Legends of the Fall (23 page)

Ludlow became courtly again with his wife: their grief finally too large to be held privately. The rawest time had occurred one hot Sunday afternoon when they were having a picnic on the lawn and a girl in a cheap summer dress rode bareback up to the gate. Tristan immediately strode out and lifted her from the mount, recognizing her while the others watched puzzled but mildly bored: it was the honyocker's daughter from up near Cut Bank to whom Samuel had given his gold watch for safekeeping. She approached the table hugging her satchel to her breast. Tristan introduced her, brought her a plate of food and a glass of lemonade. He sat down beside her and balefully watched as she drew Samuel's watch from her satchel. She had heard of his death in the Helena newspaper and had made the three-day ride to return the watch, and if anyone cared to, they might read Samuel's letters to her. There were a hundred or so, one for each day of his service, and each in his meticulous script. Isabel began to read, then was overcome. Ludlow paced the lawn cursing while Alfred stared at the ground. Susannah took the girl off to give her a bath and a rest. In the middle of the afternoon she said she had to leave and asked that they send the letters to her when they were finished. She would accept nothing, not clothing, money or the gold watch though she asked for a photo of Samuel because he had neglected or was too shy to send one. Tristan rode silently with her a few miles wishing that she were pregnant and that would somehow bring back Samuel, but no, he died pure and virginal. And now she rode off with only a photo to console her. He wanted to strangle the world.

Tristan returned from the short ride in a mood so foul that he tried to break a young stallion that they had had no luck with. It was a tough beefy-looking animal that years later would be referred to as a quarter horse. He intended to breed it to three of his father's thoroughbred mares which Ludlow thought to be an interesting idea, but which Susannah's father, an aficionado of racehorses, thought outrageous. Tristan worked through the late afternoon until it occurred to the watchers at twilight that one of the beasts in the corral, whether the horse or Tristan, would likely end up dying in the match. Susannah's father quipped that the horse would serve a better purpose as dog meat, and Tristan stared at him and said he would name the horse in his honor Arthur Dog Meat at which he stomped off refusing to join them all later for supper and demanding an apology which he didn't get.

Late that night the ocean again entered Tristan's dreams: he tossed his bruised body and saw the black sky and immense rolling swells of the night watch, the rattling of an ice-stiffened foresail, and later the sky shot with stars too large to be stars. He awoke with Susannah covering him and the curtains blowing as if they were sails. He went to the window and stared down at the stallion in the corral; in the moonlight he could see the outline of its thick swollen neck. He told Susannah that he would be going away for a few months, or perhaps even a year, to meet his grandfather's ship in Havana. She said that she could tell that he needed to go and she would wait for him forever. At breakfast he kissed his father and mother good-bye and rode off with One Stab to Great Falls to meet the train. One Stab gave him his skinning knife and Tristan remembered that his own was buried with Noel at Ypres. He embraced the old Indian and said that he would return, to which One Stab only said, "I know it," as he rigged a lead line for Tristan's horse.

The voyage never really ended, except as it does for everyone: in this man's life, on a snowy hillside in Alberta late in December in 1977 at the age of eighty-four (a grandson found him beside the carcass of a deer he had been gutting, his hand frozen around the skinning knife One Stab had given him that day in Great Falls—the grandson hung the deer in the tamarack and carried the old man home, his snowshoes sinking only a little deeper in the snow).

Tristan took the train east to Chicago, spent a few days out of curiosity studying the Great Lakes ships at the docks, then went south to New Orleans and over to Mobile where he spent a few days on a schooner owned by a Welshman out of Newfoundland and on down through Florida to Key West where he took a night ferry to Havana after watching a load of green turtles being unloaded at a kraal from a Cayman's schooner, a graceful but filthy ship.

It was his first time in the tropics and on the night passage to Havana he was sleepless, spending the hours pacing the deck and wondering at the moist dense heat which the slight breezes of the Gulf Stream did not dispel; and beneath the bow where he walked to escape the smell of coal smoke from the stacks, the waves were phosphorescent. In the first light with Havana in distant view he sipped rum from his flask watching his first porpoises cut across the bow, lie back, then hurtle across the wake: turning he saw the strange vast purple penumbra of the Gulf Stream casts in the sky. He was red-eyed and strained from his travel but for the first time in half a year he felt something akin to ease in his soul, as if the dawn shore breeze laved the surface no matter the currents and turmoil below. He smiled at the water and the thought of his grandfather's schooner which though relatively new held so small a place in the world of the great steamers anchored off Havana. But it was a matter of less money and going where you wanted, the ports undesirable to the large shipping companies, or bays too shallow for big drafts and heavy tonnage. Besides the old man said he disliked the smell of smoke or the sound of engines at sea and it was too late for him to develop an interest in the grotesque.

People finally don't have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naive. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren't exempt: note Jesus's howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can't seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone's skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.

Thus Tristan had not more than a shred of comprehension of the agony he caused Susannah. On the morning of his departure she took a long walk and became lost. One Stab found her at nightfall and after that Ludlow asked One Stab to keep an eye on her if she left the yard. Her walking continued for weeks and her father truncated his vacation out of disgust when she refused his plan to have the marriage annulled. But Susannah's character owed more to the early nineteenth than the early twentieth century and as an abandoned lover she was unwilling to commiserate with anyone; this resolve was impenetrable and she spent her time either walking with Samuel's botanical and zoological handbooks or sitting in her room reading Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, favorites from the two years at Radcliffe before her marriage to Tristan. She enjoyed talking to her mother-in-law whose intelligence was as extraordinary as her own as long as the conversation didn't lead to Tristan. But most of all she enjoyed her long summer walks and such were her preoccupations that she never noticed One Stab following her. Sometimes she invited little Isabel along and she marveled at the child's quick wit and her knowledge of the natural world gathered from her mother and observation rather than from books. One especially hot afternoon while they were bathing in a pool formed by the spring near Samuel's grave Isabel noticed One Stab back in the forest and waved. Susannah cried out and covered herself then was embarrassed by the child's puzzlement. Then Isabel laughed and said she was going to marry One Stab when she grew up if he didn't get too old because Susannah had already married Tristan and there were no other choices on earth. Susannah slipped back to her neck in the water remembering how one day in this pool Tristan had imitated an otter chasing the fingerling trout and eating watercress. Isabel was saying that One Stab only followed to prevent her from getting lost or straying inadvertently between a sow grizzly and her cubs.

In Havana that morning Tristan took breakfast then walked the streets until noon came, the appointed time when his grandfather would make his daily visit to the shipping office. The meeting was casual at first but when they stepped away from the clerks out into the crude heat of the day his grandfather became grave and walked quickly tilted forward as a man in a rainstorm. The crew had been sent home and he had been ill with dysentery, the only complaint Tristan had ever heard from his mouth, but it was a veil over the inevitable: the schooner would be seized on its return to Falmouth for the war effort. To keep control of the ship they must cooperate. When they passed the guards at the British Consulate the old man paused and looked at Tristan with his cold blue eyes and told him not to say anything: the bargain had been struck. Then the old man pulled long from a flask of rum and offered it to Tristan saying that his senses had to be dulled a bit to bear these nitwits.

Later that afternoon they loaded supplies on the schooner with a new first mate, a Dane down from San Francisco named Asgaard, and three Cuban deckhands of evident experience. The captain of record was now Tristan and his grandfather was listed as a passenger bound for Falmouth. They slipped from their mooring after dark, raising an American flag before the mainsail and recording their heading in a brand new logbook. In a strong northeaster they rounded Cape Antonio the next morning and headed southwest down the Yucatan Channel toward Barranquilla to pick up a neutral cargo of mahogany and rosewood, and not incidentally, an important British subject. Then they headed east, passed south of the Caymans, up the Windward Channel and out the Caicos Passage turning north to catch the Gulf Stream whose current would aid them toward England.

In his cabin the old man barked an occasional order up to Asgaard and continued to school Tristan relentlessly. They took double watches keeping awake with Jamaican coffee. For a month all else was wiped from Tristan's mind except ingesting sixty years of his grandfather's experience: his sleep was troubled by imagined line squalls, frayed mooring lines, split masts, the strange giant waves found off Madagascar on occasion in the winter. They saw no sign of a German blockade as they neared the southern coast of England. They slipped into Falmouth at night where they were met by British intelligence. It was the old man's last arrival and he took permanently to bed that night aided by Tristan and his wife who had tallied his returns for over a half century. He was nearly merry when he took her hand and said that he was home for good.

Tristan was briefed the next day by an officer who had formerly been a factory manager in the Midlands. The officer was deferential and poured Tristan a drink as he nervously fingered a file. Then he asked if Tristan minded showing him how one went about scalping another human being; in his youth he had read a great deal of the literature of the American West but none of the authors had described the precise technique and he was curious. Tristan silently moved his hand in a slicing motion beneath his widow's peak and then made a swift ripping motion. It attracted his rarely used sense of humor and he said that one waited until the man was dead or nearly so depending on the degree of one's dislike and that you couldn't scalp a beheaded man because you needed an anchor to gain a good fulcrum. The Englishman nodded appreciatively and they went on about their business. The next morning the schooner was to be loaded with wooden cases marked tinned beef but which in fact held weaponry of a certain advanced nature. The cargo was bound for Malindi on the Kenyan coast to aid the British in their anticipated problems with the Germans at Fort Ikomo in Tanganyika. In this relatively early stage of the war they should have no trouble with the Germans in that they were flying an American flag but the situation could change momentarily and if Tristan were under fire he must scuttle the schooner. If the skirmish were of a minor nature as they neared Kenya a case of hunting rifles and shotguns consigned for Nairobi might be used in defense and that he should school his crew for that eventuality.

Tristan spent the afternoon sitting beside his grandfather's bed waiting for his midnight departure. While the old man slept he wrote Susannah and his father that he was on a mission for the government not realizing his letters would be censored and that he had been followed everywhere that day by an intelligence officer disguised as a Cornish fisherman. And writing the notes brought a strange sweep of sentiment over him as if for a moment his destiny was no longer so inalienably private and buried within himself. He imagined his father and Decker arguing about breeding lines and his mother in the parlor with the gramophone playing
Cavalleria Rusticana.
He saw Susannah sitting up in bed and stretching her arms in the first light, how her slight figure walked to the window to look at the weather surrounding the mountains and how she would come back to bed and look at him a long time without saying anything.

Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out. Of course no one ever saw the "will" and perhaps it is a cheapish abstraction, one blunt word needing a thousand modifiers. When Tristan set sail for Africa that morning after a silent lamplit breakfast with his grandmother—she gave him a Bible wrapped in an untreated lambswool sweater she had knitted—-he was fulfilling a number of inevitabilities. Since his sixth grade geography class in a country schoolhouse he had dreamed of going to Africa, not for the hunting because One Stab had taught him a much more honorable and functional sense of hunting than to shoot an animal to gratify his ego, but merely to see it, to smell and feel and know it, to see how it jibed with the dreams of that child crazed with maps he once was. Another obsession was caused by the tales his father told of his few short youthful trips with his own father: a trip to Göteborg in Sweden one summer and another to Bordeaux and of the whale seen breaching in the North Sea. Always the expert horseman, once in his dreams Tristan envisioned a schooner as a giant seafaring horse jumping wave froth and pitching full tilt against swells. And there was the unspoken, unthought, unrehearsed sense that time and distance would reveal to him why Samuel died.