Inland

by Téa Obreht

  “My husband didn’t write that,” she said.

  “It says right here that he did, Missus Lark.”

  But her mind had come to rest on the bulbous contours of that familiar word.

  “I wonder if you can tell me what the word ‘redoubtable’ means?”

  “Pardon?”

  “ ‘Redoubtable.’ What does it mean?”

  “Why—it means dubious, I believe. Or full of strife.”

  “Whoever wrote this letter may not know what it means, Mister Crace, but my husband certainly does. You never made such an offer to him. And he didn’t write that.”

  “All the same, it bears his ink.”

  He held the page out to her. It was typewritten, and scrawled at the bottom below Emmett’s respects were a looping signature and the stiffly scratched initials ESL.

  “If Emmett signed this, I am Libbie Custer.”

  “Really?” Crace sat back with his chin in his hands. “If only we had something for comparison. If only we had—I tell you what.” He laid his fingertips on her hand. “If only we had the letter he wrote me last month. The one outlining his sincere promises that, owing to certain compromising facts I admitted to knowing about his wife, his newspaper would never actively campaign against moving the county seat. Now of course, the Sentinel reneged on those promises by publishing the work of Ellen Francis—so one might call both Mister Lark’s word and signature worthless. And I doubt that anyone here cares to relive the unpleasantness of the details contained in my exchange with Mister Lark—a child’s death and so on—especially given how unsurprised Emmett seemed to hear what I had to say. Almost as though he knew it already. But fortunately for our purposes here tonight, that letter can continue to remain a rumor. As was Mister Lark’s trip to Cumberland for water, it seems. For here he is”—he patted the paper—“in California, after all.”

  The sudden exhaustion that moved into her now was familiar. She had felt it before, standing on the street in Cheyenne and watching the whole street burn and telling herself, don’t worry, when this is all over you can get some rest at home, and realizing in a rush of darkness that no, she could not—for here was home, on fire like everything else, and what she wanted, among so many other things, was now impossible.

  Papa’s dead, Evelyn said. He’s dead, and he’s been dead, and you’re the only one who hasn’t known it.

  How strange to know it so suddenly. Perhaps at one time there had been opportunity to learn it, grow used to it, but that was all past now. She felt as though she’d stepped into a field camp only to find it deserted and realize that all the people she had been expecting to see there had already moved on. Rob, Dolan, Toby, Desma, even Josie—their sign lay all around her in the trampled grass, but she could not tell how long they had been gone, or where to, or how far behind them she was. They might be days away, years. Perhaps she might never catch up. Beyond lay the dark: flat and unrelenting, unpeopled, absolute. Somehow it would drain her out of herself, while at once crushing in all around her. She had seen it before, but could not remember the way back from it. But then—there, just on the other side, a single lamp at the window. A gravel drive and a massif of slanted roofs; her own footsteps on the boards, and here she was—at the hearth of her rage. It was still here. She had grown up in it, let it contain her all her life, and she knew it, its margins and oddities. She was still herself, after all.

  She pressed a hand to her chin to still it. “California really must be as miraculous a place as folks say,” she managed. “If the dead can write letters to the living from there in an entirely new hand. For he is dead, my husband—no matter what that letter says.”

  “Is he?” Crace turned to Harlan. “You found any evidence of that, Sheriff?” Harlan sat, white-knuckling his kneecap, and did not reply. “You found a wagon? A bloodtrail, a riderless horse? Anything at all to invite the butchery those boys visited on my men this morning?”

  “I found nothing,” Harlan said. “You know damn well.”

  It required looking right at him to keep herself from crying, even if her gaze went unreturned.

  “Now, Missus Lark. You mustn’t be too hard on our good Sheriff. Men with bleak pasts in Charlesburg and Dodge City don’t often rise to hold office. And they certainly don’t get reelected. Men who know how to proof a wrecked little adobe cell against jailbreak because they’ve broken out of so many jails themselves are useful. But they don’t need the provenance of their skills shouted from the rooftops in an election year.” He smiled at her. “But you know that already. Of course. There are no secrets between you and the Sheriff.”

  Harlan made a sudden, flimsy show of standing up, but Crace’s fist came down on the bad knee. Some very distant part of her was amazed by the simple efficacy of this—but in truth she watched as though it was happening elsewhere, to people she did not know, as though the Harlan now sinking back with his face drained of all blood were a stranger.

  Crace went on. “You know who else keeps a man’s secrets?” he said. “His wife. A funny thing, matrimony. Never found much solace in it personally, but I’m given to understand that it supersedes everything of consequence—pasts, friendships. Not in perpetuity, of course, which is what makes it so dangerous. For the end of such a union turns each spouse into a vault of the other’s secrets. A kind of unopened letter, if you will, waiting for the right reader. Sometimes, the release of its contents is motivated by money. But often, if the heartbreak is profound, spite is plenty enough. For nothing injures the soul quite like infidelity. Even the unconsummated kind. Perhaps especially so. Imagine then, the injury of the wife of a man who cannot mask his love for some other married woman.” Harlan was saying something—her name. She could hardly hear him from whatever thick place had swallowed up her hearing. “Imagine how necessarily such a wife might unburden herself to a confidante. A handmaid, for instance—and how that same handmaid might unburden herself to strangers, at home and abroad, who care enough to keep buying her whiskey and letting her talk. Think of the things she might say: ‘God, but our Sheriff was so enthralled to that Arizona shrew—he wouldn’t leave off about her. He felt sorry for her. He felt she was some poor thing needed rescuing, for wasn’t she already a half-broken soul, carrying around the burden of having kilt her own child? Had the whole town believing it happened because she was hiding from Indians—but wasn’t she just fool enough not to be able to tell the difference between an Apache brave and poor Armando Cortez, who was only riding over with—what was it? A loaf of bread? My God. Can you imagine such a terrible thing?’ ”

  He stood and picked up his coat. “So, Missus Lark. If you intended to say that the Sheriff will hold up your side of these matters—well. I hope I’ve put any such notions to rest.” He nodded a little. “I’ll ride for the Doctor now.”

  “How did my husband die?”

  “What an absurd thing to say—he is in California.”

  “I’d like to know.”

  “Suppose he was dead—of what use would the details be to you?” Crace took his hat off the peg by the door. “I was at my father’s side when he passed, some twenty years gone. And I was alight with all my worries and fears. Was he cold? Could he feel his own pain? Did he think of me? Of my brothers, my mother? Was he, in his final moments, the person I remembered, or just a garble of thoughts all drawn together from odd corners of his mind?” He shrugged into his coat and straightened out his collar. “Save for the sense of having fulfilled my obligation to sit with him, I gleaned not one satisfactory answer to any of my questions.”

  “You fulfilled your obligation, at least.”

  “Depending on your point of view—yours being that the Sanchez brothers were responsible for your husband’s death—you might very well say that your sons have fulfilled theirs.”

  “What about my obligation, Mister Crace?”

  “That remains to be seen. You have a
n opportunity now to decide where your obligations lie.” He held out his hand. “Believe me, Missus Lark, it is my sincerest wish to face no further strife from this house.” His hand was warm, and not unpleasant. The edges of his face held the faintest trace of resignation, as if the two of them had committed some grand crime together and were reminiscing about it one last time before going their whole lives without ever seeing each other again. Of all the times she had been menaced by men, she had never felt so pointedly like one herself. “My offer stands. That I’ve made it at all, given the many ways I could bring you ruin, shows at least some of the esteem in which I hold you. I said as much to your husband: I am under no illusion about the kind of fight you might put up, but a fight is not what I’m after. I do not wish to besmirch you with talk of your dead child. I’ll tell you this, Missus Lark: I was surprised to find Emmett so unsurprised. To find he already knew what I had to say about your little girl. So I beg you to consider. If you refuse, all you’ve lost will have been for nothing. Your boys will be hunted up and down this country all their days. You’ll have only the one little lad left. We all know how dangerous it is to be down to just one. And he was so keen on the stereographs—even if he only could see down one side of them. I reckon he’d relish the chance to see some of those sights with his own eyes, in time.” Crace didn’t say ma’am, and he didn’t tip his hat. It was honest, at least. He called into the kitchen. “Come along, Sheriff.”

  For a long while afterward, she could hear Crace readying the horses in the dark outside. Harlan got himself to his feet and stood braced against the table. He was just about managing to look at her again. But he wasn’t moving. Did he expect her to come round and help him?

  “I meant to tell you straightaway,” was what he said. “About this morning, I meant to tell you. Took a moment too long to get to it, is all.”

  How strange, she thought. She had hooked into a heightened order of sensations along what felt like every lateral—she was aware of the ball of her foot, for a pebble or similar entity was goading her through the sole of her right boot, in and of itself already paining across the toes because she had spent the entirety of this hot, wretched, bewildering day in gift boots she had not wanted to admit to Emmett were too small; she was keenly aware of her thirst, of course, so matter-of-fact now that it was hardly worth noting, but there all the same, always and irrepressibly there; she was aware, too, of a growing discomfort in her stomach, not pain, but something that might turn eventually to it, for the steak was not sitting well in the wake of this rather turbulent supper; she was aware of the sweat cooling beneath her armpits and hair and of the smell of rancid fat off the pans that would linger, probably, for days. What a remarkable thing of one human body to receive all these simultaneous impressions, and be able to center on each alone, and all at once. And how strange that a body capable of such feeling might now make no association between the man standing before her and the words coming out of his mouth. They might well be the last she would ever hear from him, and they were about Josie.

  Josie.

  He would make sure the Doctor came for Josie.

  “It ain’t true I felt sorry for you,” Harlan went on. “I never said a thing like that. Not to anybody. I never did.”

  Then he braced himself to the door and went outside.

  Crace was a while getting Harlan mounted up, and a while after that getting them both from the wan light of the open door to a distance from which she could only hear their horses moving through the grass. She stood in the doorway while they loped past all of Toby’s little rock towers: twenty yards at the corral; thirty at the barn. She might be able to hit Crace, even in the dark, as far off as fifty yards, with at least enough accuracy to bring him out of the saddle. The rest would have to be done pointblank.

  She went for the shotgun behind the door. But having it to hand was one thing; raising it another entirely.

  If she raised it, she would probably fire. She knew herself enough to feel certain of this. But what then? Crace would fall, pulling the horse down with him. Roll onto his belly or crawl for cover and return fire from the bushes. If she wasn’t killed right off, she would eventually hit him—even with Harlan backing him, which might easily happen, for who knew what haunts slunk through Harlan’s life, what deals and debts bound him? But she would be killed.

  And who the hell would back Nora in such a gunfight? Toby, from some upstairs window? Josie, with legions of the dead at her command? Or would it be Gramma, perhaps? Wouldn’t that be a dose now: to realize after all this time that the old lady couldn’t merely wheel herself about and grip arms, but handle a rifle, probably better than the rest of them combined? She might as well be capable of flight.

  Perhaps it was worth seeing.

  But then, Nora knew, the cool draft of regret would go through her, as it always managed to one way or another. Even if she survived, how would she get on, dragging Crace’s corpse into the gulch, or burning it, or burying it, and then battening down for retribution? Perhaps Harlan would take her directly to jail, from whence Crace’s men would drag her some night before week’s end and string her up, probably next to Desma, if Desma wasn’t swinging already thanks to that slow elk, and the two of them would hang there with their boot buckles shining in the torchlight and be called madwomen and whores to their children’s children.

  What if she missed? Merrion Crace would wheel his horse and come back shooting. And all his men, probably dotted throughout the bushes, would mount up and back him.

  And if she let him ride away? What then? In the barn lay Josie, improbable survivor—hopefully, still—of an ordeal that seemed, even now, to have happened such a very long time ago. Upstairs, sweaty and dream-tossed, Toby was growing hair more slowly than anyone she’d ever known. Somewhere her other sons were camping by firelight. Passing the whiskey bottle. Taking turns at the watch. They were thinking about what they’d done—the lives taken. The lives avenged. Emmett’s hothead heritors. Her killer sons. They were thinking about their father. Thinking about her, in this house, imagining her asleep. Perhaps even some of the dogs were with them still. She pictured the old lusty one, resting its gray head on Dolan’s boot by the fire—improbable, she thought, for even the elation of surviving a gunfight could not have moved that ancient cur to keep pace with fleeing horsemen. For that’s what her sons were on this, their first night as outlaws—and what they might yet be for the rest of their days. Rob and Dolan Lark. Fodder for some future boy’s dime novel dreams.

  Ah, it’s a pity, Mama. But I guess it can’t be helped.

  * * *

  —

  Indians, she had said after Evelyn died. Five of them, on horseback. She had repeated it, and kept on repeating it, even after Emmett, with a few of the neighbors, rode out and found no such trail. Five of them, she said. Apache. She was certain of it. She could tell. She knew. Otherwise she would not have hidden in the field for so long, lying flat under that boiling sun, praying they wouldn’t set the whole place ablaze.

  She had left it up to Doc Almenara to explain the rest to those who cared to know: little by little, the baby girl had grown overheated. Eventually, she sundrowned.

  It had been summer. Their first house just about built. Emmett was gone somewhere, driving the flock. Evelyn was sleeping in a bindle between her breasts while Nora ferried water back and forth to the house, keenly aware of her solitude, watching the horizon, when a rider came up over the ridge. Just one man. A dark rider on a spotted horse. There was no road in those days for him to come by, only the twisted, ungovernable brush of the mesa through which she glimpsed leather and mottled horseflesh. Dark rider. Spotted horse. She thought Apache because the word had been growing in her like an illness all her life, but especially since the cavalry had raided that rancheria about a month back, and word of their doings had drifted to town with all the usual directness: buffalo fat and a bonfire that climbed and whistled and singed even
the edges of the dead. While her neighbors mulled over when and upon whom the Apache would visit retribution, so swift and so very disproportionate, Nora had sat quietly and thought: disproportionate? I’d do it to you, too. Your tongue and your eyes. Your guts pulled out in streamers, if it were my children cut down and left to dry in the sun.

  And still she had chastened that woman. That old, ordinary woman who wanted nothing more than to hold her baby, smell Evelyn’s milky breath and kiss the fat little knuckles, perhaps because her own children had been cut down in some Apache camp, long ago or yesterday. Still she had chastened her. Why had she lacked the fullness of heart to let her hold the baby, just for a while?

  When she saw the rider there on that pinto, Nora thought she had stumbled into a death foretold to her every day of her life. This was what happened to unbounded people. This was what the evening contained. Her blood lurched and went thin in her.

  She was in the field, running through the long grass, running till she went flat on the ground under that boiling sun. Eyelevel on the hot dirt with the yellow bones of a mouse or vole. Evelyn’s breath was warm and quick on her neck, until all that surrounded her was the sound of those small gasps growing faster and faster. Whimpers every now and again—but somehow, inexplicably, miraculously, never cries, though she pulled her skirt up and over her to make sure no sound escaped that depression in the earth where they lay. Eventual hooves in the distance, somewhere near the house. A man calling hullo hullo hullo—in English, she’d realized, to lure her out, deceive her into showing herself. Hullo hullo hullo, in a voice she did not recognize because she was wild with terror and imagination.

  By the time he had gone, Nora’s eyes were bloodshot with the sun, and Evelyn was hot and fretful. Asleep already.

  Her fever had not broken by the time Emmett returned, nor by the following morning. When Doc Almenara called around, he undressed her and held her on one arm in a basin of cold water and smoothed droplets around her neck and over the little tufts of hair she had begun growing. Nora was not allowed to touch her save to do the same. In her final hours, though her skin was a furnace, Evelyn had looked herself. The grim little face and the clenched fists, still and always in a huff.