Bone River

by Chance, Megan

  I felt myself pale and I stepped back, away from her finger, from that lurid smile, forgetting the step, coming down hard on the one below. Lord Tom grabbed my arm to steady me.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” I could hardly hear my own voice. It seemed to come from very far away. “I’m not pregnant. It’s impossible.”

  “Mamook kloshe mika self. It is what she means for you. Hahlakl seeowist. Skookum tomawanos.” Prepare yourself. Open your eyes. This is powerful magic. Bibi jerked her head at Lord Tom. “Mamook okoke kahkwa pelton man wawa delate wawa.” Make this foolish man say the truth.

  The words pelted me; I could barely interpret them, still so stunned by the thing she’d said, the satisfaction in her gaze.

  Then she said, “She knows you, okustee. You are all she sees.”

  I turned helplessly to Lord Tom. He still held my elbow, his fingers were tight, pressing through my heavy coat. “What does she mean?” I asked him. “What truth? What is she saying?”

  “Foolishness,” he said again, more roughly than before. “Come, okustee. It is time to go.”

  He pulled me down the stairs, and I went without thinking, my heart beating fast, the things she’d said ringing in my ears. She’d called me daughter—okustee—and there was some significance to that, I knew. Bibi had called me many things. Clever Wife, Sly One, Quickmouthed. But she had never called me daughter. And her words...impossible, and yet...I pressed my hand to my stomach, feeling only the wool of my coat. Nothing. Only flat and it couldn’t be. There couldn’t be...

  I’ve taken no precautions.

  There’s no need.

  My legs went weak; I stumbled. Lord Tom kept me upright, taking me away from Bibi, from the shack, back to the road, to the beach. I was in a daze; for a moment I could not think where I was. This is what she wants for you. She brought him for you.

  I stumbled over driftwood and fell, and Lord Tom helped me up again, but this time instead of pulling me to my feet, he sat me on a piece of wood and squatted down to look into my eyes. “A storm comes, okustee. You must pay attention.”

  “She said I was pregnant,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “I’m not. I can’t be.”

  No expression.

  “She said the mummy brought him for me. That’s what I hear too, tot. In my dreams, she says it. And I—they can’t be real, can they? They’re only...dreams.”

  He nodded. Then he stood, offering his copper-brown hand. I could only stare into it.

  “What truth did she mean, tot?” I asked him. “She said she knew what you did. What was she talking about?”

  “Nothing I did,” he said. “Pelton-woman.”

  But I saw the way his gaze slid away, and I grabbed his hand, hard, and held it. “What was she talking about?”

  The wind rose, a gust blew the rest of my hair loose. It fell onto my shoulders, the last of the pins clinking on the driftwood before it buried itself in the sand. I pushed my hair back with my free hand and dug my nails into Lord Tom’s hand. “Nothing you did. What then?”

  My hair whipped against my face, stinging, twining about my throat. I was thrown back into my dream. Running and running. Footsteps pounding, hands on my arms, jerking me back, yanking me by my hair, twisting me around. I reached up to claw at him, my nails streaking down a stubble-covered cheek, a curse, and my fingers caught on the leather thong around his neck, hard enough to break, and it fell, the tooth sliding into my dress, caught at the sash beneath my breasts, then a jerk so hard backward that my arm wrenched, and tears came to my eyes, and then the sting about my throat wound tighter and tighter, and I was choking—

  “Okustee!” Lord Tom’s voice. His face hovering over mine, worry in his eyes. I stared up at him, unseeing, feeling the tooth now between my breasts, the sharp point pressing into my skin.

  “Where no law is, there is no transgression.” God surely forgives a man for protecting himself against lesser creatures.

  “He killed her,” I said.

  Lord Tom froze.

  “The mummy,” I explained. “The woman. He killed her, didn’t he? Papa killed her.”

  Lord Tom stepped back, worry replaced by fear. “Okustee—”

  “It was why his necklace was caught in her dress. Not because it found its way in there, not because he dug her up and reburied her, but because he’d buried her the first time. He killed her and he put her in that basket.”

  He said nothing. He didn’t have to. I saw the truth of it in his face, and I felt nauseated and horrified.

  “But why? What was his reason? Was she the experiment? Did something go wrong? He said it was almost ruined. That the experiment was almost ruined. Why? What did she do?”

  Lord Tom pulled his hand away from mine and bent, pressing his hands against his thighs, an attitude of dismay and hopelessness. His dark hair came forward, half hiding his face. “I did not know,” he admitted, such sad reluctance. “Not until it was done. He wanted help to bury her.”

  “You knew. You knew what she was and you didn’t tell me. It was why you thought she was a vengeful spirit. Because she was murdered. She isn’t ancient at all. That fabric...it was woven in a factory. That was why it was so fine. How could I have not known? Why didn’t I see?” I rose, grabbing his arm, forcing him to look at me. “How long ago?”

  “Twenty-two years,” he said.

  “Who was she? What was the experiment he was doing? Something about blood and environment, I know, but what?”

  “I know nothing of an experiment,” he said.

  “Who was she?”

  Lord Tom’s gaze was bleaker than I’d ever seen. His voice was a whisper when he said, “I don’t know her name. I never met her or saw her before that day. Before she was already dead. But he said...he said she’d come for her child and he could not give her up.”

  “Her child?” A dirt floor. A child playing. Love and longing.

  “I think that child was you, okustee.”

  My legs went weak; Lord Tom caught my arm before I fell, but still I wavered, and he helped me sit again on the driftwood. Awkward, rocking beneath my weight, anchored by him.

  Gently, he said, “She was Nez Perce. He called her a savage. But her spirit was very strong.”

  My mother. I thought of everything Papa had told me. How graceful she was, how pretty. I’d imagined parlors and pianos and watercolors. I’d thought once that any talent I’d had for drawing had come from her, lessons in a finishing school...oh, the stories I’d once made for myself before it ceased to matter, before she became irrelevant.

  But she had never been irrelevant, and everything I’d thought about her, everything I knew about myself, was a lie. Nez Perce. The tribe beyond the mountains. Sun-burned, grassy hills that felt impossibly familiar. The smell of dust and shadows of clouds moving across the land like spirits.

  And my father was a murderer. He was a murderer who had killed my mother because she loved me and wanted me, and everything else was a lie.

  I could not reconcile it. None of it. My stomach heaved; I tore away from Lord Tom long enough to retch into the sand, and gently he kept my hair back from my face. When I was done, his hands came to my shoulders, heavy and reassuring. He said, “Do you want to go home, okustee? Or should we stay? The storm is coming.”

  I blinked, putting the world in focus again, looking out at the bay, the rising chop. I could not think, and I did not want to be here. I wanted to be at home. My crook of the river, the bank where I’d found her.

  “I need to go back,” I said. I took his hand and he helped me to my feet, and I tried to quiet my mind as we made our way out to the canoe, as we sank in the stinking, ankle-deep mud of the flats. I tried to think of nothing. Not what he’d done or who else had known—Junius. No. Nothing but pushing the canoe to deeper water, picking up the paddle, my muscles moving without conscious thought. The little splash as it dipped into the water, the thwap of the chop against the sides. Lord Tom steered us true; he required only th
at I keep paddling, and that I could do. The clouds darkened, hovering low; we weren’t halfway there before it began to rain, hard enough to pock the water’s surface, wetting my hair so it lay flat to my scalp, dripping over my shoulders and down my back. Too much rain. The river would not hold. The water surrounded me, and I thought again of my near drowning, slipping on the deck, plunging overboard, the tug of the rope around my waist, and then I was crying so that my tears mixed with the rain and I could see nothing but gray all around me.

  But all of this was as if I watched from a distance, because I was not Leonie Monroe Russell, but someone else, someone who had once sat on a dirt floor while my mother watched. Someone who had known the sun-burned smell of prairie grass. Someone whose father had murdered her mother, and not well—painfully and in a rage, yanking her by her hair, hair that he’d no doubt run his fingers through once. You have my mother’s hair. Funny, isn’t it, how things find their way down?

  He had loved me. This I knew. This I’d never doubted. But to discover this...to know what he’d done...How could I forgive him this?

  And she had meant for me to know it, to discover it. Wherever she was, whatever she was, she had come to me, and now she was decaying; I felt her leaving me. I felt her satisfaction blanketing me in rain. There is no science that proves an afterlife. There was nothing but my own sense of what had happened, of the truth of it, and yet...what was I to do with it now?

  I was shivering when we came ashore. Shivering and wet, cold to the bone, but I felt this all with some part of me I couldn’t grasp. Lord Tom gave me a worried look as we started up the broken shell path. “Kahta mika, okustee?”

  I said, “How can I be all right?”

  We went past the gate. There was a light burning in the window. I glanced behind me, to the cut in the Querquelin where I’d found her, taken back by the river that had given her to me. The rain was coursing, the tide rising and spilling, the wind howling through the trees, boiling the river, whitecapping, churning.

  We went up the porch stairs, and I saw it there, the trunk, splashed by rain, and I froze—so strange to think of what she was, and what she meant to me. So strange to think of how I’d studied her, how I’d drawn her. The pegs of her teeth and her skin crumbling onto mine, and my legs went weak again. I stopped Lord Tom with a touch and went to her, brushing the rain off the trunk as if it would stay away.

  Lord Tom said, “Come, okustee.”

  I obeyed because otherwise I would not have moved from there. He opened the door and I stepped inside to warmth and the smell of salt pork, and there was Daniel at the stove and Junius on the floor, the burlap bag they’d brought back from the tenas memalose illahee opened, and he was surrounded by skulls and bones, and I stopped short—the pain in my stomach so hard and fast I gasped, and then I vomited there on the floor—nothing but water and bile, splashing over the floorboards and onto the rug. Junius jumped to his feet and Daniel raced from the kitchen.

  I clutched Lord Tom, who held me tight and managed, “Get those out of here.”

  Junius looked confused. He glanced behind him to the bones, skulls laid out in a line, and then back to me, and then he stepped up, reaching for me, meaning to take me from Lord Tom’s grasp, and I pushed him away, shaking my head, saying again, “Get them out of here.”

  “But it’s pouring outside.”

  “Do as she says, sikhs,” Lord Tom said.

  Junius said, “For Christ’s sake—”

  Daniel pushed past him, his expression a mask of worry. “What is it? Leonie, what’s wrong?”

  Lord Tom’s grip eased, offering to let me go, to release me to whatever other arms I wanted.

  “I’m fine,” I said. My voice shook. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Leonie, what is it?” Daniel asked.

  I let go of Lord Tom’s arm and pushed past Daniel and Junius, stumbling to the settee, putting my head in my hands. Lord Tom strode to the kitchen for a rag and began to mop up bile. My hair dripped, soaking and lank, and I dug my fingers into it, into my own scalp, the bumps there, spirituality and amativeness, veneration and ideality. I felt the horror of what was on the floor more than I ever had. My mother’s blood. Indian blood. “Get them out,” I murmured. “Get them out, Junius. Please.”

  “Leonie, be reasonable. Don’t give me that look, Tom.” Junius sat on the settee beside me, putting his arm around my shoulders. I felt his touch like a weight, a burden. I wanted to shrug him loose, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. “I’ll take them out after the storm. They’ll be no use to Baird if they’re rotting and crumbling away like that mummy—”

  I jerked away from him. “Don’t say that. Don’t call her that.”

  Junius frowned with surprise and then made a sound of disgust. “For Christ’s sake, Leonie, you need to stop thinking of her as human. She’s a relic—hell, the boy will tell you that. He was willing to sell her to a curiosity shop.”

  “I think you should stop talking,” Daniel said.

  “Can’t stand to hear the truth of it, can you?”

  Daniel snapped, “Will you look at her? She looks ready to fall apart. What happened, Lea? Tell me. What did the old woman say?” His tone gentled with the questions, though I heard wariness there too. He’d been afraid, I remembered. Afraid of what Bibi would say about him.

  I looked up at him. “Is there anything else you want to tell me? Have you any other secrets?”

  Again, that wariness, but there was confusion there too, as if he were trying to think of whether he’d failed to reveal something important, and that was when I knew he told the truth. There was nothing to fear from him, but I’d known that already. Nothing to fear but change, a new life I thought I might be too afraid to take. But then I realized he might no longer wish to offer it. The words for what I was were ugly in any language. Half-breed, sitkum siwash, sitkum Boston.

  He shook his head. “No. Nothing. What did she tell you?”

  I looked at Junius, sitting beside me. “My father respected you above all others.”

  He put his hand on my arm. “Sweetheart, you’re shivering. You’re soaking wet. Dry off. Go to bed. Whatever you mean to say can be said later. I think you’re half sick.”

  “I need to ask you a question.”

  “Come on.” He rose, pulling on my arm, trying to pull me to my feet. “I’ll come to bed with you. I’ll keep you warm—”

  I jerked away so hard he fell back. “Everything’s changed! Why can’t you see it?”

  “Because I don’t mean to relinquish you to this cub,” he shot back angrily, glancing at Daniel.

  “I’m not yours to keep or give away.”

  He frowned. “You are my responsibility. Your father gave you to me.”

  “Like an heirloom,” I said, laughing shortly, half crying.

  He kneeled beside me, his voice pleading, “Lea, it’s an infatuation. Lust. When it’s over, what will you have? I’ll forgive you this mistake. I’ve been your lover for twenty years. Does that mean nothing?”

  I said, “Did you know who my mother was?”

  He looked confused. “Your mother? What has that to do with anything?”

  “Just tell me. Did Papa ever say anything of her to you?”

  “Lea, you’re speaking nonsense. I—”

  “Did he tell you that that he killed her? Did he tell you that he murdered my mother?”

  Junius froze.

  Daniel frowned. “What?”

  I ignored him for now. I looked at my husband. Again, I said, “He strangled her.”

  Slowly, Junius said, “I think you must be feverish, Lea. Come to bed. Please.”

  “I’m not feverish. Did he tell you anything of this? Of her? Anything at all?”

  Something flashed in his eyes, a quick knowledge. He banked it quickly and glanced away, but I’d seen it there. “What do you know, Junius? And think carefully before you answer me.”

  “I don’t know anything about any murder. I don’t know what you’re
talking about. Who told you this? Bibi? She’s half crazy.”

  “The mummy isn’t ancient,” I told him softly. “She’s my mother. My father killed her and put her in the basket. He buried her. It’s why his necklace was with her. It fell off when he strangled her.”

  “Your mother?” Junius looked so shocked and surprised that I knew he’d known nothing of it. “Are you joking? She can’t be, Lea. She’s ancient, anyone can see it. We’ll cut into her. You’ll see. We’ll find the rags and herbs—”

  Daniel’s disbelieving laugh cut him off. “Are you mad?”

  “She’s been mummified. Deliberately. She’s ancient. I’ll prove it to you right now. Fetch me the saw, boy.”

  “Fetch it yourself. Listen to her, for Christ’s sake. Look at her.” Daniel stepped over, squatting beside me. “How do you know this, Lea?”

  “In my dreams, I saw—”

  “Your dreams?” Junius burst out laughing. “You’re talking as crazy as the widow.”

  I ignored him. Daniel hadn’t taken his gaze from me, and it was to him I spoke. “It’s true. Lord Tom told me.”

  Junius looked at Lord Tom, who was tossing aside the soiled rags, rising. “What do you know of this, Tom?”

  “It was before you came, sikhs. Teddy asked me for help to bury her, but I refused. She was dead already. I would not touch her. I did not know what he had done with her body until we found her. He said she was dangerous, that she’d come for her child and he did not want to give her up. But that was all he said. We never spoke of it after that day.”

  “And you’ve said nothing of it all this time?”

  “It was not my secret to tell,” Lord Tom said quietly. “She was not of my people, and I owed Teddy my life. He was afraid of her, and I was glad that he kept her from taking her child from us. So I said nothing.”

  “Her child,” Daniel repeated. “Leonie?”

  Lord Tom said, “I have always believed so.”

  “She was Nez Perce,” I said dully, and I waited for Daniel to flinch, to look horrified, but before I could see his reaction, Junius made a sound—impatient, short, and I looked at him.

  “This is all nonsense,” he said. “Whoever that was, it wasn’t the mummy. She’s ancient, I tell you. Tom’s mistaken.”