Afterlands (38 page)

The words of the mother
, Kruger interprets,
at Punnie’s deathbed
. He’s too relieved by the woman’s confused telling to inquire further. Let the good news, no news, stand.

The child’s sombre little face appears to him.

I attended her funeral, he says.

We did think of going up.

To the funeral?

To the
Arctic
, where we were needed, by the Esquimaux. Will you travel on with me tomorrow, to the lepers?

He shakes his head. I’ll be going the other way at first light. You are welcome to sleep here, by the fire. Please do.

After gnawing at the hare’s cooling ribs he stuffs some
macuche
into his pipe bowl—his tobacco is long exhausted—and lights it with the end of a fir twig. Watching the woman lay out her scorched blankets on the other side of the fire, meticulously spreading and squaring and flattening and rearranging them over and over while muttering as if Kruger is not there, he wonders if she poses any danger. Apathetically he decides not.

The woman’s hand and Perra’s soft growling wake him. As on the sleeping ledge of the crewhut he is vised in, warm bodies on either side: Perra as always on his left flank, the woman on his right. She smells of piñon smoke, mule, and dried menstrual blood, although she looks far too old for that. At any rate, blood. Her hand is under his blanket, crab-walking among the conch-shell buttons over the remains of his husbandly paunch. Perra growls again from one side, the woman hushing her from the other.

Kruger clears his throat and sits up between them. Madam, your hand. Perra …
basta!

It was so cold over there.

She hurries her hand lower, peering up at him in the light of the embers and the half moon and the cold-sharpened stars—an eerie little manikin in her baggy suit, with huge, creaturely eyes. Their bruising is like the makeup on the old whores he would pass years ago outside the disorderly-houses on Bleeker Street. Sometimes, of course, he would enter.

Oh! she says, you’re cold as well.

Gently he removes her hand. I am a widower. Please.

We’re very like in that—we’re even the same age.

He’s not surprised to hear that she thinks this. No doubt she’s less old than she looks. No doubt he looks as old and empty as he feels.

I can’t find my husband anymore. I’ve tried.

Perhaps in the morning you can find him, he says quietly. Where the lepers are.

Maybe it wasn’t
he
I saw murdered! And you—how can I know you’re not a spy? The Padre speaks German! The Padre speaks every tongue!

But rest now, please—and he pushes his arm under her head so she can pillow it there. The bristles of her cropped hair prick into his temple. She holds herself stiff. Perra squirms territorially closer. Wedged between a smelly old mongrel and a madwoman in a ruined suit, Kruger hums a Mexican lullaby while shifting his lower body away from the woman, protective of his numb, grieving genitals. Difficult to imagine that part of him ever revived and inclined again. There’s nothing sexual or romantic in his desire to see Jacinta, and above all Tukulito, one more time. He now feels as he did on the deck of the
Königsberg
, badly wounded twenty-five years ago: dead, but still able to hear and to see. A ghost intending to haunt the ones he has loved—and, in Tyson’s case, hated—one more time before he finds peace.

Love and hate, a survivor’s fuel.

He wakes shivering, his right side chilled. Perra, completely moled up under the serape, snores on his left, her acrid breath warm on his throat. A few last stars are fading like the remote, pinprick cries of children in a dream.

The woman and her burro are gone. By the dead fire his saddlebags lie splayed and open. He crawls to them and picks out the boy’s homespun stocking that holds his wife’s jewellery. The thread that tied it closed has been removed but the pewter-and-pearl ring and earrings are still inside. His wife’s wedding Bible, with the naïve image of a blue-robed Madonna sewn onto the calf cover, is still in the bag. The rosewood schooner he carved for his son is still there, and the pearl-lighter he carved for his daughter—but his daughter’s corncob doll, dressed for the fifth of May fiesta, is gone, along with the almost empty sack of cornmeal, his papers, and the Tyson book,
Arctic Experiences
.

She stole even the damn book, he mutters, still on all fours, looking coldly at Perra who is pushing her head out from under the serape with an innocent yawn. Useless, flatulent old thing. For a moment it enrages him that an animal as short-lived as a dog should have outlived a whole marriage, a family—a family which, in a way, this dog residually embodies. With smarting eyes Kruger peers to the west, then gets up and walks to a boulder on the shore and clambers up. A membrane of night ice has knitted a few feet out into the lake. Some distance off, a mile-long reach of trail is visible, worked into the side of a cliff now brightening from rusty brown to copper in the gathering dawn, and there’s the madwoman in her porkpie hat and masculine rags, astride the burro rather than sidesaddle, plodding west toward the invisible Tarahumaras, seeking souls.

Souls or children.

He shoulders the lightened saddlebags—Perra is now too old for such work—and continues slowly east down the canyon. Ahead, toward Chihuahua City, an inflamed sun is scaling the long rungs of cloud just above the horizon. The far villages now resemble smouldering firepits—charred points scattered across the floor of the desert, smears of greasy smoke on the rise.

For eight years he has been, by marriage, a kind of accidental Mexican, a circumstantial Catholic. Now he’s truly and finally homeless, stateless, unaffiliated. In his twenties he grew to believe that only the solitary and the uninvolved, the un-enlisted, could think and act with true moral independence, and be a loyalist only to Truth. But such a solo, arduous path—surely it’s better left to the young and the strong. The dogmatic. How is an abruptly old man to inhabit an abstraction?

In late morning he makes out an insect procession thousands of feet below, filing up the switchback trail toward him and the dog. Either soldiers or fleeing Indians. By afternoon, resting in the shade of a ledge, Perra sneezing out the alkaline dust churned from far down the canyon, he can see they are Indians. At dusk he leads her off the trail and up a steep bouldered draw into a copse of stunted firs, where they camp fireless. The Pehues will be in no mood to encounter a solitary white man, and Kruger’s business is not with them anyway.

At dawn he and Perra watch from their blind as half-naked Pehues of all ages, with their starving goats and dogs, though no visible possessions, stagger up the canyon trail in silence. Some are on crutches, with swaddled wounds. Even the animals are silent. When the last stragglers have gone by, Kruger and Perra pick their way down the scree and through the boulders back onto this trail of tears. Perra’s nose is animated, her tail flapping. Every so often as they stump along, a black clot of vultures will erupt off the trail in silence and Kruger and the dog will arrive at the corpse of a Pehue man. The vultures have been furthering the work of the bullets. Kruger knows nothing about the Pehues—whether they bury their dead, burn them, or something else—but normally they must do more than simply abandon them where they fall. Perra yaps hoarsely, makes little hobbling dashes at the dispersed but waiting scavengers, then sniffs at the carrion she has claimed. With a cringing smile, her gums bleeding, she looks up hopefully at Kruger, who cuffs her muzzle too hard, as if to scold himself out of his own troubling hunger.

Dusk comes early in the vast shade of the canyon’s walls. A large white gull, or swan, or something, appears ahead among a sudden updraft of vultures. They reach the eyeless and naked, gelded body of a man about Kruger’s age. The white bird, an albino vulture, slouches in a niche in the canyon wall, like statuary in a satanic chapel. Its bald gory head is half turned away, as if feigning disinvolvement or anonymity.

They emerge out of the canyon the next morning. Along its far wall, several miles south across the
páramo
, tiny figures labour with pick and shovel, laying track, extending the railroad up into the canyon to meet the line coming down from the west. He thinks he can make out soldiers too. There’s a dull, remote thump as dynamite explodes somewhere in the cliffs. Kruger and the dog swerve north toward the Sina country, sticking close to the upland flanks and spurs of the Sierra Madre. In an incinerated village at the foot of a broad, loaf-shaped spur, he loots some cornmeal and scorched peppers and cooks a kettle of mush over the fallen, still-glowing main beam of a house.

The Padre’s purging looks to be a complete success. The country is mostly desolate. Here and there he does see untouched, presumably more cooperative, villages. Every so often squadrons of
lanceros
pass in the distance, riding north, their wakes of khaki dust rising and leaving a haze in the lower air for hours. … From the top of a mesa, behind a blind of chickweed and creosote bush, Kruger and Perra look down on a besieged village on the banks of what must be the lower Purificación. Pehues, again. The Indians have ringed the village with a rough low wall of cottonwood trunks, bales of straw, and adobe. A few dozen half-clad men with bows and arrows and historical firearms man the near part of the wall, exchanging sporadic fire with a handful of
lanceros
who sit their horses out of range among the flattened maize-fields a few hundred yards off. Behind them, on a scrubby knoll, men in the white cotton pyjamas of peons or
campesinos
unhurriedly load a small fieldpiece. A troop of
lanceros
and some infantry appear to be taking a siesta on the far slope of the knoll, out of sight of the village. It’s a leisurely siege. Possibly they are waiting for reinforcements, or waiting for the Pehues to pack up and flee into the sierra; the soldiers have made no effort to cut off the village from the rear. Assuming the Padre can still be identified by his broad-brimmed clerical hat, he’s nowhere to be seen. Either he has been killed or is leading another attack elsewhere.

With a clipped, barking sound the fieldpiece bucks and flares and the shell, trailing a cloudy comet-tail, arcs over the wall screeching and explodes unimpressively near the back of the village in what looks like a chicken coop. Women and children rush out of the church with buckets of water, others darting through an opening in the wall to fetch more water from the river a few steps away.

A hundred feet down the side of the mesa lies a foot soldier, another pyjama-clad peasant, face down, dead fingers clawing at the slope, apparently shot as he tried to climb it and get away from the fight. A methodical vulture and three crows are crowding into him. The Pehues couldn’t have hit him with their muskets at this range; he must have been deserting, and the
lanceros
, or his own messmates, shot him. His rifle is trapped under his body. A simple matter to slip down the face of the mesa, return with the rifle and ammunition, and open fire on the attackers. Kruger, the lone spectator of this casual siege, feels as much disgust at the attack as he is still capable of, yet the thought of sniping at pyjamaed adolescents who will be largely
indios
themselves, likely conscripts, or even killing some of Luz’s haughty
lanceros
, sickens him too. The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history. How long has it been since he has needed to form a thought like that? And he forms it, something like it, in German. In La Paz he came to think mostly in Spanish, his melodic language of forgetting—language of a new life. He seems to get a faint whiff of the corpse now. Or maybe just the thought of killing a man has done that. Leave the rifle. Leave the battle, which is not yours.

He has to reach Purificación.

At dusk he leashes Perra to one of the sturdier bushes and warily seat-slides down the mesa, braking with his boot heels and the heels of his hands. At his approach the vulture and the crows flutter and hop back a few paces from the corpse. They stand watching with a patient and formal air, a bald priest and three portly mourners in black tailcoats, their hands behind their backs. He has to roll the body over to get at the haversack and water gourd. The broad dark face with the sharp cheekbones and soft moustache puts him in mind of a very young Ebierbing. The suddenly old flesh is just beginning to smell. Kruger closes the calm, evacuated eyes.

In the stained haversack, tortillas and a bag of cornmeal.

After eating the bloodied tortillas he and the dog plod a few more hours north in darkness before collapsing by a snowmelt creek reduced to a trickle by the season’s advance. A pregnant moon floats up out of the
páramo
. In its glacial light another mesa appears, miles to the northeast. He recognizes this one—low and very wide, a mesa visible, he remembers, from Purificación. Tomorrow then, he tells Perra. And in this night’s dream he is sternly interrogating Amelia, asking in German why she would choose to leave La Paz and “the very earth itself” with their children. And as she begins weeping, unable to understand him, he hugs her and joins in her tears.

Mesas, the loneliest of landforms.

At first light the Padre is there. Kruger sits up and throws off his serape. This action brings on a sharp collective snapping as the many rifles aimed at him are cocked. He’s ringed by mounted
lanceros
in baize-green tunics and peaked pillbox caps. Barefoot soldiers in dirty white pyjamas and sombreros. Colonel Maclovio Luz peers down through his spectacles from under the black brim of his hat. He seems little changed: mounted on the same sorrel mare with the diamond blaze, unnaturally straight in the saddle, fresh-shaven, small and fit, holding the reins with white kid gloves. His skull-cropped hair is a handsome, metallic silver.

Dónde está la perra?
Kruger asks.

Without shifting his gaze Luz nods his brim slightly to the side. Squinting, Kruger looks between the figures of two teenaged foot-soldiers, a few paces away, training their shaky barrels on his face. Perra is on the other side of the creek, frantically tearing and gnawing at a heavy slab of some meat. Beyond her, to the east, a large force of men wait in a straggling line, south to north, with pack mules, ox-drawn
carretas
, a few fieldpieces spread among them. Their flags hang limp in the windless dawn.

Mi capitán
, this one is not she! shouts the
lancero
on Luz’s right.

Claro que no
, says Luz and his lips barely move. What is your name?

So Luz doesn’t recall him. That’s unsurprising. It was a minor incident, long ago, and Kruger has not aged as kindly as Luz. Kruger is not much afraid but would prefer not to jog the man’s memory. He says the first name that finds his tongue.

Tyson—my name is George Tyson.

English? American?

American.

Your accent is odd for an American. You sound …

I spent some years at sea. With Dutchmen, Germans.

Luz ponders him for a few seconds.

Also, sprechen Sie Deutsch, Herr Tyson?

Ja, mein Herr
, he says woodenly, as if it’s a struggle.
Deutsch auch
.

Let me see your papers, Luz says in Spanish.

They were stolen, Señor. Up on the pass, in the
barrancas
.

By whom?

He hesitates, weighing another lie—something more plausible than the truth—but decides not to press his luck.

It was a woman, in fact.

The
lancero
on Luz’s right looks sharply at Luz.

Describe this woman, Señor Tyson.

She was very small. She was—dressed like a man. He hesitates, wondering if he is betraying her somehow, then he reflects that she’s days away and headed in the other direction. She too was an American, he says.

And when did this encounter take place, Mr Tyson? Luz has switched into precise, lightly accented English.

Four nights ago I think, Kruger replies in Spanish. Maybe five.

Impossible. Five nights ago this woman killed and mutilated another of my sentries.

Kruger sees the woman’s sun-dried little face, asleep next to his.

It must be four, then, he says.

You are lucky not to be dead. You may speak in English now. I would prefer that you do. These infantry are terrified of the woman—they believe her to be a, what is the word, a witch. She was bearing westward?

Yes, he says.

Luz pivots in his saddle and projects his voice, telling his men in Spanish that this gringo saw the woman riding west in the Barranca de Cobre, and, as the eastern mouth of the
barrancas
is now being cordoned off, it will not be possible for her to return. When the fighting is over, he adds, he will send some of his best
lanceros
in pursuit.

The foot soldiers jabber among themselves, the word
chingada
repeated often.

Luz looks back at Kruger and removes his spectacles, actually a pince-nez, exposing his deeply embedded blue eyes. In English he says, This woman and her husband, whose names we do not know—missionaries of some kind—they were attempting to … interfere in our efforts. The local peoples have been in a state of mutiny—in particular the
indios
. We sought to re-establish order in a Pehues village. Her husband, who interfered, was inadvertently killed. The woman escaped that night and was concealed subsequently in other villages. Then evidently she sought a revenge, dressed as her own husband. A religious zealot. No doubt she was mad before they ever arrived here.

Well … it was obvious that your men mistreated her in certain ways.

Luz replaces the pince-nez. That is to be regretted, he says. These men are a somewhat resistant material. To shape them into an orderly and disciplined force is no small task. However, in time. How old are you and what are you doing here?

I am forty-six, Kruger says—and then he lies, fearing that if Luz knows he has lived twelve years in Mexico, he will be dragooned into this army. My ship ran aground off La Paz, he says. No other ships were docking or sailing, because of the cholera, so we had to wait there. My shipmates began to fall sick and die. I fled La Paz, and now I hope to walk north to the border, to go home.

You appear older than forty-six, Luz says. Your accent is odd, for an American. What was your rank on this, what … whaler?

Coal steamer. The
Sirius
. I was second mate, Señor.

Luz’s hatbrim dips slightly. Something of a leader, then—very good. As you are going north in any case, you might as well accompany us partway. You are too old for infantry but you will do, I think, for a sergeant. That woman zealot stabbed to death one of my sergeants. We are on our way north to oppress the Sinas.

Is this a glancing error, or a sly, grim joke? His toneless face and voice give no cue.

I would prefer to continue alone, Señor.

We will furnish you with new clothes and shoes. We are always prepared for new volunteers. Those boots and this suit are obviously finished. Your saddlebags you can place on an oxen cart.

He issues quick orders in Spanish. Within a minute Kruger receives from two panting Indian boys a set of white pyjamas, a red sash and bandana, a sombrero and poncho, leather sandals, a sabre, and a revolver and belt.