‘Morris . . . died?’ He began to shake his head back and forth, then to silently weep, and I went away from the tent.
‘Well?’ said Charlie.
‘I will ask again later.’
I thought, I have had enough of grown men crying.
Chapter 56
We combined the entire pull of gold, which between our four-man effort from the night before and Morris and Warm’s initial two-man affair made for near an entire bucket’s worth. This represented a fortune and I could scarcely lift the thing of my own strength. I asked Charlie to lift it but he said he did not want to. I told him it was very heavy and he said he believed me.
In a fit of practicality, and with my thoughts moving inevitably to the future, I began to look over Morris’s horse. He was a sturdy animal, and despite a pang of guilt I put my saddle on him and rode him up and down through the river shallows. He was a smooth rider and something of a gentleman. I had no particular feeling for him but I thought it was likely to follow if we spent any amount of time together. I decided I would win him over with kindness and sugar and trust. ‘I am going to adopt Morris’s horse,’ I said to Charlie.
‘Oh,’ he answered.
Warm was too unwell to transport, and anyway I did not think he could be saved even if we moved him. He was scarcely aware of my nearness but I did not want to leave him to die alone. Charlie brought up the fact that we did not know the recipe for the formula and I said I knew that and what did he think we should do, torture the dying man for every last instruction and ingredient? His tone was somber, and he said, ‘Don’t talk to me like that, Eli. I’ve lost my work hand in this. I am only telling you what is on my mind. After all, Warm may very well want us to know it.’ He was looking away as he said it; and I had never heard him speak this way, even when we were boys. I thought he sounded something like me, actually. He had never been afraid before, that I could remember, but now he was, and he did not know what it meant or what to make of it. I told him I was sorry I had jumped on him about the formula and he accepted my apology. Warm called out my name, and Charlie and I entered his tent. ‘Yes, Hermann?’ I said.
He was flat on his back, his eyes directed upward at the crest of the tent. His chest was rising and falling unnaturally quickly, and he was wheezing and breathing heavily. He told me, ‘I am ready to dictate Morris’s tombstone.’ I fetched a pencil and paper and knelt by his side; when I told him to go ahead he nodded, cleared his throat, and spit straight into the air, a thick globule that doubled back in a graceful arc and landed on the center of his forehead. I do not think he noticed this, or perhaps he did not care. Either way, he did not clean himself or ask to be cleaned. He said: ‘Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven’t the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood—weak blood, diluted—and their memories aren’t worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean. Most people are imbeciles, really, but Morris was not like this. He should have lived longer. He had more to give. And if there is a God he is a son of a bitch.’ Warm paused. He spit again, this time to the side, onto the ground. ‘There is no God,’ he said, and closed his eyes. I did not know if he wanted the last sentence included on the tombstone and I did not ask, for I had no plans to transfer the speech, as it was clear to me he was not completely in his own mind any longer. But I promised Warm I would write it out just as he had said it, and I believe this consoled him. He thanked Charlie and I and we left the tent to sit before the fire. Charlie, gripping the wrist of his wounded hand, said, ‘Don’t you think it might be time to go now?’
I shook my head. ‘We can’t leave Warm to die alone.’
‘It could take him days to die.’
‘Then we will stay here for days.’
This was all that was said on the matter; and this was the beginning of our new brotherhood, with Charlie never again to be the one so far ahead, and me following clumsily behind, which is not to say the roles were reversed, but destroyed. Afterward, and even today, we are careful in our relationship, as though fearful of upsetting each other. In terms of our previous manner of correspondence I cannot say why it vanished suddenly then, snuffed as it was like a candle. Of course the moment it passed I became fond of it in a sorrowful kind of way, at least in theory or maudlin memory. But the question has entered my mind so many times: Whatever became of my bold brother? I can never say, only that he was gone and has yet to return.
As it happened, anyway, we would not have to wait days for Warm to pass, but hours. Night had fallen and Charlie and I were lying beside the fire, feeling very lazy and heavy, when Warm spoke in a wispy voice, ‘Hello?’ Charlie said he did not want to go, and I entered the tent alone.
Warm was breathing his last. He knew this and was frightened. I thought, Will he turn religious at the end, and plead for a speedy entry into heaven? But no, the man was too firm in his nonbeliefs for any last-minute cowardice. He did not wish to speak with me but asked after Morris, having forgotten the man was dead.
‘Why is he not here?’ Warm gasped.
‘He died this morning, Hermann, don’t you remember?’
‘Morris? Died?’ His forehead accordioned and his mouth parted, fixed open in anguish, and I stared at his gums, shiny with blood. He turned away, inhaling choppily, haltingly, as though the passage were partially blocked. I shifted my feet and he turned to follow the sound, asking, ‘Who’s there? Is that Morris?’
I told him, ‘It is Morris.’
‘Oh, Morris! Where have you been all this time?’ His tone was so deeply relieved and moved, I felt a tightening of emotion in my throat.
‘I was gathering firewood.’
Warm, invigorated: ‘What’s that? Firewood? Foraging fuel? That’s the idea. We will have a bonfire tonight, light up the entire operation. All the better to sort through our buckets of fortune, eh?’
‘All the better,’ I agreed.
‘What about the others?’ he wondered. ‘Where have they run off to? That Charlie doesn’t much like the hard work, I have noticed.’
‘No, he would rather stand by.’
‘Not much for cleaning up, is he?’
‘No, he’s not.’
‘But he has turned out a good man, you can’t say otherwise.’
‘He’s a good man, Hermann, you were right about it.’
‘And the other, Eli, where has he gone?’
‘He is out there somewhere.’
‘Making his rounds? Securing the camp?’
‘He is in the darkness, out.’
In a lower tone he said, ‘Well, I don’t know how you feel about it, but I have come to like that one quite a lot, actually.’
‘Yes. And I know he likes you, too, Hermann.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I said I know he likes you, too.’
‘Do I hear a trace of jealousy in your voice?’
‘No!’
‘I’m very flattered by it! All these men crowding around, and all of them so decent and honorable. I felt such the outcast, and for such a long time.’ At these words, his lips curled in bittersweet sadness, and he closed his eyes; tears bloomed from the closed corners of his lids and I wiped these away with my thumbs. Warm kept his eyes shut after this. They would not open again. He said, ‘Morris, if I shouldn’t make it through the night, I want you to carry on with the formula.’
‘Better not to think of it. You should only rest, now.’
‘I had an idea that if you were to coat your flesh with pork fat prior to submersion, that would likely reduce the damage.’
‘It is a fine idea, Her
mann.’
He gasped. He said, ‘Well, I feel we have known each other a long while!’
‘I feel just the same.’
‘And I’m sorry about your dying before.’
‘I am all right, now.’
‘I wanted to help you. I thought we could be friends.’
‘We are friends.’
‘I’m,’ he said. ‘I’m.’ He opened his mouth widely and there came a foreign noise from deep within his insides, as though a solid piece of him had cracked or popped. What was this? I did not think it hurt him, or at least he made no sound of pain. I held my hand to his chest and felt his heart flutter and drop. A column of air pushed from his mouth and his body lurched and grew still, and this was where the clock stopped for Hermann Kermit Warm. His right arm fell from the cot and I lifted it back up. When it fell again I left it to hang and exited the tent. I found Charlie sitting fireside, and all was the same as when I had left him save for one conspicuous detail.
Chapter 57
Which was that there were now a half-dozen Indians milling about the camp, rummaging our bags, inspecting the horses and donkeys, and generally searching through our possessions for anything of value they might keep for themselves. The moment I breached the tent an Indian holding a rifle gestured with the barrel that I should sit beside Charlie, and I did this. Neither my brother nor I were armed, our gun belts sitting coiled beneath our saddles on the ground, as was our habit when we were bivouacked. But even if Charlie had been armed I do not know that he would have pulled his pistol. He sat to the side, staring into the flames, casting the rare glance at our visitors but not wanting any part of them.
The bucket of gold sat between us, and I believe this might have gone undetected if Charlie had not attempted to hide it under his hat, which the Indian with the rifle saw and was made suspicious by. He crossed over and tossed the hat aside; his expression was unsmiling and remained so even when he discovered the bucket’s contents. But he found it interesting enough that he called for the others to abandon their investigations, and now they were all squatting around the fire and peering into the metal container. One of them began to laugh but the others did not like this and told him, if I am not mistaken, to be quiet. Another looked at me and addressed me brusquely; I thought he was asking where we had got all the gold. I pointed to the river and he stared at me contemptibly. They emptied the bucket, pouring out equal shares into calfskin bags until it was empty. After this they stood and discussed some serious matter or another, pointing at Charlie and me as they spoke. The Indian with the rifle entered into Warm’s tent and gasped. To think of it now, this seems most un-Indian-like, him gasping like that. But he really did do it. He gasped just like an old woman and all but fell out of the tent, his hand clamped over his mouth, his eyes wide with fright and scandal. Shooing his people backward, away from our camp and toward the river, he described what he had seen in the shelter, and they all turned and hurried off into the darkness. I found it odd they did not take our pistols or horses or lives, but it was likely they thought we had some manner of plague or leprosy. Or perhaps they decided the gold was treasure enough.
‘Warm’s dead,’ I told Charlie.
‘I am going to sleep,’ he said.
And do you know, this is just what he did do, too.
Chapter 58
I put Warm into the ground in the morning, with no help from Charlie, though he was once again petulantly present for the burial itself. Warm’s lone bag was filled with his diaries and papers and I searched through these for the formula’s recipe but could not understand hardly any of what he had written down, this owing less to my ignorance of science and chemistry than to his penmanship, which was atrocious. Finally I gave up and rested the books atop his chest before filling him over with sand and earth. I made no speech this time, and decided I would not mark either one of the side-by-side graves, which I have since wished I had done, illustrating some connection between them as loyal friends, and also mentioning their accomplishments on the river. But I was feeling melancholic and obscurely hexed or obstructed and wanted badly to move on; and so the moment the grave was filled, Charlie and I mounted our horses and left, with the tent standing and fire still smoking. Looking back at the camp I thought, I will never be a leader of men, and neither do I want to be one, and neither do I want to be led. I thought: I want to lead only myself. So that they would not starve to death I had untied Warm’s horse and the donkeys. The horse did not move but the donkeys followed after us. I fired a shot over their heads to scatter them and they ran downriver. They were naked, without any sign of ownership on them, and their stumpy legs swiveled back and forth so quickly and efficiently it did not look real to me.
We took a northwesterly route and arrived in Mayfield three days later. During all this time of riding, Charlie and I had little to say to each other, though when we spoke we were civil and not unfriendly about it. I believe he was wondering whom he might be for the rest of his life; and in a way I was wondering the same thing about myself. Reflecting on the last few days I had passed I told myself, If this was indeed my last bit of work, it is just as well to bow out in so dramatic a fashion. I decided I would pay my mother a visit just as soon as I was able, if she was in fact still alive; and I had many invented, conciliatory conversations with her, each of these ending with when she reached her crooked arm over my neck, kissing me above the line of my beard beneath the eye. The thought of this made me tranquil, and the ride to Mayfield, despite our recent hardships, was as pleasant as could be expected. At what was roughly the halfway point I said to Charlie, ‘Your left hand is still faster than most men’s right.’
‘Most isn’t all,’ he answered, and we returned to silence.
My thoughts about the Indians stealing the gold were complicated. It seemed appropriate in some way that we should not have it—had I not felt a sense of remorse when I hefted that bucket? But I doubt I would have been able to pontificate with such detachment if there was not the pile of gold waiting for us under the stove in Mayfield, a sum that represented for me the realization of all I wanted to be changed in my life. So when I smelt smoke on the wind a mile or two outside of town, I was inhabited by the most powerful type of dread and apprehension. In the time it took Charlie and I to get to the hotel, my feelings pushed past worry and on to anger, which gave way to miserable acceptance. The hotel was burned to the ground, as were the surrounding buildings; in the rubble I spied the potbellied stove, and it was toppled. I stepped through the ash and blackened timber, knowing our treasure was gone, and when I found it to be unrectifiably so I turned back to Charlie, sitting with hunched shoulders on Nimble in the middle of the sun-blanched road. ‘Nothing,’ I called.
‘Drink,’ he called back, which was just as sane and thoughtful a reply as I had ever heard him speak. But with the hotel gone there was nowhere to get a drink, or nowhere to sit and become drunk, and we were forced to buy a bottle of brandy from the chemist’s and to empty this in the road like common rascals.
We sat on the walkway across from the remains of the hotel and stared at it. The fire had gone out days before but smoke still rose up here and there in wriggling ghost-snakes. When the bottle was half gone, Charlie said, ‘Do you think Mayfield did it?’
‘Who else?’
‘He must not have left at all, but hidden himself away, waiting for us to go. I suppose he got the last laugh then.’ I admitted he had and Charlie said, ‘I wonder where your girl is.’
‘I had not thought of it.’ For an instant I was surprised by this, then not.
A person appeared down the road and I recognized him as the weeping man. He was leading his horse, tears streaming down his face, as usual. He did not see us or take notice of us; he was speaking lowly to himself, in a state of catatonic devastation, and I found myself intensely annoyed by him. I picked up a rock and threw it. This glanced off his shoulder, and he looked at me. ‘Get away from here!’ I said. I do not know why I disliked him so. It was as though I were ch
asing a crow from a corpse. Well, I was drunk. The weeping man continued on with his miserable voyage. ‘I don’t know what to do next,’ I admitted to Charlie.
‘Best not to think of it just now,’ he counseled. And then, bemusedly: ‘Would you look at this? It is my own true love.’ It was his whore approaching. ‘Hello, what’s-your-name,’ he said happily. She stood before us looking damp and raw and red-eyed, the edges of her dress dirtied, her hands trembling. She drew back her arm and threw something at my face. It was the hundred dollars I had left her to give to the bookkeeper. Looking down at the money on the ground, I began to laugh, though I knew it meant the bookkeeper had died. I thought, It must not have been that I loved the bookkeeper, but that I loved the idea of her loving me, and the idea of not being alone. At any rate there was nothing in my heart like sorrow, and I peered up at the whore and said to her pitiful face, ‘And so what about that?’ She spit and walked away and I picked the coins up from the ground. I gave Charlie fifty dollars and he dropped it into his boot, his pinkie arched elegantly skyward. I dropped mine into my boot as well, and we both laughed as though this were the pinnacle of modern comedy.
We were sitting fully in the dirt now, and the bottle was nearly empty. I think we would have passed out and slept in the road but Charlie’s whore had gone and gathered all the other whores, who presently stood over us in a pack, looking down with scandal and outrage. With Mayfield and then the hotel gone, they were all of them fallen on hard times, with perfume no longer trailing over their heads, their dresses no longer crisp and folded stiff with starch. They started in on Charlie and me, saying unkind things about our characters.
‘What a pair.’
‘Look at them on the ground like that.’
‘Look at the gut on the one.’
‘Other one’s hurt his hand, looks like.’
‘No more killing stable boys for him.’
Over the din, Charlie asked me confusedly, ‘What are they so upset about?’