Andrews halted and turned upon Charley Hoge. “You mean—Did he set it?”
Charley Hoge nodded. “It’s Miller’s fire. You leave him be.”
After the first involuntary surge forward, the townspeople had not moved. Now they stood still, and watched Miller gallop recklessly among the smoking bales. Andrews slumped forward, weak and helpless. Like the others, he watched Miller in his wild riding.
After he had tumbled the hides nearest the shack into the fire, Miller rode somewhat away from the flames, leaped off his horse, and tied the reins to the tongue of one of the abandoned wagons that littered the area. A dark figure, shapeless in the outer edges of the firelight, he scuttled to one of the bales that lay on its side near the wagon. He stooped, and in the shadow became indistinguishable from the bale. He straightened, and the shapes became distinct, the bale moving upward as he straightened, seeming to the men who watched a huge appendage of his shoulders. For an instant, he swayed beneath the gigantic shape; then he lurched forward, and ran, halting abruptly at the side of the wagon, so that his burden toppled forward off his shoulders and crashed into the bed of the wagon, which swayed for a moment beneath the impact. Again and again, Miller ranged about the wagon, gathering the bales, swaying beneath their weight, lurching, and running with bent knees to the wagon.
“My God!” one of the townspeople behind Andrews said. “Them bales must weigh three, four hundred pounds.”
No one else spoke.
After Miller had boosted the fourth bale upon the wagon, he returned to his horse, unwound a length of rope from his saddle horn, and looped it around the apex of the oaken triangle that secured the wagon tongue to the frame. With the loose end of the rope in his hand, he returned to his horse, mounted it, and wound the end of the rope twice around his saddle horn. He shouted to the horse and dug his heels sharply into its sides; the horse strained forward; the rope tautened, and the wagon tongue lifted beneath the tension. Miller shouted again and slapped his palm on the horse’s rump; the sound of the slap cracked above the hiss and rumble of the fire. The wheels moved slowly, screeching on the rusted axles. Again Miller shouted, and dug his heels into the horse; the wagon moved more swiftly; the horse’s breath came in heavy groans and its hooves cut the dry earth. Then wagon and horse, as if released from a catapult, careened across the flat earth. Miller yelled once more, and guided horse and wagon straight toward the flame that grew from the shack and the piled hides. At the instant before it seemed that man and horse would plunge into the yellow-hot heart of the fire, Miller swerved his horse suddenly aside, unwinding in a rapid motion the rope from his saddle horn, so that the wagon, unloosed, plunged in its own momentum into the heart of the fire, spewing sparks over an area a hundred feet in diameter. For several moments after the wagon with its load of hides crashed into it, the fire darkened, as if the fury of the assault had extinguished it; then as the wagon caught, it flamed more furiously; and the townspeople drew back several steps before the intensity of the heat.
Behind him Andrews heard the sound of running feet and a shout that was almost a scream, high and animal in its intensity. Dully, he turned. McDonald, his black frock coat flared out at the sides, his arms flailing at random in the air, his sparse hair disheveled, was running toward the knotted bunches of townspeople around the fire—but his eyes looked beyond them wildly, fixed upon his burning office and his smoldering hides. He broke through the group of men, and would have continued running beyond them, had not Andrews caught him and held him back.
“My God!” McDonald said. “It’s burning!” He looked wildly around him, at the still and silent men. “Why doesn’t somebody do something?”
“There’s nothing they can do,” Andrews said. “Just stand easy here. You’ll get hurt.”
Then McDonald saw Miller dragging another wagonload of hides into the widening circle of flames. He turned questioningly to Andrews.
“That’s Miller,” he said. “What’s he doing?” And then, still looking at Andrews, his jaw went slack and his eyes, beneath their tangled brows, widened. “No,” McDonald said hoarsely, and shook his head like a wounded beast, from side to side. “No, no. Miller. Did he—”
Andrews nodded.
Another cry, almost of agony, came from McDonald’s throat. He twisted away from Andrews, and with hands clenched into fists held like clubs above his head, he ran across the smoldering field toward Miller. On his horse, Miller turned to meet him; his smoke-blackened face broke in a wide and mirthless grin. He waited until McDonald was almost upon him, his fists raised impotently to strike out; then Miller dug his heels into the horse’s flanks, dodging away, so that McDonald struck at air. He drew his horse to a halt several yards away from where he had waited; McDonald turned and ran toward him again. Laughing now, Miller spurred away; and again McDonald beat his fists upon emptiness. For perhaps three minutes the two men moved jerkily like marionettes in the open space before the great fire, McDonald, almost sobbing between his clenched yellow teeth, chasing stubbornly and futilely after Miller, and Miller, his lips drawn back in a humorless grimace, always a few feet out of his reach.
Then, suddenly, McDonald stood still; his arms dropped loosely at his sides and he gave Miller a quiet, almost contemplative look, and shook his head. His shoulders slumped; with his knees sagging, he turned away and walked across to where Andrews and Charley Hoge stood. His face was streaked with soot and one eyebrow was singed where a flying ember had caught.
Andrews said: “He doesn’t know what he’s doing, Mr. McDonald. It looks like he has gone crazy.”
McDonald nodded. “Looks like it.”
“And besides,” Andrews went on, “you said yourself the hides weren’t worth anything.”
“It’s not that,” McDonald said quietly. “It’s not that they were worth anything. But they were mine.”
The three men stood, silent and almost unconcerned, and watched Miller lug the bales and hides and pull the wagons up to stoke the fire. They did not look at each other; they did not speak. With an interest that appeared nearly detached, McDonald watched Miller drag the wagons and send them crashing into the ruins of other wagons that stood in stark skeletal shapes within the fire. Bale after bale, wagon after wagon went upon the flaming heap, until the fire was more than twice its original size. It took Miller nearly an hour to complete his task. When the last wagon with its load of bales went smashing into the fire, Miller turned and rode slowly up to the three men who stood together, watching him.
He pulled his horse to a halt; the beast stopped suddenly in its tracks, its sides heaving so violently that Miller’s legs moved perceptibly above their stirrups; from its mouth, wrenched and torn by the bit between its teeth, blood dropped and gathered in the dust. The horse is blown, thought Andrews distantly; it won’t live till daylight.
Miller’s face was blacked by the smoke; his eyebrows were almost completely burned away, and his hair was crisped and scorched; a long red welt that was beginning to form into a blister lay across his forehead. For a long while Miller looked over his horse’s bowed head, his eyes somberly upon McDonald. Then his lips drew back over his white teeth, and he laughed gratingly, deep in his throat. He looked from McDonald to Charley Hoge to Andrews, and then back to McDonald again. The grin slowly came off his face. The four men looked at one another, moving their eyes slowly and searchingly across the faces about them. They did not move, and they did not speak.
We have something to say to each other, Andrews thought dimly, but we don’t know what it is; we have something we ought to say.
He opened his mouth, and put his hand out, and moved toward Miller, as if to speak. Miller glanced down at him; his glance was casual and distant and empty, without recognition. He loosened himself in his saddle, dug his heels into the horse’s flanks; the horse leaped forward. The movement caught Andrews unprepared; he stood, his arm still held out, upraised. The horse’s chest caught him on his left shoulder and spun him around; he stumbled but he did not go to t
he ground. When his vision cleared, he saw Miller, hunched over the horse, riding unsteadily into the distance and the darkness. As Miller went away, Charley Hoge moved from the two men and shambled after him. For several moments after they had gone into the darkness, and after the pounding of hooves had died in the distance, Andrews stood and looked in the direction they had gone. He turned to McDonald; they looked at each other in silence. After a while McDonald shook his head, and he, too, walked away.
III
Near dawn a chill came into the air and pressed lightly against the backs of the few people who remained to watch the smoldering remains of the fire. They moved forward a few steps to the edge of the great scorched circle. Small flames licked about the charred timbers of the shack, blue upon the black-and-gray ash, and tipped with light yellow; dozens of smoldering heaps that had been baled hides and that had collapsed upon themselves, glowed a dull, uneven red, and sent thick twists of smoke up into the darkness. The uneven flames illumined the site faintly so that each man who remained stood apart, anonymous in his little portion of shadow. The acrid and rotten smell of the burned hides grew more intense as the eastward breeze lessened. One by one, the men who had waited out the fire turned and made their ways back to Butcher’s Crossing with a quietness that seemed almost deliberate.
At last only Will Andrews remained. He moved toward one of the charred bales; it appeared to have been blackened but not consumed by the fire. He kicked it idly and it collapsed, falling upon itself in a soft explosion of ash. Near the center of the scorched circle, in which he now stood, one of the timbers burned through with a faint snap; for an instant, the flames rose as if their extinguished fury were renewing itself. Until the brief rekindling spent itself, Andrews stood and gazed with an absent fixity upon the fire. He thought of Miller, and of the sudden blankness that had come upon his face in the instant before he had spurred his horse away from the holocaust he had started; he remembered the sharpness of Miller’s image, limned and defined and starkly identified against the furious blaze that he had labored to feed; and he remembered the merging into darkness of that same stiff figure, as Miller rode away from them on his dying horse. He remembered Charley Hoge, and the image of the fire burning like a vision of hell in his empty eyes; and he remembered the quick, awkward shift of Charley Hoge’s body as he turned to follow Miller, as he turned away from the fire, from the townspeople, from the town itself, to follow all that remained to him of the world. And he remembered McDonald, and his flailing against a dark animal shape that would not remain still to receive his fury, a shape that had betrayed a faith that McDonald would not acknowledge; he remembered the sudden slump of McDonald’s body when he ceased his vain pursuit and the distant, almost quizzical, look upon his face as he stared before him, as if to search the meaning of his fury.
In the east, above the horizon, the first faint gray of dawn dulled the sky. Andrews moved, his limbs stiff from his long vigil at the fire, turning away from the fire to walk in the lifting darkness back to his room in Butcher’s Crossing.
Francine was still asleep. During the night she had thrown aside her covers, and lay now in her nakedness sprawled awkwardly upon the bed, a pale shape that seemed to glow out of the dark. Andrews went very quietly to the window and drew back the curtains. The out-of-doors stretched vast and colorless before him, thickened and unreal in the gray haze that had begun to take on the faintest tinge of pink from the light in the east. He turned from the window and walked back to the bed where Francine lay; he stood above her.
Her hair, lusterless in the morning light, lay in tangles about her face; her mouth was half open, and she breathed heavily in sleep; tiny wrinkles that spread from her eyes were barely visible in the light; an oily film of sweat covered the flesh that sagged in its repose. He had not seen her before as he saw her now, caught in the ugliness of sleep; or if he had, he had not let his eyes stay upon her. But seeing her now, defenseless in sleep and in the innocence of sleep, a friendly and unguarded pity came over him. It seemed to him that he had never looked at her before, had never seen a part of her that he was seeing now; he remembered the first night he had come to her room, months before, and his rush of pity for her in the humiliations, the coarsenesses she had schooled herself to endure. Now that pity seemed to him contemptible and mean.
No, he had not seen her before. Again he turned to the open window. The flat land beyond Butcher’s Crossing lay open and clear in the crisp gray light that swelled from the east. Already, on the eastern coast, the sun was up, glinting on the rocks that lined the northern bays, and catching the wings of gulls that wheeled in the high salt air; already it lighted the empty streets of Boston, and shone upon the steeples of the empty churches along Boylston Street and St. James Avenue, on Arlington and Berkeley and Clarendon; it shone through the high windows of his father’s house, lighting rooms in which no one moved.
A sense of sorrow that was like a foretaste of grief spread upon his mind; he thought of his father, a thin austere figure that moved before the eye of his mind like a stranger, and then faded impalpably into a gray mist. He closed his eyes in a spasm of regret and pity, and perceived sharply the darkness he brought on by that small motion of his lids. He knew that he would not go back. He would not return with McDonald to his home, to the country that had given him birth, had raised him in the shape he occupied and the condition that he had only begun to recognize, and that had relinquished him to a wilderness in which he had thought to find a truer shape of himself. No, he would never return.
As if balancing himself finely at the edge of an abyss, he turned from the window and looked again at the sleeping figure of Francine. He could hardly recall, now, the passion that had drawn him to this room and this flesh, as if by a subtle magnetism; nor could he recall the force of that other passion which had impelled him halfway across a continent into a wilderness where he had dreamed he could find, as in a vision, his unalterable self. Almost without regret, he could admit now the vanity from which those passions had sprung.
It was that nothingness of which McDonald had spoken back in the sleeping house as he stood beneath the lantern that flickered weakly against the darkness; it was the bright blue emptiness of Charley Hoge’s stare, into which he had glimpsed and of which he had tried to tell Francine; it was the contemptuous look that Schneider had given the river just before the hoof had blanked his face; it was the blind enduring set of Miller’s face before the white drive of storm in the mountains; it was the hollow glint in Charley Hoge’s eyes, when Charley Hoge turned from the dying fire to follow Miller into the night; it was the open despair that ripped McDonald’s face into a livid mask during his frenzied pursuit of Miller in the holocaust of the hides; it was what he saw now in Francine’s sleeping face that sagged inertly on her pillow.
He looked once more at Francine, and wished to reach out gently and touch her young, aging face. But he did not do so, for fear that he would awaken her. Very quietly he went to the corner of the room and took his bedroll up. From the money belt that lay upon it, he took out two bills, and stuffed them in his pocket; the rest of the bills he neatly piled on the table beside the couch. Wherever Francine went, she would need the money; she would need it to buy a new rug, and curtains for her windows. Once again he looked at her; across the room, in the large bed, she seemed very small. He went quietly across to the door, and did not look back.
Streaks of red lay in soft banks in the east. In the stillness of the deserted street he walked across to the livery stable and got his horse, awakening the stableman to give him one of the bills he had kept. He saddled his horse quickly in the dim light of the stable, mounted, and turned to wave to the stableman; but he had gone back to sleep. He rode out of the stable and down the dusty street of Butcher’s Crossing; the clop of his horse’s hooves was muffled in the thick dust. He looked on either side of him at what remained of Butcher’s Crossing. Soon there would be nothing here; the timbered buildings would be torn down for what material could be salvaged,
the sod huts would wash away in the weather, and the prairie grass would slowly creep upon the roadway. Even now, in the light of the early sun, the town was like a small ruin; the light caught upon the edges of the buildings and intensified a bareness that was already there.
He rode past the still smoldering ruins of McDonald’s shack and past the cottonwood grove that stood on the right. He crossed the narrow river and brought his horse to a halt. He turned. A thin edge of sun flamed above the eastern horizon. He turned again and looked at the flat country before him, where his shadow lay long and level, broken at the edges by the crisp new prairie grass. His horse’s reins were tough and slick in his hands; he was acutely aware of the rocklike smoothness of the saddle he sat in, of the gentle swelling movement of the horse’s sides as it took in air and expelled it. He breathed deeply of the fragrant air that rose from the new grass and mingled with the musty sweat of his horse. He gathered the reins firmly in one hand, touched his horse’s flanks with his heels, and rode into the open country.
Except for the general direction he took, he did not know where he was going; but he knew that it would come to him later in the day. He rode forward without hurry, and felt behind him the sun slowly rise and harden the air.
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1960 by John Williams; copyright renewed © 1988 by John Williams
Introduction copyright © 2007 by Michelle Latiolais
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Albert Bierstadt, Lander’s Peak, Rocky Mountains, 1863
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data