October skies

CHAPTER 43

Tuesday

Fort Casey, California

The librarian, a bespectacled, plump lady with permanently flushed cheeks and ham-shank arms, looked back at Rose with eyes as wide as Starbucks cookies. ‘You’re from the BBC? You mean from England?’

Rose smiled self-consciously. ‘I work for them, indirectly.’

The woman seemed not to care too much about the distinction. Her friendly face broadened with a welcoming smile.

‘Oh goodness, I love all your TV shows and your World Service. My husband loves your Fawlty Towers and all those Python programmes.’ She offered Rose a hand. ‘I’m Daphne Ryan… pleasure to meet you.’

Rose reached for her hand and shook it. ‘Rose Whitely.’

‘We don’t get many visitors from so far away here in Casey,’ she continued, her voice rising from a whisper with the excitement, ‘especially not from England. Do you live in London? Near that Nottingham Hill place?’

Rose smiled and shook her head. ‘No, sadly not. I live in a place called Clapham. It’s in London, but not near Notting Hill.’

Daphne shook her head in wonder. ‘I’d love to live there; all those quaint little book shops and Buckingham Palace and the Big Ben.. it must be lovely.’

Rose nodded and smiled. ‘It’s okay,’ she agreed.

‘Not like Fort Casey,’ she continued, the enthusiasm quickly draining from her face. ‘Ain’t much going on here. There never is.’

Rose shrugged. ‘It’s a sleepy town. I really like that.’

Daphne lit up again, obviously as proud of her town as she was fed up with it. ‘You do?’

‘Yes, it’s a lovely place, really,’ she replied, managing a sincere nod.

Fort Casey might have been a picturesque frontier town a generation ago, with a square and a gazebo, a town hall, a corner store selling ice-cream sundaes and every home fronted by a white picket fence — all of it perfectly framed by the distant purple peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains. But now it looked like every other small town: a single through-road flanked by homogenous chain stores and acres of parking tarmac. Unlike Blue Valley, thirty miles east towards the mountains, there was no tourist trade here. No need to worry about appearances.

‘I’m interested in the history of this town.’

‘Oh, you’ve come to the right place!’ she said, her voice beginning to carry across the small library. ‘We have an extensive local history section. History of our town, archives of our paper, the Report, a section on the old army fort and garrison…’

‘I’d like to look at that,’ said Rose. ‘Your paper, how far does it go back?’

‘Oh, golly, it goes back ages and ages. As far back as the town does. We have the archives, every page of every issue on our DVD.’

Rose had already done some homework on the town. It dated from the 1840s when land was purchased for a song by the army, on Paiute territory, to build an outpost and oversee the trickle of settlers emerging from the pass and heading north-west on the final leg towards Oregon. Being directly on the most travelled route from Emigrant Pass, it had developed more quickly than Blue Valley. By the late fifties the small military outpost had been swamped by a bustling town full of traders, merchants and craftsmen looking to resupply and tend to the unending procession of weary overlanders streaming out of the wilderness.

Fort Casey was an unavoidable next stop for anyone heading for Oregon. Rose was curious where this apparently real Rag Man had disappeared to. Presumably his journey would have taken him away from the mountains from which he’d emerged.

That meant north-west. That meant passing through here.

‘Can I look at this DVD?’

‘Sure, I can fix you up on our internet station,’ Daphne said, pointing towards the library’s solitary PC, sitting in an ill-lit corner and currently being used by a sullen teenage lad. ‘Lemme sort that out for you,’ she said, heading out from behind the counter. She approached the boy on the computer, muttered something quietly to him and pointed Rose’s way. He turned to look at her, a dark mop of hair covering his face except the pout of a bottom lip. He shrugged a whatever, closed down the MSN chat box, and shuffled towards the graphic novels and manga section of the library.

Daphne waved her over.

‘All yours,’ she cheerfully whispered as Rose sat down at the machine. ‘That’s Craig, my nephew.’ She nodded towards him. ‘Better he hangs out here, where I can keep an eye on him, than elsewhere. Library’s a good place for him; all these books and learning around him.’

Rose nodded, but wondered if there was a great deal of learning going on there.

Daphne left Rose and returned a moment later with a shimmering gold disc in one hand. She slotted it into the PC and a title page popped up on the screen.

The Report: Archives 1842-1939

‘We got two discs of material,’ she said. ‘Now, our recent history, from the war right up to, well… yesterday, I guess, is on the other disc. You want that one as well?’

‘Just the first disc’ll be fine, thanks.’

‘Okay, well then, if you click on this,’ she said, moving the mouse over a search dialogue box, ‘you can enter a date here or an issue number, or you can even do a word search. Now’ — she clasped her hands together — ‘what specifically can I help you to look for?’

Rose felt awkward. Daphne Ryan had been exceedingly nice, but right now she needed a little space in which to think. She really didn’t know specifically what she was looking for, not yet.

‘I’m just going to browse a little.’ She looked up at her. ‘If that’s all right?’

‘Sure.’

Daphne hovered, waiting to be of further assistance. Rose was thinking how she was going to politely ask Daphne to give her a bit of room, when an old boy sidled up to the counter with a small stack of Clancy novels to check out. Daphne placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘You shout if you need anything else, okay?’

Rose nodded. ‘Thanks, Daphne,’ and watched her head back to the counter. She faced the screen again.

Right.

Aaron Pohenz said the Rag Man left the town of Blue Valley, then known as Pelorsky’s Farm, in the spring of 1857. He left on foot. If he headed north-west, then Fort Casey was only a week or so away.

So… from perhaps February 1857 onwards?

She typed a broad window of time into the date fields; February of that year to February of the next.

But what am I looking for?

She typed ‘Rag Man’ into the word search, hoping for an early hit. The DVD drive whirred but the search threw up nothing. Which was what she expected. The Rag Man was a Blue Valley myth — unknown here.

She decided to think things through from another angle. A paper like this, a town like this back then, would have focused its attention on the people passing through; the overlanders coming from the east. That’s how news travelled back then, not over some twenty-four-hour news network, but from the mouths of travellers on their way through. Every new wagon train of people stopping to resupply, to repair damaged or weakened wheels, reshoe horses and oxen, would have a tale to tell of their journey, of any Indian encounters, of the latest news and fashions from Europe, the latest political manoeuvrings back in Washington.

She wondered if a lone traveller, no doubt still gaunt from a winter of malnutrition, a troubled man with little to say to anyone, would have attracted the curiosity of this small town.

A search for ‘loner’ produced an article about a local farmer who had decided to introduce sheep to graze on his land, arousing the anger of local cattlemen who viewed the creatures as un-American and had hounded the poor man out of town.

Perhaps the Rag Man had talked of his experience in the hills?

‘Survivor’ yielded a dozen eye-witness accounts of Indian raids, undoubtedly exaggerated to sound more heroic for the paper. Rose also stumbled upon a heartbreaking story of three small children dying of thirst and hunger and found clinging to the bodies of their parents. A whole party of seven wagons had been stranded on the salt flats of Utah after their horses had perished from drinking foul water. The children, two young sisters and a baby brother, were picked up by the passing emigrants, but died one by one over the following week.

‘Cursed’ spewed out hundreds of printed sermons from the town’s lay preacher, Duncan Hodgekiss, who it seemed spent more time admonishing the wicked and godless from the offices of the paper than he did from the pulpit of his church.

Rose bit her lip with frustration, suspecting the twenty-minute drive down the interstate from Blue Valley, and the last half-hour in the library, had turned out to be something of a wild goose chase. The odds of tracing a nameless man from a hundred and fifty years ago amongst the spurious tales printed in a local rag were long, to say the least. In all likelihood, this weakened, troubled man… this cursed man, most probably had died by the wayside traipsing north-west on foot.

She wondered if he had been one of the names she’d picked out of the journal: Keats, Preston, Weyland, Vander, Hussein… or perhaps even the author himself, Lambert? There was no telling. This survivor might have been one of them, or one of the other Mormon men.

Or nothing at all to do with the Preston party?

She indulged the thought for a moment and then dismissed it. The Rag Man had wandered out of the very same mountains in the spring of the following year. Given the remote location off the beaten track, it was unlikely the two events weren’t linked.

She sighed, frustrated. ‘Which one of them were you?’

Searching randomly with tag words was getting her nowhere. She noticed once a week there was a regular column in the paper entitled ‘What the Wind Blows In’. It was penned by the same author each time, one Theodore Feillebois, the paper’s editor. It was a gossipy column that catalogued the more interesting arrivals of the week. Rose decided to focus her attention on those.

She was into May editions when she finally hit upon something that stirred the fair hair on her forearms.

… came into town on the dawn like a ghostly phantom. This intrepid reporter, always the keen hunting dog for the exciting tales that can be told by these courageous citizens who have braved the elephant’s tail and the deadly Indian savage, I approached the man.

He was, I found, the most curious of passers-through that I have encountered in the service of this paper of ours. A tall, gaunt, silent man, with eyes that appeared to have seen things that this reporter would be unable to commit to paper for fear of frightening the fair ladies of this town.

A pilgrim crossing this untamed continent of ours alone is either very brave or very foolish, and I have no doubt that he must have experienced much that would blanch the faces of even the brave troops who garrison our fort and protect our souls day and night.

When I asked him for the story of his crossing, the man’s response was a silence and an intense stare that I can only describe as haunted. I persisted in encouraging this man — whom I shall refer to hereon in as The Pilgrim, as I have no name for him, unwilling as he was to provide me with one — to tell me something of his adventurous crossing. But alas he declined.

He was dressed in ill-fitting clothes that appeared borrowed from another, better-nourished man, and with not a single possession in his hands. The Pilgrim, whoever he was, is a face this scribe will never forget.

When I asked this mysterious traveller where he was headed, his reply, dear reader, was one enigmatic word. A word that perhaps sums up the single-minded, dogged spirit and willpower of these brave, hardy folk.

He said to me, ‘Oregon.’

He then shuffled away from me, little more than a crow-scare in tattered clothes and not a single thing to call his own. I soon lost sight of him amongst the busy throng of traders and overlanders that fill our main thoroughfare on any given day of the week…

‘Oh my God,’ Rose whispered. ‘I think I’ve found him.’