Читать книгу Tears of the Mountain - John Addiego - Страница 7

• TWO •

Missouri, 1831

through the chinks between logs

and danced about him, and how his mother and oldest sister leaned over him in that dimly lit room, their faces like moons in a night sky, and then were gone. His earliest memory was of those fingers of light penetrating the log chamber and a wishing for their faces to return, and a wishing for the pressure on his chest to lift, but he knew that the recollections of various days had mixed together in some fluidity of time. When he tried to recall his very first memory the images would appear and dissolve like reflections on a pond’s surface, and he was somehow in the center of that pond of flickering light and longing.

He was a sickly child and not expected to live through the first winter. Jeremiah remembered much of his early years spent with fever raging in his skull and a weight like some evil incubus crouched on his chest, strangling his lungs and sinus like a creeping vine round a tree’s branches. He remembered the sense of somehow being unfit for life and a kind of fevered rage against letting go, against giving in to that little night monster on his chest. He remembered time spent in dark rooms, and vaguely, ever so impalpable and undefined in memory, his brother lifting him from a moment of deep abandonment and carrying him to his mother.

A face of such hale and handsome ease, a young man with blond curls and blue eyes, leaned over him and took him on a sturdy shoulder to the mother sitting by the fire. There was a smell of wood smoke and deer leather, and a hearty laugh, and that was all he could recall of the oldest brother, the one who left for the West with Father when Jeremiah was not yet three.

Father went west with his fifteen-year-old son and abandoned them all when the brother drowned in the Columbia River. A messenger, a stout, squint-eyed mountain man in deer leather, came to the cabin with the story and something of the boy’s outfit, the felt hat and powder horn, and that was all Jeremiah knew of it. His brother drowned, and his father wandered off without explanation—so the story went. Jeremiah had that one picture in his mind of the brother carrying him but nary a one of their father besides a vague, bearded shadow presence near Mother at the fireplace. The old man was remote as God throughout the boy’s childhood, his absence a bitter reminder of Jeremiah’s cursed health and lineage.

Out of the loss of husband and her favorite child, out of the months and hardwood seasons of stoical darkness and snow and silences, came a new bond with Mother and her ancient Bible. While she had the girls dig, plant, milk, and toil in their clearing in the woods, Mother and the son who should have died, youngest of a brood of five, began the Old Testament. Jeremiah placed verse to memory, then discovered the sense of deciphering sound from letters on the frail pages. The book was large and leather-bound with a Latin missal as appendix, and Jeremiah spent hours tracing its tiny letters with his fingers and giving them voice, even the ancient Romantic tongue. By his seventh birthday he was the best reader between two rivers of Eastern Missouri. The words floated up from the tender pages with a musty scent as of sorrel mushrooms hidden beneath a cover of dried leaves, and the boy devoured them quickly.

Mother was Pennsylvania Dutch and had been given to Father, a long-bearded, frightening, melancholy stranger from Virginia, when she was little more than a child. He was an apprentice to a local smith her father traded with and was thought to be a man of great faith who’d suffered a great loss. She wept nightly the month before and after the marriage, but her heart warmed to the new life as mother to a darling boy in a cabin the couple built by hand in the Missouri Territory. In conversation with Jeremiah, she likened Daniel to Job, a man who had been tested to the limits of his faith with a previous wife and three children killed by Indians in Kentucky and tested further, when given a second family with her later in his life, when God took his first and favorite son in a wilderness flood.

“He’s testing him even to this day,” she said, and Jeremiah pictured a wild-bearded man covered with boils and scabs, wandering the wilderness, shrieking at the heavens.

“But God give him another family,” the little boy said after some thought. “Four of us and you.”

“Yet snatched away the favorite.”

“Mayhap,” the six-year-old Jeremiah said, recalling that one clear vision of the golden-haired brother lifting him, “but it don’t make sense to me. As a test, I mean.”

“The Lord works in mysterious ways.” Mother swept the hair from his forehead and kissed him there.

“I just wonder sometimes if He gets too much on His griddle or something and kills the wrong feller.”

She yanked his earlobe. “Lands! Don’t you ever question the works of the Lord, Jeremiah! Nor say anything disrespectful to the memory of your brother!”

“I didn’t mean no disrespect,” he replied, “I was only thinking, Mother. I mean, a feller can make a mistake if he’s got too much on the fire, is what I meant. And it didn’t make no sense killing Dan’l Junior, did it?”

His mother’s tears served as a reminder to tread softly around certain subjects, especially those dealing with God and his brother. And when the boy was near the same age as the brother had been upon his death, a man with a flowing white beard rode up the trail from the forest. Late-October drizzle and its mist in the trees made the figure appear spectral. The boy watched from the manger as the horseman walked the stallion to within a yard of the cabin and stood it, towering above the porch.

Mother and Ruth stepped out of the cabin. The old whitebeard had a weathered and resigned aspect under the large-brimmed hat. He scowled down at the two of them and seemed to scrutinize each momentarily before making pronouncement: “We must be off for Oregon this spring. I come to get you, as the drought is upon us and this country no longer provides.”

The two women stared up at him, openmouthed. “Where are the other three?” the man asked.

“The older girls have married and gone downriver,” Mother responded in a small voice. “The boy is abed with the ague.”

The old horseman scratched behind an ear. “We’ll make the Missourah jump at Independence.” Jeremiah, watching in secret, realized that this old stranger was his father. He closed the manger door silently and listened in darkness.

“There is no easy turning back on such a journey,” the old man said, and the boy in the darkness imagined himself and his brother camped in a tepee among savage Indians out on the frontier beyond the Missouri. Mother called for him, and yet he hid a while and stifled his rasping gasps for air. The last light of day came through a hole in the door and projected a coin-sized white circle on the wall opposite it, which seemed a tiny, precise, upside-down vision of the tree line and their little cabin. And years hence Jeremiah would observe the photographer’s craft and think of that projection as the image

from the camera obscura, or