The Law of Dreams (43 page)

Looking at her profile, her brown cheeks, small nose, small mouth —
the strong jaw and mess of dark reddish hair streaked and filigreed by the ocean sun
— he wondered what she'd have done if Ormsby had offered
her
a
clear chance, an opportunity. Would she have left him — easily, lightly — as
she had along that road in Wales?

Sheltered between the bulwark and the deckhouse, the wind cut very little.
The planks were warm in the light, and a pungent, sweet scent of tar hung over the
deck.

“Tell me, man,” Molly said suddenly, her voice small with
intensity. “Tell me what it is, tell me what will happen, tell me something,
because it's getting fucking near, and I'm scared, I can't stand those
navvy camps again.”

“I am thinking we'll buy horses, Moll.”

He had not framed a plan in words. Desperation, the pressure of her
anxiety, had sprung the notion out of him. Almost instantly he could see it whole.

“Horses?”

“I trust my horse eye, Molly. I'd choose old stringers I could
turn into something. Pick them carefully, looking for the bones, and get them cheap.
Feed them up to sell at a profit. I reckon we could do worse than trading in
horses.”

“There it is, there it is,” she murmured, “a fellow with
a plan.”

Taking up his hand, she brought it to her lips and kissed it.

He still had the herring in his other hand and ate the little fish in two
bites, licking salt and oil from his fingers.

“We might move along, so.” He felt the pressure of her hand
squeezing his. “Build up a string. Might have a cart. Find the fairs. You could
whirl them with a pack of cards. What do you think, Moll? Trading horses, and a pack of
cards.”

“It's good,” she said firmly, keeping hold of his hand.
“Might build up a stake that way.”

Keep moving,
he thought.

Horses and a girl.

ROLLED UP
in her cloak, she lay with her back to him,
asleep in the berth, while the ship creaked and sighed.

With the stake from Pharaoh, they could begin a string by picking up two
or three cheap, sound animals, selected carefully, and a cart. He would graze them along
the roads until they were worth more than he'd paid. All the while moving west.
Selling animals to farmers. Buying more. Feeding them up and selling to carters, to
liverymen.

Plow horses, cart horses, dray horses. Carriage steppers, saddle
mounts.

Hunters.

Big roan hunters if he could get his hands on any.

Martin Coole was snoring in the berth above.

Lumps of sea ice bumped and scraped against the hull, very near their
heads — perhaps a warning not to think so far ahead so glibly. You never knew what
was coming.

But he couldn't sleep. His mind piling up riches, adding and
accumulating.

With profits of trading, he'd keep adding to his string, until he
was driving a herd of one or two hundred animals, like the hunting chiefs.

He could hear old Brighid snoring in her uppermost berth above the Cooles.
Somewhere in the hold an infant was stirring. Not full-throated crying, not yet anyway.
Only a little scratch of noise.

If life is so valuable, why is it invisible, practically weightless, like
a cup of air?

He touched the blackthorn stick with his fingers. The wood felt cool and
smooth.

Cold sank down the hatchway and was sidling through the hold, through the
thick atmosphere of people sleeping. Their breath made white plaque along beams.

People coughing.

Horses, land. You want everything opening.

Her.

You want everything.

THE AIR HAD TURNED COLD
, and the sea ran dark, nearly
black. With the Cooles they were standing at the rail, peering over the side, looking
for fish, when Fergus heard cries and, looking up, saw seabirds circling above the
peak.

Martin Coole insisted that the cold, the birds, and the black water were
all indications
Laramie
had struck the Labrador Current. “We shall be
passing the rock of Newfoundland any day now. A few days more and we'll see
Quebec.” Coole put his arm around his wife, hugging her. “You'll see
— we'll establish our school in Indiana — we'll bring the
learning to their red minds.”

“I'll not see my own mother again, that's all I know. I
want my garden — and your children want shoes more than red men need books!
We're thrown upon the world, thanks to you, like a pack of cabin johns — I
hate America!”

“You're weary of the passage, dear.” Coole tried to
embrace her but she wriggled free, grabbed her children by their hands, and fled for the
hatchway.

The schoolmaster watched his family disappear below. “She'll
have a sweeter garden in America, sweeter by far, than ever she had in north
Tipperary.”

“How do you know, mister?” Molly asked.

“I have faith.”

“Perhaps she won't have nothing so again. Perhaps she's
right and there's nothing there, not even a pair of shoes.”

“I don't believe that and you don't either, miss, or
you'd not be aboard.”

She was silent for a moment, considering. “I
believe nothing's for sure and nothing comes as you think you want it.”

Coole shook his head and turned to the rail, resting his elbows and gazing
out to sea.

They had lost the blue of the western ocean. The sky was low, streaked
with gray and yellow light. Fergus met Ormsby stalking the deck, wrapped in his fur
coat.

“Nasty waters here, ice as big as houses,” the old man said.
“
Desdemona
out of Dublin was smashed by an ice castle in the Lab
Current. Went down so quick, there was only six or seven of them and a monkey that
survived.”

THE FIRST
ice castles appeared on the following day,
butts of white ice as big as the ship, cruising gently in the black, calm water.
Laramie
had lost the hard wind, the strong way, of the western ocean. With
a wintry thinness in the air, sails were loose, the yards creaking and squealing as they
swung aimlessly, banging in stays. The sun was weaker than mid-ocean, and there was
plenty of bitter fog. The rigging was sheathed in white ice, and the sailors smeared
their hands with sticky tar before going aloft, and wrapped rags around their feet.

The cold, thin air seemed to exhaust
Laramie
. She was
sluggish.

He couldn't smell America, all he could smell was ice on the wind,
but Nimrod said the country lay close enough now. “If the old barky don't
run into an ice castle and break up and drown us, you shall see the corner of
Newfoundland any day, if it ain't for this wretched fog. If we don't get
caught in pack ice in the gulf, but find the leads and the open water, we'll slip
the mouth of the St. Lawrence soon enough. Then it is only a matter of beating the
current and the tides on the pull up to Quebec.”

It began to snow. By the time the cabooses were lit for supper, heavy wet
snow dazzled the ship, thickening on every sheet and shroud, piling up on deck, drifting
into knee-deep piles against the bulkheads.

Sailors kept lookout during the night. Fergus stood with Nimrod Blampin in
the foredeck, peering through the thickly falling snow, trying to spot ice castles
looming. The sea was flat and the ship was moving very gently on cold, weak air, almost
adrift. Ranged along both sides, the lookouts smoked their pipes and
sipped hot coffee. “By the time we see anything, it's too late to
change course,” Nimrod told him. “We're hardly making way enough to
steer.”

But
Laramie
crept through the night safely and the next morning a
wind came up to blow the snow off the ship, shake the ice from the rigging, and rustle
the sky clear.

THE OLD MAN GAVE
Molly a buffalo robe to wrap herself
in, and they played cards sitting on deck, in the lee, in bright, cold sunshine. She
dealt Pharaoh, but the old man soon tired of that game and taught her to play
trenteetun
for penny stakes. The play was even, the coins going back and
forth.

Ormsby paid the black cook to bring them hot tea from the galley, and
plates of toasted biscuits, slathered with Irish butter and honey from Ormsby's
own supplies.

Fergus sat on another buffalo robe, working at the letters, using the
Dublin Universal
, frequently breaking off to watch the sailors aloft,
fascinated by the shifting pattern of canvas being set and taken in; the speed and
daring of men so high.

Ormsby was taciturn, drinking tea, smoking cigars, and dourly flipping
cards. But he paid attention to the weather, looking up every time there was a change in
the wind's force or direction. Fergus realized Ormsby was feeling the ship,
anxious for her — as he was himself. He loved to feel they were grabbing every
scrap of wind.

The buffalo robes were only a small part of Ormsby's baggage.
“I have all my silver and china down below, ready in canoe packs. Forty-two panes
of glass sunk in molasses barrels — I'll own the first glass windows in the
Athabaska country. I only hope I reach Montreal in time to catch the brigade.”

“Are your friends in America?” Molly
asked.

“My friends are dead, miss.”

After he had played out his hand and lost, the old man sat back puffing
his cigar while Molly shuffled the deck.

It was warm enough in the sun. The buffalo robes smelled of old dust.
Every now and then a shear of ice broke off the rigging and shattered on the deck.

“You don't have any people?” Molly asked the old
man.

“None left.”

Looking aloft, Fergus watched the seabirds circling. For the past few days
they had been spattering the decks with white globs of dung.

“Shall I tell you how I met my wife?” Ormsby asked.

“If you like.” Molly was dealing the fresh hand.

“I was leading a brigade from the bay across the Rocky Mountains.
Bringing twenty packs of otter skins to the Russians in California. In those days, the
Russians allowed the Company certain rights on their territory, and we paid in
otters.

“It was October, late in the season for crossing the mountains. At
Jasper House we fitted out a string of packhorses and started climbing for Howse Pass.
However, the winter came in. The horses were no use in snow, and we were too far to turn
back. We had to turn the horses loose and drag everything on sleds. At the top of the
pass, the air was gray with snow. It was driving so hard, you could barely open your
eyes.

“You don't often meet Indians in the mountains, but we came
across a party of Peigans. Some on foot, others leading their ponies. How they got them
up there, I do not know. They were not people we traded with. None of the grass nations
are much for trade. The furs are of little value, and the people are brave, daring, and
restless, never to be insulted with impunity.

“At first, I supposed it was a war party — until I saw they
had women with them.

“They had been trading for tobacco with the Flathead Indians, on the
western side of the mountains.

“We all took shelter there in a little notch, and brewed up tea. Not
that it was a good place to stop, but some Indians, especially the grass nations, will
prick easily if you don't do the right thing.

“She was wearing her winter robe when first I saw her. She was
small, she was fine, and right there I appealed to her father, old Yellowtail, a famous
horse thief. ‘Why, I will have your daughter for my wife,' I said.
‘I'll pay you an excellent gun, a barrel of powder, three pounds English
money, a case of tea, treat her well, and honor to your family.' We smoked a good
pipe on it, and she was mine.”

“What happened then?”

“What happened? My life happened. Everything up until then, I can
hardly remember. Everything after I cannot forget. I took her with me over the pass,
made it to the boat encampment, and traveled down the Columbia without losing a man. We
wintered in the Oregon country that year I remember. In the spring a Company ship
arrived at Fort Vancouver, and I was ordered to sail for the Sandwich Islands —
the Company wished to open a post. She came with me. She delivered our child on the
island of Maui, but it did not survive. Three more babies, all sickly . . . none of them
lasted. We were at Maui two years; then back to Oregon; over the mountains again in
fall; into the Athabaska country. I became factor at Fort Edmonton. Daniel we bought
from the brave dogs — Many Gray Horses, the Bloods called him, and his Crow name
was the Constant Sky, though one must not speak it, now he is dead, and generally I
don't — he became our son, our love, our child. Six winters past, he was
killed on the buffalo hunt. On the Pembina Plains — the party was attacked by
Sioux. Then my woman had a cancer in her heart, and after she was dead, that was when I
went home. Home to Ireland.” Ormsby scowled.

“We have had different kinds of life,” Molly said. “I
like yours better.”

Ormsby rubbed his face briskly with both hands then looked at her.
“You ain't had yours yet, miss. It is still coming at you.”

A DRUNKEN PASSENGER
was beating his daughter. No one
interfered — they lay in their berths, listening to her bleating.

Outside Muldoon's door with a loaded pistol it wasn't fear
that had stopped him from interfering, though fear was part of it — everyone in
the shanty had been afraid of Muldoon. What had held him back was a sense that
interfering between a man and a girl was trespassing. Though when it came to horses
he'd have interfered, gone at a fellow with anything — fists, a knife, a
gun.