Alexander C. Irvine (37 page)

These slaves

—”The Eagle and the Jaguar”

The Mississippi river
gleamed broad and bright under a warm cloudless sky, as wide as a lake but moving slowly south, building islands and erasing others in its patient journey to New Orleans. Life was everywhere. Weeds grew on waterlogged snags that accumulated silt from the river, and frogs rested on the snags, and herons hunted for frogs among the weeds. Archie was beginning to breathe a little easier.

There had been times in the past three weeks when he’d started awake in the middle of the night, wondering
How will things grow now? Will the rain still fall or will the rivers dry up?

What have I done?

But men create gods, he reminded himself. And he added something that Tamanend hadn’t said: Men create gods, but life— the world—creates itself.

Archie leaned on the railing of the steamer
St. Louis,
watching Jane as she gazed out over the water with an expression of pure joy on her face. She’d done nothing but talk about the river since they’d boarded the
St. Louis
in Louisville, besieging him with facts about its breadth and length and notoriety as a Waterloo for careless navigators.

He’d been happy to see her react that way to the prospect of a trip. They’d stayed two weeks at the Mammoth Cave Hotel, recovering from their ordeal, and during that time Jane had been moody and prone to nightmares, clinging to Archie wherever he went. Of course he couldn’t blame her. The wounds of abandonment she had suffered would take years to heal. The scars on her body, though, had faded to light pink tracings on one side of her face and her arms. The chacmool had done that much for her.

The one place she had refused to follow him was into the hotel’s barn, part of which was used to store carriages. Riley Steen’s yellow drummer-wagon sat under a film of dust, looking strangely like an archaeological find amid the tack and farming implements hanging from the walls. Archie had gone through it, looking for anything he could sell or barter; he found a bizarre assortment of potions and elixirs, a collection of puppets, books in several languages, and a lockbox that when broken open proved to contain nearly three hundred dollars in various currencies. Not a fortune by any means, but enough of a stake to get him and Jane settled wherever they decided to go.

That night he’d asked her if she wanted to return to New York. “Eww, no,” she said, screwing up her face in such a delightfully childish expression that Archie had nearly broken down in tears at the sight of it. He did that fairly often, whenever some action or speech of hers struck him or reminded him of Helen. He supposed that, like her nightmares, this lachrymose tendency would pass, but for now it was good to be reminded of Helen, reminded of what it had been like to be a part of a family.

Like almost everyone else they spoke to, Jane wanted to go West. “San Francisco,” she said, her face alight with fantasy, and he’d agreed. But he thought perhaps Oregon would be a better place for them. Like Peter Daigle, Archie found himself suddenly averse to large cities.

West, in any case. If it was already too late in the year to join a wagon train, Archie figured he could find some sort of work until next spring; after all, he’d acquired a few skills in the course of his travels. Also he would have to see about getting Jane into school.

Archie had given the wagon to Stephen, who had set about whitewashing it and trading its contents for a down payment on two horses. He meant to buy his freedom, he said, and go to Monrovia in Africa. Acquiring whatever property he could was the first step. Archie wished him luck and wondered if he had discharged his oath. Was it peace to have a goal in sight, and believe you had the means to achieve it?

“I ought to thank you, Stephen,” Archie had said, standing by as Stephen scraped the painted slogans away from the drummer-wagon’s sideboards.

“You’re welcome, Mr. Prescott.” Stephen paused long enough to nod at Archie.

“You didn’t have to do that for me. I know—” Archie’s throat dried up as he thought of Alfonse in the waters of the Dead Sea, somewhere beneath their feet. “I mean, I think I know the promises the chacmool made you. It spoke to me as well.”

“Mr. Prescott,” Stephen said, laying the scraper down on a worktable, “I didn’t do it for you.”

Then he had walked out behind the barn. They had parted amicably, Archie supposed, with a kind of unspoken agreement to let sleeping dogs lie. Fair enough.

A May Day festival was taking place on Laclede’s Landing, with crowds of people and a fiddle-and-banjo group whose sprightly music drifted across the expanse of brown water. Jane rushed up to Archie, pointing at the gaily dressed crowd. “Can we go to the festival, Da?” she asked, tugging at his hand.

“Of course we can,” he replied. “It wouldn’t be a holiday if we didn’t see a festival.”

She smiled at him, and he felt another sudden urge to weep with joy at the sight of her. Then a shadow passed over her face, and she said, “Oh.”

“What is it?” he said, fearing she was about to lapse back into her melancholia.

She opened the small handbag he’d bought her in Louisville to go with a new dress and shoes. “I kept this, I don’t know why,” she said, and brought out a triangular-bladed knife of chipped obsidian.

Archie took it from her and turned it over in his hands, feeling a tightening in his chest around the scar below his left nipple. He had felt this knife biting into the heart of his other self, the one splayed on the altar in Jane’s place.

Or had Jane been there in his place?

He didn’t know. But Helen’s knife was gone, and this relic was what remained.

“No, that’s exactly right,” he said to Jane, keeping his voice steady. “When we cross the Mississippi, we should say goodbye to everything on the other side.”

He drew back his arm and threw the knife far out over the water, drawing the attention of some of the other passengers gathered on the deck. It sparkled in a high arc before skipping once and splashing into the river.

Jane watched the spot where it had fallen for a moment, her face troubled. Then she nestled against his side. “Nobody’ll ever find it there,” she said firmly.

“No, they won’t,” Archie agreed. He put his arm around her, and they listened to the floating strains of fiddle music as the
St. Louis
steamed toward the festival throng celebrating May Day on Laclede’s Landing.