by Téa Obreht
“Between the pair of you,” she said, “we might as well be living on Herschel’s moon.”
She seized the shotgun from behind the kitchen door and crossed the yard, sunblind. Two agonizing courses of sweat had begun to race down her ribs. She could feel each distinctly, and really smell herself besides, a needless reminder of how long this entire household had gone unlaundered.
The springhouse was a hopeless early construction: an adobe half-dome that had supported a succession of failing roofs before Emmett finally settled on this ill-fitted tin sheeting that all but defeated the structure’s purpose. The door, which came into view as she rounded the huerta, was indeed open. There was something lodged in the jamb. She couldn’t quite make it out. But from here, it looked like a boot.
“Hullo?” She cocked the hammer. “Come out slow, you’re stood down.”
It would turn out to be a man, of course. Trespassers never failed to be. Women—even the Indian ones—were good enough to come by the front door. Roughnecks, on the other hand, were only ever surprised in transgression: sleeping in the barn loft, or breaking for the woods with an armful of eggs or—once—forcibly accosting one of Nora’s sheep. Time and time again, she had managed to keep her voice firm and her aim steady, knowing all the while that she was more afraid of these bummers than they were of her—a truth made glaring on the single occasion of Rob’s encountering one such drifter. A smallish man with a mustache so dirty it appeared almost green, he had emerged from the wreckage of their henhouse and stood staring at Nora with sullen, impassive eyes, and then advanced as though the shotgun she pointed at him were a fistful of flowers. But when Rob burst, hollering, from somewhere behind her, how that ugly little bastard had lit out! She’d never seen a fella so small take such bounding strides.
This, however, was different. Rob was not here. He was in town. He would not be putting in a sudden, timely appearance to rout this sonbitch. It was just herself now, and the gun—which she prayed had not been discharged since she’d last checked it—and the owner of whatever footwear her springhouse door was thumping against.
She tried again. “You’ll find nothing to rob here.” And then: “I can fix you a meal if you’ll only come out.”
Desma would be tickled by this ruse. Town stories had it that a dusty badman had shambled in off the flats one roasting afternoon and surprised Desma in the act of washing her linens. The roughneck was ball-jointed and thin as a cur, and looked like whatever had happened to him out there in the desert had been a hell of his own making. So when he fell to his knees and begged for a drink, Desma just said, “Hold up—can’t you see I’m on my way through something? You just wait one goddamn minute while I finish what I’m doing, mister, and then you’ll have my attention.” And went right on slapping her sheets against the washboard until the roughneck slumped over and died. “It weren’t my intent to kill him,” was all she had to say in the aftermath, “but I only had that last bit of water I needed to finish up the washing, and he didn’t frankly look like the caliber of man you’d waste spit on.”
But even the promise of sustenance did not prompt this enigmatic obstruction to budge from the springhouse door. Minutes went by. Nora shielded her eyes and looked back toward the porch. Josie still had her son strangleheld in the shade.
There was nothing left to do but go forward. A few more steps brought the object to view: not a boot after all, but a leather cinch of some kind, worn as hell, though ordinary enough, and wedged sideways so that its buckle caught the light. She nudged the door with her foot, and a triangle of sun yawned across the springhouse floor. She took in the unremarkable shambles of the place—the hooked sausages in slow, perpetual rotation, the tins crammed along the rear shelf, the jerking motes that cohered finally into flies—and for a moment nothing seemed out of place. Then a sour blast of whiskey and rot gusted at her, and she saw: sometime in the night, the shelf nearest the door had been dislodged, and an avalanche of bottles and jars had met their demise on the ground.
Before her eye found the rainbarrel, she saw its lid on the floor, and knew, without seeing, that it was on its side.
Before it lay the carcass of some small, desiccated bird.
The water, Mama, Evelyn said. It’s gone.
THE SIGHT OF HER TEARING out of the springhouse took them both by surprise—but they scattered all the same. Nora was only fast enough to manage a single swipe at the hem of Toby’s shirt before he sprang out of reach and scrambled up the porch.
“Come here,” she said.
“I can’t see, Mama.” He hovered, glaring reproachfully down at her. His bad eye flitted like a jarred moth. It never seemed to do this when he wasn’t being asked to account for some grave mistake.
“That latch was wide open. Weren’t you meant to lock up last night?”
He shook his head. “Josie was.”
But Josie, too, had already flown out of reach. “I latched it, ma’am,” she called from across the yard. “I know I did.”
Of course. It had been Josie sent out for whiskey last night after Dolan’s overwrought suppertime eruption. An odd, appalling moment that needn’t have happened if he had just left off badgering Nora about his father for once—if he’d given up bewailing how long Papa had been gone, and that Nora seemed angrier about the lack of water than what folks were saying in town about Papa and the Sanchez boys and the suspicious wagon, and all the rest of that overcooked nonsense, till eventually he was shouting. He’d called Nora—what? Unseeing and foolhardy. “I see you’ve learnt some new words,” Nora shot back, pleased with how readily the reply had come to her, at least for a brief, triumphant moment. “Unseeing and foolhardy,” Dolan had said again, of her—and then put his fist through the door. It was so absurd she would have laughed if she hadn’t been laughing already. But then his knuckles turned out to have been rutted to the bone, and the entire household found itself rooted stupidly there in the gloaming of his rage. It struck her that leaving Dolan to twist in mangled distress might caution any onlookers against similar displays. But then her sympathies got the better of her. This was Dolan, after all. More taken aback than anyone by his own outburst. Welling with confusion and what turned out to be a great deal of blood. So out Josie went for the whiskey, and the rest of the evening had devolved into the candlelit stitching of flesh.
Perhaps it was inevitable that some part of Josie’s already tenuous judgment should lapse in all that confusion. But no, Josie insisted. She had locked the door, ma’am. Last year’s run-in with that bear had righted her for good, cured her of assuming any doors were fastened or windows latched. She was real careful about locking up now. She could remember the feel of the bolt against her fingers. Yes, yes she could. In the lifeless air of the springhouse, she raised her fist as though it still held the evidence that might exonerate her.
Nora gave her a little shove toward the rainbarrel. “Then how did this happen?”
“God preserve us, Missus Lark.”
“We will need His preservation now more than ever, Josie, since we hardly seem capable of preserving ourselves.”
She could picture it so clearly: the door creaking on its hinges all night, tempting the dogs, who were always prodding and scrounging around anyway, to nose it open and down the rainbarrel trying to water—like every other damn thing in this drought—and then flee to wherever they were currently waiting out their masters’ retribution.
“Goddamn, Josie, but what a mess.”
“I did lock it!”
“Don’t lie.”
“I did, ma’am. I know I did.”
“Then account for this. Did the dogs hop up on each others’ shoulders, circus-like, and unbolt the door? Or did I go sleepwalking and open it myself?”
“I really don’t know, ma’am.”
“Perhaps your ‘lost man’ left it open to spite you, then.”
She felt, before the
words even left her tongue, the cruelty of conjuring this particular apparition. But it was too late now. She was rewarded with having to watch Josie’s face tighten into a rictus of misery. “I beg your pardon, ma’am—but it’s just plain wrong to hoot at the other living.”
An uneasy silence lengthened out. “I only mean to say: this is not an act of Providence, Josie. The door was left unlocked.”
Toby was crouching over the dead bird—a windhover, perhaps, or some other insubstantial raptor—so close that his nose might brush at any moment against its dry, flattened skull.
“Leave off that thing.”
“Don’t you think it’s some sort of omen, Mama?”
“Certainly—of our worsening prospects.” There was a crust of something in her hair, just above the nape of her neck, and she scratched at it until her nails came away pink. “That was the very end of our supply. Josie—do you understand?”
At last, Josie did. You could always tell a Damascus moment was upon her when her hands went to her forehead. “Almighty God, Missus Lark—the water! I am just that sorry.”
Now commenced a drawn-out treatise, of which Nora absorbed very little. She was thinking gloomily of the depleted kitchen bucket. She was thinking, too, suddenly and viscerally, of her mother, and the gusto with which Ellen Francis Volk had committed herself to the thrashing of servant girls. Whatever solace her mother seemed to find in throwing these sapling women over her knee had mystified Nora—until now. Now, she understood perfectly that her mother’s rage—a twisting, gasping, biting thing, indigenous to the Reilly women of her maternal line—must have loosened a little as the girls’ bare bottoms and her own hand turned the same blistering shade of red. Nora could well imagine herself in the teeth of that impulse. But she could remember, too clearly, witnessing this punishment, feeling her own face tickle until it had contorted into a kind of hysterical awe, laughing and crying in simultaneous horror of the executioner and sympathy for the condemned. None of that could happen here—not with Toby standing by, pretending to study the ground but listening, all the while, to every detail of Josie’s protestation. Which was winding down now, thank God, for Josie seemed to have got herself into a knot. “What I mean, ma’am, is that I can’t imagine how I could have left it open, since I remember my own hand on the latch. I do. But—if I did ma’am, if that happened to happen, I am that sorry. I suppose you’d be right in telling me that I should have gone out to make certain, but I didn’t think of it. And even if I’d thought of it—well—I doubt you would’ve let me, ma’am.”
Let her? Nora didn’t understand. “Why on earth not?”
“Well—it had fallen dark.”
“And?” She glanced back at the house. It was, at most, thirty yards. Hardly the Panama crossing. She turned around just in time to catch a guilty exchange of glances between her youngest and her ward disintegrating like the tail of a comet. “Why wouldn’t I let you, Josie?”
“Well, ma’am,” Josie said. “On account of the beast.”
AT THE TOP OF THE drive, nora found herself turning to look right down the empty road. An old habit, frustratingly revived since the Floreses’ flight had made the Lark place, once more, the northernmost habitation for miles. The last known point before the page went blank. Then she spurred old Bill left and rode toward town along the canyon road. It was just coming on fall, and the valley was making a brilliant spectacle of its own death. Yellow detonations stood like signal fires above the subducted creeks where the cottonwoods, at least, had managed to find water.
Toby had vowed to have the springhouse righted by the time she returned, and Nora had left it at that. It was enough for now—any further sanctioning would fall to Emmett, who could always be counted on to mete out the crushing blow of his disappointment. Nora would stay out of it. She had gone too far already in barbing Josie about the lost man—though she would not, now or later, be cowed into making amends for having done so, no matter how the boys felt about it. The most recent of Josie’s apparitions, the lost man was naturally likewise the most tiresome. He had manifested on the ridge some weeks previous as a hollow, lingering redness that closed around Josie and stopped her picking any more of the season’s last piñon. “I had to flee home right away,” she had announced rather tremulously to the entire kitchen. “But I can’t say he didn’t follow me.”
Dolan, ever the first to take her at her word, sprang to his feet and made a big show of looking out the door. “Did he mean you harm?”
Josie was already wilting into a chair and reaching for a cup of water—an unnecessarily generous one—outheld by Rob. “No. But he did fill me with sorrow. He don’t know where he is at all.”
An interminable, wasted afternoon’s interrogation revealed that Josie had no sense of the lost man’s aspect or intentions, nor the nature of his demise. She knew only that he was not gone for good. Talking of nothing else for days did little to steel her for his return—which surprised her, quite conveniently, while she was clearing snakes’ nests from the overgrowth at the top of the claim. Josie was mid-swing when she felt him arrive. Into the bushes went her machete. Down went Josie, face-first into the thickets, hurrying to make contact. As Nora understood this carry-on—which she had personally witnessed once or twice, usually at parties when revelers pickled enough to welcome a bit of nonsense had goaded Josie to reach across the great divide to their dead kin—séance involved a great deal of singsong and mumbling. But it was the hand-holding where Nora’s belief ran aground—for whose hand did Josie hold when she was all by herself?
“Perhaps if we went out with you,” Nora said, “and stood around in a circle, morning and noon, you might induce him to reveal his desires.”
As this had earned her a look of general outrage from every man in the room, Nora had kept all further suggestions to herself. And in any case, the lost man had not returned since.
“No doubt he will reappear the first instant she is tasked with something more arduous than sewing,” Nora had concluded a week later, climbing into bed.
Emmett shook his head. “It’s a wonder to me that you can be so taken in by Rey Ruiz’s water-witching, and yet treat our poor Josie with nothing but contempt.”
The comparison was absurd. Rey Ruiz had made a science of divining water. Perhaps his implements were a bit crude—but willow sticks aside, he was more reliable than any cloud massing in the distance. Countless people owed their livelihoods to his proficiency at reading sign.
Josie, on the other hand, had been born to absolute chicanery. She was the daughter of Emmett’s cousin Martha and the mesmerist Reverend Kincaid, whose five other wives she had grown up likewise calling “mother.” As Nora understood it, Josie was the only child of that entire dubious coven and the sole heritor of the Reverend’s celestial gifts. These withdrawn, enigmatic people extorted money from nitwits in a dark house on Mott Street. All their séance and card reading and divination, however, had failed to predict the typhus outbreak to which they succumbed within days of each other when Josie was but thirteen. Alone in the world, Josie found herself the custodian of a ramshackle townhouse and all its attendant debts. She refused to set foot outside. For a few lean years, she performed readings by mail, and in this manner struck up a correspondence with a certain Mister George A. Hamill of San Francisco. Friendly letters quickly turned to betrothal. But he, being a gentleman, insisted that such a union be superintended by the appropriate parties: in this case, Miss Claver’s Heart & Hand Club, which connected Atlantic State brides with reputable men of the West. The necessary arrangements had somehow managed to cost Josie her remaining inheritance—which disappeared, along with Miss Claver, all evidence of her Heart & Hand Club, and Mister George A. Hamill himself—while Josie was writing verse about the landscape on a train somewhere east of Cheyenne.
These facts had been remitted to the Larks in a long letter from Emmett’s sister, Lenore, the day Emmett brought Josie hom
e from the Prescott station. Lenore was raising cattle and eight children on the Powder River, and her patience with Josie had played out. The girl was, in her words, “a gentle soul.” But Lenore’s husband preached the gospel. He did not think it fitting to tolerate communion with spirits under his roof. The loss of more than half his herd to a calamitous winter was as plain a sign from the Almighty as he needed. Josie would have to live elsewhere.
Nora had looked up from six crammed pages of Lenore’s atrocious penmanship to see Emmett smiling sheepishly at her. He drummed his hat. “We can scarcely turn away another pair of hands,” he whispered. “And I thought—well. I thought you might like a girl about the place.”
You have a girl about the place, Evelyn huffed in her ear.
Dwarfed by hat and carpetbag, and managing, by virtue of her pinched face, to look simultaneously anxious and contented, Josie Kincaid had hovered in the corridor like the chaff of some sad dream.
The sight of her filled Nora with dread. But Emmett was already seizing on her silence. “At least we’ll have spared her from the whorehouse. Can there be any doubt it’s where she would have ended up, had she made San Francisco?”
“You always were a soft touch for lost causes.”
Josie’s demerits manifested right away. Six months with Lenore in Wyoming had done little to harden her up for country life. She slept lightly, ate little, and swooned often. Ordinary ranch implements confounded her. She was likelier to use a hammer the wrong than the right way around. She had an aversion to killing anything, especially mice, which she caught and freed in the evening fields with the help of Dolan—who laid eyes on her, decided that theirs was a love preordained, and quickly became the world’s most knowledgeable and benevolent mouser. Her belief in the oracular power of birds enkindered her at once to Toby, who took to following her around as if she had just stepped forth from some storybook. Churning around in Josie’s mind was an almanac of tincture remedies, Oriental magic, occult notions, absurd natural histories—especially those detailing the monstrous lizards unearthed by Cope and Marsh—all of which she talked ceaselessly about, making household rides into Amargo unbearable.
