Afterlands (46 page)

You’ve a family of your own, you said, down in Mexico?

Kruger tells him a little about La Paz—the first real details he has been willing to revive since fleeing in March. How his daughter Aurelia used to sit in his lap in the cool of evening while Kruger would braid her fragrant, fawn-coloured hair, the tint an exotic surprise in La Paz, the legacy of her Prussian grandfather, dead now for years, who had been fair in his youth. Always after the braiding Kruger would express playful disappointment in the outcome, then unravel it and start over repeatedly, fastening the eventual masterpiece with a jade-green ribbon. The girl, carding wool, would sing to him while he braided, then tease him when he tried to join in, because, she said, he was a terrible singer.
Un pésimo cantante
. His wife and son would confirm this. The son, Felix, dwarfed by his sombrero, would often accompany him in the pearl-lighter in the early morning, sitting in the stern facing his father at the oars, the boy dropping pearl oysters in sisal bags when the divers surfaced, panting, Kruger feathering the oars to keep the boat steady.

The marriage was no grand passion (Kruger doesn’t say this part), not after the first weeks, but there was always an abundance of fondness, care, and high humour. And Kruger had wanted to make a home. In his life there had been no joy quite akin to being part of a young, flourishing family—one’s own small tribe, in fact, with its own language and rituals, customs and difficulties. All subject to extinction, however. Tyson must know this now too—the delight, and also the losing—although he has been lucky enough to start over. This should feel more unfair to Kruger than it does. Something seems to have burnt out in him. Maybe the capacity to envy and resent. He knows only that Tyson, too, has lost a child. In the pit of his belly something is in process, a lush expansion, something like the first leavening effects of mescal. What feels like the start of a love is actually the end of a hatred.

Another silence and he says, I mean to go up to the burying ground, in Groton. I think I’ll set out now, back to the station. Thank you for this, Lieutenant.

But, Kruger, you’d not arrive till after dark. Wait a moment.

It doesn’t matter.

Tyson stands up. Let me go with you, Kruger—early tomorrow morning we could go. I haven’t been up there in years. Not since ’78. I went up with my wife—Laura, I mean—but only the one time. I never wanted to see Budington, you see. But he’s dead now, the poor souse, died last year. He’s buried a few plots over, I gather. We … I’d offer you a bed for the night with us, but we haven’t one. Haven’t the space, I mean. This isn’t much of a position, as you see.

Kruger waves off the regrets, which come not as an expression of shame but a statement of fact. Neither he nor Tyson would feel comfortable with his sleeping there anyway.

Tomorrow is Saturday, Kruger says, won’t you be here?

It’s a half-day, I can be absent. I’m not needed here urgently, as you can see—nothing here is urgent. Few lieutenants, I’d guess, have ever had fewer subordinates than this. He shakes his head, grins, setting down his cold pipe. Two doormen, two janitors, two tea ladies, and the night watchman. There’s my full command. And they hop to my every command, Kruger, because they know all about my old reputation. Johnny, up at the door, he’s even read my book—which by the way has now pretty much vanished. They must think my … laxness is the manner of somebody who knows he’ll be obeyed without question. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never asked. The truth is, Kruger, I don’t care anymore—not for any of this. I gain a living here, that’s all. What matters now is my wife and my family, our evenings and Sundays, our meals together—wonderful meals! There lies all my devotion. I walked away from myself, Kruger. The malady burnt out in me. Or it was frozen out. Or maybe it was just fatigue. Fatigue can be a good thing, too. All I want now is for the world to leave me alone.

Life in La Paz was that way, I think.

Emmaline’s misfortune was to have met me when she did, Tyson adds. Before I changed. And people—here he speaks with some firmness, as if anticipating an argument—people do change. Why, you yourself seem different, Kruger—and not just an older, fainter version of what you were.

I’m willing to belong to things now. A few things.

If only one could go back and undo the hurt one did before!

Tyson eyes him feelingly. Kruger slowly nods.

For a while, Kruger says, I wondered if the best one could do was to do no harm. I decided not. I think that to go through life means at times to harm. That must be why good men—from under his brows he gives Tyson a sustained look—always seem the most troubled.

On the four-hour journey to Newark, the transfer, then the second leg to Groton, they talk only a little. Forgiveness is one thing, friendship another. Tyson speaks more comfortably with the others who sit with them in the facing seats, getting aboard, getting off. With a big sullen man who keeps his top hat on, the brim low on his brow, they discuss last year’s election, how the Democrat Cleveland lost to the Republican Harrison despite getting more of the popular vote. There’s a fine brand of democracy for you, the man says, angling for an argument. It’s no use. Tyson finds grounds for accord, even when the man shifts his tack, and even though (as Tyson has mentioned to Kruger) it was President Hayes, a Republican, who secured a position for him during the divorce proceedings in ’78, when no one else would touch him. So Tyson feels a great loyalty to the party. Learning of Tyson’s position at the Navy Department, the man bewails the fact that in times of peace there is nowhere for a fellow of vital constitution to find honourable outlet. Even the Indian Wars are all but concluded, the man rumbles. Here Tyson remarks helpfully, absently, that there may be trouble brewing with the Sioux again out in the Dakotas—they seem unwilling to keep to their reserved lands.

A phrenologist with a faint Irish accent recognizes Tyson and asks if he isn’t going up to New York City to give a lecture, as he is himself. Drowsily Tyson admits that he hasn’t done a lecture for years. He adds, Do give us a sample of your own talk, though, sir. And for forty miles the man does.

After sharing with Kruger the dozen good sandwiches that Laura packed for him—smoked oyster with mayonnaise, lobster paste, salt-ham, cheddar and cress—Tyson droops on the bench for the last hour of the trip, salivating a little into his beard, spectacles dangling mid-air by the fine wires that curl behind his ears. Eventually he slumps full into Kruger, who smokes his pipe and stares out the window. Beyond towns and pastures, chrome flashes of the Atlantic, every glimpse a heartbreak.

They step down at Groton at one in the afternoon. A single carbon arc light glows at the end of the platform, perhaps on account of the thin fog drifting in. In the direction of the harbour they walk along a dirt road between square clapboard houses, then turn onto Pleasant Valley Road, where they walked together years ago, after Punnie’s funeral. Tyson is out of breath again. Through the fog the sun is dulled, like a daytime moon. Tukulito’s house appears: green clapboards blistered, windows boarded, the house and the listing fence and the basswood tree all casting vague, borderless shadows. The men stop at the fence, look in at the framed wilderness of the yard. Where her garden was, along the front porch, phlox and poppies and lavender still throng.

They go on past a small white Presbyterian church—hers, Tyson says, and a minute later into the silence: That was another stone off my heart, losing faith. God was never anything to me but a General.

The Starr Hill Burying Ground rises to their left through the brightening fog. The cast iron gate, with the five-pointed star wrought into it, hangs open. They start up the path. A few crows bickering in the cedars behind them. The graves, Tyson says faintly, will be off to the left. Over near that tree. And he stops in his tracks. His left hand gropes out toward a headstone beside the path, although it’s well out of reach. His right hand grabs at the waistcoat over his solar plexus, tugging at it.

Lieutenant?

Tyson’s mouth gapes in his beard but he can’t seem to speak. Kruger takes hold of him.

Sir?

It’s all right.

Is it your heart?

Wincing, Tyson shakes his head. No.

Come to the bench.

It’ll pass. I was hurt, on the second expedition. Now and then it comes back, the pain.

Kruger guides him toward the bench.

Exertion does it. Very early mornings.

A girl is skipping along Pleasant Valley Road, whistling without tune, deep inside her moment. If she glanced to her left up the path climbing into the cemetery, she would see two old men frozen there, as if daunted, unwilling to continue into the midst of all those stones. One of them is hunched as if with extreme age, the other appearing not so old and yet old enough—though strong, holding the old man up, his left arm around the other’s back, bracing his shoulder, his near hand clasping the other’s arm, and his brown, fretworn face close to the old man’s ear, saying, May I do anything else to help you, Lieutenant?

Thank you, Kruger, the old man whispers. You have. I’m much obliged.

From the hillside as the fog opens, the two men can be seen departing, walking slowly now for Tyson’s sake. There’s a handsome tombstone up here—still now, years later—green granite spotted with lichen, on its crown the block letters J & H, like lovers’ initials carved in an oak, within a circle under five ivy leaves. Below is the misspelled name
JOSEPH EBERBING
, and, under an expanse of blank rock, never filled in because Ebierbing disappeared into the North, the words:
HANNAH, HIS WIFE
, and the date of her death,
AGED
38
YEARS
.

Punnie’s headstone stands eight feet in front of theirs, a small tablet of whitened marble, much of the inscription today illegible.

From this hillside, this remove in time, the two survivors vanish behind a stand of tall, cypress-like pines, retracing their road to the station and back down the seaboard to Newark, then on to Washington, where they will say a brief and reserved farewell. The next morning, trying to get a train south, Kruger will duck and elbow his way through a small Orangemen’s parade, but get caught up in it, swept along by men in orange sashes and derbies who, seeing his own hat, take him for one of their clan. Some of the Orangemen carry revolvers. The hatreds of cavefolk but with improving weapons, again. He takes the night train south, steerage, and after a fourth consecutive night reaches San Antonio, where his money—Luz’s money—is all but exhausted. After a last visit to Winfried Hussel, barber, he continues southwest on foot, a spy and a thief once more, feeding himself off the stingy land and the odd windowsill. He wades and swims the Rio Grande at the fording place near Ojinaga, still without papers, no legal identity, a border ghost, and he hikes westward, avoiding Maria Madre and the other towns, into the Sierra de la Tasajera and across to the far side.

A
lancero
on horseback finds him on his knees by the Laguna de Encinillas, drinking and filling his canteen. The
lancero
wants to arrest him—he’s paperless and uncooperative—and take him back to Gallego. Kruger refuses. The
lancero
draws his revolver and aims it down at Kruger’s face. Come now or I’ll shoot you. With no special haste, in a kind of trance, Kruger pulls Ortiz’s revolver from inside his coat and cocks it and, while the
lancero
glares in disbelief, shoots the man in the chest.

With a numb, gutted feeling he continues west on the surly stallion until, within a day’s ride of Purificación, the horse stops dead, curvets and throws him and then gallops southward, as if for help. Kruger walks on, the wide mesa nearing. Around the village the cornfields have been burned and flattened. With pent breath he plods through the charred stubble. Yet over the village are no circling birds; behind the undamaged wall the houses are deserted. A museum village. The army that arrived must have been too large for the Sinas to think of fighting. He sleeps in the grove under the cottonwoods where the sandflies, as promised, are nearly gone with the approach of autumn, and at dawn he forages a few scraps from the village and walks up into the foothills of the Sierra Madre.

On the first day he happens on a few signs of flight—a half-covered firepit, fishbones, goat dung, a few spent cartridges, some footprints in the scree. He climbs a long rocky draw and by dusk enters dappled stands of larch and Douglas fir, and then, an hour upslope, a rill trickling down to meet him and vanishing into the rocks. He sleeps there. The night air is chill, the tips of the firs piercing at the stars. On the second day as he works higher, the forests thin out, the conifers begin to dwarf and on the pebble banks of the stream the next morning there is frost. On this third day he finds only one covered firepit, then climbs on through an alpine meadow awash in gentian and saxifrage and fringed with child-sized pines and cedars, deep into the sierra now, patches of snow lingering in the shadows, and in one patch a half-melted footprint. Only that. The Sinas are trying to conceal their route and are becoming impossible to track, elusive as the Tarahumaras, leaving no tokens, not even ashes, excrement, or the bones of whatever livestock they have not yet killed. He assumes they would cleave to the stream. He is dizzy with hunger and the sparseness of the shrill air and he wears his blanket around his shoulders while he climbs. On the fourth day, many thousands of feet above the
páramo
, which is lost to view now, a figment, he comes to the headwaters, a sapphire tarn deep in a cirque of bare rock slopes and talus. Small floes and platelets drift in the tarn and by the next dawn a silver rind has appeared along the shore, edging outward. On the fifth day he crosses a pass between two icy peaks and wanders west over a moon-like plateau of rock and frozen tarns and monumental boulders sparged with lichen, and the wind is bitterly dry and cold and carries no smell of anything alive, only snow and stone, and he has lost the trail, can find no further marks. He’s starving again. He falls and lies still and then rises and drifts on. … On the night of the sixth day, on the further rim of the plateau, swathed in his blanket on a high spur, he wakes to smells, obscure and distant, though with his senses so honed by hunger he can make them out. Woodsmoke, chillis, roasting meat. On the seventh day at nightfall he stumbles down a dead watercourse among scrub firs and crabbed bristlecone pines, a thousand years old or more, and when he crawls up on a boulder to look westward he sees, a few hours off and down, like stars reflected in a still ocean, their fires.