The Congress of Rough Riders

by John Boyne

  My great-grandfather was a self-invented figure. He swept from adventure to adventure, unable to ever settle down to a normal stable life, creating the character of Buffalo Bill Cody at an early age and constantly reinventing it in order to appeal to a changing nation. He was an entertainer and a showman to the last. In life he had expressed a desire to be buried on Cedar Mountain in Wyoming, but in death Louisa and his surviving children saw to it that his final resting place was Lookout Mountain in Colorado, a more peaceful setting.

  Isaac died at home, in the autumn, just over a year after Hitomi. Although his last few months had found him slipping between full consciousness and near senility, the last week of his life passed by relatively peacefully. He woke one morning and had extreme difficulty breathing; a trip to the hospital saw him placed on a ventilator for a time but his doctor confirmed to me that he had only a few days left at most. He could stay in the hospital, hooked up to machines, or he could return home with a single ventilator which would keep him comfortable until the end came naturally; the choice was mine; I was told. I shook my head and gave the options to my father.

  ‘Home,’ he said, with a solid wink.

  Adam and Kate offered to take care of Shane for a few days so that I could look after Isaac and I gave him to them gratefully. I was almost thirty-one years old now and I couldn’t remember when I had last felt so much like a child as I did while nursing him through his final hours. In the end there was only a day and a half between his leaving the hospital and his death, but I tried to make the most of those hours, knowing that I was being given a chance here that I never had with Hitomi. He lay in bed on his last night talking to me, and I sat there in the lamplight, watching the machine clicking away, noticing how his eyelids would droop from time to time as he lurched towards sleep, even though he wanted to talk to me yet.

  ‘You know what I want?’ he said around eleven o’clock that night. I was tired myself and hoped that he would not ask for something outlandish. Something which could potentially kill him there and then.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked cautiously.

  ‘I want a glass of whisky,’ he said firmly. ‘Straight up. No ice, no water. A good glass of Scotch. How about it? Will you join me?’ The effort of saying six full sentences exhausted him for a moment and that last offer came out more as a wheeze than anything else, but I understood him nonetheless and nodded with a smile.

  ‘Sure, I’ll join you,’ I said. ‘I suppose you expect me to go down and get it for you too, do you?’

  ‘Well if you wouldn’t mind,’ he said, a slight smile flickering across his lips. I fetched the bottle and two glasses and helped prop him up a little in the bed by fixing a couple of extra pillows behind his back.

  ‘Here,’ I said, offering him his glass. ‘Just take it easy, all right? Don’t rush it.’

  He ignored my advice and took a good gulp of Scotch before turning slowly to look at me and winking. ‘So what do you think of me now?’ he asked then, somewhat unexpectedly. ‘I don’t suppose you ever thought you’d see me reduced to this.’

  I didn’t know how to respond to what he had said and so just smiled in a fairly non-committal fashion. ‘You’re fine,’ I said lamely.

  ‘I’m dying, William,’ he said. ‘You know it. I know it. Doesn’t matter.’

  I could feel a sting behind my eyes and looked away from him. I remembered when I was a child and he had seemed so big, so much more enormous than me or any of my friends, and I wondered how he had been reduced to the shell he was now.

  ‘Tell me something,’ I said after a lengthy pause. ‘The wild west show. If I had agreed to sign the papers, would you have really done it?’

  He sighed dramatically, a long exhalation of long-suppressed irritation with me, and his voice became clear now. ‘Of course I would have,’ he said. ‘It was my dream. My only dream.’

  ‘Yes, but would you have actually seen it through? Made it profitable?’

  He laughed. ‘Probably wouldn’t have made any money if that’s what you mean,’ he said. ‘Not the point though. I would have done it. What else have I done with my life?’

  ‘Lots,’ I said, even though I knew that I would have been hard pressed to say what.

  ‘Nothing,’ he confirmed. ‘Maybe it just skipped a few generations. My grandfather had it, my father and I didn’t do much with our lives. It’s up to you, isn’t it. You’re making something of yours.’

  ‘I don’t see what,’ I grunted.

  ‘You know what, I’m dying, William. This isn’t about you right now.’ There was a reprimand. And of course he was right. ‘The thing about you,’ he continued after a moment, ‘is that you’ve always blamed me for not being close to you.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ I began, not wishing to get into a fight now but he silenced me with a wave of his hands.

  ‘Just hear me out,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got much breath so don’t let me waste it. You think I haven’t been close to you, that all I’ve done is tell you stories all your life. Well maybe that’s so, but that’s where I saw our connection should be. Did you ever wonder why I told you stories about Buffalo Bill?’

  ‘Because you’re obsessed with him,’ I said. Because you wish you were him, I thought.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I told you them because they’re family stories. They didn’t all tell you about who your great-grandfather was. If you’d listened to them a little closer you would have seen that some of them told you who I was, some of them told you who you could be. It wasn’t all about the history and it wasn’t about showing off. I was trying to get close to you the only way I knew how.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, shaking my head. I could feel myself gearing up to challenge him on what he had said but knew inside that there could never really be a less appropriate time for me to do so.

  ‘It’s not fine,’ he barked, sitting forward suddenly and pointing a bony finger at me. ‘You’re a father yourself now. You shouldn’t sit in judgement of me so much. You don’t know, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t judge you, Isaac,’ I said quickly. ‘Honestly, I—’

  ‘You do, you do, Jesus but you do,’ he said with a sigh. ‘It doesn’t matter though. I’m past caring. I know what I tried to do. Maybe I succeeded, maybe I failed. Who knows. Maybe someday, though, you’ll find yourself telling those stories to someone else, to Shane maybe, and maybe then you’ll see that my life wasn’t totally in vain. That there was a reason for some of it.’ A silence descended for a few minutes and finally I reached across and took the empty glass from his hands. He seemed to have fallen asleep but as my hands touched his, he woke quickly and gripping on to my wrist tightly he pulled me close and stared at me directly in the eyes. ‘And one last thing,’ he snarled. ‘Stop calling me Isaac, all right? I’m your father. Show a little fucking respect.’

  I stared back at him, part of me terrified, another part of me wanting to hug him, but he relaxed me by lying back into the pillows, releasing my hand and patting it gently. ‘You’re not a bad son, Bill,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should have started calling you that a long time ago. Maybe you’ve earned it after all.’

  I stood up and walked to the door, watching him for a few minutes to make sure that he really was asleep before closing the door quietly and walking downstairs. I switched on the lamp in the living room and, placing the whisky bottle and glasses on the table, I filled mine again and put it on the table. Before sitting down, I walked across to the wall and took my great-grandfather’s Smith & Wesson handgun down and brought it back to the armchair where I sat down, examining it carefully. It was the most polished thing in the house, my father’s prize possession. I wanted to reach across for my glass but found that I couldn’t. Instead I held on to the gun with both hands, tighter and tighter, my knuckles turning white as I gripped it, refusing to let it go, wanting it to be with me for just a few minutes longer.

  My father had left strict instructions in his will that he was to be cremated and for the second ti
me in a couple of years I attended such a funeral. Unlike the first time, however, I did not feel as devastated at Isaac’s passing as I had at Hitomi’s. He had lived well into his eighties and had not been denied the chances that she had. His time had come; she had been robbed. And although he knew that he did not want to be buried, he had not said what I should do with the ashes. And unlike the occasion with Hitomi, I knew exactly what I needed to do.

  It was late in the year and the sun was not shining as Shane and I walked hand in hand along the dusty trail. It wasn’t cold but there was chill enough in the air that we kept up a healthy pace. Shane’s vocabulary had expanded considerably and he locked his hand into mine as we walked along, his tiny voice chattering away without any self-consciousness while I watched the path ahead, knowing where my destination lay, my mind lost in thoughts even as I tried to answer the questions he asked me.

  He was too young to understand death, of course, and so I didn’t bother to explain it to him. Someday, years from now, I thought I would. He wouldn’t remember Isaac, of course, but there were things I could tell him about his grandfather that would keep him alive. Stories that might make him wish that he had lived just a few years longer so that they might have got to know each other a little.

  ‘Here we are,’ I said finally, just at the point where I thought he was getting ready to start complaining about the length of the walk. ‘This is where we need to be.’ There was no one else around but Shane pointed in the distance and I stared as a deer appeared from the woods and turned its graceful neck towards us, staring at us indifferently before padding cautiously on its way and out of sight. I looked down at my son who was staring up at me with breathless delight, his face lit up with such wonder and happiness that I felt an urge to pick him up and crush him to me. And so I did.

  I opened my haversack and walked to the side of the mountain, taking the lid off the urn. ‘What’s that?’ asked Shane from behind me and I turned to see him pointing towards the headstone marking the grave of his great-great-grandfather, Buffalo Bill Cody.

  ‘That’s where my great-grandfather is buried,’ I explained to him. ‘I thought Isaac would like to be here too.’ Then I scattered his ashes over Lookout Mountain and, without waiting around any longer, took a firm hold of my son’s hand and turned to leave. We were only there a few moments; there was no need for more.

  About the Author

  John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of nine novels for adults and four for younger readers, including the international bestsellers The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which has sold more than six million copies worldwide, The Absolutist and, most recently, Stay Where You Are and Then Leave. His novels are published in over forty-five languages. He is married and lives in Dublin.

  www.johnboyne.com

  @john_boyne

  By John Boyne

  Novels

  The Thief of Time

  The Congress of Rough Riders

  Crippen

  Next of Kin

  Mutiny on the Bounty

  The House of Special Purpose

  Novels for Younger Readers

  The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

  Noah Barleywater Runs Away

  Novellas

  The Second Child

  The Dare

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

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  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

  Black Swan edition published 2011

  Copyright © John Boyne 2001

  John Boyne has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409030966

  ISBN 9780552776141

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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