But Jane scrambled ahead without looking at him, catching Stephen’s hand and pushing herself through with froglike kicks at the enclosing tock. Archie tried to follow her and found himself caught, his head and one arm through the crack but his progress arrested by a sharp ridge that pressed down on his other shoulder. “Stephen!” he shouted. “I can’t get through!”
For a single heart-stopping moment Stephen didn’t turn around, and memories of the tomblike blackness in the domes closed in around Archie. But no, he saw Stephen had just been hoisting Jane to safety on the same fallen chunk of rock that Archie himself had paused on before entering the chacmool’s sanctuary. That done, Stephen turned and dropped to his knees in front of Archie.
“Breathe out, Mr. Prescott,” Stephen commanded. Behind him, the lamp’s dancing shadows reminded Archie of shapes he’d seen in River Styx, less than an hour before. “Breathe out and push with your legs. Your chest is too big.”
He seized Archie’s flailing arm with both hands and set his feet against rocks on either side of the slowly closing crack.
A booming rumble like a peal of thunder sounded from behind Archie, and dust blew through the tiny space between Archie’s back and the leaning slab. Small rocks and gravel were beginning to pile around his feet.
“Breathe out, Mr. Prescott!” Stephen said again. “If the dust can get out, you can too! Come on now, set your feet and count three. One! Two!”
Archie kicked his legs, finding no purchase on the dusty floor.
“Three!”
Stephen hauled on Archie’s arm hard enough that something popped audibly in his shoulder. Archie expelled all the air from his lungs, feeling the crack press tighter around him and scrabbling madly for a toehold to push against. He squeezed forward a bit and grunted with pain and effort as the buttons popped off his blood-soaked coverall. His flayed chest scraped agonizingly on the rock.
“Da, please!” Jane cried. Another tremor shook the cave and the slab pinning him shifted the tiniest bit. Stephen hauled again, lifting himself off the ground and moving Archie another inch forward, and then Archie’s shoulder scraped through.
Stephen fell backward, losing his grip on Archie’s wrist and striking his head on a spur of rock between Jane’s feet. Jane leaped down and took his place, helping Archie wriggle forward until his other arm worked free and he pulled himself out of the tiny crack.
The cave continued to shift and heave, loosing cascades of rock and gravel from the walls and the dome over Bottomless Pit, out of sight far above. A single oblong boulder larger than a man’s head bounded down the breakdown pile and hit the wall over their heads. Stephen scrambled to his feet and caught hold of his lamp, then led the way up the breakdown. Archie pushed Jane ahead of him, staying close behind her to lift her over ledges she couldn’t easily scale herself.
Climbing the breakdown was like trying to dance in an earthquake, keeping time to each surge of the angry earth. The number of falling rocks increased, each one flashing suddenly through the hazy sphere of lamplight and booming away into the darkness below. What if the branch above had collapsed? The walls of the pit rose sheer from the top of the breakdown another hundred feet or more. If they couldn’t duck into the shelter of the branch passage, falling rocks would crush them sooner or later.
But the branch was there, and they ducked into it gratefully. Archie kept one hand on Jane almost continually as they crawled and squeezed their way back to River Hall, listening to the roar and rumble of the cave-in fade behind them. By the time they were able to stand, on the gentle slope above the Dead Sea, the cave was quiet. Archie looked at Stephen, rimed with gray dust, and wondered what to say. Something unresolved hung between them.
Jane broke the moment by stepping close to Archie and slowly, hesitantly, putting her arms around him. “I knew you’d come, Da,” she murmured into his chest.
Archie tried to answer her, and couldn’t. He stroked her dusty hair instead, feeling awkward and out of practice. A father again, he thought. It was going to take some getting used to.
As was being alive. Archie’s body still held the memory of the knife cleaving his heart, and even though he knew where he was, who he was with, nerve and muscle let go their belief in death only reluctantly. He worked a hand inside his torn coverall and found, next to the patch of missing skin from the talisman, a knobby scar about an inch under his left nipple. Omeyocan, he thought: I was and was not there, was and was not pierced, was and was not dead. The smell of his daughter filled his lungs, and he exhaled, finding that he could speak again. “As soon as I could, Jane. Soon as I could.”
She held him tighter, her arms trembling with exhaustion. He could see smooth skin in the meandering part of her hair, and her ear was whole again—more than his would ever be. The pressure of her face stung his raw chest, and his hands gave off jagged waves of pain each time he touched her, and he thought he would never again feel quite so much at peace.
After a long while, Stephen gave an embarrassed cough. “Reckon the pit isn’t quite so bottomless anymore,” he said. “Hope that trace still goes.”
He unscrewed the cap from his flask and offered it to Archie. “No, thanks,” Archie said.
“Bottoms up, then,” Stephen said, and drained the flask. “Come on,” he said. “If Dr. Croghan catches us coming out, we gonna have some fancy explaining to do.”
No one so strong, no one
so lovely
in all the things of this world
As the eagle
ready for flight
& the jaguar
whose heart
is a mountain
See how they carry
my shield now
These slaves
—”The Eagle and the Jaguar”
Epilogue
Coda—May 1, 1843
The Mississippi river gleamed broad and bright under a warm cloudless sky, as wide as a lake but moving slowly south, building islands and erasing others in its patient journey to New Orleans. Life was everywhere. Weeds grew on waterlogged snags that accumulated silt from the river, and frogs rested on the snags, and herons hunted for frogs among the weeds. Archie was beginning to breathe a little easier.
There had been times in the past three weeks when he’d started awake in the middle of the night, wondering How will things grow now? Will the rain still fall or will the rivers dry up?
What have I done?
But men create gods, he reminded himself. And he added something that Tamanend hadn’t said: Men create gods, but life— the world—creates itself.
Archie leaned on the railing of the steamer St. Louis, watching Jane as she gazed out over the water with an expression of pure joy on her face. She’d done nothing but talk about the river since they’d boarded the St. Louis in Louisville, besieging him with facts about its breadth and length and notoriety as a Waterloo for careless navigators.
He’d been happy to see her react that way to the prospect of a trip. They’d stayed two weeks at the Mammoth Cave Hotel, recovering from their ordeal, and during that time Jane had been moody and prone to nightmares, clinging to Archie wherever he went. Of course he couldn’t blame her. The wounds of abandonment she had suffered would take years to heal. The scars on her body, though, had faded to light pink tracings on one side of her face and her arms. The chacmool had done that much for her.
The one place she had refused to follow him was into the hotel’s barn, part of which was used to store carriages. Riley Steen’s yellow drummer-wagon sat under a film of dust, looking strangely like an archaeological find amid the tack and farming implements hanging from the walls. Archie had gone through it, looking for anything he could sell or barter; he found a bizarre assortment of potions and elixirs, a collection of puppets, books in several languages, and a lockbox that when broken open proved to contain nearly three hundred dollars in various currencies. Not a fortune by any means, but enough of a stake to get him and Jane settled wherever they decided to go.
That night he’d asked her if she wanted to return to New York. “Eww, no,” she said, screwing up her face in such a delightfully childish expression that Archie had nearly broken down in tears at the sight of it. He did that fairly often, whenever some action or speech of hers struck him or reminded him of Helen. He supposed that, like her nightmares, this lachrymose tendency would pass, but for now it was good to be reminded of Helen, reminded of what it had been like to be a part of a family.
Like almost everyone else they spoke to, Jane wanted to go West. “San Francisco,” she said, her face alight with fantasy, and he’d agreed. But he thought perhaps Oregon would be a better place for them. Like Peter Daigle, Archie found himself suddenly averse to large cities.
West, in any case. If it was already too late in the year to join a wagon train, Archie figured he could find some sort of work until next spring; after all, he’d acquired a few skills in the course of his travels. Also he would have to see about getting Jane into school.
Archie had given the wagon to Stephen, who had set about whitewashing it and trading its contents for a down payment on two horses. He meant to buy his freedom, he said, and go to Monrovia in Africa. Acquiring whatever property he could was the first step. Archie wished him luck and wondered if he had discharged his oath. Was it peace to have a goal in sight, and believe you had the means to achieve it?
“I ought to thank you, Stephen,” Archie had said, standing by as Stephen scraped the painted slogans away from the drummer-wagon’s sideboards.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Prescott.” Stephen paused long enough to nod at Archie.
“You didn’t have to do that for me. I know—” Archie’s throat dried up as he thought of Alfonse in the waters of the Dead Sea, somewhere beneath their feet. “I mean, I think I know the promises the chacmool made you. It spoke to me as well.”
“Mr. Prescott,” Stephen said, laying the scraper down on a worktable, “I didn’t do it for you.”
Then he had walked out behind the barn. They had parted amicably, Archie supposed, with a kind of unspoken agreement to let sleeping dogs lie. Fair enough.
A May Day festival was taking place on Laclede’s Landing, with crowds of people and a fiddle-and-banjo group whose sprightly music drifted across the expanse of brown water. Jane rushed up to Archie, pointing at the gaily dressed crowd. “Can we go to the festival, Da?” she asked, tugging at his hand.
“Of course we can,” he replied. “It wouldn’t be a holiday if we didn’t see a festival.”
She smiled at him, and he felt another sudden urge to weep with joy at the sight of her. Then a shadow passed over her face, and she said, “Oh.”
“What is it?” he said, fearing she was about to lapse back into her melancholia.
She opened the small handbag he’d bought her in Louisville to go with a new dress and shoes. “I kept this, I don’t know why,” she said, and brought out a triangular-bladed knife of chipped obsidian.
Archie took it from her and turned it over in his hands, feeling a tightening in his chest around the scar below his left nipple. He had felt this knife biting into the heart of his other self, the one splayed on the altar in Jane’s place.
Or had Jane been there in his place?
He didn’t know. But Helen’s knife was gone, and this relic was what remained.
“No, that’s exactly right,” he said to Jane, keeping his voice steady. “When we cross the Mississippi, we should say goodbye to everything on the other side.”
He drew back his arm and threw the knife far out over the water, drawing the attention of some of the other passengers gathered on the deck. It sparkled in a high arc before skipping once and splashing into the river.
Jane watched the spot where it had fallen for a moment, her face troubled. Then she nestled against his side. “Nobody’ll ever find it there,” she said firmly.
“No, they won’t,” Archie agreed. He put his arm around her, and they listened to the floating strains of fiddle music as the St. Louis steamed toward the festival throng celebrating May Day on Laclede’s Landing.
Alexander C. Irvine Page 39