Savage Girl (10 page)

It was one of the rare times she paid me any mind. I felt myself blush with pleasure, then blush with embarrassment over my blushing. I reached out and touched the purple petals of a coneflower, about to thank her for the pretty thing she’d done, before I realized that something here was odd.

How right it was, and yet how wrong. A bouquet of wildflowers, yes, each one more beautiful than the last. And yet each bloom, you see, she had pinched off at the base of the blossom itself, not seeming to know what even a toddler recognizes: When you pick flowers, you gather them by the stem.

Savage Girl could imitate behavior without taking the sense of it.

The whistle sounded to let us know our idyll was at an end. We emerged from the Land of the Lotos sleepy and satiated and sunburned, and we began to make our way back to the depot.

•   •   •

Sandobar had taken on water and coal and was ready to depart. Father and Mother and I stood talking with Bob Cratchit, the engineer. His real name was Bob Crenshaw, but following the lead of my little brother, Nicky, we adopted the teasing nomenclature.

Tu-Li and the berdache had already boarded the train. The sun had gone aslant, and the servants were bringing the rugs and furniture and plateware back to the railcars under lengthening shadows.

“Where is Virginia?” said Anna Maria. Then, in a tone of rising concern, “Where is she? Has anyone seen Virginia?”

“Calm yourself,” said Freddy.

“You calm yourself!”

“I am sure she is right here,” said my father, beginning to look concerned as well.

“She has run off,” Anna Maria worried. “She is a wild animal, and we’ve gone and lost her again. How will she survive?”

We first searched the length of Sandobar, looking under each of the cars. I climbed the shooting car’s ladder and made sure the top of the train was clear. I crossed over and put my face to the depot windows, seeing only emptiness inside. Looked around the back of the building.

Nothing.

“Virginia!” shouted my mother. “Virginia, come along!”

Freddy wanted to pacify my mother but mentioned that even enjoying the director’s right-of-way, we had to leave Kelton on time if we were to be through the mountains to Ogden that evening.

Bob Cratchit stepped up into the locomotive’s cab and sounded another blast of the whistle, then came out to stand beside the tracks with me.

This time we had really lost her. And lost her in the middle of the
chilly mountains, where night was falling, where there would be nobody to help her.

“Virginia,” Anna Maria wailed.

And then I saw the girl, galloping across the field toward us, black mane flying like a flag, her brown feet bare, as always. She carried with her a long, thin branch, something she’d picked up in the cedar grove and trailed back with her.

“Virginia,” said my mother as the girl pulled up beside us, holding her stick aloft like a torch, thrusting it out like a sword.

She didn’t look at anybody, didn’t meet our gazes at all. Small as she was, at that moment she appeared Amazonian, a warrior.

“Please don’t run away again,” my mother said, taking the girl’s hand. “We so want you to be happy with us.”

“All right,” said my father. “Enough, Anna Maria.”

Savage Girl wrenched herself from my mother’s grasp, so roughly that Anna Maria gave a little cry. But the girl paid no mind, merely pointed her stick at a patch of sand near where we stood beside the railbed, an empty stretch scattered with clinkers and ash.

She had drawn two circles and a straight line.

Anna Maria tried to bring her away to the train, but again she pulled violently away. She took my mother’s head in her hands as though she would crush it, physically making Anna Maria look at where she had been drawing.

“Wait,” I said.

Everyone went quiet.

“Well, would you look at that,” said Bob Cratchit. “Don’t that beat everything.”

What Savage Girl had drawn in the trackside dirt was, unmistakably, a
B.

Or could it really be? Could this mute, wild creature know how to create an image that was more meaningful than two circles and a line?

She again wielded the stick, and an
R
appeared in the dirt.

We held our breaths.

She drew an
O.

An
N.

“Brown,” Bob Cratchit guessed, and we shushed him.

W.

Y.

An
N.

She looked up, finally, into the eyes of Anna Maria, poking her stick down at the pebbly, gritty, ordinary dust, pointing to the blow she had struck for the revolution, a word impaled in the sand.

Then around the circle, looking with great seriousness at all our faces in turn. Then again pointing. We had been yelling our heads off to her, but calling out the wrong name. She wanted us to know who she was.

Bronwyn.

Anna Maria was the first to break the spell. “Bronwyn? Your name is Bronwyn?” My mother broke down blubbering and took the girl into her arms.

“Would you look at that,” repeated Tiny Tim’s father. “Don’t that beat all.”

Bronwyn, I thought. Not Virginia.

Bronwyn.

•   •   •

I’m sorry, says my lawyer, he to whom all things must be confessed. But this really strains credulity.

Yes? I say.

This . . . this . . . this sylph, he says, struggling for the word and arriving at what I feel is an incorrect one. This wild thing can write her name? Who taught her? The lobo wolves?

You must free your mind, I say.

William Howe looks offended. Don’t tell me to free my mind, young man, he says. My mind is free. I make my way professionally by the very freedom of my thinking.

Yet to judge the girl, I say, you accept the tale of some flimflam artist who titles himself “Professor Doctor.”

So the Scott tale is entirely untrue? he asks, appearing, at that moment, like a petulant child. No Dollie Trent?

I propose to present my knowledge of Savage Girl, I say, the way I came to it myself—that is, gradually, piece by piece. You shall be like a man taken through a darkened house, me as your guide, with a lantern I uncover only occasionally, to illuminate a part here, a part there. But at the end of the story, you shall know all.

It strains credulity, Howe repeats, stubborn.

Let it be strained, I say. In sure faith that all will be revealed.

Howe snorts. All is never revealed. This would be the first time in the history of the world that all would be revealed.

He waves his cigar, which I take as a signal to continue my tale.

9

Freddy felt his mind was occupied with lofty questions. Are we fortune’s playthings? Does a divinity shape our ends? Such concerns packed themselves tightly within the “nature versus nurture” debate, which was raging in the East Coast intellectual circles that my father frequented.

Not limited to the domain of natural science, the debate had religious, social and philosophical overtones. Were the poor stricken with poverty because they were born without moral fiber, or had their degraded environment corrupted them?

The answer mattered. If nature dictated our destiny, there was no use spending money on social programs, education or better housing for society’s unfortunates, since what they were, they were, and there was no changing it. But if the destinies of the poor could somehow be reshaped by sufficient amounts of nurture, then charity became paramount.

For many of the more odious social philosophers of the day, an impoverished child removed from the dirt and filth of his home, scrubbed clean, clothed and taught his ABC’s, would inevitably regress to the low condition of his birth. This was simply Calvinism tarted up in a political guise. Such a viewpoint considered social uplift useless or worse, since our characters, and thus our circumstances, were entirely preordained.

Many thought otherwise.

I saw Freddy’s game. I understood how my father came to his excitement over Savage Girl or, as we were calling her now, Bronwyn. She remained a tabula rasa upon which Freddy could inscribe his theories.

If he could take this single-named creature, this rough-cut, unmannered beast, tutor her, mentor her, shape her, present her to the world as fully accomplished and rendered human, why, it would be a triumph for one faction and a poke in the eye to the other.

Possibly Freddy would wind up writing a celebrated account of his work with this Bronwyn creature. Dr. Itard’s 1801 book on Victor of Aveyron made the author hugely famous.

We continued to play, he and I, at listing what we knew about his new charge. In the parlor car, one morning after breakfast:

“Charmed by music,” he offered.

“Dislikes dogs,” I said.

“Oh, dear,” said Freddy. “Can anyone be fully human and not like dogs?”

“I’m sure such people exist,” I said.

“She is mostly pacific,” Freddy said.

“Except occasionally,” I said. I mentioned our excursion to the Great Salt Lake, when Bronwyn had once bounded suddenly ahead, seized a rock and hit a good-size jackrabbit, a mortal shot to the head. Cookie made it into a fricandeau, and we had it for dinner the next day.

“No, no, that’s just impulse, not violence. Steadiness may be trained into her.”

We both looked over to Bronwyn, stretched out on a chaise in a leonine pose.

“Could we discover, do you think, the details of her life?” I asked. “Say, for example, we search for a stolen girl in the American West, around ’64, ’65, mid-’60s—there can’t be too many possibilities that fit the specific circumstances. Her family might have put out notices.”

My father sighed. “Her parents might well be dead,” he said.

“Someone will be looking for her.” It felt wrong, or anyway there was a moral question lingering in our treatment of Savage Girl. She wasn’t ours to keep. Or was she?

“I plan to put detectives on it,” Freddy said. “There have been several instances, you know, of captives who insist, when they’re found, on staying with the Indians that kidnapped them. They decline to come home.”

“Ho-ho,” I said, gleeful. “Given the choice, they choose wild savagery. Perhaps we should take that as an argument against the vaunted superiority of our culture, which we always so smugly assume.”

“I sometimes think that Nicky, at least, might prefer a Comanche life,” Freddy said. “When he was very young, he’d take off any clothing we tried to put on him. A real savage boy.”

“It’s our duty to find out all we can about her,” I said.

Freddy wanted to switch the subject. “It will make it a great deal easier to train her up when she begins to speak English,” he said.

God had to be invented, in order that men may play at being Him. Men such as Freddy.

With Kelton everything changed. Tu-Li and the berdache spent all their time with Bronwyn, modeling proper manners. Anna Maria and Freddy had her into their drawing room an hour a day for “instruction.” In the art of being civilized.

How to behave (she wouldn’t). The wearing of shoes (they killed her). Eating without making everyone else at the table ill (uneven results).

After the Wasatch came the Rockies, then the endless Plains. Comanche country. Bronwyn stayed glued to the window.

Once, far off, a swarm of black animal forms surged across the grasslands, but the big herds were gone. The bison didn’t like the railroad, and the railroad returned the favor, killing them in hordes. Teams of men, blasting away off shooting cars like the one Sandobar dragged in its rear, only multiplied by a thousand. Death trains, hauling hunters, skinners, teamsters.

Everything but the skins they left to rot. The vulture, rat and coyote populations exploded. Not so the buffalo. Nor, for that matter, the Comanche. Soon teams of scavengers would pick over the endless bone fields, collecting wagonloads to be ground up for fertilizer.

We saw antelope, too, many within rifle range of the train, but the truth was none of us had much of a taste for shooting.

During our long trip across the American Plains, everyone else warmed to Bronwyn, and I found that even I could no longer remain aloof. I think she transformed me into a child again, something I resisted and denied but finally, in fits and starts, gave in to.

We had become chums, you see. Part of it was that we were bored, thrown together as the only two young people in the family quarters. We went on tiny adventures together. She was a spirited girl, always up for something. The most physical and acrobatic creature I have ever encountered.

I surprised her on one of those nights when she slipped into the Lincoln car. She saw me, bristled, and for a quick instant I thought she would attack me.

Instead she did something just as startling. Taking a long-legged head start, she ran up one wall of the car, getting quite high up before gravity pulled her back down.

She marked the spot she had reached with a swipe of her hand. Wordlessly challenging me.
I can race up a vertical surface in my bare feet this high. How high can you go?

I felt we were somehow desecrating the holy realm of Lincoln’s ghost. But then I thought this was precisely the kind of physical challenge Old Abe would have relished. So I doffed my shoes and tried the trick myself, matching her top spot.

She went again and set the mark higher. Then me. We went back and forth. Once she managed to touch the roof of the car with her foot.

Another day, one of terminal boredom on the endless Plains, she led me to the front of the train. She didn’t need words; she pulled me onward with a glance, through the baggage car and past her bath closet, out along the rail of the tender, onto the locomotive deck to smile hello to Bob and Brownie, then onto the catwalk beside the boiler.

She moved easily and fearlessly, and I found myself admiring her grace. Slipping past the strutwork, she guided me to the little sleigh bench directly above the cowcatcher. It was a rare spot. The endless rails stretched ahead, rolled beneath us, vanished behind.

Bob went extra slow because we were up there, but Bronwyn kept pulling the bell cord connected to the cab, pulling and pulling on it:
Go faster
,
go faster.

So Bob Cratchit balled the jack across the yellow Nebraska plains.

Fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty miles an hour. Too fast for me to estimate how fast we were going. He said, later, fifty.

“Pound her out, Bob!” I screamed, laughing like a madman. “Pound her out!”

If I squinted my eyes half shut, I could imagine that the train wasn’t even there, that my body was propelled over the Plains entirely on its own. We held hands. We were flying together, she and I.

In the wake of such episodes of childishness, I always felt ashamed, and I’d retreat to my anatomical studies.

•   •   •

Chicago. On the evening of the fifth day out from the Washoe. The city had burned flat in 1871. Four years later we could still see patches of blackened earth as Sandobar rocked into town.

Entering Chicago resembled nothing so much as coming into New York, as after a long stretch of Great Plains isolation we were picking up again on a big-city way of living. Urban world. Horsecars, fine restaurants, people about the streets in fashionable clothes. My sensibility immediately readapted itself. Downtown Chicago had more in common with Manhattan than it did with anywhere else in between, or anywhere else in the world.

Palmer House, a fabulous, glorious, lyrical hotel. The hotel porters floated us into the place on a cloud. Sprays of flowers in the lobby stood as tall as a man.

“I do believe this might be the best hotel in the world,” Freddy said when we entered our suites.

Chicago impressed us. Union Stock Yard & Transit Company ran at full capacity. Trainloads of cattle, sheep and pigs came in, some of them over the same railroad lines we had just traveled. Freddy took me down there, and we marveled at the efficiency of the butchering. They did everything after the Cincinnati model, pigs hauled squealing by their back hooves onto a hoist, carotid artery opened, bled out, gutted, quartered and carved, all within the space of minutes.

This went on without cessation night and day, Christmas and Easter included.

As an anatomist I approved; as a moralist I was confounded. A stench of death hung over the whole neighborhood. The South Fork of the Chicago River bubbled like a witch’s cauldron from all the offal discarded into its depths. I was glad Anna Maria had not come along. Bronwyn, I was not so sure. Savage Girl might have enjoyed it.

We took Bronwyn instead to Marshall Field’s to buy her a suitable wardrobe. In a major step forward (so to speak), she had through Tu-Li’s ministrations learned to wear the soft black slippers of the Celestials, so at least she did not traipse through the store in bare feet.

While her dresses were being tailored, I squired her all over the sprawling establishment, each of the five stories, packed with dry goods, haberdashery, furniture, carpets, paintings, cabinet work, toys, tools, plus a regular Parisian café right there on the premises (we had tea, without incident).

When she and I came back to Freddy and Anna Maria, my father asked her, “What did you like best in the whole place?”

She looked down, stubborn. Freddy had been pushing her to say her first English words, to no avail.

He repeated the same question in Plains sign language:
What good here?

Bronwyn grabbed Freddy and Anna Maria by the hand and led them to the drinking fountain.

We all laughed. Yes, of course. Pure, cool, fresh water, free and available at the push of a button, the most miraculous thing in the world for anyone who has lived in the Great American Desert. Much more wonderful than all the finery in the store.

Palmer House stood like the gilded queen of Chicago, enthroned at State and Monroe streets, all sparkling jewels, flounces and good bones, regal amid the innocuous streetside shops and restaurants. Freshly rebuilt, seven stories tall, with a grand lobby ceiling in Moroccan tile and a fireproof guarantee that was, given the town’s recent conflagration, a comfort to its guests. The floor of the hotel’s barbershop was embedded with silver dollars.

“Some of them minted from Brilliant blue,” sniffed Freddy upon walking past it. He himself preferred that the barber come to him, and
he was shaved, trimmed, clipped and powdered in the privacy of his rooms.

President Grant had stayed in our suite before us, and Sarah Bernhardt (though I rush to say not at the same time). Our penthouse chambers had a view of the lake, a freshwater-blue expanse a block to the east. It looked as bracing as an ice bath.

The black lacquer bar in my drawing room held bottles of whiskey and gin and a bucket of cracked ice, with a small ivory-colored card alongside that suggested if I needed anything I should pull the bell rope by the door and summon “our most dutiful assistance.”