by Carys Davies
“Of course I think about him,” her aunt Julie was saying. “I think about him reading in the newspaper about the possible existence of a large, big-toothed monster and saying to himself, ‘Oh, I know what to do! Pack my bags and buy myself a big new hat and point myself immediately in its direction and ride two thousand miles towards it so I can be sure of stepping right into its jaws.’ ”
Her aunt had made her voice deep and stupid-sounding, and Bess heard Elmer Jackson let go of a hearty laugh. When she peeked out from behind the curtain in front of her bed, she saw him slap his thigh.
She also saw that his appreciation of her aunt Julie’s imitation of her father had caused her aunt to blush.
Bess had never seen her aunt Julie blush before.
She watched her aunt pat the coil of grayish brown hair at the back of her head above the collar of her dress and tuck a stray wisp of it behind her ear.
She’d never heard her aunt so cozy with Elmer Jackson, the two of them sitting there in the lamplight, drinking their coffee, and she wondered if maybe her aunt Julie wasn’t getting a little bit sweet on their neighbor, and he on her. She would never have expected it. It was the last thing she would have predicted—her aunt’s growing warmth towards Elmer Jackson, a surprising thing she couldn’t fathom or explain. She wondered if this was how it would be from now on: Elmer Jackson here in the house almost every evening, her aunt Julie sitting with him and talking to him, and laughing with him about her father and blushing when Elmer Jackson laughed too.
Bess retreated again behind her curtain and lay down.
After a little while she heard the scratch of Elmer Jackson’s chair across the wooden floor and the closing of the door, and then there were the sounds of her aunt Julie rinsing the coffee cups in the pail and taking off her boots, the creak of her father’s bed upstairs as her aunt climbed into it.
In the darkness and the quiet Bess could hear the ticking of the wall clock. When she closed her eyes she still saw a picture of what the clock looked like after her father had ridden away—when she’d turned at last to go back into the house, it had its arms flung out across its big round face, one pointing one way and one in the opposite direction, as if one hand was pointing west and the other east. In daylight, there was a different time she liked more than any other and she did everything she could to be in the house when it arrived: the time when the bigger of the two hands crept slowly through the 12 until it joined the smaller one, both of them pointing east.
She lay now with her eyes closed.
Today a crow had come into the yard, which meant her father had found the big animals and had begun his journey home.
Tomorrow, if she made it from the pump to the house without slopping a drop of water over the lip of the bucket, it meant he was in good health.
If the white hawthorn came into flower before the beginning of May, that also meant he was in good health.
And if her aunt Julie was in a bad mood first thing in the morning, it meant he’d be back before her birthday.
She did this all the time now—daily, sometimes hourly, and always last thing at night before she went to sleep, marking time by accumulating signs of good luck in her father’s favor.
On balance, of course, things tended to come out on his side, because Bess always weighted the odds in his favor by setting outcomes she had some power to influence, or at least knew were likely, such as walking very slowly and very carefully with the bucket from the pump to the house and not filling it too full in the first place, or seeing that by late April the hawthorn already showed every sign of coming into bloom very soon, or being able to rely with a fair degree of certainty on her aunt Julie being irritable when she woke up in the mornings.
Still, it was a comfort.
She drew her knees up to her chin and pulled the quilt around her shoulders. Beyond the curtain in front of her bed the clock ticked.
Two o’clock in the afternoon was the time Elmer Jackson usually made his appearance these days; nine or ten in the evening by the time he picked up his hat and said good night to Aunt Julie and climbed up on his gray, white-tailed horse, and left.
They stopped beneath a bluff of blue clay. In the evening some rain fell and Bellman shot a duck and the boy made a fire and they ate.
Bellman did not feel like a vain man. “I am not seeking any kind of glory,” he said, because it was a habit, now, to talk to the boy in the evenings after they’d eaten, even though the boy didn’t understand what he was saying.
Still, it would be quite a thing, he couldn’t help thinking, to write to the newspaper when he got home, and sit across from Julie, and Elmer Jackson, and Gardiner and Helen Lott, and maybe Philip Wallace, the schoolteacher, and the helpful librarian, whose name he couldn’t recall, and Bess, of course, and tell them all about the beasts he had found and seen with his own two eyes. It would be quite a thing to chat to them about the creatures’ real-life teeth and tusks. About the kinds of sounds they made. About the scaly or shaggy magnificence of them, whichever it turned out to be. The wonder of it all.
There were nights too, when he thought of Elsie.
Elsie on the ship as they came into New Castle, hair blowing, big smile; lit up with hopefulness of what this new country would give them.
Elsie heading out to the pump from the house with the bucket for water. Her straight back and her brisk walk.
Elsie taking a bath next to the stove, the water he poured from the ewer sliding like oil over her skin, jagged peaks and ripples beneath that were Bess moving around inside her.
Elsie sitting at the table with Bess on her knee, Elsie helping him clear the pasture of stones. Elsie upstairs after the terrible operation. Mr. Corless the barber lingering in the doorway and asking, eventually, for his money; saying he was sorry but even the best surgeon could have done no better.
Some nights in his dreams he was with her again in their bed, and he’d reach for her and wake up. When it happened it was so real he tried straightaway to go back to sleep so he could get inside the dream and experience it all again, be with her as he’d been in life.
And then there were the other nights, when he dreamed that she was in the house watching him packing and packing and packing for his journey, trying to be off—rolling and re-rolling his blanket and stuffing things into bags and dropping other things into the tin chest. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she was there somewhere in the background, he could feel her watching him, and he was never able to get the packing done—there was always more needing to go in and somehow he hadn’t started soon enough or left enough time. In his dream there was always a feeling that a deadline loomed, that there was a certain time by which he had to set off, otherwise he would never leave, and he was desperate, desperate, desperate to be on his way, hurrying and hurrying, but it never went any quicker and he could feel the possibility that he would ever begin his journey becoming smaller and smaller and draining away to nothing, and even in the dream he could feel his panic, the pounding of his heart, and when he woke the desperation was still wild inside him.
Beyond the quiet fire, though, the boy slept. His eyes were closed. Bellman could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest. Above them the willows swayed lightly in the evening breeze off the river. Bellman’s breathing calmed. It was all right. He was here. He was on his way.
And then, an accident.
Bellman’s blanket left behind at the place they’d camped the night before, some distance from the river; a decision to head back as quickly as possible downstream to retrieve it.
They heard the falls long before they reached them.
Water crashing, then, between the walls of the high-sided canyon and into the narrowing throat of the river.
Bellman pointed to the bank and a possible way up over the rocky cliffs to show that he thought they should carry the pirogue round, but the boy made it clear that he was confident about taking the little boat over the cataract. And Bellman said, all right. Because he’d watched the bo
y now for thousands of hours and it seemed that he could do anything he wanted—that the narrow canoe would do whatever he asked of it. But when the boy and the boat rose up on the foaming water, Bellman saw the boat flip. He saw all his things fly out through the foam. His tin chest thrown through the dark, roiling water and the lid flipped open and everything in it joining the river’s roaring spume in its plunging fall.
At the bottom Bellman took hold of the tops of the boy’s arms and shook him. It was the first time he’d turned on him in anger. He shouted at him and told him he was useless and then he sat down hard on the bank to survey the wreckage of their afternoon, and it turned out they’d lost almost nothing.
The pirogue was unbroken and the paddle was washed up in a cleft between the rocks a little further along. In the tranquil pool at the bottom of the falls, Bellman’s things floated or twinkled beneath the water.
“Well,” he said. “I suppose we’ve been lucky this time.”
Together they gathered all Bellman’s scattered possessions and spread the wet things on the tops of gorse bushes to dry. Everything else—his kettle, his weapons, et cetera—they brought up onto the rocks and narrow, shaley beach. He untied the oilskin that contained his gunpowder and opened it to the sun. Even his letters to Bess, bundled next to the oilskin, had survived with remarkably little damage—some blurring and splotching and brown tidemarks here and there when they were dried, but that was all. A little further on they came to their camp of the previous day, where Bellman’s blanket lay waiting for them.
“I’m sorry,” said Bellman quietly when evening came and they’d finished eating. “I didn’t mean to shout. I know it wasn’t your fault. I think I’m just feeling a little anxious and tired and worried about winter coming on again, and that we’ve come all this way without a single sighting.”
Every time now, the aunt invited him to stay for supper.
He spent the days clearing up the yard and the pasture, and foraging the animals, and in the evenings she gave him a plate of cold meat and a cup of hot coffee and a piece of cake or pie before he took himself off.
One night before the girl went to bed and the aunt’s back was turned, he leaned across the table and drew a circle with his thumb on the back of her hand as it rested beside her plate. She gave him a straight look, but didn’t seemed to know quite what he was about, and the next moment the aunt was back in her place and the girl was being sent off to bed and he was giving his attention again to his dinner.
He excoriated himself afterwards. It seemed to him that he should not have attempted anything so halfhearted—that the element of surprise, when the right moment came, was important. “The last thing you want,” he said to himself, “is for the aunt to be on the kee veev.”
That same spring in Lewistown, Mary Higson, the blacksmith’s widow, turned thirty-nine.
She’d seen Cy Bellman go into Carter’s one summer afternoon not long before he left and come out wearing a hat that surprised her. Not knowing anything yet about his plans, she was curious about what he might be up to. Whether he’d made some private decision to improve his appearance and this was the first public sign; whether, after a period of eight years since his wife’s death, he was thinking it was time to take an interest in something apart from his little girl and the mules she saw him driving into town every season in his brown felt hat and a willow switch and a steady look on his face that always seemed to her to say, “My name is John Cyrus Bellman and this is my life. It is not what I’d expected but there you are, this is how it is.”
He’d looked sweetly self-conscious, though, she thought, exiting the store that day, the hat very straight and somehow precarious on top of his thick red hair, as if he were performing some sort of dare, like walking a greasy pole balancing a lampshade on his head while everyone he’d ever known in his life waited and watched to see if he, or the hat, or both, would fall off.
For a while afterwards she thought it was possible he might call.
Several times she went to the door thinking she’d heard a knock, only to find it was nothing and there was no one, it had been her own hoping and wishing, conjuring sounds out of silence or confusing something ordinary and haphazard like the plop of a large raindrop on the roof or a person in the street taking off a shoe and knocking it on the ground to empty it of a stone.
And then one day she heard in church that he’d ridden off by himself into the west to look for some extremely big animals.
She overheard his sister Julie and Helen Lott and the minister all talking about it, saying that no doubt the enormous objects that had inspired his search were likely not bones at all but bits of tree and rock. That he was crazy to go out there alone. That he would starve or break a leg or get lost or fall into the hands of savages.
She didn’t know what to think, except that she wished he hadn’t gone.
Every time she saw his little girl, whose hair was exactly the same red as his, she thought of him and her heart turned over.
She was a funny little thing, the girl.
Solitary and solemn and always trailing a long way behind her aunt and the Lotts on their way to church.
Sometimes the blacksmith’s widow glimpsed her loitering on the library steps. Once, she saw her go in through the big wooden doors, and once she saw her fly out of them like a scalded cat straight into her aunt Julie, who cried out, “For goodness’ sakes, child, look where you’re going!”
Mary imagined saying to her: “I will be your mother, Bess, if you like. I will be your father’s wife when he comes back, and together we will look after you.”
But as the months passed and turned into a year, and then into a second, Mary Higson began to forget about Cy Bellman, and when a traveling salesman from Boston passing through Lewistown bought her a leather trunk and some clothes and many other things besides, she threw in her lot with him and left, and never again returned to Lewistown or found out what became of Cy Bellman and his little girl.
Meanwhile Sidney Lott was a foot taller than he’d been last summer and he walked to church most Sundays with Dorothy Wallace, who was fourteen years old and the daughter of the schoolmaster.
Aunt Julie said what a pretty girl Dorothy had turned into and she wouldn’t be surprised if Sidney and Dorothy weren’t a married pair a few years from now. What did Bess think of that?
Bess said she thought nothing of it. Bess said that was the last thing in the world she’d think of thinking about.
Sometimes the river was too low even for the boy to move the pirogue upstream against the sluggish current.
Bellman lashed it to his waist then, and splashed through the water and had the boy lead the horses along the bank, and pulled until his feet were so cold and his legs were so tired he couldn’t go any further, and he called over his shoulder to the boy that they were stopping for the night.
There were moments during the days when he cried out in frustration. “Call yourself a river!” he’d shout, walloping the fly-pocked surface of the gray, slow-moving water with the flat of the pirogue’s paddle. All day, every day, he kept his eyes peeled in the hope that one of the animals would at long last make an appearance, yet they saw nothing.
“I am beginning to think,” he said aloud to the boy one day, “that sluggish and low and lacking in water as it is, this river is likely the problem as far as the big beasts are concerned.”
He splashed forwards a few more paces and then he stopped and nodded.
“Yes, I’m coming to the conclusion that, like cats, they have a great dislike of rivers, of streams and creeks and waterways of any kind.”
None of their looping excursions into the hinterland close to the river had yielded anything stranger than a few unfamiliar grasses and flowers, the fat, spiny creature that looked like a species of prickly fruit with a tail; the large rabbits, the ugly trousered birds.
“None of our diversions away from the river have been long enough,” he announced decisively to the boy, his habit of talking to him be
ing quite entrenched now.
For a long time he sat with his compass. The two captains and their party had continued into the northwest; he and the boy would do differently.
“Come,” he said.
They strike a course away from the river.
They travel southwest for a distance of three hundred and fifty miles. They come to another river, which one, Bellman at this point has no idea. They cross it, and he hopes the Indian remembers the way back, that he has some special part of his brain that memorizes such things, perhaps via the soles of his feet.
He is in much better cheer now. After that little wobble in the river, his enthusiasm is restored. In the evenings he stretches himself out contentedly in his coat after another long day’s traveling and enjoys a little smoke of his pipe, writes to Bess. There is something endlessly pleasant about the quick flurries of bats in the trees at this time of day, and the soft crepitation of insects all around: a steady in-out susurration as if the earth itself is breathing. He does worry a little about snakes, it’s true, and bears, and the wolves he hears howling sometimes in the night. But on the whole he rarely dwells on those fears, and, as far as everything that might lie ahead is concerned, he remains much more excited than anxious, and more full of optimism than any kind of dread. He’s convinced he’s right in thinking that his mistake so far has been to hug the river too closely, and that now he has corrected that mistake, things will soon be looking up. He still has a small supply of oddments in the tin chest to exchange for food, should the need arise, with any savages they come upon, and fingers crossed, those savages will be of the curious, childlike sort and not the ferocious, slave-taking variety. He is low on powder and ammunition, but as long as the boy does the lion’s share of the hunting, he reckons they will manage for a while.
He calls the boy “Old Woman” now, in a bantering, affectionate way.