The Devil's Paintbox, page 5
“I'll be along shortly,” William Buck declared. “I'm gonna skin these bastards! Nice pelts here.” Buck pulled his knife out of the sheath.
Aiden stiffened, sudden anger restoring strength to his limbs. He hadn't even thought about the value of the skins but wasn't about to see Buck profit by them now. His hands clenched into fists.
“Two are rightly yours,” Jackson said quietly. “Could argue three for the neck shot. But you got a long way to go with that man. And I won't have a fight over a pelt. So figure it out, boy.”
He felt Jackson's hand on the back of his belt, half holding him steady, half holding him back. William Buck ran his knife up and down his trouser leg. Aiden hesitated. Should he make Buck an enemy or let him be a bully? Was there some other choice? In a way, wolves were easier to deal with.
Aiden slid the quiver of arrows up to his shoulder and swallowed his anger. “Well, thank you, Mr. Buck,” he said steadily. “That's—ah, that's kind of you to offer to help me out. I haven't ever skinned a wolf. And shooting them kind of wore me out. I'd say that fellow is Mr. Jackson's, though”— he nodded at the last wolf shot—”for my arrow never would have killed him. But that other one could make you a nice pelt for sure. If the others who helped shoot it don't object, that is.”
Buck scowled and hitched his belt as if he were about to protest. He glanced at Jackson as if the man ought to be on his side, but Jackson just gave him a short little smile, like he had no clue in the world what was going on. Finally Buck walked over to “his” wolf.
“I'll skin mine,” he said gruffly as he yanked the wolf's head up. “You're free to watch how, but I reckon I done enough for you for one night.”
“That's kind of you, Mr. Buck,” Aiden said, swallowing hard. “I reckon you have.”
“Quick work, then,” Jackson said. “I'll send a mule back for the skins.”
iss Maddy! Miss Maddy!” Joby came running up to Maddy while she was wiping off the breakfast plates. He stopped abruptly and looked around like a nervous schoolboy used to being frequently scolded but never exactly sure what it was going to be for.
“Calm down, Joby What's the matter?”
“Miss Maddy I need a—a—” Joby sliced his hands frantically through the air, then cupped his palms together. “I need—the thing for pouring. I lost the one we had. I'm sorry. I'm always careful.”
“Joby, I'm not sure what you mean. You mean a pitcher? Like you pour water from?”
He looked confused.
“Like a jug?”
“Well, no—” Joby's eyes wandered as he struggled for the elusive word. There was nothing about Joby that really made him look different. He had a hesitation in his speech, and a way of gazing off when he talked, but unless you talked to him awhile, you might not even notice. Physically, there was nothing in particular that one could pick out as wrong, but the way he moved seemed awkward and out of place, like a jackrabbit on ice, always scratching for balance. He was neither handsome nor homely, the sort of man a girl might not pick first at a dance, Maddy thought, but wouldn't be too sad about sitting next to either; the sort of man that if he were sweet and kind would get better-looking after time. He was squarely built, with broad, strong hands. He had brown eyes and brown hair that was already getting thin on top, though he probably wasn't more than twenty-two or -three.
“It's like a teacup,” he went on. “But with holes in both ends.” He cupped his hands together again. “To go from big to small.”
“Oh, do you mean a funnel?” Maddy laughed, then caught herself, not wanting him to think she was making fun of him, but Joby seemed only relieved.
“That. Yes. Do you have one?”
“I doubt it. I think I've seen most everything the Reverend and Mrs. True are carrying in the way of kitchen gear. Which wasn't ever much useful.” She waved a hand at the pathetic assortment of dented plates and blackened pots.
“Can you pour good, then?” he pressed, looking around nervously. Maddy realized he was trying to whisper, but his voice was loud as ever. She dropped her own voice so maybe he would hear the difference.
“Tell me what you need to do, Joby,” she said, trying to make it simple.
“I have to get water from the pail into the poison jug. But my hand shakes too much to pour from the dipper. I need the—the—” Again he gestured.
“The funnel,” Maddy reminded him.
“Yes!”
“I can pour from a dipper, Joby. That's no problem. But what are you doing with a jug of poison?”
“Doc Carlos takes it. Every morning I need to put water into the jug. And then he fills up his little bottle out of it.”
Maddy remembered seeing Dr. Carlos drinking from a small brown medicine bottle.
“Joby, why does Dr. Carlos drink poison?”
“He got poisoned in the war.”
“So shouldn't he take something to cure it? Like medicine?”
“Yes! That's what it is. It's medicine.”
“But you said it was poison.”
“I don't know, Miss Maddy.” Joby shook his hands with frustration. “Sometimes he gives it for medicine. But for his own self, calls it poison. I don't want him mad that I ain't done my job.” He began to scratch the back of his head and shift nervously from side to side.
“Yes, Joby, of course.”
Joby took her hand and almost dragged her to the doctor's cart, then handed her the dipper. There was a great puddle of water around the jug from where he had been trying to fill it himself. Maddy moved some cloth bundles out of the damp.
“The doctor's gone—to his morning duty,” Joby whispered, blushing and nodding toward the latrines. “He'll be back soon.”
“Does he hit you, Joby?” Maddy frowned.
“Doc Carlos?”
“If you don't get something right? Does he hit you?” She remembered seeing Carlos kicking the Thompsons’ dog.
“Oh no. Doc is my best friend, and I don't want to let him down, is all. He fixed my head. And got us food in the prison. So hurry, please.”
“It won't take long,” Maddy reassured him. She scooped up some water from the pail and poured it easily into the jug. By the sound of it, only a pint or so would be needed to fill it. Joby sighed with relief.
“I drive,” he declared proudly. “Oxen, mules or horses, don't matter.” He held up his calloused hands. “In the war I drove the wagons.”
“That's good.” Maddy smiled.
“So you could get married to me,” Joby went on.
“What?” Maddy sloshed some water. “No, I can't.”
“Why not? I'm going to have a job in Seattle, driving heavy loads.”
“I, um—I can't marry anyone till I'm sixteen.”
“I can drive an eight-mule team.”
“But I promised my mother,” she declared.
“When is that? When are you sixteen?”
“Two years and one month from now.”
“Is that a long time?”
“How long have you been with Doc Carlos?” she asked.
“Since the war began.”
“How long is that?”
Joby shrugged.
“How many times did the summer come?” Maddy prompted.
“Well—first summer, we camped in the trees, and it smelled so good. Next summer was a bad time, with fever, and mosquitoes on us all the time. Also, men got exploded. Then the last summer was just chopping off arms and legs too much. And the dogs sneaking around the pile trying to eat them. Then we got captured and put into the prison. And for all the winter. Then springtime came and they said war was over and we could go. So three times summer came.”
“Oh.” Maddy was trying to find her way around men got exploded and chopping off arms. “So two years is one less than the time you were in the war.” She poured another dipperful of water. The sound told her the jug was full. She put the cork in and punched it down.
“Anyway I don't want to marry anybody. I'm going to be a doctor.”
“Like Carlos?”
“Well, yes, but nicer.”
“He used to be nice.”
Maddy looked up and saw the tall, thin figure coming toward them, his head down, his shoulders hunched, everything about him coiled and wary.
“I've got to go now, Joby I got my own chores to do. You keep a lookout for the funnel,” she said. “It probably just fell in among the boxes here, okay?”
“Oh yes, Miss Maddy. I didn't mean to lose it.”
“No, of course you didn't.” She darted off before Doc Carlos saw her.
“Miss Marguerite,” Maddy said as they walked along later that afternoon, “do you know much about the war?”
“Mostly from the newspapers,” she said vaguely.
“Did they poison people, do you know?”
“Poison? Whatever do you mean?”
“I'm not sure,” Maddy went on. “But could someone get poisoned in the war so he needs to keep taking poison after?”
“I don't know.”
“Well, have you ever heard about some way poison can also be medicine?”
Marguerite lifted her head, and Maddy thought she saw a keen understanding in the pretty blue eyes. Marguerite's gaze turned toward the wagon train and rested on Doc Carlos.
“I have.”
“How can it be like that?”
“There are medicines that take away pain. Pain from the injury, yes?” Marguerite explained. “But sometimes a person may have another kind of pain, pain in the heart or the mind, and the same medicine can feel like it is helping. But if you take it too long, you start to need more and more, and it becomes poison.”
“Doesn't it kill you, then?”
“I think if one is careful he can take it for a long time.”
Maddy thought about this for a while, listening to the swish of grass against their skirts as they walked.
“What if a person watered down the poison some every day?”
“Ah. Well, that sounds like someone who is trying to quit.”
“So why doesn't he just quit?”
“It isn't that easy,” Marguerite explained. “A person who needs this medicine will be very sick if he quits suddenly.”
Maddy walked on silently. It seemed there was no end to the complexities of hurting.
fter a month of travel, Aiden could hardly remember that life was ever anything but this: endless miles of unchanging miles. The novelty of the adventure was over. Every day looked the same and felt the same—the constant wind, the creaking wagons, the feel of the hard, lumpy ground beneath boot soles. Dust coated his skin and clung to his eyelashes so that every blink stung. The dull plod of oxen hooves and the constant moaning of the cattle got on everyone's nerves.
“Stupid, stupid cattle!” Marguerite cried. “What do they need to say all the time? Do they talk about how pretty is the hind end of the cow in front of them?”
At the beginning of the journey, women had sung as they walked; children had laughed and chased butterflies. Now they trudged along like battle-weary soldiers. Babies screamed with diaper rash and mosquito bites. The women's skirts were frayed and tattered at the hems. The dogs were matted with burrs. Every day was alike, except when some catastrophe burst through the numbing torpor. Twice, tornados spun dangerously close. Once, on a perfectly sunny day, a single cloud appeared and pelted them with hailstones the size of plums. Another day, lightning struck and killed one of the German brothers’ prize cows. But most days were just long and dull. Still, they were making good time, twelve, sometimes fifteen miles a day. Another few weeks and they would see the mountains.
“No better place in all the world than the Rocky Mountains,” Jackson said one evening as he scraped the last spoonful of beans off his plate. He was in a good mood, for he liked beans. There was rarely enough fuel or time for the hourlong cooking they needed, but they had been lucky finding buffalo chips that day.
“Going to be a lot of work, hauling all these wagons over,” William Buck grumbled.
“Been done plenty of times now,” Jackson said. “Won't be easy, but you should have seen it twenty years ago! No real trail then. We were still figuring out ways to get through.”
“How long have you been out here anyway, Mr. Jackson?” Aiden asked, taking advantage of the man's rare chatty mood.
“Came out in 1831. Fur trapping. Them was some fine years—beaver everywhere, like mice in a feed bin when the cat's up and died. I brought in near six hundred skins to my first rendezvous, and that was being fresh out of nowhere, not knowing my ass from my elbow.”
“What's a rendezvous?” Aiden asked.
“Grandest party ever there was! Once a year, in July, after the spring hunt, all the trappers would meet up in one place for the companies to buy the pelts.” Jackson stretched back and got himself comfortable. “Lord—you want to know some fine festivities.” He looked at Aiden and smiled big. “Skins went for plenty then—three dollars for the poor ones, six for a good pelt. Trappers came in, got three or four thousand cash money in their hand, then drank and gambled it all away in a week.” Jackson tipped his head back and laughed. “Why, a man could go back east and buy himself a castle if he'd a mind to, but instead he'd get stinking drunk and piss it all away.”
“How come?” Aiden asked. “How come you didn't, well, piss just half of it away and save you some?”
“Ah—wouldn't that be a smart thing to do.” Jackson laughed. “But see, boy—I'll tell you some wisdom. People set up how they want their life to be. Sometimes they don't know that's what they's doing, but it is. The rich folk back east, for example, they pile up accumulations to keep them chained down there. And the mountain man, well, he piles up nothing to keep him chained out there—” Jackson waved a hand toward the western sky.
“Why'd you quit, then?” Buck pressed.
“Quit? I didn't quit. Ran out of beaver. We killed ‘em all. I trapped six hundred my first year, not even sixty my last. We killed ‘em all. You'll see. Another month we'll be up there and you'll see. Beaver scarce as dinosaurs.”
“So what'd you do then?” Aiden asked.
“Oh, various type this ‘n’ that employs. Went south and shot me some Mexicans in the war, tried out the gold, did some trade.” Jackson leaned back and pulled his hat down over his eyes. “Lately I schoolmarmed a bunch of you sorry-ass tenderfoots across the country, which is right now wearin’ me the hell out, so enough of the questions.”
Aiden had somehow expected to wake up one day and just see the mountains there, tall and snowy and stabbing at the sky like the picture of the Alps in the Atlas of the World. But the horizon crept up so slowly that they appeared at first only as a faint rise on the far edge of the earth, like a line of baby teeth. A week later and he could make out some edges and peaks. But they were still at least a hundred miles away.
As the wagon train dragged on across the plains, they began to see the toll the journey had taken on others before them. Broken wagon wheels stuck up from ruts in the ground, their spokes bleached and spiky as fish bones. As the reality of the mountains loomed closer, the group often came upon whole loads of belongings that had been jettisoned as emigrants ahead of them realized the impossibility of hauling heavy loads over the peaks. There were little furniture graveyards full of mahogany chifforobes, oak desks and ornate bedsteads. The wood made for nice campfires.
Jefferson J. Jackson had made it very clear that no one in his wagon train carried more than the absolute necessities. There was barely a blanket chest or a trunk to be found, even among the prosperous families. One day they came across a great load of abandoned furniture. A small piano was set carefully on a smooth bit of ground. Inside was a hopeful note written in elegant script: Property of Mrs. Richard D. Wain-wright, moving to Portland, Oregon. I will pay $100 for safe delivery.
“Don't nobody even think about it,” Jackson said when Maddy read him the note. “I'd sooner tote along a dead elephant. At least you could eat it if you had to.”
The piano had ivory keys and intricate pearl inlays that gleamed in the sun. The varnish was starting to crackle from exposure, but the piano was still playable, though a bit out of tune. Even though no one thought to cross Jackson in the matter of transporting the thing, there was a near unanimous rebellion against moving on, despite three or four more hours of good travel time left in the day. People were hungry for music. The furniture would make nice fires too. They would camp right there, they declared, and Mr. Jefferson J. Jackson could very well just accept it. He did. It had been seven weeks since the party in Sweetwater. They were making good distance, and it wasn't a bad idea to store up a few hours of fun against the trials that lay ahead.
While they made camp, everyone who could play took a turn at the piano. Some of the mildest women jostled each other and argued to go next. War nearly erupted among the ten Thompson children. Back home they had fussed through years of piano lessons, sullenly pounding their way through practice, but out here the little instrument was exotic and exciting. Polly and Annie could play all the popular songs: “Beautiful Dreamer,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “Oh Where, Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?” Gabriel True gamely thumped out a few marches, but Marguerite didn't play a note.
“A preacher's wife and she doesn't play?” Mrs. Holling-ford was scandalized. “Have you ever heard of such a thing? Not a single hymn!” She fluffed her skirts, sat down herself and pounded out a good twenty minutes of dreary church music before someone else managed to take control of the keyboard.
“Isn't it all just too beautiful?” Maddy clutched her arms around her knees and rocked with happiness. She hadn't heard a piano since she was five years old.
“It's not even a real piano,” Polly sniped as she sat down beside them. “It's just a little parlor spinet. We had a baby grand piano in Charleston. Stephen Foster himself played it once.”
Polly babbled on about all the concerts and recitals she had been to and the famous singers she had heard. Maddy and Aiden had never heard of any of them, except of course Stephen Foster, who had written every popular song anybody ever sang.
