Beyond the Horizon

Ryan Ireland

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781780745985
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

In frontier America, a man lives with a pregnant woman who is not his wife. When a stranger appears and advises him to register the baby as his own at a fabled military outpost, the man sets out on a lonely journey across an arid and hostile terrain. Soon after he departs, the stranger kills the woman before setting off in pursuit of the man.As their parallel journeys unfold, we learn of the man's childhood working with his father on a ship rife with cannibalism and their subsequent life in a port town; we watch the stranger as he assumes many guises to shape-shift his way through history in pursuit of the man, a pawn in his brutal game of rewriting the founding myths of the American West.Menacing, visceral and lyrical, Beyond the Horizon is an audacious debut: an astonishing sojourn into the darkest parts of Western lore that showcases a bold and enormous new talent in contemporary fiction.

Five

i

The man came to a place where the pines thinned out and grew even taller. They hugged the cliffsides. The air smelled sweet, like boiled tree sap. It was strange land like he had not seen before. Mountains were cut flat across the top with mats of green blanketing the plateau surface.

From time to time he still felt the presence of the Indians. Feeling their eyes upon him caused the man to move more quickly until he plodded through the pylons of tree trunks. He came to a cliffside and craned his head back. Through the openings in the branches, he could see caverns bored deep into the yellowed stone. Farther up, past the reach of any man, he could see the scribblings of men who had been here decades before. He approached the foot of the cliff and saw a series of footholds. Somewhere distant in the forest he heard a pinecone crumple under foot of something clandestine. He figured it to be an Indian—the one with the hand ax, maybe the one with the suit of bones. Could be the one with the scars over his nipples and the stipples in his nose. He shook his head. No, that place was gone now. He began to climb.

Each foothold and cubby for his hand was well measured and he easily scaled the cliffside right to the cavern opening. He pulled himself inside. For a moment he sat catching his breath and took in his surroundings. A mortar and pestle sat on the floor amongst shards of a broken clay pot. A ragged animal skin lay on the floor. The man lifted the pestle from the mortar. Meal crushed a thousand years ago still piled deep in the bottom. The man ate it. Grit from the crushing stone sifted through his teeth. When he was mostly done he finally looked out across the vista. The sight made him swear out loud. Up here in his cliffside perch the world spread out vast and small.

The ocean appeared much the same way to the boy. He and his father had been adrift a week in the canoe. The meat his father had cut from the woman’s legs and dried on the broad side of the knife ran out a day ago. They had both tried to eat the leg meat as if it was jerky. Each of them nibbled on the flesh, then vomited. Her body had since spoiled and bloated. His father stripped the corpse of what little she still wore. Because the canoe was so narrow and unevenly weighted the boy and his father could not simply dump the woman’s body overboard as they would have on the ship. Such an action could cause them to capsize. For six nights they wallowed in her blood, smelled her rot. Maggots began to hatch in her sore spots.

‘Damn island injuns,’ his father said. ‘Put this whore in here with us just so we’d have to deal with the flies.’

The boy looked out over the plaintive waters, trying to ignore what was happening right there inside the canoe. His father took the stone knife and wedged it under the woman’s arm.

‘Help if you hold her wrist down,’ the father said. But the boy made no move to touch the woman. ‘It’d help me get the blade tween the bones there.’

The boy did not move. His father readjusted his posture until he had a foot on the woman’s hand. He cleaved the blade back and forth until the bone splintered and flecks of blood splattered on the boy. The father took the arm and tossed it into the water. ‘Wouldnt of gotten you soiled like that had you helped me,’ he said.

In the evening, as the stars began speckling the sky, the father heaved the torso from the vessel. The canoe rocked back and forth violently. The boy’s father sorted through the footlocker. He began to speak to the boy, but thought better of it and muttered to himself as he rummaged through the maps and sails. The boy had already settled into the bottom of the boat where he slumbered.

When he awoke his father was still awake. If he had slept, the boy did not know. He did not ask. Instead he asked his father what he was doing.

‘Making a sail,’ his father said. Indeed he busied himself by taking one of the smaller sails from the footlocker and cut it down with the knife. ‘Cuttin the cloth like this.’ His father set down the knife and formed his fingers to make a triangle. ‘Gonna make a rope of sorts out of our clothes and tie it to the top there, run the rope back here and I’ll hold it. You’ll sit up in the bow there and hold down the other two corners.’

‘I’m not strong enough,’ the boy said.

‘Wont have to be,’ the father said. ‘Take your trousers there and tie a leg to each corner. You’ll just have to set on the trousers and not get blown away.’ Then he laughed. He laughed hard enough for the canoe to bounce in the water.

‘You drink the ocean water?’ the boy asked.

His father stopped working. He looked wide-eyed at his boy. ‘Did you?’

‘No.’

‘Why you ask?’

The boy’s brow wrinkled. ‘You laughed,’ he said. ‘Aint never heard you laugh.’

ii

As the stranger lay amongst his dynamite and the nitroglycerine soaked into his skin, he thought of the future. He thought how he would lie here in state for a decade or more, the climate of the shafts preserving most everything except his flesh. How the earthquake would bury him. How the dynamite would continue to age like gourmet cheese and grow sharper, more volatile. Most people spend their energies trying to go from one place to another. It was a trifle, this life. Time moves everything if you wait long enough. Our lives are usually just too short to wait out the universe.

But in here, unlike men, the stranger had time. Universes would intersect here, he knew. In the meantime, he would tell himself bedtime stories, replaying the defining moments of this world as he knew them.

He fell into a type of coma thinking of the boy and his father. He thought about how they stripped naked, shredding their clothes and tying them into rope. Then the boy’s father said they needed to shit. In unison they sat on opposite edges of the boat facing each other, shitting into the ocean. The boy bled some and the father watched.

Then, without a word to one another, the father wrapped his portion of the rope under his arms, his son sat on the trousers to hold down the bottom of the sail. Though the cloth hardly functioned as a proper sail, it provided them some propulsion, an almost vertical lift.

‘We must be caught in a current a some type,’ his father said. The boy had been awake, but kept his eyes shut. ‘Wont be long.’

And the father had been right. The stranger thought of when they spotted land, saw a boat sitting moored in a harbor. A boat flying a pennant flag. He thought of the promise they both saw in a bird, a sprig clamped in its beak, long before the land and ships came into view. Both the father and his boy hooted, called out in nonsense verse, waved their arms. The canoe nearly capsized.

When they arrived a group of men—longshoremen—gathered at the end of the dock. They tossed a rope out to the canoe. Most of the longshoremen turned away, for the father and son were both naked and stained with blood and feces, dried charcoal from the interior of the boat.

‘Good Christ,’ one man said. He touched his forehead, his gut, then each shoulder.

‘D’où êtes-vous?’ another asked.

‘Where are we?’ the father asked.

‘Port of Tobacco,’ one man said.

‘Wheres that?’

A protracted silence followed the father’s inquiry. Then one man answered, said this was America.

The man took to exploring the cavern dwellings of the cliffside. Most everything was connected in one fashion or another. Handholds and footholds led from one apartment dwelling to the next. The caves looked to be bored into the cliff through natural means. Sometimes a crawlway made passage between two apartments and the man recognized these as chiseled by human hands.

Nonsense script adorned the walls, smoke stains plaqued the ceilings. Every once in a while the man came across a rock worn down by usage into a tool of some type. It was quiet in here—he could hear no one following him, tracking his progress to Fort James.

At night he continued worming his way through the apartments, emerging now and again to scale the cliffside laterally by means of hand and footholds. He found a hole toward the rear of an apartment. The opening was lined with mud bricks and the man knew this path was one constructed by whoever dwelled here ages before he came here. He crawled in.

The darkness was instantaneous: no moonlight could navigate the angles needed to illuminate his way. He slurked forward, stomach grating on the grit and stone floor, reaching one hand o...

Table of contents

• First
• Second
• Last
• Acknowledgements