Heartbroke Bay (38 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
“Don’t touch that!” Her voice is overly loud, fast and frightening.
Hans’s hand jerks back as if it has touched the hot stove. “Wha . . . ?”
“Don’t touch it. Don’t touch anything.” Hannah knots the rag in her hand, rubs at the paving stone beside her. “I just want things to be . . .” Her mouth tightens and a muffled whimper bleeds through white lips. “I want things . . . nice . . . just for a while. Just for a while.”
SEVENTEEN
A still and windless day. As Hannah makes the long journey to the sparse woodpile, she can feel the inside of her nose burn with cold. The sounds of the forest carry sharp and bright through the unmoving air. When Hans left before daybreak, after double-checking Severts’s bonds, the snowy squeak of his footsteps could be heard for a mile. The only words her husband had said before closing the door behind him were, “Jesus, he stinks.”
Hannah pillows Michael’s head on a rolled blanket and spoons what broth there is into his mouth. His eyes are bright and feverish, and look huge in his skull. Sniffing, she catches a reek of corruption. Hans was right, Michael smells.
She packs the largest kettle with snow and places it on the stove, adding more as the contents melt. After an hour, there is a gallon or so of water. When steam smokes from the cauldron, she says, “I’m going to bathe you, Michael. I will loosen one rope at a time, and if you try anything . . .” She picks up the cast-iron skillet and places it near to hand. “If you make any move against me, I shall use this. Understood?”
Michael’s answering smile is strangely beatific, and she wonders for a moment if he is still in his right mind.
Severts is passive, moving only to lift an arm, then a leg, to assist Hannah as she unbinds, unclothes, then refastens him. His nakedness is pale and wrinkled, his pelvis a shrunken hollow above a penis, shriveling from the cold. Unspoken between them is the understanding that should Hans return during the process, he will certainly kill Michael and perhaps Hannah as well. They are silent as she works, listening carefully for footfalls.
Hannah wrings a rag in the water, and its warmth is wonderful on her hands. Michael sighs, rolls his head to the side, and closes his eyes, lost to the Oedipal bliss of being cared for as she bathes first his chest, his stomach, then under his arms. Her throat catches as she feels the bones of his sternum. Where he had once been so finely muscled, his is now the body of a slender boy, a youth without meat on his frame. His knees are knobs on legs atrophied from disuse, his stomach hollow, and his skin strangely slack. She must fight the impulse to take his helplessness and hold it to her breast.
When Hannah rolls Michael onto his side, she gasps. A biblical penance of boils and sores is spread in a painful constellation across his back and buttocks. The infected bedsores ooze a sour yellow fluid, the source of the odor.
“Hannah,” Michael whispers. “Don’t ever let me have a chance to escape again. I might not be strong enough to resist. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She cries as she dresses him.
The report of the shotgun hammers a single barking note in the distance. Hope rises. Hannah’s mouth waters, her stomach cramping at the thought of fresh meat.
When Hans returns with a garland of breath vapors frozen in his eyebrows and beard, he claims to have missed a shot at a deer. A fleck of dried blood glues a single downy grouse feather to his chin.
The next day their stomachs are empty and echo with craving. The mountains are draped in gray shadows. Nothing moves in the landscape. While Hans guards Michael, Hannah walks to the river, where she digs the decomposed backbones of salmon from the frozen mud, then gnaws and chews at the gristled remnants until they are soft enough to swallow.
After she is gone, Hans waits until Michael is asleep or unconscious, then goes quietly to the box that contains the remnants of the gold. Probing, he removes a small nugget and holds it in his hand, envisioning the food it would buy; a bushel of apples, a dozen pies, a smoked ham. Placing it in his mouth, he rolls and weighs its smoothness on his tongue and pauses. Then swallows.
It must be near Christmas. Impossible to believe in the birth of the Savior in this place. Endless darkness. Daylight, when it comes, is very weak.Hans set snares of rope along trails and caught a wolf, but the others of the pack consumed it, and all that remained was the head. Terrible nightmares of its frozen, grinning countenance. Satan in the stewpot. Tongue very tasty. Made a crude headcheese of the skull contents.Gums bleeding. My flow fails to come. I hunger to be held as strongly as I desire food. If there be a Christ, pray he grants us release from this heartbroke bay.
A wind rises, blowing the stars west toward the horizon. Negook lies beneath a pile of furs, his ear pressed to the ground. For weeks he has drowsed, curled into himself like a hibernating marmot, listening to the secrets carried by running water through the veins of the world. Attending carefully, he hears many things, but—and here he takes a breath that is a bit less shallow and his eyes roll forward behind their lids—Kah-Lituya is silent and sleeps without grumbling or raising his massive head.
Perhaps the whites are punishing themselves enough
, he thinks to himself.
I never expected that.
, he thinks to himself.
I never expected that.
His mind is still and his heartbeat as soft as a sparrow’s, while his spirit walks in dark and shining places, pondering the strange goings-on in the white men’s hut beneath the drifts.
First they started killing each other, with the dark one going crazy and doing the shooting. Then, instead of shooting him, stabbing him with a knife, or even knocking his head in with a club for his crimes, the big straw-haired man and the woman tied him up to die slowly. In times past, the Tlingit might occasionally sacrifice a slave by putting the wretch under the corner post of a new longhouse to bless the start of construction, but this sort of thing was new.
What really surprised Negook was that the man and the woman were making themselves part of the atonement, too, starving and freezing instead of using their hours to feed and warm themselves, spending their lives taking turns keeping the dark-haired hunter company as he dies. How very strange these cloud-faces are: cruel, wasteful, and yet very brave in odd, unexpected ways.
“The end will come soon.” The words echo in the stillness through which the shaman drifts. “Maybe I should go watch.”
“We have to get rid of him, Hannah. We are both going to die. We cannot feed ourselves or avoid freezing to death like this. If we both work hard, we may survive. There could be enough food with the clams and tides and all, if we both dig at ’em.” Hans prods within the open mouth of the stove with a stick, knocking the embers down to make way for another piece of wood. “Just feeding this shittin’ stove is a full-time job, and we can’t do it if one of us is always sitting here watching him.”
Yesterday Hans wasted the last two shotgun shells on long shots at a sea lion drifting offshore, firing senselessly at an animal that could not have been retrieved through the breaking surf, even if his aim had been good. There is no more ammunition, and the snares have been unproductive. There is only the tide to feed them and what roots or garbage Hannah digs from beneath the snow.
Hannah puckers her mouth and shakes her head. “No. No more killing.” The sounds and smells of Dutch and Harky’s dying flash across her mind at regular intervals. Sleep is a time of screams and red specters, and she often wakes shaking with fear, her ears ringing from the roar of dream shotguns. They live like animals, gnawing at hides and stinking, but she hangs her sanity on a scrap of illusion that there is still some hope of decency, of civility somewhere in the world. Hannah knows that taking Michael’s life now would be an act of selfishness, to save their own lives rather than an act of right or justice, and that to do so would surely unhinge her, slipping her into a mad, dark place from which she might never return.
“No,” she says, surprising herself with the determination in her words. “We will not do it.”
That night Hannah warms a pot of water, gathers a blanket, and carries both outside, intent on reducing her body’s musky smell. Peeling down her filthy top, she works hurriedly against the cold, scrubbing at her armpits and torso, wincing at the soreness in her nipples. Shivering, she reclothes herself, folds the blanket on the ground for a place to stand, and removes her boots. Stripping out of her undergarments, she shudders at the soiled, greasy feel of the shimmy’s cloth before wringing the scrubbing rag in the now-tepid water and rolling her skirt up to her waist. At the sight of the pale, goose-fleshed skin going slack over her diminishing calves and thighs, she sucks in her breath, lifts the bundle of her skirt to her ribs, and runs one hand across her swelling belly.
I presume it to be January. The days seem to be slowly growing longer. I caught a large hedgehog—Hans called it a porkapine—with the ax yesterday while searching for wood. It is the first thing I have ever killed. Surprised to feel nothing in doing so.Dreadfully tired. Mr. Nelson has frozen a finger, and it was very painful in thawing. Michael often unconscious.
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