Her Loving Husband's Curse (32 page)

“Go to sleep, Sarah. It’s all right. Go to sleep.”

She fell asleep, but it was a haphazard, worried sleep haunted by demons. She saw James slipping away, back across the years, to a time she could never recover. What if they never found each other again? No matter how many preternatural visitors, no matter how many past life regressions—what if they lost touch of each other forever? She saw herself and her daughter, their empty arms reaching toward him as he slipped out of their grasp. She gasped aloud when she opened her eyes, but she settled when she saw James sitting beside her.

“What time is it? she asked.

“Two a.m.,” James said. “We still have time.”

“Do we?”

He looked away.

“Tell me a story,” Sarah said. She needed to keep him talking, hear his voice, know he was still there.

James sighed. He stared at her face, her hair, her hands. He stared at her as though he needed to memorize everything about her all over again so he wouldn’t forget. “I never finished telling you how I met Chandresh on the Trail of Tears,” he said.

“That’s right.”

James watched the tailless black cat scamper across the hardwood floor and smiled. He looked out the window, his eyes small in concentration, that far-off look he always had whenever he spoke of his past.

“I had been living alongside the Cherokee in the Smoky Mountains…”

“That’s where you decided to stop hunting,” Sarah said.

“Yes. When I realized the Cherokee were being forcibly removed from their land I followed them west.”

“Why?”

“To this day I’m not entirely sure. Part of it was I wanted to help them the way I wished someone had helped us when we were caught up in the madness in Salem. And focusing on their hardships in the camps gave me something to think about besides how much I missed you.”

“What were the camps like?”

James moved onto the bed next to Sarah and put his arm around her, gently. He leaned back and held her to his side, pressing her head against his chest. He rested his cheek on top of her hair while he spoke.

“Inside the camps smelled of urine and fear, the rows of people stretching far and away, like corn in the fields. Outside the camps were freshly dug graves. Most nights were silent and no one spoke. Sometimes motherless sons or fatherless daughters sobbed. Sometimes you could hear the braying of the horses or the clucks of the chickens or the barks of the dogs. Some of the richer Cherokee retained a few of their possessions and brought their looms and pack dogs along, and some sadly brought their slaves. Sometimes they whispered amongst each other, but otherwise it was quiet.

“Everyone was crowded together, huddled around their campfires, their eyes closed, their stomachs aching from the salt pork, their legs and backs sore, their hands and faces blistered from sunburns. When they could muster the energy they chanted songs and prayers. One night a man, a father who had lost his sons, began screaming, his arms reaching for the sky, or, more likely, for his dead children. His eyes grew wild and he went mad. The soldiers restrained him with rope, letting him howl in one of the wagons until they cut him loose and brought him into the woods from where he never returned. One night as we walked a woman with an infant on her back, her two older children clinging to her legs, was crying as she forced herself forward. Suddenly, she dropped dead to the ground. The soldiers pulled the three screaming children from her and tossed them into the closest wagon, leaving the woman’s corpse by the side of the road.” James shook his head. “Perhaps we should talk about something else.”

“Tell me about the night you met Chandresh.”

James sighed. “We had been traveling for about a month by then, and the walking was so hard for them. Not for me, of course. I could easily catch up to the ones who walked all the daylight hours. Their going was slow because they didn’t walk over roads—they passed through the wilderness. The stronger men and women went ahead and cut the timber out of the way with axes, and it was a long, hard journey every day.

“The people were hungry, thirsty, and suffering from fever, dysentery, and exposure to the weather. They were dependent on the quartermasters for sustenance, and all they had to eat or drink was what they were given, and what they were given was given grudgingly. There was no shelter anywhere, and for the whole time on the trail I thought there were no homes left for anyone anywhere in the world.

“Every night, as I found my way forward, I passed the dead and the dying left along the trail. The shamans were doing what they could with their ancient ways, but they were in a foreign territory. They didn’t know the local plants and herbs. They didn’t have access to the medicine they knew could heal. A number of white doctors were there to help as they could, but there was tension between the shamans and the white doctors since they had different ways of treating the sick and each thought his way was right.

“Everyone was dying. Husbands died, leaving their widows and children to fend for themselves against an unfriendly forest and impatient soldiers. Wives died, leaving their husbands and children without hope or comfort. One night I saw soldiers dash a four-day-old baby’s head against a tree because it wouldn’t stop crying. I learned later that the baby’s mother had just died. I tried to intervene. I grabbed the baby and brought her to the closest doctor I could find, but the child was already gone and there was nothing left to do but bury her. Everywhere along the trail were people burying their dead in shallow, unmarked graves. When it was time to go on they had to go, and often they weren’t given time to bury their loved ones properly. Mothers were forced to carry their dead children all the day long until they stopped again in the night.”

James stopped talking. Sarah waited, but he stayed silent.

“What is it, James?”

“What else do you want to know?”

“I still want to know how you met Chandresh.”

“Sarah…”

“You asked me what I wanted to know. This is what I want to know. My heart breaks for those people, James. You have to tell me their story.”

“Very well.” James pressed her closer to his chest. “In the shadows of the night, after the people had finished walking for the day, I would see the Grim Reaper himself, cloaked in black and gloom, pointing at that old man with parched lips and distended stomach, grimacing at that little girl heaving for breath, laughing at that woman crying for the children she will abandon in her death, her husband already dead and gone.

“One night I heard sobbing, which was common enough then. I came around a bend in the forest to see the medicine man I was familiar with since his son was my neighbor in the Smoky Mountains. The medicine man had spoken to me once along the trail when he called me the Kalona Ayeliski.”

“What is that?” Sarah asked.

“The Raven Mocker. To the Cherokee, the Raven Mocker is an evil spirit who feeds from the hearts of the dead and dying to lengthen its own life.”

“He was wrong about you.”

“He was, and yet he wasn’t. The Cherokee believe only the medicine men could see the Kalona Ayeliski, and the Cherokee people on the trail definitely couldn’t see me. The white soldiers and doctors saw me well enough and spoke to me, but the Cherokee looked right through me and never acknowledged me at all. I stood alongside them in their camps, I walked among them as they ended their long day’s journey in the night, I spoke to them, I brought them food and water, I helped bury their dead, and yet they never once so much as nodded in my direction. Then the medicine man explained that they couldn’t see me because they couldn’t see the Raven Mocker.”

“Is that why Chandresh couldn’t see you when you lived next door to him?”

“Yes.”

“But he certainly sees you now.”

James looked away. “Yes.”

“That doesn’t make sense. You’re not an evil spirit. You don’t feed on anyone’s heart. You drink blood, but you don’t kill anyone for it.”

“I was no longer hunting then, that’s true.”

“Then how could the legend apply to you?”

“I don’t know, but I’m certain they couldn’t see me.”

“Maybe they created the legend of the Raven Mocker because they assumed that if vampires were supernatural then they must be evil.”

James shrugged. “I’m not aware of vampires that eat human hearts, but they may exist. The legend may have sprung from some truth.”

Sarah wanted to ask him questions to keep him talking as she had always done, but something stopped her. She was frightened suddenly, reminded of the truth of their situation, and she remembered she wouldn’t have her husband by her side much longer. She pressed herself into him, as hard as she could, trying to meld into him so when they took him away she would go too. Suddenly, she was afraid of hearing the end of his story, as though when he finished he would disappear, like it had been time for him to leave when he finished reading Miriam’s books.

She tried to stretch her arm across James and she was startled by the IV tubes she had forgotten about. James checked the attachment to her arm, saw everything all right, and he gripped her hands and kissed them. She had to hear his voice, that moment and every moment more, and when he finished that story she would have him tell another and another.

“You said the medicine man was Chandresh’s father?”

“Yes.”

“What was his name?”

“Chandresh’s father was Ashwin.”

“What does it mean?”

“‘Strong horse.’”

“And what does Chandresh mean?”

James paused. “‘Lord of the moon.’ That’s the name he received after.”

“After what?”

James looked over Sarah’s head, through the window, as though he were searching for the scenes to play themselves out so he could show her like a movie. She saw the faintest traces of a grin as he remembered.

“When Chandresh and I were living near each other in the Smoky Mountains, I would watch him return to his cabin from tending his fields, playing with his older daughter in front of their house, sitting on the porch with his wife and her mother while the girls slept. Once, at a gathering before they were swept off their land, Ashwin addressed me directly, though I didn’t realize at the time that he was the only one who could see me. Then, when Ashwin saw me on the trail, he watched me closely.”

“Was he afraid you were going to eat someone’s heart?”

“He didn’t say so, but he made it clear he was keeping his eye on me. When he realized I was there to help, to get food and water where I could, to help tend the sick and the dying, he finally began calling me James instead of Kalona Ayeliski and I knew he finally saw me for what I was. When Chandresh lay dying, that’s when he called to me.”

“Chandresh was dying?” Sarah’s hand went to her heart. She remembered herself in the dungeon, dying tortured and alone, and she remembered herself bloody and bruised along the side of the Maine road, dying in her husband’s arms, and she imagined that dying within a sea of people wasn’t any better.

“Remember when I said that one day I might tell you something that would make you run away from me for good? What if what I’m about to tell you is that thing? Would you want me to stop talking?”

“There is nothing you can tell me that will make me run away from you. I love you.”

James stood from the bed and paced as he did whenever he was agitated or worried. His brow furrowed, his finger pressing back the wire-frame eyeglasses he wasn’t wearing, there was no reason to hide his eyes now, and when he looked at Sarah it was with such love.

“Chandresh had dysentery, and he was weak from walking and malnutrition. He didn’t have the will to live any longer and he wasn’t fighting. He was ready to go. His wife and daughters were already dead. Chandresh’s mother-in-law had been separated from the family for days until people who knew them said they passed her unburied corpse miles back. Ashwin begged me to find her and bury her, and I did. When he realized Chandresh was dying too, I could hear his heart breaking, tightening in his chest, tying itself into a knot. He knelt over his son, tried to get him to drink the few drops of water he had, but Chandresh clamped his lips and shook his head. Ashwin removed his son’s turban and brushed his hair from his eyes as sweetly as any mother tending her newborn.

“‘Listen,’ he whispered to his son. ‘You cannot leave me. You are all I have in this world. We will survive this together, you and I. We will go west, and we will grow strong. Stay.’

“I had to bite my lip to keep from crying. I knew Ashwin knew what I was, and yet I couldn’t stand for him to see my bloody tears. It reminded me too much of my parting from my own father, and I knew the father’s pain, and the son’s for leaving him. Suddenly, Chandresh choked and gasped for air. He was taking his last breaths in this world.

Ashwin spun toward me. “‘Help him!’ he cried. I saw the others stare at Ashwin. As far as they could see the medicine man was begging for help from the air, or maybe from the Great Spirit who was nowhere to be seen along that forsaken trail. But I knew he was talking to me.

“‘There’s nothing more I can do,’ I said.

“‘Help him!’ Ashwin cried again. The sight of this man, so strong while he helped others along the trail as best he could, who had lost everyone he loved day by day, one by one, begging me to help him tore at me in ways that are still too painful. Again, he reminded me of my own past, this time when I sat outside the jail begging anyone I saw to help you. It was too much and I turned away.