Isaac thought of the civility Emmy had brought with her to the homestead he had claimed, and how everyone on Whidbey and the military with whom she dealt in Port Townsend seemed to go out of their way to stay in favor with her.
It wasn’t that she was not turn-heads pretty in an unpretentious way. She was. It was that she held her own and then some against any man. It was equanimity, present with every step she took and every word she spoke, that lent itself to every situation. He could never imagine someone like Emmy becoming so vicious.
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Isaac awoke, surprised he had drifted off on this thought when he most needed to be vigilant. He damned his weakness. Then he looked over for Sam and saw that his companion had moved away from his spot.
Gone.
The fog had lifted Sam away — likely he had hidden himself in the canoe — while Isaac had recklessly daydreamed.
Isaac wasn’t sure how much time had passed, had forgotten to wind his pocket watch, initially just fearing that the winding sound itself would alert the marauders, then just forgot about it. The watch had stopped at 2:30 a.m., and there was no sign of sunrise yet.
The water had receded, so he felt higher up from its edge, but he couldn’t tell how far. They had covered the canoe, turned it upside down as best they could with driftwood, digging it down into the sand so the visible line of its prow would be broken to a casual glance, camouflaged to look like drift logs. Still, he knew how sharp the raiders’ eyes were and prayed the surf and chop in the morning would be sufficiently disruptive to their vision so that, when the Northerners moved out, they wouldn’t be able to fix well on the little stretch of beach where he and Sam had hidden the canoe.
Isaac had pulled his tan oilcloth over his shoulders in the darkness and knew he had to take it off and slip behind the camouflaged boat before sunrise. Otherwise, he would surely be seen.
The drizzle started up again, masking sounds of the surf even more than the fog had when it moved in. Isaac had covered the edge of the barrel with his thumb all night to prevent condensation from creeping down into it and dampening the powder.
He kept his cartridge box close to his chest. He might get one, maybe two, poorly aimed shots off at an incoming boat if he was quick, but nothing more. And if they were attacked from land side, it would be one shot then a slashing knife fight, if he were fortunate.
He would have to provoke his attackers enough that they’d want to kill him outright. Or turn his rifle back upon himself, disappointing them with his last shot.
He had thought about that way of ending it many times, when he had taken his company with Wright to the Palouse country to help the army hunt down Kamiakin, the aboriginal Walla Walla tribe’s tyee. So had the other men, the volunteers he had brought with him, he knew.
The soldiers, mostly Irish, never seemed to talk about that way of ending it. Kept to themselves, mostly. But the volunteers all talked about it, constantly it seemed, pulling closer and scaring themselves to sleep under the stars, weapons held ready like he held his now. They had talked about where to stick the knife if the rifle didn’t go off.
They all had been spooked by what they had found on the river’s edge across from the Pendleton crossing, the remains of a small wagon train of Missouri homesteaders. Just the men, propped up in poses like mannequins he had seen in San Francisco. Naked. Fingers and noses and genitals gone, cut off and eaten by the crows, or lying next to the bodies, drying to a leathery brown gristle in the heat of the July sun.
Because it was the best crossing spot on that part of the Columbia River, someone had left that scene as a fresh warning. When, following one of several trails from that scene, they had finally confronted a large group of aborigines in the Walla Walla territory, Isaac was surprised at how easily discouraged the savages seemed to become after a few volleys from the soldiers and his militia.
And when they discharged the eight-pounder howitzer they had pulled behind them for days, the Indians just turned and ran in every direction. Then it was a matter of hunting them down, where they were hidden in the gullies, and dispatching them one by one.
Isaac and his men never found any of the kidnapped women or children, and it made him wonder whether they had punished those responsible for the river crossing massacre or whether the white women had been abandoned or killed by this sorry lot. It didn’t matter after what he had seen at the river. In his opinion, the region had to be cleared for those higher on the ladder God had created.
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Isaac had drifted again. The cold had numbed him asleep briefly earlier, and because he had been too frightened to undo his breeches to pee, he just suffered through it, offering up the pain as a small sacrifice to right things a bit with God, if this were to be his last day.
But he fell asleep again and then awoke, realizing he had just let go while he lay there, pissing away any grace he had accumulated. He wondered if the Lord would forgive him for this weakness. His last moment would be disgraced, but only he and God would know, and perhaps that was the way it should be, humbled in spirit by his body after all.
God would
