Afterlands (37 page)

You are too young for this black, Laura
.

He says nothing yet. This public encounter, even in the absence of a public, is deeply reckless on both their parts and marks a fording in their lives.

I’ve failed, however, he says.

Your presence here is a
complete
success, she says in her wry, incisive voice.

Laura, how did you know to be here?

I didn’t, for a fact. There was no word from St John’s. But I gambled on the off-chance. I’ve been here as often as I can, these past weeks.

As often as you can! Tyson repeats the phrase faintly, tears welling, overcoming him. But she seems to hear his broken exclamation as a question. She looks him in the eye and says, with a kind of fond exasperation, Why, yes, George. Every day.

Chihuahua State, May 1889

C
LIMB INTO THE MOUNTAINS
at any latitude and eventually you reach the Arctic.

Tonight Kruger and the old bitch, Perra, huddle by a meagre, spitting fire of deadfall and fir cones. They have hiked up past a small green lake rimmed with dwarf conifers and draining to the west until they reached the end of a second lake, crowded with rotten floes and pash and narrowing to a stream descending eastward. The stream’s meltwater is icy cold, sharp to the taste, though the rush of its cascade makes it oddly mild to his fingers.

Kruger is returning to Purificación. He will stop there for a few days, he thinks, then continue north to the Rio Grande. For six weeks he and Perra have been trekking through the ancient transcontinental scar of the Barranca del Cobre along Indian trails, or the tracks and skeleton trestles of the unfinished Chihuahua Pacific Railroad, leaving behind him the remains of his third life, as a family man, in La Paz. That remote and forgotten little city, in the grip of a century-long siesta, sated with sun, crossed by balmy salt breezes and the music of bells and guitars, its calendar a rosary of fiestas—La Paz has been transformed by the cholera into a site of macabre, medieval scenes. He recalls little of his last days there but even that little is too much. In early March he crossed to the mainland with other orphaned or widowed refugees, then parted ways with the rabble, fleeing up into the
barrancas
. Besides the fox-like dog—now filmy-eyed, grizzled around the muzzle and brows—he had with him a burro, saddlebagged with food and a few domestic souvenirs, although little money, as Kruger had always spent most of what he earned in La Paz as a pearl-lighterman, ferrying divers out to the rich oyster beds, his strength at the oars an advantage in the daily dawn regatta. And how good it was simply to spend the pesos and centavos as they trickled steadily in—to be free of the North with its natural hoarding compulsions, its rationing of time, food, affection, its anxious striving for status and capital. Caches secreted against future lack and loss. (And wars.) The pleasant climate and isolation of La Paz encouraged a sense of sufficiency. There was no winter to hoard for. Oysters, mussels, coconuts were there for the taking. Yet the losses had come anyway.

As darkness settles over the lonely breadth of Mexico, small asters of light begin to quiver far down in the distance, in the U-shaped section of desert framed by the canyon’s vast walls. The burro, maimed in a fall, is long since eaten. Perra is increasingly stiff in the hindparts. Kruger remains numb with grief. Yet nothing curtails his appetite. On a propped stick over the fire he’s roasting a scrawny hare, trying not to feel or to think; maybe these few bites will help him to stop dreaming of dogmeat. Now Perra tilts her head and pricks her large ears. She rises, growling low in her chest, staring into the night from which footfalls, human and animal, are approaching from the east, then glances anxiously at Kruger as if to say, Do something!

Kruger has no fear left to make him care. A small shambling figure enters the orbit of the firelight, leading a burro. Kruger sighs and removes his disintegrating straw hat.

Buenas tardes!
says the figure in a cracked, heavily accented treble.

Good evening, Kruger murmurs, continuing to rotate the hare. You are American, I think?

Yes! Yes, we are!

At this “we” his heart sinks further. There are more of you?

More? The little figure looks hopeful. On the other side of the fire he stands shivering in a dark vested suit and porkpie hat, these items ragworn and far too large. The owlish eyes have a fixed, feverish gleam. Both are pouched and battered. The white hair is cropped unevenly short. And Kruger sees that the figure is a woman, maybe sixty-five, with a small prim mouth, set far down her face, crammed with long yellow teeth.

There’s none but I and my husband, she says.

Kruger glances from the woman’s face to the lowered snout of the burro, its stoical eyes—the beast now shying back from Perra and the flames—then looks again at the woman’s face. Perra growls again but with little conviction. There’s a smell of burning meat. Kruger yanks the flaming hare from the fire and waves it between himself and the woman to extinguish it, as if performing some odd, primitive greeting ritual.

Hungrily the woman eyes the doused hare.

Your husband … he is then following?

How’s that?

Pardon me, he says, I’ve not spoken English for many a year.

My husband is dead! she snaps. May we sit down?

Kruger eyes her briefly, then extends an open hand toward the ground.

I believed we were being pursued, she says, sitting quickly. But evidently not! They’re far too occupied with their
work
down there.

He looks past her and again sees the twinkling lights of the desert villages.

She says, Those are fires. Of course, you might well sympathize, you might well be of their own stripe—another spy!

He smiles unhappily and says nothing.

You look Mexican enough.
Criollo?
You’re swarthy, yet your eyes …

A dozen years I was in La Paz, he says. I had a home there. A young family. He nods at the ring hand resting on his knee. She considers the silver wedding band, then the rest of him. Out of one side of her pinched mouth she says, It was a spy must have betrayed us. But of course, you ask, what were we
at
down there in the desert in the first place? I told him that, I warned him. Didn’t I tell you that? We’re missionaries. We came south to bring the Word to the Tarahumara natives, up here in the sierra. The Catholics never have, you see. Nobody has. Yes, and now we know why, don’t we!

Kruger sets the smoking hare to cool on the stones by the fire. Perra whimpers and bellies a few inches closer to the meat. The burro remains where it stands.

Because they are impossible to find, that’s why!
Eighteen months we spent up here and the only ones we ever succeeded in catching and herding into the fold were the poor lepers who reside in the cliffs, way over yonder. Of course, many of
them
haven’t even got limbs!

I passed those lepers some days ago, he says.

And did it appear to you as though the conversion had taken?

Her expression is crafty and peevish.

I’m afraid I can’t judge, he says. They wished to be left alone, that much was clear … and now I seem to prefer that also. He’s whetting his jackknife on a stone etched with fossils.

And we, through all of this, we imperilling our lives to get to them! As for the healthy ones, we barely caught sight of them, ever. We came to doubt that they really existed. We would come upon Tarahumara hamlets—deserted! Firepits—carefully snuffed, nobody there! A parable of the Lord’s dogged pursuit of the wayward soul, you might think, yes—only this pursuit was ever fruitless. We came to doubt our own sanity. We’d brought the Lord’s Word up here and were endeavouring to convert a nation of wraiths. Of course we wondered if the Padre might have exterminated them—them as well! Have you spied any Tarahumaras on your travels?

Only at a distance, watching me. And he adds wryly, They are said to be tremendous runners. This Padre you mention …

In time of course we conceded the vanity of our mission. I wanted to return to Pennsylvania, my husband insisted we try instead to gain converts away from Rome, down there, in the desert. No good can come of that, I said—but you wouldn’t listen!

Perra growls at the empty spot beside the woman, whose credulous gestures seem to be convincing the dog that something is there; or something is amiss.

In the end, as ever, we acted in concert. I believe one of the Padre’s spies betrayed us, down there. Or one of the Roman priests. The natives would never have. Please now, please give me a little taste of that coney!

This Padre, he says, holding the knife, not yet reaching for the hare, he’s not a real priest?

Almost worse! A captain of the Mexican cavalry. In fact now a colonel. Still they call him
capitán
.

Capitán Luz, says Kruger, straightening.

You know him—Maclovio Luz. His lancers murdered Ezra! She shows her feral eye-teeth. These are his clothes I’m wearing. My own they sullied. So I burned them, when the villages were all afire. I am going to reside with the lepers now, they’ve need of our ministry now, we shall build them a house of worship and we—

Have you been to Purificación? Has Luz been there?

What?

It’s a Sina village. Has he been burning the villages?

We were sowing the Word among the Pehues. The Sinas we were next to visit.

But has Luz been there?

I don’t know, I don’t know! Has Luz been there? Again she speaks from the side of her mouth, twisting her shrivelled torso to that side, then looks back at Kruger in befuddlement.

Nobody knows if the Padre has been there!

It’s where I’m going, tomorrow, he says. Here, take some meat. He hands her his own tin plate and fork and the extra cup. I have no more coffee, he tells her, it’s water in the kettle.

The devil, she says—stuffing her mouth, not using the fork, her long fingernails cracked and filthy—he deems the region his private domain. A Herod. The natives who won’t flee into the sierra he burns out or slaughters. Mestizos as well.
La Purga
, it’s called. The Purging. There was another tax here. Many refused it. For the railway. She closes her eyes as she swallows, then says hoarsely, Ah, God keep you, it’s days since I’ve tasted food! The last was a corn-loaf. There were loaves afloat on a river, I remember, somewhere … they were shaped like coffins. Doubtless from funerals.

It’s a Sina custom, I think, he says softly, glancing past her at the desert fires.

God forgive me but I took one. We did love them, the natives. Like children. He died for them, my husband. Stood between them and the horsemen with his Bible in hand. So brave you were!

She looks back at Kruger accusingly.

What have you done with your family?

My family?

I always know a lie when I hear it. There, you’ve been warned.

Kruger looks down, slowly filling his cup from the kettle. She leans toward him over the fire and whispers,
The hoot-owl’s calling alerts me that we are being observed from a distance
.

Over the rim of his cup he studies her as he drinks.

He says, It was the cholera.

It’s in Californee now, too! she exclaims.

The popping of the campfire and her rapid chewing fill the silence.

I found a place in the sun, he says, off the edge of the world. For nearly a dozen years, nothing happened. Nothing! Every day was really the same. How wonderful that was—to be outside of time that way.

He cuts her more meat and gives Perra another bone.

And to think, when I was eighteen, all I wanted was to be recruited into time, the future. History.

Well, nobody can hide anymore, she says. Not in these modern days. Except perhaps the Tarahumaras—for now. By and by, somebody will catch them up, for all they are good runners. As God caught up with you. At least you yourself were spared. A man can always begin again, unlike a woman. It was a large household?

For a moment he regards her with something close to hatred.

We had a daughter and a little son, seven years and five.

And we too, she says, chewing faster now. We dared hope for children still!

She’s clearly far past the age.

He says, As for being spared, I think I’ve had enough of it. It seems to be my only talent. I was second mate with the
Polaris
expedition, sixteen years ago.

She shows no surprise, no suspicion. Yes, of course—with Captains Hall and Tyson! I never forget a name. Ezra and I attended one of Captain Tyson’s lectures, in Altoona.

I saw one in Brooklyn. I thought it wonderfully inventive.

A true hero, she says, like my husband. Like my husband, Faith kept him strong. But then he did something disgraceful. He is dead to God now, dead to the Lord.

He’s dead—Tyson? Kruger feels faint, then sick. But I am on my way to—

I don’t know! Is the captain dead? We don’t know if he’s dead!

She flinches back, as if threatened. Kruger has not budged.

How long is it that you’ve been gone? he asks.

Three years two months and nine days! I’d not heard he was dead!
You
said he was dead! She looks increasingly alarmed. He, he wrote a book concerning the
Polaris
. I suppose you must be a character in the book. Yes—now I know your accent—you must be one of those Germans!

Kruger nods slowly. He says, I have that book still. Did you hear anything of Tukulito?

She stares vacantly, chewing.

Hannah, I mean. And Joe. The Esquimaux who were with us on the ice.

Oh, the poor Christian natives! I’d forgotten their names.

Poor? What do you mean by this?

We did mean to read the book. We bought one at the lecture, but we were too occupied with other things. Then he disgraced himself! What was your name in that book?

I’m Kruger, one of Tyson’s villains. But about Hannah …

Her eyes ignite as though she’s meeting Crazy Horse or Billy the Kid. No one is drawn to a famous outlaw the way a do-gooder is. But then her gaze narrows in a canny way.

Now I remember! The papers all declared you men to be agents of the Kaiser!

Yes, yes, but do you—

He’s in Washington now. I remember.

Tyson?

There was a divorce. We thought it disgraceful. There was a scandal. He divorced his wife. We thought it disgraceful the Navy should employ him after such an act! And in
Washington
. Our government is not God’s government, Mr Tyson, but in time that day may come. We’ve heard nothing of those natives, not for some years. Their daughter the Lord took away. A fine little musician, it’s said. It’s said she would play on the piano nothing but the old-time hymns! That she knew them from the beginning, without the slightest instruction. Her last words were, “Sweet Jesus, come bear your poor creature home.” Or were those the words of the mother … ?