The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 18



The letter dated April of 1834 begins: I have found the monster.' Hannibal drew himself closer to the fire that burned on the open side of the shelter, for even in early July, the mountain nights were chill. 'It's in the Bavarian dialect, and that bears about the same relation to German as Portuguese does to Spanish. I'll have some of that,' he added as January poured himself some of the coffee Frye had made. Frye settled for a half cup of Seaholly's contribution to the plague tent. After the day he'd had, he said, he needed a drink, and January couldn't argue with him there.

'I have found the monster.' For an instant, January saw in his mind the image of the doomed Baron Frankenstein, chasing the creature he had made across the Arctic ice into the darkness of eternity. He was from Ingolstadt, too.

'Franz Bodenschatz is, obviously, Frank Boden.' Hannibal angled the faded letter toward the low orange light of the flames. 'He describes Fort Ivy, and the enmity between the AFC and its rivals, pretty accurately. He calls Tom Shaw a dullard and Johnny a schwammerl - a simpleton - and describes how he, Bodenschatz, came up there from New Orleans, through St Louis. I assume this is the reason his father had the letter with him—'

'His father?'

'The letter starts out: Honored Father. At one point he says—' Hannibal turned the creased, discolored sheets ninety degrees; obviously there was little paper available at Fort Ivy, and what there was, January guessed, had begun its life as the flyleaves of Franz Bodenschatz's books. 'Thank you for the news of Katerina. I am sorry that even after your efforts, she seems incapable of understanding why I do as I must. What is wrong with these women? How can her heart be so hardened as to forget what Escher did? I fear I misjudged her, seeing in her facile pity for - something-or-other, some kind of bird, I think - and kittens the illusion of true capacity of the heart. When I have returned from America - when I have destroyed the Thing which martyred our Beautiful One - I will naturally pursue the honorable course and return to her. Yet how can True Love exist, knowing as I do now the shallowness of her selfish heart?'

He folded the letter. 'And how's Katerina Bodenschatz going to have True Love for a husband who runs off to America on a mission of vengeance, leaving her with two children, one of them a babe in arms at the time of Franz's departure, which as of April of 1834 had been - he mentions it somewhere in here - nearly seven years previously?'

'The Thing which martyred our Beautiful One.' From his pocket January took the locket, and he opened it in the firelight. The childish face of the girl within smiled out at them, and a bead of pine resin, popping in the fire, threw up a trail of yellow sparks and gave the illusion for a moment that she was about to speak. 'Escher, I presume.'

Hannibal unfolded the other sheet. 'Honored Father,' he read. 'All stands now in readiness. We have found an ally at last, whose heart bleeds as ours does, with wounds no balm can heal; an ally unshaken in the righteousness of our cause.'

'Or who says he is, anyway.' January spooned stew on to the tin plates that had come along with it: cornmeal, grouse, an assortment of Mexican spices. 'A man on a mission of revenge is one of the easiest to enlist to whatever cause you please, because he isn't thinking straight.'

'Hepplewhite seems to have convinced Franz, at all events,' murmured Hannibal. 'He can bring us unseen into the camp where Escher will be, and from there the trap will be easy to lay. No need even for bait, for the man's own disgusting habits will cause him to throw himself upon the trap spring, like the beaver who follow the stink of one another's - I'm not sure of the word here, but you know what they bait beaver traps with - to their watery ruin . . . Nice turn of phrase there, isn't it?'

He rubbed his eyes - it was now, January calculated, well past two in the morning, and the fiddler had been deciphering faded handwriting by firelight since just after dark.

'What's the date on this one?'

'This past September. Sa-sa, sa-sa, advice about having the garden and greenhouses looked to, instructions for the trip from Ingolstadt to Hamburg - evidently Papa doesn't get about much - and thence to New York on the Charlotte, to get a steam packet to New Orleans. Who to see in Independence - he's apparently coming the same way we did - which trader will get him to Fort Laramie, and a list of things he needs to bring. The journey is a difficult one, he says - there's the understatement of the year! - good boots, medical kit, tea, coffee, trade goods from St Louis in case the train he's traveling with runs into the Pawnee . . . "In case," ha! Here we are.'

He turned over the last page. 'In exchange for this, Hepplewhite will conceal us and our effects, and see to our safe return from the frontier. I hesitated to make this bargain with him, and yet, what sort of men are these, that we need to concern ourselves with their fates? I have been among them for two years now and can attest that they are brutes, little better than Escher himself. They have long since surrendered their humanity to drink, violence and the shallow pleasures of copulation . . . Clearly a man who has never properly copulated. The whole congregation of them, did you pass their souls through a hundred distillations and the finest filters you possess, would not yield sufficient paste to polish one of our precious Mina 's little shoe-buckles. The world will be cleaner for their absence.'

Hannibal raised his eyes from the letter, a whole ladder of parallel wrinkles repeating the lift of his brows. Only the sound of the river, gurgling over its stones, broke the silence of the night, drink, violence and the shallow pleasures of copulation at Seaholly's having given way at last to the peace of the mountains, the stillness that had existed since the great ranges were formed.

'He thinks he's some punkins, don't he?' Frye wrapped his arms around his knees. 'Brutes and beasts, are we? Waugh! Bet he still puts his pants on one leg at a time. Is Mina the little gal whose picture's in the locket?'

'I think so,' said January softly.

'And she'd be this feller Boden's sister? If he's callin' her "our Mina" an' his poor old Dad's the one that's carryin' her picture? Sounds like this Escher he talks of killed her . . . You said the old man was in mournin'. That's a dirty shame.'

'It sounds like it,' agreed Hannibal. 'And it also sounds like Franz has made a deal with Hepplewhite, whoever he is, to kill most - if not all - of the people here at the rendezvous, if this Escher is among them.'

'Kin he do that?' Frye looked out of the shelter, at the darkness beyond the fire. All the way up the trail, the camp- setters - and Shaw - had warned them never to get too close to a fire, lest the gold light make of them a target for lurking Indians. 'We got some tough hombres here . . .'

'And two of the toughest,' pointed out January, 'went out just after dark looking for Shaw, who I'd back against almost anyone in camp - and none of the three of them have returned.'



Gil Wallach had taken Morning Star's canoe that had brought himself, Pia and Hannibal to the island; it made January deeply uneasy to see the fiddler wade out into the river, his clothes in a bundle on his head. Completely aside from the cold of the snow-melt river, travel in the wilderness had made January aware of just how swiftly the water could rise from a thunderstorm on the mountains miles away. Nor had he forgotten the ambush on the night of the banquet.

'I'll pass like a frightened rabbit through the bottomland without even pausing to dress,' Hannibal had reassured him, 'and scamper down the trail in front of the AFC camp. I assure you I scream very, very loudly when set upon. Someone will have to notice.'

January kept to himself the reflection that any ambushers might well originate from the AFC camp, and took comfort - as he watched his friend reach the shore and vanish into the black shadows of the bottomlands - in the thought that the targets of the earlier assault had probably been himself and Shaw. Hannibal was fairly worthless to anyone, though the thought of vengeful Sioux braves lining up for the privilege of assassinating him to win the hand of Morning Star kept him smiling all the way back to the shelter.

All any Sioux brave had to do to win Morning Star's hand was lay in a stock of trade-beads and wait 'til the end of the rendezvous.

Lying in his blankets a little distance from the dying fire, January listened to the yipping of the coyotes, the mutter of the river around the island's flanks, as the images of Shaw, and Clarke and the crumpled, wolf-eaten bodies in Dry Grass Coulee merged into the image of Victor Frankenstein, wrapped in furs, running across the towering bergs of Arctic ice in pursuit of the thing he had created, the monster that owed him its very existence.

I have found the monster . . .

And left the world you knew behind . . .

Or is that me I'm seeing? he wondered in his dream. Bundled up in beaver fur, chasing Death Himself, with Rose and his sisters - and his nieces and nephews whom he cherished, and the music that was the golden heart of all his joy - all left behind him, thousands of miles behind, in New Orleans . . .

When I've avenged Ayasha's death, I can go home...

But he knew that, before he returned, they would all be dead.

Rose, no, I'm coming back . . .

'Winter Moon?'

He jerked awake, groped for his knife which had been under the spare blanket rolled beneath his head—

Morning Star, seated cross-legged a yard away by the embers of the fire pit, held it out to him.

Bo Frye snored on.

Behind the Sioux woman, morning was a monochrome of misty lavender and the dense black-green of the pines. January guessed he had slept less than two hours. The air was the cold breath of God, and his eyeballs had the batter-fried sensation they did during most of Mardi Gras.

'Where's Shaw?'

Morning Star shook her head. 'We finished the burying; he sent me ahead to scout.' Her voice was scarcely more than the waking-up clamor of every lark in the mountains. 'Twice we heard what he thought were movements among the trees up the coulee. I found nothing, but the moon was low, and it was very dark among the trees. On that second time Blanket Chief and Shoots His Enemy's Hand -' January recognized two of the numerous names the Indians gave to Bridger and Carson - 'came riding from the river. I stayed out of sight and followed them back to where I had left Tall Chief and Beauty by the graves of the others, but they were gone, and the ground was rank with the smell of sickness, and of blood. Blanket Chief and Shoots His Enemy's Hand searched the woods. It was only on account of the wolves that they found the body of Beauty, torn nearly to pieces - and scalped.'

'And Shaw?'

'I found no sign of him. Nor did they. All the horses were gone also. When the moon went in I came back here. Sun Mouse told me that Cold Face and the others had put you here, to keep the sickness out of the camp. Are you sick?'

'No.' January pulled his shirt on. 'And it's best you don't linger. Morales will be awake soon and he's keeping an eye on us.' January glanced in the direction of the merchant's small camp, though this was hidden by the island's rise. 'Others, too, and they may send someone to check on us. I can't risk you being seen here. The men are scared, and it'll be worse when Bridger brings back word that the Beauty, and maybe Shaw too, took sick just from burying the dead. The camp'11 quarantine a white man. I don't know what they'd do to one of your people.'

Obediently, Morning Star got to her feet and retreated to the line of stakes. January followed so that they stood about ten feet apart.

'What should I do, Winter Moon?'

'First, don't let anyone know you were one of the burying party. I'll make sure Frye keeps his mouth shut. Would your brothers, or others of your family, be willing to cross the river to hunt for Tall Chief?'

'I have already spoken to my brothers, and they have gone.' Morning Star gestured toward the hills across the river - shadowy still, though the sky was filled with new light. 'Chased By Bears said - and it is true - that this sickness seems worse even than the smallpox. Why should we care, he asked, if the whites all perish of it together? I said that Tall Chief is his brother now, and at least we must learn what became of him. But more, I think, he will not do.'

'Nor should he,' said January. 'Yet thank him for whatever he is willing to do to find the source of the evil that I think is walking somewhere in this valley. I don't know whether the evil that surrounded the old man by Horse Creek is a brother to the sickness spirit or not. Yet each time I look, I see that the tracks of the one lie close to the tracks of the other. And now I can't look for the tracks of either.'

He stood for a moment in thought, arms folded against the sharp chill, and passed all that had happened the previous day, and the day before, through his mind: the long, patient tracking of Groot and Clarke over the hills south of the camp; the bizarre and horrifying rituals glimpsed through the trees in the Blackfoot village - and the still-more-bizarre conversation with Wildman by the ashes of the Blackfoot fire the following morning; Fingers Woman curled up beside her husband on the reeking blankets, her head pillowed on the shoulder of the black velvet coat.

In his pocket - shut safely in his watch case - were four long splinters of burned fatwood that he'd taken from the Blackfoot fire. Their pointed ends were tipped with dried blood. What he'd seen hadn't been a hallucination or a trick.

Silent Wolf is my brother . . .

'Would you do this for me?' he asked at length. 'Would you take the big buckskin mare that's tethered at our camp and return her to Manitou Wildman? Tell him - and anyone else you meet - that Tall Chief sent you back to camp the moment we saw the bodies of the Dutchman and his party, without ever letting you get close. And ask Wildman, would he come here to speak to me?'

The young woman nodded and started to turn away. Then she looked back and asked him softly, 'Is it true? Will I become sick, as Fingers Woman and the others became sick? Will I die as they died?'

'I haven't yet,' pointed out January. 'Nor has Frye. The sickness spirit has given us time, and time is always a gift that must not be wasted.'

When Morning Star had gone, January made his way down to the water's edge to gather up driftwood and deadfalls, then returned to the camp to brew coffee. By the time Frye woke, Pia had paddled over with a camp kettle full of bighorn sheep- ribs and the information - called across the quarantine barrier, after she'd set down the kettle for January to pick up - that Bridger and Carson had just returned to the camp with the news of Clarke's death and Shaw's disappearance . . .

And that Hannibal had located Klaus Bodenschatz's hat.