by Carys Davies
Bellman stopped a short distance away and set down his bundle of soggy clothing. He lifted a schoolmistressy finger.
“No,” he said sternly. “Definitely, no.”
He snatched the hat angrily from the boy’s head and placed it firmly on his own.
He reached out and roughly lifted the boy’s various necklaces and shook them so they rattled. He pulled on the ribbons in his hair, the piece of mirror glass that dangled from his ear.
“Yours,” he said loudly.
He pointed at the incredibly dirty white handkerchief the boy wore tucked into the waist of the skimpy garment that covered his private parts.
“Also yours.”
Then he gestured around their camp at the black horse and the brown horse, at the tin chest and his wet, just-washed clothes, at the blanket they’d forgotten that day they’d gone over the falls and which he occasionally lent to the boy when it was very cold, at all his other bags and bundles. He touched the brim of his hat with his large fingers.
“Mine.”
He took his knife from the belt in his wet trousers and gathered up his hatchet and his guns and his coat with the metal inkwell pinned to the collar, and brought them all in a big, brimming armful close to the boy’s face.
“Mine too,” he said quietly. “Understand?”
He stooped so his big bearded face was level with the boy’s. “Can you say, ‘Yes I understand’? Can you?” He cupped a large hand behind his ear in an exaggerated fashion.
“Yours Mine. Yes?”—still cupping his ear theatrically, waiting for an answer.
The boy was silent and Bellman shook his head. “I have a mind, Old Woman, to call this Camp Disappointment.”
The boy stood, silent. He looked back at Bellman with cold, dark eyes, and Bellman had no idea what he was thinking.
For the whole of the rest of the day the boy avoided Bellman’s gaze, and this was the start of Bellman worrying that Old Woman From A Distance was no longer happy to be there under the terms of their bargain; that he wanted more.
That evening when they ate, Bellman gave the boy a slightly larger share of what they had than he was used to.
“We will put today behind us,” he said with a series of gestures he hoped, along with his conciliatory tone, explained his meaning. “We will forget it ever happened.”
He held out a small piece of mirror glass and one of Elsie’s knitting needles. “Here. You may have these.”
The boy’s hands closed around them, and Bellman nodded.
In Carter’s, Bellman’s sister Julie stood trying to decide between a pair of brown stockings and a pair of navy blue ones. Both were more expensive than any item of clothing she’d ever bought, and she had never in her whole life worn a pair of stockings she had not made herself. But she’d become aware, lately, of the stockings of other women, like Helen Lott, and the schoolteacher’s wife. She’d become aware that they did not fall in wrinkles around the tops of their boots like her own.
In the end she chose the brown.
Carter wrapped them in paper and gave her a questioning look she ignored and told him she’d take a pound of apricots also.
Tonight there would be apricot pie for Elmer Jackson when he was finished in the yard.
She’d begun to look at him differently since Cy left, and he’d been coming almost daily to the house, the two of them together at the table in the evenings after Bess had gone to bed.
Elsie’s ring was sewn into her skirt pocket. It didn’t seem wrong to think of it now as hers.
The whole thing amazed her; something she’d always expected that had never happened.
Meanwhile in Lewistown that summer the librarian took delivery of four new brass lamps with green glass shades for the reading room. A new portrait of the President arrived too, from Harrisburg, in a black oak frame, which, with the help of Carter’s youngest boy from across the street, he hung on the wall in the vestibule opposite the front doors.
He saw the little girl often through the library windows with her tight-lipped aunt and the slovenly yard hand who seemed to accompany the two of them more and more, these days, whenever they came into town.
She was still hungry, he was certain, for anything connected with her father’s journey. You could see it in the way she’d perched on the edge of the tall chair and traced the words and maps on the pages of the journals with her finger, her mouth a little open.
What he’d found would interest her, he was sure.
It was there in one of the old gazettes: a short item about the big Kentucky fossils that included, beneath the commentary, a sketch. A sketch of how the creatures—if all the assorted lumps and fragments could be assembled into one entire skeleton and clothed in some appropriate skin or fur—might look.
It was a comical sight, so comical he’d shown it to his wife: a thing somewhere between an enormous wild boar and a very fat horse with tiny ears like a rodent’s or a sheep’s, and a pair of drooping, backward-curving tusks.
He thought it was unlikely, after the last time, that the girl would come back to the library.
In the past, though, he’d always found that one failure didn’t necessarily mean the end of something. Other opportunities presented themselves eventually, you just had to be alert to them, and he had his class at the church now, for the children—the minister appreciative of his help; it seemed possible that she might attend at some point in the future and join him in the back room with the other children while the minister and the adult members of the congregation like his wife and her aunt conducted their business.
He kept the sketch of the ridiculous monster in the inside pocket of his vest. At the right moment, he would show it to her; give her a little, and promise her more.
He was becoming afraid that he would never find them.
That they were not out here after all. That whatever mystery surrounded their disappearance was buried in the briny, sulfurous ground in the east with that shipwreck of tusks and bones he’d read about in the newspaper; that whatever the mystery was, he would not uncover it.
There’d been a few brief moments, not long ago, when he was sure they’d come upon them at last—a big, sudden movement up ahead, a frantic disturbance in the trees, branches being pulled and snapped, a spray of twigs, a swishing and a tossing and a noisy kind of chomping.
He’d signed to the boy to stop, put his fingers to his lips, his heart beating very fast, all the trees tossing their leaves and branches, timber falling, and then—oh.
Only the wind.
Only thunder rolling in, and lashing rain, and in the distance lightning: a spectacle of crackling white light in the darkening sky.
He began to feel that he might have broken his life on this journey, that he should have stayed at home with the small and the familiar instead of being out here with the large and the unknown.
There were times now when he would stop and look around at the fantastical rocks and shivering grasses and wonder how it was possible that he was standing in such a place. There were times when steam rose up in twisting plumes from beneath the earth; when the lush plains around them shimmered and swam beneath the sculpted rocks like the ocean.
One morning after they’d set off he stopped after only a few paces, overcome by the watery twinkling of the emptiness ahead. “Sometimes, Old Woman,” he said softly, “I feel I am all at sea.”
The intermittent appearance of natives now, though he’d come by this time to expect it, amazed him: the presence of people in the vast wilderness around them. Even though he was used to the rhythm of their journey—that he and the boy could travel for a month and see no one, and then without warning encounter a large camp, or a group of savages walking or fishing. Noisy children and men whose bodies gleamed with grease and coal, women loaded like mules with bundles of buffalo meat. A whole mass of them together, undifferentiated and strange, and present suddenly amidst the coarse grass and the trees, the rocks and the river, beneath the enormous sky. All of them wanting
to touch his red hair. Half of them enthralled by his compass, the other half trying to examine his knife and the contents of his tin chest. All of them fearful of his guns and eager to traffic a little raw meat for some of his treasures.
More and more often, he found himself thinking of his own squat three-room house and fenced-in paddock, the stony track in front, Elmer Jackson’s scruffy shack to the east beyond the maple copse, the Lotts’ fine brick place and Julie’s small, neat home, which she had closed up to come and look after Bess, a little to the north. He thought of the path into town. The short main street with its shops and taverns, with Carter’s store and the library, the church and the minister’s house. He pictured all the people he knew, going about their lives there.
To encourage himself to press on, he thought of his favorite story from the journals of the President’s expedition: that the older of the two officers, Captain Clark, had brought with him a black servant: a stout, well-made Negro named York. So fascinated were the Indians by York’s extraordinary person, so eager were they to touch his coal-colored skin and short, mossy hair to see if he was real, so desirous were they of being near him, that the expedition worried for his safety, fearing the natives might try to steal him. In the event, their curiosity, their wonderment, was so great, they did something else: they sent one of their women to lie with him, because they were very anxious to have at least one partly black infant of their own—some lasting memorial of his actually having been amongst them.
Bellman loved this story, felt strengthened by it—the notion that whatever your own idea of the known world, there were always things outside it you hadn’t dreamed of.
He watched the boy, riding up ahead, and wondered if he had ever seen a black human, in his time with Devereux or before, and if not, what he would do if he came upon one. If he would reach for his bow, or hide in terror beneath the nearest cottonwood tree, or stick his finger in his mouth and touch the black skin to see if the paint came off.
At night, in the firelight, he watched the shadows come and go across the boy’s illuminated face, which seemed to him to be both young and very ancient and thought, What is it like to be you? He felt again the dizzying weight of all the mystery of the earth and everything in it and beyond it. He felt the resurgence of his curiosity and his yearning, and at the same time felt more and more afraid that he would never find what he’d come for, that the monsters, after all, might not be here.
With his finger he traced the pattern of flowers that wound its way around the circumference of Elsie’s thimble, round like the world, and wished himself home again. He rubbed the dull, greening metal with his thumb and closed his eyes and thought of Bess and wished; opened his eyes to the treeless desert he had come to and the boy moving around their camp, tidying up and hovering over the kettle on the fire.
He tried to smother his doubts. To continue to think of the huge beasts and ask himself questions about them as they went along.
Were they mild or fierce?
Solitary or sociable?
Did they mate for life?
Did they reproduce easily or with difficulty?
Did they care for their young?
But these last thoughts, when they came, produced a pang now, an ache, and as the months passed since he’d left the fur trader’s camp with the Indian boy and they’d continued west, he found himself thinking less and less about the enormous creatures, and more and more about Bess. He found himself worrying that if he carried on much further, he might never make it home; he found himself wondering if his search for the vanished monsters might not turn out to have been undertaken at too high a price.
“You did what?”
Elsie’s voice came to him sometimes and he found himself trying to explain himself—why it had seemed so important to him to come and why it had not seemed a terrible thing at the time to leave Bess for so long.
When he lay at night in his coat across the fire from the boy, he thought about his little girl and saw pictures of her behind his closed eyes—Bess being born; Bess petting her favorite jenny on the nose and whispering into its long ears; Bess waving like a windmill to him from the porch the day he left.
How long will you be gone?
A year at least. Maybe two.
In two years I will be twelve.
Twelve, yes.
He wondered how tall she would be now, if she was putting up all right with Julie, and if anything interesting or important had happened in her life since he left; if she was thinking yet of making a sweetheart of her friend Sidney Lott, or if she was still a tad young for that; if the letters had reached her safely. He wrote to her more and more often, every week and sometimes more, telling her he was doing well and making progress, that he hoped it would not be long now, that he would come upon the animals soon, and after that he would be on his way home.
The going was hard though. For long stretches there was no game and hardly any timber. Bellman and Old Woman From A Distance went hungry and had no fire at night. They walked through bearded grass and thistles ten feet high, through narrow gorges where rocky cliffs oppressed them on either side. All around them the country was barren and desert. It glittered with coal and salt.
Some days, for something to do, Bess took the hinny with the white splash on its forehead off down the stony track and along the creek. Sometimes she rode and sometimes she walked with the animal alongside. Today she rode and went until they came to the edge of the maple trees between the Bellman house and pasture and Elmer Jackson’s shack in the distance on the south side of the creek. She could see his cow in front of the low lean-to he called a barn.
Suddenly the hinny stopped and would go no further.
Bess twitched the stick against the hinny’s haunch and said, “Yip yip,” but the hinny still wouldn’t move.
“What is it?”
Bess shielded her eyes with her hand and looked off into the trees.
For a minute she sat on the hinny, and from the trees Elmer Jackson looked out. He wondered if this might be his chance. He took a few steps forwards but was, truth be told, a little wary of the hinny. It was the most recalcitrant of all Bellman’s animals, more bad-tempered even than the molly mule they’d sold last season. More than once he’d seen it land a smart three-hundred-and-sixty-degree kick in the backside of its least favorite horse.
He watched Bess turn the ill-tempered beast around, and soon after that she was gone.
Jackson swallowed.
He wasn’t sure how to manage it, or where.
Soon though, soon.
With a series of slow, deliberate gestures, the boy communicated to Bellman one morning that if they didn’t reach the mountains in good time they would have to stop and wait till spring. They were still a long way off and if they started over them too late, the snow would come and there would be no pasture for the horses and then the horses would die and so would they.
Bellman tried to picture what the mountains would look like—a long, unbroken spine of craggy peaks, spiking the huge sky.
He was in an agony of indecision: whether to carry on with his quest or give it up as a bad job and turn himself around and begin the long trek home.
He didn’t think he wanted another winter out here. He could not imagine waking to find the water in his kettle frozen like a white rock. He couldn’t imagine traveling with an icy crust over everything they wore, on top of their horses and covering all his bags and bundles. He couldn’t imagine the squeak of hooves in snow.
Also, he’d had another thought.
What if they hibernated?
It seemed more than possible to him that the huge animals might be the sort to hibernate—that they might want to find themselves some warm and suitably roomy burrow in which, like the bear, they might hole up until the weather improved.
Which would mean waiting till next spring before any possibility of seeing them. It would mean plodding through the snow or building some sort of semipermanent camp and crossing his fingers that he and t
he boy would be able to feed themselves. He had already trudged through two long and drifty winters since leaving home, and he wasn’t sure if he could face another.
They had stumbled upon another river, and for the time being they were following it.
It seemed to be taking them west, so even if the big beasts were giving the water a wide berth, Bellman reasoned it was possible the river would take them most quickly to some habitat they favored.
Winter. It still seemed a world away. The heat thickened and the mosquitoes were a torment. Bellman found himself wishing they hadn’t dumped the pirogue when they’d struck away from the Missouri. He’d give anything now to squeeze into the narrow craft behind the boy while Old Woman From A Distance paddled them along.
They ate pounded fish and bulbs the boy harvested with his feet from the bottoms of pools. Bellman, still fearful he might leave, gave him a string of blue beads and two bells and Elsie’s copper thimble and her other knitting needle.
After several weeks, the banks on both sides of the river began to shrink almost to nothing, narrow strips of ground, and towering cliffs walled them in on either side. They splashed through the water, leading the horses. Then the cliffs beside the river receded and the ground flattened out and they rode beside it. When Bellman was too sore to ride he staggered on weak legs in his worn-out boots over the cooked, hard earth.
And then he got sick.
The pounded fish made him vomit, the smallest quantity left him bent in spasms. His shit was a terrible white, crumbly and dry. He could no longer hunt. The boy did everything. He used his bow as he’d always done, but he also used the two guns, and he had the knife now too, and the hatchet, both tucked into the waist of his skirtlet. He did all the skinning, cut up all the meat, even sharpened the two knitting needles and used them to scrape out the marrow from the bones.
Bellman’s flesh began to melt away, and one morning he woke on an island in the middle of the river where Old Woman From A Distance had made their camp. Fine sand blew from the sandbars and was driven in such clouds Bellman could hardly see. He lay looking through swollen, abraded eyes at the movement of the willows against the sky and could not get up.
