He heard hoofbeats coming from behind him. He urged his mule forwards, into the shadow of the palms and out along the grass that sloped down to the water. Once concealed, he let the mule dip her head and drink. He watched the stranger passing, a hunched figure on a pale horse. He waited until the paleness was lost among the trees. The mule’s neck arched; she was still drinking. Ripples moved out across an otherwise smooth surface. As if the lake were being peeled.
Under the palms, in that evening stillness, he could feel her against his back. No heart beating, just a warmth that would not last. A weight that would diminish. He slid out of the saddle. Grass beneath his feet after an age of dust and stones. Sweet, yielding grass.
When he reached up for her, she toppled sideways, down into his arms. He carried her to the water’s edge. Returning to the mule, he collected his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade, and uncoiled the rope from the saddlebow, the same rope that had bound them together, the same knots that her life, like some contortionist, had slipped. He carried the rope and the tools to where she lay. It was only then, as he kneeled beside her, that he noticed how swollen her ankles were. He unfastened her shoes and eased them slowly off. She would not be needing shoes, in any case. The floors of heaven would be soft. He laid the rifle and the tools lengthways on her body, then he reached beneath her with the rope and pulled it through. She had never weighed much; they would be more than enough to take her down. He folded her arms across her chest. She seemed to be holding his rifle, his pickaxe and his spade for him. They were her charge, in her safe-keeping. Now and for ever. He lifted her again and, stooping among the sedge grass, laid her on the water as if it were a bed and took his hands from under her. She seemed to wait there for a moment. She could have been lying on solid ground. Then, smooth as clouds across the sun, the water moved to cover her. And chattered as she sank. Washed the dirt from her. The dirt of the wrong loves. The dirt of his lack of faith in her. Washed it all away. Wrapped her up in what she had dreamed of. Better than any sheets or arms. Now she would be cared for, honoured, pure.
He lifted his eyes from the place where she had been. The night was still new. Dogs barking, a child’s laughter. Stars prickled in a sky that had sent, miraculously, rain.
Use the hours of darkness.
His mind torn loose. Cut from his body, floating, separate. It did not seem to be his own. All he could see were women with their shaved heads painted white. Sorrow beyond weeping, grief beyond tears. The relentless violence of stones. The mask and cloak of blood.
Use the darkness while it lasted. In the light there would be suffering. Out into the land he rode, the dust and plants still cooling from the day. Out along the tracks that he had put down earlier. Into the desert with the mission bell ringing in the air behind him, a sound as rich and round as fruit.
She’s dead. I buried her.
Was it right or wrong, what he had done? It had felt right. It would look wrong. It was her wish, and yet it amounted to a treachery. He had been sent by the French to find her, bring her back. In his faithfulness he had betrayed them. In telling her the truth he would be telling them a lie. But he knew where his loyalties lay. Not with those doomed people standing on the road. Not with them. He was beginning to understand his father. His honesty had its roots in his father’s many deceptions; his consideration in his father’s utter fecklessness. And yet –
I buried her.
One fact that pulled in two directions. The spirit that divides against itself. Some might argue that he had committed a crime. But crime ran in the family. Especially the kind of crime that had two sides to it, that cut two ways. Look at my father, he would say. Well, I’m my father’s son.
He felt her against his back, and turned sharply to see nothing. Other times he felt her slipping and reached behind him. His hand met empty air. But he could not shake her presence. It was as real as the mule was — her cheek against his shoulderblades, her head by his elbow. He saw black water rippling. He saw her eyes float free like leaves. The face they left behind was smooth and mad. There came a time when he no longer dared turn round.
A jackal barked in the distance. One soprano cough, then another. The volcano loomed, a bulk against the sky. He had to keep it on his left. Every once in a while his hand passed almost absent-mindedly across the pouch where he had put the gold. The night grew softer, another presence, warm and close, as if he were lying in bed and a face had lowered over him. Eyes patched with shadows. A needle like a splinter of the moon between his father’s fingers. He cried out. The desert took the cry and swallowed it. Towards the end his father had begun to believe in his own punishment. All his misfortunes had been earned. Any apparent fulfilment of a dream was only another persecution in disguise. Hope became a poison to him; he lanced the place inside himself where it had lived, and drained it out of him like pus.
Wilson lifted his eyes. The day was breaking, wedges of rose and pale-yellow in the eastern skies. He was not fooled by it. There had been another morning once. A morning of sardonic beauty. Dawn on the Natchez Trace, some thirty miles south of Vicksburg. His father up and whistling. One hand in the mane of a stolen chestnut mare, the other on his hip. A fire crackling. A twist of steam above the kettle. They were only a few days into September, but the air had a fall snap to it. The smell of frost’s first explorations in scorched summer grass.
And then the trees moved. Gave birth to men with rifles. One man wore a star that made him God. Two others took his father and flung him face-down in the grass.
The Marshal stood over him, legs wide apart, as if he might open the flap of his pants and piss.
‘Pharaoh, you done fooled with the law.’
For some reason his father was grinning. The butt of a gun soon wiped that off.
‘Ain’t the first time,’ the Marshal said, ‘but it sure as hell is going to be the last.’
He was right about that.
They tried and sentenced his father so quickly that the sun did not even change position. Right there, among the soft colours of dawn and the birdsong and the fall’s first frost. And him still kneeling in the grass, as if someone had told him he was in a church.
When the punishment had been decided on — a matter of one question, followed by a nod from the Marshal; it was the usual one — his father was hoisted to his feet. The two men ripped his collar clean off and split his shirt open on his back. Then they pushed him up against a live oak, face into the bark. Tied rope to one wrist, passed it around the trunk and tied it to the other wrist. Then they stood back.
‘Don’t he just love that tree,’ one said.
‘Ain’t seen a woman in a while,’ said another. ‘What’s a man to do?’
There was a third man who was not laughing. His pale eyes raked the grass. ‘What about the boy?’
The Marshal shook his head. ‘Boy don’t need no whipping. Be a lesson to him, watch his pa.’
Be a lesson all right.
The darkness had drained away. Up came the sun again. Seemed it was everywhere that he was heading. Rose gone now, all yellow gone. Just glare. Thorns tearing at his legs. The land was trying to weigh him down with tools of its own. Tied its heat and drought to him. Tied it inside as well as out. They had no water left. He chewed viznaga pulp instead. Through glass air he saw an arrow tree. Its fruit was blindness. He would not sleep just yet. Would not sink down. Just one more mile. And when he thought that mile was done, one more. Sun on face and hoofs on stones. Mile after mile she clung to his back, murmuring her own dead language.
His head lifted suddenly. He must have fallen asleep again. They were not even moving. Just standing in the heat.