Jellyface
A tale of retribution across two lifetimes
It’s a full day walk from my cabin, at the edge of the forest, to the place where I can see across the badlands. That’s where the trouble’s coming from. I can stand on the soft earth, at the cliff’s edge, and look out across that baked and cracked stretch of dog-dung desert we call, simply, the flats. I can stand here on this lush meadow, in the spring sun, with my back to the forest and the hill and wait for those bastards. I’m happy waiting and watching. It’s spring and I’m laughing inside all the time and every breath I take makes me feel strong.
I have a fat baby and a woman, Lenora, with skin so pale and soft and hair so black she is like a beautiful wisp of white smoke. They are back in the little cabin waiting for me. When I go to the cliff, I leave before daylight and don’t return until late at night. Behind the cabin a thickly wooded hillside rises steeply to the ridge.
These two men that are coming smell very bad. One is my Lenora’s brother; the other one is her husband. These guys have been dogging my trail across the centuries. They always smelled bad, even in that East European Country where they had me cornered.
They got me in my misshaped body with its knobbled knees, its drooling lip, its withered arm. They took me up above that bleak little village. They took me right in front of that big, fat, greasy woman with the dirty apron who says she’s my mother. They grabbed me by the arms and marched me up the steep hill over the cobblestones, between the grey, high faces of dirty little flats stacked on top of each other; past the place where the cobblestones end and the stony path begins. I can feel the stones through the hole in my second-hand shoe. And my pants are ripped, my precious blue pants. And my white shirt, saved for some special day, is soiled.
They take me to the top of the hill and drag me through the iron gates into the cemetery. Near the gate there is a mausoleum where the town’s noble family is buried and there is a big old tree near the door of this mausoleum. I am so scared I can’t breathe. They string me up in this tree, by the arms, and slit my belly open so my guts spill out. I die turning in the wind with my toes pointed together. The year is 1762 and I am only 14 years old.
And now they are coming again, a hundred years later. But I am happy inside myself, waiting, because I am big now. I am a big man with power pulsing from my solar plexus and a dark blue cape thrown over my right shoulder and my little rifle slung across my back. I have a chest like a barrel and my hands are so large they are like hams. My face is very round and fleshy and pockmarked and I have jowls that hang down and my whole face moves around like a bowl of jelly when I walk. My eyes laugh out at the world through folds of fat. I’m a big, ugly Indian. They call me Jellyface.
*****
I was the village idiot back in that East European Country. I was a slave to that horrible woman but she said I was her son. I couldn’t talk properly and my body was all wrong. I was weak and sickly and twisted like a plant grown in the dark. I can remember sitting on the floor while she worked on a big table, in front of a dirty little window, at the end of a long, dark, attic room, rolling and pounding dough. She was the baker for the village. She wore her dark, filthy hair pulled back tight against her head. She would throw me raw dough to eat. She threw it down on the never-washed plank floor, in the dirt and grease. I would sneak out from my dark corner, grab the slimy morsel, and scurry back. I tried to clean the dough against my dirty pants.
Then I would go outside and walk around and try not to let anyone see me. I wasn’t allowed to go to school. They said I was too stupid, but I could read and count and add and subtract. I could not speak though, and slobbered down my chin.
Those boys belonged to some kind of military youth club. They didn’t actually carry guns yet, because they are too young, but they had leather straps over their shoulders; they are half-way ready. They are practicing on me. They call it playing. They come into the house and tell Mother, Magda, they want to take me out to play. I run and hide but she finds me and shoves me out the door. She knows they beat me but she says I am clumsy and fall down, which is true: I am clumsy.
They push me down the hill that runs above the river to the east of town and then they rescue me, dragging me up the rocky bank and through the spindly forest of yellow trees that grows along the top of the bank. We play war and they hit me with sticks and take me prisoner. They torture me to make me tell secrets. I don’t know any secret so they hit me again.
I call this country, this life, “The Narrow Place”. There is no room here. The people smell awful and stand too close and there is always something bad going on. There is always somebody whispering in the corner. There are men marching through the streets in the night and the sound of their boots on the cobblestones echoes between the rows of flats.
Those two boys strung me up by the arms, ripped open my shirt, laughed at my scrawny chest and swollen stomach, slit my belly and left me to die slow and painful. My guts drying in the open air. My feet inches above the ground. I died and I left that narrow place and came here, to a country with open space. I floated down from the sky like a leaf falling off a tree and could see miles and miles of rolling hills covered in tall grass. I grew strong here, in a big country of hills and forests and canyons and deserts. And now I stand and wait to meet those two guys again.
*****
I watched all spring and summer from my place on the cliff and I built a little log house at the edge of the meadows, with our back against the forest and the hill. In the fall I did some hunting but I never wandered so far that I couldn’t walk out across that rolling meadow, with little groves of aspen here and there, to the place on the cliff where I can see east across the desert flats.
The east horizon is a low line of desert mountains. Hot, barren, piles of rock. A man riding west comes out of those mountains onto the desert; two days ride without even a rock for shade. A baked and cracked ancient salt sea bottom. The cactus don’t even like being out there. They crowd around the edges of the desert and thin out like brave soldiers toward the centre, to nothing.
These two men are coming from the east. They come from a big cattle ranch beyond the barren mountains, on the rich prairie. I was working at that place for while. Lenora’s father owned the ranch and her brother was lead-hand. I slept in the barn and Lenora would come and see me and I would hold her close and tell her not be scared. She was like a bird shivering in my hand. Her husband was a mean bastard. He beat her when he drank and he was cold-hearted when he was sober, so Lenora and I ran away together. I was laughing the night we sneaked off, thinking about the commotion we left behind. Her father would make those guys come after me. Lenora was the apple of his eye and she had run off with a big, ugly savage. There would be hell to pay.
I had been away from my own country too long. Scouting for the army. Fighting for pay. Working for white men. I was tired of that life. I was taking this woman I loved back home.
I watched for those guys all fall, and the winter came. We had fresh meat, some flour, some coffee. And I had that woman, Lenora, who took my breath away – she moved like a willow in the wind.
The first storms of winter were ferocious. The snow piling up in the mountains and blowing in big drifts across the flats. I walked out to my lookout on the cliff and watched out for those two guys every second day, no matter the weather, and, finally, I saw them crossing around the north rim of the flats. They were no bigger than fleas weaving their way through the rock pillars, the hoodoos, that stood sentinel along the northern boundary of the desert.
When I saw those guys I went crazy, dancing on that cliff. My spirit crouched low and sprang in a war leap, high above the desert. Then I danced slow on the earth, lifting my legs with care and treading lightly. I sang a song to announce my intention that I would kill these men. I sang my song into the rocks, into the trees, into the cold earth where their blood would seep. Every winter bird cocked its head against the howling wind, to hear this song they understood without reason. Every animal stopped and listened and the resounding “YES” shot through my body in a ripple of power and joy. My chest pounded hard enough to break my ribs. My step was light and certain.
Those two guys, Lenora’s pretty blonde husband with the cruel, narrow, too-red mouth and her swarthy and corpulent brother with the little red eyes of a pig. Those two guys thought they could sneak across the desert through the windblown rock pillars and then up the valley that opened wide off the flats.
The valley is the only break in an unbroken line of cliff stretching south along the west edge of the desert as far as the eye can see. They didn’t know the wide mouth of the valley narrowed quickly into the box canyon and the only way up the steep south slope of that canyon, to my little cabin, was a willow-choked nightmare.
As a rider enters the valley he notices the south slope rising up the ridge is steep, loose, rock slides. He pushes farther on and the valley becomes narrow and the slope to the ridge becomes sand cliffs, impossible to climb. A little farther up the valley, he rides into a box canyon, horse hooves ringing echoes on the stone floor. The rider remembers a creek gully rising steeply to the ridge about two hours ride back down the canyon. The creek is so little, and the water in such great demand, it is dry before it reaches the canyon floor, but in its wake is a strangle of willow brush. The little creek is the only way up the ridge and up the ridge is the only way to me.
****
My grandfather brought me to this country when I was a little boy, about 10 years old. We came across the desert from way south, maybe a hundred miles, where there is a single steep trail that rises off the desert, up the cliff and onto The Meadow With Many Streams. I was riding a roan mare with a broad back. The mare was so gentle I could sleep on her and she would never let me fall.
We camped on the meadow beside the many streams and my grandfather showed me the country and drew maps with a stick in the sandy banks so I would never forget this place. He drew The Hot Mountains to the east, The Dog Shit Desert and The Long Cliff on the west side of the desert. He drew The Meadow With Many Streams on top of The Long Cliff. West and north of the meadow he drew the steep Wooded Hills. And farther north, down the backside of The Wooded Hills, he drew The Trap Canyon. He told me my life would be full of trouble. He told me to come here and I would be safe. He said I could fight against a whole army from this Great Natural Fortress. And there was always lots of game.
I get tears in my eyes when I remember my grandfather. He was so kind to me even though I was damn ugly. He would say,
“You can kill your enemy with that ugly face,” and I would jump around, yelling, and make my face shake like jelly and my eyes pop out and we would both laugh. He named me Jellyface. He made me proud to be so ugly. I got my bad sense of humour from my grandfather.
****
I didn’t even bother to watch those two guys after they left the flats. They would be three days up the willow-choked creek bed in the deep snow. My little willow friends would slap their faces every step of the way.
On the afternoon of the third day they would be on top of the ridge behind my little cabin.
I went out on the afternoon of the third day with my rifle and my knife. My blue cloak and buckskin trousers. I had some food and warm moccasins with high leggings. I made myself comfortable in the snow with my rifle across my lap and my cape around me. I disappeared inside myself. The power from my chest was so strong I was warm all over. The winter was nothing to me!
Just before dark they were coming close. It was snowing hard and the wind blew the snow sideways. I could hear their leather saddles creaking as they came down the steep trail from the ridge. I could smell the whisky and the heavy rotten hides they wore as coats. I would kill them because they were so heavy in their coats and I was so light.
Their smell had soured over the centuries. Back in that other country, that European Country, they had smelled of the sickly-sweet sweat of pubescent perverts covered with splashes of lavender cologne. Now, a century later, their smell was almost solid; the rot was so far gone. Their smell hit me like a dog smelling a snake. The dog’s head, when he catches the snake scent, snaps back like he’s been kicked in the chops. Their smell was that bad.
The first guy coming down the hill was the fat one, Lenora’s brother. I stepped out from behind the big birch tree, dressed light as a feather, shirtless, my cloak lying on the snow behind me. Lenora’s brother was slightly below me, moving down the hill from left to right, his horse up to her belly in the snow. He turned in the saddle at my movement. We exchanged “a look” and I shot him in the side, right between the ribs. I can still see the exact spot where the bullet went in.
I jumped the blonde one, Lenora’s husband, and killed him with my knife. I preferred to kill him with my hands. I meant to shoot him but I was overcome with passion and dropped my gun, jumped over the bank, and knocked him to the ground and slit his throat. I held his long blonde hair and sliced his scalp. He gurgled and, in his conceit, looked surprised. He had been so sure of himself.
Now there are two graves up on the hill and there is one fat Indian, with a face like a bowl of jelly, down in the cabin eating bannock and eggs. I’m one lucky man and I have two fine horses, saddles and all.
I wanted to leave their bodies for the animals to eat the flesh and scatter the bones but Lenora made me string them up in a tree. In the spring she wanted me to bury them but I pretended I couldn’t find them. I ran around the little cabin looking under the bed and in the corners, making a big joke. I pretended my back was too sore to dig the hole. I made a big show and moaned and groaned. I pretended I couldn’t find the shovel. But Lenora got mad, so I buried them.
I left the brother’s big stinking fur coat hanging on a tree for a while just so I could look at the hole where the bullet went through and the dry blood matted the dark fur. It made me happy to look at that coat but Lenora made me take it down. She said,
“After all, he was my brother.”
So I took the baby and held him up and showed him the hole where his daddy shot a bad man. The baby put his finger in the hole and that made me laugh all afternoon.
