Gabriel's Story (7 page)

He went on to say that because of the sad fact that the horses could not demonstrate their full range of abilities in so limited a pen with so limited an amount of time, he wanted to highlight a few of their less obvious qualities. He directed everyone's attention to a certain young bay. This horse, he assured the audience, was smart enough to herd cattle without either rider or instruction. He had a habit of doing just that, managing the herd all day and only calling it quits when his replacement showed up. Another specific horse, he claimed, had mastered several Indian dialects and could happily serve as a translator if the need arose. Several others had skills in regards to cooking, fishing, and celestial navigation. And quite a few had things to say about animal husbandry.

He had just begun to point out another horse when he called out, “What? Who put my horse in the ring?” His face took on a look of great consternation, lightened by a smile just behind it all. He ranted a few moments, confounded the help he had for their ineptitude or downright treachery, and finally spoke once more to the audience. “That horse, gentlemen, is my own sweet Sophia. She's so smart she once tied up my shoelaces for me. She's so strong she once sent a grizzly to the great beyond with one fell kick. She's so fast she ran from the top to the bottom of a twister in six and half seconds flat. And she's just about pretty enough to marry. But none of you'll have her. She's mine till the good Lord sees to tear us apart, which may happen eventually but surely won't happen today and is likely not to happen in Kansas.”

He went on for some time refusing offers that nobody had made as yet, and then he prepared to retire. He said goodbye to the auctioneer, bowed to the audience graciously, and hurried down to the ring with the utmost feigned urgency. Applause followed him from the podium. It turned to laughter when he whispered in his horse's ear and patted her on the rump solicitously. Gabriel laughed with the rest and watched as most of the horses sold high and fast.

GABRIEL WALKED BACK INTO TOWN ALONE, with a casual, loose-legged gait that still had something of the city in it. The hard labor of the past months had carved changes into the boy's body. His hands were callused across the palms and bruised over the knuckles, making them puffed, rugged versions of their former selves. Cords of muscle fanned out across his back like wings growing beneath the skin, and the round curves that joined his chest and arms had twisted into solid balls. The drudgery of farm life, which warped many bodies, broke manmade tools, and took a toll of blood on both the land and its people, seemed only to strengthen this boy and speed his way to manhood. He grew with an intensity beyond that of anything planted in the ground—like a weed, some might say, and with much the same angry intent.

He spotted the wagon from some distance away, parked on a main street near the store. The mule stood with its head hung low, in quiet contemplation of whatever it is that mules are likely to think about. Gabriel walked up to it and stroked the coarse hair of its forelock. He studied the creature for a few moments, then whispered in its ear, “You ever wish you were all horse?” The mule watched him with one rotund eyeball but gave no answer. “Ever think about that? You could have been all a horse or all a donkey, but instead somebody stuck you together a hinny.” The mule tossed its head at this and shied away a step, apparently not comfortable with being so characterized.

Gabriel turned and looked at the store. It was a flat-faced wooden building built with a certain practicality of design that highlighted and yet economized on the sturdy timbers transported a thousand miles into this treeless world. It stood out on the street, not in design or size but in the brightness of its fresh white paint, and by the raucous colors of its new sign: HOWE AND SONS GENERAL STORE, yellow letters on a vermilion background, with a border of dark green.

The inside was lit only by the front windows. Gabriel stood for a moment near the door, letting his eyes adjust to the dusty light, trying to make some order of the rows and stacks of merchandise, food items, household wares, and building supplies. He eventually located Solomon. He went up behind him, stood for a moment, then cleared his throat. When this brought no motion from Solomon, Gabriel cleared his throat once more and scuffed his foot against a crate. The man turned around, roused out of his thoughts, and smiled at the boy.

“Hey, Gabriel, I was wondering what you were up to. Just looking over some things here. Just dreaming, you know. Just dreaming. What do you think of this here?”

He held out the new plowshare that he'd been contemplating. He ran his fingers over it and checked the blade from different angles in the light, divining a future in its contours. He held it with the delicate fingers of a glassblower as he explained that this blade was some new steel, harder than the old stuff, longer-lived. Perhaps with a blade such as this they could turn up the whole of that south-facing slope and double their tilled land in no time at all. He asked the boy his thoughts and got answers, such as they were, only in shrugs and nods, which seemed neither to confirm nor deny his hopes. Whether disheartened by this response or not, Solomon decided to make the purchase. He took the plowshare and his other supplies up to be tallied by the storekeeper.

Gabriel stood back a little, watching the man calculate their bill. He looked over his features, settling on the man's thick and unpleasant eyebrows and the slightly sinister curl of his mustache. He was cordial in the way of whites to blacks, joking with Solomon and asking after the health of his family, wondering whether they were turning much soil, assuring him that this plow would indeed help their progress, and saying that Solomon was lucky, as this was the last one he had in stock.

This statement, casual as it was, caught the attention of another man, a small fellow with reddish skin and ears that craned forward, rodentlike, as if to pick up just such information. He approached the counter, watched the goings-on for a second, then spoke. “Did I hear you right, Howe? Is that there the last of them new blades?” Howe answered that he had heard right. The man thought this over, his eyes fixed hard and suggestively on the storekeeper's. “Don't you remember I asked you to set one of those aside for me? Just the day before yesterday, came right in here and asked you explicit not to sell the last one except to me.”

Howe slowed in his work and drew himself up, his eyes finally meeting the other white man's and joining in some optical discourse. Before long he began to recall just such a conversation. “Hal, damned if I didn't forget all about that.”

“I thought you'd remember, though,” Hal said, letting a smile tilt his lips. A trickle of tobacco juice escaped the corner of his mouth and blended into the reddish hair of his chin. “I had your word, didn't I?”

“That you did.” Howe hung his head for a moment and considered the sad state of these events, then looked up at Solomon. “Sorry, Solomon, looks like this here plow blade was on hold, just like Hal says. I can't sell it to you.”

Solomon was slow in answering. Across his face passed many emotions in rapid-fire succession, not the least of which was anger. From where Gabriel stood, he could see the man's fingers grip the gray boards of the counter as if they would pierce through them and rip the wood asunder. The boy waited for what words or deed would come, as surely some must, for this was the man who had so lamented the pain of dreams deferred and cried the virtues of the freedom of honest work.

“You can't?” Solomon asked, as if no other words would come to him.

“Naw, he can't,” the customer said. He reached over and took the blade from Solomon's things. As he turned to resume shopping, he murmured, “It'd be wasted on you anyway, damn nigger farmer.”

Gabriel followed the man with red-hot eyes. They fixed on the man's ears, on the scrawny tube that was his neck. He looked back at Solomon, his face for once characterized not by a look of loathing but beseeching instead, longing for a wrong to be righted. Solomon held his gaze for a second but made no communication with the boy, turning instead and settling the bill.

Outside, the two loaded up the wagon in silence. Solomon patted the boy on the shoulder, turned, and climbed onto the seat. Gabriel watched him, sour-faced. “That's what you call being a free man?” He said it quietly, just a whisper, but clearly, so that his stepfather could hear it.

The man paused before seating himself, thought for a moment, then let himself down onto the blanket. When he spoke, his voice was honest, half defeated and far from proud. “Naw, I don't reckon we're all the way there, but we're on the way. Things could be a lot worse than somebody taking your plow. We're still finding the course to better things.” He motioned for the boy to climb aboard.

Gabriel looked around, considering other options and none too sure that the wagon was the best one. He eventually climbed in and settled himself, facing the back. He crossed his arms and sat in silence as the vehicle began its slow, creaking progress home.

THE SKY THAT SUNDAY EVENING began calm and still. No breeze blew across the grass, and even the coyotes were silent, their familiar cacophonous calls absent from the night. Hiram sat beside a tallow candle, in its warm, flickering light, and read from the Bible, from the old tales of the pharaohs and the Israelites. Egypt seemed an incomprehensible land, and Gabriel could scarcely conjure images of that strange country and the deeds performed there. Hiram spoke of Moses and Pharaoh, he who spurned God's wishes, of how Pharaoh was punished with miracles beheld by all, how he became repentant and wished to release the Jews. But each time Moses returned, God would turn Pharaoh's heart hard and make him refuse and thereby bring upon his people a new plague. This they repeated time and again. Gabriel couldn't help thinking that God was a cruel God, one who would toy with the souls of men and make them suffer against their wishes, who would choose one race of people over another and so mete out his curses.

Hiram found the words moving to the core and soon turned the evening's reading into a full-blown sermon. He spoke not as Hiram to his close kin but as preacher to a greater audience, with a fervor that made Eliza smile. He began by recollecting their distant homes in the South. He talked of that warm and humid land, of the beauty in its tragic history, and he spoke of the troubles of that place, the hardships they'd all known. They'd come here to escape some of that suffering, hadn't they? They'd come to make a new life for themselves, to prosper, grow, and multiply. Wasn't this so? He paused when they answered in the affirmative, and then said that they might escape many things in this country, but there was one force from which they could never escape. “Do you know what I'm speaking on, all of you?” He looked at the boys, who affirmed that they did. Hiram seemed to doubt this. He closed his eyes and stated, as if to a loved but naughty child for the hundredth time, “Ye cannot escape God's laws, God's sight, God's blessing, and God's judgment.”

He went on to tell the story of Jesus' life, summed up and abbreviated, stressing his love for the poor and devotion to the common man. With his own upheld arms he painted a picture of Jesus nailed to the cross, dying once again before their eyes, for their sins, so that man would not be destroyed but could live to be tested further. And later, with quiet words that caused the listeners to crane forward, he told of the man's resurrection. His body became stiff and unwieldy, dead and frozen, and only gradually did he regain life, as the Lord breathed the spirit back into him and Jesus both.

In the end, Hiram turned their eyes back out toward the fields. He read from the hundred and fifth psalm, verses forty-two, forty-three, and forty-five, and painted a picture of the prairie blooming like a giant rose, a sweet-smelling thing of beauty and delicate refinement. “Are you looking for the Promised Land?” he asked. Eliza's voice, singsong and light, said that they were. “Well, behold, you've found its location. Now farm and reap and thank God for the gift of life.” By the time he'd finished, there was little doubt as to the bounty of this land or the blessed rightness of their decision to journey here. Gabriel alone lacked enthusiasm, a fact that he tried hard to demonstrate with his twisted countenance.

They bedded down a couple of hours later, Hiram wishing all a fine rest and heading out to his half-completed room. It was just after the house had fallen into silence that the wind kicked up. At first it just tickled the prairie, caressed the house as a benevolent hand pets a loved old dog. But as the night grew darker, so the wind grew bolder. Before long a tempest howled against the sides of the house like a Fury intent on utter destruction. Gusts tore through chinks in the walls and cracks in the door, creating a whirling dance within the cabin. Gabriel pulled his cover up over his head and lay listening.

“You hear that?” Ben asked.

“I don't hear nothing. Go to sleep.”

But sleep had been blown away by the wind. Both boys lay with ears alert. The storm soon became a living thing running across the prairie. Far off they heard the pounding of footsteps, a steady bass over which the wind played. It grew louder, like a stampede of cattle, coming on hard and furious. It hit the house with a force that seemed to rock it. The window shook in its pane and the door bucked against its hinges. But the pounding was no herd of maddened beasts, no creatures of the apocalypse. It was rain.

A few seconds after it began, water started leaking through the roof. It dribbled down at first in a single trickle, then two. Then a section of the ceiling, which had been so faithful in lesser rains, caved in. Water pelted onto the table and floor in a torrent, some liquid, some tiny balls of ice.

“Damn,” Ben said. He jumped to his feet. “The roof's broke!”

Gabriel looked over his shoulder but only half took in the scene. He turned away and curled close to the wall. “Who cares?” he mumbled.