Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  She had dragged the cowhide up onto the hogshead and had the luxury of both blankets and so was sleeping curled tight to fit the round space but more comfortably than she had since the man took her from Maine. This after supping on the rich hot black tea that he reserved for himself and great rinds of bacon that she could not slice but washed the worst of the mold in the bitter brook water before roasting so the fat spit and burned her face and what mold was left was burned clear and she ate as much for once as she wanted. Sharing the hide-rind with the dog who sat atop its hogshead watching her as if recording her transgressions with some silent stamp. Still, the dog was happy to eat the offered food. All the time with the wind funneled piercing down through the cleft above. But the fire was high and warm and there were no blackflies and she went to sleep with her belly stretched and her mind slowed and easy. So when the enormous hound woke her with his roaring she was blear-eyed and thick-headed.

  She thought at first it was the snow the dog sounded, great platelets the size of saucers in a drafty sweep down through the wavering ovoid of firelight, and was scrambling up to her knees and holding the rifle tight as she reached one hand to try and calm Luther when she saw the wolves. Three of them. She had never seen one before but there was no mistake, the nightbeasts shadowed gray against the black, the yellow rimfire eyes turned hot sideways toward her as they moved, pacing back and forth just at the edge of light, the three forms weaving past one another the way water braids through a cat-tail stand. The lone ox was bellowing now also, heaving its weight against the side of the cart as if it might join the dog and girl atop the load, the cart rocking against its terror.

  The wolves still had thick winter pelts and against the new-fallen snow and the light of the burned-down fire they appeared to float. They were silent, making a half circle back and forth where the cart was lodged against the steep cliffside of the road, leaping dainty over the brook to keep as close to the cart as they could or would. The ox was down on that open side of the cart and the wolves would make slight feint as they approached and fall back again as they passed, the dog Luther stretched high and quivering on his stoop, howling, extended as far out as he could over the bulging fearful ox, his four legs bunched together, feet jammed against the cask-rim, his head lowered so that he bayed his awful roar down the side of the stricken ox and the sound flowed out toward the wolves.

  Sally had her feet pulled under her and her shawl over the flintlock of the rifle although she guessed the cap was already wet from the snow but did not know enough to know what to do about it. Her hands wet and there seemed no way to check it. With her other hand she reached out and dug a hard hold of the heavy hair and fold of skin at the base of the dog’s tail and he turned and snarled at her but she gripped harder and shouted at him and he looked at her again and then turned back to the wolves. She would let the wolves eat the ox before she would let the dog off the cart. He was all she had. She thought a moment of Blood returning with a mended axle and only a single ox for a load that needed a team and wished he was here, that he’d waited until morning to set off and then she realized that if the ox was killed they would have to go through something like this all over again and she began to shout at the wolves. At first just words yelled, Git, Git, Git Out Of Here, and then the delicious fever of release came over her and she began just to scream, the high drawn pitched cry of her soul—and her screaming seemed to enthrall the wolves. One sat on its haunches in the snow and tipped back its head and watched her and the other two slipped back a scant pace and weaved among the trees. The one seated then began to howl, its mouth agape to the night and the long cry coming as if answering her. And she screamed back and the hound and ox roared their wails as well and the night filled with this music against the silent old forbearing earth.

  One of the other wolves, made bold by the sound or finding it provoking or just too hungry to wait longer made a dash in toward the ox and the ox turned and slashed with a hindfoot that struck nothing but sent the wolf back toward the dark and it was then, still screaming and not knowing what she was doing, that she raised the rifle and did not aim so much as simply hold the howling wolf with her eyes so it was secured under the barrel of the gun and she hammered back the lock and pulled the trigger and the rifle went off with a tremendous concussion that nearly threw her from the hogshead. A glut of powder-smoke sifted through the air and the falling snow was obscured for a moment. And the music was smothered. The first thing she could hear out of the ringing silence was the trifling spatter of snow against the covered ground.

  On the evening of the third day Blood returned with the repaired axle, a hindquarter of young moose and a soft-tanned bearskin slung over the back of the ox, coming through the snow that had fallen that first night and most of the following day but was now shrunk back and melting under warm days and the night interval, the snow rotting from the bottom up and so running streams of water in every declivity and pooling in every hoofprint or smallest depression between stones, and found her, back in her shift with her stream-washed clothing hung to dry over a shadbush with swollen buds and the wolf carcass hanging from a tree where she had drawn it up on a length of rope to keep the dog from attacking it, far enough from the cart so the camped ox was calm but close enough to warn off other wolves.

  The fire was still going even with the warmth of the day, piled over with fresh spruce boughs to smudge against the blackflies now out and the stack of wood was even greater than what he’d left her with and he stopped above the camp on the track down from the notch and surveyed all this while she stood silent waiting him. And when he finally looked back at her after this long perusal she saw he understood everything, even likely the liberties she’d taken with their provision.

  He goaded the loaded ox down the last length of rock-strewn trail.

  She said, “I drank up all but the last of the tea. I figured the bounty on that wolf would pay it back.”

  Blood nodded. He was unstrapping the axle from the load. His leather breeches were soaked through to mid-thigh. He said, “It’s a long ways to any place might have tea to sell. Or to collect wolf bounty either one.”

  “Well,” she said, “we’ll just have to make do then.”

  He laid the axle next to the cart and took down the rest of the load, setting the bearskin up on the pile of bedding without speaking of it and passed over to her the weight of moose meat. Then he handed her his belt knife and said, “Cut a pair of thick steaks but take that smudge off before you roast them. Cook em slow while I ready the cart. Don’t rush it—I’m starved for fresh meat myself but waited to get back here.”

  “I ate up most of the bacon.”

  “Get yourself sick?”

  “Not hardly.”

  “I couldn’t stomach any more of it myself. I’ll miss the tea though.”

  “There’s a mite left.”

  He was down on his knees, fussing and adjusting the stone tiers holding the cart aloft. Then turned on his back and pushed under it, dragging the axle with him. She used a stick to clear the smudge from the fire and turned to the meat. She had no idea how to cut it but would not ask him and so ran her fingers over the quarter of meat, letting them learn the muscles and tendons and how the bone lay underneath and trying to gauge how to butcher. Then he came out from under the cart, his back and one side streaked and grimed with mud. He held his hand over his eyes against the sun and looked up at her. He said, “When was it you shot the wolf?”

  “That first night. When it snowed.”

  “You reload the rifle?”

  “I don’t have the first idea how.”

  He nodded. Then said, “That was some god-awful snow, wasn’t it?”

  “It weren’t so bad.”

  “Was it just the one wolf?”

  “There was three of em.”

  He studied her. “What happened to the other two?”

  “They left.”

  “Well by Jesus. I bet they did.”

  She said, “If you got that axle on we c
ould eat and get along. I’m sick of setting here.”

  Blood sat looking at her. Then he slid down out of sight again under the cart. He heaved and cursed and writhed against the ground, his heels kicking for leverage as he worked. She cut the meat as best she could and hunkered by the heap of coals with two chunks of moose impaled on peeled branches, positioned where she could watch both the cooking and the repair. After a bit he stood and wiped dirt from his face with the grimed back of his hand. Then sat with his legs splayed before him, his bootsoles showing holes. Blood said, “Time comes to collect that bounty, it’s not just the tea and bacon gets deducted. But the cost of the ball and cap as well.” Watching her.

  “That’s fair,” she said. “You going to charge for my supper here too?”

  He stood and wiped his hands on his breeches. “No. No, I don’t believe I will.”

  “Well then. You ready to eat?”

  Both squatting before the fire, holding the slow-cooked meat in both hands and eating, he looked across and asked, “Can you sew?”

  She shook her head. Chewed and swallowed. “I can mend. Why?”

  “Never mind.”

  Later he left her with the cowhide as a groundsheet and the bearskin to wrap herself in beside the fire and took the foul blankets and himself off into the underbrush and she lay warm listening to him thrash and groan as he turned for comfort against the muck and hard ground and rocks.

  “Come in by the fire,” she called. “Come warm yourself.”

  No he called back, the word choked as if the thoughts behind it were some kind of bile or vomit he would force down before spewing.

  They had traveled from winter through spring back into winter again in the notch and now they would travel spring once more. In the morning they went that final three hundred yards up to the head of the notch before sunup and descended into the valley, into the boundless unbroken northern woods as the sun cleared the mountains behind them and lit the land, a pale washed lambent glow settling on the red buds of the maples and the pale quaver of spring branches. In daylight there was no light to mark the farm far down the valley where Blood had found repair for the axle and purchased the hide and fresh meat, and although he could see the languid lean smoke-rise from the house of the goodwife there, he did not point it out to the girl and she did not see it, so far away and faint it was in the morning sun. The people there had been accommodating and the man indeed had a forge though little custom. He and his wife were pleasant but reserved and the smith made no offer to accompany Blood with the repaired axle. As if they read correctly Blood wanted nothing more of them than what he bought. They were happy enough for the hard coin currency, having already, Blood was sure, a box stuffed with scribbled promissory. More important, they told Blood of the shortcut road north he’d find not more than a mile from the head of the notch, a road coarse and ill-made, largely untraveled but yet one that could save him a week, perhaps more, than if he followed the main road on west beyond their farmstead to the Connecticut River where he would only then turn northward. They warned against the inferior route but in such a way that Blood was convinced they correctly read his desires. He had no interest in the settled towns and expansive farms along the big river valley. If he could circumvent he would. And so the shortcut road.

  The girl said nothing when they turned onto the ragged little track studded even at the junction with small stumps and upthrust rocks not cleared from the road and young alders, no more than waist high and lithe as grasses but clear signs of the conditions ahead. She only paused at the junction, still out in the muck of the main road and peered awhile down where they would not be going, as if trying to divine what she was missing. And he did not speak or call out to her but went on, knowing she would follow. She was no longer tied to the back of the cart.

  Loosed from her tether, her tongue was set free also. As if some part of her long damped down was allowed to breathe and flare. She chattered along, her words as unencumbered as the rush of water that ran everywhere, small mountain snowmelt brooks making their own brief courses where they must. She was more child than woman then, even if she spoke as a woman and child oftentimes all at once. Blood knew she was freed not once but twice; the once when he’d assaulted her as some demon of his own mind—that had been Blood’s first forced hard look at her as something more than a method for possible gain. The second when she’d shot the wolf and for her this had been clear and easy victory—she could take care of herself. And Blood. There was a tenderness in him that he thought had been gone long since. Determined she would never know it, he now thought of her as something out of providence; perhaps, he thought, nothing more than yet another test of his soul.

  And like her words the world was coming alive around them, the roadside birds—the waxwings and red-winged blackbirds, nuthatch and robin and chickadee—the birds of winter and summer mixed as easily as the woman and child bound up in the one body, all these seemed to enjoin her to sing out, to cry full throat the day.

  Blood could walk miles without once responding to her. There was no need. Everything she said was addressed to him but she expected nothing in return. She would as easily tell herself to the oxen or the hound Luther. Whom she was trying to make a pet of and who would snarl at her if she got too close, ran her hand too long along his back. But who had taken to bringing back from his afternoon disappearances meat for them all, snowshoe hares still in their winter white pelts or ducks or geese ambushed from some thick reeds, once an inedible muskrat. And Blood saw this and knew the dog’s loyalty was not redirected but expanding and this troubled him as some outward sign of his own feeble wavering. If Sally saw any of this she did not speak of it. And Blood was sure she saw at least something of it. And so was impressed again by her. And further disturbed within himself.

  Could he resent her springtime?

  Did he have a choice?

  He was a man self-shorn of choice. But he could not stop her and she knew it. If it was a perverse god who had brought her to him he knew also that he was his own agent, he had someway sought her. If a man acts that does not mean it’s condoned. And there she was, a pretty little girl with her feet toughened, in her plain shift with her hair loose down her back skipping along to his steady trudge, her hand batting at the blackflies, her life so unexpected, ingenuous with delight.

  She said, “I was figuring to slip on out of there someways, anyhow when you come along, I just didn’t know how, and then I didn’t have to. I had you pegged for a fearsome kind of man right off when she woke me and you were standing back there in the dark of the hall. I thought if it’s got to be one that takes me off it might as well be one that others will be feared of. So much the better for me, is what I’m hoping. I might be wrong but I can’t help it—it’s how my mind works. These black-flies are a plague, idn’t that the truth? I never seen nothing like em. But it beats the nits, I give you that. That house was lousy with nits. She bought that special soap off the barber and we all washed with it but some more regular than others. Without naming no names. But, you laid with her, you might like to check yourself good. Not that there’s much you could do. ’Cept to stay away from me. I’m clean as a whistle and know it. I check myself every day. She was a bad one for it. Didn’t care. I recall once setting to eat and looking over and seen em working in her eyebrows. Just crawling. She’d buy that soap and then not use it. But she had to have it there. Some men was particular about their parts, wanted to wash before and after. It was the old married ones mostly. The young ones, they’d be too worked up to care. Most of em sea-men anyhow and most of them was the ones brought the nits in the first place. I guess. I always thought they was something about like rats—just always there, a part of things. These blackflies they ain’t nothing next to nits. You could lay there and pick em off with the tip of a pin, had to pry em off and then crush em with the head of the pin and you could do that all day long and the next day there would be as many as before. The most terrible wicked itch I ever known. You scratch, scratch, scratch
and it just makes it worse.

  “You’re not married are you? You’re the most single man I ever seen. She always claimed she was my mother and I guess maybe she was. I couldn’t see myself, looking at her, but that don’t mean a thing. If she had a clue who fathered me she never let on. I never had but the one name as far as I know. Just Sally. Come to think of it, you see the need for me to have a second name we should talk about that. I wouldn’t care to have two but I’d like some say in what the other might be. Just don’t spring one on me, introducing me to someone wherever it is we’re going. If you have any mind to do that I mean. Not only cause I’d like some say but also I might go ahead and forget what it was and botch things up somehow. I got no objection to just being Sally. Sally’s who I am, always has been. Sally and Blood. It makes for an interesting couple, don’t it? That fearsome thing you got about you, it just rolls right off up against me, don’t it? It would make people curious. Might be, it could work good for us. Whatever it is you got in mind. Although I guess I know well enough what that is. Leastways for me. But”—she turned where she was ahead of him on the path—“that don’t mean I won’t take what comes my way.”

  “Why don’t you hush,” Blood said. “Doesn’t your jaw ever get sore with all that jabber?”

  “I like you Mister Blood. You’re the first man ever in my life I felt like I could say whatever came to mind without him trying to figure out how to get something out of it for himself.”

  “Well you could take a pause, couldn’t you?”

  The track ran along the edge of a widespread openland of beaver marsh and ponds, and meadows of harsh wild hay just beginning to green at the base of the dried clumps of last year’s grass and they stopped for a night although it was not yet the usual stopping time of dusk. Blood lifted the yoke from the oxen and ran a length of chain between their nose-rings and turned them loose to forage. Sally was already gathering firewood; it was her job and since the wolves she liked a big fire she could feed throughout the night. Blood took a hook and handline and baits of cubed salt pork and caught a string of orange-bellied spotted trout, all the while watching the network of beaver lodges strung throughout the ponds to see if they’d been trapped out or not. He heard at least a couple of warning tail-slaps and saw one swimming and what he thought were young atop one of the more distant lodges. Not perhaps abundance but they hadn’t been wiped clean, at least not yet. Some feller would be in here soon enough. He had no traps himself. Beyond all edges, that’s what he thought of the trapper’s life. The ones he’d known all went crazy or broke or both. Maybe crazy to start with. There was much wrong with himself, a blunt fact, but he was not crazy. And as pleasing as the prospect might seem, it was not for him to do. It was his job to keep himself right where he was. All the time every inch of every way aware of himself. The way a drunk would struggle to keep his finger in a candleflame for the count. Except there was no end to it. And no free drink at the end either.