The Shirt On His Back (4 page)
Read The Shirt On His Back Online
Authors: Barbara Hambly
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traders weren't so discreet. As the afternoon progressed, tribesmen in all
degrees of serious inebriation came and went along the path or across the green
open meadow to the west: shouting-drunk, singing-drunk, howling-drunk,
weeping-drunk, men who had little experience with the raw alcohol doled out by
the traders, and none whatsoever in how and when to stop.
One
man staggered out of the trees, naked except for his moccasins, and began a
reeling dance with his arms spread to the sky; Hannibal emerged from the tent
beside January, asked, 'I never got like that, did
IT
'Every
night. Rose didn't want to hurt your feelings by telling you so.'
'Tell
me that again if you ever see me head for the liquor tent.' The fiddler had
gotten over the sweating jitters, but still looked like many miles of bad road.
'I
promise.'
The
squaws came, too, to admire the beads and, even more loudly, to admire the
trappers who had skins to purchase them with. Beautiful, many of them, with
their long black braids and doe eyes. Though he had not the slightest intention
of being unfaithful to Rose, the sound of female voices after months of hearing
nothing but masculine basses made January's loins ache.
It
didn't help matters that every man at Fort Ivy, and every engage on the trail
across the mountains to the rendezvous, had at one time or another informed him
that most of the women of the tribes hadn't the slightest objection to a
friendly roll on a blanket with a trapper who'd provide the vermillion, beads,
mirrors, or knives that constituted wealth among the peoples of the plains and
the mountains. It was a way of adding to her own and the family's wealth, and
in addition, a way of obtaining the white men's luck and magic to pass along to
their husbands. A number of the mountaineers who came by did so with Indian 'wives',
purchased from their fathers for a
couple of horses
or a good-quality rifle, sometimes for the few weeks of the rendezvous and
sometimes for years.
'If you don't
fancy supportin' the girl's whole family with gifts, there's always Seaholly's
girls,' added a wiry little trapper named Carson, on one of the extremely
numerous occasions that afternoon when the subject of coition was brought up.
'They're mostly pretty clean, though myself, I'd wear protection if I was to
venture there.'
'If you was to
venture there,' rumbled a huge mountaineer whose black beard seemed to start
just beneath his eyes, 'you'd
need
protection, Kit, 'cause Singing Grass'd scalp you.' And he laid on the counter
two blue-and-yellow-striped plew-sticks for a checked shirt: Ivy and Wallach
plews, universally pegged at a beaver skin apiece. It was the first time
January had seen the man that day, and he thought:
he must have been at the fort during the winter . . .
Carson grinned.
'Singin' Grass bein' my wife,' he explained to January. 'It true you got a
feller here with a fiddle?'
January glanced
across the tent at Hannibal, who made a small shake of his head: 'Twisted my
hand in a pack rope on the way up here,' said the fiddler.
-
it may be weeks before I can play again.' He turned almost immediately and left
the tent, lest well-meaning questions and sympathy - January guessed - uncover
the fact that he had done no such thing.
It had been a
long and difficult winter.
Following a
murderous binge in November - which coincided with and immediately followed the
wedding of the son who wasn't aware that Hannibal was alive - Hannibal had once
more sworn off the liquor and laudanum on which he'd existed for decades, with
the result that he'd lost an entire winter's income to illness and a depression
of spirits so violent that he had found himself unable to make music at all.
January had not been surprised - he'd known other men who had broken free of
the opium habit - and had patiently sat by his friend, played endless games of
all-night chess, made sure he ate - when he
could
eat - and
walked with him through the streets of the French Town in the small hours of
the morning . . . 'What
the
hell good does it do me to get my life back, if it costs me the only thing that
matters to me?' the fiddler had cried, on the occasion that January had tracked
him down on the wharves at four o'clock one morning after a Mardi Gras ball.
By
Easter, Hannibal had begun to revive a little, and even practice again, in the
shack behind Kate the Gouger's bathhouse where he was living by then. When
Hannibal had announced that he was accompanying January and Shaw to the
mountains, January had suggested that he bring his fiddle with him, guessing
that at some point in the months they would be away, he would heal enough to
want it. Still, he had the sense, when he looked at his friend, of seeing a
tiny pile of desiccated moth-wings heaped in the midst of the endless prairie,
waiting for the next wind to rise and scatter them all away.
Then
his sadness for his friend - and his uneasy fears about what he would do if
Hannibal didn't find his way back to the music that was his life - were swept
aside by the sound of a woman's screams.
There
had been, more or less, an intermittent punctuation of female shrieks all
afternoon. Years of playing piano in New Orleans had given January the ability
to identify in their sound the outrage, anger and drunken curses he knew from
the levee and the Swamp: pissed-off whores cursing their customers or each
other, or a girl squealing with excitement when two men came to blows over her
charms.
This
was different, and he knew it instantly.
This
was rape.
'Stay
here,' he ordered Clopard and ducked out through the back of the tent at a run.
It
was a good bet that nobody else in the camp was going to take the slightest
notice.
There
were three of them, in the brush close by the waterside. A yellow-bearded man
was holding the girl while another, smaller and dark, cut her deerskin dress
off her with a knife. A third, burly as a red bull, stood back laughing; he was
the one January caught by the back of the shirt and threw at the knife wielder,
before turning to Yellow-Beard - he only heard them splash as they hit the
river. Yellow-Beard ducked his first punch - 'Waugh, Sambo, wait your turn!' -
but when January came at him he pushed the girl aside and whipped out his
knife. January scooped up the limb of a deadfall tree as Yellow-Beard lunged at
him, rammed its broken end at that broken-nosed, blond-bearded face.
The
trapper cursed and staggered back, then came on again, murder in his red face.
January had his own knife out already, though he had never used it as a weapon
- in New Orleans, or anywhere he'd been in the United States, he wasn't even
permitted to carry it - and in any case he saw the original dark-haired
knife-wielder pelting up dripping from the river at him, to stab him from
behind. January ducked, sidestepped and was aware of a fourth man emerging from
the trees behind him, to throw himself into the fray. January had a glimpse of
long black hair, a black beard that seemed to start just below the eyes and
shoulders the size of a cotton bale: the man who'd joked with the trapper
Carson about Carson's Indian wife. The huge newcomer caught Yellow-Beard by the
hair, slashed with a knife of his own—
Then
Yellow-Beard and the dark little rapist were dashing away across the rocks to
the river, splashing in its shallows in their fervor to escape.
Cheering
in the trees behind him told January that the fight had, in fact, attracted an
audience. He turned, took note of the volunteer rescuer at his side - a human
grizzly nearly his own six-foot-three-inch height, with a prognathous jaw and
the small, brown, glittering eyes of an animal - then faced the crowd of a
dozen trappers, all whooping and waving and shouting, 'You sure showed 'em,
Manitou!' and, 'Good fightin', nigger!'
'I
catched her for you!' yelled somebody, and sure enough, two of the camp-setters
hauled the half-naked girl to the fore, struggling despairingly in their grip.
'You won her, fair and square, nigger!'
The
big black-haired trapper Manitou turned to regard January with those cold brown
eyes, and January said, 'Let her go.' He walked toward the crowd, held out his
hand. The girl looked about fifteen, and he could see the bruises her attackers
had left on her face. 'If I won her, I say let her go.'
'She
gonna get away!' protested someone.
Someone
else yelled, 'Watch it!'
Three
Indians appeared from the brush at the water's edge. Someone in the crowd
called out, 'Oh, hell, now you gotta pay for her,' but the voice sounded
unnaturally loud in the sudden hush. Knives whispered in the crowd. Rifle
barrels came down ready for firing.
The
smallest of the Indians stepped forward, a stocky, heavily pockmarked man in
his thirties, a skinning knife in his hand. The other two - bare-chested as he
was, and wearing feathered caps of a kind January hadn't seen before - moved
off to both sides, rifles held ready to answer fire.
January
said, louder, 'I said let the girl go.' The girl cried out something, and the
man holding her cursed. The trapper Manitou crossed the distance between
himself and the other mountaineers, wrenched the girl free and shoved her in
the direction of the Indian men.
'God
damn your hairy arse, Manitou, the nigger won her fair an' square—'
The
girl stumbled in the sandy soil of the riverside. January reached down to help
her to her feet, and when the two Indian rifles leveled on him he opened his
hands to show them empty as she fled from him to them.
Without
a word Manitou turned away, as if none of this concerned him any longer, and
shoved his way off through the crowd.
January
turned back to the four Indians. 'Are you all right?' he asked the girl, who
stared at him with uncomprehending eyes.
The
pockmarked man snapped, 'She is well, white man.'
Robbie
Prideaux moved up out of the crowd to January's side, his rifle pointed; Carson
and another man put themselves on his other side. 'Well, here's damp powder,
an' no fire to dry it,' Prideaux murmured. 'The runty one with the pockmarks is
Iron Heart. He's chief of the Omahas. You watch out for him, hoss.'
Iron
Heart put the girl behind him. The two other Indians flanked her, and slowly,
in silence, the four of them backed away to the river's shallows, then waded in
them away upstream.
'That
was good fightin', though,' added the trapper approvingly. 'You's busy right
then, hoss, but you shoulda seen Jed Blankenship's face when old Manitou come
to your colors. Waugh! I thought he'd piss himself—'
Hannibal
slipped through the dispersing crowd of trappers.
'Salve, amicus meus
?’
January
thrust his knife back into its sheathe. 'I'll know that as soon as I know how
many friends my opponents have.'
'Oh,
hell, pilgrim, you don't need to worry about Jed Blankenship.' Prideaux, who'd
waded out to the shallows where the burly red-haired man lay face down, paused
calf- deep in the purling water. 'Not unless you mind him struttin' all over
the camp sayin' as how he had you licked flat an' beggin' for mercy 'fore
Manitou came roarin' up—'
'He
can strut and flap to his heart's content if that's what pleases him.'
'Everybody
in the mountains knows Jed's all cackle an' no egg to speak of. 'Sides,' added
Prideaux as he knelt to turn over the red-haired trapper in the shallows, 'I
don't think there's a man in the camp who'd ask why anyone in his right mind
would run away from Manitou.' Ribbons of blood, bright around the body,
dispersed themselves to nothingness in the water.
'An'
Blezy Picard - that's Jed's l'il friend - he won't even remember what happened,
when he sobers up. Well, don't that just suck eggs,' Prideaux added in a tone
of mild regret as January and Hannibal approached to help him carry the dead
man up from the riverbank. 'What a way to go, eh? Ty here got himself through
clawin' by a grizzly bear, gettin' shot an' chased by the Blackfeet, an' being
clapped by that whore last year at Fort Ivy, an' how does he die? In a damn
fight over a damn Injun girl 'cause he's too damn drunk to get out of the way
of Blezy Picard's damn knife.'
'Ty?'
said January, straightening up. 'Ty Farrell?'
'Oh,
yeah,' said Prideaux. 'That's him. You know him?'
January
sighed. 'Not exactly.'