Inland

by Téa Obreht

  The crowd of some twenty souls dispersed into the night. For half a mile, she watched the receding orbs of their torches dance away. Harlan led her up the mesa and into the cedars. They felt their way along, calling Peyton’s name until they were hoarse, then rested up in a little glade where Nora, forgetting herself, pressed her hands against her eyes. “Oh Peyton,” she said, unthinking. “You’ve all the chins of a hog, but none of the gumption.”

  Harlan’s laughter was explosive and surprising. She thought of how sunstruck he’d looked that day, bloody from the fighting, wiping himself down with his shirt, and a bruise already welting his shoulder, and found herself practically grinning.

  By morning, another search party had come upon Peyton’s dogs barking at the mouth of a ravine, and a few swift climbers confirmed what they already knew: there he was, smashed unrecognizable below.

  After the burial, Harlan had the care to find her and say, “It weren’t sin to laugh nor tell the truth that night, even if did concern a dead man—just so you know.” Something in her shifted to build a secret, unassailable room for him, and he still occupied it.

  “Poor Peyton,” she said now. “It’s an age since we poured one out for him.”

  “Still no sign of the boys,” Harlan observed.

  “Not yet.”

  “I guess I might prevail on you to show me that cart after all.”

  They went outside into the cool evening. She found she did not need the lantern to make her way. Harlan rustled along behind her. She felt hemmed in from all sides, and rigidly self-aware. Foremost on her mind: the flimsiness of her unlaundered shirt and the weight of her boots. For want of a better arrangement, she put her hands in her pockets—but this caused her to slouch, so she took them out and let them swing at her sides. It had been a mistake to wear trousers. The seams, which had been pressing all day into her most conspicuous reaches, felt now like the strings around sausage. At least, she thought, it was dark.

  About halfway out over the flat, Harlan stopped to look back at the shining windows of the house. He didn’t stir when she said his name. He was sure he’d heard the boys, he said, their voices floating out from somewhere upstairs. Her insistence that this was impossible went unanswered. He continued to stand there, staring up at the eaves and Toby’s small shadow roaming around behind the curtain, until she said, “Harlan, we’re quite alone.”

  Then he turned around.

  In the barn, he really did look at the cart after all. It was a wrecked-out old thing whose undercarriage had finally given way last summer, this time for good. For months, the Lark boys tossed around the notion of repairing it again, but then it was decided—by time, if not committee—that they should sell the salvageable parts to whoever couldn’t afford to buy them new. Harlan did not fit this bill.

  “I can’t see the sense of you clattering around town in something so decrepit,” Nora said. “Aren’t you meant to inspire confidence? I thought it was your lawkeeping destined to finally make us respectable enough for statehood.”

  “I don’t know about that—respectability, I mean, not statehood.” He grinned up at her with those incredible teeth from where he knelt beside the cart. “I’m from Missouri; I know all about statehood.”

  The rig would take some fixing, but he could right the axles and sand her down and give her a new coat of paint. Harlan got up and wiped his hands on his thighs. “How much they asking?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “What’s it worth?”

  Harlan climbed into the wagonback and shifted his weight from foot to foot to get the feel of it. “You look like something out of a Barnum and Bailey revue,” Nora said. This only plunged him into more exaggerated pantomime. He held his hands out to her and she climbed up beside him and they jumped up and down a little bit and the poor cart creaked and shook beneath them until a pin shot out of the undercarriage.

  They sprang down together like transgressing children, the cart’s worth now significantly depreciated.

  “I reckon three dollars,” said Harlan. “That sound fair to you?”

  “Three dollars?” She was a little out of breath. “With all the work you’ll have to do on it?”

  “You’re supposed to take your boys’ side. Tell me: Three dollars? Harlan Bell, I do declare.”

  “I don’t talk like that, you know. Like I just stepped off the Alabama train.”

  “Harlan Bell, I do declare,” he went on. “Don’t you know this was built by Robert Cade Lark—who growed up to be Carter County rodeo champion three years running—when he were only two? Don’t you know he and his brother used to pull each other around in it long before Dolan Michael Lark got the big judgeship over in Cheyenne? Three dollars, Harlan Bell—get away with you.”

  “I guess you’re right. Maybe seeing what a wily dealmaker their mama is might dispel some of their grievances against me.”

  He waited patiently for the last of her laughter to subside. “All boys got grievance with their mothers.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “Nora. Where are they—really?”

  “I don’t know. Best I can figure, over in Prescott.”

  He jumped down and stood beside her. It was an unconscious habit of his to light his pipe when he really meant to listen. “What’s in Prescott?”

  “They’ve queried the marshals about Emmett’s delay.”

  “Has there been any news?”

  “No. But they’re unconvinced of how carefully you looked for his wagon.”

  He put the pipe down and held out his hand. “I ain’t lying. I looked real careful. I been swearing to you and I’d swear it again.”

  “I know. They’re young. They think I accept without merit the things you tell me and they accuse me of foolishness. And now, it seems, they punch doors.”

  “So that’s what happened. I didn’t think it right to ask.”

  “Dolan did that,” she said. “Would you believe it?”

  Harlan stood with the velvet smoke rising around his face. “Well. Drought times try people in the strangest way. And I can’t say the entire county ain’t lost its mind about this vote.”

  He looked around the barn, and then climbed up into the loft and disappeared. She could hear him moving things around up there in the dark: now came the scrape of wood on wood, the sound of hinges creaking, a lid falling open. She couldn’t imagine what he might find. An old smoothbore, apparently, and a couple of Colt pistols. Emmett’s siege arsenal. Harlan was picking the guns up one by one and turning them over.

  “What are you looking for?” she said.

  “Not for—just around.”

  “All right. What are you looking around for?”

  “Anything amiss. Don’t it fall to me to ensure you and yours are safely kept till Emmett comes back?”

  “He is coming back.” She had not intended to pose a question, but Harlan was already nodding. “You found no sign of a cart out there? Nor sign that he had come to any harm?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “If you had, your being here would be despicable.”

  “I know it.” He swung his boots over the side of the loft and sat looking patiently down at her. They had gone over this already. He was merely waiting now for her to arrive at her point so he could reiterate his: delays happened for all the ordinary reasons, to everyone, all the time. Emmett would come home.

  “Remember how long we waited for news before the wires went up?” he said. “We forget quick enough, Nora: today’s conveniences were yesterday’s magic.”

  True enough. She could well remember the dread of separation twenty years ago. The inevitable sense that the people you were leaving behind might never be seen again—dead, perhaps, by evening, and their loved ones on the road for days, weeks, even months, believing that life was carrying on as usual in their absence, when in fact, all that
remained behind was emptiness. It seized her up a little just to think of it, that old not-knowing, that particular kind of evening. But then the wires had come through. Now one’s most ardent hopes or dreadful fears might be confirmed in a matter of minutes. And having to live with the old discomforts, for even an hour, even a day, felt impossible.

  She and Harlan had stood side by side last year when Ash River’s first telephonic transmitter, with a single line to the Crace ranch, was installed in the Worther Hotel. The hotelier, Walton Pickney, had got a new purple cravat for the occasion. A choker of sweat ringed his collar. By noon, a streetwide crowd from three counties was pressing against the fifty people who had managed to cram into his establishment. The fortunate among them, like Rob and Dolan, had gained the elevation of boxes and crates. Toby had been small enough to sit astride Emmett’s shoulders. Moss Riley and Walt Stillman—further entrenched in their enmity by the dredging up of their respective failures to win the telegraph company contract for Amargo all those years ago—were moated by damp bodies. Across the room, Nora and Harlan were wedged in so tight the Sheriff was obliged to put on his hat to keep it from brushing against her. The scent of tobacco clouded out from Harlan, and she tilted his way to let it overcome the potent cocktail of everyone else’s odors. All those souls in twelve feet by twelve, and Walton Pickney in his cravat and waistcoat advancing with the steeliness of a tightrope walker toward the machine where it sat in state on his new desk. He assumed the chair and laid his hands on the table. Then he put on his half-moons, turned to the device and lifted the cup to his ear. He cleared his throat. “Good afternoon, Mister Crace, sir. Here is my message: must I with my base tongue give to my noble heart a lie that it must bear?” Wood flies barmed the shelves and ticked against the sweet-lipped candy jars. Then the horn crackled to life, and back came the miraculous, rough-soft voice of Merrion Crace, distant and a little broken-up, but sounding every bit like the man they could all imagine hunching over a similar contraption many miles away. “Walton? For God’s sake, it’s not the telegraph—a simple ‘good day’ will suffice.”

  “Oh—good day, Mister Merrion Crace!”

  “Well done, Walton.”

  Poor Walton Pickney. He would later confess to Emmett, after a few too many, that he had spent the better part of the week choosing this ill-fated first utterance. But his disgrace went unremarked; to the breathless assembly in that room, all was miracle and magic.

  Afterwards came the obligatory barn dance, a great bright jolting mess of boots and dresshems that grew progressively more rancid as the evening wore on, until Nora could no longer stand it. Harlan found her taking the air. The hills above town were constellated here and there with the orange lights of miners’ lanterns, and the music of their work came down and broke up the skirl of fiddles and racket of feet.

  “I’ve the strangest feeling,” she said.

  “Fitting enough for strange times.” Harlan stood near and lit his pipe. “Ten years ago, it was invisible flashes flying through the air that staggered us. Words traveling at speeds so incredible that all a man had to do was write a notion on one side of the country for it to appear two thousand miles away, almost at the speed of his own thinking.” How impossible. Harlan had sat a good many years staring after those steadfast teams of men planting the telegraph poles. Wood and wire, and suddenly the whole horizon of human thought was altered. It had made him wonder what else might be coming. What else might be possible. “And now, sure enough.” He pointed back to the Mercantile. “The human voice.”

  Nora thought about it. Hardly a day went by, it seemed, without the newspapers touting some remarkable discovery that upended the truth or convenience of living. Miracles of every variety: buildings so tall they could only be summited by electric conveyance; pictures captured on metal. From Atlantic state palaces of learning, educational revues were making their way slowly inland to share the latest scientific advancements: anatomical marvels and wonders of automation. Put together, these all had the effect of drawing things closer to one another, of illuminating that grainy twilight beyond which lay the landscape of a new and truer world.

  And then there was Josie, who despite all of Emmett’s questioning was fixed in her belief that spirits, occupying the selfsame plane as their living counterparts, could announce themselves by script or knocking. That they could be summoned from their heavenly abode just to appease human frailty and frivolity. Called down from the hereafter for confessions and parlor tricks. What an absurd and unholy notion.

  But on the daylong ride home from Ash River, Nora fell quiet. She couldn’t leave off wondering about what Harlan had said. If electromagnetic pulses could fly through the air; if giants with shinbones the length of her entire body had once roamed ancient seas; if the world was plagued by legions of creatures so minuscule that no living eye could see them, but so vicious that they could lay waste to entire cities—was it not also possible that Josie’s claims, however exploitative and preposterous, might hold some truth? Might the dead truly inhabit the world alongside the living: laughing, thriving, growing, and occupying themselves with the myriad mundanities of afterlife, invisible merely because the mechanism of seeing them had yet to be invented?

  She had come home feeling affixed to her fate. There in the kitchen sat Josie, gracelessly shucking the last of the summer corn.

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Whiskey?”

  She watched Josie struggle through a few tentative sips. It took strength to drink without wincing—Nora mustn’t forget that, no matter the debasement to which she might now willingly subject herself.

  “Josie,” she said. “How are you able to call faraway spirits down?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Well, when Mister Crace asked you to call Fint Colson down,” she said. “Remember?”

  The girl did. “He never answered though.”

  “But where did you call him from? He can’t have died near town.”

  Josie lapsed into a long, ruminative stare. “I’m not sure where they come from, Missus Lark. I call out to them, and they answer or they don’t.”

  “Do they answer more readily if you call out from the place where they’ve died?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “And do they answer more readily if you call out from where they’ve lived?” She could see the girl was not following. Nora wasn’t entirely certain of following all that well herself. She tried again. “Would a séance, for instance, held within the home of the deceased be more favorable?”

  “Of course. Well. Not always.” Josie frowned. “I wish you would just go on and ask what you’re circling around, ma’am—I feel I’m answering you wrong, and it makes me that fitful to be around you when I think you’re mad.”

  Briefly, Nora considered giving up. But there was something so eager, almost pleading, in the girl’s upturned aspect. And she had one foot in the mire already. “I suppose—do spirits move, Josie, or are they fixed to one place?” What did she mean? “If a spirit were about—if it haunted a house, for instance. Would it be fixed to that house for all time, or could it move away?”

  “It could be made to leave, of course.”

  “But could it be made to follow?” She pressed on. “Suppose a family moved—could the spirit move with them?”

  Josie brightened. “That would depend on the spirit.”

  After a time, she took Nora’s prolonged silence as evidence of the conversation’s end. She began picking at the cornsilk meshed between her fingers, adding to the mountain already heaped on the tablecloth like the rent-apart wig of some scarecrow.

  “You know I had a daughter.”

  “I know,” Josie said. “She died of the heat.”

  “I guess I’m wondering—is she here?”

  They closed the kitchen door and extinguished all the lights save the candle in the m
iddle of the table. All the room’s shadows slid languorously from the corners and darkened the floor so that Nora could not even see her own feet. Everything filled with haphazard slabs of darkness. Josie did her the courtesy of dispensing with the usual turban and bangles. She sat with the planchette before her, and closed her eyes. The silence grew until it seemed to sit down at the table beside them. Josie asked whether Evelyn Abigail Lark was attendant to them—could she hear her? For a long time, there was no answer. Then something ticked against the window. Nora could not bring herself to turn her head. Evelyn might be there, looking exactly—or not at all—as Nora had envisioned her all these years.

  Josie called again to the darkness, and again the tapping came. She invited the spirit of Evelyn into herself. This was, Nora realized, perhaps her last chance to let her invention live on unaltered. Wasn’t it enough to know what she knew of Evelyn? What if the ghost who slid into Josie and opened her eyes to look on its mother for the very first time did not resemble that soul whose presence, real or imagined, had nevertheless followed Nora through life?

  But it was too late. Josie was stiff and far-seeing. Her pencil had begun to scratch wide, looping shadows.

  “Your daughter is here,” she said. “She found the dress you picked out for her christening very beautiful.”

  Nora could not remember that dress. She leaned closer, but by darkness the etchings did not resemble words at all.

  Josie went on. Evelyn had a lot of opinions about improvements to the house—most of them agreeable, now that she had learned to navigate them. It was difficult to learn new maps of the living world.

  Nora said nothing. The Evelyn of her imagination—radiant, tall, like Nora’s mother—had never liked the new layout of the house, either. She thought the porch too small. She did not understand why they had built around and then up, and not simply raised a new house when the present one became insufficient to contain them all. She was keenly aware that a room had not been designated for her—and Josie said this now, in a moment of sudden alignment: “She is glad to know she would be old enough to marry—for where would she sleep otherwise?”