by Ryan Ireland
And it was true. Life at sea made for easier living than this place where they ended up. At least when they moved on the sea. The Sargasso told another story all together. ‘Cmon boy,’ his father said. ‘Time to get some shut eye.’
The boy’s hands gripped the railing. Far off in the village streets he heard laughter and strange music.
ii
For nearly a whole day the man rode with occasional breaks to water his mule at streams. He rode into the night. Though sore in buttocks from the journey, he pressed on, his head drooping every now and again with slumber. He jerked his head back up. Moonlight, brilliant and glittering, lit a path before him. He thought to look around, study the far stretches of darkness pulled out in every direction. But manmade light, there was none.
His thoughts wandered. He imagined his woman back at the hovel, wondered if she’d given birth yet. He thought about his son. In his mind he became certain now that the stranger must have been correct, it would be a son. He pictured her cradling the baby in the crook of her arm, singing those listless songs in her foreign tongue. Thoughts of the stranger, how he tended to her, infiltrated the periphery of his fantasy. First he imagined the stranger holding the baby, smiling at his wife, speaking to her as he had that one time. He would say things to her like his father used to say to the women at the wharfside houses.
Then he imagined the stranger and his woman in bed together, her still loosed from birth, but wanton just the same. Somewhere in the hovel the baby cried while they fornicated.
The man shook his head, as if the thoughts could be flung right out into the darkness around him. In doing so, a memory took their place. He remembered his father’s breath, hot with wharf house grog, telling him to watch.
His father stood naked over the bed. His body hewed lean, tanned all. Stray hairs and scars marred his skin.
‘You want him here?’ the woman asked. She lay in the bed next to the boy. She was naked too.
‘Needs to watch,’ his father said. ‘Needs to see a man give it to a woman.’
The hired woman craned her head around to look at the boy. He’d drawn himself up against the wall, pulling his legs to his chest.
‘Aint a thing to be scared about,’ she said. And as she said this, his father pulled her leg to the side and inserted himself. The woman’s brow flinched and she groaned.
The boy looked out the window by the bed, which began to rock rhythmically.
‘Hey,’ his father said. He snapped his fingers to draw the boy’s attention. ‘Keep watchin. This is how men do it.’
When the man awoke, the daytime returned. His mule had stopped to graze on some reed grass by a spring. The man gauged the sun, guessed it to be late morning. If he had been dreaming, the thoughts were a fog now. He dismounted the mule and squatted by the spring, refilled his canteens. The chaff meal ran low, maybe another two days’ worth.
He made a half-hearted attempt to forage something, but found nothing here. He looked out behind him, half expecting to see back as far as the hovel. But there was nothing. He turned his back to the sun and looked ahead. Faint and jagged, farther out than the rest of the land before him, lay the mountains.
The stranger ate dinner with the troupe of soldiers. He looked over the insignia on the officer’s uniform, looked at the faded patch of fabric where a name used to be embroidered. The two other soldiers sat on a length of driftwood, eating from their mess kits.
‘Want to thank you for the dinner, the kindness,’ the stranger said.
‘Cant let a man go hungry out here on the plains,’ the officer said. He didnt make eye contact when he said this. He looked at the boots the stranger wore, looked at the roped clumps of black hair on the stranger’s head.
‘Good for you theres not a whole lot of men in these parts then,’ the stranger said.
The officer poured both him and the stranger cups of coffee. The two soldiers declined theirs. ‘Hot if you want it,’ the officer said setting the kettle on the ground by the fire.
‘Run into many men?’ the stranger asked.
‘Few, yeah. Mostly the desperate type.’
‘That so?’
‘Some men with no business bein out here like they is.’
The stranger raised his eyebrows. ‘And what business is it that should keep a man at home?’
The soldiers on the driftwood tended to their weapons, conversed between themselves.
‘Ran into a fella,’ the officer said. ‘Never heard of an Apache.’
‘Is that right?’
‘God’s honest truth, right boys?’
The two soldiers paused their conversation long enough to grunt in agreement.
‘And what business do you have out here, in these parts?’ the stranger asked.
This question caused all three men to give the stranger a hard stare.
‘We’re soldiers, infantry,’ the officer said.
‘But youre not going back,’ the stranger said. ‘To your fort, I mean.’
‘No,’ the officer said. ‘Cant rightly say we are.’
The stranger looked at the two companions, each sharpening his weapon. He studied the smaller of the two men. A skittish sort, the man used a flat stone to rub the face of a hatchet.
‘Youre scalping,’ the stranger said.
The officer snorted, slurped at his cup of coffee. ‘Doin whatever pays, whatever keeps us goin.’
The stranger wrapped his hands around the tin cup, letting the warmth flood through them. He looked once at each of the men before addressing the smallest. He smirked. ‘Ik zal je vermoorden duren,’ he said.
The officer nearly spat out his coffee. ‘What in the hell’d you say?’
The stranger stayed calm. Men usually became worked up when he spoke a native tongue to them. But this younger soldier, the one with the hatchet, he understood.
‘Youre a fur trapper,’ he said to the soldier. ‘Een bonten handelaar. Started out in the sylvania country other side of the Mississippi. Never fought in any war though. Thats why your uniform is so ill-fitting.’ The stranger closed his eyes. ‘You took the clothes off a dead man so you could reap all the army benefits.’
‘Hold on here,’ the other soldier said. The stranger silenced him by raising his hand. He addressed the interrupting party directly. ‘Youve had these thoughts yourself, sometimes when your comrade in arms mispronounces a word, when he stays silent while you and your officer here are laughing at a turn of phrase.’
The officer slurped at his coffee, studied the soldier in question over the edge of his cup. Still, the stranger kept speaking, this time rotating his oration between all three men in his audience. ‘You’ll say I’m making this all up. And I am. The story never existed until I put it into your head. Doesnt make it any less true.’
He sipped at his coffee. The soldiers exchanged glances. The officer spoke. ‘You of any value?’ he asked the stranger.
‘You saw me walking,’ the stranger said. ‘No horse to speak of, no possessions.’ He looked at the soldier with the hatchet again. ‘Ah, maar de bonten handelaar. How fitting.’
The soldier stopped sharpening his blade, letting the rock fall into the grasses. He gripped the stock of the hatchet. The other soldier thumbed the edge of his knife.
‘Whats that mean—how fitting?’ the officer asked.
The stranger laughed, gulped down the last of the coffee. ‘You all are going to cut the scalp right off my head, claim it as an Apache’s. Youve been eyeing my hair since I sat down. My value to you is as a corpse.’
The officer gave the soldiers a nod and the one with the hatchet lunged at the stranger. But the stranger pulled out a shank of his own, a scrap of metal. It cut the man across his bicep. Flesh flapped limp and the arm fell deadened to the man’s side. He howled in agony. The stranger seized up the hatchet and in one broad stroke split the other soldier’s skull from one orbital cavity to the next. He whirled around, missing a jab from the officer’s sword. Two more hacks and the officer lay broke
n in the grass.
The stranger squatted by the officer’s corpse and undressed him, pulling the uniform jacket and trousers from the body. He stuffed the trouser legs into the sleeves of the jacket and tied the clothes around his waist. Then he stood up.
The fur trapper tried crawling away, his arm with the cloth and muscle and bone all unfolding. He panted. The stranger sauntered over.
‘How far ahead is the man who hasnt seen an Apache?’
‘Lieve God.’
The stranger clucked his tongue, kicked the man in the arm. A scream rang out. ‘Waar is hij?’
‘U zult mij doden?’
The stranger smiled. How quickly men wanted opposite things. One moment it’s life, the next theyre hoping for death. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How far out was he—how many days?’
‘Drie.’
The stranger nodded, saying he had one more task. He scooped the man up like he might a babe and carried him across the plains. ‘You cant die just yet,’ he cooed. ‘We’ve got to find a decent resting place first.’
In his arms the fur trapper sobbed.
In the evening hours, after the blue of the sky succumbed and bled into the redder hues of the passing of the day, the stranger and his bounty came to a low-built sodhouse. The plankwood door creaked back and forth in the breeze. Neither lantern light nor smoke from the tin pipe chimney gave indication to life inside. The stranger smelled the air, noted a rankness he associated with rotting meat. Then he spied the dismembered corpse of a woman. The Apache had been here. He must be close on their heels.
‘Slecht land,’ the fur trapper murmured, dizzy with delirium from losing too much blood.
The stranger shushed his captive and heaved the man to the ground. He scanned the land about him. He shut his eyes and smelled the decay of the place full in his nostrils. He sauntered away from the crumpled form of the fur trapper toward the homestead. He creaked open the door.
‘Dia duit.’
All inside—the father and two sons—lay dead. The stranger allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He picked up a biscuit from the supper table, still set. It tasted fresh enough. He swiped his finger through the blood on the stovetop. It hardly smudged and had a tack to it.
A clay pitcher sat on a stool by a bed. The stranger picked up the pitcher and smelled the water. He closed his eyes and inhaled again. He poured the water from the pitcher, the stream splashing off the table and trickling across the dirt floor to the doorway. Once the pitcher drained completely, he untied the uniform from around his waist and crammed it into the stoneware vessel. He walked back outside. The fur trapper still lay where he had been left. The stranger turned his attention to the pitcher. He knelt, putting his hand to the ground like an Indian scout might. Then he nodded and used his bare hands to scoop out a hole in the earth.
Once the pitcher lay buried, he hefted the fur trapper back onto his shoulders. The man stank of feces, of blood and sweat. Still he breathed, a shaky inhalation and a wheezing exhalation. Pause. Then another rattling.
‘Last thing most men do on this planet is shit themselves,’ the stranger said. ‘Natural thing—the bowels open up, shit just rolls out.’
He walked a hundred paces and looked at the Y-shaped post hanging crooked over the well, a rope looped in the elbow. ‘It’s because we run out of energy, cant keep it tight,’ the stranger laughed. The fur trapper, in his delusional state, chuckled. ‘Killed a baby a piece ago,’ the stranger said. ‘Most babies are born right into shit with the mother pushing so hard. It is as if I summed up all of life by pre-empting it.’
The stranger looped the rope from the well around the both of them, binding the trapper’s arm and legs to his torso in a clove hitch. Then he jumped into the well, waiting for the rope to pull tight.
iii
Mountains loomed closer with each passing hour. Yet they stood as artificial things, jags of glass set out on the horizon only to tease the man. He consulted his maps. If the cartographer who drew this scape years ago were not a liar, then Fort James lay on the other side of the mountains. A thin dotted line noted where one might pass without much weather, without too much struggle.
When the mountains came closer still and took on dimension, the man stopped to study them. He had traveled through most of the day again. He had forsaken his appetite, his desire to slumber. But he knew here in the evening hours, with shadows masking entire slopes of the mountains, the tips of white shimmering like capstones of an ancient Aztec temple, he knew it to be wise only to travel into the folds of the mountains in the daylight. A rounded rock could turn his mule’s hoof. An elevated trail might take an unexpected turn. He’d heard stories. Stories told by lantern light from the mouths of sailor men. He was young then and his mind made the tales bigger, he knew.
The mast rigger told the other men how he learned his trade in a jungle land. Said he swung from vines and shimmied up trees to escape from the injuns there. ‘Weird ones they was,’ he said. ‘Twigs in their faces, tattoos all o’er their bodies. All of em skinny though. Probably from all the runnin.’
The boy’s father, a navigator and quartermaster on the schooner, said the mast rigger was lucky, theyd be fatter if theyd caught him. Everyone laughed, even the Portuguese deckhand.
But the Norseman had the best stories. He told of his days in the mountains of his country—only there the mountains were called alps.
‘No travel in the night,’ he said, his accent only growing thicker with imbibing grog. ‘Men like beasts eat night travelers. Best to make fire.’
The other sailors laughed loudly at the anecdote. But the boy remained captivated. The biggest threat in every story involved being eaten. ‘You were a mountain man?’ he asked.
The Norseman agreed with a sailor’s aye.
‘How’d you end up on a boat?’
‘It what Norsemen do,’ he said. He quaffed back the last of his grog and swayed with the lilt of the ship. ‘There none mountains i oceanen.’
Later, the boy’s father said it wasnt true, what the men in the galley had mentioned. ‘They were drunk,’ he said. ‘They invent stories to out-talk each other. Dont want you gettin the wrong ideas bout the world.’
The boy asked if he would ever see the mountains. For as far back as he could remember he had lived on a boat, enlisted with his father as a deckhand. On his eighth birthday he learned to keep the galley, how to trap and kill rats. Once he could brave the open deck he swabbed and fetched and rigged.
‘Not if I can help it,’ his father said. ‘Aint nothin inland that you need to see. Bunch of nonsense there.’
The mountains were grander in scale than he originally supposed. It took him another day to reach the foothills and he camped where the land began a steep grade into a canyon. He mixed the last of his chaff meal with water and swished it about his mouth. If he was lucky, pieces of the meal would stick in his teeth and in the morning he could suck them out for sustenance. He tethered his mule to the tree and looked up at the thick band of stars sprawled out, composing the Milky Way. Deep in the southern sky Corvus and Centarus danced together.
It had been this way on the ship. Some nights his father seemed a softer man. He stood at the bow rail, pointing out the constellations to the boy, telling him how to chart a course by following the stars. ‘Had a Spaniard teach me bout the stars while back,’ he said. ‘Before you came along.’ The boy ignored the sudden angst that embittered his father’s speech. In a moment’s time, he continued talking. ‘Spaniard said the stars are like million suns throughout the galaxy—whatever that is. I think it’s the same as heaven. He tried to tell me what we see in the sky is a history of what happened. Said it was like getting a letter: we can read what happened and what we’re readin seems like it’s happenin now.’ He shook his head as if he’d lost his way in talking. ‘But it already happened, we just see the past for a moment.’
The boy said he didnt understand.
His father chose his words cautiously. ‘This man—the Spani
ard—tells me we could very well be lookin at some stars that already done burned themselves out. He told me, sober as a mission priest, the stars with their energy, can navigate the distances between places. But they can also guide us through time.’ He chuckled. ‘This is why I dont want you to take what these men say as bein true.’
‘You dont believe him?’ the boy asked.
Again, the man considered his answer before replying. ‘Aint that you cant trust em. It aint that. But these stories they tell, theyre like a half truth—partly something they made up. Hell, they might even believe it any more. Spoke it right into life.’
The boy nodded. He smelled the air, looked at the stars. Other men could have the world, he’d take the sea for himself.
When he woke, he scarcely recognized his surroundings. Light bathed the slope and there was no escaping it. He sat up, put his hand to his gut. He had terrible hunger pain. He sucked the meal from his teeth, but that did little to assuage his appetite. He picked the crust from the corners of his eyes and ate of it too. Leaving his mule hitched to a patch of scrub, he wandered the hillside, flipping rocks over in search of insects, looking for a place where ground varmint might store their winter food. He came to a flat spot on the hill—bald, the dirt bleached white by the sun. An odd place, the man figured, with no hope of food. Yet the strangeness drew him in.
Atop the slope there a scrag tree stood, branches sprawled out in petrified order. Wood scorched down to grey, looked to be blistered by lightning. A vulture perched on the topmost limb. A flitting shadow caught the man’s attention and he looked to the sky. Above him a half dozen more buzzards circled in slow arcs.
Beneath the tree an oblong hole gaped, a few round stones scattered about it. The man slowed his gait and studied the scene. Only his mule hitched a quarter mile yonder moved. The buzzards too. A corpse lay next to the open grave. It was a man’s body nearly decayed beyond recognition. Rags of clothes—a pair of trousers and a flimsy shirt—covered the rough-hewn leather of his skin. He lay face down and for that the man was grateful. First thing the vultures take is the eyes.
