Free Lost Nation by Jeffrey Lent Page B

against the outside wall with legs splayed full out before them, the blithe exhaustion of work well done. The air steady as water in a bucket. Pewter and tin cups of rum. Clay pipes, smoke a blue pleasant blur to the air, fragrant as the spruce from up hillside. Meadowlarks crying from Blood’s own uncut meadow.
    Blood himself was inside, in the dim cool, seated high on the stool he’d fashioned from the top of a powder keg and three peeled-pole legs. Behind his plank counter, a tally sheet beside him, a quill and well with ink ground and mixed just that morning. So it was the farmer Cole who spied the figure surging up the road raising his own small devil of dust, a scarecrow in rough linsey-woolsey the burnt black of a dead crow, pantlegs and coat-arms too short so his scabrous wrists and ankles were displayed, the boneyard glimpse calling all to view their own future.
    Cole in slow motion was sharpening the blade of his scythe, spitting to whet the stone. His pewter noggin secure against his inner thigh. He said, “Bless the day. Here comes something lively.”
    One of the Canadian habitants, Laberge, said, “One good swipe that throat be stopped for good.”
    Cole said, “You Papist bastard, it idn’t his fault he puts the fear of God to you. Do you good to mind the Deacon.”
    “Plenty fear in me, plenty God too. But my business, that’s mine. Not his.”
    Cole grinned at his neighbor. “It do make you uneasy don’t it? The way he knows what he hadn’t ought. It ain’t like nobody talks to him.”
    “The Devil.” Laberge spat and rinsed his throat.
    “Oh, I don’t reckon so. I guess when he’s not out spouting he’s shut up in that shack listening to voices you and me can’t hear. Or maybe just slipping around with his ear pressed up against walls, doing the same thing. It’s one or the other I guess. But he’s harmless, less you let him get to you. There ain’t no hiding from the Deacon.”
    “Something wrong with that man.”
    “Why sure there is. But that ain’t a reason to cut his throat or we’d all be dead.”
    “It be a hard travel to find a priest to hear my confession. So maybe only one two times a year I get before a true man of God. The rest of the time surrounded by heathens. So it is. But I got nothing to hide. Pure is me, pure before God.”
    “Oh Jesus,” said Cole. “Ain’t we all.”
    Blood heard this from inside and frowned. It didn’t matter that the men made light of the Deacon—he saw the man as bringing trouble. As if the man gave voice to those few who by nature or some garnered sense of the appropriate had aligned themselves against Blood from his arrival. Mostly women but he did not discount the power of women over their men. Even, perhaps especially, those men who flaunted their wives and came to Blood’s for what they would anyway. Blood licked clean the quill tip and laid it atop the tally sheet and waited for the first words to issue from that parchment throat. Both hands flat on the counter but he did not realize he was leaning forward until there came the swift urgent cries from the back of the store, from the log room built onto the domicile end of the house with a single door, from the inside. Sally at work with the young pitch-holder Bacon who’d arrived only days after them to start his work, his wife and children left behind this first season down-river at her parents’ home in Bath. Blood didn’t blame Sally. She knew what took a man over the top, could gauge it in each and every one of them. But he regretted the timing.
    So he rose, pushing himself up with his hands, wiped them on his breeches although they were clean enough, went around the plank counter to stand in the shadow of the open door and watched the shabby devout come on toward the group of men, he alone in his ragged black not arrested by the fierce urging of the girl. But ploughing through the road dust, a filament extended out from him.
    The Deacon came to a stop before the group as