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Atrapada en la ventisca: el refugio que ella misma construyó.

by Bien Tap Vien•

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That was the detail Emma Hardwell would return to for decades.  Not the pressure of his father’s fist around his neck, not the blast of cold November air against his face, not the impact of his knees against the packed earth of Bosseman’s trail.  What I would remember most clearly, in the way the mind retains its most useful wounds, was the sound of those wheels, continuing without pause, the squeal of the axle, the rhythmic labor of the oxen, the canvas flaps returning to their place as if nothing had been disturbed.

She sat down on the road and watched as the chariot shrank against the Absaroca mountain range. The mountains were already covered with early snow on their shoulders, indifferent and enormous, and the cart moved across the valley floor like a dark splinter pulled from pale skin.  Ema’s younger sisters were inside that canvas shell.

She knew it.  She knew that at least one of them had looked back through the opening before the flap closed, because she had seen a small, four-fingered hand, the thumb tucked in the way her younger sister always held her hand when she was scared, reach out and then withdraw.  She didn’t scream after her, nor did she scream after her sister.

The temperature on the afternoon of November 14, 1873 was already dropping towards what she estimated to be negative 9 gr Fahrenheit, although she had no instrument to confirm it.  He judged it by the behavior of the air, the way it  immediately drew moisture from his lips, the way the exposed skin on his wrists ached instead of simply feeling cold, the way his exhaled breath did not disperse, but crystallized and fell.

These were things his mother had taught him to read, not as poetry, but as facts, in the way a carpenter reads the grain of the wood before the first cut.  Useful information offered by the world to anyone patient enough to receive it.  The nearest settlement with any permanent structure was Bosseman, 43 miles to the northeast.  She had no food, no tools, no weapons; she had the clothes she was wearing , a heavy wool dress, now dusty at the knees from her fall, and the worn blanket that had fallen from the cart beside her, thrown away by accident or by some

small mercy she could never confirm.  She stood up, brushed the dust off her skirt with two methodical strokes, and looked at the landscape without allowing herself to look at the road that led northeast toward the settlement. Looking in that direction would require measuring the distance with his body, and his body wasn’t yet ready to comprehend 43 miles.

Instead, he looked west, where the sound of the stream was coming from, the soft insistence of moving water filtering through a grove of poplars, perhaps 200 yards north of the trail.  Then he looked at the valley itself, the way it ran, the way the slopes rose on either side, the way the lodch pines clung to the western ridge in the particular formation that meant good timber rather than scrub.

He looked south, towards the exposed sandstone outcrop he had been observing from the car for the past hour.  The way the rock broke into flat planes instead of rounded fragments.  Then he picked up the blanket, folded it over his left arm, and began walking toward Los Álamos.  When the mind cannot afford the weight of pain, it finds something heavier to carry.

He had been carrying what he knew for 6 months, ever since the wagon train left Pennsylvania in late April.   For six months she sat motionless on a moving bench, while the adults around her slapped each other, argued, played cards, or stared at horizons that meant nothing specific to them.

6 months observing everything that moved with purpose, because purpose was the only thing worth observing.  I had seen the wheel carpenter, a quiet man from Ohio named Caleb, diagnose a cracked hub by pressing his ear against the wood while the wheel was still turning, the way a doctor listens to the chest for something the patient has not yet named.

I had seen a Swedish family build their first night shelter out of nothing but prairie grass and wooden posts.  The wife directing and the husband building with no apparent disagreement between them.  The finished structure, imperfect, but standing tall against a wind that had destroyed two tents.

He had seen the blacksmith weld a broken piece of hardware by reading the color of the metal instead of the clock, taking it out of the fire at a specific shade of orange, which meant something precise about the molecular state of the iron inside.  And I had seen Augus Bauer. Augus Bauer was 62 years old, or so he said, and he had the hands of someone who had spent all that time making and unmaking things out of stone.

He traveled by wagon train to the eastern edge of the Montana Territory, where he planned to meet with a cousin already settled near Billings, and throughout the journey he seemed to be engaged in a private conference that happened to be taking place in public.  He would crouch down by the nightly bonfires and draw careful diagrams in the ground with sticks of things that had nothing to do with the current situation, explaining to anyone within earshot the principles of a masonry heating system he called, in accented English that no

one seemed to find charming, a cachelofen, a masonry heater, a device that could heat a cabin for 18 hours with a single fire by trapping the heat inside stone channels instead of sending it straight into the sky. Most people steered clear of August Bauer’s drawings as they would of an unfamiliar smell. Not exactly offensive, but it wasn’t his business.

One night, a man from Virginia said, not cruelly, but purposefully, that they hadn’t crossed 1000 miles to build a fancy stove.  They would build a proper American fireplace, like any sensible person would.  And August looked up from his land diagram with an expression that Emma had cataloged and saved, the expression of a person who sees an avoidable mistake gaining momentum.

Emma had stayed throughout all the explanations.   She had stayed not because she was particularly interested in stonemasonry, but because August Bauer was interested in it, and interest in a specific thing pursued with full attention was the most reliable sign she knew that something was worth understanding.

He didn’t ask any questions that might attract his father’s attention.  He stayed far enough back to appear merely present rather than listening, but he listened from the first line to the last every night.  And by the time August Bauer left the train at the crossing, she would have been able to draw her diagrams from memory on any surface that could bear a mark.

The stream was shallow at the bank, but deepened at a bend 30 yards downstream, cold enough to make his teeth hurt when he knelt and drank, fed by the spring on the ridge above, probably running clean all winter.  He drank until his stomach pressed against him again.  Then he straightened up and began to walk along the shore, reading it as his mother had taught him to read any new terrain, not looking for what he wanted to find, but looking at what was actually there.

Her mother, whose name Adahi, before taking the name Ann for a marriage that required it, had been Shon from the Ohio River country.   She had died when Emma was 8 years old from a fever that arrived in March and left in April, taking her with it.  What Ema retained from those 8 years was not the language that her father had discouraged, nor the ceremony that her father had forbidden.

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