Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Tasmin found the two of them increasingly hard to tolerate, though the rest of the company was not much more to her liking—always excepting Cook, who followed the progress of Tasmin’s pregnancy with the attentiveness of the seasoned midwife that she was.

  Tasmin had spoken sharply to George Catlin so many times that the disappointed painter seldom uttered a word while in her presence—why give the woman a target?

  Mary Berrybender, her young breasts just budding, was not so easily squelched.

  “I fear you may commit adultery with Pomp, if you aren’t careful, Tassie,” Mary said. “Indeed, I fear it very much.”

  “Hush, you minx!” Tasmin said. “I have no improper feelings for Pomp.”

  Mary turned aside and began to kiss and stroke the gloomy botanist, Piet Van Wely, her special friend. Numbed by the cold and depressed by the short winter days, the Dutchman had fallen into a deep melancholy. Now and then Mary could coax a sentence or two out of the sad fellow, but no one else could persuade him to speak a word.

  Seeing that Pomp Charbonneau was deep in conversation with Eulalie Bonneville and Tom Fitzpatrick, Tasmin left the table and strode briskly out of the trading post into the cold Montana night—she had scarcely passed beyond the gates of the stockade when the ever-watchful Pomp appeared at her elbow, which irritated her. She liked the young man very much; but she didn’t like him coddling her. Coddling was her husband’s job, though one he entirely refused to do.

  “What was all that stir?” she asked.

  “Hugh had a grudge against Jimmy Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick,” Pomp informed her. “It was Jim and Tom who left him for dead, after the bear clawed him. His whole chest was ripped open—the boys thought he was dead, and the Sioux were close, so they took his gun and left, hoping to save their hair.”

  “Aha, but he lived to chase them down,” Tasmin replied—Hugh Glass’s survival did not seem all that surprising. Even in her own short time in the West she had observed the sort of things human beings could survive, provided they had sufficient vigor. Her own father had roared like a bull while his leg was being sawed off, and yet, scarcely a week later, he was hobbling around on his crutch with considerable agility, shooting unwary buffalo from the boat and assailing Vicky Kennet, who was plenty wary but had no place to run. Vigor did seem to be the necessary factor. Tim, the stable boy, only lost two fingers and a toe to the bitter frost, and yet came near to dying, and even now looked like a haunt of some kind, a man not sure whether he belonged to life or death.

  “Yes, Hugh chased them down,” Pomp said. “It’s lucky there was a bunch of the boys handy to jump on him—otherwise there might have been blood spilled. Jim and Tom convinced him they did their best—it’s not always easy to say when a man’s alive, not when the Sioux are in the neighborhood.”

  They walked on. The winter stars were tiny pinpoints in the dark sky. Their feet crunched the crust of a light snow. Pomp Charbonneau’s manners were so easy, so nearly infallible, so European, that Tasmin found herself rather resenting them; it seemed to her that those manners masked a certain neutrality, a preference for standing apart, a trait she could not but disdain. Pomp had been educated in a castle near Stuttgart; perhaps the castle was the trouble, Tasmin reflected—when had she not disdained men raised in castles? Drum Stewart had also been raised in a castle; he too was eligible for her rich scorn. She had not liked the cool way the Scot had skipped past her in order to focus his charms on Vicky Kennet. Glances were not neutral acts, where grown men and women were concerned.

  “Pomp, have you never lusted!” Tasmin burst out suddenly. She could not tolerate neutrality and was determined to smash Pomp’s, if she could.

  “Not strongly, I suppose,” Pomp said, with a quick smile. The question did not seem to surprise him, a fact irritating in itself.

  “Oh, hell—why not?” Tasmin asked. “Inconvenient as men’s lusts frequently are, there’s not much else a woman can trust about them.”

  Tasmin picked up the pace of their walk, stung by Pomp’s refusal to be ruffled by her pique.

  “I don’t mean I want you lusting for me,” she said. “But I’d like you better if you lusted for someone—perhaps a wild Ute, of the sort my Jimmy once found so appealing.”

  “I did once care for an Italian girl, but she died on the Brenner Pass,” Pomp said, a little sadly.

  “Not good enough—you’re young and handsome—there are native beauties aplenty,” she told him. “Besides, it’s no good loving a dead woman— indeed, it’s quite unfair to those of us who remain alive. We might need you.”

  “You’re just annoyed that it’s me that’s walking you home,” Pomp said. “I expect you’d rather it was Jim.”

  “You’ve hit it!” Tasmin exclaimed. “Only I’m more than annoyed—I’m furious. Why isn’t it Jimmy? After all, you are a very good-looking man. Unlikely as it seems, a sudden lust might overwhelm you—over-whelm us for that matter. I’m flesh and blood, after all: nothing I respect more than sudden lusts. Yet this possibility never occurs to Jim—does the fool believe he’s the only one subject to sudden lusts?”

  “Jimmy and I have roamed together—I expect he just trusts me,” Pomp said—whereupon Tasmin felt her fury burn even hotter.

  “You, certainly—he can quite clearly trust you,” she said. “But it’s me he’s married to, and I’m rather a more volatile animal! I won’t be taken for granted, not by Jimmy Snow or anyone else. He can’t just entertain me with a little conjugal sweat and assume I’ll be docile forever. Others are quite capable of working up similar sweats—wouldn’t a good husband know that?”

  Pomp gave a polite chuckle.

  “Jim, he’s different,” he said. “I expect he’ll walk you home himself, once it warms up a little.”

  “Why would the weather matter—cold doesn’t affect him,” Tasmin said.

  “No, but the grizzly bears will be coming out— Jimmy’s careful about bears—so am I,” Pomp told her.

  Tasmin was in no mood to receive such vague assurances. That her husband would prefer that she not be eaten by a grizzly bear hardly checked her fury; Jim had always been alert in protecting her from Indian abduction and other local dangers—she granted him that normalcy, at least. But the notion that she might need to be protected from her own strong feelings was a notion her husband simply didn’t grasp. She was his wife—it was settled—and they would live where he chose. At the moment that meant a drafty tent by a frozen river. If Pomp chose to walk her home, that was fine—so there she was, being walked home, every night by a neutral, amiable chaperone, in this wintry wilderness.

  It made Tasmin furious, and yet, when they reached the camp and Jim turned his mild eyes up to her, and moved so as to make a place for her on the robe beside him, Tasmin failed, as she usually failed, to sustain her hot feelings, and quickly forgot all the things she had meant to thrash out with Jim once Pomp was gone.

  “Hugh Glass came by,” Jim said. “That bear didn’t kill him after all—he’s mighty hot about the boys that left him, though.”

  “Oh, we noticed that,” Tasmin said.

  “He busted Tom in the jaw and tried to strangle Jimmy Bridger,” Pomp said. “It took about all of us to get him calm.”

  Pomp chatted only a few more minutes, and then slipped off into the night. Tasmin sat on the robe her husband offered, her anger melting away like snow in a teapot. It was easy enough to be mad at her husband when she was away from him and could examine his actions coolly—and yet she could rarely manage to sustain her hot angers once she was with him. Instead of bursting out in fury, she leaned her head against his shoulder and all too meekly subsided, worn out from the turbulence of feeling she had just experienced.

  At the trading post it was easy enough to feel like a woman rather undervalued, or misunderstood, or not taken seriously. She might complain to Cook about the drafty tent or various other aspects of their domestic arrangements, and yet once Pomp was gone and she and Jim crept into the tent and
turned to one another, beneath their warm robes, Tasmin forgot her complaints. In the tent, amid the furs, with her husband, she felt like a wife, wanted—simply a wife, wanted. In the nighttime, at least, that was enough.

  3

  Otter Woman was old now, cranky and almost blind…

  IN the still night, once he had delivered Tasmin to her husband, Pomp could already hear sounds of the coming carouse at the trading post—naturally the trappers would want to welcome old Hugh Glass back to the land of the living. Pomp, not much of a carouser, did not immediately return, though he liked Hugh, a man who had seen much and was not loath to share his information. Hugh Glass had fought with William Ashley and Jedediah Smith in their great defeat at the Arikara villages a decade earlier—it had been that defeat that drove the trappers off the Missouri River and forced them to seek out beaver streams deep in the Rockies. It was at one such stream that the enraged mother grizzly left Hugh so torn and broken that Jim Bridger and Tom Fitzpatrick left him for dead.

  Even now, at the fort, Hugh was trying to convince the skeptical trappers that he had crawled and hobbled some two hundred miles before being rescued by friendly Cheyenne. Already, before Pomp left with Tasmin, he had seen Joe Walker and Eulalie Bonneville rolling their eyes and shaking their heads at old Hugh’s claim of a two-hundred-mile crawl. Some of the boys were so glad to see the old man that they pretended to believe him, while privately regarding the story as just another tall tale. No doubt the story of Hugh Glass, the bear, and the two-hundred-mile crawl would be told around Western campfires for years to come: the bear, the desertion, the crawl, and the search for revenge seemed to Pomp to have the makings of a play, or an opera even—he had seen plenty of the latter in Germany.

  Though glad, of course, that Hugh Glass was alive, Pomp felt no inclination to join in the party. Tasmin, in her annoyance, had stated an awkward truth about him: he was not often lustful, and he had rarely been able to join in the spirit of any group celebration. The English girl stated clearly what he himself had never quite articulated: he stood apart, not hostile or critical of the lusts or greeds of others; his gaze contained no stiff judgments, as her husband the Sin Killer’s fierce look was apt to do. Pomp would have liked to love a woman, feel a brother to a man, and yet he never had—or at least, he hadn’t since the death of Sacagawea, his mother; and that had occurred when he was only a boy.

  Down the Missouri, a few miles from the post, a small band of Minatarees were camped; one of them was his old aunt, Otter Woman, his mother’s sister, who had also, for a time, been married to Pomp’s father. Pomp thought he might just visit the Minataree camp and talk with his aunt a little. The cold was sharp, but Pomp didn’t mind it. Otter Woman was old now, cranky and almost blind, but she had been at Manuel Lisa’s fort the day the sudden fever had carried Pomp’s mother away. Pomp was in Saint Louis, living with Captain Clark at that time; his father, Toussaint, had been there as well. When the trapper John Luttig came in with the news of Sacagawea’s death, Pomp’s father wept, and then Captain Clark wept too. The two men drank much whiskey that night; more than once they wept, a thing that surprised Pomp—he knew that Captain Clark was a very great man, and yet he wept for the death of an Indian woman. Seeing the two men, both drunk, so bereaved, caused a kind of breaking in Pomp—after that he saw his mother only in dreams; she became a woman of the shadows, a phantom he could never see clearly; though he could remember the warmth he had felt when she carried him close to her body in his first years.

  Later, looking back, it seemed to Pomp that it was on that night in Saint Louis, when he had realized his mother would hold him close no more, that he had begun to live at a distance from other men, the distance that Tasmin Berrybender noticed and complained about. In Germany his kindly old tutor, Herr Hanfstaengl, had cared for Pomp deeply; and though he liked Herr Hanfstaengl and the jolly cooks in the castle of the prince of Württemberg, who, with William Clark’s consent, had taken Pomp to educate, he could not really close the distance between them. The cooks all wanted to hug him, but Pomp would rarely let them.

  Now, a grown man, he was back on the river of his birth, the great Missouri. Much had changed since his mother and father had brought him to Saint Louis so that Captain Clark could see to his education. The whites were in the West now, exploring every stream and trail. In his office in Saint Louis, Captain Clark, old but still alert, kept a great map of the West tacked to his wall; this map he amended constantly, as reports came in from trappers, priests, military men, merchants, informing him about a river or a pass that had escaped his attention. The old captain, tied down by his duties as commissioner of Indian Affairs, talked longingly of going out again, making one last, great trek, perhaps this time to California; it made Pomp sad to hear the great captain talk so—for it was only an old man’s dreaming.

  It was in Captain Clark’s office that Pomp had met Drummond Stewart—Pomp had just been helping Captain Clark amend his great map again, putting in one or two of the tributaries of the Green River, where he had gone trapping with Jim Snow and Kit Carson only the year before. At once the tall Scot had asked Pomp to guide him on a hunting trip, a great expedition meant to last three years. The Scotsman didn’t just want to kill the great beasts of the West, the bears and the bison; he wanted to capture specimens of all the Western animals—elk and antelope, cougars and wolves, mountain sheep, hares, and porcupines, even—and take them back to Perthshire, where he planned to establish a great game park on his broad northern estates. Of course, they would hunt for the table as they traveled but Drum Stewart was a man who had no interest in slaughter for the sake of slaughter—his enthusiasm for the West was so keen that Pomp happily agreed to go with him as a guide. Drum Stewart’s questing spirit had so far never faltered, though here they were, more than two thousand miles from Saint Louis, at Pierre Boisdeffre’s new trading post where the two waters joined, the brown Missouri and the green Yellowstone.

  Only ten days before, as Pomp was just starting off on a hunt, who should surprise him but Jim Snow, trudging along the Missouri at the head of a shivering party of English, trailing behind him in a wagon and a buggy.

  Jim Snow took to groups even less readily than Pomp, which is why the sight of him at the head of such a party was such a surprise. Word had reached them from some wandering Hidatsa that a big boat was stuck in the ice somewhere downriver; two or three of the trappers had been vaguely planning to investigate this wonder—but here the whole party came, with Jimmy Snow well in advance of the others. Kit Carson and Jim Bridger had been playing a game of kick ball with some Assiniboines when the Sin Killer suddenly appeared, carrying only his rifle and bow.

  The sight of Pomp, his old friend, seemed to cheer Jim Snow up.

  “Are you hired?” Jimmy asked at once. “If you ain’t I want to turn this bunch over to you—all except my wife.”

  “So, Jimmy—got a fresh wife? What tribe would she belong to?” Eulalie Bonneville asked—he assumed, of course, that Jim would have taken a native woman—he himself had several native wives.

  “The English tribe—that’ll be her driving the wagon,” Jim admitted. The statement quite flabbergasted all the trappers. To see such a beauty as Tasmin on the Yellowstone was miracle enough; but then to hear that Jimmy Snow, a man who never bothered much with women, was married to her at once set the fort abuzz.

  There were more than a dozen people in the wagon this English beauty drove; in the buggy was a tall woman, a short Italian, and the old lord himself, his left leg now a heavily bandaged stump.

  “Jimmy, I am hired,” Pomp admitted. “I’ve been engaged by a Scot—we mean to be out here three years, catching critters for his zoo.”

  Jim Snow felt a little disappointed—Pomp had lived in Europe and would no doubt be the best man to deal with a lot of Europeans.

  “Well, there’s Kit—I might try him,” he said. “Kit’s polite, at least.”

  Before the wagon even reached the stockade Jim Snow had shaken hands with t
he boys, said a few words to Kit Carson, privately, and left, headed, evidently, for the nearby Yellowstone.

  “Dern, Jimmy left before he even got here,” Eulalie said.

  “That’s our Jimmy—he don’t linger,” Milt Sublette remarked.

  “Jim’s married—I expect he just intends to make a separate camp,” Pomp said. “He’s shy—not like you, Bonney.”

  “He could have told us the news, at least,” Jim Bridger said, rather annoyed. He always liked to get the news.

  “At least he brought us a circus, though—let’s watch it,” Tom Fitzpatrick observed. “I wonder who that old one-legged fellow could be.”

  Then, as they all watched, the sprightly English girl stopped the wagon, jumped down, and sprinted off after her husband, Jim Snow, by then nearly to the frozen Yellowstone.

  “Why, look at her go—she’s a regular antelope,” Billy Sublette allowed.

  “She don’t mean to let Jimmy skip out, does she?” Joe Walker observed.

  Kit Carson was astonished—he had never seen a woman run as fast as the English girl.

  “Why’s she chasing after Jimmy so hard?” Kit wondered. “I expect he’ll come back and get her, if she’d just wait.”

  “You’ll learn this soon enough, so I’ll tell you for your own good, Kit,” Tom Fitzpatrick said. “There are some girls who won’t be made to wait.”

  4

  In fact, the mouse was sleepy too …

  WHEN Pomp walked up to the campfire, three young Minataree braves were playing a game with a mouse. They had three leather cups and were shuffling them rapidly, singing a kind of mouse song to distract the boy who was trying to guess which cup the mouse was under. It was an old game. The boy who was supposed to guess which cup the mouse was under proved to be a very bad guesser. He was wrong three times in a run—the quick boy who shuffled the cups laughed at such ineptitude.

  “You try,” he said to Pomp. “This one will never beat me.”