The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 17



Clemantius Groot - clothed in a handsome black frock- coat - lay on his blankets, which were stiff with vomit. Beside him Fingers Woman was curled up, as if she'd died clutching her belly, her face pressed to his shoulder. Frye's whisper was edged with panic: 'My grandpa died like that. Yellow fever, in Boston in '93 . . .'

'The vomit's the wrong color.' January had worked plague wards, both in Paris and New Orleans. This was bad - four men and a woman, crumpled and twisted where they had fallen, two with faces and bellies torn open by the wolves. But nothing to what he had seen. 'And yellow fever doesn't kill in a night.' He dismounted, his borrowed mare fidgeting her feet and thrashing her head at the smell of death.

'But the cholera does, don't it?'

'Yes.' He was a little surprised at how detached his voice sounded, though, oddly, it seemed to steady the frightened young man beside him. 'Cholera can kill in a night.'

Or a day. He had made love to his beautiful Ayasha, early one hot morning in the cholera summer in Paris, kissed her - not an instant of that day had left his memory, nor would it, he knew, until he died, his love for Rose notwithstanding ... He had walked down the twisty stairs of that old tall house on the Rue de l'Aube and along those gray medieval streets where moss grew between the cobbles, to the plague hospital where he was working . . .

He could even remember the song the two children at the corner had been singing as they bounced their ball against the wall.



'Dans la forêt lointaine

On entend le coucou

Du haut de son grand chêne

II répond au hibou:

"Coucou, coucou . . ."'



And she'd been dead, when he'd come back to the room about half an hour before the setting of the sun.

He shook himself. If he let it, the thought would devour him. It had paralyzed him for months after that day - which still felt exactly as if it were yesterday. Even if it was yesterday, today is today . . . And today we have five people dead in a coulee in the middle of the Oregon Territory and no way of knowing whether the contagion has already spread like wildfire over the rendezvous camp . . .

He took a breath and said, 'The stools are wrong.'

'You can tell what they died of from lookin' at their crap?' Goshen Clarke grimaced, oddly revolted - particularly for a man who engaged in the competition-swallowing of raw buffalo-guts.

'For some diseases, yes. Cholera's one of them.'

Among the bodies, cups and kettles lay, two of them that had been set down still upright containing a little water. Thirst could mean fever . . .

Standing at the edge of the camp, holding the horses, Shaw's face had a cold stillness to it. He'd been in and out of the plague wards, too - January had seen him there. And had gone into more than one small house in New Orleans, or those small rooms behind shops and groceries and livery stables - only to see the whole family, father, mother, children dead. As his own family had died, leaving only Johnny and Tom.

'Could it be somethin' they et?' Frye tagged at January's heels like a child as he went from body to body; as he knelt to feel faces and hands, though he knew if they'd made camp sometime before dark they'd be cool and only beginning to stiffen. 'Woman that lived behind us on Water Street bought something in the market she thought was juneberries and made a pie of it for her family. All seven of 'em died, and for a couple days the whole neighborhood thought that it might be some sickness from down the wharves.'

'It could be.' January raised the eyelid of one of the engages, but saw nothing unusual in the dilated pupils, the glazed whites. 'Though I can't see Fingers Woman baking a pie.' He straightened up, then walked the whole of the camp again, observing everything, touching as little as he could.

Morning Star, ever practical, had already taken the thirst- crazed horses further down the draw, to where someone had dug in the sand of the creek bed yesterday evening. The hole was now filled with water from the sunken stream. Clarke stood as close as he dared get to his partner and his partner's Indian wife - perhaps ten feet - staring at them as if he still didn't believe what he was seeing.

It's got to be a mistake . . .

January knew exactly how he felt.

It's got to be a mistake. I was supposed to be with these friends a lot longer.

And in his mind he heard Iron Heart, the pockmarked leader of what was left of the Omaha village . . . Rotting on the ground, as my people lay among our tents and rotted . . .

And Shaw's soft, creaky voice saying: Tom never got over it ...

One person, a family, a village. The shock was the same, almost physical, like an anchor-chain parting. The stunned mind asking: what happens now? What do I do for the rest of the day? The rest of my life . . . ?

He didn't like Beauty Clarke, but that didn't matter.

He said, 'We need to warn the camp.'

'Holy Mother of God.' Frye's eyes showed a rim of white all around the blue of the iris. 'You mean this coulda broke out in the camp whilst we was up here?'

'You want to do that?' asked January. 'You can go straight down the coulee and across the river. You can probably make it by dark. We'll take care of these folks here and follow on—'

He glanced questioningly at Shaw.

'Why'n't you go with him, Maestro? If there ain't panic in the camp, don't start it. Ask around quiet, an' I mean quiet, if there's sickness . . . But go first to Titus, an' Stewart, an' McLeod. Get 'em together an' tell 'em what we found here, 'fore anythin' else. All right?'

'All right.' January looked down at young Mr Frye at his side. 'That sit with you, Frye? To avoid panic in the camp, people doing stupid things?'

'All right.' The young man sounded a little better, for having someone to tell him how to handle this.

Shaw turned back to Clarke, gestured to Groot's body on its blankets. 'With your permission?'

Clarke looked away. 'Go ahead. I doubt he'll care.' January wondered if he was remembering Manitou's words about ghouls.

Shaw knelt, felt in all the coat's pockets. Narrow-cut, January identified the garment automatically; it barely fit the Dutchman's stocky shoulders. Dried blood still crusted around the knife hole in the back. Swallow-tailed, with the same old-fashioned lapels as the black waistcoat and the same covered black buttons: he has to have been in mourning. From the pocket, Shaw brought out three envelopes.

One contained a ticket for the steam packet Charlotte out of Hamburg and fifty pounds in Bank of England notes. The other two contained letters in what January thought was German, until he tried to read it. He blinked, words seeming to make sense and then eluding him . . .

'What's it say, Maestro?'

He shook his head. 'It's some kind of High German dialect. Hannibal will know.' He turned the sheets over. Both were signed: Franz.

The envelopes were addressed to Klaus Bodenschatz, on der Pfarrgasse, in Ingolstadt.

And among the unfamiliar verbiage on the last page of one, January recognized the name Hepplewhite. He put the nail of his thumb beneath it, held the page for Shaw to see.

Shaw's glance lifted from the paper and for a moment met his, like frost on steel. 'Hell to pay.'



Cholera was the first thing Gil Wallach thought of, too. 'You're sure?' he asked as he and January walked down to the tents of the AFC through the darkness. And, when January reassured him: 'It's not the smallpox, is it?'

'Absolutely not.'

The little trader wiped his face nervously. 'I tell you, Ben, I was down in the Nebraska Territory when the smallpox went through the tribes there, and it's nothing you want to see. Nothing. There wasn't enough living to bury the dead. And the coyotes, and the birds ... I never want to see nuthin' like that again.'

'It's not the smallpox,' repeated January. 'Or yellow fever - and I've never heard of yellow fever up on high ground like this.'

'What can we do?' The man sounded scared - as well he might, January reflected. They were fifteen hundred miles from the United States, and surrounded by tribes who outnumbered them and who might easily convince themselves to take advantage of the white men in their time of weakness.

'First thing we can do,' said January, 'is find out what we're talking about.'

As they approached the AFC camp Robbie Prideaux hailed them from the group gathered in front of Seaholly's, engaged in the old trapper contest of seeing who could put out a candle with a rifle ball: 'C'mon, pilgrim, you can't say you seen the elephant 'til you tried this!'

January waved good-naturedly, but shook his head. The minute they'd entered the camp, he'd dispatched Bo Frye to the Hudson's Bay compound, with instructions to bring McLeod down to the AFC tents and to tell no one but McLeod the reason. The last thing they needed, January was well aware, was panic and finger pointing. That done, he'd lingered only long enough to fetch Gil Wallach and hand the two German letters over to Hannibal. He knew, to within a few degrees of certainty, that most of the other traders would be at Seaholly's.

This indeed proved to be the case. While Wallach quietly gathered up Sharpless, Morales, Wynne and a few of the other traders, January went to the crowd of trappers around the candle, signed to Bridger and Stewart and - when he'd actually fired off a shot that did put out the flame - Kit Carson: 'We need to talk.'

'You find that feller's camp?' asked Bridger as the three gathered around January.

'Not exactly. Titus in?'

'He's gone up to McLeod's - looks like here he's comin' now.' A clatter of hooves and a jingling of bridle bits as the horses emerged from the darkness; January could see in the Controller's face that he knew. Titus signaled to Seaholly to leave the bar to Pia and preceded them all into his big markee.

'What happened?' he asked January. 'What exactly did you find? It true what Frye says, that the Dutchman and his whole outfit are dead?'

'Except for Clarke, yes. It didn't look like the cholera, and it didn't look like yellow fever - I'm a surgeon, I know the signs - but they purged and puked themselves out, and died in the night. They were still warm this morning.'

Silence. The traders bunched in the small tent murmured among themselves, eyes glimmering in the shadowy lantern-glow.

'My question is,' went on January, 'if anyone else in the camp is down sick?' He looked at the men, in their dark town- coats and beaver hats. Sooner or later, these men saw every trapper, every Indian, every engage in the camp.

And heard every breath of gossip.

Their voices clucked a little like the river stones: Jim Hutchenson? . . . Nah, that's just a hangover. . . Fleuron was pukin' pretty bad t'other day . . . Well, he's in with Irish Mary now, so I guess he's feelin 'better. . . What about the savages? ... I ain't heard no death songs . . .

'You didn't just leave 'em laying out there, did you?' asked the Missourian Pete Sharpless uneasily, and Wallach retorted:

'What, bring 'em back to spread the sickness here in the camp?'

'Shaw and the Beauty are out there, burying them,' said January. 'They should be back—'

'And what about you?' demanded Morales. 'I don't want to sound cold, Señor, but who's to say you're not spreadin' that sickness to every man in this tent?'

Taken aback, January said, 'I've got no reason to think I am—'

Though the tent wasn't a large one, it was surprising how much space the traders - including Gil Wallach - could put between themselves and January without actually backing out the door.

'An' they had no reason to think they'd picked it up, until they died.' The Mexican trader looked around at the others. 'I'd vote, first off, that we quarantine Ben and Frye until we know what this thing is.'

'Makes sense,' agreed Wynne.

'Shaw and the Beauty, too, when they get back to camp.'

Wallach opened his mouth to protest, but closed it. Bridger asked, 'And how do we keep the Indians from coming in quiet and killing them, the minute they hear there might be a white man's sickness there? That smallpox outbreak in Nebraska in '32 has some of 'em pretty spooked.'

'Don't tell 'em.'

'How they gonna know?'

'They're gonna know, boyo,' pointed out Seaholly, exasperated, 'because some Granny Poke-Nose trapper'll see the quarantine camp, ask somebody why he can't go into it, come to me and get himself fogbound and then proceed to go airing his yap to every man in the camp, including the local representatives of the Ten Lost Tribes—'

'Not if you put 'em on that island in the river behind my place,' said Morales. 'It's half a mile to the next camp downstream, and it stands high enough that even cloudbursts don't cover it. I'll keep a watch, to see no man crosses over to it. Those who ask, I'll tell that you have the heatstroke, or got your head cracked, and must have rest.'

'That sit with you, January?' Titus turned to him.

In the faces of the men around him, January could see that he had little choice. 'Fair enough. But send me word of whatever you find out. I trained in the biggest hospital in Paris—'

'They let niggers be doctors in France?' Sharpless was genuinely startled.

'There's no law against a black man being a doctor in the United States, you ass,' snapped McLeod. 'Lord God—'

'We'll send you word,' Bridger promised. 'Kit,' he added to Carson, 'why'n't you and me ride out tonight and meet Shaw and Clarke - Dry Grass, you said? There's just a few too many Blackfeet wandering around the hills, and the thought of them catchin' the plague from scalpin' the burial party somehow isn't enough to console me for their loss.'

January said quietly, 'Thank you.'

After that it was only a question of making their way in secret among the cottonwoods and wading out - breast deep in the fast-flowing black water - to the island, which January guessed would be easier still to attain in a day or two, barring another storm on the mountains. Wallach went to fetch January's 'plunder' from Morning Star's lodge; Titus donated a small tent for shelter, and Seaholly even contributed a few bottles of whiskey that January wouldn't have touched on a bet. Frye protested - he had assumed when he left the camp a few days before that he was going to find himself a partner in a miraculous secret beaver valley - but was told to shut up. 'Less you say, the better,' McLeod informed him grimly. 'In fact, come to that, if Ben has to be free to give advice on matters medical, that means that you, Frye, are the one who got a crack on the head—'

'God damn it, Mac!'

'—and is being looked after here by January,' approved Stewart. 'I like it. It's got -' he made a gesture reminiscent of young Mr Miller framing a scene to sketch - 'symmetry.'

'It's got horse hockey,' retorted Frye, uncomforted.

The shelter was set up on the backside of the island's ridge, where a fire would not be seen from the camp, and Titus supervised the driving of a ring of stakes about twenty feet in all directions from the shelter. 'Any man comes across, I'll send a man with him, to make sure he doesn't get closer to you than ten feet,' promised the Controller. 'It's nothing personal, I hope you understand, Ben . . .'

'I understand.' And I understand you're pretty pleased to rob Gil Wallach of two clerks without having to hire them yourself. . .

'We'll see you're provided for. Hell,' the big man added, 'I'll even send one of my clerks up to Wallach's to help out, him bein' short-handed . . .'

January kept his thoughts to himself as Morales and Sharpless - both newcomers to the trade - exclaimed at the generosity of this gesture and Bridger and Carson exchanged trenchant glances.

By this time the lemon-rind moon stood high overhead. Here on the rear of the island, the noise from Seaholly's - fifty yards upstream and about that distance back from the water's edge - was softened by the intervening cottonwoods, and the smell of the camp's waste dumps mitigated by the river breeze. January debated whether to point out that establishing the shelter on this side of the island not only hid their fire from the curious in camp, but also exposed it to whatever tribes might be wandering around on the east side of the river, but decided to keep quiet about this. This campsite would give Morning Star and Hannibal a much better chance of coming and going unseen.

Only a few of the ad hoc Committee of Public Health still lingered when Wallach returned to the island shortly after midnight, carrying January's blankets, clothes and shaving gear and followed by Hannibal and Pia with a pot of Veinte- y-Cinco's stew. 'Don't cross the stakes,' said January - for the benefit of Titus and the ever-inquisitive Morales - and added in Latin, 'I need to have someone who can come and go in the camp.'

In the same language, the fiddler replied, 'That's not all you need,' and taking a camp kettle, picked his way over the moonlit rocks to fetch water. He took his time about it, only returning when the defenders of the camp's health had all sworn each other to secrecy again and started back toward the AFC camp. Wallach, January noticed, kept Pia under his wing and firmly away from Titus, who ignored the child as if she were a pane of glass.

'You let me know if there's anything I can get you,' called Morales over his shoulder. 'I have a couple books up at the tent, if you're inclined that way: an almanac and Robinson Crusoe.'

The offer being put off until the morrow, the trader quickened his steps to catch up with the others and disappeared into the trees.

'And left the world to darkness and to me.' Hannibal stepped out of the shadows and through the staked circle. January gestured him into the shelter - he didn't quite trust Edwin Titus's motives - and followed him inside.

'Where's Shaw?'

January shook his head. 'He stayed behind with the Beauty and Morning Star, to bury the Dutchman.' Quickly, he outlined what they'd found in Dry Grass Coulee. 'It never occurred to me they'd quarantine us. It should have.' He slapped at a mosquito. 'New Orleans is such a pest hole, I've gotten used to thinking that everyone's in the same danger of whatever disease is around.'

'You think Titus is behind this somehow?'

'I think he's glad Gil's out two clerks. Beyond that?' He shook his head. 'Whatever this is, it's bad. It strikes hard and swiftly—'

'Rather like the Blackfeet,' said Hannibal grimly. He held up the two folded letters. 'I've got them translated,' he added. 'And what they say isn't good.'