The Homesman (24 page)

“Hullo, ladies,” he said.

Moonlight let him see, and what he saw was that they were loose, he'd forgotten that morning to strap them in. Well, they hadn't harmed one another, so the hell with the straps from now on. He opened the grub box, found a tin cup, and gave them each some water from the keg.

“Now I'll be gone a spell,” he told them. “You be good girls and go to sleep and I'll be back, all right? Wait for me.”

Bolting the doors, he patted Shaver on the rump and untied and saddled his roan. Then, making sure of Cuddy's rifle in its scabbard, he got several boxes of cartridges for it and for his Colt's and slipped them into a side pocket. He mounted, leaned forward, blew a breath in the animal's ear, and headed him for Fairfield.

It was no more than a mile. He kept to one of the staked streets until the hotel loomed, its windows, eight above, eight below, like mirrors in the moonlight. A lamp glowed in one on the second storey and in two on the first, one by the bar and one at the back. When he was a few rods off the building he walked his animal entirely around it and dismounted at the rear, where, as he expected, there was a stable, a lean-to. He counted five horses. One by one he led them out and whacked them away into the night. Mounted up again, he drew rifle from scabbard and said to himself: do it awful fast. Do it faster than you ever did anything or you will get yourself killed.

Briggs kicked the roan into a canter and rode around the hotel in a wide circle, reins in left hand, rifle in right. He fired deliberately, round after round, reloaded, rode on, and fired. He blew out every window on the first floor.

During the second circle he blew out every window on the second floor. The light up there went out and he was fired on. He saw muzzle flash and heard lead whine. He had driven them upstairs now, four partners and the barkeep, where he wanted them. He'd broken thirty-two windows, every one in the hotel.

He hauled up by the back door, shoved rifle into scabbard, swung down, pulled the repeater, and slamming wide the door, barged in.

It was the kitchen.

He took in a stove and a coal-oil lamp and a long table, under it a woman on her hands and knees yowling like a scared cat and on it a stack of towels and two loaves of white bread.

“Get out of here!”

Yelling at the woman he plunged through a door to confront the rear stairway and fired a pistol round up the well.

Past a lighted lamp on the bar he ran to the front stairs and to keep them honest upstairs fired two rounds up the well.

Belting the Colt's he broke back into the kitchen. The woman was gone. He seized the lamp and with the other arm swooped up the towels and lunged back into the bar area and let go half of the towels on the lower steps and ran around to the front stairwell and let go of the other half. Pulling the wick from the lamp, he poured the oil over the towels, dropped the lamp, struck a match, and threw it into the wet towels, which blazed up in excellent fashion.

Opening the front door for a draft he dashed back to the rear, stopping for the lamp on the bar, and using the oil and a match in the same manner got himself a fine fire going on that end.

He heard shouting overhead.

“We'll kill you, Briggs!”

“This way, for Christ's sake!”

“You murdering sonofabitch!”

Drawing the pistol he emptied it up the stairwell, three rounds, to keep them trapped, then heard running in the other direction, down what must have been a hall. He ran himself, reloading, caps and cartridges, to the front stairs, and as they reached the well, stuck his forearm around the edge and fired three rounds upstairs. This time they answered, rifles and a pistol down the well, but Briggs was over behind the bar.

Stacking bottles in the crook of an arm, he ran to the front stairs and began to hurl them one by one up the well. As they hit the risers of the upper steps, they smashed, and whiskey flowed down to flare up as it met the rising flames.

He collected more bottles, ran them to the rear stairs, and by the same means hurried the fire upward to the second floor.

Briggs could do no more. He was full of smoke and his legs were shaky and he backed off and stood in the kitchen door to see what he had wrought. The two fires, rear and front, ate up the stairs with such a sound that he could no longer hear anything above. And even as he watched, eyes watering, flames licked across the ceiling. He'd better go while the going was good.

He passed through the kitchen, pausing to tuck the two loaves of white bread under an arm. Out back, his roan stood exactly where he was left. That hammerhead would stand till Judgment Day if necessary, fire or flood or a man on his back with a rope around his neck. Briggs mounted him and walked them away amongst the white stakes until, at a safe distance, they turned, horse and man, and had the pleasure of a long look.

It was a hotel in Hell. It was a paper hotel in a paper town and blazing like paper, both floors and roof, and roaring like a thing alive. Every bone of it traced red, and smoke lofted in a pink pillar straight up to the stars. Set on miles and miles of stark plain, it seemed a fire capable of being seen from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Briggs was proud of his night's work. Wasn't he a Christian, though? One man against five and hadn't shot a soul! So bright was the fire now that he could make out dark figures jumping from second-storey windows, and if he'd had a mind to, he could have picked them off with the rifle like big birds, one at a time. They ran to the rear, probably to saddle horses that weren't there and chase after him, and this gave him much satisfaction. You insulted me, you bastards, he said to them. You insulted the women, who are in my care. Let this be a lesson to you. Lend a hand. Out here in this country that's what we do for each other. We lend a hand.

Just then the Fairfield Hotel fell in on itself. The walls caved in and the roof dropped on the walls, sending up fireworks of sparks and a huge dying sigh to the sky along with the last green-lumber smoke. The show was over. Briggs turned his horse for home. Under his belt, against his stomach, the steel of his Navy Colt's was still warm.

Once arrived at the trees, he let the ladies out of the box, took them around a tree to relieve themselves, and used the opportunity himself. “Listen, ladies,” he said to them, “I put on a big party tonight. Word gets around. And the next time you want to stop at a hotel, I'll bet they treat you right.”

Then while they watched he picketed the animals, laid and started a small fire, hauled out the grub box, and placed it near the fire. Finally he stepped again to the wagon, returned with something behind his back, and sat down at the box. The women sat down around it.

From behind his back he brought a loaf of white bread, set it ceremoniously on top of the box, pulled his Barlow, and sliced the loaf into five slabs. Then, from his coat pocket, he produced the tin of sardines he'd carried all the way from the day Cuddy spared him hanging. He peeled it open and lifted the sardines out by their tails onto the bread, portioning them equally. Pitching the can over his shoulder, he picked up the slab before him and began to eat. So did the women, immediately.

Briggs had never tasted anything as delicious. He paused and glanced around the grub box at the giddyup girls. There in the moonlight, Mesdames Petzke, Belknap, Sours, and Svendsen were having the time of their lives, chewing and licking their lips and letting sardine oil run down their chins. Happily he loaded up again.

“Ain't this good, girls?” he enthused, his mouth full. “Oh, ain't this grand?”

•   •   •

But he couldn't sleep. He was too full of bread and the roar of flames and men shouting and walls falling down and the crack of guns working and succulent sardines. He'd shown them a thing or two, the shit-brindle bastards. He laid back a blanket, got up, and had a look at the women sawing wood under the wagon. He'd forgotten to tie their wrists to wheel spokes, just as he had to strap them in the box today. No harm in it. He'd have them over the river tomorrow or the day after. He built up the fire a bit, brought the green sewing bag from under the wagon seat, and sitting down by the fire went once more through the contents. The first thing he noticed, though, was his right hand. So desperately had he gripped the handle of his pistol, firing, that the palm of the hand was black as the ace of spades. He looked over the women's papers: Belknap's sister's name and address on a sheet; the name and address of Petzke's brother, plus a packet of letters; the many names and addresses of Sours's relations; the envelope with name and address of Svendsen's cousins. These would presently be important, and the right papers must go with the right woman—in Hebron he'd be the only one who knew which one was which. He counted the greenbacks from an inside pocket. After paying three dollars for salt hog, he had fifteen dollars left—not much, but better than a poke in the eye with a bull thistle. Then he reappraised the pink cameo with girl's face and crowned head and judged again it would fetch enough to make up the three dollars. Finally he counted again, twice, the six fifty-dollar notes on the Bank of Loup, before stuffing them down deep with the greenbacks and cameo. The corners of his mouth stretched into a wide grin. Three hundred dollars. He was rich. Replacing the papers in the sewing bag, rising, putting the bag back in the underseat compartment, he stepped a few paces away, unbuttoned, took a leak, and eased again between his blankets. He lay on his back, folded his arms under his head on the bedroll, and looked up through an opening in tree branches at the faraway stars.

Cuddy.

He had refused to think about her, but now, using her bedroll for a pillow, and this close to the end of everything, he allowed himself.

I hope you are satisfied, he said to her. I gave my word I would see this business through and I am. We will reach the ferry tomorrow or the day after. They have been bothersome, too. They run after me like chicks after a hen. I can scarcely take a piss in private. I had to spend some of the money to buy meat. I hadn't knocked her cold, your dear friend Belknap would have drowned me. And when they were turned away, insulted by a gang of no-good grifters, I had to get shot at and burn a damn hotel to the ground to pay 'em back. If you don't know these things, you'd better. Also, I take back what I said. That you're plain as an old tin pail and have a viper in your mouth. Cuddy, I apologize. Anyway, your women are as good as home. I have earned your three hundred dollars. So I hope you're satisfied and will think kindly of me hereafter.

He let his thinking roam over the entire journey, from the day she had found him with a rope around his neck to the morning she had tied one around hers. It seemed to him he could now see the whole of what had happened, and the why, clear as crystal. When they set out from Loup, she was as much man as she was woman. She could ride and shoot and handle a span of mules and give orders. Day by day, though, on the trail, there were more and more things she couldn't do, that only he could, and did, and that rubbed her the wrong way. Gradually all she could manage was to cook and care for the passengers and take his orders and be a woman. That broke her spirit and her mind. Then she asked him to marry her and he said no, for one reason because marriage wouldn't have sufficed her. She'd have expected him to love her, too, and he didn't know what love was. He'd never had any. Lucky for her, he'd said no. She deserved a better catch. And begging him to lie with her—that he couldn't understand, unless she simply didn't care to die a virgin. And of course it went against the grain of her religion. Well, when he thought it over, her death was none of his doing. It had to happen. He had to be a man and she had to be a woman, made from his rib. He could be at peace. In the end she wasn't pushed, she jumped. It was just like those paper-town promoters. When they were trapped upstairs by fire, no way down, they jumped out the windows. The difference was, they made it and she didn't. She had too far to fall.

Still he couldn't sleep. A little wind soughed through the trees, lifting the branches, and over it he swore he heard her singing:

But if I should perish,

Thy promises keep,

Take thee our two hearts

And bury them deep.

Briggs stuck fingers in his ears. Wouldn't it be a caution if he went, too? Crazy? That would be everybody. One hundred percent. He couldn't stop his ears.

Take thee our tokens,

In love let us sleep.

Neither could he close his eyes. He had asked her not to haunt him, but in death as in life she did as she pleased. He listened to the song and stared at the stars.

•   •   •

They breakfasted on the other loaf of bread and Briggs shaved, just in case. He cut his neck in two places and stanched the flow of blood with spit and oaths. Then he harnessed and hitched, and tied and seated the ladies, and got the old gray mare of a wagon going. There were about a dozen crossings of the Missouri River along this middle reach, but Briggs had used only one, at St. Joe, when he enlisted and came west as a dragoon recruit. He had heard of Kanesville, which people had begun to call Council Bluffs, that it was not one but two widely separated crossings, Upper Mormon to the north and Bellevue to the south, and he aimed, if possible, to hit the lower, the Bellevue, which would take him across only a mile or so above Hebron.

It happened so unexpectedly, in a late hour of that afternoon, that he thought his eyes misled him, and had to stop the wagon. He had topped a rise, and there before him and below, there at long, long last, was the Big Muddy. It had to be the Missouri, one of the most meandering and contrary of rivers in the U.S.A. Sparkling in the sun through lowland on either side, it twisted and turned upon itself, running north, south, east, and west, take your pick, in different places. Here it was wide and deep, there narrow and shallow; here its bottom was firm underfoot, there quicksand would make a meal of a wagon or a yoke of oxen in less time than it took to tell it; here it ran free, there it was choked with towheads. That any steamboat, no matter how slight its draft, could navigate it was a wonder. Briggs supposed he should stand on the seat and wave his hat and yell “Yahoo!” but had no inclination. The way had been too long and hard and sad, and he was tired in every inch. What would Cuddy do if she were here now? He knew at once. Climbing down he stepped back to a window in the wagon and putting his face to it said, “Girls, we're there. The river. We've done it. We'll be over it soon and you'll be in better hands. So cheer yourselves and rest easy. D'you understand?” He expected no answer and had none and took the seat and clucked to the mules.