Gabriel's Story (10 page)

But in the passing caravan nobody posed questions such as these. They nodded their heads when greeted and touched their hats, and none made conversation. Apart from these greetings, there was little interaction with the farmers. On some whim that seemed as inexplicable as it was beneficent, Marshall did make a gift of one horse each to three homesteads that caught his attention in some way. The homesteaders could make no sense of such an offer and seemed scarcely willing to accept, but Marshall insisted and rode on, leaving the farmers with halters in hands, protests or good wishes on their lips.

As one such homestead passed into the distance, James nudged Gabriel with an elbow. He whispered a complaint against Marshall, who could've just as easily given each of them a horse. But James didn't seem to take the suggestion very seriously. “I sure as hell wouldn't want to be one of them farmers, though,” he said. “Them people look poor as dirt—poorer than dirt, cause the dirt ain't got no debt to worry on. Your folks could end up the same way, and it wouldn't be nobody's fault neither, cept God's. Don't that make you think we done right?”

It took Gabriel a few moments to answer. He'd looked at the homesteaders with neither kinship nor compassion. His eyes touched little on their faces, and when they did they passed on quickly. It seemed those people were to him sad reminders of things escaped and things to keep moving from. And it seemed also that there was some shame in this. He preferred the sight of his own boots taking bites out of the earth and moving onward toward something he placed faith in still, even though he couldn't clearly define the origins of this faith.

“Yeah, we done right. Farming ain't no way to live,” he finally replied.

AT SOME POINT THEY CROSSED INTO THE INDIAN TERRITORY of Oklahoma. Day-long, the view was uniform in its abandoned solemnity. The land stretched out pale and unpeopled, with tufts of grass erupting from the ground like blemishes on the back of some scurvied reprobate. James said this must be the desert, but Jack laughed at this and said maybe one day he'd see real desert and there'd be no mistaking it then. Marshall cautioned all to beware and watch out for Indians, who might protest their passage, ask for payment, or steal what they could. He rode with his rifle ready, sometimes loose across his saddle and other times standing at attention, aimed at the innocent sky. The day passed tense and dry, without a single sighting of another human being, native or otherwise.

It was a somberer evening than most, the desolation of the place having affected the men with melancholia. As Bill tended to the oxen, he sang a song, low and smooth, in a voice that flowed like liquid and seeped out over the land as if to comfort its bare spaces. Gabriel caught hardly a word of the song, but its meaning was more in the sound than in the words, and perhaps it was this that spurred him to pose a question to Dunlop, who sat next to him at the fire.

“Where'd you say you were from—Aberdonia?”

Dunlop laughed. “You've almost got it. Aberdeen's the place, back in Scotland.”

“Oh.” Gabriel nodded at this as if recollecting the place himself, but then asked, “What's it like over there?”

“Wet and green.” Dunlop let this answer lie for a few moments, a complete portrait of the place drawn in two adjectives, but then he mused further, in language both proud and forlorn. He called Scotland an old country and said that in such places the ghosts of the past intermingle with the living. He said it had a beauty that couldn't be described but must be beheld to be truly grasped. He spoke of it as a sad place as well, where inequity had been woven into the fabric so long ago that it seemed the country had crept that way out of the mists of creation and could never change without being destroyed. His father's family had worked the land of Ballater for generations but still couldn't own it outright, as there was a laird, whose ownership took precedence over the rights of common folk. This laird, he said, valued deer hunting more than the lives of his wards. He cleared the land of people so that he and his kind could pursue their sport. It was because of this that Dunlop's family had had to move to the city, where they died fast and furiously from consumption and from the great alcoholic thirst and from sorrows that ate away their spirit. He said it was a place he missed every day.

“Why'd you come over this way?”

“Why?” Dunlop wrinkled his brow. He took a long sip of coffee. “To shoot a grizzly.”

“What?”

“To shoot a grizzly.” He let this answer sit and watched Gabriel think it over and slowly find acceptance of it. But then, as was his way, he added that he also crossed the ocean to make a life for himself after his family had passed on, one and all, leaving him in a position to choose the trajectory in which his life was to proceed. “How about yourself? You left some family back in Kansas, didn't you?”

Gabriel nodded. He offered no more explanation. He fixed his eyes on a gnarled piece of wood, the rooty workings of some stubborn tree. The flames ate it slowly, afraid of venturing far from their center but impelled outward by the hunger to consume.

Dunlop studied his face in the firelight. He saw the blankness of a troubled heart, not the organ but that other thing with the same name, so necessary to our lives and yet so fickle in its function. Dunlop saw this and proceeded carefully. “Did you fall out with them, then?”

“Maybe you could say that. I had a different mind on some things.”

“Different minds are hard to bring together, family or no. Sometimes it's best to find your own mind and follow it.” He laughed. “Sometimes—not always.”

Gabriel watched him, smiling faintly but showing no joy. He couldn't help wondering how one knew when to follow one's own mind and when not to. James joined them, and the three sat quietly for a few minutes. Eventually Gabriel asked, “You ever shoot that grizzly?”

This brought a new smile from Dunlop. “I haven't—not yet, at least. I saw one once, though, up in Nebraska. Even had my sights on it.”

“You miss?” James asked.

“Not exactly.” The Scot looked between the two boys, something hidden in his eyes. He shrugged and stood up. “I don't know, lads.” He motioned in the air before him, a brief explanation in two sharp twirls of the wrist. He proceeded as if the meaning of this gesture should be clear to all, or clear to none, depending. “Anyway, if I'd bagged the grizzly, I'd have completed my mission. I'd have had to pack up and head home, and I'm not ready to do that just yet. I kind of like this place, strange as it is.”

GABRIEL BEDDED DOWN ON THE EDGE OF THE CAMP, placing the wagon between him and the rest of the men. He rolled himself tightly into the worn woolen robe that Marshall had given him and lay with his head hard on the bundle that served as his pillow, his eyes roaming from that strange angle across the horizon. The moon had just risen above the earth's rim, hauling itself up with tired resilience and casting pale light across the plain.

The boy watched the moon's progress for some time, wondering if the same moon might be viewed this evening by his mother or brother, stepfather or adopted uncle. If so, would they wish to share such a sight with him? Or would they turn against him, a unified front that would spurn him just as he had them? What sins against family will be forgiven, and what punished here on earth as in heaven?

He awoke late in the night. The moon was gone now, having progressed its full course across the sky and retired. The landscape was much darker. The fire behind him simmered low and the voices were now silent, turned instead into a chorus of nasal breathing. Gabriel saw nothing new before him and closed his eyes. He held them that way for several seconds, then eased them open again.

His eyes picked out movement in the dim light. A creature emerged from the cover of grass and waddled across a clearing of bare ground into view. An armadillo—a young one, it would seem. Its rotund body caught the dull glow of the starlight and projected an image of monstrous girth in relation to its tiny head and thin snout. It moved clumsily, waddling, and yet somehow it conveyed complete confidence in the correctness of its form. It paused at one point, contemplated a subterranean sound only its sharp ears could hear, then dug into the soil to reach the delicacy hidden therein.

Gabriel watched it work at this for some time. After a while, the creature made its way over to him and brushed up against his body. The boy didn't move, and neither did the creature retreat from his foreign smell. It nuzzled into the wool, rustled around for a few seconds, then lay still. Before long it seemed to sleep. The boy watched its scaly back rise and fall, rise and fall. He moved not a muscle, like a father who fears waking his slumbering child. Some time later, while still contemplating this steady rhythm, Gabriel too drifted into slumber.

He awoke to the early rays of morning light. There was a commotion behind him, Rollins cursing the pain of heat transmitted through metal. The armadillo was gone, having left no trace, sign, or footprint. The boy stared at the spot in which the creature had sheltered, then closed his eyes once more and feigned sleep for as long as the illusion would hold.

GABRIEL AND JAMES WALKED BESIDE THE WAGON, their strides easily matching the slow rotations of its wooden wheels. They had risen to a sky clouded over with the threat of rain, but as the morning passed the clouds did likewise. Gabriel felt the hard-packed earth through the worn soles of his boots, and he couldn't help but compare it to dried skin, blistered by so many days without rain.

Marshall roused the boy from his thoughts. He rode by them at a canter, tipped his hat, smiled as if addressing polite company, and moved on up to converse with Caleb.

James leaned close to Gabriel. “What do you make of Marshall?”

“Don't know. Reckon he knows his job all right.”

“Yeah, he does that,” James said, although his tone indicated that this answer was not in keeping with the thrust of his question. “Don't he seem strange to you? Like he thinks one thing one minute and then the exact opposite the next.”

“How's that make him different from any other white man?”

“Well . . .” James found it hard to argue with this.

“They think what suits them and change their minds when it suits them. That's how come they're white.”

James smirked. “Is that why? I thought it had something to do with skin color.”

They walked on. Just after eleven o'clock Gabriel noticed that something was happening. Caleb galloped out ahead, and Marshall hefted his rifle and rode with its barrel against his shoulder. Bill motioned to the boys. “Come up, we got us company ahead.”

And thus Gabriel rode the wagon into the first settlement of Indians he'd yet seen. It was not the sight he would have imagined. Their homes huddled in the earth like the dens of creatures only half gifted with the knowledge of carpentry, part turf and part skins and part cave. There was only one teepee, massive compared to the other structures but weatherworn, shredded by heat and wind. As the caravan drew near, forms rose up from the hovels and walked out to greet them. Dogs followed the people, more like the protected of this tribe than protectors. In front walked an old man and woman, a couple so aged and wrinkled as to be kin to the first humans. Behind them walked several more of different ages and sizes, all clad in rags and stray garments, one with a cavalry shirt and one sporting a hat of buffalo fur, which seemed strange, as the day was warm.

The old man hailed the wagon in his own language. With a nod from Marshall, they halted and listened to the man's words, sounds thrown together and meaningless to all but Jack. The Indian spoke with gestures that seemed both beseeching and instructional, as if he would ask them for something but must first explain the premise he proposed and provide the background and other salient details.

“They're Kansa,” Jack said.

“Are they?” Marshall asked, though he seemed little interested. He took off his hat and worked its shape with his fingers. He looked ahead of them. “What do they have to say?”

Jack and the old man spoke for a few moments. The old woman interrupted twice, punctuating some point of the man's with her own emphasis, nodding her gray head and reaching up toward Marshall with gestures that were difficult to interpret. Jack thought for a minute before translating. He seemed to process the conversation at full length, and he spat before he spoke. “They want food. He says they're starving. They been eating grasshoppers.”

“Grasshoppers?” Bill said. “Shit.”

The woman nodded.

Marshall stuffed his hat back on his head. “Better than nothing, I guess. They got anything to trade, or they just appealing to our sense of Christian decency?”

Jack shrugged. “You got eyes, Marshall. You figure they got anything to trade?”

A girl stepped forward from the back of the group and touched the side of the wagon. Bill looked down at her, suspicious, but the girl looked around him and studied James. Her hair hung straight and black around her face. Her eyes were black also and large, more like the eyes of a deer than of a person. She might have been as old as sixteen or as young as twelve. It was hard to tell. She reached out and touched James's knee. She caressed it and looked up at him with eyes that were both inviting and curious. James drew back from her and brushed against Gabriel.

“Looks like the squaw fancies coloreds,” Bill said, with humor in his voice but a frown on his face. “Never could make sense of Indians.”

“Go on and get yourself some if you can,” Rollins said. He glanced at Bill and shared a smile with him. “She's clean. You can see that. Clean and sweet, I'll bet ya.”

“Get me what?” James asked.

“Get what she'll give you,” Rollins said. “Or sell you. She can't cost much out here.”

James hesitated. He looked at Gabriel like a man soon to be guilty of some crime seeking forgiveness. He would have asked his friend something, but the urging of the men and the girl made him climb down from the wagon. The girl held his hand in hers and looked him long in the face. She reached out her other hand and touched his chest, slid her fingers over his collarbone and out to the muscles of his shoulder.