The Shirt On His Back (37 page)

In the
afternoon, as January was helping Morning Star butcher out an elk for that
night's feast, Veinte-y-Cinco came to the camp to bid the Indian woman goodby.
'You go back Taos?' Morning Star asked, in the rather shaky English that Hannibal
had been teaching her, and Veinte-y-Cinco nodded.

'Hell, Mick and
I know one another,' she sighed. 'I don't give him trouble when he drinks, and
he don't give me trouble when I don't.' She held out to the younger woman a
necklace strung with silver coins and a silver cross. 'I want you to have this,
coraz
ó
n.'

'You can come to
New Orleans with us,' offered Hannibal as his bride joyfully put on the new
ornament and kissed everyone in sight. January suspected, by the wistful note
in his voice, that the fiddler would miss his Sioux wife very much, despite the
fact that both knew that neither could survive in the other's world. 'I don't
think Shaw would mind an extra rider.'

Veinte-y-Cinco
smiled and laid her thin palm to his cheek. 'That's sweet of you, Sun Mouse.
But I know Taos. And what would an old whore like me do in New Orleans, up
against so many that're pretty and young? But if it's true Mr Shaw wouldn't
mind another rider—' She glanced, a little shyly, toward the store tent, where
Shaw was helping Gil Wallach pack and count the unsold goods, and then back at
January. 'Would you take Pia? She's got nothing waiting for her in Taos but
what I've got. Last year I almost sent her off with those missionaries that
came through here, but she was so young
then ...
I thought I
could keep her another few years. But after what happened with that bastard
skunk Titus . . . Would you take her? Take her and see to it she gets work with
a good family, who'll look after her? The world is hard,' she finished softly.

'My wife'11 look
after her,' promised January. 'After you fetched Moccasin Woman to the Crow
camp - when you very well might have run off and left us - we owe you that and
as much more as you care to ask.'

That night the
whole of the Ogallala village came to the feast - joined by large numbers of
Delaware, Crow, Shoshone, and also by Asa Goodpastor, who'd ridden into camp
that afternoon. 'First time I've had a banquet to celebrate a divorce,'
Hannibal remarked, incongruous in his much-battered frock- coat with feathers
braided into his long hair. 'Something I should do more often.' But January
guessed, as the liquor went around, that the fiddler would have liked to get
drunk, to forget that he was leaving her. He played instead, as stories said
Compair Lapin had played, calling the stars down out of the sky and the Devil
up from Hell: Irish airs and Mozart dances, sweet wild tunes that seemed to
flow upward into the Milky Way, all that he could give this girl in farewell.

In the morning,
before the mist was off the river, the tribes were gone.

Hannibal spoke
little through the day as the Ivy and Wallach men broke their camp. He seemed
anxious and nervous, as he had when first he'd ceased taking opium, but the
mundane work of packing seemed to steady him. Robbie Prideaux and his partners
brought Franz Bodenschatz with them and left him tied to a tree while they
assisted. 'You're taking a chance with that one,' warned Goodpastor quietly as
he took January aside.

The German sat
on the ground by his tree reading Goethe - silent and as contemptuous of the
men around him, as Tom Shaw said he had been at Fort Ivy . . . but every time
January looked at him, he felt the hair lift on his nape.

Although Shaw
was helping Gil Wallach pack furs, January noticed that the Kentuckian never
got where he couldn't see his prisoner, and never let his rifle out of instant
reach of his hand. He had stayed awake guarding Bodenschatz for two nights now.
January guessed he was expecting something, too.

'Any
suggestions?'

'Hell.'
Goodpastor grinned crookedly. 'If I knew what he was planning to try I wouldn't
be twitchy.' His bright-blue eyes went from Shaw back to Bodenschatz, who after
his bitter imprecations and curses thrown at Titus and McLeod that first night,
had said little to anyone. 'It's six weeks back to the settlements. Tall
Chief's gotta sleep sometime.'

'I'll do what I
can.' Though January guessed that writing was something of a labor to Shaw, he
knew that the man had patiently prepared a stack of affidavits - from Poco,
Moccasin

Woman (under her
English name, with no mention of her race), Morning Star, Hannibal and everyone
else he could find - as to the circumstances of the deaths of Klaus
Bodenschatz, Clemantius Groot, Goshen Clarke and the Dutchman's three
camp-setters, and had gotten Goodpastor to sign and notarize them.

He hoped this
would be enough for Tom Shaw.

'And you watch
out, especially for that little girl.' Pia and her mother waved to them as they
came up the path from the AFC camp, where tents were being struck also: furs
weighed, plew-sticks tallied. Pia, too, had been quiet all day, and it crossed
January's mind to wonder if Johnny Shaw was the only child to dream about
running away with the Indians. Today she looked very grown-up, in her red vest
and a new skirt, with one of Morning Star's beaded necklaces around her throat.

'Don't you let
her get anywheres near him,' said Goodpastor quietly.

'I won't.'
January's instincts told him that whoever else Shaw might sacrifice, to bring
his brother's killer to justice, a threat to the child would render him
helpless.

Bodenschatz
would know that, too.

But on the
following morning, when the Ivy and Wallach train was preparing to leave, Pia
couldn't be found. Shaw had sat awake a third night guarding Bodenschatz, and
he attested that the girl had had no contact with the prisoner. She'd come back
to the camp past midnight with Hannibal, after doing a land-office business on
her final evening dealing faro in front of Seaholly's.

'Scarcely
surprising, considering the number of eleventh- hour customers waiting in
line,' added the fiddler, who had spent the evening alternately playing chess
with Sir William Stewart and making music for men who would hear nothing for
the next eleven months but wolves howling and the chants of Indians. 'I
understand she and Jed Blankenship, working in concert, took three hundred
dollars off John McLeod at vingt-et-un.'

The child had
slept close to the fire, near Hannibal and Manitou. Her blankets, folded
neatly, had been there when Manitou had woken at the first whisper of light.

'What do you
expect?' said Bodenschatz, when he heard of the matter. 'The girl is a whore.'

Hannibal and
Prideaux went out to search the camp, while the rest of the party loaded the
mules. 'We can't wait long, if she ain't found,' warned Goodpastor. 'I'd search
that skunk Titus's tent, myself—'

'Given that
McLeod's watchin' like a hawk for somethin' to cause the Company grief,' Shaw
said, returning from a careful inspection of the ground all around the
campsite, 'I
think
he'd be too smart to try anythin', though there's no sayin'. Anyways,' he added
grimly, 'by the sign it looks like she walked away from the camp alone.'

It was Hannibal
who brought the news, hastening back down the path from the Hudson's Bay
compound. 'A couple of McLeod's engages saw her leaving camp at first light,'
he said, pressing his hand to his side. 'With Jed Blankenship.'

Into the stunned
silence which followed, January said,
'Blankenship
?’

And tied to his
tree, the prisoner sat down and laughed uproariously at the consternation in
his jailer's voice.

'She kept
company with him, Prideaux says, while her mother was away.' Hannibal sat on
one of the rocks that surrounded what was left of the fire pit. 'And with Edwin
Titus, evidently. The men who saw her leave say she was laughing with
Blankenship; riding one of his horses, and making jokes with his engages. It
doesn't sound as if she was forced.'

'She's
thirteen—'

Hannibal only
looked up at him with weary eyes. They both knew whores in New Orleans younger
than that.

'Hell, I was
thirteen when I left the settlements,' said Prideaux, with a trace of sadness
in his voice. 'I joined Fitzpatrick's brigade to go trap on the Popo Agie. An'
for the same reason. There wasn't nobody much lookin' after me. An' it looked like
a whale of a lot of fun.'

Nevertheless,
Gil Wallach and - to his enormous and unexpected credit - Mick Seaholly
delayed their departures from the much-trampled valley of the Green River for
another forty- eight hours, while Prideaux, Manitou, Shaw and Asa Goodpastor
scoured the hills, trying to pick Blankenship's trail out of the mazes of
departing hoof-prints of independents, the early- leaving Hudson's Bay trappers
and the numerous Indian villages heading north and east and south on the autumn
hunts.

January and
Hannibal spent most of the two days either guarding Franz Bodenschatz - who
seemed glumly disinterested in anything other than how badly the world had
treated him - or comforting Veinte-y-Cinco.

'The girl was a whore,'
was all Bodenschatz would say. 'You could see it in her eyes. Why all the world
weeps over a brat like that and lets the murderer of my beautiful sister go
free . . .'

All he had asked
for was his books - which he read and reread - and Mina's gloves, portrait and
chemise. These he kept inside his clothing, next to his skin, and turned in
smouldering disgust from January's attempts to draw him into speech.

Through most of
the first day, Veinte-y-Cinco cried, on and off, and talked incessantly of her
daughter. Again, to January's surprise, Mick Seaholly proved to be a patient
listener - in-between working the bar - and doled out to her the hard comfort
that: 'It ain't like she's turnin' her back on finishing school and engagement
to some nice boy from Philadelphia,
acushla.'

'I wanted
something better for her,' the woman whispered, huddled against January's side
in one of the makeshift crib- tents that had been temporarily reset, this one
apart from the others. Even the most loutish of the trappers kept their
distance.

January met the
barkeep's wide, heaven-blue glance over her head.

'We all want
somethin' better for other people,' said Seaholly dispassionately. 'But they go
right on ahead and make their own mistakes, just like we do.'

By the second
night, when the searchers returned with word that they hadn't been able to pick
out Blankenship's tracks from the hundreds in all directions that they were
mixed with, Luz Veinte-y-Cinco was able to thank them, and to let her daughter
go.

It was four
weeks down from the mountains, through the gap in the ranges called the South
Pass, and across mile upon mile, day upon day, of arid scrubland to Fort Ivy.
All the way, January was oppressed by a vague sense of failure and defeat. 'What
would have given you a sense of success?' inquired Hannibal, when he spoke of
it one night when they both had guard duty. 'Shooting Bodenschatz from behind a
tree? Your success is that you'll come home.'

'With another
two hundred dollars,' added January, trying to speak lightly. Trying not to
think of what he'd seen daily in his heart: the house on Rue Esplanade closed
up when he reached it, the frantic canvassing of neighbors. Seeing in his fears
how their eyes would avoid meeting his:
shall you tell him or shall I?

Rose
. . .

Even on better
days, he knew that Hannibal was absolutely right. The two hundred dollars
barely mattered.

His success was
that he'd come home.

And Rose would
be ripe with their unborn child.

Virgin Mary
Mother of God,
he prayed to the desert stars,
let it he so.
It had been
five months since he'd seen either her or a single line of her handwriting . .
.
Let it be so.

The desert stars
made no reply.

Sitting on guard
at the edge of the camp, his rifle in his hand, looking out across the silvery
darkness of sagebrush and bunch grass for some break in the patterns of what he
knew to be safe - jackrabbits, foxes, prairie dogs, kangaroo rats - he realized
he would miss this open silence, this thin, free air. Far off he could still
see the white peaks of the Wind River Mountains, glittering in the starlight:
the Green River in which he'd almost drowned, the dry coulees where he'd almost
starved, where he'd fought for his life against the Omaha and the Crow . . .

He'd miss those,
too. No wonder the mountain trappers stayed in the mountains.

It wasn't only
beaver that they sought in those valleys that whispered with the voices of the
pines.

Beside the fire,
Manitou slept -
and dreamed of
what
?
The medieval
streets of a German University town? Or the empty world where he was safe from
the danger that the thunder spirit in him would awake?

By daylight the
big trapper kept close to the train, as if to reassure - or remind -
Bodenschatz that he, too, was going back to the United States to face justice
for what he had done. But as they moved east and the endless pale-yellow miles
stretched on, he became more and more uneasy. 'We should be seein' Indians by
this time,' he said one evening, as the engages were setting camp. 'This's the
time of their Fall hunt. Plain should be crawlin' with 'em. I ain't even seen
sign, have you?'

Both Shaw and
Goodpastor shook their heads.

Shaw was quieter
also as they put the miles behind them. He took his turn at scouting, but
January could tell it bothered him to let Bodenschatz out of his sight, and
most nights he would stay awake, watching him. Having risked his brother's
anger for the sake of doing justice, January guessed, he lived with the dread
that something would go wrong and leave him bereft of both justice and revenge.
And if that happened - as he had once said to Manitou - he stood to lose not
one brother, but two: all the family that remained to him in the world.

For his part,
the prisoner had little to say for himself, and what little he did was mostly
sarcasm: 'If to destroy me, I have made that beast take himself back to
justice,' he remarked on one occasion, 'then I have accomplished my aim.' When
he wasn't reading - and he scorned Hannibal's small volume of Shakespeare's
comedies - he watched Manitou with glittering eyes. 'I will confess whatever
you ask me to,' he said on another evening to Goodpastor. 'Just so that you
bring him also to the scaffold and let me tell in open court the things that
man has done.'

But January
thought that as they went east, Shaw was bracing himself.

Tom Shaw met
them at the gate of Fort Ivy, his narrow face dark with shock, anger and
disbelief as he saw who rode in their train. 'What the
hell
you think
you're doin', bringin' that piece of pig snot back with you?' he demanded, when
Shaw dismounted and helped Bodenschatz from the saddle. He turned and struck
Shaw open-handed across the face. 'Where the
hell
you think you
are, brother? New Orleans? Goddam Philadelphia? You think
any
jury back in
the States is gonna convict a man for shootin' another way the hell and gone
out past the frontier?'

'I do, yes,'
replied Shaw in his mild voice. 'I said I'd bring him to justice—'

'There ain't
gonna be no justice for what he done to Johnny!' retorted Tom. 'You think
twelve "good citizens" is gonna
care
about somethin'
that happened out here? Like God Himself could even
find
twelve good men
in Independence—'

'Been awhile
since you been to Independence, sir,' Goodpastor broke in. 'It's settled some,
and there's enough men there who'll convict a man, if not of killin' your
brother, then of killin' his own father - which is what we got plenty of
evidence for, an' affidavits, too. Not to speak of plottin' with the savages to
murder every man in the rendezvous. Believe me, he'll hang.'

'You stay outta
this.' Tom Shaw barely glanced at the older man. 'I don't give spit in a
whirlwind about what-all else he done. This's blood. An' we was brought up - /
was brought up - that blood wins out, over what twelve "good
citizens" or the whole damn Constitution of the United States
might
say ...
or might not. I was brought up not to take chances with your blood.'

He took the
pistol from his belt, and Shaw stepped between its barrel and Bodenschatz. Tom
reached to thrust him out of the way, and Shaw, his face a careful blank,
thrust back. 'We had enough murder here,' he said. 'Seven white men an' a
woman, killed 'cause of another man's revenge, not to speak of a score of
Indians who got dragged into it just through bein' there. It needs to stop.'

'No, brother,' said
Tom quietly and lowered the pistol to his side. 'We's one death short.'