The builders had begun the construction of the Ervin tannery. Joseph’s wife was worried about conscription. The government was recruiting in ever greater numbers and her husband, a third-generation American, was going to end up on the Union’s volunteer list. All the shops in the area saw their activity boosted, directly or indirectly, by the war, with goods for the army sent east on a daily basis. On the plains, during the last expedition to capture mustangs, Bowman and his men had encountered three teams of hunters who shot the wild horses, following the method Joseph had explained to him, on behalf of companies that had contracts with the army. The mustang hunters left half of the horses dead, killed by bullets that lacked precision. In August, applauded by the citizens of Carson City, eight volunteers left to swell the ranks of the North’s army.
In September, in an Express Mail stagecoach, a letter left Carson City, signed by Erik Penders and addressed to Pastor Edmund Peavish, Grantsville, Utah Territory.
In October, Alexandra and Bowman paid their last wages to the three seasonal workers. The brown leaves fell from the trees. The reserves of meat, wood, feed, cereals and dried fish were almost exhausted and Reeves’s money was all spent. All they had left was about a hundred dollars to get them through the winter and cover the first expenses of the following spring. The hut had not been extended. They were preparing to spend their second winter as they had spent their first, with Alexandra reading books out loud. The first one she had read, the previous year, was Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. In it, the author told a story that took place in the imaginary utopian community of Blithedale, which bore a strong resemblance to Reunion. She read the whole book while Bowman lay next to her and listened.
“Was your friend Penders interested in that subject?”
“No idea.”
“Blithedale, in fact, is Brook Farm. A community founded in 1840 in Massachusetts.”
“What happened to it?”
Alexandra’s face darkened.
“The same as Reunion. Poverty and sickness. Power struggles.”
*
By late October, the mountain peaks had already been white for three weeks and snow was beginning to fall on the lake. Before retreating into their hut, they lit a large fire on the edge of the cove and jumped into the water one last time. They only stayed in there for a minute, hugging each other tight and shivering with cold, then ran over to the fire and wrapped themselves up in blankets.
“That’s it, we’ve got rid of it.”
She turned towards him.
“Rid of what?”
“Reeves’s money.”
Alexandra nestled close to him.
“Look at me – I came to America to build a socialist community, and I end up the prisoner of a misanthrope on a mountain and a partner in a two-and-a-half-thousand-acre ranch funded by the British India Company.”
Bowman put his arm round her shoulders.
“There’s not enough room in the hut for anyone else.”
“I’ll last another winter.”
A few days later, as the snow was settling in a disturbingly deep layer, a young Express Mail employee left Carson City, cursing heaven. He took the path to the Fitzpatrick ranch and rode under the first boundary markers. He saw the horses gathered around the big barn or sheltering under the trees. He went over the mountain pass and headed down the western slope towards the lake. After four hours, he reached the prairie, the little corral and the small, snow-covered stable, and stopped at a prudent distance from the hut, where he called out to Mr Penders. The horse, held by the lead rope behind him, started to snort and stamp its feet.
Bowman opened the door of the hut, rifle in hand.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Ricky from the Express Mail, Mr Penders! I have a horse and a letter for you!”
Sergeant,
Your letter, which reached me a month ago, came as such a surprise that it took me a long time to get over it.
A year and a half has passed since our last encounter and never would I have imagined all that has happened to you, nor believed that you would find peace in those mountains. Whether you like it or not, my dearest prayers for you have been granted. I had been hoping to hear from you, but I could never have believed your news would be so good or that it would represent, for me, such a liberation. Since the tragic events that brought us back together and then separated us again, I have been living my life like an impostor, unsure whether I had made the right choice, not knowing if you were still pursuing the search that I had abandoned.
Today, thanks to you, I know that we did the right thing.
So I stayed in Grantsville, firstly because I was incapable of leaving for a long time, weakened by fever and bad dreams, and then because the sad renown I acquired after the death of the killer had turned me into a sort of celebrity. The community of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints welcomed me as one of their own.
I converted to these men’s religion. Primarily because I wanted to stay here and live with them.
I am a little ashamed to admit this to you, Sergeant, but I have taken wives in Grantsville. I have two at the moment.
The reward money was under lock and key for a long time, as I had resolved not to touch it. But since your letter, I have decided to invest the sum in a farm in Grantsville, one of the few areas of pastureland around Salt Lake. The demand for meat – between this war that has broken out and the convoys of immigrants – is increasingly significant. I am becoming – like you, if in a rather less wild way – an American citizen taking care of business, and a priest who now has a real parish and a real community. Here, among my kind, I feel safe.
As promised, I have taken care of your horse. That animal has an impossible character – it often made me think of you. I hope it will have made the journey without carrying a burden; I was promised that it would be very well treated. So the horse will be my messenger to your mountains, where I hope, one day, to come and visit you.
It sometimes seems to me, when I am tired, that we are a hundred years old.
Dear old friend, my thoughts are with you.
Kind regards to you, and to your lady friend too.
Edmund
Despite the snow and the wind, Bowman saddled up Walden and took the horse on a ride around the Fitzpatrick ranch, showing it every boundary marker, as if the horse were a new business partner. He led it to crevasses hidden by snow, so that it would remember them, including the one into which Jonathan had fallen, and where Erik Penders’ Winchester now lay rusting. He took his mustang back to the little stable, looked after it, and left it for the night with Beauty, Trigger and their foals.
*
The winter of 1862 was the harshest that old MacBain had known in his fifteen years in the Sierra Nevada. One third of the Fitzpatricks’ animals died: some of cold, some of disease, some eaten by wolves, some fallen in crevasses while they foraged for food beneath the snow. The horses sheltered in the big barn emerged after the winter all skin and bones. Alexandra and Bowman crammed about a dozen horses into the little stable near the lake, and they all somehow survived. Throughout January and February, the weather alternated bizarrely between torrential rain and snowfall, decimating the game on the ranch and flooding the plains all the way to Owens Valley, in the south of the Sierra. The Paiute and Shoshone tribes, starving, began to kill cattle from the mining camps, which strayed onto their land in search of food. The conflict escalated, and some miners were killed. In March, a detachment of cavalry left Aurora, north of Carson City, with a mission to pacify Owens Valley. The first clashes took place and the renegade Indians fled into the mountains.
In spring, the mountains slowly came back to life and the Fitzpatrick ranch recovered from the damage inflicted by winter. The Carson Daily Appeal reported increasingly violent battles between Union troops and Confederate troops in the south of the country. In Shiloh, Tennessee, four thousand soldiers died in two days.
In June and July, eleven mares gave birth, two of them dying al
ong with their foals. It was a beautiful summer and the ranch’s forty horses returned to good health. Alexandra and Bowman no longer had money to hire people and they negotiated a line of credit with the Eagle Ranch for horse feed if the need arose. If the following winter proved as difficult as the last one, they would leave a few of their horses there to be looked after. The Fitzpatrick ranch, specialising in the breeding of prize horses, would take at least two years to move into profit, and the army did not care about the animals’ characters: it needed as many horses as it had cavalrymen, and their only requirement was to charge for a few minutes before being killed by bullets and shells. But Abraham Curry, of the Eagle Ranch, believed in their project and agreed to help them after visiting their ranch and seeing the promising yearlings.
In September, 75,000 Northern troops and 50,000 Southern troops clashed in Antietam, Maryland. Twenty thousand men were killed or injured during a single day of battle, and both sides claimed victory. The factories and large farms of the United States were booming, and the country had emerged from the economic crisis that had gripped it since the great drought of 1857. As soon as winter was over, the flow of immigrants continued increasing, and the California track – which passed through Carson City – became a ceaseless flood of convoys headed to the Pacific. The city grew and, while a dozen other volunteers left farms devastated by the winter weather, two hundred new inhabitants moved there within a year.
From Grantsville, Father Peavish exchanged a few letters with Erik Penders, the owner of the Fitzpatrick ranch. Peavish had been luckier than Bowman. His business was already going well, and the bad winter in the Sierra had only boosted his meat trade even further. He offered to give Bowman money, if he needed it: “I owe you that money.” Peavish now had three wives and as many children. “It is customary, in our community, to have a family as large as our means allow. Believe it or not, Sergeant, but I have, with my bony frame and rotten gums, become a very eligible man.”
The last pioneers crossed over the mountains in October and the snow returned. The ranch was ready for another winter. Joseph Ervin’s new tannery was operational now, and when the season ended at the Fitzpatrick ranch, he and his wife set to work, refining their method of white oak bark tanning. As he no longer had time to go hunting, Ervin ordered hides from the Sierra’s trappers, who became accustomed to camping on the ranch’s land when they visited.
*
Alexandra and Bowman lit their big fire by the waterside and swam one last time. Under the blankets, they were silent for a moment, looking at their hut, their horses in the enclosure and the bare forest.
Alexandra pressed herself against him.
“Do you remember what you said last year?”
“No.”
“You said there wasn’t enough room in the hut for anyone else.”
Bowman looked at her.
She smiled.
“How old are you, Arthur?”
“Forty-one.”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
She had sounded strange when she said this. Bowman lowered his eyes.
“You’re bored here, aren’t you?”
She burst out laughing.
“Not at all.”
Alexandra looked over at the hut.
“We’ll have to make it bigger.”
“If that’s what you want, we’ll do it next year.”
She took Bowman’s hand, placed it on her belly, and stared deep into his eyes.
“I was wondering why it didn’t happen earlier. Maybe we needed time to prepare ourselves.”
He did not understand.
“Are you ready, Arthur?”
His face showed surprise, then he frowned: an expression of worry and fear that Alexandra had never seen before. He opened his mouth but could not pronounce a single word. Big, tough Bowman was struggling to breathe. His eyes did not leave Alexandra’s, and his hand, on her belly, was trembling.
She kissed him and stood up.
“I’m going inside to get warm.”
On the doorstep of the hut, she turned back. Arthur Bowman had stood up and moved away from the fire, draped in his blanket. He stopped at the water’s edge and watched the sun disappear behind the mountains. The sky was grey, ominous with snow. The sunset lasted only an instant, casting an orange glow on the naked forests and the ripples on the lake. He stayed there for a moment, standing tall and motionless in the cold, blowing little clouds of steam until night had fallen. Before going to the hut, he paused by the Fitzpatricks’ grave.
“This time, I’ll use one of your names.”
He shivered. His bare feet ached on the cold earth.
“Sleep well.”
The fire crackled. He threw his blanket on the bed and warmed himself before the flames, which soothed his painful scars. He rubbed the stumps on his bluish hands, then got into bed with Alexandra. Her body was already warm. She wrapped herself around him.
“You O.K.?”
“Yeah.”
He buried his face in her hair.
“Sorry.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t speak.”
“That doesn’t matter.”
As winter went on, Bowman anxiously watched Alexandra Desmond’s stomach swell. He often left the hut, going for long rides in the snowy mountains with Walden, coming back to sleep with her in the evenings, placing his hands on her belly to feel the child move beneath the skin. Sometimes he had nightmares. He dreamed about the fishing village, women throwing themselves in the flames with their children in their arms.
The winter was mild and the Fitzpatrick ranch did not need to go into debt to buy fodder. By March, the snow was starting to melt.
Alexandra Desmond gave birth to a little girl on 8 May, 1863.
Aileen Penders was born in the hut by the lake in the middle of the afternoon, under the blue sky and bright sun of the Sierra.
Although Mrs Ervin protested, having given birth to her three children without anyone’s help, let alone her husband’s, Alexandra had refused to let Bowman leave. He almost fainted as he held her hand, fascinated by the sufferings of labour and Alexandra Desmond’s fierce determination to bring a child into the world. Mrs Ervin handed Aileen to him, her body covered in white grease and blood, looking tiny in his hands. He dared to hug her for a few seconds, but when she screamed for the first time, he placed her, terrified, on her mother’s breast.
When Alexandra was able to get up and walk again, she went to swim in the lake’s cool water, where Aileen took her first bath. Carrying her daughter on her chest, wrapped in a blanket, Indian-style, she took Aileen everywhere, and rode with her, on Trigger, around the Fitzpatrick ranch.
The Eagle Ranch ordered two three-year-old males for the following year. In June, a breeder from Aurora came to visit them, having heard about their horses, and he too bought an option in three future stallions and four mares. The advance fees, though far from huge, were the first dollars they had earned in two years. Bowman used this small profit to fund another expedition in Utah. In September, the ranch’s population was back to the levels it had had before the terrible winter of the previous year. Sixty horses, a dozen of them male. Springfield, now seven years old, was a magnificent stallion. Within a year, his and the Appaloosa’s progeny would begin to interbreed, the branches of the genealogical tree growing more numerous.
In early July, 160,000 thousand soldiers fought for three days in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Forty thousand died on the battlefield.
*
Bowman went swimming every morning with his daughter. At three months old, she already had curly hair as red as her mother’s and Bowman watched her grow up, searching for signs that she resembled him too.
“She just looks like you.”
Alexandra took the little girl in her arms and spoke to her, making fun of Bowman: “Did you hear that?”
Aileen had Alexandra’s hair, but she had Bowman’s thin, serious mouth, his cheekbones, his blue eyes and his expression.
After the birth of his daughter, Bowman’s nightmares ended.
He took her into the mountains, riding Walden, telling her about what he saw, describing the landscape, the horses, telling her about his memories of grand hotels and wide rivers and deserts, describing London and the ships sailing up the Thames, telling her about sea-fishing and those steam liners crossing the Atlantic faster than trains. Aileen, her head on Bowman’s chest, fell asleep listening to his voice.
A trader in Carson City bought all of Joseph Ervin’s stock of leather for the year. Some of it was sent to sewing workshops in New York, to be made into gloves for the Northern army’s senior officers. Ervin lent the Fitzpatrick ranch two hundred dollars for the construction of a new, three-bedroom house on the edge of the lake. Alexandra drew up the plans, while Bowman went to town to hire builders and take care of the business that took him there twice a month. He went to the offices of the Daily Appeal to buy the week’s copies for Alexandra and give her response to Henry Mighels. The journalist had asked Mrs Desmond to write a column for the newspaper. Alexandra had agreed.
She waited until late at night for Bowman to return, but it was early morning of the next day before he did. She found him sitting on the roof of the half-built house, on the beam that the workers had just put in place, staring out at the lake, red-eyed and stinking of alcohol and vomit. At his feet was a copy of the Carson Daily Appeal, dated 7 July, 1863.
Carrying Aileen in her arms, she sat down next to him without a word, watching the sun rise over the mountains. Aileen wriggled and grabbed Bowman’s sleeve. Bowman made a nest for her in his arms, leaned over her and whispered: “You’re nothing like your father.”
Aileen smiled and tried to grab his lips as they tickled her ear.
Alexandra got up and left Bowman alone with his daughter. She went back into the hut and lay on the bed, hands on her thighs, trying to control her breathing and hold back her tears.
The next day, an envelope left Carson City for Grantsville, containing a page from the Daily Appeal and a brief note from Arthur Bowman for Father Peavish.
For three weeks, Bowman had been locked inside a monstrous silence, not speaking a word to anyone except his daughter, whom he took for horse rides. He told her about the India Company army, its battles, Africa, the lost garrisons, Godwin’s fleet and the white sloop, the war in Burma and the monsoon, the forest, the drought in London and the sewers of St Katharine’s Dock.
Retribution Road Page 48