Other Earths (collection)

“How can I describe the expression on my wife’s face when she saw me—Bright Sun indeed, but streaked with clouds of anguish and despair. The Indian had his knife at my throat, and he dragged me forward into the firelight. I held out my hand as if to reassure her, but at the same time I saw nothing but blackness ahead of us, as if she and I together had been swallowed up in darkness or the shadow of the pit. I felt darkness overwhelm me, and I raised my hand to push it away, push its shadows from my eyes. The sharp steel was at my throat.

“At that moment, as the darkness threatened to surround me, I heard a noise from away down the hill. I heard a few soft, breathy notes, the low murmur of the black-robe’s wooden flute, an air from his native Brittany …”

I have seen a photograph of Amelie de Fontenelle, taken when she was in her sixties after the end of the Civil War. She is dressed in mourning. Gray ringlets hang down underneath a white lace cap.

No photograph or painted portrait still exists of her brother Lucien. He was a famous trapper and mountain man, who established a trading post at Bellevue, Nebraska, in the eighteen twenties. His wife was an Omaha princess named Bright Sun. His only child, Logan, was the chief who bartered the land of the Omahas to the United States government after small-pox had destroyed the tribes. In 1855 he was scalped and murdered by the Dakota Sioux. His father did not live to see it; Lucien Fontenelle was dead from alcohol, or typhus, or suicide by that time, an ugly man, according to letters and journals of various pioneers, with a face like a monkey.

But what if his mother in Pointe à la Hache had not eaten too heavily one evening when she was pregnant, had not dreamed her monkey dream? What if Madame Mercier had been a different kind of woman, one who had taken to heart, perhaps, the great victory off Malta in 1798, when Horatio Nelson’s flagship had sunk with all hands? She would have been just a girl, impressionable and easily influenced, perhaps, by the celebrations in the streets. Later on, she might have been overjoyed to take into her home her brother’s children after the catastrophe. She might have loaded them with kindness. Stuck in a loveless marriage, she might have felt herself responding to the handsome young Lucien despite the difference in their ages. Generous, open hearted, and näve, perhaps she could not guard her nephew from the maniacal and sadistic Dr. Mercier, who would have driven the boy not just from the city but from the entire territory of New France—up the Mississippi and then east up the Ohio to the Kentucky wilderness. Several years later he might have sent his sister the following letter:

“Ma Chere Soeur, my heart bleeds when I think of you still in the grip of that madman—I do not speak of my aunt. But I must tell you what has happened in case the worst comes to the worst. I lie here wounded, close to death, shot down by Douglas Sharpe and my erstwhile companions …”

(In New Orleans, Amelie de Fontenelle might have wondered at the careful, feminine handwriting on the envelope. “Ah, is it true?” she might have thought.)

“Dear heart, it is true. And so I must leave a record of what has happened, for you to join together with your memory of our life together in Pointe à la Hache—ah, such times seem a paradise to me. In this way I might feel that my life has a pattern, however fitful and provisionary, however much it loops upon itself, as if I were a plaything for an arbitrary and erratic God. I also must inform you of what I most believe: that a war is coming, despite the wisdom of the emperor and his well-known sympathy for the rights of his native subjects, the appeal they have made to his own wild nature. The land is too empty on our side of the river. To the east the land fills up like water in a cup, and the time will come when it will burst its bounds.

“I have seen this at first hand, from the day I left the blessed shore of New France to assume my exile among these Americans. I suppose you must imagine me miserable, bedraggled, without funds, alone in an English-speaking land. Never mind how, but I found myself in a country called the Barrens, in the parish of Edmonson, along the banks of the Green River. This was a terrible desolation, as vast and lonely as the desolation in my heart, a sere expanse of hills and limestone knobs, with dark forests of blackjack trees in the crevices between them. Everywhere were fissures in the earth such as could swallow up a man on horseback—remnants of the earthquake that formed that country in the early days and whose instability can still be felt.