The Englishman's Boy (7 page)

“What’s ailing your friend?” the driver suspiciously asked the boy. He didn’t like the way the Englishman’s teeth chattered and clicked.

“Ague,” said the boy.

“Sure ’tain’t mountain fever?”

“I said her once,” the boy said, putting his foot to the wheel and boosting himself up on to the seat beside the teamster. “You got your trip money. Move them skinny mules.”

Soon they were rumbling down Front Street, the Englishman rattling and groaning on the wagon bed. Front Street wasn’t much, white dust and a ramshackle collection of log, frame, and adobe
buildings, a thoroughfare littered with horse droppings, torn playing cards, and chamber-pot slops that Fort Benton’s sporting women tossed out their bedroom windows. Wild-eyed men wandered in and out among the wagons and horsemen, on the verge of being ridden down or driven over. Bursts of cheering and the energetic thumping of bar-room pianos by saloon “professors” announced the broaching of the first whisky barrels, which had been galloped posthaste up from the
Yankton
by buckboard. Merriment was epic and general. In a situation of robust supply, the price of whisky had plummeted to two bits a shot.

The proprietor of the Overland Hotel was loath to let a sick man on the premises, saying it was bad for custom. For a time the Englishman’s boy stood silent. Then he said, “Nothing worse than fire for business.”

The owner wanted to know what he meant.

“Never know about fire,” said the boy. “Comes out of nowhere sometimes, like a thief in the night.”

He got his room. For three days the Englishman alternately shook with a bone chill or swam in a greasy sweat slick as melted butter, the fever frying him like pork in a skillet. The boy never left his side, God’s rightful angel of mercy. His own Pap had died of a like complaint, fire and ice, his spleen swelling like the Englishman’s, rising below the ribs hard as a piece of oak, bulging out in what was dubbed the “ague cake.”

In snatches the Englishman’s boy would doze on the floor, waking when Dawe commenced raving and thrashing on his straw tick, hollering for some woman called Nanny Hooper. The Englishman’s boy had seen his share die, and it was frequent they called on their mamma in the testing time, the hour of travail, travelling back to the years of the milk-titty. But the Englishman just bellered for his Nanny Hooper, whosoever she might be when to home.

The second night came the convulsions. Straddling Dawe’s chest he rode the bucking pony, grabbing fistfuls of hair to pin the flailing head to the pillow while the Englishman’s face slowly turned black,
his eyes rolling back in their sockets, his heels beating a frantic tattoo on the hard mattress.

The third night there was nothing left to do but sit on a hard chair and listen to the sound of the ragged, hoarse breathing wind down. Towards two in the morning Dawe suddenly cried, “Nanny! Nanny! Nanny!” in the high voice of a little child, then he curled himself up on his pallet and died. The boy straightened the limbs, washed the body, tied the jaw shut with a hanky, closed his eyes. He didn’t know what a dead Englishman required in the way of a leave-taking so he sat back down on the hard chair with his hands on his knees and sang “Amazing Grace” to the naked white body, the aubergine face and yellow eyelids.

Going through the deceased’s effects he was surprised to find so little real money, only forty-five dollars in gold coin. He had heard Dawe say a line of credit was arranged for him at LG. Baker Company, but a dead man couldn’t draw cash nor goods and the Englishman’s boy was owed two months’ wages.

He appropriated Dawe’s tweed jacket and bowler. Both were sizes too big for him, but he could wear the hat by stuffing the sweatband with the old newspapers which the Englishman had refused to throw away because he said they spoke to him in the soft accents of home. The boy pulled on the jacket and examined himself in a yellowed mirror. With the cuffs turned back it would serve. Warm and a hard-wearer. He slipped a box of revolver cartridges in his left-hand pocket and a box of cartridges for the carbine in his right. Last of all, he crossed two bandoliers on his chest, buckled on the holstered Colt, and slung the Winchester over his shoulder in its saddle-scabbard. As close as he could calculate, with some generosity allowed for the risks he had taken nursing the Englishman, this was what he was entitled to. The rest of the Englishman’s worldly goods and possessions he left behind.

The owner was not on duty, a night clerk nodded in a chair. The boy tapped the counter with his knuckles and asked to settle up. The bill came to fifteen dollars for three nights’ lodging, six dollars for
meals delivered cold to the room, five dollars for a bottle of whisky he’d dosed Dawe with when he was taken with the chills. Twenty-six dollars. Computing the inconvenience of a corpse, he handed the desk clerk forty, and kept back the last five of the Englishman’s ready money for himself.

The clerk asked if the fourteen dollars extra was on account for his friend, was he staying on?

“Until you bury him,” said the boy. “I took what’s owed me. The rest of his guns, his personals – they’re yours now.”

“You ain’t leaving a dead man on premises!” the clerk shouted after him as he went through the door. “Here, you! Stop!”

The boy walked on. He figured they’d do all right burying Dawe, it had to be purely profit. There were silver-backed hairbrushes and a gold watch up in that room. There were shirt-studs and rings in a jewellery case, fancy guns, drummer’s clothes. He could’ve taken his pick of it all and gone out a window, but creeping and crawling wasn’t his line. He remembered what the Englishman had said about him down the Missouri, that he’d stand and fight. If it wasn’t for the sake of those few words he wouldn’t have stopped a minute with the dying man – the truth be known, he hadn’t liked him much. His Pap had taught him his lessons about rich men. The soft words of a whore and a whore’s hard heart, hand in your pocket. Still, the Englishman had spoken him his due, allowed he had spunk, and was owed his due in return.

The Englishman’s boy went out into false dawn, presentiment of morning, the big coat and big hat and the expensive guns rendering him ridiculous and a shade sinister at the same time. The night clerk came to the door of the Overland Hotel, ready to press his point, but seeing him there lit by the light spilling from the doorway, dwarfed by another man’s clothes, dwarfed by the long shadow rooted to his heels and stretched in tortured protraction across the pale dust of the street, he felt a sudden unease and hurriedly turned back inside.

The door slammed and the boy sniffed the cold air, looked deliberately up and down the street. A few horses were still standing saddled and tethered to hitching posts outside the saloons, looming in
the pearl-grey light like the strange horses that galloped through the last days of the world, the horses his mother had read to him out of the Bible. The boy walked on as the horses snuffled and nickered and tossed their heads in apprehension, walked on past the silent, shuttered hurdy-gurdy houses and saloons, past I.G. Baker’s and T.C. Power’s big trading concerns, past a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, a bunkhouse for bullwhackers, walked on with the numbness induced by three days of sleeplessness, propelling one boot mechanically in front of the other. It was a short street in a short town and soon he had walked himself out of it and into a wilderness of space, the forlorn sweep of sky and land offering the final proof he was trapped in this town. There was nowhere to go. He had no horse. The
Yankton
had left town as soon as she unloaded and headed back downriver. In any case, five dollars wouldn’t have bought him a ticket in steerage, wouldn’t buy him much of anything in a boom-town of sky-high prices.

He sat down on a rock, back to the rising sun, and wrapped himself tighter in the tweed jacket. One thing for certain, he couldn’t stomach sweeping out no more saloons, nor sloshing out no more cuspidors, nor being at the beck and call of bar-keeps, piano players with two left hands, frail sisters, and soiled doves. He was done with all that. Sooner starve like a dog in a ditch than be whistled up by the likes of them. And he knew ditches, had more than a winking acquaintance with them in the two years since his brother put the run on him.

It might be one thing to swallow a whipping at the hands of your Pap, but he didn’t figure that whipping rights had passed along to Dan with the farm when the old man died. Seeing as his brother was four years older and forty pounds heavier, he’d took it for a while, but then one day when he’d had enough, he’d done Dan with a shovel, whacked his head good and sound, same as a nail. One swing to pound him onto his knees, two more to peg him flat and level with the dust. That shovel blade had rung sweet as any church bell to his ears, whanging away on Dan’s poll.

So there his brother had laid swooning in the yard for nigh on
an hour, the chickens clucking and cocking their heads at him, eyeing the blood leaking from his scalp and puddling on the ground. But at last Dan gave himself a shake, climbed to his feet like the risen Lazarus, and reeled for the cabin, muddy gore caked to his face. When he sallied back out with the flintlock, raising the stakes like that, gun against a shovel, what was he to do but fold his hand, cut and run? Now that he owned guns of his own, one at his belt, one at his back, God help any poxy bastard who snicked a bullet past his ear the way Dan had. He was done with showing his heels to any man.

The Englishman’s boy turned his eyes over his shoulder and to the river bluffs across the Missouri. There the strong glow of the rising sun lit a mass of shelving cloud so that it appeared a bank of molten lava squeezed from the guts of the earth, each striation distinct and gleaming with a different fire. The topmost layer the rich ruddy purple of cooling slag; then the dim cherry of a horseshoe heated for shaping; then layers of orange and yellow which smelted down to where swollen, bulging hills met the sky in pure white fire. He faced west again where the sun over his shoulder was painting the valley hills with a tenderer light. On the crest of these hills the Englishman’s boy could make out three tiny black dots, moving.

They were still so distant he could not make them out, but he presumed they were horsemen. The sun came nudging up behind him, soaring above the folds of the river bluffs. On they came, figures swimming in the waxing light. The Englishman’s boy shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the three might be afoot. White men didn’t go abroad without horses. He took the Winchester off his back and laid it across his knees. The Colt he put no real stock in as yet, having never owned or even fired a short gun before. It was the carbine he trusted because he had been a hunter since the age of seven and a crack shot with a rifle. He sat and waited, hands relaxed on the gun-stock.

By the time the great yellow yolk of the sun was completely clear of the earth, he knew the men descending the slopes to the river flats were not mounted; but it was only God’s guess whether they were white or
red. At six hundred yards the heads became dots and the bodies tapered. At four hundred yards they still lacked faces. At three hundred yards the heads were blurred, but now he knew they were white men. At two hundred yards they began to resolve into individuals.

Without more delay they were upon him, three men in stinking clothes stiff with grease and blackened with old blood, one of them in a slouch hat with eagle plumes stuck in its beaded band, another who called to mind a flour barrel with legs, the third, a redhead with a wispy beard the colour of a fox’s brush and the burned red face and white cracked lips of a man cursed with a complexion unsuited to constant sun and wind. They halted at the rock and leaned on the muzzles of their rifles.

“Morning,” said the redhead.

The Englishman’s boy nodded warily.

“What’s this?” said the stocky one. “Welcoming committee?” He was evidently in an ugly mood.

“Don’t pay no mind to Vogle,” the redhead told the boy. “He’s out of sorts from riding shank’s mare. He ain’t too light on his feet so’s it’s a chore.”

“Lost your horses?”

“Had twenty head lifted,” said the redhead. “Camp’s five mile from here up on the Teton. Didn’t think there was any need to ride night-herd so close to Benton, but we was wrong. Goddamn Indians would steal horses stabled in your front parlour.”

“Ten thousand wolf pelts sitting out there in six wagons and no horses to move them,” said the one the redhead called Vogle.

“We can borry teams from I.G.,” said the man in the slouch hat. “We’ll get them pelts in. I didn’t freeze my ass all winter skinning carcasses to get my carcass skinned come spring.”

“Not to worry,” said the redhead. “We’ll get them pelts in right smart and we’ll get on the trace of them horses right smart, and we’ll spank them red scamps right smart, won’t we, boys?”

“Hardwick,” remarked Vogle, “I swear to Christ you’re happy as a pig in soft shit that them Indians lifted our horses. You’re just looking for an excuse to take a crack at them.”

Hardwick flashed an uncanny smile. “Happy is the man doing the Lord’s work,” he said.

“Happy, happy, happy,” said the one in the slouch hat. He didn’t smile but he spat.

As Hardwick had said, with the loan of six teams and a couple of saddle horses to haze them out to the Teton, the wolfers ran their pelts into Fort Benton right smart. Bumping up Front Street in wagons, they cut a sorry sight, the grim set of their jaws testifying that they knew they were laughing stocks for getting carelessly relieved of their horses on the very doorstep of civilization. In the saloons to which they dispersed, there were sly remarks and winks about infantry and church parades and having to visit a cobbler to get your boots half-soled. That is unless the redhead, Tom Hardwick, happened to be present. He and John Evans were standing drinks all around in an endeavour to recruit a posse to recover the horses and punish the Indians. Both men were well-known in Benton. Most considered Evans an easygoing, affable sort, but Hardwick was held to be a dicey proposition and nobody to mock to his face.

As the day wore on the wolfers got drunker, touchier, and blood-thirstier. There was no stampede of volunteers to help retrieve the horses, and a reluctance to sign on often occasioned charges of cowardice and name-calling, a scuffle or two. Among the wolfers themselves there was resentment against Hardwick for threatening to turn them out of Benton so soon to pursue the horse-rustlers, nipping their fun in the bud after a solitary, cold winter. Philander Vogle, for one, was trying to cram as much amusement as he could into an afternoon at a crib on the line. The crib girls were the cheapest a jump, but they didn’t allow you to take your boots off, so Vogle stood at the end of the bed with a bottle in his fist, his pants down around his ankles, waiting for Nature to reassert herself with the wherewithal for a repeat poke. However, the lazy whore kept dozing off in between times – which wasn’t much encouragement to Nature.