A Sudden Country Read online

  She nodded.

  SOMETIME NEXT DAY he saw the sun a failing silver, veiled in ice. The snow began to rise and slide in ribbons. He tied his hat. He tucked his chin against her, bore along the hissing gusts, ice scouring his cheeks; it stung his eyes like sand and melted into tears. He blinked and wiped them, kept the river on his right. It was better on a day like this to move than to keep still.

  He’d had to force her to drink tea that morning. Now, helping her to make her water, he saw her wasted thighs, the skin not honey brown, as it had been, but clay. Her breath was worse. She choked. She bleated, trembling.

  “Stay with it,” he tried to say. No sound came out. He said, “It’s you and me. The two of us.”

  That night he set a twelve-foot pine alight, and slept in falling sparks, and held her fevering close against him.

  WITH DAWN CAME ease, then quiet. The snowflakes warmed and fattened, idled down. They could be close but had no way to tell; the sky was blank, the horizon sifted into nothing by the snow.

  And he’d thought she might not make it, but it couldn’t ease those hours. Kneeling at wet coals. The pine’s black skeleton was steaming. Nothing lit. Nothing lit. She wailed. He sat and held her head. He’d have given her his life but only gave the blankets from around his feet when she told him hers were cold.

  She said, “I want to stop.”

  “We’ll stop. We’ll stop the day.”

  His feet were bare. The snow had quit. Chickadees were peeping in the boughs.

  “Tell me Elisabetta.”

  Elisabetta, the white bear, had danced like a woman if a fiddler played. She’d smiled and swayed her hips. He swallowed. Like ashes in his throat. All the features of his mind seemed gray and flattened. He couldn’t remember what to say.

  “A long time ago, when I was young . . .”

  “On the stony beaches.”

  “On the stony beaches of the north,” he said, “there lived a beautiful white bear. And her name was Elisabetta.”

  He tried to tell it, as he had so many times. When her breath went still and the color drained, he put her down and climbed the low rise behind him and started calling out for help. He called and called like a madman, until he was hoarse, until the icy snot ran down his face and all his breath was gone. But of course, no one was in this world to hear him.

  CONFINEMENT

  LUCY WOKE FROM A DREAM of falling dogwood petals, then saw snow swirling past the window.

  When she closed her eyes again, a memory came to her as clear as dreaming: how, beside a dappled pool, she’d stood with Luther in the rain of blossoms. Their white skin glowed in the gold-green light of dogwoods.

  He knelt before her. Her hands were in his hair.

  He had undressed her there, every stitch. Each thing had come away until this moment, standing awed, seduced by possibilities, by the coolness of the air. She, who’d never been allowed bare feet, whose childhood wrists had never shown.

  Gravely, she had done the same to him until they lay, twined on leaves, like Adam and Eve in their green and ticking jungle.

  She heard the metal doorknob click. It was the midwife, Old Johanna.

  They’d held her down against the pillows, Johanna and her strong daughter Anne. They’d folded a square of flannel and pressed it to her mouth that morning, to muffle her cries. Now the baby, squashed and appallingly small, cleaned and neatly swaddled, slept.

  “What did you give to make me dream so? I hardly know where I am.” Her tongue was very strange. It made her smile.

  “Safe in your bed is where. And a little girl to nurse and keep at home. Of what did you dream?”

  “Of my husband.”

  “So? This is very soon.”

  They smiled together.

  “Shall I call him in?”

  “Who?”

  “Your husband.”

  “If he pleases.”

  “IS SHE ABIGAIL?” her husband leaned and asked. How dispassionate he always seemed, how fixed. Fixed: the hard high ridge of his nose, the hollows of his eyes. The beard in careful angles, as though he could not help but survey and order the features of his face, drawing points and boundaries. He paced through counties with his stakes and chains, marking off one neighbor from the next, straight through the curves of slopes, unruly forests, all needing to be claimed.

  He was Israel, of course, not Luther. Luther was years gone.

  “I keep dreaming,” she said. “So many dreams.”

  It was her fourth lying-in, the second in this tall square house in Iowa, with the crab apple tree outside the upstairs window. It was her third daughter, the first to be born in a waning moon and snow. Israel would go down to their big Bible now and record the necessary fact: January 6, 1847. While Johanna boiled the ruined sheets.

  But the name. Surely not his mother’s. Not Abigail.

  What door had opened in her soul?

  She heard him ask, “Is Mrs. Mitchell all right?”

  The grief seemed almost new. Her tongue was strange. What had they given?

  “Ja, very well. I try to make them easy. It’s good for both to sleep.”

  Lucy saw him turn, walk to the mirror. For births, he wore his Sunday suit. He straightened his jacket now. She saw the good shoulders, the silvering curls at his nape. She did know his virtues.

  She said, “I was thinking Mary.”

  What had made her cruel today?

  A pie, a pudding, a roast chicken had all arrived. Olive and Samuel had sent five loaves of bread. Anne would come each day of this confinement to feed Daniel and the girls, to see that a mother’s work was done.

  He said, “I’m visiting the Whitcombs this evening. They mean to go to Oregon this spring.”

  In her arm, the baby stirred. Mary. It was Luther’s mother’s name.

  “I said the Whitcombs mean to start for Oregon this spring.”

  “No,” she said.

  He turned. Her eyes denied him, sought instead the clemency of snow, its gentle ambiguity. It lofted and spun beyond the panes. Here was no straight fall to earth.

  A YELLOW LILY

  HE WAS WARM AT LAST and sliding through long waves of dreams when her voice woke him.

  Tota?

  His eyes came open, he tried to pull the blankets back. His hands were dressed and bandaged. He’d never meant to sleep.

  With one foot on the chill dirt floor, he listened. The ropes of the old cot had sagged so deep, the mattress all but kept him. What he’d heard now seemed more like an echo, a thing said in some other time and gone.

  Outside, the black pines roared. Wind moaned across the snow. His hands were aching. His face was stiff with scab. He pulled his foot back in.

  The parchment window filled the room with deep gray light. Sacks of meal changed shape in shadowed corners. He saw the kegs and shovels, the leaning hoes. He closed his eyes. Because, of course, he was alone.

  TOTA?

  He surged awake. His belly thrilled and eased. The room full dark. His heart beat through his muffled fingers.

  Well, how many nights had he stayed awake? He would not believe in ghosts.

  The parchment rattled. His feet were cold.

  An arm or leg, removed, he’d heard, could remain so strongly in the mind of one who’d owned it that for years it might go sounding its aches and needs. For years it could exist without existing, not a ghost, but a simple failure of the body’s understanding.

  That’s what it is, he thought. The voice. A shadow of perception, like the light that stands an instant on the eye when a flame has been blown out.

  HE WAS DREAMING of ice, of men in furs in tiny boats of skin, when he woke again. Light broke in squealing angles through the door. He squinted.

  It was the tall one, Mengarini. The one he had seen first.

  Sun glared on the snow outside. MacLaren closed his eyes against the light, having seen the tall robed figure, the basin and the cup set steaming on the pine round by the door. The hinges squealed again. The wood
en latch fell to.

  This hut, he knew, had been the first of all the buildings on the grounds of St. Marie’s. It had a hearth as well as the small window.

  The man was kneeling now. MacLaren heard wood laid. Ashes stirred. Then something seemed to slip from him, the strangest feeling. In that instant, he not so much recalled his family or the valley he had left, the cabin, barn, the knoll of pines—it was no kind of memory, but a corporeal sensation that a part of himself had just slipped out and been there and come back in the time it took the hair of his neck to stop prickling. He’d felt it go out of his left shoulder.

  He’d never considered souls until now, or believed in their material existence.

  The Jesuit Mengarini had long fingers and very dirty wrists, as though for years he’d washed his hands and nothing else. He stood over the cot, spoke down in Italian. The sounds bounced out in strings of vowels. He held the tea and offered it.

  In French, MacLaren said, “You could put it on the floor.”

  The Jesuit waited as though expecting some reply. Then spoke in Dutch.

  MacLaren would have liked to know where Junie was. Whether the priest Laurent was here. But he wanted more than anything to lie still. He’d never learned a word of Dutch. He said that, and thanked him. He said, “I’ll drink it later.”

  The Jesuit cocked an ear and pursed his lips, a caricature of incomprehension. Then smiled and reached and said, in Salish, the word to sit.

  “I don’t need help.” MacLaren fended him off in Nez Perce. “I don’t need help,” he said. “I don’t need help.”

  MENGARINI BROUGHT HIM bowls of food. He brought him tea with laudanum. Each time MacLaren woke, his soul, if that was what it was, would slip away and then return. It happened other times as well.

  Twice each day he looked up from his cot and saw the Jesuit’s dirty robes, the fraying cincture, the yellow teeth. One day the man brought chess pieces and a board to set on a stump between them.

  MacLaren sat. He played one game on which he spared no great attention, and was beaten. Mengarini smiled, a kind smile, tried to set up the pieces again. MacLaren only studied the hollowed cheeks, the innocent brown eyes. A solitary man, he thought, with no way to understand the change a family brings.

  And perhaps he never had, himself. Only looking back it seemed he’d found, with his wife and children, some fulcrum of the heart he’d never noticed, but it had put a power in his smallest task. So that now the world had lost all base and purpose, or he all use in its relation. So if he moved now, it was habit or pretense, and if he ever laughed again, it would make only a rattling, like shorn metal.

  THE WIND TURNED warm one night, and in the morning the priest Laurent was sitting on a round of pine beside the bed.

  “Bonjour.” His eyes, in the window’s light, were very blue. Water ran from the melting eaves. “I’ve been at the winter camp. You know? The Flathead, they wish we stay with them. Father Point has gone among the Blackfeet. Very brave, you think? But now I hear of you.”

  A new sound came across the snow, a distant shrill shout. Laughter.

  Laurent said, “I have brought some children. To learn with us awhile.” Then stood and craned his neck to the parchment square of light as though some joy might be visible through it. So, looking up, MacLaren saw the fleshy throat with its stubble, which he could resent. But when the eyes met his, he looked away.

  WHEN HIS HANDS had healed enough, he went out to the woodlot in the mornings to split more pine for their fires, though his blood still raced from the least exertion. The scabs on his back and legs caught in his clothes and wore away and left his skin a spattered pink. His soul, for the most part, stayed.

  He took his meals at night with the others in the mission hall, and when he had wiped the table clean, and washed the four tin plates and spoons, and the others had retired to the back room for the night, Laurent would get the chessboard.

  “What was the first bed you remember?” The priest asked this while setting out the pieces. When not attending to afflicted souls, or saving them, he collected lives. The chess was a diversion. So Laurent had learned already of MacLaren’s childhood home in Scotland, the hills and cattle. How on wet windy nights, the stones that weighed the thatch would stretch their ropes and swing, and clack against the walls.

  “It was a boxbed,” he answered now. “I shared it with my cousins.” They had been gangling boys, all three, overrun with the itch. Giggling in their dark closet, farting, pounding one another’s ribs.

  “What was your first sin?”

  “Not what you are thinking, if you’re thinking that.”

  Consider your evil tendencies, said a book Laurent had left beside his bed, and how far you have followed them. Consider how every day has added to the number of your sins against God, against yourself, and against your neighbor, by deed, word, thought, and desire.

  He said, “We’d steal the blood from ponies.”

  They fell silent, considering their moves, the plights of ponies and starving boys.

  “What age when you left that place?”

  “Fourteen,” he said, and there was the rubble and ice of Hudson’s Bay, the fort where they had slept and worked and drunk their measure of Sunday rum, and the bear, Elisabetta, who drank it with them and would dance with her long chin across their shoulders, until she was shot one night—he’d never told his girls this ending—for refusing to stir from an Orkneyman’s bed, and was eaten for supper the next day.

  Tell me Elisabetta.

  He said, “It was a miserable country.”

  So sometimes he would find himself in the very regions he most wished to leave. Even distant memories held surprises. He rubbed his face, and when the pieces were put away, he went back to the hut he slept in. He took the pine round and shouldered with it through the door, and set it in the moon-striped snow, and sat, and lit his pipe.

  And marveled, now, at things he’d never noticed: how the trees with their rimed branches looked like the still white pieces of coral an old Kanaka had once given him, which he had liked to study, imagining warm seas and watery forests. So he sat and saw the stars afloat on the surface of the night above him, and felt himself to be as nothing more, perhaps, than a crab on a bright sandy floor.

  “The world is too beautiful, eh? Sometimes?”

  Laurent had crossed the snow and stood beside him.

  “God forgives us what we cannot forgive ourselves,” the priest said.

  MacLaren rubbed his stiff knuckles. He said, “If there be a God, sir, He is the one to need forgiving.”

  The priest considered. “And so we must,” he said at last. Then said, “The evils of the world all have this source: tristitia. Sorrow. It will poison any man who carries it too long. Be careful, my friend.”

  HE HEARD a jingle of harness bells one morning as he paused in his work, and came through the gates to find two dogsleds halted and the dogs now panting and turning in their traces. Four native attendants had helped a heavy man to stand, and now beat the snow from his robes.

  Laurent raised his arm, called MacLaren over. He left the sledge of wood he had been pulling.

  “Here is the Abbe Franchere, by God’s grace. He is touring our new missions. Abbe, Monsieur MacLaren.”

  The abbe’s heavy lips pulled in, dismissive.

  Laurent said, “He is a gentleman of Hudson’s Bay. Trader. Cartographer. Expert of language.”

  “Mercenary,” the abbe said. Their eyes had locked.

  MacLaren answered, “Oui.”

  THE ABBE had come from France the summer before, to oversee these scattered missions. By ship, around the Horn to Fort Vancouver. By bateaux, up Columbia to Frenchtown. By horse, across the Palouse hills to the northern missions and Coeur d’Alene, where he had passed the winter. A voyageur called Gabriel had brought him here, with three grown boys of the Flathead tribe.

  Now, morose and inconvenienced, the abbe shut himself for a week in the back dormitory, writing up his letters. The Flath
ead boys waited on him. They had given up their names and now went by John, Philemon, Baptiste. Laurent and Mengarini slept on cots in the hall.

  Baptiste and Philemon slept on MacLaren’s floor. In the evenings they sat looking into the fire, laughing, talking in their own tongue, while MacLaren smoked and read by tallow light the book Laurent had given him: An Introduction to the Devout Life.

  We must be on our guard not to be deceived in making friendships, it said, between persons of the opposite sexes. If discretion be lacking, frivolity will creep in, then sensuality, till love becomes carnal. It is sweeter than the taste of ordinary honey; so worldly friendship is profuse in honeyed words, while true friendship speaks a simple honest language.

  “And your wife?” the abbe had asked with greasy lips one night across the supper table. Laurent, sidelong, had watched them both.

  Lise. He’d never called her wife, in all the twenty years he’d known her. Although a priest had married them. Lise had borne his children, nursed and raised them. Together they’d cut hay, split wood, plucked geese. They’d made a life together, strong as timbers joined and braced. He’d always thought it was that strong and true.

  True friendship is always the same—modest, courteous, and loving—knowing no change save an increasingly pure and perfect union.

  “Is she dead also?” the abbe had asked.

  And he’d replied, “She was well enough when I saw her last.”

  AFTER A WEEK, he was still stepping over Indians and the old voyageur had moved into his hut as well. “When are they going?” he asked Laurent.

  “Soon. We think by horse to go home by way of the Missouri. To St. Joseph. The abbe and I. Gabriel. The Indians. And you, I hope, also.”

  “Me?”

  “Of course. Ah? You know the way.”

  THEY BEGAN their journey with the snow still soft by day, anxious to make way as soon as the season would allow. They wrapped the horses’ legs in blankets and traveled under moonlight on the crusted ice. At morning’s end, old Gabriel would lift the great abbe from his mount, and the Flathead boys would rub his legs and serve him tea. They cooked and ate and went to sleep, the Jesuits in their oilskin tent, the rest pitched under what shelter they might find: a ledge, a bush, a leaning tree.