by Carys Davies
The boy did not respond. He stood. He seemed to be turning the proposal over in his mind. He said he’d do it if he could have one of the guns too.
Devereux shook his head. “No.”
The hat then, said the boy.
Ah, the hat!
The fur trader eyed the boy narrowly, wondering if he’d waited to ask for the hat because it was the thing he wanted most.
“You can have the hat when you get back. And the gun.” The older of the two guns along with the hat would be his on his return.
“Entendu?”
The boy looked at his feet. “Entendu,” he said quietly. Agreed. It was one of his few French words.
Then, using the back of one of the dead man’s drawings and the ink in the little container that had been behind the boy’s ear, Devereux wrote to Bess, in English.
He said he hoped the return of her father’s letters and papers would be a comfort.
He told her to be sure to send her own scrap of writing back with the Indian to show she had received them.
“So I know you went there,” he said to the boy, looking up at him as he wrote his message to Bess. “So I know you didn’t just ditch the man’s letters in the river and run off with all this booty here.” He handed his letter for Bess to the boy and watched him place it in the bag with the other letters.
“Mr. Hollinghurst is leaving tomorrow for St. Charles,” he said. “You can accompany him, and from St. Charles, Mr. Hollinghurst will indicate how you are to go the rest of the way.” He paused. “You can take the man’s compass.” Devereux stooped and picked the small, plum-sized ebony thing out of the tin chest and put it into the boy’s hand, explaining the work it did and tapping the important spot he must follow in relation to the arrow.
“It is not a gift,” he said. “It is a loan and I’ll be having it back when you return with the piece of paper from the girl.”
The narrow-shouldered Indian turned the compass over in his hand. Devereux could not tell if he considered it useful or not. Still, the boy’s fingers closed around it and he gathered up the miscellaneous items Devereux said were his for making the journey east to deliver the letters and the papers to the dead man’s daughter. Devereux saw him cast one last, covetous look at the hat and the gun, which were promised to him on his return, and then Mr. Hollinghurst came, and after that they were gone, the two of them heading off on their horses in an easterly direction.
Ah well, it was worth a try. Devereux reckoned he had a fifty-fifty chance of ever seeing the boy again.
In St. Louis he smelled beer and whiskey and flour and molten iron. It was the noisiest and most crowded place he’d ever seen. St. Charles, when they got to it, was quieter, but it still frightened him, the idea of being alone in it.
He had no warm feelings at all for Mr. Hollinghurst, who in the years that he’d known him had been even stingier than Devereux and always struck him much harder when he was angry. Even so, he was sorry when Mr. Hollinghurst turned to him in St. Charles and said, “I’ll be leaving you now, so listen up while I tell you how to go.”
Like Devereux, he always spoke to the boy in the boy’s own language.
“This,” said Hollinghurst, stamping down on the ground with his boot, “is here.”
He spoke slowly and loudly, as if to a stupid child. “Now, give me the green ribbon from your hair and that long string of blue beads you have there and your short string of white ones.”
When he hesitated, Hollinghurst rolled his eyes and turned irritable. “Don’t worry, I am only borrowing them to show you the way you need to go and then I will give them back. Now, give.”
He watched the fur trader’s long fingers arrange the things he had given him on the ground so that the blue beads trailed away from the toe of his boot and the white ones led off from the end of the blue ones and the green ribbon made a separate squiggle further along. “So. First you’ll take yourself along the Ohio River here”—Hollinghurst pointed to the blue beads—“which will bring you into Pennsylvania. Then you’ll carry on along the Allegheny and then along Mahoning Creek”—the white beads—“and when you reach the mountains you’ll hop over to the western branch of the Susquehanna River”—the green ribbon—“then head south, and here, further on”—he tapped a spot beneath the ribbon with his toe—“is your dead man’s house.”
The trader told him the things to look for, the shapes of the big mountains he would come to before the Susquehanna River, and of certain hills and forests beside the rivers, and the occasional appearance of groups of brick and wooden buildings, the likely position of the dead man’s place in a valley beyond a medium-sized town.
The boy nodded. He was ashamed he didn’t know the territory himself; that he had no memory of it.
Mr. Hollinghurst said he would expect to see him back at the trading post well before the beginning of winter. “All right?”
“All right,” said the boy.
For a long time before St. Louis and St. Charles, as he’d traveled with Mr. Hollinghurst, there’d been people who looked like him. Along the smaller rivers they’d come upon them all the time, hustling for toll money or goods in exchange for allowing them to cross where they wanted to, in the least difficult places. Just before they got to St. Charles, a whole band had clattered by on horses, wrapped up in their red blankets, and for a while after that there’d been camps and villages. Now, as he made his way further and further east, as he passed over the mountains and through broad valleys, there seemed to be none at all.
He rode without a saddle, mostly at night, the fur trader having told him he would not be welcome where he was going. Across his chest on a strap he wore his various necklaces, his small hickory bow, and a hide pouch on a strap containing his arrows and the papers.
“I am in a different world,” he said to himself.
Even in the darkness he was anxious about being seen. When he saw a light, or the blacker shape of a house up ahead, and heard the huffing of cattle or the yapping of dogs or any sound suggesting occupation or settlement of any kind, he made a large, looping arc around it. The weather was good. What little rain there was fell during the day, while he slept, or in brief showers. Slowly, day by day and night by night and week by week, he made his way east.
The compass the fur trader had given him he had no use for because he had the music of the river and the bright configuration of the stars, but he carried it in his hand because he liked it for its beauty and the suspicion that it had some secret power of its own the fur trader wasn’t telling him about; that it was alive in some way. He liked the way the tiny needle quivered beneath the clear covering, like his own heart when he was out stalking or waiting with a hook for a fish to bite.
The dead man’s papers shifted and crackled against his chest as he went along. There were moments when he seemed to see him again, scribbling away—the dip of the point of one of his half-bald feathers into the ink, the sound that was like the working of the claws of a small creature on a leaf or the smooth bark of a tree.
They belonged to the daughter now, the fur trader had said, and the boy was pleased he had no need of them or any desire to possess them because it meant he would not mind giving them up. It was true that he liked the pictures—the drawings of the trees and flowers and grasses—and the pattern of marks with the sideways hills and the eyes and the snakes, which Devereux said signified the name of the dead man’s daughter. That was striking and pleasing too. But he did not desire any of the papers in the way he desired the gun or the tin box or the hat or the blouse. He was still angry with Devereux for keeping so much of the dead man’s booty for himself and as he rode east he wondered if the stingy fur trader had any intention at all of ever giving him the beautiful hat. He thought about this a great deal as he went on mile after mile in the darkness of the night. He could always try, perhaps, to hold on to the compass; if Devereux tried to keep the hat then he could refuse to give back the compass.
The land he passed through was soft and
fertile. There was wheat and hemp and cotton and every sort of fruit.
He came to several towns that were smaller than St. Charles but had all the things he’d seen in St. Charles, with many houses, taverns, mills, churches, farms. Even in the dark when he skirted them, he could tell that the places were busy and full of people. All the buildings were made of wood or brick and sometimes stone. Large and solid. Then forests and cultivated fields and lots of hills, then more towns and farmhouses and roads. Then sometimes for long stretches, nothing—a log cabin, one large house. Cows, sheep, hogs. From behind one large house he took vegetables and a chicken. Mostly though he hunted and picked what he found. The wind blew from the west and was very soft. On the roads there were wagons full of people and baggage. A lot of the time the traveling was very rough because the horse stumbled on long stretches of limestone. Beside him lofty banks covered with trees and shrubbery rose up beside the river.
When he came out of the mountains along the Susquehanna there was a half-built bridge and from his hiding place he saw people cross on a flatboat poled by four men. He waited in the pine trees. It was dark and foggy. He waited till night, then crossed the river himself with the water up to his shoulders, the horse lifting in the swift current and swimming.
After the bridge, more houses and taverns and mills and churches and farms.
He thought often about the dead white man, and how he too had been stingy like the fur trader to begin with, then less so after the day he shouted at him for trying on the tall hat. It had been a good time, after that, the big explorer rewarding him every so often with some small, new item as they traveled through the rain and the roasting heat towards the setting sun in pursuit of the fabulous animals.
For a long time after he began his journey back towards Devereux alone, Old Woman From A Distance had missed Bellman, plodding forwards on his big, booted feet, or up on the black horse, rocking from side to side, the squeaks and creaks of his leather saddle, dipping his pen into the ink in his coat and, more and more towards the end, stopping suddenly as they went along to sit without moving, as if he couldn’t think what he was doing or how he’d come to be where he was; at night playing with the little copper ornament and in his sleep twitching and murmuring.
Old Woman From A Distance still missed the cracked, quiet singing that had come near the end, and there were days just before the dawn when he crept into the trees and tethered his horse and curled up in the leaves, and tried to recall it.
He thought about the dead man’s dusty drawings.
The four legs like giant trees, the monstrous bodies and vast curving tusks. It was true what he’d told Devereux, that he’d never seen anything like the creature the man had sketched in the dirt.
He’d heard about them though.
For as long as he could remember he’d heard stories about the vast man-eating creatures: his people had seen their bones when they lived in the east, sunk in the soft, briny clay of a wooded valley. The very same ones, perhaps, that the big red-haired explorer had read about. But what he’d been told was that the monsters were all gone—that they’d vanished forever when the Great Spirit, the Big God, had destroyed the huge bloodthirsty animals with thunder and lightning because the beasts had preyed upon his people, consumed them.
Which begged the question, why did the Great Spirit not destroy the white settlers from across the sea the way He’d destroyed the mammoth animals?
He’d asked his father the very same question the day they’d packed up their things and begun to move out of the east, and his father had shrugged. He’d said the world was full of mysteries and you had to be patient, and for now all he could say was that they had fought and they had lost and the best thing they could do was to leave with the things they’d been given.
In the darkness he continued along narrow paths and bad roads over hills and rocks, old trees and rivers, through clouds of insects. If there were any remnants of his people or others like them, living quietly still in the forests, he did not see them.
He thought about his sister, and the settlers, and about the things which had been half of what his people had been promised by the government for leaving their lands in the east and agreeing to move off into the west. He thought about the old man also, from those times when he was a boy: his warnings against entering into any kind of commerce with any white men, his prophecy that if they did, it would be the beginning of their end.
Old Woman From A Distance still wasn’t sure what to think.
One thing he was sure of though: there was no Great Spirit. No Big Man in the Sky looking out for them. If there had been once, there wasn’t anymore.
He liked the dead man’s horse very much. It was a nicer color than his old one and it went faster. Sometimes, to encourage himself, he laid his mouth against its soft, leaflike ears and whispered, “Remember, there are no gods. We have ourselves and nothing else.”
As he headed east he felt the pleasing heaviness of the dead man’s coat around his shoulders, the soft and beautifully striped blouse lifting in the breeze. He thought of the tall hat and the gun that would be his, as long as the fur trader did not cheat him, if he delivered the letters to the girl. It did not feel wrong to want any of these things. He was small and his name was not a fine one, but riding along now on the dead white man’s excellent horse, wearing his gear and with more to come, he did not feel like any kind of fool. He felt grand and purposeful. He felt intelligent and adventurous. He felt like someone on a mission that made him different from other people.
The journey east, though, was long and difficult.
In the daytime, while he hid in the forests, he slept, and when he woke in the dusk and there was still a little light, he took out the dead man’s letters. He liked the crackle of the pages, the drawings of trees and grasses and animals. It was annoying he could not read what they said. He turned them over, these dry, patterned things, and wondered what mysteries they contained. He would have liked it if Devereux or Mr. Hollinghurst had taught him to read. He would have liked it if they’d instructed him in both their languages, but they had always spoken to him in his own tongue. They seemed to want to keep their own languages a secret, a pair of weapons they did not want to give away.
In his time with the dead man, the boy could tell that the language he spoke was more or less the same as Mr. Hollinghurst’s. The big explorer had spoken often and loudly in this language, as if he expected one day that the boy would be able to understand it all, but Old Woman From A Distance had understood almost nothing of the words themselves, only a handful here and there, familiar from Mr. Hollinghurst. He could tell when the big man was angry or sorry or excited or uncertain, but the little scrapings he possessed of the man’s language were not enough to make sense of him, and there was nothing at all that helped him to understand what was written on the papers. The one thing he knew, because Devereux had at least told him this: that the small, repeated picture at the tops of many of the papers signified the daughter.
Old Woman From A Distance did not recognize the country from his childhood. It was no more than dimly familiar, remote and far-off, like something half-felt in a dream which had slipped away the moment he’d woken. The fresh, varied greens of the summer trees, the dark green-blue of the river, the slight sinking into the rich earth of his horse beneath him each time they took a step forwards in the direction he’d been told to go—all these things seemed to belong to a world that had shifted somehow and been reshaped between the roads and the buildings and the fields he passed so that he could no longer decipher it.
It had frightened him, what the fur trader said, that people would not be pleased to see him in places where they expected all his kind to have left. Hunting was difficult in the darkness, and he was very hungry. By the time he was nearly there, he had only one arrow left, the rest had gone off into the night in pursuit of a rustle or the crackling report of something good to eat and he had not found them again and then the last one he’d used up on a raccoon he’d se
en slinking through the leaves, which had scampered away before he could catch it, the arrow stuck in its haunch, wagging in the gloaming and then gone and he had nothing now with which to kill his food or to defend himself. He was afraid of the white people, their guns. He wished he could have got one of the dead man’s guns from Devereux. He loved guns. He felt very alone, the only company the small blue needle in the wooden case that quivered next to his heart.
BessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBessBess
He looked at them now, the sideways hills, the half-closed eyes, the two small, wriggling snakes. No picture in his head of the girl herself. His dreams a jumble of everything: Devereux and Hollinghurst and the dead man and the dead man’s daughter and the dead man’s gear, the big bundles that were half what his people had been promised, the rivers and forests and gardens of his childhood, corn and beans and squash ripening in the sunshine, the skinny white settler who’d taken his sister, the old man’s warnings. Hills, and eyes, and snakes, and everything else that had ever happened in his life and might yet happen in the future. Over and over and over.
Ever since the librarian, Bess had become more and more afraid of Elmer Jackson, and she wasn’t sure what would happen now that she saw him coming, but she thought she had known for a while that sooner or later something would, it was only a matter of time.
He turned up regularly these days to carry out some small repair, or help Aunt Julie with the mules, but he’d never come before when Aunt Julie was absent, and the word covering came now into Bess’s mind: a picture of what happened when the stallion came to cover the jennies and how sometimes the jennies ran away and Elmer Jackson had to go chasing after them to bring them back, and what happened then, and how afterwards the jennies mostly went to stand in the corner of the field with their heads lowered and looking miserable.