Everville (2 page)

"Don't destroy it," Harmon sighed. "I'll open it for YOU."

He took a key from around his neck and knelt to unlock the box. Pottruck was down from the wagon now, and, pushing Harmon aside, kicked open the lid.

Maeve had seen what lay in that box many times, it wasn't much to the uneducated-just a few rolls of paper tied with leather thongs-but to her, and to her father, these were treasures. The city of Everville lay waiting to be born upon those sheets of parchment: its crossroads and its squares, its parks and boulevards and municipal buildings.

"What did I say?" Pottruck spat. "You said books," Goodhue replied.

"I said shit, is what I said," Pottruck said, rummaging through the rolls of paper and tossing them hither and thither as he searched for something he recognized as valuable.

Maeve caught her father's eye. He was trembling from head to foot, his face ashen. His anger, it seemed, had been overtaken by fatalism, for which she was glad. Papers could be replaced. He could not.

Pottruck had given up on his digging now, and by the bored expression on his face, he was ready to go back to his wife-beating. He might have done so too had Goodhue not caught sight of something lying at the bottom of the box.

"What's this?" he said, stooping and reaching into its depths. A grin spread over his unshaven face. "This doesn't look like shit to me."

He brought his discovery out to meet the light, sliding it out of the parcel of paper in which it had been slid and holding it up for the assembly to see. Here was something even Maeve had not set eyes on before, and she squinted at it in puzzlement. It looked like a cross of some kind, but not, she could see, one that any Christian would wear.

She approached her father's side and whispered, "What is it, Papa?"

"It was a gift... " he replied...... from Mr. Buddenbaum."

One of the women, Marsha Winthrop, who was one of the few who had ever shown anything approaching kindness to Maeve, now stepped from the knot of spectators to take a closer look at Goodhue's find. She was a large woman with a sharp tongue, and when she spoke, the throng ceased muttering a moment.

"Looks like a piece of jewelry to me," she said, turning to Harmon. "was it your wife's?"

Maeve would often wonder in times to come what had possessed her father at that moment; whether it was stubbornness or perversity that kept him from telling a painless lie. Whichever it was, he refused the ease of deception. "No," he said. "It did not belong to my wife."

"What is it then?" Goodhue wanted to know.

The answer came not from Harmon's lips but from the crowd.

"One of the Devil's signs," said a strident voice.

Heads turned, and smiles disappeared as Enoch Whitney emerged from the back of the crowd. He was not a man of the cloth, but he was by his own description the most Godfearing among them; a soul commanded by the Lord to watch over his fellows and remind them constantly of how the Enemy moved and worked his works in their midst. It was a painful task, and he seldom let an opportunity slip by to remind his charges how much he suffered for their impurities. But the responsibility lay with him to castigate in public forum any who strayed from the commandments in deed, word, or intention-the lecher, of course, the adulterer, the cheat. And tonight, the worshipper of godless things. He strode in front of the erring father and daughter now, bristling with denunciations. He was a tall, narrow man, with eyes too busy about their duty ever to settle on anything for more than a moment.

"You have always carried yourself like a guilty man, O'Connell," he said, his gaze going from the accused, to Maeve, to the object in Goodhue's fingers. "But I could never get to the root of your guilt. Now I see it." He extended, his hand. Goodhue dropped the cross into it, and retreated. "I'm guilty of nothing," Hannon said.

"This is nothing?" Whitney said, his volume rising. He had a powerful voice, which he never tired of exercising.

"This is nothing?"

"I said I was guilty of-"

"Tell me, O'Connell, what service did you do the Devil, that he rewarded you with this unholy thing?" There were gasps among the assembly. to speak of the Evil One so openly was rare; they kept such talk to whispers, for fear that it drew the attention of its subject. Whitney had no such anxieties. He spoke of the Devil with something close to appetite.

:'I did no service," Harmon replied.

"Then it was a gift."

"Yes." More gasps. "But not from the Devil."

"This is Satan's work!" Whitney bellowed.

"It is not!" Harmon yelled back at him. "I have no dealings with the Devil. It's you who talk about Hell all the time, Whitney! It's you who sees the Devil in every corner! I don't believe the Devil cares much about us. I think he's off somewhere fancy@'

"The Devil's everywhere!" Whitney replied. "Waiting for us to make a mistake and fall." This was not directed at Harmon, but at the assembly, which had thinned somewhat since Whitney's appearance.

"There's no place, even to the wildernesses of the world, where his eyes are not upon us."

"You speak of the Devil the way true Christians speak of God Almighty," Harmon observed. "I wonder sometimes where your allegiances lie!"

The response threw Whitney into a frenzy. "How dare you question my righteousness," he foamed, "when I have proof, proof here in my hand, of your unholy dealings!" He turned to address the crowd. "We must not suffer this man in our midst!" he said. "He'll bring disaster upon us, as a service to his internal masters!" He proffered the medallion, passing before his congregation. "What more proof do you need than this? It carries a parody of our Lord upon the cross!" He turned back upon Harmon, stabbing his finger at the accused. "I ask you again: What service did you do for this?"

"And I'll tell you, one last time, that until you stop finding the Devil's hand in our lives, you will be his greatest ally." He spoke softly now, as to a frightened child. "Your ignorance is the Devil's bliss, Whitney. Every time you scorn what confounds you, he smiles. Every time you sow the fear of him where there was none, he laughs. It's you he loves, Whitney, not me. It's you he thanks in his evening prayers." The tables had- been turned so simply and so eloquently that for a moment Whitney did not fully comprehend his defeat. He stared at his opponent with a frown upon his face, while Harmon turned and addressed the crowd. "If you don't wish me and my daughter to travel with you any further," he said, "if you believe the slanders you've heard, then say so now, and we'll go another way. But be certain, all of you be certain, there is nothing in my heart or head but that the Lord God put it there...."

There were tears in his voice as he came to the end of his speech, and Maeve slipped her hand into his to comfort him. Side by side they stood in front of the company, awaiting judgment. There was a short silence. It was broken not by Whitney but by Marsha Winthrop.

"I don't see no good reason to make you go your own way," she said. "We all started this journey together. Seems to me we should end it that way."

The plain good sense of this came as a relief to the crowd after all that talk of God and the Devil. There were murmurs of approval here and there, and several people began to depart. The drama was over. they had work to do: wheels to fix, stew to stir. But the righteous Whitney was not about to lose his congregation without one last warning.

"This is a dangerous man!" he growled. He threw the medallion to the din, and ground his heel upon it. "He'll drag us down into Hell with him."

"He ain't going' to drag us anyplace, Enoch," Marsha said. "Now ya just go cool off, huh?"

Whitney cast a sour glance in Harmon's direction. "I'll be watchin'

you," he said.

"I'm comforted," Harmon replied, which won a little laugh from Marsha. As if the sound of laughter appalled him, Whitney hurried away, pushing through the crowd, muttering as he went.

"You'd better be careful," Marsha said to Hannon as she too departed.

"You've got a tongue could do you harm one of these days."

"You did us a great kindness tonight," he replied. "Thank you."

"Did it for the child," Marsha replied. "Don't want her thinkin' the whole world's crazy."

Then she went away, leaving Hannon to gather up the scattered papers and return them to the chest. With her father's back turned, Maeve went in search of the medallion, picking it up and examining it closely. All of the descriptions she'd heard in the last few minutes seemed to her plausible. It was a pretty thing, no doubt of that. Shining like silver, but with flecks of color-scarlet and sky blue-in its luster. Any lady, wife or no, would be happy to wear it. But it was clearly more than a piece of decoration. There was a figure in the middle of it, outspread like Jesus on the cross, except that this savior was quite naked, and had something of both man and woman in its attributes. It was surely not a representation of the Devil. There was nothing fearsome in its aspect: no cloven hooves, no horns. Shapes flowed from its hands and head, and down between its legs, some of which she recognized (a monkey; lightning; two eyes, one above, one below), some of which were beyond her. But none were vile or unholy.

"Best not to look at it too long," she heard her father say.

"Why not?" she asked, staring still. "Will it bewitch me?"

"I don't know what it'll do, to tell the truth," her father said.

,,Did Mr. Buddenbaum not tell you?"

Her father reached over her shoulder and gently pried the medallion from her fingers.

"Oh he told me, sure enough," Hannon said, returning to the box and placing the medallion inside, "only I didn't altogether understand him." With the contents now gathered up, he closed the lid and started to lug the box back to the wagon. "And I think maybe we should not speak that man's name aloud again."

"Why not?" Maeve said, determined to vex some answers out of her father. "is he a bad man?"

Harmon set the box down on the tail of the wagon. "I don't know what kind of man he is," he replied, his voice low. "Truth is, I don't rightly know that he's a man at all. Maybe... " he sighed.

"What, Papa?"

"Maybe I dreamt him."

"But I saw him too."

"Then maybe we both dreamt him. Maybe that's all Everville is or will be. Just a dream we had, the two of us."

Her father had told Maeve he wouldn't lie to her, and she believed him, even now. But what kind of dream produced objects and real as the medallion she'd just held in her fingers?

"I don't understand," she said.

"We'll talk about this another time," Harmon said, passing his hand over his furrowed brow. "Let's have no more of it for now."

"Just tell me when," Maeve said.

"We'll know when the time's right," Hannon said, pushing the box back through the canvas and out of sight. "That's the way of these things."

"These things, these things: what exactly were these things? For the next several weeks, as the wagon train wound its way through Idaho, following a trail forged by half a decade's westering, Maeve had puzzled over the mystery of all she'd seen and heard that day. In truth the puzzlement was a distraction-like the sewing together of dream-scraps-a distraction from the monotony of the trail. The weather through late June and July was mostly sweltering, and nobody had much energy for games. Adults had it easy, Maeve thought. they had maps to consult and feuds to fume over. And they had that business between men and women that her twelve-year-old mind did not entirely grasp, but that she yearned to comprehend. It was plain, from her observations, that young men would do much for a girl who knew how to charm them. they would follow her around like dogs, eager to supply any comfort; make fools of themselves if necessary. She understood these rituals imperfectly, but she was a good student, and this-unlike the enigmatic Mr. Buddenbaum-was a mystery she knew she would eventually solve.

As for her father, he was much subdued after the clash with Whitney, mixing with the rest of the travelers less than he had, and when he did so exchanging only the blandest of pleasantries. In the safety and secrecy of the wagon, how ever, he continued to pore over the plans for the building of Everville, scrutinizing them with greater intensity than ever. Only once did she attempt to coax him from his study. He told her sternly to let him be. It was his intention, he said, to have Everville by heart, so that if Pottruck or Goodhue or their like attempted and succeeded in destroying the plans, he could raise the shining city from memory.

"Be patient, sweet," he told her, then, his sternness mellowing. "Just a few more weeks and we'll be over the mountains. Then we'll find a valley and begin."

In this, as in all else, she trusted him, and left him to pore over the plans. What was a few weeks? She would content herself in the meanwhile with the triple mystery of dreams, things unsaid, and the business between men and women.

In a tiny time they would be in Oregon. Nothing was more certain.

But the heat went out of the world even before August was over, and by the end of the third week, with the Blue Mountains not yet visible even to the keenest eye, and food so severely rationed that some were too weak to walk, the word had spread around the campfires that according to friendly natives, storms of unseasonal severity were already descending from the heights. Sheldon Sturgis, who had led the train thus far with a loose hand (some said that was his style; others that he was simply weak and prone to drink), now began to hasten along those who were slowing progress. But with a growing number of frail and sickened pioneers, mistakes and accidents proliferated, adding to the delays that were an inevitable part of such journeys: wheels lost, animals injured, trails blocked.

Death became a fellow traveler sometime in early September, that was Maeve's belief She did not see him at first, but she was certain of his presence. He was in the land around them, killing living things with his touch or his breath. Trees that should have been fruitful in this season had already given up their leaves and were going naked. Animals large and small could be seen dead or dying beside the trail. Only carcass-flies were getting fat this September; but then Death was a friend to flies, wasn't he?