"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

a miserable line to purchase a bottle of medicine, a solution of menthol and cocaine in
alcohol.
It worked a lot better for Daniel than for me. He was soon snoring in bed. The
medicine did quiet my stomach, but seemed to excite my other sensibilities. I spent hours
staring out at the roiling waves frozen in the flashbulb thrusts of lightning, gripped by an
unnatural state between fear and wonder.
The feeling of being transported to another plane was so extreme that it frightened
me deeply, as if I were facing death—even though I was aware that it was the medicine
affecting my brain, coupled with purely understandable fear of the storm and anxiety
over Daniel's safety and Edward's malevolence. I felt profoundly forsaken by God, as I
never had before in my life.
In later years I could see a reason for this so necessary trial, and wonder at the
ingenuity of Fate—God's tool, or servant, or master—in providing an earthly foretaste of
my unearthly destiny.
The storm ebbed at about three in the morning, and I fell into an exhausted sleep.
I woke at dawn to the hooting of an owl—my diary says "the moping owl does to the
moon complain," from a poem in Palgrave's—and we were in the calm harbor of Detour,
a small fishing and logging village.
Daniel woke famished and he had a good breakfast (I managed a pot of tea and
some dry crackers) while we steamed up a lovely river, the St. Marys. In a couple of
hours we arrived at Sault-Ste.-Marie, where we were to transfer to the Chicago steamer.
I was ready to spend a day on dry land, so we arranged for a stay-over and moved
our belongings into the Iroquois Hotel. Daniel was immediately seduced by a handbill
advertising "Shoot the Rapids with an Indian Guide!" I enquired at the desk and the bell
captain said it was thrilling but perfectly safe. At three dollars, it cost as much as our
room, but I was in no mood to be parsimonious, or to seem overly protective. Daniel
loved canoeing and was very good at it, so we took a landau up to the head of the Soo
Rapids, where I left him in the care of a young Indian man, gruff but with a sparkle in his
eye. The landau then took me down to the take-out point at the bottom of the rapids,
where it would return in two hours. Those two hours would profoundly change our lives.
Daniel was probably ecstatic to be away from Mother for awhile, but I of course
was apprehensive, not so much because he was hurtling down a foaming stream under the
guidance of a savage stranger, as just for the simple fact of his being out of my sight for
the first time since we had fled.
Hunger distracted me; the smell of a wood fire and roasting fish. Indian men were
standing in the water, scooping whitefish out of the stream with nets—I supposed the
poor fish were dazed from threading their way through the rapids!—and women were
cleaning the fish and pegging them to planks, to roast by the open fire.
I bought a plate of fish and took it with a cup of cool water to a table shaded by an
awning. There was a woman sitting there reading the Bible, making notes on the pages
with a pencil. That made me uneasy; as a child, I was told that writing in a Bible was
sacrilege, and although I had come to feel that that was misdirected piety, I had never
gone so far as to write in a Bible myself.
"Oh, the fish is ready!" she said, and put the book aside. She went to the fire and
got a plate and returned, sampling it daintily as she walked.
She sat across from me. "You're not from around here."
I extended my hand. "Rosanne Libby" (the name I'd been using for travel)
"Philadelphia, born in Georgia." I didn't try to hide my slight accent.
She cocked her head. "After the war."
"No, I'm a little older than that. My parents sent me north just before it began."