Inland

by Téa Obreht

  Standing back Nora dragged down the stubborn morass of skirts. Josie’s left shoe came off in the effort, but the right foot was crooked and hopelessly swollen, and Nora could not shift the boot even having unlaced it. Gathered up, the dress must have weighed twenty pounds. She wrestled it down into the scrub. From somewhere in the stiff tangle of fabric, a hard weight met her hand.

  The right pocket was empty. The left yielded a small, four-pronged woodpiece—a buffalo, she realized. One of Rob’s.

  Fear of Toby had so stupefied her that she had failed to consider Rob at all. Well, Evelyn said. He loves her. It felt strange to know this now and realize still more hazily that she had never imagined the woman Rob might love. Or perhaps, in truth, had never imagined that Rob would love a woman at all. Always in her mind she had seen him a wanderer. Resigned herself somehow to the fact that sporadic letters would take his place in her home. All the love he might get in life would have to be got before he crossed her threshold toward those hard nights of road living and dimlit Montana saloons and blue northern reaches. It had weighed heavy on her, the inevitability of his solitude, all the while without her realizing that some other life had been possible for him.

  And here she was, the girl Rob loved—sitting up dazedly. “I’m helping.”

  “Lie still now.”

  “All right.”

  Before long, her eyes had guttered closed again. Nora dragged her upright and put her over her shoulder and started up.

  What a trick it was of the darkness to sharpen inclines and soften the memory. She came through the trees and groped with her free hand along the canyon wall. The crumbling earth fled her fingers and showered, pattering, around her. She could hardly hear for the rustle of petticoats and thought now what a horror it would be to invite the beast’s return—betrayed by the rustle of underwear. The scree slid under her and she fell a few times. Dropped Josie once. Her hands were stinging by the time she cleared the rise. There stood the house in its middle distance, still lit up with the jagged woods and the darker mesa rising behind. No sign of ambulatory bushes anywhere. She ran with the damp stickiness of Josie’s body burning down her right shoulder. She imagined now how it would go with Toby: the terror and crying, the blame. She could not do it alone. She veered.

  In the barn, she found a dry place and laid Josie down across the crates and covered her with a clean tarp that didn’t smell too badly of anything. It took some shaking to bring her round again.

  “I hurt awful,” Josie said.

  “Your head?”

  “My leg. My shoulder. Everything.”

  “Lie put.”

  Scraping back down into the canyon, Nora sang a little. “Caroline”—or some such ancient ditty whose words she couldn’t remember. Harlan picked up the notes somewhere in the darkness below, and that was how she found him. He had managed to maneuver up through the trees a little, not very far, crutching his way from boulder to boulder.

  “Can you stand?”

  “Hardly.”

  When she got her shoulder under his, she could feel him shivering. They three-legged it the rest of the way, pausing now and then for him to catch his breath. She had not expected him to give her so much of his weight, though she could feel him trying to move it off her. He was lying, she realized, about how badly he was injured. A man didn’t sweat from a little twist of the knee.

  “I wish to God I’d been a better man than to ask you for that shave,” he said quietly.

  “I wish to God there were two stone of petticoats to lighten from you.”

  Side by side, they fit themselves into the mouth of the trail. The wall scraped her shoulders. Earth crumbled into her hair. An outcrop caught her knee, and the pain sang through her body so that she wanted to double over. Her mouth had split and she could feel the sting of sweat in its corners. Near the top, where the incline was steepest, she was obliged to fall back and push him like some stalled mule. She felt, then, that he did not sense how close she was to playing out.

  At the top, they rested. The breeze had gone cool and the clouds had cleared. They went on again toward the house through the grass. About halfway over the field, she met the smoke wafting from their stovepipe and smelled charred meat.

  Voices floated down to her. Emmett, she thought. Never mind her having to explain Josie’s condition, or being under Harlan’s arm in the dark—it was Emmett at last.

  But as they came on, she saw no sign of the dray.

  Instead, a horse she did not recognize was hitched up out front.

  THE HOUSE WAS THICK WITH roasted air, the smell and sputter of meat frying. Twin skillets smoked on the stovetop. Toby was where she’d left him, still obediently in his chair, his face half-obscured now by a black rectangle he held pressed over both eyes. Though she had knocked down a stack of books bringing Harlan through the narrow corridor, he did not look up at their entrance. Neither did Gramma, who was at that moment sitting with her jaw all but unhinged to dispatch a hunk of beef, pink and dripping and speared on the end of a fork held by a stranger, a stout, dark-haired bull of a man who sat on the footstool before her. He looked up at them and stood, lowering the empty plate. He wore a striped gray suit and clean boots, and in all that heat his sunbrowned skin shone without a bead of sweat.

  “Missus Lark. Sheriff.” He smiled. “We were in a wonder over what had become of you.”

  Toby looked up. “Mama!” he said, and held the contraption out. “Look.”

  She shifted her shoulder under Harlan’s slump. “What is it?”

  “A streptoscope.”

  “Stereoscope.”

  “It’s got pictures in it from all over the world.” Nora made an appreciative noise, but Toby caught her pinched tone and looked worriedly at her. Then, panic-stricken: “He gave it to me.”

  “Don’t point, Tobe.”

  “Well I don’t know his name—he ain’t said it.”

  “That’s Mister Merrion Crace, honey.”

  “The limey carpetbagger?”

  Crace was good enough not to let that sit too long before casting a smile her way. “It’s far better than what I expected in this house, Missus Lark.” He pointed the butt end of his fork at Harlan. “Best get that leg upraised, Sheriff. No matter how agreeable your present position.”

  She helped Harlan over to the table, and he steadied his boot up on the adjoining chair while she got the scissors to cut away his trousers. She was relieved to find the wound sieving only a little bit of blood now, most of it black already, save for the yellow shard of bone jutting ostentatiously from just below his knee.

  Toby, still clutching the stereoscope, was torn between very different fascinations. “What’s happened, Mama?”

  “Nothing but a little stumble,” Harlan said.

  “Where’s Josie?”

  “Gone for the Doctor.” It was no small thing, dispensing with his question so handily. That bill would come due soon enough, of course—but she weighed the balance and found it worthwhile, for the time being.

  Crace meanwhile had wet a rag with whiskey, and was offering it to her. She was trying to find a way to ask him what he was doing in her house, but couldn’t get around his fussing: there was something lodged in that wound, so where did she keep her styptics, her needle and thread, her pincers? When she did not reply, he brought a cup of flour and stood at her elbow, peering down while she wiped Harlan’s blood away.

  “That’s bad now, but it ain’t the worst,” he said.

  “I can feel something in it, right there,” said Harlan.

  “A rock, I’d say. Who pushed you?”

  “I did,” she said.

  Crace grinned and nudged him. “Well, Sheriff. That’ll teach you to forget yourself.”

  All the way up the stairs, she could still hear him. Even with the door closed. He was grating on about the weather, the cr
ops, the outcome of that morning’s altercation. You could always tell when Merrion Crace had arrived at a gathering. His consonants were just that bit too loud for any room. All day, she hadn’t drunk and now the very last of her water would go toward dousing a wound. And all day, she hadn’t eaten a thing, and now the smell of the steaks was overwhelming her. She wondered if she would be able to steady her hands. By the time she returned, Harlan and Crace were well into the whiskey. She got a small pot boiling and tonged pincers and knife in and out of roil and flame, water and flame. Gramma watched her, tonguetip protruding between her lips.

  When it came time for the drawing, Crace did her the courtesy of getting out of her light. She could hear him behind her, rattling dishes.

  “Come here to me lad—do you know how we come to call the English ‘limeys’?” he asked Toby, who didn’t. “In wayback days, English sailors were forced to eat limes to safeguard against scurvy.”

  “What’s a scurvy?”

  “A skin-bleed that twists you up and won’t quit.”

  “Does it kill you?”

  “It does indeed. You come here young man, and keep looking this way.”

  She could see the rock, black as a leech, sitting in the thick muscle below Harlan’s knee. She put the tip of the pincers against it. His leg jolted, and his breathing caught like an uphill train. Behind her, Crace was shaking the pans, one at a time, loudly. More meat dropped onto the hissing iron.

  Toby was still getting his head around the notion of scurvy. “How’d they take sick with it?”

  “Because they were packed all tight together, with naught to eat for months but hardtack and jerked meat.”

  “Are you a sailor?”

  He was not. He said so.

  “But you’re something,” Toby decided. “You talk funny.”

  “We’re all branded with the traces of our upbringing. Yours perhaps will be that eye. The kind of inevitable war wound that befalls a boy who grows up breaking horses. Now mine are a distaste for gloomy weather and these wonderfully rolled vestigial R’s.”

  “Like Coyle Williams!” Toby said.

  “Another Englishman.”

  “Or John Johnson,” Nora put in. “Yet another Englishman.”

  “Yet another Englishman—whose deeds are vilified in the public imagination.”

  The rock came out whole. It slipped from her pincers and she heard it clatter away somewhere under the table. Harlan eased the belt out from between his teeth and set about straightening the leg against a kitchen spoon she’d provided as a splint. Already, he looked improved. She poured him a whiskey, splashed and floured his leg. The blood gummed up in its white coating. When she turned to wipe her hands, Crace was looking at her, rolling an obscene pat of butter around the skillet. “Really, Missus Lark. From myself to John Johnson in the same sentence.”

  “I thought we were naming Englishmen. I really couldn’t speak on whether or not the similarities between you stop at your vestigial R’s.”

  “They do.”

  “For all I know, they might extend to Johnson’s tendency to decant howitzers into women and children.”

  “Surely that had less to do with his being English than with his collecting scalp bounty.”

  She tilted the whiskey bottle over one palm and then the other and dug under her nails with the kitchen towel. Her hands were still the color of thin tea. “I wouldn’t presume to know.”

  “Is that right?” Crace had the huge, furrowed black eyes of a bloodhound, and he stood gazing woundedly at her. His voice was so soft she had hardly heard him, though he was as near her now as he had ever stood, and giving her a keen sense of his size and focus, and of how faraway Harlan really was—not just owing to the distance from the stove to the table, and the table to him, but his injury and the four generous whiskeys it had taken to numb him.

  “If you’ve a yearning to disprove my opinion of you,” she said, “you might find it in your heart now to ride for the Doctor.”

  Crace looked puzzled. “What a vote of no confidence in Miss Kincaid—she’s not been gone an hour!”

  Nora’s stomach tumbled. Here was her lie, eating its tail. She muttered something about the dark, Josie’s poor sense of direction, the wisdom of perhaps sending a second rider in case the Doctor was occupied. Already Toby was talking about the beast again—the beast, she thought! God’s heaven what a cruel turn!—a few shrill syllables about everyone needing to stay put exactly where they were. Crace steered her back toward the table. “You’ve fixed the Sheriff up so handily. What’s left for the Doc to do besides administer laudanum and change his dressings? Rest yourself now, and we’ll have our supper while we wait for them. I reckon the Sheriff’s up for something to settle his guts.”

  The moment she sat down, Toby was on her. He wanted to know how Josie would fare all alone out there in the dark—and when she wrangled him away he came back to her with the stereoscope. “Here, look.” She gazed into its foggy interior. Toby changed the slides and grated on about what she was seeing: now the zoological gardens of Paris, now the Palace of Horticulture. And here was the great train station of Philadelphia! Before her eyes flashed blurry gray columns, webs of metal, glimpses of distant gardens. He showed her a preposterously tall animal, speckled with square blotches, and her mind had almost dredged up its name—what was it? Emmett had showed her something similar in a naturalist’s handbook a lifetime ago, and suddenly it came to her, the name of that thing in the gulch. She said “camel” aloud—“camel!”—but Harlan didn’t hear her. Toby looked inside, laughed, and said “Naw, Mama, that’s a giraffe!” and slotted the next picture into the frame. He showed her a stone beast in the desert: it wore a square hat and lay buried to its shoulders in a velvety sandbank. Next came the lustrous, blank gaze of an enormous severed head. Beside its cheek sat a grim, dark-faced man, shawled head to toe and leaning against its nose. She kept saying, “I see.” But all the while she thought camel. Camel. Camel. How could anyone have guessed?

  Crace meanwhile was moving around her kitchen. Opening doors and laying out plates. Casting a suspicious eye over the smudged ends of her cutlery.

  “I do the washing-up,” Toby said helpfully.

  “I believe it.”

  He eased steaks and drippings onto each of their plates. Three more remained in the pan. “Will we wait for your young men?”

  At first, she did not know whom he meant.

  Later—much later—she would remember that Harlan roused himself to say: “No.”

  They ate in silence. Toby as though he’d come forty days through the desert to get his hands on this huge, fat-rivered piece of rump. Harlan, ghost-pale, tilting uneasily at his red-puddled plate. Crace as though he were sitting at the Golden Hind, right in main-street Cheyenne, with an awed hush humming all around and the world’s every lens trained on him. He finished in six smooth, symmetrical slices, and sat back smiling at Toby.

  “Young man. What good fortune has the miraculous Josie foreordained to you?”

  Toby got around his mouthful. “She don’t tell fortunes.”

  “I thought she was a spiritualist.”

  “But she only talks to the dead. What she calls ‘the other livin’.”

  “Ah.” Crace lapsed into a long silence.

  It had been a terrible mistake to leave Josie out there in the dark. Suppose she were headhurt. Suppose she sat up and started calling for them—wouldn’t that take some explaining? Nora would have to find a pretext to go out there, and soon. The meat on her plate had begun to cool and resist her knife. She did not dare look up from it in this freighted interval. She half-expected Crace to turn Toby’s way and say Josie’s broke in half, and all thanks to your mama—though he could not know this, for there had been nobody else in the gulch to see it save the camel, and no one had been standing on the porch when she had come uphill with Josie o
n her shoulders. Nobody knew save herself and Harlan, and all the creekside eyes that cared nothing for life got or lost.

  And the rider, Evelyn said.

  The rider. She hazarded a glance at Crace. Is that where this shitheap of a day might lead—Merrion Crace, the architect of all her miseries, charging around in the dark on a camel like some phantom bandito? That’s your thirst talking, Mama.

  “Have you had milk, Toby?”

  “We haven’t any.”

  “You must have something.”

  “I ain’t thirsty, Mama.”

  “I might drink some tomato,” Nora said. She stood and split the top of a can and took two gulps of the reddish water. It stung going down, and stung coming halfway back, and stung still more going back down again. “Toby,” she gasped. “You must have some.”

  “No Mama.” Toby shook his head. “No.”

  Crace looked stupefied. “How unusual,” he said. He held out his hand for the can and she gave it him, watched him grapple with what she hoped he would interpret as merely a strange domestic custom. She was fading in ways she had not expected, reeling at the edge of some precipitous place. She did not want him to know it. May two sips of tomato restore her.

  “Can’t say I care for it,” Crace was saying. He slid the can back across the table to her. “You know, Toby, I never did meet a dead person who was all that eager for carrying on with talk,” Crace said, as if their conversation had been ongoing all this while. “It’s a wonder to me that Miss Josie can make a living from it.”

  “Josie talks to all sorts,” Toby said. “There’s a Navajo girl in the Simons’ orchard what died a hundred years gone, back before there was oranges here at all. And in the square Josie met a gallows-hung fella who mistook her for his daughter.” He grew excited. “And ourselves, we got a man in the springhouse right now. She calls him ‘the lost man.’ ”