by Téa Obreht
“He ain’t a horse,” I said. “And he ain’t dying.”
The man was bald, his clothes a patchwork of previous summers and winters all strung together on a whippet frame. “I can hear him in there wheezing. Ain’t you Christian enough to do right and put a bit of his meat our way? We’ve had naught but hardtack in weeks.”
But as soon as that happened, didn’t we break camp and keep going till we reached the foothills and the blue desert beyond? The nights were still bitter, but the days were as bright and lonesome as we liked them. We kept by the streams. Your walk was slow and meandering, sure. You got real stubborn about leaving off the greasewood, which made the skin hang off you in drapes and your hump slowly begin to list. Night after sleepless night, I lay awake and counted your breaths, fearful I might drift off and wake to find you a shade.
But then we came through it. As I remember, we had wandered into a canyon getting clear of a lightning storm one wild-colored March day. We followed the water to a burled fence that threaded through the woods. Behind its gate sat a squat red house with smoky windows. A bent woman with white hair and a woolen shawl was emptying a bucket of ground meal before a congregation of wildly plumed black-and-white chickens.
“Well,” she said. “Now there’s a sight.”
Dueña Maria’s kitchen was cluttered with sprigs of herb and corncakes and little jars and flowers. Paintings of an old man and knitted baby boots were laid side by side on her mantel. It was only after we sat down to posole that I felt any certainty she was alive at all. The dead may cook, for all I know, but they certainly don’t eat. Her stew numbed my lips and set my nose running. Between slurps, the old woman leaned back in her chair to get a look at the yard, where you and her murdersome shoat stood eyeing each other across the trough.
“What does it taste of?” she said.
“Can’t say. I never tried eating him.” She wouldn’t leave off looking out at you, so I said: “And the people who mentioned wanting to ain’t lived.”
“You’re some hero, threatening to kill an old woman what’s given you the benefit of her fire and her supper.”
“I’m threatening nobody, if nobody’s threatening my camel.”
She went back to her soup. The fire went on snapping and chattering.
“So,” she said. “That’s a camel.”
She looked you over. Through the kitchen window, I watched her bring your big gnashing head down and peer into your mouth, rest her ear against your shoulder and listen for the whistling intake. Your breath riffled her fine white hairs. Whenever she drew you closer, your smile seemed to deepen.
For the benefit of the concoctions Dueña Maria dosed you with, I cleared her shed, threw out eons of crates and newspapers, laid siege to mice in her grainhouse. I clapped together a rickety ladder, and climbed her roof while you and she stood staring below. Years of nests sat mossed between her shingles. Acres of bracken snarled her vast claim. Every day brought some new task to light. All this toil got us two squares and a bed, and you a daily dark green poultice and a rancid nostrum you fought with all your strength against imbibing.
But it wasn’t so bad, was it? Your wheezing did subside. Meat climbed back up your thighbones. By the time the fields behind the house were finally cleared, it was you pulling the plow and me blundering along behind while the old woman hollered instruction.
“I wish I’d had a tintype made up this afternoon,” she said contentedly after supper one evening. “You were some sight, the pair of you.”
“Folks wouldn’t know what to make of it.” It made me drowsy to hear the steady snap of her pipe. Outside, in a cold light rain, you and the old woman’s shoat were digging yourselves deeper puddles and licking fenceposts for the salt, and spring had come.
“You know,” she said. “There’s a man way out in town would give his fortune to see a camel again in his lifetime.”
“I’m that weary of people wanting to see camels. In my experience, all they ever really want to see is how much weight it’ll take to break their backs, or how their innards are configured in comparison to horses, or what they taste like.”
“Not so with this man.”
In the morning she led us the twelve miles into town, riding ahead on a small white donkey whose plodding tilted her left and right like a gale-tossed ship. The April sun hung lazily between white cords of cloud. The shady sides of the hills were still thick with snow, but the weather was fine and warm. We reached the village to find the saloon crowd had spilled into the sunlit plaza and circled their chairs around a chess layout. One by one the players sat up as you came out of the trees and into the thoroughfare.
We followed Dueña Maria to a small house at the far end of the village. She sprang out of the saddle and went down the walk, hollering: “Filip Tedro! Come out and be surprised!”
The door flung to. And there—beneath a speckling of gray hair and a groomed mustache—stood Hadji Ali.
EVENING
AMARGO
Arizona Territory, 1893
“THERE’S THE BOYS AT LAST,” Nora said.
Late evening had brought bats and dry air, and now a rider down from the road. He followed the bluffline with the sun red behind him, and worked his way through the mesquite and toward the house. A second rider had not appeared by the time he reached the trees.
It’s Harlan, said Evelyn.
Josie, shading her eyes, said it almost simultaneously. “That’s the Sheriff.”
It was. Unsettling, how a person could be so easily recognized at a distance, not by feature or coloring, but by the composite gestures particular to himself alone. Harlan Bell was lean as a greyhound. He rode cave-chested, holding the reins loose in one hand at an odd angle. He listed to favor his right side on account of ghost pains from shot he’d taken scouting the borderlands for Crook.
“I guess there might be news on Mister Lark,” Josie said.
“You’d best get that poultice warming for Toby.”
With Gramma tucked away in a less obtrusive corner of the kitchen, Nora rearranged herself. Her hair was a shock, but there was little time now to do anything save fight it down flat. In the mirror, Gramma’s eyes guttered back and forth, following the speed of Nora’s hands.
Harlan was reining up when she got back outside. He was not a handsome man—but in Desma’s words, “you’d live after seeing him.” He had sparse hair and a high, wide brow and an even wider set of teeth. The first afternoon Nora met him, he had just won a prizefight at the expense of two molars. A punch had shoved the balance of his front teeth straight back in their gums. He stood, in nothing but muddy trousers and a bib of his own dried blood, calling for a spoon. Moss Riley had obliged him with one. Harlan, in full view of everybody, had put it to the backs of his teeth and pushed them forward into place with a crack that called to mind a felled tree and momentarily cost at least one observer his consciousness. Somehow, improbably, the teeth had managed to heal back to their original magnificence. He had small, quick black eyes set far back in a staved-in face, and the whole configuration came together to always make him look a little wild. This new beard, which he’d sprouted abruptly in September, softened his corners a little. But it did not suit him.
“Sheriff,” Nora said. “Back again.”
“You shamed me so thorough the other day for coming round empty-handed, I figured I’d best remedy my disgrace as soon as possible.” He sent the lead rope over the porch rail and back around.
She hoped he was ready to be shamed again. “A brick made its way through the Sentinel office window overnight. Yet here you are, reining up with neither mention nor solution.”
He looked grim. “First I’m hearing of it.”
“Guess you haven’t been by your office since this morning.”
She had intended that to sound less deliberate. He stood there, watching her. “It was an early start kept me ou
t,” he said. “Not a late night.”
“What business is it of mine, where you spent your night?”
His hands drifted into his pockets. “Where’s Rob and Dolan?”
“Away just now.”
“They due back soon?”
“Depends on what you want with them.”
That she did not intend to invite him in was now manifestly clear. He had not expected to meet resistance at her door. That was a comfort. If bad news were abroad, he would have come less unprepared.
“I might have use for that cart they been looking to sell,” he said at last.
“If you need a cart so bad, why don’t you use my husband’s? I hear it was found near the Sanchez place.”
More of the same lingering. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Abroad.”
“Rumor is what it is. I ain’t heard it fresh since I went up there to look.” If only he would glance down at his boots, or hesitate, or flinch some other way, she thought. Then she could be certain of his duplicity. But he had an earnest way, Harlan, of looking straight ahead at her, as he was doing now. “If you doubt me, I’ll go back again in the morning, Nora. I will.”
Without intending to, she had waited too long to answer and brought herself now to a change of subject. “What do you want with a cart?”
“Figured I’d have my deputy paint it up with my name, and drag it round behind my horse for the benefit of any as-yet-undecided constituents till the election.” He took the opportunity of her laughter to hunt around his duster pockets. “And I thought you could use this. For Toby.” He held out his hand. In it was a small, withered eye patch. “Wearing it awhile set my nephew seeing straight after he was born cross-eyed. I know you said your boy’s eye is torn, and that’s different. But I figure it couldn’t hurt.”
Unexpected tears blurred the outline of him. She pushed her tongue against a seam of muscle that had suddenly begun to tighten her mouth. “That’s mighty of you.”
“You needn’t use it if you reckon it’ll do more harm than good.”
She took it from him and held it in her apron pocket and felt along the cracks that braided the leather. “You’ll stay and have a bite of something, anyway.”
Harlan followed her into the kitchen and stood in the doorway, muttering his greetings under the full blare of their household chaos: Toby raising Cain over the eye poultice, which was loose and oozing and too hot and too cold; Josie readying Gramma’s supper, cutting the margins off a ham and shouting the moment he entered, “Sheriff Harlan again!—but you keep coming round here like we still need convincing to vote for you!”
“Rob said he weren’t voting up Sheriff Harlan no way,” said Toby cheerfully.
Shushed from all flanks, he shrank in his seat and quickly discovered something in the grooves of the tabletop worth studying. Nora sat Harlan opposite him, and the Sheriff made his way through Amada de Almenara’s pan dulce in silence, one corner at a time. If he had any notion of the gulf his possible third term had opened between Larks, he didn’t show it. Toby, his mood greatly improved by the arrival of his own share of the dessert, grew thoughtful.
“Won’t it be queer to call you Mister Bell again? After you been Sheriff Bell so long?”
“Just you go on calling him Sheriff Bell for now,” Nora said. She pushed a plate of ham and corncake across the table at him. “Take your gramma her supper. Go on.”
He stomped reluctantly off, cheeks bulging with his last, hurried bite.
“I reckon you’ll be sheriff again,” Josie said. “But not with that beard.”
Harlan feigned a gut wound. He twisted at himself until he was satisfied with her laughter. Then he said: “I think it rather becomes me.”
“I read once that folks like lawmen to be clean shaven,” said Josie. “It’s more honest-looking.”
“What about dignity?”
“Your beard’s a bit thin for dignity, Sheriff.”
“It’ll thicken out.”
“Do let’s shave it.”
He dealt her the long look of a parent already won over and merely withholding his answer. When he said, “All right go on,” Josie leapt up the stairs. Returning with all her barbering implements, she stretched over Harlan to tie the bib behind his neck, and then went around tucking, shifting, smoothing, running her hands over his shoulders and down his arms. The beard, an uneven gray snarl, was further ravaged by all the evidence of Harlan’s numerous attempts to shape it, which Josie was able to ennumerate in almost supernatural detail—see here, Sheriff, how you’ve cut it long and it ain’t coming back even? see how the direction of your hair’s all changed? my goodness, Sheriff you didn’t really try doing this all by yourself, did you? Though, of course, he obviously had. Josie was behind him now, frowning, tongue stuck out, brow furrowed, as if her very serious undertaking had indeed warranted all this tactile investigation, and there was very good reason to lean so close and put not one, but both, hands in his hair.
“Haven’t you anything more useful to do?” Nora said.
“No, ma’am. The chickens are fed and the springhouse is swept.”
Nora watched those feeble, pink fingers wandering slowly across Harlan’s scalp.
“Weren’t you meant to get those hackberries off the damn tree?”
Josie made a noise. “I plain forgot, ma’am! I’ll do it first thing.”
“Now’s as good a time.”
The girl looked up cautiously. The pause she allowed to lengthen out, Nora realized, was meant to convey the gravity of what was now being asked of her.
“Well?” Nora said.
“But, ma’am—it’s falling dark.”
“Well then you better run, hadn’t you?”
Josie set her scissors down. Her movements were all gallows-walk now, slow and deliberate, hopeful of a last-minute intercession from somebody. None came. Toby, unaware of her predicament, chattered without pause in another part of the house. He would not be howling to her rescue now.
The picking basket was under the sink. Josie retrieved it and shook the few loose twigs stuck to its bottom over the back step. She wondered aloud whether or not the evening had by now got cold enough to warrant a change of clothes.
“You’d best take a shawl,” Nora said. “At this rate, it’ll be winter by the time you get down there, and it’s your frozen husk we’ll be getting instead of berries.”
Josie’s hat went on slowly. The ribbon, which she ordinarily let fall behind her shoulders, was wrestled painstakingly into a single, and then double, knot beneath her chin. She looked about ready for a noontime picnic, but didn’t smile when Nora pointed this out. With a final wounded look in the general direction of the kitchen, Josie went outside.
Harlan sat with his knees stuck out from under the blanket and examined his boot-toes. Josie’s departure had left a residue of sadness in the room, and it spoiled everything. Even the splendor of those faintly purpling clouds couldn’t overcome it.
“She’s a nice girl,” Harlan said.
“Thank God for that. If she weren’t, you’d be hard-pressed finding any sign of the Almighty’s design in her.”
His smile was patient. “She’s harmless enough.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t be so curt with her.”
Emmett had used the word “cruel” on more than one occasion. But Harlan just shifted his shoulders under the drape. “She wouldn’t take it so hard if she put less stock in pleasing you. But ain’t that how we learn to be ourselves? Failing to impress them that matter most to us?”
Outside, evening dew had opened up the smell of the grasses. The dark outline of Josie had made it just past the fence, moving quick now among all the other tableland shadows. A sudden and inexplicable weight connected with Nora’s chest, momentarily displacing the realization that she and Harlan were alone. From somew
here, Evelyn’s voice said: call her home.
But now Josie had gained the ridge and become, for a fleeting instant, just the angular silhouette of herself—hat, neck, shoulders, waist, bell-shaped skirt—before disappearing down the trail.
“AND WHAT’S TO BECOME OF me?” Harlan said. “Sitting here, resigned to my fate, with no one to barber me?”
“I’m of no use in that regard, I’m afraid.”
Harlan resettled himself and looked through the window. “Hope that girl can tell her way. Or it’ll be Peyton Landers all over again.”
Nora hadn’t thought of Peyton Landers in years—though perhaps, in mulling on the beginnings of her and Harlan’s friendship, she often thought in a roundabout way on the occasion of Peyton’s demise without featuring him in it at all. Peyton had been a haggard Carolina prospector with a quick temper and a smallish claim up the creek from Amargo proper. He lived in a state of agitation, at odds with everything: the heat, the weather, the gold or lack thereof; the density of the crowds and the absence of quality people; his neighbors and their proclivities; the fact that they were so far inland he doubted a railroad would ever come their way—and if so, what was the point of staking up in such a godforsaken place?
“Hard queries all,” Emmett had said, “but fuck, don’t the rest of us manage to live somehow without biling on about it all day long?”
One night, back in the days when they were all still lying under canvas and counting each other by name in the dark, Peyton failed to announce himself. They called for him awhile. Waited and called again. A few of the bolder lads went around the whores’ tents, but found no trace of Peyton there, either. Every spare hand was rousted to the search. The women numbered five: Desma Ruiz, riled for having to endure this ridiculous odyssey for such an unworthy soul; Amada de Almenara, thinner in those days and sundark and every ounce as methodical about this as she was about everything else; two whores, whose excitement about the variance of their usual itinerary was wearying; and Nora. Some torch-wielding authority at the point of the crowd paired her off with Harlan Bell. She knew little about him, save that he was the postrider who had scouted for Crook, and kept mostly to himself. Just that morning, he had won a prizefight.
