by Carys Davies
He was conscious of the boy moving around the camp—could feel his presence like a soft shadow.
What is it like, to be you? he thought, watching the boy as he went about his tasks.
Bellman remembered wanting to ask the boy the same question once before, months and months and months ago, and it came back to him now from that time. Had he asked him, in fact, back then? Had he spoken the question aloud? He may have, he wasn’t sure.
If he had, and the boy had understood it, how would he have answered it?
Hard to say.
The boy is, after all, only eighteen years old. A mess of feelings.
You could say that he is angry about the past, but ambitious for the future. Impossible to say which impulse will turn out to be the stronger, or if the two things are simply bound together in him and inseparable; the essence of who he is.
Perhaps the truest thing you can say is that everything he does, he hopes it will be for the best.
They stayed there a week, and towards evening on the seventh day the boy brought a squirrel. He cooked it in Bellman’s kettle and shredded it with his fingers and dropped threads of meat into Bellman’s blackened mouth, but Bellman retched and choked.
That night Cy Bellman lay thinking about the long way he’d come.
Of all his various encounters, one kept returning to him: his meeting on one of the bateaux with the Dutch land agent who’d agreed to take some of his letters to St. Louis. Bellman had told him about his quest, and had used the same words he’d read in the newspaper: “I am seeking a creature entirely unknown,” he’d said, “an animal incognitum.”
He knew the words only because they’d been in the newspaper, and he wondered now if he’d sounded very pompous, very self-important. Perhaps he had. Anyway, the Dutchman must have told his wife about their conversation, because when the time came for Bellman to jump off the big flat boat and continue on his way, she’d called after him to say she hoped he’d reach Cognitum before nightfall, that he wouldn’t lose his way before he got there, and as he rode away, he’d heard her high, trilling laughter.
Had he made a mistake, coming to America in the first place? Dragging Elsie halfway across the world so she could die in an unfamiliar place? Should he have stayed in England, in the narrow lanes and what now seemed like the miniature hills of his youth, everything small and dark and cramped and a feeling inside himself that he would burst if he did not escape? Even then, a little of that prickling feeling, the vertigo; a longing for what he’d never seen and didn’t know.
The boy wore Elsie’s blouse now; most of the bits and pieces Bellman had brought in the tin chest, and in the two bags, he’d given away to the boy because he was afraid that without them the boy might not stay. Nearly all the things Bellman had brought with him the boy had now, including all his weapons.
Bellman felt himself getting weaker, more and more he wasn’t sure if he was awake or dreaming. He seemed to have forgotten the purpose of his journey. What had tormented him in his own small house no longer assailed his mind. The possibility of the enormous creatures disturbed neither his days nor his nights. What he thought about now was home; Bess.
At the height of his fever he could feel the slow, hot waves of his blood, beating against something inside him. Against what? His life? Against the things that had happened in it? Against all the things he had and hadn’t done? Was that what he could feel inside himself?
He remembered the moment of his daughter’s birth, the pulse of Elsie’s body, the terrible limbo when it seemed that between them they would not manage this last part—getting Bess born; when she’d been suspended, half out in the world and half stuck, still, inside Elsie’s body, balanced between life and death, and then the great sluicing suck and pull and she was out, bawling and alive.
He recalled her childhood illnesses—her pale skin besieged by crusty spots, her swollen throat, a cough that sounded like a wild animal’s, a strawberry tongue, covered with little bumps, the creases in her skin red—red in the folds of her elbows and the lines of her neck. Nights when they thought she might not see the morning. What had Elsie done then? There’d been cold water and there’d been hot, but he couldn’t remember why. What he knew for certain was that Elsie had sat and often put her hand on Bess’s forehead and left it there, a steady weight.
He slept and woke and slept again, sang old songs he’d crooned to Bess when she was a soft parcel against his shoulder. His vision was dark, there were shadows and small clouds of moving color he thought must be sunlight, and trees, and Old Woman From A Distance.
Perhaps Julie was right. Perhaps he should do something sensible with his time, and though he did not think he could go back to church, perhaps he could find himself a new wife. Julie had mentioned Mary Higson, the blacksmith’s widow, more than once. Perhaps when he got back he should marry Mary Higson, a mother for Bess, the three of them a family; make a better go of the mules, enough money to take on Elmer Jackson full-time. In a few years, perhaps, move a little further west to some nice fertile spot like the ones he’d passed through before crossing the Mississippi. Branch out into some cereal farming.
You had so many ways of deciding which way to live your life. It made his head spin to think of them. It hurt his heart to think that he had decided on the wrong way.
A thing seemed important until there was something more important.
He looked at himself in one of the remaining fragments of mirror glass he had in the tin chest and laughed. He’d need to clean himself up a bit. Visit the barber for a bath and shave his mustache, cut his beard, which was dirty and long and large enough to hide a small bird.
He could only lie on the ground now and occasionally open his eyes. Pictures of his faraway house, of his tall and bony sister standing stiff and protective with her hand on Bess’s shoulder, floated before him. In fits and starts he talked. At one point he looked at the guns slung across the boy’s chest, at his hickory bow and the stone-tipped arrows he always carried in a pouch around his neck, and although he knew the boy could not understand, he told him that he himself had always been more of a worrier than a warrior, and then laughed a little at his own joke. Loose, separate thoughts flocked and scattered in his brain. Once, he said aloud that he thought there must be a pattern to things but he could not see it. After that he didn’t speak again, and Old Woman From A Distance could not wake him. When he touched him, his skin was sometimes hot and sometimes cold, and the boy thought the thing to do now was to make a warm pit so that when the man woke he could step down into it and stand, and breathe in the smoke and the warmth and it would revive him. He had seen it work, in the course of his life, many times, but in the event Bellman came to only slightly, only enough to sit up and have his right arm lifted over the boy’s narrow, sloping shoulder and be half-carried down into the pit, where he did not have the strength to stand, and since in the boy’s way of doing things it was important for Bellman to be upright if it was all to work, Bellman leaned propped up against him, crumpled and, like the boy, very thin. Their collarbones clicked against each other and Bellman’s head drooped and rested in the shallow cradle of the boy’s neck. Bellman’s red beard touched the boy’s face and the boy found that he did not mind. He no longer associated the big explorer with the skinny white man from the past. For an hour or so the fire breathed smoke inside the pit, and it seemed possible for a while that it would work, but at the end of an hour Old Woman From A Distance felt the life go out of Bellman and he was alone.
“You’ll be needing a new dress,” said Aunt Julie, “in the spring.”
They would get the cloth at Carter’s, she said, something tough and serviceable, and she would show Bess how to cut out the pieces and put them together. In the meantime, Bess could let down the hem on the present one, which was patched and darned and a hand’s width too short now that the top of Bess’s head came up past the height of the old wall clock.
Bess sat at the table in her shift. There was a dark line, crusty with g
rit, where the old hem had been. She cleared out the crud with her fingers and pressed the material flat and sewed up the new hem as far beneath the line as it was possible to do.
“And take the brush,” Aunt Julie called from the porch, “to that dirt from when you were lying down in it yesterday.”
All through the previous afternoon Bess had stayed in the back, stretched out on the damp, lumpy ground watching a snail make its slow, stubborn way through the stiff grass and over stones and fallen leaves and rotted branches; its meandering, silvery trail, the way it seemed to know, somehow, where it was going and how to get there.
She finished the hem with a knot and bit off the thread. The dirt from yesterday she left and put her dress back on and went outside.
Every day now she collected the eggs Aunt Julie’s hens left in the coop and in the pasture and in their favorite hiding places behind the house.
Most mornings the eggs were what she and her aunt ate, and once a week they took the ones they had left over into town, where Carter bought them, or exchanged them for oil or string or salt or sometimes a bag of fruit if Aunt Julie was making one of her pies.
It was harder than before, living with her aunt Julie, because although Bess didn’t like her any more than she ever had, she felt the need to stay close to her these days. She felt safer when her aunt was nearby; glad that she was always in the house when Elmer Jackson came.
Then one morning Aunt Julie said the new colored window for the church had arrived by ship all the way from Banff in Scotland.
It had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and traveled in a wooden frame on a wagon over ground from the coast.
There would be a small welcoming party to receive it, she told Bess, but no children—the colored panes would depict Moses Blazing with Light, and it would be a terrible thing if they had come all this way, only to be smashed into a thousand pieces by an unruly infant.
“I am not an infant, Aunt Julie.”
“No, Bess, but you are still a child and the minister has said no persons under fifteen years old.” She said she expected to be back before dark, but if it all ran on and she was delayed, Bess was to leave her supper on the table under a cloth and not wait up. At the end of the track she joined Helen Lott and her husband, Gardiner, and together they began the long walk to the church.
Elmer Jackson watched Julie go.
He gave it a couple of hours, in case the aunt decided she’d forgotten something and turned herself around and came back. After that he put on his hat, and went over there; stopped at the gate into the pasture to make sure it was shut because he had a weird kind of inkling that maybe the hinny the girl was so fond of—the one with the violent, unpredictable kick and the white splash on its forehead—would find some way of interfering. He tugged on the rope that was there to secure the gate and, satisfied that it was doing its job, turned and began to walk up to the house.
He had lit a fire and dug a pit, the boy told Devereux.
He had held the white man in his arms and let him breathe in the smoke but he had died anyway.
He had buried the big leather saddle with him, along with his boots and a quantity of unused paper, because it seemed important to put him in the ground with something of his own.
Everything else, as the fur trader could see, he’d brought back with him: the knife, the hatchet, the two guns, a metal file, the brown wool coat, the fishhooks and the remaining tobacco, the tin box with what was left of its treasure, the tall black hat, the blanket, the kettle, the two leather bags, the satchel with its long buckled strap, the papers with drawings on them and the ones with the same repeated thing on them that was like two hills together and an eye and two snakes exactly the same, which he liked and considered because of its frequent repetition to be of some significance.
BessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBess
He had also kept the dead man’s black, brown-tailed horse. His own he’d traded for food on the journey back home because for a long time there’d been no game and no fish. Devereux saw that he had the small ink container too, which had been stuck through the lapel of the man’s coat; he was wearing it behind his ear, like a flower.
The fur trader nudged the musket deeper into the boy’s cheek. He didn’t know what to believe. He stepped on the boy’s hand and heard the bones crunch. The boy yelped.
“Tell me the truth now. Did you kill him?”
“No.”
Everything, said the boy, had happened exactly as he’d described.
Devereux grunted.
He leafed through Bellman’s surviving papers—his drawings of grasses and flowers and trees, the occasional bird or creature. A jackrabbit, a horned frog, some sort of vulture. There were dried specimens between the pages, notes written in a series of cramped, misspelled sentences, various sketches with the dotted lines of his route. Letters to the daughter. No indication whatever that he had come upon the mammoth creatures he was seeking.
Devereux pictured again the red-haired man’s large, earnest features, the thick rectangular beard, and was moved.
He recalled the serious way Bellman had spoken of the great beasts, and his mission to find them, and found himself strangely touched by the news of his death. The letters were full of mad hope and a kind of deranged curiosity, the last few telling the daughter that he expected to find the animals very shortly and then to be on his way home. It would be good to see her, the letters said. He hoped her aunt Julie was well, and that Elmer Jackson was not proving himself too troublesome a neighbor.
The fur trader sat down with the pile of notes and drawings and surveyed the things that remained of the man’s demented quest. Some of the letters to the daughter were loose, numbered sheets with the girl’s name on the first page. Others were already folded into fat squares, tied and knotted with cord, and on the front, in Bellman’s large handwriting, a few lines describing the whereabouts of his house in the United States. It all produced in the trader’s mind a picture of the little girl waiting for her father to come home, the crusty old sister who was perhaps softer on the inside than she was on the out. He recalled the letters that he had promised to send and then forgotten about.
Well, he would send them on now to St. Charles with these new ones, along with the notes and the drawings, with Hollinghurst when he left.
He told the boy he could go—he could keep the blouse and the red beads for his trouble. The coat and the pretty copper thimble he could take off and leave with everything else here in a pile next to the dead man’s hat.
The boy stared back truculently and didn’t move.
He said the dead man’s things were his, for all the services he had rendered.
Devereux passed a hand across his face and sighed.
No, he said, they were not. The things were in his custody now, all except the letters and the drawings, which he would send with Mr. Hollinghurst, who was going east, as it happened, in the morning. Mr. Hollinghurst would do his best to see they got back to the daughter.
The boy stuck out his bottom lip. He seemed very aggrieved. He took a step forward. He said if Devereux let him keep the tin box of treasure, and one of the two guns and the hatchet, and the dead man’s tall hat and his coat and the metal flower with the spike, he would go instead of Mr. Hollinghurst. He could find his way if it was described to him. He would take all the papers and give them to the girl.
Devereux sucked his teeth.
He felt guilty about not sending on the letters, he did. His mother would have called it a sin of omission, and he wished now to put it right. Nevertheless, he also had a commercial eye on the gear the bandy-legged Indian had brought back. He was already totting up the number of dark, glossy pelts he’d have in exchange for it by the end of the week.
“No,” he said.
He told the boy he had no need of his services for this one. Mr. Hollinghurst would do what needed to be done. “Now go away. Shoo.”
But the boy didn’t move.
He said he’d d
o it for less. He’d do it for one of the guns and the blue beads and the blouse and the coat and the tall black hat.
Oh, these people, thought Devereux.
Was there anything they wouldn’t do in exchange for a clapped-out weapon and some fancy dress and a handful of glittery trash?
He looked at the boy, at his sloping shoulders and his dark, piplike eyes, at his ribbons and his beads and the grimy woman’s blouse, which he said had been given to him by the dead man for helping him on his journey. He was thinner than before and very dirty, and there was something unspeakably tawdry and undignified about him being dressed in the old cotton blouse. A small piece of mirror glass hung from the end of one of his pigtails next to the copper thimble. Knotted around the other was the now filthy handkerchief Devereux recalled Bellman giving him at the start of everything.
Devereux hesitated.
Oh, what the heck.
There was, perhaps, an advantage in the boy going. He had enough about him to make Devereux think he might be a better option than any arrangement made in St. Charles by Hollinghurst—the letters misdirected or given to the wrong person or left behind and forgotten for a second time—and he didn’t want that to happen, he really didn’t. He felt bad about not sending on Bellman’s letters in the spring as he’d promised. It was just possible the boy might make a more reliable courier than Hollinghurst.
“All right, here’s the deal.”
The boy could have the dead man’s coat if he went, and the last of his treasure—the bits of copper wire and the remaining handkerchiefs and the mirror glass, one of the knitting needles but not both of them, and all the remaining white and red beads but not the blue ones, and Devereux would throw in a carrot of tobacco and a tot of rum. And he could keep the blouse.