by Ryan Ireland
Last he’d seen the stars Virgo graced the sky. Boötes began to peek over the horizon. He wondered about his woman, if she suspected that he wouldnt return. Such promises are broken on a regular basis—worse still are the ones kept. Christopher Columbus kept his promise and returned to the New World once it became just another world. Perhaps if he’d only come once, those tribes that greeted him would have considered it salvation; it is the returning in which we are damned.
As the man stood to go back into the mammoth cave, he noticed a movement, a discreet fleeting down in the canyon. He did as he learned as a boy and cupped his hands around his eyes, making holes to narrow and magnify his vision. A bush of scrub shook and something flitted behind it to a boulder. It was the Apache with the stovepipe hat. The man uncovered his eyes and stood to flee into the cave. When he did so, he saw the skeleton chief on the white horse. He rode without guise or protection, the man’s mule in tow. The man retreated into the village, searching for a place to hide.
Two weeks passed before the boy and his father had a different visitor. The cellar hatch opened and a man descended the ladder. He had a kerosene lamp in hand. He paid no mind to the captives in the room as he trimmed the wick. The light illuminated his face. He had burly white sideburns and wore a suit and hat. Someone above handed down a round stool. ‘Thank you kindly,’ he said and set the stool on the floor. Once seated on the stool with the lamp by his side he addressed the captives. ‘Come here and let me have a look at you.’
The father and son emerged from the shadowed space where they had stood observing their new visitor. The father placed a hand on his son’s shoulder.
‘Lots of rumors circulating about you two,’ the man said. ‘People saying all types of wicked things, terrible things, things that no human could ever possibly imagine.’ He stopped and frowned. ‘But yet here they are, these settlers, spewing off falsities as if they were true. The mind is a dark place.’
‘Who are you?’ the father interrupted.
‘You buy people?’ the boy asked.
The question seemed to surprise their visitor, although his inquiry, in reality, had no such effect. ‘Now why would you ask such a thing?’
The father squeezed his son’s shoulder. No one spoke until the visitor decided to continue speaking. ‘It’s because you saw humans bought and sold, yes?’
‘What sort of man are you?’ the father asked again.
The visitor sighed, smiled wearily. ‘Thats a more difficult question. To a seafarer like yourselves I might be called a witch doctor—’
‘A witch doctor.’
‘Yes. I know, I lack the usual appearance—the adornment of bones, the nose piercings… I dont live in a hut.’ He chuckled. ‘Indians might call me a medicine man.’
‘You dont look like a savage.’
‘You do. Thats why I am here. I’m here to judge you.’
‘Hows that?’
‘Guess you might rightly call me a judge.’
‘Dont look like a judge,’ the father said.
The doctor said, ‘And what are you supposed to look like, sir?’
The boy’s father stood dumbfounded.
The doctor continued. ‘These people will make up stories about you and arrive at the inevitable conclusion that you should die—a creative conclusion, certainly. But I decided to intervene. I will change the end of your story if I see fit. They believe my stories over their own eyes… Can I examine your son?’
The father let his hand slip from his son’s shoulder. The boy took a step forward and knelt down before the witch doctor. The doctor grabbed either side of his head and stared into the boy’s eyes. He did not lock gaze with the boy, rather he looked past whatever anguishes were housed there. He pried the boy’s mouth open and examined his teeth. Then he groped at the boy’s body as if inspecting him for concealment of a weapon. He held the boy close and asked if the boy ever saw someone bought and sold. The boy replied that yes, he had.
‘Thought so,’ the doctor said. ‘But you all werent slave traders. No.’ He cocked his head to the side. ‘You were scavengers of a different type. Wheres the rest of your crew?’
‘Dead,’ the father said.
‘All of them?’
The father nodded.
‘Perhaps,’ the doctor said, ‘it would be best for you to tell me the entire story of how you came to be here.’
The man formulated plans in his head of how to confront the Apache as he searched the village for weapons. But there were no weapons to be found. He took the shiv from his pocket and squatted by the doorway of a rectangular tower. He figured he could kill the Indian who came through the door first, yoke the body up in such a way as to deflect the blows from the Indian who came in next. He imagined he could commandeer a weapon, fight his way free.
He squatted by the threshold for some time, until his legs burned. He stood and knew it was futile. He placed the shiv into his pocket and stepped out into the alley. As he walked the narrow path between the bricked buildings he picked up stray pieces of driftwood, the occasional bundle of brush.
The man found a large stone pit, a place excavated into the ground and paved with cut stone. In the center of the round pit there was a hole in the floor. The man built his fire there. He struck a rock against the shiv and the sparks set the brush aflame. He knew the skeleton man on the white horse would see it. That the Indians would come here, to this place, and cut him into pieces. He did not know of prayer, but this wish that he be killed quickly came as close to prayer as he had ever been. It quieted his mind.
He had not been asleep long when he stirred from slumber, feeling another’s eyes upon him. He started awake and squinted against the flames of the still raging fire. A tall figure stood opposite the fire looking at the man. He was familiar. Haze from sleep still clouded the man’s vision. The figure moved and picked something off the floor. The man hunched forward and suddenly recognized the figure to be the stranger he had entrusted his wife to.
‘You,’ he said aloud. His voice resonated in the stone cavern of the kiva.
The stranger stepped forward, holding whatever it was between his fingers like an alm offered up to some deity. His boot came down on the log, sending embers flurrying up into the air. He looked up over the head of the man. The man looked to the same spot.
The Indian chief stood there. The white horse stood by his side. The man jumped up and treaded backward. He looked for the stranger. The stranger was gone—no more than part of a dream. Frantically he searched his pockets. He pulled out the shiv and shook it in front of him.
‘Come down here ya nigger and I’ll run this through yer eye.’
The Indian chief appeared slightly bemused by the man. He watched as the man pantomimed stabbing him through the eye. As the man danced around the fire pit, the logs collapsed into coals and a few licks of flames now and again.
‘Send yer other nigger with the hat down then,’ the man said. The resolve had left his voice and when he issued the challenge it was tinged with resignation. He stopped moving around the pit. A dull clank cried out in the night when he dropped the shiv. Then he sat on his haunches. Though his words were no more than murmurs, than sobs, the acoustics made his ramblings audible to the chief.
‘Just go on an kill me if thats what you aim to do,’ he said. ‘Do it quick if you can. Wont be the worse that ever been done to me.’ He cried for a while, head down and eyes scrunched shut, anticipating a blow to the back of the head at any moment. When he opened his eyes and looked back up, the chief still watched.
‘I’s just trying to get to Fort James,’ he said.
The chief’s eyes went alight.
‘You know it,’ the man said. ‘You know Fort James?’
The chief raised his index finger, the hand of bone flexing with his own, fleshed hand, pointing seemingly at the stars. The man began to stand up, but a hand on his shoulder spun him around. He came face to face with the painted Apache. The Indian raised a hatchet into the air and bro
ught the blunt butt side down on the man’s eye. Blackness engulfed him.
The boy and his father were released from the cellar immediately. Though a dulled cloudy grey, the light outside caused in both of them a temporary blindness. They were afforded a room at the inn down by the docks and given clothes. The innkeeper did not look the father in the eye when he said the room was already paid for. Whatever fortunes had been bestowed on them, their benefactor remained unknown.
The boy had his suspicions though. It was when they were telling the witch doctor about the Sargasso. The boy had been struggling to find a proper lie when his father interrupted.
‘It was the Sargasso,’ he said.
‘Yes, the Sargasso,’ the doctor said. ‘Heard of it. Doldrumed place.’
‘Aye.’
The boy decided he needed to say the rest. ‘Men there acted like animals.’
‘Your men? Your shipmates?’
The boy nodded. ‘Did things like eat each other, stick their pricks in each other—’ The father coughed abruptly. ‘The Portuguese ate a candle.’
The doctor’s eyes went alight. ‘A candle, as in a taper?’
‘Yes,’ the boy nodded eagerly.
The doctor shifted his weight on the stool, straightened his back. He stroked his sideburns. ‘I am a well-traveled man,’ he said. ‘Been to many strange lands—been to a place where two men were born of one backbone; their faces looking in opposite directions. Ive sat at the head of a table—if you could call it that—and eaten a dog. Birthed a baby in a barren place.’ The father began to interrupt, but the doctor continued. ‘I know more than most men will ever know. If you collected all the seafarers, magicians, priests and teachers in the world, they have only heard of a fraction of what I know, what Ive witnessed. The world is a goddamned beautiful place, friends. And what I say now, I say with certainty: you are meant to wander, boy.’
‘What about me?’ the father asked. ‘Am I meant to do anything?’
‘What does wander mean?’ the boy asked.
‘It’s what you will spend the rest of your life doing,’ the doctor said. He shifted his focus to the father. ‘If you had purpose, it’s done now.’
He stood and shifted his hat on his head. ‘No ones going to lynch you. I cant say what happens will be any worse.’
With that he left. Together in the dankness of the cellar, the shadowed space, the father and son contemplated what the witch doctor said.
‘They just gonna turn us loose,’ the father said. ‘We’ll be on our own again.’
‘But he said that was worse than dyin.’
‘Hes right. What we gone through is already worse than whatever the next life holds.’
The hatch in the floor opened, a pair of boots visible. ‘Come on up outta there, you dirty redskinned niggers,’ a man called. ‘That witch doctor says hes done with you.’
Again the man came to in the Indian village. One eye was swollen shut. A splintering pain gnawed at the side of his face. He tried to lift himself off the ground, but his vision began to blacken and he let himself collapse back to the ground. It was daylight now. The logs from last night had long burned down to coals. The coals, now cooled, were little more than ash and char.
The man lay on the smooth stone. The cold rock felt good on his skin. He tried to shut his good eye, but that made him dizzy. Each time he inhaled, his head mushroomed with pain. His body felt like it was pulsating. If he died here, years from now some good Samaritan would come along and insist this miscreant had perished without a proper burial. They would dig a shallow grave somewhere and, assuming these bones were those of an Indian, wrap them in cloth and leave the resting place unmarked. But these were not his thoughts.
Instead, he thought of his woman. He tried to imagine what she might be doing at this very moment. It’s a common thought of those who are separated. And like most of the departed, he did not actually imagine what she would be doing. He simply recapitulated the things he had seen her do.
He sat up more slowly this time. He leaned against the wall of the kiva. From above, at the kiva’s edge, there was a noise. His mule stood, tethered to a rock. A gourd with a lanyard sat by the rock. Unbemused as ever, the mule swished his tail. The man used his legs to push his back against the wall of the pit. With considerable difficulty he pulled himself from the kiva. He lay on his stomach for a moment, anticipating an ambush. He would not have fought. After a minute or more of silence, he rolled over, reached for the gourd.
A trail at the mouth of the alcove climbed the plateau. The Indian had pointed up, as if that was the trail he should take. He cared not if this was a path into perdition. Life, he imagined, would either continue or cease; there isnt anything between the two. The trail was steep as no other man had taken his mule on it. He knew it was a practical thing to guide the mule by the reins, guide him up the slope. Doing otherwise meant risking both their lives. He resolved to ride the animal anyway.
Twice on the slope the mule faltered, its hooves chuffing off a stone smoothed over by wind and sand. The man slumped over the head of the mule. With his arms wrapped around the animal’s neck, he could feel each breath it took. The climb was taxing. He turned his one good eye to the crest of the slope, where the land broke flat and even. The sun baked down at the topside of the mesa. The man determined it must be noon.
They rounded the top of the trail and the man yawed back on the reins. The mule stopped. It was an open place. Ghost mountains on every side of them. The man used his hand to cover the damaged eye and studied the distant sights in more detail. Far out, sagged up against the nearest mountains, the land looked to be nothing but powder. The man figured it to be a sand desert, a place meant for certain death. But here atop the plateau there were at least some small indications of life. Sticks of grass cropping out of the coarse soil. Birds, not of the predator kind, fluttered about. Out farther on the mesa, barely dotting the horizon, was shadow.
‘Gee-ah,’ the man managed to say into the mule’s ear. He slapped the beast’s shoulder and they sauntered forward. Waves of heat rising off the ground distorted the distant visions of this place. At moments it looked as if nothing was there, but then the place would reappear with more detail than before. They passed the threshold of illusion and the man could see this was a civilized place indeed. A band of men trolled through the grasses a quarter mile out from the settlement. As the man passed by them, he asked what this place was called.
Most of them ignored his query. One looked up; he had eyes of solid white and seemed to look directly at the man. ‘Wie heisst dieser Ort?’
‘This place,’ the man said. ‘Tell me this is Fort James.’
‘Ja,’ the blind man said. ‘Das ist Fort James.’
Second
One
i
Making bricks was new to the stranger. He had participated in many things in his time, but brickmaking was not one of them. After stating that he had work to do, the stranger set out in search of anything that might be used as a tool—a length of metal, a board of hardwood, a flat-sided stone. Some miles from the Indian village he happened across a broke-down crate. He dusted the powdered earth off the wood. The sun and aridity of this place nearly petrified the wood. He brought it back to the Indian village.
By fixing the pieces together with some cord and bracing it with rock, the stranger formed a rectangular mold. He knelt by one of the walls of the fallen tower, which had buckled under its own weight. At its base some of the Indian bricks still fitted together, giving shape to what was once a sturdy structure. The stranger scraped his index finger between two of the bricks, pulling out mulled bits of mortar. He tasted it. Each one of these bricks was formed from a mold and left to bake. This place was like a kiln. All that lived in this place was formed from dirt. From the beginning, there was nothing else other than rock and dirt. But then some men, if they were even that, came along and spat in the dirt and made mud. They wiped it on their foreheads and found it to be a wa
y to keep the mosquitoes away. It cooled their blisters.
Within a thousand years these cavemen, while wallowing in their own filth, would come to plop gobs of mud one on top of the other. They formed rudimentary walls. Then slept in shallow pits, huddled next to whatever mate theyd found. Give these men another thousand years and they achieved what the stranger had already made—a brick mold.
He sat cross-legged, looking at his invention—the empty wooden box. In here he would shape not just the future of this place, he would recreate a past that never was.
