Shaman by Robert Shea (nice books to read TXT) 📖

Benjamin walked slowly over to Auguste, suddenly reached out and gripped the deerhorn handle of the knife at his belt. Auguste tensed.

But Benjamin grinned up at Auguste and let go of the knife without trying to pull it out of its scabbard. Then he ran back to his father.

Grandpapa Elysée beckoned, and as Auguste walked toward him he noticed that the soles of his moccasins were striking a hard surface. He looked down to see that the floor of the lodge was covered with flat stones. Auguste and the others followed Grandpapa across the length of the floor to a stone hearth so big a man could stand inside it.

They passed three long, cloth-covered platforms raised as high above the floor as the sleeping platforms in Sauk and Fox summer lodges.

"Those are tables," Pierre said. Auguste remembered the word from a book of words and pictures Père Isaac had shown him. On the tables lay a confusion of shiny objects.

A man standing by the hearth, who appeared as old as Elysée, stepped forward and bowed. He had a round, bright red nose and white whiskers that stood out on either side of his face.

"This is Guichard, our majordomo," said Pierre.

"Ma-ja domo," repeated Auguste.

"Guichard came over from France with us thirty years ago."

Guichard said, "I greet you, Auguste." Auguste was amazed to hear him speak in the Sauk language. He spoke with a lisp, though, and Auguste noticed when he opened his mouth that he had no front teeth.

Pierre clapped Guichard on the shoulder. "I do not know how he does these things, but he always surprises us with what he has learned. And by his care for us in so many ways."

Guichard stepped back with another bow, and Pierre turned to a short man and a plump woman also standing before the hearth. The woman's full lips curved in a smile of greeting for Pierre; then she plucked at her skirts, lifting them a bit, and bent her knees and ducked her head.

"This is Marchette Perrault," Pierre said, and Auguste noticed[105] that his normally pale face was flushed. "She reigns over our kitchen." Auguste did not need to rely on his special sense to see that there was a loving secret between Marchette and his father.

The man standing beside Marchette, short and powerful-looking, with a bristling brown beard, was staring at Pierre with hatred in his face, his eyes narrowed. His mouth was invisible in his beard, but Auguste knew that his lips were pressed together, his teeth clenched. He also knew that this short man was as strong as a bull buffalo.

The look the brown-bearded man gave Pierre frightened Auguste, and he wondered if he was the only one who could see it.

"Armand Perrault, here, is the overseer of our estate," Pierre said, apparently oblivious of the man's expression. "He makes the crops flourish, the trees bear fruit and the cattle grow fat. He and Marchette come from French families who settled here many generations ago."

Armand bowed, a quick jerk of his head and shoulders, to Pierre. Somewhat to Auguste's relief, the angry man did not even look at him. Abruptly he turned his back and strode across the hall to a side door.

Pierre said, "Most of those who live and work here at Victoire are Illinois people of French descent. The town, Victor, grew up after we built our home here. Most of the people there are Americans from Missouri, Kentucky or back East. Everyone you meet in America is from somewhere else."

Not my people, Auguste thought.

Marchette made another bow to Pierre and left, too, to go into another connected house in which Auguste saw a fire burning under a huge metal pot in another hearth. There was much smoke and steam in that lodge, and he could not see everything, but the good smells were coming from there, and he remembered that he had eaten nothing today but a little dried venison.

Pierre took Auguste by the arm and led him to a place at the table near Grandpapa. Guichard pushed a wooden seat made of sticks toward him. A "chair," Auguste remembered, from Père Isaac's picture book.

Why do they sit up high and raise their food up so high? Auguste wondered. Perhaps pale eyes did not keep their floors clean enough to sit on and eat from. But these appeared very clean.[106]

"This is a special meal in your honor," said Pierre. "Most of the people who work on our land will be eating here with us." Men and women were seating themselves at the other tables.

A feast! thought Auguste. Perhaps there would be dancing afterward.

"How many people live on your land, Father?" he asked in Sauk.

"About a hundred men, women and children live and work here," Pierre answered. "Beyond the hills to the west, by the river, is the settlement called Victor, where another hundred people live. Many of them work for us too. Nicole and Frank live in Victor."

Two hundred, thought Auguste. That was not so many, after all. There were nearly two thousand people in the British Band.

Nicole sat beside him, Pierre across the table from him. Nicole went through the names of the objects on the table—"plate," "glass," "knife," "fork," "spoon." Guichard was going around the table behind the people sitting there, filling each glass with a red liquid from a pitcher.

Auguste had seen beads and other small objects made of glass at Saukenuk, but here glass was everywhere. What was glass, and how did the pale eyes make things from it?

Even as he was wondering about glass he saw his father take out of his coat pocket an oval silver case hanging from a purple cord around his neck. Pierre opened the case and took out yet two more small, round pieces of glass in a metal frame. To Auguste's bewilderment, he put these over his eyes, like a transparent mask. He smiled when he saw Auguste staring.

"Spectacles. I have trouble seeing things that are near to me, and these help. I like to see what I'm eating."

Last night, as Auguste lay beside the sleeping Star Arrow in the tall prairie grass, he had thought of quietly climbing on his pony and fleeing back to Saukenuk, in spite of the tobacco-sealed promise. Now he was glad he had not run away. The people all looked kindly at him, except for that man Armand, and there were so many wonders to see. He could feel his heart beating hard and his hands trembling with excitement.

When Guichard filled his glass with the red liquid, Auguste drank from it. The liquid was cool and burned at the same time. It was bitter and puckered his lips, but was sweet in his throat. He was thirsty, so he drank more of it.[107]

"Wine," said Pierre. "You've had it before?"

This must be like that burning water the pale eyes call whiskey that I tasted at the council last Moon of Falling Leaves on the other side of the Great River. The chiefs and braves and warriors had drunk much of the burning water from a barrel, he remembered, and they had grown merrier and merrier. The women and boys were each allowed one small sip and the young girls none at all.

"I have tasted it," he said. Pierre frowned and seemed about to speak, but he said nothing when Auguste held his empty glass out for more wine to Guichard, who was going around again with the pitcher.

Men and women brought food to the table on big plates and in bowls. There was turkey, duck, fresh venison, flat bread and round bread, dark bread, white bread and yellow corn bread, cooked fruit and raw fruit, loaves of maple sugar, fruit baked inside crusts, heaps of mashed-up vegetables. There were slices of fish burned almost black and piles of boiled crawfish. The food, Auguste saw, was coming from the connected lodge Marchette had gone into, where the big pot was with all the smoke and steam.

Auguste watched the way the people at the table with him were eating. He tried to use his knife and fork as they did and saw Pierre smile approvingly. The sight and smell of the food made water fill his mouth and his stomach growl. But when he put a slice of meat in his mouth it was unexpectedly very hot to the taste. Not just hot from being cooked, but hot because of something cooked into it.

Peppers, he thought. His mother kept some, traded up from the south, in her collection of medicine plants, and he had tasted their fire.

Pierre himself, Auguste noticed, put very small portions of food on his plate and ate little of what was there. Auguste was saddened. If only there was something he could do for his father. He had consulted Owl Carver before leaving Saukenuk, but the old shaman had only said gloomily that in his experience such an evil spirit in the belly was usually fatal.

The hot food made Auguste thirsty, and he drank more wine. Each time he held his glass out, Guichard, smiling toothlessly, seemed to be there with the pitcher.

Still hungry, he grew impatient with knife and fork and began[108] picking the food up with his hands. He tried to take small pieces with his fingers and eat quickly so that people would not notice, but then he caught the two boys and the girl, at the other end of the table, watching him and giggling and whispering to each other. His face went hot.

Nicole, sitting on his right, asked him short, simple questions about how the Sauk and Fox lived, and he answered with the little English he had. She smiled and nodded at him many times as he told her the Sauk names for things, and she repeated them after him. She seemed to find pronouncing them easy.

The other people mostly talked among themselves in their own language. The pale eyes never stopped talking, it seemed. Would there never be a moment of thoughtful silence? The voices, all speaking so fast, gabbling like a flock of turkeys, made him dizzy.

A strange feeling was coming over him. He heard a buzzing in his ears, like locusts on the prairie. His face felt numb. He reached up and touched his cheeks with his fingertips, and it was as if he felt his face through a thin, invisible cloth.

His stomach started to churn. He felt with a sudden panic that he could not hold all the food he had eaten. The peppers and the wine were burning together in his stomach. He lurched to his feet, swaying from side to side. The vast room seemed to be spinning like a canoe in a whirlpool, and the voices around him faded away.

He felt Nicole quickly stand up with him, her hand firmly on his arm, steadying him.

He shut his eyes and held his hand tightly over his mouth, wanting to die of shame and embarrassment. His belly bucked like a wild pony. Hot liquid spurted through his fingers.

"Here, son, here," a voice said. He opened his eyes to look into the face of his father, full of pain for him. Pierre held a large wooden bucket under his chin. On the other side of him Nicole had a strong grip on his shoulder.

Auguste took his hand away from his mouth and let his belly give up what it had held. Stained red by the wine, the food he had just eaten poured into the bucket. The smell of vomit filled his nostrils, making him feel even sicker.

He fell to his knees, coughing, choking, tears streaming from his eyes. Pierre knelt beside him, still holding the bucket for him. Auguste's[109] stomach heaved again and again, forcing the remnants of his meal through his throat and past his slack lips.

As he recovered a bit, he heard someone laugh softly in a distant part of the room, and someone else speak in the pale eyes' language. The tone of contempt was unmistakable.

He was overwhelmed with shame. He had made a fool of himself before his entire de Marion family and their whole tribe. He had disgraced the Sauk. He had embarrassed his father.

It was as he had feared. He could not stay here. It was too painful.

Tonight, he promised himself, holding his aching belly. Tonight I leave the land of the pale eyes forever.

Reproaching himself, Pierre knelt beside Auguste, trying through the pressure of his hand on the boy's back to tell Auguste that he loved him.

He said he had tasted wine, but I should have known he could not drink so much. The poor boy must be dying of shame, and it is all the fault of stupid Pierre.

Auguste coughed and wiped the back of his hand over his face. Pierre patted him gently on the back.

Nicole, kneeling on Auguste's other side, suddenly