West

by Carys Davies

  He had her pinned to the wall now with his arm across her throat.

  He was breathing hard and fumbling with his belt buckle. A lumpy blood vessel, thick and awful, pulsed next to the cords of his neck. He stank of hinny crap and his own unclean clothing. She closed her eyes. A spurt of vomit filled her mouth.

  She cried out for her aunt Julie even though she knew there must be no hope of being heard. Aunt Julie was a long way out of earshot and was not here to protect her. Aunt Julie would be in church by now, looking up at the stained glass beauty of Moses Blazing with Light.

  Bess bit Jackson’s chin and his cheek and clawed at his back and screamed, but his belt only clunked to the floor and his pants fell against her leg.

  Mr. Hollinghurst had described a narrow valley bordered by low, tree-covered hills, a creek to the north and then a town; the dead man’s place a short ride beyond it along a stony path; a log house with a porch and a fenced pasture in which there would likely be mules. This, said Mr. Hollinghurst, was what was written on the front of the folded letters, and the boy did not think he could be far now.

  For the first time in his long journey, feeling himself to be so close, he continued beyond daybreak instead of pausing to hide himself in the trees till nightfall, looping around the town’s string of buildings and making his way through the trees back to the road that led away from them to the east.

  He arrived at a white church and heard singing from within. Ahead he could see the stony path.

  Perhaps it was the unaccustomed daylight that distracted him.

  Perhaps it was because he was sleepy after traveling through the whole of the night and now through half the morning too.

  Either way, he was caught off guard; didn’t see the fat white man until he was almost upon him. Up ahead next to a tall shrub behind the church: a fat white man in a yellow vest and a pair of eyeglasses with his hand inside his trousers.

  The boy hushed his horse and stepped her into the trees. He’d seen many white men before this one who’d produced pistols from inside their clothing. Had this one seen him? He wasn’t sure.

  The fat man glanced quickly to the left and right, and then his gaze seemed to fall in the boy’s direction and he appeared to pause, as if on the brink of something. Old Woman From A Distance could see now that he was definitely holding something in his hidden hand. The boy’s heart was beating very fast. “I have no weapon,” he said to himself. “No arrows left, and no gun because that mean, chiseling fur trader Devereux wouldn’t let me have one until I go back.”

  Which is when he remembers the knitting needle.

  With a quick, tight knot he shortens the stretchy sinew of his small hickory bow, bites down hard into the soft wooden knob at the blunt end of the long steel needle till he has a groove; sets it in place, draws back his arm, and shoots the fat librarian dead.

  Pleased and a little surprised by the accuracy of his shot, he dismounts. The knitting needle being a precious thing and because he doesn’t know when he might need it next, he draws it out from the man’s neck, which it has pierced like a maple trunk, the dark sap bubbling out over the man’s vest and shirt and pants.

  The boy regrets the lovely vest, which is the same beautiful color as his favorite flower. The eyeglasses he hesitates over, having no use for them himself, his own eyesight being quite extraordinarily sharp. But he is old enough and wise enough and experienced enough to know that the fact that something is of no use to him doesn’t mean it is of no use to someone else and therefore valuable. And even if the eyeglasses turn out not to have any value as eyeglasses, the glass itself is surely too good to pass up, as are the thin pieces of curved metal around the man’s spongy white ears.

  He lifts them off and drops them into the pocket of Cy Bellman’s big coat, wipes the knitting needle quickly on the sleeve of the dead man’s shirt, gets back on his horse, and continues in what feels to him, from the position of the sun and the movement of the wind and the last details of Mr. Hollinghurst’s instructions, like the right direction.

  Bess holds her breath, and tells herself to think of something different. Something far away and nothing to do with the present moment and what is happening in it. Her only hope that it will soon be finished.

  Out in the yard one of the jennies brayed. A loose shingle shifted somewhere up on the roof in the wind. Behind her the clock ticked loudly and the little ledge at the bottom of it dug into the back of her head as Jackson maneuvered her against the wall. She closed her eyes.

  And then the boy remembers.

  With the road and the small wooden town at his back, he pauses. The undulation of the hills, the configuration of the woods, the fresh scent of the summer grasses and the rich, dark earth—they all come back to him from his childhood, arriving across time on the breath of the morning wind.

  “This was mine,” he thinks, emerging from the maple copse. “I am here. I am back where I came from and where it all happened.”

  Grunting then, and moaning. Jackson bunching her dress in his fist, calling her his baby.

  Then hoofbeats in the distance, and through the open door between Elmer Jackson’s heaving shoulder and his damp red neck, a figure on a black horse approaching at a gallop down the long, stony track across the pasture from the west, a figure with dark, flying pigtails in a flapping brown coat and a billowing, pastel-colored blouse that looked to Bess like some undreamed-of holy trinity of her father, her mother, and some stranger she had never met in her entire life.

  “Help me!”

  She kicked and bit and clawed at Jackson’s back.

  For a long time the figure on the black horse seemed to come no nearer, and Jackson had her drawers off and her legs up around his waist. More hoofbeats then and some whinnying, a long, dusty-sounding skid, and something feather-light and swift launched through the clear morning air and glittering with a silvery light and coming out through Jackson’s eye just in front of her nose.

  She felt Jackson unstick and peel away from her and sink to the floor.

  He twitched once, and then he was still.

  The Indian was beardless and not tall, with narrow, slightly hunched shoulders, wearing her father’s coat and her mother’s blouse. Threaded in his dark braids, ribbons of various colors, around his neck strings of beads, blue and white and red, a small tinkling bell and a copper thimble she recognized beneath one of his ears.

  She took a gulp of air.

  Heavens. First Elmer Jackson. Now an Indian wearing her parents’ clothes.

  She was shaking, unable to speak.

  Perhaps it was because of the two years she’d spent living with her aunt Julie, and because it was a long time now since she’d chattered away to Sidney Lott on a Sunday morning, that Bess, when she did speak at last, sounded more like a woman of forty-five than a girl of twelve and a half:

  “Thank you, sir,” she said, still catching her breath. “I am very much obliged to you for the timing of your arrival.”

  She couldn’t tell if he understood. She thought probably not, since he only stood before her and said nothing. He was sweating from the ride, and his face gleamed. He was like no one she had ever seen.

  Bess straightened her torn and rumpled clothing. She was trembling violently. She did not want to ask the boy how he came to be wearing the blouse and the coat and the thimble. She did not want to know how he had come to possess one of her mother’s knitting needles or to be riding her father’s horse. She did not want to know anything more than she knew now. She did not believe he was the bringer of good news.

  The boy said nothing.

  When he is old, he will still think sometimes of the man moving against her in the distance. Visible through the open door, like an animal through a tunnel of trees, illuminated in a surrounding darkness.

  From a bundle on his horse he took out the papers that had been entrusted to him by the fur trader and gave them to her.

  “Oh,” said Bess.

  There were the unsent letters, of cou
rse, with her name on them, and there were drawings of unfamiliar grasses and trees and shrubs, a few small, strange animals and birds, a large rabbit, and between the pages some pressed and crumbling leaves and tiny, dry seeds that fell across her hands.

  There was the letter from Devereux explaining to her that her father had died and that his bones were buried in the west.

  There were no drawings at all of any huge, tusked creatures.

  “Excuse me, please, for a moment,” she said to the boy and walked out onto the patched and sloping porch.

  For a long time she stood shielding her eyes from the sun and looking off into the west, willing, in spite of the news the boy had brought, a tall figure in a stovepipe hat to appear through the settling dust and the small, pale rocks kicked up by the swift, black horse, but none came. There was the sky and the trees and the long path, and she could see that was all there was, but she still stood there and looked, her mind doing everything it could to avoid believing what it had been told; everything it could to refuse the news. Only her body accepted it with its violent trembling, and she fought, now, to overcome it, aware that she was poised before a flood, which, if she allowed it, would engulf her, and she would not be able to come up for air.

  At the pine table she sat down and wrote to the fur trader as he’d asked. The boy held out his hand for the piece of paper and she gave it to him.

  “You may keep the blouse,” she said quietly, “and the coat and the thimble.” It seemed a small price to pay for the services he had rendered, though again it was hard to tell if he understood.

  In a louder, slower voice she said, “I will go to the pump and fetch us each a mug of water. We will both feel better for a cold drink I am sure. Stay here please, I will only be a minute.”

  Bess always wondered what the boy was thinking while she was away at the pump, what his feelings were beyond being, presumably, rather tired.

  She wondered if he was afraid that someone would come after him because of Elmer Jackson lying there in a river of his own blood with a knitting needle through his face—if he believed she herself might even have gone to fetch such a person.

  She wondered if, standing there in the strange house with the pale light of the morning all around, he’d found himself feeling suddenly very homesick or if there was some extremely pressing appointment, or person, he had to get back to in a hurry.

  The only thing she was fairly certain about was that he must have felt he deserved more for his trouble than her mother’s dirty blouse and her copper thimble, and her father’s old, travel-worn coat, because when she returned from the pump with the two tin mugs of water, one for each of them, not only was he was gone—not only had he taken the hair on Elmer Jackson’s head and retrieved the bloodied knitting needle from his eye and taken that too, along with Elmer Jackson’s gray horse—he had also taken, from inside the house, the crocheted pot holder from its hook on the wall beside the range, a dish cloth, two forks, a knife, and a spoon, an embroidered apron, and her aunt Julie’s black umbrella.

  For a while she stood on the porch holding the mugs of water and looking off into the west, but there was no sign of him. The only evidence that he had ever come, other than the things he’d taken that were no longer in the house, was the body of Elmer Jackson lying beneath the clock.

  She drank the water and waited until her heart had slowed a little.

  Aunt Julie would be very cross about the pot holder and the dish cloth and the embroidered apron, and she would be furious about the cutlery and her umbrella, which had a silver ferrule and had only recently been repaired.

  “Well,” said Bess aloud, “I will say I went out with the john mule for wood, and that when I came back, the things were gone.”

  In the meantime she would fetch a bucket and scrub the blood from the floor and tie Elmer Jackson by his ankles to the hinny and drag him out into the far pasture, where the ground was soft and easy to dig, and she would dig a pit for him and roll him in, and cover it over.

  Her father’s letters she would keep under her mattress and she would not tell her aunt Julie about any of it, ever.

  She did not wish for her aunt, or the Lotts, or anyone else in Mifflin County, to know that he had fulfilled their mean-spirited prophecies and not returned; that he had never found the enormous creatures he was seeking.

  She did not want to hear what her aunt Julie would have to say about his failure.

  She did not wish him to be named a fool, to be numbered amongst the lost and the mad.

  Nor did she want to tell her aunt Julie about the smooth-faced Indian who had saved her and robbed them and then left without a word of goodbye.

  It seemed likely that her aunt would find something bitter and disapproving to say about him too, and she preferred, therefore, to keep that part a secret also.

  As for the compass, it wasn’t clear to her if he had dropped it in his haste to be gone or if he had left it for her on purpose. Either way, she did not put it under her mattress but kept it in her pocket with her hand around it and continued to think of him riding away, back into the west. The bloodied knitting needle, she supposed, would be in his empty quiver with the cutlery, and he would be carrying the umbrella under his arm, like a lance. The pot holder he would have tied, perhaps, onto his head, the dish cloth and the embroidered apron around his shoulders. When she closed her eyes she saw them fluttering behind him in the morning breeze like a flag, and a jeweled cape.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My very grateful thanks to the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library for a 2016/17 Fellowship, which was so important to me in the writing of this book. Thank you to Jean Strouse and her wonderful team there, and to the curators and librarians at the NYPL.

  Thank you to Salvatore Scibona, Akhil Sharma, and Jonathan Stevenson, who first read and commented on the manuscript.

  Thank you to David Constantine, Cathy Galvin, Mary O’Donoghue, and Sophie Rochester.

  To Marion Duvert and Anna Webber.

  To Sarah Goldberg and Bella Lacey.

  Special thanks to Bill Clegg.

  And to Michael, always.

  A Scribner Reading Group Guide

  WEST

  Carys Davies

  This reading group guide for West includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

  Introduction

  When widowed mule breeder Cy Bellman reads in the newspaper that colossal ancient bones have been discovered in the salty Kentucky mud, he sets out from his small Pennsylvania farm to see for himself if the rumors are true: that the giant monsters are still alive and roam the uncharted wilderness beyond the Mississippi River. Promising to return within two years, he leaves behind his daughter, Bess, to the tender mercies of his taciturn sister, Julie. With only a barnyard full of miserable animals and her dead mother’s gold ring to call her own, Bess fills lonely days tracing her father’s route on maps at the subscription library in town and shrinking from the ominous attentions paid to her and her aunt by their neighbor and sometimes yard hand, Elmer Jackson. Bellman, meanwhile, ventures farther and farther from home, across the harsh and alien landscapes of the West in reckless pursuit of the unknown.

  Topics & Questions for Discussion

  1. West opens on the morning Bellman is preparing to leave his farm in Pennsylvania to head to the unsettled territories. What does “west” mean to Bellman, and how does its significance contrast with what it represents for his daughter, Bess, his sister, Julie, and his neighbor, Elmer Jackson?

  2. Bellman can only explain his response to the giant animal bones in terms of bodily sensations: “There were no words for the prickling feeling he had that the giant animals were important somehow, only the tingling
that was almost like nausea and the knowledge that it was impossible for him, now, to stay where he was” (p. 16). How would you articulate, using the words he can’t summon, the reasons that the animals ignite such a profound yearning in Bellman?

  3. Why does Old Woman From A Distance choose to leave the Shawnees in favor of working with Devereux and Mr. Hollinghurst? Why does he then leave them to go with Bellman as a guide even though he knows the giant animals aren’t out there? What does Old Woman’s behavior toward these men reveal about his worldview, his hopes, his fears, and his deepest desires?

  4. Bellman’s route to the West is retraced by Old Woman when he journeys east to deliver the letters to Bess. How do the two men experience the same terrain differently? How do they influence each other along the way?

  5. West is narrated by a chorus of characters both principal and ancillary: Bellman, Bess, Old Woman From A Distance, Devereux, Elmer Jackson, the librarian, Mary Higson, and an omniscent narrator, among others. How did the shifting perspectives contribute to your enjoyment of the novel? Which character’s perspective did you relate to the most? The least?

  6. In Bellman’s thoughts, Aunt Julie is often accompanied by a variation of the epithet “perhaps softer on the inside than she was on the out.” Do you think this is a fair assessment of Julie’s character? In what ways does she challenge it?

  7. By the time Bellman meets his fate in the vast wilderness of the West, he is very, very far from his first home in England, a place he describes as “small and dark and cramped’’ (p. 111). How do you interpret Bellman’s feelings toward the notion of home at this point? Is he more or less ambivalent toward where he comes from than when he first left Lewistown? Did learning that Bellman has already made a journey from England to America change the way you think about his decision to continue west from Lewistown?