White Desert Page 7
“Thanks. Wine sours my stomach.”
“A glass, then.” When the waiter left, Vivian drew an envelope from inside his tunic and placed it beside my plate.
I mopped the grease off my hands with my napkin but didn’t pick up the envelope. “I haven’t been in town long enough to acquire an admirer, and you’re no messenger.”
“Directions. You’ll find the place inaccessible without them. I can’t guarantee she’ll talk to you even when you find her. But it’s all I can do.”
“She?”
“You said you wanted to interview survivors of the massacre. Most of them have been moved four hundred miles east to Fort Garry, to await relocation next spring to the homes they left behind, some of them in England and France. Only one elected to remain in the area. She’s living in a tent on the site of the cabin she shared with her husband and two children. She won’t leave their graves.”
“Is she too heavy to scoop up and carry?”
“She has a shotgun and a great blunderbuss of a pistol that belonged to her husband, neither of which she is ever without. I cannot say whether she intends to use them on herself or whoever draws near enough to seize her. I’m reluctant to find out. I make it a point to ride out there every ten days or so and deliver provisions. She is always sitting Indian fashion outside the tent, with the shotgun across her lap and that big revolver strapped about her waist. I don’t know if she ever goes inside. The only evidence that she moves at all is the provisions I left last time are always gone when I bring replacements. I leave them on a flat rock, outside shotgun range.”
“How long’s it been since the last time?”
“I was planning to make another delivery tomorrow. I cannot predict how she’ll react if two men ride out there at the same time,” he added.
I picked up the envelope then and took out the directions. He had a neat round hand, symmetrical if not elegant. His wrist would never touch the desk while he was writing. “What is it, about a day’s ride?”
“Count on being gone two nights. It gets dark early in that thick forest.”
“Mining settlement, wasn’t it? Did they see much in the way of color?”
“Just enough to trade for supplies once or twice a month here in town. It’s a hard life. Some trapper who hasn’t got the word there’s no more market for beaver pelts in London finds a nugget and they come pouring out here planning to get rich in a fortnight. If they have any luck at all they make wages. Have you ever met an old prospector?”
“Only in dime novels.”
“Forty’s the expected span. They die of pneumonia or starvation or fall off mountains or follow color too deep into Indian country, and no one knows what happened to them until some other twit stumbles over their bones. Partners kill each other over a handful of dust or just because they tire of staring at the same face all the time, or they kill themselves because it’s easier than going home failures. Or they manage to survive all that, and a pack of animals on the run from America slaughters them for two or three hundred in raw ore. All to make an attractive setting for the diamond on Jim Brady’s pinky finger.”
“That’s not why,” I said, “and you’ve been out here long enough to know that.”
“Oh, I know bloody well the importance you Yanks put on your precious liberty. You’ll sacrifice everyone else’s to maintain the illusion.”
“You English always make good points. I’ll take it up with my Irish and Scot friends and get back to you.”
The waiter brought his fried chicken. When we were alone, Vivian spent some time arranging his napkin in his lap, then sipped his wine. “It seems we’re destined to remain at loggerheads.”
“Destiny’s overrated. That’s why I carry a gun.”
“In that case I suggest we make an effort to put aside our cultural differences while you’re here. We’re not likely to agree in any case, and it will make your stay far more pleasant for both of us.”
“We need to save the unpleasantness for Bliss and Whitelaw,” I said.
“Right.” He tore apart a wing. “I was undecided whether to share this with you, but since we’re determined to get on, here it is. There are no telegraph lines between here and the northern posts, so I depend on the monthly mail packet and the occasional long rider for news from that area. Fortunately, the service processes requests for transfer on a regular basis from troopers who find the life up there too stark for their adventurous fantasies, and these individuals carry messages from their former posts. One of them stopped here yesterday from Fort Chipewyan, up on Lake Athabasca.”
I watched him nibbling at the bone in his hands. He managed to do it without getting grease in his moustache.
“The fort sends out patrols in a two-hundred-mile loop around the lake,” he went on. “For supplies and information the patrols stop regularly at a trading post on the Methye Portage. The day this trooper left Chipewyan, a rider came in from the patrol with word that the trading post was in ashes. They found a burned body, which may or may not belong to the trader, a Métis named Jean-Baptiste Coupe-Jarret. That’s Cutthroat in English. Colorful chap, rode with Louis Riel in the uprising in ’69.”
“Witnesses?”
He shook his head, deposited the bone on his plate, and used his finger bowl. “Beastly place, Methye: solid cliff with the Athabasca River boiling round it like Saturday night in Picadilly. Only reason the post is there at all is to do business with Indians and voyageurs carrying their canoes around the cataracts. If anyone saw anything he’s down the river and gone. Only damn fools and Mounties mind anyone’s business but their own in that wild country.”
“It has Bliss and Whitelaw’s signature.”
“It could just as well have been Cree, or those Sioux from the stronghold, or those rum Metis. The Canadian Pacific has got them all stirred up this year.”
“You said Coupe-Jarret was a Métis.”
“He ain’t the loyalist he was a dozen years ago. There’s some as say he never was, and claim he sold out Riel at Fort Garry. I do know he’s one of them we’ve depended upon for information about what the half-breeds are up to. Coupe de poignard, I’ve heard them call him: Back-stabber. If he’s dead, I hope they buried him deep. Otherwise the blighters will dig him up and feed him piece by piece to their ugly dogs.” He bit into a breast.
“How soon do you expect details?”
“Mail packet’s due any day. If it’s an uprising, Chipewyan will send to Fort Vermilion for reinforcements and notify Ottawa through here. If it’s your marauders, they’ll handle it themselves and report. Three hundred troopers ought to be more than enough to cane a ragtag bunch of American bandits.”
In the interest of putting aside our cultural differences I held my tongue. I looked at the directions again, returned them to the envelope, and put it inside my shirt. “I’ll ride out tomorrow and talk to your survivor,” I said. “You didn’t tell me her name.”
“Weathersill. Her Christian name is Hope, if you can believe it.”
“I wouldn’t want to know a set of parents who would name their daughter Despair.”
“Yes,” he said, and remembered his wine. “Quite. Perhaps I shall have good news for you when you return. You may be back in Helena in time to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. Gala event, I suppose: Fireworks and pageants and the mayor parading about in tights and a powdered wig.”
“No, we generally save that for Independence Day, when we beat the tights off King George.” I paid for my meal, excavated my bearskin from under the coats that had accumulated on top of it, and went out, leaving George Washington face up on the table.
10
A pair of large charred log timbers formed a rude cross at the top of a mound of freshly turned earth overlooking the roiling Saskatchewan, visible for a mile through gaps in the tall pines. It marked the mass grave where Inspector Vivian and his volunteers had buried the victims of the Christmas massacre, and if it weren’t for that feature I might have been a week finding the remains of the settlement; for reasons roughly having to do with the banishment from Eden, God never places gold in the middle of a well-traveled road.
However, the inspector’s directions were accurate. Late in the forenoon of the second day out of Moose Jaw I pushed the mustang and pulled the gray up a hill covered with sugary snow and looked down from the top upon the black and broken evidence of atrocity.
Snow had fallen since the event, but not enough to cover the raw wound. Piles of scorched logs lay in regular patterns, spaced evenly apart like the shacks and cabins that had preceded them, with stone chimneys rising obstinately from the rubble. Some of the logs had burned entirely but retained their original shape even though they were made completely of ash and would crumble apart at the touch, like cigars left to burn themselves out forgotten in an ashtray. On the downhill side of the river opposite the settlement, a sluice built of logs sawn in half for the purpose of washing away silt and sand from recovered ore had collapsed in a broken line, its supports knocked loose with axes or kicks from horseback. After a month the scene still smelled of soot and burned flesh. I could swear I heard the echoes of gunfire, rebel yells, and the screams of the maimed, raped, and slain. Perched on that hill I felt twenty years wash away; I was back at Stone’s River, after the battle.
At the near end of the string of debris appeared a white pyramid which I took at first for a snowdrift, but it turned out to be a tent made from a wagon sheet. There was no sign of life nearby. I called out that I was a friend come with supplies, and listened to my own echo bang around among the trees and ridges for the better part of a minute. When no reply came after the second time, I transferred the Winchester from its scabbard to my lap and picked my way down the grade.
The sorrel became skittish and the gray tried to back up when we reached level ground; the stench of death was faint but unmistakable. I used my spurs and jerked the lead, but after another fifty yards the gray set its feet and would not budge. I stepped down, dallied the lead around the saddle horn, and hitched the sorrel to a low spruce, then approached the tent carrying the Winchester. There was no sign of a recent campfire outside the tent, and no smoke-hole in the canvas to accommodate one inside Indian fashion. I was cold enough in my bearskin, and I had been moving. How a person managed to stick in one place in that frozen country without a fire and avoid freezing to death was a mystery. Perhaps she had died, and been dragged away by wolves or a bear. Camping the night before, I had heard the weird baby-cry of a grizzly not far away, and had built my fire large to keep from waking up with a leg gnawed off. What Bliss and Whitelaw had started, the Canadian woods might have finished.
In front of the tent I stopped and called out again. When no one answered I pulled aside the flap, sidestepping quickly in case lead came out. It didn’t. I ducked my head and went inside.
What light there was came filtered through canvas. The sun was dazzling on the snow outside, and I waited a minute for my eyes to catch up to the change. Otherwise I would have been out in thirty seconds. I was alone in the tent with a buffalo-plaid blanket someone had been using for a bed and an iron-bound trunk with the lid thrown back.
Out of curiosity I stepped over and poked through the contents with the barrel of the Winchester. The trunk was full of tangled cloth, patching and dress and curtain material selected with care by a woman determined to make a civilized life for herself and her family in the wilderness. There was calico and denim and tightly woven wool, flannel and duck canvas and one slim roll of damask, expensive to obtain and wrapped in cheap blue cotton to protect it from handling. Everything else looked as if it had been pawed through recently. Some of the material was brown at the edges—part of the trunk’s lid was scorched—and there was a strong smell of stale smoke, but the trunk must have been stored somewhere the flames hadn’t reached. I used the carbine’s muzzle to work the top off a straw sewing basket. It contained spools of gaily colored silk and cotton thread, a sheaf of dress patterns on tissue carefully folded and tied with a pink ribbon, and a handful of shriveled black walnuts stashed by a squirrel.
Two large scraps of gingham and gauzy lace were spread out side by side on the earthen floor. A pair of shears with black enameled handles and sawtooth blades lay on the gingham, freckled slightly with rust. Bits of brownish fabric lay nearby, curled like dead centipedes. Someone had been busy trimming the smoke-stained edges.
I withdrew the Winchester from the trunk, hoping I hadn’t gotten any oil on the fabric. Out there among the wolves and Indians I felt as if I had violated the sanctity of a woman’s bedroom. I slunk out—and that’s when someone shot me and ruined billiards forever for Page Murdock.
PART TWO
Runners in the Woods
11
I’ve had forty years to sort things out and I still can’t swear to how much of what I witnessed next actually happened and how much I dreamed through a haze of pain so thick it could almost be called a form of sleep.
Start with the shot.
The evidence of all that domestic activity involving the scraps of material in the tent had knocked the edge off the caution I normally carried into open territory along with my weapons and provisions. I threw the flap wide and stepped right out into the open with the Winchester dangling at the end of one arm. The sunlight was brilliant after the dimness inside. I saw a purple shadow against the sky and my hands were just receiving the signal to raise the carbine when something struck my right side with the force of a boulder and my feet went out from under me and I went down hard on my tailbone. My lungs collapsed and a lightning-bolt of pure white pain shot up the base of my spine to the top of my skull. I have a clear memory of realizing what had happened to me, of the importance of finding my legs and scrambling for some kind of cover before a second shot came, and then a red-and-black wash took away my sight and I teetered over backward into a hole I hadn’t noticed before and fell into warm darkness. It was like tumbling back into the womb.
The rest is a tangle. I remember a woman with her hair loose and blowing wild; Farmer Donalbain’s weathered features ringed by his Quaker beard; an Indian with a platinum watch chain strung across his middle just the way the meat millionaires wore them in Chicago; striped and solid-color ivory balls rolling on green baize; John Swingtree’s hairless skin plastered to his skull, his body in chains; the smell of uncured buckskin boiled in some solution made of pure stench; Sloan McInerney telling Judge Blackthorne he’d spent eight hundred dollars on a cigar at the Coliseum; the sound of bone utensils clanking against each other like hollow metal; a clear tenor voice chanting, “Sharp be the blade and sure the blow and short the pang to undergo”; the taste of something warm and liquid with a greasy base and dried greens floating in it. I’m pretty sure now the chant and the ivory balls and Sloan McInerney were left over from before, and I doubt either Swingtree or Donalbain had shaken loose from their respective prisons—the territorial house in Deer Lodge and the lonely wheat farm below the Canadian border—and traveled north, but I’m undecided whether I actually saw the Cree chief Piapot, particularly since he made a strong enough impression to visit me in my dreams as recently as two months ago.
The rawhide and foul stench were real enough. When I awoke for certain and pulled aside my bear coat, which someone had spread over me like a blanket, my shirt was open and the lower half of my trunk was encased in a buckskin wrap from which all the hair had been scraped and which had dried as hard as plaster. I rapped it with my knuckles, testing it, and got a crisp report as if I’d knocked on a door. It was as tight as a corset and restricted my breathing, but I wasn’t in pain. I had seen Indians repair shattered buttstocks and splintered lodge poles with the same device, but this was my first experience with it in healing.
Sunlight filtered through canvas. I was lying on the buffalo-plaid blanket I had seen before, and when I turned my head the trunk full of fabric was still there, but with the lid shut. I spotted, perched on the ground beside the blanket, a white china bowl with a delicate scalloped design around its lip, marred by a black stain and a crack on one side. I smelled cooking grease and boiled greens, and something clawed at my stomach lining. I was famished. I reached over and touched the bowl. It was still warm. I twisted a little to get both hands around it.
That was a mistake.
Pain lanced my left side. I gasped, dropped the bowl, and fell back while a sheet of white fire swept over me. Someone groaned loudly in the cracked, froggy voice of an old woman. It was me.
Something tore aside the tent flap then, allowing a brass beam of pure sunlight inside and in its middle the same purple shadow I had seen just before the door slammed in my face. I saw a glint off gun metal. I put my hands on the ground and tried to slide backward, like a startled snake slithering for cover in the shadow of a rock. The pain rocketed up my side, paralyzing my right arm. It buckled and I fell over sideways, into a fresh country of pain.
I had been shot before, and taken blows, fallen off horses and trains and mountains; broken bones and been bunged up for weeks. The agony I had known those times was something I prayed to get back to from where I was now. On none of those occasions had I been hurt so badly I didn’t care if someone put a bullet in my brain. I peered through the throbbing watery fog at a woman with her hair loose and blowing wild, at the great gaping muzzle of the horse pistol she had pointed at me, and didn’t care which end she used on me as long as it put me back in that warm dark womb I’d had the bad sense to crawl out of in the first place.
The pain reached high tide and began to recede. My vision cleared, particle by particle, like bubbles bursting. The woman was a giant, standing over me with her shoulders hunched slightly to keep her head from brushing the top of the tent; but then I remembered I had had to stoop as well the first time I entered it, and that now I was looking up from the ground. She wore a man’s canvas coat that hung loosely enough to expose the blanket lining, the cuffs turned back a couple of times, but apart from that she was dressed as a woman, in a plain brown dress whose hem hung to the insteps of her lace-up boots, its edge dirty and tattered from dragging the ground. She had a cartridge belt buckled around her waist with six inches of leather flapping free because she’d had to punch an extra hole to make it fit and an empty holster. The revolver that belonged to the holster, a huge Walker Colt designed for carriage in a scabbard attached to a saddle, was heavy enough to bend her wrist with its weight, but she didn’t look as if she wanted to put it down any time soon. Her other hand was occupied with a double-barreled Stevens ten-gauge shotgun, the kind Wells Fargo messengers carried, with the muzzles pointed at the ground. I counted myself fortunate that when the time had come to shoot me she had decided to use the pistol. If it had been the shotgun there wouldn’t have been enough left of me to shovel into the tent.