Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke

this sapping lassitude, and by then it was too late in the year to join the brigades for the fall season. Regardless, by that time I had found something else to divert my interest, and that was probably the best remedy of all. I have found that questions about death are never really satisfied with the intellect, but they can be neatly conquered by distraction.
    I had been in the settlement for six weeks and was making my first visit to the infirmary. Smitts and Plochman would not even allow natives in their stores, yet the young soldiers were constantly visiting the infirmary, as all had heard this unlikely structure held the settlement’s only real attractions. There were the nuns and the nuns’ Italian and French helpers and a woman called the Widow Bailey who excited much speculation among the young soldiers.
    The native infirmary was half a mile south of the town, in a long, low structure built into a hill with a rock chimney at either end. The shutters were kept open during the summer, and the two wings of the infirmary were connected by high walls, making a rectangular courtyard between them. The walls of the courtyard had doors embedded into them that allowed children to enter and exit without being exposed to the illness.
    On this day, August 1827, I walked south along the top of the bluff, crossed the high point where the road dwindled to not much more than a path, and walked down toward the double-winged building where the sick natives were cared for.
    I heard moans and murmured native dialects and the clink of cupping glasses inside the infirmary. I entered a long, low room with makeshift cradles made from straw baskets. On the east sidethere were pallets with impossibly skinny natives, some of them asleep, others hacking into tubs of murky water. Scalpels were tossed into porcelain basins. There was the smell of chemicals and death. I tipped my hat to Dr. Meeks, who said, “You shouldn’t be here, Wyeth,” and I agreed with him as I furtively surveyed the room’s attractions.
    I ducked through another low door into a courtyard where native children sat in rows in a sort of classroom. A woman in European clothes scratched at the dust with a wooden stick. She was drawing the letter
C
with the stick and the children were drawing with their fingers or small twigs in the dust.
    “
C
is the third letter … 
C
,” the teacher intoned.
    She had a French accent, and dark hair cut short and pulled back with a wooden clamshell that gave me a strange feeling. Then there was a flip in my mind, a kind of vertigo. I realized the teacher was Alene Chevalier, the Canadian tanner whom I’d conversed with before I left St. Louis. She was dressed in black and wore work boots that were too big for her small feet and her skin was so dark from the sun that I had mistaken her for a full-blood native.
    She saw me in the doorway, let out a brief shout, but recovered almost immediately. “William Wyeth. Upright and interrupting my classroom,” she said.
    “My apologies,” I said, and stood there grinning foolishly, not able to contain my happiness at finding her there.
    She motioned for me to go, which I did, but only after she assured me she’d follow in a moment. She went on with the stick, scratching in the dirt. “
C
 … the third letter is
C
 …” I walked back through the infirmary and out over the hard-packed dirt and waited near the path.
    I was grinning and pacing back and forth with all manner ofhopes and fancies surging inside. We were hundreds of miles from St. Louis and I’d been in that settlement more than six weeks and somehow I had not seen Alene or known of her existence there. I realized she was the woman they called the Widow Bailey and was in black because she was in mourning.
    My mind went back to the last time I’d seen her and how she’d stood in front of her cottage with Henry Layton and Horace Bailey.
    Blast the dandies, I thought. She must have married that pork-eater Bailey.
    I stood