Gabriel's Story (2 page)

They stood there, seemingly the only ones shocked by the appearance of things. Gabriel thought back to the brownstone they had left in Baltimore. They had occupied only the upstairs apartment, and it had never seemed so special or spacious before. But now it stood out as infinitely grand: those wide stairs and high ceilings, the bay windows facing a busy street, the kitchen, and the dining room with its inset fireplace and flowered wallpaper. The bedroom that he and Ben had shared had seemed too intimate a space. But that room, with its iron-frame bed and view onto the alley three stories below, was nearly as big as the space they were all to share now. He glanced at his brother, for a rare moment seeking some camaraderie. Indeed, he read similar thoughts written on Ben's troubled features.

Gabriel glanced at the curtain behind which his mother had disappeared. His mouth worked, as if he would call her out and demand some explanation, point out to her the impossibility of what this man had just presented to them. But his tongue couldn't form the words. He moved over to the bed when Solomon offered to get a little fire going to keep the night warm. He sat on the firm pallet and watched the man, his eyes dark and brooding in the candlelight.

THE TWO MEN RODE EAST to San Antonio, where they passed
three days in a haze of alcohol and sex. From there they rode on to
San Marcus and Mountain City and into Austin, where the white
man drew on his bank account and so further fueled their
debauchery. They spent time and money in Waco and Fort Graham and Dallas, leaving behind them two men near death, a
string of damaged saloons, and three prostitutes who cursed the
men by name and description and asked that God do them the
one favor of tearing these men from the earth and throwing them
to the fires of hell.

The white man harbored a rage that had been newly stirred but
that had begun before anything he could name and plagued him in
his dreams, both sleeping and awake. He thought up tortures for
his enemies, and when they were exhausted, he thought up new
enemies and so continued. The black man watched it all with
quiet eyes and waited.

Outside of a saloon in Dallas, the white man took the butt of a
rifle across his forehead and lay immobile as blood trickled into his
eyes, wondering if this was what death felt like, wondering if the
fires of hell were actually liquid, and if so, could they be consumed? The black man carried him away and sat him on his
horse, and they rode down the Trinity River and camped at one of
its forks and sobered up. The white man cursed everything, himself included, and struggled with the demons within, and tried to
push them away because they were not his demons but had been
planted in him. They need not be his, and this need not be the
course of his life. He stared into the flames of their mesquite fire
and listened to the coyotes and watched the progress of suckerfish
in the river and thereby found a new sanity. He nursed his mind
gently and watched it grow calm.

GABRIEL WOKE EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, chilled to the bone and damp. His brother pressed against him, his mouth open, breathing with a peaceful rhythm. Behind the thin screen of cotton Solomon snored, low and nasal, occasionally mumbling some bit of dream conversation. Gabriel listened to the chorus created between them, punctuated by silences that seemed alive with tiny sounds: coyote songs from the prairie, the scurrying of mice, and, fainter still, the burrowing, grinding noise of some creature, whether within the walls or inside the soddy, he could not tell. He lay there for some time, his eyes probing the wall nearest him.

Eventually he sat up and slipped from underneath the woolen blanket he and his brother had shared and emerged fully clothed, even down to his shoes. The room was dimly lit. There was a lone and tiny window, and through it came only the faintest indication of light. In the stove, orange embers pulsed and glowed, warm although they gave no flame.

He stood there like an aged and senile man, looking around him at the foreign world of his own home, until he heard movement beyond the curtain that enclosed the space Eliza and Solomon shared. This spurred him on. He crept over to the door, a wooden thing that neither fully fit the space it occupied nor appeared to have been a door by design. He had to lift it to move it.

Although sunrise had not yet taken place, it was noticeably lighter outside. The sky had all but cleared of clouds, and the last faint traces of stars were still visible in the west. Gabriel walked away from the house with determined steps, across earth touched by frost. He paused only when he got to the top of a hill. There he turned and looked back.

The house was a stark silhouette against the eastern glow. It sat small and inconsequential on the landscape. Next to it lay a plot of turned soil, a tiny brown square he could have held between his fingers. He studied this for a moment, and then his eyes drifted on and stared unfocused at the prairie around and behind the house. He had seen such space yesterday and the day before that, but his eyes were not yet comfortable with it. They roamed across it in search of a boundary, a border, an indication that this land didn't go on forever. No such marker was to be found.

The lonely call of some creature drifted past Gabriel, a cry part canine and part musical. As if summoned by it, a shape emerged from the house: Solomon. He stood for a moment, taking in the morning, then turned to some task on the far side of the house. Gabriel folded his arms across his chest and stood unmoving. A drop of moisture clung to his nostril. He sniffed to halt its progress but otherwise ignored it. How could Solomon call this a home? His letters, although written in another person's hand, had promised so much. They had painted a picture of prosperity that bore no resemblance to what Gabriel now saw before him. He silently named the man a liar, one more slur to add to the list that he'd compiled over the long train ride. He trudged back toward the house, firm in his conviction that his mother would also see this fool's folly. She would look it in the face, turn from it, and flee.

ELIZA DIDN'T DRAW HER CONCLUSIONS as quickly as her son did. Instead, she listened patiently through Solomon's tour of the place. There was little to show, but Solomon managed to stretch the tour out with long, detailed descriptions. For each individual thing he began with a lengthy discourse that proved the nonexistence of the object; then he set about building it with words and gestures before the eyes of his listeners. In such a way, the house began as a flat stretch of grass on which could be found naught but buffalo dung. He told of the grasshopper plow and the yoke of three oxen that had cut the sod into fifty-pound bricks. From there it rose, brick by heavy brick, up from the ground and into the building they now had before them. It was a structure unknown in the East but standard in this treeless habitat. The well beyond the rise was dug with words that sought to convey the full import of the action and the expense of such an endeavor. He indicated the size of the land they owned with gestures that seemed to encompass the earth itself. He pointed out boundaries that no eye but his own could see, and he expounded on their good fortune, by the grace of God, at being able to acquire such a large and promising parcel.

Despite his eloquence, the three newcomers, even Eliza, shared a look of forlorn suspicion as they took in what lay before them. The soddy stood, in the light of day, like an earthen ogre, with the door as its gaping mouth and the dingy window as its one remaining eye. The roof hung low and tired, a bushy mass of hair no different from the fields of grass around them, except dead where the fields were living. Solomon spoke as if the barn existed already, as if there were stables full of thoroughbreds and rows of planted corn, but the three saw none of this. The barn lived only in the man's mind, the stables even more so, and the areas of turned earth were feeble and lifeless in comparison with the untouched expanses around them.

Behind the house and set some thirty yards away was a fenced-in area of mud and filth, at the center of which stood a mid-sized sow. She watched the family approach with a curious gaze, although she didn't let it stop her from her business, which appeared to be nosing around in the mud with her snout. Solomon called her a guarantee against the weather or locusts, a sure profit and a fail-safe so that no one calamity could destroy them. The pig stared back through all of this with a skeptical look that said she was not as impressed with them as they were with her. She grunted, raised her snout in the air, then turned her back to them and moved off toward the far end of the pen.

“I wish I could be showing you the whole place up and running,” Solomon said, “but last year was tough, harder than I thought. For everyone, but harder even for the coloreds.”

“Here and elsewhere,” Eliza said. “That's how it always is.”

“True. True. That's how it always is.” Solomon nodded at the sad reality of this. “They gave me some trouble about the land, it being such a good piece, but we own it free and clear all the same. Out here, a man ain't so much fighting against white folks as he is fighting against the land. White folks still cause you trouble, but the land . . . Apart from everything else, there were the locusts, a plague of them. Figured you read about it in the papers.” Eliza nodded that she had. “They tore through this country, ate everything in sight. Some things I wouldn't have thought you could eat, too. Air was so thick with them you feared to breathe them in. It was a hell of a thing.” He looked down at his feet and scuffed the soil with his toe. “But they won't come back this year.”

“How do you know?” Ben asked.

“I don't
know
, but that's what I expect. Folks say they never do come back two years consecutive, least not that many. I don't mean to tell the Lord his business, but I figure it's about time for him to smile on us.”

Gabriel stood silently for a few moments, apparently meditating on providence and God's role in bestowing it. But when he spoke, his mind showed a different focus. “Thought you said we already had a barn.”

“Well . . .” Solomon shrugged like a man caught at some childish prank, embarrassed but smiling. “You would've already had a barn if you'd come out in midsummer. Y'all gotta remember you come out earlier than I expected. It's still in the planning stages right now.”

Gabriel acknowledged no humor in the situation. “You didn't write about no planning stage. You wrote a whole lot of things I don't see no sign of.”

The man's lips pursed before he spoke, but his voice was calm. “Well, I'm not that good a letter writer. Maubry, the man that wrote the letters out for me, he thought I should keep to the positive side of things. So I wrote things the way I saw them being soon. That's what it's all about out here, looking to the future and making it so. This here is a land and a challenge like God intended.”

“This—” Gabriel began, but Eliza silenced him with a glance. She spoke gently, but with a firm back.

“It does beg the imagination a bit, Solomon. You have to grant us that.”

Solomon nodded his recognition of this. He looked up at the sky and exhaled a breath so long it might have been pent up the entire day. He seemed to search that blue and tranquil void for some answer that eluded him on earth.

He searched long, and whether he found the answer there or in some other region, Gabriel knew not. But the boy watched with surprise as the man fell to his knees and clenched the turf in his large hands. He stared down at the thick blades of grass that thrust between his fingers, and he asked Eliza to kneel with him. He asked her if she understood what it meant to hold this earth in their hands, to know that it was theirs by right, to do with what they would or could, and that it could be passed down to their children in perpetuity. Did she understand that if there was ever a thing that this nation, which had enslaved them both and so many others as well, could truly give to them, it was land and the right to work it as they would? He begged her to forgive him his folly if she could but asked once more if she understood.

She answered, clasping her hands over his and so doubling his handhold on the earth, “Well, Solomon, I'm listening to you, and I'm trying. I can't see it all clear as you do, but I'm trying.”

Gabriel shook his head and turned away, like a man wearied by the ravings of a street-corner prophet.

GABRIEL WAS THE FIRST TO SPOT HIRAM, riding in across the prairie late in the afternoon. His horse, burdened with bags of seed and supplies, plodded with steady steps that brought him on as smoothly as clouds drifting over the land. Hiram was a man in the later years of middle age. His clothes were bedraggled, simple garments of a coarse material like burlap, and his hair was unkempt, a lumpy mass of tight curls. But his face shone with a charisma that held it all together. Gabriel had known him exactly as long as he'd known Solomon. The two had appeared together one day from the fabled South and had left together to plant their dreams in the soil of the West. But this man had an entirely different effect on the boy from his stepfather's. His quiet and unassuming air, his gentle smile, and the humor of his stories made Hiram something like a beloved uncle to both boys.

He dismounted with well-tried movements, although he walked with a limp, as one leg refused to straighten itself completely, an injury from a distant, southern time. He took in the whole group with a glance, nodded at Gabriel and smiled at Ben. But he walked first toward Eliza, shaking his head and whispering something meant for no ears but his own.

“Hiram.” Eliza took his hands in hers and held them firmly. “You got yourself in this mess too? What kind of fools are you two?”

Hiram smiled at this and seemed to find no insult in it. “The kind of fool that is godawful happy to see you. Do you know that you've just become the best-looking woman in a hundred miles? Maybe two hundred?”