Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  Anyway it was just her feet and the mud wouldn’t last forever or the road either. Although she did not allow herself to think about where the end of the road might be. She still bled when she shat. But that would pass and her feet would toughen. The days warmed more although the nights stayed cool. She did not know if they were less cold or if she was getting used to it. They began to climb into the mountains and afternoons she sweated through her shift; then came the blackflies and midges and she ceased her worries over their destination and more than once found herself thinking kindly of Portland until she caught herself, knowing that if nothing else Blood represented prospects as yet unknown, whereas what lay behind her was all too clearly limned. She believed she could endure anything if there was hope for change and she knew that walking with this brooding quick-paced broadbacked man was the best hope for change that had come her way. If pressed she would not have been able to say what exactly she hoped for. But each step forward was one toward that possible unclear clinging thread. Blackflies after all just blackflies and while she could see how a man might lose his mind attempting to get away from them she knew it was a lesser man than Blood was, or herself for that matter. She had no education but a quick mind and saw already that she had learned something from Blood. She was fifteen years old as best she knew.

  They passed through a settlement called Errol, a plankbuilt tavern and store and rough log houses. They did not pause there but Sally watched as a woman in clothing as crude as her own came to a raw-timbered door and studied her with open disdain and she thought Women is the same everywhere if they don’t know better. They crossed over the Androscoggin River by rude ferry and then for some miles had decent road, the corduroy of logs with bark yet on them firm atop the ground and that afternoon made good time toward the cleft of mountains before them. At dusk Blood clubbed a partridge that stood motionless studying the approaching apparition as if for the bird such strangeness could only be curious and not danger. It was the first fresh meat since he’d bought lean tough pork in Conway, although each day the dog would disappear into the woods and return hours later with blood on his muzzle and the sweet reek of raw meat about him, a smell that overwhelmed her, filled her mouth with saliva that she swallowed over and over as if to find succor there. And now this partridge. When the dusk was all gone to dark but for pale green light off within the trees they made camp and Blood threw the bird for her to pluck while he gathered wood, dead branches broken off the lower reaches of spruce and tamarack, and for the first time made a fire of consequence and roasted the bird. As if he’d passed an invisible line in his mind, a point where some sense of safety gained upon him. Not quite ease but something she could not name. Anyway, the fire was pleasure enough without parsing Blood. Whatever it was she knew it was more than the simple river crossing of the noontime.

  The ship-biscuit crackers were gone but there was a sack of wormy meal that she mixed with water and patted into flat cakes to roast on stones turned against the fire. While above the bird dripped and spat grease and blackened on the thick ramrod spit from his rifle. The smell unbearable.

  When they finally ate she burned the roof of her mouth on the first hank of breast torn from her half of the bird. Blood had split the carcass evenly and she considered if this was kindness or if he was simply maintaining his investment. For the moment she was happy to be maintained. The corncakes were dry and hard but also hot and she sat on the ground with her legs curled under her to one side and felt for the first time as if, things turned right, she might sometime prosper.

  They woke some time of the night to horrific ascending unending screams seemingly rods away in the woods surround. The fire burned down to nothing, a scant mask of color over heaped dead coals. The oxen stamping, trodden beasts chained in place, low moans from them as if they scented their own death. The dog paced the dim rim of light, its hair hackled in a sharp quilled ridge. Blood spoke a low command to the dog, locking it in place even as the girl rolled over and grappled Blood, against and then over him, pressed tight, her hands locked in hard knots that grasped through his linen blouse to clutch the curls of his chest hair and wrapped both her legs in a hard cramp around one of his, it feeling to Blood like her legs encircled his times beyond counting. He was pinned, constrained, snared all ways. Her teeth grazed his neck, terror all through her, a possession absolute, and through her pants of fear her voice choked, begging to be saved.

  “It’s a cat, girl.” His hands up pushing against her shoulders’ writhe. “A catamount is all.”

  “It’s after us idn’t it? It smells us idn’t that right?”

  “It’s not after nothing. They scream like that.”

  “No. It’s coming. Screaming to scare us witless is what it’s doing.”

  He paused. He’d heard the screams before and always took them to be because the cats could—they could curdle the night and freeze up all living creatures—but he’d never considered it might be for hunting. It was the first rule—the notion of not alerting your prey in any way. But for a moment he reflected on the child logic laid before him. And Sally took that moment to harden her hold of him and his hands were ineffectual against her and so they grappled and he did not hear the cat cry again. But could suddenly smell himself reflected against the girl and could smell her as well, no fresher than himself but still the deep emission of an other, and could taste also the girl of her, the woman, the bitter salt of her skin and the roasted meat breath and the other, the smell of the ocean sea she was born beside. And then got his free leg up, his knee raised as he pulled his heel up for purchase against the ground and he threw her up and not off him for that was not possible and no longer wanted but over where he followed down on top of her and the breath went out of her as her back struck the earth hard and he raised himself and tore up her shift and unbuttoned his flies and sank back against her and he jerked into her but also into the night, into the very earth itself, and the small sounds that came from her were not her child’s voice but some other voice altogether as she locked around him and he pressed harder against her, harder to try and drive away the sound of that voice, to drive it out of her. And could do that no more than he could drive it from his own brain. As she spoke, her voice stretched and drawn, that one word Oh Oh Oh over and over and it might have been, surely was, No No No and he would never know how she knew, how it came from her but it burst through him and ran heat through his spine and the tendons of his legs and arms and a scree of chill over him and he clenched his eyes shut and finished in her, already again just the girl Sally. Already back exactly where he was. By a cold dead fire on a cold spring night in the deep north woods, the mountains with names he did not know, the place he was aiming for and did not know either; all this again before him. He lifted himself from her and stepped away, pulling up his breeches as he went.

  He went out into the dark and stood there. The dog came up and sniffed and marked a tree and Blood went around to the oxen and tugged the ring in each nose to settle them and he saw there was faint light in the east and turned back to see the girl up, scraping open the fire with a stick and then feeding wood onto the flaring coals. Her shift was on the ground where they had joined and when she bent over the fire her small breasts stayed high and tight against the bones of her ribcage shown in the firelight as bars of orange and black. Her hair down loose shrouding her face, the slight swell of her hips where she squatted.

  Blood’s groan inaudible to her.

  * * *

  Midmorning she walked up beside him, a short dangle of the tether displayed from her wrist, the end gnawed and wet. They were climbing into the notch now and the sliced sides of the mountains overshadowed even the thin wedge of sky, far up the slopes bare of trees where sunlight struck off white quartz. The brook alongside the road was overflowing, snowmelt water jammed in the narrow confines of boulder and ledge. The brook was all they could hear, that and the ever-anguishing creak of the cart.

  “See,” she said, her wrist held up for inspection. “There idn�
��t no need to tie me like a beast. I’m not going nowhere you ain’t anyhow.”

  He called up the team and the oxen stood blowing, heads dragged earthward. He sighed and took up her hand and studied the strap still around her wrist; then he released her and unrolled the cowhide from the cart and cut a new, longer strip while she stood watching him. He made a loop in one end of the thong and caught up both of her hands and bound them together fast so the leather cut into her skin and tied her again to the rear of the cart. He paused a moment and then took up his knife once more and cut off the remnant of the first strap and pitched it into the shadbush growing between the road and the brook and walked back past the cart and took up the goad leaned against the cart wheel and spoke up the oxen and the mean conveyance lurched and ground forward again.

  “Treat me how you will,” she sang out. “I’ll not forget a bit of it.”

  “I’d not think so,” he called back without turning or breaking stride.

  Late afternoon found them stalled three hundred yards from the constricted top of the notch, the road here a jumble of boulders and mud-slick gravel, the cart listing off to one side, one wheel mired, the other up on a boulder. The oxen strained to hold the angled rig in place; Blood had stacked stones behind the lifted wheel to help. Now he sat off to one side in a scanty stand of scraggly spruce. Ravens barked from the ridgeline out of sight. The sun was gone although the light streamed high above them. The freed girl hunched on a nearby stone, her arms wrapped around her chest. There was a whetted wind. The axle was broken.

  There was a shadow of bruise on her face where he’d slapped her when the catastrophe first occurred and she had turned striving to hide her laughter—a glee he thought edged with excitement, as if immediately she knew the pendulum had swung ever so little toward her in balance. Now she sat, her face vacant, waiting.

  Blood held his head with his hands. He was tired and his head hurt. None of the remedies that occurred appealed. He knew in all likelihood in the open land beyond the head of the notch there would be a farm, perhaps more. Perhaps a forge but even if not, probably someone who could help mend the axle, fashion some sort of replacement, whatever was needed to limp onward to wherever a permanent repair could be made. Although uncertainties they struck him as being not unreasonable. The problem, most simply, was how to get here to there.

  Even with his head held he knew she was watching him, knew also that if he did not speak she soon would. And silently pleaded for her own silence. He did not feel up to her.

  “It’s a pickle.” Her voice almost gay, only scarcely guarded.

  He said nothing, did not lift his head.

  “I don’t know what’s more trouble, the load or me. But I know this: Even I wasn’t here that load would set right where it is, regardless of what you was to do. I don’t see how you could just leave it, go off for help. Someone might come along. Of course, there’s that—someone might come along, be willing to help we waited long enough.”

  He looked at her now but remained silent.

  “How long,” she asked, “you think before that might happen?”

  After a time he spoke. Slowly. “The way it works, it’d be just a minute I was to leave it here and go after help. But then, we was to set here, we’d likely eat up both the beeves before we saw a single living soul.”

  She nodded. He wondered if she really understood this, the full implications of this formula and how it applied to their peculiar circumstance. Then recalled her background and guessed likely she did. She said, “What do you figure to do?”

  “I don’t like any of it.”

  She nodded again. “One of us has to stay and one go on for help. That’s all there is to it. Question is, which one’s the better guard?”

  “You got that calculated.”

  She shrugged. “I’m tougher’n dried cod. You was to leave the dog, if he’d stay, and leave me your rifle, I’d do just fine unless it was a passel of em and then likely it wouldn’t matter twas you or me here.”

  “You could as easy see me top the ridge and strike out back the way we come. I got no idea how far it’d be to find repair even of the roughest kind.”

  “But if I was the one to go after help you’d have no idea when to expect me back. You’d just be setting here. Either way you got to trust me.”

  “Mind your tongue girl.”

  “Listen,” she said. “I’ll whore for you cause I got no choice in it. But it seems to me, we was to work together just the least bit it might not be such a bad thing. You was to trust me some I’d trust you to watch out for me. That’s the plain truth.”

  “You say that now, cold and brokedown. But you’d skedaddle first occasion you thought might be just a smidgen better.”

  She studied him, raking fingers through her hair, tugging at knots and tangles, freeing bits of twig and trash. She said, “Whoever you are, you’re a fearsome man. And wherever you come from I doubt I even want to know about. But I got no choice but to trust you. And I’ll tell you this too—I might be off here in the woods set to whore for you when the chance comes but it’s still better than what I’d be up to every day back to Portland. At least this is—”

  “What,” he asked. “What do you call this?”

  “Well,” she said. “It’s interesting, is what it is.”

  “Christ girl,” he said. “Look at you. Half naked, feet all cut up and swelled all over with the fuckin bugs and bout starved to death and you set there and tell me it’s interesting.”

  She stood and stretched her arms up high over her head and he turned his eyes from her and she came and leaned her hands on her knees and brought her face close to his and said, “It takes a rough patch to get you talking, don’t it?”

  He stood off the stone and stepped around her and bent once more to survey the busted axle. She squatted down beside him to look also. When he glanced to her, she said, “It don’t change much, looking at it. Does it now?”

  He pushed up, his hands on his knees. She stayed where she was, her face tilted toward him. He said, “All right then. Get your clothes on, your skirt and such.”

  She stood. “What for?”

  He was too tired to tell her to just do it because he said to. He said, “So, if someone does come along, you look respectable.”

  She stood then too. Looked at him and nodded. Then said, “Is there a name to call you?”

  “Name’s Blood.”

  “I mean one I can get off my tongue.”

  “Get dressed.” He turned from her. “Blood’s all the name anyone needs of me.”

  He worked while she knelt at the brook and washed herself. He packed more rocks around and under the cart and levered it up with a stout pole and wedged more rocks to hold it in place. He used the pole as a mallet to remove the cotters from the wheels and pulled them from the axle and then, lying on his back under the cart cursing, worked free the axle. It was near dark, the long spring twilight. He unhitched the oxen and chained one to a tree and strapped the axle across the back of the other. Then stopped and built a fire and hauled in loads of wood so there was a great pile alongside the cart and last he gave her the rifle and told her to just hold it up steady and aim at whomever she might need to and let the dog do the rest. He did not need to tell her the gun was useless after the one charge it held. The dog was called Luther. Blood bent, grunted and lifted it in his arms and placed it atop one of the rum hogs-heads and commanded it to stay. He had no idea how long he’d be gone. He took only a single piece of corncake and a moldy chunk of bacon, hoping his scanty rations would reassure her.

  He left as the light went purple, not looking back at where she sat up on the other hogshead in her skirt and bodice and shawl, the rifle gripped before her like a talisman. Her feet dangled bare, too swollen to fit into her shoes. The fire burned sufficient beside the cart, the stack of wood high enough so that for the time being at least she could merely lean to feed it. He yupped the laden ox and they went up toward the last feeble light at the crotch of the
mountains just above them. By the time he could see out onto the open vastness beyond he could no longer see the cart or her. Just a pale flicker high up where the firelight struck against the bare quartz rock or the last rotten embedment of ice.

  * * *

  There was a light far out ahead in the vast black bowl of broad long valley surrounded by the mountaintops now low hills rearing also black against the sky. But what he paid first attention to were the stars coruscating overhead, cut off midway to the horizon by a bank of rolled cloud coming from the north-northwest down upon where he stood. The wind that felt so keen down below had lost some bite so he could not say if he faced rain or snow but either way he and the girl were in for it and he hoped they were both equal to whatever came. With this study he placed himself in the otherwise measureless landscape ahead. He rested a hand on the dingy ox-shoulder beside him and yupped it again and moved forward into the night, onward toward the light. Which was soon lost from sight as they descended the valley and into the growth of hardwood and spruce and tamarack forest which surrounded them. The road underfoot firm with frost and back in the woods the snowpack, a luminescent shadow of the night itself. This land stalled in winter.

  He told himself it was April and whatever the weather it would change soon. Even a heavy snow would linger but a handful of days. The girl would be all right. The important thing was the glimpsed light. It would’ve been so natural for it not to have been there at all. He could not predict this land. It was this fact, most simply, that had brought him here.