Gabriel's Story

by David Anthony Durham

  THAT EVENING THEY SAT AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE as Gabriel told his tale. He began with halting phrases and apologetic glances. The others prompted him cautiously. Eliza sat next to him, rubbing his hand and affirming his words with faint murmurs of understanding. Solomon made a pot of coffee. He fumbled with the small cups in his large hands. Hiram sat silent and attentive, an expression of troubled joy written on his face. And Ben stood near at hand, with undisguised awe in his large eyes.

  Gabriel stumbled forward as if it were not only the tale but the words themselves that he needed to recall from the past. He told of the ride south in the wagon, of the men he rode with and the homesteads they passed. He told of the chain of events that broke the group up, of the long walk he and James made together, of the things that came to pass at McKutcheon’s, of being twice shot at. He told of the wonder of the land across which he’d traveled, losing himself in the unpeopled landscape of his mind, creating a panorama of desolate expanses and flesh-covered mountains and temples carved in stone. He told of the gold. He let it be known that he had seen things he wished he never had and that people had been wronged greatly, some even to death, but he did not give details.

  It was difficult, but manageable, to tell of those things. It was another thing altogether to find the right words to form the images that haunted him still. Ugly Mary and Rickles staring out at the rising sun, a deer impaled upon a living tree, smoke hanging in the air above Santa Fe, the sight of a homestead and a river glistening in the morning sun: of these things he didn’t speak. Of friendships made and lost; of James and how he was betrayed; of Dunlop, whom he’d last seen bound and tied in the light of campfire; and of the girl, so abused, robbed of blood and history and kin: of these he did not speak, only bowed his head and prayed for the images to pass in silence.

  Eliza watched him, both as he spoke and through his silences, and she never took her hand from his. By the time he finished, more than one pot of coffee had been consumed. He had told his tale incompletely, with great chunks left yawning with questions, but Gabriel felt more exhausted than ever before. It seemed the toil of all those days in fear had been relived in one evening, and he sat with his head heavy between his shoulders. The night had grown thick about them, and each member of the family was alive with questions. Most of these they held to themselves, either to keep safely unspoken or to ask at some later, gentler time. But some questions were too urgent to wait.

  Ben swallowed before he spoke, a sound loud enough to warn the room of his intention. “Gabe? What’s happened to James?”

  Gabriel seemed pained by the question. He closed his eyes and his lips and then inhaled through his nose and exhaled his words. “I don’t know. I couldn’t bring him with me.” He opened his eyes. His gaze met his mother’s, and something in the contact brought forth a flow of words, one fast upon another. He repeated that he hadn’t been able to bring him. He had tried and he had wanted to, but James wouldn’t have made it. He was in the water already. He was floating away, and Gabriel had only a second to make his choice. As quickly as his words came out, he lost composure. His lips worked and his forehead wrinkled into jagged lines and tears burst from his eyes. His words were twirling away, snapshots of thoughts and images that none in the room could follow.

  Eliza pulled the boy close to her once more and held his head under her chin. She told him to let it go. “These things are past. Don’t hold them too tight.” With her eyes she cautioned Ben to question his brother no further. “You just let them go and pray for the souls of the departed,” she said.

  She held Gabriel until he pulled back and wiped the moisture from his face. He seemed to want to speak more, but he didn’t. They sat in solemn thought for some time. Attempts at conversation went nowhere, and it wasn’t until Eliza suggested bed for them all that Gabriel again found he had something that needed saying. He got up from the table and stepped outside and returned with a saddlebag. He unbuckled the bag and set it on the table.

  “I’ve got more I should tell you,” he said. “I will, but . . . I can’t say it all just yet. But you should maybe look at this.”

  The others sat a moment looking at it, as if the worn leather somehow spoke volumes all by itself. Eventually Solomon reached out and emptied the contents onto the table. The gold bar made a strangely muted sound against the wood. It was less than spectacular in appearance, but still it took the collective breath out of the room.

  Solomon gripped his jaw in his hands and massaged the tension there. This done, he whistled. “You rode off on the man’s horse . . .”

  Gabriel dropped his eyes to a dark space on the floor. “I didn’t mean to. It was crazy that night. The horse just came to me.”

  “A blessing and a curse both,” Hiram said. He seemed to have trouble controlling the lump in his throat. “I’ll be damned.”

  Ben stepped closer, the tip of his tongue protruding through his teeth as if he might touch it to the metal. “Man alive. That’s gold? It don’t even look that nice.” He reached a tentative hand toward the bar.

  Eliza stopped him, saying, “You leave that where it lies, Ben.” Her gaze flicked up to Solomon, who seemed to have one eye on her and one on the gold at the same time. She again placed her hand on her son’s and squeezed it. “Let’s not forget what’s happened today. We done got Gabriel back. He’s walked along the valley of death, but he’s come home.”

  She allowed no more conversation. She said it was time for them all to sleep, and she carefully put the gold back into the saddlebag. They left it there on the table and went off to their troubled sleep, each trying to work out through dreams the questions that the morrow would bring.

  GABRIEL WAS AWAKE BEFORE SUNRISE. He lay listening to the room around him. It seemed that the sounds of his sleeping kin were the most comforting noises in the world. He tried to remember a time when this had not been so, but it seemed impossible. How could he ever have wanted to be anyplace else? What’s better than waking to the touch of your brother at your elbow? Or the sound of your stepfather’s snoring? Or the rustle of the linen when your mother rolls over in her sleep? All of the closeness that had once seemed suffocating and wrong now seemed life-giving and so fundamentally right as to be unquestionable.

  He heard Solomon rise before any of the others. He listened as the man dressed, following each motion betrayed by sound, from pulling on his thick overalls to sliding his feet into his boots and doing up the laces. The leather creaked as the boots grew tight, and Gabriel almost thought he could hear the protests of the man’s gnarled fingers. Just after Solomon had slipped quietly through the door, Gabriel rose, dressed, and followed him out.

  Although the western horizon lay gray and slatelike, the east was already growing light. The very rim of the eastern sky was tinted a tranquil turquoise. A lone bird called its greeting to the morning from the roof of the house, then darted for cover when Gabriel turned toward it. He couldn’t see Solomon, and it took him a minute of listening to the prairie silence to locate the man. He found him hefting the slop bucket up onto the fence of the sow’s enclosure.

  Solomon paused when he saw the boy and said, “Morning.” Gabriel nodded his greeting and indicated that he would like to help. Solomon made it clear that he didn’t have to. Actually, he said, it was normally Ben’s job to feed the animals. He had just figured they could all use some rest, what with staying up late the previous night. Gabriel wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a backhanded bite to these words, as if Solomon would offer his generosity while reminding the boy of the disruption he had caused. His face betrayed no such double meaning, but the boy heard it all the same. Gabriel took the bucket from him and climbed into the pigpen.

  They worked slowly, the two of them. After tending the sow, Solomon led Gabriel around to the newly constructed chicken coop. It was a thing hardly resembling a manmade structure, a motley conglomeration of posts and sticks and curving loops of wire that held the chickens only as long as they consented. Solomon looked at the structu
re sadly but cautioned Gabriel against disparaging it. “Ben built it hisself, and he right proud of it,” he said. He tried a smile, but Gabriel nodded and considered the coop without a hint of humor. They let the nervous birds loose and tossed out feed to them.

  As Gabriel showed no inclination to speak, Solomon filled the silence with his own halting string of words. He told of the work of the summer, what crops they had planted, where and why, which things grew well and which didn’t grow at all. There had been a scare in late July with the appearance of cinchbugs in some of the corn, and later, in early August, they’d watched the crops bake under a cloudless sky. But the Lord protects, as Hiram said. Nothing truly came of the insects, and rain did fall in time to save most of the crops. While those to the west were ravaged by fires, some to the south by drought, and many pockets all around the plains by locusts, they had fared well. “I been telling them we need to harvest what we got fore we lose it,” Solomon said, “but Hiram and your mother are the most patientest types you’d come across. Almost seems like they were waiting for you to show up. Myself, I told them they best not wait.” The man bent to examine a piece of wire that stuck out in a ragged loop from the chicken coop. He studied it intently. “I don’t mean to sound coarse, Gabriel. I’m happy to have you home, and I thank God you’re safe. But I do wonder . . . I wonder how long you’re staying for, whether you come to work or whether you just passing through.”

  The boy’s eyes tried to hold on to the man’s face, but as Solomon spoke, they grew wearier and wearier, until they eventually floated away and settled on the dry earth. There was a cringing tension in Gabriel’s face that both accepted and sought to deny the man’s questions. He felt a whole host of words tumbling around within him. He wanted to let them out. He wanted to shout and make it clear how much he wanted to stay, how he’d learned from this journey and come back different and would prove it with time. He wanted them all to understand him completely, to read him like a slate before them so they could know the things he’d been through while permitting him never to say them out loud. But each claim seemed anchored to a refuting fact, denied by his own words, damned forever by actions taken and untaken, choked to silence by them all.

  Solomon straightened and watched him for a few moments, giving him time to speak. But when the hush went unbroken, he sucked his lips and patted the boy on the shoulder. “Come on, let’s get us some breakfast. Figure your mother will make her best for you.”

  IT WASN’T UNTIL THAT EVENING that Gabriel found himself alone with his mother for more than a few minutes. He sat across the table from her, both of them shucking corn. The green richness of the husks was thick in the room, temporarily covering the damp smell that had so disturbed Gabriel in the early days out here. He wrapped his fingers around the cornhusks, pulling them away with a satisfying ripping sound. He ran his fingers down the firm white kernels, finding a pleasure just in the touch of them, in their neat near-uniformity, in the way they fit so tightly together. He tried to think about them only, to feel the pleasure of this work, the close comfort of the soddy, and the nearness of his mother. But from one moment to the next, his mind would wander. He would find himself staring blankly at a space on the wall. He was not sure how long these lapses lasted, and he was not sure just what images were tugging at his mind’s eye. But one came up time and again.

  “Sometimes it helps to talk, Gabriel.” The boy was suddenly aware that his mother had been staring at him for some time. “I see you got a confusion in you. Sometimes it helps just to say it out loud. I don’t know what it is, son, but spit it out to the world. Having a tortured rememoration ain’t no different from taking a bit of some spoiled fruit. You spit it out fore you swallow it. Cause if you swallow it down, it’ll be a long time fore it passes.”

  The boy looked as though he would disdain the comparison, but instead he said, “There was a girl.”

  Eliza waited, but the boy stared at his hands. “Yes? Tell me about her.”

  Gabriel shook his head. It didn’t seem possible. He turned from her as if he would rise from the table and move away. Somehow this motion helped him. The slight angle at which he’d turned away gave him strength, although it looked as though he were ready to flee. “There was a girl,” he repeated, and slowly, haltingly, this segment of his untold story emerged. He spoke of the family, describing their homestead with a certain pained detail: the fir trees shimmering in the breeze, the tiny creek, and the fields that lined it. As he began to speak of the father, he paused. He retraced something in his mind and met his mother’s eyes. He dropped them and moved on, skipping forward and leaving things unsaid but thereby conveying the substance of the events clearly enough. He had known all along what the men were doing. He had watched them beat down the father and mother, bind them, and defile their daughters. He had seen them lead the girl off each evening and heard the lewd words with which they bragged. And yet he’d done nothing.

  Lines of frustration furrowed his brow, crept down the bridge of his nose, and tightened around his eyes as he continued. “She fed us. When we was on the run and didn’t have any water . . . She had some canned tomatoes, and she would feed them to me and James. Even after all of that.” He looked at his mother as if she might understand this act and render some meaning back to him. She smiled sadly and simply waited. The boy finished his story, leaving the girl once more astride her horse in the desert.

  Eliza listened through it all, watching her son and sometimes closing her eyes. In the end she walked around the table and hugged him. She told him he was a good boy, a good man, and he shouldn’t take the guilt for other men’s crimes too much to his heart. She said that such things can rarely be explained, even using the lessons of the church, and that sometimes things must simply be lived with. “Men will do awful things without laws to bind them. Even with laws to bind them. They say that all men are good at heart until Satan gets within them. But I don’t know if I believe that. It’s awful hard for me to separate the sinner from the sin. So what do you do? You go on. You be the person that you are, but be stronger for the things you seen. Know that the Lord let you live for a reason, and don’t let him down.”

  She loosened her grip and studied her son from a different angle. “Us mothers, we always want to save our children from the awful things we seen, and we want to give them a future better than anything we seen. Looks like I ain’t more than half accomplished it on the first count. The things you seen are part of my life too. You hear? There are things that happen in a life that aren’t fit for a mother to tell a son. I got my own share of rememoration, and some of it awful bad. That’s as plain as I can make it.” She paused when the door opened. Ben peeked in, hesitated a moment, then smiled. Eliza motioned for him to enter, then said, “I haven’t saved you from seeing evil at work, but I’m still here with you. And I’ll be here as long as you need me. You gonna get to see them good things I never did. You gonna find this life is a good thing, a gift that just humbles you to think on. Maybe that girl knew the same thing.”

  Later that evening a number of things were decided. The gold and the pistols were to be buried deep in the earth on the far side of the cornfield. The family voted with one voice that they could see fit neither to spend nor to discard the bullion, so let it be buried and see if time couldn’t make something of it. They’d see if they couldn’t trade Marshall’s saddle at market next weekend, along with any saddlebags and accouterments that had adorned the mount. The rifle they’d keep in the soddy for security, and the dun horse would remain, for the time being, in the barn with Raleigh. This was the hardest decision. They knew the horse might bring unwelcome attention, but it was the horse that had brought Gabriel home to them, a beautiful creature with no guilt for her master’s crimes and with nobody in the world with more claim to her than the boy.

  GABRIEL WAS HOME, and there was work to be done. Before he knew it, he was adjusting once more to the patterns of farm life. He was up in the morning with Ben, tending the animals and walking from the
chill of the night into the first rays of sun. It was harvest time, and the corn needed to be cut by hand. The brothers took turns swinging the long knife that served as harvester. It blistered his hands, as did the rough stalks that they piled into bundles to dry, but he welcomed these blisters. They were so different in their feel and function from the worn patches of skin he’d developed from holding the reins.

  After supper, Hiram still read from the Bible. To Gabriel, listening now with an attention he had never given before, the stories were vividly evocative of his life-and-death struggles. He understood the words now in a way he never had before. Yes, the hand of God was in it all, but he acted only through the deeds of humans. The boy couldn’t help wondering if that hand directed or followed. Was it there to guide, or was it there simply to witness with shame the beings God had created? And also he thought it strange that the crimes of man had never really changed. These were stories of murder and betrayal, of avarice and lust, and of lives lived with and without faith. Those Biblical times were not so different after all.

  One Saturday afternoon the two boys saddled the horses and rode along the creek together, Ben on the dun and Gabriel once more on calm old Raleigh. At first they talked of simple things: the weather and the coming of fall, horses and saddles and the colored church that had sprung up on the prairie north of Crownsville. It was a long way to go, and the congregation was little more than a handful of families, but there was something special to it all the same. Ben spoke of new friends he’d made there: a boy named Kip, his brother, Eustace, and a girl named Jessica, about whom Ben had more than a few words to say. It was only after this flow of conversation slowed and the horses drew to a halt and munched the grass beneath them that Ben asked his brother more about his travels.