The Congress of Rough Riders

by John Boyne

  Later, London was dark and cold and the streets were lit by Christmas trees and festive lights. I’d made a mistake coming to Oxford Street on a Thursday evening in mid-December. Shane was wrapped up warm and had fallen asleep in his buggy but I was finding it difficult to negotiate my way through the shoppers. Middle-aged women in heavy coats and matching scarves and gloves looked at me irritably as I made my way along, from time to time banging against their Selfridges shopping bags; frustrated men stared around in despair at the doors of the department stores, too exhausted to step inside, too unimaginative to find presents for their wives. Everywhere was noise; the taxi cabs blew their horns incessantly while the traffic barely moved. A construction crew had chosen this time of the year to begin work on a stretch of pavement on one side of the street. A crowd of people stood at their hoardings, trying to step on to the road and to the other end of the pavement, but what seemed to be an enormous lake of rainwater stood in their way. I stopped momentarily, pulling myself up and gripping the handles of the buggy tightly; I could feel a burning perspiration work its way along my forehead as I clenched my teeth. A teenage boy crashed into me as I stood there. He turned to stare at me in annoyance as he passed; his head had been focused directly on the ground below. He had earphones connected to his pockets and as he looked at me through his dark, hooded eyes, he wore a look of bored contempt. I growled and bared my teeth at him like a woken dog, daring him to challenge me. Little fucker, I mouthed and he squinted, considering the comment, before continuing on his way with a shrug.

  More than anything else I wanted a drink. I wanted to find a pub somewhere, sit in a dark corner, order upwards of eighteen pints, and drink them all. I wanted to be carried out of the place sometime towards midnight shouting nonsense. I wanted to throw up in a gutter over Vauxhall Bridge and bury myself in towards the railings, closing my eyes, begging for sleep to come. I wanted to be drunk, that was all. But I couldn’t do any of those things because I had Shane with me and he’d wake up soon and want feeding. I had to finish my shopping and get home.

  I’d left Denver a few weeks after Hitomi’s death. The man who had killed her – a thirty-two-year-old unemployed man named Denis Fitzgerald – had been arrested by police the following day after his fingerprints were found all over our apartment. He had a criminal past and a file on record. He was too stupid to wear gloves. He’d never killed anyone before although he had a history of burglary and theft and, although I never came face to face with him, I was told that he did not appear to be unduly fazed by what he had done. He had seen me leave the apartment that night with Shane and, believing the place to be empty, had broken in without much difficulty. By that time, Hitomi was in the bedroom undressing; she heard nothing as she already had the taps on the bath running. When she stepped out of the room, they surprised each other. She had turned and run towards the door and, probably without thinking, he had made a grab for her, pulled her to the ground and, in order to stop her screaming, had lifted the phone from the side table and crashed it down above her right ear, smashing into her temple, silencing her, leaving just a thin gasp of air exhaling from her mouth for the next half hour until I arrived home and held her while that too became lost to her.

  I had made friends there, of course, but they were no use to me. I buried myself in Shane in order to give myself something to do; I had little choice on that matter. And then I decided to leave America and return home to London, believing that my old house, Isaac’s house, was the right place for me to be. Naturally he welcomed me home with open arms. Although he had barely known my wife, he was genuinely upset by her death. Indeed the passion of his sorrow angered me for some reason, for I wanted to be the only one going through that pain. I couldn’t accept that someone else would want it too.

  Although the Denver police had offered to contact the Naoyuki family and tell them of the tragedy, I felt that was something I should do myself. It was the hardest phone call I ever had to make and can remember little of it. I phoned Tak, my brother-in-law, and told him what had happened. He wept bitterly on the phone while I remained composed. He didn’t blame me – yet – and said that he would tell his parents. When the phone rang the following morning in the hotel room I had taken with Shane I assumed it was the police and picked it up, making only a grunting sound to indicate that I was listening.

  ‘Is that William Cody?’ said an unfamiliar voice at the other end, but by the inflections I recognised the Japanese accent. In an instant I knew that deep male voice could only be Hitomi’s father.

  ‘Mr Naoyuki,’ I said, a stab of pain hitting my chest, a feeling of guilt, as if all of this was my fault. I wondered how he had got my number. A flash photo of the first and only evening I had ever spent in their home came into my mind; I was just a kid then, I thought to myself. I didn’t know what to say to him now and there was a long pause as he waited for me to answer his question. ‘Yes,’ I replied finally. ‘This is William Cody.’

  ‘Mr Cody, you have of course begun to make the necessary arrangements,’ he said in an emotionless and formal voice.

  ‘Arrangements …’ I muttered. ‘I don’t … I mean what do you mean exactly?’

  ‘Tajima has informed us what has happened,’ he said with a sigh. ‘There are arrangements to be made.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘We would like Hitomi’s ashes to be sent to her family here. In Kyoto.’

  Again, a rush of pain ran through me. Her ashes. It was beyond final. Of course I knew that she wanted to be cremated but the thought of actually going through with it seemed barbaric to me. And yet underneath I could see no reason why not to accede to his wishes. Already I knew that I had no desire to keep them with me. If I had thought of it at all, I probably would have wanted to scatter them somewhere peaceful. And although I was upset and angry and felt like lashing out at someone – and Mr Naoyuki being the one I was talking to, he seemed a perfect candidate – I knew instantly that the peaceful place I was looking for was her own home. Japan. Although he could not see me, I nodded slowly and closed my eyes.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll speak to the hospital. I’ll arrange for that to happen.’

  ‘You should never have taken her to America,’ he said and I could detect in his voice a feeling that he did not want to engage in conversation with me but could not stop himself. ‘You know how she felt about America. She knew she would die there.’

  I shook my head. ‘That’s not true,’ I said quickly. ‘That was England. She said she’d—’ I couldn’t say the word. ‘It was England she said that about. Not America. And anyway, that was just—’

  ‘I don’t wish to speak to you about that,’ he interrupted, a crack coming into his voice, a sudden flicker of emotion. ‘My grandson, however. You will need to make arrangements for him too.’

  ‘Your grandson is my son,’ I said quickly through gritted teeth, anger forcing my hands into fists. ‘Do you hear me? Shane will be with me always. Do you understand me?’

  A long pause ensued. I wondered whether he had just been hoping against hope that I would for some reason capitulate and hand my son over to relative strangers, and less than perfect ones at that. I already knew that if I had one thing to live for, it was him. I knew what was important to me. ‘Please ask the hospital authorities to contact me directly after your arrangements are made,’ he said finally. ‘We won’t speak again, Mr Cody.’

  ‘Fine with me, buddy,’ – (a word I never use, so why?) – I said bitterly, hanging up the phone.

  In June 1888, Ellen Rose gave birth to a boy, who she named Sam. She never saw my great-grandfather again after their meeting in the hotel when she had told him that she was pregnant; however they communicated sporadically for, despite his faults, he was true to his obligations and would send her money from time to time, although he never asked for news of the boy or made any suggestion that he would like to meet him.

  Despite her parents’ protestations, Ellen left the Regis-Roc Circus when Sa
m was just over a year old and moved to London where she found work in the box office of a theatre. She was fortunate enough to find a kind employer who had no objection to her bringing Sam with her to work in the evenings and he spent his infant years crawling around the ticket stall, and divided his childhood between the classroom and the theatre itself where he became a regular fixture and unpaid hand.

  Isaac never told me many stories of Ellen Rose from the time she had separated herself from my great-grandfather; curiously his interest seemed particular to Bill Cody and not to those with whom he came in contact, even if they were part of his own lineage. Ellen was Isaac’s own grandmother but he did not remember her for she died quite young, when he himself was only a child. Sam, my grandfather, became a soldier and survived the trenches of northern France, returning to England where he was killed in a motor accident shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. As for the tales of my grandfather, there are few for once again Isaac was reticent on the subject. These are the points where his stories end, for his characters begin to die. These were the ones he did not like to talk about. He was at home riding across the prairies of his imagination, or travelling the world with his Congress of Rough Riders, but as his heroes and ancestors grew old and proved they were mortal after all, his enthusiasm would wane. Always, however, he finished with the last stories of Buffalo Bill. Naturally, Isaac’s historical world could only ever end one way – with a death.

  As my thirtieth birthday approached, I found myself sunk into despair. Shane and I were living with Isaac, who was dying even before my eyes. His sight had faded a lot and he had difficulty hearing the television if it wasn’t pitched up to its highest possible level. He seemed to be losing his alertness as well; I caught him looking at me sometimes with a strange look in his eyes, as if he was not entirely sure who I was. Shane seemed to scare him somewhat, although the child always wanted to sit with him. I was grieving, deeply grieving, and yet found myself cooking and cleaning and keeping house for my father, for if I did not do it, who would? Sometimes, I wanted to talk to him about Hitomi, about how much I missed her, about how senseless her death had been and how angry and lost it made me, but such conversations would have been pointless. I knew that he had already forgotten her and could never have conceived of the tornado blowing inside my mind. I felt absolutely alone and despaired for my own future.

  And then, in the deepest moment of my unhappiness, a simple offer proved a lifeline. While I had been in Denver, Adam and Kate had married, and they had made a point of inviting me to their house, which was not far away, ever since my return to London. I had gone for dinner once but found their happiness – not to mention their obvious attempts not to appear too happy lest it would upset me – too much for me and had collapsed at their dinner table, weeping hysterically, furiously grabbing at the corners of their table for support, and yet unable to allow them to comfort me. At home that night I had wanted only to join Hitomi and found myself standing by the mirror in my bedroom, a kitchen knife in my hands, staring deeply into my own eyes to see my own pain, holding the knife to different parts of my body, willing my hands to force it in, knowing all the time that I had not the guts to do such a thing, and instead dragged its blade across my face, sighing with happy pain as I cut myself, not deeply enough for any true damage, but surface scars nevertheless. I scratched it down time and again until my cheeks were a bloody roadmap of sadness, pure lost despair, before sitting on my bed in sorrow, wondering how and when this terrible feeling would pass me by. That night was a difficult night and I prayed for some release.

  The release came in the form of my friends. Kate offered to take Shane two evenings a week if I would agree to go out with Adam and Justin and get – in her words – rat-arsed. Her offer made me laugh when she made it but I accepted, not really thinking that it would help but glad to get out of the house for a night and away from the responsibility of looking after my son. If I didn’t have to keep worrying about him, I thought, I could at least concentrate on making myself even more miserable.

  At first, I could tell that Adam and Justin felt uncomfortable with me. They wanted to help me, to comfort me, but did not know how to do it. We had known each other all our lives and were now grown men of thirty years old, with experience and maturity behind us and suddenly we were reverting to our youths once again and spending a lot of time together getting drunk. And somehow over the course of several months they managed to bring me back to some form of consciousness. Although I often lashed out at them, saying dreadful things, insulting them openly, they sat there and allowed me to abuse them until I had no choice but to believe they were truly my friends, truly cared for me and would not allow me to disappear. And when I accepted that, I knew that I was not alone after all. What they showed me was not that I had them in my life, but that I had Shane. And even Isaac. And I was loved.

  ‘You don’t have to do this any more, you know,’ I told them eventually one evening as we sat in a local pub. ‘You don’t have to keep spending so much time with me. You have lives, you know.’

  ‘We’re not going through this again,’ said Justin immediately, sensing that I was trying to get rid of them. I shook my head and patted him on the shoulder.

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ I said. ‘You need to get back to your lives. We should make it one regular evening a week, not two.’ They both looked at me, unsure how to respond, waiting for me to say more. I could tell that they wanted that too, that as much as they had nursed me back to health, the rest of our lives could not continue like this. ‘I mean it,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to pretend things are perfect. Of course they’re not. I’m not going to say that I don’t think of Hitomi every hour of the day, because I do, but the awful darkness is slipping away.’

  ‘You do seem more … together,’ said Adam cautiously.

  ‘Because I am,’ I said, desperate to reassure them. ‘You’ve both helped me so much. And so have Kate and Mark allowing you both off the leashes so often to be with me. It does mean a lot to me you know. I don’t know what the right words are to express it.’ I sighed and breathed heavily, staring at my beer mat for a moment, twirling it between my fingers. ‘You’re my friends,’ I said finally, a simple statement perhaps but I meant it. ‘But you’re not my son and he’s the one I should be with, you know? He doesn’t understand any of this but he’s going to one day. I mean he’s talking now a little and I need to be with him more than I am. For God’s sake, he thinks Kate is his mother and she’s not, his mother’s dead and I need him to realise that. I mean it’s not that I’m not grateful to her—’

  ‘It’s okay, I understand what you mean,’ said Adam quickly, biting his lip and I could see his eyes were a little glazed because the lines that were coming out of my mouth were indeed the old me, or at least a slightly battered version of the same.

  ‘Isaac’s dying,’ I said with a shrug. ‘You both know that. He doesn’t have much time left and I should spend more time with him now too. I want to just feel like I understand him before he goes. I don’t want to feel that I never said things to him that I should have. You see that’s how I feel about Hitomi. There’s things that—’ My voice cracked and I caught myself in time, stopping the sentence, knowing that I had promised myself that I would not allow every conversation to lead inexorably towards her. I breathed and pulled myself together before looking up at my two friends gratefully. ‘One night a week from now on, all right?’ I said. ‘We’ll get drunk, catch up, go home and wake up with hangovers. How does that sound?’

  They smiled. I wanted to hug them but the table was in my way. Maybe I didn’t need to. Sometimes people know how important they are to you and you don’t have to keep showing it to them like that. I went home that night and felt as unhappy and miserable as before, but there was a difference now; I knew my life had meaning and worth and there were people in it who added to it. And they didn’t want to lose me either. And that mattered. It matters now.

  As for Buffalo Bill Cody, the
twentieth century was not kind to him, except after he had died. He returned to America and continued to tour with the Congress of Rough Riders until he was invited by the government to be part of the plans to settle Wyoming. This brought him back to the events of his youth and he took a great pride in helping design the towns and cities which would make up the basis of the state; one of the towns, Cody, was ultimately named for him. When Nate Salsbury, his long-time partner in the wild west shows, died, he took the opportunity to invest a greater portion of their earnings in a mining company in Arizona, which soon went disastrously wrong. Within a couple of years, he had lost every penny he had ever earned, the shows had gone bust and he returned to Denver, Colorado as he reached his seventieth birthday, refusing to be broken by his bad luck. The wild west shows ended when interest in the west floundered among the American people. It would be many years later before that interest would be rekindled in nostalgia and movie reels, but there could be no denying that he was as responsible as anyone for the myths which developed over the ensuing hundred years. Myths which somehow developed into history lessons, creating an ideology and a story which was more fiction than anything else. Throughout his life he had earned and lost fortunes, the fact that his old age found him penniless was neither a surprise nor a concern to him.

  As the shows began their inevitable decline, my great-grandfather poured more and more of his savings into them. Finally, he was a bankrupt and lived off nothing but his reputation. Divorced now from Louisa, he tried to become involved in the fledgling movie industry but without success. The early pioneers of short films in California were all young men attempting a new form of entertainment and had little interest in an ageing mythologiser whose time had been and gone. What little resources he had left he poured into trying to set up his own new movie company but he received no financial backing and had little choice but to retire to Denver, where he died in 1917, alone and penniless. He never did see his son, the child he had fathered with Ellen Rose, nor did he live one extra year to discover that he was a grandfather through that same child. The newspapers show that he was widely mourned upon his death but few of the articles knew how to differentiate between the life he had led and the one he had portrayed for himself on stage and in books, for the lines between the two intersected too often.