The Last Crossing, page 9
“I’d have give them pork,” Dooley muttered.
Lucy turned to Straw. “Where do you figure they went? Back home?”
“Kansas? I doubt it. Titus got himself in a spot of trouble there. His mother remarried and there were bad feelings between the boys and their stepdaddy. Titus shoved a pitchfork into him, and the fellow damn near died. Both boys did a skedaddle. Their mother’s a cousin of mine. I guess they heard talk I was selling horses here. Showed up on my doorstep one day looking for work.”
Lucy nodded to herself, lips pressed tight as she thought. “So where do you reckon they went – if they aren’t welcome home?”
“Probably north to British territory. Titus was always threatening to make for there and sign on with a whisky post. It’s a job would suit his temperament – drink poteen all day, and put his boots to drunk Indians. Don’t worry about those two, if they were dropped into hell Titus would claim the window with the cool breeze for the two of them.” Straw stopped himself then, realizing he had ventured in to rocky territory. This was a tender subject for her.
“Like Abner,” said Lucy, “cut from the same bad cloth.” Lucy’s eyes wandered aimlessly about the saloon, then came back to rest on him. “Mr. Straw, I have a boon to ask of you.”
“Just you ask, Mrs. Stoveall. I’d be pleased to do whatever I can.”
She poured herself another dollop of whisky before speaking. “I want you to take me up north and help me find my husband. He ought to know what befell my sister.”
Dooley jingled the coins in his pocket, a warning to Straw. He didn’t need it. “Mrs. Stoveall, that’s not a good idea,” Straw said. “The country up there isn’t fit for a woman.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Straw was treading carefully. “I traded in that country for a short while. It wasn’t easy country then, and it’s got a damn sight worse. The Indians are dying in droves up there from smallpox. Whisky has made them beggars. They know who brought both to them. White folks aren’t welcome.” He paused. “I’ll be damned if I take a white woman into that.”
Straw’s refusal, the whisky in her, caused Lucy to loose the grip on her smouldering anger. Lips twisted, she remarked to Dooley, “He’s kindness itself, Mr. Dooley, isn’t he? He’ll talk good deeds every which way. But he won’t deliver.” She swung round to Straw. “Don’t think I don’t know your kind, do-gooder,” she said, voice climbing dangerously high. “I see through you.”
Dooley broke in, trying to bend her from her course. “Think it might rain again, Miz Stoveall?”
But Lucy Stoveall was not about to be deflected. “I know your kind,” she said, keeping her attention fixed on Straw.
“Understand me, Mrs. Stoveall, I’m not taking you to chase after your husband in that country. But if you want, I’ll go and look for him myself. That I’ll do.”
“He wouldn’t come back for the likes of you,” Lucy said. “You aren’t the sort of man to get a point across. You’re a creeping Christer, Bible-reader, do-gooder like that Clumb.”
It was an unkind comparison, but Straw told himself she was unmoored because of the funeral. “Mrs. Stoveall, you aren’t going to get a rise out of me, I can promise you that.”
“No, sir, I won’t get a rise out of you,” she shot back. “Because you’re a cheek-turner. You let everybody run over you – old Daniels, even your hired hands.”
Dooley was inching his chair towards them, bumping the legs over the floorboards. “Miz Stoveall,” he said, proceeding carefully, “Custis only has your interests at heart. And he’s right–”
Lucy flared. “I don’t give a damn if he’s right! You think Custis Straw’s being right means anything to me!”
“I want you to listen to me, Mrs. Stoveall,” Straw said, ever so softly. “It’s true, you want me to be wrong, but wanting doesn’t make a thing so. It’s best you wait on your husband here. It can’t be too long before he turns up. Until he does, you ought to move out of that busted-up wagon and into more comfortable quarters. I want you to have my room here in the Stubhorn.”
Just then, Dooley’s question to Lucy about the possibility of more rain was answered. Sheet lightning sent a flicker through the room that played a blue-white jig on all their faces. Thunder rolled an empty, groaning barrel over the roof and set the windowpanes to rattling in their frames.
Straw saw that the liquor had finally got the better of Lucy Stoveall. There was no more life in those lovely brown eyes than in a doll’s. She was no longer with them. He said to Dooley, “Take Mrs. Stoveall upstairs to my room. She needs to rest. See her settled.”
Dooley fingered Lucy’s elbow delicately. She rose, took a few faltering steps. There was a sharp crack of thunder, but she didn’t register that, nor the sizzle of light that danced through the saloon. Straw took a small bottle from his jacket pocket and pressed it into her hand. “Laudanum. If you wake, Mrs. Stoveall, take a draft. It’s a soporific.”
Lucy accepted it numbly. Dooley led her upstairs.
Lucy groped her way out of an opiate dream. She could not locate Madge, kept reaching for her. Ever since Abner had left them, they had shared a bed for warmth, for comfort. She could smell the familiar scent of her sister. Her palms ran over the sheets, fumbling for her.
Then Lucy remembered Madge was dead. She sat straight up with the shock of it. It was the lye soap her sister had scrubbed Straw’s laundry with that she was smelling; it was there in Straw’s sheets, the same harsh, cleanly odour that had worked its way into her sister’s hands. A picture rose in Lucy’s mind: her little sister’s raw red fingers toying with the buttons of her dress as she sang.
Lucy lit a lamp to chase away the picture. The room had no clock, but she could feel the lateness of the hour. She had obliterated the afternoon, the evening, most of the night in dreamless sleep.
She saw herself in the mirror above the bureau, saw how much Madge and she had resembled one another. The white bodies scattered with russet freckles they had tried to fade with buttermilk poultices, laughing at their foolishness. The high, slanted cheekbones. Madge’s sorrel hair just a tad darker than her own tousled red mane. Lucy’s grief was a mother’s grief. The longing to mark changes in her child. My baby, she thought. My baby that I mothered, that I raised up. My baby that they took from me.
A brush lay beside the lamp on the bureau, beckoning. Lucy took it up. It had a silver back, streaked with tarnish. The weight of the silver was the weight of sorrow. Slowly, she flexed her wrist, watching the lamplight slide to and fro from the brightness of the metal to its dark tarnish. She made a pass through the air and felt the abundant heaviness of Madge’s hair under the brush. She heard singing, a purely pitched voice. Felt pleasure as she brushed Madge’s hair and her sister sang. Lucy’s lips began to move.
Straw had waited all afternoon and evening in case Lucy came back downstairs. She didn’t. Around ten o’clock, Dooley called it a day and took to his cot in the backroom of the Stubhorn. Straw made a mattress from the folded tarp and lay down to sleep in his clothes. But he could feel every board in the floor. The pain of the old war wounds to his legs stabbed him awake each time he tossed and turned. It rose from his body like revenants from a graveyard.
Straw knew there was no point in coaxing sleep any longer. Stealing through the darkness of the saloon in his stockinged feet, he went out the back door. The storm was over and the sky was clear of clouds. Straw stood in the wet grass under a mass of seething stars, countless sparks in the pitch-black night, drawing the coolness of rain-freshened air deep into his lungs.
Above him, the lamp came on in his room. He shifted to where the light from the window lay spread on the ground, gleaming on the wet grass, and checked his pocket watch. Four o’clock. For several minutes he stood begging the lamp to go out, for Lucy Stoveall to ease back into sleep.
Suddenly there came a faint voice, a tune afloat, drifting all around the light in which he stood. He strained to catch it, the voice slowly strengthening under his attention; the words finally making the darkness ring.
“Let us pause in life’s pleasures
And count its many tears
While we all sup sorrow with the poor.
There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears;
Oh, hard times come again no more …”
Lucy Stoveall was singing up there, in his room. The voice was familiar, but it was not hers. A light voice, a young girl’s voice.
He was hearing Madge. As Lucy had said, no one had sung for her sister. Now it seemed Madge was singing for herself.
“ ’Tis the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door;
Oh hard times come again no more.”
The singing stopped. The light went out and they all returned to their respective darkness.
9
CHARLES Yesterday evening, urged into action by the tattoo of the native drummer, I threw on my hat and coat and rushed off to the I. G. Baker Company, the firm engaged by Father’s New York business agent to act as our expedition’s treasury, seeking there dependable advice and assistance in the matter of locating Jerry Potts.
In my excitement, I had not stopped to think that given the lateness of the hour – somewhere around nine o’clock – that Mr. Baker would not be at the helm of his establishment. A foreman supervising the unloading of a shipment of goods informed me the proprietor had gone home, but, if I wished, I could speak to a Mr. Jabez Cooke. In the grip of my newly found resolve, I said, “Yes, at once.”
Directed to his office in the warehouse, I found Mr. Cooke presiding over a cluttered, filthy room with windrows of dead flies banked on every window sash. Mr. Cooke is typical of the specimens of American frontier manhood I have so far encountered, lanky, gaunt, most likely malarial. After offering him a cheroot, the end of which he bit off and began to chew, setting the remainder aside, I stated that I had come to him, a gentleman representing one of the great mercantile firms of Fort Benton, to make an inquiry about one of its citizens.
“Who might that be?” he asked, making himself comfortable, slinging a sinewy arm over the side of his chair and hoisting a cuspidor into his lap into which he squirted a stream of cheroot juice from between his front teeth.
“Mr. Jerry Potts. Do you know where I can find him?”
Mr. Cooke mumbled that he didn’t have time to keep track of half-breeds and their damn peregrinations. Then, rather impudently I thought, he asked what I wanted with Potts. I told him my brother and I wished to engage this Potts as a scout for our forthcoming expedition north. I added that it would prove useful to me if he could provide me with any information about this individual’s suitability and character.
Mr. Cooke, as it turned out, was only too willing to oblige. After twenty-five years involved in the trade with the Indians of the Upper Missouri, his and Jerry Potts’s paths have crossed often. He embarked unbidden on an interminable tale of Potts’s ancestry and upbringing, which, as I listened to it, seemed to rival one of Mr. Charles Dickens’s own novels, not only in its length, but as a chronicle of childhood hardship and ill-usage. Jerry Potts, I learned, is the son of a respectable Scot, Mr. Andrew Potts, who some thirty years ago was an employee of the American Fur Company during the time of the great trade in beaver pelts. Andrew Potts took an Indian woman to his bed, a Blood of the Blackfoot Nation, called Crooked Back, who, in due time, delivered him a son christened Jerry Potts. Sadly, while the child was still an infant, Andrew Potts was murdered by a disgruntled Blackfoot who shoved a musket through the trading wicket of Fort Mackenzie and shot him dead.
Crooked Back then formed another liaison with a Scottish trader, Alexander Harvey, who, in Cooke’s florid telling, seems to have exceeded the brutality and depravity of Dickens’s Bill Sykes. Crooked Back soon fled Harvey to return to the Blood tribe, leaving behind her baby son in Harvey’s charge.
When, bewildered, I asked why a woman would do such a thing, Mr. Cooke simply remarked with a nonchalant shrug, “Maybe Harvey wouldn’t surrender the boy so’s to punish her. Maybe Crooked Back thought it would be best if her son was raised white.”
Mr. Cooke spat into the cuspidor on his lap with an air of reflection, leaned towards me across his scarred desk, and with great relish launched into a series of gruesome anecdotes touching upon Harvey’s depravity. The heat of the close, stuffy office threatened to overwhelm me as these blood-soaked yarns were related. It was a struggle to curtail my impatience, but being determined to find Potts, I hoped that if I bore with Mr. Cooke, in the end he might impart some useful information that would be of assistance in locating the scout.
Everyone, it seemed, had been terrified of Alexander Harvey, white and Indian alike. When the American Fur Company engages at Fort Mackenzie could no longer bear his presence, they organized a petition to company headquarters in St. Louis, asking that he be removed. Harvey caught wind of it, beat every signer to a pulp, and went so far as to murder one of the petitioners within the very walls of the fort.
Harvey was a law unto himself. When a Blackfoot took a pig which he found wandering outside the walls of the fort, the Scot tracked him down and put a musket ball in his leg. “He sauntered up to the wounded brave, cool as you please,” Mr. Cooke continued, “lit a pipe and offered it to the groaning Indian. While the Blackfoot smoked, Harvey commented on the pleasing warmth of the sun, the prettiness of the view. When the Blackfoot had finished the pipe, Harvey said, ‘Take one last look at this fine world and think of how you’re going to miss it.’ Put his musket to the Indian’s ear and blew his brains out.”
But according to Mr. Cooke, the escapade which brought this madman’s career in the fur trade to an end involved a slave owned by one of the managers of the American Fur Company. In the depths of winter, the poor Negro was sent out to cut fuel in the woods near Fort Mackenzie. There he was discovered by Blackfoot who killed and scalped him. For Harvey, the murder of a black man was of no consequence, but the destruction of a piece of valuable company property was. He was determined to teach the Blackfoot a lesson. The next spring when they rode up to the fort ready to trade their skins, Harvey met them with a loaded cannon and, without warning, fired into their party, killing and wounding a score of them. Apparently, these particular Indians were not the perpetrators of the crime in question, but that did not matter to Harvey. However, his action did not instill in the Blackfoot a respect for the white man’s property, but only a great hatred for the American Fur Company. The Indians inaugurated a campaign of harassment and murder of such ferocity against the traders that the fort had to be evacuated and abandoned.
Cooke gave me a yellow-toothed grin after relating this incident. “There was mighty hard feelings towards Harvey after that. The one thing you don’t want to interfere with is a man’s pockets. It was decided the only way to be rid of Harvey was to kill him. For every one of them put a knife into him at the same time. But Harvey was too cute and canny for them bumblers. He got wind of the plot, stole a boat, and headed downstream. The bastard purely disappeared without leaving a trace.”
“And Jerry Potts? What of the boy?”
“Well, it’s a hard thing, but a man’s life is precious to him and I reckon a kid so young would have only slowed him down so Harvey left him behind. There’s some who say the only soft spot Harvey had in his black heart was for the little tyke. But for him, Harvey didn’t have a friend in the world. I’ve heard from engages at Fort Mackenzie that when Harvey got drunk he’d keep the boy up all night playing cards with him in his quarters, they could hear him ranting to young Potts how everybody was against Alexander Harvey, how he didn’t dare turn his back on a man-jack of them for fear of getting shot or stabbed. Would Jerry stand by him? Could he count on him?”
Delicately, I made the observation that the fashion in which Potts was raised surely must have encouraged criminal tendencies in the boy. The more I heard, the more I wondered how suitable a guide Jerry Potts would be.
“How he was raised did toughen him some,” Mr. Cooke remarked matter-of-factly. “I’ll grant you that. Rumour has it that after Harvey lit out on him, Potts lived like a stray dog at the company posts, sleeping in any corner, eating whatever table scraps he got thrown. But he survived it, and that recommends him in this part of the world. And then another Scotchman, Andrew Dawson, came along and took him under his wing, put him to work in the trade, tried his best to make a honest, sober Scotchman out of him.”
“And the experiment was a success?” I said, growing more hopeful.
“Up to a point,” said Mr. Cooke. “Over the years, Potts had occasionally seen his mother when the Bloods came in to trade. Finally, she decided to take him off to live with her and her people for a time. The Bloods watered down the white in him a good deal, I reckon. Taught him to hunt like a Indian, ride like a Indian, read land like a Indian, fight like a Indian. They taught him Blackfoot religion. So he’s neither fish nor fowl. No man can tell where the white in him stops and the red starts.”
The question needed to be asked of Mr. Cooke. If he were in my position, would he hire Potts?
“Potts carries a map of every river, every butte, every coulee, every pimple on the prairie’s ass up there in his head. But, more important, once you set foot into Blackfoot country he’s your safe passage. Potts is worth a troop of cavalry. He stands mighty high in their estimation. The Blackfoot call him Bear Child, and that’s more than just a name like John or Joe, it’s a title of honour. They gave it to him after he led them in a mighty battle with the Crow. If Jerry Potts is with you and your party keeps its nose clean, don’t give offence, the Blackfoot won’t touch a hair on your heads.”
