Rupert Thomson - Air and Fire

Use the darkness while it lasted. In the light there would be suffering. Out into the land he rode, the dust and plants still cooling from the day. Out along the tracks that he had put down earlier. Into the desert with the mission bell ringing in the air behind him, a sound as rich and round as fruit.

She’s dead. I buried her.

Was it right or wrong, what he had done? It had felt right. It would look wrong. It was her wish, and yet it amounted to a treachery. He had been sent by the French to find her, bring her back. In his faithfulness he had betrayed them. In telling her the truth he would be telling them a lie. But he knew where his loyalties lay. Not with those doomed people standing on the road. Not with them. He was beginning to understand his father. His honesty had its roots in his father’s many deceptions; his consideration in his father’s utter fecklessness. And yet –

I buried her.

One fact that pulled in two directions. The spirit that divides against itself. Some might argue that he had committed a crime. But crime ran in the family. Especially the kind of crime that had two sides to it, that cut two ways. Look at my father, he would say. Well, I’m my father’s son.

He felt her against his back, and turned sharply to see nothing. Other times he felt her slipping and reached behind him. His hand met empty air. But he could not shake her presence. It was as real as the mule was — her cheek against his shoulderblades, her head by his elbow. He saw black water rippling. He saw her eyes float free like leaves. The face they left behind was smooth and mad. There came a time when he no longer dared turn round.

A jackal barked in the distance. One soprano cough, then another. The volcano loomed, a bulk against the sky. He had to keep it on his left. Every once in a while his hand passed almost absent-mindedly across the pouch where he had put the gold. The night grew softer, another presence, warm and close, as if he were lying in bed and a face had lowered over him. Eyes patched with shadows. A needle like a splinter of the moon between his father’s fingers. He cried out. The desert took the cry and swallowed it. Towards the end his father had begun to believe in his own punishment. All his misfortunes had been earned. Any apparent fulfilment of a dream was only another persecution in disguise. Hope became a poison to him; he lanced the place inside himself where it had lived, and drained it out of him like pus.

Wilson lifted his eyes. The day was breaking, wedges of rose and pale-yellow in the eastern skies. He was not fooled by it. There had been another morning once. A morning of sardonic beauty. Dawn on the Natchez Trace, some thirty miles south of Vicksburg. His father up and whistling. One hand in the mane of a stolen chestnut mare, the other on his hip. A fire crackling. A twist of steam above the kettle. They were only a few days into September, but the air had a fall snap to it. The smell of frost’s first explorations in scorched summer grass.

And then the trees moved. Gave birth to men with rifles. One man wore a star that made him God. Two others took his father and flung him face-down in the grass.

The Marshal stood over him, legs wide apart, as if he might open the flap of his pants and piss.

‘Pharaoh, you done fooled with the law.’

For some reason his father was grinning. The butt of a gun soon wiped that off.

‘Ain’t the first time,’ the Marshal said, ‘but it sure as hell is going to be the last.’

He was right about that.

They tried and sentenced his father so quickly that the sun did not even change position. Right there, among the soft colours of dawn and the birdsong and the fall’s first frost. And him still kneeling in the grass, as if someone had told him he was in a church.

When the punishment had been decided on — a matter of one question, followed by a nod from the Marshal; it was the usual one — his father was hoisted to his feet. The two men ripped his collar clean off and split his shirt open on his back. Then they pushed him up against a live oak, face into the bark. Tied rope to one wrist, passed it around the trunk and tied it to the other wrist. Then they stood back.

‘Don’t he just love that tree,’ one said.

‘Ain’t seen a woman in a while,’ said another. ‘What’s a man to do?’

There was a third man who was not laughing. His pale eyes raked the grass. ‘What about the boy?’

The Marshal shook his head. ‘Boy don’t need no whipping. Be a lesson to him, watch his pa.’

Be a lesson all right.

The darkness had drained away. Up came the sun again. Seemed it was everywhere that he was heading. Rose gone now, all yellow gone. Just glare. Thorns tearing at his legs. The land was trying to weigh him down with tools of its own. Tied its heat and drought to him. Tied it inside as well as out. They had no water left. He chewed viznaga pulp instead. Through glass air he saw an arrow tree. Its fruit was blindness. He would not sleep just yet. Would not sink down. Just one more mile. And when he thought that mile was done, one more. Sun on face and hoofs on stones. Mile after mile she clung to his back, murmuring her own dead language.

His head lifted suddenly. He must have fallen asleep again. They were not even moving. Just standing in the heat.

He dug his heels into the mule’s flanks. She took a step. He dug his heels in once more. He no longer knew the why of it. Not the French, not the gold. Not the ghost he carried on his back. But on they went, across the barren plain, their shadow slowly overtaking them.

The sun was high when they cut his father down. But he had not been looking at his father. He could not. Instead he had been looking at the man who was sitting by the fire. Staring at the man. A tightness reaching from his stomach to his throat. A tightness that was like an ache. The man had a length of metal, not much longer than a toasting fork, and he was holding it over the flames. He watched it carefully, head tilted on one side, eyes narrowed against the smoke, turning it and turning it in the hot part of the fire, as if he were cooking some tender morsel and it had to be done just right. The two other men brought his father across the grass. His father breathing hard, as if he had been running. But his legs dragged, and the toes of his boots pointed at the ground. They took his shooting hand, told him to make a fist and raise his thumb. The Marshal stood some distance off, among the trees. He was staring out across a stretch of open country, a cigar wedged horizontal in his mouth. Smoke curled, almost slavish, past his face. He did not acknowledge it. The two men held his father by the upper arms as the rod was lifted, glowing, from the fire. A quick hot sound: one raindrop landing in a pan of fat. His father struggling, and then still.

The Marshal stared out across the open country.

Be a lesson.

His shadow lengthened on the ground. He was heading for a gap in the mountains, a gap he thought he recognised. Looked like the space between fingers and a thumb. But the plain laid out in front, of him seemed endless. Mind the only thing moving. Turning and turning in a fire. Man on a doorstep, fat in a pan. He was seeing white hills, the Cajon Pass in February. Ice hanging from the bridle bits. Teeth chattered in your mouth as if your head were bone and nothing else. You could not get the shiver out of you. And riding north, towards Alaska. Worse. The winter plains, smooth as ironed linen. Soot-grease smeared beneath your eyes against the glare of snow. You had to paint your canvas overcoat to keep the east wind out. Seemed like a kind of heaven to him now. Mind turning in a fire. A quick hot sound. The smell of sealed meat. A ghost clung to his back, delirious. Her shoes swung from the saddlebow. He could not look. The hoofs of their four horses dwindling, his father lying in the grass. His back a mesh of red against the green. And they had written on his thumb. Letters that would bind their lives together. ‘Happy Times,’ his father would always say. ‘That’s what it stands for. Happy Times.’ He could not look. Her laces threaded neatly through the eyeholes. Her heels shaped like sheaves of wheat. He had helped his father to his feet, laid cool dock leaves on the wounds. His father’s eyes more painful than his back. Grapes without their skins. A layer gone, the nerves exposed. All the hope drained out of him. All the pain of that moment facing out.