The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 22



Dear God—'

Shaw stepped quickly into the firelight, January barely getting a glimpse of his thin face scruffy with sandy beard, his long hair tied back in a straggly braid, before he kicked out the flames and buried the coals. He had an impression of half-healed cuts and bruises, of a shirt torn open over corded muscle and too-prominent bone, of one rifle in hand and two others slung on his back. 'Get the fish an' let's pull foot,' Shaw whispered, "fore they tracks you by the smoke. You all right?'

'I been better.'

'The worst is not, so long as we can say, "This is the worst,"' quoted Hannibal, whom death itself probably would not have found without a poetic allusion. 'Yourself?'

'Breathin'.'

This was all any of them said for the next several hours. Shaw led them east through the thin timber, where the waning moonlight glimmered between shadows like the abysses of Hell; along the granite backbone of a ridge; and down into a dry draw, where stones along what had once been a stream bed would obscure their tracks. They ate on the move. Twice Shaw signaled them to halt, and in the silence January heard the rustling movement of some animal ahead of them among the trees. Shaw passed him a rifle and powder horn - by the brass studs on the stock January knew it was Goshen Clarke's but January knew better than to shoot it.

At the top of the draw they crossed sloped ground carpeted with thin bunch-grass, under a drift of starlight. He had only the dimmest sense of the country dropping away to the left north, now, judging by the stars and the dark rim of mountains in the west. An owl hooted somewhere, and the men walked carefully, knowing that it was the hour when things besides vengeful Omahas did their killing.

Another draw, steeper-sided, one wall of it armored with an uneven rampart of granite escarpments. The flare of sparks as Shaw lit a makeshift twist of dry grass was almost blinding. Wordlessly, the Kentuckian took January's spear and swept it through a crevice in the rock face, checking for rattlesnakes, then crushed out the flare and carefully brushed away the ash. 'Lay up here.' He put a hand on Hannibal's shoulder and his voice was barely more than the scratching of fox claws on pebble. 'No sound, don't move, I don't care what walks acrost you. Pretend you're back home with as much opium in you as you can hold. We'll get you when it's dark.'

'One thing—' Hannibal caught Shaw's sleeve as the taller man would have boosted him up into the cranny. 'Was there a liquor bottle among the dead at Groot's camp?'

'There was.' Shaw's voice was grim. 'Clarke drank to 'em - there wasn't but a swallow left—'

'What's here? A cup? Closed in my true love's hand . . .'

'Didn't hit him 'til we'd got everyone buried an' was startin' to head back. Then it took him hard. It was good an' dark, an' for an hour an' more I'd felt through my skin that we had to get movin'. He was pukin' an' purgin', but didn't have no fever - there was no keepin' him hid, but I couldn't leave the man. Any idea what it was?'

'Castor-oil bean, it's called,' whispered January. 'African coffee is one of the names for it. Turns out old Bodenschatz was a chemist back in Ingolstadt.' Quickly, he outlined the discoveries deduced from the letters, and from Charro Morales's hat.

'Well, I knowed it was Iron Heart,' whispered Shaw. 'How it all fit together was only a guess, but when Iron Heart an' his braves come slippin' out of the woods, I put that together with the fact that old Bodenschatz was carryin' poison an' figured what Johnny stumbled into had to be his revenge on the white man, for the smallpox down by the Platte. We did have our eye on Morales, him bein' new in the trade . . .'

'He was the one who suggested we use the island as a quarantine zone.'

'He said he'd look after them,' mused Hannibal softly. 'I must say, there he did not lie. According to Morning Star, it sounds like there's more poison hidden in one of the lodges in the Omaha camp—'

'Waiting for a time when Boden and his father were certain their own quarry would be in the camp,' said January. 'Which leads back to "Escher" being Manitou Wildman—'

'An' leads straight back to Iron Heart - an' Boden - havin' to get rid of us at all costs, 'fore we gets back to the camp. I had already figured out,' Shaw added drily, 'over these last three days, that they wasn't gonna let me get acrost the river. I come pretty close last night, enough to see you on the island.'

'Was that you who fired the shot?'

'That was me.'

'So what do we do?' asked January softly.

'Water'll be down by tomorrow evenin'. What we need to do today is lay low. It ain't just the Omahas; I come near to bein' took by the Blackfeet twice. You spoke to Wildman?'

'He's moved camp - gone.'

'Figures. Boden'll be off after him . . .' Shaw fell silent, standing in the starlight like one of the boulders around them, barely more than a shape - a part of this silent land where there was no law, only the strength of one's will to commit vengeance.

And you '11 be off after Boden ? wondered January. Following him into the mountain winter, like a wolf on a trail? Turning into a wolf yourself?

For a time, all that he could hear was Shaw's breathing as Shaw himself pursued that thought - and what then? An intaken breath, long held, then released as if with conscious effort. Another the same, as if struggling to say words or not to say them. To frame thoughts or to thrust them underground in chains.

Would I follow a man who killed Rose? Or Minou, or Olympe? Would I leave all things behind me, like the hapless Baron Frankenstein? All my lesser loves - music and friendship and the peace of sleeping in a safe place each night - to kill the man who robbed me of my best love?

He realized he could see the thin features of the Kentuckian's face and understood that light was beginning to stir in the sky. In the pine trees, on the prairies below, in the grasses of the hillside and the tangles of barberry at the bottom of the draw, a million birds woke and sang.

He laid a hand briefly on Shaw's bony shoulder. 'Let's get through this day before we worry about what happens on the one after that.'



At some point about three-quarters of the way between noon and sunset, January - lying flat beneath the carcass of a deadfall pine-tree, with brush piled up before him so that he couldn't even see whether he was in danger or not - whiled away the time by envisioning a debate between the greatest orators he could think of, as to whether the worst part of this situation was hunger, thirst, not being able to piss, or not being able to move. The Roman Cicero, arguing for the last contention, eventually won, but the poet and preacher John Donne (sitting in the imaginary audience) pointed out that the advantage in January's situation lay that in being vexed with all four conditions, he must be considered blessed in part by having one discomfort displace the other three in the forefront of his consciousness, thus giving him three-quarters relief from complete misery. The fact that the tree under which January had squeezed his body had been dead for a considerable time, and had become a veritable apartment-house for grubs, wood beetles, centipedes, ants and spiders of all species did not improve either the situation or January's mood.

For fourteen long hours, the world consisted of the green light that came in through the heaped brush, the smell of dirt and rotting wood, the calls of birds in the trees around him - ravens, jays, wrens and thrushes - and the consciousness of how close he was to a lingering death by torture.

Those things, and his memories and thoughts. I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space . . .

He ran through everything that he remembered of Hamlet, of Dante's Inferno, of The Rape of the Lock. He mentally played each piece of music he had mastered throughout his lifetime: Mozart, Beethoven, ballets, waltzes, operas. He turned over his memories of Rose: walking beside him with her gray cloak belling out in the moist, spooky winds of summer storms; sitting on the gallery in the stillness of twilight; lying in his arms with her light-brown hair a silken river on the pillow. He tried to deduce the species and natures of everything that he could feel walking across the back of his neck of up and down his arms. He wondered if the patriarch Joshua had returned to the earth again and had made the sun stand still in the heavens, and if so, why?

Twice bears came close enough to the log for him to see their claws through the thin rim of space beneath one of the berry bushes that Shaw had thrust in over January to conceal him; close enough for him to smell the rank feral mustiness of their coats. Once - infinitely more terrifying - he heard the stealthy pad of moccasined feet, and the murmurs of voices speaking some Indian tongue.

Hunger, thirst and everything else had vanished, consumed in a white blaze of fear . . .

And returned within an hour, grinding and tortuous as ever.

Several times, he slept. From the last such nap he woke to find the light had faded, and the whole world breathed of pine and the river. As soon as he judged it dark enough, he moved the brush aside, with arms so stiff he could barely work them, and crawled out, used a broken branch to dig a hole to piss into, and was just covering the evidence when Shaw whispered from the gloom, 'Maestro?'

'Here.' Keeping his rifle within instant grabbing range, he slithered out of his shirt, shook out whatever it was that had been crawling around his skin for the past few hours it was too dark to see what they were - then moved toward Shaw's voice. Only then did he see him in the filtered moonlight. 'I never asked you: where are we? How close to the camp?'

"Bout twelve miles. We need to get ourselves acrost the New Fork River, then over the ridge to the Green again an across it. From there it'll be about eight miles 'til we get to the first of the camps. We can probably make it by morning if we're lucky. You tol'able, Sefton?' he added, for they had reached the rocks in which Hannibal had been cached, and January made out the pale shape of the fiddler's face against the shadows of the boulders.

January added - from Hamlet - 'Stand and unfold yourself and Hannibal got to his feet, holding on to the rocks behind him for support.

'Very funny. You come most pleasantly upon your hour . . . You just missed the rattlesnakes. Three of them crawled into my hiding place with me - to get out of the sun, I presume and just left at sundown. I've spent better days.'

'If you'd struck at 'em, or made a noise,' remarked Shaw, 'you'd've spent a worse one.'

Hannibal started to reply, then broke off to cough, pressing one hand to his mouth and the other to his side in a vain attempt to still the sound. Even stifled, it sounded as if his lungs were being sawn in half. 'I'm all right,' he said, as soon as he could speak. 'A trifling indisposition only, , as Aristotle put it. Nothing that food, rest and immoderate quantities of opiates would not instantly cure. The former two can be found in the camp and will suffice.'

With Shaw in the lead, they made their way through the scattered timber that cloaked the foot slopes of a tall butte, three shadows in the deeps of the night. In the hills to the east January could hear the howling of packs of wolves, fat with summertime and no great danger to men. Pallid moonlight sketched the shapes of deer in the open ground, trotting noiselessly down toward the valley below; of rabbits in such numbers that all the ground among the bunches of grass seemed alive. Water gleamed in the valley, and as they descended the side of the butte January could both hear and smell it, exquisite after a day of thirst and sharing sips from Shaw's water bottle at long intervals since sundown. From his own weariness he could only guess at Hannibal's, the fiddler lagging further and further behind and their progress slowed by frequent stops to let him catch up and rest. With these Shaw was infinitely patient, only sitting a little distance from the two of them and listening to the night with the wariness of a beast. Once January went over to him and whispered, 'Are we all right?' and the Kentuckian shook his head.

'We need to keep movin'.' He glanced back at Hannibal, sitting with his head between his knees. 'Let him rest now,' he added softly. 'He's gonna need his strength later.'

There was less moonlight beneath the trees. In addition to Clarke's rifle, January carried the sharpened spear he'd cut, and he used it as a probe and a walking stick, to test the ground before him and to balance as they descended toward the water. By the sound of it, the New Fork River was very high. The thought that they might get swept by the current back down to the Green again, and thence downstream and lose all the ground they had gained, brought him a sense of infinite weariness and futility.

'Ford's about a mile up,' Shaw whispered. 'They'll be watchin'. River goes over a rim of rocks a mile upstream of that, an' that's where we're makin' for. But it's no ford, so it's gonna be rough.'

It was. The river had gone down some, leaving the margin of the water - what in Louisiana was called a batture - strewn with flotsam, from small branches up to full-sized trees. Shaw and January found a young lodgepole pine about twenty feet long and as thick through as a man's doubled fists. It was all the three men could do to lug it to the river. Thrusting it ahead of them, they clung to the upstream side of the rocks, snow- melt water pouring over and around them, without the violence of the original rise but with terrifying strength. The longest gap between any two of the rocks was about twelve feet; with the force of the water holding the log against the rocks, it was possible to cross, but every second January was positive that one end or the other was going to slip and let him be swept away. Exhausted and famished, he knew his chances of getting out of the river again, even if he managed to cling to the log, would be nil.

The moon was low, when Hannibal and Shaw reached down from the bank to drag January - who was the last on the log crossings - up to shore. 'I do not ever,' he whispered, shivering so much that he could barely get the words out, 'want to have to do something like that again.'

'Don't say that,' advised Shaw, "til you knows what the alternative is.' He was already at work screwing the gun worm down the barrel of his Hawken to draw the bullet and charge, swiftly breaking down the lock to dry it and replace the soaked powder.

'And men do this, year in and year out, summer and winter,' said January, 'for a hundred and fifty dollars a year?' He reached for his gun to do the same, then let the weapon slip from his grip and sat heavily on one of the flat boulders on the bank, his hands momentarily too shaky to continue.

'Like I said -' Shaw dug ball and patch from his pouch, poured powder from the horn, which he'd carried wrapped in his shirt and tied around his head to keep it dry - 'all depends on what you'd be lookin' at instead. Blacksmithin' in some town in Missouri? Workin' a factory for thirty cents a week in Massachusetts? Or in your case—'

Shots cracked from the dark of the trees and January dropped behind the rock on which he'd been sitting. Hannibal scrambled down beside him - God damn it wet powder! - and the next second Indians broke from the trees, raced across the narrow band of riverside pebbles. January whipped his knife from his belt, made a dash for the river, and this time didn't make it.

Shaw had his bullet rammed home and got off one shot before the Omahas overwhelmed them.