by David Liss
“I don’t doubt they’ll do fine,” said a voice from behind us, “but if you please, my good turd, they won’t do it alone.”
I turned and saw two dozen men and nearly that many women, some of whom had children clinging to their skirts or babes in their arms. There were beasts—a quartet of sturdy horses, a pair of mules, and half a dozen frolicking dogs. Nearly all the men wore western attire, and they carried guns and knives and had tomahawks looped to their belts. They looked like white savages, clad in beast skins and furs, and yet for all that a humanity shone through.
The one who’d spoken stepped forward. He was a tall man, almost a giant, I thought, and looking every bit the frontiersman in western garb and reddish whiskers, which were, if not long, then at least ornate. His mustaches, in particular, drooped down from his face with a curious flourish. This man removed his raccoon cap to bow, revealing an entirely bald head.
“Lorcan Dalton at your service,” he said, his voice redolent with the tones of an Irishman. Returning the hat to his head, he said, “We’ll get to more introductions soon enough, but first let’s get these villains back to their master.”
“Hain’t no call for unkindness,” said Phineas.
“You want kindness, you quit Tindall,” Mr. Dalton said.
Hendry turned his horse to face Mr. Dalton. “You act like we ought to fear you, Irisher.”
Mr. Dalton grinned, showing a mouth of regular brown teeth. “Reynolds used to bring out the new ones. He doesn’t do it now, does he? Guess maybe that pretty wife back east don’t like the scar.”
Hendry said nothing. He and Phineas tied together the horses and mules and rode off without a backward glance.
“I never lament seeing the back of Hendry,” said Mr. Dalton, “and I’d only relish the front if there were a bullet in it. He’s worse than any two Indians and only makes amends for it with his lack of cunning. Now, then, let’s let the women start making us some repast while we men get to working. Lot of folks come out here, Mr. Maycott, who never got their hands too dirty before, but you don’t look like that sort. You look like you’re equal to some hard work.”
“I reckon I am,” Andrew said. “But what work is that?”
“They bring you out here,” Dalton said, “and they leave you here. And why not? Tindall and Duer—they don’t care if we live and would rather we die, for they can then turn about and pass the land along to another victim. It’s why they don’t trouble themselves to do aught about the redskins. But we look after one another here. Many folks on the border have turned savage, hardly better than Indians, but we don’t let that happen. New folks get the help they need, and all we ask in return is that you do your share when the next new man arrives.”
“Of course,” said Andrew. I saw he was moved by the kindness. Perhaps back home he would have made free with his emotions, but the western frontier was no place to be a man of feeling.
“Now, you’ll need a place to sleep,” Dalton said, “so we’ve come to build you a shelter. And we had better get to work if we’re to make any progress before the sun goes down.”
So it was that our first day upon our new land showed us both the lowest depths of human greed and evil and the great generosity of the human heart.
They were wondrous in their skills, felling trees, cutting them to size, and, with ropes slung across their shoulders and feet dug in like horses, dragging them to where they might be of use. My innocence, coupled with their single-minded labor, in which they were more like buzzing bees than men, led me to believe that they might build a cabin entire upon the spot, but such luxury was not to be ours. Their design was instead what is commonly called a half-faced camp—a shelter made of logs, composed of but three walls, with a fire built on the fourth side to keep the inhabitants warm and the beasts at a distance. The roof was made of a combination of crossbeams and thatching and would be of limited value in any great rain, but it was far superior to the wild nothingness to which I had believed we had been consigned.
Andrew had brought with him the tools of his trade, and the hardened frontiersmen were pleased and impressed by his carpentry. It seemed he possessed some special new way of bracing the logs together, and they were glad of his addition to the community, if that term could be used for such isolation.
While the men worked, the women provided me with instructions on how best to build a fire and fetch water and regaled me with more information than I could hope to absorb on the spinning of flax, the preparation of bear meat, the uses of bear fat, and a thousand other things I could not recall the next day.
Our rude shelter was completed shortly before dark, and I thought we should be left alone to our first night in the woods, but it seemed that the assistance they provided was, in part, an excuse to gather. The fire that burned outside our shelter was joined by a series of others, and soon the women were roasting meats, boiling porridge, and teaching me to make a kind of western bread called johnnycake, made of nothing but corn flour and water and grilled into flat pieces useful for taking in a travel bag.
These women were helpful but reserved—suspicious, I believed, of what they saw as eastern refinement: my education, my manner of speech, my obvious fear of the West and its environs. Yet they did their best with me and explained about the settlement, a rough and loose confederation of cabins, bound together by little more than vague proximity and a few points of social contact: the church, which lacked any sort of clergyman unless an itinerant wandered through; a rough imitation of a tavern called the Indian Path; a mill; and Mr. Dalton’s house. He owned the whiskey still, which made him something of a grandee.
I struggled to feel at ease, but Andrew seemed to have no difficulties. These Westerners valued competence above nearly all else, and he impressed our neighbors with his skills that day. Of these men, two in particular interested me. One was a man my own age, not yet thirty by my estimate, one of the few to keep his face free of whiskers, though it was possible that he could not grow them. He was handsome in a rugged sort of way, with wide eyes that seemed forever lost in thought. He had assisted in the hard labor of building the half-faced camp, and in so doing he had exhibited extraordinary strength. More than once he had been called over by some great bull of a man who wanted this smaller man’s assistance in rolling a log or pulling an unmovable lever. Yet, though he exhibited in a thousand ways signs of great strength and no aversion to using it, his interactions lacked the open ease that most men exhibit with one another. At times he and Mr. Dalton exchanged a quiet word, but mostly he kept to himself. Now that the time of merriment had come, he neither ate nor drank as much as the other men but only sat by Mr. Dalton’s side, sipping his whiskey while others gulped, smiling politely at jokes while others guffawed and brayed laughter.
The second man piqued my interest also because he was so different. He was no older than Mr. Dalton, but while the great Irishman’s power rendered him ageless, this man had something of a scholarly look about him and seemed to me almost old. He wore not the rough clothes of a border man but the practical breeches and shirt and coat of a successful tradesman of the middle rank. He kept his gray hair long and his beard short, and perched upon his nose was a pair of little round spectacles.
He sat upon the ground with the other men, and he drank his whiskey with them, but I observed that on several occasions he turned to look at me. When our eyes met, he turned away and reddened slightly. I have been gazed upon by men before, sometimes in the predatory manner of a Colonel Tindall, but here was something else. I did not know what it was precisely, but it neither frightened nor offended me.
The other women noted his interest as well, and while they talked and gossiped, one creature, a rugged and meaty woman they called Rosalie, with hair somewhere between straw and white, let out a snort. She told me she was not yet forty. She had once been, perhaps, pretty, but now her face had been leathered by the elements, her hands calloused and sun-spotted. “That Scotsman should learn to keep his eyes to himself or I reckon your husba
nd will relieve him of one of them.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“He was a schoolteacher,” said another woman, older and thicker than the first and with but three or four teeth in her head. “In Connecticut, they say. But there was a scandal with a married woman. And now here he is, gawking at you like you ain’t got a husband right before him.”
“He don’t belong here,” said Rosalie, “and would never have no companionship neither if it weren’t for Dalton. He and the Scot make their whiskey together and are friends, like. But then Dalton has his own way with friends.”
All the women tittered at this, and I suppose if I had felt more at ease with their company I should have asked about this secret, but as they did not volunteer I did not inquire. I think they did not like my reserve, and one of these women whispered something in the ear of another, and she, in turn, looked at me with face frozen for a long moment before she burst out in laughter.
I loathed this feeling of being unwanted and longed to join the gathering of men. I would have even consented to drink their whiskey if necessary. As I lamented my state, the Scottish gentleman, whom they called Skye, rose from his seat and approached our fire. The women began a fresh round of whispering and laughter but fell into an awkward silence as the man came toward us and took a seat in the dirt next to me.
“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Maycott,” he said, in a Scots brogue that reminded me of my father, “but we haven’t met. I am John Skye.”
“You’ve met her husband, I’ll wager,” said Rosalie, igniting a general laughter.
“Maybe she’ll take it kindly if you give her your Shake Spear,” said one of the others.
“Lord knows Annie Janson weren’t impressed,” cried a third, to much amusement.
“Might I have a private word with you?” he asked of me.
I looked at the faces about me and knew they disapproved, but I could not live my life for their favor. I pushed myself to my feet and he followed, and we walked away from the women’s fire, listening to their cackles and their hooting. We did not step far, remaining close to the men’s fire. Andrew looked at me and smiled and then returned to a conversation with Mr. Dalton. Never had there been any mistrust between us on this score, and certainly he could not have mistaken my interest in Mr. Skye and found it inappropriate. Andrew would have seen the thing for precisely what it was and found amusement in it; here, among the rough and unlettered folk of the West, I had found perhaps the only person of a literary turn.
“Your husband tells me you are a great reader of books, Mrs. Maycott,” he said. “I wished to let you know that I am lucky enough to possess no small number of volumes, and I should be happy to lend you what you wish.”
“You are kind,” I said, “though I am not sure a roofed patch of forest floor is the best place to bring so precious a thing as a book.”
“You’ll have your own home soon enough. Your husband will fell some seventy or eighty good trees in his spare time, and when these are assembled we will have a cabin-raising party. If he is industrious about it, you should be inside doors within a month or two.”
I laughed. “A month or two sounds to me like a long time to be outside-of-doors.”
He coughed into his fist. “I am fortunate enough to be in possession of a large home, in which I live alone. I have two stories and several rooms. You may, if you wish, pass the time there. I have already made the offer to your husband. The two of you may stay with me.”
I sensed that he wished to add that if I chose to stay while Andrew worked about the property, I should be most welcome, but he did not yield to the temptation. Instead, he offered me a crooked smile in which his teeth, very white for a man his age, glistened in the light of the fires.
“It is a funny thing, is it not, people such as ourselves cast adrift in a place such as this?”
“How can you be certain that you and I are people of the same sort?” I asked him, though not unkindly. He addressed me with an attention that was not entirely appropriate, but the great difference in our ages, and the proximity of my husband not many feet away, made me feel there could be no danger in it.
I looked over at the beardless young man, who continued to sit with the others and yet somehow hold himself aloof. “Pray, who is that gentleman?” I asked Mr. Skye.
He let out a guffaw. “Mrs. Maycott, there are no gentlemen in the West. That man, however, is Jericho Richmond. He is Mr. Dalton’s friend.”
“Does he have but one? I thought I had observed that you are Mr. Dalton’s friend.”
“Indeed I am. My life should be far more difficult without his friendship. Jericho, however, is Dalton’s very good friend. They live in the same home.”
“He is a handsome man. Does he not have a wife? I was led to believe that people married quite young in the West.”
Mr. Skye cleared his throat. “He and Dalton are very good friends.”
I then understood the nature of the connection, and that it was to be spoken of only obliquely. In some strange way, these ruffians of the West were more tolerant, out of necessity, than men of the East. Jericho Richmond, from what I had observed, worked with every bit the vigor as any other man, and that was, no doubt, all that was required of him. It was Hell we had come to, there could be no doubt of it, but it was turning out to be a curiously complex sort of Hell.
The scene was almost merry. One fellow named Isaac, who worked for Dalton—he called his men whiskey boys, and they ran his spirits throughout the four counties—played a tolerable fiddle. Another whiskey boy, a one-eyed fellow, entertained the children with the story of how he had, fifteen years earlier, been transported to America for the crime of catching a two-pound trout in a squire’s pond. Andrew stood with his arm around my shoulder, staring at our little hut, made by his labor and the community’s, and I knew he was in some small measure happy or, at the very least, satisfied.
The frolic, as such parties were termed, had been under way many hours, and the men had swallowed a river of whiskey, before trouble showed itself. One of the men who had done much of the work had struck me as the most unsavory of this western lot. He was, like Andrew, a carpenter. As with many western men, it was hard to guess his age, concealed as his face was beneath hair and grime, but I imagined him to be near forty and hardened by his years in the wilderness. He wore an old hunting shirt, much in need of mending, and had a wild prophet’s beard near as black as midnight, soiled with food and wood shavings and, I suspected, his own vomit. The other men made no secret of their dislike for him, but they tolerated him for his expertise. Indeed, I suspected that one reason Andrew had been so instantly embraced was because his carpentry skills meant the settlement would be less dependent upon this vile man.
Andrew had taken his measure early on. There had been a dark anger in his eyes when Andrew had mentioned his trade. The bearded man, Mueller, by name, had spat and shaken his head. “Lot of eastern men call themselves what they like. Out here they ain’t nothing; no one calls himself carpenter till I give leave.” Rather than take offense or give challenge to this bumptious boasting, Andrew had instead given the man the respect he craved. If Mueller was nearby whenever Andrew performed some operation, he would ask the ruffian his opinion. He watched Mueller work and asked questions or made observations upon his skill—which, he informed me, was really quite impressive. “I hate it when men are full of bluster but without merit,” he said, “but I hate it more when they actually know of what they speak.”
This show of respect did its business, and soon enough Mueller was putting his arm about Andrew, drunkenly shouting that this city dweller would be a man yet. Dalton had informed us that Mueller lived some distance away and had little to do with their community except at those events where his skills could not be done without. Andrew understood that the best course was to pretend friendship and then send him on his way.
At the frolic, however, Mueller would not leave Andrew’s side, and his company—along with his stench, his belligerence, an
d his propensity for physical contact—began to grow wearisome, even oppressive. Westerners drink whiskey as though it were beer, but even by those standards Mueller drank great quantities. When he’d had enough to kill two ordinary men, he began to stagger on his feet and speak so he could hardly be understood. His beard became a great greasy tangle of gristle and tobacco and once, though I did not know its origin, blood.
All night I’d feared he’d been racing toward confrontation, and at last I was proved right. He approached Andrew and gave him a shove in his chest. “You got a nice woman there, Maycott!” he shouted, though they stood but inches from one another.
Andrew offered a faint smile and then shrugged, gesturing toward the crowd of people who gathered around while the fiddle player scratched at his instrument. A dozen or more Westerners sang along to “Lily in the Garden,” and Andrew wished to communicate that these conditions made conversation difficult.
“I wouldn’ta thought you could land such a pretty thing, to look at you,” Mueller shouted. “Maybe she wants to sit on my lap. One carpenter’s as good as another, eh?”
Andrew forced a weak smile. “I do love your good cheer, friend.” He cast me a glance, which I understood to mean he wished me to disappear from the drunkard’s sights.
I had been delivering a dish of roasted turkey to the gathering, so I set it down and turned to make my way back to the cooking fire. Mueller, however, reached out and grabbed my wrist.
“Sit on my lap, I said.”
Andrew stepped between us. It was one thing to placate such men when they were merely boorish, but here was something else, and he would not let it pass unchallenged. “You grow too warm,” he said, in a voice firm though not yet challenging.
Mueller let go of me and rose to his feet. “And you forget your place.”
Andrew appeared to all the world placid, but I knew a fire raged inside him. “My place,” he said, in the softest of tones, hardly audible over the music, “is looking to my wife’s honor. You know that. If you must challenge me for doing my duty, I stand ready. It is no more than I did in the war.”