The Shirt On His Back Read online

  Mentally, January noted it all. Tents of canvas bleached by years of weather; cruder shelters, ranging from a few deer hides, to huts of pine and cottonwood boughs skilfully lashed with rawhide. Here and there a tipi, where a trapper had an Indian wife. When he’d gotten on the steamboat for Independence, Rose had handed him an empty notebook and told him to bring it back full.

  ‘The only way I can keep from hating you for being able to go, when I can’t,’ she’d said softly, ‘is to know you’ll bring this back.’ She was a scientist. January knew it was agony to her, to be left behind, to be shut out of the wonders of a world unglimpsed because she was a woman, and with child.

  Four months now he’d been making notes for her: animals, birds, plants, rocks. On the nights when he’d felt he would go insane with longing for her, it had been a little – a very little – like touching her hand. Like Shakespeare’s comic lovers, whispering devotion to one another through a crack in a wall.

  In the dappled shade of the cottonwoods on the river side of the trail, traders had hung scale beams to weigh the furs: the men of business in neat black broadcloth to mark their status, or gayer hues if they were Mexicans up from Taos. Most were clean-shaven, as befit representatives of all that was best in nineteenth-century civilization. Most wore boots.

  At six dollars a pound, the furs they weighed represented the whole of a man’s work for a year.

  June was ending. Some men had been here for weeks – others would still be coming in. For the trappers, it was more than just the only chance they’d have to sell their furs, or resupply themselves with gunpowder and fish hooks, lead and salt and sharpening stones. For many, it was the only occasion they’d have to talk to anyone in the language of the land they’d left behind, or to see faces beyond the narrow circle of partners and camp-setters; the only chance to hear news of the world beyond the mountains, to talk to anyone of events beyond the doings of animals, the chance of foul weather, the clues and guesswork about which tribes might be nearby – and were they friendly?

  It was also the only occasion for the next eleven months that they’d be around enough white men to be able to get drunk in safety, and despite the quality of the liquor, most of them seemed to be taking fullest advantage of this facet of the situation.

  He’ll be at the rendezvous, Tom Shaw had said, of the man who had killed his brother.

  ‘He’ll be at the rendezvous.’ And as he’d said it, Abishag Shaw’s brother – five years the elder, Shaw had mentioned on the steamboat, breaking a silence of nearly forty-eight hours on that occasion and then returning to it at once – had laid on the table between them in the firelit blockhouse of Fort Ivy a human scalp, the long hair a few shades fairer than Shaw’s own.

  Shaw had looked aside. ‘Why’n’t you bury that thing with him?’

  Tom Shaw had taken his surviving brother’s hand in his own, picked up their brother’s scalp and laid it in Shaw’s palm. ‘’Cause I know you, Abe,’ he said. ‘’Cause I heard you go on about a thousand goddam times about law an’ justice an’ the principles of the goddam Constitution. An’ I tell you this: if’fn any single one of the men that wrote your Constitution had had his brother murdered the way Johnny was murdered – scalped so’s we’d think it was the Blackfeet, an’ worse – an’ left up the gulch for the wolves, he’d go after the men that did it, an’ screw all justice an’ law. I wish you’d seen him when they brought him in.’

  Shaw stroked the dried skin, the fair straight locks that he’d touched times without number in life. ‘I wish I had.’ His chill gray eyes seemed to see nothing, and there was no expression in his light-timbred voice.

  On the steamboat – deck-passage, which in January’s case meant the narrow stern-deck just inboard of the wheel – Shaw had informed his two companions only that his younger brother Johnny had been murdered at Fort Ivy, a fur-trade station some six weeks beyond the frontier. Their older brother Tom was ‘bourgeois’ – the head man – of the fort; he pronounced it ‘bashaw’. ‘If it was Indians,’ he had said quietly, ‘Tom wouldn’t’ a called it murder.’

  After a long silence, with the firelight devils chasing one another across the log walls of the fort’s little office, January asked the bourgeois, ‘How is it you’re sure where this man will be?’

  The oldest brother’s face had tightened in the flickering gloom. He was much shorter than Abishag Shaw’s six-feet-two, and darker; his body reminded January of something that had been braided out of leather.

  ‘Frank Boden was the fort clerk.’ Tom Shaw’s voice was an eerie duplicate of Abishag’s, but thinner, like steel wire. ‘Johnny told me he’d found a half-wrote letter in Boden’s desk, to a man named Hepplewhite, that spoke of creatin’ some kind of trouble at the rendezvous this summer. Bad trouble, Johnny said. Killin’ bad. I didn’t believe him.’ A bead of fatwood popped in the coals, and the tiny red explosion of it glinted in the back of his dark eyes.

  ‘When I got back from Laramie a week later, Johnny was dead. Blackfoot, the engagés said.’ Tom cast a glance back at the door in the partition that separated the lower floor of the Fort Ivy blockhouse in two: his office where they sat, with its sleeping loft, and the store, where Clopard and LeBel – the oldest and the youngest of the half-breed ruffians who hunted meat, prepared hides and looked after the stock – were bedded down in their blankets. ‘They said Boden got so spooked at the way Johnny was cut up that he left the next day. Goin’ back to the settlements, he said. Then a week later it thawed, an’ one of ’em found Johnny’s scalp, stuck into the hollow of a dead tree a couple yards from where his body had been. No Blackfoot would leave a scalp that way. I knew then Johnny’d been right.’

  Shaw had said nothing through this. Had only sat looking into the fire, his brother’s scalp in his hand.

  ‘You kill him, Abe.’ Tom’s voice was cold and as matter-of-fact before witnesses as if there were no law against the killing of a man one merely suspected had done you a wrong. ‘You find him, and you kill him. You was the best of us. Best killer on the mountain, Daddy said—’

  ‘I never was.’

  ‘You was ’til you lost your nerve.’

  Shaw said nothing, his narrow gargoyle face like something cut from rock.

  ‘He’ll know me if I come to the rendezvous. He’ll know there wasn’t but one reason I’d leave this post. But he’ll think, seein’ you, only as how I called you to take Johnny’s place on account of him bein’ killed by the Blackfoot. You kill him, an’ you bring me his scalp, for me to nail to that wall.’

  Something in those words made Shaw glance across at his brother, straight thin lashes catching a glint of gold. Someone in the family, thought January, had nailed scalps to the wall of whatever cabin it was in the mountains of Kentucky where they’d grown up. ‘An’ this Hepplewhite feller?’ Shaw spoke cautiously, as if he feared a trap. ‘This killin’ trouble Johnny read of—’

  ‘What the hell is that to me?’ Tom Shaw took Johnny’s scalp out of his brother’s hand, sat back in his chair, the only chair in a room that was furnished primarily with benches of hewn logs, stroking the long fair hair. ‘You been on the flatlands too long, brother. You know better’n that. They’s a million square miles of mountain out there, Abe, an’ only this one chance to find him in that one place. You can kill anythin’ with one shot. I seen you do it. So don’t you breathe one single word that’ll scare him off. That ain’t our business.’

  The elder brother’s eyes burned like those of a man in slow fever. It was as if January, and Hannibal sleeping curled up in the corner by the dying fire, had ceased to exist. ‘You owe me, Abe,’ he said. ‘Hadn’t been for you runnin’ the way you did—’

  ‘I walked away. I never ran.’

  ‘A man that turns his back on his family is runnin’,’ retorted Tom. ‘Hadn’t been for that, Johnny an’ me, we’d never have had to go down to New Orleans the way we did, sellin’ hogs so’s there’d be money at home. You owe our blood, an’ you owe Johnny, an’ y
ou owe me. You tellin’ me you’ll run away again?’

  Shaw sighed. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘No, I won’t run away.’

  The pack-train passed the camp of the American Fur Company, a big store-markee with its sides up, and another – sides down – with a makeshift bar on trestles across the front and a gray-coated man with the blue eyes of a defrocked angel pouring drinks. Trappers and engagés clustered along the bar and around the half-dozen Mexican girls who lounged on rough-built benches along the front of the tent.

  ‘Hey, Veinte-y-Cinco!’ yelled Clopard, who had ridden with the train from Fort Ivy, ‘you wait right there ’til we get set! I got a little somethin’ for you!’

  The skinny whore gave him a dazzling, gap-toothed grin, ‘Hey, minino, I remember how little it is—’

  At the female voice Hannibal looked up, roused from his nightmare of barely-suppressed panic, and murmured, ‘Malo me Galatea petit, lascivia puella . . .’ a classical allusion that January hoped wasn’t going to spell trouble.

  The American Fur Company was making a good showing: in addition to a separate liquor tent, they had what amounted to a full-scale dry-goods store set up and half a dozen canvas shelters – watched over by engagés – to store the furs that their trappers under contract had brought in already. These were not traded for by weight, but simply handed over by the mountaineers in exchange for their pay, as if the land they trapped through was the AFC’s private farm, and they, laborers in the vineyard. January couldn’t help wondering if the Mexican girls were also on the Company payroll.

  A quarter mile further upriver, Shaw drew rein before a small store-tent and a couple of deer-hide shelters, which marked the camp of Gil Wallach, a former-mountaineer turned trader. The little black-haired bantam came from around the store’s counter and held out his hand to Shaw as he dismounted: ‘Tom wrote me you’d be heading up the train, Abe. I surely am sorry about Johnny.’

  Shaw made a motion with his hand, as if to brush the name away like a cobweb. ‘Ty Farrell in the camp? Tom had a message for him.’

  Wallach tilted his head a little, as if he smelled trouble even in this simple request. Ty had been a clerk at Fort Ivy. He’ll know Boden, Tom had said, in the firelit office that first night at the fort. They shared the room above this one, up ’til last Fall. He knows him, better’n any man at this fort: how he moves, how he talks, what he’d look like if he shaved off his beard . . . An’ he hates him. He won’t go cryin’ it around, like the engagés will, if they learn you’re on Boden’s trail.

  Like everyone else, Wallach would have heard that Johnny Shaw had been killed by the Blackfoot. Like everyone else, he seemed to accept that naturally the middle brother would leave his position as a Lieutenant of the New Orleans City Guards, to take up his junior’s responsibility of getting the supply-train up to the Green River. But Wallach had been a trapper, thought January. He can smell blood in the wind.

  ‘Ty’s camped about halfway to Hudson’s Bay.’ Meaning, January assumed, not the actual arctic bay, but the handsome agglomeration of tents that he could see another half-mile up the trail on the far side of Horse Creek, ringed with the tipis of its Indian allies. The British Hudson’s Bay Company had established the fur trade with the Indians long before the Americans had pushed their way to the north, and ruled the trade from the Yellowstone to the Pacific.

  ‘He’s fightin’ shy of me,’ Wallach continued wryly. ‘Seein’ as how he took an’ sold all his plews to that snake Titus that’s runnin’ the AFC camp here this year, without a word about the salary we paid him or the money he owes us. He may take some lookin’ for.’

  Shaw said, ‘Consarn,’ in a mild voice and commenced unloading the mules.

  The Ivy and Wallach markee had been pitched next to one of those great granite boulders that littered the riverbank, to discourage canvas-slitters in a country where theft from one’s enemies was a virtue among the tribes. January helped haul the stores inside, and he saw that two sides of the tent were further fortified with stacked packsaddles. Hannibal, a little shakily, carried his and January’s saddlebags down to an open spot in the cottonwoods just below the store, where a shelter could be set up behind a screening thicket of rabbitbush.

  The fiddler had attached himself to the expedition rather than endure alone the black depressions and attacks of unreasoning panic that still plagued him, though his last dose of opium had been the previous November, and had made himself useful as a sort of valet to his companions. For his part, January was grateful he’d done so of his own accord. After a winter of walking the French Town ’til dawn to keep his friend from throwing himself into the river, he still – at Easter – hadn’t been entirely certain that he would return from a six-month journey to find Hannibal still alive.

  ‘That a fiddle I see in your friend’s pack, pilgrim?’ A red-bearded trapper loafed over from his own nearby camp to help with the unloading. ‘Dieu, it’s been years since I heard fiddle music! You tell your friend from every man in this camp, he’s got only to put his hat down outside Mick Seaholly’s –’ he waved toward the AFC camp with its various accommodations – ‘an’ he’ll have a stack of trade-plews higher’n his knee inside an afternoon. Name’s Prideaux,’ he added, offering his hand as soon as he and January had set down their respective bales of shirts and trade-beads inside the markee. ‘Robespierre-Republique Prideaux.’

  ‘Ben January.’

  ‘Not up here before, I think?’

  ‘First time,’ said January, liking the man’s friendliness. They returned to the mules, pulling buffalo-hide apishamores from the animals’ backs and stacking them in the back of the tent.

  ‘Clerk?’ Prideaux took in at a glance January’s obviously store-bought clothing: calico shirt, coarse wool trousers, battered corduroy roundabout. With a sly grin, the mountaineer added, ‘Or you care to try your hand at huntin’?’

  ‘If ever I lose my faith in humankind,’ returned January solemnly, ‘and wish to put a period to my existence, I’ll do so by taking an oath to eat only what I can shoot,’ and Prideaux crowed with laughter.

  ‘Never say die, hoss! You come out with me tomorrow mornin’ – what kind of rifle you got? A Barnett? Them’s first-class guns . . . I’ll have you shootin’ the pips outta playin’ cards at three hundred yards by sundown, see if I don’t! Waugh! Why, sure as there’s meat runnin’, I once shot a bobcat as it leaped out of a tree straight behind me, on a pitch-dark night, aimin’ only by the sound of its cry—’

  ‘Maestro—’ Shaw appeared around the corner of the tent, quiet as the smallpox in his weathered scarecrow clothing, his long Kentucky rifle in his hand. There was another on his back – Mary and Martha, he had named them – and a knife at his belt; he looked as if he had been a part of this world for years. ‘Looks like I need to go out an’ hunt Ty Farrell, as he ain’t like to come around here anytime soon.’

  ‘Check for him at Seaholly’s, hoss,’ advised Prideaux cheerfully. ‘I hear Edwin Titus – that sourpuss Controller the Company’s put in charge this year – hired him on to the AFC for a hundred-fifty a year, plus seven-fifty a pound for his plews! Waugh! For that kinda wampum, he’s gonna be plowin’ through them girls like a bull buffalo through the prickly pears. I never did see a child go for the female of the species like Ty, ’ceptin’ for a sergeant of the marines I knowed down on the Purgatoire . . .’

  ‘I’ll keep the store,’ offered January.

  ‘Obliged.’ Shaw looked for a moment as if he might have said something else – asked Prideaux, perhaps, after Mr Hepplewhite, or queried for rumors about the unspecified trouble that Johnny had thought serious enough to risk his life pursuing. But January guessed how word of anything would fly from man to man in a camp where there was nothing really much to do but trade, get drunk, copulate and talk. Even the relatively short journey from Fort Ivy to the Green River had brought home to him how vast was this land beyond the frontier, how endless these mountains and how right Tom Shaw had been: only this one chance
to find him in that one place.

  He’d also learned that trappers, engagés, and traders – whose survival depended on observing the tiniest details of their surroundings – would gossip about anything.

  Only in silence lay any hope of success. Silence, and Ty Farrell’s willingness to play Judas.

  You can kill anythin’ with one shot. I seen you do it . . .

  January had, too.

  Shaw nodded his thanks, then set off down the trail afoot, in quest of his prey.

  TWO

  The goods in the tent hadn’t even been completely arranged – traps hung from the frame Clopard knocked together from cottonwood poles, twisted brown plugs of ‘Missouri manufactured’ set out on a blanket-draped trestle-table, skeins of trade-beads dangling temptingly from the inner frame of the markee – when others besides Robespierre-Republique Prideaux came to shop. Ivy and Wallach employed about six trappers full-time and some fifty engagés, who for a hundred dollars a year ranged the streams and rivers of the wilderness that stretched from the Missouri to the Pacific hunting beaver. This wage was paid in credit, and they spent this – and more besides – in the company tent. But the rendezvous camp also included independents, who had had enough money to outfit themselves and sold their skins to one company or another by the pound. These were the men who came to see what Gil Wallach was offering, and what he wanted for his wares.

  And, they came to talk. Inside that first hour, January discovered that the thing the trappers wanted most to do at rendezvous – besides get blue-blind drunk and roger their brains out at Mick Seaholly’s liquor tent in the AFC camp – was to talk. To tell tall stories. To trumpet their pristinely uninformed opinions about what President Van Buren (‘It is Van Buren, ain’t it, now?’) should be doing to fix things back in the States. To brag of their exploits in the mountains, in the deserts, on roaring rivers in flood or of how they’d triumphed over a whole encampment of Crow Indians in the competitive swallowing of raw buffalo entrails, waugh!