by Téa Obreht
Of that particular journey, Ellen Francis Volk was reluctant to say almost anything—save to confess that its duration had felt, to her, like drifting, unbounded and bereft, away from any graspable fact of life, while all around her a featureless and impenetrable twilight gathered, like an evening of the mind.
NORA GREW UP A STRANGER to that feeling. Morton Hole was comfortingly delimited: west of town lay the rich plain, dotted all the way to the Missouri with folk sturdy or mad enough to break it; east lay the Mississippi, with its great log drafts, merging and bumping alongside her father’s in their stagnant downriver course.
The Volks opened a boardinghouse, and Nora’s earliest memories were of miles of damp linen, acres of bread, the ceaseless music of spoons on tin that attended the upkeep of hungry lumbermen.
She learned letters and manners from the pale, dismayed wives of her father’s subordinates, who raised her to defend the hearth and revile a lie—nominally at least, for the older she grew the more she came to recognize falsehood as the preservative that allowed the world to maintain its shape. The lumbermen, for instance, talked of her father as a fearsome man: proud, immense, and daunting. Their reticence about his more vulnerable qualities—his superstitions about the weather, or his habit of leaving a little a drop of something at the bottom of his glass to placate the Devil—allowed him to go through life undiminished. He, in turn, lauded the hospitality and vigor of his wife, blind or indifferent to the well-known fact that years on the trail had made her rheumatic and closely allied to whiskey.
For Nora’s brothers, too, duplicity was a way of life. Around town they were known for being decent and upright, the kind of boys who’d help you break acres if you were injured without accepting a cent for their trouble. But at home they were hellions, the gentle Michael lured into instantly regretted misadventures by the head-wild Paul. Hardly a morning arose without some concealment of the previous night’s exploits: where they’d been, how late they’d stayed, why they smelled like the cathouse, how much money they’d lost in whatever long-odds prizefight had most recently rattled the barn behind the school. Nora withstood years of her mother’s switching for refusing to report their nocturnal misdeeds. Her own knack for deceit surprised her. Lying was as easy as saying nothing.
It struck her at some point that all life must necessarily feed on willful delusion. What else could explain the existence—and still more surprisingly, the persistence—of a place like Morton Hole, this huddle of journeyed lives strung along a thoroughfare obdurately referred to as Main Street? Would it not have been more earnest to call it Only Street? Despite his illiteracy, its founding father (a prospector evangelist now awaiting salvation beneath a stone slab marked A. R. MORTON) was at least forthright enough to call it a hole. Nora’s elders, on the other hand, had gussied up their row of shacks as if it were Chicago rising. They built a church with a white steeple, and a clubhouse for town councilors. The Ladies’ Association troubled itself with securing schoolteachers, establishing watercolor salons so that Morton Hole’s fairer sex might be initiated to the sublimities of portraiture. The storekeeping Fox brothers fit their Mercantile with a huge plate-glass window, which fell victim to howling storms, only to be replaced by new panels from Saint Louis—each after the other doomed to the selfsame fate, year after year, as though the Fox brothers believed sheer determination might alter the odds of glass against an Iowa hailstorm. As though any recent arrivals on these plains had more agency than the cornhusk dolls Nora had wantonly demolished as a child.
Buttressing local delusions were the polite idioms that ruled both print and conversation: women took the waters; men took the air; folks did or did not acknowledge the corn. The only exception was made for Indian depredations, regarding which both newspapers and conversation were pointedly explicit. By the time she was five, Nora had heard just about every imaginable butchery detailed. She spent so much time imagining the wretched corpses scalped and disemboweled and scattered about the plains that she began to feel she’d witnessed it all personally. The town ladies must have shared that illusion, for a great deal of their time was spent debating the extent of God’s mercy where self-solution was concerned. It took her a long time to understand that they were wondering whether their Heavenly Father would forgive them if they killed themselves upon being captured by the Dakota. Ten years old when Fetterman rode out on his star-crossed jaunt against the Sioux, Nora had squirmed through a sermon dedicated to outlaying the desecrations those good men had suffered: their eyes torn out, their limbs hacked off, all of it detailed right there in the Herald, which the reverend shook at his congregation from the pulpit. Less than a year later, that same reverend would stand graveside at her brother’s burial and say that Michael had been “remanded to his Judge”—igniting in Nora a lasting flicker of hatred, because she knew the cleric capable of listing atrocities, and it seemed cowardly of him to talk around Michael’s agony. There was nothing genteel about the fever that had denigrated her brother and scorched his brain.
When she first met Emmett Lark, he’d seemed as susceptible to such distortion as everybody else. He turned up at Gus Volk’s mill the summer Nora turned sixteen: a rangy, bronze youth with an odd, angular face and a firework of sun-fried hair. Nothing to his name but a chessboard and a gunnysack of old books. He was picking up labors on his way out west, where he intended to become a schoolmaster. The first thing Nora heard about him was that he seemed unprovoked when the other men derided his teaching ambitions. The second was that a mere week on the job saw him entrusted with the notching and tallying of the logs, as no greater pedant had ever come through Morton Hole.
Emmett was a natural fit for the attic, the roasting crawlspace to which Nora’s mother relegated all newly arrived greenhorns. Nora, in her Sisyphean stairwell treks, would look around the laundry pile and see him bellied on the floor in a futile effort to keep cool, his finger wandering slowly, back and forth, down the page of some unintelligible scientific guide. Every once in a while, for variety, he would lay the chessboard out and stare at it. More than a month went by before she realized his set was not intact. Hominy kernels were interspersed among the rooks. A huge, cracked bicuspid sat where the white knight should be.
“What’s that?” she asked one night, having braved up enough to put her head around the door.
Emmett raised it from the board. “A tooth.”
“That’s evident enough,” she said, flushing with embarrassment now that the conversation seemed fated to continue. “What from?”
“A river horse.”
“What’s that?”
“Something rather large, I think.”
Even in those days Emmett’s smile brimmed with a kind of inscrutable half-sadness. It had made her feel very gullible, and therefore very provoked. “I think you’ll find that we are not such bumpkins here as you suppose, sir,” she said. “I happen to know there’s no such thing.”
“I’m afraid there is, miss. In Zambezia, I believe.”
She went away seething. Zambezia indeed. No smirking attic-dweller better think he could fool her so handily with some bestial invention. It amused her now to remember that the most punishing thing she could think to do was revert to calling him “Mister Lark” and restrict her interactions with him even further. A curt good morning. Clipped thanks when he happened to hold the door. A simple strategy, but one that continued to confound Emmett until Christmastime, when some magazine illustrator lodging with them donated a stack of stereograph cards to the Yuletide bazaar in an effort to impress her father. Tasked with raffle inventory, Nora was shuffling through them before the festivities when she came across the picture of a boatful of outmatched tribesmen, hurling javelins at a tusked and boulder-headed monster, which reared at their vessel from the frothing waters. At the bottom of the picture were printed the words: HUNTING THE RIVER HORSE.
She found Emmett outside, clearing the drive. “You ever seen one
?” He stared at her from behind a drift of breath. “A river horse?”
“No, miss, I have not.” The tooth had been gifted him by a well-traveled friend of his father’s. Nora drew the stereograph from her sleeve and held it out to him. He helped her climb the jackfence, and they angled the card to catch the light sieving out from the party.
Emmett whistled. “If that picture’s within a breath of the real thing, some poor fella surely lost his life gaining this tooth.”
“From the mouth of a river horse to an Iowa timber camp,” she said. “What a journey.”
Other people had spring wagon rides and long afternoon walks. Nora and Emmett had the tooth. It reminded them how little of the world they really knew, a fact they strived together to remedy. Whenever he was sent to town, Emmett would buy, borrow, or barter whatever newspapers and magazines he could source, and scour the faded print for any new learning that might swell their mutual bestiary. With an unsteady hand, he cut out stories about Burmese wildcats, or snakes the length of a whole train car that could crush a man’s bones and swallow him whole. Nora, in turn, pored over the ancient newsprint that papered ladies’ kitchens. She tore out pictures of dome-backed pack mules of the Saharan desert and strange, striped wolves that haunted the islands of the Tasman Sea.
Not long before they fell in together, a traveling circus brought a zebra through Morton Hole. Emmett and Nora stood on the bridge and watched it move slowly down the road on the opposite bank, through the brindled trees and into history.
“They never look in life as they do on paper, do they?” Nora said.
Emmett shrugged. “I guess people don’t either.”
In November, when the river began to freeze, he rode for Nebraska. She was as sorry to see him go as she had ever been about anything. It was a wretched, drawn-out goodbye, and she readied herself for a wretched, drawn-out wait for his letters. He surprised her instead by reappearing in her father’s parlor that same evening, dressed in what passed for finery, heart outspread, dry field nettles in his fist.
The story, as Emmett later told it to their boys, was that he’d gotten as far as Freehold, been thunderstruck by love for her, and turned his horse. The truth, she suspected, was that he’d reached Freehold, realized he had very little notion of what he was doing, and come back for reinforcements.
They were married in her father’s house, and set off the following spring. For two years they followed railroad and rumor. Where schoolmasters were not needed, the frontier flung wild alternatives at Emmett, who was game enough to try his hand at just about anything: storekeeping, clerking for the railway. Dispiritingly, no occupation tolerated greenhorns for very long, even if they were learned. No sooner had Nora warmed to the curtains and mattress of whatever place boarded them than they were off again.
She did not begin to feel the unboundedness her mother had described all those years ago until a few towns along the way. It grew in from the outer corners of her mind. She could not help feeling, as she marked the particulars of each new camp—the view through her window, the way to the Mercantile, the face of whatever woman lived nearest—that a featureless twilight was massing both ahead and behind. With every rearrangement, it seemed to draw a little nearer.
The Larks ended up in Cheyenne. Some years earlier, the Union Pacific had come through and left behind a Babylon maelstrom, a bilious, gray, seething wreck on the plains. Miners and gamblers and pimps, swaggering dudes who’d found themselves lesser men than they believed: all of them, guts laidbare. From the tiny window of their house on Spruce Street, Nora watched the defeated shadows lurching home at dawn and felt this must be the crux of life: everybody blundering around in the full glare of ruination.
No undertaking in Cheyenne was ever completed. Hammers sang day and night. The moment paint gawded a falsefront, the pale blond bones of some new joint sprang up overnight just down the road. If something looked to be nearing completion, there loomed the unspoken understanding that it would likely burn down soon enough and compel more work. Beyond town lay the twin cables of the railway, and the plains, gray and snow-dregged in winter, yellow every other season, scattershot with distant, unseen forts. You could stand anywhere and look off in any direction and feel you were nowhere, and yet somehow perfectly bounded, perfectly surrounded. That was Cheyenne: nowhere, wanting nothing more than to be exactly what it was.
Even Emmett could not escape its influence. At first, he pursued his old schoolmastering ambitions with his usual good cheer. He started small. Set up a tiny schoolhouse he managed to fill with unruly ragamuffins who shouted over him and tumbled about the place. But there was little living in that, and he was flanked on all sides by greater chancers than he had ever been. Of course, that he was surrounded by them in saloons, where they came to weep about how their risks had bankrupted them, made little difference. Nora recognized what was coming—her father had been similarly disposed.
Sure enough, their house became a waystation for the woebegone. She lost track of how often Emmett returned at day’s-end, tailed by some low-down, hungry soul, half-crazed with sun and the absolute bleakness of life. She would lie on their cot behind the buffalo hide curtain that divided the room, listening to Emmett defend the sanctity of work and worth until dawn.
One of their more tolerable lodgers was a man named Sandy Freed. He’d got himself sideways in some sort of assaying enterprise, and had just drifted into town in disgrace when he happened to sit beside Emmett’s table at the Iron Horse saloon. The two of them were prone to wax poetic about this moment, but Nora could guess at the meat of it. Emmett was probably scribbling in his notebook, and Sandy was not so drunk that he couldn’t read over his seatmate’s arm. He’d probably said: “May I tell you, sir, what a damn pleasure it is to meet another literate person here? Pardon my profanity, but I must speak my mind. A damn pleasure.”
Then they probably shook hands, exchanged pleasantries. Emmett was persuaded to divulge his frustrations with frontier schooling. And then Sandy Freed, gazing wonderingly at him with those big liquid eyes, went on to say something like, “If the frontier were made up of more men like you, sir, I reckon I wouldn’t have hit the gargle at all. Yes, yes. And maybe I’d have done all the things I intended to prove up this here territory in the spirit of the coming century.”
Once Sandy Freed got upright again, he made himself useful about the house. Nora found he could be marvelous company. His God-given eloquence was buttressed on all sides by charms he’d cultivated throughout a long life of asking forgiveness for assorted transgressions about which he was alternately boastful and ashamed. He’d read the poets, and was happy to talk for hours about them. A life of travel had initiated him to the world’s many wonders. Their details varied somewhat from story to story, but hearing him gab on about them while she worked kept the twilight at bay. When Sandy was not crumpled by his chief vices—drink, dice, and balcony women—he could see straight to the beginning of the century. And what a glorious vision it was. “Information!” was his favorite breakfast talk, assuming he had managed to rouse himself from whatever debasement he’d enjoyed the night before. “News, debate! That’s what’ll help the plowman and the stonebreaker, Emmett. You gone fight a righteous fight? Then spread the written word from here to California.”
By this time, the Larks were rounding the bend on their second year in Cheyenne. Emmett had failed utterly in his efforts to redirect the hatred of Cheyenne’s schoolchildren from the Indians to the British; and from luckless settlers to cattle barons. He had also served as a pallbearer to strangers—cowpokes and prospectors at whose funerals he was often the only mourner—and had begun to feel that the disadvantages of being a community pillar outweighed the merits. Every hour of the day might bring some distraught new widow to his door, freshly robbed of a husband who’d been cheated out of land or dues or goods by more powerful interests. These women wanted advice, protection, a sense of what to do next. Guilty o
ver the limits of his counsel, Emmett resorted to buying their livestock, mostly sheep, thereby easing a little of their burden as they packed up and returned to whatever life they had most recently abandoned.
“What in goddamn are we supposed to do with all these sheep?” Nora asked, once their rickety little makeshift pen was overrun.
“Sell them, of course,” Emmett said cheerfully.
He tried this, and after several half-failures learned from some more knowledgeable entity that he’d managed to get himself a runty flock. Nora’s fury failed to even dent his amusement. He threw himself into learning how to right the ship—which was, in truth, what she had most admired about him all along. He learned how to shear them, and then found out little by little that their ongoing deficiencies were the result of needing more grazing land, a place to roam and fatten without the threat of ruinous winters.
By this time, Sandy Freed had taken off for Arizona Territory. Having roamed awhile, he took on the role of town booster for a little mining district between Phoenix and Flagstaff. For a thousand dollars he had acquired a mortgaged plot with a ramshackle house on it and a printing press installed therein. One thousand dollars. A sum Sandy had never seen, nor would ever earn, in his lifetime. But there was his signature on the bank papers, and his name in the banner of the misspelled newsletters that kept arriving at Emmett and Nora’s under the heading The Amargo Sentinel with charming regularity until the next time Sandy hit the bottle.
Then his correspondence took on more urgency. Oh, Mister Lark, how glorious it is in Arizona Territory. Cloudless blue skies and green fields for grazing. Fine, hardworking folk unafflicted by the deficits of character that drive men to gold fever, et cetera. And such redoubtable ladies to keep Miss Nora company!