Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  To his surprise she did not argue or question but washed herself and dressed in her best outfit—that is, skirt and bodice all the same moss green rather than mixing the colors as she was wont to do—and again without prompting despite the warmth of the day wrapped her shawl over her shoulders and upper arms and drew it together before her so it covered her breasts in the thin bodice. Stood patient as he brushed out her hair and did not complain when he pulled it back to her nape and gathered it there with a string. He came before her and pulled the hair a little loose from the string so it was full around the sides of her face. She waited while he sat and worked cooking grease into the chapped and cracked leather of the buttonhook boots she’d not worn since March. Her feet, although brown and hard-calloused, were no longer swollen and slid easily into the softened leather. She stood rather than sat while he put on his one decent shirt and newer breeches.

  They went up the road together. Starting out, she stumbled in the unaccustomed shoes and grasped to steady herself against him. Once her balance regained she took her hand away but he retrieved it to tuck into the crook of his elbow. So together, side by side, they made their way up to the mill and beyond that to the fresh raw cemetery and the group gathered there on a small open hillside above the lake. There was a mound of earth to mark the hole and a roughboard coffin rested on planks over the hole and they stood not away from the group but off to one side and back a little, present but not intruding upon their neighbors. All of them thus waited in silence until it was clear that those coming had arrived. The Chase brothers and two other men stepped forward and lifted ropes either side of the coffin and an appointed boy came forth and slid the planks away from the hole and they lowered the Deacon soundless into the earth. Then Emil Chase read briefly from Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians. Blood was surprised at how poorly he read, without pause or inflection but all the words running together as if any one word was the same as another. Chase looked to the hole again and bade farewell to the man whom not one present knew by any true name and commended his soul to Christ. Again, wordless, the four men took up spades and began to fill the hole. And the people remained watching a short time before commencing to speak among themselves and so formed small groups and clumps that soon began to drift, not one alone but all together down the hill and away from the man who would have a plain unwrought stone and within a generation would be forgotten completely, or if recalled at all only for the way he died.

  Blood and Sally stood a time longer. Not until the work was done but until the rest of the people were gone from the hillside. Most but not all had gathered at the mill to await the men laboring over the grave and thus get on with the rest of the afternoon, with the martial business at hand, with the prospect for adventure, the tingle of danger. Halfway down the hill Blood spoke to Sally without looking at her. “Take my arm.” She did and so linked they passed by the group outside the mill, mostly men but some women too who would wait by their men until the meeting started and then repair to the house with the miller’s wife for tea to await the outcome.

  Blood and Sally walked by them, Blood looking straight ahead until he was abreast of the party when he turned and looked the men over slowly, letting his eye linger here and there as if judging them for abilities yet untested for their undertaking. He raised his hat and bid them a good afternoon. Replaced his hat and walked with the girl close beside him down the road to where his tavern stood open and untended, knowing they were watched all the way. He did not pause in the yard or look back but strode inside with Sally behind him. Shut the door and barred it. He was not open for any business. Although he knew that late afternoon, when the sun diminished and evening slid long over the land, he would open the door and light his fires and hear then all he needed or desired about the plans made that afternoon. But for now he wanted only to be alone. He was hungry. There was most of a smoked ham taken in trade he could cut slabs from. There were potatoes. There were the rest of the English peas. He decided to pick only half the peas and chance the rest. He loved peas. Once gone, summer would in some way be over. He decided they would sup early. Then he might take a nap. He was tired from it all. He felt as if he’d been standing at attention for hours and hours, for days. He would’ve loved a tub and hot water and a bath. A nap would do.

  For some days Sally could not sleep and when she did she woke crying out.

  She could not differentiate between dream and waking-screaming until Blood came and comforted her, holding her in an odd crabbed kneeling on the bed beside her, his knees prodding her thigh as he bent hard at his waist to hold her shoulders and head against his chest, his body stiff and arched, as if she were dangerous to him, or he dangerous to her. Cradling her head against his heavy laboring chest as if some last piece of solid earth for her to grind her fear against. Talking to her, the same simple words over and over, varying the order but not the words themselves the way one would talk to a child. She did not know this. There had been no other children in the house where she had grown.

  He would say, “It’s just a dream. A dream is all it is. Only a dream.” Over and again.

  Most times when her crying stopped Blood would settle her down again in her bed and leave her, stepping from the room wordless. But one time she went from sobbing directly to speaking and he sat and listened to her, as if there was no difference to him between her cries and her words.

  She told him, “I wasn’t ever happy. When I was just the littlest girl I was always in the way or making noise when I shouldn’t so somebody was always cuffing me or slapping my rear and telling me to hush. There was a old woman that I don’t know if she was partners with my mother or if maybe she owned the house until she died or what. She might’ve been my mother’s mother but I don’t think so, though my mother and all the other women there called her Mother. Mother Holmes. Oh she was a wretched hunched-over old thing with chin whiskers out of a mole and smoked a pipe like a man. She was the worst to hit me but the other girls seen her at it and none of them would hold back if they felt a reason to wallop on me. And all they was doing was passing along what came their way. I don’t know if it’s just whores but men will be vicious to a woman, they turn their minds to it. I seen my share of black eyes and busted noses and broken arms and such. It’s a ugly world is what it is and I never knowed it for a hard fact until you come along and carried me off up here. It was just what I knew. You can’t say one thing is worse or better than another if you only know the one thing. I was never one to think Poor me. But I was thinking maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. And then that poor man, that idjit. Can you imagine not being able to close your eyes? I can’t imagine that. Not being able to close your eyes. I can’t imagine a worse thing.”

  There are worse things, Blood thought but did not say.

  “When I was little, maybe four, five, I had a tiny kitten that showed up and I claimed. Scrawny sad little thing. White and orange striped. Well you know how that story ended. Some man coming drunk downstairs at three in the morning and the kitten bolted down the steps ahead of him and he trod on it and slipped and fell and slid down the stairs and come up roaring and got hold of that little cat and swung it by the body and busted its head open on a chairback. I was awake, right there to see it happen. I didn’t know nothing about right hours when I was that little. It was only later I learned about what happens at night and what happens during the day for most people. But when I was little time didn’t make any difference to me at all. Pussy. That’s what I called that cat. I didn’t know that some call a cat Puss. I just knew the word, knew it was the best thing a body had in this life, the one thing you had that everybody else wanted. It was the simplest thing in the world to call her Pussy. But I never wanted another cat after that.

  “The summer I was either ten or eleven, I already told you I ain’t sure just what my age is, never was sure. Nobody around me was and so I wasn’t either. Now you’d think my mother would know. That’s part of what makes me wonder if she really was my mother or if she just got me someway wh
en I was too little to recall it—there’s children left or sold or some even likely stole although I can’t imagine her wanting me enough to steal or buy me—I expect if I wasn’t hers then I got left there. Maybe some girl working in the house had me and fled or maybe I was just brung there someway. Or maybe she did birth me, the fact she couldn’t keep my age straight don’t mean much, not with her. But anyways, that summer I was I guess a pretty little girl, growing up although I didn’t know it. I didn’t have boobies yet and was a couple of years from my monthlies but I guess I was starting to be pretty enough. So there was this man, big old hairy fat thing, at least it’s how he looked to me, I overheared him talking to my mother trying to settle on a price for me. She called me in for him to look at me and made me lift my skirt and turn around for him to see me front and back. Then they begun hollering at each other. I guess she wanted more than he wanted to pay. Anyway I’d seen just about everything there was to see by that time and I couldn’t begin to imagine his big ugly thing going inside me so I ran right out of there. I doubt they even seen me leave, they was so heated up at each other. But I run right out of the house, right through the kitchen and down the alley and hid myself. And every time after that whenever he come to the house I’d be spying for him and I’d go to hide. It got my mother worked right up, I can tell you. Each time I’d come back she was in a terrible lather and she’d blister my behind. I guess they come to terms over me but it was a long time before he got what he was after. I’d duck out the back and run down the alley and cut across to another place where there was big old barrels all over the place, new ones, what do you call them places?”

  “A cooper,” said Blood. Looking at her eyes. “A cooperage.”

  “I’d run down there and find one of them barrels tipped over on its side back behind some others and hide in there until I felt enough time had passed to go home. And there was rats all over that place and one time one climbed into that barrel with me and all I did was suck my breath and punch it right in the nose. It took off out of there I can tell you. Didn’t even rear up and snarl like one does when it’s cornered.”

  Then she grew quiet. It had grown light, pale dawn coming through her high window. Blood in his nightshirt, Sally under the blankets pulled up, her knees drawn up and her arms down around them, her back naked, the spindle of her spine raised as her back curved forward. Her hair a tempest. She gazed away from him at the log walls. He waited until, hating it, he knew he had to ask.

  “What happened?”

  She turned her face sideways so her cheek was on her knee and said, “What do you think? One day he outwaited me and I come back to the house and there he was. It was terrible, I tell you. Any tenderness he might’ve once had for me was long gone. The funny part about it all was that while it hurt when he done me that wasn’t near so bad as the rest of it. I thought I was going to die. I mean I thought he was going to kill me, to smother me with his weight. I couldn’t draw a breath. It was a while before I learned that a man should take his weight on his elbows. But what happened was I started to scuffle so bad trying to get him free so I could breathe that it got him going faster than I guess maybe he’d counted on. Or maybe the wait for me done that. Or maybe it was just having this little girl under him. Whatever, I learned something because once I started in thrashing and twisting under him that emptied his sails real quick. And I learned something else that time too. When a man is done with you he is done. He didn’t even bother to wash his dick in the basin although I guess he knew there was no need of that.”

  She raised her head to face Blood squarely and said, “Truth is, I always thought happy meant when you got paid or when there was a morning you could sleep in late or when there was a bad storm and there wasn’t any men about. That’s what I thought happy was. At least until you come along. I thought maybe this was a good place, that maybe things would work good here. But it’s ugly here. There’s meanness here. And the way I feel, it could easy get worse. That poor idjit, I can’t get him off my mind.”

  Blood stood off the bed and stretched. He looked away from her, toward the narrow window. He spoke to the bit of sky beyond the window. “It’s not such a bad place. I think it’ll work out fine. There’s good and bad everywhere you go.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “I just only known bad and so thought maybe this would be good.”

  “No.” Blood turned to her. “It’s always part and part. Most places have more of one than the other. Myself, I still have hopes for right here. My thinking is all this is just an incident. It’ll pass. Things’ll settle down.”

  She studied him a moment and then dropped her blankets and stood naked off the bed and bent for her shift where it lay on the floor. She pulled it over her head and turned to face him, pulling her hair free of the neck opening. She said, “You think?”

  Blood milked the cow, carried the warm milk to the house and went to the stream to wash his face with the cold clash of water. Slowly went back toward the house. He could hear her working, going back and forth between hearth and table. He remained outside and sat on the chopping block beside the woodpile and held his chin in his hands. He was trying to understand why he had bought her, what it meant that she had come into his life. He did not believe that he owned her, had never believed that. But now he felt he owed her something. Why he might feel that way was too obvious to him and he did not believe in that sort of reckoning. But he had to ponder what power had delivered her to him. Or him to her. Perhaps, at best, each someway deserved the other. This not a matter of redemption.

  For several days she would take no men at all to her bed. This at least in part because she slept much of the day and early evening. Because, as Blood knew, she tried to stay awake through the fearsome quiet dark when the tavern was still and humanity had fled before the night and Sally would lie then fighting sleep and the terrible dreams. Sometimes he would wake in his sorry loft bed beside his crude gun carriage while it was still dark and hear the poked-up crackle of a fire below and her stealthy movements. He would lie there knowing her furtiveness was only meant not to disturb him. He trusted her more than he’d trusted anyone in years.

  Then for the next week she seemed to be awake around the clock and would take most any man at all—old men she’d spurned and the few young ones that before she’d flirted with but kept away from for reasons of her own divination and the stinking rabid trappers drinking away their summers and their winter earnings, even the barbarous habitant bachelor settlers who had little or no English and were of a caste separate from even the poorest of the other farmers—all these she took.

  Finally she came to Blood. “I got to stop. I don’t know what’s got into me but it ain’t no good I keep up like I am. I got to stop.”

  Blood nodded. “All right.” Then, after a moment he said, “Just how long a holiday you intending?”

  “A what?”

  “How long you intend to stop for.”

  “I don’t know. A week. Maybe just a few days.”

  He studied her face. Open, intent, determined. Free of guile. He said, “Keep in mind. Too little can be as bad as too much.”

  “I know it. I just need a little time. Tell em I got my monthly.”

  “Again?”

  She looked at him. “Men don’t keep track.”

  * * *

  The men formed a Committee of Safety and drew themselves up in patrols with elected captains who devised a schedule and were charged with keeping order. Parties rode or hiked out daily in diverging directions, each footpath, trail or crude road followed only until the last habitation of even the most unlikely kind had been reached, the squads of men numbering no less then six or seven and often more since the younger men found an excitement and purpose in this activity that allowed them to overlook their more homely work. Because not all places could be reached and returned from in a single day these patrols overlapped so that at times as many as twenty men would be gone from the farms along the river falling out of the lake. In the evenings whatever
men returned gathered at the tavern to drink and talk of what they had seen. Or rather what they had not seen for it appeared the two wild men had left the country and the men held themselves responsible for their departure.

  For Blood, beyond the bothersome repetition of the tales, mostly this meant the long-awaited increase in sales of powder and lead—not exactly the circumstances he’d have chosen but he was not a judge but a businessman. Still, there were some few men who requested quantities beyond good reason. Blood offered the excuse that he was not yet amply supplied for the winter. Which he was beginning to suspect might be true. But there was plenty of summer left and he would only slowly increase his stores. Prudence was all that was.

  So he told no one when the last of his English peas were taken one night. Nothing else was touched. Luther had sounded no alarm, had not stirred as far as Blood knew. The house was already heavily barred each night after he closed. It had always been so. The only precaution he took was to let the dog out each morning before Sally was up and headed outside herself. This variation of routine so slight as to be noticed by no one. Except the dog who did not mind.

  July turned to August. In the shortening summer twilight, the sky through the open tavern door a broad smutch of green within the dark trees, the green bleeding up to royal blue and then somewhere over the lake turning to black. The first star, a planet hanging low in the east. Inside was light from the hearthfire and two candle lanterns, one hanging from a rafter of the public room, the other directly over the plank counter where Blood sat with his tally sheets and dram measure. The light soft, the color of pumpkin flesh, thrown spots on the log walls from the pierced tin of the lanterns. What air sifted through the open door was cool.