Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  The objection that had in the past prevented him from doing so—that if he died, God might reasonably condemn him to hell on the grounds that he had committed suicide while blasphemously eating from the tree of knowledge—no longer seemed to apply. Ash wanted to die; he was even willing to believe that a self-induced death might be the act toward which his passion had been driving him.

  “If I do not die,” he cried in his last prayer before inoculating himself, “then I will know that Your purpose is yet to be revealed to me. But oh! reveal it soon!”

  Working while the patient slept, Ash scratched an X on his left biceps, collected three samples of crust from three separate pustules, and rubbed them into the wound.

  Hour by hour in the days that followed he watched and recorded the progress of his symptoms—the reddened skin on the inoculated arm, the hardened swelling, the growing lassitude—with an excitement that was heightened by the inevitable appearance of a high fever. Finally the pimples appeared—a dozen on the face, a few on the extremities. Four days later, the eighth day after inoculation, these erupted into pustules.

  The sores were especially noticeable on Ash’s colorless skin, but no one said anything about them until Rose Barebones came through the gates of the town. Her eyes shone brightly and her exquisite face was slightly flushed as she stood on the snow-covered green with Ash’s daughter in her arms and the Clum girls and Jean Judd slumped in the snow at her feet.

  “Your wife is dead, but I have brought you your daughter, Edward,” Rose said, proffering the sleeping infant in its papoose frame.

  Then, seeing the pustules, Rose pulled the bundle back. “What’s that on your face?” she asked.

  “A slight rash,” Ash replied, very surprised when his words were followed by a loud sob, and then by another. He stared at his child.

  “A slight rash,” Ash repeated, sobbing hysterically and groping for his daughter Solitude as Rose walked backward to avoid his touch.

  7

  Philippe waited outside Two Suns’s wigwam in the early morning, sitting cross-legged on the beaten dirt like an Abenaki until Fanny appeared. She was not surprised to see him.

  “Are you still yourself,” Philippe asked, “or have you been adopted by Two Suns?”

  She wore Indian dress: moccasins that laced to the knees, a short skirt, a red blouse cinched at the waist with the belt of wampum that Two Suns had given her as a gift of welcome. Her hair hung down her back in a thick plait.

  “I am still myself,” she said.

  “Then we can talk. You asked me about the forest. When I was a boy, Bear and I went down Lake Champlain, where our canoe was capsized by the wind, and across the edge of the Mohawk country, where we found a deer strangled in a Mohawk snare, and then through blue mountains covered with hemlock forest. Just as the moon was turning full, we came to a big grove of beech trees, where we saw a lot of black bears, a whole herd of them, it seemed, eating the beechnuts. They are tiny things, the nuts, but there are heaps of them on the ground in the fall. There was a small river, full of trout, at the edge of the grove, running very fast through a narrow slot between high cliffs. There is no French word for a place like this.”

  “A gorge,” Fanny said in English.

  “Yes, a gorge. I think this is the place that you wanted to go to.”

  Fanny looked at Philippe very carefully. He was dressed for the forest, his jaeger rifle slung over his back, knife and hatchet stuck into his belt, his belongings lashed onto a willow pack frame.

  Philippe was smiling at her with compressed lips. She smiled the same smile back.

  “What is this place called?” she asked.

  “From today it is called the Gorge,” he replied in English, then returned to French. “Formerly it had no name. As you are a canoeist, we will go part of the way by water. And as we will not be accompanied by a priest this time, I think we had better be married before we leave.”

  “Very well,” Fanny said.

  “Wait,” Philippe said. “Before you consent, let me tell you about my fortune and my prospects. What I own is what you see, except for a sword and some uniforms, which you have also seen—and my wig, of course. I am the only son of the Sieur de Saint-Christophe, who is penniless, and if I live longer than my father I will inherit his small cold house in Normandy and five hundred arpents of boggy land.”

  Fanny had not heard Philippe speak at such length before. Perhaps he had thought out his speeches beforehand. She asked, “Have you discussed these plans, this marriage, with your family? I am not, as you know, French.”

  “My family is preoccupied with other matters,” Philippe said. “Marie-Dominique gave birth to a healthy son who has been named Philippe Jean Armand Louis Marie Edwige Dominique de Grestain. My sister advises you to accept my offer of marriage. She says that the cards are emphatic about this, but to remember the importance of secrecy. I don’t know what she means by that. But I assure you that the Spy has been hanged.”

  “And your brother-in-law?”

  “Armand is waiting for your ship to come in. I didn’t receive his blessing.”

  Suddenly Fanny said, “Tell me about the forest. How far into it have you gone?”

  “To the Great Lakes to the west, to the sea to the east and south to Atlanta. I don’t want to talk about the forest. There is something I must tell you about Alamoth.”

  “I have decided that I don’t need to know that particular secret,” Fanny said. “Have you ever found a place where there are no people and never have been any people?”

  Philippe was interested now. “There are some mountains about halfway between the Hudson and the Connecticut where nobody lives,” he said. “I went there with Bear when we were boys. The Mohawks go over to hunt moose in the winter, and they’ve driven some other Indians called Mahicans into the southern valleys. But in the north it’s empty.”

  “Empty? What is it like?”

  “Forest, rivers, rocks, mountains, wild animals.” “That’s where I want to go.”

  “Go there? How? Why?”

  “With you, since you know the way,” Fanny said, “to live in silence, to be something that is not French or English or anything else.”

  “Silence I can promise,” Philippe said.

  Father Nicolas married them the next morning in Saint-François-de-Sales as soon as the light was strong enough to illuminate the stained-glass windows.

  Philippe insisted on waiting for that moment because one of the disciples, Timothy, closely resembled Used to be Bear. Speaking her vows, Fanny spoke Philippe’s Christian name for the first time; he called her by her given name, Genevieve, but whispered “Fanny” into her ear when he kissed her by the altar.

  Afterward Thoughtful gave Fanny a gift of seed corn and bean and pumpkin seeds.

  “Plant them in the sun,” she said. “Water them every day. The beans will climb the corn.”

  Two Suns gave Philippe a bow and quiver. “Don’t make your wife run too much before you get her with child,” he said. “Seed doesn’t catch in a woman who runs. The year my daughter Squirrel was born in the wrong place was the year Thin Ice was running away from the Iroquois.”

  Paddling down the Richelieu, and then along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain, Philippe sang in Abenaki, smiling at Fanny when she turned around in her place at the bow to join him.

  At its southern end, Lake Champlain narrowed into a long strip of water that was hardly wider than a small river. The western bank lay in Mohawk country. Long before they reached this point, Philippe stopped singing and forbade noise of any kind. They paddled at night, never speaking, stopping often to look and listen.

  Philippe fell into a hypnosis of woodcraft and caution. If Fanny rattled her paddle against the gunwale, Philippe would poke her hard on the back with the dripping blade of his own paddle. If she coughed he would cover her mouth with his hand, half-smothering her. They lit no fires and made no camps, but carried the canoe ashore before dawn and hid it, and then slept a long way
off from it.

  They slept in turns, never at the same time, so that one of them was always on watch, and ate in turns too, so that one was always listening while the other went about the ear-plugging business of chewing up nocake. They urinated and defecated in running water, one squatting while the other watched the surrounding scrub.

  Philippe checked the priming pan of his jaeger ten times a day. Before setting out he had taught Fanny how to load and shoot the jaeger, and also his Belgian pocket pistols. He gave her one of the pistols to carry in a pouch slung across her chest. She also carried a knife.

  “If you see a Mohawk, make yourself small,” Philippe whispered. “Say nothing, do not move. If he sees you, cock the pistol. Do not let him see it until you shoot. Hold it in both hands. Fire when he is three steps away, aiming for the heart. Then run.”

  “And if I miss?”

  “Then use the knife, quickly.”

  He meant use it on herself, because he, himself, would already be dead.

  After a week they were far enough away from the Mohawks that they could risk a fire. Philippe kneeled by a stream, building a little tipi of sticks with which to light a fire. He had just caught two large trout and they flopped on the moss beside his knee. Fanny had snapped a handful of dead stubs off a hemlock. He added these to the tipi. Then he lifted Fanny’s hands one at a time and kissed the palms.

  “Your skin smells like honey.”

  “It smells like pine pitch.”

  “Then it’s a trick—I’m smelling its color. Listen!” Fanny did so, making herself motionless and small at the same time, thinking that he had heard something moving. She could hear only the wind in the canopy of the forest and the twitter of birds—unmistakably birds and not a Mohawk imitating a bird because so many of them were calling all at the same time.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Fanny said.

  “That’s because there is nothing to hear, just as you wanted. There are no people here—no Christians, no Turks, no Indians, no English or French, only you and me.”

  By the time they reached the Gorge, the moon was full, which meant according to Fanny’s calculations that they had been married for three weeks. They had not yet become lovers.

  At night they slept in each other’s arms, fully clothed in their deerskins, and often she would be awakened by Philippe’s kisses. She kissed him back, able to see his face and the desire in it as the moon grew larger and brighter night after night, and feeling the change in her own breathing, a lightness in her body, a change in her racing mind so that at last she thought of nothing but making him her lover.

  Philippe would hold her body cradled against his own, breathing deeply like a sleeper, but not asleep. They went no further than that. When they walked through the forest they walked in single file, with Philippe always in the lead, many paces ahead. Often he would stop on the trail and watch her as she approached. When she reached him they would kiss again, sometimes for a long time.

  Fanny did not know why they were behaving in this way instead of doing what they both longed to do, or how much longer it would last. The kisses, the smiling glances, produced a constant state of desire, strong enough to give off a ferny scent, new to Fanny, that lingered on them both.

  After lying for a long time in Philippe’s arms with her eyes closed, apprehending him with senses that had nothing to do with sight, she would wonder who he was when she looked at him again. She never doubted that he had some reason for conducting the courtship in this way. Philippe was subject to ideas, to plans; Fanny had learned that much about him even before she knew that she loved him. He formed an intention about nearly everything and then carried it out. He had formed an intention about Fanny, about Alamoth, about the angle of the sun at the precise moment that they spoke their marriage vows in Saint-Françios-de-Sales.

  Now, evidently, he had formed an intention as to the circumstances in which they would consummate their true marriage. He called it that, afterward: le vrai mariage.

  When Fanny saw the grove of beeches and the Gorge itself, she understood why they had waited.

  Of all the American trees, the virgin beech was in every way the most beautiful and the most haunting. Fanny loved its pallor, its serenity. The smooth bark was gray, of a shade somewhat whiter than wood ashes, and when struck by the sun or even by the moon, it absorbed light in a way that made it seem translucent. The trunk could be huge, sometimes fifteen feet in circumference, rising straight, clean, and symmetrical to the first branches twenty or thirty feet above. The delicate leaves, pale green on one surface and silvery on the other, turned in the slightest breeze, creating ripples of changing color and the sound of whispering. The wood, when cut, was pallid too, and beaded with fragrant sap. Dozens of fearless red squirrels scampered through the foliage, scolding and hurling down twigs on the intruders.

  Philippe and Fanny walked hand in hand among the beeches, toward the sound of the water. There was water in the air—not spray or dampness, but the smell and coolness of water. Fanny was overwhelmed by the belief that she had been in this place before. The colors, the patterns of light and shadow, the hue of the sky which was darkened by the elusive tints of gray and green interposed between it and the eye, the roar of the water growing louder with each step—it was all as familiar to her as her own body.

  How could that be?

  The edge of the Gorge was quite close now. The noise of the water was far louder. Spray rose above the lip of the cliff, wetting the rocks. Fanny started to go closer, but Philippe pulled her back and led her toward a high ledge. Pointing out the steps and handholds as he went, he climbed to the top.

  Fanny followed. They were standing on a huge sheet of gray rock. Beyond it lay the mouth of a cave. Philippe signed to her to wait and not move; he went inside, returning after several minutes with the brittle skull of a bear. He poked his finger through a hole in the cranium and mouthed the Abenaki name for Bear.

  They went into the cave. It was divided into one large room at the front and two or three smaller ones farther in. The floor was littered with rocks, large and small, that had evidently dislodged from the ceiling over a period of thousands of years. Philippe rolled aside a boulder, revealing a small low chamber leading off the main room. He put his pack and rifle inside, and then Fanny’s pack and weapons, and rolled the boulder back into place. Although the rush of the water was still audible, it was far quieter in the cave than it had been outside. Philippe, silent and serious, looked down on Fanny.

  She smiled with her lips, thinking that he was going to kiss her. Instead he turned her around so that he was standing behind her and began to undress her, blouse, skirt, leggings. He fumbled and she tried to help. He removed her hand gently and went on. He kneeled and unlaced her moccasins, lifting first one foot and then the other and stripping them off. When she was naked he unbraided her hair and shook it out so that it hung like a shawl down her back, touching her buttocks.

  “Wait,” he said.

  From the sound of his movements, Fanny knew that he was undressing too. She was facing the mouth of the cave. On the other side of the Gorge, a hundred yards away, she saw different trees—birches, maples, oaks. Birds wheeled in the afternoon sky, silenced by the roar of the water. The sun was well down below the tops of the trees. The mist was more visible in this horizontal light, and larger drops of water leaped into the sunshine too.

  “Come,” Philippe said, taking her hand.

  At first Fanny did not look at his body. She did not think that he was looking at hers either. When they walked outside, the watery breeze from the Gorge played over her skin, touching every inch of it in the same instant. Her hair moved around her, her nipples hardened, she felt the whetted surfaces of the rock beneath the soles of her feet.

  Philippe led her to the edge of the Gorge. The river, after passing over a series of waterfalls, a very high narrow one and then three lower ones, boiled through a narrow gash in the rock. Spewing out of this stone nozzle, it crashed against a series of huge l
edges, sending spume twenty feet into the air. Then, after flowing over a long bed of boulders, it spread out into a wider place and became calmer.

  Fanny had never seen anything so wonderful; her heart pounded. Philippe stood behind her again and put his arms around her. No naked body had ever been pressed against hers before; Philippe’s body, muscular and slightly scratchy except for the smooth, very warm part pressed along her lower spine, felt much as she had expected. He was trembling slightly.

  “Look toward the sun,” Philippe said.

  Fanny turned her head and saw a rainbow in the spray. Philippe cupped her breasts in his hands. He moved his right hand and laid the palm flat on her stomach. She touched the backs of both his hands. He turned her around and looked into her face. He wore the same mesmerized expression as when they were passing among the Mohawks.

  She still could not see his body; he was too close. But now she saw that he had more scars—a long white saber slash on his chest, the puckered pink eye of a healed bullet wound on his shoulder. Her own body did not have a single mark on it; except for the wine-dark aureolas of her breasts, her golden skin was the same glowing color everywhere.

  They stood at the very edge of the cliff. At the bottom, twenty feet below, the water had collected into a calm pool between the bank and a huge dark rock.

  “Do you love me?” Philippe asked.

  Fanny nodded.

  “Say it.”

  “I love you.”

  She could see his entire figure now with the mist behind it. She had not dreamed that the male body was so beautiful, so perfectly made for its purposes, so much fleeter and stronger than her own.

  Philippe took her hand, looked into her eyes, smiled, flexed his knees. He went through the sequence a second time, teaching her something. The third time, Fanny flexed her knees too and sprang outward with him off the edge of the cliff.