In the Distance

by Hernan Diaz

  One morning, he woke up to find that he had slept a stone’s throw away from a makeshift graveyard. The tombstones, three planks stuck upright in the ground, bore words that had been burned into them with a hot iron. Although unable to read them, Håkan could see the despair in those unsteady lines. Two of the plots must have been for very young children. The earth on all three had been torn up and raked by hungry paws. Håkan found the contrast between the improvised, impermanent nature of the graves and the final, definite condition of those in them immensely sad. Over the next several days, shallow graves, few of which had eluded the violation of wild beasts, and heaps of ungainly and impractical objects strewn throughout the plain became a frequent sight. Then the smell came. After such a long time in the odorless desert (he had long ceased to notice the few habitual scents of his body, his animals, and his fires), the stench of civilization hit him like a solid mass, rather than a vapor—a smell at once slippery and barbed, piercing and thick. And yet, despite the corruption and the decay, the miasma brought back a sense of life. Rancid meat, feces, sour milk, sweat, porridge, vinegar, rotten teeth, bacon, yeast, fermenting vegetables, urine, bubbling lard, coffee, disease, wax, mold, blood, broth. Two days Håkan traveled against the swelling reek until he saw, drawn against the edge of the prairie, a long, low creeping line.

  11.

  Because the beginning and the end of the caravan curved behind the horizon, from afar the train seemed to be motionless. It was only when he got closer that Håkan made out the heavy-gaited beasts pulling ponderous wagons, and, trudging next to them, a multitude of men, women, children, and dogs. Few people rode. Nearly all saddles were empty; most seats were unoccupied. Marching alongside their teams, the drivers cracked (and sometimes applied) their long-lashed whips and encouraged or insulted the yoked animals. Everyone was young, but they all looked old. Most of the travelers were engaged in the all-consuming business of moving forward—spurring the oxen on, making adjustments to the harnesses, tightening up broken locks, replacing wheels, resetting tires, greasing axle shafts, steering their herds, marshaling their children. Some managed to share domestic moments on their moving wagons: have family meals, pray, play music, and even give school lessons. People went from one party to the next, trading and bartering. And everywhere, dogs. Some walked lazily under the wagons, hiding from the sun, but most ran in packs, prancing in between the legs of horses and cattle, snapping and yapping, pestering the oxen, sniffing the air for food, picking fights with one another, and getting kicked in the ribs by impatient boots. By the side of the rut, several emigrants had stopped by a broken wagon and were helping make a new axle out of a log. As far away from the trail as safety permitted, a group of women stood in a circle, all of them facing out and spreading their skirts to the sides, creating a round calico screen. Whenever a woman came out, arranging her dress, another one went in. On occasion, the ignored report of a rifle came from afar. Scouts were constantly leaving and rejoining the caravan. As Håkan walked past each convoy, people quieted down and stared at him from under their hats and bonnets, their eyes invisible in the strip of shade cast by the brims. During these brief silences, all that Håkan could hear was the grinding of the iron tires, the rattle of harnesses, the dry impact of wood on wood, and the stiff flap of waterproofed canvas.

  The sides of the rut were one long latrine to which men and women continually contributed bucketfuls of waste. Here and there, like irregular milestones, mounds of rotten bacon and offal emerged from the muck. Dead cows and horses—some of them skinned—shrunk under the sun. Håkan kept walking against the current of wagons. It was inconceivable that the crowded procession could have an end. Lorimer had been right when he had described it as a massive city stretched out into one thin crawling line.

  Some travelers nudged each other, snickering at Håkan’s outfit. But for the most part, they looked at him with mute curiosity. Nobody greeted him. He spotted a young couple—not much older than he, he guessed—and, trying to overcome his shyness, changed direction and started to walk alongside them on the other side of the slimy stream. They looked at him furtively and exchanged discreet, worried whispers. Finally, Håkan found the courage to address them. He introduced himself. They politely pretended to understand his name, and he theirs. A long silence ensued. The man cheered his team on. Håkan asked if they had a horse for sale. They could not spare any of their horses, but they referred him to a man a few wagons up who had more livestock than anyone else in that company. He thanked the couple and caught up with the man in question. After a short and failed exchange, Håkan stated his request. The man quoted a massive amount that made Håkan’s entire capital—which he hitherto had thought to be quite respectable—seem insignificant.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Håkan kept walking up and down the train, asking if anyone had a horse for sale. The sellers always asked for prices that could never be met and bore no relation to each other—one asked almost one hundred times the already exorbitant sum demanded by another. Ever since he had landed in San Francisco, all the commercial transactions Håkan had witnessed had been conducted in the most extravagant terms, always dictated by circumstances. The pound of bacon for which prospectors in the desert paid in gold, today lay rotting by the emigrant trail. A simple piece of wood that never would have caught a trapper’s attention, now, in the tree-deprived plains, was exchanged for a calf to replace a broken axle shaft. But horses were the one commodity exempted from these drastic ebbs and flows. They remained consistently unattainable. And not only that: they were, on the whole, excluded from commerce. Men were reluctant to part with their horses, regardless of the sum offered, and whenever forced to sell them, they always felt that they had been swindled, even if the amount received had been outrageously high—probably because they knew that they would be unable to replace the sold property. Knowing all this made the loss of Pingo, painful as it had already been, almost intolerable. Every day, Håkan was visited by the elation he had experienced riding his own horse, a feeling that had been intense enough (his physical frame had barely been able to contain it) to ripple through time and lap against the present.

  Although far from ideal, he believed that getting to New York on foot was not such a wild thought. It rained often enough and walking against the trail solved the problem of finding supplies for the journey. He was resigning himself to this plan when an armed rider approached him. He stopped at a prudent distance.

  “Evening,” said the man, whose beard had not quite caught up with the mustache that must have preexisted it. In this exuberant thicket glowed a calm yet intense smile, and below a pair of dense eyebrows—the mustache’s runaway offspring—shone a set of twinkling green-blue eyes, which, although sharply focused on Håkan, stirred from side to side with mousy eagerness. There was something sunny and even melodious about his countenance. He looked like the happiest man Håkan had seen since arriving in America—maybe even the happiest man he had seen in his life. Håkan greeted him back, and the man responded with a seemingly welcoming speech, of which Håkan understood almost nothing. Still, he noticed that the tone, cadence, and rhythm of the man’s voice did not match his face—the natural arrangement of his features resulted in something that looked like cheerfulness but did not reflect an inner state. After a failed exchange, the man gathered that the newcomer’s English was limited and spoke to him slowly and, as people often do with foreigners, loudly. Håkan responded to his questions as best he could while the man nodded along, as if with the deep dips of his chin he could dig out from the air the words that the Swede missed. Introductions were made (Hawk? Hawk can? Hawk can what?), and Jarvis invited Håkan to dinner with his family.

  As they moved on, it became clear that strife and resentment were widespread among that particular convoy and that there were at least two factions—those who warmly greeted Jarvis as he passed by, and those who, with a hostile frown, turned their backs on him.

  “I hear you’re looking for a horse,” the man said.

&nbs
p; “Yes.”

  “Want one of mine?”

  “How much?”

  “You must be hungry.”

  Careworn and always shrouded in a mackinaw blanket, Abigail, Jarvis’s wife, was drained of all the joy and gaiety that her husband’s face, probably despite itself, so radiantly displayed. She was a rawboned matron, slightly disfigured by exhaustion and bitterness. Her children annoyed her. The elements annoyed her. Her husband annoyed her. The animals annoyed her. Håkan annoyed her.

  The sun would soon set. As if by common accord, hoots and whoops burst throughout the caravan, and the train came to a stop. With difficulty, but also with great coordination, the drivers got out of the rutted track and fanned away from the trail. The plains echoed with whistles and the few utterances the oxen seemed to understand—So, then! Yah! So, then! Wo! Gradually and (despite the arduous, plodding maneuvers) with remarkable grace, the wagons were wheeled into wide circles, the hind axletrees chained to the tongues. The oxen were unhitched and left free to roam together with most of the cattle within these large improvised corrals while the rest of the stock and horses were hobbled and left to pasture at their leisure. India rubber cloths were laid out on the ground, and cooking utensils were brought out. As the men pitched precarious tents outside the circle, the women produced hard brown discs from sacks and crates, piled them up together with some kindling, and set them alight. Håkan looked at Abigail’s heap and asked what those odd cakes were. She ignored him. He picked one up from her bag and smelled it. Dung. Jarvis saw him inspecting the disc and explained that, as Håkan had surely noticed, there was no timber to be found on the plains, and that they had to rely on dried buffalo manure for fuel. The chips had a steady and smokeless burn that glowed brighter whenever the fat of the buffalo meat roasting upon tapering spits dripped down on them. That meat, together with bacon and corn flour fried in buffalo lard, was, as Håkan would learn, their daily bill of fare. Combined day after day in tinware that was never fully cleaned, these viands had solidified in a crust at the bottom of every pot, pan, and bowl, infusing whatever was put in them (including the occasional pickle and the dried apples steeped in warm brandy they had on special occasions) with the same flavor.

  Over dinner, Jarvis asked Håkan everything about him and his travels. They did not understand each other easily, but Jarvis, making good use of his appearance, persevered with jovial tenacity. He was particularly curious about the Clangston lady and her gang (How many men? What kind of weapons? Where exactly was the town?). The precise destination of Lorimer’s tracker and his men was another matter he came back to over and over again. In turn, his answers to Håkan’s questions were vague, and he dismissed anything related to himself with a slack wave of his hand. Behind them, beyond the light cast by the fires, a child was being belted. As Håkan was trying, for the third or fourth time, to provide Clangston’s location—an effort doomed by his limited vocabulary and inveterate disorientation—he was interrupted by a robust farmer who took off his hat and nervously wrung it in his hands as he approached them.

  “Mr. Pickett, sir,” mumbled the large man, barely overcoming his shyness.

  “Jarvis,” responded Håkan’s host, relying once again on his cheerful face. “And drop the mistering. I told you it’s just plain Jarvis,” he said in a tone of friendly remonstrance.

  “Mr. Jarvis, sir,” the bearish man muttered, proffering a small sack. “From my wife, sir. With her compliments.”

  He seemed to curtsy as he bent his knees to hand the gift over to Jarvis, who, sitting on the tarpaulin, accepted it ceremoniously.

  A lash and a muffled cry came from the gloom.

  “Edward,” said Jarvis with grave appreciation. “Thanks. Many thanks.”

  Edward looked at his strangled hat. Jarvis opened the sack and poured out a handful of glazed pecans. He tried one. The big blond mustache danced to each crunch. Edward kept looking at his own hands squeezing his hat. A lash and a cry.

  “Gold nuggets. That’s what these are. When did I have one of these last? Years?”

  “From my wife, sir.”

  “Well, please—please—thank her.” He was about to eat another nut but checked himself. “Sorry,” he said, holding out the bag. “Please.”

  “Thank you, no, sir.”

  Håkan declined as well. Jarvis shrugged, ate another pecan, and put the bag by his side. Edward bid them good-night, took a few steps backwards, turned around, and left.

  Similar scenes, with different visitors and different offerings, took place numerous times throughout the evening while Jarvis asked Håkan the same questions again and again (“But where are they? So rifles and pistols, eh? How many did you say they were?”). Timidly obsequious men and women approached Jarvis with their offerings—tea, molasses, a penknife, dried pumpkins, tobacco, silver. And in each case, Jarvis showed himself humbled but deserving.

  “The horse, then,” said Jarvis after having accepted the gift of a blanket from a girl holding a baby that could well have been either her sister or her daughter. “I’ve got one for you.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh please,” Jarvis said with friendly affront.

  A pause ensued. Jarvis probably expected Håkan to break the silence by asking him once more to name his price.

  “Do you know how to use a gun?” Jarvis asked when the lull was getting awkward.

  Håkan looked confused.

  “A gun,” Jarvis repeated while miming a firing pistol with his thumb and forefinger.

  Håkan shook his head.

  “Look,” Jarvis said. “Most these people are sore fond of me. You’ve seen it for yourself. I mean.” He pointed to the gifts and shrugged his shoulders. “But there are a few who. Look. These here are hardworking people. And this here is all they own. Some get nervous. And I fear some may be greedy for my life.”

  Håkan looked down.

  “You are a big fellow. You travel alone. No property. No family. I could use your help. Just ride along with me. We’ll get there in a few weeks. And you’ll have your horse. It’ll be easy to make up for lost time. What do you say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Håkan was not sure of their location (were they closer to the Pacific Coast or New York?) and had no way to gauge whether it would be worth it to follow Jarvis and then make up for lost time on a horse, or if he should set off east by foot immediately. There was, on the other hand, the issue of the actual job he had been asked to do and the risks it might entail. The discontent clouding the convoy was manifest, and the animosity many felt toward Jarvis was clear. But unlike the moody prospectors he had met along the way, or the Clangston gang, or Lorimer’s tracker and his crew, these were family men. They worked hard, cared for their children, and read from their Bibles. However disgruntled they might have been, Håkan could not picture them shooting anyone down in cold blood. Furthermore, many liked Jarvis—the offerings proved it. Whatever his detractors’ reasons were, he could not imagine what Jarvis might have done to justify his fears of retaliation. Håkan thought of Linus and wondered what he, who never showed a sign of vacillation, would do. Would his brother have accepted the elements in this dilemma—guns, horses, mutiny, the wilderness—as perfectly expectable circumstances, and therefore have an answer ready? All Håkan knew was that this would probably be his only chance of acquiring a horse.

  “Tell you what. Just ride along for a couple of days. Think about it. I’ll throw a saddle into the bargain.”

  By the time the fire was dying out, a considerable pile of goods lay on Jarvis’s canvas. He wrapped them all up in the blanket he had been given, wished Håkan good-night, and retired to his wagon. The belting, which had stopped for a while, resumed in the dark.

  “Get up! Get up! Get up!” The screams filled the air at the first light of dawn. With these cries, the donkeys started braying, forcing even the heaviest sleepers to wake up, get out, and set to work. Tents were rolled up; flour and water fritters sputtered in lard; roped oxen were wre
stled back into their yokes; teams were hitched to carts; canvas bonnets were adjusted on wagon bows. All these arrangements were made under the close supervision of the dogs roaming the quickly dissolving camp. “Get on! Get on! Get on!” was now the call echoing throughout the plains as the wagons got back on the trail and resumed their slow progress.

  Later that day, Jarvis, carrying a shovel and a broken wagon wheel attached to his saddle, took Håkan for a ride. They headed south, away from the trail, and stopped when the caravan had disappeared behind their backs. After dismounting, Jarvis asked Håkan to help him bury part of the wheel and prop it up with some rocks so that it would stand on the ground. Once it was in place, they took about fifteen steps, and, from an inner chest pocket, Jarvis produced the strangest pistol Håkan had ever seen. There was nothing extraordinary about the grip or the trigger, but the rest of the gun was monstrously overgrown, as if thickened and disfigured by some morbid disease. It had six massive barrels mounted in a circle around a central axis. Seen frontally, the six muzzles resembled a gray flower. It smelled of oil and sulfur.

  “That’s right,” Jarvis said, dreamily smiling at the gun. “Bet you never seen a pepper-box before.”

  He cocked the unloaded pistol and pulled the trigger repeatedly. After each click, as Jarvis squeezed the trigger, the hammer rose and the barrels turned over so that a new cylinder would get under the pin just in time for the next impact.

  “See? You don’t have to stop to reload. And none of that flintlock rubbish. That’ll just get you killed. Twice!” He chuckled. “Twice they’ll kill you while you ready one of those old things.” All the while, he kept pulling the trigger, the barrels kept rolling on, and the hammer kept snapping on the empty chambers. “No, no. None of that flintlock rubbish. You just put these here like so,” he explained while putting caps at the end of each barrel. “And you’re good to go. Not one, not two, but six shots,” he said after loading the balls. “Look.”