by Téa Obreht
“Seems an awful lot of damage for one horseman,” Nora said.
“Well, ain’t damage Crace’s staff of life?”
“Still.”
Desma straightened. She was making that face she sometimes made when she was fixing to call you an idiot. “You saying I’m telling tales?”
“Of course not.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I do.”
Desma dusted off her hands. “You know how you sit up in the night sometimes, but you’re still half-asleep and casting about for what woke you? Well. A few nights ago, I came to and lay an age trying to figure it out. Then I realized it was Goatie, calling down the gods. Raving and hollering. She gets that way these days, being half-blind. Sometimes I think she realizes through that fog of hers that she hasn’t seen Rey in a while, and wonders where the hell he’s got to, and starts crying for him—only she always quits after a little while. That night she didn’t. So I went over to the window and seen my little garden fence all busted up and a horse so hard at work in the plot I could hear it chewing all the way up in the house. When I got to shouting, it turned and I could see the rider, clear as day, grinning at me. Grinning, Nora. Like all along, he’d been hoping to get caught. Anyway, as the shouting made no difference, I started shooting instead. I must’ve hit the horse, for it left a bloodtrail. Not that it did much good. Just look at the damn fence.” She pointed to the wreckage on the far side of the yard, where the old poles were blown out like timber behind an avalanche. After a while, she laughed. “If Rey was here, I’d have had to talk him out of giving chase. Lest it was a trick to lure us out here for hanging.”
Nora looked down at her shoes. She made the only joke that came to her. “Toby would say you’ve seen the beast.”
Desma shook her head. “The notions that child’s mind runs to. You ought to put that Josie right out of the house, like your sister did.”
“And break Dolan’s heart? He’d never forgive me. None of them would.”
“He’d forgive you soon enough. Boys always do.”
Desma espoused the kind of easy faith in children only held by people who’d never raised any themselves. And thank God for that, for it was good to be reminded of the merits by someone who lacked the constitution to withstand many of parenthood’s most profound rewards: the shying and the sulking and the constant ingratitude, and eruptions like the one last night, which she had intended to detail to Desma, but thought better of now. If her determination to forgive the boys was sincere, Nora must not compound their disgrace by poisoning the neighbors against them.
And anyway, Desma was shading her eyes and looking up the hill. “What’s here?”
A rider was coming down the side road. Desma let the hammer sink. Her free hand had vanished in her apron pocket, where her derringer bulged none-too-subtly behind a pattern of faded flowers. Nora drew over to her and they stood together and watched him: a stringbean in a plug hat that could only be Ferdy Kostic bringing the mail.
“Lord,” Desma said through her teeth. “That hat.”
“Emmett calls him ‘strawman.’ ”
“How come?”
“Because he says Ferdy has all the outer vestments of a real fellow—but if you ruffle him one bit, the stuffing comes right out.”
It felt good to be laughing together at last. Here they were, two old friends on the same side of something. Perhaps the Almighty had devised a purpose for Ferdy Kostic after all.
He drew up at the fence and sat there, surveying their handiwork. “My God, Desma,” he said. “I see you just about fixing to keep the whole county out.”
Desma returned the hammer to her shoulder. “I’m staking up against whatever bummers been feasting they horses on my cabbage.”
“Well thank God I came by in time to see the last of our open range,” Ferdy said.
“Thank God.”
He sucked in his cheeks and made a show of squeezing through the fence. “I reckon I’ll have to jump my horse from now on.”
“You’d do better to leave the mail on the front porch, like normal folk.”
Ferdy said nothing.
Then, at the sight of Nora, his entire face lifted. “Well hullo, Missus Lark! I’m surprised to see you here.”
She shifted a little. “Yes, I only just came by.”
“And here you are,” he said. “Well, you’re mighty brave. Mighty brave.”
The only thing she could think to say—“Ferdy, I hope you haven’t been taken in by all that depredation talk!”—dropped thick and lifeless among them all. No change in the postmaster’s mien. Not a flinch from Desma.
Still mounted, Ferdy now opened his gunnysack and started rummaging. Nora had long suspected his whole pretense for taking up this work was owed to his desire to make wild conjectures about other people. It had ceased to humiliate her on home ground—in fact, she had surprised herself by the sincere absence of feeling whenever he asked why no young men were ever writing to Josie—wasn’t it strange, her being so delicate and lovely and gifted in such a very peculiar way? But to weather this ceremonious fumbling here, of all places, fired her whole being.
“Well, let’s see now,” Ferdy said. He rested a fistful of letters against his pommel and squinted through them. “Let’s see. I got a rather short note from your brother in Philadelphia. What a strange word that is, Philadelphia—ain’t it strange?”
“Strange as it was last week, Ferdy,” Desma said.
“Who ever heard of putting two perfectly good letters together—and not to make a new one, but one what already exists? Where I come from, our F’s are F’s. Imagine my name being spelt Pherdy.” He was amused enough by this to spell it once or twice, by which time Nora caught herself chuckling in agony. Desma’s face was like stone. “Last week’s Ladies’ Home Journal, delayed—and Missus Lark, I have yours, as well. Here it is. What else? Another notice from the Land Office. I see you’re still back and forth with them about Rey’s claim? I reckon they don’t like it when you go awhile without reply. I can stop back through on my way to town, if you want to answer ’em right off. No? All right.” He shifted in the saddle. Desma’s hand was still outstretched. “I didn’t bring the Clarion round—I didn’t think you’d care for it after this week.”
Desma stood staring up at him. “I pay for the Clarion.”
“Do you? Better hope the Land Office don’t.”
Nora’s stomach plunged.
“You’d better bring it round later, Ferdy,” Desma said.
He looked down at the fan of remaining envelopes in his fist. “What about this letter for Rey? Will I leave it with you?”
“What’s the alternative? Leave it on Rey’s grave?”
He made a show of looking through the letters again, switching between two and three, as though he couldn’t decide how many there were, until Nora finally said: “For God’s sake, Ferdy—can’t you read?”
His downcast smile was full of confidentiality. “I’m awful sorry these letters for Rey just keep on coming. I reckon it must be hard to apprise ever’one that he’s gone and left this world. Can’t hardly think of a person who would expect it. A young man, really, at forty-five. But he was awful big, Desma. Not fat, I mean, but big. I reckon he went for the same reasons big dogs go sooner than little ones.” He tapped the letter against his pommel. “I’ll tell you square, Desma. This note here looks mighty personal. D’you mind if I leave it at Rey’s place? I know you’ll only go and get it after I’m gone, but—well. I got the law to consider.”
“Do what you like, Ferdy.”
“All right, then.” He tipped his hat. “Missus Lark.” And then, disaster. “Missus Gris.”
He turned his horse up the rise. It seemed to take hours, but at least, Nora thought, the cold dregs of this moment were fading. He was working his horse over the tumble of rocks by th
e big juniper, and once they were over it would be up and away toward Rey’s plot, and perhaps then she could bring herself to look at Desma—who, in true form, was already back to work, crouching with the letters heaped on her lap. How like her to be so calm. To be stooping already to thumb the dirt from a huge potato with her right hand.
That it was a rock did not become apparent until it was halfway through its arc to Ferdy’s head. Even then, there was no time to shout a warning. It thumped between Ferdy’s shoulders, knocking him sideways. His horse jerked, twisted out from under him and left him in the dirt. He wasn’t on the ground two seconds before Desma was on top of him. Her fist caught him between the shoulders with a surprisingly thin thwack. Without knowing how, Nora had appeared at their side, close enough now to see mud spraying everywhere, and the fact that Ferdy was moving.
“Help me,” Desma said. She shifted off him and grabbed his shoulder. Nora stooped and helped roll him. The effort made her head swim. She gasped once, and then again, wondering how long it had been since she’d drawn breath—and there was cause now to go back to not breathing, because Desma was straddling Ferdy Kostic’s chest. An arm emerged from the struggling mass of his coat to hold her away. Ferdy was sputtering. Desma forced her fingers into his mouth.
“Say, Missus Ruiz,” Desma said. “Say it.” His whole head followed when she tugged his jaw down. “Say it.”
A garbled version of it came foaming around her fingers. Meethuth Rooweez. Rey’s letter now appeared in her other hand, and she began tearing it, wadding a flurry of paper into Ferdy’s mouth. Her fingers, where they disappeared in the wet, wrenching recess between his lips and tongue, were harrowed with gnawmarks, orange with the same blood that oiled his teeth.
Whatever ideas Nora’d had about how Ferdy might be let up were lost to the vision of Desma pulling him to his feet and then kicking him back down. It all happened so fast she couldn’t even say where Desma’s boot had connected. He sat there forever, spitting out one piece of bloodied paper after another. Then he was on his feet, retreating to the twitchy withers of his horse, so fast he seemed sped along by Desma’s curses rather than his own volition: “Don’t you ever lay a hand on a piece of paper with my name on it again, Ferdy Kostic—you hear? You hear?”
A miraculous swing lofted him into the safety of the saddle. He didn’t turn around until he was all the way to the fence. His parting words—“You’re a right old bitch, Desma—they’ll string you up for claim-jumping yet, and won’t nobody say a goddamn thing save good riddance”—were shouted over a torrent of Desma’s Hellenic expletives.
THERE WAS WATER IN DESMA’S kitchen after all. It had been hidden in plain sight, in a bucket Nora had mistaken for the slop pail just beneath the wash basin. She watched the tragic last dregs of it decanted into a pot, there to boil while she got bandages and Desma sat on the table with her legs up on the stools and dug through her gouged knuckles for bits of grass and stone. She did not suffer being touched even under ordinary circumstances, and when Nora soaked the rags and brought them over, Desma took them and balanced them on her lap and began cleaning her hands herself. Nora stood back against the counter and listened to the cool crackle of the water wrung back into the bowl. She must not leave here without some—if there was any left, if Desma hadn’t wasted the last of it on the ridiculous exercise of beating the postman senseless.
“He bit you,” Nora finally allowed herself to say.
“He sure did.”
“Reckon he’s got madness?”
But there was no coaxing a smile out of Desma. “He’s right, you know.”
“Don’t mind him.”
“But he’s right. Rey never did make up no will. He could plan on a whole lot of life, but he never was too keen on readying up for the hereafter. I think he reckoned we’d die together in an embrace at the age of a hundred and twenty having spent all our money and salted our fields so the rest of you couldn’t take them.”
“An admirable dream.”
“Though a little rosy, I think, given his tendency to get into fights with stockmen and inspectors and every other goddamn soul, all while spitting in the face of the Land Office besides. And even if he hadn’t pointed a gun at every inspector that came this way, won’t no Land Office in the world give 160 acres of creekside land to some woman whose porch an angry Mexican left his boots on—even if he did leave them there for twenty years.”
“But you’re his wife.”
Desma had moved on to bandaging. Her apron was spattered with blood.
Nora felt dizzy. Little pinpricks of light dotted the shadows of the kitchen. At length, she tried again. “You have his name, Desma. Nobody’s ever known you as anything save Ruiz. Surely that’s got to count toward inheritance. Perhaps if we wrote you letters of proof.”
“Please, Nora. I’m quite satisfied with what’s been achieved by you writing on my behalf already.”
There it was. And here was the moment, overtaking her at last. Confess her wrongdoing or disown it. She could outline her reasons for what she had done, right her wheels here and never feel cowed about this again.
But she didn’t. She buckled. “What do you mean?” she said.
Saint Peter had sounded more convincing at the break of day.
Desma was laughing. For a moment, she seemed almost sincere. Perhaps it might not be too late to pretend her answer had been a joke. But it was. “Ellen Francis?” Desma said.
“Who’s that?”
“Nora. For God’s sake. You’re the only soul I ever told that Robert got shot up over a pony.”
“That’s hardly true.”
“It is.”
“You told plenty of people. You told Emmett, you told Rey.”
“Was it Rey wrote that letter? Being dead for some time now, I doubt it—though it seems nothing can be put past dead husbands of mine.” Desma shook her head. “All I ever said to anybody else was that Robert Gris was buried back east.”
Nora stood for a long time, watching Desma bandage her hand. “Why would you say anything different to me?”
“Because you ask and ask in that way of yours. And we known each other seventeen years.”
“How did he really die?”
“I guess he didn’t.”
“So it’s true. You’re not his widow.”
“Perhaps,” Desma said finally. “Last I saw Robert Gris, he was sitting up under a pile of boards at the bottom of our staircase, which had fell through as he was coming after me with a broom. The whole staircase went, right down to the bottom. Like something godstruck. Took me a stretch to realize I weren’t dead myself. Then I just ran. Didn’t look to me that anybody could survive a fall like that—hell, the house itself didn’t. But I’ll tell you. It’s Devil’s work, that letter. For even if Robert crawled out of that wreckage, he never wrote the Ash River Clarion, or any other place. That man could hardly cipher. His skills were drinking money away and closing distance between us with whatever wood or iron or belt he could lay hands on.” Desma shook her head. “Shot up over a pony. My God, Nora, you never could keep from showing off every little thing you know.”
Anger, quick and brilliant, roared her up. “Well it’s your own damn fault. What a thing: lie about your husband’s death, but give everyone his real name?”
“A person don’t reckon such things will follow her across a thousand mile of desert and end up in the paper, Nora. A person reckons her bosom friend won’t use her darkest stories to grease her own chin—while on the opposite shore, cattle barons and newspapermen and mail carriers come heaving after every scrap she’s worked her whole life to hold.”
Nora pinned her bottom jaw to steady it. If it went on clattering, Desma might hear and point it out. After a time, she could speak again.
“I only did what I thought right. What I thought you would do.”
Desma laughed. “How
would I manage without you here to be so rock-sure of my virtues?”
“Well,” she said. “Aren’t I just the badman for everybody today?” This was Ellen Francis all right—Ellen Francis Volk in the flesh, resurrected here in the throat of her daughter and suddenly holding forth on the obvious injustices of life. She had not come here to be subjected to this. She was that sorry, but she had only meant to help. Did Desma, after all this time, believe otherwise? Did she think Nora would deliberately wright her harm, or cost her inheritance and humiliate her marriage? Wasn’t it bad enough that she had gone days and days with no water, and was coming—peaceably, she had been mistaken to think!—to this place of safety after having endured, as no woman should, the silent vanishment of her own husband and the thankless and cruel remonstrance of her sons? Who had gone mad, by the way. Well what a mistake on her part, to think that she could find some comfort, some shelter from the confusion of the household in which she had been basely and falsely accused of being unseeing and foolhardy and then attacked—yes, attacked in her own kitchen, by a young man she had raised up and now hardly recognized in all his rage and gullibility. Desma might as well row in with Rob and Dolan, and Emmett too, wherever the hell he was, so they could all line up against her together.
Desma eyed her coolly. “A tragic tale, to be sure,” she said. “But it’s got fuck-all to do with this. You must have writ up that article weeks ago, Nora.”
There. It was over now. Their anger had taken its customary course: barming up and dissipating in a flash. Already the room was growing bigger, easier to breathe in. She felt almost cool. A long silence would now elapse, and then someone—probably Nora, for she never had nerve enough to stretch a standoff the way Desma did—would say something light and mild, and the shy smiling would start. In a few minutes they would be laughing again. Well, perhaps not quite laughing. It had been a dire fight. One thing at a time, she thought. Slowly, slowly. She would apologize first. Use some endearment. And then, quite carefully, she would ease herself toward the question of water.
