Whatever your own idea of the known world, there were always things outside it you hadn’t dreamed of

Timothy H. O'Sullivan - A man sits on a rocky shore beside the Colorado River in Iceberg Canyon, on the border of Mojave County, Arizona, and Clark County, Nevada, 1871

Bess

She was drawing a circle in the muddy ground with the toe of her boot. “So how long will you be gone? A month? More than a month?”
Bellman shook his head and took her hand. “Oh, Bess, yes, more than a month. A year at least. Maybe two.”
Bess nodded. Her eyes smarted. This was much longer than she’d expected, much longer than she’d hoped.
“In two years I will be twelve.”
“Twelve, yes.” He lifted her up then and kissed her forehead and told her goodbye, and in another moment he was aloft on his horse in his brown wool coat and his high black hat, and then he was off down the stony track that led away from the house, already heading in a westerly direction.
“Look you long and hard, Bess, at the departing figure of your father,” said her aunt Julie from the porch in a loud voice like a proclamation.
“Regard him, Bess, this person, this fool, my brother, John Cyrus Bellman, for you will not clap eyes upon a greater one. From today I am numbering him among the lost and the mad. Do not expect that you will see him again, and do not wave, it will only encourage him and make him think he deserves your good wishes. Come inside now, child, close the door, and forget him.”
For a long time Bess stood, ignoring the words of her aunt Julie, watching her father ride away.
In her opinion he did not resemble any kind of fool.
In her opinion he looked grand and purposeful and brave. In her opinion he looked intelligent and romantic and adventurous. He looked like someone with a mission that made him different from other people, and for as long as he was gone she would hold this picture of him in her mind: up there on his horse with his bags and his bundles and his weapons—up there in his long coat and his stovepipe hat, heading off into the west.
She did not ever doubt that she would see him again. (p. 6*)

There were times when Bess let herself consider the possibility that her father had taken her mother’s blouse not so he could trade it with the Indians, but so that her mother would have something beautiful to wear when he found her; that the knitting needles and the copper thimble were so she’d have something to do on the long journey home. (p. 65*)

Cy Bellman

Bellman nodded cordially and observed that even the largest creatures are inclined to be shy, and almost all wild things consider it more sensible to remain concealed in the trees or bushes than to go parading themselves in the open. (p. 22*)

Bellman knew that the fur trader thought he was an idiot and a half-wit. He didn’t mind. He’d met plenty of people since leaving Pennsylvania who thought the same thing. (p. 22*)

Bellman shook his head. He smiled warmly and pulled the collar of his coat up around his big red beard and rubbed his large hands together in the chill morning air. He could not account for what the President’s men had or hadn’t seen. Nor could he explain why he himself felt so sure the monsters were out there. He could only say that what he’d read in the newspaper had produced a fierce beating of his heart, a prickling at the edge of his being, and there was nothing he wanted more now than to see the enormous creatures with his own two eyes. (p. 23*)

Bellman loved this story, felt strengthened by it—the notion that whatever your own idea of the known world, there were always things outside it you hadn’t dreamed of. (p. 76*)

Old Woman From A Distance

Part of him thought of his sister, and everything else they’d left behind in the east—their rivers and their forests and their neat gardens of beans and corn—and about the old man’s prediction that if they took the things they’d been given in exchange, it would be the beginning of their end.
But another part of him coveted the things they’d been given, and this other part of him thought that the best they could do was to not regret all they’d lost. This other part of him thought that the business his people had entered into since they’d arrived in the west, with the Frenchman called Devereux and his partner, Mr. Hollinghurst, was on the whole a good thing rather than a bad thing.
He’d hesitated when Devereux had said to him one day, a piece of copper wire and a string of beads curled in his white palm like a short red snake, “Here, for that nice little pelt you have there.”
How could you know the best thing to do? How could you know the future you would make with what you did now?
He wasn’t sure. For a long moment he’d looked at the trader’s outstretched hand and paused. Then he’d held out the pelt to Devereux and taken the wire and the beads, and when Devereux and the Englishman, Mr. Hollinghurst, had headed off to pursue their business further along the river, he’d made up his mind to go with them, away from his father’s resignation and his mother’s sorrow. He’d been Devereux’s messenger and dogsbody ever since, keeping himself close to the trader, because even though he wasn’t sure, it seemed like the best you could do. (pp. 29-30*)

The compass the fur trader had given him he had no use for because he had the music of the river and the bright configuration of the stars, but he carried it in his hand because he liked it for its beauty and the suspicion that it had some secret power of its own the fur trader wasn’t telling him about; that it was alive in some way. He liked the way the tiny needle quivered beneath the clear covering, like his own heart when he was out stalking or waiting with a hook for a fish to bite. (p. 95*)
* sur ma liseuse

Carys Davies - West (Scribner, 2018)