The Shirt On His Back

Chapter 3



Abishag Shaw said, 'Well, consarn,' and stood for a time with his long arms folded, chewing on both his tobacco and the news of his informant's death.

'Wallach wouldn't know Boden by sight?'

Shaw cast a glance up through the cottonwoods toward the store tent. The little trader had taken over at the counter while January led Shaw down to the river's edge, allegedly to have a look at the scene of the fight. 'Wallach works mainly out of St Louis. I doubt he seen Boden more'n two-three times, an' those most likely in the post store where the light ain't good. Even Clopard an' LeBel knew him bearded, an' I'm guessin' his beard was the first thing to go. Boden kept apart from most of the men in the fort, Tom says.'

'That's a strange disposition to have,' remarked January, 'for a man who takes a job at a trading post.' He recalled the muddy palisaded yard - eighty feet by sixty - and the cramped quarters that were snowbound five months of the year.

Shaw spit at a squirrel on the trunk of a Cottonwood half a dozen paces away: the animal jeered at him but didn't bother to dodge. For a man who could kill anything with one rifleshot, Abishag Shaw couldn't hit a barn door with spit. 'An' I'd say your disposition for helpin' your fellow man an' goin' to confession regular is a strange one to have for what we're doin' here, Maestro. But yeah, I'd say it's strange. Johnny did, too. Else he wouldn't have been pokin' his fool nose around Boden's desk.'

'He write to you about it?'

Shaw shook his head. 'Johnny couldn't hardly write his name. But Tom said, Johnny asked about him, months before he found that letter. He's too smart for what he's doin', Johnny said. An' he's stayed out here too long. Tom told him it wasn't none of his affair.'

January leaned his shoulder against the tree, looking out over the river - low in the thin gold light of afternoon, exposing a long strand of rock and driftwood - and seeing instead the cramped blockhouse of Fort Ivy. Each night the stock was herded into the gray wooden palisade, and the ground, the walls, the air smelled of their dung. Through the six months of winter the snow would lie deep around the walls. No travelers, no news: nothing to do but play cards and drink and talk about women and beat off. Even sharing a two-room slave-cabin with twenty other people in his childhood, with a drunken and unpredictable master thrown in, January and the other slave children had at least been able to seek the cypress woods, the bayou, the batture along the river with its fascinating mazes of dead wood and flotsam . . . and to do so at any season of the year.

On the plains beyond the frontier, even in the summer, you stood the chance of being murdered and scalped if you went too far from the walls.

As Johnny Shaw had been.

Though he had never met the young man, he knew exactly why Johnny had asked himself: what was Frank Boden doing there?

'Boden hated it, Tom said,' Shaw went on in his light, scratchy voice. 'Wouldn't drink. Wouldn't play cards. Hated it - an' hated every soul in the place. Farrell shared that loft above the store with him. From the start they was always pushin' at each other: Boden would go silent, Farrell would talk louder an' dirtier. Once Farrell pissed on his books. Yet Boden stayed.'

They'd searched that low-raftered ten-by-ten-foot room - January, Shaw, Hannibal and Tom - the morning after their arrival at Fort Ivy and had found nothing. Tom had said that he'd searched it himself three times before they came, for any sign of the half-written letter that Johnny had found, or any clue or hint as to the 'trouble' he and his correspondent Hepplewhite had been plotting that might help in tracking Boden down. There were few enough places to look. The walls were bare log with the bark still on them, the rafters open to view from below. A puncheon floor - split logs - provided no loose boards or convenient carpets to cache things under. If Boden had had anything he didn't want Ty Farrell to know about he'd taken it away with him when he left.

And what did you carry, January wondered, when you left your world behind? Books? Letters? A Bible? The only things he'd taken from his years in Paris had been a gold thimble and a single gold earring in a camel-bone box, that had belonged to the wife who had died there. If Farrell had pissed on his room-mate's books, Boden had probably hidden whatever else was dear to him.

With odd, clear suddenness he remembered his hatred of 'Mos, the eleven-year-old son of the other slave family with whom his parents and younger sister had shared that single cabin-half. The older boy had bullied him, stolen his food, broken or traded away to others anything January treasured, given him 'Indian burns' and challenged him to do things that had nearly killed him. January could still hear his high-pitched nasal voice, still smell the peculiar individual scent of his flesh. He hadn't thought of 'Mos in decades. Yet he knew he would recognize him even now, however the years had changed him, bearded or clean, hair black or gray . . .

Ty Farrell would have known the man he'd lived with and hated, if no other had.

But he remembered, too, weeping with Kitta and the others, when 'Mos had been sold away.

After a long time he asked, 'Didn't Tom think it was odd? That Boden stayed on in a place he hated?'

'Tom figured it wasn't none of his business.' Movement downstream: the Mexican trader whose pitch lay downstream of the AFC had led his mules to the water to drink, his rawhide jacket a cinnabar flicker in the dappled shade. Despite the placidity of the river, January could see how far up the banks lay the debris of recent rises: whole trees uprooted, boulders of granite rolled loose from the stony bed, matted tangles of torn-off shrubs. On the plains he'd learned how quickly water could rise, and he didn't grudge the walk of fifty yards through the cottonwoods he'd have to take the next morning to bathe.

Shaw sighed and scratched his long hair with broken fingernails. 'Tom's got about as much imagination as a steamboat. They's plenty men in the East, gentlemen like Boden, that has to stay beyond the frontier. Tom didn't think much of it.'

You owe me .. . Had the oldest of the brothers spent sleepless nights, wondering how things could have been different had he paid more attention to his inquisitive junior's words?

Had his thoughts of vengeance fed on that possibility, or sponged it from his mind?

'What about the trappers?' They walked back up toward the markee again. Out in the meadow in the long slant of the afternoon light, a bunch of Robbie Prideaux's friends had organized a shooting match, a common pastime to judge by the shots January had been hearing all afternoon. 'There's no way of knowing whether Clopard and LeBel can keep their mouths shut if they get drunk, but there are trappers that must have known Boden. They'd be more observant, even if he's done something to change how he looks.'

'More observant,' agreed Shaw. 'Less like to go shootin' off their mouths, if'fn word gets out as to how Johnny Shaw's brother is askin' questions about Frank Boden?' He spit again at a pocket mouse at the foot of the boulder behind the store tent, missing it by feet. 'Like Tom said, I get one shot at the man. I purely don't want to have to go trackin' him through the mountains.'

It was on the tip of January's tongue to ask, 'Would you?’ but he held back from the question, as he would have held back from grabbing a man's broken arm. In the four years he had known Abishag Shaw in New Orleans, he had never heard the Lieutenant speak of any family, save once, when he had mentioned a sister who had died. Hadn't been for you runnin' the way you did, Tom had said. What had happened because Shaw had walked away?

It was clear to him now that Tom and Johnny had been the only family Shaw had.

Will you give up your beliefs about law and vengeance, so as not to lose the single person of your own blood that you have left?

Follow a man into endless and deadly wilderness, rather than go back to your only kin and say, I couldn't? I wouldn 't?'

January recalled swearing once that nothing would ever induce him to return to New Orleans. He had learned since then what it was to need your own blood, your own kin, as a drowning man needs air. To need to know that you weren't utterly alone.

'That feller who helped you out in your fight, Manitou Wildman—' They ducked beneath the line of dangling traps as they came into the store tent. 'He was at the fort last winter.'

'I thought he might have been. He had credit-sticks - plews? Or are plews the skins?'

'Plews. An' yes - they call the sticks same as they call the skins, just so's everythin's clear an' understandable.'

'He had plews from the fort.'

'He's one I need to talk to. Clem Groot - the Dutchman - an' his partner Goshen Clarke was camped near there, too. Trouble is,' Shaw added more quietly as Wallach gave them a salute and headed off up the path for the Hudson's Bay Camp, 'we got no way of knowin' that they wasn't part of whatever Boden is mixed up in. That goes for the engages, too.'

'What could he be mixed up in?' January waved out across the counter at the rolling meadows, the distant clusters of white tipis, the long string of shelters and campfires upstream and down. 'What trouble, what evil, could a man be here to do?'

'Other'n murder, without proof, a feller he thinks might be the one who killed his brother, you mean?' Shaw perched on a bale of shirts. 'That I don't know. They's money in furs, Maestro, more'n you or I'll ever see. The American Fur Company's already crushed out two big outfits that they felt was takin' their Indian trade away from 'em, an' God knows how many little ones like Ivy an' Wallach, an' not just by gettin' their trappers to desert 'em with all their season's furs, neither. You talk to Tom Fitzpatrick sometime, 'bout how the AFC works. They got agents livin' regular with the Crow villages - hell, Jim Beckwith's a chief of the Crows these days - an' the Crows or any other tribe is just as happy to scalp a white man they catches on their huntin' lands . . . an' the Flatheads is just as tickled to return the compliment on anyone who ain't a friend of their friends, the Hudson's Bay Company.'

A trapper named Bridger - older than most and recognized through the length and breadth of the mountains as being as wise as the Angel Gabriel, for which reason he was generally called Gabe in spite of the fact that his name was actually Jim - came to the counter to ask the prices of salt and tobacco.

When Bridger had gone, Shaw went on, 'The Hudson's Bay men been tryin' for years to spread east into the Rockies. At Seaholly's this afternoon they was sayin' as how that Controller the AFC sent out - that snake-eye Titus - has his orders to do what he can to cripple 'em. An' in a place where there ain't no law,' he concluded quietly, 'Do what you can takes on a whole new meanin'.'

A couple of Shoshone came to the counter next, joking in their own tongue and smelling faintly of cheap whiskey, offering winter fox and wolf as well as beaver in trade. Even the Indians allied with the enemies of the AFC, January was aware, knew themselves to be outnumbered and outgunned, and therefore kept the peace, not only with the whites, but with one another. On the plains they were constantly at war, tribe against tribe, and in the course of the afternoon January had learned that their tribal politics were inextricably tied up with keeping on the good side of the trading companies. Without guns and powder, each tribe knew its enemies would wipe it out.

Even so, looking out across the meadows in the clear gold crystal of the evening light, January resolved to steer well clear of the pockmarked Iron Heart and his Omahas.

Campfires were being built up. Men he'd been introduced to by Prideaux or Wallach in the course of the long afternoon greeted him as they went past. Others he already knew by sight: Edwin Titus, the AFC Financial Controller Shaw had spoken of, frock-coated and prim, with eyes like chilled blue glass; red-haired Tom Fitzpatrick, whose company the AFC had crushed two years before and who now worked for them; fair-haired little Kit Carson. Engages - camp-setters - many of them very young. These were often the sons of Indian women themselves from an earlier generation of mountaineers, hired cheap to go out with the trappers, to pitch camps, mind horses, flesh and stretch the skins when the trappers brought them back to the brigade camps deep in the wilderness, hunt meat while the trappers sought more valuable prey.

'Could Boden be passing himself as an engage?' January asked.

'He could.' Shaw stood and stretched his back with an audible popping of bones. 'Or a trader; or a clerk with the AFC, if this Hepplewhite he was writin' to is of their Congregation . . .'

The sun had slipped behind the low western peaks. Shadow began to fill the little tent. Shaw started gathering up the tobacco and knives, the vermillion and beads, from the blanket- draped trestles and stowing them in a lockbox, while January untied the rolled-up side of the tent. 'He could be a clerk with Hudson's Bay, or even - if he's real clever - that fool preacher that was standin' outside Seaholly's shoutin' about how the whole passel of us was bound for perdition an' brimstone. Or he could be passin' himself as a gentleman come to the rendezvous for the huntin'. They got a Scottish nobleman that's stayin' with the AFC - with his private gun-loader an' horse- minder an' his personal artist to memorialize the trip for when he goes back home.'

'That's a lot of money for a disguise.'

'It is to you an' me. But we got no idea who Boden's workin' for, nor how many are in it with him. AFC's got their own store-bought Congressmen - one of whom ran for President last year - so a murderer'd be picked up for small change. Good thing I seen this Sir William Stewart in New Orleans over the winter or I might shoot him from behind a tree just on the suspicion.' A trace of bitterness flickered across Shaw's gargoyle face - a trace of self-contempt. 'Pretty much the only thing Boden can't be passin' hisself off as is a trapper.'

'Do we know he didn't do any trapping? You said yourself Tom didn't know anything about him—'

'Nor did he.' Shaw nodded at Robbie Prideaux and half a dozen mountaineer friends gathered around his little campfire a dozen yards on the other side of the path, ferocious-looking in blanket coats and bristling beards. 'But I'm guessin' he could no more pass hisself off as a trapper than I could get up at a Mardi Gras ball an' pass myself for a musician, just from talkin' to you. First time somebody handed me a bassoon I'd be a dead beaver.' He cracked his knuckles. 'Truth is, Maestro, we're trackin' an animal that we don't know what its prints look like. Where's Sefton got to?'

'He went off to explore the camp.'

Shaw grunted and answered January's thought rather than his words. 'If'fn he stays sober in this place, we'll know he has truly drunk his last drink.'

Out on the meadow, two more trappers approached Robbie Prideaux's fire, lugging between them an appalling mess of the entrails of what looked like an elk, heaped up on the animal's skin between them, and were greeted with cheers.

January had heard of this particular contest and groaned. 'I'd hoped that was just a tall tale.'

Shaw grinned. 'Hell, Maestro, you think anyone could make up a story like that?'

The point of the contest - usually involving buffalo intestines, further to the east in that animal's range - was for one mountaineer to start at one end of the some eighteen feet of entrails, with his opponent at the other end, and to see which man could swallow the most, raw and whole. Judging from the whoops, shouted comments, cheers and slurps which followed, the only lubricant involved - other than the general texture of the guts themselves - was large quantities of AFC liquor.

January shook his head in amazement. 'Do they clean them first?' he asked. 'Rose is going to want to know.'

'Depends on how they feels 'bout bein' called a sissy.'

Shaw struck flint with the back of his knife, lit the candle in the lantern, a warm ball of gold in the cindery blueness which he hung to the corner of the markee. The air was cooling rapidly: in New Orleans it would be like a slow oven until the small hours of the morning.

Rose ... He pushed the thought aside.

'Sounds like your brother Johnny would have made as good a policeman as yourself.'

'He was sharp.' Shaw's flat voice held the first trace of sadness January had heard in it, in all these weeks. The first trace of human grief. 'He was a good hunter. But he had no hardness to him. He was kind. But if brains was gunpowder,' the Kentuckian added, shaking his head, 'Johnny couldn't'a blown his nose. He probably walked straight up an' asked Boden: "Who's this Hepplewhite an' what kind of trouble you talkin' about in your letter . . . ?" He didn't think evil of no one. It wasn't in him.'

Words floated up on the wind from Seaholly's: '—hollowness of the world - sinful fornication - writhing in eternal flame—' It definitely sounded like there was a preacher in camp.

'Sometimes I think it's 'cause he left the mountain so young,' said Shaw. 'He was only twelve when he come downriver with me an' Tom that last time, us all thinkin' it was just for the summer an' we'd sell them hogs an' puke our guts out on

Bourbon Street an' then head back to our mama an' our wives an' find 'em as we'd left 'em . . . The mountain was like this,' he added, looking out into the growing blue of the twilight. 'No law; no reason not to kill a man who put your back up, 'ceptin' fear of what his friends'd do to you, or to your kin. There was bad blood all over the mountain, from the Tories sellin' weapons to the Indians durin' the war.'

From the direction of the liquor tent came the sudden spatter of gunfire, whores' shrieks and a man's voice raised in a howl of pain. 'Damn it, am I killed? Am I killed ...?'

'Couldn't hardly have a weddin' or a dance, 'thout somebody gettin' killed from ambush. If your kin called on you to go burn somebody's barn or kill their stock - or maybe shoot somebody 'cause maybe his brother might of killed your cousin - you went. You didn't ask. I was awful old 'fore I even saw a sheriff, much less knew what one was. We grew up lookin' after our own.'

He shrugged his bony shoulders as if trying to shift some unseen weight. 'Johnny had a good soul.'

The last streaks of gold and yellow dimmed above the western ranges, the sun gone but light still saturating the evening sky. Looking after our own . . .

January prayed that his sister Olympe, the voodoo-ienne, and their youngest sister, the beautiful Dominique - not much older than Johnny Shaw had been - were looking after Rose. It was fever season in New Orleans. With the quick-falling tropical dusk, mosquitoes would rise in whining clouds from the gutters and drive everyone from the galleries into the stuffy dark of the house. Please God, don't let Rose be taken with the fever . . .

He wouldn't know until November, whether she was living or dead.

There was nothing he could do but pray, and trust.

'I was twenty-five years old,' he said after a time, 'before I saw a mountain. The first year I was in France, some of the medical students at the Hotel Dieu asked me along on a trip to Switzerland with them. I'd seen pictures, but I almost couldn't imagine what they'd be like.'

'Somebody in New Orleans,' sighed Shaw, 'gotta put up a hill or somethin', so's the children growin' up in that town knows what the word means. I do miss 'em,' he added. 'For all what it was like, keepin' a watch on your back when you went anywheres, or hearin' hooves in the dark outside your house an' havin' to go for your gun just in case - I miss the mountains. The stillness there ain't like the still you get in the bayous. Johnny missed 'em bad. He wasn't but twelve when we come downriver in '29. Tom never was much hand for writin', but after they left New Orleans an' came out here, I'd think of 'em, in mountain country. An' I woulda bet money,' he concluded resignedly, 'if'fn I coulda found a taker, that 'fore full dark Sefton would get hisself hooked up with some filly—'

'Well, no takers from anyone who knows him,' agreed January, following the direction of Shaw's gaze. Hannibal came walking back from the direction of the Indian camps, his spidery silhouette against the lavender dusk trailed by a smaller, plumper and more curvaceous figure in a deerskin dress.

'Pleased to meet you, m'am,' said Shaw, and he and January removed their hats.

'She only speaks French,' explained Hannibal.

'And this is—?' January prompted.

The fiddler gave them a happy smile. 'Gentlemen, permit me to introduce to you my wife.'