by Téa Obreht
All this, as she had long suspected, was what came of naming fragile things.
Years of thin handshakes and cursory nods across crowded rooms followed. When she remembered days that now seemed past, she saw the scenes from outside herself, as if she were observing them third-person, as if all along they had happened to somebody else. In twisting flashes populated by faceless people, she sometimes dreamt that they were still friends. She sometimes dreamt they were more, too, which was far worse. “Are you ill?” Emmett asked whenever she woke weeping—a rare enough occurrence these days, but so common back then that Doc Almenara had finally outlined the benefits of laudanum. He was cautious about prescribing it. He would not offer much, and only for a little while. She was glad of this interlude, for his gentle suggestion was all she required to get herself upright again. Laudanum indeed. It was just a little heartsickness, nothing the task of living couldn’t overcome. What did he take her for—some wilting, Atlantic-state hotel wraith?
The new Missus Harlan Bell left town the following September. Desma came riding over to tell Nora all about it. Apparently, the lady had packed up without a word to anybody, taking the servant girl, Sara, and heading east to Texas to take the waters. There was an assumption she might be in the family way, but Desma wasn’t so sure. People living within earshot of the Bells said there had been quarrels. A lot of nights spent abroad. It did not seem to be an ordinary curative trip.
Harlan was just beginning his tenure as sheriff. It was to be an interim position. His predecessor, Mac Calwell, had taken two rounds in the thigh putting down a couple of rustlers near the border, and Harlan had stepped in for him while Tucson physicians debated whether or not Mac’s ham of a leg could be saved. Amargo recapitulated all the reasons it had elected Mac Calwell in the first place: Harlan didn’t spend enough of the year local to possibly have the full measure of the town’s inner workings; during the last election, Harlan had seemed flexible on the question of range-fencing; and though he was now married, wasn’t he bound to be a little reckless, what with the wife gone abroad for the season? To make matters worse—for Nora especially, this smelled of spite—Emmett printed an article arguing that the Territory, being up for statehood, must generally resist the ascension of elected officials whose lawkeeping record could not be verified. Harlan Bell, the Sentinel insisted, was friends with a lot of particular interests all over Texas, and woefully unready to contend with a jailhouse then overrun with desperadoes. What could he possibly do with the four souls sharing a cell at the far edge of town (a duo of prospectors who’d attempted to gun each other down, and two bedlamites who had reneged on wagers at the Bitter Root and come to grief at Walt Stillman’s hand)?
The jailed desperadoes shared this outlook. They welcomed Harlan on his first day with a rousing chorus of “Garry Owen”—and soon enough made the reason for their mirth evident, attempting a jailbreak just after Harlan went off home that same evening. But this was where the story turned: the new sheriff, unbeknownst to any of them, had rigged the outer adobe walls with bells. When the men started digging, the whole jailhouse went off like Easter Sunday. Two o’clock in the morning, and people came out in their shawls and stood around in shock while Harlan coolly waited in the street with his shotgun aimed at the presaged exit. Nora didn’t see the incident herself, but it was acknowledged to be the most marvelous arrest everyone else had ever witnessed.
The two of them warmed up again right around election time. Nora happened to pass by one afternoon while Harlan was standing on a box in the thoroughfare, staggering miserably through a speech that was intended to put to rest some of the questions Sentinel readers were still asking. She drew up and listened, fanning Toby’s tiny bald head while he squirmed in his wrappings against her chest. Harlan Bell was categorically against cattle fences; unequivocally in favor of maverick branding; the author of more than fifty arrests all over the Territories. His opponent’s support of fencing homesteads seemed like a ready solution to the rustling problem right now, but it would go a long way toward breaking up the fabric of their community, the trust and care with which Carter County cattlemen treated one another, knowing that any steer might graze on anybody’s land at any time and not fall prey to the dangers of dishonest profiteers.
Harlan sweated. His voice faltered. Never had a man so suited for the job been so inept at this—the only means by which to obtain it. She wanted to laugh, to commiserate. She wanted to tell him it would be all right.
Toby fussed and kicked and fell asleep and woke up again. At the oration’s end, Nora raised her arms over her head and applauded with all the zeal she could muster.
Bertrand Stills made his pendulous way over to her. From beneath that oil-slick moustache, he asked whether Nora, as the wife of a pillar of the community, might tell him how the Lark house was now disposed toward the incumbent.
Nora answered without thinking. “Ensuffraged Larks will naturally support Sheriff Bell.”
This endorsement would prove unnecessary, of course. All anybody could remember or talk about was the thwarted prison break and how it had felt to stand in the street and bear witness to something the grandchildren would surely never believe. Damn near every ballot went Harlan’s way, and not even an amputated foot could garner Mac Calwell enough sympathy to make the contest remotely sporting.
But the print-up of Nora’s remark in the Clarion led to one of her and Emmett’s most bitter and enduring battles.
“My vote spoken for,” Emmett cried. “And promised to a low-down range detective.”
“He’s a lawman.”
“Have you any notion of how many people he’s strung up, Nora, all over the Territories?”
“That’s just nonsense cooked up by his opposition.”
“You know what they call him in Texas?”
“Sheriff Bell, I’d imagine.”
“They call him Harlan Knell.”
“You can damn well vote any way you like when you’re in the box. No one will know.”
But Emmett would not make a liar of her. And in November, he was obliged to stand before the Ash River photographers and grin to the point of rupture while the moment of his one and only vote for Sheriff Harlan Bell was forever immortalized for the benefit of strangers. That a daguerreotype of this scene now hung above the Mercantile cash register—beside a picture of Merrion Crace with Wyatt Earp—had proved a raw and lasting insult.
* * *
—
A last gleam of tallow still clung to Harlan’s face.
“How does it look?” he wanted to know.
“Marginally improved,” she said. “But then I’m not a magician.”
His hand wandered over his chin and then across her fingers where they rested on his shoulder. Ten years ago, this would have been a gesture to decipher, long for, visit and revisit again and again over the interminable stretches of his absence. Not so now—not at all. Here they were, friends and still unscathed, still the keepers of each other’s deepest confidences. Betrayers of no one, having wounded neither bystanders nor each other. She thought of Harlan sometimes as a fellow combatant with whom she had resolved never to speak of how close to disaster the battle had brought them. That they could be sentimental of the unspoken truth of their friendship was enough. And if his visits were less frequent now, they were also less fraught. And if they sat further apart at the kitchen table, it did not feel an excruciating privation. And if he spoke of his wife—with whom he did not expect to reunite, though they would stop short of a divorce on account of his office—Nora did not feel all the time as though she were being doused in freezing water. And if her skin tingled a little where he touched it—well. It was only flesh and blood remembering.
How strange, then, to find his hand had moved down to her knee. The whole world had gone mad today.
“What’s got into you?”
“Nora,” he said. “Listen to me.”
/>
He looked at the point of tears. “Good Lord, Harlan—what’s the matter?”
“Listen.”
FROM SOMEWHERE DOWN THE CORRIDOR came the skirling of those dreaded chariot wheels. Nora lowered the mirror. Harlan was already sitting up to wipe his face when Toby rounded the corner in the wake of Gramma’s chair. He edged the old woman over to the window where she could sit in the cool. Then he sat, squinting suspiciously at Harlan, who had managed to fight down whatever emotion had been rising in him and replace it with an ordinary, if unconvincing, grin.
“Why ain’t you ridden out to Cumberland and see if my pa is there?”
“We’re undermanned,” Harlan said. “But we’ve looked elsewhere for him.”
“Well you’re here,” Toby said, “so I guess you ain’t looking now.”
A heady snort cracked out from the depths of Gramma’s wheelchair. She looked as surprised as anybody to have emitted it. Her eyes shivered from Toby to Nora, from Nora to Harlan.
“Well, it’s dark out now,” Harlan said. “Not everyone is fine in the dark, like your pa.”
Toby looked down. “No one’s fine in the dark with the beast about.”
“What beast is that?”
Toby looked at her. Out it came: the beast whose tracks he’d seen up at the old Flores place when he’d been grouse hunting. The tracks—“Josie can tell you herself: Josie!”—were very, very strange. Toby put his fists down on the table, one beside the other, so that Harlan might countenance the sheer dimension of a single footprint.
When Toby paused for breath, Harlan said: “There’s a bear been breaking into springhouses up and down Narrow Creek.”
Toby put this down flat. “It weren’t a bear.”
“Well, then,” Harlan said, leaning conspiratorially forward on his elbows. “Perhaps it’s that ghost horse put itself through them prospectors’ tent down the gulch at Shelley’s Point about a month back.” Had Toby heard about it? By his open-mouthed silence, Harlan could tell he had not. Nora’s attempt to intercede here went unnoticed, and Harlan plowed on. It was Sal Abregado who first told him about it, maybe a month or two back. He’d gone fishing down on the Blue Fork in late summer when there was water still, and come across the brush all torn up, like a big herd had gone charging through it. Spoor trail and thick clumps of hair snagged on every branch. Well, Sal Abregado had never let fear turn him away from anything in his life, and wouldn’t start now. He went up into the thickets and through the gulch, all along this game path that had been torn until he got to a little clearing below the ridge, where a couple buscadores were encamped. Only when he got there, the camp looked like a stampede had come through. The tent was ripped in half. The hearth was trampled. Pots and pans everywhere. Some of the horses had pulled up their pickets and run off. Sal Abregado’s pals had met the rough end of this surge. One had an arm already slung up, and the other was trying to splint his twisted foot.
“Sal offers them water, and then says que pasó aquí? And he can tell, grateful as they are for the water, they’d rather not bore too deep into what had pasó aquí and what had not. Sitting there looking at one another with all their gear flung about. Nothing, they tell him, just a little disagreement. But Sal’s no fool. He don’t let up. He asks again: What kind of disagreement? Don’t they know it ain’t right to fight your brother?
“You know how Sal is,” Harlan said to her. Nora nodded. All she could remember of Sal was that he was a charming and easily distractible sportsman who would watch two snails crawl up a stalk of grass if somebody deemed it a race.
“Well?” Toby said. “What was it?” He had slid all the way down the end of the bench, abandoning his poultice in an oily pile on the table.
“It was a huge red horse,” Harlan said. “Big as a house, with dog’s teeth and a lion’s mane. All night they’d heard it howling about in the brush. The two of them sitting there under their canvas, shoulder to shoulder, pistols drawn but scared to look out. When it came time to defend, they were powerless. It went ripping through their tent and rolled them up in it like they was dolls, and dragged them twenty or thirty feet together, howling all the while. All they caught of it was a handful of red hair and the glimpse of a huge, white head and black eyes before it lit into the trees and disappeared.”
Nora could see it now: the avalanche of this story engulfing Toby, the sleepless nights that would follow. She charged into the silence.
“And then those two rowdy buscadores were clapped up for lying. The end.”
Nothing about Harlan’s smile indicated that he had heard her, much less caught her drift. His hands lay on the table within inches of Toby’s.
“It didn’t hurt them?” Toby whispered.
“I guess it roughed them up pretty good. Tossed them around in their tent.”
“That’s just like what Josie saw,” Toby said. “The lion’s mane and the white head. She’ll tell you.” He began calling her name again. “Josie! Where is she?”
“Must be upstairs,” Harlan said.
Nora trailed them to the banister as they started up. Toby led the way, bugling Josie’s name. Harlan’s dust-scuffed boots followed. It heartened her so much that he was willing to play up to the boy like this. She watched them scrape around the landing from room to room, Toby checking himself against the walls, Harlan opening doors and looking behind each, disappearing first into Dolan’s room and then into Toby’s. He reemerged and looked up at the next flight that led to the attic. “Farther along, I guess,” he said, and went upstairs. His hand was on his holster—force of habit, she imagined. His footfalls faded with each step, and the rafters shook out a little of their dust. Rob’s door banged open. She heard it thud against the rear wall, and then come creaking back. Harlan’s boots scraped from window to window. Then came two consecutive thumps—the sound of his knees on the floorboards, she realized, and she could see him, just as clearly as if she were in the room herself. He had gotten on his knees to look under the bed. What the hell for?
Toby was still on the stairs below. Josie’s name had become a two-syllable warble emitted at intervals regular enough now to be truly agitating. JOH-ZEE, JOH-ZEE. Devoid of all meaning. Between those outstretched vowels and the sudden swooping sensation between Nora’s ribs, Evelyn’s voice rose clear:
Something’s the matter.
Upstairs, to some unknown end, Harlan was opening Dolan’s wardrobe. She could hear the hinges groaning on their stiff pins. She could hear Harlan’s fingers sighing drily along the length of the landing wall as he came back down. Every few steps, he stopped to knock on the boards.
He came into view again. He looked grim.
“Harlan,” she said. “What the hell are you looking for?”
He said something about the boys again, but this was lost to the panicked tremor of Toby’s voice. “Mama, Mama—where’s Josie?”
Only then did it strike her: the girl had not come back at all. “Down in the gulch, honey,” she said.
FALLING FROM HORSEBACK LAST MARCH, Toby had made no sound. The horse in question had been a pinto bronc recently broken by Rob and destined for a quick sale. The bronc had pink nostrils and an uneven white blaze down its face. It had spent the balance of a month charging around and snapping its corncob teeth at the dogs. “He’s well broke now anyway,” Rob had insisted, though all of them knew it wasn’t so. But it was unlike Nora to keep open score on how often she was right and others mistaken, so when Rob boosted Toby into the saddle, she said only, “Mind him, now.” It all went softly enough at first, the little man and the bronc lifting velvet purls of dust. As she passed them on her way to the springhouse she saw the bronc’s back legs go up—just barely. An exploratory bump. Rob was shouting instructions about heels and reins and posture from the corral fence. He said, “Don’t lettim get away with it”—whatever that meant. Toby did whatever it was he thought was expected of hi
m. This gesture, unseen by Nora, sent the horse’s back legs into a vault. Toby went down. Rob—unaccustomed to being moved for—didn’t move. The bronc was a rangy, thin-legged thing. It stilled the same instant Toby went flying, perhaps because its only aim had been to shed the weight that harried it or perhaps—as Rob always insisted when it came to horses—because it sensed itself responsible for something unworthy. It hovered with its foreleg curled away from the boy. Toby lay stunned. A real pity, Mama. Nora could tell that all the air had gone out of his lungs. His mouth opened and closed soundlessly. Then he caught the air and sucked it in, loud and ragged like a belch reversing course, and Nora found her own aching breath. He stood, a little shakily. Rob, still at the fence, was saying, “Take the reins and get right on up now. You hear?” Toby went for the lead-rope, missed and fell forward again. This set her running. By the time she reached him, a crooked trail of blood had left the corner of his mouth. She would not remember, despite promising herself otherwise, to search the dust for his lost tooth later. Toby ran a hand across his face, spreading the blood up toward his eye, so its source was unclear to her once she’d swept him into her arms. All the while it was the silence that terrified her most. She had seen a boy brainhurt before, back in Iowa, and all this felt familiar: as if the body, half-remembering some well-learned map of living movement, had floundered out in one final gesture and been silenced.
None of that compared to the weight of Toby’s silence now. Even Harlan took a step back.
“Well, Josie’s only been gone a few minutes,” Nora said.
“Well,” said Harlan.
“Not long at all, lamb.”
“Maybe she got turned around in the dark.”
Toby dragged a single, dry sob. “Mama, I can’t see.”
Harlan looked at her. They struggled toward the same conclusion together. A few minutes? The sky had still been alight when Josie left for the gulch. The two of them had lingered in the kitchen awhile longer, gone out to the cart, spent unaccounted-for minutes in the barn, come all the way back. Nora, in the grip of some desire to preserve this sanctuary of calm, had decided to shave Harlan’s beard—and he had let her, and again that strange bittersweet urge to stretch the moments kept her from quite paying attention to how long it had all taken. Long enough for Toby to return. Long enough for Harlan to tell the story of the ghost horse. Long enough for him to scout the upstairs rooms—for what?—itself an episode that felt foreveraway and longago, though it had only just happened.
