by Carys Davies
He picked out a white ribbon and the shortest string of blue beads he could find and gave them to the boy, who put them on straightaway and looked now, thought Bellman, happy as a girl.
Before they left, Bellman asked Devereux if he would please send on some letters for his daughter, who was ten years old, no, eleven and living at home with his sister, who could be difficult but underneath was a good person. He had left several letters, he said, in the course of the last year with various travelers and other people he’d met. He knew his daughter would be waiting for more. Would Devereux be sure to send these latest ones on?
Devereux said he would.
That first day, they started at dawn. Bellman and the two horses, his black one and the boy’s brown one, walking on the bank, the boy and the gear in the pirogue. Later they swapped, the swap confirming what Bellman had suspected all through the earlier part of the day, that the boy was more dextrous by far than he was with the log boat, flicking the paddle and passing easily between the sandbars and the driftwood that crowded the sluggish and disappointing stream. When Bellman clambered in to take the boy’s place and began attacking the shallow water with the paddle, the boat stayed in the same place, spinning in an endless circle.
Thrashing about in the river, Bellman could see the boy on the bank doubled over with laughter, and as the pirogue continued to spin, Bellman too began to laugh until he was too weak even to try to move off in the right direction. He held aloft the paddle and signaled to the boy.
“Here. You can have another go.”
As dusk began to fall, Bellman congratulated himself on his new acquisitions: the boy, the brown horse, and the boat.
Back now on dry land, leading the horses, he lengthened his stride.
He marveled at the beauty of his surroundings: the pale gray ribbon of the river; the dark trees; in the distance the bright spread cloth of the prairie, undulating and soft; the bruised blue silk of the sky.
He felt lighter; more hopeful than he had for months that he was moving closer towards what he was looking for.
Spring came round again and Elmer Jackson managed a dinner or at least a cup of coffee three or four days a week over at Bellman’s place.
He felt quite at home these days.
He’d got better at not using any curse words, and more than once at the end of a day’s work with the mules or after he’d done various odd jobs around the place, Bellman’s sister had followed up the plate of cold meat with a slice of ginger cake or a piece of apple pie.
Ever since his tall, big-footed neighbor had gone wandering off into the sunset, Jackson had gone over there many times to lend a hand, coming and going on his gray, white-tailed horse. “Thank you, Elmer,” the aunt said when he came, and again when the work was done and she was giving him coffee at the end of the day and sometimes dinner and sometimes the cake too, or pie.
It had been a great moment for Elmer Jackson, the day he’d arrived in Mifflin County with enough money in his pocket—scraped and hoarded over the years of laboring in gristmills and foundries and breweries and the horrible nineteen months he’d spent in General Wayne’s army in Ohio—to buy his own small piece of land. It was a great moment when, after all the hard days and miserable nights in a ceaseless string of leaky tents and cramped, malodorous bunkhouses and garrisons, he took possession of his own parcel of ground, to have and hold if he so wished, in perpetuity.
He’d always liked Bellman’s place more though—had always preferred it to his own. The tall mule breeder had arrived a year after he had, and from the beginning he’d appreciated the warmth and the cleanliness and the little touches of beauty in the other man’s house—the row of pickle jars on the shelf, the sparkling windows; later on, the bright quilt with its rainbow of colors on top of the little girl’s bed.
His own home was a series of roughly interlocking logs and a plank floor. There were no adornments or soft touches, only his bed and a table and a chair, a bucket for his business during the night, which he took outside in the morning and poured on top of the beans he planted every year in the back.
It seemed more than possible to him now that his neighbor would never come home. It seemed more than possible that if he was careful and played his cards right, he might have something of a free hand around the place.
He’d heard mention of a gold ring. With the proceeds from a gold ring he might expand the mule business, add some improvements to the house, some smart new garments for himself. Bellman’s hat had been a fine thing.
He knew that people in town looked down on him; that Carter watched him in his store as if he thought Elmer was getting ready to palm something the moment his back was turned. On the few occasions he’d turned up in church, the minister had viewed him from a distance with a look that said he’d rather not have him sit down in his greasy pants on any one of his straight-backed wooden benches. Well, they would all greet him with more respect when he was running Bellman’s place.
He took another mouthful of the aunt’s pie.
The girl seemed to grow taller every day. She had her crazy father’s red hair, but mostly, in Elmer Jackson’s opinion, she resembled the dead wife. The wife had been neatly made, and the girl was too, and she had the same straight back and brisk walk.
As far as Elmer Jackson was concerned he had a choice, the aunt or the girl, and he had never much fancied the aunt. The aunt, with her long, bony face and wrinkly stockings, was scarcely more appealing to Elmer Jackson than one of her brother’s mules.
When the girl was small she used to sit on the fence while he worked with Bellman in the yard, swinging her legs in a pair of cotton britches. At the beginning he hadn’t known the first thing about mules and she’d sung out the basics to him in a high kind of chant like a nursery tune.
A girl donkey is a jenny and a boy donkey is a jack.
A stallion crossed with a jenny makes a hinny and a mare crossed with a jack makes a mule.
A boy mule is called a john and a girl mule is called a molly.
A girl hinny is sometimes called a mare hinny and a boy hinny is sometimes called a horse hinny but mostly we just call them hinnies.
If you put a boy hinny with a girl hinny or a jack mule with a molly mule or a girl hinny with a jack mule or a boy hinny with a molly mule you almost never get anything. Hinnies and mules can’t have children at least hardly ever which is why you have to do everything with the horses and the donkeys. The real name for a mule—laughing and jumping off the fence and skipping away—is an ass.
He could wait a few years, he supposed.
In a few years the aunt could pack herself off back to her own place and take her wrinkly stockings and her brown and white chickens with her.
But as Elmer Jackson sat at Cy Bellman’s table finishing Julie’s pie and contemplating his future, he found that he did not want to wait a few years.
Lately, he’s taken to spying on her. The hour on a Friday when the crotchety aunt fetches the small tin tub down off its hook on the wall and has her strip and bathe. She is a perfect little thing—reminds him of milk, or cream, cooling in the shed, a silken chill when you dip your finger but a soft warmth inside. Oh dear God, for a taste. With his eye pressed to the gap between the timbers he holds his breath and watches, not touching himself so that the pleasure when it comes will be the greater. It becomes his ambition, his one goal. He begins to plot how he will achieve it, feeling every day that, with his helpfulness in the yard, his patience with the mules, his appreciation of the aunt’s cooking, his acceptance into their midst, he is coming closer, each friendly favor a new stone making a path along a river that he is almost across; that he is just waiting now for his chance to make it happen.
The big white man always fell asleep before he did.
Wrapped in his thick woolen coat, he was always snoring within a short time. His breathing slowed and deepened, and after that his body twitched from time to time like a sleeping dog’s, and the boy wondered what dreams he had.
; He’d seen a red-haired white man once before, the day the settlers had come and set fire to his people’s crops and tents. Smaller and thinner but with the same flame-colored beard and head hair, pulling his sister into the open, his sister kicking and scratching and crying out, the skinny white settler with his red hair and his red beard moving on her like a dog and then cutting her throat. In his dreams he still saw her kicking and scratching and heard her crying out. When he woke and saw the big white man near him, half his face covered in red hair like the other one—there were times when he almost gagged.
A beard of any color was a gross thing, an animal thing, that carried in its bristles the stink of food, sometimes crumbs and threads of actual food. But this one was worse because it was red like the other man’s. Sometimes as he and the big explorer were going along, when they were lifting the pirogue or strapping the bags onto the horses, the big red beard brushed against his cheek and he retched. The smell, the picture in his head of the skinny white man from before.
Some nights Bellman woke in the dark, and when he opened his eyes the boy was looking at him. Over on the other side of their softly glowing fire, points of light popping in and out, the ash shifting as the sticks burned through and broke and quietly fell, when Bellman looked the boy was not asleep but lying there with his small piplike eyes white and wide open in the dark.
It made Bellman feel safe. The boy awake like that and alert, watching for danger that Bellman might not even know was there.
It could be a troublesome business, the stallion covering the jennies and the jacks covering the mares—her father and Elmer Jackson doing much hauling about and yelling, the animals running this way and that, but eventually it all got done, and a little less than a year later the mules and the hinnies came, curled in their slippery bags, then tottering about on spindly legs into the pasture.
These days, with her father gone, her aunt Julie and Elmer Jackson managed it between them, with Elmer Jackson doing most of the work, whipping and organizing the stallion and the jennies, the mares and the jacks, coaxing and bullying depending on which ones were being reluctant and which were not.
This did not happen on one particular day, but on different days according to which animals were being brought together. Her aunt Julie did her bit from the sidelines with the special “yip yip” call her father used for the business, though once the thing was started Bess noticed that her aunt generally found some other job that needed doing, like digging up a few potatoes or scrubbing a tub full of laundry or some other task that required her attention inside the house, and left Elmer to see it through.
Bess got to help with the birthing though. The pulling and sometimes the roping and the whispering of encouragement into the long ears of the jennies or the short ears of the mares.
It was a wonder and a mystery, Bess used to tell Sidney Lott before she stopped speaking to him, two different animals, horse and donkey, coming together to produce a different one, and such a fine one! Mule or hinny, it made no difference: the mule was an excellent animal. “Stronger than either a horse or a donkey. A mule will carry more, Sidney, and go farther, plus they have a good, stout, hoofy kick, and are much cleverer.”
“Why don’t you go on a mule?” was a question she’d asked her father in the days before he left on his journey once it became clear he planned to take his black horse.
“That’s a good question, Bess,” he’d said, “and I’ve thought about it: which would be better, horse or mule.”
He’d actually considered taking both, he’d said—making himself into a kind of small traveling caravan with him riding the horse and his gear loaded onto the mule, but in the end he’d rejected the idea, it seemed too slow and cumbersome, and the best thing seemed to him to crowd all his equipment, along with himself, onto the horse.
Bess said if she was going, she reckoned she’d probably choose a mule.
“A horse will be quicker, Bess,” he’d said gently, squeezing her hand because he could see her eyes had filled with water. “A horse is a swift animal. A little brainless, I grant you. But I will go faster, Bess, and come back sooner, on a horse.”
The days passed, it rained a lot, and as he rode or walked, Bellman scanned the riverbank and the prairie beyond, and the lines of struggling pines in the distance on the summits of the hills. From time to time he sketched the unfamiliar rocks, the trees and shrubs and grasses, and pressed some of their leaves and stalks between the pages of his drawings, but mostly his head was full of the giant animals.
What did they eat?
Were they fond of meat, or plants?
Did they, like the wolves, stalk and partake of the buffalo?
Were they, in spite of their enormous size, fleet of foot? Or did they move slowly, gently, like the cloud-creatures that had drifted across his mind’s landscape when he first stumbled upon the possibility of their existence?
Were they hunters or were they gatherers?
Did they use their enormous tusks to spear their prey, or did they reach up with their mouths into the trees and nibble walnuts?
Did they graze, as he and Old Woman From A Distance did, on serviceberries and chokecherries, on ripe grapes?
Did they also relish a beaver tail or a fresh catfish?
He was encouraged by the sight of other animals he’d never seen before in his whole life and stopped to sketch them too: oversized rabbits with ears the size of the big flat paddle the boy used to ferry the pirogue along the river; a fat little beast somewhere between a frog and a lizard with spines all over its body; an ugly bird with feathers covering half its legs like a pair of short trousers, pale, horrible naked skin between the feathers and its big clawed feet.
These strange and unfamiliar creatures gave Bellman hope and he pressed on.
Accompanied by the boy, he made excursions to the north and south in the hope of a sighting, returning after a few days to the river and moving along it for a day or two, then repeating the exercise. Excursion. River. Excursion. River. Excursion. This was his slow, meandering, laborious approach. Week by week, month by month, they crept west.
There were times when the ground beneath his feet seemed to tilt again; when he was unsteadied, the way he’d been that day at home when he’d read for the first time about the huge bones: when the thought of everything he didn’t know had made him dizzy, when he knew he couldn’t stay at home. He’d been completely unable to explain it to anyone, not to Julie, not to Elmer, not even to the new librarian, who’d helped him find the maps and the journals. Now he wondered if it was because it seemed possible that, through the giant animals, a door into the mystery of the world would somehow be opened. There were times, out here in the west, when he lay down at night and, wrapped in his coat, he’d look up at the sky, its wash of stars, gaze up at the bright, broken face of the moon and wonder what might be up there too—what he’d find if he could just devise a way of getting there to have a look.
Winter came again, and it was very hard. So much snow Bellman thought it would bury them, and even the boy was unable to conjure much in the way of food from the frozen world around them. On the bitterest nights it occurred to Bellman that the best thing they could do would be to lie close to each other for warmth, but he couldn’t imagine doing such a thing—he and the boy wrapped up against each other inside his coat or the blanket. Even on the worst nights it seemed an impossible thing to propose, and the two of them lay apart in the ice-cold arms of the night. For long periods they couldn’t travel, and sometimes Bellman feared he had come all this way only to go no further.
But then spring arrived again, and in the mornings they woke to clear skies above and the quiet river below and continued on their way.
He enjoyed the quiet company of the boy: his constant and predictable presence; the sight of him up ahead with his hand resting lightly on the short hunting bow he carried with him at all times. The bow amazed Bellman. It was so small and slight it looked to him like a child’s toy, and after all this time it still
astonished him, the way Old Woman From A Distance could shoot with it from his galloping horse and return, day after day, with dead things for the two of them to eat.
Mostly, it seemed to Bellman that they were getting along pretty well.
As far as he could tell, the boy was happy enough with the bargain they had struck in the presence of the fur trader, Devereux. At night, after they’d eaten, Bellman often saw him twirling the mirror glass in the firelight, or rearranging the ribbons and beads and the white handkerchief that together decorated his black hair and thin, rickety-legged body.
Bellman liked the evenings after the long days of traveling—the quiet, almost domestic contentment, their things put away for the day, the plates scraped and rinsed in the river, the warm fire casting soft shadows on their camp. Sometimes the two of them spoke aloud after they’d lain down for the night, Bellman in his language and the boy in his, neither one knowing what the other was saying.
It was pleasant, thought Bellman, communing in this way, listening to words whose meaning you didn’t understand; like listening to music. And on top of everything there was the boy’s skill with his bow and arrow, and he was a good fisherman too. All in all, thought Bellman, they were doing all right. There was plenty of game and enough fish in the river to feed a city.
From her bed Bess heard her aunt Julie and Elmer Jackson talking.
They were drinking coffee. Every now and then she could hear the soft clunk of their cups on the table.
