At the end of my write-up on The Big Sky, I said this about its central character -- Boone Caudill.
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.
And at the end of my write-up on its immediate sequel, The Way West, I said this about its central character -- Dick Summers.
Dick’s wisdom is not so much in providing the answer, but in offering the surest way of finding it -- almost like the way that the scientific method takes precedence over any conclusion it may help determine.
For two novels now, I have been looking for a Cooperian Pathfinder in these tales of men going west, for a guide, not just through the wilderness of the continent, but especially through the wilderness of man’s heart and morality. Dick Summers comes closest in The Way West, but even there he seems more the compass needle than the mariner who directs the ship.
And now, in Fair Land, Fair Land, there is a chance for Summers to redeem himself in this regard, especially since the very thrust of the novel rests on the idea of moral consequence and retribution.
One thing stuck in his gizzard, too heavy to pass through his system. Jim Deakins dead and Boone Caudill the killer. He had pieced the story together, from Birdwhistle there on the Columbia’s banks, from Higgins who told him the talk at Fort Benton, from Teal Eye when she would speak of it. Caudill, the sudden and unthinking man, had shot Deakins out of suspicion with no hold on fact. He had killed his friend and deserted Teal Eye and the boy and not set foot in Blackfoot country again. He had to be told the truth somehow and somewhere. He had to live with his mistake. That was fair. All men should live with the wrongs they had done.
This all references the great climax of The Big Sky, when Caudill murders his and Summers’s friend Jim Deakins when he jealously suspects him of sleeping with his native American wife, Teal Eye. As Summers describes above, Caudill then goes missing (wandering back to his childhood home in Kentucky) and is absent from all the action of The Way West. Now, Summers decides to seek him out, to find him, to… to… well, to tell him the truth. To make sure that Caudill lives with the wrong that he has done.
But it is not Summers who finds Caudill.
“I located Boone Caudill, him you wanted to see.”
“Where at?” Summers’ voice had a snap in it.
“Him and three men are takin’ the shortcut, bound for California.”
“There now?”
“Be there in three or four days. Four most likely. But I used up a night and a day gettin’ back.”
Summers went silent for a long minute. Then he said, “It was meant all along. It was like it was writ in some book.”
“What?”
“That him and me would meet up. I gave up lookin’ for him. Put him almost out of my head. It ain’t no accident, Hig. It’s one purpose.”
“Whose?”
“How do I know? It’s just there.”
“Shit. Be sensible. It’s make-believe.”
“Nope, Hig. Not when you hear the all of it. Comin’ away from Oregon, before I teamed up with you, a man name of Birdwhistle sat by my fire. He had trapped and hunted with Caudill. No mistaken’ that. Call our meetin’ just a stray happenin’ if you want to. But then I come onto Teal Eye. She was Caudill’s woman onct and had the boy by him. Then, like you know, there was the talk at Fort Benton. Then come a blank, but now you’re tellin’ me Caudill’s comin’ our way, just when I was thinkin’ no use dwellin’ on him. So it ain’t an accident. Some things, seems like, was just meant to be, and no man can whoa ‘em.”
“You aim to see him, then?”
“Got to.” Summers rose. “Sunup.”
This is all so disingenuous of Summers’s part. He’s playing like this is all fate, but he’s the one who has been stewing on Caudill and what he’s done the whole time. His moral vision here is cloudy, almost cowardly, if he is going to blame fate rather than his own moral action for whatever may befall Caudill when the two of them actually meet.
And their meeting is, let’s say, anticlimactic.
Horses, wagon, men picked up their pace with water just ahead. They made a line along the shore. The men got up, wiping their mouths. From twenty feet away Summers called, “How Boone?”
Caudill came forward, scowling. The years had coarsened him, and time laid on some fat, but muscles played beneath it.
The scowl disappeared. “Hang me if it ain’t Dick Summers. How?” He held out his hand. Summers let himself shake.
“What goes with you? Where’s your stick float?” Caudill asked.
“It’s a long story.”
“Come with us, along to Californy, you and your ganted-up friend.”
“Don’t be belittlin’ him, Boone.”
“All right. Come along.”
“Don’t reckon so. Let’s talk a spell.” Summers made for a dead and drifted log and beckoned Caudill. Caudill yelled to his men, “See to the horses. Make camp. Me and an old friend got to jabber.”
“How come the wagon?” Summers asked.
“Two of my pardners ain’t worth a shit on a horse, and the wagon might come in handy. The men can shovel, by God. They’ll shovel when we get to pay dirt.”
“Heard you were huntin’ hides?”
“A man’s got to live. What’s with you, I done asked once?”
“I’m a settled man, married and everything.”
“You mean really married? By a preacher?”
It was time to let him have it, or some of it. “Yep,” he said. “Me and Teal Eye.”
Caudill jerked his head to stare at Summers. “Teal Eye? My old squaw?”
“She ain’t old. Your boy’s growin’ up.”
“Not my boy, by God. You watch out, she’ll cheat on you.”
“She never cheated on anybody.”
“Like hell you say. Birthed a boy with red hair like Jim Deakins. A blind pup to boot.”
“You ever see a white buffalo?”
“One time.”
“Could you pick out his pa?”
“You talk crazy talk.”
“Trouble with you, Boone, you never knew what real friendship was.”
“You speakin’ of Jim Deakins, I saved his life onct.”
“And took it for nothin’ at all, nothin’ but what you made up in your mind.”
Caudill’s face was full-turned to him with such a look of torment in it that Summers felt minded to say, “Now, Boone. Easy. It ain’t the first mistake ever made.” But the look of torment changed to black rage.
Summers, with his hand on his knife, thought he was prepared. He wasn’t, not for the heavy arm flung across his chest. It knocked him backward over the log. Caudill rolled over and straddled him. He locked his strong hands on his throat.
Summers had his knife out. He couldn’t slash at the arms or hands, not with his upper arm pinned by the great weight of the knee. The forearm was free with the knife in it. He could jab it into a gut. He didn’t, not yet. The hands clamped tighter. His lungs churned for air. But even as his sight dimmed and his senses blurred, he kept the knife by his side. It wasn’t a killing matter.
He thought he heard the crack of a rifle. He thought he felt the big body lurch and then tremble. Then most of it fell forward at his side. He squirmed out from under. There was a hole is Caudill’s head just under the hairline.
Panting, he looked up. Higgins stood a few feet away, a wisp of smoke drifting from the muzzle of his Kentucky.
Higgins said, “He didn’t mean nothin’ to me.”
Summers couldn’t answer for the clench of fingers still felt on his windpipe.
Higgins turned to the watching men. There he was, seen dimly, a skinny rack of bones unarmed except for the unloaded rifle. “You want to make something of it?” he asked.
One of the men answered, “It ain’t no skin off our ass.”
“Get shovels, then. We got to dig a grave. I’ll help.”
The same man said, “Be a pleasure.”
Summers just sat, his hand lying on Caudill’s dead shoulder. He sat and watched the men and the hole grow deeper. He tried not to think, tried not to remember how it was long ago.
He patted the shoulder and got up and walked to the men. “Time,” he said and tried to clear the squeeze from his voice. “Time to be goin’ home.”
Is Dick Summers the Pathfinder?
No.
In this novel, especially, he’s going the wrong way -- heading back east instead of going west -- intentionally into the troubled past instead of out into the hopeful future. And all along the way, while stewing on the prime moral question of Caudill’s past action, he demurs and provides no guidance to others who are seeking, who are needing it.
And in this final clash with Caudill -- these three pages of anticlimax that ends only Part 2 of the book -- he is the epitome of inaction, of vacillation, of wandering without purpose. He wants to speak the truth to Caudill, but Caudill, of all people, is unable to hear it, and Caudill, inevitably, winds up dead, shot to death by an outside moral agent while Summers’s knife is held in his firm but useless hand. As readers, we all saw this retribution coming. We all knew Caudill was going to die, but not Dick Summers. To the very end, for Dick Summers, this “wasn’t a killing matter.”
Dick Summers is almost the anti-Pathfinder, showing us, if anything, what not to do. Throughout this frustrating novel he lies to himself, and just ambles through a world that requires some kind of justice.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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