Chapter Thirty-Two
Keasik gathers the dark red berries from the loganberry bush and drops them one by one like polished stones into the basket made of lyme grass.
Now that they are back in the woods again at least she knows she won’t starve, but the deeper dread that has haunted her ever since she stuck her paring knife into her husband’s neck and then struggled free from underneath him as his lifeblood spilled out has not gone away.
The fat-bodied raven isn’t following her like it was before, but instead she’s troubled by memories so vivid and powerful that when they spring up suddenly and take her by surprise it’s as if all the time in between has collapsed and she is lying helpless on the ground with Nabayah’s fingers clamped tight around her throat, or else standing speechless in the wrecked camp looking down at Datsanthi’s and Pawpitch’s desecrated bodies with their bellies slashed open and faces too split and swollen to recognize.
Today when she goes out to forage for food, her mind is clear and she isn’t thinking about Nabayah or worrying about her troubles, but then without warning, it begins to happen.
It starts with a happy memory, of picking berries with her mother and sisters, all of them laughing and singing together, but that makes her think about Pawpitch again, and thinking of Pawpitch, even fondly, makes her think, without wanting to, of Datsanthi and then, worst of all, of Nabayah, and soon, much too quickly, before she can prevent it, her mind is racing backward, the torrent of time is flowing uphill, and instead of green leaves and the basket of berries, bright and fragrant on the ground in front of her, all she sees are whirling fragments of color and shadow.
She still understands, in some distant part of her mind, that a solid, living world must exist, that the dream is just a dream, but in that black, disabling instant she has sunk so deep it’s as if she is drowning, and she knows that the only way out now, the only action she can take to save herself from the swelling tide of darkness, is to pull the paring knife from her belt and press the blade’s sharp edge hard against the palm of her hand until her own blood, fresh and bright, wells up in a line and she feels, rising up from her opened flesh like a twisted blessing, a newer kind of pain to cover up the old.
When the girl walks, her sadness trails behind like a second shadow much deeper and darker than the first. Her face is bruised and scarred on one side, and she has a fresh cut across the palm of her hand, which the Englishmen don’t seem to notice.
What has happened? Ministik wonders. What has been done to her and why?
He is curious but doesn’t ask. Not yet. Instead, he watches quietly.
He sees that she’s afraid of the man with one arm but not of the other one.
When the other one speaks to her, she listens and replies, but when the man with one arm talks she falls silent and looks away.
Sometimes at night in the tent he hears her weeping, and in the daytime when they’re walking or stopped to rest, if she thinks no one is near, she will talk to herself in a low, insistent mumble, asking strange questions, then answering them.
He guesses that her husband is dead, killed by the Esquimaux, and probably her father too, or else why would she be all alone like this?
She is not his sister or his cousin—he has never seen or heard of her before—so he knows it’s not his duty to help, and she doesn’t ask him to.
Most of the time she appears happy to ignore him.
He wonders if her heart has been broken; that’s the phrase he has heard his mother and sisters use to describe a woman who is sad or distressed.
When he is ready to speak to her, that is the question he thinks he will ask: Has your heart been broken, Keasik?
he will say. Is that why you weep alone at night, is that why you ask yourself strange questions, is that why you have a second shadow following behind you, much deeper and darker than the first?
When they were children together, before they were married, Nabayah could be friendly and kind, but then he changed completely.
So why should she trust this new stranger?
That’s what Keasik thinks. That’s why she keeps her distance from him and answers his questions with only a nod or a mumble.
She expects him to be aggrieved or irritated by her coolness, but he doesn’t seem to mind it very much, and after a while he doesn’t try to talk to her anymore, which makes her glad but also reminds her again of how lonely she is.
Ministik is a good hunter, at least, and he understands the land, so they eat well and move more quickly than they did before.
She skins the deer he kills, stretches the hides, mends and gathers and sews as usual, but her mind is still unsettled.
The forest shadows at dusk are full of demons, and in the nighttime her dreams are turbid and blood-soaked.
For the sake of the child, she still wants to live, but not for any other reason she can think of.
When she is alone and the horrors of the past rise up and overwhelm her, she reaches again for the knife.
Their new guide, Ministik, is reticent and speechless to the point of eccentricity.
Hearn tries more than once to begin a conversation, but the answers he gets back are brief and cryptic, and between the words there are long unexplained silences, as if Ministik has lost interest or forgotten his purpose.
Hearn wonders at first whether he is simply shy.
His apparent truculence may be nothing more, he thinks, than the natural awkwardness of youth worsened by the fact that he has suddenly been thrown among strangers of a quite different race and kind.
But the longer he watches him, the less convinced he is of the usefulness of this simple explanation.
Datsanthi and Nabayah had been among the English long enough to absorb some of their manners, but Ministik is of a different, more ancient type, Hearn decides.
It’s not that he is tongue-tied or unsure of himself but rather that his allegiances are quite different from ours.
We struggle to survive out here, Hearn thinks, so far removed from our man-made element, but Ministik moves through these woods with an ease and authority as if his body and mind are at one with the trees and the earth.
He lives in a world made of instinct and nature, while we live in a world made by man, a world of limits and distinctions, objects and thought.
To us he may seem like an odd and taciturn exception, Hearn thinks, but to him no doubt we are the ones who appear strange and out of place.
“Is your heart broken, Keasik? Is it broken?”
Ministik has not spoken to her for days on end and now, out of nowhere, this sudden foolish question. Is your heart broken? And he says it so strangely, as if it’s not a question at all but rather a spell or a proverb.
“What do you know about my heart?” she says.
“Nothing. I know nothing about your heart.”
“Then why would you ask me if it’s broken?”
“I see the scars on your hand. I hear you crying in the tent at night.”
“My husband is dead. Did they ever tell you how he died?”
He shakes his head.
“How did your husband die?”
“I killed him with this knife.” She holds out the paring knife to show him what she means. “I stabbed him in the neck. Is that enough for you? Have you finished with your foolish questions now?”
His expression doesn’t change at all. He doesn’t flinch or frown or look away. She can tell he’s waiting, but not impatiently, for whatever must come next.
“I had to do it to save myself and the child,” she says. “I had no choice, but now his ghost is haunting me.”
At last he looks surprised. “The child?” he says.
“It doesn’t matter.” She shakes her head. “There’s too much to explain.”
She turns away and wishes he would leave her alone again with her unhappy thoughts.
“You can’t help me,” she says. “You don’t understand a single thing.”
He doesn’t move or try to disagree but keeps on gazing at her steadily, undeterred, as if the angry words don’t matter.
“I’ve seen the ghost,” he says. “Your husband’s ghost following after you. It looks like a second shadow.”
She is shocked by his presumption. How dare you? she thinks suddenly. How dare you appear from nowhere, a stranger, and tell me you can see my husband’s ghost?
“You’re lying. No one has seen the ghost but me.”
“I see it every day there on the ground behind you like a second shadow, much deeper and darker than the first.”
“Stop it,” she says to him, almost shouting. “Stop it. Stop telling such lies.”
He waits quietly just as he is, crouched on his haunches, until the anger fades from her face and her breathing settles down again.
“Why are you bothering me?” she says. “What do you want?”
“I want to give you something. Here.” He takes the copper charm from around his neck and hands it to her. “It’s old and precious. My mother had it first.”
She looks at the charm, rubs it with her thumb, and turns it over. One part of her wants to give it back to him and another part wants to kiss it.
“Who are you, anyway?” she says. “Where do you come from?”
“My name is Ministik, as you know. My father’s name is Mackachy, and his father’s name was Woudby. We come from the land between Fox Lake and Black Mountain.”
She puts the leather cord about her neck, then tucks the burnished copper charm beneath the neckline of her deer-hide tunic. Its weight against her skin is cool, then warm. She’s never heard of Black Mountain, or of Fox Lake either.
“I have a child inside me. Five months old.”
“I understand that now.”
“No,” she says sharply. “No, you don’t.”
After that, he falls silent for a long time and she wonders if he’s changing his mind about her already. Then, when he speaks again, his voice is calm and resolute, as if he believes their course is fixed.
“Then tell me what it means,” he says. “Tell me why you suffer.”