An Undisturbed Peace (4 page)

Such was the fullness of his emotion when the toe of his left boot happened to strike the side of a plain pine box that was either hidden or stored beneath her bed. It felt a fateful discovery and so he knelt down and took it out. The box looked to him to be about two cubits squared but, on lifting it, he thought it very light for its size. He rattled it first, gently against his ear. It made little noise. When he opened it, he discovered a bundle of letters, most from a lover whom it appeared she had also rejected in some way. The letters were signed variously as “The Abandoned,” “He Without Hope,” and “He Who Adores You” but with no corresponding name as if secrecy, anonymity, was paramount to their author. They were full of regrets and pleadings on mysterious propositions that Abe found typically English—that is, masked in double or even triple meanings. “I choke on the fruit I gathered for you. Why, my beloved, have you returned it to me?” he read before rolling his eyes and putting the letters aside. Beneath the letters were a collection of feathers—he assumed these were of ritual importance for their being wrapped in sheaths of deerskin—and a few bones from small animals. On the dried skin of a creature he could not identify, there was a document written in strange symbols, ornate
o
's and
t
's with queer slashes, squiggles, and tails. There were two corked miniature amphora, one filled with a red powder and the other with white, and also, at the very bottom of the box, underneath a protective sheet of muslin, what appeared to be a family portrait, an oil on canvas stretched over a square wooden frame. What a surprise, he thought, to find a portrait, a formal one, in a Cherokee treasure box, even the treasure box of one educated in England and living a more or less civilized life in the foothills. His own mother did not possess a single one. Abe examined the portrait's family carefully. The men were dressed in cotton shirts, turbans, and buckskins. They wore long gold earrings. The women also wore cotton shirts but with tiered skirts of many colors cinched by beaded belts. There was a much younger Marian, a mature man wearing a stovepipe hat whom Abe assumed to be her father, and a small woman next to him who was likely Marian's mother. There were also two Cherokee boys, and by his stance, a warrior male several years older than Marian. In addition, there were two blacks—family slaves, Abe deduced—a male and female of indeterminate age in European dress, standing with inscrutable expressions behind the primary group. There was a smudge over the face of the black man nearly erasing his features. The father, the mother, and the warrior in the foreground looked stern, not only unsmiling but angry.

Proof of her boasts when they first met, the painted Marian was magnificently beautiful. Abe judged her no older when it was painted than he was at present. The artist was either in love with her, a remarkable genius, or both. He portrayed a young beauty with a gleaming freshness to her skin, a firm fullness to her shape, and a softness to her eyes and jaw line, none of which were present anymore. She wasn't merely lovely, she was a creature born to be worshipped. He looked at the portrait a very long time before carefully packing everything away in the box exactly as he'd found it. He lay back on the bed to daydream of the Marian of long ago. Who was the warrior? he wondered. A brother? A lover? Alive or dead? And the painter. Who was he? Most of all, why would she hide the portrait? Why didn't she display it proudly?

She returned at dusk, riding bareback on her horse, her short bow and quiver on her back, a brace of wild turkey draped over the mare's withers. He stood at the open doorway to greet her. She rode to him, nodded without expression, then with a speed and grace that tortured him, she swung a long shapely leg over the mare's neck, slid to the ground, and handed him the fowl. “Do you know how to dress them?” she asked. “I think so,” he said. He'd watched his mother prepare fowl many a time. “Go to it then,” she said. “I have animals to feed.”

Determined to please her, Abe sat on a stool outside the cabin and plucked with his head down, deeply concentrating on his task. Soon, the tops of his boots were buried in feathers. Each time he inhaled, feathers flew to his mouth and stuck there 'til he ripped them off. It was wretched work. Wretched women's work, he thought, and cursed softly so she would not hear him although she was far off in the shed doing he knew not what. He plucked on. He bit his feathered lips and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his arm when he thought he heard her approach. He kept his head down, furiously plucking, hoping to be done with at least one of the birds by the time she came up to him. Then he saw another man's boots, rapidly becoming buried in feathers as well, facing his own at a distance less than the span of his right hand. He looked up.

Standing in front of him was not one but three men, Cherokee all, got up in European style, in dusty suits and soft-collared shirts with dirty ruffled cuffs. Each wore a wide silk tie knotted in a bow with ends that draped down to the first button of his jacket. None wore a hat. Their long black hair was tied back with ribbons, then braided. Strung through the braids were clusters of long, tapered feathers.

“Where is the woman who lives here?” asked the tallest and hardest of them.

“She is here,” Marian said, at least that's what Abe assumed she said since she said it in Cherokee. The peddler knew but five words in that language and Marian had not employed these. He'd been so mesmerized by the men, he'd not seen her come up to the cabin as well. But there she was, positioning herself to stand between Abe and the Indian men, forcing them to back up a few paces. Abe wondered if she did this to protect him and decided yes, it must be so. Abrahan Bento Sassaporta Naggar felt a jolt of elation. Marian of the foothills cared for him. He no longer suffered doubts, he was certain of it, despite his clouded memory of rejection. He sat on his stool basking in the shield of her shadow with a tiny, irrepressible smile playing about his lips while Marian and the men discussed in their language a matter that appeared to be one of some gravity. Covered in feathers, sitting on his stool, he knew he must appear to her tribesmen a slavish idiot boy. He didn't care.

The end of the conversation came quickly. Marian said something that was maybe angry, maybe simply final. The men acquiesced. They turned and left. A covered wagon emerged from concealment inside the tree line to meet them, no doubt the very conveyance that had taken them to Marian's door. How had they got it through the woods? There were roads nearby, but not many. Why had they hidden it? One of the men ascended to sit next to the driver's seat, while the others climbed in the back, and then they were gone but not before Abe had a glimpse of the wagon's cargo.

People. Cherokee people. Women and children mostly, but also old men. They were dressed, like Marian's visitors, in Western clothes. The women wore bonnets. The old men, shirts and vests. They were quiet. They were very quiet. Even the children. He could not see their faces well enough to determine why.

“What was all that about?” he asked.

She stared off in the direction of the wagon's egress, although it was already out of sight. When finally she looked at him, her brow was knit with worry. The corners of her mouth turned downward. Her eyes were round and blinked back tears. This was the first time he'd seen her anything but in control, either placid, lustful, or merry. The change in her touched his tender heart. His own eyes welled. He rose, took her by the shoulders, squared her to him, then put one hand to the side of her face as a gesture of comfort.

“What is it? What has troubled you?” he asked. “Who were they? What did they say?”

Slowly, she seemed to come back to herself. She sighed, then smiled at him, brushing a few stray feathers from his beard and hair, which elated him once again. Still, her eyes remained solemn, mournful.

“I'll finish the birds,” she said. “You can split wood for me.”

He knew her well enough by now not to press her on the matter. He would only irritate her. Instead, he rushed to the woodpile, whistling, happy to serve, especially in a manner that was profoundly masculine. He chopped and split a huge stack of logs until it grew dark and she appeared at the cabin door and called to him. He washed up. They sat together and ate a meal of roasted turkey and corn. He praised her food profusely, talking nonstop about its flavor and texture. When he ran out of reasonable compliments, he became ludicrous, then stuttered under the weight of his own flattery. She left her chair and lay on the bed. After staring at him silently for a few minutes, she opened her arms to him. He went to her and worked to banish her sadness with the urgency of his love.

At the dawn, Abe opened his eyes to find Marian propped up on one elbow and studying him. She reached over and ruffled his hair affectionately as if she were his mother rather than his lover. He stretched and put his arms around her, drawing her close.

“How are you today?” he asked.

She smiled. “Well. I'm doing very well. Ready to face the day my Father the Sun has given me.” She leaned forward and kissed his lips. “I'm getting used to you,” she declared with the confidence of a queen. “You may stay a little longer.”

“I will stay with you the rest of my life.”

“No. You will stay until I tell you to leave, Peddler. Have you not work to do? Sales to make? Will you not be missed and your customers make inquiries?”

She had him there. He envisioned Isadore's trackers coming with their dogs to find him out. He feared what those brutal men might do to her should they arrive to drag him back to camp, and if she thought to object. Hiding his fears, he dissembled to affect a courtliness he imagined she'd experienced in her days abroad.

“Whatever you allow me will be the greatest gift,” he said.

“Hmph,” she muttered. She got up, put on her buckskins and shirt, and left to feed her animals before she fed herself. She gestured toward the potbellied stove on her way out the door. “Make us something to eat. I won't be long.”

He opened the stove. It was full of kindling, which he lit. Marian had eggs in her larder and a kind of bread he'd never seen before. He broke it open and tasted its dark yellow dough. Potato, he decided, a very strange potato. There were also onions and mushrooms. Other foodstuffs she kept he did not recognize. He left the latter alone and mixed the identifiable together, breaking the bread into pieces, chopping the vegetables, mixing the eggs, then stirring the lot in a pan over the stove's hot burner. When she returned, they sat and ate. Although she finished every bite, she did not compliment him, an omission that stung until she said, “This will be your job while you're with me. To make the food in the morning while I tend the livestock.” He thought this meant he had not exactly failed her and was pleased.

After breakfast, she taught him how to grind corn and grain, pointing out huge heaps of unhusked corn and fresh-cut grain that needed attention. Then she sent him to clean the horse shed and goat pen, and to re-bed them. Once finished with that, he was to empty, then scrub the water troughs and refill them, bucket by bucket, from the living stream behind her house. There was wash to be done also, if he had time to manage that. In the meantime, she would ride out and inspect her fields, which were in a valley in a place the white men did not know. Afterward, perhaps, she would hunt. Abe was so in awe of her by now he did not grumble but set to his work on the stable as soon as she and her horse were out of sight.

An hour or two later, he hauled water with worthy resolve until he heard the approach of strangers. He picked his head up. White men in long oilcloth coats and broad-brimmed hats, armed to the teeth with both shotguns and pistols, rode toward him on mounts as disheveled and mud-caked as the brutes astride them. He walked into the cabin as swiftly as he could without seeming to run or rush, so as not to betray his fear. He grabbed a rifle from the wall and went to face the visitors outside by raising his weapon and pointing it at them. Blood pounded through his ears. “Gentlemen, you can stop right there,” he said, although the men had halted the moment he'd raised arms against them. Their caution gave him courage. He summoned up the best voice of command he had in him. “Who are you and what do you want?”

The biggest and roughest-looking of them sheathed his shotgun in a holster strapped to his saddle. He held up gloved hands in a gesture of peace. The others did not holster anything. They glared at him. He glared back.

“We're lookin' for a woman what lives here. An Injun woman.”

“There is no woman here.”

“Where the hell is she then?”

“Certainly not here. I don't know who you're talking about. This is my place since winter last. As you can see, I am alone.”

They could not see any such thing, not with Abe standing in the doorway, rifle raised and pointing. The leader tilted his head to the man on his left without taking his eyes off Abe and told him to dismount and look around inside. “That alright with you, son?” he asked, giving Abe a smile that was half sneer. Enough of the man's teeth were missing to make his mouth look a dark, gaping hole. Abe once more marshaled his courage and said, “It's alright as long as he remembers who my gun is pointing at.” He stepped aside to a position where he could keep his eyes on the man inside the cabin and the two on horseback both. Never was he so grateful that Marian rejected the feminine trappings of white women.

The man left the house with his weapon lowered and his shoulders raised as if to say
No sign of a female here
. He remounted his horse. The leader tipped his grimy hat. They left. Abe began a tense vigil, waiting for his beloved to return.

Marian appeared again at dusk. This time a large fish dangled from the quiver on her back. She held a spear of potatoes, both sweet and white, balancing it against one leg in the same way the men seeking her balanced their shotguns. Abe felt a great rush of relief, which he struggled to conceal, failing utterly. He stood red-faced and wide-eyed at her door, tongue-tied when she came to him, gave him her bounty, and left to put up her horse. Once she was done and in the cabin, washing up with the water he fetched for her and the soap he'd given her as a gift, he could contain himself no longer. “You sure have a lot of visitors,” he said. She looked at him quizzically. He told her everything in a great spill of words. When he was done, he held his breath anticipating a response worthy of his intense concern but she said only, “Thank you.” He asked what she was thanking him for. “You did well,” she said. “You've bought me time.” She dried her hands on a towel. “Were those men what you called once the hirelings of your neighbors?” he asked. She shrugged. “Likely so,” she said.