All in all, it was Tilfert’s life that was in the greatest danger, as the dudes attempted to bag their trophy. Watching Tilfert duck an unremitting whine of lead overhead while the buffalo strained, tongue out and eyeballs rolling, overheated from the protracted run, it occurred to me that it would be safer for my friend, and provide a quicker death for the buffalo, if the dudes were to target Tilfert instead. Or Tilfert could have allowed the dudes to shadow the cow all day until the animal died of exhaustion. Yet he kept patiently turning the animal, giving the dudes one chance after another to make their target. The men shot off a horn here, a piece of hide there, fired into the dirt and over the animal’s head, enraged her by peppering haunches, slowed her with unwitting hits in a torturous farce of hunting.
I clutched Tilfert’s hat, ducking and dodging in sympathy, wondering how I was going to tell Avelina her man was gunned down by men who that morning hadn’t even known how to put bullets in a rifle.
Finally Tilfert’d had enough and delivered a fifty-caliber coup de grâce. The cow rolled into the dirt. The men dismounted and emptied their rifles into the dead animal.
Tilfert got off his horse and fell to his knees. I ran to him, terrified he’d been hit. His face was raised to the heavens. He whispered into blue sky, “I’m alive!” He looked at me, thunderstruck. “If I never thought there was a God afore, Ned, I can’t say I don’t think so now.” He jammed the hat I offered him back on his head. “Let’s get to it.”
There wasn’t much reason to skin out the carcass, riddled as it was with holes and the meat rank from the steam she’d built up. Tilfert would send the men home with robes we’d skinned previously, so I wielded the knife at the hunt site merely as theater.
In spite of their poor showing, or perhaps because of it, the dudes had the audacity to berate my skills. They gathered around, having close to exhausted themselves whacking each other on the back in congratulations. One fellow nudged me with a silver-toed boot, speaking in an Easterner’s idea of a Westerner’s drawl. “Knife’s bigger ’n you are, young buck. Get yourself something your own size, maybe you’d do better.”
I looked up, incredulous. “I should do better?” No less than twenty bullet holes slubbed the hide. “You’ve got nerve—”
Tilfert hurried over. “There, there, Ned. You jus’ leave that be. I’ll finish it myself.” He ushered the men away, his near-death experience having loosened his tongue and warmed him to his part. “Don’ mind ’im, orphaned by Indian attack, had ’is hair half lifted, now’s not altogether there.”
Furious and disappointed, I strode away. Some distance off, I pulled out my notebook. I’d entertain Lill with a drawing of the gaggle of dudes: the outlandishness of their costumes, puffed hair, and smirks.
As I sketched, I considered the buffalo. Out on the plains they were majestic, awe-inspiring. Once you were close enough to smell them, they ceased to be kings of the prairie, but vehicles for lice and worms, fur-matted, shit-spattered. From afar the wealthy sparkled, and I thought once again of Peter the Great.
My grandmother didn’t tell me—perhaps she didn’t know—that the boy Peter, within his log garrison, killed two hundred and forty children in the jejune war games he conducted there. She didn’t tell me that the man Peter conducted himself like a sophomoric ogre, not so much wearing his welcome out as ransacking it in one country then another at the cost of thousands of lives. Peter ordered his own son, who had fled the penalty of rule and his terrible father, to be beaten until he agreed to follow his father’s footsteps. The boy died before he would do so. If Peter was great, how terrible was Ivan? What are the men who back our wars, our hungers, our progress?
“What’s this?” One dude wandered back to look over my shoulder. “Damned fine drawing.” He shifted back on his heels and patted his pockets for a cigarette. “I’ll buy the portrait—Turpentine, isn’t it? How much do you want?”
I stiffened. “My name is Edward Turrentine Bayard the Third.”
The dude smiled and raised an eyebrow, lit his smoke, and held out his hand for my book.
I watched him flip through the pages, noted his ivory cigarette case. “Five dollars,” I told him.
He blew smoke in the air, turned another page. “Steep.” He looked at his likeness on the paper. “Exceptionally well done, however. I’ll take it, if you’ll make a copy to go along with it.” He reached in his jacket for a wallet, handed me a card and a five-dollar bill. “I’m off tomorrow, but send the original and the copy to this address.”
The card read MONTGOMERY ELIAS, SOLICITOR. HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT. My heart jumped. Though I’d struggled to contain my imagination, I worried that my mother’s mysterious visitor had done her in. Why else her silence? Only foul play could explain it. It was a classic plot: The innocent stalked for her wealth. I could hardly bear thinking about it. But here, in front of me, was a man who could ferret out the details, bring justice to bear.
Mr. Elias closed my book and walked with it toward the tents. I trotted behind, waving the money. “No charge, after all, Mr. Elias. But I would appreciate if you’d do me a favor.”
Mr. Elias ignored me and handed the book to the portly man who had fired the hunt’s first shot. The fellow was slumped at the table, suffering, I expected, from the heat. He wore a high-collared blouse and a vest, jacket, and trousers of beaded and fringed doe hide. He carried plenty of his own insulation as well, the kind of girth prone to gravity. He was likely in his mid-forties, but his chest had slipped to belly and his belly to ass. His wide cheeks drooped to jowl, which, at the moment, flamed crimson to match an upper lip protruding in a rabbity overbite.
Elias pushed the book at him again. “You’ll want to see this, Quillan.”
Quillan waved him off, smoothed back his sparse oiled hair, and mopped his temple, glaring at Elias.
Elias chuckled. “I promise this is no prank.”
Quillan took the book as if worried that it might bite him. When he deemed it safe, he pinched a pair of spectacles onto his nose and opened the pages with a smirk. If I hadn’t been so frantic to engage Elias, I would have removed the sketches from Quillan’s condescending pink grasp.
Almost immediately upon opening the book, however, Quillan began murmuring in a pleased sort of way. When he arrived at the illustration of the turtle he out-and-out yelped, drumming the paper with a fingertip. “Where did you see this? You must show me. Right away!”
Yet trying to get Elias’s attention, I ignored Quillan and repeated, “No charge, but the favor, sir?” I brokenly detailed to Mr. Elias what little I knew of my missing mother as Quillan continued to tap the paper like a telegraph.
“Boy, do you hear me? Tomorrow, I said!” Quillan took my arm but I shook him off.
The solicitor laughed at the round man. “Edward Turpentine, I think you’d better pay attention to this gopher before he has a heart attack.”
The man reddened. “Gopher! I am Wallace Quillan. Chief paleontologist at the Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut. Perhaps you have heard of me.”
I had heard of Wallace Quillan. I had even briefly visited the Peabody during a spate of passable health and had seen his display of fossils. I was agog that he stood before me but was that desperate to dig up information on my mother, he had to wait. I begged the great man. “Sir, one moment please. Mr. Elias?”
Mr. Elias agreed. “Certainly, I will investigate, Ned.” I pushed the five dollars at him, but he refused it.
The professor folded his arms, irritated. Elias patted him on the back before leaving, advising me, “Take care with this one. He is round and soft, but gophers have long sharp teeth.”
Quillan glared. “Business has no feeling for science, only money. And unfortunately, scientists have no feeling for money. If the two came together, what progress might be made.” He put out his hand and I shook it. He held up my sketches. “I must see the fossils!”
CHAPTER 4
Dearest Omar,
It is no less than tedious h
ere without you. Come to me and we shall picnic and shoot. When may I expect you?
Yours, India
Dearest India,
Seeing you is ever on my mind. I have much to show you and tell you as well and could not anticipate our visit any more if the Queen were pouring tea. I will come, if it is convenient, day after tomorrow. Regards to your family.
Yours ever, Omar
I spent a long night, though pleasantly filled with the riant phantoms of prospect: Montgomery Elias returning my name, my fortune, and my mother; Wallace Quillan recognizing me as a fellow scientist; Lill, adoration brimming in her eyes. It was hard to sleep. It was hard to say what I anticipated more keenly, the morrow with Quillan or the day after with Lill, so agreeably were the two entwined. I’d finally drifted to dreams when I was roused by the squeak of the door. A shuffling toward my corner, the curtain drawn aside. Through the dawn I saw Quillan. “Time’s wasting, Edward,” he whispered. “Wake up!”
Before I could nod, Avelina descended on the professor, taking him by the collar and shaking him like a rat. Quillan howled. Tilfert roared from his bed, stumbled over, sized up the situation. “Hey now! That’s our little round man, woman! Lay off there!”
Avelina dropped him and shot back to bed, so far under the quilt that not even the berserk nimbus of her hair was in evidence.
Quillan fell to his knees struggling to regain his composure, though it must have been difficult. He not only had his marbles shaken loose, but Avelina was a beauty queen by day in comparison to how she appeared in the night hours.
Tilfert scratched his woolly chest. “Sorry ’bout that, perfessor. You shouldn’t be sneakin’ around. Avelina likely thought you was Indians.”
I put my boots on as Quillan waved Tilfert off, gasping. “No harm…. Ned … let’s get out of here.”
By the time the sun rose, Quillan was in full torment with the delays. I was used to chasing Chin around, wheedling, to get a bit in her mouth and harness around her casklike belly, but with Quillan shouting over and over that the horse needed to be taught a lesson, I thought Chin would never let me hook her up. I finally insisted that Quillan wait out of sight for forty minutes of begging, petting, oating, and pledging my undying gratitude to Chin before I was able to drive her and the wagon round and pick Quillan up from behind the officers’ quarters.
Chin had run herself low on obstreperousness, apparently, for once we were on the way she behaved admirably, not even stopping to refuel. The day brightened over the sea of grass, the morning air soft. Chin plodded along. I was in the company of an eminent scientist and my girl waited for me on the morrow; I was the prairie prince indeed.
Quillan was not as happy. He was still grousing a full hour after leaving the fort, rustling like an irritated bird, complaining about Chin and squawking over Avelina. “She’s not a woman, she’s an ape.” He cheered greatly once we arrived at the turtle site, however.
A punctilious man, squeamish about dirt except when in company of fossils, Quillan jumped from the wagon and slogged through the small creek in order to run his hands over the ancient turtle’s skeleton, murmuring happily, “Archelon ischyros, great turtle of the Cretaceous!” He turned to me, aglow. “This monster swam the muddy waters of the western interior seaway over seventy million years ago, Edward.” He ran his hand over the beaked head. “The heavy mandible and the thick palate gave him a bite like a guillotine, my boy. See these huge paddle-like legs? Not only the appendages of a swift hunter, but one swiftly hunted. What eats a nine-thousand-pound turtle? A forty-foot mosasaur!”
My very vision was altered, the prairie before me transformed into a giant sea pregnant with soupy beginnings. The turtle that I’d drawn so painstakingly weeks before fattened and swam in the world Professor Quillan described.
He broke off his musing. “Ned, fetch the kit in the wagon.”
He handed me brushes, small picks, needle tools, paint in a canvas bag. He ferreted out a notebook of gridded paper and demonstrated drawing to scale. “One square for every inch of measure.”
When he was certain I understood, Quillan took measurements of the fossil. As he called out numbers, I sketched. It took an hour to complete the drawings, after which we set to work incising the fossil from the bank. We removed the fractured bones with the tiny picks and needle tools, cataloging as we went, numbering, wrapping, and packing them into giant rolls of burlap. We loaded the bundles into the wagon.
The day was a dream; the sun ran its track far too quickly. Before I’d even begun to weary, Quillan was griping over his fugitive dinner, throwing tools back into his bag and demanding my sketches.
He clapped me on the back. “Edward, you have a gift.” He turned page after page of drawings. “Would you consider a career in science?”
I laughed. “It’s my dream.”
He crossed his arms over his chest, scrutinizing me from my worn shoes to my stained shirt, walking behind, making me acutely aware of the ragged haircut Avelina had delivered. Still, he announced. “I will train you in paleontology as my personal assistant. Scientific illustrations, cataloging, research. Interested?”
I felt as though I would pop. Lill’s song was in my ear: “You will catch and I am caught.” How would I tell her? What would she say, what would she do? Perhaps she would throw her arms around my neck, once again kiss me. Should I ask her to marry right then or wait until I’d procured a ring?
Quillan harrumphed. I returned to the world and stammered, “Interested? I am very interested, Professor Quillan, very.”
“A young man like yourself could be instrumental in the progression of science, Ned.”
The sky was aglow. I would use just those words. “Lill, I am to be instrumental. …”
I tried to look serious and wiped the smile off my face. “Are you offering me a position, Professor Quillan. A paid position?”
“Of course. Paid handsomely. Partially with a small stipend and the rest, more importantly, in education. I will be your mentor, the great Yale University your classroom! You have only to pack your bags and it will be yours. We depart on the morrow.”
“Depart?”
“For New Haven, my lab at the Peabody.”
The glow damped. Of course he would want me to return east. But tomorrow? Lill was in the palm of my hand. I thought of her lips on my cheek, the courtship just begun. It was ludicrous to think I could knock the future together in the hours I had left.
I stared at the ground at my feet. The clay was dry and checked, the grass sparse. A grasshopper methodically mowed down a beige slip of timothy as I made my decision.
“Professor Quillan, I can’t go with you tomorrow. I have personal business to attend to.”
He frowned. “Personal business? In this backwater? No, young man, you have a future, but it is not here under these brutish conditions with brutish people flown from civilization and likely the law.” Quillan shook his finger at me. “You spend enough time out here, and a pigsty will look like a castle. It is time to go, young man.”
I spoke quickly, snatching at the sherds of my dreams and trying to piece them together midair. “I could meet you in New Haven, after I’ve made my arrangements.” When Lill was mine and would venture there with me.
Quillan slapped his thigh in exasperation. “I need you now, damn it all.” He glared at me. “There are dozens of young well-educated Yale scholars banging on my door begging to have this experience I offer to you … a buffalo skinner! I have a mind to rescind my offer altogether!”
I slumped but stared straight ahead. I couldn’t give Lill up.
Quillan looked through the drawings again. “You do have promise. All right, I will leave money for your ticket east. If you do not board the train in one week, I give the job to someone else.”
A week? I figured feverishly. Thoughts I would never have entertained outside the laws of daydreaming now seemed not only possible but plausible. My luck had turned. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a letter for me from my m
other in the mail, clearing up the entire disappearance of herself and my money. But a week? It was still too soon. The circuit preacher was due in three weeks, when Avelina and Tilfert were to be wed. If I could ingratiate myself with Lill’s parents, Lill and I could make it a double wedding, then honeymoon all the way to Connecticut. “A month, sir. Please.”
“Of all the cheek!”
“I know of other fossil beds,” I blurted out. “I would put the time to good use here, gathering and recording what I find.”
He rubbed his chin. “You know of others?” He looked behind him, as if someone shadowed us, narrowed his eyes, and apparently made his decision, for he handed me a clear notebook. “Record the finds exactly as I showed you. I will see you—”
I shook Quillan’s hand, my change in fortune singing like meadowlarks. “In a month, sir. One month.”
CHAPTER 5
Dear Brill,
Walter Quillan has offered me employment! Further, the next you hear from me, I hope to be affianced. How the world can tip on and off its axis.
Ned
UNDELIVERABLE:
RETURN TO SENDER
Liesel Bayard
3 Linden Lane
Cornwall, Connecticut
The next morning I woke late, my arms and thighs tight from the digging of the day before. Nothing would dampen my spirits, however. This was to be the day my tepid life burst into flame. I jumped from bed to find Avelina sitting in her rocker, taking stitches in her wedding dress. She held it up. “A shame to wear just once.”
With the voluminous skirt, tiny tucks, and froth of ruffles, the dress had a circus tent’s worth of fabric in it. Avelina pointed with her needle to the stove. “Stew’s on.”
I ladled out a bowl. Avelina asked, “You get the bones that man wanted?”
“Yep.” I sat down and took a huge bite of stew. “Offered me a job.”
“He say anything about me scarin’ him like that?” She glanced up at me and stitched quickly.
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