The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (97 page)

And Eustace replied, “I’m happy to be on a team as long as we always do what I know is right.”

Judson and Susan headed off down the canyon.

“It was the coolest day of the whole journey,” Judson recalled. “Wild scenery and nature. We rode through rivers up to our horses’ bellies and we rode through ancient rock spires. We loved every minute of it, laughing and singing the whole time. It was everything I’d imagined the trip could be. We felt like old-time outlaws. And Eustace missed it.”

“Their horses came back limping,” Eustace remembered. “They never should have been down there. They could have been killed, or they could have destroyed their animals. I was right.”

From then on, Judson decided to shut his mouth and go along with Eustace’s commands, because it was more peaceful to submit than to fight. But as he rode alongside his older brother, he endured the dreadful sense of knowing that they would never be the same after this.

They made it to the Pacific by Easter, as they’d planned. No desertions and no deaths. They rode through San Diego to where they could smell the ocean. When they broke over the last highway and got to the beach, Eustace rode his horse right into the surf, as though he’d like to ride Hobo all the way to China. He was in tears, still pushing.

Not so Judson and Susan. They were finished with this brutal trip. It was over, and they were thrilled. Judson went directly to where people were. He rode his horse right into a bar and sat—
on his horse!
—for several hours, spinning his six-shooter and telling stories while the customers crowded up to him and the bartender bought him round after round. As for Susan, she tied her horse outside the bar and walked into the crowd quietly, garnering no particular attention.

They spent the next week in San Diego, where their mothers came to meet them. Mrs. Conway and Mrs. Klimkowski wanted to take the kids all around the town, to show them Sea World and tour the zoo and eat at fancy restaurants. Judson and Susan were more than happy to be pampered, but Eustace stayed clear of everyone, silent and morose.

“I don’t know how they could turn it off like that,” Eustace said later. “I wanted to tell them, ‘Hey, you guys just had this incredible experience with your horses and you can forget it? One day you’re living life so intensely and the next day you can hop in the car and go get a fucking Tastee-Freez? Like it never happened?’ They didn’t seem to care at all.”

He spent the week alone, brooding, riding his horse every day, all day long, up and down the beach. His companions would ask, “Aren’t you sick of riding yet?” No. Never. Eustace rode the beach for hours, contemplating his journey, facing down the undeniable limitation of the Pacific Ocean, and dealing with the geographical reality of his personal Manifest Destiny: that there was nowhere else to
go
. The country dead-ended right here. It was over. If only another continent would appear out of the sea so that he could conquer it, too . . .

They drove the horses back to North Carolina in the trailer. Gave them a nice break. Eustace may not have needed to relax after the journey, but he was bent on letting his beloved Hobo relax for a while.

So Hobo got a nice rest in a trailer, riding all the way home to North Carolina like a celebrity. Back at Turtle Island, Eustace gave the horse several months in the pasture to unwind before they started riding together again. Of course, riding was going to be different at Turtle Island from what it had been on the road. Eustace needed Hobo now for farm work more than for speed. He needed to ride Hobo when he was out surveying property and he needed to hitch Hobo up to help drag logs and sleds filled with tools. They worked hard and well together. Hobo had a sweetness that even surpassed his speed.

And then, one day, long months after the Long Riders trip was over, Eustace decided that he and Hobo had earned an old-fashioned joy ride. So they took off from the stress and hubbub of Turtle Island and rode up into the mountains. They climbed and climbed to a high meadow, where, Eustace remembers, he let go of the reins and spread his arms wide and allowed Hobo to open up and run for the sheer delight of it in the high, bright air.

They rode back home, quiet and happy. But when they were almost in sight of the barn, Hobo tripped. He tripped on a tiny rock. You could hardly call it an accident, it was so insignificant. This beautiful horse, which had crossed the continent without injury or complaint, which could scale loose rock and sheer Appalachian slopes without a moment’s hesitation and always responded with intelligence and eagerness to Eustace’s faintest hints of communication, just stumbled over a common stone. Hobo took a funny little step and broke his leg, and the femur snapped nearly in half.

“No,” Eustace said, leaping off his horse.“No, please, no . . .”

Hobo couldn’t put any weight on the leg. He was confused and kept turning around to look at the injured limb. And at Eustace, hoping for an answer to what had gone wrong. Eustace left Hobo there alone and ran to his office, where he made desperate phone calls to his mentors, the hillbilly Hoy Moretz and the Mennonite Johnny Ruhl. He called every veterinarian he knew, and every farrier, but when he described what had happened, all they could do was confirm what he already knew: that nothing could be done. Eustace would have to shoot his friend. After all they’d been through together, to have this happen on a fine afternoon at home, when they were almost in sight of the barn . . .

Eustace got his shotgun and went back to the horse. Hobo was standing there, as before, looking at his leg and then at Eustace, trying to make sense of it. “I’m so sorry, Hobo,” Eustace said, “and I love you so much.” And then he shot Hobo in the head.

The horse buckled to the ground, and Eustace collapsed with him, sobbing. He clung to Hobo’s neck as the horse died, telling him about all the good times they’d had together and about how brave he always was and thanking him. How could this have happened? They were only
steps
away from the barn . . .

Later in the day—and this was the hardest part—Eustace returned to cut off Hobo’s mane and tail. These would mean much to him in the years to come. Maybe if Eustace ever got a horse someday who was worthy, he could take strands from the mane and tail of Hobo and weave them into a bridle for the new animal, and this would be a fine tribute. To make that first cut, though, to disturb his friend’s body with a knife, was almost impossible, and Eustace cried as if the weight of his grief would fell every tree in the woods.

He left Hobo where he’d fallen. He wanted the vultures to eat him. He knew that the Native Americans believed vultures to be the sacred transport, the means by which a spirit is delivered from the earth up into the sky. So Eustace left Hobo there, where the birds could find him. Which means that, even today, whenever Eustace is working outside and sees vultures drifting in the air, he looks up and says hello, because he knows that’s where Hobo lives now.

When springtime came, Eustace returned to where Hobo had fallen to look over his friend’s bones. He wanted to collect the vulture feathers he found around Hobo’s body and keep them in a sacred place. But his intention was not merely spiritual; Eustace also wanted to examine Hobo’s broken femur, now that the meat was gone from it. He had a suspicion that the break may have been inevitable. He’d often wondered whether Hobo had once been a racehorse and sustained a career-ending injury, and that’s why the farmer in Texas had ended up with him and was willing to sell him for a reasonable price. Maybe Hobo had carried this stress fracture around for years, and there had always been this weakness in the bone, and it had been only a matter of time before it broke again.

And indeed, when Eustace studied Hobo’s bleached bones, he found his suspicion to be correct—the bone had always been cracked; the injury had always been there. This moment, when Eustace knelt on the ground and examined the bone with a scientific eye, is crucial, because it shows how, even in his grief, Eustace Conway always searches for logic and for answers. Life goes on, after all, and one must always seek the lesson even through the sorrow. Never remain static; never stop collecting information.

And it’s this same reluctance to remain static that made Eustace Conway, only two years after the Long Riders trip had ended, attempt another insanely ambitious horse journey. Because one must always keep pushing. One must always scrutinize and challenge and put one’s limitations under a microscope to examine and reject.

Of course, Eustace didn’t embark on the same journey. No reason to repeat experience, after all. But a slightly different adventure this time. Having mastered transcontinental horsemanship on a saddle, Eustace decided to hitch his horses up to a lightweight buggy and take them on a lightning-fast tour of the Great Plains of North America, riding a twenty-five-hundred-mile circle across Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, up into Canada, through Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, then back down into Montana and Wyoming. He figured he could do it in under sixty days. He had a different partner now. He was riding with his new girlfriend. He had recently allowed himself to fall in love for the first time after having survived the whirling tornado of Carla. It had been a few years, but he was ready. He was excited about this new love of his, and he called me up shortly after he met the girl to tell me all about her.

“What’s she like?” I asked.

“Beautiful, intelligent, kind, young. Half Mexican. The most beautiful skin you ever saw.”

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Patience.”

“It better be!”

Patience Harrison was a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher. She was young, but certainly tough enough for a voyage like the one Eustace was about to take. She was a superb athlete, the former captain of the Duke field hockey team, and she was bold; she’d already traveled across Africa under much harder circumstances than she would encounter in Canada. Eustace was mad about her.

He loved Patience for her brains and for her winning personality and for her physical courage. The first time she came to visit Turtle Island, Eustace took her for a buggy ride. He asked whether she wanted to try driving the horses for a while, and she reached for the reins without a moment’s hesitation, totally game. He thought,
Wow, that’s the girl for
me
. He was also won over by a video he saw of Patience playing collegiate field hockey. In the video, you can see her take a nasty hit by an opponent with a flying stick and then drop to the ground in pain. She had broken her wrist. Then she gets up and tries to run after her opponent, even as her arm is dangling all wrong at her side. Then she’s down again on the ground in pain. Then she’s up for another attempt, hauling ass down the field, teeth gritted, refusing to quit. Forget about pornography; this was the sexiest video image of a woman Eustace had ever seen.

And he loved Patience, it must be said, for her looks. She was gorgeous. Now, Eustace Conway isn’t ever going to have a girlfriend who isn’t gorgeous, but Patience was, as Eustace later put it, “my ideal. Can you imagine ever being with your ideal? With her Mexican background, she has that dark skin and dark eyes and white teeth that I find to be the most beautiful look in the world. I desire her so much. I’m never with her that I don’t desire her. Everything about her—her hands, her body, her lips, her ears, the gloss of her hair—I worship every cell of that girl.”

He declared his love to her with his typical fervor.

“With rainbows in my eyes I see your beauty,” he wrote to her in an early letter. “With sunshine in my heart, I feel love for you. Guided by butterflies I flow toward freedom with you. With the fertile rains of hope I dream of our future. With more passion than you would be comfortable with, I want you.”

There was certainly no contesting that last statement. Patience Harrison was plenty compelled by Eustace and fascinated by his romantic life, but from the beginning she was cool to his ardor. It took him forever to coax her into physical intimacy in private, and she wasn’t physically attentive to him in public, either, not somebody who would even hold hands when people were watching. She was decidedly uncomfortable with his passion and found it difficult not to look away in embarrassment whenever he tried to gaze deep into her eyes. She disliked it immensely when he called her Baby, and grew annoyed at how fixated he was on her beauty, complaining, “Could you sometimes tell me that I’m intelligent or talented or interesting, instead of just gorgeous?”

At which Eustace would joke, “You have the most intelligent glossy black hair I’ve ever seen. Your smile and eyes are hauntingly talented. You have the most interesting body in the world.”

It did not, to most observers, seem a perfect match. Patience was a thoroughly modern young woman who had always kept boyfriends at a distance in order to maintain her independence. (She was so standoffish, she joked, that one of her ex-boyfriends had nicknamed her “Prudence.”) Eustace, who, as always, wanted a seamless union of fiery proportions, was stung by her coldness. Moreover, Patience wasn’t too sure about giving up her life to go live at Turtle Island forever as the new First Lady. But her biggest reservation, she would later admit, was that she was terrified by a comment Eustace had made early on about wanting to have thirteen children with her.

That’s right: thirteen.

I just had to ask Eustace about that.

Actually, my exact question was: “Please tell me you didn’t really say that.”

His response was, “One hundred years ago a woman wouldn’t have been scared by that idea!”

Which was such a disappointing answer. Setting aside the perfectly obvious fact that it
isn’t
a hundred years ago, there is so much else wrong with this statement that I’m not sure where to start dissecting it. Eustace Conway, as a true student of history and anthropology, should know better. Even a hundred years ago, the average birth rate of the American woman had dropped to a mere 3.5 children per lifetime. Women were already using birth control and had publicly begun debating how raising huge families would affect their economic and social standing. You have to look a lot further back than a century, in other words, to find the kind of enthusiastic breeders Eustace was dreaming about.