by Téa Obreht
The window rattled again. Nora looked. Outside, the moon was standing clear of low clouds, and tracts of darkness hurried over the quicksilver plain.
“What else?”
Well, Evelyn was glad that Emmett had stopped calling her “birdie.” He had always called her that when she was very small, and it had made her cross with him. But now he referred to her as “Evelyn” on the rare occasions he did bring her up, and she considered this a great improvement. She could feel him thinking of her in those moments as she really was—not as she had been—and it pleased her.
“She is full of forgiveness,” Josie said.
Nora nodded so she would not have to speak.
“And the Indians,” Josie said. “The ones who rode in and drove you into the fields where she died. She forgives them, too.”
The girl went on, but Nora didn’t hear the rest. The candleflame swam. After a while, she held up a hand. “That’s enough—that’ll do.” On her way upstairs, she blew out the light.
If there was one thing Evelyn—the real Evelyn—would surely know, it was the circumstance of her own death. The Evelyn of her imagination knew it; rarely spoke of it, but was frank when she did so. Left the Indians out of it, for she knew the truth.
This shade conjured by Josie—whatever it was—did not know.
The only other soul who really did was Harlan.
And he was standing now with his hips slung forward and looking at her in that old, grim-soft way. “So the boys think Emmett’s kilt?”
“And that the Sanchez brothers were involved.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know.”
She sat down on the cart. “I guess a few days’ silence seems an eternity to them. Ain’t that funny. They were quite small, and don’t remember when it was a common enough thing to go full two months with no word whatsoever from their father. I’d worry one day, rage the next. So that by the time you rode over, week seven or eight, with a letter from Denver or Cheyenne or wherever he was at the time, I wouldn’t even read it. Remember? Just set it there on the table while we had our supper.”
She had a sudden memory of sitting across from Harlan on one such night. He looked like his present self in the memory—beard and all—which was impossible. But she could see the plate, with its blue rim, and his food divided neatly on it. Peas here, potatoes there, meat carefully trenched in its spot and not a lick of sauce traversing these separate zones. She had teased him mercilessly about this, and it shamed her to remember, and so she said the only thing that fell to mind.
“That beard really does make you look awful mangy, Harlan. It won’t do at all.”
SHE GOT THE BOYS’ TALLOW soap from Dolan’s room. Harlan sat very still, looking down at his hands, while she greased up his face and whet the knife. Ordinarily, she preferred to start in front; but standing behind the chair offered her an unobstructed view of the window, through which she could watch the road for any sign of visitors or returning parties—Josie, or the boys, or worst of all, Emmett, who was liable to overreact to this particular tableau. She scraped the first of the oil from his cheekbones. She was dismally out of practice.
“By God, I don’t know about this,” Harlan muttered through a nervous grin. “You seem a little unsteady.”
“Only on account of your talking.”
“I’m only talking because I ain’t had a dry tallow shave in ten years, and I don’t reckon my skin can stand it. It don’t spring back like it used to, Nora.”
“Let’s leave it, then.”
“No,” he said. “Go ahead—go on. Please.”
How gratifying to learn she still knew the contours of his face by heart. Why should this surprise her? Weren’t features as memorable a topography as any other? Hadn’t she shaved him a hundred times before, back when they would come together after dinner with the fire banked and nothing between them but the quick scrape of the blade and the occasional wet zip of the razor against the bowl’s tin rim? She always worked the same way: lip first, chin next, followed carefully by the sides of his face and neck so that he could rest the weight of his head against her shoulder while she finished. The first few times her hands had shaken so badly she cut him—once on the chin, and once quite broadly below the ear. It should have been sign enough for anybody: nothing so ominous as throat-cutting to ward a man off. But he’d proven obligingly cheerful about it.
“Go ahead and slice me a few more times, while you’re there,” he’d said, examining his blood-soaked towel. “My trade don’t often earn me a wound this impressive without proper risk to life.”
All this had begun some years ago—five, she’d been telling herself for so long that it was now closer to ten. Before Ferdy Kostic, back when Amargo had no post service at all—just Harlan running the only freight contract in town and occasionally bringing the mail. A stretch of prosperous years tracking rustlers all over Texas had put him in good standing with local cattlemen, who could always be counted on to make a bloodhound of him for two or three months at a time. When work was slow he wintered in the Amargo mining camp. But after getting deputized to assist in the capture of the Foxbow gang, he figured he ought to put down roots, just in case a shot at elected office might be in his cards. He filed on a claim two lots over from the Larks—a craggy little tract where not even Rey Ruiz could divine water—and took to calling around when Emmett was away.
Harlan would ride over in the afternoon with mail and sundries and gossip from town. One chore or another would keep him there till suppertime, much to the disdain of Rob and Dolan—who, at the ages of eight and seven, considered themselves expert on a host of household undertakings about which Harlan dispensed terrible and needless advice. Harlan, to Nora’s delight, was unfazed by their contempt. On summer evenings he would follow her and the boys down to the stream, where they cast shabby lines into the warm mud of the creek and listened, with helpless beguilement, to stories about his traveling days. He had helped stake two hundred miles of rail. He had lived four years with the Sioux. Though he was not, by his own admission, much of a shot, he had backed Page Starr and Armand Gillespie in gunfights and lived to tell about it.
“Got a warrant out on you anyplace?” Rob had once astounded Nora by asking.
“Yes sir,” said Harlan, without hesitation.
“Where?”
“Bullhead City.”
“How come? You kilt a man?”
“I always heard it said the only men leaving Bullhead City without warrants on them were kith and kin to the Devil—and for that reason I consider my warrant a badge of honor.”
Later, when Nora asked him to elaborate—having suddenly realized that if she was going to allow her boys to hear talk of warrants and gunplay, she ought to get full measure of the case; was there a woman in question, for instance, a consort or betrothed that Harlan had simply failed to mention?—he obliged. In his lawkeeping capacity—sometimes deputized, often as a range detective, occasionally as a mere bystander—he had countenanced the very lowest people. Suffice it to say the depredations of the men he hunted were not limited to cattle or property. It weighed on him that he might have been overzealous in meting out justice now and again, but the overturning of warrant after warrant against him kept his conscience clear. Then a woman had disappeared, he said, somewhere in New Mexico. She’d had two daughters. That the boy he apprehended was only a kid, and not the primary architect of what had happened to them, did not concern Harlan. The judge disagreed. And of the four warrants out against Harlan, only this one was still outstanding—which, he felt, was as it ought to be. He wasn’t sorry for what he’d done.
He reminded her of men she’d heard about in Cheyenne. They lived by their own unflinching laws, often subduing misrule by their mere presence. She had no doubt that Harlan’s aspirations for Carter County sheriff would come to bear. But they did not. Amargo—backward hole that it wa
s, den of small-minded misers and fishwives—reeled at the prospect of a hothead young bachelor, devoid of familial foundations, wearing the tin. He worried that it might be something else, but she was able to convince him after a while.
“If you were married,” she said. “It would have gone differently.”
“I know,” he said. Then he kissed her hand for the first time.
She began to notice the letters Harlan brought her were sometimes two or three weeks delayed. He was keeping some of them back, she realized, in order to justify his visits in the intervals she received no correspondence. “How droll,” Desma had said, without really seeming to mean it. Nora considered telling him not to worry about pretext. Neighbors could call on each other for the simple sake of being neighborly. She felt almost sure of having read a passage about that in Scripture. But she said nothing, because to name this strange, fragile thing—this whatever-it-was that kept him appreciating her middling cookery and laughing at the occasional humor of her small cruelties and even touching her fingers now and again—might break it.
Moreover, she knew well her own part in all this. She did not make a habit of shaving any of her other neighbors’ faces. She did not laugh when their jokes were terrible, nor consider their near-illiteracy charming. She did not count down the hours until their arrival, either; nor let them linger past midnight before the fire so they could regale her with stories about scouting for inept brigadiers. If they happened to squeeze her hand, she did not thrill for days afterwards. And if she had brought them into her bedroom to attend to a stuck window, she would not have hovered in the doorway like some faint novice, feeling strangely warm and unable to keep from touching her own face.
So for as long as things did not need saying, she said nothing. Ecstatic, unbearable—this charade went on for years.
Even so she had thought it a happy time. Everything had felt a little easier, as though life were slowly righting itself. The Evelyn of her mind was about nine, chatting ceaselessly in her ear, occasionally even praising her for getting the hang of ranchwork. Emmett was making headway with the newspaper and still cheerful about their odds of squaring Sandy Freed’s mountainous debt. There were no other newspapermen coming to visit—odious creatures, she thought, always plotting how to make something bigger or meaner or more worrisome than it was.
Of course, not all of it was happy. If watching Emmett leave distressed her, facing his return after weeks with Harlan was harder still. She would fill up with dread, lose her appetite, argue cruelly against everything. Emmett, believing it a reaction to his long absences, withstood it with surprising patience.
The closest he ever came to reproach was when he compared coming home to entering a snake’s nest—and even then, his complaint turned only into a joke at his own expense. “I have to place my feet very carefully,” he’d said, tiptoeing toward her.
She laughed, but felt the urge to say, “Try breathing with half a lung.”
For that was how it felt to be torn from the comforting routine of possibility, the momentum that seemed to bring herself and Harlan inevitably closer to a precipice. At any moment, Harlan might make his overture and change everything. The promise of this had carried her through the days—carried her on from Evelyn’s death, and the upbringing of her mutinous boys, and the knowledge that she might be stuck here until Emmett failed or succeeded, which could happen today, or next week, or twenty years hence, when she was played out and old.
But a person could get used to doing without. Gamblers did, and so must she. For six weeks—or months. A year, sometimes, during which her only reprieve might come at some loud party where the density of the crowd would thrust her and Harlan together in some quiet and exciting corner to carry on a conversation interrupted months before, which both nonetheless seemed to remember. She counted them all, and out they came, dancing into view as the seasons changed and the years went on, full of comings and goings.
Then came the winter of ’89—a soul-hollowing winter that drenched them in downpours and ate away the mountainsides and buried whole ranches and swallowed up those poor men who were still trying to coax some flake out of the played-out canyons, all of it so catastrophic she wondered if there might not be something biblical in the works after all. If she could only get through it, she thought, Harlan would come back from his latest job in Texas, and Emmett would head for the annual gathering of newspapermen in Denver.
A few weeks into March, however, Harlan returned in the company of a woman whom town gossip quickly established to be Missus Harlan Bell. Wild rumors eddied around her: she was a Confederate loyalist; some desperado’s widow Harlan had been forced to marry; an heiress of the Blackwood logging company. Nora didn’t believe any of it. One look at the woman told you everything you needed to know: she was a thin, blond, bird-boned thing; but no amount of Atlantic breeding could mask that Doric forehead, that jaw so robust you’d be forgiven for thinking she ate rawhide four squares a day. Her consonants dropped like stones, leaving little room for doubt that her ancestors had been present at the sack of Rome. Harlan, it seemed, had met her in Texas, fallen hard, married her before the judge, and managed to keep the whole thing secret until she came clicking into town behind him in her little black gig, signing the guestbook at the Bitter Root Inn as Emma Konig-Bell.
The few facts that emerged about her over the following weeks were firmed up by her handmaid, Sara Wright, a slight flint of a girl whose daytime terseness stood in stark contrast to how loose-tongued she became after one or two glasses of whiskey after hours. Missus Emma Konig-Bell was from Minnesota by way of Texas. She liked this mining camp only a little better than the one where she had met Mister Harlan. A jewel the size of your head was sewn into the hem of one of her dresses. She drank beet elixirs twice a day. She had always set her sights on marrying an upright fellow with lawkeeping ambitions, but would live at the Bitter Root until her new husband had made his homestead habitable for one such as herself.
The town ladies had some theories about what kind of person preferred to live in a hotel rather than in a home of her own keeping. Nora had thought herself above such cruelties—but something brittled up in her. Having gone so long without naming whatever it was between herself and Harlan—which had now, seemingly, died—she could not name its aftermath. And unable to name it, she could not root it out.
Nights at the dinner table, she tilted the soupspoon and forced thin dregs of sustenance between her teeth. Again and again, she woke from hazy dreams to the conviction that her house had been robbed.
By the time Harlan rode out to her place again—it was a year; she had counted (not that it mattered, but she had): November to March, during which time she had blithely thought everything was all right while Harlan was falling head over heels in Texas; and then March to the big spring celebration in May when she shook Missus Emma Konig-Bell’s smooth, light hand for the very first time; May to August of course, oppressive and interminable; and then finally August to November, which had once been their season—Nora was four months along with Toby. Emmett was in Denver. The new Missus Bell was visiting cousins in Minnesota.
Nora stood on the porch and spoke—she believed—softly, trying all the while to suss out any appreciable change married life had wrought in Harlan. He looked a little played out. Anyone fool enough to marry a German would be, of course. His gauntness spoke volumes about the woman’s cooking—or lack thereof, for what kind of cooking could a woman possibly acomplish within the stuffy, wallpapered confines of the Bitter Root Inn anyway? Harlan, meanwhile, stayed mounted. He meandered through news of weather and crops and his recent failures at joinery and the conversations he’d had of late with Mister Merrion Crace, who was unexpectedly civil and encouraging of his intentions to run for sheriff—though it had been difficult to parse whether Crace was sincere or just over-polite.
“You know the English,” he said.
“It’s an affliction,�
� said Nora.
He looked her over. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He climbed out of the saddle and went on looking at her, passing the lead-rope from one hand to the other. “It does my heart good to see you, Nora. It’s been too long.”
“Don’t be absurd. Weren’t we both at the Hallows fair only just last week?”
“Well.” Caution stifled his voice. “We didn’t hardly speak at all.”
“I don’t know about that.” She stuck her hands in her apron and looked down the road. “You told me all about Missus Bell’s ambitions to instate a vegetable garden once she’s moved out to your place—I reckon that’s more than we’ve said to each other in months.”
“Missus Bell does intend to instate a vegetable garden.”
“I’m pleased to hear it.”
“More to the point: there is a Missus Bell.”
Her heart jumped. “I know that.”
“Of course. I only meant. You understand the impossibility.”
“Perfectly. I understand it’s fine enough for you to come riding over here night after night, with your mixed-up letters. Hanging about till it’s too dark to ride back home. But now that there’s a Missus Bell—oh, how the sanctity of blessed union comes rushing to the fore.”
She had him on the back foot, but not for long. He went red.
“There is also a Mister Lark.”
“What a ridiculous thing to say.”
“No more ridiculous than pretending we’re strangers when your husband comes in the gate, and then expecting me to come calling again the moment he’s gone.”
