THE RIVER PASSAGE by Heather Monley
On Sunday he wakes early, walks the mile into town, and sneaks behind buildings, among vegetable patches, water pumps, and small stables. The young man looks for nothing in particular: amusement, worthless treasures, things he can take without notice.
There’s movement at an upper window. A woman’s head dips down and rises dripping. She’s washing her hair in a basin. She twists her hair, and then dabs it with a cloth and coils and pins it at the back of her head.
He fiddles with his tobacco. Soon, the woman’s husband passes behind another window, and the young man moves on. He walks through the grass and down along the river to throw a few rocks in the water, and then he cuts up the bank, back toward the buildings. Behind a house, he comes to a coop and hears chickens clucking inside. He could steal one, he thinks. The bird would struggle and peck, but he’d get it under his arm and carry it back to his family’s farm as a joke.
He looks back in the direction of the house where he saw the woman, and he grows restless at the idea of the chicken: a childish prank.
He waits in front of the clapboard church. Smoke creeps from chimneys. At first, he’s alone, and then people appear in the street. From a long way off, he sees dust curl behind a wagon from one of the outer farms. He waits for his father and brothers to arrive, and then he follows them into the church.
As the preacher speaks, smoke and serpents swirl in the young man’s mind. The woman sits a few rows up, and his eyes fix on her hair, the twist of her bun.
* * *
Out in the barn before dawn the next morning, he listens to the cows chew the hay. He likes the quiet, the weight of their animal smell. A few years ago, he would have gone to school after breakfast. He remembers the press of other boys, the dust of the schoolhouse, the girls on the other side of the room. Feel of chalk on his fingers. Now he has a full day of work ahead of him. His face reddens: he can’t want that, to be back at school, like a little boy.
He thinks of the woman he saw Sunday: he has seen her before, but thought little of her until now. She’s older than him, but how much? Two or three years. She’s much younger than her husband, who owns the general store. She moved from another town the year before. He twiddles a piece of hay in his hand, pulls apart the split ends and knots them until they snap.
* * *
He wakes in the dark and can’t fall back asleep. It’s Sunday again. He wonders whether, if he walked into town now, he would see the woman at the window. He rises, starts the fire, and sits at the table to wait for his father and brothers to wake, but then his legs seem to stand on their own.
He walks down the road. The sky is deep blue, then pink, and now a brilliant red. He slips behind the buildings, walks back and forth in the grass, glances now and then at the woman’s house. Soon she appears at the window. She holds her wet hair, twisted and dripping, out to one side, and as she wrings it, she sees him standing in the tall grass. She takes the young man’s eyes and holds them, as if she’s calculating something – as if she’s paused to work out figures in her head.
* * *
His father needs goods from the store. As if in a dream, the young man says he’ll go, and his father nods. All the way into town, he grips his father’s coins like a rope. It will be her husband at the counter, he thinks, or it will be her, but she’ll be cold to him, or he’ll stumble over his words, or she’ll tell him to leave. Or. Or.
When he reaches the door, he can’t breathe. It’s her at the counter. Miraculously, she smiles.
* * *
He walks with her down to the river and away from town. Her buttoned boots stumble among the rocks and the holes of hiding animals, and he lets her walk first and follows. Something will happen, he thinks, but he doesn’t know how or when, and his face grows warm and itches.
She crouches to walk under a low tree branch, and a strand snags loose from her bun. She worries at it as they walk, and then stops to fix it. She says something, but he can’t hear over the rush of the river. She takes the pins out one by one and puts them in some hidden pocket, and her hair falls loose down her back. Where it was pinned deep inside the twist, the hair is still damp.
His hand shakes as he reaches for her hair, but when he touches it, his hand springs back, afraid. The woman takes hold of his sleeve, then his hand, and he looks down at her thin fingers, their smooth nails and clean crescents of white: her fingers in his own rough palm. She leans toward him, and her lips are at his. He feels swept forward, as if in the current of a river, and he can see how he’ll follow it, borne past rocks, joined by tributaries in a great rush of water. He reaches behind her head and feels for the damp place in her hair. It’s cool to the touch.
* * *
He lies awake and listens to his brothers’ breathing. The dark in the room has a weight to it, like being pressed deep under water.
He’s again down at the river, and again the woman takes down her hair. He reaches to touch it, and it’s hot. It burns his fingers.
He runs to the river. He’s aware, as if from a great distance, of his feet stumbling down the rocky bank. The burns form into blisters, which spread from his fingers across his palm and up his wrist. He falls to his knees and thrusts the hand into water.
He wakes, mouth open, gulping for air.
* * *
Working in the field, the young man stops to look down at his hand. He leaves his tools in the dirt and wanders. He lies back under trees, and then wanders down to the river to watch the ripples and eddies, and gaze toward deeper places, at the blue bottoms of which he can just see the looming shapes of rocks. He walks into town and stands outside the woman’s house, and she comes to meet him at the kitchen window. Her white arm snakes out over the sill, and her hand meets his among the flowers that grow beneath.
His father grows angry. The boy leaves his work undone, and he has been seen with the woman. She’s a married woman, his father says. He must leave her alone. But the next day, when he should be in the field, the young man waits in front of the woman’s house, where anyone can see. The father, that night, cuffs him hard across the chin.
The young man thinks of himself as an outlaw. He turns the word over in his head. He and the woman meet outside town, among the rocks and junipers. He reaches his hands over her body, but at a certain point she stops him, smiles and looks away at the dry earth.
Sometimes, he cannot wait for her and creeps into town to stare at her house. She tells him to stay away – her husband has seen him – but the young man can’t help it. He thinks of the things that happen in the house, how the husband must touch her and take her to bed.
* * *
Long ago, when he was a boy, a man traveling toward wilder places stayed in his family’s barn. The boy at the time had seen little of strangers. He crept around the man with eyes wide like a cat’s.
Love, the stranger told him, is two parts: good and bad. You take what you can of the good and leave the bad alone.
Now, the young man understands that the stranger must have been drunk, to say these things to a little boy. Still, he runs the man’s words over in his head.
* * *
He waits outside town, but she’s late in coming. He lies back on the rocks and counts bats flapping against the darkening sky.
He startles at hooves in the gravel, but when the horse comes into the moonlight, it’s her on its back. She has not come on horseback before.
She dismounts like falling water. Her eye is black and the bridge of her nose swollen.
My husband, she says. He went to the saloon. I came as soon as he left.
She’s taken her husband’s mare and packed food and water and blankets. To show him these things, she unclasps the saddlebags with hurried fingers, but it’s too dark to see the bags’ contents. His head swims. They must leave tonight, she says, before her husband knows she’s missing. The young man looks back toward town, and past that, somewhere in the dark, his father’s farm. He turns back to her and grabs her to him, and she moans because it hurts her, to be held so hard with her bruises.
* * *
First she rides behind him, and then, when she fears she will doze and fall, he holds her in front. She rides astride, her skirts bunched up, and even more than by the closeness of her body, he feels pulled and distracted by the bareness of her legs. The moon is not full but nearly so, and they move across the plain by its light. When it sets, they pick along with the stars for guidance. The horse walks with care and avoids dips and rocks that the man cannot see. Animals, he thinks, have wondrous abilities: speed, endurance, vision at night.
This mare was her husband’s, and now the young man is a horse thief: a true outlaw. In the dark, he can’t make out the animal’s color. He must have seen it before, but when he tries to remember the woman’s husband on horseback, he can only picture him behind the counter of the general store. He becomes anxious to see the horse in the light, to see what he’s stolen. It’s some sort of brown, he thinks, but what shade? He wonders if the woman has fallen asleep – she is quiet and heavy in his arms. He guesses at the color of her stockings.
The night loosens into shadowy blue, and then bands of pink break across the clouds. The sun creeps up, and they ride away from it, as if chasing shadows. For now, he thinks, the west is dark, but soon the sun will overtake them. It’s a full hour after sunrise before he remembers his curiosity about the horse’s color. The animal is a warm and even chestnut.
In the glaring heat, their clothes damp with sweat, they reach a lone cluster of boulders, left in the flatlands by some ancient tumult. They stop to rest. The woman falls into a deep and quiet sleep, and he eyes the bruises on her face and the rise and fall of her body.
He sleeps, too, but is fitful. He dreams that the plains fill with men on horseback, who part the grasses like fish in water. He runs. The land is flat and heavy under his feet, but then it falls away. It slopes downhill, and he stumbles through grass and then over rock, until he is there again at the river near town. The woman is beside him: she has taken down her hair. He wants to reach out and touch her, but his arm is aching and hot. He looks down and sees blisters rising, red and bubbling. Something moves under his skin. He holds his arm up close to his eyes. Through translucent skin, he sees scales: a fish swims under the surface.
* * *
When his eyes open, the sun has crossed over, the clouds edged in yellow. He is lying on his arm, pinned against rock, so it tingles and lies numb. He wakes the woman with a hand to her shoulder.
They cross grasslands and great dry lakebeds. They ride for two days, and sleep at odd hours. Now and then, they pass farmhouses –a ribbon of smoke, the rise of a windmill, the glow of distant oil lamps.
* * *
At sunset they reach an abandoned homestead. He walks the perimeter, boots crunch the dry soil, and he calls out for inhabitants. The woman hangs back by the horse. The cabin sits up against low hills, and there’s a small stream and clumped trees. He pushes the door of the cabin in, and the interior is bare except for a wood stove, chimneyless and at an odd angle, as if someone gave up the attempt of moving it. He walks back to the woman and takes the horse’s reins from her hand. We can stay here, he says. It will keep the wind off us, for tonight, at least.
He sweeps the cabin of cobwebs and bird droppings, and the woman builds a fire outside. They stand close to the flame, rub their hands, and roast potatoes in the embers. The fire burns down to nothing, and she holds a candlewick to a coal until it flickers and takes. He follows her into the cabin.
She kneels on the dirt floor and unpins her hair, and shaking, he kneels beside her. He thinks of his dream: skin blistering, a fish in his arm.
A small strand of hair runs down her cheek, and he reaches and grasps it. The hair is cool and dry. He lets it fall loose over his fingers and quiver with the shaking of his hand. His kiss is hard but careful. He’s careful not to hurt her. She brings his hand to her lips, and he feels her tongue on his skin.
At times throughout the night, the wind blows, and the horse outside whinnies. The woman doesn’t like the wind, the way it whines through holes in the roof. It sounds like people dying.
* * *
His father said that water was the important thing. He was a small boy, and his family was searching the dry lands for a place to settle. Follow a creek, his father said. A farm doesn’t need much, but it needs water.
They stopped at a cliff to view the badlands beneath, and his mother held his small hand and told him to keep back from the drop. The thought grew heavy in his mind. He became afraid that if his mother let go, or if he snaked from her grasp, he would run straight for the bluff and fall over. They stood on the cliff’s edge in the still air, thick with the hum of insects, and all the while he waited to see what he would do, until his mother pulled him back and the family traveled on. Their wagon bumped along the road. Dust curled like smoke.
* * *
In the morning, he walks out to the creek. He is caught between sleep and waking. He stares at the stream and watches where the sun reaches through cottonwood trees and shatters on the water. The trees blow in a soft morning wind, and light flickers on the current.
Quick! he shouts. Come quick!
The woman, half dressed, runs from the cabin. I thought you were hurt, she says, bit by a snake maybe.
He stands bent over, eyes intent on the stream. A fish, he says, I think I see a fish.
He points, and she looks at the water, then at him, then back to the stream. The rising sun warms their necks.
* * *
There’s work to be done. He’ll fix the stove, patch the roof and walls of the cabin, repair the outbuilding as a stable, and mend the fence for a pasture. One day they’ll have cows, maybe sheep. They’ll plant seeds for a garden, and next year a field of hay. He’ll irrigate from the stream and dig a well. The days spread out in a procession of tasks, and there’s comfort in this: each day predictable in its labor.
He waits for the woman to wash her hair, but she does so in private, when he’s out working. She’s clean and particular in all things, he finds. She sweeps the floor and scrubs the walls, checks their clothes for tears to mend, and washes her face and hands with care. She finds a bucket hidden in the grasses near the stream, and carries water in for cooking and washing. The bucket makes him think of those who were here before, how they too must have carried water from creek to cabin.
The third morning at the homestead, he rises and takes the bucket, and finds mule deer at the stream. He turns back for his gun, but his boots crunch the earth, and the animals scatter to the hills like birds. He follows their tracks, but the hoof prints fade into nothing, as if the creatures took to the air.
We should file the homestead claim, the woman says, own the land. But the man doesn’t want their names on paper. They’re outlaws: horse thieves. The woman took money, too, when she left her husband’s house. He imagines her thin fingers reaching under the mattress or into a drawer of her husband’s desk.
He rides the mare out over the plain and learns the contours of the land, its curves and distant mountains. He finds his way into a small town, a wild place, a clapping together of boards. He buys supplies – seeds to plant, flour, sugar, beans, a bolt of cloth.
On the ride home, he stops here and there to arrange rocks, to mark the way into town, and as he kneels at this work, he hears a noise in the brush and sees the retreating tail of a deer. His arms move without thinking: he lifts the gun and shoots. The animal crumples, the horse rears, and he cries out, as if he himself were shot.
The woman is in front of the cabin hanging washed clothes. Her figure waves in the heat, as if underwater. When he gets near, and she sees the dead deer slung over the horse’s back, she claps her hands. She runs her thin fingers over the antlers, covered in summer velvet.
* * *
At first, they’re shy with each other at night, but then she begins to help him, to direct him. She takes his hand in the dark and puts it in a new place on her body. Like this. Like this.
At first he’s ashamed, but then he sees that he’ll learn. One day he’ll know these things, how to please her. As they lie together, he thinks of all the things he will learn and do. He’ll buy cattle, or perhaps there’s gold in the creek. In the lamplight he looks at her arm, her wrist, and traces his finger along the veins that show bright and blue through her skin. They’re like streams or rivers, one flowing off the other, meeting and parting. And he imagines following these rivers, and all the things he’ll do wherever he goes.
The woman speaks of her husband. They were only married a year, long enough for her to know it was a mistake. The young man tries to hold onto his dreams and plans, but it’s difficult, when she’s speaking of the past. He runs his fingers over her arm again, over the veins. She speaks of her childhood, and he of his own, of traveling in covered wagons, outlaws passing through town, the hard sound of gunshots. Their stories are Western stories: this is how they’ve learned to describe themselves. He sees how the past has led him forward, how his family traveled west and he’s traveled farther. He presses his fingers to her arm, onto the veins, until she places her hand on his and says, Not so hard.
* * *
One afternoon, she cries. There’s nothing. No one to talk to.
He points to the creek. There’s water.
She sobs again.
He puts an arm around her, but the limb feels odd and stick-like. He doesn’t know the right way to do this – comfort a woman. He’s worked on the cabin all day, and she on her knees in the garden. Her forehead is beaded with sweat. They stand out on the plain, where the sun has been beating, and heat rises off the ground, but now the sun sets and soon the air will be cooler.
He pulls her close to him, and kisses the damp line of her hair. He points out into the grass, where the heads of small creatures appear and vanish. Prairie dogs, he says, look.
* * *
He walks, following fence posts. The evening is cool with the coming of fall. Here and there in the grass, he finds remnants of those who lived here before: a shard of china, a bullet casing, a torn scrap of calico. He walks past the paddock he built for the horse, past the old broken posts that extend beyond. The wind bites his cheek, and the moon rises pale in the dusk.
From somewhere, he hears a voice. He thinks it might be the woman, calling him back, and he turns toward the cabin. He has walked farther than he realized. Their home is small and squat against the hills. The voice repeats and is joined by others, and now he understands that they’re not human but coyote. They yip and howl, and he turns toward the sound, searching for their dog forms in the grass. He sees nothing. How strange his own form must appear – upright and stark in this land of low running creatures. He lets a hand drift up to his bare neck. He sees the grass, the moon, the last fence post, but no sign of the animals that bark and howl all around him. Then they are past, moving westward. He waits, darkness settles, the moon grows brighter, and the coyotes fade into silence.
* * *
One day the horse is gone. It’s not in the shed or the pasture. At first they blame each other, thinking the other has left the gate open, but the gate is latched. She imagines a wild nighttime theft, footfalls soft as goose down.
The man thinks it more likely that the mare has jumped the fence, and she’ll soon return for the warmth of the stable. But days pass, early snow dusts the ground, and still there’s no horse.
The woman cries – what will they do without a horse? The man tries to comfort her. It’s several miles to town, but they can walk when they need to. He puts his arm around her shoulders, but she flings it away. She goes into the cabin, but he stays and looks out to the farthest reaches of his vision. All things seem to get swept onward: he and the woman to this cabin, and whoever lived on the homestead before them, lost to the open West. He imagines the land is not still but flows, and he pictures them floating, one after another: the unknown homesteaders, the horse, he and the woman.
* * *
A blizzard hits. They don’t have enough food. He crafts makeshift snowshoes out of kindling. When the winds die down and he opens the door, all they can see is snow. He tunnels out and upward.
He walks the miles into town. His stone markers are hidden in the white beneath him, but he picks his way by trees and other landmarks. When he reaches the town that had first seemed so wild, it now appears snug and calm. He buys supplies at the general store.
On his way home, the storm returns. Weighed down with his bundle, he sinks in the snow. The ice and wind sting his eyes. The sky grows dark early, and he digs deep into the snow until he has a hole he can crawl inside. He’ll die here, he thinks, and worries for the woman, alone in the cabin. But without her, he thinks, he would have stayed at his family’s farm. He would now be warm by the kitchen fire, playing cards and laughing with his brothers.
The wind roars, and then, after some hours, all is silent, except for creaking and settling deep within the snow. He has strange, half-waking dreams. He’s an animal shivering in a burrow, he’s a fish so deep in the waters of a lake that no sun can reach him. He sees his hand blister – fish form beneath his skin. He runs down to the river, and when he thrusts his hand into the water, from the blisters spring three silver fish that break loose from his skin and swim into the current. The fish speed away and are lost in the ripples of water.
He wakes to thin, gray light and digs his way out. The snow has stopped falling and, even in the low morning sun, the white makes his eyes ache. There are trees on either side, and he puzzles over where he is. At last he understands: he has camped above the frozen creek. He holds his hand and looks down at the snow. He imagines the fish from his dream are there, frozen beneath his feet.
* * *
In the slow, dark winter, in the small space of the cabin, she cooks and mends, and he fixes his snowshoes or cleans the gun. They talk little.
He often thinks of his fish. The dream, so often thought over, becomes fragile, like an old letter that has been fingered and unfolded too many times. He tries to get the particulars right: were the fish as thick as his thumb, or thin like the woman’s small finger? Were they pale silver like the moon, or dark like the stream at night?
He grows so involved in his thoughts that he forgets there’s another person in the cabin, and if the woman coughs, he startles like a wild animal. She looks at him with worry.
* * *
Early one morning he wakes to the woman moving in bed. She rolls over and reaches an arm to his shoulder, lets her fingers drift down his arm. Her skin is too smooth, and her body moves like a water creature, like an eel wrapping around and pulling him under. It clutches around his back. He jumps from the bed.
He fastens his pants with quick movements, but his hands shake and tingle. He can’t look at his hands: he knows if he looks he’ll see them redden and blister. He bursts from the cabin. As if far away, the ice and rocks scrape his bare feet. The blisters grow across his palm and up his wrist and arm. He reaches the creek, frozen with thinning ice, which he shatters as he thrusts his hands in the water. He can feel the fish trying to break free of him.
The woman pulls at his shoulder. Stop it, she cries. What are you doing!
He is cutting his palm with his knife.
He drops the blade with a clatter. The wound stings and hums.
He looks at the woman. She clutches the blanket around her and looks at him with wild eyes. A line of blood drips from her nose. When he jumped from the bed, his hand must have hit her face.
* * *
The land thaws, and the woman miscarries a baby. She hadn’t told him of the child, and now, his mind struggles to contain it: new life and its loss. He knows he should comfort her, but when she takes his arm and cries, he pulls away.
He walks outside to chop wood. The axe thuds and cracks against the quiet. He starts fast on the wood, like he wants to hurt it, but then he slows and stops, feeling the purposelessness of it. The land grasps toward spring. The grasses, green at their roots, strain to shrug off the last patches of snow. He has waited for this, eager for work, for soil in his hands and new green things in the earth, but the land looks bedraggled and smells of rot. He tries to picture the farm he will build. He looks out over the land, at the fence he built last year, but with no horse or cows, the fence is a lonely object. If they were to make a farm here, he thinks, they should have animals already, and a well dug, and fields laid out to be planted.
He remembers how, when they first came here, and she worried, he had pointed out the prairie dogs, and the little things made her laugh. She had turned to him and placed her face against his chest, and a warm feeling shot through his body.
He walks back into the cabin. She’s turned away in the bed. He can see from her shaking shoulders that she’s crying. The smell of blood in the room hurts him.
* * *
The woman takes ill and asks for the doctor. To fetch a doctor, he would have to make the long walk into town, and then walk back, and he doesn’t like the idea of her alone all that time, burning with fever in the bed.
He goes outside and rubs his hair in the sun. The warmth makes him thirsty. He closes his eyes, and sees his mother, in the bed on the farm, on a hot summer afternoon several years back. He wanted to go to her, but his father and brothers hung near the walls, and he followed their example. Two flies beat at the ceiling and buzzed near their heads. A man, the preacher, spoke in low tones. Now his mind moves onward, to the clapboard church and the preacher speaking of serpents, the fires of hell, and strange foreign places, and the woman sitting some pews ahead, her hair dark and still damp. He sees, like a revelation, the fish break from his hand and swim into the water. He clutches at his bandaged hand.
He opens his eyes and is shocked by the green of the grass. He runs up to the cabin.
A doctor, the woman says again. She grasps at his hand. Her lips are dry and cracked. He runs out to the spring to fill the bucket. He holds the ladle and she drinks slowly. Her pale tongue works at the drops on her lips.
He takes her hand and turns over the wrist and runs his palm along the veins. He dips his fingers in water and spreads it along her skin.
That night he lies on the floor to allow her full comfort of the bed. At times, she turns and talks in her sleep, and then she grows quiet. He listens for the sound of her breath. Why didn’t he go for the doctor? He tells himself he must watch all night and not sleep, but then he opens his eyes and there’s light through the window. He bolts up and turns with wild eyes, but the woman is sitting up. She smiles. She says she is hungry – she thinks she could manage to eat.
* * *
She sits in front of the cabin and holds her face to the late spring sun. He fetches blankets to wrap her shoulders. She looks out at the plain and asks about the surrounding country. He describes what he’s seen, the miles of grassland, the low hills, the scattered homesteads, his stone markers that lead to the little town. Is there a railroad? she asks.
He laughs. They are far from anything like that. But from the nearby town, he guesses, one could take a stagecoach to a railway town. But why does she ask?
She smiles and shakes her head. She is curious. She has kept close to the cabin, like a creature straying little from its den. She asks about the little town, and he describes the ramshackle buildings, the general store and boarding house, the cattlemen and sheepherders on the street.
The woman’s strength improves every day, and she takes short walks along the fence posts and down near the stream. When she’s eating full meals, he decides to go hunting, to provide her something better to eat. He follows the tracks of deer up the hills and down into the plain. He wanders for hours, far out over grasses, but he finds no animals, and when the sun is low he turns toward home. When he reaches the cabin, the sky is blue and dark like a bruise, and the woman is nowhere to be found.
* * *
He waits until morning, and then he walks toward town. The woman was weak from her illness, he thinks, too weak to walk the long distance. He expects to find her collapsed along the way. Or perhaps she got lost and is somewhere out there, sunken on the plain.
He reaches the town and goes to the general store. For several minutes he stares at the high shelves behind the counter, the jars and sacks and bolts of bright fabric, unable to speak. He goes to the small hotel, and here he manages to ask about the woman. Yes, he is told, such a woman was here, but she left on a stagecoach.
The man walks back to the homestead, and sits in the grass. He listens to a distant clamor of coyotes, and later, an owl hooting in the cottonwoods. He peers into the heavy dark before him and believes he sees a river, wide and slow, and there in its water go the horse, the fish, the woman. The banks seem to move outward, flooding over the land, and soon he too will be in the current, along with the cabin and outbuilding, the bucket, and deep beneath them, somewhere on the riverbed, the iron stove, sunk at a tilt in the mud, clawed over by crawfish, with great bubbles emerging from its chimney.
* * *
One day, two men approach on horseback. He stands outside the cabin and watches their figures bob over the grasses. One dismounts and ties his horse to the fencepost. The other stays mounted, and his horse steps about with agitation.
He avoids looking at the men’s faces, their heavy whiskers. He puts his hand to his own face and feels the thick beard like an unfamiliar terrain.
The dismounted man approaches and asks how long he has been on the land. He can’t answer. He must listen to the man closely, to make sense of the words, as if he has been alone so long he has forgotten his own language. But it can only be weeks since the woman left. Summer has not yet ended.
The man asks if he filed the claim for the homestead.
He thinks, The woman wanted to file. Her husband’s horse was the warmest shade of chestnut. The words circle his head, but when they reach his mouth, they seem to circle back without emerging.
The man answers his own question. You didn’t file the claim. I’m afraid the land is not yours.
The young man musters a few words. He knows this.
A rancher bought up all of this, the man says, and sweeps his hand out over the horizon. His tone is kind. I’m afraid you must leave. He turns about to view the land, the fence, and then turns and looks up at the cabin, and walks over to the vegetable garden and looks down at the plants, many of which have withered without the woman’s care. The man still on horseback directs his horse to follow a few steps behind, and the animal leans down to nibble a vine that has wound out from under the fence.
The dismounted man whistles. It’s too bad, he says. I can see how you’ve added improvements. It’s good land, too, with water.
The young man looks at the earth and nods. There are questions he wants to ask: is one of these men the rancher who owns the land? Will the new owner have sheep or cattle? But he can’t think how to word things.
They’ll be back in a week’s time, the dismounted man says, and he must be out by then. The young man understands this is a kindness, to give him time to pack, but a week is too long, and he’ll lose track of days. He wants to tell the men, If I must leave, I can leave now, but the words do not come. He feels at his beard. He points at the stream and says, That water doesn’t wait a week to run. The men look without understanding.
He walks into the cabin and packs food in one of the horse’s old saddlebags and ties on a blanket, and then he straps the bag over his shoulder. When he walks out of the cabin, the men have ridden away. He watches them retreat in the distance.
* * *
He walks westward, and after several days, he finds himself in a region of mountains. He climbs an old road, weeded over. There’s ice in the breeze. Though the hills were brown where they met the plain, behind these he finds new ridges stained green with bright grasses and shrubs. The soil is rich and wet. Sunk into it are the tracks of deer and mountain goats, and those of bobcats, coyotes, and cougars.
Everywhere is water. He finds streams of it falling down rock faces, welling up in grasses, pooling among boulders. He hears its trickle and rush all around him. His scarred hand tingles. He feels the water running in the mountains, down from the higher reaches, and he imagines each of his fish in a different small stream, wriggling through clear water, swimming downward to meet him.
When he started climbing, he believed he had only one peak to climb, and then he would see out in all directions. But the mountains, he learns, are many. He weaves among ridges, as if the world folds in on itself, and he is lost in the cracks. Being accustomed to open spaces, he feels he cannot see far enough. He wonders what waits out of sight, around the next turn of his trail. Often, he hears water but can’t see it, and he spends whole days scrambling over boulders and scree, searching for streams. He hears coyotes and hawks, and the whistle of the wind, but as these sounds echo they seem to be a woman calling out to him.
He sleeps in the open, beside a fire that burns down to nothing. One morning he wakes to snow dusted over his blanket. He yells and brushes the flakes from his clothes like insects. He moves on, and when he finds a deer trail that winds downward, he follows it. He walks for two days, scrabbling through brush and over talus. The grasses turn brown again. He crests a low ridge and the plains open before him. The sight is like rain after drought. He sees far off to the south a shallow mirror of lake, and near it, clustered buildings and threads of chimney smoke. He’s hungry: he has grown thin, and finds new hollows on his body. It seems good to him now, as it hadn’t before, to be among people, to hear their talk, to wash in water warmed on a stove, to eat hot food at a table. He follows the trail, down from the mountains, and toward the distant settlement.
* * *
He stays in the town, and then wanders, and then finds a new town and wanders again. He watches the sun cross over and over, and the seasons turn, too many times to count. He serpentines and circles the West. The land folds outward, and one river joins another and bears him on to wilder places. He sees deserts, dry mountain ranges, ancient lakebeds, and pools bubbling with sulfur. He finds spiders the size of his palm, plants that shoot quills, and primeval forests cast into stone. Coming upon these new things, he says to himself, Now this is a wild country. And yet, in other ways, the West grows tamer. He’s always among people, and if he strays into open land, the terrain seems to funnel him back into towns. He is never so alone again as he and the woman were on the homestead.
He falls into ways of living. He works as a ranch hand, but he’s no good at it, though he knows how to ride and handle sheep and cows and keep off coyotes. Among the droves of huffing animals, his mind grows weak and pensive, and he lets the animals stray and get away from him.
He works on the railroad, as a miner, in the oil fields. He paves roads.
Out in the desolate places he works, in the plains and deserts, he tells stories. He talks of what happened long ago, but he can’t get the order straight. Mountains, farm, woman, cabin, fish from his burnt hand, plains. He talks of coyotes, prairie dogs, and a stove deep under a river. The other men look at each other and laugh. He tells them of things he was not there to see: the woman’s husband, coming back drunk from the saloon and finding his horse gone and the money pilfered. He tells too of the woman, still weak from fever, walking miles, picking her way by stone markers, stopping now and then to rest, and putting a hand to her damp forehead. Then standing and walking again, until she reaches a small town, and steps into a stagecoach. He sees, too, that she reaches the railroad, and bursts across the plains in a roar of fire. And then, from some green precipice, the woman looks out at the ocean, an endless plain of water, wild with waves and spray.
Years and decades have passed, and yet his mind circles back to his youth, and the year he spent with the woman. He thinks of this time so often, that it swells and consumes his whole life.
Old man, some younger man says, this story you tell goes nowhere.
* * *
He holds his hand. Years of work have grown calluses over the scars he cut with the knife. He listens to the wind, which he hears overhead. He clenches his eyes and feels himself spinning, carried along in a wild current. Strange shapes swim behind his eyelids. He sees how his river forks and curves, and one river leads to another. His river grows wider, until he can’t see the banks, and water extends as far as he can see. Still, it carries him onward, to places beyond the eye or mind, and from far away, off in the distance but growing nearer, he sees silver creatures, bright as the moon, swimming forward to meet him.
Heather Monley’s fiction has appeared in Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, Crazyhorse, New Orleans Review, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.