Legends of the Fall

  Tristan had in his fever achieved that state which mystics crave but he was ill-prepared for: all things on earth both living and dead were with him and owned the same proportion, he did not recognize in any meaningful sense his naked foot at the end of the bed, or the ocean under whose lid it was always night even at high noon, the blood at the end of the great tusk did not belong on the schooner and throwing it overboard would somehow return it to the elephant’s head. Susannah arrived as a pale pink sexual ghost and her womb covered him, saline like the spray off the bowsprit until he was a ghost, too, and he was the ocean, Susannah herself, the bucking horse beneath him, the wood of the sea horse beneath him, both wind ripping the sails and the moon above the sails and the light of the dark between.

  He had largely recovered by the time they hit the entry of the Strait of Malacca and sailed in fair soft winds toward Singapore. The ivory was dumped without ceremony at a shipboard conference not the less profitable because of the Chinese businessmen’s fear of the cutthroats that watched the bargaining. Tristan was stretched thin by his disease as cable about to be sprung but fully in command. He agreed to take at an exorbitant price a trunk of pure opium to San Francisco to be accompanied by one of the businessmen. Asgaard hedged but over dinner Tristan made an even split of the ivory profits with the crew, saving out an extra share for his grandfather as the owner of the schooner. He said the same would happen with the opium profits and Asgaard lapsed into a dream of a small farm on the coast of Denmark that could easily be his own. The Cubans celebrated thinking how overwhelmed their families would be with this new wealth. Only Tristan and the Mexican were rootless, cared next to nothing for the pile of money before them because they wanted nothing that could be bought with it: one could suppose that the Mexican thought of his far-off and beloved country he could not return to without dying. And God knows what Tristan wanted other than to revive the dead: his brain was the remnant of carnage, a burned city or forest, cold scar tissue.

  The schooner headed north through the South China Sea stopping at Manila for fresh supplies and water. The opium courier was panicked at that infamous port, so Tristan set Asgaard and the two Cubans armed with hunting rifles on deck. He then went down to his cabin and wrote a short but fatal note to Susannah (Your husband is forever dead, please marry another) which he posted with the captain of a fast steamer he met when he and the Mexican began their binge in Manila. Just before dawn on the way back to the ship they were set upon by four thugs near the dock and might have died were it not for the Mexican disarming one of the assailants while Tristan attacked the largest man. The Mexican cleanly beheaded one with the man’s machete and the others, save the one Tristan was strangling, fled, but not before Tristan received a severe leg wound, a deep slice across the side of his knee which cut the tendon. The Mexican applied a tourniquet and they made their way singing back to the dinghy which they rowed drunkenly to the mooring. Asgaard cleaned and sewed up the wound with catgut improvising knots around the tendon. The wound had healed by the time they reached Hawaii though ever after Tristan walked with the trace of a limp.

  No one but his far-flung crew knows much of Tristan’s next six years except for a few details, all the more teasing because of their incompleteness: we know he reached San Francisco then headed south to Panama hoping to pass through the new canal but the landslide at the Gaitland Cut had temporarily closed the new passage so he rounded the Horn and had a small steam auxiliary put in at Rio. Then the schooner had a relatively stable three years in the Caribbean working as an island trader ranging from Bermuda to Martinique over to Cartagena. Tristan bought a small ranch on the Isla de Pinos then set off for Dakar on another escapade for the British government in the last year of the war. He rounded Good Hope returning to Mombasa where he took aboard a Galla woman for a week but she feared the rocking of the schooner and was put ashore with a small sack of gold in Zanzibar. He was repeating his ivory and opium run as he made his way again east to Singapore, Manila, Hawaii and San Francisco, down through the open canal late in 1921 and thence back to Havana where Asgaard and the rest of the crew left him except for the Mexican. He spent a few months on his ranch and when he returned to Havana he learned of the death of his grandfather five years before and that his father had suffered a stroke and that he wished him to come home so that they might see each other before Ludlow died. Tristan and the Mexican hired another crew and made their way to Vera Cruz where the Mexican now had enough money to bounty his life with power. Tristan put the schooner in the Mexican’s care and journeyed north by horse and train arriving in April of 1922, still sunblasted, limping, unconsoled and looking at the world with the world’s coldest eye.

  It is not for us to comprehend Ludlow’s speechless delight when he and One Stab sat on the porch listening to the symphony on the radio one warm April afternoon and saw Tristan’s horse picking its way around the melting snowdrifts in the road and up through the gate. Tristan jumped from the horse and caught his father falling into his arms from the porch and he repeated father over and over but the old man was truly speechless now because of his stroke. One Stab stared straight upward and felt the first tears of a life so rough as to be incomprehensible as Ludlow’s delight. One Stab began singing. Decker ran from the corral and Tristan and Decker tried to lift each other at once. Pet came from the kitchen hearing the noise and tried to bow as Tristan embraced her. A girl of sixteen with a long pigtail wearing men’s clothing came around the corner carrying a bridle: windburned but not quite Indian in her darkness. She stared at Tristan who caught her glance but then she walked away. Decker said it was his daughter Isabel but she was shy.

  Pet killed and dressed a spring lamb, built a fire behind the kitchen and began roasting it. They sat on the porch drinking but mostly silent. Ludlow wrote questions on a slate board with chalk. His hair was white but his carriage erect. Decker looked off in the distance and explained that Tristan’s mother was in Rome, then paused adding as a false afterthought, that Alfred and Susannah had been married the year before and were on an extended though belated honeymoon tour through Europe and would be at Cap d’Antibes for the summer. Decker was relieved and drank deeply when Tristan seemed unconcerned. Tristan walked a circle on the lawn and said he wanted to take a quick ride and hoped they wouldn’t be too drunk by dinner.

  He rode quickly up the creek that led to the spring in the box canyon. The remnant of a snowdrift covered Samuel’s grave and a magpie flew off the stone as he arrived and unhorsed. He watched the invisible tracery in the air the bird made climbing to the canyon top above his head. He decided he wasn’t good at graves because the grave under his feet was merely snow and earth and a stone dulled by the weather. On the way back to the house he watched Isabel grooming three spring foals in the sunlight. Decker called her Two to avoid confusion with Tristan’s mother. He asked her where the badger was and she said the animal disappeared but his children still lived up behind the orchard. She took him into the barn and showed him an Airedale puppy Ludlow had bought for her birthday. Though only ten weeks old the pup advanced growling on Tristan and he swept it up gradually calming it until it chewed on his ear. Then he stared at her closely until she flushed and looked down at her feet.

  At dinner Ludlow carved the lamb ceremoniously, then wrote “tell us tales” on his slate board and passed it to Tristan. Oddly, and like many men compelled to adventure with no interest in the notion of adventure but only a restlessness of the body and spirit, Tristan did not see anything particularly extraordinary about his past seven years. But he had an extravagantly accurate idea of what the table wanted to hear so he talked on for his father: the beheading of the Filipino thug, a typhoon off the Marshall Islands, an anaconda he bought while drunk in Recife that wound itself so tightly around the mast that it could not be detached until they offered it a piglet, the beauty of some of the horses he left in care of his crew hands in Cuba, and how some of the citizens in Singapore eat dogs, which shocked everyone at the table except One Stab who ask
ed Tristan about Africa. After dinner he distributed some presents from his saddlebags including a necklace of lion’s teeth which he placed around One Stab who set off a few days later on a three-day ride to Fort Benton to show the necklace to One Who Sees As A Bird. Tristan impulsively gave a ruby ring meant for his mother to Two, placing it on her ring finger and kissing her on the forehead. The table was silent and Pet started to interfere but Decker calmed her.

  Later that night after everyone had gone to bed Tristan walked far out in the pasture in the moonlight: the snow patches were a ghostly white and far to the west he could see the even whiter peaks of the Rockies. He listened to the coyotes yelping and chattering in pursuit and occasionally a short howl. Back near the corral he heard the puppy crying and went into the barn and picked it up. He took it in the house and up to his room where he put it on the mule deer skin and built a nest around it with a comforter against the chill of the night. Tristan slept then until the middle of the night when the puppy growled and in the moonlight from the window he saw Two standing at the foot of the bed. He reached for her hand and after a while she joined his deep and dreamless sleep, wound about each other with all loneliness faded at last from the earth.

  Tristan’s life seemed to be moving through time in increments of seven: and now he was to have seven years of grace, a period so relatively peerless and golden in his life that far into the future he would turn back to that time; the minutiae of the book of days, a hieratica relived slowly so that each page was turned with some eagerness. No grace is isolate, and it was to a greater part the people he loved, but could scarcely comprehend as people when he left, who led him into light and warmth; but on that first morning he could see them clearly from the window after Two slipped back into her nightgown, kissed him and left the room: first there was a loud unidentifiable noise far out in the pasture which proved to be a Ford flivver jouncing over the rocks and through mud in great circles with One Stab at the wheel and Ludlow sitting erect beside him in his buffalo robe. Decker leaned against the barn in an Irish wool cap having a morning smoke in a patch of sunlight and scratching the nose of a Hereford bull as it poked through the slats of the fence: Pet scattering grain to the chickens and a few geese and shooing away the pup who chased the chickens. And when he came down for breakfast the wood cook stove was warm and sunlight flowed through the south window with a view of the valley. Two poured him coffee and he looked into the crockery bowl of herring Roscoe Decker was addicted to and fetched a piece with some pickled onions. Two served him fried trout that One Stab had caught at dawn. He stared at her back and the black shiny hair in a single plait as she washed the breakfast dishes. He closed his eyes and the floor rolled beneath him for the moment as the sea and he could smell brisk sea air at northern low tide in the herring. He opened his eyes and asked Two with a smile if she would marry him soon and thus avoid scandalizing the house with nightly visits. She dried her hands and took her ruby ring from the window sill as if she were holding a chalice and said yes if he were sure of himself, and yes if he weren’t sure of himself.

  There was a grand early October wedding, delayed until then so Isabel could get back from Europe and at Pet’s insistence because she feared that Tristan would leave at any whim, an idea remote from his thoughts. Tristan spent the summer building a lodge house up in the box canyon overlooking the spring. A group of Norwegian carpenters came from Spokane along with three Italian stonemasons from Butte. The lodge was simple in design with one huge main room with a kitchen and fireplace at one end, and on the other end a wall-sized fieldstone fireplace. There were two wings of three bedrooms apiece. Two was embarrassed at the size of the place and One Stab and Ludlow visited daily in the flivver carrying lunch for the workers. Ludlow had taken to writing longish, eloquent letters to which Tristan would answer around the fire after dinner.

  In Montana the Depression came ten years early. On the eastern plains the grain market goaded to affluence by the war collapsed totally aided by two years of severe drought. Banks failed and the cattle market inflated as the hunger of soldiers dwindled. Decker pared the stock back to registered Herefords, but the sole income of the ranch was the get of the foundation stallion, still referred to by all as Arthur Dog Meat, that Decker bred to the thoroughbred mares. The offspring didn’t own the strength or the sturdiness of the quarter horse but they were exquisite cutting horses and class pleasure mounts, pretty faced and spirited. And they were powerfully fast at the quarter mile and Tristan and Decker raced them at fairs in Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. With gambling winnings, Tristan bought Ludlow a Packard touring car that One Stab drove with dignity and care, still in his lion’s tooth necklace. Men came from as far as San Antonio and Kingsville, Texas, to buy horses for amounts that Decker and Ludlow found boggling, but which Tristan insisted upon with shrewdness.

  The fall wedding had passed into memory without the presence of Alfred and Susannah. In fact it was four years before Tristan saw Susannah over a polite but festive Christmas dinner. Alfred arrived from time to time when he was in the area campaigning for the United States Senate, a contest which he won handily helped not a little by the coffers and influence of his father-in-law. No one but Two and Pet saw Susannah’s grief that Christmas. She was still childless and when Tristan’s children, Samuel Decker and Isabel Three, caressed her yellow hair in the parlor, she wept.

  The economics of the time grew more questionable and on Arthur’s advice Ludlow slowly withdrew his capital from the Helena Bank and for want of a better idea buried gold beneath a huge stone on Tristan’s hearth. Tristan with his habitual though charming arrogance insisted the ranch be self-supporting. He still sent formal notices and amounts of money to Susannah and her father for the use of the land they mutually held.

  CHAPTER

  III

  What doomed him again (for there is little to tell of happiness—happiness is only itself, placid, emotionally dormant, a state adopted with a light heart but nagging brain) was a trip to Great Falls with Two and the ranch hands to drive a group of fall steers to the railhead. It was a pleasurable trip, not the less happy because of its almost antique nature. It was October and the stock market, whatever that was, had just collapsed. But Tristan had got a small amount of cash for the cattle and they all—Two, Tristan, Decker, the half-black Cree, a Norwegian who remained on from the carpentry crew years before—stayed to celebrate after an arduous hot summer. They had the best meal in town with plenty of drinks, but were put off by the finery and wealth of a neighboring ranch crew that had gotten rich by smuggling liquor in from Canada in defiance of the Volstead Act.

  One Stab was coming next day in the Packard to take Two home with her fall shopping, so Tristan told the smugglers’ leader he would take ten cases of whiskey for his own use and to sell to his neighbors. He told his crew he would split the profits and they were drunk with pleasure thinking of the quick money, ordering even more whiskey to carry in the panniers of the packhorses.

  They made a strange procession filing down a narrow canyon into a valley near Choteau, the horses not far behind the Packard bogged and slowed in the October rain. Then at the mouth of the canyon near where the road turned north toward Choteau, the law with two armed men and a Ford coupe blocked the road. They fired vaguely into the air as they had been instructed as Federal officers. And the procession still in good humor stopped. The Federal officer said they had learned of the shipment and Tristan would have to give up the whiskey. They recognized Tristan and were apologetic saying he would face charges in November in Helena but they would have to destroy the liquor. Tristan turned from the officers hearing One Stab wail. He walked to the Packard, looked at One Stab’s face, then at Two where she sat in the back with the supplies and gifts. She sat there as if built of stone with a ricocheted bullet from the canyon wall neatly piercing her forehead like a red dime.

  Tristan went berserk then, reached for a nonexisting gun, then slugged each startled officer, putting one of them near death for months. He
drew Two’s body from the Packard and ran with it down the canyon. The procession followed him as he carried her body for miles through the cold rain. He carried her body howling occasionally in a language not known on earth.

  * * *

  Three days later the marshal came to Ludlow’s house saying that Tristan would have to serve thirty days in the Helena jail because of the severity of the crushed skull of one of the Federal officers. The lightness of the sentence was due to Alfred’s enormous influence in Montana politics. Pet interrupted to say that Isabel Three was gone. Tristan rode out covering a dozen miles until he found her close by up in the woods near the spring. One Stab was singing his Cheyenne death song and she was joining in with a voice so high and plaintive that the remnants of Tristan’s heart broke in half. He lifted her slight body to the saddle and carried her home.

  It is still argued by old men in the area whether it was alcohol, jailor grief, or simply greed that made Tristan an outlaw: but this is only gossip to nurse the drinks of pensioners and interesting in that forty years later Tristan was still an object of fascination, somehow the last of the outlaws, rather than a gangster.

  In fact after he found six-year-old Three up at the spring singing with One Stab, he was mute for a number of months, except with his children. He was mute in jail refusing all visitors, including Alfred who came to offer his condolences and those of Susannah in a letter. The Helena press covered the meeting under the heading “Senator Visits Bereaved Brother in Jail.”

  In fact, Alfred was hoping for some solace and intervention from Tristan. He had arrived at the ranch the day after the funeral and only a few hours after the Marshal accompanied Tristan to jail. Ludlow stayed in his room and would not see his eldest son. He sent Pet down into the parlor carrying his slate saying he could not talk to Alfred as long as he represented the U. S. Government and its base practices.