Crossing Purgatory (34 page)

Authors: Gary Schanbacher

T
HOMPSON WOKE TO EERIE SILENCE
. Full morning, light slanted through the window. He lay still and listened. Five minutes, a full ten. Nothing, a glorious silence. In his head, the drumming had ceased, the bones departed. The song of a lark filtered into the cabin, a sibilant stream, and he rose, a modest strength returned, and left the cabin with its stale air and stench of illness. Outside, he built a fire and boiled coffee. He had no food to cook but nevertheless was grateful for the sensation of hunger. To feel anything at all. The coffee tasted pleasantly bitter in his mouth, and heat traveled down his throat to warm his empty stomach. In the distance, Paloma and Hanna approached from the placita. Paloma stopped short when she noticed Thompson sitting by the fire and veered off toward the fields. He watched as she approached Carlos, how Carlos set aside his gathering sack and removed his hat and stepped toward her. Paloma handed him a pouch, his midday meal, Thompson supposed, and when he took it, she placed a hand on his arm and Carlos drew her near for a moment, a tender interlude, before she turned for the placita and Carlos to his work.

Hanna continued to the bluff carrying a small pail, held it out to him.

“Teresa's atole, for your health,” she said.

“The thought of food had crossed my mind,” he said, accepting the pail.

“Your color looks good,” she said. “You concerned us.”

“I'm much improved,” he said. “I will be back at harvest presently.”

“What more do you require? How may I help?” Hanna asked.

“Nothing more, thank you. You've done much already,” Thompson said.

“I've done nothing,” Hanna said.

“Someone fed me yesterday,” he said.

“Teresa,” Hanna said.

“Teresa?” Thompson asked. He deserved Teresa's scorn, she offered kindness. He deserved condemnation, she offered compassion. What right had he to accept such freewill gifts?

“We all worried about you,” Hanna said.

“Your words last night,” Thompson continued. The voice had been familiar, and female. “A comfort.”

Hanna, quizzically, “I don't understand.”

Thompson recognized her confusion, understood his mistake. “Of course,” he said. “I've been muddled.”

“But you are well, now?” Hanna asked.

“Yes.”

Hanna, after a pause, “I'd gladly offer comfort if you would accept it.”

Thompson studied her face, questioning and hopeful, but he had no response. Still, he wished her to remain with him a while, wished for her company after struggling alone with his internal demons for such a stretch. But she must have interpreted his silence as withdrawal.

“I'll leave you to your nourishment,” she said.

Thompson watched her go. Who then, last night? A dream? Of course. He slurped the thick corn drink straight from the pail, appreciating the surprising hint of cinnamon and sugar, and tried to piece together the past few days, a blur of reality and fancy. The incessant drumming in his head: fancy. Being given water: reality. His dream: fancy, he concluded after some indecision. And he clearly remembered his resolve to quit the Purgatoire Valley. But quit it for where? Another barrens? Or, dare he return east, to Indiana or Kentucky, to his past? Thompson remembered his father's estate as if he'd walked it yesterday: rolling green hills; dense woods; tobacco fields; the aromas wafting from the curing shed and the smokehouse during autumn. Some days working the brown, water-starved earth of the prairie, memories came, sweet, tangy stabs of yearning. Sunday meals following church services, girls in bonnets and gloves. The scent of lavender water. Perhaps it was time.

Yet, this place! Tainted as it was by his transgressions, its raw beauty, its harsh climate, its yawning presence like a touchstone for his soul. Stay, to what purpose? Leave, to what purpose?

Teresa's atole revived him, and he planned to work the fields that afternoon. But the longer he sat, the less willing his body to action. When finally he stood, he found his legs wooden, his arms leaden at his side, the aftermath of his debilitation. A short rest, he decided, and went inside and stretched out on his bed, and his next awareness was of a room dim with the shadows of waning day.

Outside, he kicked up the fire. Above, light softened and the land lay quiet. Thompson watched Teresa emerge from the placita to sit with Benito during the vesper hour. As evening deepened, the others returned from the fields and joined Teresa for a few minutes before leading her inside. When the gates swung closed for the night, Thompson imagined himself alone in the world. Except for the faint glow from the windows of Upperdine's house in the distance and the dim outline of placita walls still visible, it was Thompson only in the vast, darkening expanse of land and sky. He considered sleeping in the open, but night carried a chill and finally he rose from the stump by the dying fire and entered the cabin.

D
URING THE DARKEST HOUR
,
HE
woke. Someone called to him. He sensed a near presence, not unlike the night before. A deep longing pricked his skin and quickened his pulse. He lay in darkness until a slight differentiation in shading defined the window. He rose and went to the door and opened it and in that moment before the dream world left him, before the owl called again to jar him awake, Rachel stood in the night light, young and radiant, their boys shyly peeking from the folds of her skirt. She looked at him and smiled, and in that instant he felt redeemed. He reached for her, but she receded. He strained to refocus, to hold her in his vision for one heartbeat longer, but she was no more.

Thompson remained outside, no inclination to move, to disrupt the moment. The owl continued to question from its perch in the cottonwood. A warm calm settled over him, and the deepest peace he'd ever experienced. Like a clock spring unwound, tension left his body, a tension that had twisted and tightened around and through him for the past year without his realizing it. In departure, just before she faded back into the ether, Rachel had swept her arm across the valley. A benediction over the land, or permission to take leave? Thompson did not know, but it mattered little. He'd been forgiven, and the rest would become clear. He would make his choice and whatever happened, happened.

A paling in the east, the faintest tint, and Thompson stepped into the cabin, gathered his bedroll into which he'd packed his traveling gear, took up his rifle, and started for the junction of the Arkansas. At Captain Upperdine's township, Arkansas City, he stood beside the foundation laid in notched logs for what would become Hanna's cabin. The others had begun construction while he and Benito were away with the prospectors. Their return had interrupted work, and now it waited on the harvest. Thompson stepped inside the foundation's perimeter and imagined a family here, Hanna and Destiny, a husband and more children, some day. Outside, the surveyor's stakes foretold other cabins, other families. They would come. They would encounter hardships beyond comprehension attempting to carve out a living, and in the end the land would best most of them. But not everyone.

He turned in the direction from which he'd just traveled. Go, or stay? The bedroll lay at his feet. He could continue to the ford and decide, west or east. He could return to the cabin and begin his chores. He vacillated. What course? He felt no anxiety, because if only he waited patiently, the answer would come. He waited.

Dawn slowly opened the valley to another day, washed it in new light, soft umbers and rusts, the colors of flesh and skin and bone and blood, and it came to him with the sun. He would never leave. So intimate was he a part of this place that only the thinnest of membranes separated him from the dust at his feet and the firmament above. A membrane so tenuous that at any moment it might split and he would dissolve back into the soil or disperse into the air with the lightest of breezes.

The town might thrive or decay, but the people would endure. Crops may yield or fail, but the land would endure. And he understood now with certainty that he too would endure, in this place. He would never seek to own a part of it; he would not put himself to the test again. But he would nurture it. He would become a part of this land, a part of its history, help cast its future, and one day his bones would rest in its folds. As he followed the gentle tilt of the land onto the floodplain, retracing his steps, he turned and looked back at the foundation of Hanna's cabin. It would command pleasant views of the river and of the great openness beyond. He would continue with her wheat patch, if she so desired. He hoped she would.

Thompson returned to his cabin on the bluff above the river, his home. Across the floodplain, crops showed golden in the heightening sun. He watched Carlos and the boys emerge from the gates and turn out the goats to forage. He ducked inside, hung his rifle on the rack above the door, tossed his bedroll onto the table, and collected his corn knife and a burlap sack. Outside, the sun bore down and the wind blew fresh and strong, a fine morning to begin tending Benito's fields.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
owe a great debt to the novelist William Haywood Henderson for his close reading and insightful comments, and to my colleagues in the Lighthouse Writers Master Novel Workshop who gave an early draft much greater attention than it deserved.

Heartfelt gratitude to Jennifer Carlson for believing in this book; the original manuscript gained immeasurably from her thoughtful suggestions.

I deeply appreciate Maia Larson for her untiring and often thankless job of editing, and the entire production crew at Pegasus Books.

Thanks to the Ucross Foundation for the gift of solitude on the rolling plains east of Buffalo, Wyoming. Every writer should be so fortunate.

My thanks also to Don J. Unser, author of
Sabino's Map
, a fascinating oral and pictorial history of life in the plaza, for the generosity of his conversation.

To the Writers Block for providing a desk, a lamp, and the good vibes of other writers struggling to pull off the same impossibility with words, thanks.

Thanks for the artistry of Jay P. K. Kenney and Catherine Hope.

Finally, I'd like to freely acknowledge the liberties I've taken with history. By intent, the fictional characters and events portrayed in
Crossing Purgatory
are historically plausible rather than factual.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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