Afterlands (34 page)

Failure to answer the questions of an officer in a prompt and clear manner, the remaining
lancero
stated. Failure to address an officer of the Seventh Regiment of the Cavalry of the Republic with due respect. And with a nasal cry, a drumroll of thudding hooves, he too was gone. Kruger tried to sit up, then decided to lie still. His eyes half closed. A centaur shadow glided over him. There was a dense humid whiff of horse-breath like a field of sodden hay. Far above, an eyeless face hovered in its black brim halo, deep sardonic creases bracketing the mouth. Instead of the
coup de grâce
the captain was holstering his revolver and, to Kruger’s numb wonder, speaking in virtually unaccented English. You appear to be an intelligent man but your actions are not intelligent. In the future do not be so cursed with courage—like the
primitivos
. This morning you are fortunate. I shall order my men to leave your saddlebag and cantina in the road. They would be unlikely to think of that by themselves. Senseless cruelty does appeal to them—as opposed to necessary measures. And yet, I must have them. Here he frowns, thoughtfully. There is work to be done. I should advise you now to depart this region.
Auf Wiedersehen
.

A nudge of the spurs and the blazed sorrel mare thundered off, horseshoes chipping sparks off the stones of the road. In this way Kruger’s mouth and eyes were generously refilled with salt dust. By the time he was able to look again, the captain had caught up with his troop. The men of the Seventh Regiment were receding in the heat, the little grey mule lost among stallions, Kruger’s saddlebags jettisoned in their wake. How easy for a life to become mere flotsam. He got up bleeding and reeled about in the road, trying to corral his identity papers and books, his tumbleweed hat, the fragments of his pipe, the latest note he meant to send Tukulito from Chihuahua City. And slowly walked on, ever southward.

In that part of Mexico the women of those times would pin back their hair with fragile white combs made from the sternum and sharpened ribs of jackrabbits, roadrunners, even
tuahmec
. Every night on the houseboat when Jacinta releases her smoky hair she stands a few of them on the candle-ledge of the icon—a gaudy
Pietà
nailed to the wall over the bed. She keeps a good half-dozen combs there. Last night when Kruger slipped out with one of them in his hand, she was on her back snoring gently, the sheet pulled to just below her nipples, crucifix glinting, her mouth ajar as if to drink the fluid moonlight pouring onto the bed. At her feet a passionate aftermath of blankets. Now it’s only in hardest sleep, with her face calm and solemn, that she reminds him of Tukulito; otherwise she has become herself to him. Maybe he really can escape his northern past. He bent to ease a serape over her, drawing it to the scooped vale of bone at the base of her throat.

In the comb a few wiry sable hairs were caught, and this morning he wove them among the tines and wrapped the comb in his handkerchief and put it in the breast pocket of his jacket. He has been thirty days, a whole moon, in Purificación. Having spent his last few centavos, he’s altogether broke, and Jacinta must start saving for the new poll tax that the Padre will be coming to collect in the autumn. By Padre she means not the village priest but the scholarly officer he met on the road; everyone in the district fears him, this Captain Luz, Maclovio Luz, not only because he seems to be everywhere at once, but also because he speaks a little Sina.

Kruger must go on to Chihuahua City and try to claim his next puny remittance. Then he’ll make his way southwest up the traders’ trail into the sierra and through the deep copper gorges to the Pacific. I have always wanted to see the Pacific, he has told her, fearing that he might soon tell her more—the rest of his story, what came after the rescue. The temptation is growing. One night he might prowl up from the cantina after a few mescals and tell her the full story and suckle whatever sympathy he can get and be on the way to turning into his father—dyed deep with grievance, poisoned with self-pity.
Think of surviving such a sustained assault by Nature, only to find it brutally renewed by Society!
It would be that easy to import his mess into Purificación.

At sunup he lashes the saddlebags onto a makeshift travois that the vulpine dog draws, her hazel eyes flicking up to his expectantly, her plume of a tail erect and wagging between the traces. She seems to rejoice at being fastened so physically into the journey. Kruger’s own heart, being human, can’t quite restrict itself to the moment. No
humilliado
ever forgets himself entirely. His bluchers are freshly shined. He wears his frayed brown suit and round collar and black bow tie, his hair reared vertically over his brow as if pomaded with clay.

Down the path to the village among tufts of sage and creosote brush they proceed with their shadows stretched long before them like stick-figure silhouettes on cave walls. Around them Sinas in yellow field pyjamas are turning the earth for the spring planting. The skies have a scoured clarity; to the west the slopes of the cordillera arch up toward their own separate weather of storm clouds. Jacinta is in the yard, bent over a washtub and a pannikin of soap, her skirts hiked up and her sleeves rolled, thick forearms plunged in suds. Her mother is stationed on her chair in the doorway. On a green serape the first daughter kneels with a bone needle and thread, stringing chillies while her sister squats behind her, gravely braiding her hair. The little son, chin high, dispenses handfuls of corn to the chickens with an air of sovereign pomp and largesse.

Jacinta straightens from the tub and dries her hands on her skirts, beaming her wide silver-capped smile. She greets him as always,
_¡
Que milagro!
—what a miracle, what a miracle to see you!—a greeting that struck him at first as mere rustic quaintness, another instance of Latin hyperbole and social theatre. He has come to see it as appropriate. He rumples the rumpled hair of the boy, Mateo, who ducks from under his palm and bolts away, red poncho flapping, chasing Perra and the jouncing travois through the yard.

There can be no goodbye embrace here, ashore, in the open. Last night before sleep she held his face close to hers by pressing the middle fingers of either hand into the sunburned hollows under his cheekbones, as if to memorize the form of his bones. Maybe the local women do this for purposes of future identification. Now she cocks her head back and narrows her eyes at him, scolding him drolly, her voice low, for him alone. Why had he not remained the full night with her when it was to be his last night on the boat?
Su última noche
.

I intended to stay. The dreams were especially bad.

Always leaving the bed! It’s a miracle to me that you gringos are so many. Of course the people don’t want you to leave. There have been no funerals in the month of your staying. Stay! The
barrancas
are full of cavalry and
primitivos
. (Her word for other
indio
tribes, all of whom she hates.)

He says wryly, You will be faithful, I trust, until my return.

If you are returning tonight.

He smiles, with closed lips. Her smile seems more truly amused—a sort of Esquimau acceptance of whatever might befall her. He doubts he ever will return. Perra is approaching with her panting grin and lolloping sirloin tongue, gamely leaning into the work as she drags the travois with Mateo lying in state aback Kruger’s saddlebags. Hands on his chest he gazes with glistening black eyes into the blue immensities high up there, his heels sketching twin furrows in the dirt.

The little church bell peals the matin mass, a silvery chain of sound in the sky, as Kruger and the dog make their way out of town, turning southward along the track to the city. Mateo and his grubby chums, lightly armed with sticks, escort them some distance, nattering in Spanish at Kruger and tormenting the dog, though with little commitment, and turning back one by one until only Mateo remains.

You come back to Purificación, Señor Kruger … ?

It’s not clear if this is a question.

Someday, I hope, says Kruger.

The boy adds earnestly, You must try not to be killed!

Kruger smiles. I’ve always been a bit of a failure in that line.

¿Mande?

Being killed. You go back to the village now, Mateo. Goodbye, Mateo.

And the boy answers in Sina—farewell, or return soon?—with tears magnifying his eyes.

The peaks of the mountains are still in winter, dark timber in the folds. Keep the sierra always to your right, Jacinta told him, drawing from her apron a roll of corn tortillas wrapped in a clean rag. Turning back to her tub of laundry she’d added, Someday you may be sent up here again, to spy over us. Maybe then you can give back what you have taken.

Groton, Connecticut, June 1877

T
HE AFTERNOON OF
M
R
C
HUSLEY’S VISIT
is so windless and still that you can hear, through the open front window, the faint clicking and crunching of the paper wasps chewing at the wood of the porch columns. In this heat she is too weary to go out and shoo them away. Her visitor seems not to notice them. The noise, to her, is increasingly pronounced, aggressive as the buzzing of a horsefly trapped in the long funnel-front of the bonnet she always wears outside at this time of year, to keep her face from darkening in the strong, southern sun of New England. She has not been beyond the front gate for some days. The vegetable patch is suffering. Her pallor is not far off Mr Chusley’s; as if this white world is fully inducting her at last, while nature, in the form of the wasps, deer mice, and the scouring effects of another hard winter’s passage, takes the house back to nothing, bit by bit.

It is not easy to concentrate on Mr Chusley’s words. In part this is an effect of his stutter, but also there is her own grasp of English, which seems curiously reduced. Lately, when she speaks to Mrs Budington or the Reverend Cowan, stray words in Inuktitut will insert themselves in place of the intended English. Her skin may be lightening, but that older world is returning for her. She knows she is dying. She assumes her visitors must see it as well. Still, she has dressed properly for this visit, in a brown delaine dress with milk lace collar and cuffs, a brimless hat of black straw, cocked with hatpins at a jaunty angle, a sprig of baby’s breath on the crown. How she will miss her southern clothing, the variety and complexity of it, the slow, delicious ritual of dressing, even the corsets. …

As Mr Chusley chatters nervously, the parlour behind him half-revolves and returns, revolves and returns, as if suspended from the ceiling by a chain. There is the crackle of the paper wasps’ chewing. Beyond Copps’s knoll, now green in young maize, vast-piled sumptuous summer clouds pillow upward over the Atlantic, invisible a mile to the south.
I hope he will find his own place down there, in the hot countries
. Her visitor is trying to speak, she realizes, about Punnie’s playing.

Now now, now I think I know what it was. The pup, piece her hands were playing, on her, her little coverlet. At the end.

Please have more coffee, sir. I do wish these were better.

No—w—wonderful!

They are yesterday’s. I had no more powder. I have some of Daboll’s soda crackers, if you …

His hand lurches out, apparently to grasp and reassure her own, but then it stops, trembling, tentative, as if looking for something, cream or sugar. He begins to move the short, red-bitten fingers slightly, as if at a keyboard—as if he’d meant to do this all along, a demonstration! She watches the hand in remote absorption. His sentences are clipped as he tries to outrun his stutter.

Even then I knew. But dared not believe. I, I … I had only
shown
her the music.
Schu
mann! She’d not played it!

Yes, sir.

I’d not taught her, you, you. You understand she’d scarcely seen it! Yet, somehow she …

He looks at her urgently, as if for assistance. His soft brown eyes shine uncharacteristically. Wide and red-edged eyes. Moved now, she extends her hand. She touches the doughy, hairless back of his hand. It’s as if the touch releases him:

Oh—what we have both lost, Hannah!

She looks down instantly, catching her breath, trying to hold herself in.

Indeed, sir.

After some seconds: Forgive me, Hannah. I had no, no. Had no right.

Not at all, sir. Please, I am quite well.

Only, you see. Only—you see when I’m with you I feel. I
feel
. He pauses, takes a breath, then blurts the rest as if in angry defiance of his impediment:

I
feel
I am in the presence of something
strong
beyond my understanding!

After a pause filled with the weird sizzling din of the wasps, she says, I am really not so strong these days, sir. Then she regrets the words, surprised she has uttered them. Perspiration is dewing on her scalp under the hat. She seems to detect the hard cool edge of the hatpin against her scalp.

I’m in love with you, Hannah.

I should not have said that, sir, she says, referring to her own last statement; then his declaration reaches her, seconds late. Mr Kruger’s declaration returns to her, too.

Of course! says Mr Chusley, scarlet to his hairline. Of course I should not have! I am so—I am
sorry
, Hannah.

That is not what I mean, sir.

She ought to have gone with him, perhaps, into the rope locker aboard the
Tigress
. For her husband has abandoned her. Perhaps he has a new family up there.

I am sorry, her guest repeats. Please. He rises from his chair— a small, soft, clean-shaven man in a rumpled suit and poorly tied cravat—and stumps across the parlour to the spinet.

May I please, please—may I play for you? Schumann’s “Träumerei.”

Or perhaps he is dead.

Apparently she has answered because her guest is on the bench, hunchbacked over the keyboard, playing with eloquence. Outside a brougham or buggy passes with a clatter of wheels and a beat of hoofs. The tune shifts constantly from major to minor to seventh to suspended chords: not so much like the dreaming of the title as like actual life. This sad bachelor has doted on her for several years—perhaps because she has never shown any impatience when he stutters out his words. Her compassion swells with the tears she constrains as he plays Punnie’s final song, though there are notes besides compassion in this heart’s chord: a clear note of anger at her husband, another of loneliness, notes of listless apathy, surrender and, strangest of all, a faint high note of desire. As sometimes when she works the treadle, thighs rubbing, and feels the hum of the machine deep in her lap. She is almost delirious, worsening. This must be how it feels to be drunk. Uncaring of all consequences. She can see no reason not to be generous to such a kind, and famished, man. The reasons have all disappeared. She rises, still dizzy but not heavy of limb, in fact she feels almost weightless, lets the rolling chords and melody float her across the parlour to Mr Chusley’s side. He looks up, the tune dying under his slowing fingers, as she places her ring hand on his shoulder.