by Téa Obreht
But the girl was not entirely without use. For one thing, she talked to Gramma. Not in the way an ordinary person might address an invalid—which, during her lifetime, Nora had learned was similar to the way most people might address a dog—but conversationally: with accommodating syntax, pauses to allow for Gramma’s imagined reply. You’d round the corner to find Josie and Gramma in the kitchen, sphinxlike, locked eye to eye in wordless confab. Afterwards, Josie might say, “Missus Harriet don’t like the look of the garden this year. Says there’s not enough rain in the world to save them cabbages.” And for all of Nora’s aggravation, the old lady would seem a little more smug in her armored chair. A little more present. This was the sole, undeniable boon of Josie’s tenure: she kept the old lady’s cogs turning.
Owing to Gramma’s age, however, Nora had begun to suspect that this was a gift compromised by its connection to Josie’s cardinal power: communion with the dead.
The dead, whom Josie called the “other living,” were apparently everywhere. They announced themselves to her in town; on the road; at church. Their sentiments were revealed to her abruptly and unbearably. She might be riding along, content enough, and suddenly find herself so dismal that she would double over and whisper: “I feel a lonely girl here.” And then whosoever happened to have the misfortune of accompanying her would be obliged to stand there while Josie felt around for this unmoored soul with her mind, sometimes for hours.
This unwelcome eccentricity was further poisoned by the fact that the dead seemed outnumbered only by living affiliates who wished to commune with them. Word of a clairvoyant at the Lark place had gone roaring through town the instant the girl arrived. To Nora’s provocation, visitors began appearing on her porch with pies and pan dulce and other neighborly tributes. They lingered for hours, bashfully sidling up to the subject—could the mistress of the house possibly be persuaded, oh would she ever be so kind as to consider asking Josie to summon a brother, a mother, some friend long-deceased?
“Not in this house,” was Nora’s general position.
But Emmett was giving. Emmett was curious. Emmett was determined to see the girl in her element. “The Paloma House has offered to host a séance,” he told Nora.
“Now what on earth would possess Moss Riley to do a thing like that?”
“I believe he has some words for a cousin who passed on while Moss still owed him money. And God knows he needs the business.”
“I’m not sure crowding his parlor with imaginary ghosts will bring the throngs back to Amargo.”
But crowd his parlor with imaginary ghosts was exactly what Moss Riley did: first in April, and then again in June. Soon enough, Emmett found himself escorting Josie to town for séance every other Thursday. He would sit against the parlor wall while the lamps were dimmed and the curtains drawn, and watch the candlelit faces of Ash River prominents in their haunted evening finery: the new mayor’s new wife; the schoolmaster; even the daughter of one of the Stock Association bigmen. They had come all the way back to Amargo to mill nervously in the creaking ruin of the Paloma House Hotel and make their peace. One after another, they outlaid their regrets to Josie. The mayor’s wife had lost a sister in childhood. She longed to explain that she had not intended all those small, daily cruelties that sisters visit upon each other, and for which she’d thought she would have a lifetime to atone. Jack Turner was after a lost compatriot from Gettysburg; he wanted to confess that despite promises to return the dead soldier’s journals to the mother who mourned him, he had failed to do so and sent only a letter, and was awful regretful of this lapse now that he was getting too far along in years to travel anymore. And so on and so forth.
More intriguing to Emmett than even the details of these confessions was Josie’s occasional, staggering accuracy about intensely private matters: childhood endearments, deathbed confessions. And then there were the sourceless rappings that sometimes erupted around the room while she was in the thick of her visions. Emmett was not too prideful to admit that, having approached the whole thing with an air of skeptical curiosity—either Josie was the genuine article, or he would uncover the means by which she got up to her tricks—he was surprised to find himself still casting about for a conclusion six months later.
Complaining to Desma Ruiz about it, Nora had said: “Emmett started out thinking he would play Seybert to Josie’s Fox: trick her into an admission of fraudulence and write it all up for the Sentinel.” She put down her cup of tea. “But now here we are: he’s all but ready to declare her holy.”
If there was one person whose disdain of spiritualist practices exceeded Nora’s own, it was Desma.
“Want me to try the girl’s mettle? I could call down to Amargo next Thursday and ask after my dead husband. Ask her: Do you see a short, bearded bummer, wearing a stolen shirt and sporting a gambler’s bullet in his skull? And will he tell you where he hid all that money he stole from me?”
She had meant her first husband, Robert Gris; her current one, Rey, a smiling colossus of a man, had been standing behind her, still very much alive—at least for the time being.
Rey said: “If she does manage to summon up that sonbitch, make sure and ask him if it’s hot enough where he is now.”
“Rey,” Desma said testily.
His hand vanished among her curls. “Don’t reckon the dead can hear me, Desma. And if they can, so—they’re well warned of the company they’re keeping. Robert Gris was a sonbitch.”
Week after week, Emmett and Josie clattered off together, side by side in the dray: he falsely somber but humming with excitement; she veiled in taffeta like some tragic widow in a play, clutching her planchette in its black velvet box.
The bereaved came and went, thinning out until only the guiltiest remained. And all the while, not a word praising or condemning the whole absurd pantomime appeared in the Sentinel.
Then April came, and—as the old folks put it—Rey woke up dead.
Doc Almenara declared that Rey’s heart had simply given out. It was a surprise to all, though it should not have been: Rey had been tall enough to stoop coming through any door in the county, tall enough to pluck stranded children from trees. The Reverend Miles, who had tolerated all the furor around Josie in staid dismay, used the opportunity of Rey’s burial to point out that there were fewer people assembled here—“to send to God a very fine man, a pillar of the community, the finest Mexican who ever lived”—than there had been at the Paloma House on any given Thursday in months.
“I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” Nora told Emmett afterwards. “You’ve managed to abet Josie in upstaging the church.”
“I can think of no better way to honor Rey. He would have preferred séance over service.”
“How can you bear to have us affiliated with a hoaxer?”
“Darling, whether her powers are real or not, Josie is a true believer. She doesn’t think she’s hoaxing anybody. There’s not an ounce of harm in her.”
“There’s plenty of harm in telling people she can talk to their dead.”
He folded his arms. “Don’t you talk to Evelyn?”
She had not expected to feel so wounded—but then she had not expected him to sound so gleeful in catching her out, either. He was only aware of her furtive confabs with their dead daughter because Nora had confessed to them in an agitated state, at the very edge of sleep, some distant night when Emmett had returned from town so maudlin with Christmas punch she’d believed him incapable of retaining a single word she said. “She was only just beginning to laugh,” he’d whispered through unexpected tears. “How I miss her.” It had felt safe, even necessary, to tell him how that laugh had grown and changed with the girl she still imagined roaming this house.
That he had remembered after all, and could now bring himself to fling it at her in defense of Josie, blew through her like cold rain.
“That,” she managed, “is not
the same thing.”
THERE WAS STILL NO ONE else on the road when she climbed up out of the valley to the last stretch of hardpan, and urged her horse to the edge of the Cortez aguaje. It was a brackish tank, near-empty now and tenanted by a few stranded frogs that peered up at her from the mud. Once, in a summer almost as dry as this one, Nora had carried this brown mire home and the boys had rigged up a sieving line with nothing but two buckets and a silk scarf they’d begged her to sacrifice for this purpose. “Trust me, Mama,” Dolan had said, small and newly spectacled, humming with the prospect of replicating a trick he’d read about. “Silk’ll work best.” It had been a miraculous transformation to watch: the steady fall of the loam in one bucket, the rise of clear water in the other, like a single, interminably drawn-out exchange of breath. “See?” Dolan had said. But that had been years ago. Any surface water she’d passed these recent weeks was true mud, thick and still, fit for nothing but sucking down your boots. No amount of alchemy or patience could turn it into water. There was so much silt in the aguaje now that even Bill wouldn’t drink. He just stood there dripping foam, looking dazedly around. Still. She could give it a try.
No. It would not come to that. Emmett was likely back at the house by now. And if night should fall to find him further delayed—well. Surely someone would come along. She looked around. Save for the blinding white arses of a couple of antelope bouncing away, the flat lay empty in all directions.
Whoever had thought to instate a watering hole in this spot could not have been a woman. It was impossible to linger here without feeling observed. The goblin barrens rose up on either side of the path ahead: bulbous gnomons; knotted terraces; wedge-headed hoodoos, each a narrows into some otherworld. Eastern dudes were known to pay good money to be brought through here and stand around in their frills, trying to guess where, in this maze of stone, some outlaw or another had laired in the old days.
This seemed to be the place to fall out with other men. The boys had come home as recently as last week covered in this telltale red dust, and waved her off when she pressed them about it, telling her the matter was “settled.” There was finality to this summation, a tone that suggested no further inquiry would be suffered—which, of course, only infuriated her. They had taken to cordoning off their affairs, whispering, veering into Spanish when they heard her step in the hallway, as if she were some enemy, and not the woman who had rubbed nettle tea on their pustule-cratered chins for years, or caught them eating elk velvet in a misguided attempt to gain a few inches of height.
All her boys had augured themselves in this valley. Rob—her son through and through, bullheaded and quick-tempered, beloved abroad and withdrawn at home—was a wild and unheeding child of the silver camps. In the eerie, misshapen stones of this valley, he had recognized what he most loved of the world. Today, this rock might resemble the Green River railhead; tomorrow, a buffalo—shapes he had pursued through dime novels and eventually recaptured, many years later, in the wood carvings for which he had become known. For a long time now, she had tried to resign herself to the inevitability of losing him to the life that called out to him. Grassland days and starlit nights. Printhouse apprenticeship ran contrary to his every longing. That kind of work—precise, bookish, slow to glory—came more naturally to Dolan, whom the goblin barrens had presented with the first opportunity to talk down to his wild, lithe older brother. Where Rob saw abstractions of the world, Dolan saw facts, the plain passionless truth of things: stone carved by water and wind, and nothing more. He dismantled Rob’s visions accordingly: of a geographic depression resembling a woman’s skirts, he had once said, “That’s just a bajada, you idiot—can’t you see?”
Poor Dolan. An exasperated schoolmaster—one of the dozen who’d fled Amargo—had once called him “a most condescending plodder.” The explanation Nora demanded on this point only made things worse: “Well, Missus Lark, Dolan can spell and do arithmetic, and don’t he let everybody know it. But I doubt he could find the schoolhouse were it not for the other children. I believe he’s never gone anyplace ahead of someone his entire life.” She had campaigned against the continued employment of this ill-mannered windbag, all the while privately fearing his assessment might be true. He had high opinions, Dolan, but rarely found the conviction to follow through on them, even if he was right. A second rider all his life. Yet he was more Emmett’s son than the other boys: meticulous, measured. He studied a situation carefully before speaking. When he took a position he rarely deviated from it. And he could be a joker on par with any of the funny boys from the big papers.
But too often of late, he had surprised her. Yesterday in particular. That outburst with the door, the force with which he struck.
She didn’t like to think about it overmuch, lest she devolve again into rage. It would do her no good to arrive at the printhouse in a mood.
And then there was Toby, of course—a man apart. Where the goblins were concerned, he went in for the old prospectors’ stories: the stones were maidens, usually, endungeoned or cursed with immobility, awaiting some providential intercession. He knew them backwards and forwards, while Nora hardly managed to retain even their broadest outlines. No hoodoo ever looked the same to her—which, Toby insisted, was part of their magic.
“This one makes me sad, Mama,” he’d once said of a caravan of knotty lumps.
“Why, lamb?”
“It’s a lost remuda, and they’re trying to get home. And they never will. It makes me sad.”
Mournful wonders swirled everywhere he turned. This outlook had taken root in him when he learned that the little block of granite on the hill behind their house did not merely bear Evelyn’s name; she was buried beneath it. “Her bones, Mama?” he asked, with a kind of gruesome wonderment that left Nora sleepless.
He wanted to know how his sister had died. Nora told him about heatstroke. About how people could drown in the sun—“which is why you must mind me, or Josie, or anyone else who tells you to come in the shade.” Next, he wanted to know where Evelyn’s spirit had gone. Nora’s answer—“Heaven”—did not suffice. After consulting Josie, he decided the little gravestone itself must be ensouled, and no amount of contradiction could persuade him otherwise. Next thing Nora knew, he had got to making his own weird little hoodoos around the ranch, stacking flat stones to a height of about two feet, naming them after made-up people with made-up demises.
“Are all those folks buried here on our farm, Tobe?”
“Yes, anyplace there’s a marker.”
“So many.”
By his logic, the whole goblin barrens were one sprawling boneyard.
* * *
—
She was thinking about this when she realized the susurrus in the grass had quieted.
She turned around. The road was still empty.
Mama, Evelyn said. Look.
Some creature, black and huge, was coming through the distant heat-shimmer on the ridge. Nora mounted back up and laid the rifle across her knees. There were a few trees up there, spaced just inconveniently enough to conceal whatever was moving down toward her. She couldn’t tell, in truth, if it was one thing or two, but its slow plodding betrayed an animal dazed by the heat. She waited for whatever was coming to take shape.
What is it, Mama?
A steer, I think. Probably one of Absalom Carter’s.
What’s it doing way out here?
Looking for water, same as us.
What’d you think it was before?
Before when?
Just now, when you jumped up in the saddle like that. What’d you think it was?
I hardly know.
You thought it was Toby’s beast.
Don’t be tiresome. Here it comes.
That don’t look like the Carter brand, Mama.
It does so. That’s a C, ain’t it?
But look at the hooks on those C’s. That’
s Crace ranch.
Well so it is. The Cattle King’s own runaway. What’s it doing way out here indeed.
I thought it was looking for water.
Mister Crace has plenty of water on his own goddamn land. Brazen bastard doesn’t even pretend anymore to keep his cattle from wandering wherever they please. Here, let’s give it room.
Why should we, Mama?
Papa would want us to, Evelyn. He wouldn’t want us being careless.
There’s room enough at the water for a horse and a steer, and a good deal more than that.
It will do no harm to back a little ways from it.
I’m staying right here.
Don’t let’s do anything to stir it up. Or look like we’re trying for it. Trying to interfere with it, I mean.
Wouldn’t we need kerchiefs for our faces, if it was interfering we intended to do?
Or frown at it, or look at it sideways, or any damn thing.
Ridiculous.
Remember what happened to Fint Colson? Somebody happened to say they saw him on the Almovar Road, moving a couple black steers that didn’t look like his own. And nobody’s heard from him since.
There’s a wide gulf, Mama, between rustling steers and watering your horse alongside the Crace brand.
Still. I’d not want any onlookers to mistake my intentions.
Besides, Fint had a notorious problem with cards, and it’s widely known he ran off to Mexico.
That’s just something they wrote in the Ash River Clarion, Evelyn.
There’s plenty of folks think Mister Crace is a very fine man.
