Savage Country

by Robert Olmstead

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “Life has taught me to believe in the one but not the other.”

  She sat erect, her eyes flashing, her cheeks spotted with crimson, her expression strangely imposing. She drew in her lower lip. Who was she to judge? What truth could she lay claim to? Her husband was dead and she was poor.

  “I am very tired,” she said, her voice shaking a little. “I would like to rest.”

  Her eyes were fixed on the fire. She drew her shawl closer about her. She turned her head to him.

  “You sleep at night?” she said. “I can offer you a sleeping powder.”

  “I will sleep.”

  “Do you walk in your sleep?” She’d steadied her voice.

  “No.”

  “Then you won’t bother me.”

  She stood and when he stood before her she extended her hand and he accepted it.

  “I’ll say good night now,” she said, leaving him to the dog.

  When he finally lay down to sleep that night the coyotes made a fearful howling and gibbering down by the river and his dream was the rattlesnake striking the stirrup iron. Again, he uncurled the whip and took off its head, and in the morning when he awoke, he found a broken fang embedded in his boot heel.

  Chapter 5

  The sun had risen and the shadows driven from the land. On the stovetop were kettles of stew and in the ovens were roasts.

  The simple coffin was made of pine and lined with cambric. Under the head was placed a black velvet pillow trimmed with gold thread, and gilt tassels were at the four corners. The exterior of the coffin was covered with black velvet and set in the cover was a pane of glass above the face. The shield of flowers was made of paper.

  Carriages filled the lane as the people arrived carrying hampers of food for the table of David Coughlin’s always hospitable house. The people gathered from town and the surrounding country­side to stand by the grave, the surviving farmers and stock raisers, merchants, homesteaders, businessmen, and their families. They lived on top of the land in houses and they lived beneath it in dugouts. They were dressed in ready-­made and homemade, the garb of spun butternut, the cloth of handlooms. Some wore new suits bought in stores and others their old army uniforms of sky-­blue trousers and navy-­blue blouses with brass buttons with the American eagle upon them, blue overcoats with the long cape of the cavalryman. The women and girls were as if dressed in a single black garment shaped and sized for fit. Among them was Bonaire the wolfer whose hat was decorated with two stuffed blue jays. He rode a mule and walking some distance behind him was an olive-­faced woman dressed in buckskins and moccasins and whose nose had been cut off.

  Their heads bowed to the ground in sorrow, they understood the strange and terrible in life. They were believing people, and in their lives the men were watched over and they in turn watched over the women. In their lives there was no chaos and there was no coincidence. There was only the pattern of providence, the cycle of loss and restoration.

  The pallbearers who carried the flag-­draped coffin to the little hillside cemetery that morning were Alvin Lee, Darby, Ransom, Daragh, and the Miller brothers—Story and Temple—all men who had devotedly followed David Coughlin into battle after battle and after the war came west with him to Kansas to break the land. They respected him in life and revered him in death. Their hair was washed and combed and plastered behind their ears.

  The sun rose that morning in brilliant reds and oranges and yellows. A more beautiful day could not have been asked for.

  Elizabeth stood bravely and silently by the grave with Michael beside her. Behind her veil her eyes were swollen from weeping. Her mourning was fearful to her for how hollow she felt. Grief seemed as if something she could not afford. She was too haunted by the memory of Whitechurch’s hard boys, the ones who drove off the cattle to pay debt interest, their eyes like burn holes in their young faces. She would pray for them, but not today.

  She’d met David in Washington, where she was a nurse and he was recuperating from a gunshot, the ball having passed through both his thighs. When he proposed she fled back to Halifax and he followed and persuaded her to marry him. They were married in New York City and from there they traveled to Key West, Jamaica, and Panama, where he loved the flowers, and then here, to Kansas. He’d been a great dreamer from the very start and she always felt that she was with an old friend living an eventful life.

  Because of the locusts, there were no flowers to place on David’s grave. She stepped closer to Michael so that should she fall he might catch her.

  The Reverend Doctor Purefoy conducted the service. He was tall and strikingly handsome and spoke in a singularly clear and pleasing style. He did not maunder. He read from the Psalms and the old soldiers bent their heads forward and their eyes wetted with tears.

  Michael scanned the hillsides before he bowed his head. He wore his brother’s long mourning coat and beneath it he wore his revolver.

  The Reverend Doctor Purefoy then closed the little volume bound in leather and spoke extemporaneously. He spoke of life as a day: the graying, the pale blue, the sun, the greatness of the coming light. He said David Coughlin was a courageous man and was worshiped by his men, who would have followed him anywhere he asked them to go.

  He shot out his tongue and licked his lips. He smiled. He said, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-­hew them how we will. In times like this we must do our best to come to life.”

  Michael listened to what the reverend doctor had to say until his mind began to wander. He held no anticipation of punishment or reward after death. He experienced no terror of the underworld, of the afterlife. He had no dread of suffering upon perishing. He believed in the transition of souls into horses and in the second sight of dogs and their ability to see invisible spirits and witches. He believed in omens and dreams and warnings and instinct. He believed, contrary to the Gospels, the meek, however blessed, would not inherit the earth.

  When they took up their rifles to fire the salute, Michael could hear in his mind the bygone bray of drums, the melancholy bugler, the rasp of swords unsheathed. The rifles reported and there was a hush and from high an adjacent hillside, his shoulder roughly stitched, the red dog began to howl.

  People milled about before starting down the hill, but not for long. They were hungry.

  Aubuchon had set the big dining table and two more tables made of planks and sawhorses to receive the roasted geese, the boiled hams, meat loaves, and curled links of sausage. From the bake house the Miller girls brought doughnuts, coffee cakes, pies, and large loaves of wheat bread. There were baked beans, potpies warmed in the oven, a great tureen of oxtail soup, lamb stew. There were pickles, gravies, preserves, coffee, milk, and buttermilk.

  Elizabeth welcomed everyone into her house. She stood erect, her left hand resting lightly on the table and then more heavily on a chair back. Her other hand hung by her side to be clasped again and again in condolence. Now and then she caught her breath and reset her feet. She had never felt so alone in the company of so many people. She felt damaged and their sympathy for her felt like pity. Soon enough there would be evening chores to do and the men and women would begin to depart and journey to their homes that they should arrive before dark. Until then there was nothing she could do to speed them on their way.

  Chapter 6

  Michael went to the stable to be with Khyber and Sabi. He touched Sabi curled up in the straw and rubbed her smooth and then Khyber. The night Khyber was foaled a crowd gathered and he’d caught her in his hands and there was a great noise of exaltation. “Amen!” they cried. “May Allah bless thee! He has sent thee a child.” He then fed her three eggs before setting her to her mother.

  In the stall next to Khyber’s was an iron-­gray hunter named Granby. Eyes full and large, nostrils wide, and mouth deep, his neck was long and straight with a firm thin crest. He was broad-­breasted and stood about sixteen hands in height.

  “Mr. Granby was a gift from the major to the missus,” came
a voice.

  Michael turned to the speaker. It was a Negro, about his own age, who wore dark blue wool trousers with a yellow leg stripe. His shirt was white with a placket front and his boots were cavalry.

  “The major was very good to me,” he said, extending his hand.

  “You rode with him in the war.”

  “He took me under his wing at a very young age.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Darby.”

  “Who do you answer to?”

  “I am my own master.”

  “It is good to be your own master,” Michael said.

  The man was silent for a thoughtful moment. He seemed to be thinking of something else and changed his mind before he spoke again.

  “It was a pleasure to meet you,” he said, and without another word he walked away.

  Michael moved a chair into Khyber’s stall, his back against the wall and Sabi settled between his legs. Through the boards he could hear the hired help migrating with their plates of food into an empty stall. Elizabeth made them to know they were welcome in the house, but here was where they worked and where they felt most comfortable. They sat on cracker boxes and nail kegs and drank their hot coffee and ate hungrily from the plates they’d filled. When they stood they groaned and limbered their bodies and hesitated before they sat down because they knew they’d eventually have to stand back up.

  After a time he could hear them talking. He had little interest in what they might say. He found his reading book in his saddlebag and tobacco and left the stables. He passed under a bower of thorns and entered Elizabeth’s garden.

  He sat smoking in silence. From inside his shirt he withdrew a gold chain with a locket. Inside the small folding case was a photographic portrait of a young woman. Her hair was long and fell in waves and curls about her shoulders. He closed the locket and let it inside his shirt. He opened the novel he carried and found the page he’d bookmarked with a quill.

  When the reverend doctor stepped into the garden he saw Michael in the arbor, deeply engrossed in his reading.

  “Good afternoon, young man,” he said. “Don’t rise. Keep your seat.”

  The reverend doctor slipped into a chair opposite him where he hummed and nodded his head.

  “You have found a good spot here,” he said.

  Scraping at the bowl of his pipe, knocking the sparks onto the ground, he asked Michael what he was reading, and before he could answer, the reverend doctor said he liked a good book too and was especially fond of Fenimore Cooper, met him when a boy and read him with great pleasure.

  Michael finished the passage he was reading, inserted the quill, and closed the book.

  “Your brother was to build a little chapel over there,” the reverend doctor said, pointing to a hillside caught in pretty sunlight. He shaded his eyes and looked at the sunlit hill. He seemed to study it as closely and as long as he could.

  “I’m clean out of tobacco,” he announced, and Michael handed over his pouch. The reverend doctor repacked his pipe, scratched a match, and lit it again. He had a habit of clacking the stem against his teeth.

  “I am grieved at your loss. Your brother and I were dearest friends. Intimates,” the reverend doctor said. He was a man who spoke in declarations.

  “You arrived yesterday,” he said. “I understand you have traveled to the strangest lands.”

  “I have been around the world.”

  “I guess you have some fine stories. I should like to know them sometime.”

  Without pausing, the reverend doctor told Michael how he loved to plant and the husbanding of animals. He was by nature a homebody. He loved the sun. He loved Kansas and had come here before the war with the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society.

  “How do you find Kansas?” he asked.

  “Rattlesnakes,” Michael said, then shrugged.

  “We don’t mind them. I have killed three hundred on my place alone.”

  “You just want to mind where you step and walk and sleep and where you put your hand, that’s all.”

  Michael knew no matter what he said the reverend doctor would continue down the path of his own interests. As with all religious men, he was a man of many ideas but only one conclusion.

  “I have worked hard in my life and roughed it,” the reverend doctor said. “Hardship is God’s gift for self-­improvement.”

  “Then you must be much improved by the many snakes,” Michael said. He had little interest in this conversation.

  “Were you baptized?” the reverend doctor asked.

  “I do not know,” Michael said, building a cigarette and lighting it.

  “Are you a believer?”

  “Sometimes I have wished I were, but no,” he said.

  “You were in the Southern army.”

  “Yes, I was,” Michael said. “At the time, David was in Massachusetts and I was in Texas with my mother’s people. I rode with the Eighth Texas Cavalry, Colonel Terry’s Rangers. We fought from Bull Run to Appomattox and as you know we lost.”

  “You were just a boy,” the reverend doctor said.

  “A lot of men were boys.”

  “You’ve had a hard life.”

  “I don’t think of it that way,” Michael said.

  “David said you were ten when last he saw you.”

  “I always wondered if one day we would meet on the battlefield, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

  “What would you have done?”

  “I do not believe I could have killed him if that is what you are wondering,” Michael said.

  “And then?”

  “I went abroad.”

  “Why not come home?”

  “There was no amnesty,” he said. “It was for the better good.”

  “God’s judgment,” the reverend doctor said with cool sympathy.

  “Both sides prayed to the same God,” Michael said.

  “And he made his decision,” the reverend doctor said, smiling thoughtfully.

  Going-­away crows hoarsely cawed over the corncrib and went silent. A calf bleated inside the barn and a cow bawled in return. The windmill pumped lazily.

  “Where did you go afterward?”

  “I shipped out to Vera Cruz, and when the French left Mexico, I went back with them. From there to Egypt, where I served the khedive in the Abyssinian campaign.”

  The two men could not help themselves and turned from each other toward the westering sun.

  “Nature is a miracle,” the reverend doctor said, and then turning back to Michael, he said, “Do you like it here?”

  “Like it?”

  “This beautiful farm,” he said with a magisterial wave of his hand.

  “Yes, I like it,” Michael said, understanding that the reverend doctor would conclude him to be prodigal and grasping.

  “It’s the liberal use of Peruvian guano that gets such results. Wheat, corn fodder, beans, peas, cabbages, squash, strawberries, fruit trees—it is indispensable. It provides for roses’ and flowering plants’ color and brilliancy. With good guano, three hundred pounds per acre is considered a very fair manuring.”

  Michael had nothing more to say. He’d judged the man insincere and hypocritical. He was like talking to a drunk.

  “Where have you been lately?”

  “Africa, primarily,” Michael said.

  “How did you find it there?”

  “I was not overawed by the brutality.”

  “What does one do in Africa?” the reverend doctor said.

  “I thought to get rich in the ivory trade.”

  “And how did that fare?”

  “The trade in slaves is inextricably tied to that of ivory. Slaves are needed to carry tusks to the coast. Lately I work for a man named Mr. Salt,” he said, “shooting large mammalia and preserving and collecting their skins and skeletons.” Mr. Salt had standing orders for museums and private collections. Michael explained that he’d shot tigers in India, bears in the Balkans and Tibet, ele­phants in Ceylon and Abyssini
a. He also captured wild animals, a male and a female were needed, and these were sold to zoos or private menageries in New York City, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, Vienna, London, Amsterdam, Paris.

  “Sometimes they require one of each, but more often two of each, four of each, sometimes six,” Michael said, thinking that just as the reverend doctor was in the pursuit of souls, men such as Mr. Salt were in pursuit of all the phenomena of nature. They would possess the flora and fauna of the earth, its machines and art, its minerals, water, fire, and air. They would own the rising and setting sun, the moon and the planets, the shining stars and the meteors, the seasons and the change of season, the clouds, the wind, the rain and snow. They would possess the created and the uncreated. They would own history.

  “Like Noah,” the reverend doctor said.

  “Without an ark,” Michael said.

  “Why did you never come visit sooner?”

  He shrugged his shoulders as if to say it could not be helped.

  “You could have come home,” the reverend doctor said, more adamantly than he intended. There was reproach in his words.

  “Home,” Michael said. The word, it seemed strange to him and his thoughts sank more deeply into the motionless past. His face altered and darkened. He released his lower lip from his teeth where he held it.

  “May I ask what finally brought you here?” the reverend doctor said.

  “David wrote to me.”

  “He wrote you?” the reverend doctor said. He could not help himself, his surprise.

  “He asked that I should come see him and I had a strong feeling to do so.”

  “And the horse? You journeyed here with the horse and the dogs. She is perhaps the finest I have ever seen. What happened to her?”

  Michael told the story of the lion attack and then said, “Dr. Livingstone claimed the lion’s bite is painless, but I can vouch that is not true.”

  “You’ve been leading the wandering life for so many years. You must miss it.”

  “I have had no other calling.”

  “I wish I could say the same. I envy you your lot. I am sure I could enjoy such beautiful scenes forever and ever. But are you alone? Without companions? Without even a roof to shelter you?”