Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

  THE TWO MEN RODE EAST to San Antonio, where they passed three days in a haze of alcohol and sex. From there they rode on to San Marcus and Mountain City and into Austin, where the white man drew on his bank account and so further fueled their debauchery. They spent time and money in Waco and Fort Graham and Dallas, leaving behind them two men near death, a string of damaged saloons, and three prostitutes who cursed the men by name and description and asked that God do them the one favor of tearing these men from the earth and throwing them to the fires of hell.

  The white man harbored a rage that had been newly stirred but that had begun before anything he could name and plagued him in his dreams, both sleeping and awake. He thought up tortures for his enemies, and when they were exhausted, he thought up new enemies and so continued. The black man watched it all with quiet eyes and waited.

  Outside of a saloon in Dallas, the white man took the butt of a rifle across his forehead and lay immobile as blood trickled into his eyes, wondering if this was what death felt like, wondering if the fires of hell were actually liquid, and if so, could they be consumed? The black man carried him away and sat him on his horse, and they rode down the Trinity River and camped at one of its forks and sobered up. The white man cursed everything, himself included, and struggled with the demons within, and tried to push them away because they were not his demons but had been planted in him. They need not be his, and this need not be the course of his life. He stared into the flames of their mesquite fire and listened to the coyotes and watched the progress of suckerfish in the river and thereby found a new sanity. He nursed his mind gently and watched it grow calm.

  GABRIEL WOKE EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, chilled to the bone and damp. His brother pressed against him, his mouth open, breathing with a peaceful rhythm. Behind the thin screen of cotton Solomon snored, low and nasal, occasionally mumbling some bit of dream conversation. Gabriel listened to the chorus created between them, punctuated by silences that seemed alive with tiny sounds: coyote songs from the prairie, the scurrying of mice, and, fainter still, the burrowing, grinding noise of some creature, whether within the walls or inside the soddy, he could not tell. He lay there for some time, his eyes probing the wall nearest him.

  Eventually he sat up and slipped from underneath the woolen blanket he and his brother had shared and emerged fully clothed, even down to his shoes. The room was dimly lit. There was a lone and tiny window, and through it came only the faintest indication of light. In the stove, orange embers pulsed and glowed, warm although they gave no flame.

  He stood there like an aged and senile man, looking around him at the foreign world of his own home, until he heard movement beyond the curtain that enclosed the space Eliza and Solomon shared. This spurred him on. He crept over to the door, a wooden thing that neither fully fit the space it occupied nor appeared to have been a door by design. He had to lift it to move it.

  Although sunrise had not yet taken place, it was noticeably lighter outside. The sky had all but cleared of clouds, and the last faint traces of stars were still visible in the west. Gabriel walked away from the house with determined steps, across earth touched by frost. He paused only when he got to the top of a hill. There he turned and looked back.

  The house was a stark silhouette against the eastern glow. It sat small and inconsequential on the landscape. Next to it lay a plot of turned soil, a tiny brown square he could have held between his fingers. He studied this for a moment, and then his eyes drifted on and stared unfocused at the prairie around and behind the house. He had seen such space yesterday and the day before that, but his eyes were not yet comfortable with it. They roamed across it in search of a boundary, a border, an indication that this land didn’t go on forever. No such marker was to be found.

  The lonely call of some creature drifted past Gabriel, a cry part canine and part musical. As if summoned by it, a shape emerged from the house: Solomon. He stood for a moment, taking in the morning, then turned to some task on the far side of the house. Gabriel folded his arms across his chest and stood unmoving. A drop of moisture clung to his nostril. He sniffed to halt its progress but otherwise ignored it. How could Solomon call this a home? His letters, although written in another person’s hand, had promised so much. They had painted a picture of prosperity that bore no resemblance to what Gabriel now saw before him. He silently named the man a liar, one more slur to add to the list that he’d compiled over the long train ride. He trudged back toward the house, firm in his conviction that his mother would also see this fool’s folly. She would look it in the face, turn from it, and flee.

  ELIZA DIDN’T DRAW HER CONCLUSIONS as quickly as her son did. Instead, she listened patiently through Solomon’s tour of the place. There was little to show, but Solomon managed to stretch the tour out with long, detailed descriptions. For each individual thing he began with a lengthy discourse that proved the nonexistence of the object; then he set about building it with words and gestures before the eyes of his listeners. In such a way, the house began as a flat stretch of grass on which could be found naught but buffalo dung. He told of the grasshopper plow and the yoke of three oxen that had cut the sod into fifty-pound bricks. From there it rose, brick by heavy brick, up from the ground and into the building they now had before them. It was a structure unknown in the East but standard in this treeless habitat. The well beyond the rise was dug with words that sought to convey the full import of the action and the expense of such an endeavor. He indicated the size of the land they owned with gestures that seemed to encompass the earth itself. He pointed out boundaries that no eye but his own could see, and he expounded on their good fortune, by the grace of God, at being able to acquire such a large and promising parcel.

  Despite his eloquence, the three newcomers, even Eliza, shared a look of forlorn suspicion as they took in what lay before them. The soddy stood, in the light of day, like an earthen ogre, with the door as its gaping mouth and the dingy window as its one remaining eye. The roof hung low and tired, a bushy mass of hair no different from the fields of grass around them, except dead where the fields were living. Solomon spoke as if the barn existed already, as if there were stables full of thoroughbreds and rows of planted corn, but the three saw none of this. The barn lived only in the man’s mind, the stables even more so, and the areas of turned earth were feeble and lifeless in comparison with the untouched expanses around them.

  Behind the house and set some thirty yards away was a fenced-in area of mud and filth, at the center of which stood a mid-sized sow. She watched the family approach with a curious gaze, although she didn’t let it stop her from her business, which appeared to be nosing around in the mud with her snout. Solomon called her a guarantee against the weather or locusts, a sure profit and a fail-safe so that no one calamity could destroy them. The pig stared back through all of this with a skeptical look that said she was not as impressed with them as they were with her. She grunted, raised her snout in the air, then turned her back to them and moved off toward the far end of the pen.

  “I wish I could be showing you the whole place up and running,” Solomon said, “but last year was tough, harder than I thought. For everyone, but harder even for the coloreds.”

  “Here and elsewhere,” Eliza said. “That’s how it always is.”

  “True. True. That’s how it always is.” Solomon nodded at the sad reality of this. “They gave me some trouble about the land, it being such a good piece, but we own it free and clear all the same. Out here, a man ain’t so much fighting against white folks as he is fighting against the land. White folks still cause you trouble, but the land . . . Apart from everything else, there were the locusts, a plague of them. Figured you read about it in the papers.” Eliza nodded that she had. “They tore through this country, ate everything in sight. Some things I wouldn’t have thought you could eat, too. Air was so thick with them you feared to breathe them in. It was a hell of a thing.” He looked down at his feet and scuffed the soil with his toe. “But they won’t come back this year.”<
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  “How do you know?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know, but that’s what I expect. Folks say they never do come back two years consecutive, least not that many. I don’t mean to tell the Lord his business, but I figure it’s about time for him to smile on us.”

  Gabriel stood silently for a few moments, apparently meditating on providence and God’s role in bestowing it. But when he spoke, his mind showed a different focus. “Thought you said we already had a barn.”

  “Well . . .” Solomon shrugged like a man caught at some childish prank, embarrassed but smiling. “You would’ve already had a barn if you’d come out in midsummer. Y’all gotta remember you come out earlier than I expected. It’s still in the planning stages right now.”

  Gabriel acknowledged no humor in the situation. “You didn’t write about no planning stage. You wrote a whole lot of things I don’t see no sign of.”

  The man’s lips pursed before he spoke, but his voice was calm. “Well, I’m not that good a letter writer. Maubry, the man that wrote the letters out for me, he thought I should keep to the positive side of things. So I wrote things the way I saw them being soon. That’s what it’s all about out here, looking to the future and making it so. This here is a land and a challenge like God intended.”

  “This—” Gabriel began, but Eliza silenced him with a glance. She spoke gently, but with a firm back.

  “It does beg the imagination a bit, Solomon. You have to grant us that.”

  Solomon nodded his recognition of this. He looked up at the sky and exhaled a breath so long it might have been pent up the entire day. He seemed to search that blue and tranquil void for some answer that eluded him on earth.

  He searched long, and whether he found the answer there or in some other region, Gabriel knew not. But the boy watched with surprise as the man fell to his knees and clenched the turf in his large hands. He stared down at the thick blades of grass that thrust between his fingers, and he asked Eliza to kneel with him. He asked her if she understood what it meant to hold this earth in their hands, to know that it was theirs by right, to do with what they would or could, and that it could be passed down to their children in perpetuity. Did she understand that if there was ever a thing that this nation, which had enslaved them both and so many others as well, could truly give to them, it was land and the right to work it as they would? He begged her to forgive him his folly if she could but asked once more if she understood.

  She answered, clasping her hands over his and so doubling his handhold on the earth, “Well, Solomon, I’m listening to you, and I’m trying. I can’t see it all clear as you do, but I’m trying.”

  Gabriel shook his head and turned away, like a man wearied by the ravings of a street-corner prophet.

  GABRIEL WAS THE FIRST TO SPOT HIRAM, riding in across the prairie late in the afternoon. His horse, burdened with bags of seed and supplies, plodded with steady steps that brought him on as smoothly as clouds drifting over the land. Hiram was a man in the later years of middle age. His clothes were bedraggled, simple garments of a coarse material like burlap, and his hair was unkempt, a lumpy mass of tight curls. But his face shone with a charisma that held it all together. Gabriel had known him exactly as long as he’d known Solomon. The two had appeared together one day from the fabled South and had left together to plant their dreams in the soil of the West. But this man had an entirely different effect on the boy from his stepfather’s. His quiet and unassuming air, his gentle smile, and the humor of his stories made Hiram something like a beloved uncle to both boys.

  He dismounted with well-tried movements, although he walked with a limp, as one leg refused to straighten itself completely, an injury from a distant, southern time. He took in the whole group with a glance, nodded at Gabriel and smiled at Ben. But he walked first toward Eliza, shaking his head and whispering something meant for no ears but his own.

  “Hiram.” Eliza took his hands in hers and held them firmly. “You got yourself in this mess too? What kind of fools are you two?”

  Hiram smiled at this and seemed to find no insult in it. “The kind of fool that is godawful happy to see you. Do you know that you’ve just become the best-looking woman in a hundred miles? Maybe two hundred?”

  “You can’t charm me, Hiram. I’ve been around too long for that.” She drew back and looked the man up and down. “And look at yourself ! You’re dressed as if you’re back at South Hill.”

  “Maybe so,” Hiram said, taking a look at his garments, “but here I’m working for no one but myself, and I guess you, now that you’re here.” Hiram looked her long in the eyes, and something passed between them, a message of both reprimand and forgiveness and a certain pained understanding. But when he looked away and found the boys, his smile returned. “Sweet Jesus, look at you two! Left you boys and find you men. This world moves too fast for me sometimes. Must be getting old.” He shook hands with both, bringing them close to him in nearly a full embrace.

  Ben’s face lit up in the first show of joy this long day. Gabriel tried hard to stand firm but couldn’t keep a grin from tugging at his lips. Hiram talked easily with the boys, asking them had they seen any Indians or buffalo, warning them that this land was hard, might be too hard for the likes of them. This got just the expected reaction from Ben, who denied all Hiram said with rough gestures that soon involved the man in a tussling match.

  The afternoon passed into twilight. Eliza prepared a supper of tinned corned beef that they’d brought with them, served alongside some of last year’s potatoes, with a measure of lard laid across it all. To the men’s surprise and delight, she also produced a jar of peach preserves, just as soft and sweet as they remembered from some long-ago time. They ate the fruit in big dripping spoonfuls that Hiram named “syrup-covered sunlight.” But it was over all too soon, and both men licked the spoons they ate with and scraped the bottom of the jar as if more of the delicacy might be hidden somewhere in the glass itself.

  They soon engaged in a meandering conversation that tended toward light banter. They talked of people they all knew back East, about food items and comforts yet to be seen on the plains. The men told of some of the trials of this land, but did so with the humor of distance. They made the chill of winter into a joke, coyotes into playful creatures, and the labors of the land into things not to be feared but to be proud of. Gabriel sat beside his brother but seemed to find entertainment only in the dark corners of the room. Each change in the conversation seemed to annoy him, although he spoke no protest.

  Solomon built up a fire and sat tending it like one would a sick child. For a moment it appeared to have all his attention, and yet when he spoke, his words came out measured and thoughtful. “Guess it’s easy enough for Hiram and me to laugh. We done been out here long enough to love the place. I’d ask y’all to give it some time, if you would. We may look poor, but we got more than most—this land, the mule, the horse, and the sow out back. And you and I both farmed the land before, Eliza. I know this here’s different, but we can learn what’s to be learned. Think for a moment how good things maybe could be.” He looked at his wife, his hopes for their future written in the deep lines of his face. “But I’ll tell you what else. Hiram and I talked about it . . . If you choose to head back East, we’ll pay the fare.” This got Gabriel’s attention. “There’s no cash left to speak of, but we could sell the horse—sow too, if need be. I’m just saying the choice is yours. Life out here ain’t like being a slave, but it’s a might harder than the city life y’all been living, might harder than we knew, fore we got here.”

  Eliza didn’t look at Gabriel, but her hand rose in a vague gesture, as if she were reluctantly waving him away. The same hand moved to her lips and quieted some thought there. She walked over and sat down next to Solomon. Gabriel followed her with his eyes, unsure what to read in her face. She leaned forward and spoke close to her husband, although loud enough that the others could still hear her. “Solomon, I been thinking on it all day. When I first saw the house
, this house, I just about forgot that we had dreamed this up together. Thought maybe you’d lost your mind and I was about to.” She spoke the words plainly, punctuating each one to make sure they were understood. Solomon lowered his eyes and studied the shape and size of his hands. “But Solomon, I tell you what. You my husband, same one I married before God’s eyes. I did that cause I thought I could finish this life with you, and that’s still what I intend on doing. So what I’m saying is, you have me. All of me. You always have. And I knew that before we boarded the train.”

  Solomon raised his eyes, which were suddenly moist; his face was flushed and exhausted by the day but timorously joyous at the words his mind was still processing.

  Eliza turned to her boys. She still directed her words at Solomon, but her look asked the boys that she be allowed to speak for them too. “I know my boys. I know they’re smart enough to wonder what in God’s name this is all about. But they’re also wise enough, I think, to understand that sometimes you gotta have some faith and put in some hard work to get the things you want. And they’re strong too. We’ll put them to sod-busting, and they’ll have the place turned over in a week’s time. They’ll do us proud, and make you two men feel like some old somebodies.”

  Solomon smiled, uneasy. Hiram laughed outright but kept his eyes on the boys.

  Gabriel stood with his chin pushed forward, inhaling deeply, as if he might finally speak in something more than a grunt, longer than a sentence. He didn’t look at his brother, for he already saw Ben’s face in his mind, shy and smiling under the praise and ready to accept anything their mother proposed to them. Gabriel silently cursed the boy, a weaker, feebler version of himself. He held the room in silence for a long moment but in the end spoke only with the breadth of his back. He shoved the door open and stepped into the night air. After striding forward a few steps, he faltered and stopped, witnessing before him a panorama that in no direction promised solace or escape but that led only unto itself, infinitely.