A Sudden Country Read online

  PRAISE FOR A Sudden Country

  “Fisher has done for the Oregon Trail what Charles Frazier did for the Civil War in his Cold Mountain. . . . She has taken a shopworn saga from the recesses of American history, elevated it beyond its usual roost in western genre fiction and infused it with fresh insights, intense immediacy and poetic language.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Enthralling . . . miles of fine writing.” —People

  “A grand, mesmerizing novel . . . [Fisher has] a poet’s sense of the sound and heft of each word. . . . In the collision between household and wilderness, Fisher brilliantly illuminates both the tragedy and the new life wrought by manifest destiny. This is a great novel of the American West.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Accomplished . . . Fisher lends each hardship, beauty, and horror a daguerreotype clarity.” —The Boston Globe

  “A gorgeous and mesmerizing story of a journey. Fisher provides both the historical context and the perfect detail with equal grace. She deals in big emotions, big adventures, big landscapes, and human-size people. This is a remarkable, remarkable book and I loved every word of it.” —KAREN JOY FOWLER, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

  “Plenty of bad weather, ill temper and gunplay stalk the pioneers in A Sudden Country, but beauty also dogs every page. . . . Fisher accomplishes that rarity in a Western—a rich evocation of a woman, transformed along a 2,040-mile route. . . . A worthy and mesmerizing cousin [to Cold Mountain] . . . [Fisher] gives A Sudden Country the rhythm of the saddle. —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “[Fisher’s] dexterity with language is worthy of a far more advanced novelist. . . . At times frightening, at times rapturous, it exerts pressure on travelers and readers alike.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “ The writing is flawless. . . . Extraordinary.” —JANE CAMPION

  “Rich in metaphors and flashbacks, [A Sudden Country] is full and wise and not bound by any century.” —Seattle Weekly

  “Glorious . . . We feel the ferocious wind, and the grit it leaves in Lucy’s blanket. We hear hail pounding on canvas, the shrieking of a sick baby. . . . We witness the wild and dangerous beauty of a land destined to change forever. This is a remarkable journey. It’s history brought to life.” —The Arizona Republic

  “[A Sudden Country] offers a graceful interplay between psychological and natural forces. . . . Subtle and powerful . . . Fisher uses the epic travail of her characters to try to show us who we are.” —Chicago Tribune

  “On every page of A Sudden Country, Karen Fisher finds a way to astonish— with her extraordinary command of period details, with her profound insights into love-tormented hearts and minds, with her style that’s both lyrical and economical. This is a magnificent debut.” —LARRY WATSON, author of Orchard and Montana 1948

  “Hypnotic . . . liberating . . . At times, this sprawling and scrupulously researched novel resembles D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover set against a rough-hewn panorama worthy of frontier photographer Carleton Watkins.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Fisher takes us on the trail, spinning a tale of history, love, survival and, last but not least, the power of stories to bind us together.” —New Orleans Times-Picayune

  “A Sudden Country . . . is many wonderful things: a stirring appreciation of the Western landscape, a dramatic account of a wagon-train trip from Iowa to Oregon in 1847, and a sensitive exploration of American Indians and whites living side-by-side in that pioneer period. . . . Beautiful and haunting . . . [Fisher’s] perspective gives [ A Sudden Country] both resonance and grace.” —Baltimore Sun

  “Remarkable . . . [Fisher] is a born storyteller who has created two memorable characters. . . . An exciting journey full of surprises.” —The Oregonian

  “Fisher’s work reads truest [in] the finely rendered scenes of ordinary people at the end of resources and in untenable circumstances. . . . A frank exploration of the prejudice and anger that were so much a part of this country’s making.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “An epic read . . . Like [Cormac] McCarthy, Fisher has written a work of art, true to its terrain. . . . Fisher has created a tragic and wondrous world. . . . [Her] writing is simple yet eloquent, earthy but almost biblical. . . . Her craft shows in her words and attention to details.” —USA Today

  “A vigorous, deeply moving work . . . Fisher’s settlers are vivid and particular. Brave and naïve, generous and cruel, canny and ignorant: They are real, and Fisher manages to make the familiar story of their westward movement strange. . . . Elegantly written and powerfully original: a magnificent story and a remarkable debut.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “The heartbreaking first chapter alone is worth any number of lesser novels.” —Entertainment Weekly (Editor’s Choice)

  “A literary masterpiece . . . While Fisher’s depiction of the West’s grandeur is masterly, she approaches description obliquely, as would a poet, whether she is portraying a fleeting image from the natural world or the novel’s major events. Powerful as the historical notes are, the novel’s themes of love and connection, resolution of grief, and the wantonness of civilization transcend the Western genre to resonate with all readers. Buy this book! —Library Journal (starred review)

  This is a work of fiction. Though some characters, incidents, and dialogues are based on the historical record, the work as a whole is a product of the author’s imagination.

  2006 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

  Copyright © 2005 by Karen Fisher Reading group guide copyright © 2005 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE TRADE PAPERBACKS and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc. READER’S GUIDE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Fisher, Karen.

  A sudden country: a novel / Karen Fisher.

  p. cm.

  1. Overland journeys to the Pacific—Fiction. 2. Oregon National

  Historic Trail—Fiction. 3. Hudson’s Bay Company—Fiction.

  4. Women pioneers—Fiction. 5. Whitman Massacre—Fiction.

  6. Wagon trains—Fiction. 7. Oregon—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3606.I776S83 2005

  813’.6—dc22 2004054179

  www.thereaderscircle.com

  www.randomhouse.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-43049-6

  v3.0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Praise

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  There Alone

  Confinement

  A Yellow Lily

  A True Wife

  Memory and Flight

  A Rendering of Favors

  No Safe Convention

  That Great Stillness

  Courage Once

  Stolen Horses

  Beyond all Bounds

  A Pitiable Hunger

  The Book of Wealth

  Blue Beads

  In Cupped Hands

  Us The Sinners

  Our Time on Earth

  Part Two

  What Cannot be Seen

  Wild Stone Heart

  Nothing

  The Moon’s House

  Sound and Light

  The Heart so Quick

  The known World Upside Down

  Copper Bells

  To Drink from Empty Cups

  Man and Woman

  Part Three

  Stones into Dust

  Home

  How we Learn to Leave

  Fait
h

  A Supplicant Hand

  Free Air

  Their Thousand Dreams

  To go now and Attend

  The Exact Reminiscences of Emma Ruth Ross

  New Leaves

  Remains

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Reader’s Guide

  A Conversation with Karen Fisher

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  Part One

  So we see that sorrow may be good or bad according to the several results it produces in us. And indeed there are more bad than good results arising from it, for the only good ones are mercy and repentence; whereas there are six evil results, namely anguish, sloth, indignation, jealousy, envy, and impatience. The Wise Man says that “sorrow hath killed many and there is no profit therein,” and that because for the two good streams which flow from the spring of sadness, there are these six which are downright evil.

  —ST. FRANCIS DE SALES, “On Sadness and Sorrow”

  THERE ALONE

  HE CARRIED HIS GIRL tied to his front, the trapsack on his back, the rifle balanced like a yoke along his shoulders. He walked all day on snowshoes, lost in effort, in steady breathing. The snow drove thick and clotted on his eyebrows, filled his beard. It cluttered his drawing breath.

  He’d left the cabin, his valley with its knoll of pines. In the barn, the wind had pulled the uneaten hay and scattered it. He’d left the saddles, stiff with frost. The horses had run off.

  There had been a pass to climb. A north wind to bear against. He’d thought to catch the clearing weather, though each night the moon grew smaller.

  “Are you there, June?”

  He made halt with his back to the wind. Took off his mittens, blew on his hands to thaw them. She stirred in the bundled blanket.

  “Let me see.”

  Her hands emerged. MacLaren tried to feel them, but his own hands were too cold.

  “All right?”

  She nodded. She’d cried the night before, a sad thin wail against him in the stinging wind. He kept looking at her fingers, held them balled inside his hand. He squinted at the sky. In all the world now was nothing but the two of them, and white.

  AT MIDDAY, he unlaced his snowshoes, stood them on their tails. Knocked the ice out of his beard, lit a fire, stripped balsam boughs for tea. The snow had quit.

  When water boiled, she took the blanket from him, held it tented as he’d shown her, so she could breathe the clearing steam. Her hair was damp, eyes murky gray like his. He watched her fingers curl around coarse wool. He put the steaming pot beside her.

  All his life, he’d only gone from one thing to the next, only done what needed doing. His world had all been wood and water, fire, food; it had all been journeys needing made, traplines to set, a world of things to mend and mind with never time enough. But these past few weeks had taught a different kind of seeing. It was as though such endless diligence had muffled him somehow. But here now were the curled edges of his daughter’s ermine scarf, and he could see the hairs stir in the wind, and could see each crack and split in her small lips. He had learned, in these past weeks, the shapes of her knees, her feet, had seen her secret skin. He knew the hard black scabs of scars she would come to live with. If he could command it.

  She looked at him.

  You are mine, he thought. With his eyes, again, he saved her.

  She began to cough. He waited. Fed the fire. The wind came up and sprang the pines, and showered them with snow.

  HE CAME OFF the forest slopes into the river valley in a waning daylight moon. It took less strength to plod along than to see what shelter he could find, what fuel to make a fire. Everything was frozen. And he’d worked like this, in winter, his whole life, but always in the company of men. It was terrible to stop, to see how small she lay without him, waiting for some warmth.

  At last, in a cove of pines, he trod the snow and floored the camp in boughs. Made rough shelter. Hacked down limbs and shook them.

  He put the meat to boil, and listened to her breathing. He closed his eyes and waited.

  One morning after he had made the graves, he’d stood and watched the wind blow down the snow, watched it spill off the laden pines, drift glittering through the blue. Each joint and twig of aspen lined in snow, a faery openwork of black and white. It hardly seemed the world should be so beautiful. He’d walked out past the barn and seen, on all the stumps and posts and rails, a dazzling crest. A herd of elk was feeding off his snowy hay, yarded up content as horses. He’d shot a cow, cut the meat to carry.

  He woke to the stink of his blanket burning.

  She was curled against him, her hand inside his coat. Until these recent weeks, it was always Lise she’d clung to. He’d never known this kind of flattery, or what it was to be a source of comfort. Now he heard the rattle in her lungs, like glue.

  He’d come to think he could refuse to sleep. That a man could stay awake.

  When Lispat went, he’d been sleeping. Lispat—Elizabeth—her lanky legs, sly eyes, the cheekbones like her mother’s. She’d raged at the last for scissors, as though she might still cut some figure out of paper. She was ten. He’d had the fever himself by then, and was tired. Go to sleep, he’d said, and left her. Not believing any child of his could die so easily.

  He remembered the dry grief cracking out. He’d stood in the doorway’s glare, panic-stripped and heaving.

  The ground was hard, he’d had no strength to bury her. He kept her for two days inside, then hauled her onto the ridgepole for fear of wolves. He came to fear his own sleep after that as well, for the losing of his other two. He stayed awake. He talked to them. Tried to cool their faces, keep the chill away. The fire he would keep alive.

  Five days of fever turned to chill. Engorgement of the flesh. Suppuration. All his life he’d worked with men who had survived, seen women scarred, seen children blinded or made deaf, but now they owned that horror: variola. Agony, exact and inevasible, every surface real, remembered, the eyes, the tongue, the palms that closed around the cup, the soles on which he walked. His lungs shot through as though he had breathed lye. And no one in a hundred miles to know it.

  “Tota?” June would call as he was dozing.

  Alexander suffered it ten days. His golden child of two. Blessed release. He remembered carrying him outside, how the bright cold hit them. In the snow against the cabin wall, his legs had given out. He remembered sinking with his boy in his arms, waking sometime later. Remembered the horror of the snow, which had fallen while they slept, and lay unmelted in those curling palms.

  So he and June, his middle child, were left. Still burning. Each breath disturbed what only begged for peace, each effort broke what little surface might be healing, but he tried to answer when she called. He lay festering in his robes, and moaned and would have been glad for death but for the nightmare fear that she’d be left alone. He would not die and leave her there alone. So he stayed, insensible of days and nights or that the horses had run off, until the sores began to melt together and stiffen into solid sheets like bark that split and stank, and he thought the two of them might live. And, for a silent fortnight, they had.

  He pulled June’s head against him. Smelled her hair. Six days, he thought. Six more, if he could do it. Then there would be rest.

  THE SUN ROSE in a yellow band below the gray. By midday the sky was clearing. He’d reached the plain along the river, now followed that valley north. Blackfeet, Gros Ventres—he saw no villages, no sign, but they were there. He was making for the mission, St. Marie’s. The Jesuits had come out two years before. They had built a crude hall and a palisade against the Blackfeet, who resented them. Their work was with the better tribes: Flathead, Salish. To bring them God and learning. To heal their sick.

  “I’ll take you there,” he’d promised, when her lungs began to fail. “They’ll help you. They’ll have something.”

  At noon h
e stopped for longer than he meant to rest, and by dusk he was all but ruined. An ache had lodged in the backs of his legs since the fever, and would turn to knives, but the land here afforded nothing. He kept on, though his eyes were falling shut, his course wavering. The plain was too exposed. At last he made a camp above the river. It took two hours to find some wood and light it.

  He boiled the meat by starlight. They heard voices in the silence, swells of laughter, a distant gathering in happy conversation.

  “Tota?”

  “Hey.”

  She lay watching him. The whites of her eyes shone in the faint light.

  “Can all people fly? After they be dead?”

  He said, “Did your mother teach you that?”

  “She said some go in the water.”

  “It’s the river you hear,” he said. “The river’s moving under ice, that’s all.”

  “TOTA.”

  He woke. The sky was filled with stars.

  “Tota. I’m cold. Tota.”

  She fevered, spooned against him, almost touching the last coals.

  He reached for the wood behind him, put a few small pieces on.

  “Tota, when will Sally come back?”

  He closed his eyes, saw their horses homing through the snow—against the dark, he dreamed them flying, spinning through the heavy drifts, the spray of ice, steam roiling from their nostrils. The branches, in their wake, freed and springing.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll go out after thaw and find her.”

  None of them had asked about their mother. They hadn’t seen Lise go. He’d told them that first lie and never told another, and wondered since if they’d known more than he. But hadn’t found the strength to ask.

  “The fire wants more.”

  She said this—as though she’d read his thoughts—in her mother’s tongue, Nez Perce. He answered in the same. “He can’t have more. Not here. Do you know why?”