Delivering Virtue

by Brian Kindall

  I smiled weakly, and held my hand over my belly. “I am quite sated,” I said. “I do not have capacity for another bite.”

  But she only took hold of my hand, turned it upright, and spilled the berries into my palm. She took a single berry from the little mound and held it before me between her thumb and forefinger. “Ouvrez votre bouche!” she commanded.

  I opened my mouth.

  She placed the berry onto my tongue, and then, taking the top of my head in one hand, and my chin in the other, she closed my mouth for me. “Mangez!”

  How could I refuse?

  The berry rather exploded throughout my mouth cavity, filling it up with a tart and tasteful sensation that was not unpleasurable.

  Turtle Dove smiled. “C’est bon?”

  I nodded. “Oui. Very good.”

  I ate the rest of the berries, one by one, as she watched. I fully expected to die any minute, but ultimately did not.

  Turtle Dove then went over and shared some berries with Virtue. They laughed quietly and talked, and then the woman let down her tunic and gave the girl her evening ration of milk.

  “Berries with cream,” I mumbled, and licked my lips.

  I watched them nursing for a while over the dancing flames of our small buffalo chip campfire. But then Turtle Dove’s eyes met mine, unblinking and staring impassively, and I found myself compelled to drop my gaze.

  I rose, stretched insouciantly, and went to check on the horses.

  Sabrina and Genevieve were kept on one side of the camp, while Puck and Brownie were kept on the other.

  “Bonsoir, mes demoiselles,” I said, and passed my hand over their withers. “Is there anything I can do for you ladies? Something to make your night more restful?”

  But they only smiled kindly, humoring me.

  I went over to my horses.

  “Hello, boys.”

  Both Puck and Brownie stood side by side, trail weary, with their heads held down low. By now it had become apparent that the mares considered them no more than younger brothers – snot-nosed and still in their knickers. This solicited from my lads a hangdog demeanor that was uncharacteristic of their usual bon vivance.

  “Cheer up, fellows,” I said. “They are not as pretty as all that.”

  But of course that was untrue, and my attempts at commiseration only made things worse.

  I brushed them out with a currycomb, and then left them to their sorrow.

  I wandered the margin of the camp, just beyond the halo light of the fire. It was like watching into a lighted house from a darkened street. Voyeuristic to be honest, as I was somewhat spying on the Indian woman from the cover of darkness.

  Most men would call such a lady a squaw, but most men are beasts. I knew too much about the underpinnings of words to use such derogatory nomenclature on such a fine specimen as Turtle Dove. “She deserves better,” I whispered to myself.

  A coyote yapped somewhere over the hills. And then another. And then dozens, or so it seemed. It was always hard to tell with them.

  I thought about the word – Coyote. “Coy dog,” I voiced. “Shy. Elusive. Full of secrets.”

  The stars sparkled up above. I tipped back and gazed into them, feeling like I was falling and falling into their depths. A joyful melancholy flooded my soul right then. One of those moments that is so hard to elucidate. How can unhappiness make a person so damn happy? How can tragedy become such a welcome comedy? How can etcetera and etcetera marry to become so etcetera? I looked for my own blue star. But to no avail. It was lost like some part of my self in the ever-widening expanses.

  “Turtle Dove,” I said quietly. Her name was lovely to contemplate. An amalgam of a primitive water creature with an elegant and ethereal creature of the sky. “The deep life mystery stuff of poems.”

  “Maybe I could write such a poem,” I told myself. The solace of poetry. “Perhaps I will try.”

  *****

  The pen felt unfamiliar to my fingers.

  The ink smelled like the exotic perfume of some long lost lover. My hands were fairly shaking as I held the little booklet of paper against my knees, and I had to grin at myself for my schoolboy anxiety. “One would think you were about to do battle with a dragon,” I mumbled to myself.

  Virtue and Turtle Dove both looked at me over the fire and I felt myself redden with discomfiture.

  “Never mind,” I said, and smiled a bit too broadly. “Rien. I was merely talking to myself.”

  They went back to their ladylike occupations.

  I dipped the nib into the bottle of ink and then held it over the paper, poised and ready to compose a thing of utter beauty.

  But then I froze stiff. I could not so much as make myself press the pen to the parchment. I could not find a symbol for the words and feelings that were dammed up in the deepest and most haunted pools of my turbid brain.

  How on earth, I wondered, could anything once so simple and pleasurable have become so terrifying?

  A tiny bubble of ink dripped from the pen to the paper, and I swear that it made a noise louder than that of a painful, bloodcurdling scream. I winced.

  I swallowed hard, and then gazed over the flames at Virtue and Turtle Dove. How mind-bogglingly beautiful they were! Like a painting by George de la Tour. Their delicate features. In this starry night. With the coyotes playing a wild American symphony as background to it all! And I found myself overwhelmed by the magnitude of the colossal ruins of my life.

  Oh, Rain, I internally moaned. Oh, Rain.

  I was on the edge of despair, I will confess. I was on the verge of tossing my tools of poesy into that buffalo shit fire. For what was the use?

  But then the girls came over and sat, one on each side, next to me. Turtle Dove was making busy cleaning the dirt from some roots she had gathered. She had a little heap of them before her, and a wooden bowl. She sat so close I could feel her warmth. I could smell her woman scent – a heady mix of milk and soft cinnamon skin.

  Virtue held out a hairbrush made of porcupine quills. She smiled at me. She was so pretty there in the firelight. “Rain,” she said. “Will you brush my hair?”

  And so I did.

  Gently, tenuously, working out the tangles of her fair yellow hair as if they were the knots binding my own heart.

  It was quite a domestic scene.

  One in which I never in my dreams imagined I could be a part.

  We were like a happy little family.

  THE SKY HAD FORGOTTEN how to rain.

  Or so it seemed.

  Nary a drop had fallen on our journey thus far.

  The grass had grown dry and brittle. The dirt beneath our hooves had turned to powder. It all felt wrongful. Truly, it seemed as if some malign weather spirit was mad at us, or was at least enjoying the tawdry spectacle of our dry-throated suffering. Waterholes and streams were few and random, and we often found them all dried up – just cracked mud and fossilized bird tracks.

  So it was with a giddy expectancy that one late afternoon I sighted a building of clouds on the western horizon. They scudded and clumped and rolled our direction, growing dark and heavy with promise.

  “Il pleut! Il pleut! Mais je suis heureux,” I crooned. Although, in truth, it had not yet begun to so much as spit.

  The evening swooped in fast, and with the clouds filling the heavens, a gothic velvet glow suffused the prairie. Was this our old familiar Earth? It appeared more whimsical and strange. The air was stagnant, the whole world seemingly held its breath.

  As a child my mother had given me, as un cadeau du Noël, a miniature diorama. I would play with it for long hours, lost in my imagination. I manipulated a pair of marionettes – one of a knight, the other of a fair maiden – so that they acted out scenarios of heroism and chivalry in that fanciful make-believe world. Now, in this gloaming, I was overcome with a nostalgic sensation, bringing back to my mind my childhood toy. Only this time I felt myself to be the figurine. I peered up into that roiling purpled glow, but detected no puppet master w
orking my strings. Still, the sensation remained.

  Turtle Dove trotted abreast of me. Virtue had learned to ride in tandem behind her, and the girl sat on Genevieve’s haunch with her arms wrapped around the Indian woman’s waist. She smiled over at me, augmenting my growing happiness.

  We rode side by side for a ways, myself in a state of naïve joy.

  Then Turtle Dove spoke.

  “Le ciel est sec,” she said. The sky is dry.

  “No, no,” I laughed. “It is fixing to rain. We had best to make camp, get under cover, and be ready for the downpour.”

  “Non!” She pointed at the darkling sky, a suggestion of anxiety in her gesture. “No rain.”

  We pulled up and assessed the situation. The clouds throbbed with electricality; the grumble of thunder swept toward us over the grassy swells – all indications of an impending tempest. Still, I had to concede, she was correct. There was no hint of water on the air, none of that usual wet smell of rain that precedes a shower. Just a sullenness mixed in with the stink of burnt ozone.

  “Should we make camp?” I asked. “And hunker down?”

  “Non.” She shook her head. “Attendez!”

  “Wait for what?”

  Turtle Dove turned her hand with her fingers pointed upward, wiggling them in the air between us.

  I laughed. “What is that supposed to mean? Worms are going to fall from the clouds?”

  She did not see the humor. A foreboding flash of lightning blinded me right then, followed directly by an earsplitting knell of thunder.

  Once my blindness subsided, and I could find focus on the scene before me, Turtle Dove pointed toward the swiftly approaching storm. She turned her horse so she was squarely in front of me, and then, peering straight into my dilated eyes, she said, without hint of irony or accent – “Fire!”

  *****

  At once, darkness consumed the world, punctuated heavily with flashes of bright blue light. A man’s eyes could not adjust quickly enough to the back and forth interplay of gloom and brilliance.

  The skeleton shapes of girls and horses burned like ghosts onto my eyeballs.

  The dead air came to life with wind.

  “Stay close!” I shouted. It would be easy for us all to be blown asunder. “Stay together!”

  The horses had worked up into a frenzy, rearing and prancing. They nickered in trepidation, and I heard the dull thud of one animal’s body colliding with another in the intermittent darkness. I feared someone might fall and get trampled.

  “Stay still!” I shouted. “Do not move about!” But the thunder swallowed my words.

  It was a most nerve-wracking circumstance. One instant you were alone in the darkness; and then in the next you were being pummeled with electrical light. The hairs stood out all over my body, the air crackled and sparkled, and I truly expected to be fried by lightning at any moment.

  Soon, just as Turtle Dove had foretold, at a point where a lightning bolt had stabbed into the earth, a single flame began to dance in the distance. It appeared like the alluring radiance of a flower – albeit, in the garden of a demon. Another flame then came to bloom in another direction. And then another, and another – some close, some far away – all around us on that dry grass prairie. The wind whipped the flames up bigger and bigger. In no time, there was enough light to see the details of the panorama. Although indeed, there was nothing to see in any direction that did not cause the heart to pound with a doomful dread.

  “Allons!” cried Turtle Dove.

  She dug her heels into Genevieve’s ribs and galloped off with Virtue into the fiery maelstrom. The rest of us followed without question. Puck. Sabrina. And finally, me and Brownie. The woman was leading us through the encroaching inferno toward a corridor of darkness – a passageway as of yet not engulfed by fire.

  The flames joined on one side and became tall and orange-red, sweeping toward us in a hot wave driven by the wind. Smoke blew thickly over the plain, causing eyes to sting and throats to burn.

  We sped toward safety, endeavoring to outrun the closing blaze.

  The thunder boomed and boomed, and then, curiously, it grew into a constant rumble that built to a crescendo with the pounding of our hooves. A dark mass poured out of the surrounding flames and hinter reaches.

  Wild eyes flashed on every side.

  “Awhooo!” I cried. For I was overwhelmed with a sudden terror. It looked as if we were running with the very fiends of hell.

  But they were not devils – only bison.

  Thousands of them, just as scared as ourselves, and just as desperate to outrun the devouring flames. They swarmed in a stampede and swept us up into their pell-mell tumult. I was stunned, right there in the midst of it all, to be taken by the overriding bovine odor – the repugnant reek of animals in a panic. The stench mixed with the smoke, creating a pernicious aroma that gagged me, even as I drove blindly onward with the herd.

  I could see my comrades ahead, drifting farther away. Virtue’s blond hair. Sabrina’s and Genevieve’s pale rumps bouncing among the collective corpus of brown-black beasts. But there was nothing I could do to bring them back. It was as if we were in a violent stream, and were at the absolute mercy of the current.

  The buffalo closed around me and Brownie. Their black horns sawed at the air along the horse’s sides, threatening to disembowel him with any wrong move, or misplaced step. He gallantly managed the helter-skelter.

  It became apparent to me that Brownie was struggling to inch himself toward the edge of the herd, easing sideways through the bounding bodies, pressing toward the outside so that we would not be in such danger of being crushed.

  “Good boy!” I cried.

  The corridor was narrowing, the flames closing in, causing the bison to funnel through an ever-constricting gap. One could feel the heat of fire on all sides. We were nearly at the outer edge of the mob when a bison’s horn painfully grazed my shinbone.

  “Ahhh!” I cried, and drew my legs up high out of the stirrups. But alas! This proved unwise, as it put me off balance in the saddle.

  I fell.

  Whump!

  One somersault – bang! And then another.

  My wind was knocked out, and I was sorely dazed. But I retained enough of my sense to get up quick. I leapt to my feet and spun around.

  Wham!

  A bison lowered his shoulder into my chest.

  I rolled backward, tossed something like a rag doll. Legs and hooves flashed on all sides of me. Flames. The stench. Even in the midst of it, I saw my mother’s face.

  “Now my powers are all o’erthrown,” I sighed, and held up my palms.

  But no. Brownie had stood by, my noble steed. He positioned himself between my battered person and the beastly onslaught. Rearing up. Making such a ruckus and racket that the animals shied away, parting around him. I struggled to stand. The tail end of the herd rolled by and then, of a sudden, Brownie and I were alone.

  The thunder subsided, replaced now with the roar and crackle of hell.

  Brownie stood heaving as I climbed onto his back.

  We were completely surrounded by the conflagration.

  Great licking tongues of flame; sparks spitting up into the clouds and stars.

  Brownie paused for only one second, gathering, and then he raced off at a gallop. Faster and faster, directly toward the blaze. The heat closed around us like a clenching fist. Closer and closer. Brownie’s hooves driving over the well-churned sod.

  “Go! Go!” I shouted. “Take us through!”

  At last Brownie leaped – high, high as a winged myth – through that looming wall of flame.

  I DO NOT CLEARLY recall what happened next.

  I must have pitched off my horse and tumbled onto the ground.

  I have a nebulous recollection of imps laughing and dancing in the brimstone. They prodded me with tridents, and taunted me with the rudest of words. But I suppose that may well have been no more than a dazed hallucination brought on by a blow to my head. At any ra
te, I soon became cataleptic.

  Everything went fuzzy, then black.

  *****

  When I came to, the first thing I noticed was that my body had been replaced with pain. Every square iota of me hurt. Even my fingernails.

  “Oooh!” I groaned.

  My cheek felt to be on fire, but I could not yet lift my head. Opening my eyes was task enough to begin with.

  The earth was cocked sideways, and scorched, and still smoldering before my face. I saw it stretching out from where I lay. I vaguely deduced that it was dawn. For a pale gray light suffused the seared landscape. It streamed in apocalyptic fashion through the drifting smoke, but it was not unlovely. There was something almost peaceful about it.

  The wing-shadow of a bird flitted past.

  I swallowed at the cinder in my throat.

  I coughed.

  And then Brownie stepped into view before me.

  He dropped his nose close to mine, his nostrils blowing hot breath over my face. He nibbled at my ear with his rubbery lips, tickling me back to life.

  I crawled into a seated position. The ground was covered with the feathery ash of burnt grass. It puffed up and disintegrated wherever it was disturbed. A mound of something indiscernible smoldered a few feet away to my right. I squinted at it, wondering if it was perhaps a human brain – maybe my own – but then decided it was only buffalo manure, and not something to be concerned with.

  I looked at the back of my hands and arms. They were covered in ashes, and the hair seemed to be singed clean of the skin. I then reached up and ran my fingers through the hair on my head.

  “Ah!” I chimed. What a disconcerting surprise!

  My hair crumbled and came off in crispy clumps in my fingers, burnt and singed and stinking. I rubbed my head carefully, until, near as I could tell, I was bald. All the hairs had been toasted from off my topknot.

  “How do I look?”

  Brownie whinnied reassuringly, but I could hear in his voice that he was only being kind. He looked sound enough himself, a few small cuts, and a bit seared along the flanks. But otherwise no avulsed eyeballs, disgorged entrails, or other injuries glaringly displayed.