Authors: Win Blevins
Since such was her nature, she thought the words later, and made them part of her evening prayer. “Vehicle. This small, half-grown woman is a vehicle. Mystery transpired within her. Mystery manifested itself from within her flesh, between her legs. Spirit into flesh, eternity into
time. This is how life dances forever, a dance awful and sublime.” Sun Moon paused before murmuring the next words. “Thank you, Mahakala.” Her gut twisted, not hard enough to hurt, only a reminder.
They celebrated.
First the three Swaney sons went hunting, Burton with them. The marsh here at the sink was a haven for waterfowl, swarming thick as bugs on a May evening. Late in the afternoon they came back with armloads of geese and ducks. A long, narrow fire was built and three spits set up. Burton saw the Swaneys look at Sun Moon like she ought to do something, but she slipped away. He could hear her thinking,
Do your own deuced plucking and cooking
.
He asked himself,
Will you meditate? You’re right. People don’t make you part of things except as a servant
.
While the fowls cooked, Sir Richard and Rutherford Swaney sat together and talked. A certain sense was in the air—we two are alike and must flock together. Burton amused himself by considering what Sun Moon or Asie would be thinking—middle-aged white men together? Or was it white men who are fatherlike together? He himself was amused by the ways of his culture sometimes.
Swaney was no witless backwoodsman. “Our cattle are getting so poor it takes two to make a shadow,” he said. The man had attended the University of North Carolina—he got out his copies of Lord Chesterfield’s letters and Byron’s poems to show proudly to Burton. “Of an evening I read a little,” he said. “It elevates the mind”—he glanced toward the wasteland surrounding them—“in circumstances where elevation is badly wanted.”
Mr. Swaney actually rang a dinner bell—
clang-clang-clang-clang-clang!
—which seemed to Burton a quaint expression of his authority as
paterfamilias
. The three Swaney lads shambled up.
How odd,
Burton thought, three sons nearly grown and now a fourth, no daughters. One son of about twenty helped the new mother to a seat, holding her child. She looked wan, happy, and dazed. To Burton’s eyes the young man’s expression was utterly unreadable. He let her go and sat down across the fire without an upward glance.
Harold Jackson, Muley, and Carlson joined the dining circle. By instinct Asie and Sun Moon hung to the rear, like shadows.
Swaney went to his wagon and brought forth a jug, surely preserved with care in anticipation of this moment. “In honor of Emerson Judd
Swaney,” he said, lifting the jug high in a toast. Until that moment Burton had not heard the newborn’s name. Swaney handed the jug to Burton, who repeated the toast and drank in the peculiar way Americans had, jug against upper arm, elbow tilting it up. The whisky circled the group. Marybelle shook her head no. It was not offered to Asie and Sun Moon, sitting behind.
Bizarre,
thought Burton sadly.
Suddenly he took thought and offered them the jug himself. Asie took a swallow.
Turned on a spit, the goose was delicious, dripping with juice. Eaters tore at the flesh eagerly and tossed the bones over their shoulders into the desert behind. Burton wondered whether the unnoticed Asie and Sun Moon were actually in the line of fire, but no. Swaney carried on amiably to Burton, taking little note of his wife, his new child, or his older sons. His conversation was littered with proverbs from the Latin: A blind man cannot judge colors. A cock is bold on his own dunghill. A liar is not believed when he speaks the truth. Better be envied than pitied, which Burton noted was Greek rather than Latin, like the rest.
When the meat was gone, they spoke of the road ahead for the Swaneys, the old route, the one taken by the Donners, a name still spoken in a hush. First came the dry drive to the Truckee River, a stretch of forty miles. Then up the river to Donner Lake and Donner Pass.
“Rest your stock, get ’em well watered, carry plenty of water, you won’t have no trouble,” said Muley. “No trouble, less’n ye’re afraid of ghosts.” He grinned toothily. “Steep, bugger steep, but a go. Folks didn’t switch on account of the route. Account of the ghosts.”
Burton regarded them.
All unspoken, but tangible, and bitter as cold wind in the face
. The Donner story. Lateness. Early snow. The winter camp at the lake. Human beings eating one another. The rescue, in time for some, too late for others, and too late for self-respect. Sometimes Burton thought the failure of America was lack of imagination, a failure to grasp what strange creatures human beings can be. A failure of the British, too.
“We are afraid of guns, not ghosts,” Swaney said to Burton, like it wasn’t Muley who’d been talking.
“Is that why you are taking your family to California?”
“From Egypt’s persecution into the Promised Land,” intoned Swaney.
Burton cursed himself for his curiosity, but it pushed him on. He eyed Swaney and nodded ambiguously.
A Southerner. Tennessee.
“A Secessionist
then?” This was daring. The War Between the States was far more inflammatory as a topic of conversation than religion.
“Secessionist? What an appellation for those who simply wish to live their lives in their own way. We secede from tyranny.”
To tyrannize others,
thought Burton. His gullet burned, but he asserted his impeccable self-control. From the corner of his eye he saw Sun Moon and Asie walking off, and was relieved they wouldn’t hear any more.
“You don’t think the South will win?”
“The world favors the strong over the righteous.”
To the devil with it,
Burton decided. He took a moment to frame his question simply but bluntly. “Do you think Negroes your inferiors?”
“A black plum is never as sweet as a white,” quoted Swaney. “That, however, is not the issue. Mr. Lincoln is right. The issue enjoined in the Great War is not slavery but union. The question being decided is whether the South must live as the North wills.”
Burton let the man see his evil eye for a long moment, then stood and walked off without a word. In the opinion of Richard Burton, Captain of Her Majesty’s Army, being a gentleman meant never giving offense
unintentionally
.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sun Moon stood on the river’s edge, looking into the dark water. No moon shone on it, no stars, no firelight. It was black. Black as…
Black
black. It could be felt, only felt, not known to the eyes.
She’d walked a half mile above the camp, above where the river bled into the marsh. She wanted a bath and had seen the hot spring here. She’d washed the blood off her hands earlier, and washed her clothes. But she felt the need for … She didn’t have words for it.
The bank by the spring was treacherously soft, muddy, slick, salt-wet. She would wade into the river below and walk upstream into the hot water. From here she could see the steam rising off the waters, gray intertwined with the blackness of the unknown.
She stripped off her pants, her shirt, and, last, her shoes. She stood beside the river naked. She had never river-bathed naked before. Though the night air was warm, she shivered. Her skin trembled.
She put her left foot in, and the river was cool. She put her right foot forward and felt hard, smooth river rock. She stepped gingerly on,
calf-deep,
and on farther,
knee-deep
.
The rock bottom turned back to sand. The river turned from cool to cold. A big shiver shook her skin.
She turned upriver, toward the rising steam. She made herself wade, one foot in front of the other, steadily, stubbornly. The river got deeper,
thigh-deep
.
A thought came,
I cannot swim,
and it passed. A thought came,
the unknown,
and it passed. She felt her nipples grow bumps and ridges.
She waded forward into darkness. Now she had lost her sense of place, and perhaps of time. The river was the dark night sky. It was the space between the stars. It was all waters, it was the waters of the snows of the Himalayas, it was the holy lakes of her country, it was Lhamoe Latso, it was all the mothers of life.
Instinctively, she turned toward the middle of this river of all waters. Without will she stepped forward into the unknown and unknowable liquid. She found swift, cold fluid, the current, the energy of riverflow.
She turned upstream again, and the liquid swirled around her
yoni,
first the hairs, then the flesh. It foamed and frothed. She felt a thrill in her belly. Delicately, she imagined the water issuing its vitality into her.
She walked forward and the river deepened. It reached
her navel,
her waist,
her ribs
.
She lowered her arms into the water, hands, forearms, elbows.
She walked forward.
Black liquid to the small mounds of her breasts, then to her nipples
.
She felt them shudder.
She walked forward. Cold water to
her armpits, her collarbone, her throat
.
Riverflow, cold and black and mysterious and alive.
She walked forward.
Water to her throat, her chin, her mouth
.
Its sweetness licked her lips. She opened her mouth, let a little of the water run onto her tongue, and swallowed it down to her belly. It had changed—she felt it warm now, salty, earthy.
Something primeval swelled in her belly. She turned into the warmer water coming from the bank. She let it lift her gently in its embrace.
Her body floated upward, and she rose into the liquid energy
. She opened her legs to the flowing water. Gently, she imagined the liquid surging into her
yoni,
life-bearing. Its warmth lifted her to the surface, a white lotus upon the darkness of the waters, and she surrendered.
When Sun Moon came back to her normal self, or usual self, she was sitting nude in a few inches of river. She felt unsure how she’d gotten there. She did not know how much time had passed between the moment of her surrender to riverflow and this time in this place. She stood up and looked around and listened. She breathed in, her senses open, her very flesh a sponge. The air, warm and dry. The night sounds. The moonlight. She absorbed them.
She bent, put cupped hands into the stream, and lifted up water. She turned her hands toward the moon and raised them until they reflected the pure, white light.
Moon and stars,
she said reverently in her mind,
what shall I do?
She heard no words, and the light only glistened at her, self-possessed. She drank deep. It was cool and sweet.
She did not know how much time passed before the words came from behind her. “Sun Moon.”
Her name was spoken softly, but not in a whisper. Asie’s voice.
She started to turn, then remembered her nakedness. “Asie,” she said. “You are alone?”
In answer he stepped from the dark willows onto the sandy beach, twenty steps away, not quite shadow, not quite man.
He saw it all
.
She didn’t care.
He saw me naked
.
She didn’t care.
He sees me naked
.
She didn’t care.
She rose. She faced him. She showed him her flesh. She opened her arms.
He came simply, neither fast nor slow. He touched her. He brushed her skin. He touched her intimately.
After a few moments they lay down on the sand and found their way into each other. In their love she felt again the warmth of the hot spring within her. She saw the two of them floating on the river, twin lotuses joined by the tendrils of arm and hand,
lingam
and
yoni,
eye and eye, spirit and spirit.
PART FOUR
TREASURE HUNT
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Sun Moon got crazy smack in the middle of the Forty Mile Desert.
That night after we made love there by the hot spring, we walked slowly back to the camp. I was thinking that naturally we’d get our bedrolls out of the wagon and go off somewhere and be alone together. Alone together, and probably do it again, the way I felt, and again a hundred more times.
We were holding hands as we walked along, me feeling unsure of myself, at the same time happy as a mule in mud, and my mind prancing hither and yon and everywhither. Heckahoy, what had happened, that makes a man’s mind prance, and his feelings prance, too. I did say a man.
Of a sudden I noticed she was gone, not gone physically, but still gone, not with me. Somewhere else, like she’d transported herself back to the convent without taking her body. Don’t know how I knew it, or how she did it, but it was so.
Fifty steps from the camp she stops and looks at me. In the dark I can’t see what’s in her eyes, if there’s anything, or just emptiness.
“I want to be alone.” That’s all she says, and takes her hand back. When she lets mine go, I can feel all the dryness of that desert right there in my skin.
She walks away into the darkness and disappears.
That woman had a way of surprising a man. Matter of fact, she was one big flabbergastonia all by herself.
At that moment, standing in the desert empty-handed, I marked a big step in becoming a man. I stood there in the emptiness and opened my arms and shuffled in a slow circle, offering or asking. I looked up to the sky, with stars like tinny little grace notes, and reached and reached. Nothing came. I didn’t know what I wanted. I was happy and sad at once. Happy because, well—a fellow doesn’t come to his first carnal knowledge of woman but once in his life. And beyond happy and sad I had a gigantic sense of… maybe it was strangeness.
I went down around the shore of a marshy pond and made my way to an empty nest of some of my friends the fish hawks. I sat on a rock two dozen steps away and looked.
I felt lonely, I felt fulfilled. In my mind I dit-dotted a cry to the bird. I asked it every question and heard every answer. Its yawps were the wisdom of the universe, and they were nursery rhymes and silly limericks. And somehow, nothing to do with any imaginary words the bird sang, I learned one whicheversomething that is a big piece of growing up:
Another person stands there right next to you, or with her arms around you, and doesn’t see what you see, or not the way you see it. You see fun, she sees folly. You want to embrace, she wants to run. Or vice versa.
You can’t ever quite say why. It nags at you, even tortures you. Why doesn’t my lover, or my brother, feel like me?
You can question, but the answers will always be a little off. However you twist around and look from behind her shoulder, however many miles you walk in her robes, I swear to you, it will never quite rhyme, the way you see things and the way she does.
Then, just because the sun comes up fine and the air is fresh, all that won’t matter. Sweet gizzards …
Later that day you’ll say to yourself, By God, that just doesn’t make sense.
Why’s
she different?
This is all flibbertigibbet.
Right then, if you can remember these words, you’ll find a world of help. It’s a flabbergastonia, that’s the way of it, and the wonder. And sense just isn’t what it makes. But it does make a reason to chuckle, and jig your feet, and whistle a tune.
That’s what I did that night. I made a dit-dotting call in my mind to the birds of the empty nest, birds that were probably back in the Rocky Mountains I came from. I called, Where-WHere-WHEre-WHERE-WHERE-WHere-where-where-where-where-where? Two or three times I did it, Where-WHere-WHEre-WHERE-WHERE-WHere-where-where-where-where-where? Finally, from deep in my mind or wherever, the birds answered back. Here-HEre-HERe-HERE-HERE-HEre-Here-here-here-here-here.
I called again and got the answer again. But my growing up wasn’t far enough along yet to understand that one.
After dark the second evening, when we started the crossing of the Forty Mile Desert, was where she went crazy.
It was a hard crossing, but not so big a job as in earlier years. Now everybody knew the how-to. We carried all the water we could, for there wasn’t a drop. Walked all night, rested, and walked all day until the heat got bad. Found some shade and rested there, some of us slept.
Sun Moon spent that midday rest back in front of her altar, doing what she called a
puja,
I guess. Anyhow, off on her own way.
All afternoon, too, she never walked near me, nor near anyone else. She carried an invisible wall around her, and I knew better than try to go through.
Along about dark we rested and ate in the shade of some rocks. The idea was to get on to Carson Lake that night sometime, lest people and mules alike die of thirst. If you walked during the cool night, you didn’t sweat out as much moisture.
She sat out by herself again, and after a while I couldn’t stand it no longer. I gathered myself up and walked right over to her.
I’d kind of gone crazy in my own way already. Had been walking along in fantasies, pictures of her and me doing this and that, and mostly you know what. Between the desert sun and your mind you can get really hot.
She looked up at me wild. But I’d made up my mind I would speak. Heckahoy, I’d already set myself to cross the Pacific Ocean, climb the Himalaya Mountains, and otherwise go to the uttermost ends of the Earth for her. If my courage could move me halfway around the world for her, it surely could move my tongue.
I felt right foolish—proposing marriage to a person who won’t look at you does that. I stopped my pacing, shoved my hands in my
pockets, put on my finest casual slouch, and spoke. “Sun Moon, I love you. Will you …?”
But I never got the big word out. She keeled over, flopped onto her back, and her eyes rolled up in her head.
Sir Richard put his hand on her forehead and said, “Fever. High fever.”
He poured the contents of his own canteen onto her hair and her shirt—a generous act in that dry stretch. Then he made a place for her to lie unconscious in a wagon and commanded Muley to get going. When Muley started to give him a mulish look, Sir Richard said, “Her life is at stake, man.”
Sir Richard and I clambered on, and Muley made those mules cover ground.
At Carson Lake we dipped her right in the lake, and she stirred a little for the first time.
Sir Richard said it wasn’t my proposal, or anything else we done, that made her crazy. It was fever. And it was. But later I wondered. Sun Moon had broken her vow of chastity, and she took her religious vows seriously. I think a certain sort of person would rather have a fever, which blanks the mind, than remember what she had done.
We left a note for the others and hustled those mules on toward Carson City. Sun Moon dozed most of the way. Sometimes she thrashed her body and especially her head around in a way that scared me. She lost color. She stayed hot. Though I didn’t know much about fevers, I knew she was in trouble.
A man on the road told us the nearest trustworthy sawbones was up in Virginia City. He’d lived in Carson City, but caught a fever himself, gold fever. Sir Richard ordered Muley to turn those mules up Six-Mile Canyon, and up Sun Mountain we went. An hour afore sundown on a hot day we rolled into Virginia City, queen of the Comstock.
I’d never seen a mining camp before, and was caught off guard by the smell.
Heckahoy, I know smell isn’t the word. It’s a feeling, a sense, an atmosphere that fizzes into you from all directions at once. Something rotten. Whatever in human beings was appetite, was lust, was naked, raw, coarse, it was here. Money, booze, money, whores, money, gambling,
money, violence. I felt a chill. At the same time I was intrigued. That atmosphere is dicey, it’s loony, but it’s kinda fun, too.
Then I looked at Sir Richard and saw his eyes wide, his lips aquiver, his face delighted. I started to think,
Madness,
and then corrected myself. My friend had told us he was a lover of cities—the crowds of Delhi, Cairo, Alexandria, the hubbub, the smells of food, dogs, human bodies. The corruptions—liquors, hashish, opium, fleshpots, all manner of deceptions. It was only natural his eyes should feast and his senses should crave. Natural, and dangerous.
Sun Moon was better for the moment, and we could scout the place. Muley kept asking where to go, and Sir Richard kept saying, “Onward, man, onward—let us see the town.” Muley did. The layout was sloped steep, just like any mountainside. Some streets ran horizontal, others sharp up and down. Muley turned down the mountain and sort of rolled on down. Before long I smelled it and knew what it was before I even saw it. Though I hadn’t seen a Chinatown, I recognized the aroma of ginger, sandalwood, angelica, and spices too mixed to sort out. Soon I could see it—an open-air market with chickens hanging by their feet and many vegetables and spices, yellow-skinned people milling about.
I looked back at Sun Moon, and was glad to see her awake. She looked around at the joss house. She stared at the queer writings of the Chinese on a window. (Next to that stuff it said in English, “Chinese Restaurant.”) She cocked her ear toward the singsong of the language of people in the streets. Did she want to visit Chinatown, I wondered, so she could see folks of her own color? Buy the spices she liked on food? Or did she want to stay as far as she could from the kind that kidnapped her? She lay back in the wagon, her face a mystery to me.
The streets of Chinatown were narrow, and right quick Muley couldn’t go forward. He spent some time getting into a side street and then cracked the blacksnake over the heads of the mules. They pulled uphill, and pulled, and pulled, taking us…
“To the hotel,” said Sir Richard.
“Ain’t no hotel,” says I.
“There is,” answered Sir Richard.
“Then they ain’t gonna let me and Sun Moon in it.”
I had figured without the imperial arrogance of an officer of Her Majesty’s Army.
“I shall require a suite of three connecting rooms, please,” he said to the clerk at the desk.
The ends of the fellow’s mustache twitched. I was standing to the rear, instructed to keep my eyes down.
The clerk flicked his eyes at me like a comment. Back to Sir Richard, he said, “You can pass through the walls easy enough, they’re muslin.”
Sir Richard swept on. “My servants will manage the baggage.” Which was Sir Richard’s war chest.
Now the clerk caught up with things. “How long will you be staying?”
“Perhaps a week, perhaps a month,” he said carelessly, like he wasn’t accustomed to answering to any of the clerk’s ilk.
“A week in advance then?”
Sir Richard handed over some gold coins and I knew we were in.
“One of my servants requires a physician.”
The clerk shut his eyelids halfway, a peculiar mannerism, and nodded. “I’ll send the sawbones around.”
We helped Sun Moon through the lobby up the stairs with our arms under her shoulders. She collapsed onto a bed like clothes with nothing inside. I stared at her fretfully, but Sir Richard said, “If my experience is any guide, the worst is past.”
I pushed through the muslin and saw all our rooms, which were identical, cramped and bare. To think I’d imagined polished mahogany tables, marble fireplaces, ornate candelabra, brocaded chairs, and canopied four-posters.
I looked out window. Wagons jammed the street so tight they couldn’t move. It was the busiest place you ever saw, full of people of every size, shape, language, and accent, all walking and talking peculiarly fast. There was money afoot, and every man meant to grab a share.
We had come to the home of the Comstock Lode, biggest silver strike that ever was. Men had come from the world over to feed at this trough, and some women. It was another part of Flabbergastonia. Despite my worry about Sun Moon, I was oddly happy.
Dr. Reagan strode in and started asking questions without a fare-thee-well. “How many days?” He was the spiffiest-looking doctor you ever saw, slicked-back gray hair, trim goatee, black coat, and white spats.
We counted on our fingers, and Sir Richard said, “Four.”
“How high has her fever been?”
“High, I’d judge,” answered Sir Richard.
“Chills?”
“Yes.”
“Has she complained of aches in the muscles and joints?”
“No.”
“Eruptions on the skin?”
“No.”
All the while the doctor was getting out some instrument with tubes that stuck in his ears and came together in a sort of coin at the other end. He leaned over Sun Moon, half-conscious on the bed, and started to reach inside her shirt.
She clasped her elbows across her bosom, and I clasped my fingers around Dr. Reagan’s elbow.
The doctor jerked his arm away, stood back up, and aimed his peculiar instrument at me. “This is a stethoscope. By amplifying volume,” he said, in a tone like explaining two plus two to a baby, “it permits me to hear the heart and lungs.”
“That’s true,” said Sir Richard. “It’s a standard practice. He needs to place it here and here,” indicating several spots around his upper breastbone.
The doctor glared at me. “Now may I examine her in private?”
We went into the next room. “Would he have reached inside the shirt of a white woman in front of us?” I asked.
“He would have asked us to leave,” said Sir Richard.
After about five minutes the doctor stuck his head through the cloth and waved. We gathered around her. She was sleeping again.
“Probably she is beyond the gravest danger,” said the doctor. “I cannot say what this fever is, there are so many in the West, and they haven’t been studied. They come and go unpredictably. One I’ve treated seems to last about a week, another a month, and another returns over and over.”
He picked up his little bag. “The prognosis is guarded. She needs rest. From time to time she may feel very well, and it would be good for her to go out into the fresh air and sunshine then. The most important part is this. After her fever has subsided, you must wait a week before continuing your journey. A week, to make sure it doesn’t return.” He looked at Sir Richard significantly.