Lost Nation: A Novel

by Jeffrey Lent

  He was back alongside Otter Brook making his way upstream toward a hillside thick with young alders when he saw a flash of dun movement. Low to the ground. Something springing up and away. Even as the powder smoke burned his eyes he could smell the blood and the part of his tongue that ran direct from his stomach to his imagination could already taste the roasted young meat.

  So he pressed hard up the slope through the stinging whips of young trees and found the egg-eating Indian thrown back on his side in the brush. The hole in his chest as neat as if made by an auger. His back was blown apart where the ball had gone through. His eyes strange blanks. One hand pressed just below the hole in his chest as if he’d reached but missed the mark. His hand covered with the flow of blood. His loincloth was twisted aside from his crotch. Closeby, from where he’d toppled, was a thick spatter of loose stool.

  Blood, panting with the effort of his climb, recharged his rifle. Then bent low to the ground and squatted there, watching the woods around him. After a time the squall of a gray jay came and went, came again. Some crows. Smaller birds. Beyond sight the first cries of southward geese. Blood watched awhile longer. Then stood. Looked once a long time at the dead man.

  Blood said, “I warned you against those eggs.” Then went down to the brook and knelt and drank quickly with one cupped hand, the other holding his rifle. Between weak sips he continued to watch around him. With some water in him he rose and hiked downward along the brook.

  * * *

  The body of the Indian was carried south and hung from a limb overlooking the road to serve as warning for any party passing the blazes that marked the northern boundary of Coos County, indicating entry into the Indian Stream country. Blood had argued it to be needless provocation but would not say whom he feared provoking. So it was displayed and the small patrols that skirted back in the woods near the border to watch for men coming into the country could smell it as it twisted slowly on its rope and daytimes the ravens came to perch on the shoulders and eat out first the eyes and then the rest of the softening flesh of the face and at night when the air stilled and the frost came down the smell ran through the air in a broad grope of putrefaction. On the fifth dawn when the patrol arrived to relieve the chill-stiffened men lurking in the underbrush without benefit of fire, it was the newly arrived who discovered that during the night the body had disappeared. There were no footprints but the rope was cut and left dangling. None of the night-party had heard any disturbance, all swore to wakefulness.

  Blood went to Emil Chase. “It was his own people got him you know. It was what I feared.”

  “Feared they’d take him or feared they’d find out what happened to him?”

  “Feared that with it done every man we know is going to be jumping out his skin at the least sound in the woods. If it’s just a stray ox gets shot we’ll be lucky.”

  Chase held his chin with his hands. His wound had healed. “It pleases you to be right, don’t it Blood?”

  Blood said, “There’s no pleasure in this.”

  “I wonder how that sheriff’s leg is serving him.”

  “It was a bad grinding he took. Could be he’ll not walk again.”

  “Perhaps,” Chase said. “Do you think that’d keep him off a horse?”

  As if the death of the Indian had conceived a final severance of faith, two nights later the five families of Canadian habitants loaded their carts and departed soundless in the dark up the track that led toward Halls Stream and the Canadian frontier, leaving behind crops and the houses and outbuildings of logs that once empty immediately seemed derelict, cobbled roughly, as if they had ever known their fate would be thus. The remaining habitant was the bachelor Laberge who had been in the country as long as any other man and who moved with the established gait of a man who knew no other land, wanted no place but the one where he stood. Of his own now-fled people he would only say that the turmoil was nothing more than the excuse all had been seeking to return to the townships and impose themselves upon already straitened brothers or fathers or in-laws. “It’s the women,” Laberge said, “who suffer the burden most. It’s them will hear the talk not so careful hid. I’m lucky, me. No woman, no talk, no fear to stay right here.”

  It was evening of the day the abandoned pitches had been discovered and the tavern was thick with men. One of the young men, Burt or Bacon, wondered aloud if those departed men hadn’t held some private knowledge of intent of invasion by the Crown or provincial forces and Blood looked up to watch Laberge remonstrate, “You damn fool why’d they run off if that was coming? They’d be the roosters over you little hens, that was to happen.”

  It was Bacon. “You greasy fucker I’ll cut your nuts off and see who’s the hen, you want.”

  Blood stood. There was an old reek in the room, the sweat-stink of anxiety like filings of some bright hard metal. It had been there all night. Blood thought it was his own.

  Laberge was a grim small man who smelled of sawdust, wood sap. His smile was a bright rind of white against the plaited flecked wires of his beard and upper lip hair. “Don’t talk so to a man. You a boy yourself. Just barely discover your own nuts, eh.”

  Bacon started forward and Blood began to go around the counter with the little lead bludgeon but Sally came off her perch which slowed him down and when they both came through the opening of the counter they saw Bacon snake one arm out lazy and slap at Laberge’s face and come away leaving a sickle of white showing through the beard that then filled with blood. As Bacon stepped back Laberge groaned and brought both hands up before him and Bacon came back toward him and Laberge stooped swiftly and side-kicked one boot out and snapped Bacon’s elbow. The knife skittered onto the floor.

  Bacon howled and Sally surged past Blood, running across the sudden opening toward the door to the house side. Laberge also was moving, bending to scoop the knife, a spray of blood tossed off his thrown-back head as he came upright. Bacon went sideways and dropped his broken elbow, bellowing. But with his good arm he snatched Sally by the waist and drew her against him, so she faced the advancing Laberge. Blood stopped.

  Laberge glanced around the room. He smiled. His mouth filled with blood and stained his teeth and dripped into his beard. He said, “Aw fellers. Look at this.” Then he spoke to Sally captured by Bacon. He said, “I never did no dirty work upon you girl. Never harmed you. Don’t plan to start now.” And bent again as if to study the knife blade in his hand. Blood stepped toward him but like a wejack Laberge lunged forward and with one hand grasped the top of Sally’s head and pulled it down and with the other swept the knife across Bacon’s throat.

  Blood caught up to him and bludgeoned the lead just behind the man’s right ear. Bacon was dead on the floor and Laberge caved sideways. For a moment Sally stood between the two, her dress wet with the shower of blood. Blood spoke her name. She looked at him and then with one hand lifted her skirt hem a few inches and stepped over Laberge and went from the silent room. All watched her. All heard her go through the kitchen side to her room and the bar fall after she shut that door behind her. Blood looked at the ruins on his floor. He tapped his thigh with the lead and looked at the men in the room. No one spoke. Stunned, but not for long.

  Rain began during the night and sometime before dawn turned to sleet and then ice so when the light came paltry and sullen over the land the body of Laberge was a swollen polished figure of encased darkness hanging from the rock maple outside the tavern. The body did not swing or twist but was inert as the light. Only the sheen of ice over it. Blood waited until the ice turned back to rain and cut the body down and hauled it by the feet down to the garden and dug a trench where the peas had been and buried the man there. He finished the work and turned to find Sally wrapped in her new shawl watching him.

  “You think I’m going to garden there come next spring with that in the ground?”

  He was breathing from the shovel-work. “What makes you so sure,” he said. “We’ll even still be here come spring?”

  She looked at
him awhile. Drew her shawl tighter about her throat. She said, “You ain’t going nowhere Blood.”

  He watched her walk back toward the tavern, watched her go around the corner out of sight. Just like that he knew she would bar him from her room again this evening. As if she blamed him for the violence around them. Or, he considered, there was something else at work within her. He was suddenly greatly fatigued. His hands were caked and raw, clublike with cold mud on the spade handle.

  He went that afternoon for the funeral of young Bacon. The rain had stopped and the clouds were quilted inkstains over the sky which the wind ripped sideways. The lake was a churned frothing. He climbed the hill to stop between the uprights of the granite entry posts. The funeral group was at the far side of the meager plot and he realized he was late for the service; men worked in turn to fill the grave. He did not advance but watched as a visible ripple went through the group and they turned one by one blank baleful faces upon him.

  Blood understood they conferred accountability upon him for the fate of young Bacon—these the same men now hungover, their shame turned outward to anger—who the night before had brutally taken up the unconscious Laberge and carried him into the darkness and called for rope. When Blood would not supply it some one of them took a candle-lantern into Blood’s barn and cut the length they wanted and brought it back. Blood had stood in the doorway watching. Silent. Several bad throws until the rope end went over the limb and then they noosed Laberge and held him upright while one man threw a bucket of water hard against Laberge’s face and he stuttered into consciousness as the group of men took up the free end of the rope and hoisted him off the ground. They tied the rope to an iron ring set into a stone post beyond the tavern door and all stood then watching silent as Laberge kicked his feet angry into the empty air, watched in the sputtering lantern light as the hanging man fought with his fingers against the clamp of hempen fiber choking him. Stood until the motion was over, the last spasmodic absurd antic drifted to stillness. The rain had started. Blood had gone inside and barred the door. He expected some among them to hammer upon it, to call out for drink but the men went away noiseless in the rain. Morning first thing Blood found the candle-lantern on the single stoop. The pierced tin sheathed in ice.

  He did not enter the cemetery but turned back and walked home. It was time to build fires. He’d let them go out that morning, feeling there was no reason for him to be warm. If Sally wanted warmth, let her kindle them. She’d spent the day locked within her room. He’d not seen her since he’d finished his own burying in the garden that morning. Cold as he’d been then he’d not wanted a fire. Disgusted with himself, with his failure to act the night before. Even as he knew it wasn’t for him to intervene—his place in the community now fully relegated to the suspect position of witness. It was the service he brought that saved him and that only so long as he stood clear. If he’d tried to stop them, the men of the night-mob wouldn’t have paused long before stringing him as well. Blood still sure he wasn’t deficient of courage—he just wasn’t stupid—there had been nothing left to save anyway. He’d scrubbed in the ice-rimmed water of the stream. Inside, chilled, had used the same cold water and meal sacking to halfway clean the bloodstain from the tavern floor, thinking it not a bad idea to leave some reminder for those same now righteous men. His heart was not in the job.

  But it was time to build fires. Look at him as they would, he knew that as night fell the small log and plank houses would grow too close to contain all that had happened. The single men would leave their solitude grown too close, the married ones under bald pretense and all come to the one other place there was. So he came down the road and saw the smoke boiling from both center-chimney flues and he thought There, she’s up out of her gloom now. He discovered his door barred and had the wry pleasure of pounding for entry and hearing his own dog bellow dire from within and other than that only silence. The wind was hard upon him and he was truly cold now, cold beyond the vehement deserved chill of the morning. And Blood stood a long moment. Loathe to call out to plead entrance. As if his voice before his own door would someway verify his lessened standing to himself. Calling for Sally. And some small spit of thought wondering what she was up to that she would bar him out.

  So he called out to Luther. Once, loudly commanding silence. After a beat of pause calling again as if speaking not so much to Sally or the dog but perhaps the house itself, a mild query if all was well.

  And still he stood some time more on his own step. It began to rain again, a hard slantwise rain that stung his face and wet him through behind. He stood there as a forlorn penitent before the sanctuary that would not admit him. With his head tipped down and sideways a little to let the rain strike him. And saw down off the stoop where the water fell from the eaves a small trench filled to a small canal from which water struck and pocked up off the surface. And recalled his daughter Sarah Alice not quite two years old squatting beside a puddle in the rain and reaching trying to snatch those drops fighting upward. Her face a glower, unable to fathom the way they seemed to disappear in the air inches from her face, her swiping hand. Scowling at him as if she blamed him for this failure.

  Sally opened the door wrapped in a blanket. Steam boiled out around him. He stood looking at her. Behind her he saw the heavy pot hung from the cradle swung out into the room off the fire. The floorboards swashed with water stains. He could smell the hard lye soap and also the scented rose-soap that someone—he’d not asked who—had given her. Her hair was wet and her face was pink. Water ran drops down her legs and outlined her bare feet. She waited a moment and then said, “You going to just stand there letting out all the warmth or you going to step inside and dry yourself?”

  “What’s all this,” he asked.

  “I was washing myself.”

  “Washing yourself.”

  She frowned at him. “That’s right. It’s something people do time to time. Something might not harm you, you was to try it.”

  “What for?” His brain suddenly thick, as if all the night and day had curled there and gone to sleep.

  She shook her head. Stepped back and said, “What’s wrong with you Blood?” Then went right on, “No. Don’t tell me a thing. There idn’t nothing more I want to know. But I worked too hard to get clean and warm to stand here. You want to come in, come in. I’m getting dressed. I’ll push the kettle back over the flame. It’s most full if you want it.” And turned from the opening.

  * * *

  It rained on. Hard rain that popped against the shingles, but there were no leaks. It was a sound roof. Well after nightfall a few men came in, then a few more. They stood silent drinking or seated on the benches against the wall conversing in low sporadic utterance. Three sat at the hogshead-top table dealing softened cards, playing with a dour trifle of discussion. Blood ignored this moderate ostracism but sat behind the counter with a reeking smoking tallow stub lighting the sheets of his tally book. There was nothing to update beyond the night before but he went over the entire last week, not looking at previous final figures but doing the work all over again. He was not a man who ever had to add twice so there was no satisfaction in the work beyond the appearance of business. If he was reminding anyone in this silent way that his life held some portion of theirs then he was happy to be doing so. Let them be averse to him if they chose. Tomorrow as tonight they would need his rum, his powder and lead. The girl. Who sat motionless on her stool pushed far back from the counter against the back wall and was not hostile to those few who this evening chose to speak to her so much as vacant. He watched her without obvious effort. She was pretty in her moss skirt and gray bodice and gray shirt-waist with the cranberry shawl slipped back loose upon her shoulders. Her hair seemed to be the one spot in the room where all light chose to gather. He could smell her, even this eight or ten feet away. She sat straight with her back against the wall and her eyes nowhere at all that he could tell. As if she looked out upon some other place altogether. He poured her a pewter cup a third full of r
um and without ceremony or words of any sort carried it down and set it beside her.

  Several hours after dark two young men Blood did not know came in. They paused overlong near the door as they brushed water from their stained and roughened good clothes, studying the layout of things. Without any discussion they moved along the walls of the room to a free spot on the benches where the light was not so good and they sat. One had a young man’s beard and he leaned to place his forearms on his knees and tipped his head to the floor as if greatly fatigued. Their clothes were dappled with mud and he guessed whoever they were they were camped rough. But, curiously, the other men in the room glanced up at the strangers and some looked longer than others but all seemed to discount them. As if they knew something of them that Blood did not.

  After a moment the one with the shaven face rose and came to the counter, not directly across from Blood but a foot or two down from him. But the youth looked upon Blood. Blood glanced up and met his eye and went back to his figures and completed another useless column and stood off the stool and pressed his shoulders back and cracked his neck.

  He said, “Rum.”

  The young man looked at Blood for a pause. A short moment but those eyes were filled with tremendous length. He nodded, “Two of em.”

  Blood turned for a pair of dented tin cups and poured from the pitcher and while turning back saw Sally looking at the boy. When Blood swung her way she looked up toward the smoked ceiling beams. Blood turned back and set the cups on the counter. He said, “Is this it, or will you settle later?”

  The boy ran his tongue swift over his lips. Without taking his eyes from Blood. “I believe, if it please you, we’ll settle when we’re done.”

  Blood nodded. Then said, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you before.”

  The boy took up the cups. “No,” he said. “I don’t imagine you have.”