Savage Girl

by Jean Zimmerman

  The staff, too, tumbled out of the forward end of the train, laughing, talking, in high spirits.

  Long days on a train, even so comfortable a one as ours, can get tiresome.

  I myself felt my irritable mood lift and drift away with those small clouds.

  To the south stretched the immense inner sea, its surface looking greasy and pellucid in the morning light. The Great Salt Lake.

  “Stupendous!” said Freddy.

  “Perfectly lovely,” said Anna Maria.

  And it was. The air was cool, almost cold when it hit the skin, refreshing even under the burning mountain sun. I removed my jacket, thinking ahead to stripping down altogether for a swim in the Great Salt Lake. I had heard many tales of it, and now there it was. How insane everyone would make me out to be as I plunged in splashing, naked as a newborn!

  That was what I loved about the hunting trips I had been on with my friends in the Adirondacks. You could go about free and unclothed, embracing one’s beasthood amid the streams and little lakes. It was expected. Everyone at home was so decorous, and I had no choice other than to fall in line. But in the wild, one could be free.

  A strange incident at the depot: A dirty white cur rushed at us, barking, and Virginia suddenly erupted, snarling back at the thing, which ran yelping away, tail between its legs.

  Freddy and Anna and I exchanged glances. What have we here? It took our breaths away, how quickly she had descended into viciousness. Savage Girl indeed. Was she at last beginning to reveal her true nature?

  Anna Maria directed the loading of the excursion wagons and the dispensation of the staff. She had laid the plans for our picnic to be assembled a mile from the tracks, on a small hillock above the lake at the fringe of a stand of cedars. The railroad man Collis Huntington had recommended her the place.

  We would take our luncheon there in the deliciously cool shade. This was not to be an ordinary picnic, though, but a grand endeavor, one that would re-create, out in the wastelands, the civilized features of our life.

  Dowler and a few of his men went ahead in a dray, and by the time we arrived, the little hillside had become our gracious home away from home. The servants spread out a half dozen Oriental rugs, along with small tables, chairs and stools that had been stored in baggage for just such an occasion. Even the tiger rug from the parlor car took its place in our adventure.

  My mother fell into a comfortable chair and opened her Copperfield, her face shaded by the mammoth brim of a straw hat, its cornflower-blue ribbons tied beneath her chin. Tu-Li and the berdache laid out on a carpet, beginning their inevitable game of ivory tiles. Freddy and I took a turn among the cedar trees, and not for the first time I wished I had my dog Hickory along.

  We returned to our picnic, flopped into our comfort and drowsed in a pleasant stupor, spending the morning in “a land in which it seemed always afternoon” (as Tennyson had it). The lake, the sky, the murderous sunshine.

  Savage Girl coiled up on her side on a thick, patterned rug, a little ways from the chair that had been set out for her, her eyes closed. I found myself staring and had to look away.

  Freddy roused me for a swim. We headed down the slope to the Great Salt Lake, but as we did so, an immense stink rose up to greet us. Fetid, unbearable. Is this how it always was?

  At the shore, disappointment. The lake was rimmed with an incredible mass of dead grasshoppers, their decaying bodies the source of the smell. From the actual shore, the mass extended forty feet into the lake.

  “Well, I’ve swum in it before, you know,” Freddy said. “Cold and bracing, extremely high salinity, as it is at the Dead Sea—you bob like a cork in it.”

  “Not today,” I said. “I don’t bob like a cork in that mess.”

  “Not today,” Freddy said.

  The stench was so bad it made us laugh, gag, dry-heave, then laugh some more.

  “The Saints,” Freddy said, laughing so hard that tears came to his eyes. “They’ve really made the desert bloom.”

  He meant the Mormons. Later we heard that a work party of Latter-day Saints harvested the dead bug carcasses with enormous skimmers, dried the husks and pressed the results into salt licks for their stock. Waste not, want not.

  “Those people are clearly out of their minds,” was Freddy’s head-shaking comment.

  Leaving the lake unswum and the dead grasshoppers commercially unexploited, we hiked back up the slope to our little campsite.

  • • •

  Finally, lunch. All of us gathered around a buffet table under the cedars, loading up our plates.

  Back at the depot, Cookie had bargained with a hunter in a sand-colored cap and coveralls, gun still slung over his shoulder, hoisting his tray of quail. The tiny birds looked more like children’s toys than edible meat.

  Rose now laid down a platter of the cooked quail and paused. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” she said to Anna, curtsying. “Cookie asked me to apologize to you for the birds. We had a dozen, but two disappeared even before they was plucked.”

  She curtsied again and hurried off.

  “Can you imagine?” said my mother. “Who would abscond with a quail?”

  I felt an impulse to check Savage Girl’s mouth for feathers.

  We had more than enough food as it was, with the ten quail, grilled and scrumptious, as well as asparagus from the train’s ice closet, drenched in sweet butter, plus orange fritters and chow-chow with green olives.

  As we ate, we luxuriated in the panorama, inhaling the spicy scent of the conifers. Anna Maria and Freddy toasted our adventure with crystal goblets of icy Liebfraumilch. As a palate cleanser, licorice sorbet.

  Gilbert Gates took over the fire, boiled water with a dash of vinegar, and blued the fish. These were fresh local rainbows (another depot purchase), and Gates explained that if you could parboil a catch like that quickly enough, when the natural coating on the fish’s skin was still intact, the vinegar chemically reacted and rendered an effect that was startling and excellent.

  Yes, it was. The trout showed bright, bright blue skin, bluer than berries, eye-hurting blue. Gasps and exclamations of pleasure as Gates presented the dish. They tasted good, too.

  Savage Girl grabbed a fish in her fist and gnawed on the thing as though she were starving, mashing it into her mouth and devouring it bones, fins and head.

  We all stopped eating and stared. We had witnessed the grossness of her manners before, of course—she had come to us never employing any utensil except her fingers—but this was something on a different level.

  “Fork, dear,” said Anna Maria gently. My mother had been previously trying to teach her. In vain. The girl merely picked up another of the blued rainbows and ate it with the same animal gusto.

  After luncheon a few in our party scattered about the little lakeside meadows. Here was at least partial relief from the unending desert.

  The berdache and Tu-Li wandered hand in hand. As it was the end of June, coneflowers and poppies and Queen Anne’s lace mingled in a multicolored tapestry that came to nearly waist high on the young Chinese maid.

  Breaking away from Tahktoo, Tu-Li began to select flowers, choosing carefully. As I watched her, I felt glad that she had brought some companionship to my mother. She was more than a maid. Tu-Li seemed ever calm, serious beyond her years. She was a listener, an anchor, and Anna Maria needed that.

  Savage Girl joined Tu-Li down in the meadow. I watched her walk behind, the two of them wading through the luxuriant flowers, bending and picking as they went.

  “Freddy,” I said.

  My father, his hat pulled over his eyes, pretended not to hear me.

  “This business of nature versus nurture, don’t you have to consider the part played by imitation?”

  “Certainly,” he said, his eyes still concealed. “Very good point. But that raises the issue of who is the imitator and who is the imitated.”

  Man, said Linnaeus, is a mimic animal. I looked down the slope to the two women.

  “P
erhaps she would make a suitable subject of study after all,” I said.

  “Mmn-hmm,” Freddy mumbled from beneath his bowler.

  I sketched a close-up view of one of the immense dead grasshoppers from the lake. The thing was the length of my hand. In its workings, the acute angle of its legs, the tripartite body segments covered in articulated armor, it appeared to me like a messenger from the future, a completely modern machine.

  Tu-Li and the berdache came back up the hill. Virginia followed behind them, then walked directly up to me. Avoiding my eyes, she opened her hands and dropped the results of her flower-gathering efforts on the white lawn picnic cloth in front of my chair.

  It was one of the rare times she paid me any mind. I felt myself blush with pleasure, then blush with embarrassment over my blushing. I reached out and touched the purple petals of a coneflower, about to thank her for the pretty thing she’d done, before I realized that something here was odd.

  How right it was, and yet how wrong. A bouquet of wildflowers, yes, each one more beautiful than the last. And yet each bloom, you see, she had pinched off at the base of the blossom itself, not seeming to know what even a toddler recognizes: When you pick flowers, you gather them by the stem.

  Savage Girl could imitate behavior without taking the sense of it.

  The whistle sounded to let us know our idyll was at an end. We emerged from the Land of the Lotos sleepy and satiated and sunburned, and we began to make our way back to the depot.

  • • •

  Sandobar had taken on water and coal and was ready to depart. Father and Mother and I stood talking with Bob Cratchit, the engineer. His real name was Bob Crenshaw, but following the lead of my little brother, Nicky, we adopted the teasing nomenclature.

  Tu-Li and the berdache had already boarded the train. The sun had gone aslant, and the servants were bringing the rugs and furniture and plateware back to the railcars under lengthening shadows.

  “Where is Virginia?” said Anna Maria. Then, in a tone of rising concern, “Where is she? Has anyone seen Virginia?”

  “Calm yourself,” said Freddy.

  “You calm yourself!”

  “I am sure she is right here,” said my father, beginning to look concerned as well.

  “She has run off,” Anna Maria worried. “She is a wild animal, and we’ve gone and lost her again. How will she survive?”

  We first searched the length of Sandobar, looking under each of the cars. I climbed the shooting car’s ladder and made sure the top of the train was clear. I crossed over and put my face to the depot windows, seeing only emptiness inside. Looked around the back of the building.

  Nothing.

  “Virginia!” shouted my mother. “Virginia, come along!”

  Freddy wanted to pacify my mother but mentioned that even enjoying the director’s right-of-way, we had to leave Kelton on time if we were to be through the mountains to Ogden that evening.

  Bob Cratchit stepped up into the locomotive’s cab and sounded another blast of the whistle, then came out to stand beside the tracks with me.

  This time we had really lost her. And lost her in the middle of the chilly mountains, where night was falling, where there would be nobody to help her.

  “Virginia,” Anna Maria wailed.

  And then I saw the girl, galloping across the field toward us, black mane flying like a flag, her brown feet bare, as always. She carried with her a long, thin branch, something she’d picked up in the cedar grove and trailed back with her.

  “Virginia,” said my mother as the girl pulled up beside us, holding her stick aloft like a torch, thrusting it out like a sword.

  She didn’t look at anybody, didn’t meet our gazes at all. Small as she was, at that moment she appeared Amazonian, a warrior.

  “Please don’t run away again,” my mother said, taking the girl’s hand. “We so want you to be happy with us.”

  “All right,” said my father. “Enough, Anna Maria.”

  Savage Girl wrenched herself from my mother’s grasp, so roughly that Anna Maria gave a little cry. But the girl paid no mind, merely pointed her stick at a patch of sand near where we stood beside the railbed, an empty stretch scattered with clinkers and ash.

  She had drawn two circles and a straight line.

  Anna Maria tried to bring her away to the train, but again she pulled violently away. She took my mother’s head in her hands as though she would crush it, physically making Anna Maria look at where she had been drawing.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Everyone went quiet.

  “Well, would you look at that,” said Bob Cratchit. “Don’t that beat everything.”

  What Savage Girl had drawn in the trackside dirt was, unmistakably, a B.

  Or could it really be? Could this mute, wild creature know how to create an image that was more meaningful than two circles and a line?

  She again wielded the stick, and an R appeared in the dirt.

  We held our breaths.

  She drew an O.

  An N.

  “Brown,” Bob Cratchit guessed, and we shushed him.

  W.

  Y.

  An N.

  She looked up, finally, into the eyes of Anna Maria, poking her stick down at the pebbly, gritty, ordinary dust, pointing to the blow she had struck for the revolution, a word impaled in the sand.

  Then around the circle, looking with great seriousness at all our faces in turn. Then again pointing. We had been yelling our heads off to her, but calling out the wrong name. She wanted us to know who she was.

  Bronwyn.

  Anna Maria was the first to break the spell. “Bronwyn? Your name is Bronwyn?” My mother broke down blubbering and took the girl into her arms.

  “Would you look at that,” repeated Tiny Tim’s father. “Don’t that beat all.”

  Bronwyn, I thought. Not Virginia.

  Bronwyn.

  • • •

  I’m sorry, says my lawyer, he to whom all things must be confessed. But this really strains credulity.

  Yes? I say.

  This . . . this . . . this sylph, he says, struggling for the word and arriving at what I feel is an incorrect one. This wild thing can write her name? Who taught her? The lobo wolves?

  You must free your mind, I say.

  William Howe looks offended. Don’t tell me to free my mind, young man, he says. My mind is free. I make my way professionally by the very freedom of my thinking.

  Yet to judge the girl, I say, you accept the tale of some flimflam artist who titles himself “Professor Doctor.”

  So the Scott tale is entirely untrue? he asks, appearing, at that moment, like a petulant child. No Dollie Trent?

  I propose to present my knowledge of Savage Girl, I say, the way I came to it myself—that is, gradually, piece by piece. You shall be like a man taken through a darkened house, me as your guide, with a lantern I uncover only occasionally, to illuminate a part here, a part there. But at the end of the story, you shall know all.

  It strains credulity, Howe repeats, stubborn.

  Let it be strained, I say. In sure faith that all will be revealed.

  Howe snorts. All is never revealed. This would be the first time in the history of the world that all would be revealed.

  He waves his cigar, which I take as a signal to continue my tale.

  9

  Freddy felt his mind was occupied with lofty questions. Are we fortune’s playthings? Does a divinity shape our ends? Such concerns packed themselves tightly within the “nature versus nurture” debate, which was raging in the East Coast intellectual circles that my father frequented.

  Not limited to the domain of natural science, the debate had religious, social and philosophical overtones. Were the poor stricken with poverty because they were born without moral fiber, or had their degraded environment corrupted them?

  The answer mattered. If nature dictated our destiny, there was no use spending money on social programs, education or better housing for soc
iety’s unfortunates, since what they were, they were, and there was no changing it. But if the destinies of the poor could somehow be reshaped by sufficient amounts of nurture, then charity became paramount.

  For many of the more odious social philosophers of the day, an impoverished child removed from the dirt and filth of his home, scrubbed clean, clothed and taught his ABC’s, would inevitably regress to the low condition of his birth. This was simply Calvinism tarted up in a political guise. Such a viewpoint considered social uplift useless or worse, since our characters, and thus our circumstances, were entirely preordained.

  Many thought otherwise.

  I saw Freddy’s game. I understood how my father came to his excitement over Savage Girl or, as we were calling her now, Bronwyn. She remained a tabula rasa upon which Freddy could inscribe his theories.

  If he could take this single-named creature, this rough-cut, unmannered beast, tutor her, mentor her, shape her, present her to the world as fully accomplished and rendered human, why, it would be a triumph for one faction and a poke in the eye to the other.

  Possibly Freddy would wind up writing a celebrated account of his work with this Bronwyn creature. Dr. Itard’s 1801 book on Victor of Aveyron made the author hugely famous.

  We continued to play, he and I, at listing what we knew about his new charge. In the parlor car, one morning after breakfast:

  “Charmed by music,” he offered.

  “Dislikes dogs,” I said.

  “Oh, dear,” said Freddy. “Can anyone be fully human and not like dogs?”

  “I’m sure such people exist,” I said.

  “She is mostly pacific,” Freddy said.

  “Except occasionally,” I said. I mentioned our excursion to the Great Salt Lake, when Bronwyn had once bounded suddenly ahead, seized a rock and hit a good-size jackrabbit, a mortal shot to the head. Cookie made it into a fricandeau, and we had it for dinner the next day.

  “No, no, that’s just impulse, not violence. Steadiness may be trained into her.”

  We both looked over to Bronwyn, stretched out on a chaise in a leonine pose.

  “Could we discover, do you think, the details of her life?” I asked. “Say, for example, we search for a stolen girl in the American West, around ’64, ’65, mid-’60s—there can’t be too many possibilities that fit the specific circumstances. Her family might have put out notices.”