Tooth and Claw (35 page)

AT THE BILLINGSES’

S
HE WOULD NEVER
have known the house was there but for the sudden scent of wood smoke and the narrowest ribbon of light that hung in the void like the spare edge of something grander. “If you’ll just alight, then, Missus,” John was saying, and she could feel his hand at her elbow to help her down, “and take yourself right on through that door there.”

“What door?”

“There. Right before your face.”

He led her forward even as the horses stamped in their impatience to be rid of the saddle. She felt stone beneath her feet and focused on the ribbon of light till the door fell inward and she was in the room itself, low beams, plank floor, a single lantern and the fire dead in the hearth. In the next instant a young woman of fifteen or so rose up out of the inglenook with a contorted face and demanded to know who she was and what she was doing in her house at such an hour. The girl stood with her legs apart, as if ready to defend herself. Her voice was strained. “I never seen a woman on the road so dreadful late. Who are you? Where are you going? You scared me out of my wits.”

“This
is
a lodging house, or am I mistaken?” Sarah drew herself
up, sorer than she’d ever been in her life, the back of a horse—any horse—like the Devil’s own rack, and all she wanted was a bed, not provender, not company, not even civility—just that: a bed.

“My ma’s asleep,” the girl said, standing her ground. “So’s my pa. And William too.”

“It’s William I’ve come about. He’s the Post, isn’t he?”

“I suspect.”

“Well, I’ll be traveling west with him in the morning and I’ll need a bed for the night. You
do
have a bed?” Even as she said it she entertained a vision of sleeping rough, stretched out on the cold ground amidst the dried-out husks of the fallen leaves, prey to anything that stalked or crept, and she felt all the strength go out of her. She never pleaded. It wasn’t in her nature. But she was slipping fast when the door suddenly opened behind her and John stepped into the room.

The girl’s eyes ran to him. “Lawful heart, John, is it you?” she cried, and then it was all right, and she offered a chair and a biscuit and darted away upstairs only to appear a moment later with three rings on her fingers and her hair brushed back from her brow. And then the chattering began, one topic flung down as quickly as the next was taken up, and all Sarah wanted was that bed, which finally she found in a little back lean-to that wasn’t much bigger than the bedstead itself. As for comfort, the bed was like a mound of bricks, the shuck mattress even worse. No matter. Exhaustion overcame her. She undressed and slid in under the counterpane even as the bed lice stole out for the feast.

THE BILLINGSES’ TO FOXVALE

S
HE AROSE
stiff in the morning, feeling as if she’d been pounded head to toe with the flat head of a mallet, and the girl was nowhere to be seen. But William was there, scooping porridge out of a bowl by the fire, and the mistress of the house. Sarah made her own introductions, paid for her bed, a mug of coffee that scalded her palate, and her own wooden bowl of porridge, and then she climbed back into the rack of the saddle and they were gone by eight in the morning.

The country they passed through rolled one way and the other, liberally partitioned by streams, creeks, freshets and swamps, the hooves of the horses eternally flinging up ovals of black muck that smelled of things dead and buried. There were birds in the trees still, though the summer flocks were gone, and every branch seemed to hold a squirrel or chipmunk. The leaves were in color, the dragon-flies glazed and hovering over the shadows in the road ahead, and in the clearings goldenrod nodding bright on a thousand stalks. For the first time she found herself relaxing, settling into the slow-haunching rhythm of the horse as she followed the Post’s back and the swishing tail of his mount through one glade after another. There were no houses, no people. She heard a gabbling in the forest and saw the dark-clothed shapes there—turkeys, in all their powers and dominions, turkeys enough to feed all of Boston—and she couldn’t help thinking of the basted bird in a pan over the fire.

At first she’d tried to make conversation with William (a man in his twenties, kempt, lean as a pole, taciturn) just to be civil, but talk seemed superfluous out here in the wild and she let her thoughts wander as if she were at prayer or drifting through the mutating moments before sleep comes.
You should have gone by sea
, Cousin Robert had said, and he was right of course, except that the rollicking of the waters devastated her—she’d been once with her father in a dingy to Nantucket when she was a girl, and once was enough. She could still remember the way her stomach heaved and the fear she’d felt of the implacable depths where unseen things—leviathan, the shark, the crab and suckerfish—rolled in darkness. She’d never learned to swim. Why would she, living in town, and when even the water of the lakes and the river was like the breath of mid-winter, and the sea worse, far worse, with men falling overboard from the fishing boats and drowning from the shock of it? No, she would keep the solid earth under her feet. Or her horse’s feet, at any rate.

Sure progress, the crown of the day: there was the sun, the solemn drapery of the forest, birdsong. She was lulled, half asleep, expecting nothing but more of the same, when suddenly a small thicket of trees detached itself from the wood and ambled out into the road so that her mount pulled up and flung its near eye back at
her. It took two catapulting moments for the image to jell, and then she let out a scream that was the only human sound for twenty miles around.

The thing—the walking forest—was bearded and antlered and had eyes that shone like the Indian money they made of shells. It produced a sound of its own—a blunt bewildered bleat of alarm—and then it was gone and William, taciturn William, was there at her side. “It’s nothing to worry yourself over,” he said, and she saw that he was grinning as if he’d just heard a joke—or formulated one. He had a story to tell at the tavern that night, that’s what it was, and she was the brunt of it, the widow from Boston who wouldn’t recognize a—what was it, a moose?—if it came right up and grazed out of her hand.

AT FOXVALE

T
HE BOARD WAS
primitive, to say the least, Sarah sitting at table with William while William discharged his letters to Nathan, the western Post, and the hostess bringing in a cheese that was like no cheese she’d ever seen. Eating was one of her small pleasures, and at home she always took care with the menu, serving up fish or viands in a savory sauce or peas boiled with a bit of salt meat, fresh roasted venison, Indian corn and squashes and pies—her speciality—made from the ripe fruit of the season, blueberry, raspberry, pumpkin, apple. But here the woods gathered close so that it was like night in the middle of a towering bright day, and there were none of the niceties of civilization, either in the serving or the quality. The cheese—harder than the bed she’d slept in the night before—barely took to the knife, and then it was a dish of pork and cabbage, which looked to be the remains of dinner. She found that she was hungry despite herself—ravenous, actually, with the exercise and air—and she took a larger portion than she would have liked.

“Tucking in there, Missus, eh?” William observed, giving her that same grin even as he nudged Nathan, and here was another story.

“We’ve been on the road since eight in the morning,” she said,
wondering for the life of her what was so amusing about sheltering in a hovel in the woods fit only for a band of naked savages, “and it’s now past two in the afternoon. A woman has got to eat, if only to keep up her strength.” She was throwing it back at them, and why not—that was how she felt. And she
was
hungry, nothing to be ashamed of there. But the sauce was the strangest color—a purple so deep it was nearly black—and the thought came to her that the hostess had stewed the meal in her dye kettle.

William was watching her. As was Nathan. The hostess had vanished in the back room and the sound of the fowl scratching in the dirt of the yard came to her as if she were standing there amongst them. Very slowly a branch outside the sole window dipped in the breeze and parted the dense shadow on the wall. She hesitated, the spoon hovering over the dish—they were both of them grinning like fools—and then she plunged in.

FOXVALE TO PROVIDENCE

T
HIS WAS THE LEG
of the journey that wore on her most. The new man—Nathan—rode hard and she had to struggle to keep up with him, or at least keep him in sight. Though he’d seen her discharge William handsomely enough and pay for his refreshment too, he didn’t seem in the least solicitous. He was a hat and a pair of shoulders and a back, receding, always receding. Her mount wasn’t much taller than a pony and tended to lag no matter how much encouragement she gave him, running to his own head and not a pace faster. The clouds closed in. A light rain began to awaken the dust. Nathan was gone.

She’d never been out alone in the wilderness in her life. When she was younger she’d gone berrying on the outskirts of town or spent a warm afternoon sitting by a cool brook, but the wild was nothing she wanted or recognized. It was a waste, all of it, and the sooner it was civilized and cultivated, the sooner people could live as they did in England, with security and dignity—and cleanliness—the better. To her mind, aside from the dangers that seemed to multiply with every
step they took—a moose, indeed—it was the dirt that damned the wild more than anything. She hadn’t felt even remotely clean since she’d left town, though she’d done her best to beat the soil from her skirts, brush her shoes of mud and see to the demands of her hair. And now she was wet and the horse was wet and her baggage and the road before her, and every leaf on every tree shone and dripped.

She tried to concentrate her thoughts on easeful things, the tea set in her parlor and her daughter and Mrs. Trowbridge pouring out the tea and artfully arranging the pastries on the platter, because it was teatime now, and if it was raining there they’d have built up the fire to take the damp out of the air—but she couldn’t hold the picture long. Her thoughts kept coming back to the present and the dangers of the road. Every stump seen at a distance seemed to transform itself into a bear or wolf, every copse was the haunt of Indians mad with rum and lust, the birds fallen silent now and the rain awakening the mosquitoes that dove at her hands and face where they’d coarsened in the sun. She’d thought she was going on an adventure, a respite from town and gossip and all the constraints of widowhood, something she could look back on and tell over and over again to her daughter and the grandchildren she saw as clearly as if they’d already come into existence—but she wasn’t foolish, and she wasn’t blindered. She’d expected a degree of hardship, an untenanted road, insects and the like, wild animals, and yet in her mind the road always ran between inns with reasonable beds and service and a rough but hardy and well-tendered fare. But this was impossible. This rain, these bugs, this throbbing ache in her seat that was like a hot poker applied to her backside by one of Satan’s own fiends. She hated this. Hated it.

AT PROVIDENCE FERRY

I
T GOT WORSE
.

Nathan’s silhouette presented itself to her at the top of a rise, unkempt now and dripping. Slowly, with the testudineous progress of
something you might crush underfoot, she made her way up the hill to him, and when she got there he pointed down at the lashing dun waves of the Seekonk River and the distant figure of the ferryman. She didn’t say a word, but when they got there, when the water was beating to and fro and the ferryman accepting her coin, she held back. “The water looks doubtful,” she said, trying to keep her voice from deserting her.

“This?” Nathan looked puzzled. “I’d call this calm, Missus,” he said. “And the quicker we’re over it, the better, because there’s worse to come.”

She closed her eyes fast, drew in a single breath and held it till they were across and she knew she was alive still and climbing back into the saddle even as the rain quickened its pace and the road ahead turned to sludge.

PROVIDENCE FERRY TO THE HAVENSES’

T
HEY HADN
’
T GONE
on a quarter of an hour when they came to a second river, the name of which she never did learn. It was dark as a brew with the runoff of the rain and ran in sheets over the submerged rocks and boiled up again round the visible ones. She felt herself seize at the sight of it, though Nathan assured her it wasn’t what it seemed—“No depth to it at all and we’re used to ride across it even at spring thaw”—and when they were there at the crossing and Nathan’s mount already hock-deep in the surge, she just couldn’t go on. He remonstrated with her—they were late on the road already, dusk was falling, there was another crossing after this one and fourteen miles more to the next stage—but she was adamant. There was no inducement in the world that would make her risk that torrent.

The rain had begun to let up now and a few late faltering streaks of sun shone through the clouds across the river. But wasn’t that a house there on the far shore? A cabin, crudely made of logs with the bark peeled back and smoke rising palely from the stacked stone of the chimney? The current sang. Nathan swung his horse round on
the shingle and gave her a look of hatred. “Does someone live there?” she asked. “In that cabin there?”

He didn’t answer. Just thrust his horse into the current and floundered through it with a crashing like cymbals and she was so furious she would have shot him right through his pinched shoulder blades if only she’d had the means. He was deserting her. Leaving her to the wolves, the murderers and the haunts. “You come back here!” she shouted, but there were only his shoulders, receding.

That was her low point. She tried, at first, to screw up her courage and follow him—it wasn’t so deep, after all, she could see that—but the way the water seemed to speak and hiss and mock her was enough to warn her off. She dismounted. There was a chill in the air, her clothes wet still, the night descending. She should have stayed home. Should have listened to Robert and her daughter and everyone else she talked to—women simply did not travel the Post Road, not without their husbands or brothers or kinsmen there to guide and protect them, and even then, it was a risk. Something settled in the back of her throat, a hard bolus of self-pity and despair. She couldn’t swallow. One more minute of this, one more minute of this water and these trees, these endless trees, and she was going to break down and sob like a child. But then, out there on the naked back of the water, she saw the envelope of the birchbark canoe coming toward her and a boy in it and Nathan beckoning to her from the far shore.