The Shirt On His Back (6 page)

'Could
Boden be passing himself as an engage?' January asked.

'He
could.' Shaw stood and stretched his back with an audible popping of bones. 'Or
a trader; or a clerk with the AFC, if this Hepplewhite he was writin' to is of
their Congregation . . .'

The
sun had slipped behind the low western peaks. Shadow began to fill the little
tent. Shaw started gathering up the tobacco and knives, the vermillion and
beads, from the blanket- draped trestles and stowing them in a lockbox, while
January untied the rolled-up side of the tent. 'He could be a clerk with
Hudson's Bay, or even - if he's real clever - that fool preacher that was
standin' outside Seaholly's shoutin' about how the whole passel of us was bound
for perdition an' brimstone. Or he could be passin' himself as a gentleman come
to the rendezvous for the huntin'. They got a Scottish nobleman that's stayin'
with the AFC -
with
his private gun-loader an'
horse- minder an' his personal artist to memorialize the trip for when he goes
back home.'

'That's
a lot of money for a disguise.'

'It
is to you an' me. But we got no idea who Boden's workin' for, nor how many are
in it with him. AFC's got their own store-bought Congressmen - one of whom ran
for President last year - so a murderer'd be picked up for small change. Good
thing I seen this Sir William Stewart in New Orleans over the winter or I might
shoot him from behind a tree just on the suspicion.' A trace of bitterness
flickered across Shaw's gargoyle face - a trace of self-contempt. 'Pretty much
the only thing Boden
can't
be passin' hisself off as is a
trapper.'

'Do
we know he
didn't
do any trapping? You said yourself Tom didn't know anything about him—'

'Nor
did he.' Shaw nodded at Robbie Prideaux and half a dozen mountaineer friends
gathered around his little campfire a dozen yards on the other side of the
path, ferocious-looking in blanket coats and bristling beards. 'But I'm
guessin' he could no more pass hisself off as a trapper than I could get up at
a Mardi Gras ball an' pass myself for a musician, just from talkin' to you.
First time somebody handed me a bassoon
I
'd be a dead beaver.' He cracked
his knuckles. 'Truth is, Maestro, we're trackin' an animal that we don't know
what its prints look like. Where's Sefton got to?'

'He
went off to explore the camp.'

Shaw
grunted and answered January's thought rather than his words. 'If'fn he stays
sober in this place, we'll know he has truly drunk his last drink.'

Out
on the meadow, two more trappers approached Robbie Prideaux's fire, lugging
between them an appalling mess of the entrails of what looked like an elk,
heaped up on the animal's skin between them, and were greeted with cheers.

January
had heard of this particular contest and groaned. 'I'd hoped that was just a
tall tale.'

Shaw
grinned. 'Hell, Maestro, you think anyone could make up a story like that?'

The
point of the contest - usually involving buffalo intestines, further to the
east in that animal's range - was for one mountaineer to start at one end of
the some eighteen feet of entrails, with his opponent at the other end, and to
see which man could swallow the most, raw and whole. Judging from the whoops,
shouted comments, cheers and slurps which followed, the only lubricant involved
- other than the general texture of the guts themselves - was large quantities
of AFC liquor.

January
shook his head in amazement. 'Do they clean them first?' he asked. 'Rose is
going to want to know.'

'Depends
on how they feels 'bout bein' called a sissy.'

Shaw
struck flint with the back of his knife, lit the candle in the lantern, a warm
ball of gold in the cindery blueness which he hung to the corner of the markee.
The air was cooling rapidly: in New Orleans it would be like a slow oven until
the small hours of the morning.

Rose
...
He pushed the thought aside.

'Sounds
like your brother Johnny would have made as good a policeman as yourself.'

'He
was sharp.' Shaw's flat voice held the first trace of sadness January had heard
in it, in all these weeks. The first trace of human grief. 'He was a good
hunter. But he had no hardness to him. He was kind. But if brains was
gunpowder,' the Kentuckian added, shaking his head, 'Johnny couldn't'a blown
his nose. He probably walked straight up an' asked Boden: "
Who's this Hepplewhite an' what kind of trouble you talkin' about
in your letter
. . . ?" He didn't think evil of no one. It wasn't in him.'

Words
floated up on the wind from Seaholly's: '—hollowness of the world - sinful
fornication - writhing in eternal flame—' It definitely sounded like there was
a preacher in camp.

'Sometimes
I think it's 'cause he left the mountain so young,' said Shaw. 'He was only
twelve when he come downriver with me an' Tom that last time, us all thinkin'
it was just for the summer an' we'd sell them hogs an' puke our guts out on

Bourbon
Street an' then head back to our mama an' our wives an' find 'em as we'd left
'em . . . The mountain was like this,' he added, looking out into the growing
blue of the twilight. 'No law; no reason not to kill a man who put your back
up, 'ceptin' fear of what his friends'd do to you, or to your kin. There was
bad blood all over the mountain, from the Tories sellin' weapons to the Indians
durin' the war.'

From
the direction of the liquor tent came the sudden spatter of gunfire, whores'
shrieks and a man's voice raised in a howl of pain. '
Damn it, am I killed? Am I
killed ...?'

'Couldn't
hardly have a weddin' or a dance, 'thout somebody gettin' killed from ambush.
If your kin called on you to go burn somebody's barn or kill their stock - or
maybe shoot somebody 'cause maybe his brother might of killed your cousin - you
went. You didn't ask. I was awful old 'fore I even saw a sheriff, much less
knew what one was. We grew up lookin' after our own.'

He
shrugged his bony shoulders as if trying to shift some unseen weight. 'Johnny
had a good soul.'

The
last streaks of gold and yellow dimmed above the western ranges, the sun gone
but light still saturating the evening sky.
Looking after
our own . . .

January
prayed that his sister Olympe, the voodoo-ienne, and their youngest sister, the
beautiful Dominique - not much older than Johnny Shaw had been - were looking
after Rose. It was fever season in New Orleans. With the quick-falling tropical
dusk, mosquitoes would rise in whining clouds from the gutters and drive everyone
from the galleries into the stuffy dark of the house.
Please God, don't let Rose be taken with the fever . . .

He
wouldn't know until November, whether she was living or dead.

There
was nothing he could do but pray, and trust.

'I
was twenty-five years old,' he said after a time, 'before I saw a mountain. The
first year I was in France, some of the medical students at the Hotel Dieu
asked me along on a trip to Switzerland with them. I'd seen pictures, but I
almost couldn't imagine what they'd be like.'

'Somebody
in New Orleans,' sighed Shaw, 'gotta put up a hill or somethin', so's the
children growin' up in that town knows what the word means. I do miss 'em,' he
added. 'For all what it was like, keepin' a watch on your back when you went
anywheres, or hearin' hooves in the dark outside your house an' havin' to go
for your gun just in case - I miss the mountains. The stillness there ain't
like the still you get in the bayous. Johnny missed 'em bad. He wasn't but
twelve when we come downriver in '29. Tom never was much hand for writin', but
after they left New Orleans an' came out here, I'd think of 'em, in mountain
country. An' I woulda bet money,' he concluded resignedly,
'if'fn
I coulda found a taker, that 'fore full dark Sefton would get hisself hooked up
with some filly—'

'Well,
no takers from anyone who knows him,' agreed January, following the direction
of Shaw's gaze. Hannibal came walking back from the direction of the Indian
camps, his spidery silhouette against the lavender dusk trailed by a smaller, plumper
and more curvaceous figure in a deerskin dress.

'Pleased
to meet you, m'am,' said Shaw, and he and January removed their hats.

'She
only speaks French,' explained Hannibal.

'And
this is—?' January prompted.

The
fiddler gave them a happy smile. 'Gentlemen, permit me to introduce to you my
wife.'

Her
name was Morning Star. Her father had been - and her brothers were - warriors
of the Ogallala Sioux, and the entire family visited the Ivy and Wallach camp
that night for dinner and the ceremonious giving of presents. 'Didn't nobody
tell
you when you marries a squaw you marries the whole tribe?' demanded Shaw,
yanking Hannibal aside at one point during the feast of elk ribs, stew, and
cornbread. And, when Hannibal shook his head, 'Well, that vermillion we just
give 'em is comin' out of your wage.'

Hannibal
didn't get wages - or indeed any payment at all - from the Ivy and Wallach
Trading Company. 'All right,' he agreed. 'I won't do it again.'

Morning
Star and her sisters put up a lodge behind the Ivy and Wallach markee, Morning
Star took over the cooking of the feast from the camp-setter Jorge (which was
just as well, in January's opinion), Robbie Prideaux and his friends invited
themselves over with all the rest of the elk (sans entrails - January wanted to
ask who had won the contest, but didn't dare lest he be given more details than
he wished to hear), and after supper Hannibal, to impress his new in-laws,
played the violin. Mozart and O'Carolan, jigs and shanties and sentimental
ballads. Some of the men got up in the firelight and danced, with the Taos
girls who - hearing the music - walked up from Seaholly's in their jingling
poblana
finery, or with each other in the time-honored frontier fashion, the 'lady'
scrupulously marked with a red bandanna knotted around a hairy wrist. As the
music flowed out like a shining rainbow over the meadows, January saw them
gather in the darkness beyond the light of the fire, as Prideaux had predicted:
traders and engages from the Hudson's Bay camp, independent trappers and
representatives from half a dozen Indian tribes. Most who came hauled along
contributions to the feast: grouse, pronghorns, a bighorn sheep . . .

Most
also brought liquor, and Hannibal smiled and shook his head; to the first of
them, his new brother-in-law Chased By Bears, he explained, 'The Sun spoke to
me in a dream and told me that if I tasted firewater again, he would take my
music away from me forever.' Everyone seemed to accept this except
yellow-bearded Jed Blankenship, who was stupendously drunk himself and was
finally removed by Prideaux and Shaw for a non-consensual bath in the river.
Manitou Wildman, also drunk, burst into bitter tears when Hannibal played 'Fur
Elise' and retired to the meadows to howl at the moon.

Had
they planned it, January reflected later, they could have found no better way
of meeting two-thirds of the camp and bringing the Ivy and Wallach store into
the mainstream of gossip for the remainder of the rendezvous.

The
bride herself was a little pocket-Venus, about twenty- two years old, with a
round face, twinkling black eyes, and - like most Indian ladies - a repertoire
of jokes that would put a preacher into seizure at forty paces. She was a
better cook than Jorge (the same could also have been said of Robbie Prideaux's
dog) and murderously efficient at moccasin repair, no small boon given the
quickness with which the soft leather footwear wore through. Before the end of
the wedding festivities, she had bargained for Robbie Prideaux's elk hide and
the skin of the bighorn sheep that had been the contribution of Sir William
Stewart - second son of the Laird of Grandtully and guest of the AFC - to the
celebration; January came back from his morning bath in the river to find her
fleshing and stretching them outside the lodge. 'Why should you trade good
beads to that woman with the Delawares who sews moccasins,' she asked, 'when I
can make you better ones for nothing? But you also should have a wife, Winter
Moon,' she added gravely.

'I
do,' replied January. 'But she is back in the city of the white men on the
Great River, being unable to come with us on account of being with child.' Even
speaking her name filled him with longing and with joy.

'Rose.'
Morning Star gave him her beautiful smile. 'Sun Mouse told me.' Sun Mouse was
her name for Hannibal - one which had been almost immediately picked up by
every whore in the camp as well. 'I meant, a wife for the rendezvous. I have
two sisters—'

'Tall
Chief forbade more than one of our party to have a wife.' The twin concepts of
being faithful to a spouse a thousand miles away, should one possess such a
thing, or of avoiding a massive dose of the clap by steering clear of Mick
Seaholly's girls, were so alien to almost everyone at the rendezvous that
January didn't waste his breath explaining them. Instead he spun Morning Star
an elaborate tale of the shooting contest by which it was determined which of
them would be permitted to marry, and how Sun Mouse had bested both himself and
Tall Chief - Shaw - by putting sand in their powder.