A Good Man (46 page)

Then, late one afternoon, she returned from school and found Wesley’s horse tethered to the porch rail, a blanket bundle across her haunches and a frying pan tied to the saddle horn. Lifting her skirts, she ran up the steps and into the house. Wesley was waiting for her in the parlour. When she saw his grave expression, when she saw the holster belt strapped to his waist, she dropped down on a chair and waited, mute and trembling.

Wesley delivered his news with curt urgency. “There is a pressing military emergency. Major Ilges sent me a message this morning. The Nez Perce are at Cow Island and have besieged it.” He paused. “Ilges’s garrison is badly undermanned. J.J. Donnelly has raised a force of volunteers to support the soldiers. Major Ilges believes that I might be useful in this situation given my experience in the Police and the militia.”

“Think of how J.J. Donnelly and his friend treated you last New Year’s Eve,” she said, desperation in her voice. “A man insults you and now you make common cause with him?” She knew how weak that sounded, but a frail argument was better than none. She hurried on. “For weeks you have been expressing sympathy for these poor Indians, and now you mean to take part in slaughtering them?”

“I don’t have to approve of Donnelly’s politics to ride with him. And I hope not to have to fight these Indians at all. I fully expect the Nez Perce to retreat as soon as we reach Cow Island. The goal is to prevent the few souls there from being overrun. We are not intent on slaughtering Indians, only relieving the men trapped there.”

His rectitude was unbearable. “Oh,” she said, “you are playing soldier, spouting soldier talk. ‘Pressing military emergency,’ ‘garrison is badly undermanned.’ This is Major Ilges’s problem. It is no business of yours.” She threw him a despairing, angry look. “Won’t you listen? I am begging you not to go. You have nothing to prove.”

Ada saw she had startled him with that last statement, but then he composed his face as if he were on the parade ground. “It is not a matter of proving anything. But these men can’t be abandoned. To turn one’s back on them …” He faltered. She wanted to shout at him to save his breath. “There are lives to be saved,” he said grimly. “I can think of nothing worse than to desert them.”

“I can think of something worse. You brought home dead, draped over the back of your horse.”

“There is little danger of that.” Wesley moved across the room and went down on one knee before her chair and touched her hand. “Now hear me out. There is a possibility that if Cow Island is taken, the Nez Perce may proceed up the Missouri. The minute there is any inkling of that, you must immediately go into Fort Benton. They will not attack the town. Will you promise me? Joe is here to look after you if you need anything.”

She nodded reluctantly.

“Good. I have not much more time left. We are to assemble and set off in less than half an hour. But I want to go knowing you understand that this is a matter of conviction. This is not a whim. I am –”

“Men and their honour,” she said. “How much grief has that caused?”

He got to his feet, leaned in, and pressed his lips to her forehead, held them there for a moment. “Oh, Ada,” he said, and then he was gone.

Standing at the window, she watched him mount, then urge the horse into a lope, followed him with disbelieving eyes until he disappeared from sight, taking from her the hope that he was going to relent and turn back.

As it turns out, Wesley is gone only five days, and when he returns, Ada embraces a pale and haggard man. It seems that in his absence Wesley has become a stranger to her, he talks feverishly about the coloured man, Edmund Bradley, killed at Cow Creek Canyon, his face running with sweat as he rambles on about him, voice low, hesitant, questioning. Wesley says that Bradley’s wifri. The mdian. She has a little baby. What possessed Bradley to turn against his woman’s people? What possessed him to make common cause with the whites? And why did the black barber do the same? He had wept over Bradley’s corpse as if he were weeping over the lifeless body of his own child.

And why, Ada asks herself, had Wesley been willing to risk everything as Bradley had done, why had he been willing to have her face a widow’s sorrow?

Obsessively, he speaks of how Bradley died from a gunshot to the abdomen. The hours it took him to die, his fearful groans, his raging thirst, how he begged for water, and how they had had to deny him it because of the nature of his wound. “I have imagined such a death,” he says, voice hushed. “But his agony was unimaginable. His face went grey with it. I did not think a black man’s face could turn the colour of ashes.”

“You must put your mind on other things. Do not let it fix itself there,” she tells him gently, again and again.

And his reply is always the same. “I can’t pluck it free,” he says.

In sleep, he is plagued by nightmares she can’t seem to rouse him from, it’s as if he doesn’t want to return to her, would rather face his gruesome dreams than look her in the face.

One afternoon when she came home from school, she surprised him reading some sort of dossier at the kitchen table, so absorbed in it that he was deaf to her footsteps. When he suddenly sensed her presence, he gave a mortified start, swiftly tucked the dirty bundle of foolscap down on his knees under the table, and sat waiting for her to dip herself a glass of water from the bucket on the counter and leave the room. She knew better than to ask him what he was up to.

Joe is as bewildered and worried by Wesley’s peculiar behaviour as she is. She knows he is concerned that his partner seems to have lost all interest in the ranch, and that a year of work and sweat may be coming to naught. When he comes to visit, McMullen suppresses his usual jocularity; there are long, awkward pauses when they discuss the work that needs to be done before winter comes. On the last such occasion Wesley said, “The journey to Cow Island wore me down a little. But tomorrow I’ll come by – we’ll make a start on hauling grain.”

But tomorrow nothing changes. Each morning when she leaves for school he is still in bed, staring up at the ceiling as if he were watching the progress of a comet overhead. Neither coaxing nor importuning can rouse him.

Then early one Saturday morning as she stands by the bed dressing, she gazes down on him, his arm flung over his eyes as if he is trying to blot out the world, and says, “I know how troubled you are, but I think you would do better, if instead of contemplating Mr. Bradley’s horrid death, you did something to alleviate the misery of his wife and child. He cannot be helped. They can.”

He takes his arm from his eyes, looks at her intently for a moment. “Let us go now,” he says. “Yes, the sooner the better.” Quickly he rises, goes to the dresser, jerks open a drawer. “I left a money pouch here – I meant to settle bills with it in Benton – but then the emergency arrived…”

It is perhaps too early to pay such a visit, the sun is scarcely up, but Ada decides not to point that out, fearing Wesley’s sudden resolve might stall if a delay is suggested. “I will pack them a hamper,” she says, “then make us some breakfast.”

“No, no breakfast. We must go to them directly.”

Standing in the pantry, Ada feels a lilt of relief. She stuffs a ham, jars of preserves, a loaf of bread into a wicker basket.

They set off a little after eight o’clock. A spell of warm weather has arrived. The morning holds the promise of a July day. When they reach town, none of the businesses along Front Street have opened yet; their shutters are down, their blinds drawn. Ada does not understand why Wesley is leading her this way. If he means to get them to the quarter of shanties and cabins where Fort Benton’s Negroes live, this is a circuitous route. When she asks him where he is going, he says, “To the barbershop.”

By then Foster’s Tonsorial Palace is only a few steps away. Wesley stops before it, puts his face to the window, blinkers his eyes with his hands. He gives a peremptory rap to the glass. Shortly, a lock can be heard turning. The door opens; Foster pokes out his head out and inquires tentatively, “Mr. Case?”

“If we may come in,” says Wesley.

Foster nods and they enter the barbershop. It glitters with nickel finishings, bottles of bay rum, unguents, and face balm. Wesley stands in the middle of the floor, hands balled tightly at his sides.

With the utmost reserve Foster says, “I disbelieve you come for a trim, Mr. Case. Not with the lady with you. How can I do you, sir?”

“I wondered – as a close friend of Mr. Bradley’s – would you be good enough to take his family a few things on our behalf?”

Foster moves behind the barber chair as if putting a barricade between himself and Wesley. He is a frail-looking man, extremely dapper in an immaculate striped shirt with red velvet garters at the elbows. His hands on the headrest of the chair make light, caressing passes on the leather. “Maybe you ought to deliver them things your ownself, Mr. Case,” Foster suggests politely.

“I think not,” says Case. “I am reluctant to face Mr. Bradley’s child and widow.” He hesitates. “Due to the circumstances of that day.”

Foster’s fingertips nervously skip about on the headrest of the chair. “Because we done left him behind? There was no help for it, Mr. Case.”

Wesley stands there silent, shaking his head.

Foster turns to Ada. “That’s the way Mr. Case put it at the time, Missus. Left behind. But you see, it was nothing but a body we left. Bradley’s soul had already gone over. But Mr. Case, he was dead set against leaving him. He carried on something terrible. ‘Can’t leave nobody behind!’ That’s what he kept hollering at us. But Mr. Ha#x2019;s horse was kilt dead, and he needed Bradley’s horse to ride himself out of that mess. Mr. Hale dragged Bradley’s poor corpse off his horse where Mr. Case had laid him, flung him to the ground and clumb up in the saddle. And then Mr. Case here, he said he’d pack the corpse out on his own horse, and he slung it up across his saddle, but Major Ilges wouldn’t hear none of it. He said Mr. Case would get us all kilt, trying to pack that damn body out of there. And then Donnelly and one or two of the others laid hands to Mr. Case and held him tight, and Major Ilges pulled Bradley down once more and laid him out on the ground again and –”

“And I gave way,” says Case. “I left him there.”

“Had to, Mr. Case,” says Foster. “The Major was right. If ’n you hadn’t agreed, you wouldn’t be standing alive today before me. Them Indians would have catched you and snuffed the light out of you, too.”

Case passes a hand over his brow. “If you would be so good as to express my condolences to the widow and see she gets these things, I would be much obliged to you, Mr. Foster.” He sets the money pouch on the seat of the barber chair and gestures to Ada to place the basket down beside it.

Foster gives Ada a pleading look. “I wouldn’t left Edmund neither, Missus, but I was thinking they meant for us to go back later, bury Edmund when them Indians was gone. But they was having no part of that. Wouldn’t hear of it. But Mr. Case, he come with me, he come right along when the others wouldn’t. Helped me bury poor Edmund Bradley right and proper.”

“I recall your moving display of sorrow at his death,” remarks Wesley. To Ada, it sounds a brusque, discordant thing to say.

Foster’s face crumples. “Well, I had reason for it. I tole Edmund we coloured men needed to show the white folks we got some sand. I tole him we’d get credit by it if we rode with Mr. Donnelly. I says to him, ‘Edmund, a natural man ought to get up on his hind legs from time to time.’ I pestered and picked at him until I got him kilt.” He appeals to Case. “But Edmund didn’t get no blamed appreciation for riding out with Mr. Donnelly, did he? Them others thought so well of him they was ready to leave him out there in the sun to go high.”

“A damnable business – all of it,” says Wesley, “through and through damnable.”

“Truer words never said.”

In the silence that follows, it gives Ada a fright to catch Wesley staring into the barber’s mirror as if it were a window, as if he cannot see himself there, as if his gaze was boring clear through the blindly staring man in the glass to some point hidden from her sight. A little panicked, she reaches out to touch his sleeve. Wesley’s shoulders give a jerk; he gestures awkwardly to the money pouch and hamper posed on the barber chair. “If possible, I’d like to see his wife gets these things today.”

“Yessir, Mr. Case. Before I take one customer.”

“I thank you again.”

When they step out into the street Ada laces her fingers into his. “Poor Mr. Foster,” she says.

“Yes,” he answers. Then, as an afterthought, he turns on her a hesitant, tortured smile that twists her heart. Wesley, it seems, is still trapped somewhere behind the surface of that glass. The attempt at a smile was the best he could do, an appeasing reflection of what he thinks she wants.