Gabriel's Story Read online

  No day passed during which the boy wasn’t stumped by some insurmountable problem. No task was ever completed without a new one presenting itself. Just when a day’s work seemed at an end, the harness would break, or Gabriel would slip and gash his knuckles open, or the shovel blade would drop off, or birds would swarm over the fields, devouring the seeds. Just when he lay down to sleep, his pallet would give way, or the wall above him would rain down dirt loosened by the wind, or the dull head of a king snake would appear in the flicker of the candlelight, tongue licking the air in a gesture that seemed a blatant taunt.

  Late in the month, Gabriel was put to building the barn next to the pigpen. Day long, he hauled blocks of sod from where they’d been cut and layered them into walls. The sow watched him with her disdainful eyes, as if she respected his efforts but doubted his skills as a mason. Gabriel couldn’t help speaking to her under his breath, threats and curses, reminders of the pleasure of bacon and of the short span of her life. He blamed her also for the abundance of flies that swarmed around him. They plagued his eyes, buzzed in his ears, and crawled over any patch of exposed flesh they could find. Half his efforts each day were spent in slapping the insects to death. He barely noticed the days passing into weeks, and yet they did.

  I NEARLY JUNE, Gabriel met a person who voiced a similar despair over the circumstances of his life, a boy named James. The two met in town, where James worked doing odd jobs for a white man named Pinkerd, whom he hated with a much-voiced passion. He had been orphaned as an infant outside of Athens, Georgia, and raised on the kindness of the church. He’d happily have stayed there and even continued in that line if the minister’s wife hadn’t proposed to him a move westward in the care of Pap Singleton, to a Negro community newly spawned on the plains. The boy accepted and found himself transported, mostly by the labor of his own feet, as far as Crownsville, where his entourage disintegrated amid fears of treachery and allegations that all was not as they had been led to believe. “The whole thing fell apart,” he said. “Was like every one of them just got the jivers and ran. Left me stuck in Crownsville not knowing a soul in a thousand mile. I’d nary seen a worse day in my life.” He managed to find work with Pinkerd and could feed and house himself, but otherwise he cursed the life that God had given him and wished for some way out of it.

  He came out one Sunday on Gabriel’s invitation, for an afternoon of riding and relaxing on the plains. He was a thin-boned boy, shorter than Gabriel by six inches, with a slim build and a collarbone that protruded through whatever shirt or jacket he wore. He arrived talking of cowboys, outlaws, and hangings, with a dime novel shoved in his rear pocket. It was a gift that a recent immigrant had given him, as if that man, fresh from Waltham, Massachusetts, had a manual on the West that had escaped those already living there. It was called Richardson of the High Plains and promised nonstop action and romance, authentic tales of the wild and woolly, English-cowboy style.

  Gabriel saddled Raleigh and mounted up. The horse pawed the earth and shook his head once, protesting already. Once he steadied, Hiram helped Ben up behind his brother. The two boys just fit into the saddle, perhaps a bit close for comfort but snug nonetheless. Hiram stepped back and studied them, and soon concluded that they sat the horse like cavalrymen.

  James commented that they looked a little cozy in the saddle and he’d heard that the cavalry didn’t take kindly to such behavior. But a moment later he’d climbed up himself and was trying his luck at riding behind both Ben and the saddle’s cantle. Gabriel encouraged the horse forward, and they all waved to Hiram like travelers embarking on a long and noble mission. Before they had gone twenty yards, however, something about the precariousness of his position and the hard body of the horse beneath him discouraged James’s riding efforts. He had Gabriel halt the horse, slid down, and happily walked along next to them.

  They moved off, for a while following the tiny creek to the east of the homestead but then cutting away from it and trotting through the open prairie. At one point Gabriel kicked Raleigh up into a canter, about the best the old mount could muster, and he rode along with the warm southern breeze licking his face. Ben’s arms were cinched tightly around his waist, and Gabriel found something comforting in this embrace. Looking out at the prairie, he imagined them to be alone on this great expanse, explorers heading bravely into the undiscovered heartland of America. He might have moved on to further visions if he hadn’t heard James shouting after them to “hold up, dang it.”

  The spot they stopped at was little different from any other spot on the plains, a slight rise, enough to allow the view to work its magic or cast its pall, depending on the eye and inclination of the viewer. This was the first day in many that Gabriel forgot his loathing of this place. He looked off at the thin ribbons of cloud to the north and up at the infinite tranquillity of the sky with eyes that for once saw without judgment, without comment, other than in the act of vision itself. Ben and James wandered off to explore a prairie dog city, a megalopolis of sorts, abandoned and quiet now but impressive nonetheless in its mounds and open-mouthed tunnels and hidden corridors.

  Before long, James came back and sat talking with Gabriel. Had he had the resources or the inclination, James might have worn spectacles, as he was often wont to squint at objects in the distance. He moved with quick, anxious motions and tended to engage his face in a display of whatever thought process was going on within him. He spoke of life in town. Things happened there, he assured Gabriel, things wild and chaotic, things to make your hair stand on end. He spoke of finding spent slugs in the street one Sunday morning, described a man who’d nearly killed another for punching his horse on a drunken wager, and talked of the time a man he had spoken to personally was hanged by a posse from a tree just outside town. Children had collected under the dead man and swung him back and forth by his naked toes. “Somebody must’ve stole his boots. Can you imagine that? Wearing a dead man’s boots?”

  “What had he done?”

  “The dead fella? Ain’t got the faintest.” James shrugged. “He did something. They always done did something. Cheated or stole, maybe. That’s the way cowboys is when they come to town. Don’t matter whether they’re decent folk or otherwise, they get the stump liquor in them and look to cause a runction.”

  Gabriel thought on this for a moment. “What do you make of them?”

  “Who, cowboys and them? They all right, I guess. Least they free to get on their horses and go out riding wherever they please and can’t nobody mess with them cause they mostly do carry a gun.” He wrinkled his forehead here and retraced his logic. “Well, I guess some people can mess with them, cause somebody’s always shooting or hanging somebody, like I said. I don’t know what’s better, to live a cowboy life or a town life or a homesteading life. Not one of them’s easy.”

  They both fell silent, as there seemed little more to say. Gabriel offered James the waterskin. He accepted. After he’d drunk, Gabriel took the skin back and squirted some water on his face, washing off the sweat. He sat still after that and watched his brother, who continued to roam the prairie dog city, searching for some living remnant of its community. When Gabriel spoke, it seemed that something about the boy’s vain search had inspired him. “I was gonna be a doctor before they brought me out here.”

  James looked at him incredulously. “A doctor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A Negro doctor?”

  “There’s Negro doctors.”

  “I know, but—”

  “My daddy was gonna see to it. Told me I could be anything I wanted in this world, now that coloreds were free. Then he died and they brought me out here. That’s the stinking way a life can go.”

  James thought this over for a while. “Well . . .” he said, but he could go no further along those lines. He picked up a piece of grass and ringed his finger with it. “Shit, least you got some kin left. You don’t know what it’s like working for Pinkerd. It’s like being a slave. Worse than that, the things he does . . . I hate
him. Honest talking to the Lord above.” James tossed away the piece of grass and pulled up another. Again he twined it between his fingers and wove a ribbon of green jewelry. “I ain’t nary hated a body more.”

  A little later the three boys shared a banquet of bacon sandwiches and hardboiled eggs. James pulled out his novel and tried reading aloud. His grasp of the written word was faltering and imperfect at best, slow and downright discordant more often, and Ben took the novel from him and picked up the story. It was a cheaply written tale, vague in its descriptions of place or history but elaborate in its invocation of shady characters, broad-brimmed hats, and six-shooters. The English immigrant rode a white horse. His hair flowed long and blond beneath his Stetson, and his proud Roman nose had a knack for sniffing out young maidens in distress. Ben read of one such encounter, Richardson tracking a band of ten Mexican banditos intent on ravishing a young woman, Miss Delilah Day, golden-haired and fair, who was tied to a tree with rough horsehair reatas, her dress already ripped to shreds by the brutes’ daggers. Coming upon the scene, Richardson didn’t pause to ask questions. He blazed in at a full gallop, both pistols aflame as the bullets flew, making fast work of all but two of the banditos, leaving them choking on their own blood and filth and vomitus bile—

  “It don’t say that.” James grabbed the corner of the book and took a quick glance at it.

  “It do too.” Ben made a point of pulling the book away and reading it at an awkward angle, away from James. “ ‘Richardson held the two remaining banditos at bay with his pistol cocked and steady, still smoking from the damage it had already wreaked upon the fiends. With his other hand, he cut the ropes from Miss Day’s heaving bosom—’ ”

  “It don’t say that!” James again grabbed for the book.

  Ben stretched his arms away. “It do too, you idjit. If you could read, you’d . . .” He tried to start reading again but gave up the effort and fell into a wrestling match with the other boy.

  Raleigh watched them with vague and mistrusting eyes, with the air of one who had seen such behavior before and was certain it led to no good. He snorted his judgment on the two. But then something caught his attention. He raised his head and scented the air and looked off to the north.

  Gabriel followed the horse’s gaze and at first saw nothing but flat prairie. He soon picked out a rider heading toward them at a steady canter. Gabriel watched him for a while in silence. As the man came closer, the boy recognized his clothes, his demeanor on the horse, his firm, forward-facing posture, and his dark face. He knew him not as an individual but as a member of a certain race, a people named in error.

  “There’s an Indian.” He spoke in a voice barely audible, and the boys tussled on. “Ben, I said, there’s an Indian. Stop acting the fool and look.”

  This time the two boys did just that. At first neither was sure why or at what they were supposed to look. They gazed off in different directions, until Ben sighted the rider and let out a low whistle. James squinted and studied the horizon long and hard before he made the rider out. “You say he’s an Injun?”

  “If I ever saw one,” Gabriel said.

  “What should we do?” Ben asked, grabbing for Raleigh’s hackamore. The action disturbed the horse. He snorted and stepped back, pulling the rope tight in the boy’s hand.

  “Shhh,” Gabriel said, although nobody was making any noise to speak of. “Stop acting the fool. Just wait. He’s seen us sure as shit, so let’s just wait.”

  The native rider sat his horse bareback, with only a blanket between himself and the pinto’s mottled body. They moved like a single being, united in flesh. They trundled along with a rocking, relaxed motion, the hair of both horse and man flapping up and down with their strides. The man held something in his lap, but other than that, he was unencumbered and traveled light.

  Only as the Indian passed alongside them, about fifty yards away, did Gabriel realize that it was a rifle he held cradled across his thighs. It seemed a strangely fixed object, as if it were attached to the man’s lap as securely as he to the horse. The man neither slowed nor acknowledged the boys in passing. His eyes were set below a heavy brow. They fixed straight forward on a far distant object, as if his sight could reach beyond the horizon and was little troubled by the curvature of the earth. He moved on in a silence that seemed ghostly. Gabriel entertained the thought that he was witnessing not a man of flesh and blood but an ethereal rider passed from the netherworld into this one on a mission of vengeance for his vanishing people. Before long, the rider had grown small on the horizon and was lost to sight, and all was as before.

  The boys stood without speaking for a long while. Eventually Ben asked if all the Indians hadn’t been whipped and reserved. James said that most had been, in these parts at least, and he couldn’t make no sense of this whatsoever, him riding like he’s out for blood and all. Gabriel didn’t comment. He swept up their lunch spread and crammed it into the sack Hiram had rigged to the saddle. He climbed aboard the horse and reached down for his brother. Ben swung up behind him.

  “Come on,” Gabriel said. “Let’s go. I don’t aim to be here if he rides back this way.” He dug his heels into the horse, and Raleigh jumped forward into a fast walk.

  James called out a protest but quickly fell into step, trotting along next to them like a servant doing penance. Gabriel spoke no more, except within himself. For the first time he thought that while there was still nothing interesting about the toil of his daily life, at least adventure was skirting the edges of it, offering occasional glimpses that tempted with promises more mythical than the thin tales of cheap novels.

  THE PLOW RESTED ON ITS SIDE like a creature breathing its last. The blade had finally given in, the greater portion of it bent back and sheared away from the frame. How the soft earth could have wreaked such damage on iron was a thing to wonder at, but the proof was there before them. Gabriel stared at it long and hard before he went to fetch Solomon, wondering at the malignant force beneath the turf.

  Solomon kneeled before the plow and studied it with calm eyes. He caressed its rough edges with his fingers, a gentle touch, as if he feared to do more injury but thought that his fingertips might ease the metal back into place. They had not this power, as he conceded with a long breath of air. “Well, this ain’t gonna do,” he said, slowly easing himself up. “You think a smith could mend her?”

  Gabriel stood just behind him, watching his back. He rolled his eyes at the question. “I doubt God could mend it.”

  Solomon cut his eyes at the boy, and his words came quick. “Watch yourself. No need to be profane just yet.” He kept his gaze on Gabriel, but the boy studied the lay of the grass and made no comment. “What we have to think on is what to do next. I think we can mend her. We might could buy a secondhand plow next year from someone who’s quitting, but this year we just need to make do with what we got. We could take this down to Maubry’s, see what he makes of it.”

  Gabriel looked toward the southern horizon in time to see a lone rider come over the hill there. The horseman surveyed the land, took in the house and the two standing before it, then disappeared from whence he had come. Gabriel’s thoughts flew back to the Indian, although he knew straight away that this was somehow different.

  “How about you hitch up the mule and we see about this today?” Solomon asked, not having noticed the horseman. “No use wasting a day over it.” He grapsed one handle of the plow and looked at the tool from a new angle. But this improved it little, and he let it fall again. “I’ll just tell your mother.”

  He started to move off but paused, first to look at Gabriel, who still stared out at the empty horizon, and then to follow his eyes. As they both stood there, a faint rumbling noise could be heard. It rolled over the landscape like a low-flying flock of birds, a grumble that was both sound and feeling, heard not only through the air but through the soil itself.

  The rider appeared again, cresting the hill at a gallop, pausing, and twirling his horse around in a half-circle. He lo
oked back and motioned with his arms, then let his horse fall into a canter down the slope. A second later a section of the horizon began to seethe. It boiled as if a stream swollen with debris had suddenly cut its way through the prairie. This illusion held for a moment only. Then, at either edge of the river, two mounted drovers appeared, and it became clear that the river was one of moving cattle, the first of what promised to be a great herd of livestock.

  They came on fast, pouring down into the valley, picking up speed as they approached. They were a sort of cattle that Gabriel had never seen before. They were quick and bony, with low-slung heads and enormous horns that stretched out from either side of their skulls and rose to ominous points. A man could have sat on either horn and ridden the precarious perch. They seemed always on the verge of piercing each other, as if their horns had intentions of their own and the cattle were at their mercy.

  Solomon and Gabriel both took a tentative step toward the house, fearing they’d be overrun, but the drovers were hard at their work. They fought to turn the herd from the homestead, whips snapping like gunfire, their horses wheeling and dancing under them. They moved perilously close to those horns, but in so doing managed to turn the tide of the beasts to one side of the house and plowed fields.

  A rider emerged out of the throng, a bullwhip in hand. He cut toward the cattle and backed away again, his horse surefooted and light, as if it knew the work as well as the man and reveled in it. The creature looked as though it would reprimand the steers with its teeth if it was allowed to. As his horse spun, the cowboy caught sight of the homesteaders. He paused, reflected on something, then snapped back into motion. The cattle had turned toward him in a surge. He drew the whip up behind him, dark and serpentine, like the tail of some infernal beast. With the full force of his upper body, he snapped it hard and loud at the legs of one of the longhorns. He repeated this three times, till the river corrected its course. Only then did he spur his horse away from the group and ride toward the house.