The Spirit Keeper (37 page)

Everything about my early life stank of rum. We lost our furniture, we lost our houses, we lost everything we e’er owned—but we ne’er lost that steady supply of intoxicating spirits. That dreadful May day on which I was raped, that day when Syawa claimed he had “seen” me, that day when I crawled into my family’s wagon to cry and nurse my wounds, the only place I could find to lie down was sprawled out across four barrels of rum.

So when Hector looked at me and raised that jug to his lips, my head exploded, I saw red, and I hated him as much as I have e’er hated anyone or anything. Perhaps the main reason I had agreed to come with Syawa in the first place was that I thought I was getting away from the drunks, because I was determined—absolutely determined—not to be victimized by alcohol the way my mother had been. But here it was again, and here was I—pregnant and wholly bound to a man who would not say no to the offer of a drink.

I lay back down with my arm o’er my face, trying to control my rage. The thought occurred to me that I had a way to stop him. I had an easy way to stop him. All I need do was lie—tell him Syawa was speaking to me, commanding him not to drink the bad water. Hector might defy me, but he would ne’er defy Syawa. All I need do . . .

“Ah, but men’ll drink, Katie,” I heard my gran’s voice sigh in my head. “Men’ll drink ’n’ women’ll suffer. What can ye do?”

I heard raised voices, which snapt my attention back to the present moment. The men were no longer laughing. They were shouting and growling at one another, angry spittle flying. I gritted my teeth, my lips presst in a thin, tight line. This was how it always went. First they laughed and sang, then they argued and fought, then they slobbered and gushed o’er one another before eventually passing out. I was surprised by how quickly we had passed from step one to step two, but, then again, I had no idea how much they’d had to drink.

The raised voices turned into a physical confrontation before I had time to get fully vexed. Alarmed again, I craned my neck to look o’er at the altercation and saw that Hector and the flathead were rolling in the snow, apparently trying very hard to kill one another. The half-breed was still sitting with the jug, laughing and laughing, and the third man was nowhere to be seen.

This had gone way beyond a simple bout of rowdy drinking. Hector was not playing the way he had once wrestled jokingly with Syawa—his face was contorted, his teeth were bared, and he was fighting the way he’d fought in Three Bulls’s camp. I sat up and dug frantically in his pack for the French hatchet. I pulled it out with shaking hands.

By the time I had the hatchet, the half-breed was on his feet, unsteady, shouting sloppily in his language. Of course his words had no effect, and by that time it was too late anyway. Hector had knocked the flathead down onto his belly and now sat astride his back. He grabbed the man’s head and twisted it violently, snapping the neck like a dry stick. I gasped, horrified.

But I was e’en more horrified to see the half-breed pull a large metal blade from his waistband, raise it o’er his head, and stumble in the direction of Hector’s unprotected back.

Hector was rising slowly, wobbling, panting, facing the body of the man he’d just killed, unaware of the man reeling toward him with a raised knife. I had no choice. In one sweeping motion I jumped out from under the canoe and threw that hatchet with all my might. Because the distance was short, it lodged squarely in the back of the half-breed, who fell forward from the impact onto Hector, who fell forward, too. Both of them landed on the dead flathead, and I gasped again, afraid I might have just killed my husband.

I lifted a foot to run to him only to find both my feet suddenly off the ground. The third man had grabbed me from behind in a deadly bear hug. I screamed wildly and kicked with my feet, my arms pinned against my sides as the man squeezed and squeezed. He shook me like a rag doll, back and forth, back and forth, but he was pretty drunk, so my wild kicking eventually had an effect. He fell sideways, taking me with him.

We hit the ground hard, but I knew I had no time to recover my breath. I rolled away, scrambling toward Hector, who still had not moved. I planned to snatch the hatchet from the half-breed’s back, but just before I reached it, my pursuer grabbed my ankle. I screamed Hector’s name repeatedly as the drunk savage somehow managed to stagger to his feet without losing his grip on me, after which he lurched this way and that, pulling me ’round the campsite the way I’d seen a dog drag the rotting haunch of a dead deer.

He was unbelievably strong and there was naught I could do to stop him from scraping my face through the snow and mud and sticks and rocks of the riverbank. Because I was struggling so furiously against him, kicking at his wrist, he stopt at one point to jerk my leg like a whip, thereby dashing my head against the ground again and again. When he resumed dragging me, I clawed at the muddy snow to try to pull away from him, ’til finally he stumbled and lost his grip, giving me a chance to escape. I leapt toward the river, diving into the water at a full-on run so that I was halfway to the sandbar by the time my forward motion slowed.

There was ice on the river. ’Twas thin, but I felt it crack against my face as I desperately swam the hundred feet or so to the sandbar. I was floundering in the rushes before I dared turn to see if the man was following me, but as soon as I did, I could see I was safe. Hector had been roused by my screams and was fighting with the man at the river’s edge. Their silhouettes loomed large in the wavering light from the fires, the steaming clouds of their breath roiling ’round them. Hector must have taken the knife from the half-breed, for, as I watched in dismay, he thrust that knife deep into the belly of the man who had dragged me. He pushed the blade up, then pulled it down and gutted the man like a fish.

From my hiding place amidst the chattering rushes in the icy water, I vomited forcefully, heaving ’til I thought I had gutted myself. As soon as I could manage, I looked back up to see Hector standing alone on the littered bank, the knife still in his hand, the clouds of his breath swirling in hysterical circles as he panted and drunkenly surveyed his surroundings. The flickering flames of the firelight made it seem as if the shadows were doing a wild dance ’round him.

He shouted for me. I was too terrified to respond. I had just seen him kill two men for no apparent reason and I do not believe it was strange for me to think he might, in his drunken madness, kill me. He shouted again and again, his tone growing frantic. He dropt the knife and dug through the buffalo robe under the canoe, then crawled out and fell down a few times as he stumbled ’round the fire, looking everywhere, shouting my name. He staggered into the river, screaming my name like a lamentation, splashing ’round in the water as if he feared he would find me floating there, face down.

I was trembling so violently I almost couldn’t speak, but I knew I must say something or he would, in all probability, do himself harm. How could I just sit there and watch my husband die? “I’m here!” I called, and he looked up so suddenly that he fell over again.

“Where are you?” he wailed from the lapping water at the river’s edge, and I yelled for him to stay where he was, that I would come to him.

The very last thing I wanted to do in all the world was swim back across that ice-cold channel, but I had no choice. It was either do it or watch Hector drown. At this point the water was warmer than the air anyway, so I plunged in.

The first time I swam I was filled with fear and driven to survive, so I was strong. But the second time I was numb, depleted, exhausted, and terrified of what awaited me on the other side. I sank into the depths several times and spluttered and coughed before slowly continuing to make my way across. I might not have made it had not Hector spotted me and met me near the middle. E’en in his state of inebriation he was a better swimmer than I, and so he grabbed my arm and pulled me the rest of the way back to camp.

We crawled out of the water, both on hands and knees. I slowly stood up, but he stayed down, saying, “Something is wrong with me. Everything is moving.”

I called him every foul name I’d e’er heard in English, pacing back and forth as I yelled at him. He tried to look up at me, but fell over in the process and just lay there in the lapping water, clearly unable to rise. I raised my face to the black sky and screamed. That roused him, and I grabbed his arm and pulled him ’round to push his face into the river. “Drink!” I shrieked at him in his language, determined to purge him of the rum. “Drink the water, you dog!”

He obeyed me without question, drinking/inhaling enough river water to achieve the effect I desired—he was soon vomiting up the contents of his stomach right there beside the bloody fragments of the belly of the man he’d disemboweled. I held his head up, remembering all the family members whose heads I’d seen held thus at one time or another. When he was done, I washed his face with river water, then grabbed his arm and dragged him, moaning, the way the man had dragged me, stopping beside our fire. I dug under the canoe for the bearskin, but as I rolled Hector into it, I heard a noise from the other fire and whirled ’round.

The half-breed was not dead.

He was still on his belly, but either he had moved or Hector had moved him when he crawled out from under him, for he was not where he had been before. I walked slowly over to have a look and saw the hatchet was embedded in his spine a good two inches, but, with a sick feeling in my empty stomach, I realized the wound was not necessarily a fatal blow. With proper care, this man could survive, tho’ with his spine severed he would probably ne’er walk again.

What was I to do? I stood there looking down at him, at the dark pool of blood spreading out and deepening exactly like the one I’d seen ’round the deer, the one I’d crawled from, the one that spooked me into getting lost. I looked down at that blood pool and recognized it and wondered about it—could that have been a Vision? Was it a sign I should just let this poor man lie here and bleed to death?

He must’ve heard me, because he whimpered something in a language I did not know. I was already shivering violently because of the cold, but upon hearing his torment, I shivered in another sort of way. For a moment I numbly watched the blood pool seeping out across the muddy snow. Then I turned and went back to Hector.

When he felt my touch, he moaned and mumbled and tried to get up, but I told him to stop struggling and go to sleep. He obeyed me instantly. With him taken care of, I knew I had to get myself warmed up or I was very likely going to freeze to death.

I added wood to the fire, then crawled under the canoe and wrapt myself in the buffalo robe. Hours passed before I stopt shivering severely enough to make my bones ache. I cried endlessly, and for much of that time the half-breed cried with me. At one point he began begging me in French to help him, but I knew there was naught I could do save put him out of his misery, which I just could not bring myself to do. I covered my ears with my hands and cried louder, to drown him out.

It snowed all night, tapering off at dawn. By then the half-breed had finally fallen silent, but I was still suffering immeasurably, thinking about what I’d done. I kept remembering how excited the young man had been to prove himself to his father. Now he was dead, by my bloody hand. And why? Why? I didn’t understand anything that had happened. I just couldn’t figure it out.

I coughed now and then through the night because of all the icy water I’d inhaled, and when I got up shortly after dawn to add wood to the fire, my fit of coughing woke Hector. He moaned and tried to sit, then clutched his head and fell backwards, moaning some more. I knew exactly how he felt, because I myself have been stumbling drunk a time or two, but I had little sympathy for him. He tried to tell me he was sick; I assured him it was the bad water. I told him he must sip some good water now—slowly, just a bit. He crawled to the river and did as I advised.

It took a while for him to be able to look ’round, but when he finally did, sitting at the river’s edge, he had a baffled look on his face. “What happened?” he asked, gaping at the bloodbath all ’round.

I stood fully enwrapt within the buffalo robe and told him it mattered little—what was done, was done. The important thing, I said, was what we were going to do next.

“Well,” he mumbled, rising stiffly to his feet, “we must go.”

I was flabbergasted. Here we were, in the midst of a carnage he himself had created, and Hector not only had no remorse, no contrition, no sympathy, but apparently not the slightest concern at all. Just a few weeks earlier he had been rackt with guilt because he believed he had somehow
wisht
his friend dead, but now he cared not a whit about people he had viciously slaughtered in cold blood! When I pointed this out to him, he shrugged and said they had clearly threatened us, and so forfeited their lives. They were, he said, responsible for their own deaths.

As Hector and I argued, he packed things up. I remained motionless, encased in the buffalo robe, hurling invectives at him every time he walked by. At some point he glanced at me and the light was strong enough by then that he could see inside the buffalo robe. He dropt what he was carrying to come grab my shoulders, but I gasped and shrank from him, which stung him far more than any of my angry words had done. My movement caused the buffalo robe to fall away from my face, and the blood drained from Hector’s. E’en when Syawa died, Hector was not so stricken, so shocked, so destroyed.

I’m sure I looked awful. I had a split lip, which was swelling e’er larger, and the whole right side of my face was a swollen mass of dried blood and bruises. I couldn’t open my right eye, the socket of which was no doubt blackened, and I had a large knot on my head. I didn’t e’en mention the awful pain in my side I believed was a crackt rib.

But I was so angry I wouldn’t let him look at my wounds. I jerked out of his grasp and said that by putting me in danger he had forfeited his right to touch me. He stood there with an open mouth, his eyes devastated. Glaring with my good eye, I watched as his face turned to stone. Then he lifted his chin and went to gather the rest of our things.