Dragons - Chapter 95 (DRAFT)

The following morning was Monday. And what a Monday it turned out to be. A Monday like none I had ever lived before. A Monday that, had I been writing a novel, I wouldn’t have had the courage to put down in writing. Mondays like this one just don’t happen in real life.

It really began while I was getting dressed for work, my mother-in-law, on what was likely to be her last morning with us, downstairs making breakfast for Jacob and maybe for me. I was buttoning my shirt, looking at myself with dread in the mirror on the back of our closest door, and almost didn’t hear my phone buzzing on the dresser behind me.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Alan? This is Steve Anderson.”

Yes, it was. And he apologized for calling so early, but he wanted to catch me before I went into the office this morning. He wanted to offer me the position we had recently discussed, at a salary almost double what I was currently making.

“Alan? Are you there?”

I was lucky my unmade bed had been so close, or Steve might have heard my head thump against the bedroom floor.

“Yes, yes, I’m here, Steve. Can you please say that all again?”

He did. And this time I listened more carefully, making sure I heard every single word. He offered me the position. At a salary almost double what I was currently making. And then he went on with several other details regarding the offered benefits, the relocation assistance, the support for professional education activities, and the other executive perks.

“We want to make this easy for you, Alan. We’re convinced you’re the right person for this job, and we don’t want to give you any reason to say no.”

I was flummoxed, but knew I had to say something, so I slowly thanked Steve for that vote of confidence and for the offer while my brain started working overtime in a mostly futile attempt to parse the information it had so suddenly been given. I thought desperately that I should maybe tell him about my wife, our baby, and the hospital, but quickly decided against it.

“I want to put all of that in writing,” Steve was saying, “and give you time to review it and the employment contract in detail. Is it okay if I send that to the email you listed on your resume?”

“Yes,” I said, knowing that this was my personal and not my work email. “Yes. That would be great. Please do that, Steve. I look forward to reviewing it.”

“My number will be on the email, Alan. You call me at any time if you have any questions. I hope we can bring this to a quick and mutually beneficial conclusion.”

“You bet,” I said, and then Steve said goodbye, and then the line clicked off.

And there I sat, in my half buttoned shirt over pajama bottoms and bare feet, wondering if what just happened had actually happened.

I finished getting dressed and then went downstairs and fired up our home computer. I could hear Jacob helping Meredith in the kitchen while I sat patiently through its long boot cycle, forcing myself to wait until it was complete before opening up our email program. And there it was. Right at the top of the inbox. An email from “Anderson, Steve,” with the little paperclip icon that meant it included an attached file.

I opened both the email and the document, and they were what Steve had just promised -- the email a faithful recap of the numbers and benefits he had verbally described, and the attachment an eight-page employment contract with a bunch of legal paragraphs and a pair of lines at the very end -- one of them already containing Steve Anderson’s signature.

I was halfway through reading it when Meredith appeared behind my right shoulder.

“Are you working from home today? I thought you had to go to the office?” In the corner of my eye I could see the twinkling of the diamond ring on one of the fingers holding her coffee cup.

“I am. I mean, I was. I mean, look at this.”

She leaned in closer, her matching necklace falling forward and its pendant swinging free. “What is it?”

I hit the print button, suddenly realizing the advantage of having an attorney for a mother-in-law. I gave Meredith a quick summary of what had just happened, and asked if she would take a professional look at the contract, already knowing that I was in over my head with it. In a few minutes we were sitting at the dining room table -- Meredith slowly turning pages, Jacob eating grapes and Cherrios out of two different bowls, and me placing another phone call.

“Hi, honey,” I said when Jenny picked up. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m tired,” Jenny’s voice breathed into my ear. “How do you think I’m feeling, Alan?”

I told her to brace herself and then gave her the news.

“OH MY GOD! WHAT? ALAN! HOW MUCH DID YOU SAY?”

I think it was hearing Jenny’s reaction -- the shock and the surprise, and then the joy and the laughter -- that I for the first time began to realize that my long and painful ordeal was, in fact, about to come to an end. I’m glad I was already seated, because the realization made me initially dizzy. It was thrilling -- almost dangerously so -- and yet, there was still so much to think about, and to plan for.

“What do you think?” I said, tongue-in-cheek. “Should I accept?”

“My God, Alan! Of course you should accept. You need this. WE need this!”

“But it’s in Boston,” I said. “We’ll have to move to Boston, you know.”

“We knew that going in,” Jenny said. “We’ll do it. We’ll make it work.”

“What do you think, Meredith?” I asked, seeking her legal opinion rather than her blessing.

“I’m still reading,” she said, understanding me. “And this isn’t necessarily my area of expertise, but so far, I don’t see anything unreasonable here.”

I looked up at the clock and saw that I was already twenty minutes late for work. An idea then entered my head, an idea that was both wonderful and terrible at the same time. Wonderful in its potential. Terrible in its finality.

“Should I quit?” I said back into the phone.

“What?” Jenny said. “I didn’t hear you, honey.”

“Should I quit?” I asked again, this time more forcefully, willing the idea into existence, giving it the freedom it needed to live or die on its own. “This morning? Without even going into the office? Should I just call Mary and tell her I quit? That I’m done? That I’m never going back there again?”

God, I wanted the answer to be yes. I would’ve done practically anything in that moment to do exactly what I had just proposed -- not so much so I could tell Mary off, but primarily so I would never have to go into her office again. With everything that had happened in the last seventy-two hours, the idea of never having to return there was seductive.

But cooler heads would prevail -- primarily Jenny’s and Meredith’s. They discussed it -- me actually putting the call on speaker so that they could do so -- and they agreed that I should wait. A day, or two, or however long it took for the contract to be signed and countersigned and for the deal to be legally struck. Cutting one cord before securing the next was a risk, perhaps a small one, but a risk nonetheless, and probably not worth taking. 

Except for the fact that I was drowning. And now, after the tantalizing prize of a life preserver had been dangled in front of me, the idea of returning willingly to the sinking ship, and of continuing to bail the murky water with my leaky bucket while the unsounded sea kept rising relentlessly around me, it was almost too much for me to bear.

I told Jenny that I would come and see her at the hospital after the work day was finished and then we said goodbye. Meredith went back to reading the contract and so I got Jacob out of his booster seat and took his bowls to the kitchen, soaking them in the sink with the handful of other dishes that Meredith had created. She had brewed a pot of coffee, and I poured myself a cup, sipping it slowly while I stood in the kitchen and waited for my mother-in-law to finish her review of the document that would, I hoped, chart the next major chapter in my life.

“Alan?” she said eventually, calling me back to the dining room, sitting me down, and walking me page by page through the contract. She was strictly business, adopting a tone that I had only seldom heard her use, perhaps while she was on the phone at a family gathering, talking to a client or an opposing counsel. She explained each clause to me, stressing the items that were clearly in my favor and those that were clearly protecting the interests of the organization hiring me, and she did it all in a neutral tone, simply an umpire calling balls and strikes. When she finished, she scooped the loose pages up off the table, tapped them together into a short, neat stack, and slid them across the table to me.

“It all sounds reasonable,” I said. “Am I missing something?”

She gave me a long look, her painted lips pursing with only the slightest flicker of discomfort.

“Again,” she said, carefully, “employment contracts are not my area of expertise. But, yes, to the degree that I can make an informed opinion, it appears to represent a fair agreement between the two parties.”

Her speech was stilted. I tried to look at her compassionately. “You don’t want us moving to Boston, do you, Meredith?”

She paused -- a long and quiet moment passing in what was normally a whirlwind of our house -- and then slowly shrugged her shoulders. “What I want should not be the prevailing interest in your decision, Alan. You’ve worked hard for the offer that this contract represents. I wouldn’t want you to walk away from it out of some perceived loyalty to my preferences.”

She was like a robot -- a robot lawyer, spewing nothing but legalese, assessments of mitigated risk, and sound advice. But she was also my mother-in-law, the woman who had raised the woman I loved, who had cried at our wedding, who had accepted me as a son into her aura of protection, who had doted on her grandson from a respectable distance, who had done everything in her power to love, to celebrate, to clear the way.

I looked back down at the contract. “I’m going to read it one more time,” I said.

“I think you should,” Meredith said, pushing herself up from the table. “I’ll go get Jacob ready. We’re going down to the park this morning.”

“Are you staying?” I asked her suddenly.

She nodded. “A few more days. If you think you need me, that is.”

I thanked her, told her we definitely needed her, and then I turned to the document. I read it all the way through -- first the section establishing the parties and the intent of the agreement, and then onto the clauses detailing the offered compensation and benefits, and through to those providing guarantees and protections from liability for the organization. And by the time I got to the closing clauses on jurisdiction and indemnification, I realized that I had made a decision.

I picked up my phone and called Steve Anderson. He was surprised to hear from me so soon and delighted to hear that I was accepting the offer. I would be signing the agreement as presented and returning it as soon as I got to the office and could scan it and attach it to an email. We agreed that there were still a lot of details that would need to be figured out. I would, after all, need to give my current employer two weeks notice, and then there was the matter of relocating to Boston.

“Don’t you worry about any of that,” Steve told me. “We’ll provide you all the time and assistance that you need. What did you say your wife’s name was? Jennifer? Whenever she’s ready, have her call my assistant Julie. She’ll help in any way that she can to make sure you find a place and your family can settle in. You have a little boy, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, hearing the thumping steps of said little boy’s sneakered feet upstairs. “But that’s something else we should talk about. You see, we’ve just had our second. A little girl.”

“Splendid!” Steve said, with enough sincerity I thought I could hear his face beaming. “Congratulations, Alan. That is wonderful news!”

But there were complications. I told him in a few clipped sentences about the birth, about the NICU, about my red-eye trip back from Denver. I then held my breath, only knowing how someone like Mary would have reacted to such information from a potential hire.

There was a short pause on the phone, and then Steve’s voice was back, warm and gentle.

“My god, Alan,” he said. “I had no idea. Are you all right? Jennifer? The baby?”

“We’re fine,” I said. “At least I think we are. Honestly, Steve. Right now, I’m not sure I know what fine is supposed to feel like.” I was suddenly choking up, that last few words squeezing out under distress.

“Alan,” Steve said compassionately. “I don’t want you to worry. My youngest -- also a girl -- was born premature. I still remember the few tense weeks she spent in the hospital. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Now she’s a twenty-two-year-old young woman, about to graduate college with a degree in actuarial science. She’s strong and unstoppable, my Amelia, and so is your little girl. You’ll see. Okay?”

I had to wipe my tears away with the back of my hand. “Okay,” I said, sniffling. “Okay. Thanks, Steve.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Steve said. “You get that contract back to me like you’ve planned to do. You give your two weeks notice to your current employer, and we’ll get you on our payroll effective the following Monday.”

“Steve,” I said, “I don’t know that we’re even going to be out of the hospital in two weeks. I just don’t know when I can actually get to Boston and start working.”

“I doesn’t matter,” Steve said. “You’ve got enough things to worry about right now. I don’t want you worrying about money and health insurance, too. We’ll work things out as best we can over the next two weeks. If you need to start working remotely from your current home, we can manage that. Okay?”

At first, it seemed unbelievable that he could possibly be so generous, but then I realized how much things had just changed for me. Miraculously, I was no longer a slave to the dragon, heaping my body, mind, and soul upon her ever-growing pile of ill-gotten treasure. I was free. Punched through what was once an unstoppable barrier, and out in the clear unknown.

“Okay. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, a lot.”

“No worries. Congratulations again on your baby girl. Have you named her yet?”

“No,” I said. “No, we haven’t had the chance. But now I’m thinking Amelia may be worth considering.”

Steve chuckled. “It’s worked well for us.”

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Night by Elie Wiesel

Wiesel begins this slim volume, which details his experiences within the concentration camps of 1940s Germany, with an anecdote about “Moishe the Beadle,” one of his religious teachers in his small hometown of Sighet, in then-Transylvania.

“Why do you pray?” [Moishe the Beadle] asked after a moment.

Why did I pray? Strange question. Why did I live? Why did I breathe?

“I don’t know,” I told him, even more troubled and ill at ease. “I don’t know.”

From that day on, I saw him often. He explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer …

Man comes closer to God through the questions he asks Him, he liked to say. Therein lies true dialogue. Man asks and God replies. But we don’t understand His replies. We cannot understand them. Because they dwell in the depths of our souls and remain there until we die. The real answers, Eliezer, you will find only within yourself.

“And why do you pray, Moishe?” I asked him.

“I pray to the God within me for the strength to ask Him the real questions.”

One day, as the war was ramping up within Europe, all the foreign Jews, including Moishe, were expelled from Sighet. They were taken away by the Hungarian police, carted off in cattle cars; most, never to be seen again. After several months, with life in Sighet returning to some semblance of normal, Wiesel spots Moishe the Beadle sitting on a bench near the synagogue.

He told me what had happened to him and his companions. The train with the deportees had crossed the Hungarian border and, once in Polish territory, had been taken over by the Gestapo. The train had stopped. The Jews were ordered to get off and onto waiting trucks. The trucks headed towards a forest. There everybody was ordered to get out. They were forced to dig huge trenches. When they had finished their work, the men from the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion or haste, they shot their prisoners, who were forced to approach the trench one by one and offer their necks. Infants were tossed into the air and used as targets for the machine guns. This took place in the Galician forest, near Kolomay. How had he, Moishe the Beadle, been able to escape? By a miracle. He was wounded in the leg and left for dead …

Day after day, night after night, he went from one Jewish house to the next, telling his story and that of Malka, the young girl who lay dying for three days, and that of Tobie, the tailor who begged to die before his sons were killed.

Moishe was not the same. The joy in his eyes was gone. He no longer sang. He no longer mentioned either God or Kabbalah. He spoke only of what he had seen. But people not only refused to believe his tales, they refused to listen. Some even insinuated that he only wanted their pity, that he was imagining things. Others flatly said that he had gone mad.

In many ways, this anecdote has the keys that will unlock a central understanding of this book and the seemingly impossible but horrifically truthful events that it documents. And like Moishe the Beadle tried to teach young Eliezer Wiesel, God and His elusive covenant with His tortured creation is at the absolute center of it all. 

Step One: God Has Abandoned Me

In due time, Wiesel’s family will be put in the same boxcars and taken to Auschwitz. There, they will be separated, fifteen-year-old Wiesel staying only with his father, his mother and sisters taken in a different direction. His mother, he would never see again.

Not far from us, flames, huge flames, were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there. A truck drew close and unloaded its hold: small children. Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes … children thrown into the flames. (Is it any wonder that ever since then, sleep tends to elude me?)

So that was where we were going. A little farther on, there was another, larger pit for adults.

I pinched myself: Was I still alive? How was it possible that men, women, and children were being burned and that the world kept silent? No. All this could not be real. A nightmare perhaps … Soon I would wake up with a start, my heart pounding, and find that I was back in the room of my childhood, with my books …

My father’s voice tore me from my daydreams:

“What a shame, a shame that you did not go with your mother … I saw many children your age go with their mothers …”

His voice was terribly sad. I understood that he did not wish to see what they would do to me. He did not wish to see his only son go up in flames.

My forehead was covered with cold sweat. Still, I told him that I could not believe that human beings were being burned in our times; the world would never tolerate such crimes …

“The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria …” His voice broke.

“Father,” I said. “If that is true, then I don’t want to wait. I’ll run into the electrified barbed wire. That would be easier than a slow death in the flames.”

He didn’t answer. He was weeping. His body was shaking. Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don’t know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.”

“Yisgadal, veyiskadash, shemy raba … May His name be celebrated and sanctified …” whispered my father.

For the first time, I felt anger rising within me. Why should I sanctify His name? The Almighty, the eternal and terrible Master of the Universe, chose to be silent. What was there to thank Him for?”

I came to view this sentiment as the first phase of a spiritual death that Weisel will document in this book, not just for himself, but for countless others that he would encounter and interact with in these camps.

Evenings, as we lay on our cots, we sometimes tried to sing a few Hasidic melodies. Akiba Drumer would break our hearts with his deep, grave voice.

Some of the men spoke of God: His mysterious ways, the sins of the Jewish people, and the redemption to come. As for me, I had ceased to pray. I concurred with Job! I was not denying His existence, but I doubted His absolute justice.

Akiba Drumer said:

“God is testing us. He wants to see whether we are capable of overcoming our base instincts, of killing the Satan within ourselves. We have no right to despair. And if He punishes us mercilessly, it is a sign that He loves us that much more …”

Hersh Genud, well versed in Kabbalah, spoke of the end of the world and the coming of the Messiah.

It is a strange and ultimately untenable place for a young believer to be. God exists, but has abandoned His faithful. Or that He is testing you, and that the hardship He brings upon you is a testament to His love. Philosophically, that can only serve as a way station, a place to stand and rest before moving onto darker and more troubling conclusions.

Step Two: God Is My Enemy

Among the many horrors that Wiesel is witness to, there are also hangings, men and sometimes boys, condemned to die by hanging because of some real or perceived disobedience against the ultimate rule of their captors.

The three condemned prisoners together stepped onto the chairs. In unison, the nooses were placed around their necks.

“Long live liberty!” shouted the two men.

But the boy was silent.

“Where is merciful God, where is He?” someone behind me was asking.

At the signal, the three chairs were tipped over.

Total silence in the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting.

“Caps off!” screamed the Lagerälteste. His voice quivered. As for the rest of us, we were weeping.

“Cover your heads!”

Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing …

And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

“For God’s sake, where is God?”

And from within me, I heard a voice answer:

“Where He is? This is where -- hanging here from this gallows …”

That night, the soup tasted of corpses.

Wiesel grows more and more angry, still believing that God is real, but unable to understand how He can be both good and allow these atrocities to happen. On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the last day of the Jewish year, Weisel and many of his fellow prisoners gathered in the camp’s open compound for a religious service.

Some ten thousand men had come to participate in a solemn service, including the Blockälteste, the Kapos, all bureaucrats in the service of Death.

“Blessed be the Almighty …”

The voice of the officiating inmate had just become audible. At first I thought it was the wind.

“Blessed be God’s name …”

Thousands of lips repeated the benediction, bent over like trees in a storm.

Blessed be God’s name?

Why, but why would I bless Him? Every fiber in me rebelled. Because He caused thousands of children to burn in His mass graves? Because He kept six crematoria working day and night, including Sabbath and the Holy Days? Because in His great might, He had created Auschwitz, Birkenau, Buna, and so many other factories of death? How could I say to Him: Blessed be Thou, Almighty, Master of the Universe, who chose us among all nations to be tortured day and night, to watch as our fathers, our mothers, our brothers end up in the furnaces? Praised be Thy Holy Name, for having chosen us to be slaughtered on Thine altar?

I listened as the inmate’s voice rose; it was powerful yet broken, amid the weeping, the sobbing, the sighing of the entire “congregation”:

“All the earth and universe are God’s!”

Weisel is unable to accept the bitter and obvious lesson of it all. In times of terrible strife it becomes more clear, but it is always the case. God is worshipped because He is terrible. That is actually the point. It is not to your life and the pleasures that it brings that your fealty belongs. Instead, it is always and forever to His great inscrutable purpose, even as He grinds the very bones within your flesh to dust.

But he does learn a different lesson.

And I, the former mystic, was thinking: Yes, man is stronger, greater than God. When Adam and Eve deceived You, You chased them from paradise. You were displeased by Noah’s generation, You brought down the Flood. When Sodom lost Your favor, You caused the heavens to rain down fire and damnation. But look at these men whom You have betrayed, allowing them to be tortured, slaughtered, gassed, and burned, what do they do? They pray before You! They praise Your name!

“All of creation bears witness to the Greatness of God!”

In days gone by, Rosh Hashanah had dominated my life. I knew that my sins grieved the Almighty and so I pleaded for forgiveness. In those days, I fully believed that the salvation of the world depended on every one of my deeds, on every one of my prayers.

But now, I no longer pleaded for anything. I was no longer able to lament. On the contrary, I felt very strong. I was the accuser, God the accused. My eyes had opened and I was alone, terribly alone in a world without God, without man. Without love or mercy. I was nothing but ashes now, but I felt myself to be stronger than this Almighty to whom my life had been bound for so long. In the midst of these men assembled for prayer, I felt like an observer, a stranger.

He keeps his belief, his belief in God, but now God has not just abandoned him, God has actually failed him. 

Step Three: A Great Void Opening

Shortly after Rosh Hashanah comes Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

Should we fast? The question was hotly debated. To fast could mean a more certain, more rapid death. In this place, we were always fasting. It was Yom Kippur year-round. But there were those who said we should fast, precisely because it was dangerous to do so. We needed to show God that even here, locked in hell, we were capable of singing His praises.

I did not fast. First of all, to please my father who had forbidden me to do so. And then, there was no longer any reason for me to fast. I no longer accepted God’s silence. As I swallowed my ration of soup, I turned that act into a symbol of rebellion, of protest against Him.

And I nibbled on my crust of bread.

Deep inside me, I felt a great void opening.

The great void is the lack of belief, a concept truly foreign to Wiesel and to many of his fellow victims, but which, eventually, intrudes in on their consciousness until it can no longer be denied. Constantly facing the selection, the brutal winnowing of the prisoners as the weakest and most infirm are carted off to the crematoria, it will tear the philosophical trappings of divine love and justice any until nothing remains but gaping wounds and terror.

I knew a rabbi, from a small town in Poland. He was old and bent, his lips constantly trembling. He was always praying, in the block, at work, in the ranks. He recited entire pages from the Talmud, arguing with himself, asking and answering himself endless questions. One day, he said to me:

“It’s over. God is no longer with us.”

And as though he regretted having uttered such words so coldly, so dryly, he added in his broken voice, “I know. No one has the right to say things like that. I know that very well. Man is too insignificant, too limited, to even try to comprehend God’s mysterious ways. But what can someone like myself do? I’m neither a sage nor a just man. I am not a saint. I’m a simple creature of flesh and bone. I suffer hell in my soul and my flesh. I also have eyes and I see what is being done here. Where is God’s mercy? Where’s God? How can I believe, how can anyone believe in this God of Mercy?”

The poor old rabbi could no longer believe, and neither could Wiesel, although he often seems loathe to admit it, even in the pages of this document in which he provides so much evidence against the proposition of that merciful God.

Step Four: The God Within

But it gets worse, for even after losing a belief in God, there are still things that dire circumstances can force a man to forfeit.

The door of the shed opened. An old man appeared. His mustache was covered with ice, his lips were blue. It was Rabbi Eliahu, who had headed a small congregation in Poland. A very kind man, beloved by everyone in the camp, even by the Kapos and the Blockälteste. Despite the ordeals and deprivations, his face continued to radiate his innocence. He was the only rabbi whom nobody ever failed to address as “Rabbi” in Buna. He looked like one of those prophets of old, always in the midst of his people when they needed to be consoled. And, strangely, his words never provoked anyone. They did bring peace.

This is late in Wiesel’s narrative. He, his father, and many of their fellow prisoners are being force-marched from camp to concentration camp as the Allies begin to close in on the German system of extermination.

As he entered the shed, his eyes, brighter than ever, seemed to be searching for someone.

“Perhaps someone here has seen my son?”

He had lost his son in the commotion. He had searched for him among the dying, to no avail. Then he had dug through the show to find his body. In vain.

For three years, they had stayed close to one another. Side by side, they had endured the suffering, the blows; they had waited for their ration of bread and they had prayed. Three years, from camp to camp, from selection to selection. And now -- when the end seemed near -- fate had separated them.

When he came near me, Rabbi Eliahu whispered, “It happened on the road. We lost sight of one another during the journey. I fell behind a little, at the rear of the column. I didn’t have the strength to run anymore. And my son didn’t notice. That’s all I know. Where has he disappeared? Where can I find him? Perhaps you’ve seen him somewhere?”

“No, Rabbi Eliahu, I haven’t seen him.”

And so he left, as he had come: a shadow swept away by the wind.

It is a story similar to that of Wiesel and his father, except that they still had each other, and had not been separated by fate, or by something else. For:

He had already gone through the door when I remembered that I had noticed his son running beside me. I had forgotten and so had not mentioned it to Rabbi Eliahu!

But then I remembered something else: his son had seen him losing ground, sliding back to the rear of the column. He had seen him. And he had continued to run in front, letting the distance between them become greater.

A terrible thought crossed my mind: What if he had wanted to be rid of his father? He had felt his father growing weaker and, believing that the end was near, had thought by this separation to free himself of a burden that could diminish his own chance for survival.

It was good that I had forgotten all that. And I was glad that Rabbi Eliahu continued to search for his beloved son.

And in spite of myself, a prayer formed inside me, a prayer to this God in whom I no longer believed.

“Oh God, Master of the Universe, give me the strength never to do what Rabbi Eliahu’s son has done.”

This, for me, is the emotional crucible of Wiesel’s story. The dark and inevitable place that each of us would have to confront in such a horrific set of circumstances, regardless of whether one believes in a merciful God or not. The emotion of losing a mother when forcibly separated from them, to have her disappear and never to be seen again, that emotion must be painful enough. But to lose a father, and to decide to lose him so that your own life can be sustained for what might only be a few more minutes, that emotional pain has to be bottomless.

Wiesel and his father will eventually find themselves in Buchenwald. There, his father will get ill, be abused by the guards and by the other prisoners, and begin to waste away towards seemingly inevitable death.

And in that state, Wiesel will have to make the same kind of choice that Rabbi Eliahu’s son did.

“Is this your father?” asked the Blockälteste.

“Yes.”

“He is very sick.”

“The doctor won’t do anything for him.”

He looked me straight in the eye:

“The doctor cannot do anything more for him. And neither can you.”

He placed his big, hairy hand on my shoulder and added:

“Listen to me, kid. Don’t forget that you are in a concentration camp. In this place, it is every man for himself, and you cannot think of others. Not even your father. In this place, there is no such thing as father, brother, friend. Each of us lives and dies alone. Let me give you good advice: stop giving your ration of bread and soup to your old father. You cannot help him anymore. And you are hurting yourself. In fact, you should be getting his rations …”

I listened to him without interrupting. He was right, I thought deep down, not daring to admit it to myself. Too late to save your old father … You could have two rations of bread, two rations of soup …

It was only a fraction of a second, but it left me feeling guilty. I ran to get some soup and brought it to my father. But he did not want it. All he wanted was water.

“Don’t drink water, eat the soup …”

“I’m burning up … Why are you so mean to me, my son? … Water …”

I brought him water. Then I left the block for roll call. But I quickly turned back. I lay down on the upper bunk. The sick were allowed to stay in the block. So I would be sick. I didn’t want to leave my father.

All around me, there was silence now, broken only by moaning. In front of the block, the SS were giving orders. An officer passed between the bunks. My father was pleading:

“My son, water … I’m burning up … My insides …”

“Silence over there!” barked the officer.

“Eliezer,” continued my father, “water …”

The officer came closer and shouted to him to be silent. But my father did not hear. He continued to call me. The officier wielded his club and dealt him a violent blow to the head.

I didn’t move. I was afraid, my body was afraid of another blow, this time to my head.

My father groaned once more, I heard:

“Eliezer …”

I could see that he was still breathing -- in gasps. I didn’t move.

When I came down from my bunk after roll call, I could see his lips trembling; he was murmuring something. I remained more than an hour leaning over him, looking at him, etching his bloody, broken face into my mind.

Then I had to go to sleep. I climbed into my bunk, above my father, who was still alive. The date was January 28, 1945.

Elie Wiesel was sixteen years old. And when he woke up the next morning, someone else was laying in his father’s bunk.

They must have taken him away before daybreak and taken him to the crematorium. Perhaps he was still breathing …

No prayers were said over his tomb. No candle lit in his memory. His last word had been my name. He had called out to me and I had not answered.

I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I was out of tears. And deep inside me, if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like: Free at last! …

This sad, final step -- the abandonment of a loved one, for a slim, incremental increased chance of one’s own survival -- is the reality that faced the son of Rabbi Eliahu and the son of Shlomo Wiesel and the sons of untold countless other young men and boys in camps across Germany, and Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Losing faith in God may have been previously unthinkable for Europe’s orthodox Jews, but how many would have understood that they would eventually lose their humanity -- what Moishe the Beadle might have called the God within?

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 94 (DRAFT)

“Hello? Hello? Is anyone awake in here?”

I woke up with a start, my legs dropping heavily to the floor and almost tumbling out of the chair I was perched on. After the scene in the NICU, I had gone back to Jenny’s hospital room where, both of us exhausted from our individual ordeals, we agreed to try and grab an hour or so of sleep before the hospital itself began to wake up; Jenny in the bed and me in the adjoining visitor chair.

“Daddy!” I heard Jacob shout, and then saw him run into my field of vision. I was unable to fend him off as he climbed heavily up into my lap and gave me a desperate hug. I clutched at him both to steady myself and to keep him from falling, and looked around, still not entirely sure where I was or what was going on.

“Oh, hello, Meredith,” I said, dimly perceiving Jenny’s mother standing in the open doorway, dressed in her latest ath-leisure ensemble, and a big bouquet of flowers in her left hand.

“Hello, hello!” she said again, moving into the room and setting the flowers down on the bedside table.

Jenny was just beginning to stir. “Jesus, Mom, is that you?” she croaked. “What time is it?”

“It’s eight-thirty, my dear. I brought you some flowers to help brighten up this dreary room they’ve put you in.”

“Daddy!” Jacob was shouting, practically in my ear. “Gramma made pancakes for breakfast! And they were shaped like DINOSAURS!”

“Oh, yeah?” I said distantly, more interested but unable to hear the words Jenny and her mother were exchanging.

“I liked the STEGOSAURUS best! He had bumps on his back just like a real STEGOSAURUS!”

“Oh, yeah?” I said again, deciding that I needed to get up on my feet. “Let me get up, Jacob,” I said gently, sliding him down my legs as best I could.

By this time, Meredith had her hand on Jenny’s forehead, evidently feeling for a fever the way she must have been doing since her daughter was four years old. “It’s okay,” she was saying, her tone indicating that she was referring to something other than Jenny’s temperature. “I can only stay for another day or two. But, Alan is home now. He’ll help until you’re back on your feet.”

Meredith suddenly turned towards me, her earrings clinking with the movement. “Have you seen her, Alan? Have you seen my granddaughter yet?”

I was conscious of standing there in my stocking feet and wrinkled slacks, one shirtail untucked and hanging down. Jacob was tugging on one pant leg, and I had to grab the waistband to keep him from pulling them off.

“Ummm, yes,” I said. “Late last night, or early this morning, I guess.”

“Isn’t she an angel?” Meredith asked, her face beaming with a light like that of eternal life. “When I held her last night, she looked right at me and told me everything was going to be all right.” 

I exchanged a glance with Jenny. Meredith had always been a glass-half-full kind of person, but this seemed a little out of even her norm. 

“What do you mean, ‘she told you’?”

“The look in her eye,” Meredith said easily, turning back to Jenny and now caressing her daughter’s cheek with the back of her fingers. “There’s a fire there. You can see it, honey. She’s a fierce one. She’s going to grow big and strong. You’ll see.”

An awkward silence settled in among us, broken by Jacob.

“Can I see?”

“Hmmm?” I asked, turning to look down on his upturned face. “See what, buddy?”

“The baby!” Jacob said. “I want to see her fire eyes! PLEEEEASE?”

He continued to clutch and grab and I decided it would be easier to pick him up. “Not right now,” I said as I eased him into that somewhat comfortable position on the arm and hip. “She’s probably sleeping right now.”

“Nope, she’s awake,” a suddenly-appearing nurse said, her white sneakers squeaking on the floor as she moved quickly into the room and pulled the window shade up. “And she’s hungry. How’s mom doing?” she asked, weaving between me and Meredith to stand next to Jenny. “Are you ready to give breast feeding another try?”

Jenny sighed. “I suppose so.”

The nurse was a middle-aged woman with dark hair and wide hips. Now that she was standing still, I could see the tag on her smock, the name AUDREY prominent above everything else. “We’ve got the lactation consultant in this morning,” AUDREY said. “If baby isn’t ready, we’ll get you set up for pumping. That way baby can get her mother’s milk by eyedropper until she learns how to suckle. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I’ll get a wheelchair,” AUDREY said, and then she was in motion again, quickly disconnecting Jenny from the multiple monitors that were checking her blood pressure, her heart rate, her pulse oxidation. “If you need to use the restroom, maybe dad or grandma can help you?”

She fluttered her way out of the room, leaving me and Meredith staring blankly at each other, neither one of us sure what had just happened and what we were supposed to do next. Jenny, however, was struggling her way up and out of the bed.

“Mom! Help me!”

Ten minutes later, we were all gathered in the viewing room outside the NICU, the long row of windows giving us a full view of the dozen or so incubators and their tiny occupants. I was holding Jacob up, his sneakered feet more or less standing on the bottom frame of the windows as he leaned back against my chest. To our right, Meredith was busily gowning up while Jenny sat, vacant-eyed, in her wheelchair.

“Where is she?” Jacob asked me, whispering like he was in a library. “Where is the baby with the fire eyes?”

I peered into the NICU and tried to determine the answer to his clumsy question. It was a challenge since, from our distance, all the incubators looked the same and it was impossible to tell even the gender much less the features of the little humans that lived inside. 

“I’m not sure, buddy,” I said. “Grandma will bring her over to us when Mommy is done feeding her.”

This is what had been discussed and agreed to in advance. Given the clean conditions that needed to be maintained in the NICU, only one mother and one additional person were allowed in at any single time, and that additional person, usually the husband or another relative, had to be masked and gowned. There was no way to bring someone as young and rambunctious as Jacob into such a quiet place, but the large windows offered an ability for close viewing when necessary.  

“Now you be good, Jacob,” Meredith said as she prepared to enter the NICU. “Give us just a few minutes and I’ll bring the baby over to the window so you can see her. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jacob said, as he began kicking his rubber toes against the window.

I decided to drop him slowly to the floor, knowing he was going to get quickly bored with waiting and not wanting him to cause a disturbance. The visiting space had a small play area for toddlers like him, and I gently nudged him there, towards the activity tables and coloring books. At first I was worried that he would resist, but he quickly saw the logic of the suggestion, sitting down on one of the kindergarten chairs and beginning to dig through an enormous tub of loose crayons. I lingered at the window a little longer, watching as Jenny, Meredith, and a nurse moved into the space, and then disappeared behind an encircling curtain.

“Look, Daddy,” Jacob said. “This book has babies in it.”

I went over and stood beside Jacob. The coloring book he had found indeed had a multitude of babies on its many pages, most of whom were already streaked with the angry color smudges of many previous artists. Eventually, he found a page not yet marked, a cartoon baby crawling across a toy-strewn rug, wearing nothing but a diaper, and smiling so wide that its eyes were nothing but slits.

Jacob picked up a purple crayon and began carefully coloring in one of the circles in the braided rug. “Where did you go, Daddy?”

“What?”

He did not look up or pause in his work. “Where did you go?”

It was such an odd question it took me a moment to understand what he was asking. I eased myself down onto one of the miniature chairs opposite him. “I was working,” I said. “In Denver. Remember? I showed you on the map before I left.”

Jacob nodded as if he remembered, but then repeated my words as if trying to reassure himself. “Daddy was working in Denver. But he’s back now. Now he’s back.” 

“That’s right,” I said. “I’m back. And I’m going to be staying home for a while now.”

“Is Mommy sick?”

“What?”

“Is Mommy sick?” he asked again, his little voice now sounding a bit frightened.

“No,” I said. “No, she’s not sick, buddy. She’s just tired. Having a baby makes Mommies really tired. She’ll probably need a few weeks to feel better. We’ll need to help her. Okay?”

“Okay.” He dropped the purple crayon in favor of an orange one and began working on another circle in the rug.

He was quiet for a few moments, and it gave me the first chance in a while to reflect on everything that was going on. It was hard to explain the details to Jacob, but the next several weeks were going to be a real challenge. Jenny and I had discussed much of it before falling asleep in her room earlier that morning, and neither one of us knew exactly how things were going to proceed. She was going to have to stay in the hospital for a while -- initially to recover from her c-section, but quickly (and maybe already) for the sake of the premature infant they had taken out of her. She would need her mother nearby until she learned how to suckle and began gaining weight. When that started to happen she could be released from the NICU, but would need to stay in a mom/baby room at the hospital until she was large and healthy enough to be released. The baby had been born six weeks premature, and it was likely that it would take at least four weeks before such a day would finally arrive.

And all of that meant that I would need to be home and taking care of Jacob. Meredith had done a tremendous amount already, getting Jenny to the hospital and making dinosaur pancakes for Jacob, but she couldn’t stay for weeks on end. Neither Jenny nor I would ask her to. She had her own life and her own obligations, and managing our household had never been one of them. 

And that meant that I would have to call Mary some time soon and see what kind of flexible accommodation could be made. That is, assuming I even still had a job there. The company, I knew, had no parental leave policy. It barely had any benefits at all. In fact, I wasn’t 100% sure that our extended hospital stay was even going to be covered by the company’s health insurance. That was something else I would need to look into.

I looked down at my little son, carefully coloring within the lines, and was suddenly overwhelmed by grief and terror. What the hell was I going to do? Until the call came in from Boston -- assuming a call was even forthcoming -- I needed the horrible job with Mary Walton. I needed it because my family needed it. I couldn’t see any way forward in my current circumstance without it -- but I also didn’t see how Mary was going to allow me to go forward after what I had done, and after I made the request I would be required to make. Yes, hi, Mary, how are you? Hope everything wrapped up well in Denver, but hey, don’t you know, I’m going to need a few weeks paid leave so I can take care of my wife, my 4-year-old son, and my premature infant daughter. Would that be all right? Hello, Mary? Are you still there?

In my despair, I became aware of a light tapping on glass and I looked up to see my masked mother-in-law standing on the other side of the viewing window with a small, partially swaddled bundle in her arms.

Jacob heard it, too, and in a flash, he was up out of his chair and dashing across the open floor to the window, calling for me to come, to follow him, to lift him up so he could see, so he could see. Swallowing back my fears, I rose and did as beckoned. Jacob seemed heavier than ever, but I lifted him up onto my hip and stood with him inches from the glass as Meredith carefully positioned my daughter in such a way that I and Jacob could more easily see her.

She was such a little thing, more like a kitten than a baby, loosely wrapped in a small blanket, with her fragile head supported by Meredith’s certain hand, her little arms extended, and tiny, gossamer fingers clenching and unclenching in the arm.

“There’s the baby!” Jacob said excitedly. “There’s the baby, Daddy!”

I softly reaffirmed that yes, indeed, there was the baby, but trailed off as she seemed to turn her little head towards what must have been the muffled sound of Jacob’s voice. Her eyes were open, and they seemed to widen and then squint in some unpracticed attempt at focus. Unlike the fire that he was undoubtedly expecting, her irises were the deepest midnight.

“She’s looking at me!” Jacob cried, placing his hand on the glass. “She’s looking at me, Daddy! Hi, baby! Hi!”

And then her eyes seemed to lose their focus, but the still-unnamed baby smiled, a toothless and joyful thing that momentarily lit up her little face. 

“I think she can hear you, Jacob,” I said. “She knows you’re her big brother.”

“I love you!” Jacob said suddenly, clapping his hands together in his simple joy. “I love you, baby!”

I was glad he did. Somewhere deep within my calcified heart, I knew that my family was going to need a lot of love if we were going to make it through the next few weeks.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

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The Big Sky by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

I picked this up at a used book store in Jackson, Wyoming. I knew nothing about it, but it seemed apropos, given the subject matter and the location.

I really struggled with it. It is a story told in five parts, with its protagonist, Boone Caudill, leading the action only intermittently throughout. Indeed, not entirely sure when the novel was going, as this reader entered Part Two and found himself spending page after page in the head of Jourdonnais, the French captain of the keelboat Caudill finds himself heading up the Missouri on, I started wondering whose story this actually was and questioning the competency of the author telling it.

Whose Story Is This?

Jourdonnais is a minor character, but the point-of-view doesn’t just stay with him in Part Two. It jumps around from character to character, spending some time with Caudill, but more with someone who turns out to be another major character in the novel, Dick Summers. Dick is an older man, the kind of guide and hunter responsible for killing game and bringing it back to the keelboat, and we’re with Dick when the boat is attacked by Indians.

The Sioux’s fingers lay loose around the handle of his tomahawk. Summers thought his eyes were like a dog’s, like a pitiful goddam dog’s. He had to let him have it. The eyes followed Summers’ arm up to the knife, waiting for it to come down. The far-off part of Summers’ mind told him again he wasn’t a real mountain man. Eyes like a goddam hound’s. The knife went in easy this time.

Summers wrenched himself around and lurched through the brush to the shore. He could feel his shirt sticking to his back. The boatmen strung along the cordelle pulled up, their mouths dropping open, as he burst out almost on top of them. He made himself be deliberate. “Back!” he said. “Quick, but be careful!” He heard the Indians begin to shout behind him, from the clustered willow. Their arrows made a small fluttering noise, and their fusils boomed. He thought, “Injuns always use a heap too much powder,” while he shouted at the Creoles, trying to put order in their flight. They had turned like sheep and started to run and fallen down and run again and fallen, as the fleeter overran the others. He was shouting, more to himself than to them, “Easy! You French sons of bitches.” An arrow was sticking from Labadie’s arm, but it didn’t stop his running. It just made him yell. Christ, a man would think it had him in the heart!

The Indians shouted louder, but not from the willow any more and not like men standing still. Summers could hear them breaking through the brush, their cries broken by the jolt of their feet. The Creoles were a frantic tangle down the bank. Closer, Caudill stood, his dark eye fixed along the rifle barrel, and behind him was Deakins, unarmed but waiting. “Hump it!” cried Summers, humping it himself. The Mandan lay like a dead duck at the edge of the stream, her sail down and useless as a broken wing. Free from the towline, she was settling back with the current and pulling out, drawing away from them. While Summers watched, he saw Romaine splash into the water and run up on the bank and take a snub on a tree, and then splash back to the Mandan as if the devil was on his tail.

“Go on!” shouted Summers. “Hump it, you goddam fools!”

Caudill’s rifle went off almost in his face, and then they were running at his sides, Caudill and Deakins were, running and looking back. An arrow whizzed over their heads and buried its head in  tree before them. A rifle spoke again, sounding as if it had been fired right behind their heads. “Goddam it, run, you boys!” Summers felt his legs playing out on him. His head was dauncy, as if it wasn’t fixed rightly to his neck. All of a sudden he realized he was old. It was as if all his life he had run among the sleeping dogs of the years and now at least they had wakened all at once and seized on him. He knew he couldn’t make it. “Git on, you two,” he panted. Back of him he could see the Indians, running in the open now and yelling their heads off, sure that they would get him.

And then the swivel spoke. The black smoke belched out of it, covered at first with fire, and hung in a black cloud, tattering at the edges as the air played with it. The shot silenced the yells of the Indians and the footsteps. When Summers looked back he couldn’t see a Sioux, except for two that lay there for the wolves. After a while, above the slowed sound of his own moccasins, he heard them again, but thin this time and lost in the brush. He called to Jourdonnais. “Let’s move on up and get them scalps. They’ll help a heap with the Rees and Blackfeet.”

Maybe this story belongs to Dick Summers, I remember thinking as I read this -- and then realized my frustration when it wasn’t clear to whom I should be paying attention and who would turn out to be my protagonist.

A Moral Blank Slate

Literary criticism seems sure that Caudill is the central character, and that does eventually come through, but he is, in many ways, a difficult central character to root for. In the foreword by Wallace Stegner that accompanies my paperback edition, we are given this allegorical portrait of Boone Caudill.

Caudill is an avatar of the oldest of all the American myths -- the civilized man re-created in savagery, rebaptized into innocence on a wilderness continent. His fabulous ancestors are Daniel Boone, who gives him his name, and Cooper’s Leatherstocking; and up and down the range of American fiction he has ten thousand recognizable siblings. But Caudill has his own distinction, for he is neither intellectualized nor sentimentalized. He may be White Indian, but he is no Noble Savage -- for the latter role he is not noble enough, and far too savage. Though he retains many mythic qualities -- the preternatural strength and cunning, the need for wild freedom, the larger-than-life combination of Indian skills and white mind -- he has no trace of Leatherstocking’s deist piety. His virtues are stringently limited to the qualities of self-reliance, courage, and ruthlessness that will help him to survive a life in which few died old. Guthrie clearly admires him, but with reservations enforced by the hindsight of history. Boone Caudill’s savagery, admirable and even enviable though it is, can lead nowhere. The moral of his lapse from civilization is that such an absolute lapse is doomed and sterile, and in the end the savagery which has been his strength is revealed as his fatal weakness.

This strikes me as largely correct in retrospect, but it may also be generous in terms of the themes that may or may not have comprised Guthrie’s authorial intent. Even given this clue I found myself spending a lot of time trying to figure Caudill out, trying to understand how he embodied the virtues Stegner attributed to him. From my perspective, Caudill is very much a blank slate -- just about the least introspective protagonist I have ever encountered.

On the journey up the Missouri, Caudill camps each night somewhere near the riverbank, usually with Dick Summers and another character, Jim Deakins.

Boone had his shirt close around his neck and a handkerchief half over his face to shut off the mosquitoes. They made a steady buzzing round his head, for all that he and Jim had built a smudge and bedded down close to it. He could hear Jim slapping his face and rubbing the itch afterwards.

“Worse’n chiggers,” Jim said, “these damn gnats. Listen to ‘em. It’s their war whoop they’re singing.” Boone set his mind to listening. The whole night seemed filled with the small whining of their wings. “What’s the good of a gnat, anyways?” Jim asked.

“They’ll quiet down some, if it cools off.”

“They don’t serve no purpose, unless to remind a man he ain’t such a somebody.”

“I dunno,” said Boone, knowing Jim was turning the question in his mind as he did with everything. When it came to an idea Jim was like Boone with a rock or a buffalo chip, tipping it over to see what was underneath. Boone figured it was better to take what came and not trouble the mind with questions there was no answer to. Under a rock or chip, now, a man could spot bugs and sometimes a snake.

“Maybe the pesky little bastards is asking themselves what God wanted to put hands on a man for,” Jim said after a while. “Maybe they’re thinkin’ everything would be slick, except their dinner can slap ‘em. Maybe,” he went on after another pause, “maybe they got as much business here as we have. You reckon?”

“I wouldn’t say as much.”

“They’re here, ain’t they?” Jim’s hand made a whack against his cheek. “And we’re here, ready for ‘em to feed on. I bet they figure we’re made special just for them. I bet they’re sayin’ thank you, God, for everything, only why did You have to put hands on a man, or a tail on a cow?”

Boone could look down along the shadows of his cheeks and see the Mandan’s mast, standing sharp and black.

“Or maybe they’re sayin’, like my old man would, we know it’s a punishment for our bein’ so sinful and no-account. Forgive us our trespasses, an’ God’s will be done.”

Jim Deakins is a philosopher. Boone Caudill, not so much. Unless he is the most Stoic of all the Stoics. Except he appears to lack the necessary wisdom. While Jim goes on philosophizing, Caudill’s thoughts turn towards the people and events that have brought him to this moment in time.

Sometimes, lying out this way at night listening to Jim, he thought about home and Bedwell and the sheriff and the horse he had stolen and sold at St. Louis. Mostly, though, when he thought about things like that, he thought about home. Not that he wanted to go back. God’s sake, no! Still, a man wondered about his ma and brother. And if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t be scared of Pap. He could handle Pap now, all right, even if he was still just seventeen. He had gone on to a lot in a mighty little while. He brought his left hand over and felt the muscle of his arm. He could pick Pap up and shake his teeth loose without so much as taking a long breath. When he thought about leaving home and the tears coming into his eyes and the lump aching in his throat, he wondered if he was still the same body. It would take something to make him cry now. It would take something to make him worry, even, the way he had worried when he found he’d caught a case of clap. Summers was right; a thing like that kind of wore out after a while, and a man got so he didn’t give it any heed.

Boone is changing, he changes throughout the novel, but those changes rub away the rough edges given him by his abusive father or by the other ties that bind to home and hearth. What remains beneath is smooth and placid -- and that may be something Stegner can admire -- but it also seems devoid of any in-built moral structure.

Whisky Makes Him Feel

After his journey up the Missouri, Boone will trek farther into the wilderness, seeking to become a trapper and fur trader. His initial journey into this dark frontier is with a small band of other “mountain men,” including Dick Summers, Jim Deakins, and an Indian guide named Poordevil. Once or twice a year, trappers from all over the West come together for a “rendezvous,” where they can trade their pelts and other wares for supplies and, maybe more importantly to the story, whisky.

Boone rested back on his elbows, feeling large and good, feeling the whisky warming his belly and spreading out, so that his arms and legs and neck all felt strong and pleasured, as if each had a happy little life of its own. This was the way to live, free and easy, with time all a man’s own and none to say no to him. A body got so’s he felt everything was kin to him, the earth and sky and buffalo and beaver and the yellow moon at night. It was better than being walled in by a house, better than breathing in spoiled air and feeling caged like a varmint, better than running after the law or having the law running after you and looking to rules all the time until you wondered could you even take down your pants without somebody’s say-so. Here a man lived natural. Some day, maybe, it would all end, as Summers said it would, but not any ways soon -- not so soon a body had to look ahead and figure what to do with the beaver gone and churches and courthouses and such standing where he used to stand all alone. The country was too wild and cold for settlers. Things went up and down and up again. Everything did. Beaver would come back, and fat prices, and the good times that old men said were going forever.

Whisky made Boone feel this way -- warm and happy and no longer afraid of either the present or the future. But whisky also makes Boone feel something else.

Of a sudden Boone felt like doing something. That was the way it was with whisky. It lay in the stomach comfortable and peaceful for a time, and then it made a body get up and do. All around, the fires were beginning to show red, now that dark was starting to close in. Boone could see men moving around them, or sitting, and sometimes a camp kicker jerking a buffalo ham high from the fire to get off the ashes. There was talk and shouts of laughter and the chant and rattle of the hand players. It was a time when men let go of themselves, feeling full and big in the chest. It was a time to talk high, to make jokes and laugh and drink and fight, a time to see who had the fastest horse and the truest eye and the plumb-center rifle, a time to see who was the best man.

I speculated in the margin here, wondering what else the whisky will make Boone feel, and what the whisky will make Boone do -- and then I realized that it is more than just whisky making Boone feel and do things; it is more like the whisky is what makes Boone feel, and then do.

As he and his companions move about the camp, encountering others who had come for the rendezvous, Boone makes a point of looking for a white-haired man named Streak, a fellow hunter and trapper who had once threatened to kill Poordevil, a person Boone considered a friend.

The laughing and the lying went on, but of a sudden Boone found himself tired of it, tired of sitting and chewing and doing nothing. He felt a squirming inside himself, felt the whisky pushing him on. It was as if he had to shoot or run or fight, or else boil over like a pot. He saw Summers lift his can again and take the barest sip. Jim’s whisky was untouched beside him. Goddam them, did they think they had to mammy him! Now was a good time, as good as any. The idea rose up in him, hard and sharp, like something a man had set his mind to before everything else. He downed his whisky and stood up. Summers looked around at him, his face asking a question.

“I’m movin’ on.”

Poordevil had straightened up behind him. Summers poked Jim and made a little motion with his head, and they both came to their feet.

Away from the fire Boone turned on them. “Christ Almighty! You nee’n to trail me. I aim to fix it so’s you two dast take a few drams. Come on, Poordevil.”

He turned on his heel and went on, knowing that Poordevil was at his back and Jim and Summers coming farther behind, talking low so he couldn’t hear. He looked ahead, trying to make out Streak, and pretty soon he saw him, saw the white hair glinting in the firelight. The players chanted and beat on their poles, trying to mix up the other side, and the side in hand passed the cache back and forth, their hands moving this way and that and opening and closing until a man could only guess where the cache was.

The singing and the beating stopped after the guess was made, and winnings were pulled in and new bets were laid while the plumstone cache changed sides.

Boone spoke above the whooping and the swearing. “This here’s a Blackfoot Injun, name of Poordevil, and he’s a friend of mine.”

It’s like that scene in that awful John Carpenter movie. I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum. Boone means trouble, and everyone in the game circle, including Streak, knows it.

Streak’s eyes lifted. His face was dark and his mouth tight and straight. A man couldn’t tell whether he was going to fight or not. Boone met his gaze and held it, and a silence closed around them with eyes in it and faces waiting.

Streak got up, making out to move lazily. “The damn Blackfoot don’t look so purty,” he said to the man at his side. His glance rose to Boone. “How’ll you have it?”

“Any way.”

Streak left his rifle resting against a bush and moved out and came around the players. Boone handed his gun to Jim. Summers had stepped back, his rifle in the crook of his arm. Over at the side Poordevil grunted something in Blackfoot that Boone didn’t understand.

Streak was a big man, bigger than he looked at first, and he moved soft and quick like a prime animal, his face closed up and set as if nothing less than a killing would be enough for him.

Boone waited, feeling the blood rise in him hot and ready, feeling something fierce and glad swell in his chest.

Feeling the blood rise. Feeling something fierce and glad swell in his chest. Feeling. For a man like Boone, feeling things like this must be more intoxicating than the whisky.

Streak and Boone fight, grappling desperately with one another like stubborn monsters. In the melee, Boone rips off one of Streak’s ears, breaks his arm and, after Streak pulls a knife and cuts Boone’s arm with it, Boone wrestles the weapon away from Streak and plunges it multiple times into his chest, killing him. 

Boone pushed with his hand. Streak fell over backwards, making a soft thump as he hit, and lay on his back, twitching, with the knife upthrust from his chest.

Poordevil let out a whoop and began to caper around, and Jim joined in, dancing with his knees high and yelling, “Hi-ya!”

Summers’ rifle still was in the crook of his arm. “I’m thinking the trouble’s over,” he said, and nobody answered until Lanter spoke up with, “Let’s git on with the game. The parade’s done passed. Any of you niggers want to take Streak’s place?” Boone heard him add under his breath, “That damn Caudill’s strong as any bull.”

Boone turned to Summers. “Maybe you’re ready to wet your dry now?”

“‘Pears like a time for it, after we doctor you.”

“It ain’t no more’n a scratch. To hell with it! Let’s have some fun.”

Summers looked at the long cut on Boone’s arm. “Reckon it won’t kill ye, at that.”

The men went back to playing hand, leaving Streak’s body lying. Closed out from the firelight by the rank of players, it was a dark lump on the ground like a sleeper. A man had to look sharp to see the knife sticking from it.

Boone passed it again, near daylight, after he had drunk he didn’t recollect how much whisky and had had himself a woman and won some beaver. There was the taste of alcohol in his mouth, and the gummy taste of Snake tobacco. He held his arm still at his side, now that the wound had started to stiffen. He felt fagged out and peaceful, with every hunger fed except that one hankering to point north. With day coming on the land, the world was like a pond clearing. From far off on a butte came the yipping of coyotes. Suddenly a squaw began to cry out, keening for a dead Bannock probably, her voice rising lonely and thin in the half-night. A man could just see the nearest lodges, standing dark and dead. There was dew on the grass, and a kind of dark mist around Streak’s carcass, which lay just as it had before, except that some Indian had lifted the hair, thinking that that plume of white would make a fancy prize.

If Boone is an everyman -- and he may well be -- he is one of the mindless everymen, moving aimlessly through life, driven by desires not consciously understood, and picking up right and wrong as equally as if they were only two different kinds of fruit scattered on the ground.

A Long Losing

Dick Summers, on the other hand, is something else entirely. The following morning, the three men -- Summers, Boone Caudill and Jim Deakins -- gather and discuss what they should do next -- stay at the camp, go east towards civilization, or go back into the mountains.

“Me,” said Jim, “I’d wait and go east with the furs.”

Summers didn’t answer, but it went through his mind again that he didn’t want to go back with anybody. He wanted to be by himself, to go along alone with the emptiness that was in him, to look and listen and see and smell, to say goodbye a thousand times and, saying it, maybe to find that the hurt was gone. He wanted to hear water at night and the wind in the trees, to take the mountains and the brown plains sharp and lasting into his mind, to kill a buffalo and cook the boudins by his own small fire, feeling the night press in around him, seeing the stars wink and the dipper steady, and everything saying goodbye, goodbye.

Goodbye, Dick Summers. Goodbye, you old nigger, you. We mind the time you came to us, young and green and full of sap. We watched you grow into a proper mountain man. We saw you learning, trapping and fighting and finding trails, and going around then proud-breasted like a young rooster, ready for a frolic or a fracas, your arm strong and your wind sound and the squaws proud to have you under a robe. But new times are a-coming now, and new people, a heap of them, and wheels rolling over the passes, carrying greenhorns and women and maybe children, too, and plows. The old days are gone and beaver’s through. We’ll see a sight of change, but not you, Dick Summers. The years have fixed you. Time to go now. Time to give up. Time to sit back and remember. Time for a chair and a bed. Time to wait to die. Goodbye, Dick. Goodbye, Old Man Summers.

These are the mountains talking to Dick, the mountains who see and know all, and they know in a way that not even Dick does, that he is at the end of the same journey that Boone Caudill has just begun -- a life’s journey that begins with chasing desire and eventually leads nowhere else.

“We didn’t do so bad,” Boone said, “what with beaver so trapped out and the price what it was.”

Summers wondered whether he had done bad or good. He had saved his hair, where better men had lost theirs. He had seen things a body never would forget and done things that would stay in the mind as long as time. He had lived a man’s life, and now it was at an end, and what had he to show for it? Two horses and a few fixin’s and a letter of credit for three hundred and forty-three dollars. That was all, unless you counted the way he had felt about living and the fun he had had while time ran along unnoticed. It had been rich doings, except that he wondered at the last, seeing everything behind him and nothing ahead. It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop -- a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst. He wanted to fight it then, to hold it back, to catch what had been borne away. It wasn’t that he minded going under, it wasn’t he was afraid to die and rot and forget and be forgotten; it was that things were lost to him more and more -- the happy feeling, the strong doing, the fresh taste for things like drink and women and danger, the friends he had fought and funned with, the notion that each new day would be better than the last, good as the last one was. A man’s later life was all a long losing, of friends and fun and hope, until at last time took the mite that was left of him and so closed the score.

Held Secret in Boone’s Head

Summers will decide that he is done with the wilderness and leaves Boone and Jim to go farm some land he owns in Missouri. Boone will see him again, but Jim will not. As referenced earlier as that one unsatiated hunger, Boone is determined to go north, ostensibly for more freedom in an even wilder wilderness, and Jim and Poordevil decide to accompany. In their journey, we see Boone even more clearly through Jim’s eyes, especially when he figures out what is actually driving Boone north.

The trio are travelling through a desolate country, known as Colter’s Hell, a place that Poordevil thinks is haunted by bad spirits.

Boone’s hunched shoulders bobbed ahead of [Jim], looking strong a bony under the slack cotton shirt. Beneath the red handkerchief he had tied on his head, his plaited black hair swung to the gait of his horse. He eye was always looking, to right and left and ahead, and his rifle was held crosswise and ready, but Jim knew it wasn’t the devil Boone was watching for. Boone didn’t worry about hell, or heaven either, but about Blackfeet and the thieving Crows and meat and beaver. He was a direct man, Boone was, and God didn’t figure with him. What he could see and hear and feel and eat, and kill or be killed by, that was what counted. That, and sometimes a crazy idea, like this notion of going on beyond the Three Forks where the Blackfeet were thicker than gnats and always hungry for the Long Knives’ scalps. Beaver, Boone said he was after, but Jim knew better. It was little Teal Eye, held secret in Boone’s head all this time, and all the time growing and taking hold of him, until finally his mind was made up and God himself couldn’t change him.

Teal Eye is an Indian princess, whom Boone first met on Jourdonnais’s keelboat. She is a member of the Blackfeet tribe, and Jourdonnais thought his possession of her would give him safe passage through Blackfeet lands, but it had actually instigated the opposite reaction. 

It was a crazy idea, all right, crazy as could be. Even Bridger, bound just for the upper Yellowstone and the Madison and the Gallatin and the Jefferson, was taking a parcel of men with him so’s to be safe. Jim and Boone and Poordevil made only three. And what if Poordevil was a Blackfoot himself, as Boone argued? That didn’t mean the Blackfeet would hold off. Jourdonnais had figured the same way, having Teal Eye with him, but he was dead just the same.

But as with a lot of the things that drove him, Boone was often ignorant of their true source, either attributing different motivations or, as in the case with going north after Teal Eye, justifying the danger with simple platitudes. On the trek, Jim comes to see this tendency clearly.

Sometimes Jim wondered why he hung along with Boone. There wasn’t much fun in Boone. He was a sober man, and tight-mouthed, without any give in him unless it was with Summers. Go with Boone and you went his way. A man would think Boone would be satisfied now, having his own say-so about going north, but still he fretted because they took it slow and easy according to the promise Jim had finally pinched out of him. There was no sense in hurry, not with boiling springs to be seen and the great canyon of the Yellowstone and other doings that a body couldn’t believe. It was only high summer, going on to fall, and the service berries were fat and purple on the lower slopes, and higher up the wild raspberries shone red along the ground. There was meat on hill and hollow, and the sun shone round and warm, and the wind had slackened, saving up for fall. It was a time to loaf, being as beaver wasn’t good now anyhow.

Boone was a true man, regardless, cool and ready when there was danger about. He didn’t know what it was to be affrighted. And you could depend on him, no matter what. There weren’t many would stand as steady with a friend, or go with him as far, or stick through thick and thin. For all that he gave in to Boone, Jim felt older and a heap wiser and he knew that Boone depended on him. Some ways, Boone was like a boy still, needing just a careful word to be dropped to see things right and wise. Shooting buffalo or catching beaver or fighting bear, Boone was as good as the best, but with people it was different. He didn’t know how to joke and give and take and see things from different sides and to find fun instead of trouble. All he knew was to drive ahead. Sometimes when he was about to get himself in a fix, on account of not taking time to think, a little piece of talk, said so as to seem offhand, would set him right and steady him or maybe hold him back. Jim reckoned Boone was grateful, as a boy would be grateful without having words to say so.

A Touch of Red

This portrait of Boone, accurate as it is, is also tragically prescient. They will, indeed, find Teal Eye. Boone will, indeed, marry her and Teal Eye will, indeed, become pregnant with Boone’s son, who will be born while Boone and Jim are out on one of their excursions. When they return to camp…

A woman came out of the lodge, her eyes wide like a watching doe and her body as slim as a girl’s. Boone rode to her and dismounted, seeing gladness and trouble both in the face. Jim called, “How be ye, Teal Eye? Still purty as a pet bug, you are.”

Teal Eye didn’t speak. She reached out, almost as if afraid to touch, and placed the palms of her hands on Boone’s neck and stroked them over his chest while tears shone in her eyes.

“Later’n I thought,” Boone said while his gaze took her in, “but I come back.” His eyes questioned her, but still she didn’t say anything. He went on in Blackfoot. “Have you given me a son? Does Strong Arm have a son?”

Her mouth said, “Yes,” but something waited in her face as if she had not told him all.

“I want to see him, Teal Eye,” Jim said. “Let me git a peek, too.”

Her hand made a little motion toward the lodge. Boone stepped past her, inside. The lodge was thin and old and let the sun through, but still, coming from the shine, he had to wait to see. After a little he spied the baby on its holder, with a skin over its body and a hood drawn over its head so that nothing showed except a small and withered face. Boone bent over and laid the hood back.

From behind him Jim said, “Damn if it ain’t got a touch of red in its hair! Maybe grow up to be purty like me.”

Teal Eye breathed at Boone’s side. The English words stammered on her lips. “Eyes no see. Eyes got sick. No see.”

The baby stirred at her voice. The lids pulled open. Before they closed again, Boone saw the eyes swam shrunken and milky-blind.

The blindness will eat at Boone, but more than that it will be the touch of red in the baby’s hair that will consume him -- the touch of red, so like Jim and so unlike himself.

First, Boone will talk with two of his Indian friends.

After a while he heard Bear say, “You cry inside, Strong Arm.”

Bear’s eyes were old and tracked around by wrinkles but still sharp as a hawk’s. Boone dropped his own before them and picked up a rock and began digging at the ground with it. He was of a mind to laugh or say it wasn’t so and to go on to something else, being as his feelings were nobody’s business, but Indians were easier to talk to than whites and medium friends easier than close ones. He drew back from showing Jim what was inside him, as he drew back from showing Teal Eye, feeling weak and shamed for them to see, but it was different with two old Indians who wouldn’t add to what he said or pry beyond for more.

He nodded slowly. “Is there medicine to make the blind eye see?”

Big Shield said, “Our medicine men make medicine, but blindness is too strong for them.”

“It is better to go under,” said Bear. “It is better to kill the blind.”

“I cry for the blind one in my lodge.”

Bear nodded. “I cry for my brother who cries. Does Red Hair cry?”

Boone nodded. “Jim cries. He is my brother, too.”

Bear put more tobacco in his pipe. “It is for him to cry.” His eyes went to Big Shield for a yes. “It is for Red Hair to cry.”

For what seemed a long time Boone searched Bear’s face, which was cut and puckered by time and thought. Bear’s old lips sucked at the stem of his pipe. His breath pulled a whiff into his lungs. Then he met Boone’s gaze and answered the question in it with another. “Does the black eagle father the red hawk?”

Boone heard his own voice like a crack in the long silence. “You make light talk.”

Bear’s gaze was roaming the valley again. “It is you that make light talk,” he said. “You know. When a man knows it does not matter. I have given my wives for whisky and powder. I have given them to show I was a friend. It was all right. When a squaw sneaks out and her man does not know, then he feels blood in his eye.”

Big Shield knocked the ash from his pipe and got up. “I had a wife, and she lay in secret with a man.” He rested his finger above his nostrils. “I cut her hair off and her nose and put her out of my lodge. I took two buffalo horses from the man. I found other squaws. Life was good again.”

They climbed on their horses and jogged down toward the village.

And this will consume him. Then he will torment Teal Eye.

Teal Eye said, “Red Hair went to Fort McKenzie.”

“Who told you?” Boone watched her fussing with the baby, her eyes dwelling on the blind eyes as if of a sudden they might see.

“He came to ask for you.”

“For me, was it?” Boone asked and shut his mouth on what he might say next. There was puzzlement in her face, as if she couldn’t make out what he aimed at. He looked at the baby and looked away and looked again. The red wasn’t bright sorrel like Jim’s hair, but it was red just the same -- red crossed with Indian black and showing dark on the head like the bark of old spruce. Did the black eagle father the red hawk? He got up and stood for a while unseeing, feeling sick and swollen with suspecting, feeling like a man snake-bit, the pain small and sharp in the beginning and the mind numb but unbelieving, and then the bite spreading and the flesh puffing and hurt bursting the body. He would ask if he could believe the answer, but a woman that had tricked a man would lie to him.

To her back he said, “Better to kill a blind baby.”

The words spun her around. She got up slow, her face showing shock over the sorrow that had been there before. “Boone!”

“He is better dead.”

“You don’t mean what your mouth says!”

“You heard. How long will Red Hair be gone?”

She lowered her face from his, as if she had looked for something and not found it, and turned back to the baby. Seeing her droop, he felt mean, but fierce and pleasured by meannes, too. He watched her out of the tail of his eye, wondering what secrets were in her, wondering what she kept from him. Morning, and his talk with Bear and Big Shield, seemed so long ago that he had lived a lifetime in it. There had been the pinch of pain and the unbelieving, and then the remembering, then the figuring, while the pain grew and the unbelieving little and such a misery came in him as the spirit couldn’t stand. He knew well enough that Jim was drawn by Teal Eye. He had seen a hundred things to make him know and heard a hundred more, though he hadn’t believed that Jim would do him bad. It was Teal Eye he had misfigured, thinking it was no more than liking she felt. It was Teal Eye, bent over with her back to him and maybe the secret held dear in her and her body remembering the touch of Jim’s.

All at once he couldn’t stand to be there longer. “No tellin’ when I’ll be back.” He threw the English of it at her. “Three or four sleeps.”

She didn’t answer, but he knew she followed him with her eyes as he went out. It occurred to him while he walked to his horse that maybe she was thinking that with him gone she would have a chance with Jim.

And this will consume him more. Then he will brood.

It stood to reason … the more Boone brooded on it, remembering the smiles Jim had for Teal Eye and the long, slow looks and words like posies, and her face lighting up at the sight of him and the pleasure in it at his talk. Bear and Big Shield took it for sure he shared his squaw with Jim. More than likely the whole band did, and because of things they’d seen, being wrong only in thinking the sharing was his doing. Damn himself for a fool, going along blind while they played behind his back and made sport of him! All the time he had figured Teal Eye was his alone and never to be anybody else’s. He had lain with her at night and felt richer than other men to have her and so deep satisfied he couldn’t talk about it, even to her, for the feeling was like a weakness in him, like a secret that had to be kept in his own skull, hidden under his own ribs.

And this will consume him still more. If ever there was a paragraph that described Boone Caudill, this is it. Unable to communicate, and experiencing deep shame at the very feelings that animated him, thinking that they are a weakness that must be hidden from others. In his madness, he will lay a trap, finding and telling Jim, like he had told Teal Eye, that he would be gone for a few days, and then secretly creeping back to his lodge to find the two of them together. Teal Eye is upset, worried about losing Boone and her baby, and Jim is holding her, providing her the comfort of a friend, no more.

They didn’t see him right away. They didn’t hear the brush of his clothes against the lodge. They stood there, making one shape, making the shadow he had seen against the wall. He knew what was doing now. He knew what he had to do. No use to talk or think or wonder. No use to ask or plan. A man’s body acted for him. He said, “By God, it’s like I thought.”

They fell apart, and Jim said, “Boone!” and didn’t say more but stood trying to smile and the firelight showing guilt on his face as plain as day and flashing on the fear in Teal Eye’s eyes. Jim’s arm came out, stiff and clumsy as a stick, and Jim’s mouth said, “I brung a letter for you.”

The pistol was better than the rifle. Jim cried, “Boone! Boone!” as he saw it coming up, and Teal Eye tried, too late, to throw herself between and so to save her secret man. Closed in by walls, the pistol sounded big.

+ + +

Jim staggered back, feeling as if his whole chest was empty, feeling as if it had been sunk in by a blow. He tried to straighten. He made his legs walk him toward the door for a breath of the air he was dying for. He fell on his face. It was all he could do to turn over. He wanted to cry out. He wanted to say it wasn’t so. He wanted to own up that he had a crazy minute, but no harm done and Teal Eye not to blame. The words wouldn’t come; he couldn’t get the wind for them.

“I ought to cut your goddam nose off!” It was Boone, turned on Teal Eye. She didn’t answer. She didn’t move, except that the tears came to her eyes and glimmered in the firelight and started down her cheeks in two big drops.

Things seemed a far way off, so far away the voice couldn’t reach, far away and fading farther. Jim saw legs at the entrance to the lodge and followed them up and came to the faces of Indians thrust inside and nothing showing in them but the asking look of animals. One of the faces said, “Him go under.”

Boone stooped and whipped up the letter, and his voice lashed at Teal Eye. “No good to cry. By God, I catched you!”

Jim sucked for air. He had to speak. He had to explain. You’re a hard man, Boone, and closed in on yourself, and Teal Eye sad with the blind baby and afeared of losing you, and no one to let it out on, no one but me. No harm done, Boone, no harm at all. I wasn’t no more than a chest to cry on and a hand to pat her back.

He couldn’t catch air enough for talk, not more than a drop of it before pain bore down and shut it off. He felt if he looked down he would see his chest blown open and the heart beating naked and the lungs twisting for air. He heard Boone’s voice like a whip and Teal Eye trying to answer and heard the Indians grunting and saw them pushed in at the door and Teal Eye with her child’s eyes wet and pleading.

It wasn’t any use to try for words or breath or time; it wasn’t any use but to lie quiet while the eye saw and the ear heard and the heart bled itself out. Far off, it seemed, Boone was moving, marching to the entrance with the letter unopened in his hand, marching with his head up and the braids swinging to his step while the Indians made way from him and he passed from sight. Jim brought his gaze to Teal Eye, standing as if too hurt to live and her girl’s body drooping and the open, dark eyes crying as they looked the way that Boone had gone. “You no come back,” she said in English, so low Jim hardly heard. “You no come back.”

This was the way it was at the last. A man faced up to death alone, his sight dimming and his hearing dulling off, and he so lonesome the heart squeezed up to nothing and the mind drew back from thought. The world pulled away from him, the lodge and the air and the clouds and dark hills outside and folks that stood about, until only the ground he rested on seemed close. This was the way it was with Jim Deakins, laid out with a bullet hole in him and no one alongside to touch his hand and ease him over. This was the way it was with Deakins, who had been ready to wrong a friend and spoil a woman’s life and had got hold of himself but messed things up all the same, and now no chance to set them right. He had to lie helpless and lonesome, but not much afraid any more, while over him and over the lodge that shut him in the deep sky deepened over the empty plains. He heard talk, breathed by the breath but not sounded by the voice. “I’ll know about God, I reckon, now.” After a while he realized that it was his lips that had spoken.

It’s a remarkable series of events -- made more remarkable by the eventual revelation, by Boone’s mother, that red hair occasionally did run in their family. It is also a remarkable passage of prose, weaving the words together with emotion, that expressed by Jim and by Teal Eye, and that unexpressed by Boone. And one of the most remarkable things is that double space (which I represented above with a few plus signs), coming just as the point of view switches from Boone to Jim, offering a final glimpse into Guthrie’s true understanding of his craft that had not been present earlier.

A Strange Man

Everyone who meets Boone comes to a similar conclusion.

A strange man, Boone Caudill, riding rawboned and slouched at the head of the column while his Indian’s braids swung to the swing of his horse. A strange man, with moodiness in him, and quickness to anger and the promise of childlike savagery. Was it the rude half-civilization of the Kentucky frontier that had made him what he was, or his years with the red Arabs of the plains? Watching him ride ahead, his strong shoulders loose and his body giving to the pace of his horse, Peabody concluded he was more Indian than white man. Outwardly he was hardly white man at all. He wore the clothes of an Indian and carried a bag of amulets -- a medicine bundle, as it was called. His voice was rough and deep in his chest, even when the sounds it made were English sounds. His face was dark-eyed, weathered, and often inscrutable. He had a squaw for a wife.

And, although I think some would like to view this as the central question of the novel -- which part of civilization or which part of the wilderness made Boone the way he is -- for me, this seems like a much less interesting question. For Boone is not unique. Boone is the primordial everyman, and asking what made him is similar to asking what made the sky, the plains, or the lodge. Nothing made them. They simply came to be.

Along toward the middle of the day, beyond where even a trickle of water ran, Boone climbed the last lift to the divide. One way the land pitched down to Oregon, to the Flathead and Clark’s Fork and the Columbia and the western sea; the other, it fell off to the Marias and Missouri, to Blackfoot country and Red Horn’s band and Teal Eye carrying his young one in her. It was strange that a man could go off and leave a part of him living behind him and have no power over it and no say-so but only the knowledge that there was a live piece of him that wasn’t with him. It was as if a man couldn’t get free from what he had been and done. He couldn’t be himself alone; he had to be all the other men he was, in the season before and the season before that and the season before that. He couldn’t stand just by what he did now; he had to stand by what he had done in the past, too. Old Dick Summers would understand if he was around to be talked to. Still, it was all right, all right this time. A man knowing he had got himself a young one was all right. It gave him a different feeling from what he had had before, a kind of secret fullness in the chest.

Boone Caudill is no guide -- not through the wilderness, not through the moral universe, not even through himself. So unlike the Pathfinder, in the end, Boone remains lost, not found.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.