T. Boyle - Tooth and Claw

THE HAVENSES’ TO THE PAUKATAUG

THE NEXT KNOCK came at four in the morning, black as pitch and no breakfast but what was portable, and here they were, back out on the road in the dark and cold, deep in the Narragansett country now, which to Sarah’s mind was just more of the same: the hard road, the shadowy trees and the reptatory murmur of the waters that were all running underfoot to gather in some terrible place ahead. “Narragansett,” she whispered to herself, as if it were an incantation, but she had to be forgiven if she couldn’t seem to muster much enthusiasm for the origins of the name.

They’d been joined at the Havenses’ by a French doctor, a slight man with a limp and a disproportionate nose, whose name she couldn’t pronounce and whose accent made him difficult to understand, so that they were a party of three now for this leg of the journey. Not that it made a particle of difference, except that Nathan and the doctor rode on at such a furious pace as to leave her a mile and more behind, alone with her thoughts and whatever frights the unbroken wood might harbor. From time to time she’d spy them on a hill up ahead of her, waiting to see that she was still on the road and not lying murdered in a ditch, and then they’d tug at the reins again and vanish over the rise.

The Post had warned her that there was no accommodation or refreshment on this stretch of the road — no human habitation at all — for a full twenty-two miles, but as the morning wore on it seemed as if they’d gone a hundred miles before she saw the two figures poised on a ridge up ahead, looking back at her and pointing to a tight tourniquet of smoke in the distance. She’d been down on foot and leading her mount at that point, just to ease the soreness of her seat and thighs, but now she remounted with some effort and found her way to the source of the smoke: an ordinary set down beside a brook in a clearing of the trees.

Painfully she dismounted and painfully accepted the refreshment the landlady had to offer — stewed meat and Indian bread, unleavened — and then sat over the journal she’d determined to keep while the landlady went on to the doctor about her physical complaints in a voice loud enough to be heard all the way to Kingston town and back. The woman spoke of her privates as if they were public, and perhaps they were, but just hearing it was enough to turn Sarah’s stomach and she had to take her book and sit out in the courtyard amongst the flies, which were especially thick here, as if they’d gathered for some sort of convention. She sat on a stump and swatted and shooed and blotted her precious paper with the effort until the Frenchman and the Post, still chewing a cud of stewed meat, saddled up and moved on down the road, and she had no choice but to rouse herself and follow on in their wake.

The country was unremarkable, the road boggy, the sun an affliction. Her hands and face were burned where they were exposed and the pain of it was like being freshly slapped every ten seconds. She saw a pair of foxes and what might have been a wolf, loping and rangy, with something dangling from its jaws. The sight of it gave her a start, but the thing ignored her and went about its business, which was slipping into a ravine with its prey in order to feed in some dark den, and then she almost wished it would emerge round the next bend to attack her, if only to put an end to the ceaseless swaying and battering of the horse beneath her. Nothing of the sort happened, however, and at around one in the afternoon she found Post and doctor waiting for her on the shores of a broad tidal river she knew she would never get across, not in this lifetime.

AT THE PAUKATAUG

“WELL, THE ROAD ENDS here, then, Missus, because the doctor has his business in Kingston town and I’ve got the letters to deliver.” The Post was leaning across his saddle, giving her a look of indifference. He was going to desert her and it didn’t bother him a whit.

The doctor said something then about the ebbing tide, but she couldn’t quite fathom what he was getting at until Nathan translated: “He says it’s easier crossing at low tide—”

“Well, when is that, pray?”

“Three hour. Maybe more.”

“And you won’t wait?”

Neither man spoke. They were both of them like the boys she used to teach at school, caught out at something — doing wrong and knowing it — but unequal to admitting it. She felt her jaws clench. “You’d desert me, then?”

It took a moment, and then Nathan pointed an insolent finger at what at first she’d taken to be a heap of flood-run brush, but which she now saw was some sort of habitation. “Old Man Cotter lives there,” he said, and at the sound of his voice a great gray-winged bird rose out of the shallows at river’s edge and ascended like a kite on the currents of the air. “He’ll take you in.”

Stunned, she just sat there astride her horse and watched the Post and doctor slash into the current until the water was at their waists and all that was visible of their mounts were their heads and a flat sheen of pounding rump, and then she made her way to the ramshackle collection of weathered boards and knocked at the door. The old man who answered gave her a startled look, as if he’d never seen a woman before, or a lady at any rate, but she steeled herself, and trusting in human kindness, offered him a coin and asked if she might shelter with him until the tide drew off. Very slowly, as if it were coming from a long way off, the old man discovered a smile and then stood back and held the door open for her. She hesitated — the floor was bare earth and there were animal skins on the wall, the place as dank and cold as a cellar. She turned to look back at the river, but the Post and his companion were already gone and the day was blowing away to the east in a tatter of cloud. She stepped inside.

THE PAUKATAUG TO STONINGTOWN

THERE WAS A WIFE inside that hut and two children, both girls and ill-favored, and the whole miserable family dressed in rags and deerskin, and no furniture but for the rounds of logs cut for stools, a bed with a glass bottle hanging at the head of it for what purpose she could only imagine (decoration?), an earthen cup, a pewter basin and a board supported on rough-cut props to serve as a table. The hearth was a crude array of blackened stone, and as Sarah stepped through the door the wife was just setting a few knots of wood to the flame. “I don’t mean to intrude,” she said, all the family’s starved blue eyes on her, “but I’ve been deserted here at the river and I don’t know what else to do—”

The wife looked down at her feet and murmured that she was welcome and could make herself at home and that they were very honored to have her. “Here,” she said, “you just sit here,” and she indicated the bed. After that, no one said a word, the girls slipping out the door as soon as they could and the old man responding to Sarah’s questions and observations (“It must be solitary out here” and “Do you get into Stoningtown much?”) with a short sharp grunt of denial or affirmation. The dirt of the floor was pounded hard. The fire was meager. A draft flowed continuously through the gaps in the river-run boards that made the walls of the place. She was cold, hungry, tired, uncomfortable. She closed her eyes and endured.

When she opened them, there was a new person in the room. At first she took him to be a wild Indian because there was no stitch of civilized clothing about him, from his moccasins to his buckskin shirt and crude hat tanned with the fur of some creature still on it, but she gathered from the conversation — what little of it there was — that he was the son-in-law of the old man and woman and living off in the deeper wild in a hovel of his own with their daughter, also named Sarah. No introductions were made, and the man all but ignored her, till finally Mr. Cotter rose to his feet and said, “Well, the river’ll be down now and I expect it’s time you wanted to go, Missus.”