Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Skunk, Assiniboine

  Bad Head, Assiniboine

  Red Crow, Assiniboine

  Old Moose, Piegan Blackfoot

  Antelope, Piegan Blackfoot

  Two Ribs Broken, Piegan Blackfoot

  The Partezon, Sioux

  Limping Wolf, Piegan Blackfoot

  Quiet Calf, Piegan Blackfoot

  Red Weasel, Piegan Blackfoot

  Bull, Piegan Blackfoot

  Red Rabbit, Piegan Blackfoot

  Wing, Piegan Blackfoot

  Three Geese, Sans Arc

  Grasshopper, Sans Arc

  Cat Head, Sans Arc

  Big Stealer, Sans Arc

  Little Stealer, Sans Arc

  Greasy Lake, shaman

  Walkura, Ute

  No Teeth, Ute

  Na-Ta-Ha, Ute

  High Shoulders, Ute

  Skinny Foot, Ute

  But while none, save these, of men living, had done, or could have done, such things, there was much here which—whether either could have done it or not—neither had done …

  —George Saintsbury

  THE WANDERING HILL

  1

  … tall, gaunt, furious, snow in his hair and beard, and murder in his eyes…

  THE old mountain man—tall, gaunt, furious, snow in his hair and beard, and murder in his eyes—burst into the big room of Pierre Boisdeffre’s trading post just as the English party was sitting down to table— the table being only a long trestle of rough planks near the big fireplace, where a great haunch of elk dripped on its spit. Cook had just begun to slice off generous cuts when out of the winter night the wild man stormed. Tom Fitzpatrick, called the Broken Hand, had just been filling a pipe. Before he could fully turn, the tall intruder dealt him a blow that sent him spinning into a barrel of traps—man and barrel fell over with a loud clatter.

  “Good Lord, it’s old Hugh Glass,” Pomp Charbonneau said, turning, Tasmin thought, rather white, a surprising thing to see. Pomp Charbonneau, educated in Germany, as correct with knife and fork as any European, was a man not easily discommoded.

  “Hugh Glass he may be, but why has he struck down the Broken Hand?” Mary Berrybender piped, in excited surprise.

  Before Pomp could answer, the furious stranger rushed past Tom Fitzpatrick and leapt at young Jim Bridger, who, with his partner, Kit Carson, had been nodding on a pile of blankets—both youngsters, tired from a day of trapping, came unwillingly awake.

  “Why, Hugh!” Jim Bridger said—he leapt up just in time to keep the invader from grabbing him by his throat. Pomp Charbonneau half rose from his chair, but then settled back. Several of the mountain men— bald Eulalie Bonneville, Bill Sublette and his brother, Milt, Joe Walker, all of them as shaggy in their tattered buckskins as bears—stumbled hastily out of the way of the combatants. Kit Carson, who managed with difficulty to get his eyes open, soon opened them wider when he saw that his friend Jim Bridger was locked in mortal combat with Hugh Glass.

  Kit immediately jumped into the fray, as did Tom Fitzpatrick, once he got free of the traps. Soon several mountain men were clinging to old Hugh’s back; they smashed into a shelf, pots fell, crockery broke, and the old parrot Prince Talleyrand, a great favorite with the mountain men, flew up into the rafters to escape the commotion. Pierre Boisdeffre, the proprietor and landlord, rushed out of a storeroom and began to declaim indignantly in French; he surveyed the spreading carnage with dismay. For a moment it seemed to the startled spectators that the old man, in his terrible anger, might defeat them all. Five mountain men clung to his back; soon all of them crashed to the floor and rolled around in confusion, scratching, biting, kicking, as Monsieur Boisdeffre continued his futile protests.

  “Hugh Glass is supposed to be dead, killed by a grizzly bear,” Pomp explained. Several mountain men now contented themselves with sitting on the old fellow, waiting for his fury to subside.

  “If that disputatious gentleman’s dead, then he’s pretty active for a ghost,” Tasmin remarked, indicating to Cook that it was time to serve the cabbage— cabbage was the only thing in the way of a vegetable that the Berrybenders had been able to bring with them on their hard trek overland from the steamer Rocky Mount, though a happy consequence of unloading the cabbages was the discovery of their missing sister, Ten, aged four years; little Ten had evidently been living happily amid the cabbages for some weeks, missed by no one.

  Some vittles, of course, had to be left with stout Captain Aitken, who had stayed behind to defend his icebound vessel during the chill months ahead. Marooned with him were seven engages, the old Hairy Horn, Toussaint Charbonneau and his young wife, Coal, Master Jeremy Thaw—too damaged from his clubbing at the hands of the late Fraulein Pfretzskaner to survive a hard trek in deep chill—and the Danish painter Holger Sten, who argued that if he came ashore his paints would surely freeze, a consideration that had not deterred the American painter George Catlin from disembarking with the English party. Throughout the lengthy packing and departing the Hairy Horn, half naked, had annoyed them all by repeatedly singing his death song, though everyone had long since stopped expecting the old chieftain to die.

  “Tell us, Pomp—why is Mr. Glass so very angry with Jim Bridger and the Broken Hand?” the ever-curious Mary piped.

  Pomp was about to attempt an answer, but Tasmin, out of patience with her inquisitive sister, picked up her fork and warned him off.

  “We’re eating, Mary—no interrogations,” Tasmin said. “It’s hardly to be considered surprising when mountain men fight—I can think of one I wouldn’t mind fighting with myself, if only he’d show himself.”

  She meant her husband, Jim Snow, known to some as the Sin Killer, who refused absolutely to take his meals at the trading post, or to sleep under its roof, either; a life spent almost entirely outdoors on the raw Western frontier had unfitted Jim Snow for life of an indoor, or civilized, sort. Walls and roofs made him feel so close that he got headaches; he quite refused, despite Tasmin’s pregnancy, to contemplate an indoor life, a fact that Tasmin found decidely vexing. Jim cooked his meals at their modest camp overlooking the Yellowstone River, more than a mile away from Pierre Boisdeffre’s well-chinked log trading post. Though Tasmin would have preferred to dine with her husband, she was not about to forgo Cook’s excellent victuals when she could get them; nonetheless, the fact that her husband refused even to consider coming up the snowy slope to dine with her put Tasmin in a testy mood—a fact of which everyone in the post was by then well aware.

  At the far end of the great table the other members of the party—George Catlin, Lord Berrybender, Bobbety, Buffum, Father Geoffrin, Señor Yanez, Signor Claricia, Venetia Kennet, and their nominal host, the tall Scotsman William Drummond Stewart, watched the ongoing struggle of mountain men against mountain man with varying degrees of interest. Lord Berrybender, sitting just across the table from Drum Stewart—as the tall sportsman preferred to be called—took only a momentary interest in the fight, though he did take care to keep his one leg and his good hand under the table, in case knives were drawn. Lord B. had lately become wary of knives— fortunately the struggle seemed to be moderating with no one having recourse to edged weapons as yet. The several trappers now sitting on Hugh Glass were talking to him soothingly, as if to reassure him of their friendship. Even Pierre Boisdeffre had managed to rise above the loss of his crockery—he too spoke to the fallen warrior in mild tones.

  “Glad there’s no slicing tonight,” Lord B. remarked pleasantly. “Every time there’s slicing I seem to lose an appendage—how many is it now, Vicky?”

  “One leg, seven toes, three fingers,” Venetia Kennet reported, without enthusiasm. Venetia had not adjusted well to her young pregnancy; the trip across the frozen wastes had been, for her, a horror. Her cheeks were hollow, her eyes dark-rimmed, her smile now only the mockery of a smile. And yet Lord Berrybender casually assumed that she would be pleased to keep up with his ever diminishing number of fingers and toes.

  “Hear that, Stewar
t?” His Lordship asked. “I find myself rather whittled down, although fortunately there’s been no threat to the principal—perhaps I should say the indispensable—appendage.”

  “Which would that be, Papa?” Tasmin inquired. In her testy mood she saw no reason to spare her table-mates whatever grossness her father chose to come forth with.

  “Why, the organ of generation—you know what I mean, Tasmin,” Lord Berrybender insisted. “My favorite appendage by a long shot, I can tell you that.”

  “I hardly see why you should be so proud of a mere prick,” Tasmin told him coolly. “All it’s got you is a collection of violent brats and bitches. I’m sure you know how our sainted mother used to refer to it, within the confines of the nursery, of course.”

  “Er … no . .. why would my dear Constance call it anything?” Lord B. inquired, growing rather red in the face. Tasmin’s shocking impertinence often took him by surprise.

  “’Papa’s big nasty,’ that’s what she called it!” Mary yelled, before her sister Buffum could drive her off with a few sharp slaps.

  “Thank you, Mary—you’re precise for once,” Tasmin said.

  “I don’t thank her,” Buffum said. “How painful to hear obscenity out of the mouth of a child, here on the Yellowstone in the year of our Lord 1833,” she intoned.

  “My daughter Tasmin has a tongue like an asp,” Lord B. observed, under his breath, to Drum Stewart. “Don’t argue with her, Stewart—just slap her if she annoys.”

  Drum Stewart made no reply—he was happy, at such time, to take refuge in Scots taciturnity. Though he was soon to be the seventh baronet of Murthly, the vast family seat in Perthshire, Drum walked with the trappers, slept with the trappers, waded in icy streams with the trappers, ate what the trappers ate, and starved when the trappers starved. He did nothing to set himself apart from the hardy group of mountain men—Bridger, Carson, Fitzpatrick, Bonneville, Walker, and the Sublettes—with whom he had traveled north. Most of them were now sitting on Hugh Glass, trying to persuade him to let bygones be bygones where Jim Bridger and the Broken Hand were concerned. His own understanding was that Hugh Glass—oldest and, by some accounts, wildest of the mountain trappers—had been killed by an enraged mother grizzly some years before, while trapping with Major Henry’s men; clearly this was a misjudgment, since the man was alive and kicking—literally kicking, whenever he could get a leg free. Neither Bridger nor Fitzpatrick was any longer engaged in the struggle—both stood by a table, looking somewhat stunned, as would only be natural in the light of the violent return of a man they had supposed to be dead.

  “You know, Stewart, it’s a goddamned nuisance, having to drink whiskey with my meals,” Lord Berrybender complained. “I miss my leg, of course, but the plain fact is that I miss my claret more. Never thought I’d be reduced to a life without claret—when we fought together on the Peninsula I distinctly remember that you were a man who drank claret—no small amount of claret, either. You wouldn’t have a few bottles hidden away, now, would you? For your private use? Come on, man, confess. …”

  “Oh, do shut up about that claret, Papa,” Tasmin said sharply. “It’s gone, and good riddance. You’ve drunk more than enough claret for one lifetime, in any case—overconsumption explains why you’re such a gouty old brute.”

  “Didn’t ask you, asked Drum Stewart,” Lord Berrybender insisted. “A man who’s fond of claret doesn’t change. I expect you’ve got a few bottles secreted away here somewhere … now haven’t you, Drum?”

  “I walked here, Albany,” Drum said bluntly. “We had a few ponies, but we needed them to bring out the pelts. Can’t clatter around with a lot of bottles, in country like this.”

  Drum Stewart did warm to the way Lady Tasmin’s color rose when she heaped abuse on old Albany Berrybender; and he was hardly the only man in the post who liked to hear her heap it. When Lady Tasmin spoke in her spirited and witty way, all the mountain men fell silent and became shy. The purity of her diction, the flash of her wit, the bite of her scorn all fell so naturally from her lips that no one would have dared interrupt, particularly since her fulminations were often accompanied by a heaving of her young bosom. Young Carson, young Bridger, and the Sublette brothers were so smitten that they scarcely dared breathe, when Lady Tasmin spoke.

  Despite his admiration for Lady Tasmin’s looks, and those of Vicky Kennet’s as well, Drum Stewart could not but be vexed that the English party was there. When he came to the Yellowstone valley with the Sublettes and the other trappers, he had supposed himself to be in a wilderness so remote that it would be years before the English rich arrived—getting clear of the English rich was one reason he plunged so eagerly into the Western wild. But then, before he had been at the post even ten days, who should arrive but Albany Berrybender himself, a man whose high title alone had kept him from being cashiered in Portugal for grand disregard of even the most elemental military discipline. No sooner had he settled in at the trading post than here the Berrybenders came, with Lady Tasmin herself driving a wagonful of servants and attendants. Old Albany—his left leg having been recently removed—bounced up in a buggy driven by an Italian of some sort. To Drum Stewart’s dismay a Little England was immediately established at Pierre Boisdeffre’s trading post, where, to the astonishment of the mountain men, a callow American named Catlin set up his easel and began to paint the various Indians who wandered in to trade; lordly Piegans, squat Minatarees, wild Assiniboines from the northland, all virtually jostling for positions in line in order to allow the American to render their likenesses.

  It seemed to Drum that everything he had traveled six thousand miles to escape had caught up with him before he could even draw his breath in the high West. Far though he had traveled, he had only beaten the English by little more than a week—already the one-footed old lord had taken to racing across the prairies in his buggy, with the Italian applying the whip to two fine mares. Albany, of course—in the normal way of English sportsmen—shot at everything that moved. Already the buffalo and elk had learned to avoid the vicinity of the post; the pot hunters had to forage farther afield every day, in order to find game.

  That Lady Tasmin had already managed to locate and marry a frontiersman judged to be wild and untamable even by the loose standards that prevailed among mountain trappers did not greatly surprise the worldly Scot. English ladies could always be counted on to seek out wild meat; there was little left in the East that could qualify, when it came to wildness. He had to admit that he did still admire the white throats and long legs of the Englishwomen, two of whom, graceful as swans, sat at that very table: the voluble Lady Tasmin and the somber cellist, Venetia Kennet. In Drum Stewart’s view there was no escaping a certain moral equation: with beauty came difficulty, and with great beauty came great difficulty. Thus he looked aside from Lady Tasmin and let his gaze linger now and then on the admirably long-legged cellist— she was said to be with child but hardly showed it yet. Lady Tasmin would keep talking, whereas the silent cellist spoke only when required to. Drum Stewart was, after all, a Scot of the Scots, taciturn by nature. Ten minutes of Albany Berrybender’s selfish ramblings made him want to cut the old brute’s throat.

  “Are you fond of cabbage, Miss Kennet?” Drum asked politely.

  Not the least of the woman’s attractions was a soft, full lower lip—on the long trek north from Kansas, Drum had largely held aloof from native women, put off by their short stature and the grease with which they liked to anoint themselves. To a man not naturally celibate, Vicky Kennet’s full lower lip suggested the possibility of quickening passions and tangled bedclothes.

  “She better like it, it’s the only vegetable we’re likely to have through this long winter,” Tasmin said—she was quite aware of how frequently the tall Scot’s gaze sought out Vicky.

  “It’ll do, sir, when there’s naught else,” Vicky said, allowing, just for a moment, her full lips to curve in a smile.

  “Well, if there’s no claret we’ll have to make do with brandy,
I suppose, Drum,” Lord Berrybender said.

  2

  … a wife, wanted—simply a wife, wanted.

  POMP Charbonneau had formed the pleasant habit of walking Tasmin back to her camp at night, a courtesy Tasmin found both reassuring and yet obscurely irritating.

  “Pomp, you needn’t—Pomp, it’s quite unnecessary—Pomp, don’t bother,” she protested, though never with much force. Not once did she strictly forbid this polished, friendly, very polite young man to take this trouble on her behalf. Tasmin liked Pomp very much, and yet why was it Pomp, rather than her husband, Jim Snow, who felt she needed protection on the easy walk from the trading post to the modest camp by the Yellowstone? Why—besides that—were she and Jim, in the coldest months of a northern winter, living in a tent on a riverbank? Because Jim found indoor lodgings “close”?

  “You’ve now bewitched our good Pomp, Tasmin,” Buffum said, once the elk and cabbage had been consumed. Pomp himself had hurried over to join the conclave of mountain men around Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpatrick, and Hugh Glass—evidently some long-held grudge on the part of the latter was being adjudicated by a kind of trappers’ jury.

  “Shut up, Buffum, I’ve done nothing of the kind,” Tasmin retorted. “Why would it matter to you if I have? Last I heard you were entering a nunnery, as I recall.”

  The fact was that, with the passage of time, Bess Berrybender had begun to feel considerably less nunlike; she would happily have allowed Pomp to pay her a good deal more attention, and Tasmin a good deal less.

  “That’s right, Tasmin—not fair to hog Pomp,” Bobbety said. “When spring comes he has promised to take Father Geoff and me to some excellent fossil beds.”

  Bobbety and Father Geoffrin had become an inseparable pair, constantly babbling on about geology, vestments, or licentious French literature, over which they were prone to giggle and smirk.