Jim Harrison - Legends of the Fall

The schooner headed north through the South China Sea stopping at Manila for fresh supplies and water. The opium courier was panicked at that infamous port, so Tristan set Asgaard and the two Cubans armed with hunting rifles on deck. He then went down to his cabin and wrote a short but fatal note to Susannah (Your husband is forever dead, please marry another) which he posted with the captain of a fast steamer he met when he and the Mexican began their binge in Manila. Just before dawn on the way back to the ship they were set upon by four thugs near the dock and might have died were it not for the Mexican disarming one of the assailants while Tristan attacked the largest man. The Mexican cleanly beheaded one with the man's machete and the others, save the one Tristan was strangling, fled, but not before Tristan received a severe leg wound, a deep slice across the side of his knee which cut the tendon. The Mexican applied a tourniquet and they made their way singing back to the dinghy which they rowed drunkenly to the mooring. Asgaard cleaned and sewed up the wound with catgut improvising knots around the tendon. The wound had healed by the time they reached Hawaii though ever after Tristan walked with the trace of a limp.

No one but his far-flung crew knows much of Tristan's next six years except for a few details, all the more teasing because of their incompleteness: we know he reached San Francisco then headed south to Panama hoping to pass through the new canal but the landslide at the Gaitland Cut had temporarily closed the new passage so he rounded the Horn and had a small steam auxiliary put in at Rio. Then the schooner had a relatively stable three years in the Caribbean working as an island trader ranging from Bermuda to Martinique over to Cartagena. Tristan bought a small ranch on the Isla de Pinos then set off for Dakar on another escapade for the British government in the last year of the war. He rounded Good Hope returning to Mombasa where he took aboard a Galla woman for a week but she feared the rocking of the schooner and was put ashore with a small sack of gold in Zanzibar. He was repeating his ivory and opium run as he made his way again east to Singapore, Manila, Hawaii and San Francisco, down through the open canal late in 1921 and thence back to Havana where Asgaard and the rest of the crew left him except for the Mexican. He spent a few months on his ranch and when he returned to Havana he learned of the death of his grandfather five years before and that his father had suffered a stroke and that he wished him to come home so that they might see each other before Ludlow died. Tristan and the Mexican hired another crew and made their way to Vera Cruz where the Mexican now had enough money to bounty his life with power. Tristan put the schooner in the Mexican's care and journeyed north by horse and train arriving in April of 1922, still sunblasted, limping, unconsoled and looking at the world with the world's coldest eye.

It is not for us to comprehend Ludlow's speechless delight when he and One Stab sat on the porch listening to the symphony on the radio one warm April afternoon and saw Tristan's horse picking its way around the melting snowdrifts in the road and up through the gate. Tristan jumped from the horse and caught his father falling into his arms from the porch and he repeated father over and over but the old man was truly speechless now because of his stroke. One Stab stared straight upward and felt the first tears of a life so rough as to be incomprehensible as Ludlow's delight. One Stab began singing. Decker ran from the corral and Tristan and Decker tried to lift each other at once. Pet came from the kitchen hearing the noise and tried to bow as Tristan embraced her. A girl of sixteen with a long pigtail wearing men's clothing came around the corner carrying a bridle: windburned but not quite Indian in her darkness. She stared at Tristan who caught her glance but then she walked away. Decker said it was his daughter Isabel but she was shy.

Pet killed and dressed a spring lamb, built a fire behind the kitchen and began roasting it. They sat on the porch drinking but mostly silent. Ludlow wrote questions on a slate board with chalk. His hair was white but his carriage erect. Decker looked off in the distance and explained that Tristan's mother was in Rome, then paused adding as a false afterthought, that Alfred and Susannah had been married the year before and were on an extended though belated honeymoon tour through Europe and would be at Cap d'Antibes for the summer. Decker was relieved and drank deeply when Tristan seemed unconcerned. Tristan walked a circle on the lawn and said he wanted to take a quick ride and hoped they wouldn't be too drunk by dinner.

He rode quickly up the creek that led to the spring in the box canyon. The remnant of a snowdrift covered Samuel's grave and a magpie flew off the stone as he arrived and unhorsed. He watched the invisible tracery in the air the bird made climbing to the canyon top above his head. He decided he wasn't good at graves because the grave under his feet was merely snow and earth and a stone dulled by the weather. On the way back to the house he watched Isabel grooming three spring foals in the sunlight. Decker called her Two to avoid confusion with Tristan's mother. He asked her where the badger was and she said the animal disappeared but his children still lived up behind the orchard. She took him into the barn and showed him an Airedale puppy Ludlow had bought for her birthday. Though only ten weeks old the pup advanced growling on Tristan and he swept it up gradually calming it until it chewed on his ear. Then he stared at her closely until she flushed and looked down at her feet.

At dinner Ludlow carved the lamb ceremoniously, then wrote "tell us tales" on his slate board and passed it to Tristan. Oddly, and like many men compelled to adventure with no interest in the notion of adventure but only a restlessness of the body and spirit, Tristan did not see anything particularly extraordinary about his past seven years. But he had an extravagantly accurate idea of what the table wanted to hear so he talked on for his father: the beheading of the Filipino thug, a typhoon off the Marshall Islands, an anaconda he bought while drunk in Recife that wound itself so tightly around the mast that it could not be detached until they offered it a piglet, the beauty of some of the horses he left in care of his crew hands in Cuba, and how some of the citizens in Singapore eat dogs, which shocked everyone at the table except One Stab who asked Tristan about Africa. After dinner he distributed some presents from his saddlebags including a necklace of lion's teeth which he placed around One Stab who set off a few days later on a three-day ride to Fort Benton to show the necklace to One Who Sees As A Bird. Tristan impulsively gave a ruby ring meant for his mother to Two, placing it on her ring finger and kissing her on the forehead. The table was silent and Pet started to interfere but Decker calmed her.

Later that night after everyone had gone to bed Tristan walked far out in the pasture in the moonlight: the snow patches were a ghostly white and far to the west he could see the even whiter peaks of the Rockies. He listened to the coyotes yelping and chattering in pursuit and occasionally a short howl. Back near the corral he heard the puppy crying and went into the barn and picked it up. He took it in the house and up to his room where he put it on the mule deer skin and built a nest around it with a comforter against the chill of the night. Tristan slept then until the middle of the night when the puppy growled and in the moonlight from the window he saw Two standing at the foot of the bed. He reached for her hand and after a while she joined his deep and dreamless sleep, wound about each other with all loneliness faded at last from the earth.