James asked Gabriel if this wasn’t something, and Gabriel nodded his somber agreement without meeting the boy’s eyes. He’d spoken few words to him all morning, afraid that something had changed between them but unable to name it truly. The previous evening’s fight had left a sharp taste of betrayal on each bruised portion of his body. He thought that he should still be angry, that James had proved himself a fickle friend. And yet he was not angry, and somehow he felt that it had only drawn them closer.
It was a small company, eight persons including the boys. Marshall led them, riding his horse nearly twice the distance traveled in a day with his constant trips from the front to the rear of the caravan, asking questions, posing observations, and finding things to laugh at. He wore the simple, functional garb of his trade: a thick, sun-bleached cotton shirt, leather chaps, a blue bandanna around his neck, and a Stetson tilted back on the crown of his head so that it framed his face rather than shaded it. He was all fun except when giving orders. Then he spoke in a quiet voice that broached no humor and allowed no questions.
A man named Bill sat just in front of the boys, driving the wagon. He was as slow and strong as the oxen he tended, with features equally wide and bovine. He rarely used his whip, but when he did he threw his whole body into it and snapped it just above the animals’ backs, seemingly never touching them but filling the air so full of commotion that they were prompted onward. Early that morning he had overseen the loading, at which the boys had helped, watching them with mistrustful eyes, unsure of their character or motives and fearing some deception.
Another man, Jack, rode with his Stetson low on his head. His nose protruded from underneath the brim as if it were his main feature and the organ through which he sensed the world. His eyes were little more than a notion, hidden in a shadow beneath the brim. He never spoke without first spitting a flume of liquid tobacco. This he achieved with a projectile agility that not only impressed Gabriel but would have impressed even the most hardened aficionado of that activity.
Less appealing still, in Gabriel’s eyes, was Rollins, a surly sort with a long torso and short legs. His arms stretched out as if he were an ape astride a horse, and he seemed always ready to explode in some display of anger and status. He looked at Gabriel and James with a certain amount of scorn, which he made clear by riding up next to them and lecturing Bill on the mating proclivities he’d observed in other young colored men, wondering aloud if these two had the same affection for dogs and whores.
Fortunately, there was another man in the group with a more pleasant disposition, a young Scot named Dunlop. He was in his early twenties, thinly built and long-legged. He enjoyed smiling, and when he did so the freckles on his nose danced and wiggled. In his voice was the ring of his homeland, a cadence that Gabriel found poetic. From his handling of horses and his stature in the saddle, however, it seemed he belonged to this country as much as anybody could. It was his job to loose-herd the three riderless horses they had with them, the only ones not sold at auction. He did this with a skill that almost seemed a sixth sense, at times pushing the horses out before him and letting them kick up to a trot, at other times bringing them in so close to the wagon that Gabriel could have reached out and touched them.
But the man who caused Gabriel the greatest concern was the one he saw the least of, the black man, Caleb. He led the way, darker and more silent than ever, on a large painted stallion that had some wildness in it still. It seemed he preferred his own company to that of any other and tolerated the rest only from the solitude of the lead position. Watching him on his horse, Gabriel thought him some dark figure of the apocalypse. It was unclear which of those demons he might incarnate, but when he glanced back at the caravan, Gabriel saw in his gloomy countenance an utter and indescribable loathing for the world and all its creatures. Gabriel had never seen such a face before, black or white, and he couldn’t help but hope that his perceptions were wrong. He knew instinctively that no man should be so twisted, and he knew further that no man could remain so for long without enacting some drama upon the world.
THE FIRST EVENING, THEY CAMPED ON THE PRAIRIE several miles from any settlement, beside a lonely creek that moved through the land lost and forlorn, switching this way and that in search of something it seemed destined never to find. They hobbled the horses and let them feed and built up a fire of brush and of what wood they could find along the creek. Above the fire they suspended a blackened kettle and threw into it the makings of soup—chunks of smoked meat, lard, and potatoes. With the utmost concentration, Bill added some herbs that he had bought in Crownsville, sure that they would flavor it nicely.
Rollins was kind enough to serve the boys their first wooden bowls, full to the brim, steaming and pooled with oil. He stood before them, ladle still in hand, urging them to eat. As the first spoonful passed his lips, Gabriel sensed the heat of it, but he didn’t pause quickly enough. The hot oil bit into his tongue and the roof of his mouth. He flinched, clamped his lips around the spoon, and closed his eyes as a wave of pain flooded his senses. When he looked up again, the first thing he saw was Rollins’s face close to his, smug and smiling with feigned interest and innocence. “So, what’s the verdict?”
Gabriel was trying to figure out how to answer when James cut him short. The other boy gasped and spewed his food onto the fire. “Goddamn!” He rose to his feet and danced back a few steps, as if he’d felt the heat primarily in the seat of his pants and the soles of his feet. “I near burned my mouth. That’s hotter’n Satan’s piss in a frying pan!”
This put Rollins into hysterics. He laughed and joked and imitated James and Gabriel with his dull features, using gestures that annoyed Gabriel with their inaccuracy. None of the other men seemed equally amused. “I’ll grant you the boy’s got a way with words,” Marshall said, “but sit yourself, Rollins. Sometimes you act like a damn five-year-old.”
Gabriel ate on very carefully after that, staring down at the soup mistrustfully. He blew on it till all semblance of heat was long gone, then tried to slip the food past his tender mouth and straight down into him. No sign or flavor of those herbs could be found, and Gabriel wondered if his enflamed tongue had lost the power to taste. He said nothing, but he couldn’t help giving Rollins an occasional angry look.
The men drank coffee and talked and watched the air ripple up from the fire and rise into the milky sky. Jack remembered the hospitality he’d enjoyed in a certain young woman’s arms back in Crownsville. He spoke fondly of her, bucktoothed and ignorant though she was. Marshall asked what qualified Jack to call somebody ignorant. Jack answered that the girl was fresh out from Rhode Island, still spoke with that country’s nasal tones, and had herself a whole set of ideas on the future of this nation and the role of women in it. Rollins said that he’d no use for buckteeth himself but that a big rump did it for him, that or a schoolgirl just budding or a little Mexican chica he could horse-mount and beat up a bit. Jack shook his head and tossed his coffee on the fire and said Rollins was a sick son of a bitch right enough.
Dunlop turned the conversation to other matters. He spoke of the natives and wondered if they’d have troubles passing through the Indian territory. This brought nervous looks from both Gabriel and James. James asked just where was it they were heading, anyway? Laughter all around.
“What kind of fool signed up for a hitch without asking where he was going first?” Rollins asked.
James tried to answer, but his words dribbled away unintelligibly. This brought more laughter.
Dunlop finally enlightened them. “Texas. The New Cornwall Ranch, just the other side of the Red River. We’ll be there in three weeks or so. Assuming no troubles.” He smiled at the two boys, a crooked smile with a touch of irony in it. “Is that . . . is that what you thought you were getting into?”
James and Gabriel exchanged glances, each looking to the other as if unsure of what he’d expected. It was James who answered. “Yeah, I reckon. We been meaning to get into the cowboy line.”
&
nbsp; “Well, boys, cheer up, then,” Marshall said. “You’ll be in it soon enough, soon enough.” He glanced around at the other men. “In it up to your ears, I reckon.”
IN THE FIRST WEEK FOLLOWING THE BOY’S DISAPPEARANCE, his family scoured the countryside for him. The boy’s stepfather and adopted uncle rode out each day in different directions, leaving the chores of home to the mother and the remaining son. They searched the streets of Crownsville and learned quickly that another boy had disappeared also and had inspired great wrath in his former employer. They asked questions of passersby, of persons both white and black, young and old. Yet they found no answers and had to report as much each evening to the boy’s mother, who took the news silently.
They widened the search, riding east through Solomon and Junction City and as far as Topeka, and west through Brookville and Ellsworth. The uncle stayed out the longest, returning home via sweeping arcs to Waterville in the north, or south as far as Newton, asking his questions of homesteaders and shopkeepers, cowboys and sheepherders, sometimes passing the night with strangers, once sleeping alone on the open prairie. He knew the boy lived somewhere on this globe and thought that through silence and solitude he could divine where. He listened and searched his past conversations with the boy for signs and hints, but still he returned with no news.
At home, the younger son struggled to recreate himself in his brother’s absence. He bowed his head and watched the men ride off and then went to work. He tried each day to do more and be better than the day before. If he resented his brother’s departure and the work it cast on him, he never voiced it. He tended the fields as best he could on his own, mending the things that broke and caring for the horse and mule in the evenings. At night, his body ached and stretched and contorted. He awoke in the mornings as if he’d slept a month instead of a night and had grown accordingly. And through it all he sought to comfort his mother. He told her that his brother would return. Of course he would. He was a hothead. He was anxious and angry and a dang fool sometimes, but he would return. He’s just got to see things for himself for a little. You know how he is.
When the boy spoke like this, the woman would pull him in with a one-armed embrace, hugging him to her bosom as if she would place his words that much closer to her heart. She told him she believed the same and hoped the same, but she didn’t say the things that troubled her on the inside—the fear, in its overwhelming girth, of the forces at play in the world. It was a world unfit for warriors and kings, a world that toppled nations and enslaved whole races of people, a world one could get lost in and perish in without so much as a passing glance from God. She hoped and prayed for the boy’s return, but she feared that the world was too big a thing for this son, too unkind to the young and the old alike, too indifferent to the follies of youth and the bonds of love.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS THEY MOVED SOUTHWEST. The land grew flatter and more arid, the farmers poorer and more desperate. Their homes were often little more than dugouts in rises of earth, covered over with what wood or sod or bracken they had scoured from the plains. Dry dirt caked their features like artificial suntans. And yet their faces said that they were still proud and free and American, and they were most often white. Better off than most, in their estimation.
How they could scratch a living out of ground meant only for the hardiest of grasses was a mystery, on a plain that was windswept and dry and lonelier still because of the sight of homesteads separated by miles of nothing but distance. Had they not heard of the plague of locusts that descend from the skies and ravish the land? Had they not heard of the fires of late summer, which appear and disappear with the whims of the wind and lightning and take with them homes and cattle and lives? Where were the hopes and dreams in a place like this?
But in the passing caravan nobody posed questions such as these. They nodded their heads when greeted and touched their hats, and none made conversation. Apart from these greetings, there was little interaction with the farmers. On some whim that seemed as inexplicable as it was beneficent, Marshall did make a gift of one horse each to three homesteads that caught his attention in some way. The homesteaders could make no sense of such an offer and seemed scarcely willing to accept, but Marshall insisted and rode on, leaving the farmers with halters in hands, protests or good wishes on their lips.
As one such homestead passed into the distance, James nudged Gabriel with an elbow. He whispered a complaint against Marshall, who could’ve just as easily given each of them a horse. But James didn’t seem to take the suggestion very seriously. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be one of them farmers, though,” he said. “Them people look poor as dirt—poorer than dirt, cause the dirt ain’t got no debt to worry on. Your folks could end up the same way, and it wouldn’t be nobody’s fault neither, cept God’s. Don’t that make you think we done right?”
It took Gabriel a few moments to answer. He’d looked at the homesteaders with neither kinship nor compassion. His eyes touched little on their faces, and when they did they passed on quickly. It seemed those people were to him sad reminders of things escaped and things to keep moving from. And it seemed also that there was some shame in this. He preferred the sight of his own boots taking bites out of the earth and moving onward toward something he placed faith in still, even though he couldn’t clearly define the origins of this faith.
“Yeah, we done right. Farming ain’t no way to live,” he finally replied.
AT SOME POINT THEY CROSSED INTO THE INDIAN TERRITORY of Oklahoma. Day-long, the view was uniform in its abandoned solemnity. The land stretched out pale and unpeopled, with tufts of grass erupting from the ground like blemishes on the back of some scurvied reprobate. James said this must be the desert, but Jack laughed at this and said maybe one day he’d see real desert and there’d be no mistaking it then. Marshall cautioned all to beware and watch out for Indians, who might protest their passage, ask for payment, or steal what they could. He rode with his rifle ready, sometimes loose across his saddle and other times standing at attention, aimed at the innocent sky. The day passed tense and dry, without a single sighting of another human being, native or otherwise.
It was a somberer evening than most, the desolation of the place having affected the men with melancholia. As Bill tended to the oxen, he sang a song, low and smooth, in a voice that flowed like liquid and seeped out over the land as if to comfort its bare spaces. Gabriel caught hardly a word of the song, but its meaning was more in the sound than in the words, and perhaps it was this that spurred him to pose a question to Dunlop, who sat next to him at the fire.
“Where’d you say you were from—Aberdonia?”
Dunlop laughed. “You’ve almost got it. Aberdeen’s the place, back in Scotland.”
“Oh.” Gabriel nodded at this as if recollecting the place himself, but then asked, “What’s it like over there?”
“Wet and green.” Dunlop let this answer lie for a few moments, a complete portrait of the place drawn in two adjectives, but then he mused further, in language both proud and forlorn. He called Scotland an old country and said that in such places the ghosts of the past intermingle with the living. He said it had a beauty that couldn’t be described but must be beheld to be truly grasped. He spoke of it as a sad place as well, where inequity had been woven into the fabric so long ago that it seemed the country had crept that way out of the mists of creation and could never change without being destroyed. His father’s family had worked the land of Ballater for generations but still couldn’t own it outright, as there was a laird, whose ownership took precedence over the rights of common folk. This laird, he said, valued deer hunting more than the lives of his wards. He cleared the land of people so that he and his kind could pursue their sport. It was because of this that Dunlop’s family had had to move to the city, where they died fast and furiously from consumption and from the great alcoholic thirst and from sorrows that ate away their spirit. He said it was a place he missed every day.
“Why’d you come over this way?”
“Why?” Dunlop wrinkled his brow. He took a long sip of coffee. “To shoot a grizzly.”
“What?”
“To shoot a grizzly.” He let this answer sit and watched Gabriel think it over and slowly find acceptance of it. But then, as was his way, he added that he also crossed the ocean to make a life for himself after his family had passed on, one and all, leaving him in a position to choose the trajectory in which his life was to proceed. “How about yourself? You left some family back in Kansas, didn’t you?”
Gabriel nodded. He offered no more explanation. He fixed his eyes on a gnarled piece of wood, the rooty workings of some stubborn tree. The flames ate it slowly, afraid of venturing far from their center but impelled outward by the hunger to consume.
Dunlop studied his face in the firelight. He saw the blankness of a troubled heart, not the organ but that other thing with the same name, so necessary to our lives and yet so fickle in its function. Dunlop saw this and proceeded carefully. “Did you fall out with them, then?”
“Maybe you could say that. I had a different mind on some things.”
“Different minds are hard to bring together, family or no. Sometimes it’s best to find your own mind and follow it.” He laughed. “Sometimes—not always.”
Gabriel's Story Page 8
