The Shirt On His Back (2 page)
Read The Shirt On His Back Online
Authors: Barbara Hambly
'I
take it that letter is from Jules Gardinier informing us that he's taking
Cosette out of the school and sending her to live with her grandmother?'
She
leaned back, looked up into his face in mock wonderment: 'You must have second
sight! And here Cosette was the only one of our pupils left to us—'
'And
her father owns stock in the Bank of Louisiana.' January grinned crookedly.
'Which is going to be converted into a livery stable as soon as they can get up
enough money to buy hay. What's the good news?'
Rose
was silent for a moment, as if thinking how to phrase an awkward question. Then
she propped her spectacles more firmly on to the bridge of her nose, took a
deep breath, looked up into his face again and said, 'We have two dollars and
fifty cents in the house. And we're going to have a child.'
An
hour later, with the street gone quiet in the dinner hour, they were still on
the gallery talking. The two dollars and fifty cents was in hard coin, not the
now-worthless notes from the Bank of Louisiana - or the various other banks in
the town - in which January had been paid over the winter: 'They'll make good
kindling,' said Rose in a comforting tone.
'That's
not funny.'
'Nothing
is,' replied Rose. 'Not today. Benjamin, I've spoken to your sister Olympe. If
this—' She hesitated, then went on with some difficulty. 'If this isn't a good
time for us to have a child—'
January
cut her off firmly. 'It is.' Olympe was a voodooienne, versed in the
termination of unaffordable pregnancies among the poorer blacks of the town. He
added, 'My mother won't let her grandchild starve.'
Rose
mimed exaggerated surprise. 'Whatever gives you that idea?'
'Hmmn.'
Since January and Rose had refused his mother's advice about investing their
little money in slaves -
you can feed
them dirt cheap and make a dollar a day renting them out to the logging
companies
-
that astute businesswoman had repeatedly asserted that it was none of her
business if her son and his wife starved together. January was fairly certain
that this stricture would be expanded to include Baby Rose. Besides, the last
he'd heard, his mother's money had been in the Bank of Louisiana, too.
'Something
will turn up,' said Rose.
'Hmmn.'
He
closed his eyes, wondering, as he had wondered all the way home, what the hell
they were going to do.
Holy Mary,
Mother of God . . . Please have something turn up.
When
he opened his eyes, Lieutenant Abishag Shaw of the New Orleans City Guards was
standing on the gallery.
'Lieutenant.'
January got quickly to his feet, held out his hand, even as Shaw removed his
greasy old excuse for a hat and bowed to Rose:
'M'am.'
As
Shaw turned toward him, January thought that the man did not look well. It
occurred to him to wonder if Shaw, too, had been among the unfortunates who'd
discovered that morning that they'd lost everything they owned. Framed in his
long, thin, light-brown hair, the Kentuckian's face had a strained tiredness to
it, beyond what keeping the peace in New Orleans through Mardi Gras usually did
to him. There was a slump to the raw-boned shoulders under the scarecrow coat
and a distant look in his gray eyes, a reflection of bitterest pain. January
had seen his friend take physical punishment that would have killed another
man, but this was different, and he was moved to ask - as Crowdie Passebon had
earlier asked him - 'Are you all right?' He remembered to add, 'Sir,' even
though his mother wouldn't have permitted Shaw into her house.
Shaw
nodded - as if he weren't quite sure of the affirmative - and said, 'Maestro, I
have a proposition for you.'
'I'll
take it.'
The
long mouth dipped a little at one corner: 'Don't you want to hear what it is?'
'Doesn't
matter,' said January. 'If it's money, I'm your man.'
1
They
crossed the ford mid-morning and came up out of the cottonwoods where the
valley of the Green River spread out into a meadow of summer grass: it was
their eighty-second day out from Independence. Abishag Shaw rode point on a
hammer-headed gelding the color of old cheese, with a dozen half-breed French
camp-setters in his wake. A line of mules laden with shot, trap springs,
coffee, liquor, trade-vermillion and checked black-and-yellow cotton shirts
from Lowell, Massachusetts at two thousand percent markup; fourteen remounts in
various stages of homicidal orneriness; Hannibal Sefton sweating his way
through his fifteenth case of the jitters since leaving the settlements; and
January riding drag eating everyone's dust. Mountains rose west, east and north
beyond a scumble of foothills: pinewoods, ravens, bare granite and a high,
distant glimmer of snow. A few miles upriver the first camps could be glimpsed:
makeshift mountaineers' shelters or handsome markees where the traders had set
up shop. Westward from the river, Indian lodges grouped, hundreds of them
gathered into a dozen little villages, and horse herds browsed the buffalo
grass under the charge of brown, naked children. Dogs' barks, sharp as
gunshots, sounded in thin air blue with campfire smoke.
'That's
it.' Shaw drew rein on the rise, spit tobacco into the long grass that edged
the trail. 'Man what done it, he's someplace here.'
Shots
rang out: men hunting in the hills on the other side of the river. Closer
gunfire as they drew nearer the first of the shelters, men shooting at playing
cards tacked to cottonwoods in the bottomland that lined the water. January
knew the breed. He'd seen them, ferociously bearded with their long hair
braided Indian-fashion, shirts faded colorless or glaring-new and rigid with
starch, swaggering along Bourbon and Girod
Streets
with their long Pennsylvania rifles on their backs, visitors to the world he
knew.
Now
he was the visitor. They clustered around to greet the pack-train, holding out
tin cups of liquor in welcome. On the trail from Independence January had
mostly gotten over his surprise that white men would extend such hospitality to
a black one - the rules changed, the farther you got beyond the frontier. It
was a dubious honor at best: it was hands down the worst liquor January had
ever tasted.
The
trappers roared at the expression on his face, and one of them shouted
good-naturedly, 'Now you had a gen-u
-ine
Green River Cocktail, pilgrim!
Waugh! Welcome to the rendezvous!'
Shaw
leaned from the saddle, greeting the men, but January wasn't fooled by his
affability. He saw the Lieutenant's pale eyes scan the bearded faces, seeking
the man he'd come twenty- five hundred miles to kill.
The
pack-train moved on along the river. Gil Wallach, of Ivy and Wallach Trading,
had arrived before them, a small outfit - according to Shaw, on one of the
three occasions between New Orleans and the South Pass that he'd spoken more
than half a dozen words at a time - backed by men who'd once made up the Rocky
Mountain Fur Company, before that organization had succumbed to the murderous
business practices of the rival American Fur Company. A dozen of these smaller
traders were camped along the river, between the military-looking
establishments of the AFC and its rival, the British Hudson's Bay Company,
peddling watered liquor to trappers in faded blanket coats and dickering fiercely
over the price of beaver pelts. Just above the line where the ground sloped
down to the bottomlands, a thin path had already been beaten into the grass,
forming a sort of main street of the camp.
Mentally,
January noted it all. Tents of canvas bleached by years of weather; cruder
shelters, ranging from a few deer hides, to huts of pine and Cottonwood boughs
skilfully lashed with rawhide. Here and there a tipi, where a trapper had an
Indian wife. When he'd gotten on the steamboat for Independence, Rose had
handed him an empty notebook and told him to bring it back full.
'The
only way I can keep from hating you for being able to go, when I can't,' she'd
said softly, 'is to know you'll bring this back.' She was a scientist. January
knew it was agony to her, to be left behind, to be shut out of the wonders of a
world unglimpsed because she was a woman, and with child.
Four
months now he'd been making notes for her: animals, birds, plants, rocks. On
the nights when he'd felt he would go insane with longing for her, it had been
a little - a very little - like touching her hand. Like Shakespeare's comic
lovers, whispering devotion to one another through a crack in a wall.
In
the dappled shade of the cottonwoods on the river side of the trail, traders
had hung scale beams to weigh the furs: the men of business in neat black
broadcloth to mark their status, or gayer hues if they were Mexicans up from
Taos. Most were clean-shaven, as befit representatives of all that was best in
nineteenth-century civilization. Most wore boots.
At
six dollars a pound, the furs they weighed represented the whole of a man's
work for a year.
June
was ending. Some men had been here for weeks - others would still be coming in.
For the trappers, it was more than just the only chance they'd have to sell
their furs, or resupply themselves with gunpowder and fish hooks, lead and salt
and sharpening stones. For many, it was the only occasion they'd have to talk
to anyone in the language of the land they'd left behind, or to see faces
beyond the narrow circle of partners and camp-setters; the only chance to hear
news of the world beyond the mountains, to talk to anyone of events beyond the
doings of animals, the chance of foul weather, the clues and guesswork about
which tribes might be nearby - and were they friendly?
It
was also the only occasion for the next eleven months that they'd be around
enough white men to be able to get drunk in safety, and despite the quality of
the liquor, most of them seemed to be taking fullest advantage of this facet of
the situation.
He'll be at the
rendezvous,
Tom Shaw had said, of the man who had killed his brother.
'He'll
be at the rendezvous.' And as he'd said it, Abishag Shaw's brother - five years
the elder, Shaw had mentioned on the steamboat, breaking a silence of nearly
forty-eight hours on that occasion and then returning to it at once - had laid
on the table between them in the firelit blockhouse of Fort Ivy a human scalp,
the long hair a few shades fairer than Shaw's own.
Shaw
had looked aside. 'Why'n't you bury that thing with him?'
Tom
Shaw had taken his surviving brother's hand in his own, picked up their
brother's scalp and laid it in Shaw's palm. "Cause I know you, Abe,' he
said. "Cause I heard you go on about a thousand goddam times about law an'
justice an' the principles of the goddam Constitution. An' I tell you this:
if'fn any single one of the men that wrote your Constitution had had his
brother murdered the way Johnny was murdered - scalped so's we'd think it was the
Blackfeet,
an'
worse - an' left up the gulch for the wolves, he'd go after the men that did
it, an' screw all justice an' law. I wish you'd seen him when they brought him
in.'
Shaw
stroked the dried skin, the fair straight locks that he'd touched times without
number in life. 'I wish I had.' His chill gray eyes seemed to see nothing, and
there was no expression in his light-timbred voice.
On
the steamboat - deck-passage, which in January's case meant the narrow
stern-deck just inboard of the wheel - Shaw had informed his two companions
only that his younger brother Johnny had been murdered at Fort Ivy, a fur-trade
station some six weeks beyond the frontier. Their older brother Tom was
'bourgeois' - the head man - of the fort; he pronounced it 'bashaw'. 'If it was
Indians,' he had said quietly, 'Tom wouldn't'a called it murder.'
After
a long silence, with the firelight devils chasing one another across the log
walls of the fort's little office, January asked the bourgeois, 'How is it
you're sure where this man will be?'
The
oldest brother's face had tightened in the flickering gloom. He was much
shorter than Abishag Shaw's six-feet- two, and darker; his body reminded
January of something that had been braided out of leather.
'Frank
Boden was the fort clerk.' Tom Shaw's voice was an eerie duplicate of
Abishag's, but thinner, like steel wire. 'Johnny told me he'd found a
half-wrote letter in Boden's desk, to a man named Hepplewhite, that spoke of
creatin' some kind of trouble at the rendezvous this summer. Bad trouble,
Johnny said. Killin' bad. I didn't believe him.' A bead of fatwood popped in
the coals, and the tiny red explosion of it glinted in the back of his dark
eyes.
'When
I got back from Laramie a week later, Johnny was dead. Blackfoot, the engages
said.' Tom cast a glance back at the door in the partition that separated the
lower floor of the Fort Ivy blockhouse in two: his office where they sat, with
its sleeping loft, and the store, where Clopard and LeBel - the oldest and the
youngest of the half-breed ruffians who hunted meat, prepared hides and looked
after the stock - were bedded down in their blankets. 'They said Boden got so
spooked at the way Johnny was cut up that he left the next day. Goin' back to
the settlements, he said. Then a week later it thawed, an' one of 'em found
Johnny's scalp, stuck into the hollow of a dead tree a couple yards from where
his body had been. No Blackfoot would leave a scalp that way. I knew then
Johnny'd been right.'
Shaw
had said nothing through this. Had only sat looking into the fire, his
brother's scalp in his hand.
'You
kill him, Abe.' Tom's voice was cold and as matter- of-fact before witnesses as
if there were no law against the killing of a man one merely suspected had done
you a wrong. 'You find him, and you kill him. You was the best of us. Best
killer on the mountain, Daddy said—-'
'I
never was.'
'You
was 'til you lost your nerve.'
Shaw
said nothing, his narrow gargoyle face like something cut from rock.
'He'll
know me if I come to the rendezvous. He'll know there wasn't but one reason I'd
leave this post. But he'll think, seein' you, only as how I called you to take
Johnny's place on account of him bein' killed by the Blackfoot. You kill him,
an' you bring me his scalp, for me to nail to that wall.'
Something
in those words made Shaw glance across at his brother, straight thin lashes
catching a glint of gold. Someone in the family, thought January, had nailed
scalps to the wall of whatever cabin it was in the mountains of Kentucky where
they'd grown up. 'An' this Hepplewhite feller?' Shaw spoke cautiously, as if he
feared a trap. 'This killin' trouble Johnny read of—'
'What
the hell is that to me?' Tom Shaw took Johnny's scalp out of his brother's
hand, sat back in his chair, the only chair in a room that was furnished
primarily with benches of hewn logs, stroking the long fair hair. 'You been on
the flat- lands too long, brother. You know better'n that. They's a million
square miles of mountain out there, Abe, an' only this
one
chance
to find him in that
one
place. You can kill anythin'
with one shot. I seen you do it. So don't you breathe one single word that'll
scare him off. That ain't our business.'
The
elder brother's eyes burned like those of a man in slow fever. It was as if
January, and Hannibal sleeping curled up in the corner by the dying fire, had
ceased to exist. 'You owe me, Abe,' he said. 'Hadn't been for you runnin' the
way you did—'
'I
walked away. I never ran.'
'A
man that turns his back on his family is runnin',' retorted Tom. 'Hadn't been
for that, Johnny an' me, we'd never have had to go down to New Orleans the way
we did, sellin' hogs so's there'd be money at home. You owe our blood, an' you
owe Johnny, an' you owe me. You tellin' me you'll run away again?'
Shaw
sighed. 'No,' he said softly. 'No, I won't run away.'