Bone River (48 page)

“You lied to her,” Daniel said softly.

Junius turned to him. “And you didn’t?”

Daniel laughed. “Well, I didn’t take away her life, did I?”

“I
gave
her a life,” Junius spat. “What would she have been without me? A savage. A
half-breed.
I made her what she is. My
wife
. She’s
respected
, goddammit! Everything would have been fine if you’d stayed the hell in San Francisco. If not for the damned mummy—”

“She wanted me to know the truth, Junius,” I said.

“She’s a
relic
, Lea,” he snapped. “For God’s sake, why can’t you see that? Do I have to show you the truth?” He pushed past me. “She’s not what you think she is. She’s just a goddamned mummy.” He jerked open the door. The sound of rain, the rush of wind, the roar of the river. He was out on the porch, and for a moment I stood there, stunned. For a moment it didn’t occur to me what he meant to do. And then I heard the thud of the trunk lid against the house; I remembered Daniel dropping the saw there beside it.

“No,” I said, whispering in horror. “He’s going to cut her apart.” I rushed to the door, and Daniel was beside me. Junius was already bending over the trunk, the saw in his hand. Daniel pushed by me, lunging across the porch, grabbing Junius’s arm to stop him.

“Drop it,” he said.

Junius wrenched away. He looked past Daniel to me. “There won’t be any viscera. You’ll see—”

Daniel hit him. Junius staggered back, dropping the saw, and then recovered. He threw himself at Daniel, and then the two of them were falling against the porch rail, bouncing off, stumbling down the stairs. Daniel fell into the mud, into the puddles rapidly forming from the rain, and Junius was on top of him, slamming his fist into him, yelling something—the words swept away by rain.

I screamed, “Junius, no!” and started toward the stairs, but Lord Tom pulled me back, holding me. When I tried to break loose, his hands tightened.

Lord Tom said, “No,
okustee.
The river is rising.”

I looked beyond Daniel and Junius. Lord Tom was right. The Querquelin was overfull and whitecapping, the wind whipping my hair around my head like the wild spirit of Yutilma, the water roaring and beyond that the darkness of the bay. I heard her voice in my head.
The tide.
Or perhaps it was only my own, but I knew it was the plus tide feeding too much water into a river already swollen. Too much water, and nothing could hold it all.

Daniel was up now, grappling with Junius, the two of them splashing away from the house, toward the river, through ankle-deep water, and suddenly I was horribly, terribly afraid.

I wrenched from Lord Tom, racing down the stairs, racing for them, and I wasn’t more than a few steps before I realized it was more than just puddling. The yard was flooding. The river had already overflowed its banks and was moving higher while I stood there. Shin deep, the rain bashing and heavy, pounding, and then Lord Tom was there, pulling me back again.

I screamed, “Stop!” but my voice was lifted away by the wind. I shouted again, “Daniel!” and my voice whisked away like smoke. He didn’t hear me, and I couldn’t get closer. Lord Tom’s hold on me was unbreakable; he hauled me back to the porch—the house should be safe, the house was safe. On a rise, and just as I had the thought I heard a terrible sound—like the falling of a giant tree—and then the barn shuddered and went down and the river currents took it, a huge dark shadow on the water, swirling and churning. Itcixyan, the most powerful of the Chinook water spirits, crumbling the boards and beams into splinters.

Daniel and Junius were thigh deep, closer to the river, below the rise.

I looked at Lord Tom. “You have to stop them! Stop them!”

“It is rising too quickly.” He sounded worried. He jerked his head, and I followed the motion to see that the river was coming steadily on—already lapping against the porch stairs.

“The house will be safe,” I said, but he shook his head.

“High ground,
okustee
,” he said, dragging me with him down the stairs, into the water, into the pounding rain, toward the back of the yard, the trees rising from the salt marsh.

Lord Tom shoved me toward the woods. “Go. I’ll get them.”

The water was knee deep, the current dragging so I must fight it, but I didn’t go until I saw him reach them. I saw him shout at them, but the wind stole his words. I saw him gesture to me, the paleness of Daniel’s face in the darkness as he turned toward me, and then the three of them were struggling through the currents, and we made our way toward the trees, the greater rise that climbed to the hill behind the house. Once I was there, I fell against a cedar, my skirts sodden and heavy, my boots full of water, the rest of me wet with the pouring rain, the chill creeping into my bones.

Junius and Daniel and Lord Tom stumbled up behind me. Junius shouted, “We should be at the house! The river won’t rise so far!”

I said, “It already has. Look!”

He turned to see. Water rising past the root cellar, lapping at the boards. “The bones,” he said.

And I remembered her. The trunk on the porch.

“Oh dear God,” I gasped, and when Junius strode to the edge of the rise, I was with him. “My mother.”

Lord Tom said, “No,
okustee.
She belongs to the river. She would want you to be safe. For
tenas yaka tenas klootchman
.”

Her granddaughter.

Daniel’s daughter.

He was right, I knew. Junius shook his head. “It’s not too late. I can get them all.”

Daniel shouted, “Are you mad? Leave them. It’s too dangerous.”

Lord Tom grabbed Junius’s arm. “The river will take back what it wants.”

Junius jerked away. “I haven’t spent the last months collecting those things to give them back to the river.”

“You cannot go,
sikhs
.”

I forgot my anger. I forgot the lies Junius had told me, the things he’d said. All I knew were twenty years of habit. Twenty years of loving him. I rushed to him. “Junius, he’s right. Leave them!”

He looked at me, his face grim.

I clutched his arm. “You can’t go!”

He looked over my head. “Get her off me, boy.”

I dug my fingers into his arm. “I won’t let you go.”

He pulled himself loose and strode quickly toward the water, and I rushed after him, plunging in after him, and then suddenly there was Daniel, grabbing me, holding me.

“Don’t let him go,” I said desperately.

“You can’t go after him.” Daniel’s voice was low and urgent, his arms like iron, holding me in place. The wind whipped his soaking hair into his face, which was pale with cold and wet,
stark. I looked helplessly toward Junius, fighting his way through the river, hip deep.

“He’ll die there.”

Daniel dragged me back. He bent to look me in the eyes. “I’ll go after him. I’ll bring him back. But Lea, you have to stay. Promise you won’t follow me, no matter what happens.”

“He won’t listen to you.”

His smile was grim. “If he doesn’t, he’ll drown. And believe me, he won’t let me win so easily.”

“Daniel, no.” I clutched at him.

“I promise I’ll be back,” he said. “We’ve things to talk about, you and I.”

I could not release my grip on his shirt. He peeled away my fingers. He looked past me to Lord Tom. “Don’t let her follow.”

Then he raced after his father, and soon all I could see was the white of their shirts in the darkness, and then they were rounding the house and there was nothing to see at all.

The river was climbing, sucking everything into it, the plus tide and the storm and my own desires crashing and swallowing. Lord Tom came to stand beside me, his hand on my arm as if he meant at any moment to drag me back, as if it might become necessary to anchor me. I watched for any sign of them. I strained to see. There was only darkness and water, the faint light from the house. “Where are they?” I asked. “What’s taking them so long?”

I did not take my eyes from the house, from the light glowing from the windows, my hope that I would see one of them within it, or that I would see them coming back, Junius persuaded, Daniel keeping his promise. I could see almost nothing beyond that, not through the crashing rain, the whip of the wind in the trees above my head, but I was watching so carefully it was a moment before I heard the sound. Thunder, a terrible creaking groan, an unappeased roar. It was a moment before I realized what it was, a moment before I comprehended the house rising
as if it were being lifted in Itcixyan’s palm, and then collapse as if he’d crushed it in his fingers.

I screamed out, “Daniel!” and lurched forward, and it was only Lord Tom’s hold that kept me there. What was left of the house crumpled and broke, swirling in the currents of the river like toothpicks, swept away. The lie of my life washed away by the river, which had indeed taken back its own, and I didn’t realize how I was struggling until Lord Tom pulled me hard into his arms and I went limp, staring blindly at the spot where the house had been, where I had last seen them.

“No,” I whispered desperately. “No. No. You gave him to me.”

Lord Tom said, “
Okustee,
the canoe.”

I looked to where he pointed, where a dark shadow nudged the bank where we stood. The canoe, insistent and relentless as if to say
here I am. Let me save you.

Lord Tom released me, leaning to grab the bow, pulling it up onto the bank, and I stopped him with a touch. “I need to find them if I can.”

He nodded. “Get in.”

And so we did. There was only one paddle, laying on the floor beneath our feet, the other washed away. I sat in the bow and Lord Tom pushed us off and took up the paddle. The current was hard and fast, buffeting us, and I wiped away my tears and looked past my despair, searching for them, for any sign in the darkness. She had brought him for me, why give him and take him back? But I saw nothing.

“He promised,” I said desperately, to nothing, to her, who was gone now. “He promised.” And there, suddenly, as if my desire had given birth to it, I saw something floating, a white shirt, Daniel clinging to what looked like the front door.

“There!” I shouted, unnecessarily, as Lord Tom had seen him at almost the same moment, and we were moving toward him, not fast enough, and then we reached him. He was white faced, his hair dark and plastered to his skull, and Tom and I
hauled him in, and I cupped his cold face in my hands and kissed him hard, my tears mixing with the rain and my relief, and he wrapped his arms around me and said, “I pulled him out, Lea. I did what I promised. He’s out here somewhere.”

But it seemed forever until we found him. There, unconscious in the flood, half-buoyed by a piece of siding, floating out to the bay. I thought he was dead, but when Lord Tom and Daniel pulled him into the canoe, he was still breathing. There was something clutched in his hand, held hard as a death grip.

My notebook.

I
STOOD ON
the edge of the bank and watched the storm, the avenging spirit of the river rushing over my land, until Daniel came up beside me and drew me gently back into the nominal shelter of the trees. “You need to be warm,” he said, though his own teeth were chattering, and he looked like some gaunt spirit of the cold himself with his pale face and his hair stringing dark and wet and lank.

But I went with him. My sorrow over Junius’s lies, and my father’s, was a heavy, dark and freezing thing, a regret I could not lose, and that neither had realized what they’d cost me was something I could not easily forgive. My life felt unformed and new and raw, something unmolded that I was uncertain I could recast. How did one come to terms with becoming something else?

I remembered Daniel’s words—
I’m afraid of what you’ll become if I leave you
, and my own, back to him,
Become? I am already
become
.

But I was not, after all.

Daniel led me deeper into the woods. The branches creaked and groaned in the wind above our heads, but they kept off the worst of the rain. The canoe had been turned upside down next
to a huge nurse log, which crumbled beneath its burden of ferns and moss, a dark fuzziness in the night. Lord Tom had found Edna, lowing piteously in the forest, and brought her back, tying her tether to a tree, and now she was quiet. Junius was there already, huddled beneath the canoe. He watched wordlessly as we came up, and Daniel released me, squeezing my hand before he stepped away, leaving me to face my husband alone.

Junius rose and came to me. He was bedraggled, pale, white with cold. “I tried to save your notebook,” he said. “The translations. Your drawings. I grabbed it, but...”

“I have it,” I said, touching my pocket, where I’d shoved it. It was heavy and wet; I wondered if the ink and pencil had melted away, but I hadn’t had the time or the courage to look at it. “It was in your hand.”

“I remembered to save it for you. It was the only thing I tried to save. Does that make a difference? It’s not much, but we could use it to start over. You and me, Lea. We could leave this wretched place. Go north. You’ll have the Bela Coola talked out of secret society masks in no time.”