Chapter Forty-Two
When he hears at fourth hand that his father has gone missing, Ministik leaves Keasik and the infant at Goose Lake and returns to Black Mountain to find out the truth.
Once he gets there and reunites with the remainder of his family, he learns that Mackachy and Oule-Eye went to the Fort eight months earlier but never came back.
All anyone knows about their fate is a foolish rumor, which none of them could possibly believe, that the two men, who were always the best of friends, killed each other in a drunken fight.
Ministik understands right away, without having to be told, that if his father is dead, which seems almost certain, as the eldest son he has no choice but to go east himself to discover how Mackachy died and, if need be, take revenge.
Everyone knows that blood for blood is the law, but his mother is so bewildered by the unexplained loss of her husband that as soon as she learns of Ministik’s intentions, she begs him to stay, and the elders have to take her aside one afternoon and remind her that it is better to lose a son than to make him live out the rest of his days with the shame of knowing that his father’s killer is still alive somewhere.
She still weeps and complains as Ministik says goodbye, and so do his sisters, but when he kisses them on their foreheads and tells them to be brave, he can sense that despite their tears, they understand why he is going, and that beneath this unseemly show of sorrow there is a proper portion of fury and pride.
Now, with a knife gripped tight in his hand, he crouches, waiting in the kitchen lean-to, beside barrels of salt pork and rundlets of biscuits and lard.
His hands are trembling, and it feels like a freezing claw has a grip on his innards, but he understands that fear is only a necessary prelude to action, and when the time is ripe, for his father’s sake, he will find all the power and the courage he requires.
It has been six days since he arrived at the Factory after two months of hard and solitary walking, and he has spent that time in the Indian plantation by the eastern wall listening patiently and asking questions.
At first, all he heard back from the home guard Cree was the same old lie about a drunken brawl between two Chipewyans, but then one evening when he asks again, someone mentions a half-breed woman, Nantouche, who works as a maid for the governor.
“She hears things she’s not supposed to hear,” the man says. “If you ask her what happened to your father, then you might be surprised what you learn.”
The first time Ministik and Nantouche talk, even when he offers her gifts, she doesn’t want to tell him anything at all.
It’s not her job to listen, she says; she’s only there to cook and clean.
But the second time, when he talks more about the depth of his mother’s grief and how his father and Oule-Eye were like brothers so he knows they didn’t kill each other in any fight, she begins to change her mind.
Eventually, when he sees her a final time, and promises solemnly that no one else will ever know the secret, she admits that she heard the Englishmen talking together one morning at breakfast trying to come up with a plan to hide the truth, and although she says she can’t be sure exactly what happened outside the walls, she knows that Norton blamed Hearn for both deaths.
“He was very angry,” she said. “He thought Hearn had lost his head and been careless, but then Hearn decided they should all just lie and pretend the two Indians had killed each other, and after that Norton calmed down and stopped shouting.”
“And next day the two bodies were burned—is that the truth?”
“Yes,” she said. “Hearn burned them both on a pyre and then threw the ashes in the midden pit. I watched him do it.”
Ministik is still not sure why Tom Hearn would wish to murder his father and Oule-Eye, or what he could possibly gain by doing so, but what he feels with a horrible certainty is that if he had only done as his father told him to and guided Shaw and Hearn all the way back to the Fort, this calamity never would have happened.
If I had been here waiting for them, I might have stopped it, he thinks, so I bear some portion of the blame, and nothing I can do will ever wipe that out.
But if I avenge them both, at least I will have done my duty and their souls will be free.
While he crouches in the dark listening, he thinks again about Keasik and the infant waiting for him back at the camp at Goose Lake and hopes they are both still as healthy and as happy now as they were when he left them.
Once this night is over, he tells himself, if I survive it, I can go back there and live contented, and none of us will ever have to see or think about an Englishman ever again.
For now, though, it’s much better if I don’t try to remember or imagine, because thoughts like that, however pleasing they seem, will only weaken me, when I need above all to be strong.
When Ministik starts to hear the sound of slow, steady breathing, he opens the door and steps across the threshold.
Hearn sits slumped in an armchair by the fireplace, his chin on his chest and his mouth wide open.
Ministik walks to the window and pushes the shutters closed so as not to be seen from the courtyard, then pads across the room and stands by the fire still gripping the knife.
His enemy is exposed and at his mercy, but now that the moment is arrived at last, the moment he has worked and waited for, he hesitates.
While my father’s soul is unavenged, he is still a lively presence in this world, Ministik thinks, but after his soul is at peace, how will I ever know him again?
He understands that it’s a foolish kind of fear, one not far removed from cowardice, and that Mackachy, if he was still alive, would have no patience with it.
Even so, the thought of bringing their long companionship to such a sudden and irrevocable end still chills Ministik and causes him to stay his hand a minute longer.
As he stands there caught up in sad imaginings, half listening to the muffled sounds of music and dancing from the men’s house next door and smelling the faint scent of brandy from the half-empty glass on the side table, a dog barks suddenly in the yard outside and Hearn, jolted from his reveries, opens his eyes.
Seeing an unknown Indian standing in front of him with a knife in his hand, he jumps to his feet and is about to call out for help when Ministik, realizing at last that he has put himself in deadly peril by his vacillations, does what he should have done already—raises the knife and drives it down hard, with all his strength, like a stake into Tom Hearn’s unprotected chest. Hearn stiffens, gasps, and looks astonished by this new event.
“It can’t be you,” he says, staring into the face of his assailant. “Not you. Not here.”
Ministik tugs out the knife and, taking a long stride backward, watches with a horrified fascination as Hearn stands in place for a moment, stiff and formal, staring down at the swelling rosette of blood on his linen shirtfront, then staggers sideways two paces and collapses onto the hearthstone.
Outside again, after passing quickly back through the lean-to kitchen, Ministik crouches juddering and stomach-sick in the narrow weed-filled passageway between the back of the men’s house and the curtain wall until he is sure that no one has seen or heard what has happened.
Then he ascends the ten wooden steps up onto the bastion and, looking quickly left and right, clambers over the parapet and lowers himself down to the other side.
Hidden by shadows, with his back pressed hard against the chiseled limestone blocks, he waits another minute until the waves of fear and excitement that are surging through him subside, and then, as the music whirls about in the air and the shouts and laughter of the dancers echo and rebound, he retrieves his musket and satchel from the hiding place close by the ravelin and, with his bloody knife pushed into his belt and the image of Hearn’s face as he lay dying still fresh and horrid in his mind, he turns his back against the dark confusions of the Fort and starts running westward again, with steady, eager strides, toward the deep green forest’s sanctuary.
Inside the apartments, alone amid the glints and glows of polished brass, mahogany, and walnut burr, Tom Hearn lies dying on Magnus Norton’s famous Turkish rug.
He feels the life force draining from his body, drop by drop, inexorably, as if in time to the steady ticking of the longcase clock, and he wishes with a desperate passion that he had the power to save himself, but knows he can’t.
With what small strength he has remaining in his body, he pushes himself up onto his hands and knees and crawls twenty feet into the bedchamber.
Once inside, he feels in his waistcoat pocket for the small brass key, then turns it in the padlock and opens the lid of the sea chest at the bed’s foot.
He gropes for the sack of gold beneath the folded layers of wool and worsted, and when he finds it, tugs it free with blood-slick hands and, gasping, hugs it for a moment to his breast, then looks at it again and, seeing what it is and what it isn’t, pushes it despairingly aside.
As he lies there empty-handed, while breath by breath his lungs fill up with blood, he imagines for a moment that he is back at sea again with the great black ocean churning all around and the swift gray clouds racing overhead, and he feels, as he used to feel years before, a sense of something large and boundless, some kind of spaciousness and grandeur not to be defined.
If I only had, he thinks. If I only could, but now that chance is gone.
Ignited by these hopeless thoughts, a scorching sense of sorrow and anguish overwhelms him.
He clenches his eyes against the pain of it and when he opens them again and looks upward, instead of a dark tangle of rafters and slate he sees a high window made of lead and colored glass and far beyond it, pouring down relentlessly through the empty fathoms of deep blue air, an endless blaze of golden light.