Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

  FIVE WEEKS AFTER THEY’D BEGUN THEIR RIDE, the two men ended it, at a ranch north of Fort Griffin. The ranch’s main house, near which they stood, sat like a New England estate that had been transplanted by a mischievous whirlwind and set down out of malice upon the wide skillet of the southern plains. It was a building of numerous rooms, smooth planed wood, bay windows, and a wraparound porch that stood a full six feet above the ground. It was painted a bright, pure white, with blue shutters and trim, and it was lined across the front by young apple trees. A little distance away, a buggy stood at the ready, hitched to a thin-muzzled and proud black horse. It watched the two men and their horses with an air of cautious indifference. The white man surveyed the scene with eyes little impressed by the show of grandeur.

  Man don’t even know where he is, he said.

  When the owner appeared, he walked briskly, slightly annoyed, probing with his tongue for some troublesome bit of food that had lodged itself in his teeth. He was dressed in a dinner jacket of a type rarely seen in Texas, with pressed breeches designed for riding in some country where such was done for pleasure rather than out of necessity. He paused at the porch railing, studied the two men, then asked their business.

  The white man stated it: the rumor he’d heard and his proposal to remedy it.

  The owner had heard rumors of his own where this man was concerned and didn’t mind saying so.

  The man didn’t seem to have an opinion on these rumors. He took off his hat and ran a hand up over his hair, the strands of which were so white they shone like sun-bleached hay. This done, he replaced the hat and all was as before.

  You’ve known me since I was fourteen. You know the places I’ve worked and the jobs I’ve done. You want your cattle in Kansas; I want to drive them there. Seems we got a mutual interest, don’t it?

  The owner agreed to a certain amount of truth in that. He propped one leg up on the railing and wiped the corners of his mouth with his fingertips.

  Shame what happened to your father. I can’t say he didn’t bring it on himself in a godawful way, but it’s still a shame. He was a good man in a lot of ways, just couldn’t control his excesses.

  Can’t blame a son for his father.

  This seemed to answer some question the owner had yet to state.

  No, I don’t reckon you should. If I chance it with you, you ain’t gonna make me look a fool, are you?

  The man smiled and indicated with a shrug that this was an impossibility.

  The black man watched it all and waited.

  THE MORNING OF THE BOYS’ FOURTH DAY IN KANSAS, Solomon and Hiram taught them how to break sod. They yoked the horse, Raleigh, and the mule for the effort and pointed out the features of their plow. It was an old contrivance much used and abused, with wooden handles so dry and worn that their creviced features sliced fast into soft hands. The frame of the thing was some sort of forged metal, ribbed and primitive in design, dented and aged and twisted by its labors, the blade especially so. Solomon wrapped the handles in strips of leather and set to it with the boys and the beasts all full on.

  It was awkward work, coordinating the pull of the animals and keeping them to the proper course while the plow bucked and resisted, trying to dig too deeply into the earth or slipping up and out or tipping off to one side. When Gabriel held the plow, it seemed strangely like a living thing, something with a mind of its own and the strength to actualize its intent. It took the exertion of all his muscles, from the wrists up through the shoulders, the wrap of his back and the push of his thighs, right down through his legs to his toes, which dug into the ground in an attempt to find purchase. Every so often the blade bit especially well and sliced forward a foot or so. In an hour they had cut a wavering trough that Solomon deemed long enough for their purposes. They turned the plow and swung the beasts around and labored back. And so the morning passed.

  Eliza set a simple lunch for the men and boys, a stew rich with chunks of beef and potatoes, along with cornbread fresh from their Dutch oven. Gabriel was surprised each day that she coped so well with this place, that she seemed to know the primitive tools she found and their use. Her share of the work was exponentially increased by the fact that she was the sole woman of the family, but she fell to it like one returning to an old trade. Every morning and evening she trudged over the rise and down to the well on the other side for water. As their potbellied stove was too misshapen to function otherwise, she cooked over its open flames, with all of the chores related to it: the constant need to feed and monitor the fire; the danger of being burned, singed, or scalded by pots of boiling water that seemed far too large for her thin arms.

  Gabriel watched her with anxious eyes, expecting, hoping to see her overwhelmed by it all. But like Solomon and Hiram, she went at these tasks with a satisfied energy. The work was good, and she was happy finally to get at it. She sat next to Solomon, and Gabriel couldn’t help noticing each time they touched. Their hands brushed often; their shoulders rubbed together; their laughter always took them toward each other. This too seemed strange to the boy. Try as he might, he could recollect no such closeness between Eliza and his father.

  After lunch, the men headed back out to work. Gabriel got up to go but lingered by the door. He turned around and stared at his mother, the light from the open door casting him in silhouette. They occupied the silence for a good few seconds, the only sounds being those of Eliza clearing the table. “What’s on your mind?” she asked.

  “Daddy didn’t raise me to be no farmer.”

  “It’s your daddy you’re worried about?” Eliza smiled sadly. She watched him for a moment, then continued collecting the spoons and bowls in one big kettle. “I spent near ten years working in your daddy’s funeral parlor. That ain’t no work to love either, living off the dead.” Gabriel’s eyes snapped at her, but Eliza stopped his words before the boy uttered them. “I hear you, Gabriel. I know your father had bigger plans for you than this, but things ain’t come to pass quite that way. Just settle your mind to the fact that we’re here in Kansas and live with it. I know your father wouldn’t’ve had nothing to do with this, but he’s gone.”

  Gabriel crossed his arms and stood with his legs set wide apart, although there was something nervous even in this defiant stance, something of the child playing the adult. “If you know what he’d’ve thought, why you spurning him?”

  “That was never my intention. Anyway, it’s not your place to judge me for your father.” She scooped up the last bowl and dropped it in the pot. Her eyes flicked up toward Gabriel, but only for a second. The glance seemed to affect her. She paused in her work, and a melancholy frown wrinkled her brow. She set both her hands on the table and leaned her weight on the unstable boards. “You were special to your father. You know that, don’t you? More so than Ben, and don’t ask me if that’s right. He never could get enough of you, and he always did see all of his hopes and dreams growing in you. That’s why you cherish him so. And I’m thankful for it. But Gabriel, there was no great love between him and me. He chose me because he figured I looked good on his arm and was educated enough not to embarrass him and his kin. But he never loved me, and his family never cared for me either. Yes, they’re prosperous for black folks, but they got no soul, Gabriel.”

  “Like Solomon’s got soul?” he asked, the words blunt and cold, less a question than an accusation.

  “Yes, that’s just what I mean. I loved Solomon first, if you have to know. Way back, way back and way south, when I was somebody’s property. But I got sold away and found my way to your father and he made his offer and I took it, but I never did forget my soul. I never did forget Solomon. When your father passed I sent for him, wrote him and told him if he wasn’t married already he could come up and I’d be his wife.”

  Gabriel’s jaw dropped. “You asked him?”

  Eliza nodded. She slipped her hand into an old quilted mitten, lifted a pot of hot water from the fire, and poured it over the dishes.

  “He came out with my daddy�
��s money, and this is all he got for it?”

  “There’s no crime there. What’s mine is Solomon’s and what was your father’s became mine. That’s all there is to that. Fact that things here is primitive ain’t nobody’s fault. We just have to get through it. And the fact that we’re here is just a fact, and you can see that plain as anybody else.” With that, she made to lift the pot up and move it. “Anyway, this land may be better’n you think. Just give it some time.”

  “You know what’s gonna happen, don’t you?”

  “I can’t say that I do. Never had that gift.”

  “We gonna work ourselves dumb for nothing. You gonna put me to work out there for nothing. We will go back East, only we’ll go back broke and with nothing to show for it.”

  Eliza rested her hands on her hips and looked at her son with a skeptical grin. “Is that right? That’s the way you see it? And that’s why you don’t aim to do any work to make sure we do succeed? That what you’re saying?”

  Gabriel rocked forward on the balls of his feet. “Hell, no, that’s not what I’m saying. I’ll work. I’ll work like nobody else here. I’m just saying what I think.”

  “All right. Now I know. You go on now and help your brother.”

  Gabriel turned, for a second responding like a dismissed schoolboy. But he paused by the door, blinking in the sunlight. “You won’t never be able to say I didn’t work the goddamn land.” With that, he stepped from her view.

  DURING THE AFTERNOON, the two men ventured off to design a new room for Hiram. Gabriel and Ben worked on with the plow, taking turns leading the animals and guiding that rough tool. Gabriel couldn’t help cursing under his breath, profanity a necessary feature of the labor. He didn’t pause to survey his progress, nor to drink, as Ben often did. He turned himself to the work as if to destroy the land, the tools, the animals, or himself as quickly as possible. As the hours passed, he found none of these things easy to break.

  Ben became the silent one. His brow furrowed in worry. It seemed he was slowly coming to grips with the reality of this work and its duration. Several times he seemed on the verge of offering some confidence to his brother, but the other showed only his back, his muscles, and his exertion. As dusk came on, Ben asked if maybe they should quit for the day. Gabriel said the day wasn’t over but he could quit if he wanted to. Ben thought this over. “I’ll just go get some more water.” He walked toward the house with the empty waterskin thrown over his shoulder.

  Gabriel called the beasts into motion and found that they listened. Alone with them he struggled forward, but either they were tired or the sod had woven itself into chainmail. He made no progress, though he strained and the animals rolled their eyes and pawed the turf. The blade stuck. The plow overturned. Gabriel stumbled over it and bruised his knees and shouted at Raleigh to stop. He cursed the plow and damned it well and beyond redemption and so thoroughly prayers could not hope to save it. He kicked it, but this he regretted, as the iron cage of the thing lashed back at his foot and sent him hobbling. Raleigh and the mule watched him.

  When he had spent his curses, he contemplated the whole sad scene from a distance of twenty paces. With the day’s labor they had striated a small section of the prairie with raised lines of sliced turf. There was little sign of the soil beneath, and the lines resembled seams more than furrows, as if the turf had already stitched its wounds and begun to heal. Gabriel wondered who was getting the worst of this day, the ground or his own body. His legs were so tired that they trembled supporting him; his arms ached with a dull soreness, and certain motions sent a swath of pain across his back. He spat and stood waiting for something to come, as if the earth were entitled to the next move and he was content to wait his turn.

  But as the earth did nothing, Gabriel strode to the rear of the house and got the ax from the shelter there. He carried it back, dangling from one hand. Standing out before Raleigh, he measured the arc of his swing and sought to find the proposed line of the plow’s progress. The ax swung up, cut through the air and down into the earth. It bit. Gabriel released the handle and contemplated the angle at which the shaft projected toward him. He seemed to find a certain satisfaction in this. He cranked the blade out of the earth, took a step back, and swung once more. Without a pause, he worked the blade free and repeated the action, once, twice, and then onward, hammering into the turf a halting, imprecise incision. Each stroke was a new act of increasing fury, stronger and deeper, punctuated by grunts and profanities. The horse and mule watched him with nervous eyes, as if beholding some crazed woodsman who had forgotten the true target of his trade.

  Ben returned with the waterskin. “Gabe, what the hell you doing?”

  “I’m learning the ground.”

  “Looks like you gone and lost your sense to me.”

  Gabriel didn’t protest this theory but simply tore into the earth again and again, ignoring his brother and the nervous twitching of the animals. Ben eventually unhitched the plow and led the horse and the mule away. Gabriel stuck to his demented work, hard at it until his mother called him for supper. Only then did he call a truce for the day.

  LATE THAT EVENING, Gabriel lay restless and unsleeping. His legs burned. He felt the warm mouth of some creature around his muscles, gnawing on them and pulling them away from the bone. Each inch of him hurt in one way or another, and he kept up a slow, constant movement, trying vainly to find the one posture of comfort which eluded him. The gray highlights of the ceiling above him became a canvas for the images that pressed in on him. He remembered the place he had called home, the cobbled streets of Baltimore, bustling with carriages and foot traffic, the harbor full of ships sailing to and from far-flung destinations. He caught glimpses of his father and of the intentions conjured between the two of them, schemes from a distant time but all the more solid for their inaccessibility now. Bits of his earlier conversation with his mother also crept in and nagged at him. He hadn’t known that she and Solomon went that far back, and somehow this seemed like a betrayal, like a crime done to his father and still unpunished. He rolled to one side and faced the wall, hoping this motion might somehow steady his mind and bring slumber. It did not.

  He thought of the long train ride out here, all those miles of flatlands and rolling prairie and mountains, all the people and animals and dark spaces and the great sky above. How long would that journey be on foot? Could he walk back, and if he did, what would he find, who would he have? He lay planning it all out, jumping great spaces in his mind, conversing with distant relatives and creating the kind of life for himself that would make his father proud. He created plans to the logic of a weary and troubled young mind in the dead of night, with the breathing of his sleeping kin surrounding him and the eerie calls of coyotes roaming the miles of night outside their door. These schemes became a gateway to slumber and mingled with his dreams and arose again as questions unanswered in the morn.

  IT WAS THE BLACK MAN who first noticed the Scot. He watched as the young man cut cattle from the herd for branding. The Scot moved his horse among the beasts as if he were one of them, as if he might fool them into complacency. He never attacked too fast, but maneuvered in such a way that his target always found itself standing dumbfounded before him as a lasso dropped around its neck.

  But the way he communicated with his horse was what most impressed the black man. He spoke to him, whispered, told him jokes, and asked his opinion of things. The horse would stop on a dime with just the slightest motion from the man’s arm. He’d sidle, spin, or squat at some command that observers could hardly detect.

  When the blond man rode out to check on their progress, the black man whispered his observations. Together they watched.

  What’s his name? the blond man asked.

  The black man told him, and the other called to him. The Scot rode over and waited, smiling. Sweat hung at the edges of his forehead. He wiped it away with a gloved hand.

  They teach you all that back in Scotland?

  The man smiled again. W
hen he spoke, his voice betrayed his origins, not in the words he used but in a faint lilt, a soft cadence, and the intentionally playful way he moved words around on his tongue.

  Not exactly. We’ve few cowboys over there, I’m afraid.

  Lot of sheepherders, though.

  The young man nodded and smiled on. The blond man told the Scot that he had blood of the same origins, a few generations away from their native land but no thinner for it. He told where his people had lived and some of what he knew of the place. The young man nodded and said he remembered the place himself. This pleased the man.

  Was it poverty, crime, or boredom that brought you over?

  I wouldn’t say it was one more than the other. Had my taste of them all, if you’ll know the truth.

  This pleased the man as well.

  I might have a project for you. You up for it?

  The Scot asked what it was, but the man offered no further information.

  You’d have my answer before I know what I’m agreeing to?

  I would. You can know there’s money in it, though, extra from your wages for the drive, that is. And you can know you’ll be working with Caleb here, taking orders from him instead of me for a little while.

  The young man pursed his lips. He looked at the black and found that man’s yellow eyes hard on him. He looked back at the white and found his eyes likewise, except flavored with humor.

  Fill me in, then.

  Good. You’ll like this. Just consider it a bit of joke we’re planning. A joke on an old friend.

  THE MONTH OF MAY PASSED in a dreary haze of endless work. The family was up before the sun. They ate their breakfast as the sky grew pale, and they stepped out into the morning air as the first beams of sunlight touched the landscape, highlighting the tips of the grasses, bringing the soddy out of its dull relief. The myriad tasks to be completed each day dwarfed any chores that Gabriel had ever known before. There was, of course, the constant sod-busting, work that grew no easier with experience. Quite the contrary; to Gabriel’s reckoning, the turf grew stronger each day, devised new defenses against the plow point. There were seeds to be sown and the animals to be cared for and tools to be created from makeshift materials.