Savage Girl (8 page)

Almost everyone present and accounted for, except for Anna Maria and the engineer, Bob Cratchit (his name wasn’t Bob Cratchit, but we called him that), and perhaps the random parlor brakeman and a cook’s boy or two.

“I wanted to speak to you all,” Freddy said.

“Should you wait for Anna Maria?” I asked.

“She’ll be along,” he said. He looked annoyed at me for interrupting him. This was to be his Big Speech to the Staff.

Freddy cleared his throat and launched in. “Something like ten or fifteen days from now, depending on the track traffic, we will be in New York City. The modern miracle of this I know will impress you all.

“If you but gaze to the side of the tracks today, you will notice the skeletons of horses, mules and oxen, the rusted and decrepit remains of abandoned wagons, and if you look sharp, you’ll see the grave markers of those who traveled these lands before us.

“They took five months to complete a trip which we will accomplish in two weeks. Many of them did not survive the journey at all, while we travel in safety and comfort. We honor their effort as we marvel at our advancement.

“We will make an excursion at the Great Salt Lake. We’ll stop over two or three nights in Chicago. I want you all to consider this a grand adventure, enjoy your time aboard, and come to me with any difficulties or concerns.”

Gilbert Gates spoke up. “I think I speak for all the staff, sir, in thanking you for the opportunity to cross this magnificent country.”

It would be the first transcontinental journey for most of those present, myself included. We had come from New York not on Sandobar, which was being refitted in Sacramento, but with Freddy and Anna Maria by sea to Central America, across the miserable heat-struck and mosquito-infested isthmus, then north to the Bay. It had been, all told, a dreadful voyage.

I turned to go back to the shooting car.

“Hugo?” Freddy said, interrupting his civilities with the staff.

“I didn’t think I needed to stay,” I said. “I know all this.” I couldn’t understand why I was behaving this way.

“Hold on a bit,” Freddy said. “There’s just one other thing.”

•   •   •

Just one other thing. I had underestimated the showman in my father. He loved extracting rabbits from hats. I remained with the others in the parlor car, sullen, pretending I had pressing business elsewhere, putting off the flirts of Rose and Annie and the conversational sallies of Colm Cullen and Mrs. Kate.

“It will be a few moments,” my father said.

The door at the far end of the car opened. Anna Maria entered.

“Ah, here you are,” Freddy said.

With my mother, who held a protective arm around her, came Savage Girl.

Freddy smiled widely as he presented us with his new protégée. Leaving me to wonder, the ignorant rube in the audience, how on earth she had materialized. Had she been on Sandobar all along? The new bathtub in the baggage car stood explained.

In a cowed posture beside my mother, the girl herself appeared wretched. She wore a plain drop-waisted dress of white silk, shapeless as a nightgown, and approached the small crowd of staff at the back end of the car with hunched shoulders and a guarded, unreadable mien. Her atrocious head of hair!

“I’d like to introduce to you the newest member of our entourage, this young lady, Virginia,” Freddy said. “Some of you have met her already.”

He walked over and stood near her, and just at that moment the train lurched and threw him against her, so that he wound up at her immediate side, like my mother. They resembled twin pillars supporting a tremble-kneed prospect, two proud parents of a bouncing not-quite-baby girl.

She stood shivering between them.

“Virginia has had something of a difficult time in life,” Freddy said. “She may behave in ways with which you are unfamiliar. She is highly intelligent, though she does not speak—not English, not yet anyway. She will sleep in the sixth”—
Nighthawk,
the servants’ car, where Tahktoo, Tu-Li, Dowler and Gates had their private compartments—“and take her meals with the family. I want you all to look out for her, care for her, extend her every courtesy.”

Anna Maria spoke. “She is our guest. I know you will come to feel for her as we do, with warmth and affection.”

The staff, not knowing quite how to react, broke into a polite patter of applause.

I seethed.
Some of you have met her already?
What was this, a gigantic secret? Had she been aboard even in Virginia City, while her suitors fired their six-guns and pelted us with dirt clods?

I held the suspicion that far from being a pitiful pawn of Dr. Calef Scott, Savage Girl was fully in league with him. We would see ourselves robbed, murdered in our sleep. The Sage Hen, Jake Woodworth, R. T. Flenniken and a whole crew of desperadoes waited to waylay us, on up the line.

Swarms of other questions occurred to me. Was she dangerous? Verminous? Diseased? What did we really know about her? Had my parents invited a viper into our midst? And what of her escape from us? Could it have been engineered by Freddy? If she hadn’t been hidden on the train, where had the girl been during that time?

A memory floated to the surface of my thoughts, dim and well
marinated in tarantula juice. The night before we freed her. Savage Girl, furtively leaving Dr. Scott’s barn, slipping past Costello’s Shooting Gallery and disappearing into the night. Where was she going? Why had she been allowed to leave?

A certainty stole upon me: Whatever she was, wherever she might find herself, this creature was never a captive of anyone.

7

I hesitate to report that our rail trip across the continent, such a prized and in fact almost required experience for anyone wishing to qualify nowadays as a fashionable American traveler, was in our case largely inconsequential. A few notable incidents obtrude. But for the most part, the journey had the charm of banality, the miles rolling out, the days slipping by, a certain Lotos Land flavor characterizing the whole.

At times this was literally the case. Thrust into tight quarters (although not too tight, as I had the whole of an eighty-foot sleeper car to myself), individual quirks of passenger behavior became apparent.

Every Sunday, Tu-Li’s day off, the door of her sleeping compartment stayed shut and front to rear Sandobar stank of opium, the slender coolie maid’s recuperatory drug. Lotos Land indeed. Mondays were a little dreamy for her, but by Tuesday she was back to her solemn, ironic, dewy-eyed self.

Similarly, the berdache’s bowel movements were fulsome events noted by the whole company. Sandobar’s water closets were of the very latest design, and a steam hose ran the whole length of the train, so we had running hot and cold water in every car. But Tahktoo insisted on using the old-fashioned jakes in
Black Diamond,
where you could hear, in fact feel, the carriage’s
clickety-clack
as you strained at stool, and your offerings were deposited directly onto the track bed.

Of Savage Girl there are only a few things to report. She remained on the whole docile, attached to my mother or, increasingly, to Tu-Li. And she loved the berdache. That first day, at the end of Freddy’s introductory speech, came an incident that entertained the whole company.

Savage Girl (the name Virginia never seemed to stick for me, even shortened to Ginny or, worse still, to Gin, a syllable I could not even pronounce without queasiness) stood in a thoroughly deflated posture between my parents but suddenly brightened upon spying Tahktoo.

She strode purposefully forward, stuck her face into his, pulled herself back and examined the man-woman head to toe, and laughed delightedly. Then she performed an acrobatic pas de chat straight up into the air, seemingly as an expression of her overbrimming pleasure, before leaning forward to him again and grinning.

The maneuver was decidedly odd but somehow entirely charming, and several members of the staff burst out laughing.

Through this the berdache maintained his usual tranquil demeanor, but I detected a tiny smile playing at the corners of his meaty lips.

Anna Maria came forward to retrieve Savage Girl, and the moment passed. But Tahktoo and she became great friends.

I wondered what she made of me. No acrobatics for the eldest son of the family. In fact she seemed not to notice young Hugo at all. Her attitude didn’t overly concern me, but I was slightly baffled by it. We were both young, she perhaps a bit younger, and I had enough experience with the weaker sex to expect some degree of attention, triflings, self-conscious posing. Something anyway. With her, nothing.

Her age was indeed a minor puzzle.

The morning after her introduction, as Sandobar nosed toward the dark line of the Wasatch Mountains, ahead of us to the east, Freddy and Anna and I sat together at tea in the parlor car.

Tahktoo, Tu-Li and the Savage Girl formed another trio a little distance away, gathered around an upholstered sofa. Tu-Li attempted to untangle the ugly mat of black hair that rode on our new friend’s head like some sort of particularly unfashionable snood. Virginia—Ginny—Gin stole wondering glances at Tahktoo, peaceably at work knitting a shawl.

“How old do you think she is?” I asked, repeating my mother’s question of a few days before.

“Who?” said my father. I pulled a long look at him, and he laughed.

“She says she doesn’t know,” he replied.

“‘She says’? What do you mean? She doesn’t speak!”

“Your father communicates with her,” Anna Maria said. I noticed that her eyes never strayed for long from the group across the car.

“In Comanche?”

They both were putting a calm front upon a thoroughly unsettling situation, and it infuriated me.

“Sign language, dear,” Anna Maria said. “The lingua franca of the Plains.”

Freddy passed his right hand laterally across his chest, then waved it significantly in a circular motion.

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” I said. I didn’t believe a word of it, or in this case a hand twirl of it.

But it was true, Freddy said. And it was the answer to Savage Girl’s abrupt disappearance in the Washoe.

While she crouched at my feet in the coach after her rescue from the sideshow, I had been absorbed by the mere presence of her, but somehow I’d failed to notice that Freddy and she were having a conversation. An entirely nonverbal conversation, conducted in hand signs.

Where?
she’d asked. Meaning where are you taking me?

Home, far, east,
Freddy had signed.

They had been engaged in a discussion, there in the coach! And me not knowing!

“I don’t know whether to believe you or not,” I said.

“That’s uncharitable, Hugo,” Anna Maria said. She called over to her maid. “Tu-Li, don’t tug at Virginia’s hair so!”

“Believe me or don’t,” Freddy said, shrugging. “She did leave, and she did return.”

I felt totally flummoxed. Whole worlds of activity going on, a rendezvous arranged, baths being built, all beyond my ken.

“The tub in the baggage car,” I said. “I suppose she asked you to do that? With sign language? What’s the hand sign for ‘bathtub’?”

“That was my idea, dear,” Anna Maria said. “I wanted her to feel at home. Really, I don’t know why you are getting upset.”

“I’m not upset!” I cried.

Freddy summoned Dowler over and requested a sheet of paper, an inkwell and a pen.

“I think we should catalog what we know about her,” he said.

“Who?” I said acidly. “You aren’t considering doing a study on her, are you? You said yourself she is clearly a fraud, not a feral child at all.”

Anna Maria left us and sat down next to Tu-Li. She and the berdache both joined in on the impossible task of untangling Virginia’s hair.

“One,” my father said, writing on the sheet of foolscap that Dowler had provided. “She is of European heritage.”

I looked over at her. Her sideshow pallor was underlaid by a nut-brown burn from the sun, but yes, she clearly came not of native blood.

“All right,” I said.

“Two, she has spent time with a Comanche tribe.”

“I’ll have to take your word for that,” I said. “I’ve seen you fake knowledge of a language before. What did you say to her again? In the barn.”

“I invited her to come over to me,” Freddy said.

“Do it once more.”

“Kimaru, nai-bi,”
he pronounced.

Savage Girl immediately swiveled her head, causing some difficulty with the hair-untangling process. She rose and came over to us, standing before Freddy.

He gave her a hand sign that evidently meant,
Thanks for coming over, but I really don’t need you.
She returned to her trio of hairdressers.

“Why don’t you just cut the damn stuff off?” I called over.

The three beautifiers looked at me pityingly, as though I didn’t understand some basic fact of the universe.

“All right,” I said, turning back to Freddy. “She had some sort of connection with the Comanche.”

“She has a rudimentary grasp of English, probably from exposure at a young age,” Freddy said.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” I said.

“If you monitor her closely, you’ll see her respond to certain words.”

“She doesn’t respond to me at all,” I said. “If she understands how to speak, why would she remain silent?”

“Elective mutism,” Freddy said. “It’s a recognized phenomenon. There was that Philadelphia woman, a survivor from a fire—”

“Pish,” I interrupted him. “This girl doesn’t talk.”

“Do something sometime,” Freddy said. “Catch her gaze and hold it. You will see, when you look into her eyes, a hint of a ruined, frightened child. Of course she doesn’t speak. The cat of fear has gotten hold of her tongue. It will take some while. But I am confident that with enough care, when she feels secure, she will speak. And then our real work can begin.”

“So your theory is simple and optimistic,” I said, feigning a nonchalance that I didn’t feel. “She spoke English as a settler child, she was taken by Indians, you don’t know how young, she was raised up as a captive.”

Even as I said it, I thought of my earlier insight.
Never a captive of anyone, always where she was by choice.

“Yes, that’s about it,” Freddy said.

“But in any case, she’s not a feral child at all and thus not a suitable subject for research,” I said. “Too bad for your purposes.”

“Don’t neglect a fourth thing we know about her,” Freddy said.

“Which is what?”

“Her independence. She is able to operate wholly on her own. She demonstrates agency. Look at her.”

I did, I was, I had been.

“Self-contained, not other-directed. Which implies that she has spent a good deal of time alone.”

“Being raised by wolves,” I suggested, not seriously.

“Or raising herself,” Freddy responded.

•   •   •

Day passed into night.

Depots, punctuation in a run-on sentence. Humboldt, Mill City,
Winnemucca, Golconda. Some of them little more than a single wood-framed station shack, a water tank, a stock pen, huddled in the dust. Others able to summon drummers, hunters, townspeople, trade.

We left the wastes of Nevada and entered the wastes of Utah. Coin, Bovine, Terraco, Matlin, Ombey.

No other landscape I had ever experienced more proved the point that beauty and terror are sisters. I stared out at the desert and felt its challenge. Sandobar, so mighty and impressive, seemed dwarfed by the country, dwindling to a puny, uncertain sanctum, huffing and puffing but making small headway.

Anna Maria had directed the furnishings and ornamentation of the cars, rich carvings of oiled walnut, plush upholstery, a Brussels carpet in one, Turkish in another. There were great expanses of mirrors in gilt frames. From home she brought a tiger pelt, with its large, proud head, its striped fur still untattered, sleek and glossy years after Friedrich’s late brother, Sonny, my uncle, brought it back from India.

We spent most of our time on our trip in the big, unpartitioned parlor car, second to last in the consist, called
Crucible.
It was here that we drowsed in the overstuffed chairs by the windows, sometimes catching a lucky break to witness a bald eagle soaring alongside, flying with us as though it were one of our party.

The berdache and Tu-Li played at the game of Chinese tiles or at cards, dealing hands of vingt-et-un while Savage Girl knelt beside them on the carpet, watching their faces as they managed the play. She had been entirely mild these few days, wholly unsavage, as a matter of fact.

Late morning on our second day out from the Comstock, the quartet of ladies gathered in a tight grouping in the corner of the parlor car: Tu-Li and the berdache working at Virginia’s hair, Ginny herself with eyes closed, leaning back on a red satin fainting couch, Anna Maria reading to them from
David Copperfield.

My new life had lasted for more than a week, and I was stronger than ever in those tremendous practical resolutions that I felt the crisis required. . . .

I crossed the parlor to witness the detangling process, a futile one, I thought, doomed to fail. And unnecessary. I didn’t understand why Savage Girl warranted all the attention.

One single hair separated laboriously from a strand, teased out to the length of its tangle, traced back to its knot, picked at, freed. Tu-Li employed the paired sticks the heathen Chinese use in place of eating utensils. Tahktoo worked only with his fingers, which were thick but surprisingly deft. All that knitting and weaving he did.

As yet, Little Dora was quite unconscious of my desperate firmness, otherwise than as my letters darkly shadowed it forth. . . .

Watching them work, staring down at her closed, expressionless face, I thought I might go mad from impatience right on the spot. They had been at it for a day and a half and had completed a portion but three inches in length.