Inland: A Novel

Praise for INLAND

Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY

Time • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • Esquire • Real Simple • Good Housekeeping • Town & Country • The Guardian • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • Library Journal • Literary Hub • BookPage • San Diego Entertainer Magazine • Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The true setting of [Inland and The Tiger’s Wife] is a smoky borderland between East and West, reality and fantasy, the living and the dead, textbook history and fairy tales. Ms. Obreht has the extraordinary ability to make a seamless whole from these fused parts, creating a fully immersive imaginary world governed by its own logic and oriented around its own truths."

—The Wall Street Journal

"Obreht’s novels are capital-E Events—big, ambitious, provocative reading experiences….At last we have Inland, a bracingly epic and imaginatively mythic journey across the American West in 1893, in which the lives of a former outlaw and a frontierswoman collide and intertwine."

—Entertainment Weekly

Obreht offers a new representation of the West, both in the characters she chooses and the emotional rigor and range with which she writes. The result is at once a new Western myth and a far realer story than many we have previously received—and that’s even with all the ghosts.

—NPR

"A frontier tale dazzles with camels and wolves and two characters who never quite meet. Eight years after Obreht’s sensational debut, The Tiger’s Wife, she returns with a novel saturated in enough realism and magic to make the ghost of Gabriel García Márquez grin. She keeps her penchant for animals and the dead but switches up centuries and continents. Having won an Orange Prize for The Tiger’s Wife, a mesmerizing twentieth-century Balkan folktale, Obreht cuts her new story from a mythmaking swatch of the Arizona Territory in 1893….Obreht throws readers into the swift river of her imagination….[A] deep stoicism, flinty humor, and awe at the natural world pervade these characters. [Lurie and Nora] are both treacherous and good company….The final, luminous chapter is six pages that will take your breath away."

—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Inland is an epic American story of drought, ghosts, strong women, camels, and the inevitability of change; most impressively, it showcases not only Obreht’s masterful storytelling, but her uncanny ability to make a far-flung world feel lived-in, complete, and intoxicating. Every page is a triumph—even if you don’t think you like Westerns. Trust me, this book will make you a believer."

—Literary Hub

What Obreht pulls off here is pure poetry. It doesn’t feel written so much as extracted from the mind in its purest, clearest, truest form. When Nora sips the water, she really does see it ‘all.’ Time and memory collapse into each other. She tastes the journeys of Lurie and Burke and so many others who’ve come and gone. She senses her family leaving Amargo, finally with nothing left, but Evelyn and Emmett still follow her—present, but not. She mourns her old Amargo house, ‘where they had lived once, and yes, been happy.’ There’s something deeply devastating about this conclusion, embedded as it is with the tragic reality of its dusty milieu—the death, the heartbreak, the broken promises—and yet there is Nora, a hard woman as ever, loving and losing. She will fight another day.

—Entertainment Weekly

"[Obreht] brings her extraordinarily intricate worldview, psychological and social acuity, descriptive artistry, and shrewd, witty, and zestful storytelling to another provocative inquiry into the mysteries of place, nature, and human complexities….As her protagonists’ lives converge, Obreht inventively and scathingly dramatizes the delirium of the West—its myths, hardships, greed, racism, sexism, and violence—in a tornadic novel of stoicism, anguish, and wonder.

—Booklist (starred review)

Set in the desolation of the Arizona Territory in 1893, Téa Obreht’s latest novel is permeated with restlessness, a low-level thrum that speaks to the wild unpredictability of the terrain and the people who populate it….Obreht uses her prodigious writing gifts to create a new mythology for the American West, one that glimmers with the intensity of a desert mirage.

—Nylon

"To say that Téa Obreht’s long-anticipated follow-up to The Tiger’s Wife is worth the wait is like saying the Grand Canyon is worth the visit. It’s not wrong—it’s just insufficient….Obreht has trouble up her sleeve like a magician has scarves….This conjuring of trouble from thin air is an old-fashioned but spellbinding narrative sleight-of-hand, one a number of contemporary writers might benefit from studying….By the time Obreht sings her aria—you’ll know it when you see it—I was so overwhelmed by this opus of a novel that I suddenly began to weep. ‘The sublime lives here,’ one of her characters says of the West. The same could be said of Inland. In a moment where the book world fetishizes self-examination and minute, sentence-level showiness, it is not only a relief but a privilege to see Obreht shoot the moon with this sprawlingly ambitious and fully imagined tale. Great literature is to the spirit what water is to the body. Read Inland, and drink deeply."

—San Francisco Chronicle

[A] brilliant prose poem on the interrelationship between the living and the dead, between memory and loss.

—BookPage

Obreht makes the American West unforgettably her own, weaving mysticism and wonder into a stirring story about how the lands we inhabit and the stories we tell define who we are.

—Esquire

"Extraordinary…Magic realism served Obreht well in her fable about Yugoslavia’s baroque divisions, and it’s no less effective in shaping this alternative foundation myth about the American West….[Nora’s and Lurie’s] parallel journeys into Arizona’s inhospitable interior, ‘away from any graspable fact of life,’ probe the cost of survival and the human yearning to belong. On every page gorgeously tinted images conjure the otherworldliness of this desert existence….It’s the west, but not as we know it. Nora and Lurie are set on a collision course: will they meet? Obreht’s narrative skill here is part of the magic of Inland, which succeeds spectacularly at reinventing a well-worn genre and its tropes. There are no stereotypes in this Western, only ferociously adroit writing that honors the true strangeness of reality in its search for the meaning of home."

—The Guardian

"We wait all year for summer to envelop us again, and let that anticipation warm our hands when the world is locked in ice; I do the same thing with books. For a new novel by Téa Obreht, I would wait another century, but lucky for me, I have just two months to go. Inland is a novel I plan to disappear with into the late light of August….Obreht is a true landscape artist, and I can’t wait to read her West."

—KAREN RUSSELL, GQ

"Obreht, who is best known for her stunning debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, has a knack for illuminating both history and human nature in her writing; Inland continues in that vein. The characters’ stories culminate in a six-page final chapter that is a grim, quiet metaphor for our struggles in and against the ‘the uncertain and frightening textures of the world.’ "

—Salon

Propulsive…In her new book Obreht has swapped the tumultuous history of the former Yugoslavia for that of the American frontier. What she retains, in addition to infectious storytelling and a split, double narrative, is the strong sense of superstition which pervades the earlier fiction; a form of magic realism is at work here, which does not detract from the harshly explicit truths transmitted about the nature—and the price—of survival….Obreht is as engrossing with her depiction of the colorful and disparate encounters experienced by Lurie and Burke as she is on the claustrophobia of small-town rivalries. In these fledgling communities lawlessness and occultism hold sway just as the modern age—that of telegraph wires, railroads and the burgeoning capitalism of a gleaming new century—fatefully beckons.

—Financial Times

"The long-awaited new novel from the author of The Tiger’s Wife is finally here, and it’s well worth the eight-year wait….Obreht’s writing is as lyrical as ever, and she creates a captivating story of a little-portrayed moment in America. A poignant exploration of death and our cultural relationship with it."

—mindbodygreen

"Téa Obreht’s M.O. is clear: She’s determined to unsettle our most familiar, cliché-soaked genres….The dusty desert setting—we’re in the Southwest in the second half of the nineteenth century—is as familiar as Louis L’Amour. But the ghosts and camels meandering through the narrative are another matter….Giving so much of the novel’s stage to Nora makes this a less familiar woman’s western, one that’s more about resilience, wit and family than frontier justice….The novel’s title refers to its sun-scorched setting, but also the interior monologues that Obreht’s heroes maintain to survive. In that sense, Inland can feel like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian turned inside out: contemplative rather than rollicking, ghostly rather than blood-soaked….Obreht elegantly merges Nora’s and Lurie’s fates, satisfying Obreht’s urge to play this old tune in a different key."

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"This is a desert story rendered in technicolor. Obreht is the kind of writer who can forever change the way you think about a thing, just through her powers of description—one scene in which the residents of a small Texas town empty their houses to see how much a camel might carry haunts me still—and she can snap your head back with an aphorism. ‘I have come to understand that extraordinary people are eroded by their worries while the useless are carried ever forward by their delusions,’ says Lurie, and who alive today could argue? Inland is an ambitious and beautiful work about many things: immigration, the afterlife, responsibility, guilt, marriage, parenthood, revenge, all the roads and waterways that led to America. Miraculously, it’s also a page-turner and a mystery, as well as a love letter to a camel, and, like a camel, improbable and splendid, something to happily puzzle over at first and take your breath away at the end."

—O: The Oprah Magazine

"As it should be, the landscape of the West itself is a character, thrillingly rendered throughout….Here, Obreht’s simple but rich prose captures and luxuriates in the West’s beauty and sudden menace. Remarkable in a novel with such a sprawling cast, Obreht also has a poetic touch for writing intricate and precise character descriptions….Inland has the stoic heroic characters and the requisite brutal violence of the Western genre, but the decision to place an immigrant and a middle-aged mother at its center is a welcome deviation….The history of the American West is one of violent colonization and anti-government sentiment, self-reliance and self-invention in a land of extremes. Justice is dispensed by men who were once outlaws, and may yet be outlaws again. Boundaries are blurred, maps are changing. In Obreht’s hands, this is an era that overflows with what the dead want, and with wants that lead to death. Her two central characters may not be who we have been conditioned to think of when we conjure the old American West, but they too are America."

—The New York Times Book Review

"With Inland, Obreht makes a renewed case for the sustained, international appeal of the American West, based on a set of myths that have been continually shaped and refracted through outside lenses….Discovering the particular genre conventions that Obreht has chosen to transfigure or to uphold soon becomes central to the novel’s propulsive appeal."

—The New Yorker

Exquisite…The historical detail is immaculate, the landscape exquisitely drawn; the prose is hard, muscular, more convincingly Cormac McCarthy than McCarthy himself. If the Western is the tale that America tells about itself, then this is an attempt to write a new chapter in that story.

—The Guardian

"At times, it feels as though Obreht has managed to track down Huck Finn years after he lit out for the Territory and found him riding a camel. She has such a perfectly tuned ear for the simple poetry of Lurie’s vision….On the day we meet her, Nora has run out of water—a calamity that Obreht conveys with such visceral realism that each copy of Inland should come with its own canteen….These pages are a sprawling boneyard of restless spirits, and Nora is a woman conflicted in so many ways, seared by unrelenting drought, crooked politics and tragic family circumstances. The story creeps through this fateful day with rising alarm and thirst, shimmering with barely constrained rage. The unsettling haze between fact and fantasy in Inland is not just a literary effect of Obreht’s gorgeous prose; it’s an uncanny representation of the indeterminate nature of life in this place of brutal geography. Ferrying water from the Colorado River, Lurie realizes that he has ‘gone the way of unbearable old men,’ telling stories of an improbable, lost country….‘I began to wish that I could pour our memories into the water we carried, so that anyone drinking from our canteen might see how it had been.’ Sip slowly, make it last."

—The Washington Post

"Inland bears the same storytelling rigor and frictionless prose of its predecessor….Lurie’s and Nora’s stories will intersect, a meeting which elevates Inland to something spectacular and timeless. It’s cliché to say a book has ‘reinvented’ a genre. But Obreht’s achievement feels that way: like a full reset of the American Western. Its characters are those often ignored in cowboy tales, and the Camel Corps spotlights a little-known piece of history while exemplifying the Why not? spirit of possibility—possibly the oldest American tradition."

—RYAN CHAPMAN, Longreads.com

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

Book club guide copyright © 2020 by Penguin Random House LLC

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.

RANDOM HOUSE BOOK CLUB and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2019.

Interview with Téa Obreht in the Book Club Guide reprinted with permission from Powells.com.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Obreht, Téa, author.

Title: Inland: a novel / Téa Obreht.

Description: New York: Random House [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2018050729 | ISBN 9780812982756 (trade paperback) | 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

Ebook ISBN 9780679644118

randomhousebooks.com

randomhousebookclub.com

Book design by Virginia Norey, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Jaya Miceli

Cover art: adapted from the original painting by Tamara Ruiz

ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r1

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

A Book Club Guide

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 with 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 probably 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?

We joined forces thereafter with distant Mattie cousins, Avery and Mathers Bennett: dull, happy-cabbage boys from Tennessee. They had more muscle than sense, but Donovan reasoned that two Matties hardly made a gang. With four we could knock over a waystation. We could even knock over a packtrain—and we did, pouring in amongst the wagons in the dark, so the screams lit up like candles around us.

Knocking over a stagecoach in Fordham one night, we ducked an errant pistol-shot from an overbold New York kid. His second try winged Donovan’s shoulder. Next thing I knew, I had the kid by the hair and halfway out the cab and the others weren’t even stopping me. Newspapers two counties over called it savagery. It must’ve been, though I hardly remember anything save wiping my boots after and wondering when I’d started the kicking.

The next poster said:

Wanted:

The Mattie Gang

Contact Marshal John Berger, Peyton County

Well, goddamn, Donovan said, with no dearth of pride. You got the marshals after us now. This is worth celebrating.

My heart was all sour, but celebrate we did. At a bonfire in our honor, I met eyes with a dark-haired girl whose name escapes me now—if I ever knew it at all.

She knew mine, though. Sat right up out of my arms when she heard it later on in the barn. You the Turk that rides with Donovan Mattie.

I ain’t any sort of Turk.

People say that New York boy you beat mightn’t live.

Boy? I said. He was a man. He wore a suit.

That Donovan was my brother, had saved my life just about every day since he tipped back my hat to study my sorry carcass coming through his door, seemed not to make any difference to her. She climbed down out the loft, and I was left half the night in a heave of terror, alone and missing Hobb almost more than I could bear.

Later that week Donovan led us all into town to get a look at Marshal Berger’s posse mounting up to hunt us. The Marshal seemed, even then, older than his years, his brow like a newly turned field. He had a naked upper lip three shades lighter than the rest of his face, and we could tell he was regretful of shaving his mustache by the way he kept covering his mouth with his hand. Donovan and me and the Bennett brothers ranged ourselves in back of the crowd and clapped at the speech he made about the ills of sheltering outlaws.

These ain’t good boys, was his gist. They’re badmen. Rough as hell. You’re doing evil to hide them. Ask yourselves if it’s bread and shelter you’d be giving them, were it your kid done for like the New York boy: every rib broke and one eye gone and his teeth kicked down his throat.

I remember wondering what the New York kid’s want would be, if he should happen to die and find me. Would he bind me up in the sorrows of all the things he hadn’t lived to do? Or press in on me till I gave myself up to the Marshal? Or avenge his death by sending me to my own?

Marshal Berger went on staring out at all our sun-reddened faces. At least half the crowd knew us by sight, but it was Lewis Riffles, the miller’s idiot son, who broke silence. You sure you got good pictures of the Mattie gang? You sure about they height, they weight? Couldn’t they be anybody? Couldn’t they be right here among us?

Smiling all the while, Lewis Riffles, and growing brasher with each syllable till titters shot across the square, from one end to the other.

The Marshal stood looking into his own shadow in the dirt, and answered wearily, Yeah, we got good pictures. Yeah, I reckon they could be among us now. When he’d had enough play, he came down the stairs and took Lewis Riffles by the ear and dragged him to his knees. "All right,