“When have you seen it, then?” she challenged him.
“Oh, in dreams,” he replied. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Do you remember Owen Buddenbaum?”
“Oh yes.”
How could anybody forget the extraordinary Mr. Buddenbaum, who had befriended them for a little time in Independence? A ginger beard, going to gray; waxed moustache that pointed to his zenith; the most luxurious fur coat Maeve had ever seen; and such music in his voice that the most opaque things he said (which was the bulk of his conversation as far as Maeve was concerned) sounded like celestial wisdom.
“He was wonderful,” she said.
“You know why he sought us out? Because he heard me calling your name, and he knew what it meant.”
“You said it meant joy.”
“So it does,” Harmon replied, leaning a little closer to his daughter, “but it’s also the name of an Irish spirit, who came to men in their dreams.”
She’d never heard this before. Her eyes grew huge. “Is that true?”
“I could never tell you a lie,” he replied, “not even in fun. Yes, child, it’s true. And hearing me call for you, he took me by the arm and said: Dreams are doorways, Mr. O’Connell. Those were the very first words he said to me.”
“What then?”
“Then he said: If we but have the courage to step over the threshold. . . . ”
“Go on.”
“Well, the rest’s for another day.”
“Papa!” Maeve protested.
“You be proud, child. If not for you, we’d never have met Mr. Buddenbaum, and I believe our fortune changed the moment we did.”
He had refused to be further drawn on the subject, but had instead turned the conversation to the matter of what trees might be planted on Everville’s Main Street. Maeve knew better than to press him, but she thought much about dreams thereafter. She would wake sometimes in the middle of the night with the ragged scraps of a dream floating around her head, and lie watching the stars, thinking: Was I at the door then? And was there something wonderful on the other side, that I’ve already forgotten?
She became determined to keep these fragments from escaping her, and with a little practice she learned to snatch hold of them upon waking and describe them aloud to herself. Words held them, she found, however rudimentary. A few syllables were all that was needed to keep a dream from slipping away.
She kept the skill to herself (she didn’t even mention it to her father), and it was a pleasant distraction for the long, dusty days of summer to sit in the wagon and sew pieces of remembered dreams together so that they made stories stranger than any to be found in her books.
As for the mellifluous Mr. Buddenbaum, his name was not mentioned again for some considerable time. When it was finally mentioned, however, it was in circumstances so strange Maeve would not forget them until the day she died.
They had been entering Idaho, and by the calculations of Dr. Hodder (who assembled the company every third evening and told them of their progress), there was a good prospect that they would be over the Blue Mountains and in sight of the fertile valleys of Oregon before the autumn had properly nipped the air. Though supplies were low, spirits were high, and in the exuberance of the moment, Maeve’s father had said something about Everville: A chance remark that might have passed unnoticed but that one of the travelers, a shrewish man by the name of Goodhue, was the worse for whiskey, and in need of some bone of contention. He had it here, and seized upon it with appetite.
“This damned town of yours will never be built,” he said to Harmon. “None of us want it.” He spoke loudly, and a number of the men—sensing a fight and eager to be diverted—sauntered over to watch the dispute.
“Never mind him, Papa,” Maeve had murmured to her father, reaching to take his hand. But she knew by his knitted brows and clenched jaw this was not a challenge he was about to turn his back on.
“Why do you say that?” he asked Goodhue.
“Because it’s stupid,” the drunkard replied. “And you’re a fool.”
His words were slurred, but there was no doubting the depth of his contempt.
“We didn’t come out here to live in your little cage.”
“It won’t be a cage,” Harmon replied. “It will be a new Alexandria, a new Byzantium.”
“Never heard of either of ’em,” came a third voice.
The speaker was a bull of a man called Pottruck. Even in the shelter of her father’s shoulder, Maeve trembled at the sight of him. Goodhue was a loudmouth, little more. But Pottruck was a thug who had once beaten his wife so badly she had sickened and almost died.
“They were great cities,” Harmon said, still preserving his equilibrium, “where men lived in peace and prosperity.”
“Where’d you learn all this shit?” Pottruck spat. “I see you readin’ a lot of books. Where’d you keep ’em?” He strode towards the O’Connells’ wagon. “Goin’ to bring ’em out or shall I bring ’em out fer ya?”
“Just keep out of our belongings!” Harmon said, stepping into the bull’s path.
Without breaking his stride, Pottruck swiped at Harmon, knocking him to the ground. Then, with Goodhue on his heels, he hoisted himself up onto the tail of the wagon, and pulled back the canvas.
“Keep out of there!” Harmon said, getting to his feet and stumbling towards the wagon.
As he came within a couple of strides, Goodhue wheeled around, knife in hand. He gave Harmon a whiskey-rotted smile. “Uh-uh,” he said.
“Papa . . . ” Maeve said, tears in her voice, “. . . please don’t.”
Harmon glanced back at his daughter. “I’m all right,” he said. He advanced no further, but simply stood and watched while Goodhue clambered up into the wagon and joined Pottruck in turning over the interior.
The din of their search had further swelled the crowd, but none of the spectators stepped forward in support of Harmon and his daughter. Few liked Pottruck any more than they liked the O’Connells, but they knew which could do them the greater harm.
There was a grunt of satisfaction from inside the wagon now, and Pottruck emerged with a dark teak chest, finely polished, which he unceremoniously threw down onto the ground. Leaping down ahead of his cohort, Goodhue set to opening the chest with his knife. It defied him, and in his frustration he started to stab at the lid.
“Don’t destroy it,” Harmon sighed. “I’ll open it for you.”
He took a key from around his neck and knelt to unlock the box. Pottruck was down from the wagon now, and, pushing Harmon aside, kicked open the lid.
Maeve had seen what lay in that box many times. It wasn’t much to the uneducated—just a few rolls of paper tied with leather thongs—but to her, and to her father, these were treasures. The city of Everville lay waiting to be born upon those sheets of parchment: its crossroads and its squares, its parks and boulevards and municipal buildings.
“What did I say?” Pottruck spat.
“You said books,” Goodhue replied.
“I said shit, is what I said,” Pottruck said, rummaging through the rolls of paper and tossing them hither and thither as he searched for something he recognized as valuable.
Maeve caught her father’s eye. He was trembling from head to foot, his face ashen. His anger, it seemed, had been overtaken by fatalism, for which she was glad. Papers could be replaced. He could not.
Pottruck had given up on his digging now, and by the bored expression on his face, he was ready to go back to his wife-beating. He might have done so too had Goodhue not caught sight of something lying at the bottom of the box.
“What’s this?” he said, stooping and reaching into its depths. A grin spread over his unshaven face. “This doesn’t look like shit to me.”
He brought his discovery out to meet the light, sliding it out of the parcel of paper in which it had been slid and holding it up for the assembly to see. Here was something even Maeve had not set eyes on before, and she squinted at it in puzzlement. It looked
like a cross of some kind, but not, she could see, one that any Christian would wear.
She approached her father’s side and whispered, “What is it, Papa?”
“It was a gift . . . ” he replied, “. . . from Mr. Buddenbaum.”
One of the women, Marsha Winthrop, who was one of the few who had ever shown anything approaching kindness to Maeve, now stepped from the knot of spectators to take a closer look at Goodhue’s find. She was a large woman with a sharp tongue, and when she spoke, the throng ceased muttering a moment.
“Looks like a piece of jewelry to me,” she said, turning to Harmon. “Was it your wife’s?”
Maeve would often wonder in times to come what had possessed her father at that moment; whether it was stubbornness or perversity that kept him from telling a painless lie. Whichever it was, he refused the ease of deception.
“No,” he said. “It did not belong to my wife.”
“What is it then?” Goodhue wanted to know.
The answer came not from Harmon’s lips but from the crowd.
“One of the Devil’s signs,” said a strident voice.
Heads turned, and smiles disappeared as Enoch Whitney emerged from the back of the crowd. He was not a man of the cloth, but he was by his own description the most God-fearing among them; a soul commanded by the Lord to watch over his fellows and remind them constantly of how the Enemy moved and worked his works in their midst. It was a painful task, and he seldom let an opportunity slip by to remind his charges how much he suffered for their impurities. But the responsibility lay with him to castigate in public forum any who strayed from the commandments in deed, word, or intention—the lecher, of course, the adulterer, the cheat. And tonight, the worshipper of godless things.
He strode in front of the erring father and daughter now, bristling with denunciations. He was a tall, narrow man, with eyes too busy about their duty ever to settle on anything for more than a moment.
“You have always carried yourself like a guilty man, O’Connell,” he said, his gaze going from the accused, to Maeve, to the object in Goodhue’s fingers. “But I could never get to the root of your guilt. Now I see it.” He extended his hand. Goodhue dropped the cross into it, and retreated.
“I’m guilty of nothing,” Harmon said.
“This is nothing?” Whitney said, his volume rising. He had a powerful voice, which he never tired of exercising. “This is nothing?”
“I said I was guilty of—”
“Tell me, O’Connell, what service did you do the Devil, that he rewarded you with this unholy thing?”
There were gasps among the assembly. To speak of the Evil One so openly was rare; they kept such talk to whispers, for fear that it drew the attention of its subject. Whitney had no such anxieties. He spoke of the Devil with something close to appetite.
“I did no service,” Harmon replied.
“Then it was a gift.”
“Yes.” More gasps. “But not from the Devil.”
“This is Satan’s work!” Whitney bellowed.
“It is not!” Harmon yelled back at him. “I have no dealings with the Devil. It’s you who talk about Hell all the time, Whitney! It’s you who sees the Devil in every corner! I don’t believe the Devil cares much about us. I think he’s off somewhere fancy—”
“The Devil’s everywhere!” Whitney replied. “Waiting for us to make a mistake and fall.” This was not directed at Harmon, but at the assembly, which had thinned somewhat since Whitney’s appearance. “There’s no place, even to the wildernesses of the world, where his eyes are not upon us.”
“You speak of the Devil the way true Christians speak of God Almighty,” Harmon observed. “I wonder sometimes where your allegiances lie!”
The response threw Whitney into a frenzy. “How dare you question my righteousness,” he foamed, “when I have proof, proof here in my hand, of your unholy dealings!” He turned to address the crowd. “We must not suffer this man in our midst!” he said. “He’ll bring disaster upon us, as a service to his infernal masters!” He proffered the medallion, passing before his congregation. “What more proof do you need than this? It carries a parody of our Lord upon the cross!” He turned back upon Harmon, stabbing his finger at the accused. “I ask you again: What service did you do for this?”
“And I’ll tell you, one last time, that until you stop finding the Devil’s hand in our lives, you will be his greatest ally.” He spoke softly now, as to a frightened child. “Your ignorance is the Devil’s bliss, Whitney. Every time you scorn what confounds you, he smiles. Every time you sow the fear of him where there was none, he laughs. It’s you he loves, Whitney, not me. It’s you he thanks in his evening prayers.” The tables had been turned so simply and so eloquently that for a moment Whitney did not fully comprehend his defeat. He stared at his opponent with a frown upon his face, while Harmon turned and addressed the crowd. “If you don’t wish me and my daughter to travel with you any further,” he said, “if you believe the slanders you’ve heard, then say so now, and we’ll go another way. But be certain, all of you be certain, there is nothing in my heart or head but that the Lord God put it there. . . . ”
There were tears in his voice as he came to the end of his speech, and Maeve slipped her hand into his to comfort him. Side by side they stood in front of the company, awaiting judgment. There was a short silence. It was broken not by Whitney but by Marsha Winthrop.
“I don’t see no good reason to make you go your own way,” she said. “We all started this journey together. Seems to me we should end it that way.”
The plain good sense of this came as a relief to the crowd after all that talk of God and the Devil. There were murmurs of approval here and there, and several people began to depart. The drama was over. They had work to do: wheels to fix, stew to stir. But the righteous Whitney was not about to lose his congregation without one last warning.
“This is a dangerous man!” he growled. He threw the medallion to the dirt, and ground his heel upon it. “He’ll drag us down into Hell with him.”
“He ain’t goin’ to drag us anyplace, Enoch,” Marsha said. “Now ya just go cool off, huh?”
Whitney cast a sour glance in Harmon’s direction. “I’ll be watchin’ you,” he said.
“I’m comforted,” Harmon replied, which won a little laugh from Marsha.
As if the sound of laughter appalled him, Whitney hurried away, pushing through the crowd, muttering as he went.
“You’d better be careful,” Marsha said to Harmon as she too departed. “You’ve got a tongue could do you harm one of these days.”
“You did us a great kindness tonight,” he replied. “Thank you.”
“Did it for the child,” Marsha replied. “Don’t want her thinkin’ the whole world’s crazy.”
Then she went away, leaving Harmon to gather up the scattered papers and return them to the chest. With her father’s back turned, Maeve went in search of the medallion, picking it up and examining it closely. All of the descriptions she’d heard in the last few minutes seemed to her plausible. It was a pretty thing, no doubt of that. Shining like silver, but with flecks of color—scarlet and sky blue—in its luster. Any lady, wife or no, would be happy to wear it. But it was clearly more than a piece of decoration. There was a figure in the middle of it, outspread like Jesus on the cross, except that this savior was quite naked, and had something of both man and woman in its attributes. It was surely not a representation of the Devil. There was nothing fearsome in its aspect: no cloven hooves, no horns. Shapes flowed from its hands and head, and down between its legs, some of which she recognized (a monkey; lightning; two eyes, one above, one below), some of which were beyond her. But none were vile or unholy.
“Best not to look at it too long,” she heard her father say.
“Why not?” she asked, staring still. “Will it bewitch me?”
“I don’t know what it’ll do, to tell the truth,” her father said.
“Did Mr. Buddenbaum not tell
you?”
Her father reached over her shoulder and gently pried the medallion from her fingers.
“Oh he told me, sure enough,” Harmon said, returning to the box and placing the medallion inside, “only I didn’t altogether understand him.” With the contents now gathered up, he closed the lid and started to lug the box back to the wagon. “And I think maybe we should not speak that man’s name aloud again.”
“Why not?” Maeve said, determined to vex some answers out of her father. “Is he a bad man?”
Harmon set the box down on the tail of the wagon. “I don’t know what kind of man he is,” he replied, his voice low. “Truth is, I don’t rightly know that he’s a man at all. Maybe . . . ” he sighed.
“What, Papa?”
“Maybe I dreamt him.”
“But I saw him too.”
“Then maybe we both dreamt him. Maybe that’s all Everville is or will be. Just a dream we had, the two of us.”
Her father had told Maeve he wouldn’t lie to her, and she believed him, even now. But what kind of dream produced objects as real as the medallion she’d just held in her fingers?
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“We’ll talk about this another time,” Harmon said, passing his hand over his furrowed brow. “Let’s have no more of it for now.”
“Just tell me when,” Maeve said.
“We’ll know when the time’s right,” Harmon said, pushing the box back through the canvas and out of sight. “That’s the way of these things.”
TWO
I
These things, these things: what exactly were these things? For the next several weeks, as the wagon train wound its way through Idaho, following a trail forged by half a decade’s westering, Maeve had puzzled over the mystery of all she’d seen and heard that day. In truth the puzzlement was a distraction—like the sewing together of dream-scraps—a distraction from the monotony of the trail. The weather through late June and July was mostly sweltering, and nobody had much energy for games. Adults had it easy, Maeve thought. They had maps to consult and feuds to fume over. And they had that business between men and women that her twelve-year-old mind did not entirely grasp, but that she yearned to comprehend. It was plain, from her observations, that young men would do much for a girl who knew how to charm them. They would follow her around like dogs, eager to supply any comfort; make fools of themselves if necessary. She understood these rituals imperfectly, but she was a good student, and this—unlike the enigmatic Mr. Buddenbaum—was a mystery she knew she would eventually solve.