Caravan

by Dorothy Gilman

  "A sheep led astray needs some shepherding," he said firmly. "It is the duty of any good Christian to give aid to the transgressor. I shall stop in on occasion at your school—I live nearby, and they know me—and inquire of your progress. Have you read the Bible?"

  When I shook my head he said, "I will bring you a Bible."

  And that is how I met Jacob Bowman. He was a strange man: he arrived on the next visiting day carrying both a Bible and a copy of Shakespeare; he lectured me again about Honesty and pressed a five-dollar bill into my palm as we shook hands at his departure, so that I now had Mum plotting my future as a lady, and Mr. Bowman working hard at shaping my character, and Thistlethwaite trying to shape my mind with classes in English grammar, literature, the French language, mathematics and history. It was all very well in its way but it was surprising how tiring it was, and how captive I felt.

  A few weeks later Mr. Bowman received permission for me to visit his home for a day, and I began to acquire a clearer picture of him. For one thing, he was rich. He lived in a large mansion, dark, with stained glass windows and brown woodwork, and with books everywhere. It was astonishing: there were books piled on the floor, books on tables and books on shelves. There were old swords and daggers hung on the walls. Rugs were hung there, too, with bizarre designs woven into them. There was a glass cabinet in his library with a display of gold coins—unfortunately it was locked—and a glass case of fossils and of weird little figures of people carved out of stone. And dictionary stands in every room except the kitchen. Whatever wall space wasn't crammed with books, rugs, pictures or daggers held maps of just about every country in the world. He was certainly an odd one. There was a housekeeper named Mrs. Briggs, and a Mr. Briggs who did all the heavy work, stoking the furnace and what he called yard-work, and I learned what a linguist is because Mr. Bowman was studying all sorts of foreign languages and showed me their dictionaries.

  There was someone else in the house with him that winter, a young man he called Sozap. It seems that Mr. Bowman had been learning a language called Tamahak, spoken in North Africa by a people called the Tuareg, but during a summer trip to Maine he'd found Sozap, who was a full-blooded Abenaki Indian and still knew the language. He'd borrowed him at once to bring home with him and had put aside the Tamahak to study Sozap's language, presumably so that he could write a Paper on that, too. Sozap occupied a small room with a desk, and looked depressed when I first saw him. We regarded each other with interest, each of us being new to this strange house, and of nearly the same age. He was much more attractive than Indian Joe at the carnival, who did war dances with piercing shrieks while he waved a tomahawk, but then of course Indian Joe wasn't a real Indian, he was Italian.

  Sozap joined us for lunch and I was surprised to find that he spoke English. It was a strange lunch, with only three of us seated at a huge mahogany dining table, and Mr. Bowman jovially trying out his new Abenaki vocabulary. "Caressa," he said, "today is Kadawasanda, am I right, Sozap?"

  "Saturday, yes," Sozap said politely.

  "And the month is—no, don't help me, Sozap—Peb— Peb—"

  "Pebonkas. "

  In an aside Mr. Bowman said earnestly, "It's so extremely interesting to learn that the word for good-bye in Abenaki is adio. ... When you recall—as I'm sure you must—that the Spanish for good-bye is adios, and the French for farewell is adieu, there is a fascinating connection worth tracing if I have the time."

  But time was something of which Mr. Bowman never seemed to have enough; he was planning a third and more intensive trip to North Africa at some future date; there were languages to learn, and Papers to write for his mysterious Society, but each Saturday he would appear at Thistlethwaite and escort me to his house for the day, and give me $5 when I left. That was a lot of money in those days when you could buy a sewing machine for $12, a silk petticoat for $5 and a dozen oranges for 20 cents. Each week I sent three of the dollars to Mum and Grams, I saved up and bought a new school uniform, and quieter kid boots, and put aside the rest for what Mum said always lay ahead for everyone: a rainy day.

  At Christmas Mum and Grams sent me a present of three wooden eggs with a small, slanted hole drilled in each. On one of them Grams had glued a moustache and a beard of black thread, and she'd painted eyes, nose and eyebrows to make a wonderfully humorous face. With it there was a note whose words I cherished for a long time and have never forgotten:

  Put these on your fingers,

  Not diamonds, it is true,

  But diamonds aren 't a fun that lingers

  And we must all make do.

  To this had been added, We miss you, dear, leaving tonight for Kansas City, we both thank you for warm sweaters and chocolate. Bless you. Love.

  The holes in the wooden eggs just fitted my fingers and I really loved the one that Grams had painted; when I was lonely I'd insert him on my index finger and talk to him, or sit in front of the mirror and have him talk to me. I named him Mr. Jappy, and as soon as 1 had the money to buy paints I created faces for the other two, a clown with a huge red smile and sad eyes, and a girl with a cupid's-bow mouth and yellow hair. I'd fit them on my fingers when I was alone in my room, and our conversations were lively and of much more interest than Mr. Bowman's talks on his travels and the Papers he was writing about them.

  It was because of Mr. Jappy that I became better acquainted with Sozap. I was wearing the puppet, if he could be called that without insult, after lunch one day at Mr. Bowman's, and Sozap giggled when he saw him.

  "Thou has a funny man on thy finger!" he said.

  "You like him, Sozap?"

  He made a face. "Please, my name is Joseph really. Mr. Bowman insists on Sozap but it is strange to me."

  This was interesting. "Why?"

  "He wants me always Abenaki," he said simply. "And Joseph in Abenaki is Sozap."

  "Do you like teaching him the language?" I asked.

  He sighed. "It is, to be frank—in my language the word is pizwi. It means—" He frowned. "It means senseless. What does he want with it, I ask? Most of my people don't even know or speak the language now. He pays me good money and dresses me in good clothes, but it is pizwi," he said firmly.

  "He gives me money, too." I told him wistfully but I had to admit even then that Mr. Bowman gave me much more, because of the books. Aside from lunch, which was always a treat, and the $5 I was given each week, there wasn't much to do at Mr. Bowman's and I'd begun to look at the books on the shelves. Even before Christmas I'd discovered Gene Stratton Porter's Freckles, Little Lord Fauntleroy and Robin Hood, and then had moved on to The House of Seven Gables and a few sips of Shakespeare. These had already brought me the companions I would never have at Thistlethwaitc School, and after catching up with books I'd never read as a child I'd begun some real explorations. Mr. Bowman, for instance, had several translations of Omar Khayyam's Rubáiyát, none of them matching, and I loved "Good friends beware! the only life we know Flies from us like an arrow from the bow, The Caravan of life is moving by, Quick! to your places in the passing show." I memorized that one as well as "Set not thy heart on any good or gain, Life means but pleasure, or means but pain; when Time lets slip a little perfect hour, O take it—for it will not come again."

  The words had begun to stir in me a desire to find my own place in the passing show, and to not let slip a little perfect hour that wouldn't come again, except that I didn't know how. I was captive at the school learning how to be a lady, and the only life at Mr. Bowman's seemed to be found in book-words.

  Or perhaps in Sozap. I looked at him more closely, standing near me in the library and watching me. He was really very attractive: his black hair was like dark water full of lights, his brown skin was taut over very high cheekbones and his soft eyes were looking at me with much interest, too. Very slowly, as if drawn by magnets, we moved closer and abruptly he placed his arms around me and we stood like that, so close I could feel his heart beating fast under his shirt, and although I didn't know whether Indians kissed wi
th their lips or rubbed noses like Eskimos, I lifted my face and pressed my lips to his, and apparently he knew about kissing because we kissed for a long time, his tongue pushing its way through my lips to meet my tongue, which made me feel very warm inside, and then hot in a strange new way to me. When we separated I felt breathless.

  "Miña," he murmured, eyes closed. "More—again!"

  But hearing Mr. Bowman's step outside in the hall we leaped apart, Sozap to begin idly twirling a globe of the world and I to open a book. Mr. Bowman had come to ask if 1 was ready to play a game of checkers and I meekly followed him out of the library, feeling that checkers couldn't possibly measure up to kissing Sozap.

  The next weekend I had to study for my exams; I did not at any time neglect my studies, always aware of Mum's hopes for me, and the following weekend Mr. Bowman sent word that he and Sozap had come down with influenza. This was a disappointment, because having received very good grades on my exams, on topics heavily researched by me, I'd been looking forward eagerly to research of another sort with Sozap. And so for two weeks I was kept waiting and forlorn.

  This took us to early April and spring, which is a risky time for such experiments, with the sap running in the trees, and the forsythia buds glowing gold and all the world loving a lover. I found Sozap looking pale after his bout with influenza, but there was nothing pale about the ardent look he gave me, and following lunch a subtle jerk of his head directed me to the library.

  We met there and moved at once toward each other, our kisses becoming more and more passionate, so that it seemed only natural, in the heat of this new discovery, for Sozap's hands to move to my breasts and begin caressing them, when —"Sssst," I hissed suddenly, sure that I heard Mr. Bowman in the hall. We jerked apart to stare at each other, all flushed and gasping, and were relieved to hear Mr. Bowman call out to Mr. Briggs from the dining room. Only then did he make his way down the hall to the library, to find Sozap again toying with the globe of the world, and myself running a finger down the page of a book and looking very studious indeed.

  That Mr. Bowman had seen us after all, and had retreated tactfully to the dining room before approaching the library again, was not evident until the following Saturday when I came to the house.

  Sozap was gone.

  "But—where?" I faltered.

  Mr. Bowman seemed incapable of meeting my eyes; his gaze had dropped to the floor where he appeared to study the intricacies of the Oriental rug on which we stood. 'To use the vernacular," he said dryly, "Môjo wigiidit—he is on his way home." Still not looking at me he added firmly, "It was time that I returned to my study of Tamahak."

  Two months later, just before classes ended, Mr. Bowman asked me to marry him.

  3

  Mr. Bowman had not confided his plans of travel to me but I should have guessed that plans were being consolidated because of the crates that had begun to fill the library, very efficiently roped wooden crates labeled—now that I looked more closely—medical supplies, clothes (cold weather), clothes (hot weather), food, ammunition. I had assumed for some weeks they held only new books for his library.

  "No," he said gravely, "I am planning another trip to North Africa, this time to experience the Sahara, and I would like your company on this trip very much, Caressa."

  I looked at him blankly. He knew very well that I was returning for the summer to Mum and Grams, to be followed by one last year of schooling.

  "I dislike the thought of leaving you," he continued, "for your youth and inexperience render you vulnerable and you need looking after." He gave me a glance that told me he was referring here to Sozap. "1 am considerably older than you, but 1 would consider it an honor if you would marry me so that I may take care of you, Caressa."

  As I write these words so many years later I cannot help but regard them with irony when I consider what followed some months later, but that is how he proposed marriage to me and no doubt Grams would have told me that it was already written in the palm of my hand. I was certainly astonished by his proposal and idiotically blurted out, "I'd have to ask Mum and Grams."

  "But of course," he said. "I will not ask how tenderly you regard me. Many marriages are arranged ones, in other countries at least, and love has a way of blossoming later. And you will be very well provided for," he added tactfully.

  The blossoming part didn't move me in particular but I suddenly realized what the words "provided for" meant. I could repay Mum and Grams their investment in me, and become a grand lady all at once, as well as have a chance to see the world. After all, that caravan of life was moving by, I was already sixteen and mustn't let slip a perfect hour. There was that Shakespeare line I'd memorized, too .., about a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune and, omitted .., well, I was not one to prefer being bound in shallows and in miseries.

  How could I say no?

  Mum and Grams were over a thousand miles away that month, doing shows in Colorado, so it was impossible to speak to them face-to-face. In his letter to Mum, Mr. Bowman described his pedigree, his history and his plans, listed his education (Harvard and Brown universities), his clubs, his published articles, omitted his age but artfully enclosed a bank order for $1,000.

  Of course his age had been well-established in my letters to them. When I finally heard from Mum she wanted to know if I loved Mr. Bowman, and rather wistfully I remembered how she'd fallen in love with my father the first time she saw him in his spangled tights mounting the ladder to his tightrope. Grams' letter was more confiding: she wrote that Mum was upset because, although she'd never wanted me to marry a roustabout or a snake-eater, she'd never dreamed of my marrying a man so "above my station" in life, and twenty years older. She didn't write what she thought but I don't suppose it would have changed much. At sixteen my future didn't look very promising; I didn't seem to fit in anywhere, and here was Mr. Bowman shepherding me and promising Blossomings.

  In any case, by the time Mum's letter reached me I was already Mrs. Jacob Bowman, and struggling to call him Jacob. The ceremony took place in the library, between the box labeled guns and the box labeled ammunition, with Mr. and Mrs. Briggs as witnesses. The wedding night proved of little interest to either me or to Mr. Bowman, and was not what Omar Khayyam would have called a perfect hour. Technically I lost my virginity, but Jacob was apparently so appalled by the process that he put aside all thoughts of repeating it, and returned to his own bedroom, to his plans and his lists. In retrospect I think—and this was not unremarkable—that just as I looked upon him as a father figure (although not aware of this at the time), he looked upon me as a daughter, which I was certainly young enough to be, and a whiff of incestuousness attacked his conscience and made him impotent, which I did not know enough to realize at the time. Poor Jacob.

  The result of becoming his bride was that I was instructed each day on the exciting trip we were about to undertake. We were to cross the Atlantic to Southampton in England, and then proceed by train to Marseille, where we would board a smaller ship for Tripoli. There we would spend a month or two collecting documents, arranging for guides, buying protection and finding camels to take us into the desert in October, when the heat had diminished. He was not without a goal: during a previous trip to North Africa he'd spent an interesting evening conversing with a White Father named Père Amaux, on leave from his missionary station at Ghadames, and it was Père Amaux whom we were to visit, bringing to him Bibles in French. To reach him, explained Mr. Bowman, we would travel for a week or so across the sands and I could only assume that still another paper was to be written about this for his Geographical Society. I was told that such a trip had once been impossible because of certain nomads in the desert called the Tuareg, but after a number of pitched battles the French army had subdued them. Nevertheless, he'd been learning some words of Tamahak, which was their language.

  "And I'm confident," he said complacently, "that if we should meet any Tuareg, my being able to speak a few words to them in their own la
nguage—as well as our being well-armed—will suffice to render any problems minimal."

  I looked up Africa in Smith's New Geography, where it said it was noted "for vast burning deserts, for the dark color and barbarous character of its inhabitants, and as the ancient seat of the arts and sciences"; it added that this "land of mystery" was almost unknown to geographers, who might, with good reason, place elephants in all the gaps. In its map this was true; the desert was colored pink, with a camel pictured, and an ostrich, but no elephant. But then Jacob pointed out that I was looking at a geography book published in 1860, and digging out more recent maps he showed me Tripoli, and roughly where the oasis of Ghadames could be found, and there were so many towns and cities along the coast of the Mediterranean that it all looked very civilized. I began to look forward intensely to our traveling, gripped by a strange restlessness, only vaguely aware—unadmitted, of course—that Saturday visits to the dark mansion had been very different from occupying the house for seven days of the week, and that I had only exchanged one bondage for another, being now in a different sort of school. There was very little for me to do. Jacob's passions remained with his studies, and the Briggses managed the house, and so, feeling a lonely need to keep in touch with Grams, I retreated more and more to the little room that Sozap had occupied, to read or to practice sleight-of-hand or juggling and all the tricks of magic I'd learned. These I had concealed from Mr. Bowman— Jacob, that is—lest he disapprove, finding them as inappropriate for me as picking pockets. And so, into the small trunk I was given for our travels, I packed my few clothes, my finger puppets, a number of bright coins and white handkerchiefs for palming, and a small English dictionary so that I could translate the long words Jacob used.