by James Welch
By now you may have guessed that I am about to avail myself of your kind offices and more than generous offer to help the Society in any way we might see fit. Well, you may feel inclined, and indeed justified, to rescind your generosity, because I am going to ask of you an enormous favor. And I only ask it because twice in the past you have extended your hospitality to our Prisoner Rehabilitation Project subjects. I do believe that both endeavors proved successful and came to a happy ending. We hear that both young men are engaged in honest labors and go to mass regularly.
Now to the heart of this letter: We have taken up, as part of our project, the case of a prisoner to be released in two weeks—if all goes well. This is a most unusual case, and after you hear the particulars, you may find that he is an unsuitable candidate to take in. You may rest assured that we will be in absolute accordance with your decision.
The subject’s name is Charging Elk and he is an American Indian, thirty-seven years of age. He came to this country in 1889 as part of the Wild West show of Buffalo Bill. Perhaps you have heard of this show. It performed in Paris during the Exposition of that year, then moved on to tour Europe. One of its first stops was here in Marseille, where he met with an accident during a performance and entered hospital. For some reason the show moved on without him without making any provisions for his well-being. At the time he couldn’t speak our language, and so he found himself in the hands of the authorities, who had no idea of what to do with him. Fortunately, a good family took him in—the man is a hardworking fishmonger—and he lived with them for the next two years. After that, he lived on his own, working in a soap factory, accustoming himself to our way of life. From all reports he was doing very well when—alas!—he found himself in a compromising situation with a despicable man—please don’t ask me to go into it—and ended up killing the man. Many thought, as the trial brought the whole matter into the light, that Charging Elk was justified in his actions. In fact, the trial became quite the cause célèbre. The magistrates agreed, to a degree, with the public—that indeed there were extenuating circumstances—and sentenced him to life imprisonment, instead of the expected death penalty.
Now for the good part, Monsieur Gazier. Charging Elk served nine and a half years in Samatan Prison and by every account was a model prisoner. He had not a single disciplinary report in that whole time (and you may be assured that he was virtually alone in that respect—I’m sure you are aware of the reputation of “La Tombe”). Moreover, he worked every day possible during the last seven years of his imprisonment in the gardens and orchards.
This latter fact made us here at the Relief Society think of you, my dear fellow. We thought you, as an orchardist, might have some interest in taking on this hardworking, experienced hand. I’m sure you could use some help now that spring and summer approach. Of course, we will compensate you for Charging Elk’s room and board to the tune of twenty francs per month. And we won’t ask you to keep him one minute longer than you choose. But we are hoping that you will keep him on through the growing and harvesting seasons.
By now I am sure you are asking yourself, Why Agen, why me, why not Marseille? And those would be fair questions. The answer to all is simply this: We feel that after almost a decade in prison he is not ready for the faster-paced life of this seaport, with all of its distractions and, yes, temptations. We feel that Agen and environs would be perfectly suited for his reentry into society. The strong Catholic presence in your part of the country would do him a world of good. As for you, we know of no one better to set our poor stranger on the straight and narrow path of hard work and piety.
I neglected to mention earlier that Charging Elk is due to be pardoned, a fact which might make your decision a little easier. Let me add that he is a very gentle man who wants nothing more than an opportunity to better himself as a human being so that he may more easily adapt to our modern society. He is most deserving to benefit from your tutelage and guidance.
Yours in Christ,
Mme. Sophie A. Loiseau
Gazier heard the whistle over the blowing wind and thought he must have been mad to agree to take on this ex-prisoner. The other two that he had taken in were just farm boys—one was only nineteen, the other twenty-one. They were still malleable. But this one was thirty-seven years old, and he had spent the last ten of those years in Samatan, the worst prison in France. Moreover, he was a Peau-Rouge from America. How could lie possibly “adapt to our modern society”? Gazier threw his cigar down onto the tracks and thought how complicated his life, and that of his family, had become. He glanced at Nathalie, but she had her back to him, watching the locomotive steam up to the platform. Poor Nathalie, he thought, she is just a girl and now she will have to adjust to however this endeavor turns out. Thank God she is strong and healthy, unlike her mother. Lucienne would be in bed all day after her labors of the night before. But she had insisted on helping with the fires. Oh Lord, he prayed, please give me the strength to get through these next few days. Give all of us the strength.
Charging Elk stepped down from the car and looked at all the people on the platform. He wore the suit he had owned for eleven winters now, and it was shapeless and baggy. His new collarless white shirt was too small, even though it was the largest Madame Loiseau had been able to find in Toulouse. She had also bought him some toiletries, underclothing, work clothes, a duffel bag, and a beret. She couldn’t find any shoes to fit him, so he still wore the prison-issue canvas shoes with the hemp soles. In the past, he would have been disappointed, but now he was resigned to the fact that he was different not only physically but also in that he had spent the last nine and a half years in prison. He was sure the people in Toulouse knew it, and so he kept to the edge of the sidewalks and he said very little in response to Madame Loiseau and the store clerks’ queries. The truth was, he was frightened by the movement of the people, the carriages and wagons, the clanging bells of the omnibuses, even the horses. Once, while Madame Loiseau was in a shop, he had walked over to the curb where a carriage horse was dozing and smelled it. He filled his nostrils with the musky odor, and it smelled familiar and good. But when the horse abruptly raised its head and and jangled the metalwork of its traces, he had stepped back in alarm.
They had spent the night in a small hotel near the railway station, and this morning she had put him on the train to Agen before catching one back to Marseille. Just before they parted, she had written his name on a piece of paper and pinned it to his lapel. Then she said, “They are a good Christian family and they will look out for you. You must always remember that you are as good as anybody, Charging Elk. May God go with you.” Now as he surveyed the people on the platform, he was somewhat comforted by the fact that most of them seemed to be simple people, as simply dressed as himself. Still, this was a different town in a different part of the country, and he was apprehensive as he stepped aside to let some people on the train. He almost wished he were back at La Tombe, getting the ground ready for another planting. He thought more fondly of Gustave Boucq now than he ever had. The big, taciturn man was probably spreading manure, perhaps even breaking in a new man to take Charging Elk’s place. As he looked at the faces, many of which were now staring at him, he began to wish more fervently that he was back at the prison. They knew as well as he that he belonged there.
“Monsieur Charging Elk?”
A slender man in a dark suit and a beret had approached him from the side. A young woman trailed behind him, her eyes looking at Charging Elk’s feet.
“I am Vincent Gazier, and this is my daughter, Nathalie. We have been expecting you.”
Charging Elk took the man’s hand. “Enchante, monsieur.” He bowed slightly to the young woman, who was now looking at the piece of paper on his lapel. “Madame Loiseau said I would work for you. I am a good worker.”
“So the madame says. That’s excellent, because we have much to do right now.” Gazier glanced down at the duffel. “Is that all you’ve got?”
Just then the conductor blew his wh
istle and they heard a hiss of steam, then the heavy clank of the couplings as the train began to grind ahead.
“Come. We will get you situated in your new home. Then I’m afraid we have some heavy work ahead of us.” Gazier turned and walked off at a rapid pace, and Charging Elk noticed he had a limp. “You will earn your keep tonight, monsieur.”
After that first frantic night of hauling wood, setting fires and keeping them stoked and burning until daybreak, Charging Elk’s life at the farm settled into a predictable, almost easy routine of work, eat, smoke, and sleep. He had his own room, which opened up into the courtyard. Although it was part of the main house, it was one of many additions the generations of Gaziers had built onto the house for various reasons. It had been a storage room, filled with old furniture and small pieces of broken equipment, tack that had become stiff and brittle with age—things that somehow never got thrown away or fixed. Gazier and his daughter had spent two days clearing the room, moving the objects to other rooms in other buildings around the courtyard. They had managed to salvage an iron bed, a bureau, a small table, and a chair from the debris. And although it had an earthen floor and only one small window beside the oak door, it was quite comfortable until the heat of summer days stayed in the room until well after dark. Charging Elk didn’t mind. He took his chair outside and smoked in the twilight, content to be alone and free. After his years in the cell blocks of La Tombe, he luxuriated in his evening thoughts as he watched the shadows lengthen, then disappear. He listened to the buzz of insects in the dark, the snuffling of a hog in its sleep or the shudder of one of the two draft horses, the gabbling of a goose that might have heard a distant bark, and he felt a part of the world around him. He imagined the Gaziers, already asleep in the dark house, and he imagined he would come to feel a part of their world, with time. Just as with the Soulas family.
The summer came and stayed for a long time. The farm was on the side of a sloping hill to the north and east of Agen, just out of the river valley. Below the compound of buildings, the Gaziers had a large vegetable garden, which Nathalie, and sometimes her mother, when she felt well enough, kept weeded and watered. Sometimes Charging Elk would help them out, turning water into the rows from a ditch that originated at the base of a spring in the hillside above the farm, or breaking ground for melons or squash. His job also consisted, in part, of taking care of the hogs, turning them out into the orchards to root for things that he couldn’t even see, keeping an eye on the geese, or rather an eye out for weasels and foxes, which occasionally prowled the farm at night. But mostly he worked in the orchards, helping Vincent Gazier spray the trees for bugs or prune out blight-stricken or dead limbs. He painstakingly thinned the small, green prunes, moving from tree to tree with his ladder, pinching off the hard fruit that even the hogs found distasteful. Every couple of weeks he hitched the horses to a cultivator and weeded and aerated the earth between the rows of trees. After his summers in the prison gardens and orchards, the work came easily for him. The trees offered shade and he was left alone to work at his own pace. Some days he had to make work for himself, but he always managed to find something to do, from oiling the tack to sharpening pruning shears and saws to whitewashing the stucco horse shed.
At least once a week he rode into Agen with Gazier. Sometimes Nathalie came with them, sitting on a sack of onions or new potatoes or an overturned bucket in the back of the wagon. In town, she would disappear for a half hour or so and come back with some cloth for her mother or a bottle of olive oil and a bag of coffee beans. Meanwhile, her father and Charging Elk would unload whatever produce they had in the wagon at a local market, perhaps buy a sack of feed or poison for whatever insect happened to be harassing the trees; then Charging Elk would buy some tobacco and papers while Vincent talked with one merchant or another, or another orchardist or farmer who also was running errands. His wife, Lucienne, never came with them.
Charging Elk felt sorry for Vincent’s wife, for although she was always gracious, even cheerful at times, there was something wrong with her. She was given to long coughing fits that would leave her slumped in a chair or leaning against a wall, gasping for breath. She could work in the garden for only about an hour in the morning before she would have to walk slowly back up to the house. Once she collapsed while she was picking peas and both Charging Elk and Nathalie ran to her. Nathalie reached her first and held her in her arms, cradling her as one cradles a sleepy but unhappy child. Her face had turned as white as the flesh of the onions Charging Elk was harvesting, and he became frightened for her. But slowly, as Nathalie fanned her mother with her bonnet, her color returned and she blinked her eyes and noticed him looking down at her.
“It’s all right, you two. I am a foolish woman to work so hard today. It’s the sun, you see.”
Charging Elk took his morning and evening meals with the family, and usually it was a happy occasion. Nathalie would talk about a dress she had seen in town, or something about her friend who was engaged to a soldier, and her mother and father would listen and tease or scold her, always with affection. But sometimes Lucienne would be absent, even though she had cooked the meal, and both Vincent and Nathalie would eat quietly, without the usual repartee. On these occasions, Charging Elk would excuse himself after coffee and sit and smoke in the cool evening air outside his room.
One day, as they were preparing a poison for borers, Vincent Gazier straightened up and walked to the shed doorway. He stood for a long moment, surveying the wild hill above the orange tile roofs of the old buildings, while Charging Elk stirred the liquid, dissolving the poison crystals.
“She has the consumption, you know. Her lungs are rotten with it.”
Charging Elk stopped stirring and glanced at the thin back, the long, sunburned neck, and the narrow head beneath the beret. There was a natural list to Gazier s shoulders, because of the bad leg that made him limp. But it seemed more pronounced just then.
“I don’t know how long she will be with us—not long, I’m sure. Maybe a month, maybe six. Who knows?”
Charging Elk stirred the liquid slowly, quietly. He didn’t know what to say. He had heard of consumption. He had heard that there was a unit in La Tombe where they kept the consumptive prisoners away from the population.
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think she wants to die, to make things easier for Nathalie and me. Do you understand that?”
Charging Elk laid the stirring stick on a small board. The poison was strong and filled the room with an unnatural smell. He thought of all the times he had wanted to die since he came to this country. But the woman, Lucienne, had much to live for. She had a fine husband and a handsome daughter. “I will pray for your wife,” he said. He wanted to comfort the man but he could think of nothing else to say. He suddenly felt the immense poverty of his experience. He didn’t know how to comfort another human being anymore.
But Gazier turned and looked at him. The eyes were large and moist in the gaunt face. “Will you?”
Charging Elk had to look away. He had not seen such desperation for a small ray of sunshine. “I will pray to Wakan Tanka. He is the Great Spirit who can accomplish all things. Sometimes he hears the words of his poor grandson.” Charging Elk wanted to add, But sometimes he doesn’t think his grandson’s selfish prayers are worthy of attention. He glanced back at Vincent Gazier and saw a small, weary, hopeful smile.
“Thank you, Charging Elk. That is all I ask. Perhaps your Great Spirit ...” The gaunt man suddenly stopped. He had almost committed a sacrilege. He crossed himself and asked his God for forgiveness. Still, he felt a little lighter. Perhaps it was just the talk he needed. “Well, let’s get after those trees, shall we?”
In late August the prunes were ripe. In a small ritual that the Gazier family had practiced for generations, Vincent, Lucienne, and Nathalie, along with Charging Elk, walked out to the orchards and stood under a large old tree that had been a bellwether for at least five generations of Gaziers. They each picked a prune, smelled it, squeezed it unti
l the juice ran out the stem end, then bit into it, tasting the sweet flesh. Vincent pronounced the fruit to be at the firm edge of perfection. He said a prayer to God for once again giving them a good crop and he prayed for a successful harvest. Even Charging Elk said “Amen,” although he didn’t cross himself. Nor did he look at Lucienne, who by now was matchstick-thin and dark around the eyes.
Vincent hired three boys from Agen to help with the harvest. They had to work quickly while the fruit was still firm, and so the workdays began at daybreak and ended with nightfall. Still, it took ten days to pick the four hectares of orchards.
Nathalie spent part of her time in the orchards and part taking care of her mother. She carried water out to the men in canvas bags, managed to cook a midday meal every day with the direction of her mother, and joined in the picking later in the afternoon. At the end of five days, she was near the point of physical and emotional exhaustion. It pained her to watch her mother become so helpless so quickly. For most of the days, all she could think about was the fact that soon her mother would be gone. What would happen then?
Lucienne s doctor from Agen had come out one evening halfway through the harvest, examined her, then held a conference with Vincent. He gave him a tonic to give to her and told him to make sure she got an hour of sun every morning before the heat of the day. Otherwise, she must stay in bed. Vincent had listened to the doctor somewhat impatiently, then asked bluntly, “How much longer does she have?”
The doctor, who had first diagnosed the disease some twelve years before and had come to believe that the consumption was in a latent state and would remain so for many years to come if not forever, shook his head as he snapped his bag closed. “It is in her upper and lower lungs. The infection has spread rapidly in the last month.” He shook his head again as he picked up his bag. “Its remarkable.”