Outlawed(15)
Toward nightfall, I heard wooden slats beneath the horse’s hooves, and peeked out the back of the wagon to see that we were crossing a wide, calm river. Past the far bank—powdery gravel that crunched as we passed—the land began to climb. Red rocks jumped out of the prairie at strange angles, and large birds wheeled between the hills, dark above, light below, and songless. The road grew narrow and poorly kept, and for hours the wagon shuddered over rock and scrub in land so wild I saw not even a fence post to mark a man’s claim to it. Finally we stopped, and the bookseller turned in his seat and said, “This is where we part company.”
I looked out. Behind the wagon was all darkness, the only light coming from a cat’s claw moon.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” I said.
“They don’t allow me to approach their camp,” the bookseller said. “Usually they send a scout up to the road to meet me. Tonight they didn’t. You’ll have to find your way down there on your own.”
“How do I even know which way to go?” I asked.
“Well, it’s not that way,” he said, pointing back to the road behind us. “So it’s probably that way.”
He let me take two strips of pronghorn jerky and a handful of dried buffalo berries.
“Baby Jesus keep you,” he said, not unkindly, and then I was walking in the blackness.
After a while my eyes adjusted, and I saw that to my left the roadside fell away into a silkier, deeper black, a valley whose depth I couldn’t measure. I kept close to the right, on the rocky margin where the road met the hill. I heard the hoofbeats of the bookseller’s horse in the distance, then nothing but the sawing of summer locusts and the pounding of my own blood in my ears.
The road seemed to wind down toward the valley floor, and after a while the hillside gave way to flatter land. I felt a chill in the air and a change in the shape of the darkness; I saw the stars reflected in the still surface of a pond. I had not had a drink of water since the bookseller had come back from the roadhouse that morning. I knelt with cupped hands. The pond tasted like dirt but I drank deep. I sat on the soft ground by the water’s edge and ate the berries and one of the strips of jerky. A frog hopped away from me, its croak like a plucked string. Then I heard the rustling of something much larger in the tall grass, something that scared more frogs into the water and sent a duck flapping and quacking into the air.
Mama always said wild animals were afraid of human voices, so I shouted and waved my arms. But in town the only wild animals were black bears and the occasional coyote—out here could be grizzlies and wolves and mountain lions. I had been walking for what felt like hours and I had seen no sign so far of any human life. I began to wonder if the bookseller had lied to me, if it had always been his plan to collect my books, drop me off in the middle of nowhere, and move on.
“Hello?” I called.
Nothing but a scuffling in the scrub near the road, more night animals fleeing or approaching. I began to run. I called and ran and ran and called until my throat was hoarse and my legs were spent. Then I knelt on the road—by now a horse track just wide enough for my two knees together—and gasped and ate the second piece of dry jerky, and ran and called some more.
My throat was scraped raw and my whole body aching when, out in the black to the left of the road, I heard someone playing a fiddle. The music was lively and dreamy at the same time, a tune I’d never heard but that reminded me of stories Mama told us when we were very little, about pirate ships in the time before America, about elves and goblins meeting at midnight in the woods. I was afraid my senses might have left me and I might be dreaming or imagining the sound, but with nothing else to guide me I had no choice but to follow the song.
I scrambled down a steep hill and through thick brush that scratched my legs, but the fiddle grew louder, and soon I saw a flicker of firelight in the distance and even heard voices shouting and laughing. A few minutes more and I saw the fire, tall as a man and wide as a wagon, and the fiddler, standing in its light, eyes shut and face upturned as though in prayer, bow hand moving furiously. The fiddler was black-haired and brown-skinned, and garlanded head to toe with wildflowers, black-eyed Susans and bluets and sweet William. I took a few steps nearer, not sure how or if I should announce myself, and against a tree not ten yards from my shoulder I saw two people kissing and touching each other with a hunger I remembered only dimly from the early days of my marriage. The woman was short and wide-hipped, with thick dark hair and a crown made of flowers. Her lover was tall and slim and pale, his fingers in her hair almost delicate in their movements.
I ducked behind a tree; I knew enough not to surprise a pair of kissing strangers in a place I’d never been. Peeking out around the trunk, I could see the shadows of dancers cast giant-size by the firelight on the ground below, and then the dancers themselves: a tall man in a buckskin jacket trimmed with bells, and a woman in a calico dress with her hair in two neat braids. The woman, in particular, was a masterful dancer, leaping and twirling in her partner’s arms and then, when he released her, turning a series of backflips that had even the lovers turning around to cheer. When she finished her acrobatic routine she landed as easily on both feet as though she’d been playing hopscotch, her face in the light of the bonfire both serious and full of joy.
Finally, sitting in a wooden rocking chair at the edge of the firelight, I saw a handsome, dark-skinned person dressed in a top hat and tails like the mayor of Fairchild wore on festival days. Flowing around this person’s shoulders and down onto the ground below was a cape made entirely of flowers, yellow and orange and blue and purple, so large and complex that it must have taken many days and many hands to stitch it all together.