The Snake River (29 page)

As a body, the deacons stood up to leave.

Sima ran up to his pony in a blind fury. He didn’t know whether to moan, sob, wail, shriek, or bellow. His pride in self-control—his
Indian
pride—kept his face a little straight. He had the reins and was into the saddle in one jump.

Someone grabbed the reins.

Flare.

My goddamn father.

Sima jerked at the reins. He wanted to be
out
of here. Anywhere. Away from my bastard of a father who denies me.

Flare held the reins hard, and looked hard at Sima. His eyes brimmed with tears.

“Sima,” said Flare, “I’m past due telling you something. I want to do it right now.”

Sima kicked his horse. The pony lunged. Flare threw himself to the side, dragged the pony’s head along, held the horse.

Flare stood, shook himself, and looked gravely at Sima.

Sima jumped off the horse and ran.

Flare took off after him, and to the devil with the horse.

Over a log. Around a tree with a double trunk.

Going hard—Flare began to wonder if a father could keep up with a grown son twenty years younger.

Breath coming hard now.

Sima jumped down the bank into the creek, splashed downstream fast.

Flare ran along the top of the bank and gained a little. He would never gain enough.

He had to try something. “Ow-w-w!” he hollered.

Sima turned to look.

Flare took another step and without breaking stride launched his body toward Sima.

Crash of bodies. They fell down in a tangle. Came up sputtering and shaking water off.

Flare threw one foot across Sima’s lap, hard.

“Wait!” he said into Sima’s face. “Be quiet.”

He reached with a hand and slipped the moccasin off his foot. Lying back into the water, he lifted the foot high. Spread the toes with his fingers.

The toes were webbed.

“I should have told you long ago,” said Flare.

Suddenly hot tears choked him. “I-I-I am your father.”

He held his arms open.

Sima leaned into his father’s arms.

They sat in the creek and hugged and wept.

Chapter Thirty-two

Her dear brother. She would have to persuade her brother, who had never acknowledged she was his sister, that her heart was obedient, malleable.

She was now delivered up to the mercies of a man who had sought dominion over her for her entire life. And never gotten it. Until now.

She shook her head slightly in wonder. Then she said softly to her Lord God that she would accept whatever he required of her, and looked up at Dr. Full.

His face was full of…what? Tenderness, maybe. Tenderness, she hoped.

She started to call him Samuel, but caught herself. “Dr. Full,” she said, “what are we going to do? The one thing in the world I want is to teach those children.”

He nodded. He sat next to her, touched her gently on the wrist.

“I think you know what the issue is,” he said. “Let us pray for God’s help in resolving it.” They knelt together.

“I was scared to tell you,” said Flare. “I’m so ashamed. I was just plain scared.”

They held each other at arm’s length and simply looked. After a while, Sima said, “Why?”

“You said you hated your father.”

Flare laughed out loud. “You said your father’s name was Hairy, H-a-i-r-y. All of us thought you were saying Harry, H-a-r-r-y.”

He moved away and sat on a log. He laughed more, it was so dumb. “When I saw your toes and knew it was me, I was scared.”

He looked up at Sima, standing over him. “You have reason to hate me.”

Sima shook his head, fighting tears again.

“I was ashamed. Ashamed I hadn’t been there every day for you. Ashamed I’d put you through all that pain.”

Sima sat next to him. Flare said, “Most of all, I thought you’d curse me and kick me out of your life.”

Sima put an arm around Flare’s shoulders.

“I didn’t think I could stand that. I’d just found you.”

Now Dr. Full seemed expansive, easy, generous.

“The deacons are only half convinced you need more discipline,” he said. “Some of them think you only needed a husband, and some children to keep you busy.” He smiled sweetly at her. “I’m so grateful that you have accepted God’s gift of light to show you the way.”

He smiled broadly. “The deacons don’t know you. I’ll never forget how bullheaded you were from the start. When I read Scripture aloud, you wouldn’t listen; you would read some book of your own.”

She shrugged. She’d just wanted not to be controlled every moment.

He was enjoying reminiscing. “You wouldn’t accept leadership at all. That’s the reason I told Mama you were a Jewel, not a Full.” He turned to her suddenly. “You were my favorite, you know. Because you had spirit.”

He turned serious. “Spirit in the service of the Lord, put to the uses God made for it, is the most precious of human virtues. Willful spirit is the most troublesome of vices. And now you see that.”

“I feel I do,” she said. She was determined to see it through.

“For those who have consecrated their beings to God,” Dr. Full began, “it is a question of understanding what His cause requires and entering into a compact to do it, whatever it is. Of surrendering self into the larger bliss of the whole. It is in that spirit I make this suggestion.”

Flare and Sima walked along the river. They talked.

Flare told about the competition he and Dr. Full staged, a contest to show Sima who was the better man, which was the better way of life. They both chuckled about that.

Flare told Sima about his grandparents, shopkeepers in County Galway, simple people, fiercely Irish, fiercely Catholic, fiercely anti-British. His father had been in love with poetry. Gone now, both of them. Maybe Sima would like to see Ireland one day. “A God-cursed country,” Flare said sadly.

He told Sima about his freezing journey across the North Atlantic to a brand-new continent, full of opportunities and dangers, and about how scared he was the first time he saw Indians.

After a while Sima said he wanted to sketch while they talked, and went to his packs for his sketchpad.

Flare sat and looked at the flowing river.

He loved rivers. He loved the way the water tumbled and played. He loved places like the falls downriver, where you could see water do its playing right on the surface. He also liked to think of all the little creeks that came into a river continuing to spin and undulate along, part of the river yet distinctly themselves, playing like otters in the greater mass of flowing liquid, separate melodies intertwining with each other, the inner music of rivers.

Aye, he thought, you truly can never put your foot into the same river twice.

“The criticism you’ve felt in the last few weeks,” Dr. Full said to Miss Jewel, “has been offered in Christian love. I have been aware of Christian love for you during every moment of it. And in this last year I’ve become aware of how much I admire you. You have strength, and intelligence, and a warm heart. You were a pillar of strength on the journey, and a pillar of strength when Annie Lee died.

“Wonderful gifts God has given you.”

He seemed to reflect a moment, and then he slid onto one knee. He seemed uncomfortable in that posture, but he plunged forward. “Now I come as supplicant,” he said.

He took one of her hands in his. “I’ve spent hours and hours on my knees to God about this,” he told her. He shifted self-consciously. He looked into her face. Since he could not read it, he dived in.

“Margaret Jewel, I ask your hand in marriage.”

Chapter Thirty-three

She hardly heard whatever else Dr. Full said. Something about his children, something about the integrity of the family, something about the isolation of the unmarried state, something about God’s will that man and woman should be one flesh, something about the two of them as a two flames become one bright fire for Jesus Christ. He even made some sort of joke about her finally getting to be a Full.

She didn’t laugh or respond in any way. She wasn’t attracted or repelled or anything else. She was a jumble.

Finally she withdrew her hand and stood up. “Dr. Full,” she said, “I thank you for this offer.” She had difficulty getting her breath. “It’s so sudden—I don’t know what to say. If I may, I’ll bring you back an answer. Soon. Tomorrow at the latest.”

She walked out without looking back. In front of his cabin she began to tremble. She could barely control herself well enough to walk. She broke into the shakes and had to sit down in the grass.

Finally she did walk. Down to the mill. She had not been to the mill since the awful night Annie Lee died.

She could not tell what her thoughts were. She felt heaved up and down randomly by crazy feelings, and she could hardly tell what her emotions were. Tears trickled now and then, but they brought her no relief. She walked aimlessly, flotsam in a heavy sea.

She sat on the grassy bank where she could hear the mill. She sat and listened to its river music. For her the mill was a thousand musical sounds—shoosh, gurgle, tinkle, whisper, rumble, murmur, creak, she was fascinated with them all. Sometimes they made a kind of harmony. Today they were a senseless clatter.

She did not think of being a child again, she simply felt like a child. She felt lonely, terribly lonely, as in the days when her ma was first gone. She remembered talking to the mothers and fathers who took her in and having no idea what was going on. She remembered how rejected she felt, these nice people meaning well but not understanding…at all. She remembered…lots of things, some of them good, some of them bad, all of them pungent as strong smells, old, ripe, sometimes rich, sometimes sour.

She began to sing. She wasn’t aware of when she started, but then she got going strong. She would sing and imagine that the mill was accompanying her. She sang old hymns, “Nearer, My God to Thee,” “The Old Rugged Cross,” “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

Then she sang “Wayfaring Stranger.” It was one of her favorites, and she floated it out, plaintive, above the sounds of the mill and over the wide, slow river.

I’m just a poor, wayfaring stranger,

While traveling through this world of woe.

Yet there’s no sickness, toil, nor danger,

In that bright land to which I go.

(chorus)

I’m going there to see my father.

I’m going there no more to roam.

I’m just a-going over Jordan.

I’m just a-going over home.

I know dark clouds will gather ’round me,

I know my way is rough and steep;

Yet beauteous fields lie just before me,

Where God’s redeemed their vigils keep.

(chorus)

I’m going there to see my mother,

She said she’d meet me when I come.

I’m just a-going over Jordan.

I’m just a-going over home.

Then she sang the one she’d heard the boatmen sing one night, floating down the Ohio River. She’d heard it before, but never in such a such setting, the rough, strong voices echoing eerily across the water. They were the voices of backwoodsmen, primitive men, men who couldn’t read or write but knew how it felt to be in a strange land far from home.

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you.

Away, you rolling river!

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you.

Away, we’re bound away

Across the wide Missouri.

Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter.

Away, you rolling river!

I’ll take her ’cross the rolling water.

Away, we’re bound away

Across the wide Missouri.

Farewell, my love,

I’m bound to leave you.

Away, you rolling river!

Oh, Shenandoah, I’ll not deceive you,

Away, we’re bound away

Across the wide Missouri.

Somehow the singing made it all right. She could go back.

After she walked a little, she saw Flare and Sima by the river.

Right then, like a miracle, like a revelation, she knew what she wanted to do. Knew utterly, and found a kind of peace.

They bounded happily toward her. They told her how grand they felt. They hugged each other. They laughed about how Dr. Full had tried to separate them by telling Sima the secret. Sima showed her his latest sketch of Flare, a head that caught his dash and style.

She had trouble keeping track of all their tales of joy. She tried to respond appropriately. At last she asked Sima if she could speak to Flare alone for a moment. She took his arm.

“Flare,” she said, “I want something important from you.”

“Anything,” he said.

“I must go speak to Dr. Full now. Will you take me to French Prairie afterward? For the night?”

“Sure.” He loved her, he’d do anything.

“Will you let me stay with you?” He was using Nicolette’s old cabin.

“Sure.” He searched her eyes. “What is it you want, Maggie?”

She looked at him. She supposed her eyes must look mad. She took her hand off his arm and tried to say it merrily: “I want you to take me to bed and jolly me good.”

“Tomorrow?” Dr. Full repeated.

She nodded. “At noon.” She kept her composure. “Would you ask Parky to marry us? I’d like that.”

“Of course.”

“Please excuse me now, Dr. Full. I have lots to do before noon tomorrow. The most difficult is to say good-bye to Sima and Mr. O’Flaherty.” She had told him how happy they seemed in their discovery of each other.

Dr. Samuel Full cocked his head at that. Then he considered his new opportunity in life, smiled admiringly at his woman, and said, “Things have worked out for the best, my dear.”

“You’re sure this is what you want,” said Flare at the front door of the cabin.

She nodded several times. She grinned a pretty good grin. “Carnal abandon,” she said.

She didn’t say that she had only a glimmer of what she wanted beyond tonight.

Maggie Jewel was flying, and she thought she damn well might crash.

At first light she got up. Ouch! She was sore. No one had told her losing your virginity made you sore. Losing it, the devil. She’d flung it to the four winds.

She woke Flare. She slipped back into bed with him one more time. He gentled her, whispered to her, caressed her. Then he found ways to make it not sore.

Afterward she made him shut up and listen. She told him exactly what she wanted. It took some explaining.

“At noon,” he said, making sure. “The wedding’s at noon sharp.”

“You bet,” she said. She gave him a cockeyed grin and headed for her horse and her cabin. She meant to get married looking her best.

Watching her go, Flare thought, Maggie Jewel is considerable woman.