A Sudden Country Read online

  People moved behind bright panes of glass. In his enormous cloak, the silent abbe watched them.

  “You see? I cry,” Laurent said. “So easily. Tell me what you will do.”

  MacLaren shook his head, with John and Baptiste and Philemon all waiting in the rain, not knowing where they were.

  He squeezed Laurent’s arm, its genuine flesh.

  THEY FOUND the trading house beside the river, left the Flatheads on the porch among the others of their kind, the half-breeds and Negroes. In the stink and roar inside, he and Gabriel turned in what they could for credit and got drunk. The close warmth was good after all that cold; it was good to be among these men, their steaming vices—knocking chairs, sloshing cups, shouting, swearing, throwing knives, embracing, seeing who could lie the loudest; good to forget what else he’d learned was possible.

  He had been staring into the glass above the fireplace for some time before he realized his own face in it.

  HE WOKE on a slope of dank shadow. Stubs and glass. Rotten sacking. One eye was musted in dirt. He lay looking up, and the planks and joists of the trade-post floor made a low ceiling above him.

  Two dogs nosed through the refuse. MacLaren sat, dry-mouthed, and wiped his eye. Bloody dirt came out of it. A few other men lay sprawled. Cheap clay pipes glowed like mushrooms in the midden. One lay near his hand, and he picked it up, then found another, until he had half a dozen. He knocked them clean. His girls would bring home ones like these from behind the walls at Fort Hall. They’d file away the stems and stop the holes with sap. They’d paint stars and flowers and use them for play teacups.

  He put them in his pocket and stooped out into a thick river mist to find their horses were all gone.

  Wagons clogged the place. He thought it was midmorning. He washed his face in a trough and looked around. Orange lights of cook fires glowed along the street into the mist like channel markers. Tents stood pitched at the road edge here, among wagons backed up for the ferry. Men sat in chairs in the mud watching other people pass. Some read books or leaned over skillets or held steaming mugs of coffee.

  He began to walk. The buildings were brick, and pillars stood along the street edge, with balconies above. Women had strung their laundry underneath, so that, going along, he was obliged to duck the arms of shirts, the wet wool toes of stockings.

  “Renounce your sin,” a woman’s voice called after him. Bold letters on the canvas of her wagon read: BENTON COUNTY. She said, “Renounce your degradation.”

  He skirted pigs and men with barrows, children tugging at the ears of sacks. Oxen stood in muddy feeds of hay. He crossed a street where a fiddler played, turned to see a telescope in a pharmacist’s window displayed among green goggles and tin ear horns, and bottles of Eye Remedy stacked in a clever pyramid, and a telescope was a thing he had been missing. So he found himself standing inside on the gritty boards, picking things up, and reading the backs of boxes.

  Be sure that you know the Physician as a man of standing, skill, and reliability. To such a man explain your case freely and without reserve, without false pride, and he will either do for you what medical science can do in such cases or else frankly give you the very best advice.

  He came out with a bottle of Dr. McMunn’s Elixir and no telescope and walked south out of town.

  Around midday, he found the horses with Gabriel and the boys camped down among the willows, cooking a skinned house cat over coals. He sat with them, and they ate and talked. They wanted to ride a steamboat. They’d ride a steamboat home, they said, and laughed, and he laughed, and after a while he emptied the foolish pipe bowls into the fire and broke the seal on the white glass bottle and drank it freely and without false pride.

  IN A DREAM that night he woke in his own cabin. It was day, clear and fine, and he opened the door with a strange feeling of lightness, of having been gone a long time. He saw the mountains as he’d known them, the meadow with its creek, the copse of pines. His children stood in bright sunlight beside the barn’s log wall, and he thought a year might have passed. Then thought it must be more, two years or three, because the girls were there, but he saw two boys—Alexander and a fairer one who was younger.

  Lise was in the meadow, cutting hay. He went and spoke to her. “Have I been gone?” The sky was brilliant blue. “How long was I away?”

  “You were never away,” she said. “You’ve been here always.”

  He felt a tingling fear, knowing how much time had passed, knowing he could never hide his ignorance, never step into his life and find out all those things as should have been familiar.

  “No,” he tried to tell her. “It was someone else. I’ve been away.”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve been here always.”

  He woke with the sun well up and found the camp empty. This time they’d taken all their things—the Flatheads and Gabriel—but left the horses.

  He stayed the day, but they didn’t come back. He woke next morning after a night of rain and tied the horses nose to tail. He let the brown mule follow and rode up into town.

  The sky had cleared to a hard pale blue, and all the mud was steaming. Vapors drifted down the sides of warming buildings. The puddles blazed like mirrors.

  On the far side of town, he found a place where stock was dealt, the pens and barn and office. It was early. He tied the horses to the rails and climbed the steps, squinting down across the pens and races. A man’s voice carried from inside, and a woman’s, the rattle of a stove lid. A yellow dog lay in a corner of sunlight, legs splayed, flews hanging in a scalloped grin. MacLaren stood beside the open door and knocked and called but had no answer.

  He stood and studied the riding stock: a light-boned mare, a long-backed sorrel with a bitten hip. A hard-used dun in the far corner caught his eye, its tail chewed down to a stubbled whip of bone.

  Then the liveryman banged out, and there was business to discuss. They went down the steps together. MacLaren looked on while the man ran his hands down the legs of each animal and pulled its ears, talking all the while about the mules coming in from Santa Fe. There had been something favorable in the old dun horse, and MacLaren looked again, sure it would fall short. But its frame was not the type you found much on this side of the divide. He studied it.

  And then a pale light squeezed behind his eyes, to see the old saddle scar below those withers. The gelding turned its head. The liveryman had asked him something, but the pores of his scalp were tingling.

  Thunder sounded, the faintest sigh, from clouds gathering up across the river.

  “That dun horse,” MacLaren said. “Who brought him in?”

  “Depends on why you’re asking.”

  “He ran out of my place this winter. Six others with him.”

  “And what place would that be?”

  “North of Fort Hall.”

  “Arkansas?”

  “Oregon. Who brought him in?”

  “Don’t think I’ll give that animal to you. Fellow gets in a dozen a week with every kind of shift and tale. I’d go broke,” he said, “if I listened.”

  “Who brought him in?”

  The liveryman described, at last, a pale-haired man of slight build, with silver conchos down his chevaliers.

  It was Beal Beck, as clear as life. The strut and swagger. The winning smile.

  “What happened to the others?”

  “Sold.”

  “So what’s he riding?”

  “Officer’s private horse, I sold him. Spanish bay.”

  The old horse shook its mane, turned, and moved through the mire to water. Now they could see the old Company brand in smudged white hairs on the shoulder.

  He said, “Was there a woman with him?”

  “Why?” said the liveryman. “Do women run out of your place as well?”

  When their business was done, MacLaren skirted the pens alone. From beyond the rails, the horse stood unmoving in the mire. He was nothing but slopes and angles now. Hips so gaunt the hair stood off them.

&
nbsp; “Hey.”

  He watched the matted ears turn to him. In his years of work, he’d judged more horses than men—bought and sold them, burdened and freed them, slaughtered them for meat. By order of the Board of Governors of Hudson’s Bay, no man could keep a mount. They were used in common, assigned and disposed of, as was each man, no accommodating personal desire. And he’d been all for the rules, except for this one horse, that he’d claimed and kept these many years.

  He turned away, thinking of the pool where he’d led this horse as a round-backed colt. Remembering the wary springing stride, the silver sheen on muscled brown; this horse the very colors of water over sand. He’d stood him in that river, belly-deep, while Lise scratched pictures in damp silt.

  The horse has two great gifts: memory and flight.

  He’d coaxed the colt in deeper, until they were both swimming. Slipped astride, and leaned, and put a noose around his nose. And stuck, when the horse found footing, when he launched and landed, plunged again; stuck when he had vaulted up the bank, hit the plain, headed toward the grassy hills. He’d run, and run, and run.

  What’s his name? she’d asked that evening.

  You name him.

  Drums Roll Over the Hill, she’d said.

  Now he waited, courting that great warmth of breath, more tender and more wary than any human greeting. He heard slow steps, the sucking mud. Then felt it, warm, moist, hay-smelling. He turned, the fence between them. The horse pulled back. They had both changed.

  The breath again, the prickle of whiskers in his palm.

  How many thousand miles had they shared, fifteen years in his keeping? How many journeys? This horse’s memory held them all—the mineral scents of plants and water, the cast of light and land, the pull of the earth’s pole. This horse was a great geographer, with a recollection for country far surpassing his own.

  He slipped through the rails as some end of loneliness overcame him, and then his hands were on the warm dry hide, to stroke, to feel, to free the matted hair, to smooth the soft hollows above the eyes. With the mane in his fist, to slap the neck in broken greeting, to hold him.

  FROM THAT HOUR, nothing could go fast enough. No deliberation, no care for anything but this: to find the man so knotted into his winter’s loss that the name alone was enough to stop all useful thought.

  In clatty boots, he went through likely buildings; shouldered up and down the streets through crowds, fixing on the faces of pale-haired men and men who rode bay horses. He’d gone into one of the larger mercantiles when, through the legs of people waiting, he saw his Dollard sextant in the counter’s case. Then saw his flintlock pistol, its butt now wrapped in leather.

  He waited, shifting. A man and his son were placing a large order. He knew the workings of that pistol in and out, knew the sextant’s every mark.

  He stepped up in his turn. “Did you get a telescope from this same man?” he asked, and rapped the defending glass.

  “Telescopes are over there,” said the clerk across his notepad.

  He went and came back, and when he could get to the counter again, he asked for things from the shelves behind: a shirt, drawers and sundries. With those things neatly on their paper, he said, “I have owned that sextant twenty years. It has my name on it.”

  He stood and waited, then, for the proprietor to be brought out.

  At the counter’s quiet end, he saw a man in a tall silk hat standing beside an open box. The man had some bright thing in his hand and was turning a clock key. He glanced at MacLaren as he did so, then set the thing to run, and MacLaren saw it was a pair of black tin horses pulling a red carriage. It angled off and nearly fell, and MacLaren caught it, the key sedately turning. He restored it to the counter, and the tiny gride and grind of clockwork carried it heedless back.

  “Ever seen aught like it?”

  MacLaren looked at him.

  “Must have had a case,” the man said. “Sextant as nice as that.”

  He affirmed it, looking away.

  “How’d it end up here?”

  MacLaren said, “I had to leave my place. I got back, and my outfit was gone. This morning I found my horse at the livery across town. A friend of mine had sold him.”

  “Well, I guess that’s one kind of friend.”

  “I just want to find him.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “Yellow-haired man about thirty years old. Riding a Spanish bay.”

  The toy man nodded but was already eyeing the room for other custom.

  MacLaren said, “My wife left me for him.”

  The man regarded him. Then said, “It’s Bonnie here that does most of the buying. I’ll put a word in for you.”

  HE GOT SOME other things he needed and was out at the ferry by evening, crossing with two families from Illinois. They milled and lugged. The men were awkward and sincere and talked too much. The wives in shawls and bonnets hovered, wincing, fearing for their furniture. One woman had produced a pocket stove as they were waiting, and boiled up coffee, and when they’d run the livestock into the current and set out at last, the families stood and drank from steaming cups and declared the woman a great marvel. MacLaren knelt among his panniers, taking out the things he’d bought and packed in haste: lead and powder, bricks of tea, biscuit, sugar, rice, tobacco enough and for currency. He unwrapped brass wire, needles, a roll of ribbon from greased paper, and stowed them in a pouch he kept. Four bottles of McMunn’s Elixir. A sallow daughter chewed and eyed him coldly. From the pocket of his coat he took the clockwork carriage in its printed box and stowed it in his can of flour. When the panniers weighed even, he stood and watched the moving horns of the oxen as they swam.

  So Beal Beck was driving for a family. This much he’d learned, and little more. He looked around again at the women in their dresses, the ambitious men now laughing with their buttered bread and jam.

  And then turned back and watched the raised head of his old horse, who was treading through the deeps behind: lip raised to show long yellow teeth, nostrils curled, wide eyes solemn and alarmed.

  A RENDERING OF FAVORS

  BESIDE A TRICKLE OF WATER, Lucy Mitchell stopped to pick a handful of mint and held it to her nose for comfort.

  She walked with Mary on her hip, Daniel by the hand. Clump to clump, they picked their way along the margin of what had become not a road at all but a daunting swath of clay a quarter mile wide, churned across these rolling uplands. Their boots slipped sometimes into pocked holes made by cattle, and the standing water gouted up in little geysers. Their legs were soaked from this.

  “Is he, Mama?” Sarah frowned back from under coppery tendrils. The leaden light had made her graceful.

  “Is who what?” Lucy had been trailing her three girls all morning, not attending to their arguments.

  “Is Mr. Beck a squaw man?”

  “I don’t know.”

  With Mr. Beck’s help, they had crossed the wagons by ferry in the dark of morning, committed them to their runnings again, chained the oxen, and gone forward in turn, along the wooded bottom and slowly up the bluffs as the rain began to fall, as their skirts and hair went limp, as clots and spatters fell from turning spokes. The cattle and goats and sheep had all resigned themselves to progress, and then the last view of the Missouri had glimmered through the leafing trees and gone. The Missouri had gone.

  The rain had stopped an hour ago, the air was moist and grassy, black-powder clouds massed and shifted overhead; but it discouraged her, the sight of this vast mucky artery through the green.

  “I want to go in the wagon,” Daniel said again.

  “No. You’re muddy.”

  It discouraged her. Because their fate was fixed, and Mr. Beck was now their driver. He rode glinting ahead of them. His high-tailed horse gaped and mouthed its silver bit. Mr. Beck wore a pirate’s blue kerchief and leather pantaloons seamed down the sides with Mexican buttons; he wore a new shirt, bright red and stiff with sizing. At noon they had eaten cheese and biscuits while
he’d talked in crumbling mouthfuls about wild Indians, dog-towns, rock spires, wonders beyond imagining.

  “He is,” said Caroline. “A squaw man.”

  Sarah said, “He can’t be. He’s from Pennsylvania.”

  “Well, they are all originally from somewhere.”

  Lucy sighed. Just two days ago, the Gibbses had quit, giving her a fleeting hope that Israel might reconsider; that despite all plans and promises, possessions gone, he might (having now brought them to the country’s very edge) finally see and understand that for two thousand miles, they would find no house, no store, no fixed light of any kind, but only ugly barren places, the haunts of savages, and at the end of it some mud-spattered town wholly separate from the civil world, ungoverned, unconnected. She’d felt the tiniest hope that Israel, like their driver, Mr. Gibbs, would come to his senses, and not ask them all to forge onward. Over their boot tops in mud.

  But Israel would never change his mind. The sight of this vast road convinced her. This was no personal delusion. All the little tracks and trails, the private notions of direction, had joined here suddenly into a highway of such span, a shared fever dream of such proportion, that there could be no resisting.

  Sarah and Caroline still argued. Sarah, her oldest, was fair-skinned, golden, blessed with beauty. Caroline was spinster-colored—sallow and brown—with arms and legs like spindles. No clever combinations of apparel hid this. She strode ahead, always leaning into life, pulling like a nervous horse. She was Israel’s.

  Caroline said, “They’re too lazy to work, so they live with Indians. They eat raw meat and get vermin and forget about God, and after a while it makes them crazy until they start to hate their own true kind.”

  That was Alice speaking, Lucy thought. Caroline’s dead mother.

  “Living with Indians would not make you crazy,” Sarah said.

  “Who’s Wathindian?” Daniel asked.

  “Missionaries live with Indians,” Sarah said. “All the time.”