American Meteor Page 17

  You don’t believe a word of what I’ve been telling you.

  “I wouldn’t say that, Stephen. I’m sure you’ve told a few truths, only I’d need a rocker box to separate them from the gravel of outrageous fabrications. What possessed you to spoil the negative of that Indian, if it was worth so much?”

  Something tells me I’ve come to the end of my thread. The thread that sewed my life in whipstitch to Whitman, Grant, Lincoln, Durant, Jackson, Custer, Crazy Horse. I swore to him—took an oath the last time he came to me in my sleep—never to let another person see his face. In his life, he had dreamed himself onto the other side of our world—the visible one, which he knew, in his wisdom, is only shadows. It was his great gift to sift from the illusory Phantoscope of images what is real. During the year of my headaches, he showed me it; and, what’s more, he showed me the future from the vantage of the afterlife. He was a shaman, after all, and a most powerful personality—a seer, like Sitting Bull. Seers believe that the future already exists, and maybe they’re right. How else do you explain prognostications and the glimpses of it that come to clairvoyants and oracles? Crazy Horse saw almost clear to the end, and so did I, although I recollect only a fraction of what he revealed to me in dreams—his dreams, which were like a lens trained on what will happen next . . . what’s already happened on the other side, as though he’d been granted a fabulous and frightening look at an encyclopedia published centuries hence.

  It was harrowing for me—that year of visions. I used to wear his medicine bundle to bed, afraid I’d disappear into the future or wake up insane or not wake up at all. I wish I’d never seen what lies waiting for us. Was it for this that Spotswood told me to wait? But a vision cannot be refused or denied.

  “What did you see that was so terrible, Stephen?”

  I’ll tell you what I remember. But first, I want to tell you about the Mexican girl I found outside Lamy. I was a mail clerk for the Santa Fe Railroad at the time. This was in 1879. I gave up the railroad—that is to say, I gave up the need to be in motion, which obsessed me my whole life—and opened the studio when I settled here in Lincoln in ’82. I contented myself with making portraits of “stiffs,” reading in no particular order books borrowed from the library, going to concerts and lectures on the Pygmies and the Hottentots, illustrated with magic lantern slides. It’s a sickness in some people, a kind of extreme restlessness: the wish to be always moving. It must be what drives so many millions to pack up and go west. I was fed up with it. Ever read anything about such a disease in your medical books?

  “Never. Seems a subject more in line with the authors you favor. Perhaps in the morbid imaginations of Poe or Hoffmann you might find such a notion. A dose of salts would have done them both good. And you, too.”

  I never put much stock in salt.

  “If you’re ribbing me about my shares in Lincoln’s salt wells, you needn’t bother.”

  I don’t mean to smile, Jay. . . .

  “If you’d told me you were in contact with a fortune-teller, I wouldn’t have taken a bath. Damn it, you remember the surveyor’s report: ‘There is no question of the vast wealth that will someday be derived from this region.’ Lincoln salt was supposed to be finer and more plentiful than Syracuse’s!”

  Whiskey need refreshing?

  “I won’t say no. You shouldn’t be drinking, Stephen. Not with your heart.”

  Just half a jigger.

  “You’ve got the heart of a man twice your age.”

  That would make me a hundred and six. And more than likely dead.

  “My point exactly. But I won’t lecture you.”

  I’ve learned that the most determined hearts can be undone by a small thing. It might as well be a shot of bourbon as a bullet.

  “Well, aren’t you going to tell me about the Mexican kid?”

  Sorry, I seemed to have jumped the track. In those days, it was my habit to explore the countryside whenever we were stopped for any length of time. So when the train put into Lamy—a fly speck on the map—to repair the boiler, I hired a mule and went out onto the desert to take pictures. You’ve never been in New Mexico, have you, Jay?

  “I’ve never in my life been south of Kansas City.”

  The desert’s worth seeing.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  In the desert, there’s a drought of water, and there’s also a dearth of light when the sun is swallowed by piling clouds and the thorn trees, the cactus, the sedge grass are quenched. They appear to die the instant the light goes out of them, but although they wither, turning brown and brittle, they’re only dormant, because they hold within themselves water and also light—maybe no more than a symbol’s worth of both, but enough. And when the rain comes, the trees, bushes, and grass vivify; and when the dark clouds go, they shed their radiance once again. Jackson used to say that what the photograph can do better than the human eye or an artist’s hand is to render the austerity of the world, which is the place to look for the world’s purpose and meaning. And I’ve found no greater austerity than in the desert.

  “The girl, Stephen.”

  I found her sitting by the body of a dead Mexican. She was cried out and nearly dead herself with thirst. The man—he was her father—had been shot through the chest. His serape was stained with the rust of dried blood, and his big mustache was stiff with it. She looked to be four or five years old. I gave her water and a little food, and when she could speak, she told me two men had shot her father and taken his horse and saddlebag. My Spanish isn’t the best, and when a spate of Mexican would bubble up from her, I couldn’t follow. From what I was able to understand, her mother had died of fever the day before, and her father had been taking her to stay with an aunt. I couldn’t discover where the aunt lived; I suppose the girl didn’t know herself. I climbed to the top of a hill bristling with acacia, but I could see nothing except more desert. So I thought it was best to take the girl, whose name was Carmelita, back with me to Lamy.

  “You couldn’t very well have left her there.”

  The thought crossed my mind, like a drop of vinegar in milk or a fly on a cake. The brain can conceive of such horror, Jay!

  “ ‘An imp of the perverse.’ We’re all prey to them.”

  I suppose so.

  “What happened when you got to town?”

  I left her at the mission church.

  “A sensible thing to do.”

  And then, a little while later, while they were stoking the locomotive boiler, I went back for her.

  “What in heaven’s name for?”

  I don’t really know. Unless I was ashamed: They say the thought is father to the deed.

  “What would you have done with a five-year-old Mexican?”

  Taken care of her, I guess. I wasn’t thinking. I put her to bed in the mail car, where I’d made a kind of parlor for myself, and waited for the train to go on to Albuquerque. By the time we arrived, I’d realized the impossibility of keeping her. I knew nothing about children. I knew nothing about Mexicans. I was living on a train.

  “You were living in a dream.”

  When we got to Albuquerque, I left her with the sisters.

  “Just as you should have. Drizzle a little water in my drink, will you?”

  The next time we laid over in Albuquerque, I went to visit her at the mission. They told me she’d died of a fever not long after I’d left her there.

  “More than likely, the same that took her mother. Yellow fever, malaria—there was nothing you could have done.”

  Crazy Horse said, “White men want acorns without the oak tree.”

  “I’ve got no time for mysticism, Stephen. Not Swedenborg’s or even Emerson’s, and certainly not a bloodthirsty Indian’s.”

  You don’t believe Crazy Horse came to me in my dreams?

  “Frankly, no, but it’s entertaining as all hell, though I do wish you’d hurry up and finish. You tell a story like a cancan dancer lifting up her skirts.”

  I remember how he stood and po
inted into a distance that had no end or horizon but seemed to go on and on. My eyes—I had two of them in my dream—became tired and burned, and I would have closed them or looked elsewhere, but there was no turning away from it. Just as Jackson had done, Crazy Horse was teaching me how to see the world for what it is—for what it will be one day.

  “God Almighty, Stephen! You should go on the stage.”

  I saw the Great Plains divided and subdivided by boundary lines, railroad lines, telegraph lines, and the lines of instruments not yet dreamed of. Paths trampled underfoot by Indians and bison, emigrants and their cattle became roads of gravel, macadam, asphalt, and concrete. The bison passed into history, and so did the ancient people of the Great Plains and of the continent—passed into folklore and ethnology, as curiosities and relics of an age when time and the land had yet to be apportioned. Other species of animal and vegetable life also were extinguished by poisons that dropped from the sky and rose up like dust from the earth and fell into the waters of the rivers and their tributaries, the lakes, and even of the sea, where great whales sang of their misery and oysters crowding the shorelines sickened and shriveled and all manner of fish and the life that gave them sustenance perished from the earth. I saw crops fail and the grass disappear from the prairies and the loam crumble to dust, and I saw the dust blown upward into a brown and turbid atmosphere, which darkened the Great Plains and the lungs of the people living there— coiling and uncoiling its atoms until even the cities of the East grew dark beneath the pall. And birds, whose delight it was to slip through the clear skies, like a needle through cambric, and at the end of the day to rest in the trees or in the tall grass, singing to our delight the canticles of plenty—one by one, they fell silent, the furnace glowing within each small breast put out. That was the final dust storm, when rock was scoured of soil by wind and the inexhaustible aquifers beneath it were emptied and the sweet noise of water became like the dry cough of seeds rattling in an empty gourd. The Great Plains now resembled the Sahara, and roofs and steeples sown thickly on the East Coast and on the West had vanished beneath dead oceans chilled by floes that, since the beginning of time, had been like shingles on the roof of the world—chilled and then warmed by the enraged sun, which reigned without softness or mercy over earth’s toppled kingdoms.

  Near the end of his dreaming in me, I saw how earth came to resemble its moon and the near planets, revolving to no purpose in its worn orbit until, at the end of time—for time will end—it fell into the sun.

  “You picture a world—”

  Crazy Horse pictured it.

  “Crazy Horse, then, to humor you. A world without a morsel of goodness or hope and with not even so much as a tussock of grass to clutch and pull ourselves from the mire. It goes against the American grain!”

  Jay, there are always optimists who will step close to a house on fire because they happen to be cold. They see good in everything—even the day when bees will be extinct, because they fear the pain of an occasional sting.

  “What the world needs is more good whiskey to rid it of its rust. Here—doctor’s orders. In your present frame of mind, a jigger won’t do you any harm. Stephen, I never took you for a weakling. We’d still be sitting on Plymouth Rock if we’d been afraid of getting our hands and consciences dirty. I held my tongue while you smeared the good name of Custer, who was a great American in my book. Virtue is unattractive in a man and a nuisance in a woman. And where would we be without Durant and the railroad? On the other side of the Mississippi, cutting one another’s throats for a piece of played-out land. I won’t cry over the buffalo or the Indians. Neither did the country any good, so far as I can see. Thanks for the whiskey—I’ve got to be going. Bess’ll scalp me if I’m late for Sunday dinner. I’ll see myself out. Get some rest—you must be tired after so much jawing. And I wouldn’t worry too much about the future if I were you. Like it says in the Bible, ‘The earth abideth forever.’ ”

  You cleared out of here as if you didn’t want to be saddled with a corpse before you could eat your roast. Not that I blame you; nobody does a piece of veal like your Bess. I’ve always envied you your life, Jay. I don’t know what you made of my story. I suppose you’ve heard ravings from the sickbed just as outlandish.

  The last time Crazy Horse came to me, he said, “I am destined to live forever in an empire of grass and wind and water, when all else is dust. There, fish thread their silver or their gold through sunlit rivers, birds fly their shadows over the hills, and apple, pear, and plum trees drop their fruit, unbruised, onto the tall grass, as if it were a gift left on the doorstep for our refreshment. At the end of the day, we lie down together in the lee of the hill and give thanks to all that is alive for what is alive in us—certain that the sun will rise again. I do not see you there.”

  He turned and walked away, leaving me to wonder if I’d heard him correctly or if he’d even spoken at all. And then I thought I saw my mother, Lincoln, Whitman, Sitting Bull, Fire Briskly Burning, Chen—all of them walking, nonchalant and beautiful, across the rim of the sun. And I seemed to hear drums and the distant thunder of many millions of buffalo galloping across tall prairie grass leaning in the wind.

  How beautiful and perfect are the animals! . . .

  How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!

  —Walt Whitman, “To Think of Time”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Norman Lock’s novel The Boy in His Winter (2014) and his story collection Love Among the Particles (2013) were also published by Bellevue Literary Press. Recently, his play The House of Correction was performed in Istanbul and Athens; his radio drama Mounting Panic was produced by WDR Germany. He has won The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities Literary Fiction Award, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts (1999, 2013), the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (2009), and the National Endowment for the Arts (2011). Norman lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, nearby Raritan/Lower New York Bay, with his wife, Helen.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would not have seen the light of day if not for the publisher and editorial director of Bellevue Literary Press, Erika Goldman, who not only recognized in it a story needing to be retold to a new generation of Americans but also saw in its first draft a weakness needing to be overcome. She has my admiration and thanks, as does her colleague and the press’s founding publisher, Jerome Lowenstein, M.D., as well as its associate editor, Leslie Hodgkins; publishing assistant, Crystal Sikma; publicist, Molly Mikolowski; and production and design director, Joe Gannon. I write with an ideal reader in mind. For this book, there were two of them: Erika and Carol Edwards, who edited it.

  I am indebted to Edward Renn and David Moore, whose friendship creates an interior space conducive to the task of writing. I am grateful for the examples of a conscientious and compassionate nature set by my daughter and by my son. As director of Baykeeper’s Oyster Restoration Program, Meredith works to improve water quality and increase species richness in New York harbor; Nicholas has cared for animals, wild and tame. Both have reminded me of what is due the natural world, which is also ours. Lastly, I acknowledge, with profound feeling, my wife, Helen, whose unquestioning love for forty-seven years has been the mainstay and the saving of my life.

  A further acknowledgment. Huck Finn said about Mark Twain, “He told the truth, mainly.” Likewise, I’ve given myself license to do what storytellers must, in aid of a higher truth and a livelier yarn—that is, to play fast and loose, on occasion, with history—its places, persons, and incidents. Any historians among this novel’s readers will, I hope, pardon my liberties.

  Excerpts originally appeared in Blue Earth Review and Green Mountains Review.

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