Benjamin Percy - The Dead Lands

Lewis brought the journal with him to chronicle, author the new world. Map the landscape. Sketch whatever flora and fauna he observed. Such as this plant, with its thin-jointed, odd-angled stalks topped by purple flowers in the summer, now wilted to a bony brown and bristling with frost. He lifts his pen and the ink freezes and he blows on the tip to warm it.

Every day, he has another set of questions for Gawea, and though she once found him pestering, she now feels a kinship in their secret sharing. He tells her he has come to understand that knowledge is not enough. Observation is not enough. He no longer wishes to be a scholar, a gatherer, a chronicler, but a creator, too. The same impulse that drove him to tinker with inventions now compels him to tinker with the world.

“What are you writing?” Clark says.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just playing around with some theories.” Then he notices all their eyes on him. They want to know. They want something from him in the same way he wants something from Gawea. He looks to her, as if for permission, and she says, “Go ahead. You’re the teacher now.”

The wood pops and the wind hushes and Lewis licks his lips several times before he finds the words he wants. “Did you know that humans used to bite like other primates? Their incisors clipped, edge to edge, the bottom and the top coming together to tear and gnash. Then, somewhere around the late eighteenth century, two things happened. People began to braise and pound and cook their meat. And to slice up their food to pop into their mouths with forks. Almost immediately the European population developed an overbite, their incisors now coming together like scissor blades.”

Clark says, “What does that have to do with anything?”

“The body changes. People adapt, sometimes in an instant.”

He holds his journal upright for them to see. Next to the sketch of the plant he has written down its common designation — skeleton weed — and then its scientific identity— Lygodesmia texana —and then its chemical and cellular structure, and then he knows it in a way he never has before, like a lover undressed and drawn to bed, a name whispered in an ear, an accommodating body, submissive to his wants. “Gawea taught me this.”

He looks at her and smiles and she smiles back.

“When you know something, really know it, its chemicals, its strings and charges, its clustered atoms, in essence you know its secrets, and when you know someone’s secrets, they answer when called.”

Clark says, “You ask, they answer.”

“Pretty much.”

Gawea says, “They don’t always answer.”

Everyone huddles down into their blankets and no one looks particularly convinced.

“Show them,” Gawea says. “Show them with the weed.”

In a five-foot ring around the fire, the snow has mostly melted. He holds out a hand to the skeleton weed, as if in offering, his fingertips spotted with ink. He looks at Gawea questioningly and she says, “You can do it.”

He closes his eyes. The arm shivers from the cold or the effort. After what feels like many minutes it listens. Greening. Blistering with a lavender bud.

York’s eyes seem to grow wider. The doctor shakes her head and sucks her teeth. Clark’s face is impassive, her head crowned by a red nimbus of hair. Colter might be grinning, but it’s difficult to tell with his torn cheek. Reed has his head in his hands, lost in some private darkness.

The fire snaps and hisses, the wood wet. The wind rises, scuttling leaves, curling snakes of snow around them. “It’s magic,” York says.

“No,” Gawea says. “Magic is just a word people use for what they can’t understand. You should know that better than anyone. You and your tricks.”

York flinches, hurt.

Lewis tucks his journal and ink and pen away. “My mother once said that she knew when I was in trouble. If I fell and scraped a knee, or if the other boys picked on me”—here he looks at Clark meaningfully—“or girls. If something happened to me, she always knew. She found me once, you know. That time you hog-tied me and hung me from a balcony? She found me and she cut me down. She didn’t carry knives but she had a knife in her pocket that day. As if she knew she would need it. Every parent has a story like this, and I suppose it makes sense. We are them. We are made from them. In this same way, everything is born of something else, everything twinned.”

Gawea doesn’t know why she’s being so generous. Maybe it’s the enormity of the night, the way it seems to crush them together, make them one instead of many. She says, “You’ve heard the saying? We’re all made of stardust? We’re all made of stardust. We’re all made of the same thing.”

A few of them look up, as if to consult the sky for an answer, but the night and the clouds muddle whatever they might hope to find.

“In a way it’s true,” Lewis says. “And once Gawea helped me recognize that, to see how everything is connected, it was a little like growing another eye. Or another hand, another nose. Another level of sense. And with that sense comes the ability to manipulate.”

Gawea can’t help it. She likes it — she does — when he talks about her admiringly. It makes her feel like she matters inside of someone instead of outside, more than a mere guide leading them through a maze.

For a while there is only the fire snapping; then York says, “I hear you, but it’s just a bunch of words.”

Everyone is staring at the skeleton weed, now unfurling into a purple bloom, a small shoot of life in the season of dying. The wind is ceaseless, whistling around the edges of the hill and whipping up snow. The fire bends and flattens, struggling to right itself against the gusts.

It is then that the body falls.

There is a crack — as the logs break beneath its weight — followed by a concussion of air filled with embers that sting their exposed faces. They cry out and roll away and try to calm their minds, not knowing at first what has happened, not even knowing where they are, still caught up in the unreality of Lewis’s demonstration.

It is a deer, they discover. A buck with a sizable rack of antlers. At first they think it might have, in confusion, in the whirling snow, wandered off the edge of the ledge. Then they hold a flaming log closer and examine its body and see its throat torn away.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Gawea wished them all dead, considered them an annoyance, an impediment. Now she is the first one to reach for a gun, eager to defend them. She remembers what Burr said about how she might discover camaraderie, something to fight her perpetual loneliness, and how resistant she was to that suggestion. They need her — that is clear — but now she feels, with some reluctance, she might need them too. Could she call them friends? Was that the right word? It implied a valued closeness at odds with where and why she led them. If only they could remain everlastingly in motion, if only their journey would never end. Because when it ended, this would end, the fond nervous connection she feels to a huddle of bodies shivering in the night.

She does not sleep and nothing comes out of the snowy dark. But she knows the danger is out there. And she knows if it does not find them, she will eventually lead them to it.

REED’S EYES FOCUS on nothing. He won’t speak unless pressed, responding yes or no with the barest whisper. He whimpers when dreaming. He waves people away when they come near. His eyes, when closed, look as black as shadows, as if two holes have been bored into his head — and when open they are no less disturbing, threaded with capillaries. His skin is pale, so sunken and drawn against his skull it appears to have given way to bone. He often reaches a hand into his pack to fondle the tiny coffin he keeps nested there.