then, closing her eyes, she slid her fingers down around the skull and lifted it out of the keg. She stumbled and fell to the ground. The skull rolled out of her hands and stopped against a rock. She saw the end of a black cloth leaving its nape. Something gleamed inside it. She pulled on the cloth—gasping at the sight of gold and silver coins. She knotted the cloth around the coins and stuffed them down the leg of her leggings. Then she walked clockwise three times around the skull, making the sign of the cross each time, with a prayer against a pirate’s curse that may have been placed on anyone taking the treasure. She found an alder branch and knelt to dig in the sand, her hands trembling from the fright of discovering the head and the coins. She laid the skull in a shallow grave with the red cloth over it. Her fingers went to the cross hanging from her neck. She bent quickly, a harsh breath leaving her lips as if a fist had taken her in the stomach. She stumbled back to the safety of her shelter, wanting nothing to do with a nightmare she wished she could awaken from.
Chapter 11
Addaboutik—We Are Red
A day later, Nasook found Genevieve sitting on a boulder by the ship, leaning hard, her palms pressed against her knees. She lifted one hand to clutch her belly, biting back a moan. Nasook’s warm scent brought temporary relief as his hand touched her belly. He jumped back as if startled. “You be childing!”
She turned to look at him, taking in his curved, full lips, his coppery skin with its red markings, and shiny, black eyes. Long, thick eyelashes cast shadows on his high cheekbones, rising like warm pillars. She felt the urge to incline her face against his face. Then another pain burrowed through her.
“I take you wit’ me,” Nasook said, his lips tightening.
“But your people?” Her voice was fearful.
“There only me and few Addaboutik left.”
“Like this?” She held up her spread fingers. He nodded.
“Two tapatook—canoe—turn over in water after coming to shipwreck of ship on beach. Men drown from ship curse. Now there only three men, two women—and one boy,” he said sadly. He added, “We no babies left and emmamooset—young girl—my people want for me died last moon. Steam hut not help cough. Ewinon—my father—gone long, long time.”
He spoke the words as if they were death’s hands coming to close the earth up over his family. “Among my people there be no one for me to bind body. I give life to you. You sent from sea—a gift to hold gift. There not be many of my people since battle with pirates. My people want our people’s seed to live. They want baby now. Me must give child. Kobshuneesamut—Great Spirit—be inside every skin, white, brown, red. Great Spirit stuck arrows of life in ground and first people grew; then more come from them. Spirit of life in your belly, meseeliguet—baby—under your skin wanting to get out.”
“Stay with me,” she implored.
He shook his head. “My people few; I be with them, save them for another sun. They do not have great chance.” He pulled a seashell necklace from around his neck. It fell like a whisper into her lap. He picked it up and placed it around Genevieve’s neck. “This amulet say we belong together.”
She drew back, her mind racing: What if Nasook’s people fear I’ll betray them to the white man? What if they kill me and my bébé? Her misgivings were scattered by pain pressing down on her insides as if it would break her apart.
“We go in canoe. Steady sea save us from danger,” Nasook said, grabbing her hand to pull her toward the water.
“I can’t swim,” she whispered to the sound of waves breaking along the shore. She was thinking of the Indian canoes that had tipped into the sea, drowning their inhabitants and dropping their shipwreck loot into the deep.
Another sharp pain took her—surged through her, ebbed. The tides of the sea and the tides of her body acted as one—surging, ebbing. “Have patience, my bébé; you’re not ready to come into this world yet,” she moaned.
Nasook traced his finger over the moon of her belly. “Delood—come!” he said softly. “Wind dead on the land and you aborning.” He stood up and his arm stretched toward her; his fingers seemed to spread like sun rays—an energy connecting her to him.
She got to her feet and his arm went around her back as they made their way to the canoe. Nasook tenderly lifted her into the craft, his sight fixed on her face contorting in pain. He held her with one arm and seized a caribou mantle off his shoulder. He doubled it for her to kneel on. His hands had a firm grasp on the paddle flowing out from him like a wing as he steered the craft away from the cove. The paddle cut through water, lifted it dripping like silver feathers. Genevieve closed her eyes and leaned back, her fingers interlaced over her belly as the canoe glided like an ochre quarter-moon across unknown sea. She was on a new journey, one that coupled fear and hope.
* * * *
The canoe made a long scraping sound as Nasook pulled it ashore. Genevieve slipped over the edge of the craft as carefully as she could, the baby low in her belly. She bent her knees and picked up two handfuls of stones before she followed Nasook. She dropped the tiny stones one by one to mark her way back through the dense forest to the sea’s edge.
Nasook turned back. “See,” he said, looking up through a forest that seemed to swallow them, “treetops reach into sky like mamateek poles.”
She felt shrunken and helpless by their height. What if someone takes my stones and I can’t find my way back to the water?
Nasook stopped abruptly, and she caught herself from bumping into his back. She did not see it at first—the Red Indians’ mamateek—Nasook’s home. Around it were trees, oddly damaged. Top branches were intact, but trunks had been stripped bare in places and animal bones hung around them. The bones swirled in a wind that was beginning to pick up.
“Mistikuan,” explained Nasook. “They be trees we make for our spirits. Behind trees and away is another mamateek.”
Beside the mamateek lay several large birchbark canoes. Nasook passed them and lifted a flap at the entrance of the mamateek. He nodded for Genevieve to come inside the large cone-shaped structure. Pain buckled her. She moaned, and slid to her knees.
She looked up to see two elderly women staring at her white face, as if stunned at the appearance of a stranger. A little boy ran to clutch one of their hands. They were all a version of Nasook: straight, black hair, high cheekbones, small blackberry eyes and copper skin. One elder spat the word: “Addizabad-Zéa!”
“Anwoydin—spouse!” Nasook explained. He turned back to Genevieve and pointed to the woman whose face resembled his most. “My mother help you.”
The sudden spattering of words among the women and Nasook startled Genevieve. She understood, by the women’s angry expressions, that they wanted her gone. Those thoughts were quickly ripped away.
“Uhhh-oh-ah!” she gasped, her hands clenched.
One woman’s eyes flickered in concern as Nasook shouted, “Is-shu—make haste!” The women said nothing more as they made way for Nasook to pull Genevieve, bent with pain, back up on her feet. He led her to a fur-lined poochowhat, one of several beds hollowed around the centre of the mamateek. She lay down and the boy touched her face hesitantly; his dark eyes stared into her blue ones. Nasook’s mother spoke to the boy and he left the mamateek. Then she cautiously removed Genevieve’s leggings, shaking her head at the sight of her thin body around the ball of child. “A-Enamin!” Unlike Genevieve, the woman showed plump flesh. The Indians had learned how to live well in this wild land.
Her hands went to each other, entwining as if they were her only comfort. Her body seemed to be rent in half and falling sideways. As her cries went up into the sky, there was a silent movement of feet. The red strangers sat down around her in a circle, watching. One of the women lifted a birch cup of liquid to her lips. “Buterweyeh!” a voice urged. “Cockabóset!”
“Tea,” Nasook
interpreted. “Don’t be afraid.”
Genevieve turned away. “Baby not ready, not enough months,” she panted.
“Drink tea—calm water,” Nasook said. He got down beside her, his eyes soft and caring, and drew her against his sleeveless cassock. Hairless, well-muscled arms held her. She drew in his earthy scent.
She opened her lips and drank. The women’s chants began. A musical cadence seemed to catch and still her cries as they shot out of her until another pain came. Hands lifted her, and soft voices, in strange faces, spoke against her ear. The company of humans drew her up from a black pit. Her body communicated with them as they evoked the blessings of spirits.
“Boobishat!” the midwife called and the other woman scurried outside. Genevieve heard the pound of hurrying feet and soon the woman was back with kindling to bear up the fire already in a hollow ringed with round beach rocks.
The pain wore thin again and again, thickened, thinned, ended as the woman’s hands lifted a scrawny, bloodied child from Genevieve’s body. Harsh newborn cries were cajoled into a peaceful rest by the ministering hands of the midwife who wrapped the newborn in a doeskin. Genevieve reached up to take her baby. Her hands fell back beside her. One of the women held up the tiny whimpering baby while the other washed her in oil rendered from animal fat.
Nasook brought his reddening box and daubed the baby all over with red ochre. “Odemet,” he said softly, then, “Meseeliguet.” He kissed the baby’s fingers and then her soft, fuzzy cheek as if astonished that he could help create something so small and so perfect. A twisted, blue-tinged rope of flesh trailed away from the baby. Genevieve’s heart lifted in fear at the sight, remembering the shipwrecked mother and her baby. Her heart settled as she looked from her baby to the calm face of the midwife.
Nasook brought the baby to Genevieve’s breast; tiny lips tugged weakly on her nipple. She touched the soft down of her baby’s dark hair and murmured, “Patience Elizabeth, that will be your name—Patience because I have waited a long time for you, and Elizabeth because a woman named Elizabeth follows me in my dreams. Your life brought back mine when there was a will to let it go. As a breath of wind is to a candle flame, your soft stir made my life flare. So often.”
After the cord ceased pulsing, the midwife tied it with coarse grass strings and cut it with a slate knife. Genevieve groaned when the woman pressed hard on her belly. She felt a mass slip from her body. The midwife took it.
Genevieve’s weakness, bearing down on her like a rock, brought a keen awareness that she was at the mercy of strangers, anchored to them, through Nasook and her baby. She fell asleep with the baby still at her breast.
Nasook’s voice came against her ear, stirring her awake. “Washi-Weuth—night spirit has come. You finished day in sleep.”
She opened her eyes to see Nasook holding Patience Elizabeth. He smiled and laid the baby beside her. She was covered in ochre and grease and wrapped in doeskin.
“Teehonee means star. That be her name for our people,” Nasook announced, his head high, his cheeks carrying fresh, red markings. “Soon her eyes carry stars bright as stars in sky.”
Behind Nasook stood the midwife nodding earnestly.
“Teehonee my mother’s name, too,” Nasook said sheepishly. “She midwife. The woman, round cheeks on her, be Badisut. Her husband died.”
He looked at Badisut. “Bbouguishaman’s adamadwet—white man’s musket.”
Badisut’s eyes showed anger. She turned to stir the fire. Her breast hefted with coughs and Teehonee brought her a decoction.
“Brewed from shucodimít—plant root,” Nasook explained to Genevieve.
The woman’s coughing subsided as she took a couple of swallows.
“Amet,” said Nasook, nodding to a young male entering the mamateek. “His name means ‘wake up.’ He not want wake up when he born.”
He smiled at the young male coming behind Amet. “Whooch, he named for black crow.”
Hearing their names given out to this stranger, one of the young men smiled. The other scowled. Nasook turned to the smiling boy playing with a skin ball beside Genevieve. “Buh-bosha-yesh—meaning boy—Kisa and Amet’s son. He, Odusweet, our little rabbit.”
The little boy’s eyes shone like stones licked by dew as he looked at his father and back to the baby as if he had never seen so small a living, moving human.
“Meseeliguet!” Teehonee prompted him.
“Baby!” said Nasook.
“Bay-bee,” Odusweet copied his uncle.
They all laughed in ease as if satisfied that they could learn words from another language. Encouraged by the laughter and then at “Aw” from the boy’s father, who looked like Nasook only older, Odusweet sat back on his heels beside the hollow where Genevieve lay. He laid down his maw-the-awtheu, a wooden doll, and reached his little brown hand to cup the sleeping baby’s lighter one. His body shuddered and then his face broke into a smile. He got up quickly and waddled outside to a stream. He came back with a little birch cup splashing water. “Ebantook,” he said, trying to put the cup to the baby’s lips.
Nasook was quick to call: “Newin—No!”
The harshness of his voice frightened Genevieve. She stared at him, her eyes big and bright as if they were ready to burst out of the black stitches of wavering eyelashes. Nasook met her stare. His voice calmed. “My people want you. You accepted me and they accept you. We daub you red, and white man not know you white.”
“No!” Genevieve’s answer was firm. “No ochre, no seal grease for our child either, if she is to have a place as a white being.”
Nasook’s face showed hurt for a moment. Then it relaxed into an acceptance of what he knew to be true: a Beothuk child had more of a chance to be killed. He would not have Teehonee go away from the mamateek wearing his tribe’s markings.
Genevieve looked down at the baby, her eyes dark brown and her face small and covered in peach fuzz. She murmured, “You are a fair child with golden skin. Patience Elizabeth is your English name, but your Beothuk name will be as your papa wills it.” Nasook rubbed his finger along a tiny birthmark on his daughter’s right ankle.
“Her own red angel,” Genevieve murmured, thinking of the one on her own right ankle, no longer bright red on her very thin skin. Tears ran down her thin face and her words came muffled in sobs. “There were times when I dared to hope for my life and Teehonee’s. Other times, I could only hope that if I died, she would be safe inside me, not born to face the wild and die.”
She slipped her nipple between the baby’s tight lips. This time Patience Elizabeth latched on like a leech.
Badisut, a smile on her copper brown face, offered Genevieve the bloodied glob from her own body, holding it out on a birch skin for her to eat. She tightened her lips against it as she had done as a child when her mother had offered her tripe. Badisut laid aside the afterbirth and offered her a bark cup, steam rising. “Buterweyeh,” she urged.
Nasook explained: “Lichen tea, steeped and drank, cleans blood; it medicine to bring back strength.”
Genevieve took a sip. She gulped the bitter drink, to not prolong the taste. Just as quickly, she and the baby slipped into sleep. When she awoke, Nasook’s mother was holding the baby, a tender, sad look clouding her face. Her mind is full of all her people and their little children who have disappeared, Genevieve thought.
Nasook had taken a box from the shipwreck. Now he was lining it with sealskin. “Here,” he said, motioning to his mother. Teehonee gently laid the newborn baby in the box and sat smiling at her.
“Wedumite?” she asked, looking at Genevieve and then turning to face Nasook.
Nasook smiled at Genevieve, explaining: “She like name you Wedumite—one who embraces. She give present to you: long strands of hair from her head made into flower amulet.”
Genevieve nodded and accepted the embroid
ered work. The woman’s hands were as brown as a marshberry. They were lined and pitted, her palms rough as if they had rarely been empty of work.
Nasook picked up the amulet and Genevieve felt his fingers whispering through her hair. She sensed his gentle protection as he decorated her hair with the amulet. Next he reached with an amulet toward the baby. Genevieve took the sealskin cord strung through a bird bone and slipped it over Patience Elizabeth’s head. She turned back to smile at the older woman, relieved that she was letting her into the family. In fancy, she saw her child and Nasook’s sister’s boy having a chance to bring the Beothuk seed to tomorrow, and the thousands of tomorrows to follow, if the white man and misfortune did not couple to destroy them.
“This cradle box will be christened by life,” Genevieve said weakly before she slipped back into sleep. She slept, dreaming of her baby lying warm on her naked breasts, tugging on her nipples. She awoke to Badisut’s drink at her lips. She took weak sips before she was swirled back asleep to dreams of Indians exchanging Patience Elizabeth for tools from the white man. I can’t be bedfast; I have to hurry and find my baby. Wind and rain lashed at her with a barbarous sting as she stumbled through the forest past mamateeks, zigzagging other mamateeks. Her breasts felt heavy and swollen like polyps of hot water, round and full as if ready for a baby’s mouth to hold the taut nipples. A voice called for her to spill her milk on the hot fire. Nasook pushed Badisut aside and began binding her breasts in a soft, cured weasel skin to dry up her milk. She awoke crying. Then she felt the stir of Nasook’s fingers on her face. He moved beside her, cupping her face with one hand and holding the baby against him with the other.
Maiden from the Sea Page 8
