The Spirit Keeper (38 page)

As he finisht breaking camp, I dug through the trader’s packs. Hector told me to leave their things alone, but I ignored him. Considering all the fighting I’d done recently, I decided I needed more weapons than just a hatchet, so I took a hide bundle of knives, a sword, some tools, and a pouch full of metal arrow and spear points. I don’t know why, but I also pulled out the leather satchel containing the beaverskin-wrapt ledgers. I guess I felt bad about killing that poor man and because the ledgers meant so much to him, I just couldn’t leave them to rot on the riverbank. It was bad enough I had to leave him.

When Hector asked about the satchel, I told him it was something he was too stupid to understand. His delicious lips compressed into a bitter line, and I lifted my own chin, glad I had hurt him.

Before we left, I insisted on doing something about the bodies. Hector said wolves would take care of them, but I would not get into the canoe ’til he dragged the corpses into the river. I’m sure it was foolish on my part, but I was inordinately worried about someone finding the carnage and coming after us to hang us as murderers. I reckoned if the dead men were in the river, at least our crimes would be more difficult to trace. Besides—it seemed appropriate to me their misery should end in the Misery.

Pulling the eviscerated man into the water took Hector only a moment, and the flathead, too, was soon swallowed by the current. But when he went to the half-breed and saw the hatchet in his back, he stopt and stared. He looked up at me, his eyes narrowed. I met his gaze unhappily, accusatively, and he turned to drag the body to the river. He cleaned off the hatchet and packed it away without meeting my eyes again.

Hector and I got into the canoe and set off in silence.

~30~

T
HE SKY WAS DULL
gray and my hair was still quite damp. By afternoon the wind picked up again, and e’en inside the buffalo robe I was numb from head to toe. When my hands grew so numb I dropt my paddle, Hector grabbed it from the water, pulled the canoe to shore, started a fire, and bade me sit under the canoe behind the flames. “I know you do not want me to touch you,” he said in a strained voice, “but you must allow me to warm you.” He took off his shirt and wrapt his body ’round mine before pulling the buffalo robe ’round us both.

I leaned the uninjured side of my face against his chest, sucking in his body heat the way a chimney sucks up smoke. “I want you to touch me,” I whimpered. “I was just so frightened . . .”

“Of me?” he asked, incredulous.

“Yes.”

Saying he could remember little from the night before, he asked me to tell him what happened. I told him what I knew, his fingers gently exploring the swollen parts of my face. When I described the way the man dragged me, Hector’s hand stopt in mid-air and began to shake. Suddenly he writhed out of the buffalo robe and crawled across the riverbank to vomit. After he finally stopt heaving, he remained on his knees with his head in his hands, saying he had failed me and could never, ever ask me to forgive him.

And then a very strange thing happened, a thing I ne’er imagined, a thing I could not believe e’en as it was happening to me. I suddenly understood my mother.

All those times she forgave my father, all the times she took him back—I always thought she was insane. But now I understood. There was nothing else she could do. She needed him, and, what was worse, she actually
wanted
him. When he was sober he was charming, smart, funny, fun. Of course she wanted him. She loved him. And so she forgave him. Time and time and time again. Just the way I was going to forgive Hector. Just the way I must, sooner or later, finally forgive my mother.

I was so much worse than she had e’er been. Her husband did what—made drunken threats, blustered, bullied, lost a few fortunes? Mine snapt people’s necks and tore out their intestines. My father had turned my mother into a screaming harpy who beat and tormented defenseless children. My husband had turned me into a loathsome murderer. But none of this mattered. I still loved him. I still wanted him. And I would forgive him, whether he asked me to or not.

Because just like my mother, I had no choice.

I begged Hector not to dwell on my injuries. “I’ve been beaten more times than I can remember,” I reminded him. “It truly means nothing to me.” He moaned that it meant everything, everything to him, and he would not look at me, he would not come back to me ’til I said that seeing him suffer this way hurt me much more than any beating. At that he looked up sharply, nodded, and went to wash his face and get a long, slow drink. As he came back to wrap himself ’round me again, I told him he must not blame himself for what happened—it was all because of the bad water.

In a raspy voice punctuated with coughs, I told him how the intoxicating spirits had devastated my life long before I was born. I told him about my father and my mother and my brothers and myself and all the ways demon rum had tormented us. He listened silently, his cheek against my hair, his hand absent-mindedly rubbing my arm. Whilst I talked, I couldn’t stop thinking about how those gentle hands which touched me now so tenderly could snap my neck as easily as they had snapt the neck of that flathead. I couldn’t stop thinking about how he had been prepared to accept permanent exile when he thought he broke some petty rule, but he evinced not a flicker of remorse or regret after eviscerating another human being. I understood so little about this man, and yet here I was, commending myself entirely into his hands, body and soul.

What a leap of faith is love.

When I, at long, long last, exhausted myself in talking, Hector quietly asked why my people made the bad water if they knew it was bad. I sighed. It was a reasonable question. “I wish I knew. It’s almost as if we
must
make it now, as if . . . as if it
makes
us make it somehow. It makes us do so many things we do not mean to do . . .”

Hector nodded, saying that was the way of Evil Spirits. If he had known the water contained an Evil Spirit, he said, he would have tossed it in the fire.

By this time my shivering had subsided, tho’ my chest was beginning to burn and my cough was getting thick. Hector left me rolled in the buffalo robe as he went to heat some of our dried meat. He warmed water in the drinking horn with hot rocks, then tossed in shredded bark. Nothing e’er tasted better to me than that warm beverage, but I wasn’t much interested in the meat. I ate enough to satisfy Hector, then lay down and closed my eyes as darkness settled in.

Suddenly I was a child again, sick in bed with some combination of my siblings. Throughout my childhood, one or another of us was always sick, and as bad as it was for us to fight each other when we were well, it was much worse to struggle against one another when we were ill. One disease after another, year after year, left us perpetually rolling back and forth in alternate chills and fevers, trying to create a space for ourselves in the crowded bed so we could lie in our own bodily fluids instead of those of someone else.

The worst was the pox. This was, far and away, the most traumatic memory of my early years, the most wretched experience I’d known before that fateful day in May some ten years later. I was in the sickbed with four or five others, somewhere in the middle of the straw ticking, which was ne’er a comfortable place to be, filled as it was with elbows, knees, and feet kicking from both sides. I was gruesomely ill, but for me, at least, the burning pox were confined mostly to my hands and feet, with only a few erupting on my face. My sister Ellie was not so lucky—her face literally bubbled with the vile pustules. Ellie was seven to my five, and we had formed an alliance against the others, fighting always as a team, side by side. Now we fought the illness together, and I held her close e’en tho’ it made me feel sicker each time I looked at her pox-covered countenance.

Day after day we petted each other and murmured loving encouragements. After moaning and tossing in feverish dreams for more than a week, I dissolved into delirium, regaining my senses a day or two later when my fever finally broke. I awoke in a prodigious pool of sweat and immediately felt bad about befouling the bed. I turned my head to look at Ellie to commiserate, but she was lying on her side, staring at me with vacant, glassy eyes. The curled hand beside her cheek was like a door latch, the ice-cold fingers stiff and hard. I screamed and screamed.

As I lay under a canoe somewhere in the middle of a wild continent, I found myself, once again, face-to-face with the cold cadaver of my dead sister. Her eyes were icy blue, exactly the same as mine, but hers were empty, dead, abandoned, and the pustules on her face bubbled, burst, and oozed; from every one of those popping pox an evil liquid dript and from every sizzling drop of evil liquid a Demon Spirit erupted and writhed and danced. I screamed and screamed, trying to get away, but the flood of dancing demons had fallen upon me, pinning me to the ground. I screamed and kicked and rolled helplessly under the weight of them, which felt like the entire universe of stars sitting on my chest. Then I realized it was the buffalo robe I was kicking and it was Hector I was trying to get away from as he hovered o’er me, his face pale with fear. He said a string of things I could not understand and my head flopt back and forth because I could not keep my eyes open, I could not make myself wake up, and I was hot, hot, so hot with fever. I heard a sob—from Hector or Ellie, I knew not which—and then there was only silence and softness and nothing . . .

 . . .and then it was bright daylight and Syawa was sitting beside me, smiling as I opened my eyes. I looked ’round, startled, expecting to see the riverbank and the canoe, but we were in a beautiful woodland meadow and it was spring and there were flowers everywhere. I rose up on one elbow to look ’round, marveling at the vivid colors of the flowers, the golden sunshine, and the blue, blue sky. I looked back at Syawa, my mouth open in wonder, but he just smiled that smile of his, that enchanting smile . . .

“Am I dead?” I asked, a wave of anguish rising in me. I so very much did not want to be dead.

“Not yet,” he said, smiling.

“Am I going to die?” I was shaking, shivering, in spite of the wondrously warm spring air.

“Everyone dies.”

“Like you . . .” I mumbled, which made Syawa chuckle.

“Not everyone dies like me. But, of course, not everyone has a Spirit Keeper.”

I sat up, momentarily struck by the fact this conversation was in English. When did Syawa learn English? Then I smelled the glorious perfume of all those flowers, which was so intoxicating, so invigorating. I turned back to Syawa and momentarily lost myself in the intensity of his eyes, his eyes. Oh, I had forgotten how bewitching were his eyes.

I looked unhappily into my lap. “You have made a liar of me! You made me lie to him!”

“Did I?” Syawa seemed confounded. He lightly touched my hair the way he used to do, as if he knew he shouldn’t but just couldn’t stop himself.

I looked at him, surprised how different it felt when he touched me compared to when Hector touched me. “Of course!” I said. “He believes this Spirit Keeper nonsense, and you know it isn’t true!”

“Do I?”

“Damn it! I’m sick of the way you play with me! You know damned well I’m not a Spirit Keeper because you know damned well there is no such thing. And don’t say
‘Do I?’
!”

Syawa laughed. I had forgotten how warm and bubbly his laughter made me feel. It felt good, so good. My anger disappeared. He said, “You say there is no such thing. Do you know every thing that is?”

“No.” I saw him lift an amused eyebrow and tip his head, and I looked away. “But I know I am lying to him. And I know I have to tell him the truth!”

From the corner of my eye I saw Syawa nodding thoughtfully as he sat amidst the flowers, but when I turned my face we were walking shoulder to shoulder under the enormous leaf canopy of the great eastern forest. “Do you know what the truth is?” he asked gently.

I stopt and looked ’round, confused. I gaped at him. He smiled. My shoulders slumped as I hung my head. “No.” I thought for a moment, then looked up hopefully. “But I know I love him. I know that is definitely true.”

Syawa grinned broadly as we walked. “Then that is what you should definitely tell him.”

I frowned, distracted by the amazing detail of the sticks and leaves on the ground, but when I looked up again the leaves on the trees were gone and the sun was beating down on me, hot, hot, so hot. I looked mournfully at Syawa, who was pensive, quiet, and I said, “I’m going to lose this baby, aren’t I?”

He gave me a sympathetic smile. “There will be others.”

I stopt walking and started to cry. “But I wanted this one!”

He took my hand and squeezed it, and my entire body felt suddenly weightless, filled with light, like a warm breeze. “It is hard, I know, but you will see. You will learn. Then will come acceptance.”

I wafted my face in his direction, only to find we were sitting now before a raging fire, with darkness surrounding everything but us and the snapping flames. I whimpered, “I took a life so I must give a life, yes?”

Syawa made a face as he shook his head. “No. You must give a life because you refused to use the gift I gave you. You were supposed to protect him, the way he always protected me, the way he now protects you.”

“But what was I supposed to protect him
from
?” I asked, looking uneasily at the darkness.

The darkness began spinning, spinning. Frightened, I looked to Syawa, whose eyes were so much blacker than the darkness and absolutely, perfectly still. He said sadly, “It was you.”

“Me?” I asked in disbelief.

“It was your people. You should have stopt him from drinking.”

I drew my breath in so sharply a rush of flames from the fire entered my mouth and nose, seering my throat and lungs. I coughed and coughed and coughed as I said, “But I tried to stop him! I told him to stop! He wouldn’t listen to me!”

Syawa’s eyes burnt into me even hotter than the flames had done, flickering yellow and orange and red. “He would have listened to
me
!”