West

by Carys Davies

  There are times when he thinks, What if I bring him back with me when we have accomplished our mission? Another helper around the place with Elmer? What would Julie have to say about that? Bellman chuckles, trying to picture his sister’s face.

  A day comes when Bess is sitting on the steps of the Lewistown subscription library waiting for her aunt Julie to finish a meeting with the minister and Helen Lott about a new window for the church.

  When she looks up, it is the man in the yellow vest with the eyeglasses, from last time, telling her that it is within his power to waive the nine-shilling subscription if she would like to come inside.

  “Thank you,” says Bess, and she goes in.

  The librarian shows her the big tomes of the President’s expedition and brings her to a chair and a table.

  She reads. She pictures her father on his journey: a small and lonely figure in a vast, empty land, making his way slowly along a wide, meandering river. She turns the pages of the captains’ journals, conscious of her deficiencies when it comes to understanding everything they’ve written; the pages are full of words she’s never seen before and cannot begin to decipher. But there are the maps and the sketches, and it is a joy to leaf through and look at these, and she is grateful for the words she does know—long, short, safe, dangerous, hungry, difficult, beautiful, dark, light, old, new, and a store of a good many others. She’s grateful that when at last her father’s letters do begin to come, she will be able to read whatever simple messages they contain.

  The only thing she doesn’t like is the fat man in the eyeglasses, the way his breath shudders next to her face when he bends to open one of the volumes and then, for what seems like a long time, turns the pages for her; the experience both unpleasant and bewildering. Bess knows she wants his breathing to stop, and yet she isn’t sure if the fault is his for doing it, or hers for not wanting to put up with it. He is being kind to her; he is letting her see the books without paying the nine-shilling subscription. Perhaps he always breathes in that shuddering way close to people’s faces. Perhaps he can’t help it, perhaps it’s because he’s bending down in a slightly uncomfortable position; perhaps it would be disrespectful and ungrateful to pull away. So Bess holds herself very still and doesn’t pull away, not even an inch, in case the librarian decides she’s being rude and snatches the book back. For what seems like a long time she reads with him bending over her, only wishing that he wasn’t there and that he would leave her, and, eventually, he does.

  Eventually he returns to his long desk out in the vestibule by the front doors and Bess is able to remain in the library’s reading room in peace.

  Whenever she can, she returns. Whenever her aunt Julie is busy with the minister or Mrs. Lott or some sick person, Bess is back and turning the pages of the big books of the expedition, until one afternoon, with the sun pouring in through the tall glass windows, she falls asleep with her cheek on one of the volumes of the great journey.

  She smells him before she even opens her eyes, a fusty reek of old cloth and some other kind of human or animal smell she cannot name or put her finger on though she thinks she has smelled it before. Her cheek is hot and has the wrinkled print of the page on it because in falling asleep she has crumpled it a little and also, she sees to her horror, dribbled a little on it. Her heart pounds and she is afraid of what the fat man is going to do now, that he will shout at her in front of all the other patrons for spoiling the precious book and then tell her to leave and never come back. Instead he leans towards her. He has another book between his fingers; he is holding it gently and sets it beside her face.

  “Here,” he says. “A children’s book.”

  There are pictures of a man on a winged horse and a woman with a head of snakes; stories about a one-eyed giant and a man with a golden harp who descends beneath the ground to retrieve his beloved.

  When she is leaving—Aunt Julie will be finished now, making her way from the Lotts’ house to the library—he asks her if she liked the new book.

  “Yes.”

  He has more, he says, in a special room if she would like to come. Bess hesitates before the door, thinking of the treasures behind it, but he is close to her now with his funny smell and his shuddering breath, closer than a person would ordinarily be, it seems to her, and when they step into the dark, she feels his hand on her bottom. Runs.

  After this she is more wary of Elmer Jackson, who some weeks ago traced a circle with his thumb on her hand while her aunt Julie’s back was turned. After today, and the librarian, she feels certain that before long Elmer Jackson is also going to try to put his hand on her bottom.

  She becomes fearful, skittish. The world is harder to enjoy; she feels anxious and afraid. She wishes her father would come home and that her mother had not died. “You have Aunt Julie,” she tries to tell herself, but Aunt Julie does not seem like someone who will protect her. Aunt Julie is always inviting Elmer Jackson into the house and making him dinner and cups of coffee, or off having meetings with the minister or taking plates of food to sick people or paying calls on Sidney Lott’s mother, Helen. “I am twelve years old,” says Bess aloud to herself. “I am too young to be without any kind of protector.”

  She begins to let herself dream that her father is on his way home, that he will be here very soon.

  She begins to let herself dream that he is no longer very far away.

  She begins to let herself dream that while he’s been gone he has managed to find not only the big monsters he was looking for but also her mother.

  Like the man with the golden harp, he will bring her with him, except he will be cleverer than the man with the golden harp and not look back, he will keep going all the way until they are both home. She will look out from the porch and they will be coming towards her along the stony path in front of the house and they will stay and they will look after her and keep her safe from the man with the eyeglasses and Elmer Jackson.

  Bess has no memory at all of her mother.

  Her thimble and her knitting needles used to sit in a drawer in the square pine table. Small wooden knobs decorated the blunt ends of the needles, which were long and slender and cold. Bess has a pair of stockings made with them, and she can see how the neat stitches were produced by them, the empty spaces created by the needles. The stockings are no longer big enough for her feet, but she wears them sometimes on her hands around the house in winter when it’s very cold in the mornings and the stove hasn’t got properly started.

  Mostly, though, she knows her dead mother from her striped blouse, which used to hang on the back of the door in her father’s bedroom, behind his own Sunday shirt and the black pants he wore into Lewistown. For as long as she can remember, she has been curious about her, and more and more there are times when she hopes what the minister and her aunt Julie say is true: that she lives now in another realm. A realm with a narrow gate and many mansions, with springs of living water and no scorching heat and no more night. She asked her father once if what the minister and her aunt Julie said was true and her mother was living now in another realm, and he said, “Oh, Bess, I don’t know,” but there was a flat look in his eyes and it was a very long time since he’d gone with them to church and she was fairly sure that what he meant was that she wasn’t.

  Even so, Bess thought about it often, this other realm, and sometimes in the mornings between dreaming and waking it seemed to merge into the picture she had in her mind of the west, where her father had gone, which she imagined to be a place of undulating grass and blue skies and distant, craggy mountains, a place where things that were dead here in Pennsylvania and Kentucky were still alive.

  There were times when Bess let herself consider the possibility that her father had taken her mother’s blouse not so he could trade it with the Indians, but so that her mother would have something beautiful to wear when he found her; that the knitting needles and the copper thimble were so she’d have something to do on the long journey home.

  What Devereux, the fur
trader, remembered now was that he had promised to send on the letters.

  “Of course,” he recalled saying—the sight of the ill-favored Indian boy nudging his memory now, and reminding him of what he had promised: that he would be sure to send on the letters.

  He would give them to the other trader, Mr. Hollinghurst, he’d said, when he went east in a month’s time. Mr. Hollinghurst would take them as far as St. Charles and see about forwarding them from there.

  “Thank you,” the man had said. “You’re very kind.”

  What, now, had been his name? Bowman? Bowper? Belper?

  A big, lumbering man with a large rectangular beard who had passed through last spring. A black stovepipe hat on top of his thick red hair.

  No, not Belper. Bellman. Yes.

  His name had been Bellman.

  The letters were for his daughter, he’d said, who was ten years old, no, eleven, and living for the time being, while he was away, in the care of his sister, who could be sharp but when it came down to it was a good woman who deserved his appreciation.

  Devereux recalled asking the man what brought him so far from home, business or pleasure? The man had paused for a moment, as if he wasn’t sure what answer to give, and then he’d described himself as “a kind of explorer.”

  A kind of explorer!

  Was he hoping, Devereux had inquired with a wink, to prove the President’s expedition wrong and discover a convenient river they had managed to overlook? Was it his aim to find a neat and tidy water passage that would avoid the mountains and take him and anyone else who wished to get there all the way to the Pacific Ocean?

  The red-haired man had laughed softly and shaken his head. He’d laid a large and deprecating hand across his chest. No, no, nothing like that—though, as it happened, he had perused the journals of the President’s expedition and it was his belief that there were certain large things the two intrepid captains and their men might have missed.

  Devereux looked now at the Indian.

  He was wearing the man’s brown wool coat and his black stovepipe hat, and beneath the coat he had on what looked like a woman’s pink and white blouse. There was no sign of his brown horse, and he was leading the man’s black one. There were ribbons in his hair and strings of beads around his neck in various colors. A bell and a copper thimble hung from one of his ears, and, from what the fur trader could see, he had Bellman’s two guns, his hatchet, his knife, his rolled blanket, his large tin chest, his various bags and bundles.

  Until this moment Devereux had all but forgotten the mad red-haired adventurer.

  Only the sight of the boy riding into the trading post now, wearing the man’s clothes and leading his horse, recalled their meeting.

  He’d hardly thought of Bellman since the morning he’d left—the bowlegged Shawnee boy trotting off behind him loaded up with buffalo meat and dried fish and a big stash of those little cakes made of roots the Indians made, which Devereux himself didn’t much care for but which were always useful in an emergency.

  He lifted his musket now to the height of his shoulder and pressed it into the boy’s cheek, plucked Bellman’s hat from his ribboned head and set it on the ground, and motioned with his boot for the boy to open the bags and the tin box and show him the other remnants of Bellman’s escapade. He pushed the musket barrel harder into the boy’s face.

  “What happened?”

  Way back when he’d been traveling alone along the Missouri River, there’d been the Spanish friar he’d told about his journey, what he was looking for.

  The thin, half-bald monk had listened and nodded as Bellman recounted what was known about the bones and what wasn’t: that they were likely rather old; that they were of an enormous size; that they appeared to belong to a species of gigantic beast no one had ever seen; that it seemed possible to some, himself included, that such a beast might be wandering about in the large, vacant places beyond the Mississippi.

  The friar’s rough, pale garment hung to his ankles above bare feet. His hands were small and brown with short, dirty nails. His face was very pleasant, his expression calm and kindly. He was looking off into the distance at the long and almost imperceptible westerly curve of the river.

  “You will find them,” he’d said with quiet conviction. “God would never suffer any of His creatures to be annihilated. Our globe and every part and particle of it came out of the hand of its Creator as perfect as He intended it should be, and will continue in exactly the same state until its final dissolution.”

  Bellman hadn’t known what to say.

  It was easy to mock people for their religion, and it seemed impolite, not to say ungrateful given the friar’s promise to carry a bundle of letters for Bess with him when he returned to St. Louis, to disagree.

  He hadn’t liked to say that he wasn’t inclined to believe a word of the friar’s argument—that he didn’t think anyone or anything, and that included the giant animals, had God to thank for their being or their not-being.

  It had seemed discourteous to explain that it was a long time since he’d set foot in any sort of church; that for years now on a Sunday he’d walked his sister and his daughter to the door and left them there.

  There had been a silence between them. You could hear the rhythmic slosh of the current against the low wooden parapet of the mackinaw as the oarsmen dug into the water and heaved them laboriously upriver.

  Perhaps the friar had sensed Bellman’s discomfort, his lack of belief even. He’d said he’d be sure to leave the letters at the post office in St. Louis when he got there.

  “Thank you,” Bellman had said.

  It seemed a long time ago now, his meeting with the friar, a distant event that belonged, almost, to another world. He reckoned they’d traveled more than a thousand miles since, he and the boy; maybe a little more.

  Together, since leaving Devereux, they’d endured every kind of weather, every variety of landscape and terrain. That first spring, when they’d begun to follow the river north and west—a few weeks of clear skies and warm breezes, and then nothing but endless rain. Nothing but water pouring down over the boy’s black hair and Bellman’s great sponge of a coat and the wasted, greasy-looking withers of the horses; the boy unrolling a pair of leggings and a tunic to clothe his gnarly, half-naked body; the two of them proceeding often on foot because it was too cold to ride for long.

  Summer then, with swarms of midges and biting flies and mosquitoes and hard, baked ground that was like a giant’s bed of nails, hammered into fist-sized lumps by the feet of a million buffalo. Long days riding and on foot under the hot sun, the boy in his skirtlet again, Bellman’s big shadow and the boy’s small, crooked one, the looming shapes of the horses. Bellman’s stockings long ago worn away to nothing, his feet inside his holed boots puffy and gray like old, wet newspaper.

  Winter, and long days when they scoured the landscape till nightfall for something to eat, no living things growing on the shrubs or the trees, when they ate bark and roots and sometimes a bullfrog dug out by the boy from the frozen mud.

  Bellman tore shreds from his shirt and tied the scraps of cloth to trees, hoping to signal their presence to any natives who were there in the wilderness but too timid to show themselves. Devereux had told him to do this: that the cloth would reassure the savages that Bellman did not mean to harm them, and would entice them also, to come and see what goods might be on offer. More often than not, no one came, and Bellman regretted the loss of so many pieces of his shirt, but there were times when a small band crept out from the trees, a few men and several women, children. Old Woman From A Distance would hang back then, watching Bellman and the unfamiliar natives as they went about their business—the natives chattering away in their own particular language, Bellman displaying his guns to keep them in check, offering a little tobacco or a metal file in exchange for an armful of cakes or some fish; the boy wary and guarded, as if there was no one in the entire world he trusted but himself; the proceedings always coming to an end with
Bellman drawing one of the big monsters in the earth—his idea of them, with their tall legs and their tusks, his arms flung out and pointing at the treetops to denote their great size, his wanting to know if the Indians were at all familiar with what he’d shown them. Their blank looks; their melting away again, back into the forest, and, after that, a freezing skin of snow all the time on Bellman’s face and the boy’s, sleet in an icy cape on top of their shoulders and the backs of the horses, on the roped pile of Bellman’s goods; Bellman reluctant in such cold to tear off even the smallest shreds of his clothing.

  Mostly they walked. The horses’ feet, bruised by hidden rocks and the stumps of trees, were worn to the quick. The boy made hide coverings, which the animals wore like two short pairs of matching yellowish stockings, fore and aft.

  And then spring again and a new river, and more fish, suddenly, than Bellman and the boy could eat, the boy catching them and drying them and pounding what they didn’t eat and packing it into the bags; the two of them on their way again until one fine morning Bellman left their camp to wash himself and his clothes in the river—stripping, and dunking what remained of his worn-out shirt and his long johns and his trousers in the water, rubbing the tattered, foul-smelling garments over the stones.

  “Old Woman!” he called through the trees, back towards their camp. “Come!”

  It was so good to feel clean. On more than one occasion in the course of their long journey he had tried to coax the boy into washing his handkerchief, which was the only piece of linen he possessed, and kept tucked into his leather waistband, but he would not be parted from it. Still, Bellman felt sure the boy would like to wash himself today, here in this new river on this fresh spring morning.

  “Come!” he called out again into the trees, but Old Woman From A Distance did not appear, and when Bellman returned to their camp, naked and with water dripping from his hair and his beard, the boy was seated on a large stone and he was wearing Bellman’s hat.