Gabriel's Story (4 page)

Gabriel's jaw dropped. “You asked him?”

Eliza nodded. She slipped her hand into an old quilted mitten, lifted a pot of hot water from the fire, and poured it over the dishes.

“He came out with my daddy's money, and this is all he got for it?”

“There's no crime there. What's mine is Solomon's and what was your father's became mine. That's all there is to that. Fact that things here is primitive ain't nobody's fault. We just have to get through it. And the fact that we're here is just a fact, and you can see that plain as anybody else.” With that, she made to lift the pot up and move it. “Anyway, this land may be better'n you think. Just give it some time.”

“You know what's gonna happen, don't you?”

“I can't say that I do. Never had that gift.”

“We gonna work ourselves dumb for nothing. You gonna put me to work out there for nothing. We will go back East, only we'll go back broke and with nothing to show for it.”

Eliza rested her hands on her hips and looked at her son with a skeptical grin. “Is that right? That's the way you see it? And that's why you don't aim to do any work to make sure we do succeed? That what you're saying?”

Gabriel rocked forward on the balls of his feet. “Hell, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'll work. I'll work like nobody else here. I'm just saying what I think.”

“All right. Now I know. You go on now and help your brother.”

Gabriel turned, for a second responding like a dismissed schoolboy. But he paused by the door, blinking in the sunlight. “You won't never be able to say I didn't work the goddamn land.” With that, he stepped from her view.

DURING THE AFTERNOON, the two men ventured off to design a new room for Hiram. Gabriel and Ben worked on with the plow, taking turns leading the animals and guiding that rough tool. Gabriel couldn't help cursing under his breath, profanity a necessary feature of the labor. He didn't pause to survey his progress, nor to drink, as Ben often did. He turned himself to the work as if to destroy the land, the tools, the animals, or himself as quickly as possible. As the hours passed, he found none of these things easy to break.

Ben became the silent one. His brow furrowed in worry. It seemed he was slowly coming to grips with the reality of this work and its duration. Several times he seemed on the verge of offering some confidence to his brother, but the other showed only his back, his muscles, and his exertion. As dusk came on, Ben asked if maybe they should quit for the day. Gabriel said the day wasn't over but he could quit if he wanted to. Ben thought this over. “I'll just go get some more water.” He walked toward the house with the empty waterskin thrown over his shoulder.

Gabriel called the beasts into motion and found that they listened. Alone with them he struggled forward, but either they were tired or the sod had woven itself into chainmail. He made no progress, though he strained and the animals rolled their eyes and pawed the turf. The blade stuck. The plow overturned. Gabriel stumbled over it and bruised his knees and shouted at Raleigh to stop. He cursed the plow and damned it well and beyond redemption and so thoroughly prayers could not hope to save it. He kicked it, but this he regretted, as the iron cage of the thing lashed back at his foot and sent him hobbling. Raleigh and the mule watched him.

When he had spent his curses, he contemplated the whole sad scene from a distance of twenty paces. With the day's labor they had striated a small section of the prairie with raised lines of sliced turf. There was little sign of the soil beneath, and the lines resembled seams more than furrows, as if the turf had already stitched its wounds and begun to heal. Gabriel wondered who was getting the worst of this day, the ground or his own body. His legs were so tired that they trembled supporting him; his arms ached with a dull soreness, and certain motions sent a swath of pain across his back. He spat and stood waiting for something to come, as if the earth were entitled to the next move and he was content to wait his turn.

But as the earth did nothing, Gabriel strode to the rear of the house and got the ax from the shelter there. He carried it back, dangling from one hand. Standing out before Raleigh, he measured the arc of his swing and sought to find the proposed line of the plow's progress. The ax swung up, cut through the air and down into the earth. It bit. Gabriel released the handle and contemplated the angle at which the shaft projected toward him. He seemed to find a certain satisfaction in this. He cranked the blade out of the earth, took a step back, and swung once more. Without a pause, he worked the blade free and repeated the action, once, twice, and then onward, hammering into the turf a halting, imprecise incision. Each stroke was a new act of increasing fury, stronger and deeper, punctuated by grunts and profanities. The horse and mule watched him with nervous eyes, as if beholding some crazed woodsman who had forgotten the true target of his trade.

Ben returned with the waterskin. “Gabe, what the hell you doing?”

“I'm learning the ground.”

“Looks like you gone and lost your sense to me.”

Gabriel didn't protest this theory but simply tore into the earth again and again, ignoring his brother and the nervous twitching of the animals. Ben eventually unhitched the plow and led the horse and the mule away. Gabriel stuck to his demented work, hard at it until his mother called him for supper. Only then did he call a truce for the day.

LATE THAT EVENING, Gabriel lay restless and unsleeping. His legs burned. He felt the warm mouth of some creature around his muscles, gnawing on them and pulling them away from the bone. Each inch of him hurt in one way or another, and he kept up a slow, constant movement, trying vainly to find the one posture of comfort which eluded him. The gray highlights of the ceiling above him became a canvas for the images that pressed in on him. He remembered the place he had called home, the cobbled streets of Baltimore, bustling with carriages and foot traffic, the harbor full of ships sailing to and from far-flung destinations. He caught glimpses of his father and of the intentions conjured between the two of them, schemes from a distant time but all the more solid for their inaccessibility now. Bits of his earlier conversation with his mother also crept in and nagged at him. He hadn't known that she and Solomon went that far back, and somehow this seemed like a betrayal, like a crime done to his father and still unpunished. He rolled to one side and faced the wall, hoping this motion might somehow steady his mind and bring slumber. It did not.

He thought of the long train ride out here, all those miles of flatlands and rolling prairie and mountains, all the people and animals and dark spaces and the great sky above. How long would that journey be on foot? Could he walk back, and if he did, what would he find, who would he have? He lay planning it all out, jumping great spaces in his mind, conversing with distant relatives and creating the kind of life for himself that would make his father proud. He created plans to the logic of a weary and troubled young mind in the dead of night, with the breathing of his sleeping kin surrounding him and the eerie calls of coyotes roaming the miles of night outside their door. These schemes became a gateway to slumber and mingled with his dreams and arose again as questions unanswered in the morn.

IT WAS THE BLACK MAN who first noticed the Scot. He watched
as the young man cut cattle from the herd for branding. The Scot
moved his horse among the beasts as if he were one of them, as if he
might fool them into complacency. He never attacked too fast, but
maneuvered in such a way that his target always found itself
standing dumbfounded before him as a lasso dropped around its
neck.

But the way he communicated with his horse was what most
impressed the black man. He spoke to him, whispered, told him
jokes, and asked his opinion of things. The horse would stop on a
dime with just the slightest motion from the man's arm. He'd sidle,
spin, or squat at some command that observers could hardly detect.

When the blond man rode out to check on their progress, the
black man whispered his observations. Together they watched.

What's his name? the blond man asked.

The black man told him, and the other called to him. The Scot
rode over and waited, smiling. Sweat hung at the edges of his forehead. He wiped it away with a gloved hand.

They teach you all that back in Scotland?

The man smiled again. When he spoke, his voice betrayed his
origins, not in the words he used but in a faint lilt, a soft cadence,
and the intentionally playful way he moved words around on his
tongue.

Not exactly. We've few cowboys over there, I'm afraid.

Lot of sheepherders, though.

The young man nodded and smiled on. The blond man told the
Scot that he had blood of the same origins, a few generations away
from their native land but no thinner for it. He told where his people had lived and some of what he knew of the place. The young
man nodded and said he remembered the place himself. This
pleased the man.

Was it poverty, crime, or boredom that brought you over?

I wouldn't say it was one more than the other. Had my taste of
them all, if you'll know the truth.

This pleased the man as well.

I might have a project for you. You up for it?

The Scot asked what it was, but the man offered no further
information.

You'd have my answer before I know what I'm agreeing to?

I would. You can know there's money in it, though, extra from
your wages for the drive, that is. And you can know you'll be working with Caleb here, taking orders from him instead of me for a
little while.

The young man pursed his lips. He looked at the black and
found that man's yellow eyes hard on him. He looked back at the
white and found his eyes likewise, except flavored with humor.

Fill me in, then.

Good. You'll like this. Just consider it a bit of joke we're planning. A joke on an old friend.

THE MONTH OF MAY PASSED in a dreary haze of endless work. The family was up before the sun. They ate their breakfast as the sky grew pale, and they stepped out into the morning air as the first beams of sunlight touched the landscape, highlighting the tips of the grasses, bringing the soddy out of its dull relief. The myriad tasks to be completed each day dwarfed any chores that Gabriel had ever known before. There was, of course, the constant sod-busting, work that grew no easier with experience. Quite the contrary; to Gabriel's reckoning, the turf grew stronger each day, devised new defenses against the plow point. There were seeds to be sown and the animals to be cared for and tools to be created from makeshift materials.

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.