The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (32 page)

Coe had put on his elegant white gloves, but they didn’t have a formal appearance any more. Two of his fingers were sticking out of the ends, there was a long tear on one back, and the other was stained with axle grease. He waved them around with the same style, though, and that was what mattered.

I could see my father eyeing that bottle, and wondered what would happen. Maybe it’s crazy, but I felt sorry for him. It’s entirely possible I’ve pictured him wrong in some ways. A stranger
might have dismissed him as nothing but a lovable humbug, but there was more to him than that. I realize, now, after it’s all over, that he was crushed down by responsibility for going on this trip, and especially for taking me along. He
had
got us into it, what with the slipshod dodging of his problems back home, and now, you understand, he wasn’t quite so sure he’d be able to get us out.

So he eyed Coe’s sherry, and pretty soon he gave a long sigh. Finally he said, “Sir, I’m a teetotaler, born and bred. If there’s one thing I can’t abide the sight of, it’s rum. I know you won’t hold it against me when I tell you I consider it the devil’s partner. But neither can I stand a blue-nose—I know because I’m regarded as one myself, back in Louisville—so I’ll join you, delighted to, in a beaker of light wine.”

Then he added a couple of sentences, being unable to resist throwing in a quotation or so, out of the Bible, from a man called Paul something-or-other—I didn’t catch his last name. It had to do with drinking wine to keep your stomach from getting out of whack. “So you see, scriptural authority exists,” my father added, and grabbed the little crystal tumbler that Coe held out. Matt Kissel was there, and Brice, too, whittling vacantly on a stick, and they both took a glass, Brice looking up eagerly and Kissel, after a start of hesitation. In a few minutes, he poured it out behind him; I saw him do it, but nobody else did. He
was
a teetotaler, but he wouldn’t have hurt anybody’s feelings for a wagonload of gold.

During my father’s absurd discourse on his soberness, I saw Coe regarding him with puzzlement. Coe was a sissy-looking man, by frontier standards, but by now people knew he wasn’t a sissy inside. What’s more, he was nobody’s fool. His troubles rested mostly on keeping up the appearances, and mules.

Once my father collared the glass, he held it carelessly aside, to prove he didn’t need it. You would have thought he might accidentally tip the liquid out, he was so disregarded. But when, in response to Coe’s toast to the bride and groom, he lifted his glass up, he took a bite out of that sherry that left nothing but a brown bubble in the bottom.

“Splendid. Really splendid. An elderly sack from, I assume, the region of Jerez de la Frontera. I had an uncle who wintered there.”

“You surprise me, doctor,” said Coe. “The Spanish climate can be beastly.”

“He didn’t go for the climate,” replied my father, warmed up a little and returned to his natural self. “He went down for the sherry.” Set up by this nonsense, he said, “Following his middle thirties, I doubt if he was ever aware of any change in the seasons.”

“It’s a way of life,” said Coe drily. I could see that, having made up his mind to something, he intended to nurse that bottle slowly, but he might as well have hauled it out in a wigwam full of Apaches. I once heard a man say my father could be the most engaging companion and conversationalist on earth when he tried, and now he would have charmed a bird off a limb. He spoke (I believe) on something called Bizzanteen architecture (with reference to Chimney Rock); Aztec fertility symbols, which it wouldn’t serve any good purpose to repeat here; the emigration of some Israelites out of Egypt, led by an early trail scout and lawyer named Mose, who I judged was a pretty tough old bird, not unlike Coulter; and then he gave out notes on a couple of sick poets name Sheets and Kelly; established links between man’s historical development and the grape; and wound up, as usual in this period, on the Mormons. By this time, all the wine was gone, and Coe was probably wondering what hit him.

But that wasn’t all the activity of that night for my father. After Coe graciously refused an offer of dinner, saying that Othello had a stewpot boiling and would be put out by his absence, my father took up his medical bag and said he was going off to attend a man suffering from frostbite. This seemed uncommon odd, in the middle of summer, so when Kissel looked up in his mild way, he changed it, with some hemming and hawing, to “frogbite.”

“Yes,” he said, gathering confidence, and likely convincing himself, seeing the state he was in, “I grieve to tell you that one of our number, a Mr. Belkins—small man with a gray goatee and a limp-has had a very serious encounter with a frog.”

“Bitten
—by a
frog?”
inquired Brice, looking even fuzzier than usual.

“Did I say bitten? I don’t recall it.”

“Maybe he was kicked,” I suggested.

“Listen, my boy,” said my father sternly. “The cheapest kind of wit in the world is that enjoyed at other people’s expense. No doubt it seems ludicrous to you, hale and young and ready for your supper, but I can assure you it’s no joke for that unhappy sufferer, Mr. Beldings—”

“Beiden.”

“—for Mr. Beiden, lying up there perhaps at death’s door. No, this is no ordinary case—” and then a solution occurred to him, for he said, “The fact is, it was a
horned
frog, one of the most dangerous predators of the West.
That poor fellow has been gored!”

He left, and I sat shaking my head. I wasn’t only embarrassed, I was annoyed. But I saw that both Mr. Brice and Mr. Kissel were smiling; they liked him, and enjoyed his foolishness, and that made it better, somehow.

After I’d misfired on the Latin, my father gave me a long talking- to about helping out with chores, so I went over to where Jennie and Mrs. Kissel and that Indian girl, Po-Povi, were cooking, and they said they needed fresh firewood. Jennie sent the girl along with me. Now there wasn’t the least doubt in my mind that this Po-Povi—Water Flower, if you cared to believe her translation, which I didn’t—was just as wicked as Pretty Walker, but I couldn’t to save my life hate her. She was too sad.

My father was right about one thing, though. She was a worker; she didn’t have to be told twice, she pitched in and put things to order. Mrs. Kissel said she had “more elbow grease” than five white people, and she mothered and fussed over her so gentle and kind you’d have thought she was her own blood kin. But what you wouldn’t expect was that Jennie was crazy about her, too. When I got to figuring this out, I decided it was partly aimed at Coulter and me, because we were always running down Indians. Her liking of Po-Povi, you see, was a reproach to us.

We walked off toward the river, but firewood was scarce in this bare, alkali, wind-swept land. The girl had put an apron on, and when I asked her why, she said it was for
“bois de vache.”
As my father stated in his Journals, that’s what the French fur traders called buffalo chips, and I wondered how much she had seen in the course of being dragged from one tribe to another. She could speak tolerably good English—quite a few words, though sometimes twisted—but to tell the truth she didn’t speak at all unless necessary. She would bring us harm later—I felt sure about that—but she’d been given bad treatment, all right, and she wasn’t much more than a child.

I studied her on the quiet: she was perfectly straight and had a nice line to her back; and while she carried her head high, her eyes seemed always to be cast down. Her hair was done up in the usual two pigtails on either side, and her lashes were long and silky. Her skin wasn’t red, as people claimed about Indians, but was about the same shade as Coulter’s, though smoother. She had on the same buckskin blouse and skirt and leggings, but without pretty bead-work, and she hadn’t a single ornament whatever: no bracelets, no rings, no fancy belt, no velvet headband, no feathers, no copper wire, none of the things that make life rich to an Indian woman. She didn’t need them. Her handsome carriage would have stood out, no matter what she wore. For a second, seeing the resemblance, I had a stab of pain about the Pawnee girl. We could have been friends.

But now I was itching to know what this Po-Povi thought of her new situation.

“Where did you live?” I asked her.

She looked over her shoulder and said, “Back, beyond.”

“Behind the Chimney Rock?”

“Sometimes in a far country.”

“How many suns?”

“Farther than the eagle flies without rest.”

Afterward, I found out that her talk, when she made any, often was put in pictures that involved nature’s things like eagles, clouds,
sunsets and such like, and in other terms that came from Indian myths and legends, what my father called “the aboriginal fables of origin,” going back to their great god, Glooscap.

I’d thought that sort of stuff was mostly in books people wrote about Indians, to make it sound like poetry.

For all she was aware of me, we might have lived a thousand years apart.

Along the riverbank was a scraggly line of drift, and I gathered an armful of sticks that didn’t seem waterlogged; the girl found an apronful of buffalo chips. What buffalo were doing in this wasteland I didn’t know, but later I learned that they crossed and re-crossed the Platte forks going from place to place. The herds were smeared over the plains in such numbers that they spilled out everywhere.

Dark was closing down before we got back. Everybody was having supper late, because I suppose it was the first time they had felt like taking a breather. Up and down the line we could see fires glowing, and I heard a snatch of song. A wedding was tomorrow, we had come a long way toward California, things were peaceful for the moment, and spirits were generally high.

Since the first buffalo killed by Mr. Bledsoe, Coulter had organized a system of hunting one down nearly every other day. Mostly he did it himself, with help from the drovers. It wasn’t pretty, but it was exciting: they’d ride into the fringe of a herd, bending low on the necks of their ponies, and fire buffalo guns almost against the animals’ sides. Often you could see a blue ring of powder burn on the hide.

So we had buffalo meat all the time, now, and tonight we tackled it with a kind of holiday appetite. Even Brice was hungry, because he probably remembered it was customary to eat a hearty meal before they sprung the trap. I knew where my father was, well enough; he was up at the drovers’ wagon, with Coulter and the rest of that rough crew. For the purpose of mischief, it was as close as he could come to shantyboating, and as a matter of fact, it was a little too close for comfort.

This Indian girl started to gnaw in the usual cannibally way ot her bunch, but Mrs. Kissel set her right.

“Now, child, you don’t want to take the chunk and worry it like a sawyer—put it on your plate, so, and cut it with a knife and fork. That’s better. You’ll get onto white ways soon, and you’ll thank the blessed Lord for it.”

I could see the girl’s dark, clear eyes shine in the firelight, and for just an instant—a flicker and then gone—I thought she looked like smiling.

When supper was over I made up my mind to go forward after my father, but gave it up. I doubted if it would do any good. So I helped Po-Povi fix up a tent he had got her from a man that picked it out of cast-off rubbage, and saw that she was set. She’d slept with Jennie before, but now Jennie was getting married. I couldn’t see that this made any difference, and said so, said: “Your tent’s big enough for all three of you, and more. You and Brice could simply shove over, and there’d be room enough for four or five adults and a family of buffaloes. It’s pure selfishness.”

“You poor ninny,” said Jenny, blushing, “don’t you know
any
thing?”

As usual, she’d dodged the issue. That was one of the main troubles with this schemer; she never could stick to the point.

When we got the tent fixed, I said, “Good night,” and the girl said something in a language I didn’t understand, so I concluded she was crazy. All Indians were crazy, more or less. But in a minute she stuck her head out of the flap and said, very low, “Doctor have trouble?”

“He’s had it before. It comes on him regular.”

“Po-Povi wait to make medicine.”

“You’d better go to bed. He’s a doctor, and if he can’t cure himself he’d better hand in his bag.”

“Indian medicines good for strong water.”

I remembered the stuff they rubbed on those Pawnee boys, how it healed the slices in their chests, and wondered if we couldn’t have some fun and maybe do good at the same time.

“I’ll help you,” I said. “I once worked with a very reputable Pawnee witch doctor, who stood practically at the head of his profession, and my father’s taught me a lot, too. Where do we go?”

She took me by the hand, and on the way out, I snagged a lantern. After checking on Brice and the Kissels, to be sure they were bedded down, I let her lead me back toward the river. Inside my waist, I’d stuck one of my father’s pistols, in case she was planning any monkey business. I didn’t mean to be caught napping twice. But her aims were entirely medical.

On an ordinary night, we’d have as many as four sentinels out, but in this place, without any bad Indians around, and with festivities on hand, nobody saw the lantern at all. We were free to roam as we pleased.

She kept her nose practically to the ground, like a beagle, and I moseyed along beside, carrying the lantern. To tell the truth, I felt kindly toward her for taking such an interest. It wasn’t
her
stomach that was involved, and if it had been me, I’d let it slide: the sicker he got, the more good it would do him. But she gathered little leaves here, and a berry or two there, and dug some roots at the water’s edge, and peeled bark off of what looked like a willow shoot. To help out, I turned over some things I found, but she rejected them all. It made me sort of sore. One of them was poison sumac, she stated, and the other was something called “loco weed,” that they try to keep from giving horses.

Well, it was pretty dark, even by the lantern, so I might have been wrong, but she could have been wrong just as easy. So every now and then, on the sly, I gathered up whatever she missed, for if I’d learned anything from those Pawnees, it was that nature is the best healer. You can’t go wrong if you stick to the natural growths. They’re laid right out for you, free of charge. All you have to do is pick them up.