Savage Girl (21 page)

I fed her bits of smoked fish. She refused the berry mash I presented her. Greasy strips of dried rabbit meat, yes.

Jaguars, it turned out, love nothing so much as water. She didn’t like the hot springs as much as the cold streams nearby. But she swam like an otter and sometimes joined me in my ritual baths.

For a long time, I had to keep her on a length of deer sinew to stop her from going back to the pile of rocks over her mother’s grave. I called the kitten Mallt, my Welsh mother’s name, but also sometimes Nanatunaboo, “She Who Proudly Shows Her Spots.”

Together we would travel along the streams in my valley. Mallt became an expert fisherman and shared her bounty. She grew fat and long, until she was about the same size as me. Her spots came up, dark, pretty circles. She could roar as loud as thunder.

We were often troubled by crows and ravens, whole flocks of them. They had picked clean the bones of all the dead buffaloes, and now they were hungry. Mallt thought it was magic when I brought one down with my bow.

Two summers passed. In winter we took to the cave. The Numunuh always stayed in their lodges whenever snows or storms came, telling stories and making each other laugh.

The Washoe was six valleys away from mine, but I ventured to its edges occasionally, perhaps once or twice a summer, in order to
obtain the three things I needed yet could not secure in my wild routines: clothing, metal tools (knives, mostly) and salt.

A few times Mallt traveled with me. We would sneak up on a brush house or a cabin that stood alone, take what was necessary and then flee.

I possessed a couple of treasures I had taken from an empty cabin when I hunted outside the valley. Two books, both of them dirtied and broken in half. The Bible. And another, a storybook. I didn’t know its title or the ending, since those parts were torn away, but it was about a girl named Becky Sharp.

My third spring Mallt disappeared. Now I cried for real. I searched the whole valley, the hills and mountainsides beyond it, but she was gone.

After a week of searching went by, I returned to the valley, taking my broken heart back to the cave. But still I loved the sunlight flooding the hillsides, I loved tracking game and spearing fish, wandering the meadows and, especially, the baths that were how I marked my day.

Mallt reappeared one evening as I sat in front of the cave. She rubbed herself against my shoulder. By the next morning, we were fishing together once again. Soon she became heavy with young. After three months I watched in horror and wonder as she gave bloody birth. Two of her furballs came into the world dead, but the third lived, with a pelt that was solid black.

Tukaani, I named the little one. “Night.” Or sometimes Puna-Petu. “Only Daughter.” The Numunuh always called things by a lot of different names.

Now we had a family, Mallt and Tukaani and me. I was no longer so lonely. I usually had a full stomach. I couldn’t puzzle out everything in my books, but I tried. I read to the cats, and what was more strange, they listened.

When I fell ill with fever that autumn, Mallt brought me food and allowed me to nurse alongside Tukaani. She saved my life.

Spring, another spring, another spring. It was summer when my disaster happened.

I had just come out of one of the other caves, a cool place where I stored food, not the one with the hot spring. I had retrieved some dried wild onions. Then Mallt leaped on me from a crouch. I don’t know why she did it or what I had done wrong. But she closed her jaws around the back of my neck and my skull, taking my whole head into her fangs.

I knew what came next. I had seen her do it many times to javelina, the wild pigs we loved to hunt. She took their skulls into her mouth and crushed them as easily as you or I would crack a chicken egg.

So I would be killed. I felt her teeth break the skin at my neck and my scalp, closing downward. She rested her enormous paws on my shoulders.

“Ke!”
I shouted. No! I still had the dried onions in my hand, and I swatted Mallt on her muzzle with those.

She released her bite, tearing her fangs away from me, and with two enormous leaps bounded off into the brush. My wounds were not deep, but cuts to the head always bleed more than those on other parts of the body.

My mothers. My Welsh one, Mallt. My Numunuh one, Nautda. And then Mallt again, for my jaguar mother. And now Anna Maria. Of all four, only one of them ever nursed me, and that was the one that tried to kill me.

The slashes Mallt gave me grew infected. I raged with fever, dying as I lay beside the hot spring in my cave. Mallt and Tukaani came back as if nothing had happened, nuzzling and worrying over me. But I could never feel the same about them.

If I hadn’t been sick, I would never have been captured. But the fool mountain man Jake Woodworth blundered into my cave, chasing silver. He took me, packing me on the back of his mule as if I were a dead antelope, bringing me down to the Comstock, where I fell under the care of the Sage Hen and was sold to Dr. Scott.

I never have breathed a word of this to anybody.

Breathed a word. Is that how you say it?

17

That Christmas, the holiday after Bronwyn’s disturbing revelations, December 25, 1875, I shall always think of as the Christmas When Nothing Happened. It was a calm, small, family celebration. After the multiplicity of events that had afflicted my life of late, and especially since I learned the details of my sister’s past (which I was still struggling to digest a month later), the holiday proved a welcome respite.

Diamonds were very much the fashion that season, having recently come in cheap. They were everywhere—shopgirls had them, babies wore buttons inset with chips, and many of the gifts we exchanged featured the darling sparklers. I presented Colm with a diamond breastpin. Anna Maria gave Bronwyn a diamond choker. Tu-Li bestowed a diamond-embroidered silk gown upon the berdache.

Nicky gave Bronwyn an odd gift. An Indian-style short bow, evidently an artifact of some kind, which he had taken and had the stave set with diamond festoons.

“It’s the genuine article, made of Colorado ash,” he told her. “The very bow Chief Niwot carried at Valmont Butte, when with Bear Head and Many Whips he met with Captain Aikins.”

I feared that his gift did not in fact represent that very same authentic bow; rather my brother had gotten swindled by some unscrupulous peddler of native relics, but I refrained from spoiling the holiday atmosphere with my doubts. After all, what other debutante in archery-crazed Manhattan possessed a diamond-adorned Indian bow?

For my gift to Bronwyn, I did not have to venture farther than Freddy’s library, the room where she had told me her story. I simply
chose a particular volume, wrapped the book in gay paper and presented it to her. She did not seem overly impressed, merely placing the volume aside and uttering a perfunctory “Thank you,” not immediately realizing what it was. Among all the diamonds, my present failed to shine.

For our holiday dinner, Cookie outdid herself. Roast duck succulent in its onion sauce, baked potatoes with their jackets crisped in duck fat, chicken pie, stewed carrots and a dozen other dishes. Bronwyn threw herself at the dessert candy along with Nicky and the berdache, gobbling up hickory-nut macaroons and chocolate drops. I instructed Colm to take a plate of chicken pie out to the Stone-Thrower, and he told me that the Stone-Thrower had disappeared. The morgue visit must have spooked him.

Later that evening, when the servants were let off for the half day and everyone fell dazed and sleepy from our feast, we gathered in the aviary. I retrieved my present from Bronwyn’s gift pile and went over to sit next to her.

Opening the volume to the chapter entitled “Family Portraits,” I began to read:

Sir Pitt Crawley was a philosopher with a taste for what is called low life. His first marriage with the daughter of the noble Binkie had been made under the auspices of his parents; and as he often told Lady Crawley in her lifetime she was such a confounded quarrelsome high-bred jade that when she died he was hanged if he would ever take another of her sort . . .

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Bronwyn. Paying little mind at first, she suddenly became very animated.

“It’s Miss Becky?” she asked, incredulous.

It was indeed. The book I gave her was Thackeray’s
Vanity Fair,
whose partial pages she had treasured and nursed and puzzled over during her years in the wilderness.

“I can’t imagine a more cruel state of affairs,” I said, “than to be allowed to know part of a story and not be able to get at its end.”

She rose from her seat, grabbing the book out of my hands and planting a kiss on my cheek. “Oh, thank you, thank you!” she said, her eyes shining.

My parents failed to understand the exchange. It was odd that for all their involvement in Bronwyn’s life they were ignorant of many essential elements of her existence. They had no idea she crept out at night. No awareness of her real story. No grasp on her emotional life. They made her their darling, monitored her studies, but had little appreciation of her, as I did, as a human being.

I kept her tale to myself. What could I think after hearing it? That she was a fabulist or, more bluntly, a liar? This biography of hers was clearly too fantastic to credit. Suckling a jaguar?

Yet to look at her, to ruminate upon her behavior, I wondered. That quality of self she demonstrated, so different from other young ladies of my acquaintance, was it animal grace? That she herself seemed not to care whether I believed her worked strangely in favor of my accepting her remarks.

I thought of her easy communion with the big cat in the Central Park Zoo. How she could make him roll over, do her bidding.

That Christmas season found me of two minds. I felt little confidence in the prospects for success of Freddy’s “project”—introducing Bronwyn into society. This odd, winsome creature, with her fantastic history and untoward habits, would be no one’s choice for a triumphant debut. The fearsome gatekeepers of our world, Mrs. Caroline Hood, the Tremont aunts, not to speak of minor deities such as Delia Showalter, would smoke her out immediately.

Freddy’s impetuous nature once again tipped the scales, proposing to bring the debate over Bronwyn’s pedigree into the public sphere in a particularly disturbing manner.

•   •   •

Darwin arrived in America as a gift to social conservatives, who construed his “survival of the fittest” principle as a sort of civic boosterism, a tribute to American progress.

In our rough-and-tumble nation, and especially in the business
atmosphere of Wall Street, only the fittest could survive. It was the way of the natural world, and who were we to fool with the rules that guided the universe? Survival of the fittest, to these philosophers of commerce, meant the triumph of the wealthiest.

Freddy, among the richest of the rich but way out on the progressive wing politically, itched to take on these self-congratulatory gasbags, if not in open battle then at least in public debate. Coined in 1869 by Darwin’s cousin, British polymath and fingerprinting pioneer Francis Galton, “nature versus nurture” asserted itself as the dominant question of the day.

The issue was personal with my father. His opinions were formed in rebellion against the rock-hard conservatism of his own father. Freddy despised the reigning financial moguls: the crude cattleman-turned-speculator Daniel Drew; the rapacious “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt; and this new man, the cadaverous Baptist, John D. Rockefeller, a con man’s son gobbling up the kerosene reserves in the wilds of Ohio.

All of these men piously cited religion as encouraging their actions. “God gave me money,” quoth Rockefeller.

“Men’s truths rather too neatly fit their convenience, have you ever noticed that?” quoth my father.

So it was inevitable, after attending holiday services at Grace Church, during a stroll with the family north toward Union Square, that Freddy should break off from us to confront a conservative apologist named Arvald Stockton. Bronwyn, Nicky and Anna Maria walked behind us, surrounded by a protective quartet of Grace Church pastors and deacons.

“Stockton!” Freddy called out, crossing Broadway to where the man walked alone, cane in hand. Their intercourse offering more in the way of entertainment than any passel of Episcopalian ministers, and cognizant of the fact that Arvald Stockton had often used his walking stick against his enemies, I went along with my father.

“Ho, Stockton,” Freddy greeted the man.

“Delegate,” Stockton said simply, squaring himself off as if he knew what might be coming.

“Read your piece in the
Tribune,
didn’t I?” Freddy said.

“I don’t know, did you?”

Preliminaries. The boxers circled each other in the ring.

Stockton, the same age as Freddy but with a shock of white hair, square-faced, somehow babylike in his affect, acted as a prime spokesman in the press for unfettered capitalism. As president of the high-domed Merchants’ Exchange on Wall Street, he knocked down all government regulation and blasted any publicly espoused sentiment that he could label antibusiness. This included, within his far-reaching intellectual range, the idea that the positive effects of nurture could offer a balancing ideal to the vicious rigors of nature.

“You outdid yourself with that article, my man,” Freddy said. “I didn’t know such flights of reasoning could possibly exist.”

Stockton, cautious, mistook my father’s irony but remained uncertain of praise emanating from that particular quarter. “I’ve had a very good response.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” Freddy said. “The kind of hogs you surround yourself with usually enjoy the kind of hogswallop you dispense.”

I saw the cane quiver in Stockton’s hand. In another age, and one not too distant either, such a thrown-down gauntlet would have resulted in an invitation to duel.

“Good day, sir,” Stockton said.

“I wonder if you would care to air your views in an open forum,” Freddy said. “Test our positions in the crucible of debate. Name the venue and I will be there to demolish the cant you call argument.”

Stockton went rigid. He glanced over to me. Depite the frail presence that I was, he felt himself outnumbered.

“You, sir, are a traitor to your class,” he said to Freddy.

“Better than a traitor to all humanity,” Freddy said.

“Come now, gents,” I said. “I am a poor audience for your quarrel. Mr. Stockton, my father challenges you to a debate on the subject of your article, nature versus nurture. Better to hash out the question before a genteel gathering of philosophers than here on the street.”

Stockton twirled his cane in a quick, insolent arc, making me flinch. Freddy stood his ground.

“I suppose I must accept, Delegate, if only to silence your silly natterings,” Stockton said. “You shall hear from me.”

He bowed stiffly and strolled away.

“Good Lord, Freddy,” I said. “The man will take you apart.”

“Not if I bring Bronwyn to the podium with me,” he said. “Exhibit A.”

My stomach turned. “You’re not serious, I hope.”

I looked across Broadway to where my sister and mother walked with the flock of black-garbed ministers. At the urging of the clerics, Anna Maria appeared to be admiring the new Gothic steeple of Grace Church, the pride of all Manhattan. Bronwyn, I noticed, had her eyes fixed on the pigeons that infested the grounds. Luckily for the birds, my mother had her arm linked firmly in her daughter’s.

Dust kicked up from the thoroughfare, thick with omnibus traffic and coaches. I didn’t want Savage Girl hauled into public, at least not in the way my father had planned. She remained still so unformed. I thought to keep her out of the communal fray for at least a little bit longer.

“Perhaps Cooper Union,” Freddy said, musing on a suitable venue for what he envisioned as a Clash of Titans. Lincoln had secured his presidential candidacy with a speech there in 1860, before a packed house. Freddy pictured his debate triumph along the same lines.

“I was thinking more of our drawing room at home,” I said.

•   •   •

Whether I sought to shield her from public exposure or not, I found it increasingly entertaining to squire my young sister around Manhattan. Not to social events—not yet—but to the kind of unusual, nook-and-cranny attractions that make wandering New York City so agreeable. On occasion we would take Nicky, or Tu-Li and the berdache, though rarely all three.

Bronwyn very much enjoyed the Block of Cowboys, that stretch of East Forty-second Street near Lexington where stables, blacksmiths and corrals concentrated and where a proliferation of Stetson-hatted, spur-wearing western characters walked the streets. Shipments of horses for the city’s businesses and residents arrived there, and a market in equine flesh went on six days a week.

The dray horses took our fancy especially, immense Belgians, Percherons and Clydesdales. Bronwyn had only to glance at one of the cowboys to find herself swept up and seated on one of the heavy-maned beasts.

We also went to view the ice-yacht racing on the Hudson, rode the rising-room passenger elevators to the dizzying top of the seven-story Equitable Life Assurance building on Cedar Street, played at hide-and-seek (Nicky was with us) amid the vast, snow-powdered Christmas-tree markets of the flower district, near the Thirty-fourth Street ferry landing.