The Way Back from Broken (19 page)

“Oh man.” Rakmen knew they'd been at their archeological site far more than five minutes. Leah was probably freaking out. He reached for Jacey's hand. “Let's go.” She wiggled out of his grasp and picked up the trap, cradling it in her arms like a baby as she speed-walked back to her pack.

“You're not seriously thinking about carrying that, are you? We've still got a long way to portage.” She clutched it tighter and lower-lipped him.

There wasn't time to fight with her. Not if they wanted to catch up with Leah before she totally lost her shit. “Let me hold it while you put on your pack.”

He got Jacey situated and pointed her down the trail, wishing that the rusty smears all over her shirt looked less like blood. Before he picked up the canoe, Rakmen took a last look around the meadow.

Someone had set the trap a very long time ago. Set it and left it or lost it or forgot. A whisper of the long-dead trapper and his quarry rustled through the tall grass. Rakmen shivered. He lifted the canoe and followed Jacey. He did not want to stay here any longer.

CHAPTER 24

Rakmen's anxiety rose as he neared the end of the portage. His legs were crumbling with exhaustion. He hadn't stopped again to rest because he expected trouble. Leah had probably come unglued when they hadn't shown up on time.

He cursed the stupid-long portage.

And himself for wasting time in the meadow.

A small bird with a striped head and white throat flitted across the trail in front of him and perched on a fallen log. Rakmen named it without thinking.
White-throated sparrow
. The bird's throat pulsed in and out as it belted out a rising, repetitive song. It was so very alive and yet so delicate—like the organ that every second sent blood pulsing through his own body. They were always so close to the knife-edge. A million things could still the heart.

At the end of the portage, he listened for the sound of crying and heard only the water lapping against the shore. When he set the canoe down and could finally see, Jacey was pulling off her boots and socks, and Leah was examining the trap.

“This is a pretty amazing find,” she said, smiling up at him.

He nodded, scanning her expression for trouble under the surface. Nothing. He eased the pack off his back and sat down by Jacey.

“How come she's not mad?” he whispered.

“I didn't tell her you pushed me.”

“I said I was sorry.”

She waved her stinky socks in his face. “Smell my foot wrath!”

Rakmen warded her off with the sign of the cross. Once she'd splashed off to look for frogs, he sat down beside Leah for a closer look at the trap. He ran a finger along its teeth. “What was it for?”

“Beaver,” she said. “The French trappers did a bang-up trade in the early days, and it's too small for bear.”

“How old is it?”

She wrinkled her forehead. “Over a hundred years probably. I'm trying to remember when the settlement on this lake was active.”

Rakmen was surprised all over again. “People actually lived here?”

“Some. Not many. The winters are brutal.” Leah unfolded the map on her knees. “We're right here on Allard Lake. The remains of an old farm are here.” She pointed to a spot on the map opposite the portage. Across the water, Rakmen could see a wide grassy clearing.

“Is there anything left?” he asked.

“I think so. Foundations of a farmhouse. A few old timbers.”

“Can we check it out?”

“Sure.” They checked the map again and located a campsite near one end of the meadow. “Why don't we set up camp and then walk over? That last portage wiped me out,” Leah suggested.

“What's this mean?” Rakmen asked, poking at a small square with a number four in it printed in the middle of the lake.

“Four days from here to anywhere else,” said Leah, getting stiffly to her feet. “Come on, Jacey,” she called, “we're ready to roll.”

Rakmen stared at the number four. The map highlighted canoe routes in yellow, and he could see that this lake was a kind of hub. Several different routes passed through it. Backtracking with his finger along the last portage, Rakmen traced their own route from campsite to campsite until he poked one finger at the black square indicating Uncle Leroy's ramshackle cabin.

It had taken them eight days to get where they were, but they'd taken a circuitous route and had been slow at first. If they had bypassed the Petra River and had taken a portage around several lakes, they could've made it here in four days. There was another route, also estimated at four days' travel time, that led north to a ranger station on Lake Lavielle. A third led to a small community on the western edge of the wilderness area called Branvin, where their food resupply box was waiting for them.

He folded the map and placed it back in the waterproof bag.

Leah pointed out a bird called a white-breasted nuthatch.

“Write it down,” said Jacey, nudging him.

“Yes, ma'am. That puts us at thirty-three species.”

“Thirty-four,” said Leah, pointing at a bird skimming over the treetops. “Merlin.”

“Like the wizard?” Jacey asked.

“It's a falcon.”

Leah gave a mini-lecture on its birdy attributes.

Rakmen added
merlin
to his notebook, scribbling underneath
super fast, predator, eats songbirds
. The sparrow he'd seen on the trail would be toast if that guy got his claws into it.

They saw the merlin again as they paddled across Allard Lake, soaring and swooping like a fighter jet. Death from above—if you were a bird.

They set up camp quickly, following the routine that had developed over the intervening days. Rakmen unloaded the packs while Leah collected wood. Jacey found the food pouches for the evening meal, and then he helped her set up the tents. It was clockwork now.

In forty-five minutes, they were hiking to the old homestead. Without the canoe weighing him down, Rakmen was light on his feet. It made him want to try out for track next season.

Jacey led the way along the shoreline, collecting fluffy, white seed pods from the tall grass.

“Whatchya want those for?” he asked.

“Duh! Pillows.”

He smiled at her. For the past few days, she'd been making fairy houses out of bark and moss. Of course they needed pillows. He plucked another handful for her as he walked.

A little farther on, Jacey stopped again. “What are those?” she asked.

Under the water were two obviously man-made structures, mostly crumbled and rotting away, but their form still discernible.

Intact, each one would have been about five feet across in both directions, an open box made of squared-off timbers and filled with bowling-ball sized rocks. One was about four feet from shore. The other farther out.

“Those are the old cribs,” said Leah.

Jacey squinted at her. “Like baby cribs?”

The word
baby
sent alarm bells ringing in Rakmen's head. His every instinct was to divert attention from that unstable ground. “It's like
MTV Cribs,
” he said. “You know, houses.”

“Houses for what?”

“They weren't houses,” said Leah as if she hadn't noticed the word
baby
at all. “The old timers used cribs to hold up the decking of their docks.”

She headed away from the water, and they wandered after her. Jacey found the crumbled remains of a stone chimney and what was left of an ancient wood stove with grass and wildflowers growing up through its many cracks. Other than that and a rectangular depression in the ground marking the floor plan of the one-room cabin, nothing was left.

“I wonder what it was like to live here,” he said.

“Pretty lonely, I expect,” said Leah, “so far from anyone else.”

“I'm not lonely out here with you guys,” Jacey piped in.

“Maybe not now,” Leah replied, “but you'd get sick of us eventually.”

Rakmen paced out the impression of the four walls. It was a tiny space to spend the winter. He tried to imagine being cooped up with the wind whistling through cracks in the logs and snow, snow, snow in every direction.

He retraced his steps from the old homestead to the ruins of the dock. Someone else had walked exactly where he placed his feet. Other eyes had stared out at this same lake, day in and day out, for years, maybe decades. Out there, in the rest of the world, in his old life, everything was different—cell phones and tablet computers, self-parking cars and internet glasses—but here...

Rakmen turned quickly, half-expecting to see smoke curling above the sod roof of the little square building, and the trapper saying good-bye to his family as he went to check his traplines. What he actually saw was Jacey on a little hillock at the far side of the meadow, waving wildly.

“Come here,” she hollered. “You've got to see this!”

Leah shrugged at him. “More fairies?”

His laughter came easily, rolling up from the bottom of his stomach. He strode toward Jacey, shaking his head. The girl was a goofball. Rakmen's good humor lasted until he reached Jacey, where it trickled out like a last breath.

She was standing beside a short iron fence that enclosed four graves all in a row. The stone markers were soft-edged from years of weather, and orange lichen clung to the surface, but the rough-etched names remained.

Joseph Allard, mon ainé

Marie Allard, ma troisième-née

Jean Baptiste Allard, mon sixième-né

Thérèse Allard, née Vallée, ma jolie femme,

et notre dernière née, Adèle

“What does it say?” Jacey asked, clasping and unclasping her hands.

Leah swayed on her feet, the blood draining from her face. “The first three were children. The first born, the third, and the sixth. The mother was buried with a baby.” She stepped backward unsteadily and slumped to the ground. Jacey burrowed under her mom's arm until she was practically in Leah's lap.

Rakmen could not tear his eyes from the graves. The air in his lungs seemed more like oil than oxygen. He tried to catch his breath, fighting the suffocating heat and the rising buzz of insects around them.

“Why did so many of them die?” Jacey whispered.

Leah pulled Jacey closer. “Oh honey, in the old days, kids died all the time.” Her voice fluttered like a tattered sheet. “No medicine. No hospitals. People got sick and . . . It happened all the time . . .”

Rakmen imagined the trapper shoveling earth onto his wife's vacant face. The remaining children—the second, the fourth, and the fifth—would be afraid of the way tears streamed into their father's beard. Dazed by loss, they'd stumble into one another in the small cabin, wrapping bundles of food and rolling blankets, preparing to abandon this cursed place.

Their ghosts thundered over him.

“We need to go,” he said, urging Leah and Jacey to their feet. They were four days from anywhere and way too close to the dead.

CHAPTER 25

Rakmen dropped another armload of wood by the fire pit.

“You can stop,” Leah said, feeding another stick to the flames.

The light was fading. Soon it would be too dark to see the downed maple he was systematically dismembering into firewood. The trapper's family had stayed with Rakmen all afternoon, their ghosts grasping at his heels. He couldn't beat them away, but he could keep moving.

His right arm was sore from sawing. His head pounded, and the world was distant. Once, the maniac cry of a woodpecker penetrated the shroud, but Rakmen bore down harder on the dry wood, sending shavings into the air and imagining the trapper skinning beaver in bloody strips. The man was gone. Rakmen did not know him. Yet what the man felt as he had buried his family, Rakmen felt now. He did not like the way it pierced him.

Jacey had fallen asleep early, leaving him beside the fire with Leah. She'd been steadily feeding it wood but hadn't made a dent in his supply. Rakmen had cut enough for an army to overwinter, and it still wasn't enough.

Up until they'd found the graves, Rakmen had been in the rhythm of
au large
. It was immediate, without memory most of the time. At the homestead, he'd stumbled into someone else's life, and Dora had come back on the ragged coattails of the trapper's children.

No matter how much wood he cut, he could not dislodge the memories. They were tearing him limb from limb. The sky darkened, becoming an upside-down bowl of stars cupped over the pulsating bed of coals. When it was too dark to cut any more wood, he sat across the fire from Leah, too keyed up to sleep. Rakmen watched her through the distorted column of heated air that rose from the bed of coals.

“Do you think they left?” he asked.

She stirred the embers of the fire with a charred stick. “Who?”

“The trapper and the kids who lived. Do you think they left this place? Is that why the trap got left behind?”

Leah toe-nudged the rusty beaver trap at her feet, considering. “The trap could have been dragged somewhere he couldn't find it.”

“By a trapped beaver?”

She shrugged and poked at the coals again.

He didn't want to think about an animal caught in those metal teeth, thrashing into deeper water, trailing blood. He did not want to think about that at all.

“But you're asking if I think he left after his wife died,” she said. “I doubt it. Those French Canadians were made of tougher stuff than I.”

In the dim orange light, her lips quirked up in a small, sad smile. He studied her, seeing all the pieces of her, all at once. She was his teacher and his mother's friend. Jacey's mom and the dead baby's too. She was a woman who broke plates and cried at Promise House. She had dragged them out here kicking and screaming. Yet on the trail, she seemed to be finding a way to put herself back together.

“I think you're tough,” he said.

Her eyes flicked up from the coals. “You do?”