Inland

by Téa Obreht

  Two days, or a thousand years later, they buried Evelyn on the hill behind the house.

  And the women from town started coming around with their pies and their empty regrets and, when they judged enough time had passed for such a thing to be deemed acceptable, their questions. What happened? What happened, Nora?

  She’d had to hide. She’d had to keep still.

  There had been Indians. Five of them. Apache.

  Then in October, Armando Cortez came to pay his respects. He was holding Nora’s hand when he said, “My God, if I had only known what trouble was coming your way. If only I’d known to ride out a little later—not when I did. I mighta found you home. I mighta been there.”

  And then she understood. A dark man on a pinto. Not an Apache at all, but this man, this man here, who now stood weeping into her hand. He had little girls of his own, and was imagining himself at their graveside. She was imagining it, too. Wishing fiercely for it.

  If it hadn’t been for Emmett, whom she loved, she would have tied herself a noose that same afternoon. And the next. What had the women of her youth called it? Self-solution. She thought of it whenever visitors left her alone and the house sat empty, or her husband gently put down any talk of going home, going wherever the evening wasn’t, to Iowa, or any other place where children did not boil in their own skins. Whenever Armando visited thereafter—and he came often, because he now lived a part of his own life in her lie, lived day after day counting the cost of his decision to venture out on his innocent errand a little too early, a little too late.

  Sometimes she wanted to tell him. Release him of the burden of believing his fate was so horribly tethered to hers. Instead, she kept saying only: Indians. Five of them. Apache. Of course she was certain of it. Of course she knew.

  She knew, and was believed more absolutely about this than she had ever been about anything before. A liar after all. And the lie, so easy in its time, a kind of evening in and of itself, was carried forward. Out it went, in the mouths and minds of women and freighters and soldiers, to some unknown amalgam of harm, a greater evening, so vast, so abundant, that every now and again, when she thought about it, she could convince herself it must be something else. How could there be so much of something so evidently poisonous?

  “Do you think any other people came to harm because of what I said?” she asked Harlan, when she finally told him the truth entire.

  His gaze toward her, unchanged by her admission, was full of faith and love. “No,” he said. “No, I don’t think so. No, of course not.”

  Well. Here was her lie already begetting another. One need look no further than Armando Cortez’s slow fall into terror to know it wasn’t true.

  And elsewhere, further abroad? She shuddered to think of it. Luckily, most days, she had managed not to.

  So take the water and take the land. Take the years they had built here together. Take Desma Ruiz and the Doctor and Josie. But my God, she thought—this is the house where my daughter lives. What if her entire being is tethered here, and forbids me to leave? And if I go—what if I never hear her again?

  IT’S COMING UP ON DAYBREAK, Mama.

  Looks like it might be fixing to rain.

  I do wish you’d put that gun down, Mama, and check on poor Josie before Toby wakes up.

  You know I only told Harlan the truth of what happened because poor Armando Cortez was going to pieces. And I was too damn flimsy to carry the weight of my doings on my own.

  I know.

  It was wrong enough to cost my child’s life for being a coward and a fool. But being a coward twice over—too much a coward to admit I had been cowardly. That damn near drove me mad.

  I know, Mama.

  And your father couldn’t be told, of course. A man has the right to live protected from some heartbreaks.

  But he knew, it seems. He knew and loved you just the same.

  Don’t that just beat all.

  I don’t know, Mama. I always thought it evident enough, in a way.

  I never dreamed Harlan would tell another soul.

  That ain’t the truth, now, in fairness. It kept you up nights when you first got word of his wedding. You were jealous all right—but not near so jealous as afraid that all your secrets would out.

  Well. Suddenly there was someone for him to tell them to.

  But then you thought about all the things you don’t tell Papa, and it seemed reasonable enough to feature that everybody keeps some part of themselves hid away. Even from their beloveds.

  I thought he wouldn’t tell a soul.

  We were both wrong, I guess. Put that down for a rare curiosity!

  I don’t mind people knowing about me so much, Evelyn. Knowing that I was so wretched and afraid that the sight of a mestizo on a horse scared me half to death. When it was only poor Armando coming with some bread and a story. I don’t mind them talking about me, darling. They do anyway. But I do mind them talking about you. Like you’re some poor wandering soul who had the misfortune of being born to a mad mother. I don’t want you known that way.

  It don’t matter to me.

  This is how I know you’re not a real spirit.

  How, Mama?

  You’re good to me—disproportionate to what I’ve earned by you. Every which way I go wrong, you forgive. Real spirits don’t. Neither do real children.

  I guess you’re right.

  I know I am.

  You know what Rob and Dolan wouldn’t forgive? You giving up the Sentinel to get them cleared of avenging Papa.

  Don’t care if they forgive that. I care that they don’t spend their lives running from the law. Sleeping in caves and catching bullets.

  I guess if they get wind of how you gained their pardon, they won’t much care to come back.

  That doesn’t matter to me.

  I guess in a way it don’t matter what you want. They made their sacrifice. It’ll be a worse betrayal of them to give up the Sentinel and pretend Papa ran away to California. Imagine them forgiving that!

  What choice do I have?

  You could take the Doc up on his offer.

  And then what?

  Leave and pray you find each other, I guess.

  And you? If I leave here—will you come with me? Or will you have to stay?

  JUST AFTER DAWN JOSIE CAME around once more. “I’m so thirsty.”

  “It’ll have to be tomato, I’m afraid.” She propped Josie’s head up, and the girl drank obediently. One of her eyes was bloodshot, the other purple and more or less swollen shut. But both looked straight ahead in unison when Nora asked her to follow her finger. “I don’t think you’re headhurt, thank God.”

  “It was the beast, ma’am.”

  “I know, honey. I saw.” She found the buffalo carving in her pocket and closed the girl’s hand around it. “The Doc is on his way. I only left you out here so as not to upset Toby.”

  “That’s good, ma’am. I’m glad of it. I wouldn’t like him to be upset.”

  “I know. Are you cold?” Josie wasn’t. She continued to hold Nora’s hand. After a while, Nora said, “Emmett’s among the other living now.” The girl’s eyes didn’t open. She was listening. “Killed up at the Sanchez place, I believe, just as the boys said. On Merrion Crace’s orders.”

  “I’m that sorry ma’am. I am that sorry. I’d hoped it wasn’t so.”

  “Perhaps when you’re well again, we might sit down with Emmett, you and I. I’ve some things left to say to him.”

  The girl squeezed her hand. “Someone’s here now, you know.” She smiled. “He sat with me down by the creek, talking till you came. But it ain’t Mister Lark. It’s the lost man. He’s right beside you.”

  It would be stupid to look around, Nora thought, but she did it anyway. No one was there. “He’s got his hand on your shoulder.”

&nbs
p; “I feel it,” she said. She felt nothing, of course. She turned Josie’s hand over and tried to scrape the dirt out from beneath her nails. “When we get the water in, I’ll fix you a proper bath. Are you cold now?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She brought the girl another blanket all the same and then went back inside. There was still no sign of the Doc. The edges of the mountains were just beginning to drink up the light. It rained uselessly a little east of them, and then the clouds moved over and made clear a beautiful morning.

  When Toby emerged, wheeling Gramma, Nora woke uneasily in the chair. “Why haven’t you lit the fire, Mama?”

  “I fell asleep.”

  “Where’s Josie?”

  “Still at the doctor’s.”

  “Where’s the men?”

  “They’re all gone.”

  He stood beside her with that worried look, stroking her arm. She couldn’t lift her head from her fingers.

  “Did you see Gramma move?”

  “I did indeed.”

  “I knew you would,” he said. There was no triumph in his tone—just stern and obliging forgiveness. He let her put an arm around him and draw him against her. He kept very still all the while, forbearing the indignity. “I’ll go out and get the stock fed.”

  “Don’t. I’ll do it. You go ahead and get the fire lit and fix up your Gramma’s breakfast.”

  Outside, the sage was weighted with dew. It left whips and curlicues of darkness on her boot leather. Through the window, she could see Toby moving back and forth with the wood, the bright red flare of the fire gorging itself on new kindling. He was chattering absently to Gramma. The old lady sat as still as ever and followed him with her eyes.

  She would never move herself again, of course. They would watch for it in the coming years, but it never happened, and thinking of it afterward Nora would come to wonder why substantiation always seemed to kill the things that had survived so long on faith alone.

  When Nora came outside with the bucket of chicken feed, Toby had moved to the yard. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground with the stereoscope pressed to his eyes. The gray, inflamed expanse of his head and his sun-roasted eartips. Lost in the world of its pictures.

  Behind him, coming noiselessly down from the trees, was the camel.

  The sheer size of it was a shock. The high branches of the pines parted in its path, and it left the brindling of the treecover and came out into the grass. By early daylight, it was nearly red, though some of that was owed to the dust that matted its hair. A dark hackle coursed from between its ears down the slope of its neck, where it thickened out into a hanging shag full of burrs and chollas and smashed leaves that had turned to powder over time.

  The rags of a rotted bridle hung around its pout.

  Its ribs were bilged by a cinch that cut blackly into its sides and held in place a saddle, whose dead occupant lay pinned in his blue coat by a circumscription of ropes as thick and frayed as vines.

  THE SALT

  MY POINT BEING—IF WE HAD heeded all your sulling and wheezing back then, Burke, we would have given up in that dismal timber camp all those years ago. You’ve played at being a rogue all your life, you bellyacher, you beautiful trickster. It’s no different now—naught but a little shot. If it didn’t stop you damn near killing that poor girl by the wash last night, I don’t see how it’s slowing you now. If you had strength enough for that, you’ve strength enough yet.

  Didn’t we think once before that nothing was left for us—only to find our second run? Only to find Jolly?

  For there he stood, bracing himself in the doorway of his little house. Our faces were damp by the time he crossed the yard to embrace me.

  The afternoon drew out. Chess in the plaza was abandoned. Men gathered instead to marvel at you and hear us revive the past. Trudie—Jolly’s wife, his wife, thought I, a woman he had married, a short, pretty-eyed Sonoran girl with a Yaqui lilt and a pianist’s fingers and a cross around her neck—laid out a feast, and we hovered in the garden talking until the shadows grew long. By and by, Jolly retrieved his horned saddle from somewhere in the house. You suffered him to rig you out and the two of you went bounding around the plaza, Jolly clicking and shouting while you loped in what looked to me like true delight.

  Evening rain sent us indoors. The cabin walls were papered over with Jolly’s drawings. To his already fine collection, my old friend had added miniature scenes of strange camps and headframes; mesas and clusters of flat-paddled cactus and yucca; here and there, studies of the camel’s skeleton; eyes and arms and portraits of George and Beale and other members of our late company, the catalog of his life entire. Trudie took one down and brought it up to my face with a condolatory look. “Don’t despair, Misafir,” she said. “So go the ravages of time.”

  Trudie and Jolly spoke little English together, meeting most often somewhere between limón and laymun. They had a bustling, tender manner, as though they were always in each other’s way, but glad to be. After she had gone to bed, the two of us sat outside. I remember the clouds in their gauzy herds hurrying over the hills. You lay folded up in the foreyard, a little damp, but content to raise your head every now and again to follow the thin clank of the wind-stirred trees. We felt at the end of something.

  “Why’d the Dueña call you Filip?”

  “It’s my old name. Filip Tedro.”

  “You took it up again?”

  Jolly nodded toward the house. “We could hardly have married otherwise.”

  “What about your hadj?”

  “I reckon it stands, so long as Allah hears my devotions.”

  “Can you remember them all?”

  Jolly got to his feet. “Let’s see how badly you been running this fine fellow down.”

  He went over you with careful hands. Your teeth and joints were in good shape, but there was weight to be gained back yet from what he guessed must have been a long illness. You were favoring your right leg some—I should take care to more evenly disperse your load. “And your old saddle,” he concluded, “is rubbish.”

  “I didn’t expect such poor marks.”

  “If only you’d stuck around long enough to become a proper cameleer.”

  “Some cameleer you are, with no camel. Where the hell is Seid?”

  Dead, he told me. Felled, at long last, by a younger bull in rut—a consequence of their having been penned together by Fort Tejon soldiers who didn’t know one damn thing about them. The other camels had been dispersed during the war. Some were loosed. Some were sold. George, as fastidious with his purse as he’d been with everything else, was the only one of Beale’s cameleers who’d put enough aside to secure a few camels of his own. For a while he and Jolly had a freight contract between George’s little place near Rancho La Brea and the surrounding mountains. Lilo helped, but then grew homesick and set off back east with a wagon train some years ago and hadn’t been heard from since.

  “Did you ever find those woods where the critters were all powdered up with gold?”

  “Maybe.” He laughed. “There was some mining business after the war.” He lit his pipe. “I scouted for the army. Worked as a teamster—though mules never did suit me. Wretched things. I struck a rich vein at South Pass, lived there for a while—but it went quick. Then Trudie came along and got pretty firm about my giving up that kind of way.”

  I envied him, and told him so. “You’ve managed to see the Pacific and find a wife who can stand to have you around.”

  “I guess so.” He had this faraway smile. “But you see, Misafir, there’s so many parts to everything in life and it costs you to learn all the little details. And people who’ve learned afore you take advantage. They don’t point out your mistakes, just so they can delight in watching you make them.”

  I reckoned that was true. “What’ve you learned?”

  He sat smoking
beside me. I watched him, sitting there with that faraway look of his, and for a moment time cheated me and I felt myself fall backwards to some other way of being. If a bugle had sounded, in that moment, from somewhere ahead, my bones would have known to stand and break camp, saddle you, mount up and head for the westward dark, and all the shadows of the desert would have met me as friends.

  “I learnt that a man must always be a little discontent,” Jolly finally said.

  “Well that’s easy enough,” I said. “In my years I learnt a man more or less can’t help it.”

  He laughed. “But that’s as it should be, Misafir. Too much contentment is apt to make you think you can have more. And worse, make you wonder: when will it be taken away?”

  “What do you fear being taken?”

  “Trudie.”

  “How do you keep yourself discontent?”

  He turned a little to see my face. “I stay here.”

  * * *

  —

  That was a good year. I doubt even you would say otherwise. We were a little battered, sure, and getting up there, but we made the best of things and got used to the pleasures of coming home. All told, we must’ve helped Jolly run ten tons of salt along the Gila corridor. Mining towns were springing up all over the Chihuahuan in the dry beds of ancient lakes. We carried water in and salt out. I filled my canteen in the Colorado, the Yuba, in spring arroyos and strange inland pools where huge starfish lay locked in stone.

  Out and back we went, month after month, and for the first time since Graveneck we spent more nights at our own hearth than we did under the stars. And it was all right.

  And Trudie and I became good friends. After I’d built our shambles of a house, she helped me get twenty acres broken and planted up. She stood around with her hands on her hips once I’d wrecked all our tomatoes before even the first crop, and I could tell by her that she was ready to take me on for whatever learning I needed, and for however long it took. She must have reckoned that if I stayed, Jolly would have an easier time staying, too. Carrying heavy that summer, she fanned herself through the boiling afternoons and brought out a little girl, Amelia, who came early while we three heroes were knocking around in the salt flats. The baby was already set up in her cradle like a pink little gnome when we returned, the house utterly unchanged, save for her big-eyed presence haunting it. Used to hear her hollering over at their place through the night, and that was an all right kind of music for home.