Inland
Téa Obreht
Inland is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2019 by Téa Obreht
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Obreht, Téa, author.
Title: Inland: a novel / Téa Obreht.
Description: First edition. | New York: Random House [2019]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018050729 | ISBN 9780812992861 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780679644118 (Ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Western stories. | Ghost stories.
Classification: LCC PS3615.B73 I55 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018050729
Hardback ISBN 9780812992861
International edition ISBN 9780593132678
Ebook ISBN 9780679644118
BN edition ISBN 9780593133606
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Jaya Miceli
Cover art: Tamara Ruiz
v5.4
ep
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
The Missouri
Morning
Amargo: Arizona Territory, 1893
The San Antonio
Midday
Amargo: Arizona Territory, 1893
The Colorado
Afternoon
Amargo: Arizona Territory, 1893
The Gila
Evening
Amargo: Arizona Territory, 1893
The Salt
Morning
Amargo: Arizona Territory, 1893
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Téa Obreht
About the Author
Time doesn’t change,
Nor do times.
Only things inside time change,
Things you will believe, and things you won’t.
—JAMES GALVIN, “Belief”
THE MISSOURI
WHEN THOSE MEN RODE DOWN to the fording place last night, I thought us done for. Even you must realize how close they came: their smell, the song of their bridles, the whites of their horses’ eyes. True to form—blind though you are, and with that shot still irretrievable in your thigh—you made to stand and meet them. Perhaps I should have let you. It might have averted what happened tonight, and the girl would be unharmed. But how could I have known? I was unready, disbelieving of our fate, and in the end could only watch them cross and ride up the wash away from us in the moonlight. And wasn’t I right to wait—for habit if nothing else? I knew you had flight in you yet. You still do; as do I, as I have all my life—since long before we fell in together, when I first came round to myself, six years old and already on the run, wave-rocked, with my father in the bunk beside me and all around the hiss of water against the hull. It was my father running back then, though from what I never knew. He was thin, I think. Young, perhaps. A blacksmith perhaps, or some other hard-laboring man who never caught more rest than he did that swaying month when night and day went undiffered, and there was nothing but the creak of rope and pulley somewhere above us in the dark. He called me sìne, and some other name I’ve struggled lifelong to recall. Of our crossing I remember mostly foam veins and the smell of salt. And the dead, of course, outlaid in their white shrouds side by side along the stern.
* * *
—
We found lodging near the harbor. Our room overlooked laundry lines that crosshatched from window to window until they vanished in the steam of the washhouse below. We shared a mattress and turned our backs to the madman across the room and pretended he wasn’t a bit further gone each day than the last. There was always somebody shrieking in the halls. Somebody caught between worlds. I lay on my side and held the lapel of my father’s coat and felt the lice roving through my hair.
I never met a man so deep-sleeping as my father. Dockwork will do that, I reckon. Every day would find him straining under some crate or hump of rope that made him look an ant. Afterwards, he’d take my hand and let the river of disembarking bodies carry us away from the quays, up the thoroughfare to where the steel scaffolds were rising. They were a marvel to him, curious as he was about the world’s workings. He had a long memory, a constant toothache, and an abiding hatred of Turks that tended to flare up when he took tea with likeminded men. But a funny thing would happen if ever some Serb or Magyar started in about the iron fist of Stambul: my father, so fixed in his enmity, would grow suddenly tearful. Well, efendi, he’d say. Are you better off now? Better off here? Ali-Pasha Rizvanbegović was a tyrant—but far from the worst! At least our land was beautiful. At least our homes were our own. Then would follow wistful reminiscences of his boyhood village: a tumble of stone houses split by a river so green he had no word for it in his new tongue, and had to say it in the old one, thus trapping it forever as a secret between the two of us. What I’d give to remember that word. I could not think why he would leave such a town for this reeking harbor, which turned out to be the kind of place where praying palms-up and a name like Hadziosman Djurić got him mistaken for a Turk so often he disowned both. I believe he called himself Hodgeman Drury for a while—but he was buried “Hodge Lurie” thanks to our landlady’s best guess at the crowded consonants of his name when the hearse came to take his body away.
Our mattress, I remember, was stained. I stood on the stairs to watch the Coachman load my father into his wagon. When they drove off the Landlady put her hand on my head and let me linger. The evening downpour had withdrawn, so a sunset reddened the street. The horses looked ablaze. After that, my father never came to me again, not in the waters, not even in dreams.
* * *
—
That Landlady prayed night after night before a cross on the wall. Her mercy got me hard bread and a harder mattress. In return, I took to praying with my palms together and helped tend her lodgings. Ran up and down stairs with buckets of soapwater, hunted rats, wedged myself up chimneys. Staring men who sat in the shadows sometimes lunged for me. I was a skin-and-bones kid, but unafraid enough of stairwell drunks to kick them while they slept, so they learned to leave me alone. Another summer, another plague, another visit from the Coachman and his black horses. Another and another. A mess of script appeared on our curbpost. Can you read that? the Landlady asked me. It says “pesthouse”—do you know what “pesthouse” means? It turned out to mean empty rooms, empty purse, empty bellies for us both. When the Coachman next came around, she sent me away with him. Just stood there, staring down at the coin he put in her hand.
I bunked in the Coachman’s stable for a year. He was the cleanest man I ever knew. Couldn’t get to sleep without his house just so and his slippers side by side under the bed. The only unevenness to him was an upper tooth that had come in a tusk, giving him the look of a fancy rat. Together we went round the dens and fleahouses on Bleecker Street to collect the dead: lodgers who’d passed in their sleep, or had their throats cut by bunkmates. Sometimes they were still in their beds wit
h the sheets drawn over them when we arrived. But just as often we’d find them folded into trunks or stuffed under floorboards. Those with cash and kin we took to the undertaker. The nameless we drove to uptown hospitals and delivered through back doors so they could be tabled before wakes of looming young men. Their innards laid out. Their bones boiled white.
When trade was slow, we’d have to pull them from churchyards. Two dollars to the gatekeep to look the other way while we walked among the crosses searching out newly turned mounds. The Coachman would start a tunnel where he guessed the head might be, and I would wedge down, shoulders and arms, all the way into the cold earth and stab forward with my iron until I broke the coffinboards. Then I’d feel about with my fingers till I found hair or teeth, and ease a noose over the head. It took both of us to pull them out.
“Still easier than digging them up,” was the Coachman’s reasoning.
Sometimes the mound fell in on itself, and sometimes the body caught and we had to leave it there half-dug; and sometimes they were women and sometimes kids, too, and the graveyard earth couldn’t be got out of my clothing no matter how hot the washhouse kettle.
Once, we found two people sharing a coffin, face-to-face, as though they’d fallen asleep in it together. Once, I put my hand in and felt only the give of earth and the damp velvet of the pillow. “Someone’s beat us here,” I said. “It’s empty.”
Once, I broke through the boards and moved my fingers over coarse hair and skin and was just getting the rope past a reef of jawbone when fingers grabbed my wrist somewhere in the dark. They were dry fingers, hard-tipped. I started and dirt flew down my throat and into me. I kept kicking, but the fingers held on till I thought I’d disappear down that hole. “Please, I can’t do it again,” I sobbed afterwards—but I could, it turned out, with a broken wrist, and a twisted shoulder, too.
Once, a great big fella got stuck halfway out his coffin. I sat there in the dirt with his pale arm on my knees until the Coachman handed me a saw. I carried that arm all the way uptown, wrapped in its own burlap sleeve, on my shoulder like a ham. Some evenings later, I saw that same rent sleeve on a one-armed giant who stood unmoving in the fishmarket crowd. He was pale and round and stood smiling shyly at me, as though we were old friends. He drifted closer, hugging that empty sleeve, till he stood at my side. It seems an odd thing to say, but a thin tickle spread around me, and I knew he’d put his ghost arm about my shoulders. That was the first I ever got this strange feeling at the edges of myself—this want. He let forth a rueful sigh. As if we’d been talking all the while. “God,” he said. “God I’ve an awful hunger. I’d love a nice cod pie. Wouldn’t you, little boss?”
“Fuck you,” said I, and fled.
I did eventually stop glancing over my shoulder for him—but that feeling, that strange feeling of want at the corners, it stayed. For days afterward, I would wake to whorling hunger and lie in the dark with my heart in my ears and my mouth running. As if something within was digging me up. Ordinary rations couldn’t sate it. The Coachman sat counting my spoonfuls at mealtime. “That’s enough, goddamn it,” he’d say. But it wasn’t enough—and what he berated me for was only the half of it. He wasn’t around to watch me scrounge for apples fallen from the fruitcart, or wait till the grocer’s back was turned to steal rolls. He wasn’t around, either, when the bakergirl came down the street with that basket on her arm, so huge it listed her to one side, shouting, fish pie, fish pie. Whenever someone stopped her, she flipped up a checkered napkin to reveal a mountain of doughy knots. Fish pie? she asked me, like she knew about the want going sour in me. I sank five whole pies, crouching in an alley with the laundresses shouting to each other above me, and as I ate the want grew and grew in me till it ran over, and was all gone.
I wouldn’t feel it again till years after we’d been caught. After the workhouse, after the judge passed sentence and sent the Coachman upriver and me to the railhead with six or seven other boys, westbound, with papers in my hand that read only: LURIE.
* * *
—
We were a week on the train, past farms and yellow fields and cabins smoking on gray hummocks, all the way to where the Missouri shallowed to mud. Town was a strip of stockyards and houses. The surrounding hillsides bristled with tree stumps. Wagons burdened with massive boughs harrowed the road.
They took us to a townhall that smelled of cattle and sawdust and got us up on a crateboard stage. One by one, the other boys were called down the stairs and into the dark. The old man who raised his hand for me was named Saurelle. He had frowsy ears and a hitch in his step, and a Mercantile that boasted dry goods and whiskey. His upstairs rooms were always overrun, every last soul westbound. His other hirelings were a pair of brothers: Hobb and Donovan Michael Mattie. Hobb was just a kid, four or five maybe, with a temper that could set grown men shaking in their boots. He was lightfingered, too—he could lift anything from anybody, and was pretty brazen about it. Saurelle didn’t dare lay a hand on him for fear of Donovan, some twelve years older, a man already, rangy and redheaded as a fox. The proud tender of a new little beard Hobb and I mercilessly thorned him about. Sunday afternoons, he slipped out to smash his fists against the noses of bareknuckle challengers from every corner of the state. No matter the damage to his own face, there he’d be the next morning: brewing coffee, smiling stiff. When the old man thrashed me for miscounting coin, it was Donovan who gave up his meat to cool my ruined eye; Donovan who stitched me up when yardfights went sideways; Donovan who said, “Don’t ever let nobody touch you, Lurie, no matter what.”
For two years, we shared an attic room. We scrubbed floors and ran the faro layout. We hauled freight and boiled tea to muddy Saurelle’s water into whiskey. We laughed through the gray winters, searched for privy-bound lodgers who’d blundered off in the snow. If one of us took fever, the other two followed into illness and back out again like we were going up and down stairs. In the summer of ’53, Donovan and I climbed up out of typhoid, but Hobb did not. Old man Saurelle was decent enough to pay for his casket so we wouldn’t have to make it ourselves.
Hobb didn’t come back around till a few months later. He came soundlessly and without warning. He’d lost his voice in death, it seemed, but not his itch for pickpocketing. I would roll over from wakeful dreams to find his little hand already on my shoulder and some trinket on my pillow: a needle, a thimble, a spyglass. When his want overcame me, it drew me to similar objects. I would stand at the counter while some traveling woman adjusted her spectacles to better study our wares, and my fingers would ache. Donovan, by this time, was prizefighting in the grip of ceaseless and blinding rage. How to put to him that his little brother was alighting at the foot of my mattress in the dark eluded me. So did any reasoning for why a haul of rings, spectacles, thimbles, and bullets was massing under my bed. “I stole them,” I lied when Donovan found the box. “For Hobb.” He struck me, then held my head till my ears stopped ringing. We took the box out to Hobb’s grave and dug a shallow hole to pour all that theft into—which made Hobb furious, and for long nights his want kept me awake. I only minded a little. I hoped that if Hobb’s death had made me an older brother to him, it might also have made Donovan an older brother to me.
I started another box. The want never seemed to go away. Sometimes I’d give in to it and lift a watch or a book, which gave Hobb no end of glee. Later on, I wondered if his want had gotten into Donovan the way it did me. If that was what emboldened us both to robbery. At the outset, our mischiefs were bored doings, heists only in name. Roadside holdups of travelers who happened through the clearing where we shared our midnight whiskey. We had one sixgun between us, but our quarry didn’t know that. I would follow Donovan out of the bushes and stand behind him while he aimed the barrel at fat bilks and jabbering drunks, and every once in a while some cleric who tried to turn us godward. Pretty soon, we had a good haul under the bunkhouse floor: watches, coin purses, papers that probab
ly meant something to somebody. Hobb eased off sitting on the edge of my bed and busied himself sifting through this junk. It was an all right way to go on being together.
Round about that time, Donovan caught a prizefighter in the brow a little too hard. When the kid roused up, his speech was all cotton and his eyes couldn’t fix on a point. The Sheriff came round, asking questions about the fairness of the fight and was Donovan packing his gloves? To Donovan’s claim that he wasn’t wearing gloves at all came an answering kick in the ribs and the question of what we could offer to make him look the other way. I sacrificed a silver watch from my haul, but a few days later here came the Sheriff, back again, asking, “How come ‘Robert Jenkins’ is etched on the back of my new timepiece? Ain’t he the man who were robbed just last week out on the Landing Road?”
This time, Donovan broke his jaw.
We were on the run all summer before our likenesses began showing up on bounty handbills. In Breton, in Wallis, in bayou camps, we peered into the charcoal renderings that bore our names and laughed at the lack of resemblance. “Might as well meet all this head-on,” Donovan said. So the next time we stood up a stagecoach, he made it known that we were the Mattie gang. “Say it back to me now,” he told the whip, who mumbled it around the gunbarrel in his mouth.
The next poster offered twice the reward.
We hid out in the barn loft of some laundress half in love with Donovan, who called us gentlemen in company till her neighbors softened up to the idea of having us around. This got us invited to a few suppers. We ranged, hatless and bewildered, through strangers’ kitchens. Held hands round the table with curiously smiling whitelace daughters and mumbled our thanks to God for his bounties and mercies. Somehow, nobody turned us in. “Who’d’ve thought,” they all said, “that Peyton County would be lucky enough to hide two boys willing to show the Federals just what Arkansas thinks of northern law?”
