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The Desert Between Us, Volume 1: A Novel Volume 1 (Western Literature and Fiction) - Hardcover

Barber, Phyllis

 
9781948908566: The Desert Between Us, Volume 1: A Novel Volume 1 (Western Literature and Fiction)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1948908565 ISBN 13: 9781948908566
Verlag: UNIV OF NEVADA PR, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

2020 Reading the West Book Awards, Longlist for Fiction
2020 Association for Morman Letters Finalist, Fiction

The Desert Between Us is a sweeping, multi-layered novel based on the U.S. government’s decision to open more routes to California during the Gold Rush. To help navigate this waterless, largely unexplored territory, the War Department imported seventy-five camels from the Middle East to help traverse the brutal terrain that was murderous on other livestock.

Geoffrey Scott, one of the roadbuilders, decides to venture north to discover new opportunities in the opening of the American West when he—and the camels—are no longer needed. Geoffrey arrives in St. Thomas, Nevada, a polygamous settlement caught up in territorial fights over boundaries and new taxation. There, he falls in love with Sophia Hughes, a hatmaker obsessed with beauty and the third wife of a polygamist. Geoffrey believes Sophia wants to be free of polygamy and go away with him to a better life, but Sophia’s motivations are not so easily understood. She had become committed to Mormon beliefs in England and had moved to Utah Territory to assuage her spiritual needs.

The death of Sophia’s child and her illicit relationship with Geoffrey generate a complex nexus where her new love for Geoffrey competes with societal expectations and a rugged West seeking domesticity. When faced with the opportunity to move away from her polygamist husband and her tumultuous life in St. Thomas, Sophia becomes tormented by a life-changing decision she must face alone.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Phyllis Barber is an award-winning author of nine books, including Raw Edges and How I Got Cultured, and winner of the AWP Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She has received awards for both her fiction and nonfiction and has published essays and short stories in North American Review, Crazyhorse, and Kenyon Review. She has been cited as Notable in The Best American Essays and in The Best American Travel Writing. In 2005, Barber was inducted into the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame. She lives in Park City, Utah.

 

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CHAPTER ONE: THE VISIONS
 
AUGUST 1867
Geoffrey Scott does a double take. Is that what he thinks it is?

He’s left Fort Mojave behind—buildings, stockade, new fence—and wandered into the desert to the tune of a few cicadas repeating their crrr-ing call. The night is lit by a fingernail moon and more stars than he’s ever seen before. Millions. Billions. But there’s an outline against the night sky. A bizarre repeat of something he’s seen before. Head raised high. The hump of a back and the arch of a neck accentuated by moonlight. That silhouette looks like Attah Allah standing in an outcropping of rocks but looking more like the carving of an animal king looking down from a high place. Tonight it’s not foraging. Perfectly still against the backdrop of a starry sky in its kingdom of sand and bush.
It takes a few steps. Geoffrey Scott takes his chances.

“Adababa,” he yells into an almost empty desert.

No sound. No answer.

But now he’s sure. That silhouette is the camel he rode next to on the first expedition from Texas. The one he’d ridden to the Colorado River to get supplies to Beale. Untethered, unhobbled, and uncoralled. The Civil War’s over and Jefferson Davis, the main honcho for bringing the camels stateside, well, he’s gone. What a joke. But what’s Adababa doing here? Tonight?

Geoffrey Scott feels a sharp wind cooling his backside. He lifts his shoulders as high as they’ll go, rotates them backward and forward to ease the stiffness, then reaches for the thin roll of blanket tucked into his pack. What does this all mean, he wonders, then shakes himself from the allure of pies in the sky. He’d better get the animal back to the fort where it belongs.

Tossing the blanket over his shoulders, he stumbles through the scattered rocks and approaches the camel. He shakes his head. Frustrated. When he looks closely, he sees that no one has tended to the animal’s well-being.

“Hi there, Baba. What you doing out here, no hobbles on your feet? You run away?” Adababa nuzzles into his shoulder and groans, a familiar sound Geoffrey Scott’s heard before.

The army’s been careful with their valued cargo from the Levant, even brought their own handler with them over the high seas—Hadji Ali, the man who’d taught Geoffrey Scott how to get a camel to do what a man wanted, something most of the military never bothered learning. Few soldiers are interested in the camels or their handler—a man who speaks foreign gibberish, they say. A believer in Mohammet.

Geoffrey Scott’s glad he never signed up for the uniform. Never wanted to. The idea never settled well with his Congregational/Abolitionist sensibilities anyway. Thank the Lord Above he knew how to build things. Keep himself employed and away from the enlistment office, but uniform or no, he’s helped carve the Great Wagon Road out of his bone and blood. Under Lieutenant Beale. A military road even if most of the builders were just plain working men. An accomplishment not small in anyone’s memory. Then he’s hung around Fort Mojave to help build its walls and repair its leaks. But now, as of last week, the government’s claimed the Mojave’s land. Told the tribe who knows best. He’s had enough.

He takes a long look at Adababa—alone in the desert, free as a wild animal and yet not wild. No one’s tending him. No hobbles. No broken rope around his neck. Property of the U.S. Government even if soldiers’ve been pushing some of the camels over cliffs. Favor their horses. Put off by exotic animals. But he knows this particular one. He’s ridden on its back: ten feet tall when his head’s straight in the air, about nine feet long and five feet wide, probably a ton. A camel can outlast and outpack any horse or mule in the Mojave Desert. Adababa’s his camel as much as anyone’s.

Geoffrey Scott scratches his nose with the back of his hand. Impulsively, he decides. He and Adababa will head north. Together. On the Old Spanish Trail which the Mormons have turned into the Salt Lake Road. Look for that salt mine Kwami’s told him about. Find pieces as big as a man’s fist. Pure, clear, more valuable than diamonds. People will pay for salt. That’s what this night is all about. This camel. This vision. God’s gift indeed.
 
*  *  *  *  *
 
The crescent moon. One side of a parentheses, he laughs to himself. A future open to him. Geoffrey Scott from Osawatomie, Kansas, reaches over his shoulder and pats himself on the back. He has a partner now. A camel. He’s about to become something more important than he’s been. He smiles, the full moon itself. Too bad his mother isn’t alive to see this. Then he shuts his eyes to escape the memory of blood haloing her head, pooling on the slats of the porch in Kansas, her stillness.

Wherever the souls of his parents are, he’ll make them proud, though he’d best not forget his father scoffing at pride. That man never had hopes—high or low—pushing his only son out the door when his mother was killed. How he, Geoffrey Scott, came to be, he’ll never figure because that coupling was unimaginable. He never saw tenderness of any kind. Or nakedness. Those parents had moved to Kansas from Massachusetts to cultivate fertile land, to live wide-open, and to help protect the territory from the spread of slavery. But then, something called Bleeding Kansas happened. Porous borders with Missouri. Slavers who hated anti-slavers. Slavers with their shotguns and their moonshine. His mother said no good-bye at all. She’d been so kind to everybody, no matter who. Even to his cantankerous father—the man he both loved and feared. He could still hear the man’s crazy talk in his head. 

He ties Adababa to a bush with a long rope from his pack, uncoils the horse whip he’s carried from Kansas, and forms it into a circle on the sand. He takes his blanket off his shoulders and lays it inside. Snakes won’t cross that line.

While Geoffrey Scott sleeps, dreaming about salt mines and the people who’ll pay top dollar, Adababa eats the first, the second, then all the branches on the bush to which he’s tied, mashing the brambles and thorns in its teeth. Then the camel wanders into the desert, snaking the line tied to his neck, forming a myriad of sand patterns, unmindful of his business partner sleeping inside the circle of rope. He grazes from bush to bush, from yucca spike to creosote leaves, and then stands still as a statue on another hill—this time for the eyes of Kwanyumai, the Mojave, who never sleeps by the fort at night even though he walks and hammers on its rising walls by day. Geoffrey Scott came across him about three years ago. On the other side of the river. Gave him yellow medicine for his chills and shivering.

But tonight, the stars are legion. The sky is alive. Kwami is alone, unseen by Geoffrey Scott. The camel strolls into the night with no invitation or no capture—Attah Allah, as the Arab has taught Geoffrey Scott and as he has taught Kwami. God’s gift. The Indian, if he spoke of such things, would use other words and say the camel is a gift from Mutavilya. Alone on the hilltop, the animal must have come for Mutavilya’s reasons. Kwami moves quietly through the night, his moccasins soft in the sand, then catches hold of the rope hanging loose from Adababa’s halter. He reaches up and rubs the side of the camel’s nose with two fingers. Good animal. Strong. Taller than Kwami. Almost two Kwamis for one Adababa. Together, they walk...

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Verlag
UNIV OF NEVADA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1948908565
ISBN 13 
9781948908566
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
304
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Verantwortliche Person
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