The Adventures of Silk and Shakespeare (6 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies

—
Julius Caesar
II. i

Nothing was easier than getting Jim to tell stories.

He was brown as a roasted coffee bean, a strapping fellow, nearly as tall as Hairy and within a hundred pounds of the bulk—Hairy joked that Tal added on to Antelope Jim would make a Shakespeare.

In his stories Jim was a Gargantua. That’s what Hairy called him. To everyone’s surprise, Beckwourth answered with teasing formality, “Indeed I do have big appetites and no woman among the Crow people will say me nay—thus will the nation become populated with braver men of blacker faces.”

Beckwourth could talk like an educated man because his father was one. Jim liked to say his father was an aristocratic Virginian who took his children, born into slavery, to St. Louis and raised them like they were free, white, and twenty-one.

But Jim certainly didn’t mind his black face—black was what Crows painted themselves after a victory, so Jim looked like he was always a man to honor.

Jim was fonder of nothing more than an audience, especially an admiring one. Usually his stories were brags, but he could tell one on himself.

“I’d been hunting big horns,” he launched into another one, “and stopped in at the lodge of my brother-friend to hint on how many I’d killed. ‘Eat,’ said my brother, and I set in. A man can’t hardly go hungry around here.” (That was a brag on the Absaroka people.)

“It was strips of buffalo tongue, which is always half raw, so I won’t touch it. But this time his wife had put the flame to it good, and I helped myself heartily and then some. Wagh!

“When I’d finished, thought I’d maybeso have a little fun. Asked her what the meat was.

“‘Tongue,’ she says odd-like, ’cause she knew I knew.

“I looked at my brother and rolled my eyes and grabbed my belly.

“Knowing I never ate tongue, he thought he took my meaning. ‘Tongue,’ he hollered. ‘Tongue?! You’ve gone against Antelope’s medicine. Oh, God, his medicine’s ruined.’

“He was pretty near hysterical. ‘If he dies in battle, you’re a goner,’ he moaned, pointing at her. He knew someone would give her the ax if her carelessness cost the people so great a warrior as me.” Jim flashed his winning grin.

“She looked like she’d been axed already. Mouth gaping. Eyes rolling. Legs wobbling.

“This child got to his hands and knees and set in to beller like a buffler. I four-footed my way outside. I lolled my tongue out. I pawed the ground in my mighty anger.

“All this like I was trying to throw off the effect of eating the tongue and save my medicine.

“Naturally, I gathered a crowd. How they was worried! Wagh!”

When Jim made that sound, it didn’t pop like when Hairy made it. It grumbled, like a belch.

“They took to wailing and lamenting the terrible accident. They sent a mighty sound unto the skies.

“Well, pretty soon I’d had my fun and strode along home to Still Water and thought no more about it.” Still Water was his senior wife. “Ate hump ribs instead, and practiced making babies.

“But, coons, the great Coyote in the sky, he surprises us.” Lacking God, Jim used Coyote.

“The very next day we had a buffalo surround, and discovered some Blackfeet forting up nearby. They was in for it, and they knew it. Well, I can’t never help showing off, so first thing I ride like the devil himself right up to them and hit one with my coup stick for first coup.” Jim grinned a braggart’s grin at them—first coup was top coup, and to strike without injuring was the top of the top.

“Then this child rides off a little ways to watch the fun.

“Ka-a-a-boom! I’m whomped by something te-e-e-rrific in the belly and fall off my horse.

“I’m bleeding at the mouth. Naturally I think I’m gut-shot and give myself up to go under and let my friends carry me off.

“Lord, how the women did wail when they saw Antelope Jim struck down! This own child thought his medicine maybeso got spoiled.

“My brother’s wife, she cried herself right onto her horse and hightailed it. She figured she wouldn’t last the night. Left my brother-friend with no one to keep him warm.

“But when the medicine men checked me over, they just found a bruise. The bullet hadn’t penetrated! ‘A miracle! What medicine Antelope Jim has! His skin turns lead!’

“Later I found the flattened bullet in my scabbard, and the knife handle smashed.” He held up a disc of lead hanging from his neck by a thong. He winked. “But I did not see fit to enlighten my comrades about the exact nature of my powerful medicine.”

“My brother’s wife went clear to the Missouri to live with the River Crows, and didn’t come back until she saw me alive and well at the medicine lodge the next summer.

“I offered to loan him one of my wives for the winter,” Jim said nonchalantly, “but he went dry instead.”

Tal and Hairy had been extra welcome—these were people who knew how to make you feel like family. Iron Kettle’s family, which was poor, even gave them a horse each—unbroke, true, but horseflesh just the same.

Right off Iron Kettle surprised them by moving into her sister’s lodge, and avoiding Hairy. Tal didn’t realize for a week that she’d become a second wife to her sister’s husband. That’s the way of it, Antelope Jim explained. If you lose your husband, your sister’s husband takes you. Handy, said the big mulatto.

Beckwourth practically adopted them from the first day. Tal and Hairy pitched their lean-to (Hairy’s lean-to, it was, actually) at a decent distance from camp, but Jim was over there all the time.

One night he arranged a sweat bath. Just to make us feel good, he said.

The helper kept bringing hot rocks into the low, hide-covered hut, and Jim would pour water on them from a kettle and fill the hut with steam. The heat was incredible. You’d lie in there, naked and perfectly silent, for maybe ten minutes and then slip out and gasp for breath like a beached fish in the chill night air. Hairy turned purple and stayed outside after the first round. Because Beckwourth teased Hairy about that, Tal stayed in for four full rounds, suffering grievously. Then Jim took a final round alone.

The mountain air felt delightful on Tal’s baked skin. The night was clear and moonless. The stars shone with the brightness particular to mountain skies. Tal felt weak, and drained, and cuddly, and oddly affectionate toward Jim. He came out and joined them.

Hairy was dozing.

“We’re maybeso friends now,” said Jim. “So I give ye the right of a friend to ask me a personal question.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Tal demurred, hanging his head.

“Don’t you want to be friends?”

“Sure, sure, but…” Hairy started to bugle, as Iron Kettle called it—he really did sound like an elk bugling, whether he was snoring or mating—and Jim slapped his foot. Hairy stopped.

“I’m going to ask you a personal question,” Jim assured Tal. “Just one.”

“Oh.”

Hairy started to bugle again. Jim slapped him and he stopped.

“All right.” Tal moved closer to the fire for heating the rocks. It was a windless night, but nippy.

Hairy bugled. Jim took the kettle and pitched the water on Hairy’s face. Hairy sat up spluttering.

“Pay attention, Shakespeare,” said Jim. “Tal’s gonna tell us where he’s from and about his folks.” He turned to Tal. “That’s my one question.”

“He’s told nothing but lies about that so far,” mumbled Hairy.

“I know,” Jim said softly. “Well, Tal?”

Hairy was right. Tal had a collection of inventions about his origins, performed according to occasion. He told Cap’n Fitzpatrick that he’d run away from the blacksmith he was apprenticed to, on account of being beat on. In fact, that had happened to the youngster Tal signed on for Santa Fe with, not to Tal. One of his favorites was a whopper about being the run-away son of a St. Louis slaveholder—he run away ’cause human beings ought not to be owned by anybody, but his pa whipped him for saying so. He also had a couple of well-practiced stories about being on the lam from the law.

Then, yesterday, he’d told Jim and Pine Leaf one about coming from a family of musicians who hailed from Montreal. Poverty-stricken, they were, but the joy of music resided in them. Only Tal was tone deaf, and got left out, so he had to skeedaddle.

He thought it was a pretty story at the time, appealing and with a touch of pathos.

“Tal?”

Tal wondered why he liked to befog his origins. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know. So he shrugged and started on the mundane truth.

“My dad was a preacher. His family had been in the mines. In Wales. They come—came,” Tal corrected himself, “here to try to do better when he was a boy. Dad got the call to spread the Gospel. He meant it, my dad—the Gospel was his life—God, poetry, and music.”

Jim draped a blanket around Tal’s shoulders, and he snuggled into it. He felt a kind of magic in the night, the fire, the camaraderie.

“Dad wandered. Wandered all over the East, preaching to those that would listen, living by passing the hat, and what lessons he would give. He taught reading and writing where he could, and singing. Mostly used John Milton and John Bunyan,
Paradise Lost
and
Pilgrim’s Progress
, the two divine books in the English language, he called them.”

Tal flashed a smart-aleck grin. “I can’t stand to hear either one of them anymore. Well, I can but I can’t.”

He stared into the flames and drifted back into remembering. “Dad had a hard time of it, I guess. All he had in this world was a love of God, an ear for music and poetry, and a lovely tenor voice. Went from place to place, moving on when the hat came back empty.”

Tal got quiet a while. “Once he moved on just ahead of the sheriff. Got too friendly with another man’s wife. That’s how I came along.” He looked challengingly at his two friends.

“Mom followed him to St. Louis, where my aunt, his sister, was living. I was born there. Mom stuck it out, for a while. Then we never saw her again.

“That’s when he started drinking. Not bad, but enough. I tried to keep it from the congregation, but I couldn’t. At first they felt for him and tried to help him back into the fold. After a while they gave up.

“I did too. I’d been working at the mercantile and playing clavichord at church and dad was keeping us both broke with the spirits. One night I told him that God and Jesus were just stories, like St. Nick, stories for kids. Which is the truth.

“We had a fight. With fists. He hit me, but he’d done that before.”

Tal was quiet for a moment. “I hit him. First time. Scared both of us.” He let out a long sigh. “I ran off. Crying. I was just a kid. Stayed gone, sleeping in alleys.

“The second week I went home for my clothes and he was gone. Neighbors said they thought he’d gone to the mountains. General Ashley told me Dad had signed on with the rendezvous caravan as a clerk.

“He’d left the family Bible for me, and a message in it: ‘I can help you no more, son. My legacy to you is your love of music, which is the sound of divinity on earth. I hope you, unlike your father, can stay off the spirits.’”

Tal took a long breath, looked at them naked, and then turned his face away. “Nobody out here remembers Dad. Maybe he went under,” he murmured. “But I’d know it. I’d know if Dad didn’t walk the earth.”

Beckwourth let the silence be. Hairy was staring off into the darkness.

After a long while, Jim said, “I love music, too.”

They let this remark sit in the still night air.

Then Antelope Jim Beckwourth, mulatto, lifted his rough, grainy baritone into the night sky with his favorite hymn:

I am a poor, wayfaring stranger,

A-trav’ling through this land of woe,

It was in a minor key, plaintive and forlorn.

But there’s no trouble, no toil or danger

In that bright land to which I go.

In a moment Hairy’s resonant basso joined in. And Tal, teary-eyed, added his frail, reedy sound.

(chorus)

I’m going home to see my father,

I’m going home no more to roam.

I’m just a-going over Jordan.

I’m just a-going over home.

They sat and gazed into the flames, each man alone with his mortality, while the echoes of the old hymn died away.

Full fathom five thy father lies,

Hairy broke the silence, and rumbled on,

Of his bones are…

Tal gave him a look that had the smell of burnt gunpowder, and Hairy stopped.

Jim put a hand on Hairy’s shoulder. “Long as we’re doing the truth,” he rasped at Hairy, “what about your parents?”

“My humble origins?”

Jim nodded.

“My father loved me, but couldn’t take care of me. My, how he doted on me. Sent my sister back across the water to her aunt, but he tried to keep me with him. When I was five, he had to leave me in care of the nuns in Philadelphia. He took to the road again to make our fortune. He was an actor”—Hairy always made the last syllable rhyme with
oar
—“had been in a company in Leeds and always yearned to go back, back to the land of Shakespeare and Milton, back where the sound of the English language swells and roars like the surf on the rocks…”

Jim pushed Hairy over, almost into the fire.

“Shakespeare didn’t sweat enough to get the fabrications out of him,” Antelope Jim said, chuckling.

“Life itself is a fabrication,” said Hairy, “a figment of the imagination of the Creator.” Hairy gave Jim his toothiest grin. “He was having an excess of creativity when he dreamed you up.”

Jim rewarded Hairy with a smile and turned to Tal. “Now maybeso you’d like to ask your one personal question.”

Tal fussed with his fingers and wriggled his toes. “Don’t have none,” he mumbled.

“Isn’t something on your mind about me and Pine Leaf?”

Tal pondered a moment, then stammered, “Well, is it true you want her for, uh, another wife?”

Jim grinned toothily.

“Yup,” he said easily, “she’s my sort of woman. Asked her to marry me three autumns ago when we were going against some Assiniboins on the Milk River. If both of us came out of it alive, I said. Truth was, I didn’t think we would come out of it alive. We hollered, ‘It’s a good day to die!’ and rode on. And here we are.