A Breath of Snow and Ashes (24 page)

Ian had relayed my question to Sequoyah, who squatted down next to Jamie, explaining as he jabbed a finger here and there amongst the bones.

“He says,” Ian translated, frowning, “that he knew the man a long time. They werena friends, exactly, but now and again, when he was near the man’s cabin, he would stop, and the man would share his food. So he would bring things, too, when he came—a hare for the pot, a bit o’ salt.”

One day, a few months back, he had found the old man’s body in the wood, lying under a tree, some distance from his house.

“No one kilt him, he says,” Ian said, frowning in concentration at the rapid stream of words. “He just . . . died. He thinks the man was hunting—he had a knife on him, and his gun beside him—when the spirit left him, and he just fell down.” He echoed Sequoyah’s shrug.

Seeing no reason to do anything with the body, Sequoyah had left it there, and left the knife with it, in case the spirit should require it, wherever it had gone; he did not know where the spirits of white men went, or whether they hunted there. He pointed—there was an old knife, the blade almost rusted away, under the bones.

He had taken the gun, which seemed too good to leave, and as it was on his way, had stopped at the cabin. The old man had owned very little, and what he had was mostly worthless. Sequoyah had taken an iron pot, a kettle, and a jar of cornmeal, which he had carried back to his village.

“He’s no from Anidonau Nuya, is he?” Jamie asked, then repeated the question in Cherokee. Sequoyah shook his head, the small ornaments braided into his hair making a tiny chiming sound.

He was from a village some miles west of Anidonau Nuya—Standing Stone. Bird-who-sings had sent word to the nearby towns, in the wake of Jamie’s visit, asking if there was anyone who knew of the old man and his fate. Hearing Sequoyah’s account, Bird had sent him to collect what was left of the old man, and to bring the remains to Jamie, in proof that no one had killed him.

Ian asked a question, in which I caught the Cherokee word for “fire.” Sequoyah shook his head again, and replied with a stream of words.

He had not burned the cabin—why should he do such a thing? He thought no one had done so. After collecting the old man’s bones—his face showed his distaste for the procedure—he had gone to look at the cabin again. True, it was burned—but it was clear to him that a tree nearby had been struck by lightning, and had set fire to a good bit of the forest near it. The cabin was only half-burned.

He rose to his feet with an air of finality.

“Will he stay for supper?” I asked, seeing that he seemed about to depart.

Jamie conveyed the invitation, but Sequoyah shook his head. He had done what was required of him; now he had other business. He nodded to the other Indians, then turned to go.

Something struck him, though, and he stopped, turning back.

“Tsisqua says,” he said, in the careful way of one who has memorized a speech in an unfamiliar tongue, “you re-mem-ber de guns.” He nodded then decisively, and went.

THE GRAVE WAS MARKED with a small cairn of stones and a small wooden cross made of pine twigs. Sequoyah hadn’t known his acquaintance’s name, and we had no idea of his age, nor yet the dates of birth and death. We hadn’t known if he was Christian, either, but the cross seemed a good idea.

It was a very small burial service, consisting of myself, Jamie, Ian, Bree and Roger, Lizzie and her father, the Bugs, and Bobby Higgins—who I was fairly sure was in attendance only because Lizzie was. Her father seemed to think so, too, judging from the occasional suspicious glances he cast at Bobby.

Roger read a brief psalm over the grave, then paused. He cleared his throat and said simply, “Lord, we commend to Thy care the soul of this our brother . . .”

“Ephraim,” murmured Brianna, eyes cast modestly down.

A subterranean sense of laughter moved through the crowd, though no one actually laughed. Roger gave Bree a dirty look, but I saw the corner of his mouth twitching, as well.

“. . . of our brother, whose name Thou knowest,” Roger concluded with dignity, and closed the Book of Psalms he had borrowed from Hiram Crombie—who had declined an invitation to attend the funeral.

The light had gone by the time Sequoyah had finished his revelations the night before, and I was obliged to put off Miss Mouse’s dental work to the morning. Stewed to the gills, she made no objection, and was helpfully supported off to a bed on the kitchen floor by Bobby Higgins—who might or might not be in love with Lizzie, but who seemed nonetheless most appreciative of Miss Mouse’s charms.

Once finished with the tooth-drawing, I had suggested that she and her friends stay for a bit, but they, like Sequoyah, had business elsewhere, and with many thanks and small gifts, had departed by mid-afternoon, smelling strongly of whisky, and leaving us to dispose of the mortal remains of the late Ephraim.

Everyone went back down the hill after the service, but Jamie and I loitered behind, seeking an opportunity to be alone for a few minutes. The house had been full of Indians the night before, with much talk and storytelling by the fire, and by the time we had finally gone to bed, we had simply curled up in each other’s arms and fallen asleep, barely exchanging the brief civility of a “good night.”

The graveyard was sited on a small rise, some distance from the house, and was a pretty, peaceful place. Surrounded by pines whose golden needles blanketed the earth, and whose murmuring branches provided a constant soft susurrus, it seemed a comforting spot.

“Poor old creature,” I said, putting a final pebble on Ephraim’s cairn. “How do you suppose he ended up in such a place?”

“God knows.” Jamie shook his head. “There are always hermits, men who mislike the society of their fellows. Perhaps he was one o’ those. Or perhaps some misfortune drove him into the wilderness, and he . . . stayed.” He shrugged a little, and gave me a half-smile.

“I sometimes wonder how any of us came to be where we are, Sassenach. Don’t you?”

“I used to,” I said. “But after a time, there didn’t seem to be any possibility of an answer, so I stopped.”

He looked down at me, diverted.

“Have ye, then?” He put out a hand and tucked back a lock of windblown hair. “Perhaps I shouldna ask it, then, but I will. Do ye mind, Sassenach? That ye
are
here, I mean. Do ye ever wish ye were—back?”

I shook my head.

“No, not ever.”

And that was true. But I woke sometimes in the dead of night, thinking,
Is now the dream?
Would I wake again to the thick warm smell of central heating and Frank’s Old Spice? And when I fell asleep again to the scent of woodsmoke and the musk of Jamie’s skin, would feel a faint, surprised regret.

If he saw the thought on my face, he gave no sign of it, but bent and kissed me gently on the forehead. He took my arm, and we walked a little way into the wood, away from the house and its clearing below.

“Sometimes I smell the pines,” he said, taking a deep, slow breath of the pungent air. “And I think for an instant I am in Scotland. But then I come to myself and see; there is no kindly bracken here, nor great barren mountains—not the wildness that I kent, but only wilderness that I do not.”

I thought I heard nostalgia in his voice, but not sorrow. He’d asked, though; so would I.

“And do you ever wish to be . . . back?”

“Oh, aye,” he said, surprising me—and then laughed at the look on my face. “But not enough not to wish more to be here, Sassenach.”

He glanced over his shoulder at the tiny graveyard, with its small collection of cairns and crosses, with here and there a larger boulder marking a particular grave.

“Did ye ken, Sassenach, that some folk believe the last person to lie in a graveyard becomes its guardian? He must stand on guard until the next person dies and comes to take his place—only then can he rest.”

“I suppose our mysterious Ephraim might be rather surprised to find himself in such a position, when here he’d lain down under a tree all alone,” I said, smiling a little. “But I do wonder: what is the guardian of a graveyard guarding—and from whom?”

He laughed at that.

“Oh . . . vandals, maybe; desecraters. Or charmers.”

“Charmers?” I was surprised at that; I’d thought the word “charmer” synonymous with “healer.”

“There are charms that call for bones, Sassenach,” he said. “Or the ashes of a burnt body. Or soil from a grave.” He spoke lightly enough, but with no sense of jesting. “Aye, even the dead may need defending.”

“And who better to do it than a resident ghost?” I said. “Quite.”

We climbed up through a stand of quivering aspen, whose light dappled us with green and silver, and I paused to scrape a blob of the crimson sap from a paper-white trunk. How odd, I thought, wondering why the sight of it gave me pause—and then remembered, and turned sharply to look again at the graveyard.

Not a memory, but a dream—or a vision. A man, battered and broken, rising to his feet amid a stand of aspen, rising for what he knew was the last time, his last fight, baring shattered teeth stained with blood that was the color of the aspens’ sap. His face was painted black for death—and I knew that there were silver fillings in his teeth.

But the granite boulder stood silent and peaceful, drifted all about with yellow pine needles, marking the rest of the man who had once called himself Otter-Tooth.

The moment passed, and vanished. We walked out of the aspens, and into another clearing, this one higher than the rise the graveyard stood on.

I was surprised to see that someone had been cutting timber here, and clearing the ground. A sizable stack of felled logs lay to one side, and nearby lay a tangle of uprooted stumps, though several more, still rooted in the ground, poked through the heavy growth of wood sorrel and bluet.

“Look, Sassenach.” Jamie turned me with a hand on my elbow.

“Oh. Oh, my.”

The ground rose high enough here that we could look out over a stunning vista. The trees fell away below us, and we could see beyond our mountain, and beyond the next, and the next, into a blue distance, hazed with the breath of the mountains, clouds rising from their hollows.

“D’ye like it?” The note of proprietorial pride in his voice was palpable.

“Of course I like it. What—?” I turned, gesturing at the logs, the stumps.

“The next house will stand here, Sassenach,” he said simply.

“The
next
house? What, are we building another?”

“Well, I dinna ken will it be us, or maybe our children—or grandchildren,” he added, mouth curling a little. “But I thought, should anything happen—and I dinna think anything
will,
mind, but if it should—well, I should be happier to have made a start. Just in case.”

I stared at him for a moment, trying to make sense of this. “Should anything happen,” I said slowly, and turned to look to the east, where the shape of our house was just visible among the trees, its chimney smoke a white plume among the soft green of the chestnuts and firs. “Should it really . . . burn down, you mean.” Just putting the idea into words made my stomach curl up into a ball.

Then I looked at him again, and saw that the notion scared him, too. But Jamie-like, he had simply set about to take what action he could, against the day of disaster.

“D’ye like it?” he repeated, blue eyes intent. “The site, I mean. If not, I can choose another.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, feeling tears prickle at the backs of my eyes. “Just beautiful, Jamie.”

HOT AFTER THE CLIMB, we sat down in the shade of a giant hemlock, to admire our future view. And, with the silence broken concerning the dire possibility of the future, found we could discuss it.

“It’s not so much the idea of us dying,” I said. “Or not entirely. It’s that ‘no surviving children’ that gives me the whim-whams.”

“Well, I take your point, Sassenach. Though I’m no in favor of us dying, either, and I mean to see we don’t,” he assured me. “Think, though. It might not mean they’re dead. They might only . . . go.”

I took a deep breath, trying to accept that supposition without panic.

“Go. Go back, you mean. Roger and Bree—and Jemmy, I suppose. We’re assuming he can—can travel through the stones.”