The Devil's Paintbox (24 page)

Her head was barely above the water. The current was too strong for her to even raise her other arm. Carlos's fingers tore through the fabric of her sleeve and dug into the flesh of her arm. He strained and pulled and Aiden saw her shoulder appear. Carlos heaved and suddenly she was halfway out. He saw her free arm swing up and grasp the deck. A rope flung from shore landed across her back. Aiden's heart surged with relief. Then the ferry heaved again and in an instant, she was gone. The last thing Aiden saw was her small white hand, frail and fluttering like a bird in a storm. Aiden scrambled after her, but Carlos grabbed him by the shirt and held him back.

“Let me go!” Aiden tried to wrench free. Carlos flung a leg over his back and pinned him down. Then someone else grabbed him and pulled him back. There was a sudden bump as the ferry slammed into shore. A dozen men swarmed onto the ferry with ropes, and then Aiden was being dragged across the deck. Then Jackson was there, and too many men holding on to him; then things went all soft and quiet for a while.

When Aiden came to a few minutes later, he was sitting on the muddy bank, propped against a gatepost. He saw Carlos lying on the ground nearby, Jackson standing over him with a boot on his shoulder, pulling up on his arm. Carlos gave a brief, thin cry, then rolled over and pressed his face into the ground.

Things happened in little bits.

A mule stumbled with a broken foreleg, the bone ends sticking out and horribly white.

Carlos lay terribly still, holding his damaged arm tight to his body.

Marguerite cried.

Someone shot the mule in the head.

The Thompson children were a great pile of each other, hugging and crying.

Strong men, urgent and all the same, pulled ropes and heaved parcels and dragged damage up on the shore.

The Reverend Gabriel True lay propped against a crate, his face ghostly white. Marguerite held his head in trembling hands and talked to him in French. Jackson bent over Carlos, then lifted him under the good arm and brought him to the ailing man.

Aiden tried to get up and discovered he was tied to a gatepost.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Cut me loose!” He thrashed from side to side and jerked his wrists against the rope.

“Quiet.” Jackson came over and squatted beside Aiden.

“Where's Maddy?”

“They're still looking.”

“Let me go. Why am I tied?”

“Don't need any more bodies in the river today.”

“I need to find her.”

Jackson said nothing, just stared at him grimly. “Plenty of men out looking.”

“She could be washed up in any bend!”

“We're searching all the bends.”

“Her dress is brown. She could be missed. Let me go!” Aiden kicked at Jackson, wild with fury. Jackson backhanded him hard across the face.

“Settle down, boy! You don't own all the grief today! Joby's gone. Three others gone. The reverend's had a heart pain, and Carlos nearly got his arm pulled off trying to save
your own sister and you both.” Jackson wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Took four men to drag you back already. I have to keep you tied. No good you doing something crazy. You understand.”

“Yes, I've a debt to pay” he said bitterly.

“You've a life to live,” Jackson said as he got up. “Besides the debt.”

All afternoon, men rode down both sides of the river. After them, women walked, examining the bends and crevices, while older children searched on the banks, calling the names of the missing. Six people had wound up in the river. One was pulled out alive. A man from the other ferry was found dead close by, and the top half of another man was discovered a mile away, torn apart on the rocks. That man's wife had also been thrown in and was still missing, along with Joby and Maddy

Boxes and crates, dead animals and bits of broken wagons were brought in. There was no rhyme or reason. An iron skillet was found folded like a badly flipped pancake, while a china statue of a dancing lady washed up on a sandbar without so much as a chip. The Thompsons’ dog was found two miles down the river, scared and shivering but alive and unbroken. An ironclad wagon wheel was twisted into a pretzel, but Carlos's anatomy book was found between some rocks, wedged so tightly the inside pages were dry.

It was dusk when they brought Joby in. His face was gray but unbattered, and in the soft evening light, he almost appeared to be sleeping. But as they laid him on the ground, Aiden saw how his head dangled, as if his neck were made of
rope. Carlos didn't say anything. Someone had tied his injured arm up in a sling. In his good hand, he held a small piece of Maddy's sleeve, which he rubbed constantly. Aiden would not speak to or even look at him.

Three graves were dug on a hillside nearby. There was no preacher for a service, for Reverend True was still sick, but people came up with enough Bible verses to satisfy the occasion. The two dead oxen were butchered for food, and the dead mule went for the dogs. They were the only ones resting easy that night, lying about nearly comatose, bellies swollen with unexpected plenty, tongues lazing out, paws twitching in fat, contented dreams.

Aiden was left tied. Marguerite, Mrs. Thompson and some others came over and tried to comfort him, but he would not have anyone near. He gouged his wrists bloody struggling to get free. Finally, Jackson and the Kansas boys all held him still while the widower forced a dose of laudanum down his throat.

As the queer, peaceful feeling overtook his body, Aiden watched night fall. Cookfires appeared. Torches twinkled on both banks, and the light sparkled on the rushing water so it looked like the river was full of stars. It could have been a beautiful parade, the welcoming for an ancient king. And it was, Aiden thought, for death was the most ancient king, and his entourage too fond of sparkle.

He felt himself floating up and looking down on the river. He did not want Maddy's body found. He could stand her being dead if he didn't have to see her body. He could not bear to hear the dirt fall on another coffin. He thought of the babies; sad, vague little bundles, swaddled in a mere apron or
strip of worn-out sheet. He remembered their exquisite little fingernails and the tiny delicate ears, monstrous for their awful perfection. Every time, though they measured well, the coffin turned out to be too big. There hadn't even been a good coffin since Ada. His father's was barely a platform of broken boards, and his mother had none at all, for the fire had burned everything of wood. They had wrapped her in only a sheet. Maddy had wanted to use the quilt, for softening, but Aiden wouldn't let her. Winter was coming. She fought him for it. He hit her then. The only time ever. After that he went out on the burned ground and cried so hard it was like his insides had turned liquid and poured from him, from his eyes and nose and mouth. No ordinary tears, but something foul and thick, and disgustingly sweet. But he won in the end. They laid her down wrapped in only a sheet and came through the winter because of that quilt.

Why? Why had he even bothered? He felt the drugged calm overtake him. Better Maddy be torn apart on the rocks. Better to have her swept to the sea, to someplace else in the
Atlas of the World.

Someone brought him a drink of water. Campfires and torches swirled through the darkness. He waited for more visions. He waited for his whole lost family to show up, happy now, for a picnic in the green fields of heaven. But the only field he saw was full of dying potatoes swelling like corpses and collapsing into their wet black skins. Finally the drug overwhelmed him and he fell into dense, boggy sleep.

People searched all night, but by morning, the awful tally could not be denied: one alive, three dead, two unrecovered. Aiden woke groggy and numb, though he was untied and
wrapped in blankets. His wrists were swathed in thick bandages. His feet were bare. This angered him. Did Jackson think he would not go after Maddy just because his boots were gone?

The morning sun was warm and indecently bright. People moved about with a jittery purposefulness, fidgeting with harnesses and fussing with knots, for there was nothing else really to be done. Everyone wanted to leave but felt wrong to suggest it. Finally just after noon, Jackson gave the order to move on. They could not camp forever here on the muddy bank. The ferry was repaired and had to resume traffic. The season was too short and the trail too long to delay others from crossing. And the river was too fierce and cold to allow any hope by now.

“I'm known in these parts,” Jackson told Aiden. “Word will get to me if her body is found.”

And so they moved on, in a silent, numb march, grim and guilty in their fortunes.

t was another sixteen days to Seattle. Aiden spoke to no one. He walked and did his work. Food came to him and he walked west and that was all. The Cascade Mountains were beautiful, but it was like a picture seen through a window in someone else's parlor as you passed in the street outside. The Reverend True recovered and Aiden was glad, but it was a flat, distant gladness, like hearing the crops were good that year in Australia.

Sometimes as he walked, Aiden thought up ways that Maddy might have survived. If she rolled up in a ball, the current could have carried her miles and miles through the rocks and rapids and let her off gently on the bank of some distant village. She could be miraculously unbroken. Perhaps not the smallest bones, the delicate seashell bones of wrist and ankle, where she would have grasped at rocks, but she could climb the bank with these small bones broken—in pain, yes—but she could climb and be found. A letter would come soon. But he knew too well the power of the river and the deep cold there.

It was only the walking that gave him solace, the steps taken over and over each day with incalculable rhythm and dull aching. At the end of each day he went off into the woods by himself and built things—huge piles of rocks or stacks of branches. He did not know why he did it, except that it occupied his mind and his strength. He could not sit around the fire at night, or lie in his blanket and look at the
stars. He could not bear to talk to people or hear them talk, because it meant that they were all alive when Maddy was not. Not a word or a glance passed between him and Carlos. As the days wore on, Aiden's constructions became more elaborate. He laid the stones in spirals or twisting paths through the trees. If there was a creek, he would make dams, diverting the water into trenches he carved in the dirt, as if compelled by some strange ancient force, maybe the force that had spurred Stonehenge and Easter Island and the Great Sphinx of Egypt. Maybe he was going insane. But maybe, maybe Maddy would see from heaven and know it was for her. He had missed the work of digging her grave, so he would carry rocks instead. The only thing he was sure of was that by the time he wore himself out with stones and the sweat began to chill his skin, he would have peace enough to sleep for a few hours before dawn.

They camped the final night ten miles outside Seattle. Jackson had arranged for a man to take his two wagons on to Seattle, then ship the trade goods by boat up the coast to a trading post he owned north of the city. In the morning, the group would continue on alone to Seattle while Jackson went north to the logging camp to deliver his “strays” and collect his bounty.

That night, Aiden did not go back to the camp at all. He could not bear farewells. All these people had become part of his life, but that life was over now, and he wanted no reminders: no thoughts for the future, no wishes for luck or Godspeed. God had stepped out of his journey long ago. Aiden sat out the night, watching the moonlight cast stick-stripes on the ground as it moved across the sky. In the
morning he waited until he heard the wagons roll out, then went down from the hillside.

The camp area looked forlorn, nothing but flattened grass and wheel scars, charred remnants of cookfires and a maze of footprints in the damp ground. He recognized Marguerite's, from the tiny triangle of her instep and the way the toes pressed down as if she were always dancing. For a bizarre few seconds, he found himself automatically looking for Maddy's nearby. He jumped when Jackson walked up beside him.

“I sent your books along in my wagon,” Jackson said simply. “I'll keep them for you. I would have asked was there any you wanted to take with you, but—”