Far as the Eye Can See

by Robert Bausch

“I heard tell of him.”

  “And have you ever heard of King Lear?”

  “He was one of them English kings, right?”

  Christine laughed. I didn’t see what was so funny.

  Eveline said, “She wants to impress you.”

  “ ‘I heard myself proclaim’d,’ ” Christine read out loud. “ ‘And by the happy hollow of a tree, escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place, that guard and most unusual vigilance does not attend my taking. Whiles I may ’scape I will preserve myself . . .’ ”

  “Okay,” Eveline said. “That’s all we need of Lear tonight.”

  “King Lear wrote that?” I said.

  Now both of them was laughing.

  “It don’t make no sense to me,” I said.

  “What doesn’t make sense?” Christine said.

  “That business about a happy hollow in a tree escaping a hunt and all. It don’t make sense.”

  “It is poetry, Mr. Hale.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “It’s about being an outlaw. About being pursued by everyone.”

  “Will you stay the night?” Eveline asked again. “I’ll brew some more coffee.”

  “If I don’t have to listen to no more of that Lear fellow, sure,” I said.

  They started giggling again. I settled myself back against a pile of blankets in the corner of that wagon and waited for my supper. Christine went on reading from that Bible in her lap. She let her voice rise and fall with it, and after a while it did sound right musical. I didn’t pay no attention to the words—it was hard to keep up with it when so many of them I never heard before begun to pile up and all, but her voice was sweet, high and womanly. It reminded me of something I couldn’t fully remember; like it come from someplace in another life I may of lived a long, long time ago.

  And I was hoping we might find our way to a natural kind of relation, just the two of us. Or three, if Eveline insisted on it, but then I wondered how damned natural that kind of thing would be.

  I don’t think I was ever so warm nor comfortable nor safe in my life. I lay my head back on a good soft pile of buffalo robes and blankets, stretched out, and breathed easy, letting my eyes close; and before long, I dozed off.

  I waked up from somebody a-fumbling with my pants. It was dark, and the stove give off almost no light at all. All the lanterns was out, and I could hear somebody snoring on the other side of the wagon. I started to jump up, but a hand on my chest pressed me down. I felt the belt go free and the buttons on the front of my breeches opening. I was a-stirring, and then this cold hand got ahold of me and just held on there. It tickled and I give a short laugh.

  “Shhh,” a voice said. I couldn’t tell if it was Eveline or Christine. She whispered, “A man should not sleep with his trousers on.” Then she yanked hard and pulled them off me. I come with them for a bit, and my head left the pile of robes and blankets it rested on and hit the floor of the wagon. It made a pretty loud sound.

  “You okay?” she whispered.

  “I bumped my head.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be so rough,” I said.

  Then she got up on top of me and I felt myself inside of her. Just like that, and I wasn’t even wide-awake yet. While it was going on, I realized I was powerful hungry again, and thirsty. I breathed hard and worked myself to where I needed to be, but it was no satisfying her. She wouldn’t quit. She just kept on a-moving on me and making these quiet noises like a dreaming dog.

  “Are you all right?” I whispered.

  “Shhhh.”

  “I’d at least like to let you know I’m a-feeling it,” I said, almost out loud.

  “Be quiet.”

  She moved a little quicker, and I think I got more excited, because after a while she was really finding it hard to keep quiet herself. Then she grabbed my shirt just under the neck and started pulling on me, like she wanted me to sit up. I tried to oblige, but then she let go and I bumped my head again. She leaned over me and put her face right next to my ear, still moving now, but slow and warm. I felt her hot breath on the side of my face. It smelled of apples.

  “Sorry,” she said again. “I didn’t mean to drop you like that.”

  “Are you almost done?” I said. She stopped. I heard her take in breath, then hold it in. Somehow I known she did not like the question. “I’m just wondering,” I said. “I can go on as long as you like, but I’m afraid we might wake . . .” I paused. I was never much of a gambler, but I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance of being right, and I didn’t want to leave that blank a-sitting there to fill in, so I said, “Christine.”

  “We won’t wake her. She sleeps like a dead person,” Eveline whispered.

  So now I known who it was a-riding me. I wasn’t no bucking bronco. More like a tired old mule, but she sure had a good time. She finally stiffened and give a great shudder from her shoulders to her hips, and then she fell down on top of me, breathing so hard she couldn’t whisper no more. “Did you finish?” she said.

  “I guess I did,” I told her. But to tell the truth, I never did. Once I known it was Eveline, it was just the feeling of it that kept me in the business of the whole thing. I wasn’t going to get nowhere. Not that Eveline wasn’t a fine woman and all. I just never had a notion of her that way, and was disappointed more than just a little bit that it turned out to be her a-riding me and not Christine.

  I was sure relaxed, though. For a second time as settled as I ever did feel in my whole life up to that point. I forgot how hungry I was and never even got a drink. I just turned on my side. Eveline got up, whispered, “Thank you,” and crawled to her side of the wagon, and before I could begin to figure out how I was going to remember this night, I was dead asleep.

  I don’t know as I dreamed it or not, but I think I had that fellow Lear being read to me right before I waked up in the morning. It was Christine’s voice swirling in my head when I finally opened my eyes and stared out at the frozen morning light. But she was asleep and so was Eveline.

  I got myself together and walked on over to the general’s office, but he wasn’t there. He left a cavalry officer to talk to me in his place. He was a lean fellow, tall and sour. He didn’t smile at all. “Major Brisbin,” he said. “At your service.”

  I took his hand when he offered it. He had a look on his face that told me he didn’t trust me. He wore a great handlebar mustache, too, and had a pointed chin beard under it, so that it looked as if the mustache had dripped down on his face. “General Gibbon instructed me to make a request of you, sir.”

  He waited for me to say something, but I had nothing. I known when I signed on there wasn’t no such thing as a request as long as they was paying me.

  “Well,” he said, kind of flustered. “No doubt you’d like to be back out in the field. The general wishes you to go with a detachment he will lead soon east into the Yellowstone River country.”

  “He wants me to show the way?”

  “He can find it, sir. We will be operating along that river until spring.”

  “Doing what?” I said.

  “Finding non-treaty Indians.”

  “If they ain’t signed a treaty, what do we want to chase them for?”

  “We have been ordered to go directly east and that is what we’re going to do. The government and the army wants to protect the white settlers in that region.”

  “Why?” I wanted to know. “Is there war?”

  “This campaign will put an end to the Indian problems in this part of the country,” he said. “General Custer is marching out from Fort Lincoln on the Missouri River. General Crook has ordered General Terry to come up from Wyoming Territory. General Gibbon will drive east from here to meet them. Our main goal is to find the Indians and drive them out of the territory before they scatter to the four winds.”

  “Indians start out scattered. You think they’re all gathering in one place?”

  “There will be no more Indian attacks in the Yellowstone valley or anywhere else i
n this territory. We are going to clear them out once and for all.”

  It was getting kind of close in that little room with the fire going good. I seen sweat dripping down the side of Brisbin’s face. I told him I would do what the general wanted. “I’ll help him find them. I won’t fight no Indians.”

  “You will lead a detachment of twenty white scouts,” he said. “The general will have five companies of infantry and I will lead—”

  “The general told me about his infantry and cavalry,” I said. “That’s a lot of folks all at once.”

  “We will drive out every tribe. All of them. Clear out of eastern Montana.”

  “So it’s our war,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re making war on the Indians.”

  “We tried to buy the land from them. It can’t be done.”

  “But if they ain’t bothering nobody . . .”

  “There’s gold under the pine trees in those hills. We have to open that country and make it safe for folks to . . .” He stopped. “The Indians will kill white settlers who go into the Black Hills. They’re the ones going to war.” He stared at me for a second. Then he got up, walked around to the front of the desk, and leaned back on it, facing me. It looked like he was trying to remember something important, but then I realized he was looking at me to see if he should trust that I’d understand what he was about to say. He said, “Did you know there’s a railroad from one end of this country to the other?”

  “I guess I heard we done that, or was trying to.”

  “We are building a nation. We have to make the future safe.”

  I didn’t know what I should say to that. It seemed like his big idea.

  Then he said, “The general wants to leave at first light, day after the new year. Can you be ready?”

  “I’ll be here,” I said.

  “You don’t look very certain about our assignment, sir.”

  “I said I’ll be here,” I told him. “It’s the weather I ain’t sure about. I don’t much like folks shooting at me, neither.”

  “The general’s orders are Manlian orders. Do you understand that, sir?”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “You don’t know Livy’s History of Rome?”

  I had nothing to say to that. He known I ain’t read nobody about the Romans. So I had him marked from that minute on as a truly stupid man. He was very happy about something in hisself—satisfied the way a man is when he knows he’s sold a bad horse to a fool and got a Thoroughbred’s price for it. “Livy,” he said again.

  I said, “I been reading that fellow King Lear.”

  Something happened to his mouth under that mustache. I had the feeling he was trying to hold back from laughing at me. Then he said, “Titus Manlius. Ever heard of him?”

  “No, I ain’t.”

  “Manlius was a military man, a Roman consul. To preserve discipline in his army, he killed his own son for disobeying orders. That is the kind of thing General Gibbon would do.”

  “Gibbon’s son in this here army?”

  “No.” Now he was impatient. “Do you understand that if you are not here there will be consequences?”

  “I’m in your employ, sir,” I said. “Manly orders or no, I can leave any time I’ve a mind to.”

  He just looked at me. I don’t think folks he seen as underlings ever talked to him like that.

  “But I’ll be here,” I said. “I’ll do the job I been hired for.”

  “Then we are in agreement,” Brisbin said.

  Chapter 13

  Eveline was none too happy that I was going off again so soon. I was told not to think of going back to my little room next to the stables. So I went and got all my things and moved into the wagon. I still used the bathhouse on occasion, and I made sure Cricket was well fed. That night I lay down in the same place with the pile of blankets under my head and Christine read me some more of Lear. When she finally quit and blew out the lantern, I lay awake a long time just in case Eveline got another notion, but nothing happened.

  I can’t say I was disappointed, but maybe I was. I waked up the next day to hot coffee and warm biscuits and even a little fried sowbelly. Christine did all the cooking. Eveline sat by the stove and stared at me like she was a-waiting for me to say something.

  Finally she said, “Did you sleep well?”

  “I did, thank you kindly.”

  Christine put a plate in front of me and I started eating the biscuits.

  The next night things went pretty much the same. During the reading I let on I was ready for something else, so Christine said she’d read me some Hamlet. It sounded exactly the same to me, so I ain’t sure she wasn’t just humoring me and still reading from Lear. “You got anything else?” I said.

  “I have some Dickens.”

  “Okay.” I pointed to the other books. “He sound any different than these two?”

  “Yes, he will sound different.” She picked up a big black book that also looked like a Bible and started reading from it. “ ‘Chapter one. I am born. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.’ ” She stopped. “You know what ‘simultaneously’ means?”

  “I think so.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means the fellow cried like a simpleton,” I said, not exactly sure. She smiled for a short spell, looking at me in surprise and shock I think, because I got it right. Then she went on reading. I could mostly understand it all, so I stayed awake longer. The truth is I liked her voice and it was especially pleasant to be able to understand most of the words she was reading. I liked the way she sounded when she said, “ ‘I am born.’ ” I could tell both them ladies was born to a higher station in life than me. Anyway, I listened for the better part of a hour or so, but eventually I found it easy enough to drift off to sleep in the warmth of that wagon.

  The weather got a bit closer to thawing out for a while as Christmas approached, but then it froze up again good and solid. Sometimes the wind cut through you like a sword. To prepare for the long trip, I got myself a pack of buffalo skins and seven long poles for my own lodge. The old army tent had give out completely, and anyway, you couldn’t have a fire in the middle of it like you could with a good Indian tepee. Big Tree had showed me how to make one and so I had a good-sized Indian lodge. I’d use three of the poles for the tepee to make a travois to carry all of it and a whole lot more. Since it all dragged on the ground, I didn’t need but one other horse to drag the travois and my supplies and then on Cricket I only carried a bedroll and my guns, a few canteens of water, and a little whiskey.

  Two days before Christmas, near the end of the day, the wind calmed down enough that I decided to put all my things together and assemble the travois next to the wagon. Christine come down out of the thing and stood there watching me for a spell. She was wrapped in a buffalo robe over a red dress, and I could see steam coming out of her mouth, but with no wind, it really wasn’t so cold.

  I tied three long poles together near the top and set them down on the ground, then I spread them apart at the place where they would drag along the ground. Crossways on the poles, I tied a wood frame with all my skins and a pack where I’d put food and ammunition and other supplies. I set the rest of the poles on top. It was all tied together with leather and she watched me while I cinched each knot to be sure it would hold.

  “What is that contraption?”

  “It will soon be my home,” I said. “See, I’ll lift this end at the top and tie it over a horse’s back, and then it all comes along with me.”

  “I thought you did not have to go anywhere until after Christmas.”

  “I’m just getting ready. I ain’t going nowhere yet.”
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  “Have you thought about what you will give Eveline for Christmas?”

  “I’ll be leaving just a few days after Christmas, so . . .” I had nothing more to say, because I believed it would be understood that Christmas shouldn’t be no fuss.

  “But you will be here.” She was smiling, but I could see she was ready to jump me if I said the wrong thing. Sometimes I think women have a way of tilting their head a bit to the side while they study your eyes as you talk. They’re watching for it, even expecting it: the wrong thing. And if you say the wrong thing, they pounce on it like a cougar on a foal. “It will be Christmas Eve tomorrow,” she whispered.

  “Well, what do you think she wants?”

  “A nice perfume would be just the thing.”

  I cinched the last knot and then stood there blowing out steam. “What if I give her my share of the wagon,” I said. “She’d make a mite better use of that, wouldn’t she?”

  “I would very much like it if you did that. It would be a good gift for me. But it is not what you give a person who is . . .” She stopped.

  “Who is what?”

  “In a manner of speaking, your intended.”

  “Oh, she ain’t my intended,” I said a little too fast.

  She moved her head back a little and her mouth went flat and straight across the front of her face. “I said, ‘in a manner of speaking.’ ”

  “There ain’t no kind of speaking where I ever said nothing like that,” I said.

  “You have misled her.” Now she was whispering a mite loud.

  “It ain’t true. If she told you that, she wasn’t telling you the truth.”

  She stood there staring into my eyes. I could feel my heart beating under my leather shirt. “Damnation,” I whispered. “I ain’t lying. I don’t believe she told you nothing like that, neither.”

  “What have you been doing with her on these nights?”

  “One time,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea.”

  “So you just had your fun, is that it?”

  “We both had fun,” I said. “Nobody mentioned nothing about being intended.”

  “What did you say?”