The Shirt On His Back (5 page)

Abishag
Shaw said, 'Well, consarn,' and stood for a time with his long arms folded,
chewing on both his tobacco and the news of his informant's death.

'Wallach
wouldn't know Boden by sight?'

Shaw
cast a glance up through the cottonwoods toward the store tent. The little
trader had taken over at the counter while January led Shaw down to the river's
edge, allegedly to have a look at the scene of the fight. 'Wallach works mainly
out of St Louis. I doubt he seen Boden more'n two-three times, an' those most
likely in the post store where the light ain't good. Even Clopard an' LeBel
knew him bearded, an' I'm guessin' his beard was the first thing to go. Boden
kept apart from most of the men in the fort, Tom says.'

'That's
a strange disposition to have,' remarked January, 'for a man who takes a job at
a trading post.' He recalled the muddy palisaded yard - eighty feet by sixty -
and the cramped quarters that were snowbound five months of the year.

Shaw
spit at a squirrel on the trunk of a Cottonwood half a dozen paces away: the
animal jeered at him but didn't bother to dodge. For a man who could kill
anything with one rifleshot, Abishag Shaw couldn't hit a barn door with spit.
'An' I'd say your disposition for helpin' your fellow man an' goin' to
confession regular is a strange one to have for what we're doin' here, Maestro.
But yeah, I'd say it's strange. Johnny did, too. Else he wouldn't have been
pokin' his fool nose around Boden's desk.'

'He
write to you about it?'

Shaw
shook his head. 'Johnny couldn't hardly write his name. But Tom said, Johnny
asked about him, months before he found that letter.
He's too smart for what he's doin
', Johnny said.
An' he's stayed out here too long.
Tom told him it wasn't none of
his affair.'

January
leaned his shoulder against the tree, looking out over the river - low in the
thin gold light of afternoon, exposing a long strand of rock and driftwood -
and seeing instead the cramped blockhouse of Fort Ivy. Each night the stock was
herded into the gray wooden palisade, and the ground, the walls, the air
smelled of their dung. Through the six months of winter the snow would lie deep
around the walls. No travelers, no news: nothing to do but play cards and drink
and talk about women and beat off. Even sharing a two-room slave-cabin with
twenty other people in his childhood, with a drunken and unpredictable master thrown
in, January and the other slave children had at least been able to seek the
cypress woods, the bayou, the batture along the river with its fascinating
mazes of dead wood and flotsam . . . and to do so at any season of the year.

On
the plains beyond the frontier, even in the summer, you stood the chance of
being murdered and scalped if you went too far from the walls.

As
Johnny Shaw had been.

Though
he had never met the young man, he knew exactly why Johnny had asked himself:
what was Frank Boden doing there
?

'Boden
hated it, Tom said,' Shaw went on in his light, scratchy voice. 'Wouldn't
drink. Wouldn't play cards. Hated it - an' hated every soul in the place.
Farrell shared that loft above the store with him. From the start they was
always pushin' at each other: Boden would go silent, Farrell would talk louder
an' dirtier. Once Farrell pissed on his books. Yet Boden stayed.'

They'd
searched that low-raftered ten-by-ten-foot room - January, Shaw, Hannibal and
Tom - the morning after their arrival at Fort Ivy and had found nothing. Tom
had said that he'd searched it himself three times before they came, for any
sign of the half-written letter that Johnny had found, or any clue or hint as
to the 'trouble' he and his correspondent Hepplewhite had been plotting that
might help in tracking Boden down. There were few enough places to look. The
walls were bare log with the bark still on them, the rafters open to view from
below. A puncheon floor - split logs - provided no loose boards or convenient
carpets to cache things under. If Boden had had anything he didn't want Ty
Farrell to know about he'd taken it away with him when he left.

And what did you
carry,
January wondered,
when you left your world behind
? Books? Letters? A Bible? The
only things he'd taken from his years in Paris had been a gold thimble and a
single gold earring in a camel-bone box, that had belonged to the wife who had
died there. If Farrell had pissed on his room-mate's books, Boden had probably
hidden whatever else was dear to him.

With
odd, clear suddenness he remembered his hatred of 'Mos, the eleven-year-old son
of the other slave family with whom his parents and younger sister had shared
that single cabin-half. The older boy had bullied him, stolen his food, broken
or traded away to others anything January treasured, given him 'Indian burns'
and challenged him to do things that had nearly killed him. January could still
hear his high-pitched nasal voice, still smell the peculiar individual scent of
his flesh. He hadn't thought of 'Mos in decades. Yet he knew he would recognize
him even now, however the years had changed him, bearded or clean, hair black
or gray . . .

Ty
Farrell would have known the man he'd lived with and hated, if no other had.

But
he remembered, too, weeping with Kitta and the others, when 'Mos had been sold
away.

After
a long time he asked, 'Didn't Tom think it was odd? That Boden stayed on in a
place he hated?'

'Tom
figured it wasn't none of his business.' Movement downstream: the Mexican
trader whose pitch lay downstream of the AFC had led his mules to the water to
drink, his rawhide jacket a cinnabar flicker in the dappled shade. Despite the
placidity of the river, January could see how far up the banks lay the debris
of recent rises: whole trees uprooted, boulders of granite rolled loose from
the stony bed, matted tangles of torn-off shrubs. On the plains he'd learned
how quickly water could rise, and he didn't grudge the walk of fifty yards
through the cottonwoods he'd have to take the next morning to bathe.

Shaw
sighed and scratched his long hair with broken fingernails. 'Tom's got about
as much imagination as a steamboat. They's plenty men in the East, gentlemen
like Boden, that has to stay beyond the frontier. Tom didn't think much of it.'

You owe
me .. .
Had the oldest of the brothers spent sleepless nights, wondering how things
could have been different had he paid more attention to his inquisitive
junior's words?

Had
his thoughts of vengeance fed on that possibility, or sponged it from his mind?

'What
about the trappers?' They walked back up toward the markee again. Out in the
meadow in the long slant of the afternoon light, a bunch of Robbie Prideaux's
friends had organized a shooting match, a common pastime to judge by the shots
January had been hearing all afternoon. 'There's no way of knowing whether
Clopard and LeBel can keep their mouths shut if they get drunk, but there are
trappers that must have known Boden. They'd be more observant, even if he's
done something to change how he looks.'

'More
observant,' agreed Shaw. 'Less like to go shootin' off their mouths, if'fn word
gets out as to how Johnny Shaw's brother is askin' questions about Frank
Boden?' He spit again at a pocket mouse at the foot of the boulder behind the
store tent, missing it by feet. 'Like Tom said, I get one shot at the man. I
purely don't want to have to go trackin' him through the mountains.'

It
was on the tip of January's tongue to ask, '
Would you
?’
but
he held back from the question, as he would have held back from grabbing a
man's broken arm. In the four years he had known Abishag Shaw in New Orleans,
he had never heard the Lieutenant speak of any family, save once, when he had
mentioned a sister who had died.
Hadn't been for
you runnin' the way you did,
Tom had said. What had happened because Shaw had walked away?

It
was clear to him now that Tom and Johnny had been the only family Shaw had.

Will
you give up your beliefs about law and vengeance, so as not to lose the single
person of your own blood that you have left?

Follow
a man into endless and deadly wilderness, rather than go back to your only kin
and say,
I
couldn't? I wouldn 't
?'

January
recalled swearing once that nothing would ever induce him to return to New
Orleans. He had learned since then what it was to need your own blood, your own
kin, as a drowning man needs air. To need to know that you weren't utterly
alone.

'That
feller who helped you out in your fight, Manitou Wildman—' They ducked beneath
the line of dangling traps as they came into the store tent. 'He was at the
fort last winter.'

'I
thought he might have been. He had credit-sticks - plews? Or are plews the
skins?'

'Plews.
An' yes - they call the sticks same as they call the skins, just so's
everythin's clear an' understandable.'

'He
had plews from the fort.'

'He's
one I need to talk to. Clem Groot - the Dutchman - an' his partner Goshen
Clarke was camped near there, too. Trouble is,' Shaw added more quietly as
Wallach gave them a salute and headed off up the path for the Hudson's Bay
Camp, 'we got no way of knowin' that they wasn't part of whatever Boden is
mixed up in. That goes for the engages, too.'

'What
could
he be mixed up in?' January waved out across the counter at the rolling
meadows, the distant clusters of white tipis, the long string of shelters and
campfires upstream and down. 'What trouble, what
evil,
could a man be here to do?'

'Other'n
murder, without proof, a feller he thinks
might
be the one who killed his
brother, you mean?' Shaw perched on a bale of shirts. 'That I don't know.
They's money in furs, Maestro, more'n you or I'll ever see. The American Fur
Company's already crushed out two big outfits that they felt was takin' their
Indian trade away from 'em, an' God knows how many little ones like Ivy an'
Wallach, an' not just by gettin' their trappers to desert 'em with all their
season's furs, neither. You talk to Tom Fitzpatrick sometime, 'bout how the AFC
works. They got agents livin' regular with the Crow villages - hell, Jim
Beckwith's a
chief
of the Crows these days - an' the Crows or any other tribe is just as happy to
scalp a white man they catches on their huntin' lands . . . an' the Flatheads
is just as tickled to return the compliment on anyone who ain't a friend of
their
friends, the Hudson's Bay Company.'

A
trapper named Bridger - older than most and recognized through the length and
breadth of the mountains as being as wise as the Angel Gabriel, for which
reason he was generally called Gabe in spite of the fact that his name was
actually Jim - came to the counter to ask the prices of salt and tobacco.

When
Bridger had gone, Shaw went on, 'The Hudson's Bay men been tryin' for years to
spread east into the Rockies. At Seaholly's this afternoon they was sayin' as
how that Controller the AFC sent out - that snake-eye Titus - has his orders to
do what he can to cripple 'em. An' in a place where there ain't no law,' he
concluded quietly, 'Do
what you can
takes on a whole new meanin'.'

A
couple of Shoshone came to the counter next, joking in their own tongue and
smelling faintly of cheap whiskey, offering winter fox and wolf as well as
beaver in trade. Even the Indians allied with the enemies of the AFC, January
was aware, knew themselves to be outnumbered and outgunned, and therefore kept
the peace, not only with the whites, but with one another. On the plains they
were constantly at war, tribe against tribe, and in the course of the afternoon
January had learned that their tribal politics were inextricably tied up with
keeping on the good side of the trading companies. Without guns and powder,
each tribe knew its enemies would wipe it out.

Even
so, looking out across the meadows in the clear gold crystal of the evening
light, January resolved to steer well clear of the pockmarked Iron Heart and
his Omahas.

Campfires
were being built up. Men he'd been introduced to by Prideaux or Wallach in the
course of the long afternoon greeted him as they went past. Others he already
knew by sight: Edwin Titus, the AFC Financial Controller Shaw had spoken of,
frock-coated and prim, with eyes like chilled blue glass; red-haired Tom
Fitzpatrick, whose company the AFC had crushed two years before and who now
worked for them; fair-haired little Kit Carson. Engages - camp-setters - many
of them very young. These were often the sons of Indian women themselves from
an earlier generation of mountaineers, hired cheap to go out with the trappers,
to pitch camps, mind horses, flesh and stretch the skins when the trappers
brought them back to the brigade camps deep in the wilderness, hunt meat while
the trappers sought more valuable prey.