Read The Sisters Brothers Online
Authors: Patrick Dewitt
In the static world of hard facts and figures it was approximately twenty-five minutes before the gold ceased glowing, but the moments that passed while we worked the river were neither brief nor long, were in fact somehow removed from the very restriction or notion of time—we were outside of time, is how it felt to me; our experience was so uncommon we were elevated to a place where such concerns as minutes and seconds were not only irrelevant but did not exist. This feeling, speaking personally, was brought on not only by the wealth our ever-growing piles of gold represented, but also from the thought that this experience was born of one man’s unique mind, and though I had never before pondered the notion of humanity, or whether I was happy or unhappy to be human, I now felt a sense of pride at the human mind, its curiosity and perseverance; I was obstinately glad to be alive, and glad to be myself. The gold from our buckets shone in dense shafts of light, and the branches and limbs of the surrounding trees were bathed in the glow of the river. There was a warm wind pushing down through the valley and off the surface of the water; it kissed my face and caused my hair to dance over my eyes. This moment, this one position in time, was the happiest I will ever be as long as I am living. I have since felt it was too happy, that men are not meant to have access to this kind of satisfaction; certainly it has tempered every moment of happiness I have experienced since. At any rate, and perhaps this is just, it was not something we could hold on to for very long. Everything immediately after this went just as black and wrong as could be imagined. Everything after this was death in one or the other way.
Traveling back across the dam, Morris made a misstep and tumbled into the deepest part of the river. He fell fully under the water and did not come up. The gold had by then ceased glowing and my brother and I were sitting in the sand beside the fire, hurriedly cleaning ourselves with the water and soap Warm had laid out. My discomfort from direct contact, I should say, had been minimal at first; between the coldness of the river, which tingled the flesh, and also my own excitement and fast-moving blood, I was not aware of any untoward sensation. But by the time the gold once again went mute I felt an expanding heat which became my total concern and focus. Now I was moving just as quickly as I could, dousing and scrubbing my hands and legs and feet. Charlie could only work half as fast and I came to his aid once I had washed myself. I had just finished with his legs when I heard Morris shout out. When I looked up he was dropping through the air.
Charlie and I ran to the shore, by which time Warm had moved to the center of the dam, his heavy bucket pulling at his right side. He stared helplessly at the river and Charlie called to him that he should use Morris’s stick, still wedged in the dam, to pull him clear, but Warm did not seem to hear this. He set his bucket beside his feet, and his face was grim. He took a broad step and leapt from the dam into the poisoned waters. He resurfaced with Morris under his arm. Morris was limp but breathing, his eyes closed, mouth hung open, water lapping into his mouth over his tongue.
As they cleared the river, Charlie and I came nearer to help them but Warm shouted that we must not touch them, and we did not. They lay on the sand, panting and spent, and I ran for the water pot, hefting it to the shore. First I doused Morris, who moaned, and then Warm, who thanked me, but with the pot soon empty and the men in need of a more thorough washing, Charlie and I dragged the two upriver, beyond the formula waters, and laid them in the shallows. I fetched the raw soap and we knelt at their sides, scrubbing the men and splashing them and telling them all would soon be well, but their discomfort only grew and they became increasingly vocal about their pain. Now they were writhing and tensing and shuddering as though they were being slowly immolated, and indeed I suppose that is just what they were being.
We pulled them clear of the water. I took the last of the numbing medicine and covered their faces and scalps with it. Their eyes were coated in a gray-white film, and Morris said he could not see. Then Warm said he could not see. Morris began to weep, and Warm searched out his hand. They lay together holding hands and crying and moaning and drifting away and then suddenly, alertly screaming—both of them at once as though their pains were synchronized. I gave Charlie a secret look that asked: What should we do? His secret response: Nothing. And he was right. Short of killing the men, there was not a thing in the world we might do for them.
Morris died at dawn. Charlie and I left him on the shore and carried Warm into his tent. He was delirious, and as we laid him on his cot he said, ‘What did we pull, Morris? What time is it?’ Charlie and I did not attempt to answer; we let him alone to sleep or to die. The sky was low with clouds and we slept beside the fire through to the afternoon. When it began drizzling rain over us I sat up and noticed two things at once: Morris was no longer newly dead but dead-dead, his body stiff and cruel and bloodless and somehow light or weightless, resembling a piece of driftwood more than a man; and second, the beavers had climbed out of the water and died on the shore just shy of our camp. That is to say, nine dead beavers in a line on the sand. There was something decorative about this, but also ominous or forbidding. They lay on their bellies, their eyes closed, with the leader in the center, slightly ahead of the others. I did not like to think of the group emerging silently from the waters, marching toward me and my brother as we slept. Did they have it in their beaver minds to swarm and attack us? To ruin us just as we had them with our evil man-made concoctions? Thankfully, I would never know the answer to this.
I felt badly that Morris had died so soon after making the decision to correct his life and abandon the Commodore. I wondered if during his final moments he felt his death was deserved, if he wished he had never left his post, if he passed with compunction and disappointment. I hoped not, but thought he likely had, and I hated the Commodore for his impact then. I hated him as vividly as I have ever hated anyone, and I made a particular decision about him. The decision did not make me feel better but I knew it would eventually, and so it put the matter mostly to rest for the present, despite a lingering bitterness, that our night of shared glory had ended in such a tangle of grotesqueness and failure.
I stood and inspected my legs. Hours before, as I had dropped away to sleep, I was fearful I would awaken to find them covered in the liquid-filled blisters, but there was nothing of the kind. From the midthigh down the skin looked as though it had been burned by an afternoon in the sun; they were warm to the touch and there was a degree of discomfort but it was not at all like Morris’s legs had been, and I did not believe my condition would worsen with time.
Charlie was asleep on his back, eyes wide open, and with a full erection pressing against the front of his pants, which despite my not wanting to know about the thing I took as a sign of wellness. I thought, Who knows in what extraordinary form good tidings might arrive in our lives? I pulled back one of his cuffs and saw that his legs looked just as mine did, red and without hair, but healthy. His hand, however, was much for the worse, with his purple fingers threatening to burst they were so plumped up. The sight of this, along with the beavers, and also Morris made me lonesome; I wished to wake up Charlie to speak with him but decided it best to let him rest.
It occurred to me I had not cleaned my teeth since San Francisco, and I crouched at the waterline upriver, scrubbing my tongue and gums and teeth and spitting out the foam like buckshot across the surface of the water. I heard Warm’s voice and looked back at the tent. ‘Hermann?’ I called, but he said nothing more. I moved to the beavers and hefted them one by one, holding them at their tails and flinging them into the water south of the dam. They were heavier than I expected them to be, and the texture of their tails did not feel like the appendage of a living being, but something crafted by man. Charlie had sat up to watch as I tossed out the final few. In spite of the peculiarity of my work, he said nothing about it, and in fact he looked somewhat bored. Forgetting his injury, he reached up to swat a fly from his face and winced at the pain of his fingers knocking together. I tossed out the last beaver and returned to sit beside him. He attempted to unwrap his dressing but it had stuck and dried to his gummy flesh, and when he peeled the cloth back, along with it came a layer of skin from his knuckles and fingers. It did not look to hurt him, any more than he was already hurting that is, but it frightened and disgusted him, and me, also. I said I thought we should soak the entire thing in what was left of the alcohol before removing the dressing and he answered that he would rather wait until after he ate. I made us a small breakfast of coffee and beans. I took Warm a plate but he was sleeping, and I did not wake him. His entire body was red and purple and the blisters on his legs were doubled in number and all of them had burst, coating his skin in the brown-yellow liquid. His toes were black and a death-smell emanated from him; I thought he would likely pass over before the sun set. When I came away from the tent, Charlie was pouring the alcohol into one of Warm’s pots, and there was another pot of boiling water on the fire with a cotton shirt dancing in its roiling bubbles. He had taken the shirt from Morris’s saddlebag, he said, and looked to me for a reproach, but of course I had none to give him. He submerged his hand in the alcohol and a fat, Y-shaped vein rose up and pulsed on his forehead. He needed to scream but did not; when the pain subsided he held his hand before me and I removed the dressing. The flesh came away as before, and his hand as I saw it was ruined. Charlie looked at it but said nothing. I pulled Morris’s shirt from the water with a stick; once it was cooled I wrapped the hand, covering the fingers this time, that we would not have to see them and think about what they meant.
I decided to bury Morris, away from the river where the sand and soil met. This took me several hours and was accomplished with a short-handled spade of Warm’s. I did not and still do not understand the reason for this tool’s existence in comparison with its long-handled counterpart. I will say that digging a grave with it was absolutely a self-torture. I did the work alone, except that Charlie helped me drag the body up the beach and drop it into the hole, but mostly my brother sat away by himself, and twice he walked upriver far enough that I lost sight of him. I did not press him, and he remained attendant for the actual filling in of the grave.
We had Morris’s diary on hand (why did we not return this to him when he was living? It had not occurred to us, is why), and I struggled with the question of whether or not I should bury it with him. I asked Charlie his opinion on the matter but he said he did not have one. In the end I decided to hold on to the book, my thought being that his story was a unique one, and so best to keep his words aboveground where they might be shared and admired. It was a graceless and miserable thing to see Morris’s crooked body at the bottom of that pit. He was filthy and purple and obscene to look at. It was no longer Morris but I spoke to the thing as though it was, saying, ‘I am sorry, Morris. I know you would have preferred a more stylish affair. Well, you impressed us with your show of character. For whatever it’s worth, you have my brother’s and my respect.’ Charlie was unmoved by my speech. I was not sure he had been paying attention enough to hear it. I was fearful I had been overly dramatic. Public speaking, it goes without saying, was not something I typically engaged in. Recalling my
bomboniere
from the Mayfield bookkeeper, I removed this from my coat pocket and dropped it into the pit, with Morris—a measure of grandness, was my idea. It unfurled across his chest, shining and blue and fine. I asked Charlie if we should mark the spot with a cross and he said I might ask Warm. When I entered the tent I found Warm awake and somewhat alert. ‘Hermann,’ I said. He blinked his milky eyes and ‘looked’ in my general area. ‘Who’s there?’ he asked.
‘It’s Eli. How are you feeling? I am happy to hear your voice.’
‘Where is Morris?’
‘Morris has died. We have buried him up from the river. Do you think we should mark his grave or leave him be?’
‘Morris . . . died?’ He began to shake his head back and forth, then to silently weep, and I went away from the tent.
‘Well?’ said Charlie.
‘I will ask again later.’
I thought, I have had enough of grown men crying.
We combined the entire pull of gold, which between our four-man effort from the night before and Morris and Warm’s initial two-man affair made for near an entire bucket’s worth. This represented a fortune and I could scarcely lift the thing of my own strength. I asked Charlie to lift it but he said he did not want to. I told him it was very heavy and he said he believed me.
In a fit of practicality, and with my thoughts moving inevitably to the future, I began to look over Morris’s horse. He was a sturdy animal, and despite a pang of guilt I put my saddle on him and rode him up and down through the river shallows. He was a smooth rider and something of a gentleman. I had no particular feeling for him but I thought it was likely to follow if we spent any amount of time together. I decided I would win him over with kindness and sugar and trust. ‘I am going to adopt Morris’s horse,’ I said to Charlie.
‘Oh,’ he answered.
Warm was too unwell to transport, and anyway I did not think he could be saved even if we moved him. He was scarcely aware of my nearness but I did not want to leave him to die alone. Charlie brought up the fact that we did not know the recipe for the formula and I said I knew that and what did he think we should do, torture the dying man for every last instruction and ingredient? His tone was somber, and he said, ‘Don’t talk to me like that, Eli. I’ve lost my work hand in this. I am only telling you what is on my mind. After all, Warm may very well want us to know it.’ He was looking away as he said it; and I had never heard him speak this way, even when we were boys. I thought he sounded something like me, actually. He had never been afraid before, that I could remember, but now he was, and he did not know what it meant or what to make of it. I told him I was sorry I had jumped on him about the formula and he accepted my apology. Warm called out my name, and Charlie and I entered his tent. ‘Yes, Hermann?’ I said.
He was flat on his back, his eyes directed upward at the crest of the tent. His chest was rising and falling unnaturally quickly, and he was wheezing and breathing heavily. He told me, ‘I am ready to dictate Morris’s tombstone.’ I fetched a pencil and paper and knelt by his side; when I told him to go ahead he nodded, cleared his throat, and spit straight into the air, a thick globule that doubled back in a graceful arc and landed on the center of his forehead. I do not think he noticed this, or perhaps he did not care. Either way, he did not clean himself or ask to be cleaned. He said: ‘Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood—weak blood, diluted—and their memories aren’t worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean. Most people are imbeciles, really, but Morris was not like this. He should have lived longer. He had more to give. And if there is a God he is a son of a bitch.’ Warm paused. He spit again, this time to the side, onto the ground. ‘There is no God,’ he said, and closed his eyes. I did not know if he wanted the last sentence included on the tombstone and I did not ask, for I had no plans to transfer the speech, as it was clear to me he was not completely in his own mind any longer. But I promised Warm I would write it out just as he had said it, and I believe this consoled him. He thanked Charlie and I and we left the tent to sit before the fire. Charlie, gripping the wrist of his wounded hand, said, ‘Don’t you think it might be time to go now?’
I shook my head. ‘We can’t leave Warm to die alone.’
‘It could take him days to die.’
‘Then we will stay here for days.’
This was all that was said on the matter; and this was the beginning of our new brotherhood, with Charlie never again to be the one so far ahead, and me following clumsily behind, which is not to say the roles were reversed, but destroyed. Afterward, and even today, we are careful in our relationship, as though fearful of upsetting each other. In terms of our previous manner of correspondence I cannot say why it vanished suddenly then, snuffed as it was like a candle. Of course the moment it passed I became fond of it in a sorrowful kind of way, at least in theory or maudlin memory. But the question has entered my mind so many times: Whatever became of my bold brother? I can never say, only that he was gone and has yet to return.
As it happened, anyway, we would not have to wait days for Warm to pass, but hours. Night had fallen and Charlie and I were lying beside the fire, feeling very lazy and heavy, when Warm spoke in a wispy voice, ‘Hello?’ Charlie said he did not want to go, and I entered the tent alone.
Warm was breathing his last. He knew this and was frightened. I thought, Will he turn religious at the end, and plead for a speedy entry into heaven? But no, the man was too firm in his nonbeliefs for any last-minute cowardice. He did not wish to speak with me but asked after Morris, having forgotten the man was dead.
‘Why is he not here?’ Warm gasped.
‘He died this morning, Hermann, don’t you remember?’
‘Morris? Died?’ His forehead accordioned and his mouth parted, fixed open in anguish, and I stared at his gums, shiny with blood. He turned away, inhaling choppily, haltingly, as though the passage were partially blocked. I shifted my feet and he turned to follow the sound, asking, ‘Who’s there? Is that Morris?’
I told him, ‘It is Morris.’
‘Oh, Morris! Where have you been all this time?’ His tone was so deeply relieved and moved, I felt a tightening of emotion in my throat.
‘I was gathering firewood.’
Warm, invigorated: ‘What’s that? Firewood? Foraging fuel? That’s the idea. We will have a bonfire tonight, light up the entire operation. All the better to sort through our buckets of fortune, eh?’
‘All the better,’ I agreed.
‘What about the others?’ he wondered. ‘Where have they run off to? That Charlie doesn’t much like the hard work, I have noticed.’
‘No, he would rather stand by.’
‘Not much for cleaning up, is he?’
‘No, he’s not.’
‘But he has turned out a good man, you can’t say otherwise.’
‘He’s a good man, Hermann, you were right about it.’
‘And the other, Eli, where has he gone?’
‘He is out there somewhere.’
‘Making his rounds? Securing the camp?’
‘He is in the darkness, out.’
In a lower tone he said, ‘Well, I don’t know how you feel about it, but I have come to like that one quite a lot, actually.’
‘Yes. And I know he likes you, too, Hermann.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I said I know he likes you, too.’
‘Do I hear a trace of jealousy in your voice?’
‘No!’
‘I’m very flattered by it! All these men crowding around, and all of them so decent and honorable. I felt such the outcast, and for such a long time.’ At these words, his lips curled in bittersweet sadness, and he closed his eyes; tears bloomed from the closed corners of his lids and I wiped these away with my thumbs. Warm kept his eyes shut after this. They would not open again. He said, ‘Morris, if I shouldn’t make it through the night, I want you to carry on with the formula.’
‘Better not to think of it. You should only rest, now.’
‘I had an idea that if you were to coat your flesh with pork fat prior to submersion, that would likely reduce the damage.’
‘It is a fine idea, Hermann.’
He gasped. He said, ‘Well, I feel we have known each other a long while!’
‘I feel just the same.’
‘And I’m sorry about your dying before.’
‘I am all right, now.’
‘I wanted to help you. I thought we could be friends.’
‘We are friends.’
‘I’m,’ he said. ‘I’m.’ He opened his mouth widely and there came a foreign noise from deep within his insides, as though a solid piece of him had cracked or popped. What was this? I did not think it hurt him, or at least he made no sound of pain. I held my hand to his chest and felt his heart flutter and drop. A column of air pushed from his mouth and his body lurched and grew still, and this was where the clock stopped for Hermann Kermit Warm. His right arm fell from the cot and I lifted it back up. When it fell again I left it to hang and exited the tent. I found Charlie sitting fireside, and all was the same as when I had left him save for one conspicuous detail.