In the Distance

by Hernan Diaz

  Jarvis took aim and fired at the wheel in rapid succession. The sharpness of the shots was dulled by the curved immensity around them.

  The wheel stood unscathed.

  “Well, it’s not an easy gun to aim, on account of the front being so heavy. You’re supposed to shoot leaning it on your pommel.”

  He started loading the gun again.

  “This takes a little bit of time. But then you have six shots.” A long pause. “Six.” A long pause. “Won’t even feel the ball through their vitals.”

  Håkan sat down on the ground. The horses stared at him.

  “Let’s get a little closer,” Jarvis said when he was done.

  They took six or eight paces toward the wagon wheel. Jarvis took aim and fired. He was more deliberate this time and took a short moment before each one of the six shots. The wheel, however, remained untouched.

  “Could the shots have gone between the spokes?” Jarvis wondered aloud.

  He walked back to his horse, grabbed the blanket rolled up behind his saddle, went back to the half-buried wheel, spread the fabric over it, and began, once again, with the long process of reloading.

  “They voted for me, you know. I was elected. Captain of the party.” Jarvis never looked up from the gun. “People from other companies came to join us. I know people on the other side, you see. Important people. I can guarantee three hundred and twenty acres on arrival. At least three hundred and twenty. And I know the trail. Went out west a couple of years ago, and then back to fetch my wife and children. That totals three trips. So there it is: a man who knows the way and has something to deliver at the end of the journey. And yet. Contentions, dissent, distrust. Jealousy? I don’t know.”

  He took a couple of steps, leaving just a yard or two between the gun and the wheel, and shot it point-blank. The blanket danced like a demented ghost on the rim. With the fifth bullet, the wheel toppled over. Jarvis walked over and finished the contraption off with his last shot.

  The demanding march, the nightly procedure of driving the wagons into a circle to hold the cattle, the brief meals, the hurried morning preparations were repeated daily without change. At Jarvis’s request, Håkan carried the gun at all times, always making sure it was on full display. For the most part, they stayed together, and people stayed away from them. Whenever Jarvis gave him leave, he rode up and down the train. As time went by, he noticed that on these excursions he would get the same treatment Jarvis had received when they first passed by the wagons together—some would show extreme deference (a few even uncovered their heads), but others would meet him with a scowling mien (he sometimes thought that he heard spitting behind him). While Abigail retained her shriveled bitterness, Jarvis seemed as bright as ever. Each evening he accepted, with solemn gratitude, the offerings his fellow travelers laid at his feet.

  Distractions were few, and the absorbing monotony of the trip drained their days of all substance. Every step on the unchanging landscape resembled the last; every action was a thoughtless repetition; every man and woman was moved by some forgotten yet still functional mechanism. And between them and the unattainable horizon, the dust—always the dust. It burned their eyes, plugged their nostrils, and dried their mouths. Although they covered their faces with handkerchiefs, they felt their throats corrode and their lungs shrivel. The sun itself, red and uncertain, was suffocated behind the unmoving cloud. Several times a day, even in calm weather, the dust would make it impossible to see the oxen from the wagon. On those occasions—especially when the wind whirled around them and turned each grain of dirt into a pellet, forcing them to proceed with eyes shut—the sense of immobility and changelessness became perfect, and both space and time seemed to be abolished. Rain was a blessing, well worth the muddy trouble it sometimes caused. It settled the dust, washed away foul smells (although they returned with a vengeance when the soaked clothes, animals, and provisions started steaming under the sun), and provided them with drinking water that, for a change, was not teeming with small animals.

  The last big shower on the trail lasted several days. Without interruption, the horizontal rain lashed their faces and pruned their hands and feet. Their clothes got cold and heavy on their backs. Unable to light fires, they could not broil the buffalo meat that was their main sustenance. Deep mud; glutinous mud; slippery mud. The trail became a dense mire, and the smacking sound of hooves and boots pulling out from the clay like suction cups could be heard at all times under the roaring storm. Although the submissive, strong beasts—blackened and thinned by the rain—kept the train going, they moved at a snail’s pace.

  The trail, unable to absorb any more water, had become a shallow stream. Beasts and wagons got bogged down in the swampy rut. Some carriages sank to their axles. Every day, often more than once, men up to their knees in muck had to unpack their wagons to get them out of the mud, repack, goad their oxen, and keep going, hoping they would not get stuck a few steps down and be forced to unload everything again. On a cold morning, during which the pelting rain was briefly replaced by sleet, the wagon in front of Jarvis’s got mired in a particularly deep hole. Without speaking, a group of men (Håkan and Jarvis among them) helped unburden the wagon and then lifted the wheels off the ground and pushed forward while someone laid a plank under one of the tires. Slipping hooves, screams, lashing whips. As always, there were a few children around, excited to help out, puffing, arms akimbo, with great self-importance, after each push. After a few attempts, the wagon finally was released and moved forward with a jolt. Håkan and some others fell face-first into the mud with the abrupt thrust. Everyone cheered. As he got up, he saw, through the sludge and water clouding his eyes, a small hand, and reached for it to help the boy up. The lightness of the limb was horrifying. The screams of alarm came together with the realization of what had happened. A few steps away lay the inert body of the boy whose severed arm Håkan was holding.

  The unconscious child was taken into the wagon while Håkan ran to fetch his medical instruments. Only when he got to his burro did he realize that he had taken the arm with him. He rushed back and, after he returned to the father his son’s limb, tried to get into the wagon.

  “Go away,” the man said. “We have no use for Mr. Pickett’s watchdog here.”

  “I can help,” replied Håkan.

  The man drew the tarpaulin shut in Håkan’s face.

  “I can help,” he repeated.

  No response. Some onlookers had gathered around the wagon. Håkan pulled the canvas open and was met by the father’s desperate and furious gaze. A woman who looked too young to be the boy’s mother scrambled around the wagon with aimless frenzy.

  “I can help.”

  Håkan opened his tin box and showed the man his instruments. In that muddy confusion, the tools gleamed with a promise of order and cleanliness. Even to Håkan they looked like talismans from the future. The man let him in.

  “Fire,” Håkan said as he applied a tourniquet to the remainder of the boy’s arm. “Now!”

  “What? The rain. How?”

  “Fire now! In here. Make a fire. Boil water.”

  Håkan’s decisiveness and precision in dressing the boy’s wound must have impressed the man, because he did not question the strange request but set to it at once. He smashed a milking stool and a crate with a sledgehammer and put the splinters into a large stockpot. The wood was too damp. He frantically felt his pockets while looking around for kindling. Everything was too large or too wet. Håkan looked up from the boy with anxious eyes. Panting, the man rifled through the wagon until all of a sudden he stopped, hit by a realization. He took out a box nested within a box. The woman gasped and covered her mouth with both hands. From the inner box, the man produced a bundle, and within it, safe and dry, was the family Bible. Without hesitation, he tore out several sheets of paper so thin they crackled in his hands before being lit. Placed under the splinters in the stockpot, the paper burned with a ghostly purple glow, and the wood soon caught fire.

  “Boil rai
nwater. Not too much,” Håkan said.

  The man fetched one of the buckets hanging outside, at the back of the wagon, and poured two or three fingers of water into a smaller pot, which he put on a grill he had previously rested on top of the burning stockpot. Soon, the water was boiling, and Håkan submerged his instruments into it while quietly humming to himself.

  “Spirits?” asked Håkan at length, always looking into the boiling pot.

  The man stared at him.

  “Spirits,” Håkan repeated while looking up and drinking from the imaginary glass made with his hand shaped into a semicircle.

  The man got a bottle from a basket and gave it to Håkan, who rubbed his hands with the transparent liquid that smelled strongly and, except for a faint trace of beeswax and mildew, almost exclusively of alcohol. Father and daughter looked on, their faces distorted by the shock of the accident and their bafflement at Håkan’s requests and actions. Håkan took the instruments out of the boiling water, let them cool down, and set to work.

  He had helped Lorimer and the short-haired Indian with amputations, but he had never seen a case as bad as this. A few inches above the point where the elbow once had been, the wagon wheel had ground the flesh to a dark paste and smashed the bone to shards and splinters. With extreme care, he cleaned the wound with alcohol and clipped off the tassels of flesh and nerves at the end of the stub. He then found the main vein and artery and tied them off with suture, after which he made four vertical incisions into the healthy part of the arm, through the muscle and all the way down to the bone, and created two flaps with the skin. He pushed up the biceps and the flesh receded with it, which allowed him to saw the bone off just above the point where it had shattered. The young woman sobbed at the sound. After trimming and filing the humerus, Håkan let the flesh down, sewed the muscles over the bone and the flaps over the muscles, and daubed the stump with one of the salves the short-haired man had given him.

  The rain drummed on the tarps and tinkled in the pails. Every now and then, a peal of thunder. Gently, with a fresh cloth, the girl wiped the boy’s pale brow and then began cleaning the mud off his body. For a moment, Håkan lost himself looking at the scene. He had never been touched like that, cared for like that. He regained his composure and focused on cleaning and putting away his instruments. The fire in the pot had died out. With a trembling hand, the boy’s father picked up the liquor bottle, took a swig, and offered it to Håkan, who declined. Then, the man stroked the girl’s hair, kissed his boy on the forehead, and took Håkan by the shoulders.

  “God bless you,” the man said, looking into Håkan’s eyes.

  “I don’t know,” said Håkan, looking down at the boy and then away at the floor.

  “I know. But maybe. Thanks to you.”

  They sat down.

  “I shouldn’t have called you a dog.”

  Håkan dismissed the matter with a gentle swat, surprised to realize that he had picked up that gesture from Jarvis. He felt embarrassed and looked away.

  The girl was tenderly absorbed in trying to make her brother comfortable. Håkan thought that he would give his own arm to have her wipe his brow, arrange his pillow, and kiss his lips. The girl looked up, and he immediately looked down. The man kept apologizing for his rude behavior. He had lost his mind seeing his boy like that. And it was also true that the situation with Jarvis was reaching its limit. Håkan looked up, puzzled. Why else, asked the boy’s father, would Jarvis need a big man with a big gun at his side? It took Håkan some time to realize that he was the man being referred to.

  “First, we all fought one another. But as we saw he was up to some devilment, many of us started fighting him.”

  Håkan’s lips quivered, trying to ask a question, but he didn’t know where to start.

  “So you know nothing,” the man said.

  Soon after first setting out, months ago, word spread around the train that a man who had already been west had land over there and was giving it away. At first, Jarvis Pickett turned everyone down with a chuckle, saying it was all a rumor. Then, after a few days, he admitted to some that he did have a bit of land, but that it was mostly dust and rocks, and that nobody could possibly want it. Then he confided to just a few that it was a fertile valley, rivaled only by the Garden of Eden, and that he intended to start a colony there with a select group. Then he produced maps and deeds and started giving away plots to the most loyal people around him. He never took money from anyone, claiming they were all partners in this venture—fellow colonists, he said. They elected him captain. If anyone crossed or displeased him, Jarvis would scratch his name off the deed. Each time this happened, the rumor would spread of an opening, and the hopeful petitioners would shower Jarvis with gifts. He pitched people against each other and had them compete, with presents and favors, for the best plots. After a few weeks, there were no friends in the party. But some grew suspicious of the maps and the deeds. Jarvis’s response, invariably, was that if he had wanted to steal from them, he would have just taken their money in exchange for the deeds—and yet, he had never accepted a penny. Still, their convoy seemed to be moving slower than all the rest. They took longer at rivers, made several unjustified stops, and never caught up with the wagons that constantly overtook them. Many believed their captain was stalling and extending the journey so that he could keep collecting his offerings. To this, Jarvis replied that he had never asked for anything. But by then, most people in his circle—willingly, despite their suspicions—had given Jarvis too much. They had little or nothing left to start with on their arrival, and their only hope was the plot of land Jarvis had promised them. His closest men, the ones who had given him the most, were the ones who trusted him the least, precisely because their dependence on him was absolute. Right before the big rainstorm, the tension had become palpable, and mutiny was in the air. Jarvis had grown distrustful. Some poor devils tried to appease him with more gifts, hoping to displace their more disgruntled and openly hostile rivals. And that was when Håkan had arrived.

  The following day, the sun resumed its place in the sky and soon baked the trail hard under their feet. Two or three mornings after the boy’s accident, as their party was breaking camp and getting ready to get back on the trail, Jarvis stood on a couple of crates and asked for everyone’s attention. He waited until everyone had quieted down, and then his lively mustache made a joke. Some laughed. Jarvis got serious—while retaining, somehow, his cheery countenance—and told his convoy that he had an important announcement to make.

  “Friends,” Jarvis said. “We all saw what happened a few days ago. Our future can’t wait. Our children can’t wait. Each step counts.”

  Murmurs.

  “Our children can’t wait,” he repeated. “We can follow this slow trail or we can turn here. I know a cutoff.”

  Cheers and heckles.

  “Yes, a cutoff.” Jarvis was not trying to persuade anyone—just sharing the good tidings. “Follow the trail, if you wish. Or follow me.”

  These last statements were drowned in the rising tide of voices. For a moment, the divide between the two rival sides—hitherto only whispered about—became stark. Jarvis’s supporters thanked him and congratulated each other on their good fortune, while his detractors looked sullenly at the dirt and the sky. However, most men, regardless of their faction, stayed out of the ruts and followed Jarvis’s south-pointing finger. But three or four wagons decided to keep going down the trail. Everyone was surprised, except for Jarvis, who pretended not to see the defectors.

  That evening, after driving the wagons into a circle for the night, in front of Jarvis’s fire, there was a long line of people humbly waiting to present him their offerings. Some of them even had horses.

  12.

  Rather than pulling the wagons, the oxen, with drooping heads and foaming noses, seemed to be making the crust of the entire planet turn under their hooves. Journeying through the untrodden flats was like moving through a surprisingly thick substance. In addition to the boulders a
nd holes hidden in the grass, constantly threatening (and often breaking) axles and tires, there was the resistance presented by dirt that had been packed down neither by wheel nor hoof. They were going less than half their regular speed—someone said he reckoned they were down to seven or even five miles a day. Jarvis remained as sunny as ever. He said that one mile on the cutoff was worth twenty on the trail of those stubborn tramps.

  Although weakened by the loss of blood, the mutilated boy was making a good recovery. He remained sedated for a few days, running a constant low fever that Håkan took as a positive sign of his body burning away disease. Now and again, in his sleep, the boy would frantically scratch the sheets where the missing limb would have been. Håkan came by to inspect the wound more often than necessary. After he examined the stitches, the girl would often give him food or a cup of milk to make him stay a little while longer. Håkan would eat or drink in a blushing silence. When he mustered the courage to turn his eyes up, he sometimes found her looking at him with something he liked to believe was admiration.

  Depending on the day, her hair could be copper or gold, and with her hair, her eyes changed from green to gray. Her freckles multiplied, vanished, reemerged, and moved around like constellations from one visit to the next. Håkan had never looked at anyone with such close attention and wondered whether all those mutations were real or just the result of his heightened awareness. He spent most of his nights awake, imagining what she would look like the following day.

  Had it been left to Håkan, he never would have learned her name. She seemed to understand that he was too shy or afraid to engage in conversation and that any form of encouragement would make him withdraw further. But she managed to convey her openness through small gestures. And it was in this spirit that Helen volunteered her name, without asking for his. After a moment of apparent hesitation, he explained that his name was not Hawk but Håkan. Helen was one of the few people in America who actually tried to pronounce it. She laughed as she searched for the exact shapes of those strange vowels, but even as Håkan laughed along, he fell into a solemn trance watching her lips move around his name. That day, she also wrote his name down, unsure of the spelling, on a piece of paper that Håkan would keep for years, thinking, each time he looked at it, that he was there—in those fading lines on that yellowing scrap of wrapping through which an irretrievable past managed to persist in the present—in a more intense way than in his own body. Once, he brought dried fruits and sweetmeats. They did not dare to even touch them.