Chapter Nine
Abel Walker cannot sleep for all the noises: Shaw’s gasps and grunts and the girl’s sad cries and whimpers.
Hearn was wise to excuse himself while the act took place, Abel thinks, and he wishes now that he had followed his lead instead of being forced to eavesdrop on their congress.
When Shaw has satisfied himself at last and a silence descends, Walker says a prayer of gratitude and pulls the blanket tighter about his shoulders.
Peace and rest at last, he thinks, but then he feels a hand gripping his shoulder and shaking him, and when he turns about, he sees Shaw’s damp and reddened face lit up from the side by the fire’s last embers, his wet mouth lolling open and a look in his wide-open eyes of rude desires well-satisfied.
“You may take your turn now,” he says. “If you’d like to. I’ve warmed her up nicely.”
Walker looks over at the girl, then looks back at John Shaw, who smiles and nods as if to assure him that he means what he says.
“I can’t,” he says. “Not with another fellow watching on.”
Shaw sniffs at this and seems surprised.
“Do you have some peculiar taste or practice you’re ashamed of, Abel?” he says. “Some peccadillo far beyond the norm?”
“That’s not it.”
“Just bashful then?”
Walker nods and Shaw looks at him a moment longer, then shrugs and reaches over for his leather surcoat.
“I’ll take a stroll outside, see what Mister Hearn is up to with his famous quadrant. Call out to me when you’ve finished.”
Shaw finds Tom Hearn standing alone on the lake’s shore, looking out across the frozen surface to the dark bulk of a nearby island.
On the island’s crumbling rim, above a broken layer of schist, the bare-limbed trees, draped in shadow, lean and cling together like keeners at a burial.
There is no sound as the two men stand there except the cold wind droning in the trees, and no light except the silver ice-light of the moon.
They stay together for a few moments not speaking before Shaw breaks the silence.
“Young Abel is riding her now,” he says. “And after that, you may take a spell when you’re ready.”
“Thank you,” Hearn says, “but I don’t wish to be included.”
Shaw knits his brow in puzzlement and gives Hearn a questioning look.
“This will be our last chance for four months or more,” he says. “I suppose we may find an esquimaux woman up at Ox Lake who’ll oblige us. But I don’t think we can count on that.”
“I’m happy to forfeit my turn. You won the girl, not me.”
“I did indeed, but in the spirit of friendship, I’m offering to share my spoils.”
“I think she has been shared about enough already.”
Shaw leans forward from the waist, turns his head, and peers at Hearn’s expression.
“You feel sorry for her,” he declares with a smile on his face, as if the idea is both intriguing and faintly hilarious. “I see. So that’s the reason you won’t join in.”
“Perhaps it is.”
“In that case, you’re too tenderhearted, Hearn.
It’s as I told you before. The Indians are not like us.
Great hunger or cold which would make us howl or weep barely troubles them, so why should it not be the same in matters of the heart?
They’re hardened inside; the finer feelings are absent or unreachable. How else could they survive here?”
“It’s convenient to believe that, I suppose, but how can you be so certain?”
“From twenty-five years of dealing with them, that’s where my knowledge comes from. Remember, it’s the Indian custom to wrestle for women, not ours. I’ve only followed their example.”
“Perhaps the girl is an exception. You saw the expression on her face when she arrived at the tent. It was plain that she was terrified.”
“She was nervous, perhaps, but some suffering is part of every woman’s life, even in England. It can’t be avoided. Tomorrow she will be cheerful again, believe me. It will be as if nothing has happened.”
“What if they are more like us than you imagine? What if they have souls as we do?”
“Souls?” Shaw laughs, then, when he realizes that Hearn is serious, briefly looks amazed.
“Do you ever ask yourself that question?” Hearn says.
“No, I must confess I never do. I never saw a soul, nor weighed one in my hand, and I doubt you did either, so who may or may not possess such an invisible and untouchable thing is not a matter that I waste much time considering.”
Hearn realizes that it was a foolish thing to have said, but in that moment, in his anger, he could think of nothing better.
In truth, he has no idea whether the Indians possess a soul, or whether anyone else possesses one either.
Perhaps there are no souls, he thinks as he stands there now.
Perhaps the whole notion is imaginary, and if that’s true, if there’s nothing special or particular about humankind, if we are all the same in essence as the beasts that we fatten and kill for our food, then how can we ever know what is right or real or just, or whether such terms hold any meaning despite our fervent wish that they should?
Without God as a fixed point to provide certainty (he has known this for ten or more years, but still he constantly forgets it), there is nothing firm to believe in or hold on to.
We may put our trust in reason instead, but reason is just a device, he thinks, a clever and complicated trick designed to disguise the unfathomable depths of muddlement and confusion that lie all around us.
So why do I persist in trying to change the mind of a man like John Shaw using logic and good sense?
Nothing can be proven permanently and beyond all doubt with mere words; there are always weaknesses or complications in every argument, loose threads in the weave that may appear unimportant at first but which, if tugged hard enough, will quickly enough unravel the whole.
I may believe Shaw is wrong or misguided, he thinks, I may feel it in my heart, but I cannot explain or justify that feeling of wickedness through any proposition that is strong or unimpeachable enough to sway him from his predetermined course.
“Understand me,” he says. “I don’t seek to interfere. The agreement you made with Datsanthi is your business, not mine, but I don’t wish to have any part in it.”
Before replying, John Shaw scratches his beard and then looks about from side to side.
“Do you judge me, Hearn,” he says eventually, “for pursuing my own simple, manly pleasures? Do you think it makes me a brute?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But perhaps you think it anyway. Perhaps you think I should be ashamed for the way I use the girl?”
Without needing to look, Hearn feels Shaw’s presence beside him, the weight of his will and the crude mechanical power of his muscle, blood, and bone.
I’ve insulted him now, he thinks, and if we were back at the Fort, I’d have to pay some price for it.
But out here he needs me too much to let such a small disagreement change anything. So, for now at least, I am safe.
“My private thoughts are my own,” he says, turning to Shaw and looking at him without fear. “Just as yours are. I suspect it is best to keep things that way.”
Shaw holds Hearn’s gaze in silence for a moment, then smiles and shakes his head.
“Well,” he says, “if you don’t want a taste of her, then that’s more for me, I suppose, so I shouldn’t complain.
” He bends at the knees and then cups his balls with his right hand and hitches up his britches with the left.
“Twice in one night is a rare treat for me, I must say, so I thank you for your generosity and kindness.”
He waits for a response and when none is forthcoming, nods a curt farewell and then turns and strides away back into the shadows.
Hearn waits a moment for his thoughts to settle, then he picks up his quadrant and notebook from the ground where he left them and walks back toward the center of the campground, where the bonfire built for the wrestling is still flickeringly alive.
As he stands there keeping warm and trying as best he can not to imagine what is happening elsewhere, he gazes up at the night sky crammed with bright stars and, for a fervent moment, wishes he were back at sea, with only the ship’s black hull curved beneath him, the gray arc of the sky above, and this whole restless, suffering world purged and purified, shorn down and stripped to its core.
That same night, after he is certain that Datsanthi and Pawpitch are asleep, Nabayah gets up quietly and goes outside.
He finds his way through the cold darkness to the seer’s tent at the edge of the encampment, calls out his name softly, then waits until the flap is pushed open and he’s beckoned inside.
In the dim light of the fire, the old man looks wrinkled and freakish.
His hair is shorn off at the sides and his dented skull and hollowed cheeks are inked with obscure runes and diagrams. In both ears, he has loops of deer sinew strung with glass beads and hawks’ bells, and a single black porcupine quill is pushed through the septum of his nose.
Most seers are scoundrels or fakers, in Nabayah’s opinion, but everyone says this one is different.
When he was a child, so the story goes, he fell out of a canoe and sank to the bottom of a lake, where he met the Great Fish spirit, who taught him magic.
He greets Nabayah with a smile and invites him to sit down.
“I heard you lost your wife at the wrestling,” the seer says. “You must be in a rage.”
“I’ll get her back soon enough. Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning? So why are you unhappy?”
“She’s been tainted by fucking the white men.”
“Tainted?”
“That’s how I see it.”
The seer looks unconvinced, as if Nabayah may be misunderstanding something.
“What difference does the fucking make?” he asks. “One night is nothing.”
“I didn’t agree to it,” he says. “She was stolen from me and now my honor’s at stake.”
“Why do you serve the white men anyway? What’s the point of that?”
“I serve my father, Datsanthi. He makes the arrangements. If we help them, they give us gifts in return.”
“What gifts?”
“Guns,” he says. “Powder, tobacco, ironwork. Anything we need.”
“Speak to your father, then,” the seer suggests. “Tell him you don’t like what’s happened. If the white men give you something extra for your wife, then that way your honor is preserved.”
“I spoke to him already. He says because I lost at the wrestling, no more payment is due.”
“You disagree?”
“I can’t accept it.”
“So you come to me instead.”
“My father doesn’t know I’m here. No one else knows.”
“There’s no shame in coming,” he says. “I help all kinds of people. You’d be surprised.”
Lying on the mat between them there’s a fine-looking calumet decorated with eagle feathers and an old leather pouch with the outline of a bear picked out in red and yellow beadwork on the flap.
The seer is holding a piece of carved wood in his right hand and rubbing it with his thumb as they talk; it’s an amulet of some kind, Nabayah supposes, or a good luck charm.
“I don’t like seers or soothsayers much,” Nabayah says. “The ones I’ve known are frauds and liars.”
Some part of him wants the old man to take offense so they can argue and he can leave without going any further, but the old man doesn’t seem upset at all.
“For every one who’s real, there are a dozen fakers,” he agrees lightly. “That’s always been the way.”
Over in the corner there is a woman with a child suckling at her breast and a young boy lying beside her snoozing. As Nabayah looks at them, the infant sneezes and the woman whispers something gently, then begins to hum a lullaby.
“I want revenge,” Nabayah says. “I want John Shaw, the graybeard, dead. Is that within your powers?”
When the seer doesn’t answer straightaway, Nabayah takes a twist of tobacco out of his pocket and places it on the mat between them.
“That’s the best kind, direct from the Fort,” he says. “You can smell it if you doubt me.”
The seer picks it up, sniffs it once, then stows it carefully in the leather pouch.
“You’re sure you want him dead?” he says. “Because once I begin, I can’t go backward.”
“I’m sure.”
The old man stares at him for a moment to be sure that he really means it and then gives Nabayah a piece of birch bark and an awl and tells him to scratch an image of John Shaw’s face onto the bark, then throw it into the fire.
“As easy as that?” Nabayah says once he’s done it.
“The other part is up to me. It takes longer. You don’t need to be here to witness it.”
“When will he die?”
The seer shrugs.
“A week from now,” he says. “A year. Time doesn’t mean much to the spirits.”
“It means something to me.”
“All the pain you feel now will turn into pleasure afterward,” he says. “Remember that while you wait, and be patient.”
That night, Nabayah dreams he is transformed into a wolf.
He feels his jaw and nose extending outward and his teeth becoming long and sharp.
As he pads forward across the moorland, breathing the cold night air and sifting its scents, there’s no in-between anymore, no inside or outside, just the world as it must be, pure and complete, opening up and offering itself moment by moment.
His mind is washed clean, all the usual words and pictures dissolved away, so instead of fear or hope, there is only light and dark, emptiness and fullness, the body held in space and then alive inside the body, as real and vivid as bone and blood, the violent and unnameable urges that give it form and purpose.
When he wakes from the dream, it is still dark and he sees that Keasik is back lying beside him in the usual place.
He smells her skin and listens to her soft, steady breathing.
I could kill her now, he thinks, cut her throat, smash in her skull, strangle her.
It would be easy enough and satisfying in its way.
He knows it’s not a serious thought—he doesn’t want to be known hereafter as the man who killed his wife out of jealousy—but he lets it sit there for a while anyway, enjoying its flavors and imagining, if he was crazy enough to do it, how good it might feel.