CHAPTER VI
BITTER WATERS
I
They could not drink of the waters of Marah, for they were bitter.—The Pentateuch.
"Tweet, my little plover! Thy lips are like unto the bleeding strawberry."
Wasi, the father, smiled indulgently on this child-play, cooing chatter, and sweet-flavoured words of his girl-wife as she fondled their wonder-eyed baby.
And in truth, it was a round dimpled baby—a cunning, cuddling papoose that looked for all the world like a live bronze. Wasi did well to smile.
The older Braves had sneered at Wasi, "the Yellow Pine," for had he not, they asked, breathed the breath of his squaw till his heart was even as faint and soft as a squaw's heart. But Wasi of the swart face heeded not their gibes for he loved Ermi with the flaming love known only to men of hot heart and greedy senses.
"Lazy one, to sleep till sun is high," merrily chided Ermi. "Little Ninon has been awake since the dawn raised the meadow-larks."
Wasi rose hastily, for he would take the trail early to the sun-dance, and it was four suns' journey to the North.
Once, Ermi had gone when she was ten spring-tides old, but the cruelties of the scene with its shrill jubilations, had bitten themselves into her memory. Her brother had been one of the candidates for the coveted title of "Brave," and she had seen the wooden skewers thrust through the muscles of his chest by which he was suspended to a tree and from which he only freed himself by tearing away the flesh. Since then, she had been to the mission school at St. Albert, and the nuns had taught her that the body was holy, "a temple," they called it, and that the sun-dance was sinful exceedingly.
Father Lament at the cathedral had christened her Agatha, for she had come to them in February on the day of the virgin-martyr of Sicily. But Wasi was a Pagan, and called her Ermi.
Ermi busied herself laying out Wasi's beaded moccasins, his bow of cherry-wood with its leathern thong, and his arrows of Albertan willows, that were winged with eagle feathers and tipped with iron.
All the while she sang a quaint song about love.
"Why singest thou thus!" asked Wasi. "'Tis the foolish song of the hunters from the south-land."
But Ermi laughed as she sang—
"'Twas odour fled
As soon as shed,
'Twas morning's winged dream;
'Twas a light that ne'er can shine again
On life's dull stream."
Then, as Wasi held his pony, Ermi kissed her brave and rested her slight little body against him with love speaking in every line of its limp abandon.
II
Outside, the smouldering sun sank earthward in a drapery of blood-red. In the tepee, the fierce dryness of the hot winds breathed on the baby that lay dying by the open door.
The Indian women feared the measles more than any other plague, and so Ermi had been alone all the days, save only for the medicine-man who had come to her thrice. He would drive out the evil spirits who had caused the sickness, but Ermi only shook her head and held little Ninon the closer. Once, she had seen him sear the flesh of Cheneka with a burning piece of touchwood, and he had sucked the blood from the breast of Kon. Besides, Ermi was a Christian and worshipped always at the shrine of the great white virgin.
The hours passed, horrible hours, and still in her loneliness and parching anxiety she cried for the life of her baby, cried the prayers of impotence to omnipotence. Already the baby-face was old and tired, but the mother crooned and rocked her all through the night till, at dawn, the wearied eyelids drooped over the darkened eyes for the last time. The dove had found no rest for the sole of her foot.
Ermi knew where there lay a great stone in the coulee off by the river bank. She would carry her baby thence and bury it under the stone, safe from the grovelling of wolves.
Then she washed the tiny form and combed the tangles from the soft hair, looping it back from the face with a band of scarlet. "After all," she mused, "life has no beauty so wonderful as death."
And because it was the tribal belief that if a corpse were carried through a door, the next person following would shortly die, Ermi put Ninon through the window, for Wasi would come home soon and the dread fate might fall on him.
Gathering the little clod of flesh in her arms and pressing it closely, the dry-eyed mother set out on her journey across the wide-lying plains. On and on she walked, trudge, trudge, trudge, under a brazen sky that looked down pitiless and tearless.
"Oh! If Wasi were here," she thought. "He would carry the spade and I would hold little Ninon only. If Wasi were here!"
The ground reflected heat to her weary soul and body, and the weight of the world seemed to crush her frail being.
"Oh, Mother of God! Sweet Mother of God!" she moaned. "How the sun burns, and I am very tired."
But the women of the Braves are in pain and weariness often, so Ermi staggered on till she reached the coulee, with its boulder that had been carried hither by the river when it overflowed its banks at the last springtide.
Laying her burden in the shadow of the rock, Ermi hollowed out an earthen cradle for the baby. She lined it with green, too, just as they had done at school when any one died, and then passionately kissing Ninon, she wrapped a bit of blanket about her, for the living would have the dead sleep soft and warm.
Ermi tried to think a prayer, but she had forgotten them all since the nights when Ninon was sick. She could not think of even one. She only noticed that the white butterflies swam lazily to and fro like floating blossoms, and that the sunflowers were wondrously beautiful as they punctuated the rank, shaggy grass with gold. Lissome lilies swayed gently in the hot breeze and made blotches on the earth like spilled wine.
At midday, the lilt of a lark stabbed the air, and the sound roused Ermi, for she rose sharply to her feet and sang with hoarse voice and stiff lips—
"'Twas odour fled
As soon as shed;
'Twas morning's winged dream;
'Twas a light that ne'er can shine again
On life's dull stream."
The startled gophers darted into their cover and waited. When they looked again, the mother had packed the little form in clay, had rolled to the stone and lay face down wards on the earth. It was early dawn when she rose from her vigil.
III
As Ermi neared the house, she saw that Wasi had returned, and with bursting heart she ran to tell him of their sorrow. His face grew sad and stern as he listened, but again, it lit up as he took her by the hand and led her to see Asa, the woman he had brought as a wife to his hut. Asa, who would be to her as a sister, one whom she would love in the place of Ninon, the child.
There are half-hours that dilate to years, and Ermi seemed to have suddenly grown cold. It was as though the vampire vixen who haunts the muskeg swamp had suddenly sapped her youth. Ermi spoke nought, only she laughed like Kayosk, the sea-gull, as he flies across Lac Wabamun, a loud laugh and bitter, like the taste of sleugh salt in summer.
She knew the unwritten laws of their tribe permitted polygamy, but she knew not that, even in his best love, a man's heart is never entirely absorbed, that no Wasi ever belongs wholly to any Ermi, knew not that this is the tree of woman's crucifixion.
And Wasi endeavoured to comfort her, but she was only silent and motionless. He told her of the great sun-dance, and of the feastings, and of how the sisters of the youths had cut little pieces of flesh from them, but the youths cried not, for they were no weak women.
Then Ermi moved around gently and prepared food for Asa, who wore a wreath of yellow blossoms wherewith Wasi had crowned her.
Sometimes, as she moved to and fro, she stopped as in a dream to look at the glowing and beautiful body of her rival. The woman was lithe as a sapling, her cheeks were like wild red roses, and her mouth was like to a bow and arrow when it is set. Asa's hair was blue-black, but her skin was almost white, for her father had been a pale face, one of the Company's men at Fort Edmonton.
But Ermi neither spoke nor complained, even when she read in Wasi's eyes strange depths of passion as he looked on the lovely stranger. A few days agone, she would have torn this woman to pieces, but there was no rage in her heart now. The world had hardened around her, and she could not cut through.
And so four moons filled and waned, and darkness and sun passed unheeded to the stricken Ermi, for the light had gone out of her life, and from the heavens too.
The women who loved her, and even Asa, tried to break her apathy, but guessed not that her wound was past all surgery—that her life was a bitter marah into which no tree of healing could fall.
Some said the sun had kissed her when she carried little Ninon to the coulee, and others said it was the touch of God, for the world has always a name for a broken heart.
Once the wife of Tusda told her that Ninon was better off and not needing her in the least, but this only made Ermi's heart the more dull and leaden. Wazakoo thought that Ninon might have grown into such a wicked woman as the bold Asa, but the words were an insult to the innocent eyes, the little unsullied feet, the lips pure as thought of God, which the mother's eyes called up.
"Very soon, you will go also," added Taopi, but it bewildered Ermi the more to know that the little piece of ground on which she stood was crumbling too.
Another moon waned and yet she served the household. In her brain the fire still burned on. Without, on the plains, the wind made a black discord like the sobbing cry of a starved wolf, and, sometimes, it was most like the whine of a whip-thong. Manitou walked about the earth and the leaves faded and fell from the trees. Manitou blew with his breath, and the river became like flint. At the wave of his arms the animals hid away in the ground and the birds forsook their nests in the wild rice and flew far off to the south-land.
But all the days the baby called to Ermi, and often it wailed. One day the voice wooed her unto the snow, out into the sheeted storm that turned the air into a white darkness. Streaks of bitter wind screamed across the prairie. The snow cut her face with stinging lash and the cowering cold cut into her very bones. But still, without ceasing, the baby called to her. Now and then, she almost clasped it, and her soul swooned, but something intangible, impalpable ever waved her back.
And then Ermi understood that the night was closing in and that she had come a long, long way. She would go back to Wasi, for she had forgotten about the other woman. The fire would be low, he would need her and she must find him, however weary the trail.
But even as she resolved, the woman sank limply to where one finds dreams and soft reveries and where church bells toll the vesper hour. Her hands clasped her rosary, but she did not pray. She only maundered softly the foolish song of the hunters from the southland—
"'Twas odour fled
As soon as shed;
'Twas morning's winged dream;
'Twas a light——"
Once at school, she could not solve a problem and so she broke the slate. She remembered it quite well; it was a question in the rule of three. "How foolish!" she mused, and Ermi smiled as she remembered.
The morning dawned brightly in the coulee where a stone covered a little grave. There was nothing to be seen, nor anything to suggest that it was here Ermi had lain down to dreams. The snow had hidden her well in its white bosom, but somewhere, somehow, Ermi, the Indian woman, was working out the pitiful problem of life on another slate.