A Sudden Country Read online

  WHEN THEY CAME, in a week, to the high round valley that had been his home, MacLaren left the others encamped and rode to it alone.

  He’d neared it when a drift of smoke surprised him, hazing up against the morning’s blue, from beyond the copse where his cabin would be standing.

  “Lise!”

  The name leaped out, though it wouldn’t have been her. But he dug at the ribs of the lazy mare he rode, lashed her with his reins. He arrived, of course, to find no one at all. It was only the steaming thatch.

  Crows flew up from bones around the door. The elk he’d hung had rotted and come down.

  The pegs had swollen with the damp. The door gave way to gloom. He waited in the jamb, watching the ugly mare scrape her bit along the rail outside. She pawed the wet snow and swung, fretting to get back.

  He took a breath and went in to the smell of cold smoke, the dank of abandoned places. The robes were roiled, his things so disarrayed that at first the place seemed ransacked, but it was only as he’d left it. Two half-burned timbers lay along the floor.

  He had come with things in mind to do. But when he saw the chair he’d made, he sat in it.

  His daughters’ dresses lay rumpled in the corners. If he looked, he knew he’d find their dolls and treasures hidden there, and was afraid to. He saw the table with bowls still on it. They’d grown up always eating on the ground, and here he’d made a table, but was always coming in to find June kneeling on the bench, Elizabeth astride it, Alexander in the dirt beneath, Lise on her shins by the fire.

  “Sit right when you eat, you three. Or you’ll have coals for Christmas.”

  He’d put spoons in their greasy hands, sat them decently while June asked him, “What will St. Nicholas bring? Is he really magic?”

  “As magic as the snow outside,” he’d told her. “As magic as your mother.”

  “She isn’t magic.”

  “Well, she is. She is.”

  He thumbed the smooth arms of his chair.

  His printed books stood on the single shelf he’d made, his row of ledgers beside them. There were twenty, one for every year he’d served or worked, though some were lost. All filled with cramped notations: dates, supplies, routes long forgotten. In winter, he’d let the girls turn through and look for treasure: some array of mushrooms he had rendered, a bird, a snake, a butterfly, a painted flower. They’d found his awkward portraits of chiefs, sketches on the construction of canoes, the styled moccasins of different tribes. Outlines of the forts. Junie liked the flowers. They had known by heart the pages he had written on, when each was born.

  The day was passing. He’d come with things to do.

  He went outside. The place seemed different in the thaw. He stood above the graves, in patchy snow. Now he didn’t like the place he’d chosen, or how the earth had thawed and slurried into them. A winding of print cotton lay exposed. He’d bought it at Fort Hall. He’d been keeping it a secret, red and green for Christmas.

  And then he had to go and rest his head against the rail of the fence.

  When he could, he found his shovel and dug up sod and laid it on.

  He was back in the barn, looking in the dirt for footprints, when Laurent came through and stood against the light.

  He looked up. He said, “Someone took my saddle.”

  “What else?”

  “What was on it. Some maps I’d made. My sextant. Telescope.”

  “And from the house?”

  He shook his head.

  “There is death, you know. In all the vapors.”

  “I know it.”

  He trusted only boiling. He chose the things that would survive it: knives and awls, smaller tools, his traps. Molds and presses, spoons and other plunder. He built a fire under a pot outside, broke down icicles as big as his arms from the north-side eaves and melted them, while Laurent stood over the graves and read.

  At midday he got the balky mare and began to haul brush from the river. He dragged whole pines from the copse and piled them on the cabin’s warm south wall. Inside, he raked the rushes high, dusted on black powder. He laid on the blankets and the dresses. The bench and chair. He put his ledgers on top, and kindled the base, and lit it.

  THEY TRAVELED through the early spring, east on the emigrant road. The abbe complained like a woman. Gabriel sang and swore. MacLaren rode with Laurent beside him on fine days. The priest was full of words: he told the lives of saints, brought up questions of theology, paid out self-deprecating tales of scholarship and ease. MacLaren, hearing, felt all his motive gone, all curiosity. The heart damped out completely.

  They broke their journey for a day in a village of the Ogallala, the whole tribe gathering to see the great unrolling of the Heavenly Ladder. He had seen it many times: the old canvas hanging from its rood, soft from use. Stained by instructional fingers. There were Adam and Eve, painted dark-skinned innocents in their conifer Eden; the Angels of virtues and of Temptations, the Protestants with their devilish consorts, crude Sinners tumbling into brimstone, the saved ascending in gold-leaf light. The people watched. They put their hands across their mouths to show their wonder.

  And the babies screamed at pale-eyed men but were baptized all the same. MacLaren, from a distance, heard the howling. There was smoke and water. Laurent and the abbe strode fearless through them, trinkets jingling in their cassocks. From one pocket they pulled strings of beads, steel awls, flints and strikers. From the other, small iron crosses on their thongs. And that was how old men and warriors were won. Then came speeches back and forth, in which unlikely promises were made.

  The next morning they rode on.

  “It is a great undertaking,” MacLaren heard the abbe say, “to bring such people to God.” The Ogallala, grateful, had praised the abbe for the power this god might give them against their enemy the Crow. They’d gladly hoped to wipe their own soiled backsides on the scalps of those who were less than human, to roast their enemies’ live bodies over coals, to slaughter their children, to make their daughters captive.

  The abbe, yet new to this country, was most put out.

  “Cruelty is a virtue here,” Laurent explained. “They win their honor with theft and murder. I have had to put away my lessons on the crucifixion. Always they want to know how it is done.”

  “They must be improved,” the abbe said. “They must be taught some Christian mildness.”

  IT WAS just April when they stopped among the Pawnee. This time MacLaren said, “I’m no interpreter.”

  “By gesture, no? To make them understand.”

  “Ask Gabriel.”

  He left them to it. Walked instead across the ragged snow. Black melt-water leaked under crusts of ice, the sky was cold white. All winter the world came in only these two colors—of snow and cloud and ice, of dark trees, shadows, crows.

  Then, kneeling beside the creek, a star of yellow surprised him. It was a lily, blooming in a sunny crease of granite.

  Before they’d married, he’d sent a letter down to Lise. He’d pressed a lily of this kind and enclosed it, playing on her name that way. It was all the courtship he had ever needed. She’d made him the coat he’d married her in, the one he wore today, the yellow all but faded from the quills: her lilies in return.

  He packed a pipe and smoked it, looking west across the world.

  If sorrow was an evil, he didn’t know what evil that would be.

  He thought about Laurent, his endless stories. As though he feared the emptiness they rode through. Land and time. For his own part, he had no need to fill it. There seemed more truth, these days, in silence.

  A TRUE WIFE

  LUCY HAD BEEN CONFUSED at first, opening this letter onto her lap, to find nothing but pleasantries, some note on a mutual acquaintance. She sat alone this April morning on the edge of the bed with the emptied drawer beside her. She’d just packed Israel’s socks and linens. Then, tipping the drawer to clean it, she’d discovered this letter folded under the paper lining. It was from Pennsylvania, addressed i
n her own hand. She had never seen it, never imagined the words of hers that Luther must have left, undiscovered all these years, now under Israel’s socks and linens.

  She read until she found the reason for its safekeeping:

  And now to a subject which lieth close to both our hearts . . . my thoughts on the matter are the same as when you left two weeks ago, without it is that I think of you different and love you more.

  She saw her father’s garden, then, complete in memory. She remembered writing under the elms. Three weeks before, in that same garden, Luther Ross had sat and watched her from the depths of a willow-work chair as, daringly, she’d perched on the table and read her notes aloud, of a trip to New York City. She had been nineteen.

  You must choose but one who will be a true wife and mother—and if at any time you find I am inadequate to that position do not hesitate one moment to inform me, for a little sorrow now would be better than a lifetime of misery, for misery it would be, if you have one thought or wish that I cannot fulfill.

  Well. What a thing to find, she thought. She folded away that uncompromised and daring girl, and put her in a pocket.

  THE NEXT HOUR was all apology. The Van Luvens had arrived. Through the window, she’d seen the husband lift his little wife from the buggy and set her on the puncheon walk. “I’m sorry for the disorder,” Lucy said now. “You can see there’s all the packing.”

  Mary was awake. Lucy, cradling her, stood behind their visitors, looking through the doorway at the parlor. Daniel had been playing among the trunks and crates, and now began to hammer something.

  “Daniel,” she said. “Come out.”

  He peeped, then dodged away, her small fair-haired boy.

  “I’ll show you the improvements,” Israel said.

  He’ll talk about the wainscoting, Lucy thought, and led Mrs. Van Luven into the dining room. The Van Luvens dealt in furnishings and were looking for a well-made house.

  “The dining set looks almost new,” Mrs. Van Luven said.

  “Yes. The Carrs are taking it on Monday.”

  Behind them in the hall, Israel was pointing out one thing and another. Only four years before, he’d filled the house with carpenters. As his new wife, she’d watched him stalk, the male imperial, instructing the men in this or that, fingering new joins, fussing behind them with her good broom and dustpan.

  Now she heard the back door slam. Caroline and Sarah ran down the hall and bolted up the stairs. Israel called after them. She heard a distant bawl of cattle.

  Her body swayed to soothe the baby. In these early months, it did so of its own accord. Reason had no part in the collusion; she swooped and swayed unrestrained while her thoughts clashed in the door frame. Mrs. Van Luven surveyed the brambly window.

  Lucy, I’d not like you to break the trust between us.

  That’s what Israel had finally said when all her winter’s reasons were exhausted. When he had denied that hers were reasons. On matters of pure inclination, he felt entitled to preside.

  “One could easily get more light in here,” Mrs. Van Luven told the brambles.

  Lucy said, “They’re yellow roses.” Upstairs a fight was breaking out, the girls in fierce accusation and defense. “They’ll bloom in May.”

  “How lovely. Only the rest of the time, one must suffer them.”

  The cattle sounded very close. Then Sarah was in the doorway with a pair of pantalettes dangling from an upraised hand.

  “Sarah!”

  “Mama look! What Emma did!”

  “Sarah, please!” But she did see the ragged hems.

  Then suddenly the flanks of cattle were passing only feet from the window. More were coming through the fence—she heard the sound of breaking boards. Her visitor cried out. Lucy glimpsed a passing wagon on the road, the canvas lettered with its place of origin. She turned and strode into the hallway.

  Israel was on the stairs, still talking.

  “Benton County’s in my daffodils,” she announced as Emma Ruth scowled past.

  SHE COULD HAVE put down the baby and taken up a broom against the cattle. Or stayed and praised the merits of her home. Instead she found her cloak and bonnet, and followed her daughter into the rain.

  The cattle had nearly finished passing; it was a small group. She saw the wagons, their sides all hung with chairs and tools and swinging pails. Their own new wagons stood silent in the yard as she passed, and the tent, still smelling of new wax. She’d watched through the kitchen window only yesterday as Israel and the girls had tried it out. They’d bobbed and pounded, tripped on strings, stood up poles that fell again.

  Through the barn’s dim doorway she saw Emma standing cross-armed by a stall post. Israel’s new mare had her ears back and was glaring.

  “You’re missing old Bob,” Lucy guessed.

  Emma answered, “Horses don’t miss people.”

  “Well, you watch out for this one.”

  Israel had ridden in from town a week ago on this tall Thoroughbred, the same cherrywood hue as the dining set he’d bought last year, and now sold at half its value.

  “I’ll buy you one,” he’d called. The mare had quartered and flashed her shoes, flung her head for rein. White foam flew. He’d said, “We can ride together.” As though, with five children, she might be at liberty to do so. She’d said as much, and then he’d named her.

  Don’t break the trust between us.

  He was the true grandnephew of Daniel Boone, which he mentioned on all appropriate occasions. His parents had toiled, he’d always told the girls, to give him every opportunity at schooling, so as not to pass along the hardships of a farming life: they’d roughed it on the frontier and come out the better side. So when windows needed washing, Emma Ruth and Sarah and above all his own Caroline must appreciate that there were such windows to be washed, not mere flaps of oilcloth; when it was time to walk the road to Mrs. Baker’s house, they must appreciate that there was a piano, and money for the lessons, and that they were saved—unlike his mother—from tending pigs and corn. And now they must appreciate this most of all: the chance to go to Oregon, and suffer for themselves those hardships that had made his parents such outstanding characters. The irony seemed to escape him.

  Don’t break the trust, he’d said. But who was she? When her dooryard bloomed in roses every spring? And what was a house worth? Or any place, and all its people, if you could leave it just like that? On a whim, it seemed.

  Thousands have gone already, he’d argued. There is no danger.

  So she had wondered: Did men’s imaginations fail? Or were women’s too acute? It was just that she knew caution. It was out there like a boundary fence, scarcely noticed until he’d make her cross it. Scribing, steadying, keeping them safe. Predicting grave consequences for trespass.

  “Other people go,” said Emma now.

  Her thoughts were so evident, Lucy saw, a child of ten could read them.

  “I know.” She looked up. Dark trusses glowed with pigeon dung. The rain came down. The baby stirred against her.

  Other people went. But still, beyond all daylight reasons, all petty arguments, was some dark thing she dreamed or knew. It came to her at night: a vision of vacant miles, bright sun, endless grass, sand, circling birds. She saw a grave. With certainty past reason, she knew that one of them would die, and be left out there alone.

  “If I lost one of you...” she said. But the truest words always swelled and caught before she could deliver them. So no one knew.

  She dried her cheeks on Mary’s blanket. Then said, “Don’t speak of this.”

  She looked at Emma Ruth: her brown-haired girl of slivers and scabs. Who sharpened found knives on stones, filled pockets with sucked cherry pits, who could not do a tub of dishes without studying the ways of water. Emma Ruth said nothing.

  Lucy said, “You cut the frills off your new pantalettes.”

  Luther would have loved her.

  For misery it would be, if you have one wish or thought that I cannot fulf
ill.

  How young we all begin, it seemed. How brave and full of certainty. How terrible it would be to know: not only what we must become, but who we really are.

  “Well, hem them up,” she said. “Don’t leave them ragged.”

  MEMORY AND FLIGHT

  IT WAS POURING APRIL RAIN when MacLaren saw the tiny window lights at last, shining like a beacon from the ferryman’s house at the edge of the Missouri.

  They descended the road in sheets of water to the landing on the river’s edge. MacLaren rang the bell, but no one was there, and no ferry either, so they sheltered under the streaming eaves. They leaned against the wall and passed the time in the bitter smell of budding leaves, and at last the keelboat with its white-topped wagons loomed out of the sweeping rain.

  The tide of oxen made the shore, lunged up through luminous foam and muck. The horses went wild with fright to see such creatures streaming out of the dark, and ripped free to bolt off westward with trail ropes skipping through their legs. It was half an hour before they could be rounded back and their packs put straight, and more time yet before they could be persuaded onto the ferry’s slick deck, where they stood with flattened ears while the river seethed with rain.

  They made the eastern shore. All up the road into St. Joseph, the wagons stood blocked and set, with families encamped in the mud and waiting.

  So he delivered Father Laurent and the Abbe Franchere to the door of the Peerless Hotel. From the shelter of the porch, they could smell the steaming baths, hear the clink and clatter of bottles and china plates.

  “Sleep dry,” MacLaren said. He relied on irony and haste, in parting.

  But Laurent took his hand and then gripped him by the elbow. “Come, my friend,” he said. “Come with us abroad. You would be my guest. There is so much to see. So much you could do.”