by Téa Obreht
It was the wrong thing to say to Jolly. “You ought to heed your mules—they’re wise enough to be afraid.”
This led quickly to the arithmetic that one Texan packmule was worth Jolly’s whole caravan put together, and so on. Shaw got to pointing out that he’d seen a mule kick a man straight through a stone wall. Jolly told him—in fewer words—that if his way of warfare was to kick enemies, one by one, through stone walls, then no wonder his army was in need of camels. Mico laughed so hard at this he started hiccuping. Lilo’s face tightened into a nervous smile. Whatever good nature had underlaid this repartee was thinning fast. George tried to bring everybody round. “We are talking,” he muttered, “about mules and camels.”
Jolly felt pretty sure we were not.
Half the standoff was drunk beyond disgrace, and the other blind with rage. Next thing I knew, Shaw was leading a mule from the stable, and Jolly had got the hobble off Seid. Our Mexican scout, Savedra, who didn’t care one way or another how it went, was sorting bets.
I will admit, shamefully, that once I realized it wouldn’t be you sacrificed to this unusual premise, I was quite curious to see it play out. George looked disgusted, which I understood to mean that whatever was to come would be rough as hell. You know yourself, you were there—had certainly seen it before, in your time, having come such a long way with Seid. He was a big, hard locomotive of a thing. Mean as a matter of course, and proud in the way Jolly was proud, to the detriment of all else. I have thought often of that evening, and of my memories of the moments before that black mule, with its wide eyes, and Seid, with his head lowered like a battering ram and his mouth trailing spit, connected. I can think of no words to describe what ensued, but you would no doubt agree: Seid more or less broke the mule in half.
This sobered everybody right up. A general scramble resulted in the communal digging of a very shallow grave. “Didn’t I tell you leave it alone?” George kept saying.
We’d got the mule buried by the time Wayne returned.
Some hours before daybreak, a banshee noise startled us from our tents. The jogging light of our torches angled around sleep-gray faces and torn nightshirts and alighted finally on the source of the sound: a battered, raging lion in the corral. Cornered by a forest of camels’ legs, it was shipping and roaring for a break in the line. By the time a gun appeared, it had already got its shoulders beneath the fence and we could hear it crashing around in the undergrowth for a long time afterward.
We were ordered back to quarters, but there was no sleep to be had. I lay half-dreaming, with the spyglass I’d lifted off Shaw clenched in my fist, and turned over to find Jolly awake and staring. He seemed to have been waiting for someone to whisper to.
“I’m fair ashamed, misafir.”
I asked why. He thought about it in that sullen way of his. “Well,” he said, “if there had been no blood earlier, we would not have drawn the lion.”
* * *
—
The second company, three horsemen who rode in late and unannounced, joined us some days later as we were bedding down. They were somber and quick in their unsaddling, deferent to Wayne’s presence when he came out to welcome them. Having said their goodnights, they made a fire a little ways off from our own, and sat there grimly spooning Ab’s cold leftovers and talking softly. As the evening wore on, they got to looking over at us again and again, until one of them stood and brought his mottled yellow calfskin boots to our hearthside.
“Gentlemen, pardon me,” he said. “We’ve heard so much in recent days about your charges. Understanding that it’s awful late and dark and a great imposition—would you be good enough to let us see them?”
It was a great deal of good English, and spoken very softly. The cameleers looked to me, and without thought or consultation I said, “Sure, friend”—and thus found myself looking straight up into the unmistakable face of Marshal John Berger.
If I’d been shot in the heart then and there, Burke, I would not have been more stunned. He went on looking at me. Jolly was already rising to oblige his request. Everything went to noise and light: George laughing that thick, ridiculous laugh as he, too, got to his feet. Mico whining about something, saying in Greek that he was warm now thank you, and not going anyplace. “Misafir?” George said, but I shook my head, no—which only brought Berger’s stare drifting over me again. It lingered this time, before he let himself be led away. They were all gone a long while, during which I reckoned my choices. I could bolt off into the darkness, but I would not get far. I could feign trouble with the language, if questioned, which would only make my companions suspicious.
When they returned, I was still sitting there, unmoved and undecided.
Berger wore a look of total sublimity. It almost made him look kind. “Well, gentlemen, what a thing. Much obliged.” He held his hand out to me and there seemed to be no end to his shaking. “Much obliged,” he said again, and went back to his fire.
A long while elapsed before I raised my eyes again to watch Berger in smiling confab with his companions. His glances in my direction grew more and more infrequent, and when the fire was down to its embers I rolled myself up and covered my face and lay there hour after hour expecting to look up and find myself beneath his boot.
But all night long nothing sounded but the snap of the embers, and somehow in the morning Berger and his men were gone.
* * *
—
A ragged green town rose at last from the grasslands one gray afternoon not long afterwards. The windows of its ruined church sat empty. A slurry of cloud slanted cooling rain across the Spanish houses and straw-thatched barracks.
An outlaw of some notoriety had been hanged that morning, and the whole place was still hungover from the spectacle. The streets were strewn with colored paper. We passed the scaffold on our way through town to the barracks, but the body had already been taken down. Somebody was cutting up the rope for a keepsake.
Mico, clearly on the rough end of a sleepless night, growled, “Is this une grande cité?”
A grand city, thought I. No. “This is San Antonio.”
Awaiting us at Camp Verde was a besworded commandant who had hurried from Houston to meet us. He had a smart, clean face and yellow hair, and leaned against the fence with one long leg resting on the bottom rail and a stalk of grass between his teeth. The most remarkable thing about him was the evenness of his haircut. Regimentals always groom to look as if they’re just on their way to a wedding feast.
“Do you know who that is, duchess?” Ab beamed to Jolly. “That’s my old pal Ned Beale.”
“Another clown,” Jolly said.
Whether this was a result of Jolly’s ignorance, or an attempt to get up Ab’s gall, I don’t know. Being from the Levant, Jolly could be forgiven for not knowing Beale. But the sight of him sure set the rest of us to swooning and waving our kerchiefs. Edward Fitzgerald Beale: bushwhacker, explorer, lieutenant; compatriot and brother-in-arms of Kit Carson, who once crossed from Texas to California on foot with nothing but a jackknife and enough grit to turn your teeth to powder. Afterwards, I always said that I knew Beale was a modest man by his grooming: a braggart of his stature would’ve allowed himself a mustache twice that size.
Hobb goaded me, but I couldn’t imagine the risk of thieving off Beale.
By evening, we had the fate of our little Oriental packtrain all laid out on good authority. Beale had been tasked with staking a wagon road to California. He would march from here to Albuquerque and then west from Fort Defiance, into the barrens, through canyons and badlands; through Comanche, Ute, and Mojave territory and to the westernmost crook of the Colorado River, penetrating the Great American Desert along the thirty-fifth parallel.
This news was met with general celebration—though to me it sounded much like our trip so far, except with even less water, and even more Indians. I found myself reluctant to feast in ho
nor of the expedition, for Beale’s presence had made everything seem more formal, what with photographers and all, and I had begun to fear I might be asked to leave the company here. Ah, I tried to tell myself, but that would suit me just fine. I’d been long enough with this ludicrous train and could make my way west along some less calamitous route, making far less a spectacle of myself. I could go anywhere. I sat counting out my possibilities and growing sadder by the minute. After supper, I left the Turks and infantry to their contemptible merrymaking and walked into town.
I wish you’d been there, Burke, to see the saloons all lit up in the wake of the hanging. I moved slow along the main thoroughfare, looking through windows, hovering barside, carried on the aftermath of sojourn and execution until I found myself in the plaza once more. The dead were everywhere, flitting in and out of doorways, looking for bits of themselves—for here sat the Alamo, Burke, with its ruined steeples like the peaks cut off a mountain. The flag was slumped on its mast in the courtyard of the governor’s house. The windows were filled with yellow light, and shadows of the revelers within were dark against the drapes.
On the courthouse stairs sat a thin man in a ragged coat. A strange sadness swept through me at the sight of him. The man sat with his elbows on his knees, feet slightly spread. His hands were clasped in a way I recognized. His cheeks were staved in, and there was a faraway look about him that prickled my neck before I ever sat down close enough to see the purple choker shining above the collar of that well-worn and familiar gray coat, the one I’d known and followed for years as though the garment itself were my home.
“Donovan?” I said.
It was himself. Donovan Michael Mattie—if not in the flesh, then very recently freed of it. He looked me over for a long while with those eyes I had loved. “It’s you,” he said. “Hardly recognized you.”
“What happened?”
He couldn’t quite put it together. The dead never could at first. “I was in the square. Then I fetched up here. But I can’t remember how.” His sour, maddog aspect was softened by fear. “What do you think it means?”
I told him it meant he was a free man. I suppose I was wincing back tears, because Donovan smiled slantwise at me and said, “You always were a damned fool.” He went on looking at me, and then pointed. “That’s mine.” He meant the canteen, which I’d worn about my neck since the day he left me wounded in the ditch.
“You gave it to me,” I said. “That night I was shot.” I meant to say “all those years ago”—but how long had it been? One year at most. Perhaps two.
“I remember,” he said.
“Why’d you leave me behind?”
“I don’t know.” He stared off. “Figured it was the last kindness I could do you. Was I wrong? Reckon you’re better off now, anyway. That Berger. He trailed me every chance he got and made sure someone else did if he weren’t about. He put out word of me in places I ain’t never been: Denver and San Francisco and the like, and followed up on every sighting. He didn’t quit—as you see. As you see. I wouldn’t stick around these parts if I were you. God, Lurie. I’m so thirsty.” This name surprised me. I hadn’t heard it spoken in a long time. “Lurie,” he said again. “To have seen clear enough how my life would turn. To have had sense enough to drink from every stream I passed.”
Before I could stop him, his hand was out and on the strap of the canteen. For the moment it continued falling through me, I pictured his fingertips raking my heart. It’s not as cold as you would expect, the touch of the dead. The skin prickles like a dreaming limb. It’s not the strangeness of the feeling that terrifies you—it’s their want. It blows you open.
* * *
—
I passed a ferocious night. No sooner had the dismal apparition of my once-brother left my side than I found myself plunging my face into the San Antonio River. Submerged thus, I saw a flash of desert and a ruined church. I found my way back to barracks and stood by you at the aguaje. It would be the first of many occasions I noticed the way you drink—a deep, alert, searching draught; the water observable in its course through your neck, your grunts and slurps ruminative and stern, different entirely from the idle dipping of a horse.
* * *
—
Days passed in San Antonio and still Jolly made no invitation of fellowship to me. Hope failed. I went on grooming you and watched him ready the train, dragging my feet about going my own way. Donovan’s want had got firm hold of me by then. I had taken to filling his canteen at every watering place and tipping little sips of it all through the day. With his want came a tight terror of the canteen running dry, so I could never bring myself to empty it, merely to fill and fill again, even if it was nearly brimming, so the water within mixed and tasted of everything: earth and iron and soil and the rain that spent half the day threatening and the other half flooding everybody out of the bunkhouse. Such was San Antonio.
Donovan’s want differed from Hobb’s. After that first night, it seemed to thin out little by little, until it became matter-of-fact. Perhaps it was calmer because Donovan had died older than Hobb, which made his want duller, more self-contained. Or perhaps, because it had not obliterated Hobb’s want—merely moved it aside a little—it could not be as fierce for contending with a want already contained in me. This led me to wonder after want itself—was I permitted any of my own? Must I now forever fill up with the wants of any dead who touched me, all who’d come before me? I knew little, and now know even less, save that every now and again, if I closed my eyes while drinking, a vision might surprise me. Most of the time it went so quick I could hardly catch the details—Donovan’s face or Hobb’s, or an old feeling I recognized. But then, too, unfamiliar sights: a particular evening, a particular woman, a snowbound street. A girl crumpled by the water’s edge. Well, it’s clear now what they were. But it made me uneasy in them days, never knowing if I’d been shown what was, or what might, or what never could be.
Myself, I had only one want: to continue on with the Camel Corps as guest and wayfarer for all time; or, failing that, to cease wanting to.
The night before you were set to depart, Jolly found me. There was a strange thrill to him: what I hoped was a reluctance to bid me farewell. I remember fearing that he would embrace me, and that I would shame myself by weeping. But I needn’t have worried. He was all flint: “The lieutenant has need of you.” He led me into the quartermaster’s place, right up the stairs and into the office of Ned Beale himself. The lieutenant sat behind a huge desk on a chair made of antlers, unblinking, and looked me over. “Who are you, boy?”
I told him I was one of his cameleers. This was, for the time being, still true. He looked from me to Jolly, and held up his hand. “As far as I know, Wayne hired six of you fellas for the caretaking of our stock: Hi Jolly; Mimico Tedro; Greek George; Halil; Long Tom; and Elias. Two of these men decamped at Indianola following a dispute over wages. So who the hell are you?”
Jolly wedged himself in. “They have taken his name down wrong, efendi. His name is Misafir. My cousin. Only Elias left us after Indianola.”
I stood there nodding. Beale had thick, bushy brows. One couldn’t help but think they bespoke supernatural powers of observation. He lifted a paper from his desk. “I got a letter here from Texarkana. Please be advised, it says. We have reason to suspect that a man named Mattie has concealed himself among your packers. He is a small Levantine of about twenty-three years in age, and has long been wanted for the murder of John Pearson of New York. He was an erstwhile consort of the outlaw Donovan Michael Mattie, recently hanged in San Antonio. If identified, please detain this man at barracks and send word.”
By the time he put the paper down, my chest had gone so tight I thought I would fall. Jolly made a valiant go of not looking in my direction, but I could see the veins in his forehead outstanding. It struck me I should never have given him that nazar back. What a fool, I thought, to admit thievery weeks
before an accusation of murder.
Beale lengthened that frank stare of his till I felt my death come into the parlor and take up all the remaining space. “Are you this—Mattie?”
“No, sir.”
He turned then to Jolly. “Is he?”
“His name is Misafir, efendi.”
“And where did we pick him up?”
“Izmir, efendi.”
“Gerald Shaw seems not to remember him before Camp Verde.”
“Shaw drinks a great deal, efendi, and talks a good deal more than he drinks. But that don’t alter the fact that this is my cousin from Izmir.”
Beale read the letter again. “Ali,” he said. “You’re known among the men to be an upright sort of person. A little hotheaded, according to some—”
“Who says that? Shaw?”
“—but upright and truthful and hardworking. Think carefully.” Beale held up the paper. “If you could write, and it were your name about to be undersigned to a letter defending this man, would you still make the same claim?”
Jolly managed a shrug. “I don’t know, efendi. Perhaps I’d be a bit more careful about writing ‘Izmir.’ I’m not sure if he was really born there after all.” He turned those wildly smiling eyes to me. “Can you recall the place of your birth, Misafir?”
By some miracle, it came to me. “Yes,” I said. “I was born in Mostar.”
* * *
—
Afterwards, Jolly and I sat together astride the barracks fence. He said nothing for a good while, only tamped his tobacco.
“You needn’t have done that,” I said. “But it was awful good of you.”
“We have all been called this or that over the years. But now we are who we are.”
Whoever he’d been before, he was one of God’s own as far as I was concerned, and I told him so. He didn’t seem to think much of that. It occurred to me for the first time what a funny expression that is. I had never much reckoned its meaning. One of God’s own what?
