Retribution Road

by Antonin Varenne

  Bowman stopped in the shade of a building to get his breath back. She waited for him. When he started walking again, she continued her story: “Almost all of us came from towns. Some of us were artisans, people full of good will, but who knew nothing about rural life. Richard Kramer was a chemical engineer. A brilliant man. Faced with our difficulties, he told us that we had to stop talking and act, that the town would die if we didn’t do something. He was looking for a way of enriching our soil, hoping that would solve our food problems. He was looking for a solution for everyone, but at the same time he rejected the system that we wanted to set up. That was his contradiction. More and more often, he would go to Dallas, to sell his services as an engineer and bring back some money for the community. Considerant’s company, which was also in debt, finally agreed to reimburse those who wanted to leave Reunion. Many people went back to Europe; a few remained in America to try their luck elsewhere. By the beginning of last winter, there were only about sixty citizens left. After Richard’s murder, half of them went away. Those who are still here are preparing to return to Europe. The land was bought in our own names; we live together, but each of us owns his own land.”

  They walked between empty houses; whenever they passed someone, Alexandra Desmond exchanged a smile and a greeting. The citizens of Reunion reminded Bowman of those plague colonies he had seen in Asia: monsters who fled the presence of healthy people, staring at them with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

  “Was there a preacher here?”

  “The community is open to all cults. There were several priests to begin with. The last one left after Richard’s death. He was an old Frenchman. He went back to France. After your fit, you talked about a pastor . . . Is that the man you are searching for?”

  “An Englishman. My age, more or less. Were there any British people here, at the time of the murder?”

  “No.”

  “A former soldier? A man about my height, blond like me?”

  “No, there was no-one who fits that description.”

  She took a few more steps and her face darkened.

  “Richard’s murderer was not an inhabitant of Reunion. We are on a busy road and Dallas is only two miles from the other bank of the Trinity. As I told you, Richard had been going there more and more often.”

  They arrived outside the large central building. She explained that it was their meeting place, where they organised communal activities, marriages and baptisms and parties, when there had been any. It was also where they provided teaching.

  “Anyone with knowledge of a particular field would share it with the children, and with adults too. This building is a temple, the centre of government, a school and a meeting place.”

  They were walking away from the town now, heading towards the dark line of the river. Bowman was feeling better. The air was refreshing and he threw his coat over his shoulder. They walked slowly, their footsteps raising little clouds of clay dust.

  “I’ve never taken a walk like this.”

  “Like this?”

  “In London, I walked all the time. But I did my patrols alone. I’ve never walked with a lady.”

  Alexandra Desmond gave a little smile, which quickly faded.

  “I haven’t been for a walk in a long time either. Not since Jerome’s death.”

  Bowman waited a few seconds before asking his question: “Why did you come here with him?”

  “Because we’d read too many books.”

  “You read books?”

  “Shouldn’t women read?”

  Bowman blushed and the words came tumbling out of his mouth: “I bought a book once for a woman. A book written by a woman.”

  She looked at him again.

  “I can’t imagine you with a book in your hands.”

  He hesitated.

  “Before, I only read the Bible. When I was a soldier. And then an old lady gave me another book, about America . . .”

  He stopped mid-sentence.

  “Go on. I like this story.”

  Bowman turned back towards the town, a few hundred yards behind them.

  “That book, it was a gift for one of the Englishmen I’m looking for. All my stories come back to that.”

  And by “that”, Bowman seemed to include the grey outlines of Reunion’s houses.

  “Mr Bowman, when you fell asleep, after your fit, I looked at your scars.”

  Bowman felt a hot flush wash over him. Mrs Desmond’s grey eyes were staring into his.

  “You said that you once thought they looked good. After a woman had washed you.”

  “I said that?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  She started walking again and Bowman followed her.

  “We came here to live the life we dreamed about.”

  Bowman lowered his head.

  “I’m not the sort of person who could live here. Not like your husband.”

  “I don’t think so either.”

  She came to a halt.

  “And yet you are here.”

  She looked at him strangely.

  “Would you take my arm and walk with me to the river?”

  Bowman, intimidated, lifted his arm, unsure whether he was going to accompany Mrs Desmond or whether she would support him.

  “You also said that we were just ghosts. Perhaps that is true. And when we have all left, you will inherit this town, Mr Bowman. But there was another image that you used, one that I preferred.”

  “An image?”

  “Butterflies of the night. Moths.”

  He didn’t remember. The woman’s hand lay lightly on his arm.

  “We think we know moths because they circle around lamps, but the truth is they live in darkness. When they are drawn to the light, they are no longer themselves and they go mad. Perhaps this community is one of those lights, a deceptive brightness, and the truth is in darkness, where we cannot see. Mr Bowman, you are a strange kind of lamp, a lamp that gives out shadows instead of light. I don’t like the night. But I like your image.”

  *

  It was dark when they got back to Reunion. Bowman sat in the chair with a blanket. Alexandra Desmond slept in the next room. He fought against sleep, listening to the creaking of the house as it cooled down, wondering if it wasn’t the sound of footsteps on the floorboards.

  The next morning, they ate in silence. When she had finished her breakfast, they began their conversation again as if the night had never interrupted it.

  “Actually, I don’t really believe that we read too many books. The problem was that we were surrounded by people who hadn’t read enough of them, people as uncultivated as this land. If we were naïve, it was in believing in the word of businessmen, more than in our ideas. If there was a place somewhere, where I could be a free woman, where I could read or write books, take part in political life, teach others what I know, speak when I want to and choose the men I want to live with, then I’d go there now.”

  As if there were an intimacy between them that Bowman knew nothing about, Alexandra Desmond gave him a look that embarrassed him.

  “I didn’t sleep much. I was wondering where you would go. For a moment, I thought about going to see you. To ask you to stay.”

  She stood up and smiled at him.

  “But that’s not possible. Your scars are not beautiful yet. You are still that soldier, that man with whores on every continent, and you wouldn’t be happy with a woman like me. Did you know that in certain Indian tribes in this country – those people you call ‘monkeys’, or ‘yellows’, or ‘redskins’ – when a woman no longer wants her husband, she puts his things outside the door of their house in the middle of the night? When the husband finds them the next morning, he picks them up and goes away to find another house and another wife.”

  Bowman looked for his bag and his coat. They were not in the room anymore.

  “I’ll drive you to Dallas. That’s where you should continue your search. You are not obliged to reply to me. Just because I’ve bee
n open with you, that doesn’t mean you have to be open with me, and anyway I think you’ve already said a great deal. If you can bear this silence, then accept it.”

  His mouth was dry.

  “Silence. That’s what I’d like.”

  Alexandra Desmond opened the door for him. His belongings were neatly stacked on the doorstep.

  Bowman went to say goodbye to Brewster. The old herbalist gave him another flask of that potion, advising him, if he could, to take a spoonful before a fit came – if he felt it coming – and to drink two spoonfuls afterwards if he wasn’t able to prevent it. The old man was in a bad way. He was falling to pieces just as his town was, and soon he would die along with it. Brewster did not even mention Bowman’s search for the killer, and watched him ride away on the carriage with the same expression he’d had when he was looking at the flames: that nostalgic, almost senile absent-mindedness.

  The carriage left Reunion and, half an hour later, Mrs Desmond stopped it on the outskirts of Dallas.

  “I won’t go any further. I hate this city. But you’re nearly there.”

  She shook his hand and did not let go.

  “You probably came for nothing, but your arrival brought back all my sadness, Mr Bowman, and with it the hope of escaping it. We should be glad about that.”

  Bowman understood nothing of what she was saying, but he didn’t want to let go of her hand. He got down from the carriage. Alexandra’s knees were at his eye level. He wanted to put his hand on her leg, but he hesitated, and, stupidly, his fingers touched the wood of the carriage instead, grazing against the fabric of her dress. She smiled, and snapped the reins, and the mare snorted.

  He walked past the sign for Dallas, a rapidly growing Texan city where it was forbidden to carry firearms and whose population, in this year of 1860, was 678 souls. He did not turn around to watch Alexandra drive back to Reunion.

  That evening, after asking around in Dallas’ stores, he descended from a trailer filled with timber at the entrance to the Paterson ranch. Barns and fences were being built around a new, two-storey house, about sixty feet long. The buildings were multiplying before his very eyes, as if the ranch were growing in perfect synchrony with the dilapidation of Reunion, on the other side of the river. The Paterson foreman was supervising the hoisting of a gable for the barn, moved by horses and men with pulleys. Once the structure had been put in place and made stable, Bowman approached the foreman.

  “I heard in town that you were hiring.”

  The foreman, who had to be as expert in construction as in the raising of livestock, looked him up and down.

  “You know what to do?”

  Bowman turned towards the building site and the land where cattle grazed.

  “I can learn. But if you need someone to give thirty blokes a kick up the arse, I already know how to do that.”

  “Oh, you want my job, do you? What’s with the hunting jacket?”

  “I didn’t have time to get changed. And I don’t want any problems. I don’t mind orders, as long as I’m paid right.”

  “You know the Patersons?”

  “They’re the bosses.”

  “And they didn’t get where they are today by letting a bunch of servants screw them over. Where else have you worked?”

  “Fifteen years in India. I was a sergeant.”

  “I’ll put you in charge of the team that supplies the ranch with materials. They can’t be bothered to turn up on time. Eight dollars for a six-day week, bed and food included. If everything goes well, you’ll get sixteen dollars a week after two weeks. There are eighty lads working on this ranch. Out of all of them, there are bound to be three or four who’ll take the piss out of your British accent. You will not beat up anyone.”

  Bowman held out his hand.

  “Bowman.”

  “Shepard.”

  He asked where he was to sleep.

  “That big hut over there. Talk to Bill – he’ll find you a bed.”

  Bowman picked up his bag.

  “How much does a horse ’cost here?”

  “Depends what you want it for. You want to attack a bank or you just want an old nag who’ll wait for you by the water trough of the local saloon?”

  “I want to visit the area.”

  “To carry a man like you around in the hot sun, a twenty-dollar mustang should be enough. If you leave it on the ranch, it’ll ’cost you fifty cents a week.”

  Bowman took five dollars from his pocket.

  “If I’m still here in a week, you can take five dollars out of my pay. Will that be enough of a down payment for me to take a tour of the region?”

  “I’ll even throw in a saddle. A word of warning, though: I wouldn’t go around telling everyone that you’ve got here with your pockets full of money. Go and get changed.”

  “Bill?”

  “One of the lads who doesn’t like the English.”

  “There won’t be any problems.”

  The foreman burst out laughing.

  “That bastard’s from Ukraine. You can put him in his place if you have to.”

  Bowman walked off towards the workers’ building.

  “Bowman!”

  He turned around.

  “If you see anyone from Hollis Ranch or Michaeli in town, and they offer you better wages, come and see me before you clear off.”

  6

  In the Patersons’ workers’ building, the men were divided into two categories: those who looked after the cattle and those who looked after everything else. It was like a barracks where rank was unclear, where discipline was limited to working hours, and where people resigned as often as they were hired and fired. The atmosphere was good and, like everything that Bowman had seen in this part of the country, temporary: it had the feel of something people did in passing, while waiting to make bigger dreams come true. The cowherds were saving money to buy their own farm, the craftsmen to start their own business, the cooks to open their own restaurant. And while they dreamed, the Paterson ranch grew. Having begun with 7,500 acres that soon became 12,000, it now comprised a hundred square miles, all of it along the banks of the Trinity River. Bowman learned that, in Texas, with two thousand dollars, he could buy almost as much land as the Patersons. The problem with a ranch of a hundred square miles was all the money you needed afterwards to turn it into something good.

  By putting aside five dollars a week, a cowherd would have to work for two years to buy some land, a few cattle and four planks to build a house. If there was still land for sale by the time he’d saved that money. At those prices, entire pieces of the country were being bought every day.

  Everyone talked about the King Ranch, near the Rio Grande, which was close to 200 square miles. King had crossed the border to hire entire villages of Mexicans. The names of all these rich owners explained why all the restaurants, stores, farms and ranches that people talked about over dinner were going to be built “in the West”. Over there, where no-one yet lived, opportunity still awaited. There was fertile land – all you had to do was choose it and take it – as well as rivers, game, the most beautiful wild horses in the country, and vast forests. To go West, you needed a carriage, a pair of cattle, enough food to last you the journey, a rifle and ammunition; then you had to find yourself a wife and wait a little longer, until the army had finished with the Indians. Consequently, as the dream was always delayed a few months, a solution opened up for everyone, this one a quick, safe and painless solution: go to Colorado in search of gold. Those who talked about the big mining companies swiping all the lodes and getting rid of the little gold-panners were jeered at and called cowards. To become rich in Colorado, you just needed balls and a bit of luck. In the evenings, among all these men bragging ever louder that they were right as they gradually realised they were wrong, there were about fifteen who said nothing: those who had no plans, for whom the West ended in Dallas, with its 678 souls; the lads from the food-supply team.

  Once the cowherds and the construction workers had be
en hired, followed by anyone who knew how to do anything at all, the three big ranches had no-one in town left to employ, except a few loafers and losers. Which explained why Bowman had been hired on the spot, and why the food-supply team was so useless. They were mostly big, tough men who had quite a bit in common with their mules – but definitely not the spirit of self-sacrifice.

  On Bowman’s first two days at the ranch, no-one made any comments about his accent, nor did they laugh at his strange work clothes: a fisherman’s pea jacket and trousers. The ranch was located eight miles north of the city: an hour and a half by horse, twice that long with a fully loaded carriage. The wood bought in Dallas arrived either from the great Northern lakes – by boat on the Mississippi, then on mule convoys from Vicksburg – or from Pennsylvania to the port in Houston, on the Gulf of Mexico, after sailing southwards over the Atlantic. Two merchants in town divided up the northern and southern networks. To build in stone, all you had to do was take a pickaxe to the Patersons’ land, but the stonemasons took too long. For the past five years, the ranch had doubled the size of its herds every year, and convoys of wood arrived in Dallas in a continual flood. The city was like a swarm of bees hanging to the branch of a tree in the middle of the desert.