The Shirt On His Back Read online

  Speeches were made about the election of the new President (toasts to Van Buren and to Old Hickory); challenges issued – Americans against British – to wrestling matches, horse races, competitions in shooting and knife throwing and swallowing elk guts: Waugh! The guest of honor, Company trapper Jim ‘Gabe’ Bridger, was ceremoniously presented with a suit of medieval armor that Stewart had hauled up the mountain for him, to whoops of approval from all present; Chief Red Arm was given several Company medals and a very handsome beaver hat worth ten dollars in St Louis.

  Sir William made his way over to the Ivy and Wallach party, carrying a guitar and followed by a young man in a buckskin coat bearing what looked like a sketchbook. January creased his brow in an expression of vexation: ‘What, nobody in the camp had a piano?’

  ‘Not a one,’ grieved His Lordship, stroking his black mustaches. ‘What this world is coming to I can’t think. This belongs to Mick Seaholly, of all people – you’d scarcely think the man would be a practitioner of the musical arts. And speaking of the arts,’ he added as January bent an ear to test the sound of the guitar’s strings behind the ever-increasing clamor in the tent, ‘might I introduce my friend Mr Miller? Mr Miller is a painter I asked to accompany me this year, since this may well be my last visit. In New Orleans I had word that my brother is ill, and I – I regret to say – am the heir of Grandtully Castle.’

  ‘I wish him a full recovery, then,’ said January, ‘and long life.’

  ‘Not as heartily as I do.’ Stewart sighed and looked around him at the candlelit gloom. ‘I fear that when I’m finally able to come back, it’ll all be gone. Settlers—’ He shook his head. ‘Not to speak of missionaries like that repellent chap Grey . . . I’m sure Parliament will give your government an argument about it, and I’m equally sure that argument will come to exactly nothing. I’ve been in this country long enough to know that when Americans start to move into land, it’s going to be theirs, no matter who has prior claim on it.’

  Across the firelit Breughelesque confusion, men’s voices rose in anger. Stewart turned his head sharply: John McLeod was shaking his fists almost in Edwin Titus’s face. ‘Lord, they’ll be at it in a minute, look how red old Mac’s turning. Could I get you and Sefton to give me a little Meyerbeer, before the storm breaks? Something from Robert le Diable, maybe?’

  ‘It’ll be our pleasure.’

  Hannibal had barely got halfway through the ballet of the mad ghosts of the dancing nuns, however, when the storm did break. McLeod surged to his feet shouting, ‘And that’s your way, then? To hell with what your government promises, to other nations or to the Indians themselves, so long as your bloody Company gets its profits—’

  In the corner, January could see young Mr Miller sketching frantically: waving arms, men lining up behind their chiefs, Indians looking in at the door . . .

  ‘And I suppose the trustees of the Hudson’s Bay Company are in the trade to improve the lot of the heathen by their sterling example?’ Titus said.

  ‘As you’ve improved the lot of the Crows, by paying them with liquor to murder those who stand in the Company’s way?’

  ‘You’ve been listening to your Flathead friends.’ Titus, coolly sober – January wondered if he, like Hannibal, had quietly paid one of the clerks to fill his cup with brown spruce-water instead of liquor – glanced scornfully at the Flathead chief Kills At Night. ‘I never met an Indian yet who didn’t claim that Americans had done him wrong. Yet they keep clamoring around the gates of the Company forts, begging to be wronged again, I presume. I only stated the obvious: that America’s right to the Oregon Country has been demonstrated, over and over again, in the sight of history—’

  ‘Don’t you give me your bilge water about history!’

  ‘Don’t want to bring up who’s lost two wars on this continent?’ The Controller raised his sparse snuff-colored brows. ‘Well, I can understand that.’

  McLeod – usually the most equable of men – lost his temper then and lunged at Titus. Kills At Night, who’d been following the discussion closely, was on his feet in the same moment, and if the Flathead chief had been a little less fuddled with Stewart’s cognac, and a little quicker at pulling his knife free of its sheathe, he would have been killed. Shaw, sitting close to them, had both hands over Kills’s knife-wrist, pinning the weapon and at the same time blocking the line of fire of three trappers who’d brought their rifles up at the first movement of attack; January was among the men who launched himself to drag McLeod back from strangling Titus. The noise within the shelter was nothing to the sudden wave of howling and shouts from outside, where ten or a dozen of McLeod’s Flatheads sprang to their feet and the Company’s Crows sprang to theirs.

  Stewart shouted, ‘Damn it!’ as both groups of warriors flung themselves at one another in the darkness, and he caught up his rifle – nobody at the banquet was more than twelve inches from a loaded weapon – and leaped over a log bench and outside into the fray. Others tried to follow, and January, Shaw, and the glum-faced newcomer Warren Wynne formed a rank at the edge of the firelight: the last thing anyone needed, January thought, was for trappers intoxicated on expensive port and cognac to charge into twice their number of Indians drunk on Company firewater.

  For a moment it was touch-and-go: he could hear McLeod shouting outside, and also Jim Beckwith, the Company trapper who was also a chief among the Crows (and who was probably responsible for a great deal of the alcohol being circulated outside). But he was watching Titus, and though it wasn’t easy to distinguish expressions in the glow of firelight, the Company comptroller didn’t stand like a man who was ready to charge into a fight.

  He was hanging back, watching and listening to see how things would develop.

  It was at this point that the Reverend William Grey came storming into the tent, like Moses descending from Sinai to discover the Israelites disgracing themselves around the Golden Calf.

  ‘Strong drink is a mocker, saith the Lord!’ Grey lifted his gaunt fact to Heaven. ‘Partake not of strong drink, saith the Lord, lest ye die! Publican!’ the minister thundered, one long finger stabbing at Titus. ‘Whoremaster! Is this how you keep them your slaves, then? Poisoning the bodies and the minds of God’s children with your evil swill?’

  ‘That’s coming it a bit strong,’ muttered Stewart, ‘for a man who refused to stay in the Oregon country because he said the Nez Perce were devils incapable of salvation—’

  ‘Evil is he who destroyeth the body, but more evil still, he who casteth the soul down into Hell, as you have cast these souls into hell with the liquid devil, rum!’

  ‘That ain’t rum,’ pointed out Jim Bridger, standing behind January’s shoulder. ‘Tastes like whiskey to me – the part of it that don’t taste like bear piss.’

  ‘How do you know what bear piss tastes like, Bridger?’

  Titus snapped, ‘Somebody get him out of here.’

  ‘The Lord shall have his revenge!’ Grey shouted as three of the Company engagés closed in around him. ‘Touch not the servant of the Lord! His servant cometh, even now, to break the chains of Satan – to break the chains that you have forged . . .’ He managed to get a hand free and point at Titus again, who was probably – behind the impenetrable gloom of the tent – red with wrath. ‘And to bring you and your hell-begotten Company to the justice of the Department of Indian Affairs!’

  At this sudden descent from the Biblical to the governmental, Titus held up his hand. ‘What?’ The Controller’s voice was deadly quiet.

  Grey smiled in triumph – perhaps at having gotten Edwin Titus’s attention – and shook his arms free of the grip of his captors. ‘The Department of Indian Affairs,’ he answered smugly, in a conversational tone. ‘There’s an Indian Agent on his way up the mountain, to verify the charges that I sent to Congress last year, that the American Fur Company was selling liquor to the tribes.’

  There was nonplussed silence. The Missouri trader Sharpless said, in a voice of honest surprise, ‘It’s agin t
he law to sell liquor to an Injun?’

  Titus spoke no word, and his thick-boned face revealed nothing, but the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head, were like the clash of a drawn weapon.

  ‘And don’t think you can bribe your way out of this one.’ Grey displayed stained teeth in the flickering shadows. ‘Or convince the agent that every Company man needs to carry forty gallons of raw spirits with him for personal medicinal purposes. Asa Goodpastor is a man of my own Church, a righteous man, unshakeable in holiness. A man who cares for the souls of the heathen, and who despises as much as I do the filth of liquor and all those who spread it. Woe unto you, children of Belial!’ His tone, which had been creeping back into evangelical thunder, pealed forth again like a warning bell. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan! For the footsteps of the Lord resound in the hills, and his righteous vengeance advances apace!’

  In a quiet voice, Titus repeated, ‘Get him out of here. Before I kill him myself.’

  SIX

  Whether any of this had anything to do with the trouble being brewed between Frank Boden and the mysterious Mr Hepplewhite, January wasn’t certain, but the evening had at least been instructive.

  It was unfortunately to become more so.

  ‘Could an Indian Agent actually close down the Company?’ inquired Hannibal, on the way back up the trail to camp.

  ‘By hisself?’ Shaw spoke without taking his attention from the formless darkness of the land to their left. Though the smell of that many humans was generally enough to keep bears from getting too close, it was by no means an uncommon thing to find them prowling at this time of night, drawn by the smell of camp garbage. Last night January had nearly walked into one when he’d gone down to the river to piss. ‘Not hardly. But he can sure shut down their operations for a year, while they sort things out with that gang of licensed thieves in Washington. If so be the British raise a stink . . .’

  ‘Which you know they’re gonna,’ put in Wallach gloomily. ‘Or businessmen in their pay. Money bein’ as bad as it is right now, a year can make a difference. Things ain’t like they was, even a year ago.’

  No, thought January, his mind catching the echo of words he’d been hearing, not only at the rendezvous, but all the way up the trail from Fort Ivy.

  It’ll all be gone, Sir William had said, looking around him at the candlelit gloom of the banquet tent: the mountaineers with their Indian braids and porcupine-quill moccasins, the dark eyes of the Indians gleaming with Company whiskey, the spit of venison dripping over the fire. It was the true reason His Lordship had brought his own private artist out from the East: to capture not what he was leaving, but what was leaving the world, evaporating like smoke on the wind of time.

  Yet, looking out over the vast stillness of the valley, the pale blurs of the tipis under starlight, the gleam of coyote eyes flashing suddenly in the grass, January thought: it’s gone already, if rich sportsmen have begun to come up here to hunt with the savages and pretend they’re savage themselves.

  A member of His Majesty’s Sixth Dragoon Guards, Sir William had fought at Waterloo. The regret January had heard in his voice, when he spoke of going back to the duties of his family, was genuine. But there were two other gentleman hunters in the camp: Germans who had come in quest of excitement and the right to say: I’ve chased buffalo on the Plains . . . I’ve seen the wild Indians . . .

  And behind the gentleman hunters – and the missionaries like Grey – emigrants were already on the road, following the mountaineers’ trails to the western country in search of un exhausted land that hadn’t been divided up between uncles and cousins of prior generations. In search of a new start after the bankruptcies sweeping the East. He remembered New Orleans when it had been a walled city. The cane fields had come right up to within a block of Canal Street. On cricket-haunted summer nights he’d hunted rabbits and fished in Bayou St. John, where wooden American houses now stood.

  An owl hooted in the darkness – it was only an hour short of dawn. After Grey’s departure the feast had gone on for hours, Hannibal fiddling like an elf drunk on starlight, and the men had danced out of sheer high spirits as well as Company booze. Jim Bridger had put on the armor Stewart had given him – cuirass, greaves, and helmet of old Spanish plate, suitable, Stewart said, for a Knight of the Plains – and this had led into mock battles and demonstrations of how the stuff could or couldn’t protect a man in combat. Stewart had sat back and beamed, almost – but not quite, January told himself, because he liked His Lordship – like a father contemplating his children playing with a particularly successful Christmas gift. To judge by the noise behind them now, there were trappers who were at it yet.

  The scents of last night’s storm still whispered in the air: wet forests, quenched grass, damp earth far out among the streams on the meadow. New Orleans, thought January, will be a sewer now: reeking, crawling and hot as the hinges of Hell.

  Fever season.

  Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, uphold Rose in your hand . . .

  His wife in Paris, his beautiful Ayasha, had died in the fever summer of 1832 . . . Five years ago, only five . . .

  He had come home from working in the plague hospital and found her dead.

  It was not only law that did not reach to this achingly beautiful place. It was word of those you had left behind.

  It would be September before he knew if Rose was still alive. Before he knew if the child she carried would ever be born. Not even that, he realized. The letter that will be waiting for me in Independence will have been written weeks before. I won’t know – I won’t KNOW – until I walk each step along the brick banquette of Rue Esplanade up from the levee, until I run up each step of the gallery . . .

  ‘Maestro?’

  He turned, aware that Shaw had spoken to him, and said, ‘I’m sorry . . .’

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ said Shaw, with surprising gentleness in his voice.

  Behind them, in French, Morning Star asked Hannibal, ‘What will you bet me, Sun Mouse, against this sour God-man who threatened Cold Face at the feast getting himself down the mountain alive?’

  ‘Would Cold Face kill him?’ asked Hannibal, turning to Wallach. ‘Or have him killed?’ Cold Face being, of course, Edwin Titus. Morning Star’s sisters – who seemed to have found boyfriends at the feast, because they’d been nowhere to be found when it was decided to return to camp – had a far less flattering name for him.

  ‘If that child thought he could foist the blame on the Hudson’s Bay Company somehow,’ said Wallach, ‘you bet your second-best fiddle-strings he would, pilgrim. Grey’s been McLeod’s guest up at the Hudson’s Bay camp for weeks. The man’s got nuthin’ but holiness to sell, an’ he’d have starved on that in this camp. He’ll do what McLeod tells him to. And sure as the Brits are trying to make trouble for the AFC, the AFC’s got its men in Congress just climbin’ the backs of their chairs, lookin’ for a reason to push Van Buren into startin’ a war with Britain so as to give us a good excuse to send troops into Oregon.’

  He pointed upriver into the darkness, toward the faint gleam of snow that even at this season whitened the highest tips of the Gros Ventres. ‘Five miles upstream of here, you’ll find what’s left of Fort Bonneville. Everybody said Bill Bonneville was a blame fool, to try to build a tradin’ post in a valley that’s snowed in six months of the year . . . especially since Bonneville was only on leave from the US Army for a year. Myself, I couldn’t help thinkin’ how it’s a blame stupid place for a tradin’ post, but a damn smart one if you wanted to put a garrison up here. If the Brits send troops down, they’ll have to come this way.’

  A dog barked – in Iron Heart’s camp, January calculated, the farthest from the river and from any other Indian camp. He’d seen neither the pockmarked Omaha chief nor any of his men at the feast. Other than the most necessary trading, none of them had come into the camp since the day January had fought Blankenship for the Omaha girl.

  ‘So it ain’t the liquor that’s the issue,’ said Shaw
after a time, returning to Hannibal’s question. ‘It ain’t even the Indians, but the land. It always comes back to the land.’

  ‘Well, if we don’t take it,’ pointed out Wallach, ‘either the Brits – or God help us, the Russkis down from Alaska – will. Same as all that hoo-raw about sellin’ whiskey to the tribes. You don’t hear the redskins objectin’ to it, do you? We’re not here to found a church; we’re here to do business. If the tribes see what happens when they get theirselves liquored up, an’ they don’t like it, then why do they keep askin’ for liquor? Why don’t they all just sign the pledge and put us all out of business?’

  Hannibal sighed. ‘Why indeed? That we should, with joy, pleasure, revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts . . .’

  ‘Titus was right,’ said the little trader. ‘If the government—’

  Shaw yelled, ‘Down!’ and dropped. In the same instant that January heard a sort of soft vrrrtt in the air near his face, and Wallach – who was standing nearest him – shoved him down into a shallow depression in the ground off the track. Lying flat on the dark earth January could see men silhouetted against the sky, and Wallach brought his rifle up and fired. At the same time another shot cracked – Shaw’s, January guessed – and he brought up his own rifle as a man sprang down into the hollowed ground, too close to aim at . . .