The Shirt On His Back Read online

  (Waugh indeed, reflected January . . .)

  To hear their own voices – and the voices of others like themselves – after eleven months of hunting prey that would flee at the sound of an indrawn breath and leave them hungry or at least beaver-less that day.

  Fortunately, it was one of January’s greatest pleasures to hear people who knew what they were talking about talk about their work. Inside that first hour at the store tent, he heard endless comparisons of the relative merits of French and British gunpowder, discussions of the proper ways of dealing with Mexican authorities if you happened to find yourself a little farther south than you’d counted on, discourses on how to locate water in the arid stretches that lay between the western mountains, or where the beaver could still be found as thick and populous as they’d been ten years ago. (‘Say, Prideaux, is it true that Cree squaw of Clem Groot’s showed Groot where there’s a secret valley where the beaver’s the size of baby bears? You should see the pelts Groot brought in . . .’)

  Indians came as well. As a child, January had played with the children of the local Houmas and Natchez bands, who occasionally camped on his master’s land, but even then he’d known that they were only the broken remnant of the people they once had been. Since crossing the frontier, he had found himself in the world of the Indians, where the tribes and nations were still strong. Shaw’s little party had travelled from Independence along the Platte with a trading caravan bound for Santa Fe, for protection against the Pawnee, who still held sway on those endless grasslands, and here at the rendezvous a dozen tribes and peoples were represented: Crows and Snakes keeping company mostly with the trappers who worked for the AFC, Flatheads and Nez Perce camped around the Hudson’s Bay tents, alliances mirroring the ancestral enmities of the plains. There were Shoshone and Mandan, Sioux and Omaha. There was even a bunch of Delaware Indians, who had fled the ruin of their people on the east coast two generations ago, to take up a sort of vassalage with the Company as scouts – ‘I’ll take you down there tomorrow, hoss, they got a squaw does nuthin’ but sew moccasins, an’ she can fix you up a new pair for fifty cents in twenty minutes . . .’

  January had filled pages of Rose’s notebook with jottings of their characteristic designs of war shirts or tipis, and with unsifted gossip about this tribe or that. Despite the fact that it was, as January well knew, completely illegal for white men to sell liquor to any Indian, when the tall Crow in their beaded deerskin shirts came with their packs of close-folded beaver skins, Gil Wallach shared several tin cups of watered-down forty-rod with them before negotiations began as to price. When they came into the store tent later – with the variously-colored ‘plew’ sticks that represented credit for pelts – January was given to understand that a water bottle filled with liquor was to be quietly set out behind the tent for them as part of the deal.

  Other 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 I?’

  ‘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 engagé 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.’

  THREE

  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 rifle-shot, 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.’