Everville

Memory, prophecy and fantasy the past, the future and the dreaming moment between are all in one country, living one immortal day.

to know that is Wisdom. to use it is the Art.

It was hope undid them. Hope, and the city that Providence had made them suffer enough for their dreams. They'd lost so much already along the-children, healers, leaders, all taken-surely, they reasoned, God would preserve them from further loss, and reward their griefs and hardships with deliverance into a place of plenty.

When the first signs of the blizzard had appeared clouds that had dwarfed the thunderheads of Wyoming rising behind the peaks ahead, slivers of ice in the wind-they had said to each other. This is the final test. If we turn back now, intimidated by cloud and ice, then all those we buried along the way will have died for nothing; their suffering and ours will have been for nothing. We must go on. Now more than ever we must have faith in the dream of the West. After all, they told each other, it's only the first week of October. Maybe we'll see a flurry or two as we climb, but by the time the winter sets in we'll be over the mountains and down the other side, in the midst of sweet meadows. On then; on, for the sake of the dream.

Now it was too late to turn back. Even if the snows that had descended in the last week had not sealed the pass behind the pioneers, the horses were too malnourished and too weakened by the climb to haul the wagons back through the mountains. The travelers had no choice but to go forward, ugh they had long since lost any sense of their whereabouts and were journeying blind in a whiteness as utter as y black midnight.

Sometimes the wind would shred the clouds for a moment, but there was no sign of sky or sun. Only another pitiless peak rising between them and the promised land, snow driven from its summit in a slow plume, then drooping, and descending upon the slopes where they would have to venture if they were to survive.

Hope was small now; and smaller by the day. Of the eighty-three optimistic souls who had departed Independence, Missouri, in the spring of 1848 (this sum swelled by six births along the way), thirty-one remained alive. During the first three months of the journey, through Kansas, into Nebraska, then across 487 miles of Wyoming, there had been only six fatalities. Three lost in a drowning accident; two wandered off and believed killed by Indians; one hanged by her own hand from a tree. But with the heat of summer, sicknesses abounded, and the trials of the journey began to take their toll. The very young and the very old had perished first, sickened by bad water or bad meat. Men and women who had been in the prime of their lives five or six months before, hardy, brave, and ripe, became withered and wretched as the food stocks dwindled, and the land, which they had been told would supply them with all manner of game and fruit, failed to provide the promised bounty. Men would leave the wagon train for days at a time in search of food, only to return hollow eyed and empty-handed. It was therefore in an already much weakened state that the travelers faced the cold, and its effect had proved calamitous. Forty-seven individuals had perished in the space of three weeks, dispatched by frost, snow, exhaustion, starvation, and hopelessness.

It had fallen to Herman Deale, who was the closest the survivors had to a physician since the death of Doc Hodder, to keep an account of these deaths. When they reached Oregon, the glad land in the West, he had told the survivors they would together pray for the departed, and pay due respects to each and every soul whose passing he had set down in his journal. Until that happy time, the living were not to concern themselves overmuch with the dead. they had gone into the warmth and comfort of God's Bosom and would not blame those who buried them for the shallowness of their graves, or the brevity of the prayers said over them.

"We will speak of them lovingly," Deale had declared, "when we have a little breath to spare."

The day after making this promise to the deceased, he had joined their number, his body giving out as they ploughed through a snow field. His corpse remained unburied, at least by human hand. The snow was coming down so thickly that by the time his few provisions had been divided up among the remaining travelers, his body had disappeared from sight.

That night, Evan Babcock and his wife, Alice, both perished in their sleep, and Mary Willcocks, who had outlived all five of her children, and seen her husband wither and die from grief, succumbed with a sob that was still ringing off the mountain-face after the tired heart that had issued it was stilled.

Daylight came, but it brought no solace. The snowfall was as heavy as ever. Nor was there now a single crack in the clouds to show the pioneers what lay ahead. they went with heads bowed, too weary to speak, much less sing, as they had sung in the blithe months of May and June, raising hosannas to the heavens for the glory of this adventure.

A few of them prayed in silence, asking God for the strength to survive. And some, perhaps, made promises in their prayers, that if they were granted that strength, and came through this white wilderness to a green place, their gratitude would be unbounded, and they would testify to the end of their lives that for all the sorrows of this life, no man should turn from God, for God was hope, and Everlasting.

At the beginning of the journey west there had been a total of thirty-two children in the caravan. Now there was only one. Her name was Maeve O'Connell; a plain twelve-year-old whose thin body belied a fortitude which would have astonished those who'd shaken their heads in the spring and told her widowed father she would never survive the journey. She was stick and bones, they'd said, weak in the legs, weak in belly. Weak in the head too, most likely, they whispered and their hands, just like her father Harmon, who while parties had been assembling in Missouri, had talked most elaborately of his ambitions for the West. Oregon might well be Eden, he'd said, but it was not the forests and the mountains that would distinguish it as a place of human triumph: It was the glorious, shining city that he intended to build there.

Idiotic talk, it was privately opined, especially from an Irishman who'd seen only Dublin and the backstreets of Liverpool and Boston. What could he know of towers and palaces?

Once the journey was underway, those who scorned Hannon among themselves became a good deal less discreet, and he soon learned to keep talk of his ambitions as a founder of cities between himself and his daughter. His fellow travelers had more modest hopes for the land that lay ahead. A stand of timber from which to build a cabin; good earth; sweet water. they were suspicious of anyone with a grander vision.

Not that the modesty of their requirements had subsequently spared them from death. Many of the men and women who'd been most voluble in their contempt for Harmon were dead now, buried far from good earth or sweet water, while the crazy man and his stick and bones daughter lived on. Sometimes, even in these last desperate days, Maeve and Hannon would whisper as they walked together beside their skeletal nag. And if the wind shifted for a moment it would carry their words away to the ears of those nearby. Exhausted though they were, father and daughter were still talking of the city they would build when this travail was over and done; a wonder that would live long after every cabin in Oregon had rotted, and the memories of those who'd built them gone to dust.

they even had a name for this time-defying metropolis.

It would be called Everville.

Ah, Everville!

How many nights had Maeve listened to her father talk of the place, his eyes on the crackling fire, but his gaze on another sight entirely: the streets, the squares, and the noble houses of that miracle to be.

"Sometimes it's like you've already been there," Maeve had remarked to him one evening in late May.

"Oh but I have, my sweet girl," he had said, staring across the open land towards the last of the sun. He was a shabby, pinched man, even in those months of plenty, but the breadth of his vision made up for the narrowness of his brow and lips. She loved him without qualification, as her mother had before her, and never more than when he spoke of Everville.

"When have you seen it, then?" she challenged him.

"Oh, in dreams," he replied. He lowered his voice to a whisper. "Do you remember Owen Buddenbaum?" "Oh yes.

How could anybody forget the extraordinary Mr. Buddenbaum, who had befriended them for a little time in Independence? A ginger beard, going to gray; waxed mustache that pointed to his zenith; the most luxurious fur coat Maeve had ever seen; and such music in his voice that the most opaque things he said (which was the bulk of his conversation as far as Maeve was concerned) sounded like celestial wisdom.

"He was wonderful," she said.

"You know why he sought us out? Because he heard me calling your name, and he knew what it meant."

"You said it meant joy."

"So it does," Harmon replied, leaning a little closer to his daughter,

"but it's also the name of an Irish spirit, who came to men in their dreams."

She'd never heard this before. Her eyes grew huge. "Is that true?"

"I could never tell you a lie," he replied, "not even in fun. Yes, child, it's true. And hearing me call for you, he took me by the arm and said: Dreams are doorways, Mr. O'Connell. Those were the very first words he said to me."

"What then?"

"Then he said: If we but have the courage to step over the threshold......

"Go on."

"Well, the rest's for another day."

"Papa!" Maeve protested.

"You be proud, child. If not for you, we'd never have met Mr. Buddenbaum, and I believe our fortune changed the moment we did."

He had refused to be further drawn on the subject, but had instead turned the conversation to the matter of what trees might be planted on Everville's Main Street. Maeve knew better than to press him, but she thought much about dreams thereafter. She would wake sometimes in the middle of the night with the ragged scraps of a dream floating around her head, and lie watching the stars, thinking: was I at the door then? And was there something wonderful on the other side, that I've already forgotten ?

She became determined to keep these fragments from escaping her, and with a little practice she learned to snatch hold of them upon waking and describe them aloud to herself. Words held them, she found, however rudimentary. A few syllables were all that was needed to keep a dream from slipping away.

She kept the skill to herself (she didn't even mention it to her father), and it was a pleasant distraction for the long, dusty days of summer to sit in the wagon and sew pieces of remembered dreams together so that they made stories stranger than any to be found in her books.

As for the mellifluous Mr. Buddenbaum, his name was not mentioned again for some considerable time. When it was finally mentioned, however, it was in circumstances so strange Maeve would not forget them until the day she died.

they had been entering Idaho, and by the calculations of Dr. Hodder (who assembled the company every third evening and told them of their progress), there was a good prospect that they would be over the Blue Mountains and in sight of the fertile valleys of Oregon before the autumn had properly nipped the air. Though supplies were low, spirits were high, and in the exuberance of the moment, Maeve's father had said something about Everville: A chance remark that might have passed unnoticed but that one of the travelers, a shrewish man by the name of Goodhue, was the worse for whiskey, and in need of some bone of contention. He had it here, and seized upon it with appetite.

"This damned town of yours will never be built," he said to Harmon.

"None of us want it." He spoke loudly, and a number of the men-sensing a fight and eager to be diverted-sauntered over to watch the dispute.

"Never mind him, Papa," Maeve had murmured to her father, reaching to take his hand. But she knew by his knitted brows and clenched jaw this was not a challenge he was about to turn his back on.

"Why do you say that?" he asked Goodhue.

"Because it's stupid," the drunkard replied. "And you're a fool." His words were slurred, but there was no doubting the depth of his contempt. "We didn't come out here to live in your little cage."

"It won't be a cage," Hannon replied. "It will be a new Alexandria, a new Byzantium."

"Never heard of either of 'em," came a third voice.

The speaker was a bull of a man called Pottruck. Even in the shelter of her father's shoulder, Maeve trembled at the sight of him. Goodhue was a loudmouth, little more. But Pottruck was a thug who had once beaten his wife so badly she had sickened and almost died.

"they were great cities," Harmon said, still preserving his equilibrium,

"where men lived in peace and prosperity."

"Where'd you learn all this shit?" Pottruck spat. "I see you readin' a lot of books. Where'd you keep 'em?" He strode towards the O'Connells' wagon. "Going' to bring 'em out or shall I bring 'em out fer ya?"

"Just keep out of our belongings!" Harmon said, stepping into the bull's path.

Without breaking his stride, Pottruck swiped at Harmon, knocking him to the ground. Then, with Goodhue on his heels, he hoisted himself up onto the tail of the wagon, and pulled back the canvas.

"Keep out of there!" Harmon said, getting to his feet and stumbling towards the wagon.

As he came within a couple of strides, Goodhue wheeled around, knife in hand. He gave Hannon a whiskey-rotted smile. "Uh-uh," he said. "Papa.

.. " Maeve said, tears in her voice, please don't."

Harmon glanced back at his daughter. "I'm all right," he said. He advanced no further, but simply stood and watched le Goodhue clambered up into the wagon and joined ttruck in turning over the interior.

The din of their search had further swelled the crowd, but none of the spectators stepped forward in support of Harmon and his daughter. Few liked Pottruck any more than they liked the O'Connells, but they knew which could do them the greater harm.

There was a grunt of satisfaction from inside the wagon now, and Pottruck emerged with a dark teak chest, finely polished, which he unceremoniously threw down onto the ground. Leaping down ahead of his cohort, Goodhue set to opening the chest with his knife. It defied him, and in his frustration he started to stab at the lid.