by Téa Obreht
“The springhouse?” Crace said. “Goodness.”
Nora had the eventual feeling that his refusal to meet her eye was deliberate. She crossed her knife and fork. “Well,” she said with what she hoped was an air of conclusion. “It was mighty of you to bring supper.”
It was his pleasure, his privilege. “Word round town is you been waiting on steaks.”
“It’s a lean week when word around town regards my larder.”
Wedges of meat stung the gums between her molars. Crace apparently faced similar discomfort. He began picking the back of his mouth.
“Well,” he said. “ ‘Around town’ ain’t a fair truth, really. More accurately: I was over at Desma Ruiz’s earlier. And her failure to provide the promised steaks featured last among her many, many other regrets. So she sent these around—elk she said, but see here, where the skin is scorched? That’s a brand. So it’s likelier to be what you might call ‘slow elk’—and probably one of mine.” Crace went on, but she did not hear him. The beef had suspended in its slow, abrading drag down her gullet, and for a moment she thought it, too, would make a return as potentially calamitous as the tomato juice had. By the time this feeling eased, he had already turned in confidence to Harlan. “Did you know that Desma had a mother still living in Oklahoma? Ninety-four years old.”
“God bless her,” Harlan said. He was drunk.
“Imagine the stories she has to tell.” Crace sat back and rubbed his thighs excitedly. “My own ma was only thirty when she died, and even her stories were enough to turn you inside out.”
“Well she’d better sleep soundly tonight,” Nora said.
“Who?”
“Desma.” She paused. “If she doesn’t—if something happens to her, for instance, slow elk or not—you would be the last person who saw her.”
“I doubt that very much, Missus Lark. All kinds of people been riding up and down the Amargo Canyon Road these days.”
“I know you been sending riders to her place to harry her.”
“What a thing to say, Missus Lark.”
“Like you sent somebody up here last night to drain every last bit of our water. Well. Desma better be alright. Because I’ll swear before a judge to seeing you here, in front of the Sheriff, confessing you knew something about it.”
“I ain’t sent nobody to your water, Missus Lark.” Crace looked appreciatively at Harlan. “And well—the Sheriff don’t mind. Wouldn’t be the first time he’s heard or seen something that slipped his mind later on.”
She caught Gramma’s eye across the room. A slow, inner roil had furrowed the old woman’s countenance. She was frowning, Nora realized. Frowning at Crace with her whole being.
Toby had gone quiet. Nora nudged him. “Well past bedtime, I think.”
His look drifted from her to Crace and back again. He was stuck between his desire to witness whatever was now unfolding and the knowledge that such situations only ever resolved themselves in his absence. “Just a bit longer.”
Bedtime, she said, but he went on sitting. And now Crace put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Let the young man stay. This concerns him, too. Perhaps more urgently than anyone.”
In one swift motion, Gramma shot out a hand and seized Toby by the arm. It was quick as a viperstrike. So fast that Nora barely saw it, and perhaps might not have believed it had the hand withdrawn. But there they were: five thin, green-rivered fingers clasped around Toby’s arm, and Gramma leaning halfway from the wheelchair. Not, as Nora thought for a moment, in a wild tumble from her seat, but holding herself up entirely by the strength of that grip while Toby looked down in delighted surprise, as though magic had left every other corner of the world and all gathered here.
He turned to Nora. “Mama,” he said.
“I see.”
Syllables roamed Gramma’s throat. Mm-hm-n. Her mouth spasmed. Mm-hm-n. “Come along” was the intended gist.
Toby wrapped his fingers gently around hers and got up. His arm was around her, easing her slowly back into the chair. Her hand was still on him, her fingers ticking tenderly against the sunbrowned skin of his arm.
After he had gone, wheeling Gramma away before him, the rest of them sat in wretched silence for a long time. She was trying to think on how to extricate herself to the barn when Crace said: “I hear you ain’t had the Sentinel running since your husband up and went off.”
“The boys are managing it.”
“It must take considerably less manpower to print up weather reports than falsehoods.”
She grew irritated. “We don’t print falsehoods.”
“All right.”
“What you read in our papers may not suit you, Mister Crace. And God knows I’ve pled the case round here for harder treading. But lies they are not.”
He sat with this a moment. As though actually considering what she had said.
“You ain’t been printing much of late at all.”
“There’s no denying we’re undermanned.”
“And yet,” he said. “That big Washington press continues to nip at your pockets, day after day.”
It was a burden they had carried a long time, she told him. They were well used to it.
“It always did astound me. How people can commit to something that’s fixed to just keep costing and costing them more on top of its initial price. You get the press, and that’s debt enough to its previous owner or whatever wiseman gouged you for it at its last port of call. In your case, that bank in Flagstaff—and all right, now you’ve bought yourself a printing press! But then comes a joint to house it in. Men to work the levers. Paper, ink. If you’re serious about the endeavor at all, you’re at twice the cost already, for every few months’ work puts it in need of repair. Gears stick. Joints need greasing. Meanwhile, new and better presses keep getting made out in Chicago, and their leaves are flying at twice the speed of your own. And still you’re bleeding money like a Sunday hog—but wait, now a roof leak! Or a broken window. Money lost and lost. Not to mention peace of mind.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m sure you know yourself, with the Clarion.”
“Can’t say my familiarity with the Clarion is too profound, Missus Lark. From what I understand, it’s a paper in Ash River.”
“It holds a mighty favorable view of you.”
“Shouldn’t somebody?”
He was looking at her. She wondered if she was meant to laugh. If this was his idea of a joke: to pretend that his stake in the Ash River Clarion hadn’t turned it from a foundering camp rag to the hammer it was today. She could well remember the day he shored it up. Emmett had gone up to Ash River for the ribbon cutting. There was a picture of Merrion Crace and Bertrand Stills standing side by side, smiling, in Emmett’s words, as though both of them might not make it to the outhouse in time.
“I imagine keeping cattle is no different,” she said eventually. “You buy a heifer—but now you’ve got to water and pasture her. Hire men to herd her. Protect her from wolves. By and by she catches blackleg and dies—and what did she ever do but cost you from the day she came bawling into this world?”
“That’s a—that’s a fair point,” Harlan broke in hazily. He was sweating like a choleric. She got a rag and wiped his brow.
Crace was sitting forward with one arm slung across the table. “There is a difference between newspapers and cattle,” he said. “Cattle ain’t like anything.”
He sat back and waited. The right reply eluded her. Cattle were like a great many things.
She was growing nervous now about Harlan. She had gone so deep into the lie about Josie that she had to remind herself that none of what was unfolding here could be blamed on the girl—as everything, for months, had been. No: Josie was shivering in the barn, her head lolling on a hopefully unbroken neck. Doc Almenara was at home, asleep and unaware that he was needed here. Nobody had
gone for him.
“Unless you intend to murder the Sheriff by neglect, Mister Crace, I believe it’s high time now to go for the Doc.”
“Let’s give Miss Kincaid another minute,” said Crace. She should tell him. Why not? Call a truce in whatever inadvertent parley seemed to be simmering here and say: I’ve left the girl in the barn so as not to upset my son, but now you must be decent and go for the Doctor. Crace would be a man of enough character for this. But true to himself, he had already started up again.
“My mother went to a fortuneteller once, you know. A real one back in London. Her people were shipyard folk, and she wasn’t but sixteen when she married my father. So she went to a gypsy woman who was the succor of young mothers at the time and asked what was to become of the baby in her belly.
“The gypsy told her that if I didn’t die by ten, I’d be a king. Imagine. A young girl, a dockman’s daughter, hearing that kind of thing. Taking it at its most literal meaning. Coming home through those dark, narrow streets to my half-blind father and telling him: Albert, our son will be a king.”
“MY FATHER—FOR ALL HIS FAULTS with whiskey and darts—was a gentle man. Easily swayed, eager to please my mother, for he was tender about the twenty-five years’ gulf between them. He treated her always as though she had alighted by accident in his life, and hadn’t yet realized it, and might fly away at any moment.
“They took the gypsy’s soothsaying about my prospects real literal, the both of them. Even went so far as to tell people around town—which couldn’t have helped their standing much, God love them. Just two mad Catholics walking up and down the docks, and me in the finest pram they could buy or steal, decked out as if I belonged to some other family. Ladies used to come up to my mother and ask her whose wet-nurse she was. That’s how fine the pram looked. She never flinched. It wasn’t in her to feel shame. Our son will be a king, my mother kept saying, and my father indulged her, though it surely earned him an earful in the pubs. When my brothers were born it was my old shoes they wore, and my ragged and outgrown jumpers. And all the while ’twas me in the new knits and caps, me in the polished shoes, me in the parks where the children of the gentry played because she’d got it into her head that the only way for a child of our standing to be a king was to marry a princess—and true and fair to her logic, she kept me in gentrified company. Her son, the king. When she died, I wasn’t but nine years old—and it must have terrified her more than anything to think that with her went all the prospects of my future. For though my father loved her, he was an easy and unambitious man, and she could hardly fathom that he would rouse himself, alone now and saddled with four children, to keep after the future foretold for me. There were a lot of late nights at her bedside, I suspect. A lot of recapitulated promises.
“Nothing much came of them for some years, of course. My father was a teacher. By and by, we moved to a country parish—still further from my mother’s onetime schemes. I was about twelve then, and feeling the weight of my brothers’ hatred. They never forgave, as children do not, the fact that less esteem had come their way than mine. We fought like heathens. Came home black with mud and blood-clabber. Farmers who found us squalling in their barns dragged us home by our ears. Said: Albert, can’t you do nothing about these monsters after all? My poor father—weeping at the hearth as he mended the clothes we had torn off each other’s shoulders. He used to say he never remarried for want of there being, in all of Christendom, a woman so fine as my mother. But in truth I suspect Christendom was short a woman willing to brook such mongrel sons, even if the gentlest man who ever drew breath came in the bargain.
“At fourteen I was brought on as a groom for Lord Ellsworth, up in Devon. The kind of jobs gypsy folk were doing—and we hated each other handily, the gyps and I. They because I was better treated, and I because I had grown so ashamed of the ‘king’ business by that time—which my brothers never let me forget—and was happy to blame the people who’d lied to my poor dead mother for tenpence and a laugh.
“But we got on for the sake of the horses. What fine animals they were. The Lord stabled thirty, and people were always coming from upcountry to look at them and praise them and linger and ride. Ladies in such fine dresses, with such pretty faces, you’d be blinded if you stared for more than a minute.
“I never was much of a rider. Too firm in the thighs, people said—though in horsetalk, that just means fat. Is that a smile, Sheriff? You know well what I’m talking about.
“Lord Ellsworth was a fine enough man—so horsemad that if he got you in a corner, he could talk studs and hands all evening without drawing breath. But he liked the cards almost as much, and he liked the bottle too, and those things don’t mix. When his fortunes began to falter he got to selling off his horses—which was how I came to find myself shipboard and Texas-bound, with a brood of mares he’d sold to a cattleman, Mister Sam Mulvaney. Duns and grays were the mares, and they didn’t care for the water or the rolling or the other people on the ship. My father had gone to pieces ahead of the journey, for he’d lost brothers to America in years previous, and he knew what it could do to a young man. All of a sudden he fell thrall to my mother’s wishes: remember, Merrion, he kept saying, remember America don’t look too fondly on kings. No one’s tried being king in America with any great success, remember that.
“I was to see the mares to Galveston and come straight home.
“But then—Texas, Missus Lark, in 1858. Christ, such a place. Whole swaths of nothing, and a smell of horses and rain, and a green-gray sky, and all the young blood of the world riled with talk of slavery and statehood and secession. I set my boot on that beach and knew I weren’t going back across the water not ever again.
“I took up with all manner of folk. Prospectors bound for California. Enterprising men who were fixing to stake roads across the prairies. Weren’t much point in committing to any one thing, so I drifted along. Worked in saloons and assayers’ offices. Worked for the telegraph awhile. Wound up wheelwrighting in St. Joseph. Thenabouts Mister Sonny Asterfield brought me in to ride for the Pony Express. Ain’t a more dangerous line of work in the whole world, son, he said. But if you make it through your first year, you’ll have lived enough life for ten people.
“And ain’t that the point of life, after all? To feel yourself living it?
“You all right there, Missus Lark? Someone at the door? I hope I’m not boring you. No?
“I was a year riding for them. You’d light out, one station to another, playing out horse after horse, riding so hard that every tooth in your head would rattle. Got through it mostly by thinking to myself: my mind’s here, but my body ain’t. My body has gone on ahead of me, and I am riding to catch up with it and get whole again. So when those Cheyenne or Crow would hove up out of the trees, I’d stare straight on and think to myself: there I am, in that cottonwood stand, or on that hilltop, or at the next waystation, and they, seeing only my ghost-self, would give up and fall behind.
“It was through that work I come to appreciate secrets. Every few nights, after I got done lancing saddlesores, I’d give myself the pleasure of opening just one letter from my mailbag. I’d spend hours choosing which. Looking at the penmanship on the envelope and asking the horse: Do we feel like a love letter tonight? Or more like ‘news of the family’? I’d slit the letter near the top careful and hold it by the fire and read aloud. People were going about their lives here and wanting other people elsewheres to know all about it. John, your sister’s on the mend. Sally, your mother and I are very happy for you. Tim, your pa died yesterday—those were always the strangest. Knowing the truth of a life that weren’t even your own. Poor Tim, somewhere ahead of me, living as if his pa was still on the right side of the grass. And me riding hard to bring him the truth—as if the whole dark of night were mantled out behind me, and this time, this firmament, was unbounded both forward and back.
“And then I would hand over my letters to
the postmaster in San Francisco and go to a little place in Chinatown and sit myself with a pipe and think on it. Me, a vessel of other people’s secrets. And people elsewhere living without knowing that their private lives were known to me. I used to dream about what it would be like to recognize someone from the letters on the street. I’d say: Charles, I carried a letter from your mistress. And wouldn’t your wife like to know about that? A powerful feeling. A man who knows your secrets is a man who knows you whole—and nobody wants to think of themselves laid out entire before a stranger.
“I went away from that job feeling like I knew more of the world than was ever meant for one man.
“Fascinating is exactly what it was, Missus Lark. Yes, thank you.
“Exactly so.
“I might have gone my whole life in that line of work. But then came the telegraph, and afterwards the war, and I went north and hunted buffalo awhile. That was damned work. Mostly because the men drawn to it were mirthless and mad and cold, and it wasn’t any kind of living sitting in some gloomy shack with your hands scalded by hot rifle-sides and dried blood in your nail-beds and hair.
“How you doing there, Sheriff? You look a little pale. Can’t think what’s keeping Miss Kincaid. I’ll go for the Doctor in a minute now.
“Let me tell you what happened. When I came back down the Missouri in the winter of ’65, the war was done in name alone. Militias were still in the hills, and people came pouring onto the plains with fresh urgency. Life itself had caved somewhere behind them, and there was nothing to do but walk the sageflats till you came to either your death or something new. Of course with the Kiowa and Sioux and Comanche all rightfully livid, the former was far more likely. So many on the move that the army was throwing up forts along the Platte and the Yellowstone as fast as they could cut the timber. Fixing ferries and building bridges.