The Last American Man (24 page)

That’s right: thirteen.

I just had to ask Eustace about that.

Actually,my exact question was: “Please tell me you didn’t really say that.”

His response was, “One hundred years ago a woman wouldn’t have been scared by that idea!”

Which was such a disappointing answer. Setting aside the perfectly obvious fact that it
isn’t
a hundred years ago, there is so much else wrong with this statement that I’m not sure where to start dissecting it. Eustace
Conway, as a true student of history and anthropology, should know better. Even a hundred years ago, the average birth rate
of the American woman had dropped to a mere 3.5 children per lifetime. Women were already using birth control and had publicly
begun debating how raising huge families would affect their economic and social standing. You have to look a lot further back
than a century, in other words, to find the kind of enthusiastic breeders Eustace was dreaming about.

And even then there are other considerations. Take Daniel Boone’s wife, for example, the steadfast Ms. Rebecca Boone. Married
at seventeen, Rebecca immediately inherited the two orphaned children of Boone’s dead brother. She then had ten children (who
lived) of her own out there on the frontier, adopted the six motherless children of her widowed brother, and helped care for
many of the thirty-three babies spawned by her four daughters.

Rebecca Boone lived most of her adult life in a fort. She and her children starved through the winters. Her sons were wounded
and killed by Indians; her daughters were merely kidnapped by them. In the middle of her marriage, Rebecca was able to move
her family back to her safe and comfortable home settlement in North Carolina for two wonderful years while Daniel was out
founding a new colony in Kentucky. When he came back to fetch her, she nearly revolted, almost refusing to return to the deep
woods with him. He insisted; she resisted. The marriage, history suggests, came perilously close to ending. Rebecca was a
loyal wife, though, and so, in the end, she followed her husband into the wilderness. But she was exhausted. A missionary
who came through a Boone settlement in the 1780s remembered meeting Rebecca Boone and sitting with this “quiet soul” in front
of her tiny cabin while she wept and told him of her troubles and hardships and of “the distress and fear in her heart.”

So, yes, Eustace was correct in a sense. Many pioneer women had lots of children. But were they totally
into
it? Did they absolutely dig having all those babies? Was this some kind of inspired decision? Somehow I can’t picture Rebecca
Boone turning handsprings of joy on the day she discovered, deep in the forest and well into her forties, that she was pregnant
for the tenth time. Similarly, I can’t picture young Patience Harrison—recent Duke graduate and honor student and ambitious
world traveler—getting all giddy with anticipation when Eustace Conway said he wanted to have thirteen kids with her.

And she didn’t take comfort when Eustace assured her that thirteen kids was only his dream, that he had lots of dreams he
never expected to be fulfilled, that he would even consider having no children at all if that’s what she wanted, or they could
adopt children, or there were any number of other options they could discuss. Furthermore, he wanted to know whether Patience
had experienced a people, such as the Amish or the Maya of Guatemala, who truly cherished and valued children? Maybe her opinions
would change if she could see firsthand, as Eustace had, the inspiring way those cultures fold large families into the greater
society with such ease and pleasure. Still, the number echoed in Patience’s head like the vibrations from a great tolling
cathedral bell.

Thir-teen! Thir-teen! Thir-teen!

That wasn’t the only problem between them, anyway. Patience was cautious and hesitant and remote with Eustace. But he still
loved her. He attributed her hesitancy to her youth, and he hoped they would slowly come together over time to burn with a
brighter passion. Maybe they could work things out on this adventure. Maybe the buggy ride would make everything better.

Eustace, even more than on the Long Riders trip, wanted to push himself and his horses to the very edge of endurance. He knew
his horses could move a lot faster pulling a buggy than carrying a man, and he wanted to see how fast they could travel. The
buggy was light and quick, not a heavy-duty farm rig, and the horses were fitted with slick nylon harnesses that would be
more efficient than leather.

He was demonic about not making the horses carry extra weight. He had to approve of every item of clothing Patience wanted
to bring to make sure that a pair of frivolous socks wouldn’t add an ounce of strain to his animals. Patience once stopped
at a store in North Dakota and bought a jar of pickles for snacking, and Eustace gave her hell about it. “All that glass and
fluid and pickles makes a lot of extra weight for my horses to pull all day,” he ranted, and didn’t let up until the offending
item was consumed and discarded. With his horses, particularly on a difficult journey, he was concerned, attentive, vigilant.
Miles from a vet and pushing his animals to the limits of their endurance, he was zealously aware of “every step my horses
took, everything they ate, everything they drank, every scab, every limp, every booger, the color of their urine every time
they pissed, the frequency of their stools, every tiny flick of the ear, everything.”

Eustace was even more fanatical about speed on this journey than on the Long Riders trip. He was so obsessed with not wasting
a moment’s time that when he saw a gate approaching, he’d hand the reins to Patience, leap off the buggy, and sprint ahead
to open the gate. Then he’d slam it shut and sprint ahead to catch up with her. He wouldn’t even stop the buggy to relieve
himself, choosing, instead, to leap off and piss in the woods while the horses trotted on, then catch up on foot at full speed.

Eustace and Patience got so that they could change and replace their horses’ shoes—over fifty such stops on the trip—quicker
than an Indy 500 pit team, Patience handing Eustace the tools, Eustace fixing the shoe swiftly and flawlessly. They moved
across the plains, as Eustace later reported, “faster than a cloud’s shadow across the bent grass.” They stopped for virtually
nothing. Eustace had fliers made up with information about the trip—press releases, really—that they handed to people when
the inevitable million questions came up and they had to hustle on their way. They had not a moment’s leisure. When some ranchers
in Canada invited them to stick around for a few days to enjoy the yearly round-up and branding, Patience wanted to stay,
but Eustace said, “There will be lots of brandings and round-ups, but only one chance for us to ever set a world speed record
by going twenty-five hundred miles in fifty-six days.”

The trip was most certainly a success in horsemanship, organization, and safety. But the relationship, already vulnerable,
was murdered by it. Eustace and Patience were getting four hours of sleep a night, careening across the prairie, freezing,
miserable, intense. The weather was brutal. When it wasn’t a 70 mph wind, it was freezing rain. Their hands stopped working
from the cold, so they couldn’t unfasten harnesses and buckles at the end of each day. They ate horrible food or didn’t eat
at all.

There were some unforgettable moments, of course. The scenery was extraordinary. They had a wonderful time for a few days
riding through a no-man’s-land—a swath of ownerless land
within
the Canadian-American border, in which they felt as if they were riding nowhere on the mapped earth. When the rain and sleet
abated, they read Cormac McCarthy novels to each other. That was nice. They met many generous people, and Eustace liked sitting
back and letting Patience be her gracious, disarming self. He liked watching her win over strangers, who would fall in love
with her and then offer them housing, food, help for the horses. And their teamwork with the animals was striking. What was
most impressive, though, was that Patience—competitive athlete that she was—never once complained about the physical toll
and long hours of the journey.

“That,” she told me, “was the easy part.”

The hard part was that they were passing whole days without speaking to each other, except about the horses. And they weren’t
sleeping together. No conversation, no physical contact.

“I never cried because I was tired or in pain,” Patience said. “But I cried a lot toward the end about the relationship with
Eustace. It sucked.”

The journey itself was heroic, in other words, but the situation was unfortunately reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin’s sharp
observation that “the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that.”

Patience couldn’t stand Eustace’s constant dominance over her. “I used to be a tomboy,” she said. “I used to intimidate men
with my strength. I was a modern woman with a lot of confidence in myself before I met him. But slowly he overtook me until
I had no power anymore. That’s how it happens with Eustace; you get sucked into the vortex of his goals and his life, and
then you’re lost. I disappeared to him. Lots of times, local reporters would ask to join us for the trip, so he’d ride in
the buggy with the reporter and I’d follow in the reporter’s car. He’d charm each guy and talk to him all day, but the next
day, when I rode beside him for twenty hours, he’d never say a word to me. All he did on that trip was boss me around and
tell me what to do.”

“Of course I told her what to do,” Eustace agreed. “Of course I was in charge, because I knew what had to be done. I had the
background and the experience to understand the animals and the realities of long-distance survival and to save her life and
my life and the horses’ lives on two thousand different occasions, and she didn’t even notice fifteen hundred of those times.
I never had her respect about that. She got more sulky and more immature when we were working together. She had no idea what
it took to get us alive across that prairie. We had the goal to set a world speed record. And if I’m going to take on something
like that, I’m taking it on a hundred percent, and she needs to respect my knowledge and stop having childish reactions to
my leadership.”

When I asked Eustace whether it would have helped to pull the buggy over for a day to sit in a meadow and talk over the problems
they were having, he said, “That wasn’t part of the program. That would have ruined our goal.”

Patience later complained (just as Judson had complained on the Long Riders voyage) that Eustace acted like his father during
this trip. Patience had spent enough time around Eustace’s parents to be upset by the dominance and disdain Big Eustace showed
his wife, and now she felt she was getting the same treatment from Little Eustace. The same kind of tyranny, the same level
of perfectionism, the same refusal to respond to the needs of anyone else. To both Patience and Judson, Eustace came across
on these horse journeys not only as impossible, but as tragic. What could be sadder than a man who literally travels to the
ends of the earth but still cannot avoid becoming his father?

But I’m not convinced that Eustace was
becoming
his father on these journeys so much as
honoring
him, trying to prove again that he was worthy, brave, accomplished, and logical. Just as he had tried to prove with all his
most daring adventures and mind-numbing accomplishments. As much as Eustace may have wanted to love Patience and his brother,
he could not put their needs first when the stake of each of these journeys was so massive—nothing less than the prize of
getting his father’s attention at last. He was still concentrating on the older and sadder love story, one that was so bitterly
unresolved. Big Eustace had never given his son a word or a nod of recognition despite all his achievements. What more did
Eustace have to do to get the man to acknowledge that his son was not a miserable, pathetic, idiotic failure? Would an equestrian
world speed record do it?

Would
two
?

One cannot level against Eustace a more hurtful charge than that he is behaving like his father. “I would be glad to put a
gun in my mouth and blow my own head off,” he said, “if I ever believed I treated anyone the way that man treated me.” Certainly
Eustace opens himself up to more self-doubt and self-criticism than his father has ever done, and he has suffered deeply (no
more so than on these long horse journeys) over his troubles in relating to people. He knows of these problems; he sees the
patterns; he works to correct the situations. But he does not always know what to do. He is self-aware enough to know that
he is, in his word, “damaged,” but he doesn’t know how to repair himself. He knows that he was way over his head with Patience
Harrison, that, for whatever reasons, he couldn’t communicate with her on the journey in a way that gave them any chance at
a relationship. Maybe it was her immaturity; maybe it was his relentless perfectionism; maybe it was a corrosive combination
of their combined weaknesses. But the whole thing was a disaster.

“Maybe,” he said, “we should have concentrated more on our relationship and less on our goals, but our goals sometimes felt
like the only thing we had in common. I don’t know what I should have done. I’m not good at this kind of thing. I just hoped
we could work it out later.”

There was no later. Not really. They limped along in their relationship for a year after the buggy journey, but Patience ended
up taking a job down in Boone, coaching field hockey, and slowly peeled herself away from Eustace and from Turtle Island.
And no number of his passionate fifteen-page letters (“I am sorry if I have not been able to articulate my self, feelings,
perspective, in a way that you could understand . . . I pray someday when you are strong enough or ready you can experience
this profound love I am feeling”) could win her back.

Patience had run out of it.

What killed Eustace about Patience was that she didn’t understand him. She didn’t understand how much he loved her. She didn’t
understand his emotional limitations and scars. His goals. How much love he needed from her. How much love he was willing
to give her. And how much he wanted to see that she trusted him. She didn’t understand anything about him.