A Reckoning

by Linda Spalding

  So building a house isn’t bad for nature?

  Bad for trees and good for shrikes.

  I have no claws, said the boy to the bear.

  Try ants.

  It went on like that. No human has ever been here before is what Martin thought. I am the very first! It was a month of Sabbaths, so tired was he of listening to God; he said: I am the first human here! Like Adam. He proclaimed it to God: This is mine for the taking. He planted a foot on the ground to prove his domain. He did not need a warrant to possess this land. But when was it made, all of this? Trees pointing like compasses. Go east, go west and what if I never move another inch? Where is my bear? Cuff? I am so hungry. It was the longest day ever and he yelped out loud when he stumbled on a thing that laughed. Crouched over, sharpening a knife, a woman was staring up at him. A blue bead hung on a string around her neck and there was red paint in the part of her hair and some streaks of red around her eyes and she rubbed the knife on her dress, never smiling after the laugh that sounded like a sneeze.

  Is that a real wigwam? He was having a dream. Cuff, I found an Indian!

  The woman looked Martin up and down and then went back to the knife, rubbing it at an angle against a stone and testing it with a finger while Martin stood in his torn clothes with his bitter breath and put a hand to his mouth. Please, he said, using a word she must understand: Hungry. He put his gun down and pointed with a finger to the pot that sat at some distance on three stones and a fire. He inched toward it and lifted it with both hands and drank down the contents, burning his mouth, having no thought for the woman’s need, and when it was gone he ran his tattered sleeve across his smeared mouth and belched, wondering if Cuff had found something as nice to eat in the woods. Cuff? he yelled. Cuff? Well, thank you, he said, because now he remembered his manners. I have a bear, he said, putting the empty pot on the ground and pointing at the jagged trees. He made the shape of the animal with his hands and growled. He pawed at the air.

  The woman got to her feet.

  He had eaten her food and now the thought of it caught him because he was happy to have eaten but ashamed. I’m lost, he said, bowing his head, and when he lifted his eyes, it felt easier to make a bond with hers. We walked here from St. Louis, he said. I don’t know how far that is. He touched his heart with a finger. I don’t know how many days.

  There was some movement inside the wigwam. Martin looked at it, but the woman made a sign with her arms and hands: Go. A way.

  Martin lifted his feet one at a time and put a flat hand above his eyes to show that he was looking for something. I have to find my bear. And I am so tired. He put his two hands under his face and closed his eyes, to show his need for sleep. The food had exhausted him. He could hardly stand. His knees wobbled. He pointed at the wigwam.

  The woman used the knife to make a drawing in the dirt. The drawing looked like a mound. It went up on one side and down on the other and there was a door in the middle that she filled with a scribble so he could see it was open. Wigwam? He used the word again and she frowned. Then she stood up and pointed. In the distance, he could see the top part of a hill.

  There, she said, making a motion of wind blowing and rain coming down. She got down in her crouch again and added something to her drawing that looked like a circle next to the hump. She put ripples inside the circle. Was he taking the lesson? He nodded and she raised her hand, apparently wanting to be quit of the boy who had eaten everything she had made for whoever was rolling and groaning in the wigwam and might be about to come out. Might be a savage. Someone to kill him or scalp him. She held her hand palm out and it was a sign Martin could read, and he had her knife-drawn map in his head and he turned away and went to look for his bear: Come on now, girl. Cuff? You find food?

  Acorns!

  And they came an hour or two later to a body of water that might have been round like the drawing made on the ground with the knife, although he could see only one side of it, and the water was very cold and there were no ripples or stirrings and the bottom was too far down to see. There were pretty pin oaks and water oaks overhanging it, clearly reflected, never moving or breathing; waiting. He saw a muskrat dome and heard the curdling cry of a bird, but he saw no living creature and he took off his clothes and tested the water with his foot. When Cuff plunged in, she turned her head to look back as Martin slowly and carefully felt his way in, letting the water inch up his legs as he moved his feet along the lake’s beginning with its slimy reeds like hairless animals and he remembered the pond where he had paddled with Cuff when their journey began. But now Cuff was buoyant. She moved her legs as if she knew how to swim, always had, and it was a joy to see his bear practicing for her future life. Honk of geese, hoot of an early owl. The big birds from the north landed in a noisy gang and began grubbing and gobbling on the water. They dipped and partly disappeared and resurfaced. They paddled and splashed and Martin stood with his bare feet clinging and enjoyed the frolic of the journeying geese until they surrounded the bear and she plowed right through them, once or twice snapping and grinning. Martin turned over on his back and tried to float, moving only his feet, but they kept sinking and he was soon standing on the mud again while Cuff tumbled and splashed among the birds and Martin wanted to join this timelessness, this floating and flapping and pawing at water covered with birds as if sky and water were a single thing. In an upright position he kicked and kept himself going and strangest of all was the fearlessness he felt and then he ducked under and knew he could breathe. He tried counting backward as he pushed through the water in reverse. When he lifted his face, he was glad of the air. I am human, he said to Cuff. He swam to the bear and took hold of her fur. The bear had such strength that she carried him without any complaint. What did she feel in her fur that was different from his skin? Why were they made so differently? Was the fish only made for the bear to eat? (Cuff was fishing.) Was bear only made for a man to eat? Dominion is what the Bible called it. Why? What point was there to dominion, domination, dominating? Only to survive longer than somebody else? Martin kicked. He paddled. He shut out every noun from his mind and opened his eyes underwater, seeing the plants and mud and sand and never naming a one of them, just seeing color and movement and shape. He made bubbles out of his nose and rose up and the air fit his need so perfectly that there was no word to describe the feeling except relief. From fire, smoke. From water, death. From air the unconsciousness of breath and he was thinking with words again. My father is wrong about everything. Dominion is not the point.

  The bear and the boy got out of the water. They dried themselves and went to a bush that was loaded with autumn berries. Martin had forgotten the gun. He’d left it behind at the woman’s camp. He had never shot anything, but the gun had made him feel safe. When he stretched the arm he had used to carry the gun, he noticed the pleasant lack of weight. He had found an Indian and a wigwam and his father would listen to the story if he ever saw him again. His father, who often said: Silence! Quiet, boy! He had been spanked for mumbling and beaten for speaking too fast, too loudly, too slowly. Be silent. Children should be seen and not heard, or not even seen. There should be no children, no bears, no sons. No music, no dancing, no stories. No games. Obedience. Obedience. Dominion of the fathers for keeps. I lost your gun, he heard himself say and his father said back: Never mind.

  Beside the lake was a hill just as the woman had shown in her picture and the hill had an enormous tree surmounting it. Martin thought it might be a sacred place to the Indians and yet he wanted to climb the hill to see what he could see from the top, where the big tree was shimmering. He signaled to Cuff, who had a trout in her mouth and was galloping over in order to share.

  Then Martin, still naked by the lake, began to cry at the sight of the offering bear. He got down on his knees. Come, bear, come to me. He used his shirt to dry his beloved, rubbing her carefully in the right direction, always toward the tail. He put on his wet shirt and then his trousers and led Cuff gently to the hill and there was a small skull
at the base of it that Martin picked up to study. Eye dents and toothy jaw. He ran his finger over the cheekbones and felt the smoothness that had once supported a furry face and then noticed a small opening in the side of the hill – an opening just where the skull had been laid. Pawing at the hole and finding the ground soft, he found he could enter the hill or the mound or whatever it was by shoving his hands and knees through crusts of ground and he dropped his head to avoid the jagged roof and Cuff fit herself in behind him. Martin’s hands bled from the scratches and cuts that opened on contact with the rocks, but he pushed on into the hollow hill while Cuff came after him sniffing and scooching. They sat for a few minutes in the dim quiet of the place and took their bearings. They were remote from everything else, as if they had entered a blank eternity. They were no longer hungry and there was a clean, damp breeze coming from some place in the back of this cave. Martin felt the walls, testing the surface and finding a cleft that led into darker darkness. He let the bear push past him to go in first. Important not to lead Cuff into a space too narrow for her girth, he thought, although she would be skinny come spring. He lay on his side and watched her move ahead though he was losing the thread of his plan. He could feel the hairs on his neck lift as he pushed with his feet and pulled with his hands, moving an inch, an inch, sure that his bear was hoping to find her bed in the stall of the barn. Both of them wishing such a place lay in front of them, they pushed on into the pure, cold underground.

  He touched the top of Cuff’s head, which was bony under the flesh and there were the big geese leaving the lake to fly south, leaves trickling down outside, worms digging in, and the bear was sated under the tree of the world while its old roots reached under them to hold the mound and its cavern. Bellows of beasts in the upper world, and ten thousand keepers and nesters underneath. It came to Martin, that here was the point. He whispered instructions to his bear and kissed her with love and crawled out of the sheltering hill.

  65

  Under the wigwam’s strips of bark, Bry woke up for a few minutes and then fell into his nightmare again, being pulled along the ground in the skin of a beast, dragged to the wooden post and the gleaming knife hot from the fire so his parts could be thrown to the pigs. Or was he doing that squealing? He felt the sound in his chest, his throat, and his mouth after a poke of the blade bathed him in squirting blood, the pigs making riotous noises and the man with the knife wiping blood off his hands. Will I die? Is this dying? Will he sew back on what he cut away, Mama Bett? Where am I?

  Here.

  They caught me.

  You were drowning.

  So it was Emly who sat on her knees in her house where no one went in or out but her children, the master, and the hen who laid eggs and yet he was listening to her childhood, he was lying on her mat and hearing about the time she was taken from her mother’s breast and sold to a woman who fancied a pet and allowed her to play at the end of a leash, given no words to know except come, fetch, rub my neck, my poor tummy, say nothing little monkey or I will send you out to dig yams.

  Who does such a thing to a child?

  Please, remember this for me.

  They won’t believe it. I’m not a man. Did the woman love you? With her leash?

  She sold me when I was too big for a pet.

  How big?

  I was eight.

  To our master.

  Sleep now.

  66

  On the fifth day, Lavina was approached by a passenger wearing a clean, tailored jacket and vest. Tipping his hat, he said: You are among the blessed, ma’am. He clicked his heels together and introduced himself: Mister Able D. Kirk.

  She was inspecting him. She, who was among the blessed.

  I refer to those who are making their way to K.T. He leaned over the rail to study the current and appeared to be pleased.

  We are going to St. Joseph, said Lavina, who, until a few weeks ago, rarely spoke to strange men but now exchanged information easily. Where our grown son will meet us, she added, explaining that he had been expected in Louisville and then in St. Louis but there were other ports, other stops, and St. Jo was the final and obvious place. She said: He will have found us land. She said this because an exchange of information was to everyone’s advantage when traveling.

  Oh, well, said Mister Kirk, and he seemed disheartened. I’m sorry to hear that you are not…well, I mean, I can only hope your son has already secured land, as you say. The way prices are rising. He put a finger on the shiny fabric of his jacket.

  He will have it secured, Lavina said confidently, looking down at the water as if it might reveal her future.

  You put faith in its rightful place above reason. Mister Kirk took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket, shook it, and then blew his nose. He said: After all, faith is exactly what brings us out here beyond the borders of a lawful society. Faith is our historical example. Isn’t it? He used his handkerchief to carefully wipe the rail before he put both hands on it. Then he bent backward to examine the expressionless sky. He said: My misfortune is to fall into the category of skeptics who must always know the pluses and minuses, the dashes and dots, before assuming any risk. I admit to a lack of faith in the ways of this new world out here. He turned to look into Lavina’s face, which was defenseless. He went on: I will add that I do not feel it quite fair to involve my family in an enterprise purely based on faith so I went to a deal of trouble to ascertain the situation most likely to benefit them. It has been my ardent quest. And I have indeed found the fairest piece of land between Louisville and Frisco. He studied the backs of his hands, his shiny nails, holding them out and shooting his cuffs.

  Lavina put her own calloused hands behind her back.

  To tell you the truth, it was my intention to get ahead of the railroads. I mean, west all the way. But when I set eyes on this location…Why, if wheat doesn’t flourish there along with anything else one could want to plant in that rich soil…if libraries don’t flourish there and businesses and schools don’t instantly spring up…Actually, I have a lithograph of our town plan, if you would care to see it. Only to amuse you while we chug along on this river of opportunity. He chuckled, then reached into a valise on the deck by his feet and brought out a folded brochure showing churches and houses and pretty hills with people shopping and chatting and walking comfortably on a paved street.

  Kansas is only a territory, Mister Kirk.

  And did I travel all this way and bring my children out of a safe home and a good school in order to set up in another finished place? I did not, I did not, madam. I wanted to get in at the ground-breaking and help make a new town according to my own values because I regard the duties of citizenship as highly as you regard your duties to the Lord, or so I suspect with regard to your faith. I am a man of this world. It is right here that I seek immortality.

  Lavina had read in the Lexington Missouri Express a few days before that every steamer up the Missouri was taking more and more emigrants out to Kansas. By now, fifteen thousand people had passed up the dark river and as many more had gone by land, people standing in groups waiting their turn to cross the Kansas River because a hundred and sixty acres would be granted to each head of family who settled there. What about the fighting? Those abolitionists. She looked at the traveler. He might well be one of them, toting a rifle in his valise.

  No little skirmish will discourage a patriot, said Mister Kirk. And it will be over before we can blink, by which time I will have an up and running farm with fields of wheat and I may try some cattle since this is good buffalo country and the creatures must have similarities. Let the slavers and antislavers fight amongst themselves and I will build my empire.

  Lavina looked at her husband slumped on his crate.

  We who go first will make of K.T. what we desire, is all I’m saying, and I wanted to offer your family a piece of good bottom land if…you…

  Lavina flushed. She who no longer had any authority.

  The fact is that the government has released the territory a
t a bargain that won’t last. Civilize the place first and then we go for statehood. He touched his lips. But I’m sure your offspring will choose a fine topographical site near to markets, to neighbors, to a church and school…

  Lavina put a hand on the gentleman’s arm. She avoided his eyes. She was that much taller than Mister Kirk, in fact, that she stepped away and bent her knees and said softly: If I might prevail on you to speak to my husband?

  The setting sun glazed the river and Mister Kirk’s cufflinks sparkled. Homes will be built. Songs will be sung. Babies will be kissed. I wish you could see how the steeples will sit tall in front of the hills…how the cottonwoods hug the riverbank. He waved his hands as if for an orchestra. He conducted the river’s dark current. A lady friend tells me that the flour there does not require yeast. Can you imagine? I was looking around for congenial souls, resting my eyes on your family. Of course I will speak to your husband.