by Téa Obreht
What I thought was that any improvement we might be making was greatly impeded by having to wait around for Ab’s chuckwagon, the caboose of the packtrain, which stalled in the ruts at least once a day and could not be freed without your aid.
George saw the truth of this. “Can you go no faster, Ab?”
“It’s this fucking cornmill,” was our cook’s reply. “It’s three hundred pounds of axle-breaking nonsense that we ain’t even using.”
When George identified the Little Giant as the fount of our delay, it became plain that Beale held the thing in very great affection. Our commandant referred to it at once by name, which of course complicated George’s campaign against it. But we had a mandate to make Fort Tejon by October, and eventually, worn down by George’s forecast of an inglorious wintertime arrival, Beale perked up to the whimsy of just leaving the cornmill there, on the malpais, for the next tribe or wagon train to be surprised by.
“I came across a printing press like that once, you know,” Beale said dreamily.
“What’d you name it?” George asked him.
But even with the lieutenant’s tacit permission, Ab still couldn’t bring himself to heave the Little Giant overboard. “Two hundred dollars of cast iron flung out the back—all for some fool quartermaster reckoning that grinding corn would be a fit way to pass the time.”
So, to George’s provocation, we went on dragging the cornmill behind us like a bad leg, all the way to Rojita. A mesa there had served as a trail marker in Beale’s youth, and we all stood around in the dusk while he wandered its base searching out where his outfit had scratched their names among the ancient Indian pictures all those years ago. We found nothing save a little winding path he didn’t recall seeing before. It rose sharply up to where we could see a wrecked-out church the color of blood hidden among the black cedars on the rim.
“How many dead folks you think they got piled in there?” Mico whispered to me.
“Some.”
In truth, there were dozens. I saw them flicker into being as the last of the day faded: kids, peering over the bluff, bright as falling stars.
We were just getting settled around our fire when the church bells rang out. Sudden music, the first we’d heard in an age. It slid slowly off the mesa and down our spines and froze us where we sat. I swear, even you camels all drew together as though you knew to be worried: who was up there, pulling them belfry ropes?
I never did speak of the dead to anyone but you, Burke, save for when I turned to George halfway through supper that night. “You reckon they’re warning us away, them phantoms up there?”
“Maybe,” he said. “But if not, you reckon they could use a cornmill?”
Somehow, this solution was acceptable to everyone: we would leave the Little Giant here, a benefaction to whatever good souls had built a house of God in this desolate place.
So when Beale hove out with the packtrain next morning, we unhappy wardens of the caboose dragged Ab’s chuckwagon, with all its clanking ornamentations, uphill to the church.
Close up, the place was quite dignified. Papery purple vines arched over the gate. The graveyard was neatly fenced. A clutch of Indian kids in white linen were nudging hoops around the courtyard. Your appearance at the top of the rise sent one of their ill-fated wheels sailing off into the bushes. We stalled out there, right in the archway, with all them kids pressing in around your legs. The dead ones were there, too, drifting at the edge of the crowd, thumbs in their mouths, their eyes faraway.
Down the colonnade came a bald, smiling padre in a brown robe. He shook our hands and brewed coffee while the kids made a climbing post of you.
George wasted no time. “Lieutenant Beale was curious to know if you’d have use for a cornmill?”
I’d never seen a man think so hard on a gift.
“Well,” said the padre. “That depends. How fine does it grind?”
We were determined not to let him thwart our charity, and so set about showing this ill-mannered cleric that we’d brought him the finest damn mill this side of the Mississippi. But our first grind failed to impress. The padre let it run rough through his fingers and said only, “hm.” Our second was likewise found wanting. George kept forcing the wheel faster and faster, with all Hell’s curses streaming out on his breath. Ab hovered close, useless with disbelief, foreseeing a future bleakly tethered to the Little Giant. By this time, the afternoon was already cooling. The children were filling your bridle with wildflowers, while you just stood there, in your smug way, watching us take turns at the crank till our hands burned.
I hadn’t even marked Jolly’s disappearance until he came back from someplace looking distraught. As he knelt down to take my place at the machine, he whispered: “I just been through the graveyard. Misafir—whose children are these?”
“I don’t know. Orphans, probably.”
“Do you reckon they’re stole?”
By the time we were on our fourth grind, he’d gone and come back again and got himself further worked up. “I think they’re stole.”
The padre must’ve overheard him, or guessed his thinking, for here he came with a comforting arm to put around Jolly’s shoulder—and the next thing I knew, the two of them were strolling the little garden, together. Jolly kept trying to wedge a question in, but the padre was talking steadily, sweeping the air with a gentle hand, ruffling shrubs and bending tree branches to Jolly’s nose. Before long, they’d taken to naming plants aloud.
“Limón,” the padre would say. “Limón?”
And Jolly, reluctantly, would answer in Arabic: “Laymun.”
“Azahar?”
“Zahr.”
He was returned to us from this expedition with a gunnysack filled with some strange and fragrant herb clutched to his chest, and he stood there looking disconsolate for a long while.
“Well?” I said. “Are they stole?”
“He says they’re not. Says they’ve been brought to Christ in this here school.”
“Well then,” I said.
We must have turned a hundred pounds of corn to dust only to find ourselves heaving our star-crossed contraption back into the wagon again as night drew around us. The padre shouted blessings from the gate, where he stood waving amidst that small throng of white-clad kids while we made our way back down the path. Jolly kept turning over his shoulder. “They’d know it if they was stole,” he said again. “Wouldn’t they?”
The dead certainly knew, buried up on that hilltop but a thousand miles from their rest.
Stole children or not, he never could bring himself to dispose of the gunnysack. The smell of that place always followed us thereafter: manzanita and sage and the bright spice of some childhood shrub, some plant whose ancient name had followed it to Spain, and from Spain to this place, this roasting rock-tower half a world away, where it had somehow managed to flower and call Jolly’s mind home.
On the way back to camp, we bogged the wretched chuckwagon in the bed of an arroyo again. And so we left it among the creosotes in the red mud there, for somebody else to find, if ever a pilgrim in need of coarse grind happened to come this way.
* * *
—
All of George’s efforts to speed us along were brought to bear just outside the little town of Bajado. Beale, with his forecamp, was rested out in the mesquite shade just after noon when we caught up to them at last to the sound of the sentry’s bugle. We dispersed to pass among the resting men and then reconstituted on the llano and kept forward on the unbroken road to the next stream—the Oro, which tasted of salt.
After that, we never fell behind the roadbreakers again and led the way west through a red rock scatterland and up into the forested heights above the Devil’s Fork. Another week brought us out of the San Francisco range, and into a barrens of yellow grass and petrified trees, and still further into a desert teeming with da
ncing cactus. Creekbed after creekbed we passed was dry and empty, and we didn’t find water again until some nameless riffle that mystified even George. A pale, daytime moon hung above us.
We were just about encamped when a line appeared on the horizon. Too small for a horse, it advanced through the bright striations of sunset, pitching right and left, until it took form: a girl, stumbling and so tattered you could hardly call her dressed.
By the time Beale arrived with the roadbreakers, George had wrapped her in blankets and the two of them were stood off about how much water she was permitted to drink. She had already dispatched a full goatskin, and wanted more. He kept pointing to the bloat of her stomach. “You must wait,” he said. “It’ll pain you.”
This reduced her to tears, in which state she threw herself on Beale’s mercy. She had walked for days, she said, from the malpais, where two played-out mules and a dwindling water supply had stranded her people’s wagon train.
“Whereabouts?” Beale asked.
She pointed north.
We were already so far off-trail that Beale didn’t know what to make of this. Our course seemed obvious: help the wretched child. Yet we’d seen so little misfortune that her arrival seemed a likely prelude to the ambush that could disgrace us all. “Imagine the honor of any brave who rustles the War Department’s camels,” Beale muttered. Everybody, of course, had been imagining that very brave ever since Indianola. But here sat the girl. Someone—likely George—had outfitted her in a too-large shirt and too-long britches, and she sat sullen and dust-stained with one arm around Maida’s knee.
Well. If she’d had the courage and good fortune to make that journey unscathed, what would it say of Beale if he balked at sending her people help? “An impossible but unavoidable rescue will make a thrilling addition to our chronicles,” Beale said. He looked wistfully into the gathering dark. “I wish I could join you.”
* * *
—
It was clear by morning that the girl had got so turned around on her way to us that we might as well not have brought her along at all. She had a round, windbattered face, and a mouth that might have been Indian if any of it had been visible from the scars got by her sunburn. She rode just ahead of Shaw, whose last-minute addition to our party Jolly surmised in one quiet growl: “We can’t be trusted to ride alone with her of course.”
George relished this misadventure. He made quick work of backfollowing her trail, pointing out the gaps where she had broken through the scrub as we climbed steadily north.
“I don’t recognize none of this,” the girl said miserably.
“You were delirious,” George told her. “Don’t worry, it will come to you.”
We’d given her no chance to rest, so it was no surprise she started sliding out of the saddle. Shaw lashed her mule to his horse and put her up in front of him. Jolly didn’t like that. He rode up and down the line, eyeing up Shaw, riding close and then wheeling away. “Look at him,” he muttered to me, like some ancient porch-sitter. “Why’s he got to hold her like that?”
When we stopped to water at a small creek, the girl became desperate. “I don’t know this place,” she said. “I weren’t never here.”
“You were.” George led her into the brush and pointed out her own tracks. He even stood her in them to fit them to her feet. Seeing evidence of her passage, but unable to remember it, she cried a little. “I think I must be dead, sir,” she said to me. “I think you can’t be real.”
I laughed, but I don’t mind admitting that her words goaded me. I brought her round to you, so she could feel your breath in her hair and touch your nose and put her ear to your grumbling heart. “Do you like magic?” I opened my canteen. She peered inside. “That’s water from six rivers. The Guadalupe, the Pecos, the Rio Grande, the Canadian, the Brazos, the Colorado. You ever drunk six rivers at once?”
She tilted it. “It tastes salty.”
“That’s the Brazos,” I lied. “Drink again.”
“Now it tastes of iron.”
“That’s the Rio Grande.”
We tented your packsaddle, and she curled up below and slept through the heat. Jolly, meanwhile, seethed around the camp. He knelt to splash his face across the stream from Shaw, who had stripped down to his waist. His chest was taut and blindingly white, like some dug-up statue.
“Got a wife, do you, Shaw?”
“It’s Mister Shaw to you.” He rested his hands on his knees. “And what goddamn worry is it of yours if I got a wife or not?”
“Just watching you there, I got to wondering if you been recently reminded of the difference between a woman and a girl.”
“I’m surprised to hear you talk of women at all. I’d have thought you would prefer that big goat of yourn.”
It was too hot for the customary route of escalation, so they left it. They slunk to opposite sides of the camp and lay up under canvas while the day whitened around us. Jolly, a light sleeper at the best of times, huffed through the next several hours. “Do you see the way he puts his hands on her when they’re riding?” he said, as though we’d been talking about it all the while. “I ought to break his neck.” I said nothing. That Shaw’s neck needed breaking was evident to anyone who’d spent more than an hour in his company. I had just begun to drift off when Jolly repeated: “I ought to break his fucking neck.”
“You ever done it?” I said.
“What?”
“Broken a man’s neck? I mean, kilt a man.”
“Of course.” He sat up and started roughing his saddle blanket into halves. “For two years I fought in Algiers.”
“I mean kilt a man who wasn’t after killing you.”
Half and half and half again went the blanket. “Have you?”
“Maybe.” I found myself plucking at the tips of the dead sage. “It ain’t the same as battle, you know. You ought to spare yourself the finding out.”
* * *
—
Next came a sun-bleached afternoon. Miles of boiling air between us and the distant hills. We passed the midafternoon heat in the twisted shade of mesquite trees. The mercury shot up. George kept tapping the thermometer, but it kept showing impossible numbers. Of course, he found this interesting enough to grin about.
The girl tugged at my hand. She wanted more water. “From the six rivers.”
“There’s not enough of it to drink every day,” I said.
“Please,” she said. “When I drink it, I see everything.”
I allowed her a tiny bit. “What is it you see?”
“I see my mama and my old house.”
“What else?”
“Some things I don’t like.”
“What things?”
“Wolves.”
We were dozing again when George stood and picked up his rifle. “What’s that there?”
From the boiling meridian flickered into being a wide, flat shape. It grew as it came across the hardpan, melding and tattering in all that twisted light until it became what it was: a suited Indian in an ox-drawn dray. A waist-length braid hung over his shoulder, plaited through with colorful ribbons. He shaded himself with a small black parasol. When he reached us, he raised his hat.
“My, my. Ain’t you boys a sight. What do you call that there?”
“Camel,” I told him.
“Ain’t he handsome.”
“He smells,” our little girl said.
“He does indeed. Why’s his back all funny like that?”
“Where you coming from?” Shaw said.
The Indian sat back down. “The fort.”
“You come across a stuck wagon train up this way?” said George.
“Wagon train? No. That way? No good to be stranded that way. There’s flesheaters on the wing.”
He sold us water and jerked meat, then raised his hat and was on his wa
y again. We watched after him till he disappeared, just to assure ourselves of his mortal substance. Then we went on sitting in silence. Jolly was smiling. “Hell of a day to wear a suit,” he said.
Mico cut a glare his way. “Ain’t that the aim of a great kingdom?” he said. “Get all its heathens in a suit?”
“I was only saying he must be hot.”
“He must reckon he’s a big man now, wearing a suit. Better than his brothers.”
“All right.”
“Or perhaps he tells himself he only wears the suit so he will not suffer. And all that while, he disdains his brothers.”
“I said all right, Mimi.”
“Don’t call me that,” Mico said.
Soon enough, he started up again.
“What fools his brothers are, he tells himself. Why don’t they just wear the suit? It would stay the capture of their children. The theft of their homes. What fools they are to always choose the suffering way.”
Jolly looked at him and said something in Greek. Of Mico’s reply, I caught only the bilious tone and the fact that it sent Jolly back to the wordless study of the dirt around his shoes. Mico was still looking at him, smiling mirthlessly. He leaned forward. “You hear me?”
Shaw got up. “Look here, you two.”
“Sit,” George told him.
Mico wasn’t paying attention. “You hear me, Hadji Ali? You hear me, hadji? You hear me, prodotis?”
Well, Ali jumped up. Mico was already on his feet and halfway to him. I did get one arm between them, but blows were landing left and right. A foot caught me in the knee, and we all went down together and scrabbled around till our mouths were full of dust and our faces throbbing. Then Jolly got up to find his shoe. Mico seized his hat out of a bush.
When we set off again that evening, the cousins rode in a gulf of silence. I feared the rift might be lasting.
