by Téa Obreht
She examined the bucket in the stagnant privacy of her kitchen. How on earth had the water dropped further? What possible reason could that fool girl have found to waste still more of it? But to refuse the Doc now would look like pettiness, and she could not bring herself to do it. She watched him drink it down with a knot in her throat. It was the longest, most luxuriant drink she’d ever seen another person take.
“Thank you,” he said, when he finished.
“Hector,” she said. “What is it you want me to do?”
“I’d like you to give some thought to selling me the newspaper.” His boot tapped the table-leg lightly. “And should you find yourself so inclined, perhaps you might help Emmett arrive at the same conclusion. It’s too vital now to squander such a resource on indecision or cowardice.”
“This is why Emmett dislikes you, you know. He’s always after telling me not to accept you coming over to dispense medicine uninvited. It may seem free, Nora—but somewhere, someone is running a tab.”
“Most tabs, I believe, seek to draw on money you don’t have rather than give you more. Not so with me.”
She stood, knowing he would follow suit. “I’ll give it some thought, then. Ask myself: how will this help me do better than just raise Emmett Lark’s hothead heritors?”
He skated the envelope of letters across the table to her. “You may find all kinds of things sway you. Who knows, Nora? Perhaps a week from now, you’ll be a rich woman and running off with Sheriff Harlan.”
A single mention of Harlan Bell had been uncivil enough. A second was intolerable. “What have you got in your mind about my association with Harlan Bell?”
He replaced his hat. Its top very nearly touched the ceiling beams. “We’ve been very good friends for a very long time, Nora—I’ll do you the courtesy of withholding my reply.”
SHE WATCHED THE DOC SAY his goodbyes from the boiling shade of the porch. Restored to his ordinary, charming ease, he nattered with one hand in Toby’s hair, the other on the small of Josie’s back, interlarding his endearments with the small jokes that got folks wistful for his company. Already, even Nora herself was longingly revisiting a moment not half an hour old: his joke about absolving her of her debt, the debonair swirl of his invisible pen. What a rake, she thought. Blessed with a certain manner, one could inhabit a room long after having left it.
Emmett, too, was like this: concerned, attentive, offhandedly charming. Possessed of that rarest gift: making his every gesture seem like a benediction. People saw his passions as something to aspire to. She had always suspected this to be what Sandy Freed had recognized in him. He cleaved bullheadedly to his stances because he had taken great pains to arrive at them. Every screed against the bureaucracy of land claims or the matter of Indian sovereignty had somehow earned him more admirers than it cost him friends. Even Nora, who had grown up under the formidable shadow of the Dakota, and made a point of smirking when he called Indians the “dispossessed children of the earth,” had found herself swayed by his convictions.
Of course, she had been different in the early days: lovestruck and excitable and naïve. She did not really know what it meant to homestead. She had never been lonely. Even her terrors had been communal. What did she know about Indians—their women in particular? In Iowa, they had not come visiting as they did here. She’d been in the Territory three weeks when she found herself sitting at Desma’s table with a Navajo mother and two lively daughters, who, not twenty minutes before, had been mere apparitions on the plain, and were now maneuvering handily between Spanish and Navajo while Desma poured coffee and readied bags of cornmeal for them to take home. When they returned the following week, Nora asked: “I’ve heard of them begging like this in Nebraska—do they just go from house to house?”
“Not begging,” Desma said. “This is their way.”
Somewhere between Desma’s sharpness and Emmett’s children-of-the-earth treatise, she resolved to make herself hospitable. However uneasy, she would try.
Because hers was a new homestead, and all the girls seemed to have their favorite haunts already, no Indian visitor came until June, when Nora turned, with Evelyn sucking at her breast, to see a curious face in the window. It was an old woman—likely Navajo, though later she would ask herself what this presumption had been founded upon.
The old woman was still out there an hour later when Nora opened the door. She came in and sat herself down at the kitchen table as though she had done so a hundred times before, and began looking around the room, offering a quiet but torrential commentary on what Nora assumed must be the deficiencies of her housekeeping. The whole enterprise felt precarious. Nora spoke no more Navajo than the woman spoke English. Her youth made her naturally deferent, but she suspected her every gesture—from serving the tea without a saucer to standing rather than sitting in her guest’s company—to be a calamitous insult.
But presently, without incident, the woman left.
Every few weeks thereafter she would appear at the top of the ridge and Nora would sling the kettle on the hob. Her guest talked steadily—a mercy, really, for it allowed Nora to nod along and emerge from the encounter feeling quite hospitable despite having remained more or less silent. And it was all right, even pleasant, to have another soul around the house—save for those occasions when her guest succumbed to the uninvited urge to help herself to Evelyn, then about three months old, who growled and hiccuped most hours of the day in a kitchen drawer Emmett had rigged for a cradle.
At every abrupt silence, Nora would turn to find her daughter asleep in the stranger’s blankets.
“Where’s the harm in that?” Desma said.
Wasn’t it obvious? Suppose one day—owing to some tragic miscommunication or the general derangement of age—the old woman should refuse to return the baby? It had happened before. Desma might wave her off, and Emmett might laugh, but it had happened in other houses, to other women. Nora had read about it and felt sometimes that her fear was apparent enough to even drive the old woman to it.
It did not take her long to arrive at the solution of distracting her guest from caregiving by barter. The old woman had great affinity for sugar, but offered very little in return—trinkets, mostly, which Nora tended to keep on the porch as soon as the woman left and replace in various positions of state about the house as soon as she reappeared.
“I hope the two of you are getting along,” Emmett muttered after paying up their account at the Mercantile. “I believe we’ve bought up all the sugar in the county this month.” That was the price of friendship, Nora wanted to say—but she cursed herself for having just set a new precedent of gifting coffee beans along with the sugar. When next the old woman showed her face, Nora tried to retreat from her own previous extravagance. This led to what must have been a kind of quarrel: the woman grew very excited and pointed repeatedly toward the kitchen. Her next visit was a grand affair, at which she presented Nora a remarkable and elaborate blanket. When she tried to wrap Evelyn up in it, Nora dropped a bag of sugar into her hands instead.
Right away, she felt herself touch the line of insult—anyone with half a mind would realize that the exchange was conciliatory. Grasping that she would not be allowed to hold the baby, Nora’s guest looked baffled and sullen. Nora obliged her with a second bag of sugar. When a third seemed to be demanded, Nora flew into the teeth of her own anger. “That’s quite enough.” She said it in English of course, but her general meaning was unmistakable. The old woman began to protest, and Nora, with Evelyn still in her arms, began edging her toward the door.
When last Nora saw her, the old woman was making her way across the ridge in the opposite direction of her customary travel. Not left and up the road to town, but right—down the road leading nowhere, right off the map and into the evening.
Next followed a plunging dread. For hours, Nora waited by the window for the old woman to return.
W
hen Emmett came home to a cold stove and a still house, she alluded to the incident but couldn’t confess the degree to which it had all barmed up in her mind. She was certain, by now, that her visitor, in her old-woman vindictiveness, would send riders from her village against the house to steal the little girl. Yes. Nora had read about it—too often, perhaps, and in precisely the kind of publications Emmett would deride, but there it was, the unbearable truth of her thoughts.
“We had an unpleasant time,” she said.
“Don’t worry so.” Emmett gave her a little squeeze. “Old women are such bitter devils. She’ll come back again next week, if only to remind you what a churl you’ve been.”
But still the old woman did not return.
This only worsened everything, of course. The stories of Gus Volk’s imagination, of Nora’s girlhood, teemed with vengeful hags—woodland witches shoving pretty children into ovens, or else fencing their houses with the bones of men who had aggrieved them. A girl weaned on such notions should have known better than to insult some venerable ancient. She realized, in mounting despair, that she lacked the learning to ascertain whether the woman was even Navajo at all—there was every chance, God help her, that Nora had dismissed an Apache. And for what? The indulgence of another bag of sugar?
What harm would it have done to let her hold the child? A woman so old had probably raised a few of her own. She had probably lost some, too, to distance or ailment or the scalp hunters who ranged south of here, and had wanted nothing more than to inhale the deep, sunshine warmth of a new baby.
By then, Nora was staying up nights and sleeping through the daytime hours. Her planned atonement grew more and more elaborate. Useless concessions sprang up in her heart: she would overcome the bedevilment of her own stupidity and conquer, at long last, the Spanish language, as Emmett had implored her to do, though the effort reduce her to tears; she would be hospitable, and learned, and she would pull herself from the teeth of her rage for all time, if only the Almighty would send her slighted guest back to her door.
But the old woman shadowed everything except her threshold. And the more time went by, the more justified Nora’s dread seemed.
When she sought Desma’s counsel about it, the irrepressible Missus Ruiz waved her off. “Oh, no doubt you’ve wounded her to her very bones. But don’t be stupid. Whoever she is, she has worries that far exceed even your insults.”
This hadn’t gone very far toward easing her dismay. And Desma’s tolerance of female absurdity had its limits. She withstood another few days of questioning, and put things to an end with a firm: “Don’t be stupid.”
Nora had never blamed her for that, of course. Desma did not have children. Desma did not understand the evening. She did not understand the fear that overcame Nora when Emmett left, or when any sound stirred the brush, or when that pinto and rider had appeared, some weeks later, on the hill.
AT FIRST, EVELYN’S DEATH CAST both Nora and Emmett down in equal measure. They did not eat. They saw no visitors. They slept through their days and let the crops rot and the sheep wander. Ruination seemed imminent, but unimportant; for what else mattered, now that the evening—kept at bay all this time by sheer force of will, by the careful assembly of facts and mapping of environs—had finally pressed itself against the house? Nora lived, but only in her mind. Remembering that time, on the rare occasions she couldn’t help but think of it, she was able nowadays to resurrect only two pictures: sitting up, some morning or afternoon, and watching Desma Ruiz weed her garden; and realizing that Emmett’s beard, against which she pressed her face when she slept, had finally grown in enough to stop inflaming his chin.
Emmett’s grief moved her. She had felt certain loss would make them strangers, or reveal, as misfortunes often do, the extent to which they had been strangers all along. But he took her by surprise. He saw to the house, cooked terrible stews, drew her baths, combed her hair. His passion for her seemed to deepen inexplicably, and for a while they drifted through the weeks, hand in hand, as though all that need be done was mind one another. Just under a year later, stern as a little owl, Rob came along. All Emmett’s joy was restored, but Nora despaired even to look at the child, at his pink little nail-beds and whisper of hair. Again and again, her mind flew to all the ways he might be killed—considerations to which her husband seemed blissfully immune. Didn’t he know the cruelty of life? The evening had withdrawn a little, but could return at any moment to consume this child as it had the last one, and Nora along with it. She began to consider flight. In one letter after another, she tried to ready her mother for her return. She felt unwell and lonesome for Iowa; the West did not agree with her at all. But Ellen Francis Volk was hesitant. What would people say, Nora? What indeed. There was no need to ask. But would it be so very terrible to become one of those women who could not endure the lives into which they had followed their husbands, and whom the townsfolk derided in whispers? Would it be so terrible to have her disappearance explained as temporary, necessary for her health? Hem Aftergood’s wife had been such a woman; so had Roberto Silva’s. Years had passed without either of them being heard from again, and neither Hem nor Roberto seemed especially broken up about it. But there lay the problem—Emmett would be. Unlike those other unions, the Larks’ was a love-match. Hadn’t he come back for her with that fistful of dry flowers? Hadn’t he minded her more carefully than she had any right to expect? What betrayal to abandon him now in favor of this tiny, frowning son, who, she felt in her bones, would not survive his first year regardless of the pains she took to save him. It was as clear to her as a sign of rain: the child would die.
It’s a real pity, something distant in her kept on whispering. He’s doomed, poor thing.
She came to find this inevitability strangely comforting. Since Rob was doomed, she could regard him abstractedly—not with dispassion, but from some odd, hazy remove, as though she were merely looking in on him through glass. Her mothering got to be a little cavalier. She could ride into town with him bindled between her breasts. She could leave him in the kitchen-drawer cradle and be pleasantly surprised to find him still there, kicking and fussing, a minute or an hour later. Ah, the voice would say, but next time he won’t be so lucky. Somehow, he always was. Rob turned one, and then two, bobbing falteringly around the yard in pursuit of chickens, disdainful of the brother Nora had borne him—a development which did not brighten her views about either child’s odds of survival. Sooner or later—when her back was turned, or right before her eyes—some violence or misfortune, some rusted nail or ill-gained ladder or bucking horse or diphtherial outbreak would raze them both and prove her right. It’s a pity, Mama, that’s for sure. But it can’t be helped.
* * *
—
By the time she had begun to feel like herself again—or at least, allowed her love to grow toward, rather than alongside, her boys—Emmett had gone back to trying to save the printing press. And most vitally of all, that new, curmudgeonly little voice had begun answering Nora whenever she talked to herself around the house.
She knew the voice could not belong to the real Evelyn. The Larks had never been particularly godly, but from her childhood brush with Gus Volk’s religion, Nora had managed to retain that neither phantoms nor angels matured in the ethereal realms. And yet this voice—a sweet, slightly clipped little tone—seemed more suited to a child of about six than the infant Evelyn had been when she died. Nora thought perhaps it might belong to some other ghostly child—some victim of heat or circumstance, an Indian kid maybe—but its answers were almost always in step with Nora’s own. No—this was Evelyn as she would have been, first at six, and then at eight, and then at eleven, as though Nora alone had been gifted a glimpse of how all of life would have unfolded had the girl survived. Evelyn Abigail Lark: kind enough, but bullheaded; pragmatic but wistful; unimpressed and a little irreverent when she hit those turbulent years between twelve and fourteen. Somehow, she had wandered b
ack from that darkness into which she’d been let fall those many years ago, and the house had stood its walls around her and kept her safe.
Much of her wit was got from a combination of the boys, whom she watched over in their beds as they slept and followed through childhood accidents and misdemeanors. She derided Nora’s baking, offered a counterpoint to ranching problems, held political opinions that sometimes ran contrary to Nora’s own. All angles of a problem were evident to her, making her counsel indispensable to goings-on large and small: all improvements on the house, all livestock decisions, all instructions to hired hands. On nights when all the boys were away, she was happy to banter till dawn, just to get the last word in, just to keep Nora awake.
Emmett did not benefit from this voice. Save for Nora’s solitary mention of it a few years back, he did not seem to think of it, nor suspect the extent of its influence. Town life was a constant preoccupation: years were spent acquiring books, running the printhouse, teaching his sons to composite. He was gathering stories from every corner of the Territory to print up, and occasionally writing his own: about the government’s relentless assault on the Indians, about territorial disputes, about the land wars that had swallowed his sister’s ranch up north. If he was surprised, now and again, by Nora’s roughening manner, he likely attributed it to her exhaustion from wrangling boys and constantly watching the skies at home.