Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  They said nothing more to him. The pipe-smoker rose and leaned forward and staggered a short distance down the road, his free arm stretched taut behind him, a rudder for a ship gone aground. Then he turned abruptly and, full upright, slashed his free hand against his throat. Looked at Blood with nothing quizzical in his gaze, as if knowing Blood held the answer he sought.

  Blood nodded. Then held up two fingers and passed them in the air in a small circle. Two days. Then pointed down the road.

  The pipe-smoker stepped and came close to Blood and stood looking at him. Blood shook his head. The pipe-smoker waited a long beat and then nodded. He started to turn and his companion caught his arm and delayed him. The pea-eater then looked at Blood and raised his hand in a drinking gesture. Blood did not move, did not change expression. Only looked at the man. Then slowly shook his head. The pipe-smoker turned again and again the pea-eater caught his arm. This time Blood spoke. “Luther.”

  The hound nosed the door and stood looking out at them. The savages looked at the beast and back to Blood. This time Blood smiled a moment before he shook his head once more.

  The pipe-smoker bobbed his head once at Blood. Then stepped out of the hold of his fellow and turned and went at a slow lope down the road the way Blood had pointed, his pouches and powder flask bouncing in even motion as he went. The pea-eater watched his partner a moment and then followed, not looking at Blood until he was a hundred feet or so down the road when he flashed his face back once over his shoulder. As if to tell Blood something. Perhaps to warn of possible return.

  Blood spoke as if the man were still next to him. “You do it, bastard. But give it another week so what’s left of those peas’ll be ripe.”

  Blood’s measurements were good ones. The bundle of new clothes arrived and fit Sally well. In this place of drab linsey-woolsey she was an indigo bunting, a scarlet tanager, a bluebird among the sparrows and wrens of the women residing. If this raiment marked her more clearly to those same women she did not care; she had no friends among them and expected none. If they saw her as some broken vision conjured by the worst of what dwelt in their men she saw herself otherwise—as beyond all men, all time, all places or situations. She understood herself to be free of all that bound those women to this place. Even as she herself was bound in other ways to Blood. They were partners was how she saw it. Even if she was not equal to him in their partnership. What woman was? She could pick and choose whom she took into her bed. She might wear what she wanted, as little or much of it as pleased her. She slept in, ate when she wanted of what there was and took pleasure in the late nights of the store which more and more clearly to Blood was becoming a tavern and not a store at all. His bolts of impetuous cloth lay uncut.

  Twice a week early morn, though it meant a short night of sleep, she gardened. She found that she enjoyed the mild work, the stretch and strain of her muscles in the cool damp summer dawns, the dig of her toes in the soft crumbling earth, took pleasure in how tending the plants produced fresh sweet food. Was as amazed as Blood had forewarned with the rich steaming broken-open new potato, a taste that she thought of as the earth itself passed through some invisible hands to render it this sweet white flesh. And most simply loved the quiet time of it where her body and mind folded all to one without her ever having to consider the needs or desires of another. And so learned the grace of simple work. And the attendant grace of solitude. A child of a whorehouse, a simple garden was not some chimera of paradise—it was wholly and directly what it was. A place where things grew and she the mistress of this. A garden of food. Among all the other things it allowed her to understand appetite. She who had only known hunger.

  She wore her old shift to garden in. The sun would be up when she finished and she would carry whatever she had picked to the kitchen table and then go out again up through the meadow intervale of swale hay to the curve of the stream to bathe, walking back down drying inside her rough smock, going into her small room to dress then for the day. And come out to drink the sweet milk still warm from the cow and eat lightbread spread with the butter she’d finally learned to churn and be seated there, a sight for the men coming in for their early morning tots of rum. To remind them she was there. As if any had forgotten.

  She implored Blood until he finally consented and cut her a small window high up in her room. Before this, she would swelter there on summer afternoons and into the long evenings. The window was cut high and narrow, to blunt any attempt at spying upon her, perhaps also to make impossible her taking any illicit trade. She did not complain. It let in air and some light. Lying under the shudder and spasm of one man or another it gave her a tender slice of sky to gaze toward. Alone at the end of the night she could look out upon the stars. A narrow rectangle of moonlight would track over her bed.

  The time had arrived to fortify against all unforeseen possibilities—Blood expected and desired no troubles but it had not been whim that caused him to bring the small cannon north with him. And from the first morning when he scanned the miller’s house and saw the double shutters and gun slits he’d known his impulse had been correct. It was winter he feared, a hard time in this place and when any number of men might grow mad as the season ground on and their own supplies fell short and lucid thought was replaced with more outlandish schemes or notions.

  So he buttressed the loft from below with posts of peeled whole trees and then built in the loft a rude carriage for the swivel gun and mounted it there. He cut a narrow three-foot-long section from the roof that allowed the muzzle of the gun to look out upon the yard of the tavern, end to end. He fashioned a tight shutter to fit the gap, the shutter secured by a double length of gut that ran back taut to a rafter above the gun carriage so it could be cut to fall open. He laid beside the gun a supply of charges. He had no cannonballs and wanted none. Among the supplies was a keg of musket balls and each charge would take a double-handful of them. As badly as he wanted to see how wide a swath one charge would cut in the trampled yard he resisted the urge to testfire. There was no reason to doubt that the damage would be considerable. Beyond that, he counted on the terror such a surprise would provide.

  Simon Crane’s body was found high up alongside a brook that fed east into Indian Stream by a new settler making his pitch far up the Stream, found when the man was seeking a wandered cow soon to freshen. A crew of ravens alerted him. He feared a wolf-killed newborn calf. He forgot directly the cow and came down to report and seek help—to have other men see what he saw. Blood did not go with the party and they brought no body out with them, burying Crane there deep in the woods but Blood heard plenty about it.

  Crane had been bound hand and foot, his arms tight to his sides, and buried up to his neck in a small beaver bog that was boiling with mosquitoes and deerflies. Very precisely his eyelids had been cut away. Not the sort of wounds that would allow a man to lose consciousness. Not anytime soon at least. The load of stinking furs was nearby. No one mentioned another head and Blood did not ask. Whoever had put Crane in the bog had taken Wilson with them.

  The men overflowed the room, milling in the yard. When the long twilight deepened they prevailed upon Blood and built a bonfire in the road. Early on, after the initial party had returned, two men had ridden horseback to find the cabin and seek Wilson, to either inform him or see if he had disappeared. Blood let them go. Among his reasons was his curiosity to learn what the rest of Wilson was up to.

  The horsemen were back soon after dark to tell of Wilson decomposed but upright in a chair, lashed in place with old rawhide, the lacings ineffectual sutures against the spillage of his insides from being cleaved from his throat to his scrotum. His head was gone. The men had left him there. It would take more than two men to bury him and other than a cart or sled there was no way to bring him in—already he was falling apart like an overcooked chicken.

  Blood was behind the counter, leaned forward with his forearms on the rum-run boards to listen. Sally sat up on the stool nearby, mute, unnoticed by the men. Emil Chase arriv
ed, his first time inside the tavern although he’d twice delivered orders of sawn timber daytimes. He came to the center of the room and removed his hat and held it before him as either a vessel or to ward off something of the room and said, “What do we have here.” It was not quite a question. He already knew as much as the others.

  Cole, one of the riders, said, “Somebody killed them two trappers. Each one different but each one horrible.”

  Gandy spoke up. “You got to consider that whoever killed Crane was not certain the same as killed Wilson.”

  “Why?” Chase said.

  “Well. First off, I knowed them two. They made a strange pair. They was partners and had been some time but you couldn’t say they liked each other. Whenever I seen em they was bickering about one thing or another. Worse than two old women they was. Except, there was a meanness between em. Plus, you got to wonder where Wilson’s head is at.”

  Chase said, “It was not on him?”

  Cole said, “It wasn’t nowhere that we saw.”

  John Burt, another of the summer’s new pitch holders said, “Someone ought to send down to Lancaster for the Coos high sheriff.”

  Chase turned to him and said, “You think so.”

  “Well it’s a heinous thing.”

  Chase said, “I don’t know you.”

  Burt introduced himself.

  Chase said, “That doesn’t mean anything to me. John Burt. And there’s nothing to stop you from being the one to ride to Lancaster and find Sheriff Hutchinson and he’d be plenty pleased to ride up here and poke around. Maybe poke a little further than even you might like, John Burt. Or if not you then maybe some of your neighbors. For that matter, you want to fetch a New Hampshire sheriff in here then you might as well go on over to Saint-Hereford or whatever-it’s-called there in Canada and talk to the magistrate they got. We be somewhere between Canada and New Hampshire you know. Just where is pretty much left up to each man every day to decide. Some would have it one way, some the other. Some have good strong reasons for their choice. You might think on that too, John Burt.”

  Cole said, “We don’t need anybody from outside in this. It’s trouble enough.”

  Another man said, “They was just a pair of crusty old sons-a-bitching trappers anyhow, God rest their souls.”

  Cole said, “It sure wasn’t Wilson buried Crane in that bog. Wilson has been right where he is some ripe time, I can tell you that.”

  Gandy said, “Wilson run with some Indians time to time. True savages from I don’t know where. Mohawks from over to York State I think.”

  Emil Chase turned his hat over and looked in it and looked back at Gandy. “You think they killed Wilson?”

  Gandy drank off his rum and set the tin cup on the counter and Blood refilled it. Gandy left it sitting. His expertise was rare. He shoved his hands under the waistband of his breeches and said, “They could of. I’d suspect that type capable of anything. But then you got to wonder two things.”

  Chase was irritable. He was terse. “What’s that?”

  “Well, like I said, you got to consider his head ain’t there. And if they killed Wilson why’d they lead or track poor Simon Crane all the way to hell and gone before they done him. Now, Wilson, that sort of killing, that could’ve been done by any simpleton. But the way Crane was killed, there’s a talent to that.”

  Chase said, “So you think Crane killed Wilson and what may or may not have been Indians killed Crane?”

  Gandy thought a moment before committing, sensing Chase was near done with him. The circle of men all leaning toward him. He took up his cup and sipped and nodded. “It was Indians all right that killed Crane. And I’m betting it was him that done in Wilson. After all, there was that sled of furs setting not ten feet from where they sank poor Simon into the marshland up to his neck.” Then paused and in the lowered voice of the punchline added, “Right where he could keep an eye on em.”

  The new man John Burt spoke up. “So what do we do? Do we go after em?”

  Chase turned to look at Burt. Cole said, “Go after em where? Where do you propose we go looking for em?”

  Burt said, “I don’t know. You’re the ones know this country. Just go track em I guess.”

  Chase spoke up. “You’d as well track air boy.”

  Chase’s farmer brother Peter was back in the group. One of the men who had gone to recover Simon Crane. He said, “Still it might not be a bad idear to make up some patrols and move around the backcountry a little bit. If those devils are lingering it might persuade em to move along.”

  Burt said, “We can’t just go on about our business with them out there somewheres.”

  Emil Chase spoke to his brother. “You can disregard your rowen if you want. One excuse is good as another.” Then he turned to Burt and said, “Son, they ain’t after you.”

  “What makes you so sure who they might be after next?”

  “Well I can’t say. But I can tell you twas you they wanted they already would’ve plucked you.”

  Men laughed, short uncomfortable snorting. Emil Chase put his hat on his head and turned to face the full group. He said, “Go on and patrol if it makes you feel any better. I’ll stay put myself. But tomorrow morning I intend to ride to that cabin and see the man is buried. What remains of him at least. And I want men to go with me but none so rum-soaked as to mistake it for a lark. Don’t none of you offer now but whoever’s at the mill come six-thirty I’ll count on to ride with me.”

  Cole said, “I’ll be there.”

  “I know it.”

  Then came a cry from the man standing just inside the door watching both the proceedings and the bonfire as well. He took up his musket and jumped outside the door. There came a warning cry from him, commanding someone to stop. A shot. Then another cry from him, something inchoate then choked off. The men scrambled for their weapons and the room emptied. Only Blood and Emil Chase stood still. There were more cries from outside and then an aggregated sound, a groaning gasp from the group. Blood looked at the miller. Emil Chase had again removed his hat as if knowing there would be no quick departure this evening. Perhaps it was his way of readying himself. Blood took up Gandy’s unfinished cup and took a swallow from it, his first of the night. As the men came slow back through the door in a tight clump. Inside they stepped apart, to reveal as well as gain what distance they could.

  It was the Deacon. His ankles were hobbled with rawhide, not bound but short enough so he could only shuffle forward, each footstep one that came to a harsh halt and jerked both his knees. He was upright but barely, with clotted blood dried down his face from his lidless rolling eyes and his mouth was sewn shut, a rough job done with an awl and deer sinew. Behind his lips his jaw was clenched tight so the muscles of his cheeks and jawline leaped and twitched and from low in his throat came a sound as a kitten mewling. His elbows were lashed to his sides and his hands were before him. From him came the smell of a keen and utter corruption.

  His hands were bound by the wrists to a dense wet ball also wrapped in lacings, tied so his wrists lay either side of the mass. Despite this his fingers gripped hard the thick pelt of hair as if the object were sacred or valuable. As if he had any choice.

  What he gripped and offered to the men around him was what was left of the head of Wilson.

  Sally began to scream.

  Blood cleared the room. He came around the counter and went first to the Deacon and touched the man’s forehead and spoke to him, his fingers and words stroking. Gazing into the sightless eyes. Then without taking his eyes from the Deacon spoke in a low voice and ordered all out. The men milled, some drinking hard at their cups. Blood looked around and spoke sharp, “Get to your families.” As if released from thrall the men surged and checked their weapons and conferred amongst themselves and left. From beyond the open door Blood could hear them talking where they gathered in the last light of the bonfire and he stepped around the Deacon and went and closed the door and dropped the heavy bar in place. Other than the Deacon t
he only man left in the room was Emil Chase. Blood ignored him. But neither did he request his departure.

  He went to Sally and took her by the arm and when she would not move, still perched on the stool, still keening, he wrapped his arms around her and picked her up and carried her through the other door to the house-side into her own room where he set her on her bed and lighted a candle and stood on tiptoe to close and bolt her window and then turned back to her and told her to stay where she was. When she clutched at his arm and would not free him he did not struggle with her but instead spoke the dog’s name and the hound came into the room and stood before the bed gazing upon them. Blood pointed at the bedcovers and said, “Up,” and the dog made a graceful leap onto the bed and circled once and settled with his back against the now sobbing girl. In such a way that she might hunch over him and wrap her arms around him and he would be as solid to her as any thing on earth. Blood left them there and went back through the house to the tavern.

  The Deacon stood where Blood had left him. Emil Chase had likewise not moved. Blood glanced at him and Chase looked away.

  Blood went behind the counter for an empty powder keg and his whetted belt knife. He stood before the Deacon with the powder keg caught between his knees and cut free Wilson’s head. Which dropped into the keg with a wet slop. He took the keg and considered it and then placed it up on the counter. The smell was high and he didn’t want it in the house but he could not bring himself to just set it outside. Then he went back to the Deacon and knelt and started cutting at the hobbles and worked his way up until all that was left was the fine hard sinew stitching through the man’s lips. Here he paused and went and whetted his knife once more and returned. With his free hand gripped hard the man’s jaw and tilted the dreadful head back and slid just the point of the blade behind each sinew and sliced them open. He made no effort to pull the cut strings free. Blood dippered water from a bucket and held it up to the man’s mouth and let him drink a small amount and then took the water from him, dashing out what was left in the dipper onto the floor. Back to the counter where he filled a cup of rum and came back and again held the man’s jaw tilted up and forced the rum down his throat. The Deacon choked and swallowed and choked again and then came his first clear groan, the sound of rock cleaving. Blood set the cup away and took up a clean rag and wet it to wash as best he could the man’s face. Just dabbing the crusts of blood-tears. Immediately fresh blood began to ooze from his cut-open eyes. The Deacon lifted his arms and groped for Blood and Blood held him and the man clutched Blood a moment, then sagged and went down onto the floor. Lying rolling, crying out. Blood looked at Emil Chase and again Chase looked away from him. Blood looked down at the Deacon who was now thrashing, his knees drawn up to his chest in pain and his arms wrapped around his head.