by Téa Obreht
“What’s the matter?”
“You think I’m telling tales,” he said. “You won’t even look around.”
“Aren’t I looking?”
“Not like you really think you gone find anything.”
She seized her trouserlegs and shoved into the thicket, pretending to look for sign. The boys still called this hillside “the antelope trail”—though any namesake antelope were long gone, having wised up quickenough to the shoddy little blind Emmett had built at the top of the gulch back when they were newcomers here. These days the slope was a scald of dead grass, one switchback after another twisting all the way up the red face of the bluff. The only heartbeat around might belong to the occasional chaparral cock scurrying from shrub to shrub. Here was one now, of course. It took off the moment her shadow touched it.
She stood in a drowse among the new ironwoods, still pretending. The sun had got into her. Damn near all morning, she had gone without thinking of her thirst. Something miraculous had happened while she slept to make it seem as matter-of-fact as breathing. She was slow and warm, and glad now that Toby had delayed her going into town. She could take less frenzied stock of matters. That Emmett was three days late returning from Cumberland with water was not so unusual. He could be no later than this evening, and there was a little water yet in the rainbarrel to last until then. Nor was it unusual to find Rob and Dolan’s beds empty. They had managed to pack up in the dark and make their way to the printhouse, as they often did, without waking her. As soon as she had put Toby’s fears to rest, she would ride into town with their lunch—the long way, calm and unhurried. She might even feel brave enough to stop by Desma’s place and pick up the elk steaks, after all. Call on Harlan, perhaps, and see if the Sheriff’s day was slow-going.
“There’s nothing up here, Tobe.”
“You ain’t gone but ten yards.”
“Toby.” He wouldn’t look at her. “When do you figure I can turn back? Once I’m snake-bit? What’ll you do then, all alone, and your brothers way out in town?” She had drifted somehow into trying to coax a smile out of him. “You gone throw your mama over your shoulder, carry her all the way back up the draw by yourself?”
His voice was ruinously sad. “That’s all right, Mama. Please come back.”
She went on. Stowaway burrs dimpled her hem. She climbed the narrowing trail to its first hairpin, where the undergrowth lay flattened over the path. A huge, brown grasshopper sailed from stalk to stalk, becoming a distant rustle. Some twenty yards above her, snags of moss were outspread across the brush. As sun-burnished and red as the dead girl she and Emmett had dragged out of a cave down in the hollow their first summer here. Kindling crisp. In the places where her muscle had dried out, the skin had stiffened and dented. A thatch of orange moss, just like this, capped her skull. No sign of how she’d got there, though Emmett had notioned she must have crawled in to get away from the heat and never crawled out. Grinning to herself for a hundred years—or a thousand, they hadn’t been able to tell.
“There’s nothing, Tobe.”
Below, her son was back to frowning at the bank. “Don’t it look—well—cloven to you, Mama?”
“No.” She watched him. “Why would it?”
He shrugged a little, but his real concerns were finally loose now, and there was no pretending otherwise. Interest in cloven hooves, like every other recent absurdity, could only point back to Josie, Emmett’s ward and occult cousin.
“Pig hooves are cloven,” Nora said. “Remember what those look like?”
“I don’t hardly.”
Nora held up two fingers. “They leave a trail like moth wings.” She went back down to him, and they looked at the red mud together. “It’s not cloven, Tobe. No matter what Josie’s been putting in your head.”
“She ain’t putting nothing.”
“Well she certainly isn’t helping your elocution.”
All the way back along the creekbed, the empty bucket clanked against his thigh. His free hand was stuffed in his pocket, out of her reach.
BACK AT THE TOP OF the gulch, Toby stopped. “Where’s the dogs, Mama?”
She was hot and out of breath, and she didn’t know. But his question had finally flushed out the strange sense of absence that had goaded her all morning. It wasn’t just that the boys had already fared off, or that Emmett’s ongoing delay had forced her to brace for yet another wretched, waterless day. No, there had been something else, too, something under or around it all, and now it struck her: the dogs. The dogs were gone—four of them, possibly five if that old amorous one had survived his latest dalliance with whatever coyote bitch had most recently turned his head. Their din—feral and ungovernable as they were, sounding off from every corner of the farm at every hour of the day, and driving Emmett to empty threats of execution—was her constant companion, and in its absence stretched a stillness so vast the small music of the grasses could not rise to fill it.
“The boys must have taken them,” Nora said.
“Where?”
She thought about it. “Hunting?”
For the first time all day, Toby laughed. “Mama,” he said. “How silly.”
He went on ahead of her toward the house. It sat against the bluff with the melted sun in its windows and a black cloud—the telltale sign of Josie’s fried eggs on the make—sieving through every crack around the door. Of late, Nora had found herself envisioning what might become of the place when the Larks, too, finally played out. When Rob, his patience overdrawn, finally joined some northbound cattle drive; and Dolan lucked into an apprenticeship—perhaps, with God’s mercy, under the benevolent hand of some patient judge; and Emmett inevitably got his way, abandoned the newspaper, and bundled Nora and Toby and his ancient mother into the wagon and set course for his next venture in some nameless camp, if there still existed such a thing in this world. The house would fall silent. Mice, having prospected every last crumb, would nest in the eaves. Rattlesnakes would follow. The scrub oaks, with their thirsty roots, would wander down the hill, creeping, by and by, over the jackfence and over Evelyn’s little headstone and down toward the outbuildings. The yard would go to seed, all those hard-fought grasses returning in their prickly mats to outman the descendants of Nora’s cabbages. Perhaps a late summer storm might blow the barn down. Perhaps a prickly pear, small and round, would begin its slow ascent through the floor in one of the downstairs rooms. Soon some quiet autumn evening would find the farm just another massif of slanted roofs, and the lightless windows would draw some desperate neighbor to probe their well, as she and Emmett had done when the Floreses—Rodrigo and Selma, and Toby’s little friend Valeria—had pulled up stakes last year without warning. Gone without goodbye, in the custom of surrender.
Watching Emmett stand in the Floreses’ dusty foreyard and guess how long their well had been dry had been bad enough—but then came the greater mistake of going into the house, where a host of small heartbreaks lay waiting. The beds all made up. Boxes of old cards and letters still in the drawers. Pictures left by the front door because they had obviously been considered, deemed too frivolous or heavy, and jettisoned on the porch. The silence that overwhelmed Nora and Emmett in that house had lasted through their evening chores and followed them to bed, where they had nevertheless set about each other with uncharacteristic vigor. Some hours later, sleepless despite her exhaustion, Nora had watched Emmett raise himself from their twisted blanket and balance on the windowsill to reach the ledge high above their headboard.
“What’s got into you?”
“You’ll see,” Emmett said. He was still unclothed and a little out of breath. He worked a nail loose and began scratching something into the wood.
“What are you writing?”
He surprised her with a smile that shed ten years from his eyes. “Emmett, Nora, and their boys lived and were happy here.”
“What ab
out Evelyn?” she’d wanted to ask—for sure enough, Evelyn was already in her ear, muttering: Yes! What about me? She sounded more incredulous than hurt, which was fitting for a seventeen-year-old girl—as she would have been, as Nora imagined her. Seventeen and incredulous and asking a not-unreasonable question: What about her? Hadn’t she, too, once lived in this house? Hadn’t she gone on living in it, persisting as she did in Nora’s imagination? And if she’d been a real spirit, rather than the imagined manifestation of their long-dead child, would the decampment Emmett now seemed to be planning not leave her to haunt this place, horribly and unimaginably alone?
Over the last year this idea had grown in Nora, and its growth had crept between them somehow, like ice between planks. Perhaps, if she had mentioned it to Emmett that night, this would not have happened. But Emmett had seemed at such blissful remove, so pleased and absorbed by his scribbling, that Nora couldn’t bring herself to pierce him with such questions. Instead, she had drawn the covers around her chin. “That’s a fine glut of nonsense, Mister Lark.”
“I reckon it’s a damn lovely truth,” he said. “We should remind ourselves of it more often.”
It was so unlike him to be this extravagantly wistful. There was no recourse save to tease him. “I’m sure you’re not writing one damn thing, Mister Lark.”
“Of course I am.”
“Well, if you are I’ll bet you’re only writing ‘in this house, Emmett Lark brooked a lot of nonsense from his wife, God help his soul.’ ”
“Here, look for yourself, if you don’t believe me.” She let him help her up, but even standing on tiptoe brought her nowhere near eye-level of the ledge. She persisted in teasing him about it. In the intervening months, whenever some quarrel erupted between them, or he disappeared like this, she became more and more convinced he hadn’t written anything there at all.
What a thing to say—“Emmett, Nora, and their boys lived and were happy here.” Well, the living could not be denied. But she doubted whether any of them could stand before the court of heaven and truthfully lay claim to happiness.
Except Toby, of course. The eerier and more inhospitable a place, the happier he seemed. There he was in the foreyard, cheerfully waving her down.
“Look!” he cried. “Gramma’s escaped again!”
Emmett’s mother, Missus Harriet, sat on the front porch with her face tipped sunward. Her wheelchair—older than the Territory, and on loan to them from Doc Almenara for so long Nora figured they must own it by now—had truly disintegrated into something monstrous. Cane curls fanned out from its wicker back in all directions. Where they met the fingers of whoever happened to be pushing it, they drew blood. The huge, rusted forewheels gave the whole conveyance the look of some bedraggled survivor of Pharaoh’s army. Its present charioteer—sixty now, perhaps a little older, and still the battle-ax she’d been when she came to them from Kansas—had been immobilized two years ago by a stroke. Robbed, if not of her appetites and aversions, at least of the means to voice them.
Toby backed the old woman carefully into the kitchen, where Josie was prodding a skillet of pulverized corncakes in the midst of the usual bedlam: charred eggs and smoke; the wide-flung oven belching still more heat into the kitchen. Two breads, left to rise overnight, had burst out of their pans like dancehall girls leaning over the rail. The sight of them sent a bolt of panic through Nora. She had mixed them last night in the grip of optimism, still listening for Emmett’s wheels on the drive—still counting on all the things water would allow, a long drink and laundry, perhaps even a bath—and now here they sat: two bloated mistakes that had brought the entire household not one, but two, cups closer to the bottom of the bucket.
Not yet seven in the morning, and already she was shouting at Josie.
“Didn’t I tell you get that bread baked?” In one swift motion, the girl threw the pans in the oven and kicked the door shut. “And didn’t I tell you never leave Missus Harriet out on the porch? People die sundrowned here.”
Josie looked aghast. “I’d never leave her, ma’am—she must’ve escaped again.”
“Don’t lie, goddamn it.”
“She keeps doing it, Mama,” Toby put in. “She manages it somehow when nobody’s looking.”
“Lies cut holes in the fabric of Heaven, Toby, and make all the little angels fall out.”
“So does saying ‘goddamn.’ ”
“Look.” Her mother-in-law’s face was beginning to glow around the furrows. “She’s sunstruck.”
Josie bustled in to wipe the old lady’s brow. “May I give her some water?”
“I suppose you’ll have to.”
“You mustn’t keep getting away from me, Missus Harriet.” Her anxious little face was stern. “You’ll get me in Dutch.”
The dram of water she measured out mercifully hadn’t reduced the bucket by much—there was still enough to cover the bottom of the ladle, enough for a small drink, perhaps for everyone, perhaps even Nora herself.
“How much is there left in the springhouse?”
“I hardly know, ma’am.”
“Well don’t be giving her any more until you find out!”
Josie hurried into her hat. She was “that sorry, ma’am”—she was always that sorry, and there were countless transgressions to be that sorry for. Josie had the hazel eyes and broad forehead of Emmett’s far-flung Scots kin. Her cheeks and throat were scattershot with freckles that flared an obscene pink after half a second in the sun. A triad of clefts fissured the bridge of her nose whenever she was under duress, and Nora was beginning to feel sorry for these hardworking lines. They might as well stake up for keeps for all the rest they got between admonitions.
Passing Toby in the corridor, the girl grazed a hand over his bristly head. He seized at her and said in what he thought was a whisper: “Mama don’t think the tracks are cloven. They don’t strike her as tracks at all.”
Josie stooped down to him. Dark lines laddered the back of her dress—a rare sign of mortality, Josie sweating. Born of woman after all. “How do they strike you?” she said. She, too, thought she was whispering. She thought Nora couldn’t see the small shrug of Toby’s shoulders, or the way Josie’s hair met his stubbled little forehead.
“They’re tracks,” said Toby.
“Well, then, that’s so. What we see with our hearts is often far truer than what we see with our eyes.”
Having wafted this profundity, Josie took her leave. Her ridiculous hat, crowned with turgid burlap sunflowers, presented almost too great a temptation when it came bobbing by the window moments later. It could be dislodged with the mere flinging of a shutter. But then the hat’s occupant might be knocked down or, given Nora’s luck, knocked out. And the day would fall to waste: confusion, reproach, water wasted on cleaning her up, hours wasted on summoning the doctor, tears wasted on patching up that pale forehead. And hadn’t they all had their fill of stitches last night?
Nora resumed her calculations. There were two, perhaps two and a half cups of water left in here. Filling at least one bladder in town and boiling a little more from the rainbarrel would restore the bucket to almost half-depth. They had gotten by on less all day. For now, she had only to go on resisting thirst herself—a feat more easily managed when she was not watching others drink.
Perhaps inevitably, Toby came in frowning. “I’m thirsty.”
“Want some water?”
“No, Mama. I know you’re awful worried.”
“There’s a drop of coffee left.”
He made a face. “It’s two days old!”
He stood on tiptoe anyway and peered into the kettle.
“Are we square about those tracks, Tobe?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Toby.”
“Well, Pa would believe me.”
Of this, she had no doubt. “Why not show him when he gets ba
ck?”
“Dolan says he ain’t ever coming back.”
He clapped the coffeepot shut and began thumbing hunks of corncake apart, one for himself, one for Gramma. Whatever nascent glimmer of forgiveness Nora had been brooding since the previous night dissipated. No amount of entreaty or admonition could make the boys understand that careless talk could not be had around Toby. Nothing escaped him. He was always listening, always mulling—especially when he appeared not to be. A perceptive child, she’d told them, casting about for a diplomatic way to put it—perceptive. Yes, more perceptive than any of them: more perceptive than Papa; more than Josie; more even than Dolan, who by his own esteem was the very paragon of perceptiveness, declared himself perceptive in the way of Greek poets, really, capable of perceiving for the county, and happy to tell you all about it. Well here was the harvest of their ongoing underestimation of their little brother: he had overheard last night’s racket. In frightening him, it had naturally resurrected all the other things he found frightening, with cloven hooves, and all the devilry they bespoke, right in the vanguard.
“Missus Lark!” She was in such froth she almost failed to notice the premature return of Josie’s hat, which shot past the window again and reappeared moments later in the doorway—with Josie wilding under it. “Missus Lark! Something’s got into the springhouse.”
“THERE.” JOSIE TUGGED AT HER arm. “You see?”
The springhouse crouched in a copse of scrub oaks at the far end of the yard, but nothing was visible for all the branches, save a glimpse of light-stippled tin Nora supposed must be the roof, and a sliver of door, which jawed a little on its hinges, first this way, then that, clattering faintly where it slapped back off the jamb.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, ma’am. Something’s stuck the door.”
“Well is it man or”—she veered at the last possible moment—“animal?”
But it was too late. “Beast,” Toby said. He had gone very still in the tangle of Josie’s arms, his whole mien more reminiscent of some thunderstruck little dime-novel urchin than a real child now, all of which deepened Nora’s unease into irritation.
