I clasp him around the throat with both hands.
My hands tighten.
The breath wallops out of my body as we crash to the ground.
We crash to the ground gargling and groaning and rolling, with the charcoal of his body paint smearing all over me, and the heat of his body burning into me, and the dust grinding in my teeth, and the firelight flickering one moment and starlight the next, and the midget drummer still pounding his drum in my skull, although never loudly enough to drown Natty and Boss who are shouting, Stop!—but the Rider pays no attention and I pay no attention; I keep heaving and strangling and throttling because I have Black Cloud in my grip now, and perhaps the Painted Man as well, and they will not release me, and neither will I release them, until all their life has been crushed out, until they are rags to be thrown away into the wilderness where they will never be buried or remembered.
Until Natty and Boss drag us apart.
Until I am hauled to my feet and away to the wagon, still raving and lunging.
Until I am forced down onto the ground and tied to the wheel of our wagon with ropes around my wrists and legs.
Until my fury burns out.
Until my head sinks onto my chest.
Until I am swallowed by sleep, and drift down to the deepest bed of the deepest ocean where there is no light and no movement but only an immense weight of water holding me still…
When I floated back to myself again, I thought dawn must be breaking. There were dim purplish lights swirling through the darkness above me: lights the color of bruises. I decided to sleep some more to make certain; to let the drummer pack up his instrument and leave me in peace.
Next time I opened my eyes there was no mistake. That glare was most certainly the sun afloat in its blue ocean, and that shadow was Boss standing on the shore to launch his first conversation of the day, which was to give orders about the packing of our possessions, and to quench the embers of the fire, and to water our ponies. All simple things, but all hammer-blows thundering on my skull.
I lay as still as possible, my face in the dust like a dog. Pain: the shimmering brightness of it. And shame. I never chose to drink from the cup. I was given it. I had been tricked.
And what was this darkness falling across me suddenly; was it Natty coming to apologize and comfort me?
It was the Rider: his charcoal paint restored and his severe face immaculate.
“Well,” he growled.
“Untie me,” I told him.
Now here came Natty at last, looming over his shoulder. But I saw nothing contrite about her. Her face was washed and her hair brushed; she was smiling broadly.
I would not speak. I watched the Rider tug at my knots and saw that his fingers were creased and dry-looking.
“You’re very brave,” Natty chuckled. “You should never have finished the whole cup.” She would not look at me but preferred watching the Rider finish his work, and his black hair shining.
Still I said nothing.
“No one drinks a whole cup,” she said.
“How was I to know that?”
“Wasn’t it obvious?”
“Not obvious at all. How was it obvious?”
“Because the others wouldn’t touch it.”
The Rider grunted to show that I was free, and at once I sat upright, rubbing my wrists where the ropes had chafed them.
“Are you saying it’s my fault?”
“Why are you talking about fault? No one’s to blame for anything. It was only a drink.”
“It was not only a drink; look what it made me do.”
Natty chuckled again. “Nobody remembers that. Nobody cares.”
I kept rubbing my wrists, with the Rider now facing away from me and looping the rope into coils.
“Besides,” I said. “You don’t know what I saw.”
Here the mood changed, because the Rider was suddenly tense and listening. Turning toward me again he asked, “What did you see?”
“Black Cloud,” I said, without feeling sure he would understand.
But he did understand, and he was interested. More than interested. He was on his guard, looking around our camp, then back at me again. How did he know about Black Cloud? Had Natty told him? Was this one of the things they had talked about while I had been unconscious?
“Black Cloud, yes,” he said. “But where? Did you see where he was?”
“In you,” I told him.
The Rider flinched. “Where in the world?”
“Nowhere. I saw him here.”
“You are sure?”
I nodded, and the Rider held my gaze for a moment, his eyes refusing me like a cat.
“I’m sure. He was only in you.”
I said this to hurt him; to punish him for taking Natty away. And who knows, it might have led to more words between us, to blows even, but Boss saw what was happening and suddenly busied up. He was carrying pots and blankets to stow in the wagon.
“Headache, dear boy?” he said much too loudly, scattering whatever else had been in the Rider’s mind, and in mine. “I have heard that potion produces a most tremendous headache. Indeed, I remember suffering myself, on one particular occasion, on more than one perhaps, on one or two, and having for hours, I might even say for days, a distinct…”
Boss dropped his load into the wagon and took out the saddle for his pony without drawing breath, then rambled away with the stirrups banging against his thighs. He had done what he meant to do; my quarrel was not over, but it was finished for the moment. I stood up and brushed the dust off my legs, and the Rider leaned into the wagon to fetch something he needed for our journey.
But then Natty laid a hand on his shoulder. She laid a hand on his shoulder and he bent his head to whisper in her ear. It was all done in a second, but it was enough. All my anger returned and all my confusion. While I had lain unconscious something had passed between them; I was sure of it.
Natty saw me notice.
“You’ll feel stronger soon,” she said, letting her hand drop to her side and giving me her sweetest smile.
I did not reply but walked to the further end of the wagon, where I could stand a little apart. I stared at the earth; at the grains of dust and the shadows of the wagon and the seeds in the grass-heads.
“It’s nothing to worry about,” Natty said, following after me and speaking in the same deceptive way.
I still did not answer.
“Jim?”
The world expanded a little.
“What have you done?” I asked. I did not care if the others heard me; although in fact none of them did—they were all still busy preparing for our journey.
“What do you mean, what have I done?”
“What have you done?” I did not want to say any more; I could not find the words.
“Nothing,” Natty repeated. “I’ve done nothing. It was you who did something. You poisoned yourself.”
“Not that.”
“What, then? I can’t understand you.” Natty reached forward as though she wanted to brush the hair out of my eyes. At another time I would have loved her for this; her gestures of this sort were rare. Now I thought it was deceitful and stepped away.
“That’s not true,” I said. “You understand perfectly well what I’m asking.”
Natty’s eyes widened. “Jim,” she said, with great deliberation. “I think…”
But once again Boss appeared, barging round the side of the wagon to interrupt us, and a moment later had swept us off to our ponies, lifting us on a wave of prattle about the need for an early start, and the heat to come, and the uncertainties of the way ahead, and a hundred other things that did not interest me in the slightest.
“Here we are, then, here we are,” he said, stemming his flood for a moment to hand us the reins of our ponies. “And now—all aboard! Are you with me, friends?”
As he jumped into his saddle and began fussing over the Spectacle, straightening her dress and wiping the dust from her face, Natty tried t
o finish what she had started.
“I thought you’d lost your mind,” she told me, bending close to my face; her breath touched my cheek.
“Perhaps I have,” I said.
“That would be…” She paused, staring into the wilderness and biting her lip.
“That would be…too much,” she said at last.
“It would?”
“Certainly.” She nodded firmly, as though knocking the word into my chest; when she felt sure it was driven home, she turned her back and kicked up one heel so that I could help her onto her pony. The brown skin of her leg, streaked with trails of dried-up water that showed where she had washed herself, almost made me cry aloud. I grasped her ankle, and felt the heat of her skin, and hoisted her up.
Then I scrambled onto my own pony, straightened the satchel against my tunic, and we resumed our journey—with me taking my place beside the Boss, who passed me a piece of bread and a flagon of water, and Natty trotting beside the Rider as she had done the previous day.
CHAPTER 20
Cat’s Field
In England one sort of landscape flows very quickly into another: marsh into pasture, plains into hills, woods into water meadows. In the wilderness there are no such quick changes. Threadbare scrub, dust devils and lilac horizons: they are all the same yesterday as today, and the same today as tomorrow. How Boss kept cheerful in the face of such tedium I cannot say. Why we endured his chatter and continued to follow his lead are simpler questions. He was the only guide we had, because he was the only one with enough spirit to consider himself worthy of the role.
I soon lost my sense of time as an orderly thing, and lived once more in a dream of clanks and rumbles, sways and lurches, dazzles and darkness. Did I still think a town might exist somewhere in the country ahead of us? Did I think we might die before we got there? To tell the truth I did not care much in either case; I felt too consumed by the sight of Natty and the Rider still moving along very smoothly together; too distressed by the speed and depth of her absorption in him; too preoccupied by their occasional laughter and their contented silences.
And still too preoccupied a day later, a week later, then ten days later, whenever it was that the trail broadened at last, and we found the country tensing as it will often seem to do before vanishing under bricks and mortar.
Boss soon began to share my sense of expectancy, lifting his hat from his head and then cramming it down again, his red face turning scarlet and his back straightening as though he had swallowed a poker. All this was wonderful—hilarious, in its way—and so were the greetings that erupted when we saw our first living and breathing strangers. A farmer leaning on his rake in a field. A clerical-looking gentleman riding in a buggy. A cowboy lounging against a tree. Each of them in succession were hailed with such a stentorian “Good morning!” I thought they might be frightened straight back into oblivion.
For my own part: I felt perfectly astonished to see such people and such proof of civilization. Wide fields began to appear, with hedges and gateways. Then the smallholders who owned them, rattling along in carts or ambling on ponies. Then well-to-do men and women who had no other purpose in life except to survey what belonged to them, and enjoy it. Creamy skins and feathered bonnets! Fancy waistcoats and clean hair! The shine on watch-chains and eye-glasses! The newness of everything felt so great it was almost painful—especially because no one returned our stares, our waves, our greetings, with anything like the same enthusiasm that we showed to them. They seemed pleased to see Boss himself, because he promised them some entertainment. But I was mistaken as an Indian, and judged accordingly. I am sure Natty and the Rider felt offended in the same way, although I did not ask them.
Then the roofs of a few buildings broke the skyline, and we knew we had reached the town that Boss had predicted for us.
The first houses we saw were more like fortresses than homes, with high palisades all around, and thick walls made of rough logs and planks, and small dark windows in which the only signs of life were a shadow passing among shadows, or a shutter pulled to and bolted. The effect, despite all the warm opinions that Boss continued to pour forth at every turn (“Charming, charming,” “most ingenious,” “very practical and robust”), was to make us feel the place was closed against us.
Boss never so much as suggested this, and after a while I had to admit he was right to persevere, because these fortresses gave way to less forbidding homes, with gardens front and back, and windows where families gathered to wave at us. A little farther, and the welcome was even more enthusiastic, with doors opening, and men and women stepping out to stare, and children asking Boss who we were, and where we came from, and what we meant to do, some in English, many in Spanish, a few in French, and others in languages I had never heard before.
To each of them—and over their heads as well, so their parents heard and their neighbors, and regardless of whether they understood him or not—Boss explained in his loudest voice that we were the Entertainment, oh yes, indeed we were, and shortly we would be performing for the delight of everyone, and he would be most obliged, really very sincerely obliged, if they would take it upon themselves to spread the word, since a diversion as remarkable as this, a spectacle as spectacular, was the first of its kind in the New World, and might never be repeated as long as a world of any description continued to exist.
Admiring this cascade, and watching the children pluck up their courage to come close, and tell one another how strange we looked, or in the case of myself and Natty how dirty, I felt like a hermit dragged off his solitary pillar. A moment before I had been surrounded by wide horizons; now everywhere I looked there were walls and turnings and obstacles and faces—faces with work to finish, and friends to meet, and plans to make, and all of them peering about, and laughing, and scowling, and frowning, and sneering, and commenting, and criticizing, and appreciating, and gossiping, because here was their home. Home with a wide road, and now even tidier houses on either side, wooden houses, houses two stories high, and a church, and shopfronts, and glass shining in these shopfronts, and an open door with fiddle music, and horses tethered along a rail, and more shops, and a shaded walkway where people clattered to and fro, and a hotel, and another church, and another hotel, this one much smaller, at the farthest end of the main street, where the bustle died down again, where a tortoiseshell cat slept in the sun, where a yard opened before us, where Boss led the way and our wagon groaned in behind us, and we pulled at our reins, and slithered to the ground, and handed over our reins to the stable boys, and stroked our ponies on the nose, and patted their shoulders and thanked them, and looked at one another, and knew that for the moment at least we had reached the end of our travels.
We stood in amazement, Boss speechless for once in his life: at the row of stables ahead of us; at the fresh straw that lined the stalls; at the patterns of sunlight that came through the tiles of the roof; at the saw-marks on the beams overhead.
Boss recovered first and told us—with a great deal of hand-rubbing and back-slapping, and a tender embrace of the Spectacle—that the place was well found, very well found, before leading us away from the stableyard and in through the back door of the hotel. With his shoulders square and his hat shining on the back of his head, he looked as though he stayed here every night of his life, and was the best of friends with the manager, and had personally arranged for the paraphernalia of tassels and drapes and picture-frames and pictures that greeted us.
“Business!” He pounded on a desk that stood in the lobby, and shouted as though he meant to be heard across the whole of America.
In the pause following this eruption, several doors slammed shut on the story above (I imagined guests crouching behind them, wondering what tornado had blown into their shelter), and a piano in the neighboring room tinkled to a halt.
Then silence, and the suffocating sense of being indoors, as though everything had suddenly closed around me and squeezed the breath from my lungs: the dark yellow stripes of the wallpaper,
and the milky candle-bowls, and the carpet that showed little blue waves rippling endlessly toward an invisible shore.
What was the need for it all? What sort of wrong turn had mankind taken, when it abandoned the life of simple things and open air? I gasped, and found I had clutched the arm of Clown, who quickly shook me off. Was I the only one choking like this? Apparently. Even the Rider seemed perfectly at ease, gazing at the picture of a sunset fuming on the wall beside him, while Natty kept her shining eyes fixed on his face.
Then doors creaked open again upstairs and feet shuffled along a landing. The piano trickled back into life. Shadows shook in the alcove behind the lobby-desk. And the hotel owner Mr. Vale appeared: small, stooped, wearing a green eye-shade, and apparently as mournful as his name, which hung above him on a neat wooden sign.
Boss hailed him with tremendous vivacity, giving orders about how many rooms we needed, and what kind, and for how long.
“You, Wee Man…” he said, scanning our faces in turn as though to remind himself how many disciples he had gathered around him in the desert, and feeling impressed by the number. “You, sir, I think must sleep outside in our wagon to protect our possessions. Are you content?” (He made no pause.) “I see you are content. You, my love…” (He beamed at the Spectacle, who clasped her hands together and rose onto tiptoe as though the tether that kept her tied to the earth was being sorely tested.) “You shall of course remain with me, in the matrimonial bower. Now…” (He pointed at Clown and me and Natty and the Rider.) “You and you and you and you will all have a room to yourselves. A room each I should say. Extravagant, I grant. Extravagantly extravagant. But we shall have great profit from our Entertainment, great profit, Mr. Vale, and pay you when we have made that profit, which will be tomorrow night. You accept our terms, I am sure. Very good, very good. Excellent in fact. We shall be very generous to you. Generous to a fault. We are generous people. We are brave hearts.”
What else could Mr. Vale do but agree? He winced. He tugged at his eye-shade as though it was the peak of a cap. He winced again. Then he meekly passed Boss a handful of keys and murmured that he accepted us gladly into his hotel, before returning to the shadows from which he had been summoned.
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