That night I went to warn the Ute family, to make them leave. I didn’t care that they couldn’t understand me, that the woman’s husband might even try to kill me, thinking I meant them harm. I had to drive them further down the river. It was then I noted the tracks, two riders who took the long way around so that their trail would seem to be coming from the opposite direction of town. I doubled my pace.
About a hundred yards before reaching the camp, I came across the body of the woman’s husband, knife in hand, two bullet holes in his chest. I was right, he would have killed me had he seen me that day or if I’d tried to warn him on this one. The second was that of the older girl, also holding a knife, a knife they used to make her slit her own throat. She must have come at her father’s first cry, running to aid him, instead of running away as he would have wished. The third body was that of the woman. She was stripped naked, beaten about the face, blood and dirt shoved deep into the cracks and lines that marked her age. Why the men chose her for their pleasure, I do not know. There are things about the criminal mind that no book will ever reveal. I covered the woman with the torn remnant of her own dress, a European style affair she must have traded for. I bent my ear to her mouth, no longer hoping to hear her voice, but to catch a hint of her breath.
Nothing but my own frantic breathing. Was there not another? How many bodies had I counted?
A stifled scream from inside the wickiup. I grabbed a melon-sized rock, jagged on one edge, and ran to her. The drifter lay atop the girl, his pants around his ankles, thrusting himself inside her. I recognized the man cheering and laughing beside them as Ben York, a miner who’d arrived the year before and never caused any trouble. Without thinking, I raised the rock above my head and brought it down hard upon the drifter’s skull. He made a dull gasp in surprise, then let out a low moan like a sigh. I brought the rock down upon his head again and again until the skull gave way, softly.
“Wallace, have you gone crazy?” Ben screamed. I rose and turned to him. And something in my face must have scared him, because he ran without waiting for an answer. I started after him, thinking to kill him too, but the girl’s moan stopped me. I dropped the rock and pulled the drifter from her body. Her eyes were shut tight, blood splattered about her face.
My only thought was to wash her face, her body. She raised no arm against me, made no attempt to stop me, not even when, kneeling upon the bank of the Blue, I lowered her in its icy waters. Her eyes opened with a shock then, and she looked about as if waking from a deep sleep. I took off my own shirt, and scrubbed every part of her, then sat holding her in the morning sun.
I couldn’t return her to her camp. I couldn’t give her that last memory of her family. But where could I go? Back to town was impossible. I was an outlaw now.
As I wrapped the girl in the blanket I kept tied to my saddle, she said one word, the only word she would ever say to me: “Nahoonkara.” I didn’t understand the word, could only guess at its meaning. Yet it sang to me as I imagined the old woman’s voice might have done.
Ever since Nell had become a midwife she rose before the sun came up and sat upon the bank of the north branch of the Seven Falls that ran behind her house and watched the first blush of light as it warmed the river. I’d noted everything in the town but especially those things that had to do with Nell. I’d often watched her sitting upon the damp earth, leaning back against a pine, her pant legs rolled up so that her calves could take in the sun. She’d sold her fancy dresses, her hats. Always, she tilted her head back against the trunk, her eyes closed as if she could see better that way. And though I knew it was wrong to watch her so, I found I could not turn away. After a time, I matched the rise and fall of my breathing with her own. Only then, would I allow myself to leave and go about my business.
Nell received us as if the reason for her morning ritual had always been to prepare for this one day. And once again I felt the peace of inhabiting the same space with her, of breathing her air. Without a word, she took the girl from my arms and set her down upon a bed of moss and pine needles, then went inside for her things, returning a moment later with boots and a simple dress that looked to fit the young girl. She never asked what had happened, how I’d come to care for this dark child. It was as if she understood that lives were made up of moments like these. All else was watching, waiting.
“The dress was mine when I was her age,” she said, her lips parting ever so slightly. “It’s the only thing I had left from before my parents died.”
I nodded and took the clothes from her.
“She will have to start over, too,” Nell said, almost as if talking to herself. Then, when we finished dressing her, she grabbed both the girl’s hands and looked her over. “I’m going to save you the trouble I went through,” she said. “Your new name will be Dee.” The girl stared back at her, but Nell didn’t try to explain herself further. She just took the girl’s hands, placed them upon her chest and repeated the name. “Dee.”
And those were the last words she spoke that morning, preferring the depth of our silence. I set the girl upon my saddle and grabbed the reins to mount my horse, hesitating only a moment. It was then Nell’s hand brushed my shoulder. I did not turn for fear that if I did I would never leave. And my time was through in that town. It did not matter. I understood the message the touch conveyed, the warmth that said we know who we are, the soft grace that said we know what we have become for each other. And I held tight to the promise of that touch.
I followed the Blue as it wound its way north, after a week of travel coming upon a family of homesteaders who agreed to take the girl so long as I also left them my horse. They seemed good enough. Christian folk. And they promised to raise her well. So I walked away from her as I walked away from Nell, as I walked away from the town of Seven Falls and my life as a sheriff.
As I walk even now, my soul heavy with starlings.
THREE
THE LONG SNOW
Narrator | Colorado
The morning of November seventeenth, 1886, the snow began to fall on the town of Seven Falls and didn’t stop for three months. In the first days of the snow, the trees waved gently back and forth, as if trying to catch the snowflakes. But soon the trunks stiffened under the cold, the branches sagged beneath the weight, until finally, after a week, even the pines gave up and set themselves to endure what would be the longest snowfall in their memory.
Coyotes yipped throughout the night of the seventeenth and eighteenth, calling their kind together, as if their very survival depended upon the strength of the group. Bears dug in deeper than usual and prepared for a very long sleep. And the deer and smaller animals, the raccoons and porcupines, squirrels and badgers, all ran about frantically, knowing those first few days might be their last.
The snow fell slowly day after day, in no hurry to blanket the world. And as the snow fell, and the trees grew still, and the animals grew quiet, time itself slowed. Life slowed. So that by the fifth day if you stopped to listen all you would hear, if you were very quiet, was a low creaking deep inside the wood.
After two weeks, any building in Seven Falls less than two stories was completely buried. It was as if the miners’ cabins and the general store, the meat market and the post office, the bank and the smithy all ceased to exist. During this time, people still thought they could wait out the snow, and they generally stayed in their homes or shops. The town became a graveyard, the two-story buildings forming multiple headstones that peeked out from the white surface: Guller’s and Percy Hart’s Saloons, Carl’s Dancehall, the twin bell towers of the church on one end of town and the schoolhouse on the other, and the entire second floor of Demings’ Hotel rising above the arctic expanse. The guests, not understanding that they would be trapped there for the next three months, made the most of it, taking their drinks out on the balcony where they sat and watched the snow fall, as if they’d just arrived from the tropics and had never seen this crystalline miracle. And in truth they hadn’t, for the snow continued to fall week
after week without cessation. In those first couple of weeks before some of the guests began to panic, they sat on that balcony staring out at the world like birds from the treetops. And even those who panicked never forgot the gift of their new perspective, the way in which they in turn were watched by a great horned owl from a neighboring tree, a family of downy woodpeckers from the grove a few yards off from the balcony, and countless mountain chickadees who stared back from their upside down perches along nearly every tree and even the sides of the hotel itself. The way in which it no longer mattered who lived where or which saloon had the nicer front as everything was buried in white.
One particular guest, an architect named Isaac Hamlin, saw, in the pattern of indentations that marked the criss-crossing of the side streets with Main and the mounds that represented each building along them, a vision that would haunt him for most of the rest of his life, until he eventually moved to San Francisco, where he designed a cathedral, the chapels, cloisters, and naves of which traced the same ghostly pattern he’d seen during what he proudly told other San Franciscans was the greatest snow in the history of the known world.
After a month, even the two story buildings were buried, and people understood that this was no normal winter storm, that their lives might be irrevocably altered. The guests in Demings’ Hotel descended to the main floor lobby and huddled there, praying for help.
And, as Christmas approached, the first people emerged from their homes and shops—not slowly or lethargically like bears from their caves, but rather, like ants digging their tunnels beneath the ground, for they had to dig their way from one building to another. Their lives depended on it. The first tunnel went from Cluskey’s Dancehall to the hotel, as Carl had heard the cries for help and knew that Demings couldn’t possibly have stored enough food for all, and that the guests, being mostly city folk, would be unaccustomed to tightening their belts.
The second tunnel went from the hotel to the general store, and they didn’t have to dig very far, for thinking along the same lines as Carl Cluskey, Pete Myers had already dug over half way to meet them. The celebration that ensued was only one of many during those first couple of weeks of the second month of the snow, for as one tunneler came upon another it was as if two brothers who had been estranged for years had finally met. Even the most bitter of enemies were seen to hug each other, tears running down their cheeks, swearing an end to whatever conflict had been between them, if they remembered the conflict at all. It was that way with Martin Watson and Frank Foote, who after hugging each other over and over and sitting down beside their shovels to laugh about the reason why they’d not spoken in the last year, could not even remember it had been because Frank had refused to pay Martin for the re-shoeing he’d done on Martin’s horse. Frank was not a cheap man. It was just that he’d felt Martin had simply hammered the same shoes back on again.
Soon the townsfolk were walking the dark tunnels of early morning to feed the animals in their barns. Then, they ventured out on other mundane tasks, most of which centered around how to keep the fires in their cabins lit: poling a hole to the surface for the stove pipe, clearing ash, carrying wood or coal from the storehouse. And their routines remained largely the same, albeit beneath the surface of the world. The supply trains had done an admirable job of keeping the tracks clear and were still able to make it with supplies until nearly the end of the second month. So, for the people of Seven Falls, the long snow didn’t mean that life had to stop, but rather it took on a different form. Women met for tea, taking turns in one another’s houses and occasionally gathering within a hollowed out town square that had taken shape as several tunnels converged. The women actually enjoyed snuffing out their candles one by one, then sitting, sipping their tea under the eerie blue glow of the scant sun sifting through the layers of ice and snow.
The blue glow was the only way the townsfolk could tell the difference between night and day. They’d gotten used to carrying candles and lanterns as they traveled in the tunnels, no matter what the time. Though, somewhere near the end of the second month, Lulu Giberson took to walking about without a candle even at night. She said it put her in touch with her other senses, with the deepest part of herself. And soon the other women followed. Clubs formed, as it became the thing to do. They found it even more intoxicating to stumble upon each other in the darkness, as they moved about, their hands before them, tracing patterns along the icy walls of the tunnels. The women said the men grew jealous; they didn’t like the idea of their women meeting in the darkness like that. And so, the men formed their own clubs and took to walking about without the aid of lights as well. In fact, it quickly became the favorite pastime of the town, particularly as people made their way to and from Cluskey’s Dancehall throughout the night. And Carl Cluskey was happy to keep the dances going, Frank Foote playing his fiddle well past the witching hour. No one knows how many romantic liaisons were formed or broken during those few short weeks of total darkness, but many such unions did occur, and they were not all between lawfully married men and women.
Something about the anonymity of the darkness liberated the townsfolk, so that when they looked back on that time, they often smiled, though a few tried to erase it from their minds altogether, preferring to forget not only the anonymous other, but also the secret person they’d discovered within themselves deep beneath the snow. For it was not only encounters out of wedlock that occurred, but occasionally women with women and men with men.
Though no one talked about the subterranean trysts in public, conversations did sometimes occur in private;, but even on those occasions people usually made excuses for their behavior, saying they couldn’t tell who was who in the dark. When others heard such excuses, they recognized them for what they were: attempts to rationalize what cannot be rationalized, to explain away that animal part of ourselves that resists explanation. For all the tunnelers understood that one didn’t need eyesight to know who was who, because their other senses had grown quite acute. That was partly wherein the pleasure lie. Each tunneler attuned himself to the crunching snow beneath his boots, and every tunneler’s sound was unique. Lulu Giberson’s “Below-the-knees” squeaked as the high heels scraped against the frozen ground, while Pete Myers’ coppertoed “Wolverines,” as he liked to call them, had a sort of machine sound as they punched the earth. Of course, the sense of touch was the most heightened of all.
As one tunneler heard the approach of another, the anticipation of that touch was almost too much. Searching fingers found each other, then moved over hands to wrists, feeling downy hairs or coarse skin. And eventually, hands made their way to faces, the contours of which took on a completely different aspect under the sight of touch. But the explosion of the senses that occurred beneath fingertips was nothing to what happened once lips met flesh.
The encounters didn’t always follow that path. Sometimes, the emotions stirred, the sensations felt were almost too much for the tunnelers;, or, perhaps, they were just what was needed, and they would simply stop and hold hands, listen to the stillness about them, feel the weight of it. They would sit or stand there like that until the sound of Frank Foote’s fiddle called to them through the snow.
At what point in the night Frank actually took up his fiddle no one was really sure, as time had begun to lose all meaning for the tunnelers. All they knew was that sometime after their world turned completely black, the music of the fiddle would call to them, at first softly through the snow; but as Frank picked up steam, it was as if his music carried some of the heat generated by his fiddle and used it to melt a path through the snow, calling louder and louder. And as they entered the third month of the long snow, the trysts between private couples gave way to large gatherings of folk in the town square. The town would gather together in the darkness shortly before Frank began playing, as if the anticipation of the sound now joined them completely. They didn’t talk or socialize during this time. In fact, if asked a question they would not even have answered. It was as if the town had undergon
e yet another metamorphosis, and they were one creature, standing together, absorbing the silence, and soaking in the faint blue light, the result of the full moon that signaled the beginning of the third month of snow. They stood beside each other, often holding hands, taking in this new alchemy until the fiddle called to them. Then, as if they were one mind, they would move together to the dancehall, no longer able to distinguish the unique sounds of each boot upon the ground, for in this final phase of the snow all boots sounded the same.
Once inside, they broke up into couples and danced polkas and mazurkas, but all in the dancehall knew that though they were pairing off, though things seemed to be going back to the way they had been, things were not like that at all. They understood that a community had formed, one deeper and surer than any they had known before, one that would be needed if they were to withstand the events that would unfold in the month that followed, the events that began as they emerged out of necessity from their subterranean world to walk once again upon the surface.
THE LARVAL DREAMS OF CHILDREN
Narrator | Colorado
Sometime during the end of the third month of the long snow people stopped going out again. It was as if they’d swallowed the snow, and now it had stuck inside them, thick against the walls of their stomach, piling its way up their throats until they could no longer breathe. The secret meetings and nightly dances stopped, though occasionally someone swore to themselves as they sat in their houses that they heard the faint whisper of Frank Foote’s fiddle.
Food grew scarce, but the townsfolk sat as if frozen to their chairs, the call of hunger stifled by the weight of winter. Word was the supply train that came from Denver had gotten snowed in. The railroad had fought valiantly to keep the track open, but the thirty-foot drifts finally overwhelmed the C&S Boreas, and it sat out the final month of snow somewhere in the Ten Mile Canyon, the snowed in passengers on the train surviving only by eating the food meant for the residents of Seven Falls and other towns. But food alone wouldn’t have brought the citizens of Seven Falls out of their icy sepulchers. They wouldn’t have smelled it even if they’d had the desire to eat, for their sense of smell along with all desire had been smothered, the air pressed to such a density it’s a wonder they could breathe at all.
Nahoonkara Page 12