Lost Nation (18 page)

“You really want to know? Or you just being nice?”

He turned. “What do you want?”

She said, “This has been so peaceful. Just you and me and nobody wanting nothing. I’d like to hold on to it a bit more. What I’d like is to spend the evening, just the two of us, alone. Quiet. Easy. Like this.” She paused and he heard the fear in her voice as if she were asking too much. She rushed on, “I’d work extra, as long as it took, to make up the difference. I would.”

He stripped a trout from the stick and ate it and tossed the head and bones off to Luther who’d come close in the late afternoon shadows. He wiped his lips with his hand and looked at her. She had not yet eaten. Because he had to, he said, “That’s fair.”

Thinking, You know better. You certainly do. Blame no one else. You tempted fool.

* * *

That morning he’d nailed a cedar shingle to the door with the legend Closed For The Day scribed upon it. In a crude hand someone had penciled underneath
To your returned Health Mr. Blood
. He studied this in the thin dusk, then discarded any connection, however dim, with his own internal ravage as a vanity. He followed Sally in and shut the door. And barred the door from the inside but also left the dog out as caution against any so bold as to approach. There was nothing gained in an evening off if continual breaches were attempted. The dog would hinder any so brash.

Not for the first time, Blood considered the nature of the beast. Eight years old, he’d been with Blood from the age of three months. The man Blood obtained him from had both the Wolfhound sire and the Mastiff dam and so Blood knew both as stouthearted bold creatures and had picked the puppy from the littermates because of his size and reserve. Luther was a dog of slow appraisal and resolute loyalty. Blood would never speak of it to another man but sometime during that first year together he realized the dog held a perceptivity of Blood’s needs, of the tenuous and changeable nature of circumstances. There was some alignment of his mind to Blood’s that allowed him to comprehend without commands what was required of him. Blood wondered if this was some aspect of his own nature, some vibratory field the dog keyed to. Blood did not know and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He had no desire to know himself through the mind of the dog. Otherwise he trusted him absolutely.

The air inside the house was stultified from the closed-up warm day, overlaid with thickened scents of humanity, the odors of living that life itself seemed to abate but absence magnified. Sally was getting a fire going in the kitchen hearth and that would freshen the air. Blood went to her room and opened her narrow high window so air might flow into the house with the door barred. Then out into the drawing night to squat near-blind by the side of the swollen cow, milked and left the bucket outside for the dog. They would need no fresh milk until morning. He entered the enclosure where the young hens and cock had run of the stockade and flapped his arms to drive them into the hutch that was meant to keep bears from hogs and shut and bolted the heavy door. Then back to the tavern. His home, he abruptly comprehended. His first, seventeen years to the day.

* * *

They sat in the kitchen with a candle burning on the table. There was a single ladderback chair and a set of plank benches. The fire was small, a single log resting on a heap of coals with the slightest fingers of flames working. Blood had brought in his two good pewter mugs half filled with rum and the pitcher of water and they sat quietly talking: Blood on a bench and Sally sitting on the table beside him, her feet resting on the bench.

He said, “You favor a high perch.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I noticed you like to sit up atop something. The stool behind the counter or up on the hogsheads. And look at you now.”

“I oughtn’t to set on the table I guess.” She did not move.

“Sit where you like. It was just an observation.”

“I like to see around me. I learned that young. It don’t mean for sure I’ll see what’s coming but it don’t hurt.”

“Well, that’s right.”

“You’re the same way. I seen the way you watch people. Like you’re not doing a thing at all. I know how you work.”

“Do you?”

“I believe so. The only real difference between you and me, Blood, is you got the bulk of a man on your side.”

“You think that’s it?”

“Mostly.” She sipped from her cup. “There’s men respect you and one’s don’t but there ain’t one I seen yet that don’t have a fear of you in them.”

Blood smiled with no pleasure. He said, “And you?”

That girl grin. A glimmer of something else. She looked away. “I’ve got no fear of you.”

“And other men?”

Swift, serious, she said, “I fear them all.”

That was a good thing. He said, “There’s not one you’re a little fond of?”

“You think I’m a fool?”

“No. I do not think that.”

She drank and so did Blood. She said, “I know what I am to these men. Some little bit of time they mostly feel bad about afterward. But it ain’t me they feel bad about, it’s theirselves. It’s what they need I
guess. But it don’t have much to do with me. Others see it different most likely. But that ain’t me either. Do you know why I charge on top of you?”

Blood studied her. Then said, “Everybody wants money.”

Sally drank again and looked back at him. “No. Well, that’s part of it. But I want them to look at me while they pay. I don’t want any of em thinking every bit of me is yours, neither. I got to have some authority over em. But mostly I don’t want the first one of em thinking it’s anything but what it is. I don’t want some idjit confusing fucking with anything else. That would be the worst thing, don’t you think?”

Blood nodded, said nothing. Considering how she’d slipped in the bit about remaining someway separate from him. A small alert perhaps except it made sense.

She paused a moment, perhaps giving him time to sum this. Then went on.

“But the money. You know what it truly is to me?”

Blood drank from his mug which was near empty. He guessed hers was too. It was their one nightly dram. His mind was divided. He wanted more. Guessed she did too. He was apprehensive but mildly expansive. He said, “No, I don’t know. What is it but money?”

She drained her mug and set it down on the tabletop with a precise thump. She peered at him. “You’re going to think I’m mad.”

“I doubt it.”

She craned sideways to look at the fire and then back to him. She said, “I only take coin. Silver coin. I don’t take notes, no paper money. You want to know why?”

He waited.

She went on. “It’s the moon. Those coins in my hand is like a piece of moonlight captured. Or more like loaned to me,” she said. “But I watch the moon. Up in the sky. And it’s all its ownself. There’s nothing there but moon. White and silver and just rolling across heaven. And it looks to me like a nice place to be. Peaceful. And the moonlight falling. Nights I look out at it and the world can be different. I see that the world is more than how it seems daytimes. And I can hold them coins in my hand. Like someplace I never been and never will go to but I know is there.”

And she stopped.

Blood said, “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

She rose from the table to stand on the bench and stepped to the floor. She turned to him and said, “Isn’t that the worst foolishness you ever heared?”

Blood drained off his cup and choked and coughed. His throat a blistered tube. His eyes watered. “Not the worst,” he said. “But close. Close enough.”

He looked upon her erect up before him. Bent forward, intent upon his verdict, her face screwed tight, her arms folded over her chest.

“Oh Sally,” he said. “Go ahead. Go right ahead. Love that moon. It’s the most faithful thing you could ask for.”

Much later. A tin pitcher of rum on the table now and a bucket of water with the dipper tilted across the top. A pair of new logs on the fire and the candle had consumed itself. Outside, Luther had bayed once and that was all. She sat cross-legged on the table with her skirt pulled down over her knees. Just room for their cups between them.

“They say you killed your wife.”

“Is that all they say?”

“No.”

“I told you not to pester me with what you heard.”

“I know.”

They were quiet. Both drank. The firelight was grown liquid, runnels lapping and receding as the logs settled and seethed.

“She died,” he said. “In an accident.”

“A long time ago.”

“Yes,” he said. “It would seem so to you.”

“Not to you.”

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t you be feeling sorry for me.”

“If it was a accident you don’t carry blame for it.”

“I didn’t say that.”

She paused then and drank, looked away from him. Then back. “So you was responsible some way for it? You caused it to happen?”

He considered rising and ending it. He wasn’t sure he trusted himself to continue. He wasn’t sure he trusted her. He wasn’t sure he wouldn’t hurt her. But he remained seated and took up his pewter cup instead, turning it in his hands, watching the light soft in the metal. Then he looked at her and said, “Not the way you think.”

“All right.” But he heard the warble of disbelief.

He sighed and drank and refilled it from the pitcher and drank again. He set the cup on the table, wiped his mouth with his hand and looked at the girl. Her eyes upon him the gaze of wisdom certain unto itself, the gaze of one who has witnessed most all the profusion of bad that life may offer its hostages. One whose notion of humanity extended not much further than ever-changing laws of behavior she must decode against what harm was coming her way. And Blood saw it was not redemption after all that she offered, though he’d never truly believed that. She was a tender balance against the weight of his life. Thought unobtainable and more than he’d dare hope for.

He spoke soft but clear. “My wife died doing something she loved. But at a time and place she knew better than to be. For myself, how I contributed, was being engaged in activities, had she known, would have caused her great distress. I had no reason to think she would learn of them. But life is peculiar and the forces that guide us are not random but of great design unknowable to any of us. In the end I can’t say I weren’t responsible for what befell her. I was. Certainly so. In every way but the most obvious.”

Her face was knotted with thought. She said, “You think she done it on purpose?”

“No.” Quickly.

“I don’t understand.”

“It was an accident. But it was not. It can never be so, in my mind. And there’s no other authority for me to consult. God is silent to me. As He should be. Whatever mercy He might once have extended to me I quelled. As sure as that candle there died. I used up every drop without even knowing I was doing it. And once gone, it does not return. He is not limitless in His mercy, as the preachers would have us think. Like any Father, there is a point where He cries Enough. And I passed that point. I have not looked for any mercy and expect none. In this life or any other.”

It was quiet then in the room. Some time passed. Blood had lived without clocks for a long time. Without markers of any sort time is allowed its own rhythm. It moves slow or fast depending on its need. Now it was very slow.

Finally Sally said, “Maybe it really was just a accident. Something that just happened.”

“Oh it was. As far as that goes. I don’t believe, and never have, that she intended things to turn out as they did. Most I can say, as far as she was concerned, is she was angry. Perhaps nothing beyond knowing something wasn’t right. Even just thinking she could dance close and come to no harm. Whatever she did know, whatever she suspected, no blame lies with her. It’s mine alone. Because, you see, she was not alone.”

Sally considered this. Drank some from her cup. And then very quiet she said, “Who was with her?”

“A boy.”

“Your boy? Yours and hers?”

“Yes.”

“And he died too?”

“Yes.”

“I hadn’t heard that.”

Blood stood. Struggled off the bench and back away from it. Took up his cup and drained it. This time he did not choke. He was very drunk and knew it and possessed of absolute clarity. Everything, all of it, was right before him. The upturned sunburned face of the girl the perfect confessor he’d been seeking. Not believing he’d wanted that until it appeared. In fact the opposite. But he was within it now and there was a surge, a joy unmistakable in the dropped bindings. For an instant he recalled the sound of the knifeblade cutting the sinews that locked the Deacon’s mouth. He set the cup on the table before her and gripped his hands together.

He said, “Yes there was a boy died with her. But there were others as well. Whom I abandoned. A younger boy.” He paused but went on, to have it out, all of it. “And another. The oldest child. A daughter. Have you heard”—he paused again to reconsider but the words would not—“have you heard that part as well?”

She was silent. She hadn’t moved, still cross-legged on the tabletop. Her cup balanced on her folded knee. Her eyes away.

“I regret—,” Blood said and stopped. He was crying. He wanted to believe his tears were pure. That being held for so many years they had gained a purity. He knew it wasn’t so. It could not be so. He tore at his face with his hands as if to break it apart, to stifle this grief undeserved. It was no help. He finished, “I regret everything.”

He fled the house. When he jerked back the door the hound Luther was lying on the step and Blood came near to falling but flailed with his arms to catch the jambs, kicking hard the side of the dog who raised up snarling and Blood kicked the dog again and then was past him, falling running off the step out into the night, around the house. Into the dark. Away.

He went up through the wildgrass dadewater and came to a stop at the edge of the stream where a long-fallen beech lay with several feet of butt-end up on the bank, the trunk a footbridge that led down into midstream, growing more slender as it went. A footbridge to nowhere. There was no moon, just the summer night sky, the bleed of stars white far overhead. Too little light to throw shadow upon the land but the water curled silver in streaks and backwash. The voice of the stream muted in the night, the land silent but for the faint water. It was cold. He straddled the log and sat gazing down its length to where it disappeared into the water.