I could but nod.
Virtue moved away to where she had made a bed beyond the penumbral light of the fire. I watched her drop to her knees, smooth her bedroll, and then sink away into the shadows. I admit to feeling very much like a drowning boy right then – one who had just let escape his last chance at salvation. My heart fairly beat itself to death inside of me. I was sore confused.
I sat for a while, considering the circumstances – the various Thou-shalt-nots of the moment. For god’s sake, I was a beat-up, middle-aged, one-eyed nincompoop in a dress. What was allowed to such a character in that particular situation? If this had been a novel, or a play, what would I be preordained to do? But then life is not like that in actuality. There are no fanciful miracles here. I realized this by and by. And so after a time, I quietly stood and stretched my aching back, peering once more into the stars. Of all things, I saw mine own star amidst the stellar chaos. I was sure that this was the selfsame one upon which I had once cast my wish. I recognized its bluish hue. Surely there was meaning in this. And yet, one learns to doubt such impromptu justification for hope. Such confidence is the stuff of fools and zealots. Nevertheless, I made my way hopefully over to where Virtue lay in her bed.
I stood above her, hovering somewhat, it occurred to me, like a dark angel. The light was minimal, affording only that quiet luminance of the stars, but I could clearly see her face. Her slightly parted lips. Her closed eyes. She was sleeping. Was she somewhere in a far away dream, even as she lay here before me? Could I, I dared to wonder, be a part of that dream? Her breath came and went from inside of her – her animating force – intermittently lifting the blanket draped over her breasts.
I watched, enchanted.
All good things, I reminded myself, have a dark side, too.
But how do we discern one from the other?
Experience. And through our mistakes.
Well you certainly have made a few of those.
I rubbed my face in my hands.
Oh! And, Oh! It all seemed a quagmire.
You, Mister Rain, have some decisions to make.
I blew a long plume of frosty breath into the air before my face. And then, trembling, I looked once more, almost pleadingly, into the sky. But the stars were silent. Maybe… Perhaps… I heard some laughter drifting from beyond the distant horizon. But otherwise, those stars were unforthcoming of any guidance. And so I did what I always do when faced with loneliness and desperate sadness. I reached down into myself and pulled out a comforting poem. I turned it over in my mind, admiring it, remembering it from when I had first discovered its deepest meanings so long ago on the waves of the sea. I whispered it to dear Virtue as a gift, hoping, I suppose, that my presence would work its way into her soul, and find residence therein.
“The moon has gone
The Pleiades gone
In dead of night
Time passes on
I lie alone”
Simple as that.
I peered down at her one more time.
So lovely.
I thought of my mother.
And then I forced myself to turn away.
THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE CAME and went. It can be a most dramatic example of geologic wonder, complete with soaring peaks and ramparts of up-thrusted stone. But the portion we passed over was unimpressive – no more than a broad plateau inhabited by twisted sage and sparsely scattered pinion pines. A brotherhood of magpies flapped and swooped over the monotony. A cold and sunny wind buffeted us from the north, tossing up a grit that stung our eyes and ground between our teeth. It was some time before I felt any sense of having dropped over to the other side, as the terrain was generally undulating in character. I saw mountains in the distance, to both our left and our right – pale blue silhouettes looming like the backs of breaching whales on those horizons – and for a time these were the only milestones by which to mark our progress. But then I noticed the subtle shift indicating our drop in elevation. The air felt changed. And then one realized oneself adjusting accordingly in the saddle, leaning back a single degree of angle to accommodate the downwardness of the trail. Of course, this was partly an aberration. There was surely plenty more uphill travel in our future. But one felt a huge leap in our progress. We were drawing closer to the City of Rocks. All the rain and snow that fell on us from this point on was destined for the big pond of the Pacific.
We were not far now from the regular route of the westward bound travelers. At times I almost believed I could smell people – their soaps and sweat, their smoke and filth. We were more or less traveling parallel to their dusty wagon roadway. And yes, it did occur to me to go there and see if I might possibly make a trade of my velvet dress for a pair of trousers and perhaps a fine woolen shirt. But I chose not to. The premonition of such a humiliating encounter overpowered my desire to be attired in a more masculine style. Maybe I would wait for my hair to grow a bit more, and for my eye and ear to heal up completely. People can be so mean to anomalous creatures, especially the ugly ones. And I was not yet up to the challenge of dealing with humanity and all of its twofaced judgments. Besides, I greatly preferred the harmonious privacy of our band of misfits. We were, in many ways, like a little family. Although I would have been sore pressed to explain just who of us played what role in the traditions of your typical familial potpourri.
Who had Virtue become in such a scenario?
Who were the horses?
And who, pray tell, was I?
No doubt some of this confusion came from my wearing that velvet gown. Not to mention the varying differences in our species.
*****
I developed a fever. It came and went intermittently throughout the subsequent days. Sometimes it was quite severe, causing me to generate a cold perspiration that damped my clothes. At other times it was less of a presence, just a headache and general chilliness. But it refused to go away.
“Woe unto you, Didier,” I whispered. “It seems your wanton ways are catching you up.”
I determined that the plentitude of poisons I had so recently ingested – the liquors and horsemeat and dubious water sources, as well as the various other venoms that had so menacingly been thrust upon me by my recent captors – were totaling up to an abominable mélange lodged within my physical being. Add to that the other maladies I was healing – my ribs and shinbone, my eyeball and earflap – and it seemed obvious that more than one door had been left open to let in some infection, or demon otherwise disguised. At any rate, I was not much enjoying myself.
Virtue noticed my juddering and asked, “Should we stop for a while?”
I shook my head and tried to smile reassuringly. “I do not believe that it would matter one way or the other. I will be fine. We might as well keep moving.”
So we tramped onward, with me swaying woozily on my horse’s back.
I wished I had not lost my hat.
My sickness was worse in the mornings, accompanied by nausea, somewhat subsiding as the day progressed. Sometimes I felt to be traveling in a hallucinatory condition. Such a thin veil hung between my reveries and the actualities of the world through which we moved.
We traveled along a riverbed, dry and without much indication that it had ever channeled water any time in the last hundred years. It was like a slow healing scar on the land. I was thinking much about my childhood. My recent recounting of that time had kept it in the fore of my mind, and I now found myself rehashing those old memories. On that particular day, I was recalling my boyhood games of slaying dragons, of how I used to swing a wooden sword at such denizens of the imagination, when lo! There before me, in the high sandstone bank of that river, I was faced with the full sized skeleton of just such a beast.
I stopped Brownie, and squinted at the bones held suspended in the wall.
“Am I truly seeing this?” I asked.
Brownie whinnied that yes I was.
The bones had turned brown over the ages, but they appeared to be all there. The creature seemed frozen in an in
stant of long ago time. It was taller than three horses. Such teeth it had!
“I greatly doubt,” I laughed to myself, “that my puny rapier would have done much good against this big fellow.”
At this, with a grinding dirt sound, the bony brute turned his enormous head from out of the sandstone, looking me up and down. I peered into his vacant eyeholes. I nearly fell over dead with amazement.
The moment passed quickly, but so vivid was the experience that I could not be sure it had not truly occurred. The dragon creature resumed his position in his sandy crypt.
Brownie moved forward apathetically.
I was deeply shaken, with cold beads of water gushing down my face.
Another time, we came over a rise below which was spread a wide valley. In one instant it was vacant, just a wilderness of silence and desolation. But then in the next moment, I saw a sprawling city of unusual buildings. They were not beautiful in their architecture and materials, just rectangles and squares with garish ornaments of bright lettering. The signs were too far to read, but I noticed one that stood out from the others. It had large golden arcs looming on a pole above its rooftop. These arches formed a letter M, and I was certain almost at once that the building was a church, and that the monogram stood for Mormons. For what else could it be but some declaration of religious pride and wherewithal – a sort of beacon drawing at the disparate members of a sect?
Soon the vision disappeared, returning to the wilderness valley inhabited only by rabbits and squirrels. But I noted in my delirium a likeness to that same sensation I have had of stealing from poems not yet written. This experience was much the same, only more sickly in its general impression, and I found myself wondering for the first time how true prophets could stomach their visions. Granted, mine were only fever-induced daydreams, but they held a doomful god-like ability, and were not something to be endured by a mere mortal like myself.
This Nehi character must be something quite extraordinary, I told myself. Truly a vicar of God.
Maybe prophecy was only a form of disease. My own brushes with the prophetic arts had only made me want to retch.
I GREW EVERMORE SICK.
I could neither eat nor drink.
Every bit of food or water that passed my lips just as soon passed back out with a violent upheaval. I felt myself growing thinner, wasting away.
“That time of year thou mayest in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold…”
My dress turned baggy on my withering frame. My ribs rubbed disconcertingly on the inside of my gown’s crenulated bodice. There seemed nothing I could do to halt the downward progression of my wellbeing.
One dawn, after a restless night of dreaming about my father and dragons, I could not lift myself from my bed. I knew it was time to get up and hit the trail, but I could not so much as move a muscle. I was drenched in sweat. I was quivering like a distempered cur. I glanced around the camp for Virtue and the horses, but they were not to be seen.
“Virtue!” I called, my voice no more than a croak. “Brownie?”
The fire had not been lit, and was nothing but a shallow pit of ashes.
It became apparent that I was alone.
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
Had they gone without me? I could not blame them if they had.
Still, I found myself edging toward a panic, until I heard footfalls coming through the brush behind me. When I rolled that direction, I was pleased and somewhat astonished at whom I saw coming my way.
“Oh, Dove!” I said. “You are truly a sight for my sore eye.”
She did not smile at my paltry joke, but came near to me and knelt on the ground. Her hair had grown out since last I saw her.
“You look very pretty,” I told her.
Her face was scrubbed clean.
“I am not feeling well,” I confided. And then, through a sudden spate of sobbing, I said, “I think maybe I am dying.”
She reached under my blanket and laid her hand on my chest, feeling for where my heart was thumping weakly beneath its velveteen shell. I could not tell from her blank expression if she agreed with my prognosis.
“What is it like?” I asked in a whisper. “Should I be afraid?”
But she did not indulge me with an answer. Instead, she opened the pouch on her belt, and pulled out a single red berry.
“Ouvrez votre bouche,” she commanded.
Either the berry was poison, or it was not. What did it matter now? I felt disinclined to put up a fight. So I opened my mouth as she had bid.
She placed the fruit on my tongue.
“Mangez!”
I chewed. I was greatly astonished to find that the berry tasted just like Turtle Dove’s milk.
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “May I have some more?”
She shook her head, and laid her fingers over my mouth. “Ça suffit.”
I closed my eye, savoring that lingering flavor. “I am sorry,” I said, “for what I did to you. Please, I hope you can forgive me.” But when I opened my eye back up, I was disappointed to find that Turtle Dove had gone.
I waited.
A ragged crow flapped above me through the blue sky.
At last, with much effort, I forced myself to rise. I slipped into my boots and stumbled out of camp. I did not know where I was going. The ground and brush was all laden with a hoary mantle of frost. I passed amidst the branches and boulders with no small effort, pausing regularly to catch my breath. And then I kept on. It seemed I had walked a thousand miles when I at last came to a clearing. I blinked at the scene before me, trying to discern the figures I saw through the mists rising over the meadow.
Brownie and Puck and Genevieve were all there. They grazed without looking my way. I could hear them tearing up big mouthfuls of the frosty grass and chewing. A ways off to the side, on the edge of the little vale, I saw a mule deer doe and her fawn. The fawn glanced over at me and flicked her tail. I noted that the little creature’s spots were gone from her coat, indicating that she was moving out of her animal childhood and into maturity. The doe herself stood quite still. I could not fairly believe to what I was now a witness.
Life is a mysterious experience, I assured myself.
Virtue knelt beneath the doe and was partaking of her milk. I stood quietly watching. I had the same sensation I had always felt when I had watched the girl taking suck from Turtle Dove’s breast. Albeit, now my own desires were somewhat mitigated, no doubt as a result of my sickness.
When she had finished, Virtue held one hand cupped beneath the doe’s soft udders, while using her other hand to wring the teats. She then stood, resting her empty hand on the doe’s flank. She leaned and spoke some words into the deer’s large gray ear. Virtue walked across the meadow to where I was waiting. Oh, her smile.
When she came close, I nodded. “I did not know where you were,” I explained with some embarrassment. “So I came looking.”
She held her cupped hand up to me. “Here,” she said. “Drink this while it’s still warm.”
I leaned forward and, awkwardly, lapped up the milk from her palm, working my tongue along the wrinkles at the base of her fingers. It was intimate and very nice to do. I straightened up and wiped my chin. “It tastes like berries.”
“Yes,” said Virtue.
“Thank you.”
She nodded and then took hold of my hand. “Let’s get you back to your bed.”
Virtue led me back the way I had come. We felt to be fairly floating over the ground. At last we reached the camp and I lay down in my blankets. I did not know if I would now die as I sank back into my sleep. At that point I did not figure it much mattered. I would be disappointed not to deliver Virtue in person to her destination, but I felt that she could probably make it from here without much help from such a pitiful deliverer as myself.
ONCE MORE, I OPENED my eyes.
Was it a day later, a single minute, or as mu
ch as a week?
I could not rightly say.
A ragged crow flapped above me through the blue sky.
I felt very sleepy and wrung out, but not necessarily dead.
I clenched my fists and stretched my legs beneath the blanket.
I heard the fire cracking and turned to see Virtue bent over the flames. She dipped a tin cup into our cooking pot and then came to me, kneeling by my bed.
“Here.”
I raised myself onto an elbow and took the cup, gulping its steaming contents. I was very thirsty, and this herbal beverage was quite delicious. I felt it going down into me, spreading a comforting warmth all throughout my vacant innards. I licked my lips, and handed the cup back to Virtue. “Thank you.”
I half expected the tea to come back up in an instant, but it did not, and I realized that I was feeling somewhat improved.
“Do you want food?” asked Virtue.
I shook my head. “But more tea would be nice.”
I was able to sit up without my morning sickness, and after being ill for such a long while, I found it quite pleasant to do the simplest things.
I sipped my tea.
I watched Virtue.
She had changed from her dark mourning dress to one that was slate gray. Her lithe figure filled the dress nicely. Her blond hair was drawn back and she was as stunning a young woman as one could ever imagine. I gazed down at my own dusty, sweat-stained dress and immediately felt self-conscious. But I did notice that I was at least seeing the world through both of my eyes, and the tenderness was all but gone from alongside my right cheekbone. I combed my fingers through my sprouting hair.
“How would you assess my ear?”
Virtue examined the side of my head. “Good,” she said. “Shall I pull the stitches?”
And so I was on the mend. I still felt like a beat up, stomped on puppet doll – weak, and none too pleasant to look at – but things were generally improving all around. Before we broke camp, I had Virtue trim my hair in a more civilized style. And then I shaved the whisker stubble from my chin. Except that I was still wearing a dress, I was beginning to feel more like a man.
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