The Shirt On His Back (10 page)

Whether
any of this had anything to do with the trouble being brewed between Frank
Boden and the mysterious Mr Hepplewhite, January wasn't certain, but the
evening had at least been instructive.

It
was unfortunately to become more so.

'Could
an Indian Agent actually close
down the Company?' inquired Hannibal, on the way back up the trail to camp.

'By
hisself?' Shaw spoke without taking his attention from the formless darkness of
the land to their left. Though the smell of that many humans was generally
enough to keep bears from getting too close, it was by no means an uncommon
thing to find them prowling at this time of night, drawn by the smell of camp garbage.
Last night January had nearly walked into one when he'd gone down to the river
to piss. 'Not hardly. But he can sure shut down their operations for a year,
while they sort things out with that gang of licensed thieves in Washington. If
so be the British raise a stink . . .'

'Which
you know they're gonna,' put in Wallach gloomily. 'Or businessmen in their pay.
Money bein' as bad as it is right now, a year can make a difference. Things
ain't like they was, even a year ago.'

No,
thought January, his mind
catching the echo of words he'd been hearing, not only at the rendezvous, but
all the way up the trail from Fort Ivy.

It'll all be
gone
, Sir
William had said, looking around him at the candlelit gloom of the banquet
tent: the mountaineers with their Indian braids and porcupine-quill moccasins,
the dark eyes of the Indians gleaming with Company whiskey, the spit of venison
dripping over the fire. It was the true reason His Lordship had brought his own
private artist out from the East: to capture not what he was leaving, but what
was leaving the world, evaporating like smoke on the wind of time.

Yet,
looking out over the vast stillness of the valley, the pale blurs of the tipis
under starlight, the gleam of coyote eyes flashing suddenly in the grass, January
thought:
it's gone
already, if rich sportsmen have begun to come up here to hunt with the savages
and pretend they're savage themselves
.

A
member of His Majesty's Sixth Dragoon Guards, Sir William had fought at
Waterloo. The regret January had heard in his voice, when he spoke of going
back to the duties of his family, was genuine. But there were two other
gentleman hunters in the camp: Germans who had come in quest of excitement and
the right to say:
I've chased buffalo on the
Plains ...
I've seen the wild
Indians . . .

And
behind the gentleman hunters - and the missionaries like Grey - emigrants were
already on the road, following the mountaineers' trails to the western country
in search of unexhausted land that hadn't been divided up between uncles and
cousins of prior generations. In search of a new start after the bankruptcies
sweeping the East. He remembered New Orleans when it had been a walled city.
The cane fields had come right up to within a block of Canal Street. On
cricket-haunted summer nights he'd hunted rabbits and fished in Bayou St. John,
where wooden American houses now stood.

An
owl hooted in the darkness - it was only an hour short of dawn. After Grey's
departure the feast had gone on for hours, Hannibal fiddling like an elf drunk
on starlight, and the men had danced out of sheer high spirits as well as
Company booze. Jim Bridger had put on the armor Stewart had given him -
cuirass, greaves, and helmet of old Spanish plate,
suitable,
Stewart said,
for a Knight of the Plains
- and this had led into mock
battles and demonstrations of how the stuff could or couldn't protect a man in
combat. Stewart had sat back and beamed, almost - but not quite, January told
himself, because he liked His Lordship - like a father contemplating his
children playing with a particularly successful Christmas gift. To judge by the
noise behind them now, there were trappers who were at it yet.

The
scents of last night's storm still whispered in the air: wet forests, quenched
grass, damp earth far out among the streams on the meadow.
New Orleans,
thought January,
will be a sewer now: reeking,
crawling and hot as the hinges of Hell.

Fever
season.

Blessed
Mary ever-Virgin, uphold Rose in your hand
. . .

His
wife in Paris, his beautiful Ayasha, had died in the fever summer of 1832 . . .
Five years ago, only five . . .

He
had come home from working in the plague hospital and found her dead.

It
was not only law that did not reach to this achingly beautiful place. It was
word of those you had left behind.

It
would be September before he knew if Rose was still alive. Before he knew if
the child she carried would ever be born.
Not even that,
he realized.
The letter that will be waiting
for me in Independence will have been written weeks before. I won't know - I
won't KNOW - until I walk each step along the brick banquette of Rue Esplanade
up from the levee, until I run up each step of the gallery
. . .

'Maestro
?'

He
turned, aware that Shaw had spoken to him, and said, 'I'm sorry . . .'

'She'll
be all right,' said Shaw, with surprising gentleness in his voice.

Behind
them, in French, Morning Star asked Hannibal, 'What will you bet me, Sun Mouse,
against this sour God-man who threatened Cold Face at the feast getting himself
down the mountain alive?'

'Would
Cold Face kill him?' asked Hannibal, turning to Wallach. 'Or have him killed?'
Cold Face being, of course, Edwin Titus. Morning Star's sisters - who seemed to
have found boyfriends at the feast, because they'd been nowhere to be found
when it was decided to return to camp - had a far less flattering name for him.

'If
that child thought he could foist the blame on the Hudson's Bay Company
somehow,' said Wallach, 'you bet your second- best fiddle-strings he would,
pilgrim. Grey's been McLeod's guest up at the Hudson's Bay camp for weeks. The
man's got nuthin' but holiness to sell, an' he'd have starved on that in
this
camp.
He'll do what McLeod tells him to. And sure as the Brits are trying to make
trouble for the AFC, the AFC's got its men in Congress just climbin' the backs
of their chairs, lookin' for a reason to push Van Buren into startin' a war
with Britain so as to give us a good excuse to send troops into Oregon.'

He
pointed upriver into the darkness, toward the faint gleam of snow that even at
this season whitened the highest tips of the
Gros Ventres.
'Five miles upstream of here, you'll find what's left of Fort Bonneville.
Everybody said Bill Bonneville was a blame fool, to try to build a tradin' post
in a valley that's snowed in six months of the year . . . especially since
Bonneville was only on leave from the US Army for a year. Myself, I couldn't
help thinkin' how it's a blame stupid place for a tradin' post, but a damn
smart one if you wanted to put a garrison up here. If the Brits send troops
down, they'll have to come this way.'

A dog barked -
in Iron Heart's camp, January calculated, the farthest from the river and from
any other Indian camp. He'd seen neither the pockmarked Omaha chief nor any of
his men at the feast. Other than the most necessary trading, none of them had
come into the camp since the day January had fought Blankenship for the Omaha
girl.

'So it ain't the
liquor that's the issue,' said Shaw after a time, returning to Hannibal's
question. 'It ain't even the Indians, but the land. It always comes back to the
land.'

'Well, if we
don't take it,' pointed out Wallach, 'either the Brits - or God help us, the
Russkis down from Alaska - will. Same as all that hoo-raw about sellin' whiskey
to the tribes. You don't hear the redskins objectin' to it, do you? We're not
here to found a church; we're here to do business. If the tribes see what
happens when they get theirselves liquored up, an' they don't like it, then why
do they keep askin' for liquor? Why don't they all just sign the pledge and put
us all out of business?'

Hannibal
sighed. 'Why indeed?
That we should, with joy, pleasure, revel and applause, transform ourselves
into beasts
. .
.'

'Titus was
right,' said the little trader. 'If the government—'

Shaw yelled,
'Down!' and dropped. In the same instant that January heard a sort of soft
vrrrtt
in the air near
his face, and Wallach - who was standing nearest him - shoved him down into a
shallow depression in the ground off the track. Lying flat on the dark earth
January could see men silhouetted against the sky, and Wallach brought his
rifle up and fired. At the same time another shot cracked - Shaw's, January
guessed - and he brought up his own rifle as a man sprang down into the
hollowed ground, too close to aim at . . .

January swung
the rifle butt, smelled the other man's sweat; the blow hit and glanced off as
other shapes rose out of the grass all around them. Someone seized him from
behind, a bare arm like iron around his neck; a hand gripped his hair. He
pulled his knife and cut at the arm, even as the corner of his vision caught
the glint of a knife and he felt the blade cut his forehead - his own knife
ripped muscle and the choking hold loosened. January surged to his knees,
twisting like a harpooned whale, and dragged his attacker over his shoulder with
his own greater strength and smote the ground with him as with a blanket.