Inland by Téa Obreht

Author:Téa Obreht
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

SHE WATCHED THE DOC SAY his goodbyes from the boiling shade of the porch. Restored to his ordinary, charming ease, he nattered with one hand in Toby’s hair, the other on the small of Josie’s back, interlarding his endearments with the small jokes that got folks wistful for his company. Already, even Nora herself was longingly revisiting a moment not half an hour old: his joke about absolving her of her debt, the debonair swirl of his invisible pen. What a rake, she thought. Blessed with a certain manner, one could inhabit a room long after having left it.

Emmett, too, was like this: concerned, attentive, offhandedly charming. Possessed of that rarest gift: making his every gesture seem like a benediction. People saw his passions as something to aspire to. She had always suspected this to be what Sandy Freed had recognized in him. He cleaved bullheadedly to his stances because he had taken great pains to arrive at them. Every screed against the bureaucracy of land claims or the matter of Indian sovereignty had somehow earned him more admirers than it cost him friends. Even Nora, who had grown up under the formidable shadow of the Dakota, and made a point of smirking when he called Indians the “dispossessed children of the earth,” had found herself swayed by his convictions.

Of course, she had been different in the early days: lovestruck and excitable and naïve. She did not really know what it meant to homestead. She had never been lonely. Even her terrors had been communal. What did she know about Indians—their women in particular? In Iowa, they had not come visiting as they did here. She’d been in the Territory three weeks when she found herself sitting at Desma’s table with a Navajo mother and two lively daughters, who, not twenty minutes before, had been mere apparitions on the plain, and were now maneuvering handily between Spanish and Navajo while Desma poured coffee and readied bags of cornmeal for them to take home. When they returned the following week, Nora asked: “I’ve heard of them begging like this in Nebraska—do they just go from house to house?”

“Not begging,” Desma said. “This is their way.”

Somewhere between Desma’s sharpness and Emmett’s children-of-the-earth treatise, she resolved to make herself hospitable. However uneasy, she would try.

Because hers was a new homestead, and all the girls seemed to have their favorite haunts already, no Indian visitor came until June, when Nora turned, with Evelyn sucking at her breast, to see a curious face in the window. It was an old woman—likely Navajo, though later she would ask herself what this presumption had been founded upon.

The old woman was still out there an hour later when Nora opened the door. She came in and sat herself down at the kitchen table as though she had done so a hundred times before, and began looking around the room, offering a quiet but torrential commentary on what Nora assumed must be the deficiencies of her housekeeping. The whole enterprise felt precarious.

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