Inland

by Téa Obreht

  They diverged according to their responsibilities: he was a man of words; she a woman of action.

  Lately, it seemed he would run off to Cumberland at the slightest opportunity. She had begun to wonder if there might be a woman—a notion at which Evelyn scoffed—or if he was simply priming the entire household for a runner. After all, this, too, was a possibility. She had become a less and less forgiving companion. The boys were getting ornery in a way that overwhelmed Emmett. Rob might row with her, but at least she could take him in hand; Emmett had lost all ground with him long ago. When they argued, she was afraid they would come to blows, and that she would have to intercede on Emmett’s behalf. And Dolan, always shadowing Rob’s every move and mood, was not far behind.

  Three days late with the water. It would be dishonest to pretend she hadn’t entertained the possibility long before this. Of course, it seemed almost impossible—even if his heart, for some unvoiced reason, was worn out enough to leave them all behind, his conscience wouldn’t allow it. Not in a drought.

  And yet. And yet.

  A few years ago, when they’d lost nearly all the flock to blackleg, and Nora had been at her wits’ end, pulling mutinous boys out of every imaginable catastrophe, hadn’t Emmett put on his hat and gone outside and backed the dray out of the barn and just sat in the drive in the reddening sunset? Half an hour later, hadn’t she watched him stable the dray and loose the horses as if nothing had happened?

  The incident was never mentioned. She pretended she hadn’t seen him, and he pretended he hadn’t been seen.

  And what of last March? A cursory glance through the kitchen window had revealed Emmett returning from the creek, shaking with what she thought was drink. When he drew closer she’d realized that Josie, unconscious and mud-caked, was draped across his arms like a broken pelt. Sunstroke, of course. It had always been useless to warn her. Nora had put Josie to bed and directed Toby to keep changing out the cold compresses and tip water into her mouth whenever the girl came around. She had emerged from Josie’s room to find Emmett and the boys holding a wistful confab in the kitchen.

  “She just isn’t fit for rough living,” Emmett was saying. “After all, she’s an Atlantic girl.”

  Rob slouched against the counter, worrying his hat like some dime-novel badman.

  Dolan said: “If Josie and I ever come together—I mean, assuming she would, you understand, assuming I asked and she said yes. Or she said maybe. Assuming all those things. We’d probably have to stake up someplace better’n this.”

  Nora had been unable to restrain herself.

  “What the hell for?” she shot out.

  “To ensure her comfort.”

  “Comfort? I been living here half my life, and no one’s ever asked after my comfort.”

  Emmett shifted in his seat. “Well, doesn’t one always hope for better where one’s children are concerned?”

  “She’s not my child.”

  “But Dolan is.”

  “I never known Dolan to be the fainting sort.”

  She nudged him. It was a good jape. But Dolan was too old to let flattery conscript him to her side. He looked down at his coffee.

  The assembly didn’t resume their talk again until she left the room. From the corridor, she listened to Emmett’s voice strengthen. “What I mean to say is: hard living is for hard people. And hard women are a particular sort to which Josie does not belong.”

  Every part of her felt staved-in. Of course, Emmett hadn’t just meant one wants better for one’s children. What he had meant was: one wants better for ladies—and one wants ladies, not hard women, for one’s sons.

  Hadn’t he considered her a lady, once?

  Perhaps not. Their coming together had not been presided over by chaperones, nor impeded by any of the usual formalities. Theirs had been a love-match—strong enough, in its youth, to withstand even the death of a child. But somehow, in the intervening years, Emmett had ceased to think of her as he once did, just as she had always suspected he might. This was not entirely his fault. Nora had gone to considerable lengths to steel herself for the life into which she’d followed him. This had required hardening; she was no Libbie Custer, spooning caviar out of a tin while all around her the men were whipped for stealing ham. Even if she had wanted to remain soft, the work would not allow it. Two people at full strength could barely manage all the chores of a homestead: plowing, sowing, raising fence. And if Desma, if her own mother, if Missus Harriet were hard women, then Nora must be, too. It must never be said of her that she had succumbed to the trials of her life and had to be gentled back to some easier state of existence. Evelyn’s death filled her with even keener purpose. Keep busy or go mad. Keep busy or be called mad. All the while, she had felt certain this would strengthen their union. Certain it would allow Emmett to see her better, as she really was. Not a beautiful woman, perhaps—and certainly not a delicate one. But one worthy of the life he’d put before her.

  Instead, in a single kitchen musing—one of the thousands she and Evelyn had overheard and giggled about—Emmett had managed to bypass her wholesale. He not only failed to see her as a lady—he wouldn’t even trouble himself with the comparison. She was a tough, opinionated, rangy, sweating mule of a thing, and the sum total of her life’s work was her husband of twenty years enumerating what he desired for his sons—which did not include a companion with her qualities, but did include moving to a more favorable clime to secure the affections of a person with not one-half of Nora’s merits.

  Of course it did. All difficulties, in Emmett’s view, could be solved by pulling up stakes. Any failing could be got away from. Failing in Baltimore, a man might move to Iowa. Failing there, he might move to Wyoming, and then to the southwest Territories. Start a flock. Start a paper.

  He had made a grand adventure of his failings, and could make another when Amargo went bust.

  Here, meanwhile, was Nora: thirty-seven years old and half-habited by the apparition of a child she had known for only five months, whose remaining life had nevertheless somehow unfolded in her imagination so that every beam, every mirror, every corner of this house breathed with the immutable spirit of her daughter—herself a hard person, too, hardened by death and life and by Nora’s own design. She couldn’t help but be.

  Every guest who crossed their threshold for the month following Josie’s fainting spell was treated to a long recapitulation of what had happened the day Josie Kincaid swooned. “Down went the bucket,” Emmett would say, “and Josie right behind it, facefirst into the mud. It was so sudden I thought she was putting me on. Of course, I got a good deal more serious about it on the run home. No mean feat, getting her up the gulch. You ever been down there? You know how far it is?”

  Hearing the story verbatim for perhaps the fifteenth time at a gathering in town, Nora finally lost her temper.

  “You carried a slip of a girl a half mile uphill,” she said. “You’re just Paul Bunyan in the flesh.”

  This drew laughter, of course—though not from Emmett.

  “It beggars belief that you could be so jealous of a child,” he said to her afterwards.

  “Then we’re both of us disappointed,” said Nora. “Turns out I’m married to someone for whom carrying a fainting girl is an affirmation of valor worth bringing up in company.”

  He’d sat there beside her on the bed with his back turned, one suspender ligating his arm. It was a new habit, this going still for want of a reply. “I’m sure Harlan Bell has no need of fainting girls,” he said finally, “but the rest of us mortals must stake our valor wherever we can find it.”

  Meeting him on this ground was pointless. You could not argue Harlan Bell with him and win, and if Emmett had felt at all inclined toward real conversation, he would not have brought the Sheriff up in the first place. She was not jealous. Nor did she believe that there was some great impropriety brewing between
Emmett and Josie. Or that Josie was an unfit match for Dolan—though she suspected that if the two of them ever came together their household would be razed by some perfectly avoidable domestic catastrophe within the week.

  No. She could not put words to what she felt. Twenty years ago, Nora Volk and Emmett Lark had come together in love—or in what they believed was love, and at the very least a torrential hope that they were both cut from a cloth that could turn life at the edge of the world into a grand adventure. He’d had one; she had not. And now, in hoping better for their sons, Emmett had measured and weighed their years together and cast them off as wanting.

  And given the chance to reimagine his life, Emmett might not have chosen Nora for his companion at all.

  This was what Rob and Dolan and Josie, and all the people harping on Emmett’s disappearance did not know. If his delay in Cumberland was not owed to some terrible misfortune—and it was not, she knew it, felt in her bones that her other self was alive and whole—it might be owed to impulse. To grand adventure. She’d never felt more certain that Emmett could not have written anything on that puncheon ledge last year; that he might easily have driven his dray into the ditch, mounted up and ridden on. Past Cumberland, and past Gentry, too. Past Buford and Cruces, past the border, shedding their whole life in the blue wastes of the Sonoran night.

  TOBY AND JOSIE’S EFFORTS HAD more or less brought the springhouse to order. Everything salvageable lay in a dismal heap on the table. The rest was waste: smashed glass and fruit, the two beveled hulls of a broken whiskey bottle. The bird carcass had been trussed by the feet and folded in its own wings, altared on a crate with a garnish of dead thistles.

  “Toby—will you please bury that goddamn thing? Will you?”

  He looked at her with disappointment and alarm. “It ain’t ready yet, Mama!”

  She sent him inside to keep an eye on Gramma. He sloped off, turning every few stomps to look back at her with something like suspicion.

  Josie was gathering pieces of mangled cloth in the corner. Stinging brine still fumed about the place, recalling the worst labors of summer: the woodstove roasting the kitchen, the cloud of boiling vinegar, batch after batch of steeping jars, the wet shirt glued to her back, and Josie on her knees shoveling wood in and ashes out of the stove—for what?

  “It’s a wonder they didn’t hear this racket all the way to town.”

  “I ain’t lying,” Josie said.

  “Pardon?”

  “I ain’t lying about Gramma moving.”

  “Surely even you understand that’s impossible.”

  “Maybe so, ma’am. But it’s true.”

  “Your superstitions make the whole lot of us look like witless bumpkins.”

  “She moves, Missus Lark. I ain’t lying. Not about Missus Harriet. Not about the lost man. And not about the beast.”

  “You ought to have been dismissed a hundred times by now,” she said. “All you do around here is tell us we’re haunted and feed Toby’s nonsense.”

  “To tell you fair, ma’am, I thought I already was dismissed—and maybe just hadn’t been apprised of it. On account of how you haven’t paid me a wage in weeks.” Josie squeezed the rags over a bucket, one by one. “But I surely am relieved to hear I’ve room for redemption.”

  Nora looked her over. Nothing in that heat-rashed face betrayed the kind of grit that would make this a challenge. “There’s an order to things round here. Your pay’s coming.”

  Josie believed her. She wasn’t complaining. “Sure, what use have I got for money out here anyhow?”

  “Is that why you left the springhouse door open? As a reproach?”

  “Ma’am—that you could think so ruins my heart. We were all so flummoxed by Mister Dolan’s accident, and I got turned around and before I knew it hours had passed. And there went the sun and all my nerve for setting foot outside. And that’s the truth.”

  “You raise an important point,” Nora said. “Knowing that Toby’s eye is ruined”—Josie nodded; she knew well, had ridden for Doc Almenara when it first happened—“I can only fathom your desire to cosset him.”

  “I love him with all my heart.”

  “Which is why you mustn’t play up to his bullshit.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I mean it, Josie.”

  “He’s very afraid.”

  “Without cause. This nonsense about the beast only takes on a harmful cast if it’s freighted with our willingness to indulge him.” She wondered if Josie had brains enough to recognize that Nora had drifted into self-reproach now. After all, it hadn’t been Josie down in the gulch this morning, climbing into the thicket, pretending to look for sign. Nora had volunteered herself for that pantomime entirely of her own volition. “You’re a smart enough girl,” she lied. “I believe you can help me disabuse him of it.”

  Josie thought on this awhile. “You mean lie to him?”

  “I mean do your part to make him understand no beast exists.”

  Josie looked at her—really looked. As if she had just now realized that the two of them had been talking crosswise all along. Too late, Nora followed her to the realization.

  “But Missus Lark,” she said. “It does. I seen it.”

  Nora was relieved to find her earlier anger out of reach, scrimmed by exhaustion and disappointment and the heady smell of the springhouse.

  “I suppose it flew by your window.”

  She knelt down and dragged the tinkling mess of glass across the floor. The whiskey bottle lolled. Something about it, she thought, should be evident to her. But there was that scrim again.

  “It was exactly how Toby described it.”

  Nora shifted to stretch her neck. Toby had never mentioned having seen the beast. His descriptions of it were limited to the tracks. There had been vague mention of something else, too—an unfamiliar odor lingering around the chokecherry thickets that rimmed the Floreses’ garden, which Nora had put down to rut-crazed elk.

  “What did he say about it?”

  It was huge, Josie told her. A ruffle-boned skeleton with great, folded wings on its back. A vision so improbable that even Toby mistrusted himself. Felt that his brothers were right to mock him. Only Josie had felt sorry for their rough treatment of him, and so had gone through his picture books to determine where the idea of such a creature might have first rooted in his mind—to no avail. She’d hated to leave him there like that: no longer quite believing himself, but unable to arrive at any other conclusion. So far removed from the apparition that it was beginning to feel like a dream.

  “Which it is,” Nora said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  Josie had seen it. Unable to sleep, as she sometimes was, lonely for city racket, she had sat up at an unknown hour and pulled aside her curtains on a clear moon night some weeks ago to the sight of a massive black shadow moving slowly from around the side of the barn. It was bigger than anything Josie had ever seen, the huge, folded wings on its back just grazing the upper-story windows.

  “I’m that shocked you didn’t scream,” said Nora.

  “In my head, I did. All the while, I screamed and screamed, like someone was tearing out my heart. Only the sound stayed stuck in me.” It seemed to Josie that not just her voice, but all the sounds of the world had been sucked up into a vast black nothing—and that, perhaps, the mere fact of her vision meant that she could no longer count herself among the living.

  “Yet here you are,” Nora said, disappointed.

  “To tell the truth, ma’am, I’d vouch what saved me was my own determination to live so I could tell Mister Toby he’d been right. For I was that sorry to rank with the rest of you in doubting him.”

  “I’m sure you were. And did you tell him?”

  “I did, ma’am.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “That he’d seen the self
same thing.”

  “Where?”

  “At the Flores place. Only from much further away, with the sun in his eyes. And excepting one thing.”

  A crucial detail that had almost eluded Josie herself. Just as the monstered shadow moved out of her sight—after an hour or a minute, she hardly knew—Josie’s screaming heart gave her away. Her terror shook the void. The beast stopped what it was doing and turned a huge, shining head from between its folded wings to grin in her direction.

  There was significant discomfort in witnessing the retrieval of an unwanted memory. Here was Josie, cross-legged on the springhouse floor, with her face as contorted as that of a person passing a graveyard at midnight. But whatever pity Nora was meant to feel for the girl stayed behind that scrim, along with everything else save the slowly emerging notion that Toby—her Toby—had once again become part of a conference of whispers from which Nora had been excluded.

  “Doesn’t it seem more probable that the alignment between your vision and Toby’s is owed more to what he described than what you really saw?”

  “I thought so, too, ma’am. Only afterwards, I got to thinking. And I remembered that Toby never said a word about no grinning head.”

  “Memory is a changeable thing. I would urge you to question the substance of anything you think you may remember about what Toby said he might remember.”

  “But that leaves me with the same conclusion, ma’am. Because my own powers of observation lead me toward naught but the occult.”

  “Well,” Nora said finally. “It was dark.”

  Josie folded into silence. Rubbed her sweat-reddened chin. Looked to be readying for a whipping. Maybe she should be, Nora thought.

  Then the girl leapt up. “I can prove it.”

  SHE STOOD IN THE STIFLING quiet of Josie’s room and watched the girl ransack the old dresser on its dilapidated legs. The heft of Nora’s own presence felt monumental here, amidst the deluge of Josie’s forsaken intentions: the trunk with its westbound stamps from New York to Chicago, Chicago to St. Joseph, St. Joseph to Cheyenne; the patent boots tucked neatly under her bed; the ridiculous hat, tumescent with burlap flowers, which Josie had wisely put away.