Free Lost Nation by Jeffrey Lent Page A

trouble me out there. After that, we can sleep and worry about the rest of it tomorrow. All right?”
    She sat a long moment and then rose and came around the table and stood near. She was so small and he felt her shaking so close to him. Not a fear but some other pulse. As if she would give him something. She said, “You’re a strange man, Mister Blood.”
    He said, “You’re the most recent in a long line to make that cipher. There’s no help for it, none wanted nor needed. I am who I am and that’s not a matter for human eyes to see or judge. But you mean a kindness, Sally. You’re a good girl.”
    “That’s not something I’ve been called before.”
    “Like I told you, you can’t expect what life will bring.”
    She nodded. Did not move away from him. He was sweating. It was the first time he’d been warm in weeks. He didn’t want to leave it but needed the sudden sharp clarity of the cold one last time for the night. He paused and ran his hand over his face, squeezing the muscles, to try and let his eyes open a little wider. To see more clearly.
    “By Jesus,” he said, “I feel like I been trampled by an elephant.”
    She stepped back. Then reached one finger out, a delicate tenuous impact that touched just the tip of her chipped and chewed nail to his skin where his linen blouse opened down from his throat onto his chest. Took her hand away and held it with her other before her breast. She said, “What’s a elephant?”

Two
    High summer. Days carved by the heat, explicit, exact, the world as if new each day. Nights so short as to be little more than a single dream, if the day’s labor left any dream room to work. Winter altogether vacant from the land save for the short gnarled trees and the bitter bite of spring water, river water, lake water. As if winter slept in the water.
    A man called the Deacon lived in a collapsed cabin built by some long-forgotten departed trapper in the bog up on Coon Brook, dwelt there on the meager rations provided by his negligent god, living his days to a calendar unknown to other men and so his Sabbath day fell not by a simple cycle of seven but according to some reckoning of his strident parched soul. This Sabbath not a single day either but a pilgrimage of however many days and nights without stopping it took him to tramp the rough circuit of dwellings of the Indian Stream country, those hundreds of miles surrounding the four Connecticut lakes.
    Regardless of the hour of arrival he’d stand outside and hold forth, his harangue particular and directed, as if the log or frame walls themselves gave forth knowledge of the infirmities of the souls within. It was a mystery what he knew for otherwise he did not venture from his miserable den and would not speak of the everyday when encountered on his rounds. More than once he’d been shot at, not yet with any intent to kill but only to drive him off, the gunner wanting his sleep or dinner in peace. Even if the Deacon’s words rang a bright shade too close to truehe was tolerated as a nuisance child: not imbecilic but touched, and in such a place this gift was not important but neither was it scorned. Only the Papist Saint Francis Indians avoided him. When he would come upon their trapping encampments, regardless if day or pitch night, they would leave him ranting to rouse and pile their gear and goods onto hand sleds and drag them off into the woods, leaving him with his head tilted to the sky, his words trailing after them as if it were nothing to him if they heard him or not; he was speaking for them. He made no effort to follow them. As if this was not necessary for his commission.
    The Deacon came to Blood’s door one midmorning. Not his first visit there but the first so public. A gang of men gathered inside and out in the shade of the rock maple relaxing after the morning scythe when the sun burned dry the dew that let the blades cut clean. Men lounging in linen shirts black with sweat, some seated upright, backs