Inland

by Téa Obreht

  She remembered bristling at this. “Why would I want to keep company with redoubtable ladies? What the hell does he mean to suggest?”

  “That you’re pretty redoubtable yourself, I think.”

  “The nerve of him!”

  Emmett eyed her sidelong. “What do you figure it means?”

  “Of doubtful reputation.”

  Emmett shook his head. “This is why a writer must always steer clear of words that aren’t intuitive. That can’t be easily pulled apart. Redoubtable. Means formidable.”

  Every day, Sandy insisted, the town was filling up with new souls and fresh elation. Why, a Portugee clothier had just opened! Such fine scarves. Sandy’s contentment was impeded only by how fiercely he missed dear Emmett and dear Miss Nora—who were denying themselves a real benediction in this earthly course, not seeing the birth of a splendid new town. Wouldn’t it be something if they could all be reunited again under the banner of a glorious and worthy newspaper, therewith to bring the Territories into the bosom of the Union?

  “Why’s he so frantic?” Nora wondered.

  “He’s in trouble.”

  “You’re not thinking of heading to his rescue, are you?”

  They almost certainly would have managed to resist his enticements had their house not been the very last in a row that caught fire one September night when a cook at The Golden Spike two doors down let the bacon go a little too black. One errant spatter, and there went their books and papers, their roof and bed. Nora had been in the family way—or, at least, she thought she might be, despite several years of failing to be. She had stood across the street, with one small ewe under each arm, watching the useless mustering of the firewagon, and known in her very bones that Emmett would take this disastrous turn as an omen of new opportunities. Nothing that felt like reversing course could hold him here. She had seen her last autumn in Cheyenne.

  Sheep, fire, and Sandy Freed’s silver tongue. Those were the intertwining threads that brought them clattering into Arizona Territory in 1876. They arrived to find Amargo little more than a row of tents along Big Fork Creek, and Sandy Freed already dreaming up new prospects in Montana even as he initiated Emmett to all the exasperations of the Washington press—which, Emmett was flustered to learn, was swiftly growing outmoded and already worth nowhere near what Sandy had paid for it. But Sandy was himself: charming and well-intentioned, though a hopeless writer and editor, and still no stranger to the cardhouse. By November, he was so desperately in arrears that Emmett’s signature had to be secured on the bank papers. Not long afterwards, Sandy rode out to resupply in Flagstaff. His last letter had arrived six years ago, and was postmarked from Ontario—a place Nora heard was cold and isolated and overrun with badmen, the kind of place where a person could easily drown or freeze or fall down a steep ravine, or meet with any number of just comeuppances for taking advantage of the blithely good.

  Mama, Evelyn said, after Nora had accumulated about twenty pages of this. You’ve veered off the merits again.

  “Right,” she said. “The merits.”

  Why don’t you write about the house? Everyone’s got a house.

  The house. Emmett had insisted on building their first one himself. After the August monsoons carried it off, they raised this one together, squabbling over its construction. Emmett was homesick for the white palings and velvet wallpaper of his boyhood. He wanted Nora to have that, at least. But she couldn’t help seeing such frivolities as a shortcut to all kinds of ruin. There must be a reason why every poblador within a hundred miles of Amargo built jacal. Mud walls humbled a house, made it look sturdy and self-contained, removing the impression that it might be occupied by a bunch of vulnerable know-nothings. If they were going to be rubes in every other walk of life, hadn’t they better be practical where the house was concerned? Besides. They’d be up and gone within the year.

  But Emmett stood firm. So they hauled timber from the mountains; cut back mesquite and manzanita; hammered and measured and sanded until they had raised the very finest, lopsided imitation of a dogtrot she’d ever seen. They built a henhouse that fell victim to every enterprising fox within ten miles of the place, until they wised up and started laying out strychnine—which cost them dog after dog in the bargain. By the end of the year, they had thirty acres broken and their first winter wheat planted—and when that went to hell, they grew doomed greens until Desma Ruiz took pity and gifted them squash and turnip and better notions of how to coax life out of the roasted earth. On their claim papers, they wrote that they intended to “raise wheat & sheep.” Emmett could laugh about this now, as though it had been some stranger’s distant, pastoral fancy—but the facts stood clear: they had spent years sanding hooves and shearing miles of shit-smeared wool and yanking steaming, blood-clabbered lambs into life. Autumn after autumn, they had brought the flock in off baking summer hillsides, so they could inch forward against the debt of the printing press; so the three boys they raised up on hearthside pallets might have books and pencils; so they could get well enough situated to close off the old porch into two rooms, then three, and build up a floor, and put each boy behind his own door so that each might become his own man.

  Should the county seat be lost to Ash River, all this would have been for nothing. All the sores and sunstrokes. All the little details of life. And death, too.

  The merits, Mama, Evelyn said. The merits.

  The merits, the merits. Well, if Emmett could be believed about what was written on that puncheon ledge, the merits were simple enough. They had lived here. Not happily—but more so than some. Emmett, Nora, and their boys. Evelyn, too—for only a few months among the living, certainly, but every day thereafter as well, grown up in every cobweb and mote of dust and pool of sunlight upon the floor. When Nora pictured the empty house, she saw Evelyn coursing through its beams and banisters, through the burled hearts of the logs and the unconquerable window smudges and the oil stains on the counter. Her daughter was as much a part of it as any of them—more so, perhaps, for Evelyn was tethered to its very foundations, buried in the soil on which it stood. She had grown into a fine, pragmatic, if slightly brusque, young woman, and she would not tolerate leaving this house.

  But there was no writing this. So what was there left to say?

  “For many of us, our gardens are the graveyards of our very hearts. When Amargo goes bust, will we leave our dead behind?”

  You’d better not write that, Mama, Evelyn said. It will only draw people’s minds to me.

  She had better not write any of it. She was seized suddenly with the terror of what people would think if the nonsense she found herself committing to paper should ever be read by anybody. Even in its most censored edition, her words could only whet the appetite for gossip that seemed, at this juncture, the only thing Amargo and Ash River still had in common. She did not want to write about Evelyn; and without Evelyn, Nora’s story was as matter-of-fact as anyone else’s—save that other people’s daughters had lived, while hers had not.

  Everything she’d written went into the fire.

  But the whole endeavor was in her blood now. If only she could find the right standpoint from which to make a single, necessary appeal.

  If only Desma were willing to write something. Desma was unassailable. Unlike damn near everybody else, she had come to this place before any hope or delusion had formed about what it might become. Not one soul in this valley had managed to stand on two feet without a little push from Desma—a push she was always willing to give, though it ran against her fundamental inclination to be left alone. To have managed all that, and be rewarded after twenty-four long years with the death of her dearest love and truest friend, and be harried now by a relentless procession of riders and inspectors and agents questioning the legitimacy of her holdings. Well, it was just about beyond endurance.

  This was how, a month ago, Nora had finally come to write:

&n
bsp; Alas, it seems the word “Amargo” cannot appear in the Ash River Clarion’s pages without reference to outlaw depredation, insolvency, and water shortage. We of Amargo are astonished to learn our prospects are so dire. The introduced measure is nothing but the final stroke in a long campaign of malicious denigration of our township and citizenry, prospects, and safety, all to Ash River’s gain. The Clarion would do well to remember Amargo’s near-twenty years of meritorious service as the county seat, owed in large measure to the efforts of good folk like Desma Ruiz, a widow twice over, who settled here twenty years ago and has remained through drought and famine and Stock Association depredations to prove up the land and serve as a reminder that fulfillment and prosperity and fellowship can be got here. We owe her esteem and allegiance—for what will become of her house, her memories, her redoubtable life’s work should the town go bust? Amargo must not surrender without contest, no matter how many false reports the Ash River Clarion prints; no matter how many dragons’ teeth Mr. Merrion Crace and the Stock Association sow.

  Emmett was puzzled when she showed him the letter.

  “Why are you using the word ‘redoubtable’ here?”

  “Well, I know its meaning now.”

  “Other people don’t. They might run aground on the same misunderstanding as you did before. It’s not an intuitive word.”

  “You haven’t much faith in your readership.”

  Emmett was still studying the paper.

  “And here—what do you mean by dragons’ teeth?”

  “The Hellenes had it that when you sow dragons’ teeth, you reap a battle-ready army.” Pleased with herself, she watched him make his way through her letter again. “When will you print it?”

  “Print it?” He looked up at her with genuine surprise. “Darling, this undertaking was purely for the benefit of your constitution.”

  Her constitution? Her constitution boiled for days. Worse still was Emmett’s inability to comprehend why she was so withdrawn and curt.

  But don’t you feel released, Mama, having written it?

  She did not. All that time, all that effort. Pages and pages written and rewritten, wrung out and reconstituted until she was no longer certain of her own logic. And Emmett—still dragging his feet with a rebuttal he continued to claim he was writing; still dawdling with half-hearted scraps of script he refused to let her see. Where was the pen-wielding cavalier who had protested the Apache Wars outright, and marked every land-grab and unjust closure and extrajudicial hanging from here to Yuma?

  Well. Emmett had carted off to Cumberland in search of the wretched Paul Griggs and his damnable water delivery, leaving the boys in charge of the printhouse. And one day later, a little giddy with sleeplessness and determination, Nora had found herself slipping her note to Dolan.

  “A last-minute addition,” she said.

  Dolan read it with widening eyes. “Has Papa seen this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who on earth is ‘Ellen Francis’?”

  In a failure of imagination, Nora had put her mother’s name to the text. But Dolan had no memory of Ellen Francis Volk, had never met nor written to her. It would surprise Nora to learn that he remembered having had a Grandmother Ellen at all.

  “You don’t know her. She’s newly set up out on the Red Fork.”

  “And she wrote to you?”

  “To your father. Last week.”

  And still there had been time to confess, to withdraw. Still Dolan had lingered in the doorway, twisting his hat. “You’re certain Papa approves?”

  Rob, who’d watched all this sidelong from the fence, returned and took the note from his brother’s hand. “Come on,” he said, “Papa approves.”

  And so the piece had run—and what had it wrought? A fleeting afternoon’s thrill at the sight of her familiar words, ink-fat and coursing down the page, so formal, so lasting. A brief daydream that she and Desma might laugh about all this together. She had even allowed herself to believe—just for a moment, admittedly, for she knew Desma well enough—that after an initial period of agitation, Desma might grow to feel bashfully warm about having been lauded thus for all the virtues she would never extol in herself.

  But instead, everything had gone to hell. The very next afternoon, Dolan was waving the Clarion in her face. They did not shy from rebuttals, the Clarion, and they’d written one up so fast Nora could scarcely believe they hadn’t had it lined up long before the whole mess had even begun. Goddamn the might of the daily.

  Despite our desire to mount a defense of our publication’s character—baselessly maligned by The Amargo Sentinel—the Ash River Clarion abstains from anything that might invite indictment of our journalistic propriety. Suffer us to dismantle these accusations instead. Firstly: reporting the facts about Amargo’s predicaments is a matter of civic responsibility. That once-noble town’s inevitable ruination is as wounding to us, its friends and neighbors, as it is to its own fine citizenry. Second: it is well proven that counties derive a great benefit from the movement of legislative seats. The process encourages civic engagement, and will be crucial to our Territory’s petition for statehood. Finally: though Mr. Merrion Crace holds a stake in this newspaper, the Sentinel’s crude understanding of his involvement betrays divination rather than truth—which is unsurprising, of course, given its publisher’s connection to mesmerists and mediums. The facts are as follows: this paper was established to furnish the people of Inés Valley with news and tidings, and Mr. Crace has always been divested from its management. As to Mrs. Desma Ruiz, being widowed twice would require her having been widowed to begin with; and since we have it on good authority that her confederation with the late Mr. Rey Ruiz was not legal—insofar as she was, and yet remains, married to her first husband Mr. Robert Gris—it is the duty of this publication to point out that she is not a widow at all.

  “There’ll be hell to pay now,” said Dolan despairingly. “From Father and the Stock Association both.”

  “So be it,” Nora said. But her heart was whipping. She read the last line again. How perfectly like Bertrand Stills, that desperate windbag, to compensate for his lack of editorial substance by devising utter fictions—and about Desma no less, and so soon after Rey’s death. The muckraker.

  I reckon she wouldn’t be in the muck, Mama, Evelyn pointed out, had you not plunged her there to begin with.

  It would have been wiser, perhaps, to let the matter lie. Had the slights been aimed at Nora herself, rather than at Desma, perhaps she might have managed to harden herself to them, and the whole affair would have fallen silently from memory. But there she was, not two days later—folding her reply into Rob’s hand, because she knew in her bones that Dolan would not make the same mistake twice.

  Rob smirked. “This Ellen Francis sure is something. She writes up the news faster’n we do.”

  “She’s got nothing better to do,” Nora said. “She’s very old and past her time.”

  “Awful steady penmanship. I damn near recognize it.”

  “Don’t be smart. Make sure it’s printed before Missus Francis expires from this world.”

  And so it was.

  If any doubt remains as to the Ash River Clarion’s relationship with truth, look no further than its reply last week to The Amargo Sentinel. This screed reveals all one need ever know about the Clarion’s stance on fact. Though if further proof of duplicity is required, one need look only to the Clarion’s recent history. Was it not the Ash River Clarion that published, just last summer, a report of two schoolmarms roasting to death in their shack—a quickly disproven fiction whose purpose was to discourage homesteading by professional ladies? And did not the Ash River Clarion vastly exaggerate the number of steers that perished in the Brushing fire—claiming it was four hundred head of cattle, when in fact it was thirty, so that Merrion Crace and the Stock Association could claim greater losses? The scores of recent arrivals fo
r whose benefit the county seat warrants removal may not know this of their local paper yet—but rest assured that those of us who have lived with it for years are not so readily fooled. To besmirch a citizen as well respected as Desma Ruiz casts a pall over Ash River and all its citizens. It is well established that Mrs. Ruiz’ first husband, Robert Gris, was gunned down in New Orleans in 1868 following an altercation with a gambler about a pony. To those lacking the necessary arithmetic: this means Mrs. Desma had been a widow for eight years when she wed Rey Ruiz of Carter County on March 25th 1876 in the church of maintown Amargo, whose very pews the county seat relocation would see emptied. As many of you know, she was widowed again following Rey’s death this April past.

  And thus in the eight days since Emmett had been chasing Paul Griggs and the water owed to them around Cumberland, blows had been exchanged thrice between Amargo and Ash River, and Dolan had lost about a stone of weight agonizing over it. But all the details were now outlaid: dates, locales, the manner of Robert Gris’s death. Indisputable to a fact.

  Nora had just begun to feel steady again when the next reply came flying through her door. This one froze her blood.

  I write regarding a matter of which I have been advised by a gentleman agent who visited me last week. I am that same Robert Gris of New Orleans, the very man married to Desma Gris in that selfsame city. I have not seen my wife, Desma (née Zaganou), since 1868, when she disappeared from our house. Given that she was prone to certain indulgences and had vanished to pursue them before, I presumed she would return in due course. When she did not, I presumed some ill fate had befallen her. I regret to hear of the passing of her friend, Mr. Rey Ruiz, of which the agent has informed me, but the law is clear: we cannot both have been her husband, as she is still my wife. I urge the citizens of Amargo and Ash River not to be taken in by this unfortunate duplicity.