Carry Me Page 37

Crossing el llano that afternoon, heading west from Canyon, Texas, toward New Mexico, we soon left the last irrigated fields and the wild green of winter wheat. The real soul of el llano had always been hard as bone. Those Comanche ponies really did live on scrub.

  The road was straight and level. She wore a pair of sunglasses bought in a pharmacy in Oklahoma City, and a yellow silk scarf.

  Half a century later I’m in the clutches of the same colon cancer that killed Lady Maire. Stage 4, the oncologist announced. During these days I am supposed to be making my peace with this quite-rotten world.

  I shouldn’t say that. As worlds go, maybe this one isn’t so bad.

  The yellow scarf is tied over her hair, knotted under her chin. The sunglasses were bought at the drugstore where we sat at the lunch counter and ate hamburgers and she dared order something called a malt—we presumed it was beer, but it wasn’t.

  Had she been able to keep going a little while longer, we’d both have made it. This seems to me true. She might have found what she needed on the other side. As I did.

  What strikes me now is her youth. She was younger than my children are.

  So many have left their bones on El Llano Estacado.

  Altitude, not latitude, often determines climate in the West. Sometimes on el llano it snows.

  When I awoke that morning in a tourist cabin in the hamlet of Grady, New Mexico, I looked out and saw the ground covered with an inch of gleaming snow.

  Karin was nowhere to be seen. I assumed she must be in the rather primitive outhouse.

  Sun had just snapped over the horizon. The snow was already dripping and melting. The highway would burn clear and dry before very long.

  I blew at embers in the stove, added kindling and a couple of piñon logs. I was always good at fires. With the blaze roaring and the stove creaking I filled the kettle from a pail of well water and set it to boil for coffee. We had coffee and milk and a few groceries we’d bought the day before at the Piggly Wiggly store in Amarillo, Texas.

  I must have made coffee. Still she did not return. When I looked out, in all directions I saw as pure an emptiness as ever I’d imagined. It would be easy to track her across the fresh snow, but if she wanted solitude in which to savor the uncanny joy of el llano, then I wouldn’t disturb her. I figured she must already be feeling the flavor and warmth of the rising sun.

  El llano was never a blank page. Those southern plains have as active and bloody a history as any piece of this earth, but it wasn’t my history, wasn’t hers.

  I finished my coffee. I was probably starting to worry.

  Still am worrying. Did I let you down? I think about it all the time.

  I’m carrying you still.

  The sun was up, blazing. In shirtsleeves I walked outside, sniffed the piñon smoke flowing from the metal pipe chimney, heard snow dripping off the eaves. There was a faint, fresh breeze. Her footsteps were imprinted in snow, which was melting fast to red earth.

  It was easy to follow her trace across the highway. She’d skipped over the road ditch, slipped underneath the barbed-wire fence, left a scrap of tweed cloth caught on a barb.

  There was a cattle gate nearby; she must not have noticed it. I swung it open and started across the pasture. New Mexico sun on snow was so bright, nearly blinding. I could feel the sun’s strength but also a cold wind pushing at my back.

  Half a mile in from the highway was an irrigation ditch. It was only a couple of feet deep, but deep enough to give a bit of shelter from the wind, deep enough so that I didn’t see her until I had nearly stumbled over her.

  She had taken off her coat and spread it out. She lay on her back, looking up at the sky, like someone daydreaming on a picnic blanket by one of the summer lakes outside Berlin. Her eyes were open.

  She had on one of her chic Berlin dresses and a pair of rubber overshoes bought at Gimbels in New York.

  She’d pushed up a sleeve and punched the needle into a vein on her left arm. On a patch of melting snow I saw the empty glass bottle and the needle and syringe with its pink plunger pushed all the way in.

  I lost track of time for a while. Eventually I decided I couldn’t leave her out there. From Karl May I knew el llano was a country of bears and coyotes, of scavengers.

  So I picked her up. She didn’t weigh very much. I began carrying her in my arms across the fields. The snow had mostly disappeared. Red soil glued to my shoes.

  I crossed the highway and kicked open the door of our tourist cabin and laid her on our noisy, squeaky bedsprings. I covered her with my jacket. I was shivering. I added wood to the stove before going back outside. I was approaching the old woman’s cabin when her door creaked open. She stood holding a Winchester rifle in both hands. I recognized the rifle from so many western films.

  “There’s been an accident,” I said. I spoke in German—it just came out that way. I repeated myself in English.

  I was trying to warn my feelings away. I did not want feelings at that time. The ground I remember: red and wet. The blue sky, the violent sunlight.

  “Está muerta? She dead?”

  Like a lot of people out that way, she might have had Comanche or Apache blood. Her brown eyes were almond shaped and her steel-gray hair was in a thick braid. Fear seemed no part of her. She lived so far from anyone’s help maybe fear was no use, fear had atrophied.

  “You go to Clovis.” She motioned at the Plymouth with the rifle barrel. “Find the sheriff. Get out of here. Go.”

  On the driver’s seat of the Plymouth I found the note Karin had scrawled on a sheet of paper torn from her notebook. The woman stood watching while I cranked the starter, punched the gas pedal too hard, and flooded the carburetor. I reset the choke, counted to thirty, and stabbed the starter button with my foot. The engine caught, and the car began to growl and shake like an animal. The highway was clear and dry. It took an hour to reach Clovis, with nothing on the way, no traffic, no animals, only the surreal emptiness of el llano. The sheriff’s office was in the courthouse at the center of town. There was no one in. The clerk in the tax office sent me to a café across the street where the waitress pointed at a man in a gray suit, white shirt, and black necktie, alone in a booth eating his lunch. He stared at me while I described what had happened, then he picked up his hat and I followed him back to his office. An hour later we started for Grady. I sat in the backseat of the sheriff’s Pontiac, a deputy in a mackinaw jacket sitting beside me. Someone had snapped handcuffs on my wrists. Two more deputies followed in a wheezing truck.

  When we got there I wasn’t allowed to get out of the car. The woman stood in her doorway watching the sheriff go into our cabin. He came out after a while and disappeared into the old woman’s cabin for what seemed a long time. I watched the deputies carry out Karin’s body wrapped in a sheet and place her in the back of their truck. It was nearly dark when we started back to Clovis.

  I was the only prisoner in the Curry County jail until Christmas Eve, when they locked up a young cowboy who’d been fighting. He was sick all night, and in the morning the deputy made him scrub out his cell before turning him loose.

  The day after Christmas we buried her. The cemetery was mostly dirt, very little grass. The sheriff stood alongside me. There was a warm, pleasant wind. The pine coffin was like her father’s, except with metal nails. The nearest rabbi was in Santa Fe, two hundred miles away. A New Mexican priest read Old Testament psalms.

  The coroner ruled the death a suicide, and I was handed the keys to the Plymouth, which had been driven to the courthouse. Her things were in her suitcase in the trunk, except her overshoes, her purse, her British passport, and the Kinds of Light notebook, which were in a grocery sack on the passenger seat. Nothing was missing as far as I could tell.

  It took three days, driving all day and most of the night, to reach the Canadian border. I sold the Plymouth, crossed the border, started life in a new country.

  I didn’t know what to do with her things, so I had the clothes laundered and cleaned and p
acked them in a cedar chest. I should have given them away, but that seemed impossible at the time. After the war they no longer had the same power over me, but I held on to the chest, as my wife and children are perfectly aware. I still have it. It’s in the attic of this house. After my death I’ve asked my son to see to it that everything is burned. He’ll manage that. It’s too much for me. I’ve asked him to hold on to these pages for twenty-five years, and after that he may do with them what he likes.

  Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  Although I traveled over the plains for more than three hundred leagues, there were no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea.

  —Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to the king of Spain Oct 20 1541

  In Oklahoma we had encountered bitter weather, a norther, with a horde of freezing droplets of dust and rain rattling and banging against the passenger side of the Plymouth. I turned south at Guymon, Oklahoma. Soon we crossed into Texas, and soon after that were across the Canadian River, very weak and thin in those drought years, hardly a trickle showing.

  South of the river we could see the red-rock bluffs of el llano rising up from the desert floor. The highway was built on a rubble incline, and as we started climbing, our speed began dropping. I could feel the motor straining, and downshifted.

  Then suddenly we were at the top of the bluffs, and the blacktop shot before us like an arrow, perfectly level, perfectly straight. This was the great high plain, el llano. And almost immediately the black clouds cracked and the sun pitched down a rainbow. It lit the country up so quickly it took us by surprise.

  “Pull over!” she cried.

  We had not passed another car since crossing the state line of Texas. There was no traffic in sight, and I could see a long, long way ahead. I pulled over. She flung open her door and was out almost before the car stopped. I happened to notice a small dark stain on the back of her skirt and saw a spot the size of a quarter left on her car seat. Ever since the miscarriage there had been cramps and bleeding, sometimes heavy.

  She had left her door hanging open and was walking along the highway.

  I shut off the motor and climbed out. There was a scent of sage, of rain on dry ground. The rain had stopped by then. Little ghosts of steam fluttered from hot asphalt.

  To the east I could see the silver-blue column of rain walking away across the country. Sunlight spread over fields the color of lion skin, fragrant with wet. There was a tick of hot metal from our car. Barbed-wire fence flanked the highway on both sides; wind had piled up tumbleweeds along the western fence. The highway ran perfectly level as far as I could see, pointing like a needle to the level horizon. The sky kept opening up. A tumbleweed broke free from the mash and went skittering across the road.

  One feels vulnerable, certainly. Humans are small out there. But the sun shone with power, and El Llano Estacado just then spread out before us like a promise we could believe in.

  A young man wearing a silk necktie bought in Paris. A young woman with a blot of blood on her skirt. A Plymouth car with blue NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR license plates, pulled over on the highway shoulder, passenger door hanging open.

  “Billy!”

  She was pointing to the west. When I looked that way I saw a small herd of pronghorns moving across a wide pasture.

  My blood hummed. So we’d been right after all! El llano was a powerful place, and its magic was occurring for us. The past was behind us. Sweetie the Plymouth was taking us in the right direction, toward the future. Sage smelled like incense, and small, hasty, finely tuned animals were moving like our best dreams across open country.

  I’ll leave you here, beside a highway in Texas, just come up on el llano. It’s not where our story ends, but it’s where I’ll leave you, your right hand shading your eyes as you watch those antelope flicker across a yellow field—alert, sensitive, tuned to one another. Moving in unison, like a darting flock of birds.

  Why you’ve done it, Billy Lange. You’ve brought her to the open country.

  That’s what I was thinking.

  It’s rare to recognize happiness for what it is, but I did then. It was like that morning on the Eschenheimer Anlage, your pied-à-terre—French doors flung open, rain just past, and the fragrance of trees floating from the palm garden across the road. I held it in my hands, I knew it for what it was.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Jenny Mayher of Newcastle, Maine, was, once again, my earliest reader. Her suggestions and insights were invaluable. I learned a lot about Llano Estacado from Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest by Dan Louie Flores, from John Miller Morris’s El Llano Estacado: Exploration and Imagination on the High Plains of Texas and New Mexico, 1536–1860, and also from Meredith McClain’s Web site, www.meredithmcclainphd.com. I owe huge debts to NIAS-Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, to the Dutch Foundation for Literature, and to the Canada Council for the Arts for their generous support.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter Behrens’s first novel, The Law of Dreams, won the Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada’s most prestigious book prize, and has been published in nine languages. His second novel, The O’Briens, appeared in 2012 and was hailed as “a major accomplishment” by The New York Times. The author of two short-story collections, Night Driving (1987) and Travelling Light (2013), Behrens held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and is a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Born in Montreal, he lives in Maine.

  An Alfred A. Knopf Reading Group Guide

  Carry Me by Peter Behrens

  The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Carry Me, the captivating and poignant new novel by the acclaimed author of The O’Briens.

  Discussion Questions

  1. The novel opens with an epigraph, a line from W. B. Yeats: “In dreams begin responsibility.” What does this mean? How does it figure into the novel?

  2. Each section opens with a selection of archival materials concerning the characters. What purpose do these letters and diary excerpts serve?

  3. “It’s an extraordinary impulse in one that age to confront something as enormous and active as the sea without feeling the least intimidated. Karin was determined to enter that wild world and leave behind the calm and safety of shore” (this page). What does Karin’s attempt to swim to America reveal about her character? How does that aspect of her personality evolve throughout the novel?

  4. The theme of guilt weaves through the story. Which characters feel it most deeply, and which don’t seem to feel guilty enough?

  5. Behrens plays with time, moving forward through the events of 1938 while also telling Billy’s and Karin’s stories from the beginning. What impact does this have on the reader?

  6. Why do Karl May’s books entrance Billy and Karin so much? What does the myth of the Old West mean to them?

  7. “ ‘The thing with bad news, when you hear it, is keep it inside, Billy. Hold it inside, don’t let no one else see it, Billy, and be brave’ ” (this page). Hamilton offers this advice to young Billy—does he heed it? When does it prove most useful?

  8. For many characters—Billy, Karin, Buck, Eilín, and Krebs among them—clothing plays a crucial role in how they see themselves and in how others treat them. What point is Behrens making?

  9. At different points in the novel, parents sacrifice for their children. At what point do the tables turn and the children begin to sacrifice for their parents?

  10. Billy is a refugee during World War I, and later Karin works to help Jewish refugees escape Hitler before becoming a refugee herself. How does Billy’s childhood refugee experience help him in 1938?

  11. What influence, intentional or not, do Billy’s Irish grandp
arents have over his life decisions?

  12. What is the significance of Billy’s name change?

  13. Why does the scene at Karin’s brother’s grave (this page), when she implores Billy to strip, and eventually, “Carry me,” have such resonance for Billy? Why is the novel called Carry Me?

  14. How does Buck’s time at Alexandra Palace influence his response to Hitler’s rise?

  15. Several peripheral characters reappear throughout the novel—Krebs, Kaufman, Anna von Rabou, Mick. What does each one represent?

  16. The dream of crossing el llano helps Billy and Karin through some of their most difficult times. Billy writes, “Escapism? Of course it was. Escapism was for realists in Frankfurt then. Escapists saw things plain” (this page). How does this dream help him?

  17. Why is The Lamentation so important to Karin? What does it signify?

  18. After the war, Billy decides to study geography and literature together. “I wanted to investigate in a rigorous way the hold particular regions have on the imaginations of artists,” he writes (this page). How does this relate to what Behrens does in this novel? Which region has the firmest hold on his imagination?

  19. How does the reality of el llano contribute to Karin’s decision at the end of the novel?

  20. Why does Billy hold on to Karin’s belongings for so many years?

  21. Behrens has Billy choose to end the story in a moment of pure happiness. Why?

  Suggested Reading

  Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow

  Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

  Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth

  Michael Cunningham, The Hours

  Karl May, Winnetou

  Ian McEwan, Atonement

  Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

  Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

  Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway