The Shirt On His Back (38 page)

They camped
outside Fort Ivy for two nights. Shaw and January divided their time in
guarding Bodenschatz while Goodpastor and Hannibal negotiated for supplies. The
engages who'd traveled to the rendezvous with them were clearly troubled by the
whole affair: '
En effet,'
said Clopard to Shaw, when he helped Manitou carry out sacks of flour and
cornmeal to be loaded on to the mules, 'what does it matter, eh? It isn't like
anybody will know, or come after you.'

'Nope,' agreed
Shaw, and he shifted his rifle across his knees. 'It ain't.'

Tom Shaw never
crossed the twenty yards of open ground that lay between the fort's gates and
the camp, or as far as January could tell, even came as far as the gate. Gil
Wallach spoke to each of the brothers once, about settling their affairs with
one another: 'You think how long it is, from New Orleans out to here, Abe. You
think of all that happens out here. You really want to risk never seein' your
brother again, for the sake of justice to a stranger who so far as I can tell
is pretty much a murderin' weasel?'

Shaw leaned his
head back against the thin trunk of the lodgepole pine by which he sat - one of
the small clump of trees near the fort, where in other years the local Indians
would have been camped by this time - and repeated: 'For the sake of justice. I
have lived where there's no justice, Gil.' For a time he sat in silence, then
added, 'An' I have lived where I had no brother. I'll think on what you say.'

But January
guessed he wouldn't.

It was from
Wallach, too, that January learned why they'd seen no hunting parties as they'd
crossed the high plains back to the Fort: 'There's smallpox in the tribes, all
up and down the river. It started among the Mandans at Fort Clark - there was a
couple cases in the deck passengers on a steamboat that come through. Now
there's ten, twenty a day dyin'. Blackfeet, Minnetarees, Arikara, Assiniboin .
. . they've all got it now. Whole villages wiped out, wolves an' rats eatin'
the dead among the lodges.'

'Looks like our
friend Iron Heart was a little ahead on his revenge,' said Manitou quietly.

Wallach bristled
like a miffed porcupine. 'Well, it wasn't us that did it. Not the folks at the
rendezvous, I mean, nor the trappers—'

'No,' sighed
Manitou. 'It never is. Didn't mean to say it was.' He turned and walked away
from the camp then, out on to the prairie: silent, open grassland that would
never thereafter be the same. The tribes were dying. There weren't even buffalo
to be seen. Only dry wind, and heat.

Bodenschatz
called out angrily to January, 'You gonna let him just run off like that? You
gonna let him get away, just 'cause he's a friend?'

'Oh, shut up,'
said January, weary to his back teeth of vengeance and anger, hate and death.
'He isn't going anywhere.' He wondered if Morning Star and her family were
still alive, or Silent Wolf and his Blackfeet, or Walks Before Sunrise . . .

And knew that
there was not the slightest likelihood that he would ever find out.

Manitou was
silent when the train moved out the next morning, on the worn trail down toward
the distant Platte. The beaten trace snaked like a blonde ribbon, visible for
miles in the brown distance and rutted now with the wheels of the big immigrant
wagons. January was conscious that among the debris of the trading caravans
along the ruts, there were objects that could only have been thrown out by
those seeking Oregon land. A broken spinning-wheel, like the echoes of a
woman's voice. A small trunk of books. Anything to lighten the load as the dry
air shrank the wood of axles never designed for these high plains and the ox
teams broke their sinews at labor . . .

'More of 'em
this year,' remarked Goodpastor. 'Fleein' the bank crash, probably. Headin' for
free land in Oregon.'

'And they took
their journey from Elim,'
quoted
Hannibal,
'and all the congregation of the
children of Israel came unto the wilderness . .
. where God obligingly slaughtered everyone they met for them.' It was the
closest he came, in all that journey, to speaking of Morning Star.

'That's gonna
sit well with the British.' Shaw edged his horse over beside the Indian
Agent's, his pale eyes in their worn dark circles never leaving the sharply
rolling land, the dry watercourses and the empty skylines. 'Get enough settlers
in that territory, we ain't gonna need the American Fur Company startin'
schemes with the Crow to get us into another war with England. Settlers'11 do
it every time.'

'An' now their
king's dead -' this news had also been waiting for them at Fort Ivy - 'I doubt
that little niece of his - what's her name?'

'Victoria.'

'I doubt that
little gal's gonna go startin' any wars over fur.' Goodpastor shook his head.
'Independence'11 be crawlin' with 'em.'

'Good.' On his
led horse, his hands still tied to the saddle tree, Bodenschatz turned cold
eyes on Manitou. 'That way it will need no testimony of mine to prove that the
judgement against him in Germany was unjust, a fraud by the rich. You had best
watch him, when he gets among civilized men. You who keep
me
bound, who keep
watch on
me
with a rifle, as if I were some kind of dangerous criminal - you will see your
mistake. He is the one who—'

The crack of the
rifle seemed very small in the dry hugeness of the scrubland; like a
firecracker, January thought, even as the prisoner's body arched backward with
the impact, mouth popping open, eyes staring in shock at the sky. Shaw wheeled
his horse at once, scanning the horizon for dust while January flung himself
from his saddle, caught Bodenschatz as he sagged sideways. The prisoner's
wrists were still tied to the saddle, and by the time January had got them cut
free Bodenschatz was dead. He heard Shaw say: 'That draw we passed—'

Hooves thundered
away. An engage brought a blanket. January laid Bodenschatz on it and opened
his shirt. The bullet had struck him just behind the right armpit and gone
through both lungs and the heart. The worn batiste chemise, the pink kid
gloves, folded small into a packet beneath his shirt, against his skin, were
soaked through with blood.

They came back
to the camp at fall of night, having found no tracks. January could have told
them they wouldn't. He guessed, from the angle of entry of the bullet, that in
fact the killer had been elsewhere than the cover they'd suspected. 'Don't
matter,' said Shaw quietly, when he helped January dig the trail-side grave. 'I
know who done it.'

'You want to go
back for him?' asked Manitou. Stripped for the work, his chest and arms showed
in the firelight the horrific mazes of scars left by repeated torture, tracks
of a pain that was his only salvation.

'An' do what?'
Shaw's face was covered with dust, the straggly beard he'd grown on the trail
thick with it, his eyes strange and light in the dark grime, like a bobcat's,
except for the pain in them. 'Arrest him by an authority I ain't got, for a
murder I can't prove, that no jury in the State of Missouri's gonna convict him
of? They's only so much I can do,' he said, driving his shovel to break the
hard knots of interlaced grass roots, 'an' I done it. Now let's put this sorry
bastard to bed an' go home.'

Manitou Wildman
rode with them for three more days, then disappeared one night, leaving not
even tracks behind. January guessed he'd go back to seek out his brothers the
Blackfeet, if any of them had survived the epidemic.

'Did it ever
occur to you,' January asked Shaw on the following night, 'that it might have
been Franz who killed Mina, and not Manitou at all?' He'd left the chemise and
gloves inside Bodenschatz's shirt when they'd laid him in his shallow grave.
The locket as well, which they'd offered to Manitou and which he had refused to
touch. 'He loved his sister - passionately, it sounds like. Jealous men have
done worse. And guilty men have gone to greater lengths, to absolve themselves
of what they feel is another's fault.'

'That crossed my
mind from the first.' Shaw stirred at the fire with a stick. January had shot a
buffalo that afternoon: probably the last time he would do so, he guessed,
before they reached Independence. They'd begun to find the droppings of
corn-fed horses, and to see the signs of white hunters, with their large fires
and boot prints in the earth.

His journal to
Rose - which he'd kept every evening of the return journey - was overflowing
with these observations, and with the remembrances of the men who'd taught him.
Please, Mother of God, let me put it into her living hand .
. .

'They's no way
of provin' it,' Shaw went on. 'An' no point doin' so. We can only know so much,
Maestro. Then we got to let it go. Like that old play Manitou spoke of: it's
why we got to get twelve strangers to sit down an' say,
"This is how we settle it: it's done."
It's got to be taken out of our hands. If it ain't, it eats us alive.'