“We’ve been bothered by crows,” she says. The carrots fall apart into coins under her knife. Bob stands at the window, watching for men, and Cat and I sit on her bed. “They get worse in the summer, but now’s the time when they’re going around with their babies and teaching them what’s food and what’s not.”
She throws the vegetables into the kettle with salt and fat, and I miss my mother’s corn.
“We have an old woman,” I say, “who sits in our field and keeps the crows away.” I’m surprised to see her in the clothes of white people, leading such an alone life. But she may have been Spanish before she was Indian, or black.
“I’ve too much to do to sit around all day, and anyway, I’m not hardly old yet.” She snaps her head around, eyes wide, so we can see the youth still in her face. She gives a final hard stir to the stew and then puts down her spoon and lifts the musket from the back of her door. “Excuse me, sons.”
Bob moves to the back window and watches her walk into the garden. We hear a blast, a pause, and then another blast, and I am stuck to my seat, knowing it is just the woman with her gun, catching a rabbit or a dove for dinner, but thinking still of Le Clerc and his nearness. A warbler flashed through the woods while I was gathering kindling, and I thought it was the gleam on his rifle. She comes back inside, wet again, with two dead crows dripping from her hands.
She clears the table of the tin plates and flour sacks and tufted carrot tops and replaces them with a large wooden bowl. She hums as she gathers ingredients from her shelves. I stand beside her while she rolls them into a paste.
“That’s not for bread,” I say.
“One ounce asafoetida, four ounce flour brimstone, four ounce gunpowder, two ounce hog’s lard.”
We all three watch her arm turn in circles, knowing that this is witchiness but unable to leave this house. Even with the dampness of our bodies, it holds an uncommon warmth.
“My grandmother’s recipe,” she says.
“Who was she?” I ask.
She rolls the paste into balls, walnut-sized, and stuffs them down the throats of the crows. Their beaks spread wide for her dark hands. “There now,” she says, cradling their bodies and sliding them under the bed beside the truant onion. She tosses the remaining paste in the trash heap outside and pours a ladle of water over her hands to clean them.
Bob and Cat look at each other like children, afraid and also wanting to smile.
We eat what she serves us, uncertain now what’s in it, but swallowing because it’s warm and not burned and tastes like lives we had before.
“I haven’t gotten enough from you,” she says, pointing a delicate claw at Cat. “Let’s say this tracker falls off the scent, doesn’t find you bunch of misfits. You’re free and clear, and this one, if his arm don’t fall off, is going west, he won’t stop talking about it, and that one’s circling back to his village one day, though, darling,” turning to me, “I think you’d best wait a year or so to build a name for yourself, take over some of the trade from the upper towns before you approach the Chickasaws. That way you’ll have more pull going in. But you. Where are you headed?”
We all wait. We’re sitting on the floor again, and he puts down his plate and rubs his fingers across his lips as if trying to feel for the taste that was just there.
“Carolina,” he says. His voice cracks, and he swallows. “My wife was there.” He digs a hand into his pocket and pulls out a brownish letter. The woman takes it, looks at the address and the scribbles on the back, but when she raises her eyebrows at him and fingers the seal, he takes it back. “Where is it going?” he asks.
She points to the writing on the front. “Camden,” she says. “That’s closer to the upcountry. What’s that river it’s right along?” She’s taking her time, fiddling in her cap, to give him room to find his courage. “Wateree. We had some people from there in the lower towns,” she adds, looking at me.
She finishes her stew and pushes the plate away. Her fingers work at the knot beneath her cap and she pulls it off, stretches her legs out straight, tries to grab her toes. Bob is unusually quiet again, giving Cat space.
“I want to deliver the letter. This.” He shakes the envelope once.
“If you want to take it yourself, you’re heading the wrong way, son. You need to be going east.”
He smiles, the first smile I’ve seen that seems at ease, that comes from some emotion I might find familiar. “I’m afraid,” he says, turning his hands palm up.
She returns his smile and mimics his gesture. I am reminded of a game Oche and I would play after our mother fell asleep. My brother, who today is probably weaving baskets and seeing spirits, all very gently. This quiet exchange is making me sleepy, and I reach for one of the quilts in the pile on the woman’s bed and fold it beneath my head. A black feather floats along the floor next to me. I brush it aside. Bob leans back against the bedpost, and though we are inching away from their intimacy, we’re listening. This silent man that we have protected, dragged along, refused to abandon, is speaking.
He reaches out for her open hand and holds it in the space between them. He smooths the pink palm with his thumb and then leans close to inspect the lines and scars there. She lets him, as one would humor a child.
“Your hands are even smaller than hers,” he says.
She turns hers over and enfolds his, giving it a squeeze. “Let’s see if I have something here,” she says, hoisting herself up, showing beneath her extravagant skirts that she is shoeless. She bustles into a corner of the kitchen where a stack of rolled and folded papers seems to slide with every loud sound. After shuffling through them, she pulls out a long white scroll and brings it back to Cat, pinning down its corners with a few stones from her windowsill.
“There we are. Now this is us here,” she points, “and this is the trail you fellows came down, and fast, I’m betting. Now,” and she snakes her finger up and to the right like it was traveling in a boat on a river, “way up here is the Carolinas, north and south, and there’s Camden somewhere in this woody part. That’s where you want to go.” She looks up at his face to see if he’s understanding the distance.
He slows his fingers across the map, feeling for mountains.
“Where are your parents, son?”
“Her parents are dead.”
She pulls his hand away from the map. “No, yours.”
“Hers died in a cart on the way to see her. Said it wasn’t her fault.”
“Was she driving the cart?”
“No.”
“Well, there you have it.”
He leaned into a whisper. “But she was bleeding out. I might have stitched her up.”
“That’s maybe a half fault at best, certainly not a whole one. And what can you do now?”
“Suffer.”
“No, no, what can you really do? Bring her back? Throw yourself off a tall tree? Crawl into her grave? Think for a minute, son.”
He waits, his hand still draped on her knee where she left it, the map between them. Beside me, Bob has drifted into a doze on the floor. Her voice alone makes us feel blameless. I am proud that I know what can and cannot be done. Though the creek muddled me briefly, and though Polly still has no solution, I need only keep on the same path I’ve been walking; my plans make sense. There is a difference between killers and leaders, though both may take men’s lives. I am neither yet, but I must tell myself there’s a difference so that I can keep following the good path, in hopes of ending up at a good end. Life keeps going, and no man is lost until the end. I must remember to tell Cat this. He is not yet lost.