Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “Have to go, Tasmin, I fear,” George said. “I’m a poor man, after all—have to take my daubings to market as soon as I can.”

  Tasmin, totally unprepared for this news, was at once overcome with feeling. She squeezed George Catlin in a desperate hug and gave him a kiss smeared with her tears, which were flowing freely.

  George could but hold the weeping woman close—he himself was too moved to speak.

  “Oh, George, how I’ll miss you!” Tasmin cried. “I don’t believe I meant a single one of all the wicked things I said to you on our trip—a devil gets into me somehow and I can’t resist heaping abuse, even on you, who have been such a faithful friend.”

  Much touched, the painter managed a rather sorrowful smile.

  “Oh, now … that was all just sport, Tasmin,” he managed. “Just sport. Fine ladies can’t seem to resist having a bit of a tease, with me. I’m sure it wasn’t meant to wound.”

  “Shut up, of course it was meant to wound,” Tasmin commanded. “It was beastly behavior, and you know it.”

  Kit Carson, observing this scene, was astonished—Tasmin was still crying.

  “Why’s she crying—I thought she despised that silly fool,” Kit asked Jim, who just shrugged. What was there to say about a woman given to such loud moods? He was just backing Gussie into her traces, and was hoping that the babies, two of whom were squalling at the moment, wouldn’t spook the filly.

  “Besides, George, I can’t understand it,” Tasmin said. “Surely there will be Indians along the Yellowstone that you ought to paint. I promise I won’t ever be mean to you again, if you’ll just come with us.”

  It confused her that she felt such a deep pang of sorrow at the thought of parting from this skinny, awkward man—he was not young, his hair was thinning, his complexion splotchy, his teeth not the best—and yet she had watched him risk his life many times on the Missouri’s banks, struggling to capture the likenesses of savages any one of whom were capable of killing him. She knew George had often been pained by her chilly rebuffs; she also knew that he was in love with her and had been in love with her almost from the moment they met. Was her husband, Jim Snow, in love with her? It hardly seemed so, although of late he had been an amiable, courteous, and fervently passionate male. Yet the fact was, love was reckoned differently on this raw frontier; the harsh practicalities that must constantly be dealt with left little time for the higher sentiments, the refinements of anguish or ecstasy that Father Geoff was always finding in the pages of Crébillon or Madame de Lafayette. These could hardly be indulged if one was fighting Indians or trying to scrape together adequate meals.

  George Catlin, who was unmarried, and too old and too poor to enjoy especially good prospects in the matrimonial line, loved her—more than that, he was, in his skeptical and thoughtful way, a kindred spirit, the only one she could claim in this large, rabbly company. George had a brain, he had thoughts, he was smart—even if his little jests and mots rarely came off. That she would have to part with him in only a minute or two left her feeling greatly confused.

  George Catlin patiently waited out Tasmin’s little storm of feeling. He did love her, and in moments of foolish optimism had aspired to her—after all, there had been cases, even in staid Pennsylvania, where lovely women had bestowed their affections on rather unlovely men.

  “Tell me again why you won’t go with us, George,” Tasmin asked. “I’m by no means convinced that your reasoning is sound.”

  “Poverty’s a pretty sound reason, my dear,” George said. “I’m poor—I need to sell some pictures. I have a sizable portfolio to hustle, and hustle it I must, while there’s still much interest in the red men back East, where people have money. Might sell the whole thing to the nation, if I’m lucky.”

  “If you must leave me adrift in this wilderness, then I don’t care for you to be lucky,” Tasmin replied, not yet absolutely convinced that the cause was lost.

  “We’ve heard that there’s smallpox among the Choctaw,” George said, attempting to give her a comforting pat, which only infuriated her more.

  “Then, damn it, come with us—don’t bother about the stricken Choctaw,” she said.

  “The point is that if smallpox comes up the river, there won’t be any more Indians for me to paint—or for Herr Bodmer, either,” he told her. “Sorry I didn’t manage to meet the fellow—wouldn’t have minded comparing techniques. Never too old to learn, you know, Tasmin—though I suppose it is possible to be too young to learn—probably Herr Bodmer didn’t think he had anything to learn from an old dauber like me.”

  “Damn it, you’re not saying anything I want to hear, George!” Tasmin retorted—then she caught herself and looked around apprehensively at her husband—if he had heard her curse he would surely come over and smack her. Fortunately the Sin Killer, in his domestic mode, was cleaning out one of the mare’s hooves, and didn’t hear.

  “Will you ever finish that picture of Vicky and me parading our fecundity on the virgin prairies?” she asked. “And if you do finish it, will I get to see it?”

  “Oh, it’s not abandoned,” George assured her. “I’m still having a bit of difficulty with the perspective. I might bring it to England when it’s done—I’ve been thinking of bringing some of my Indian pictures to England, in a while. I might be hawking old Blue Thunder and the others in Picadilly when you get home.”

  “Will I get home, do you think, George?” she asked. “I don’t know that I shall. Jim talks of proceeding to Texas, which I judge is not too distant from Santa Fe.”

  “Texas? Now, there’s a place brimming with Indians,” George said. “I might go there myself— want to look at the Comanches and the Kiowa. Perhaps we’ll yet bump into each other on the trail.”

  Tasmin suddenly felt foolish. Why was she arguing so, trying to keep this poor man from earning his living? She was rich—George wasn’t. She gave him another hug and a slightly less smeary kiss.

  “At least this leaves us two prospects for meeting again—Texas and Picadilly,” she said. “I’ll be hopeful, George.”

  “Texas or Picadilly,” George said, with an awkward smile.

  Tasmin hurried to the cart, yanked up a startled Monty, popped him into his pouch, strapped the pouch to her back, and strode off to the south, saying not a word to anyone. Behind her the others dawdled, packing and repacking. Pierre Boisdeffre was still trying to persuade Cook to accept a position with him, but he had made the mistake of attempting unwanted familiarities, a behavior Cook had no intention of accepting. Besides, it was hard to know when the company might again need her skills as a midwife.

  Mary came striding out with Piet, both of them equipped with nets and bottles, but the mass of the company still dawdled.

  Annoyed with this lagging, Tasmin turned and vented some of her irritation in a good loud yell.

  “Say! You at the post! Ain’t we leaving?” she yelled.

  Then she resumed her march toward the purplish, distant mountains, and did not look back.

  46

  Tasmin marched off briskly…

  TASMIN marched off briskly, but after a bit, her anger and confusion began to subside and she slowed down. Monty soon made hungry sounds. The plain was barren of anything to sit on, so Tasmin simply sat down in the long waving grass and gave him the breast. In the distance the Berrybender expedition could be seen leaving the post, widely strung out, as if each member of the company, vexed beyond endurance by the proximity of the others, had decided to seek his or her own path toward the mysterious south. Millicent drove the wagon, Kit Carson the cart. Jim Snow was nowhere to be seen, a fact which troubled Tasmin for a moment. She had not forgotten with what ease and rapidity Jim disappeared when he felt in the mood to go. But then, suddenly, there he was—the almost imperceptible swell of the prairie had concealed him for a bit. Better yet, he was alone, which was less and less the case now that Kate Berrybender had attached herself to him with the tenacity of a leech.

  “I thought that sluggish
bunch would never start,” Tasmin said angrily. “I do hate dawdling.”

  “They’re pokey packers,” Jim agreed. “The Sioux could roll up fifty lodges and be up in the middle of Canada in less time than they took to get started.”

  He squatted beside her and urged a kiss on her, such a long kiss that it flustered her slightly. Lately it seemed that her angers awoke his lust—she had only to flare her nostrils like the mare and he would be at her. It seemed Jim had not known much of kissing before she taught him, but now he liked it and was frequently apt to surprise her. In this case his kiss was particularly reassuring: she had been cursing loudly over having to part with George Catlin. Jim might just as well have walked up and slapped her. He was welcome to her soft mouth, though at the same time she felt slightly embarrassed, with Monty nursing just below. Two males, it seemed, were feeding on her at once; which was all very well, except that a mite of some sort was attacking one of her armpits—she badly needed to scratch. Also, the company was coming closer—she could hear the steady creak of the wagon. Sitting in the tall, wavy grass, her baby nursing and her husband kissing insistently, Tasmin felt sweaty and muddled, half yielding, half resisting. Jim’s kiss was no casual peck—he wanted her, if not instantly, then soon. But how were they to manage?

  “Jimmy, the baby’s not through,” she said, withdrawing her mouth long enough to switch Monty to the other breast. “Besides, the expedition’s coming.”

  “Let ’em pass,” Jim said. “We’re in a hollow. They won’t see us.”

  That was true: the company, each member babbling about his or her own concerns, passed fifty yards to the west. Geoff had decided, after all, to stay with Bobbety—the two were chattering about Congreve.

  “Let him guzzle all he wants to,” Jim said. “Then I’m taking him to Little Onion.”

  “We mustn’t rush him, now,” Tasmin warned. “If he doesn’t finish he’ll get colic, and we don’t want that.” Though half pleased by her husband’s desire, she was also half annoyed. Why must she have to manage these conflicting streams of need? Though she let herself be kissed, she was fully determined to allow Monty to finish; finally he belched and sighed sleepily before she surrendered him to Jim, who took him and at once ran off to hand him to Little Onion.

  By the time Jim returned Tasmin was irritated.

  “What is your hurry?” she asked. “You can have what you want, but you can’t have it while the baby’s nursing. I can’t do everything at once. And besides that, this is a mighty scratchy place to copulate— couldn’t you have at least brought a blanket?”

  Jim looked around. The Yellowstone River was not far—there was sure to be a soft, shady spot along its banks. He had started to pull down his pants, but he pulled them back up and helped Tasmin to her feet.

  Just such a soft, shady spot was soon found. Tasmin ceased hesitating, and, in time, the peaks of passion were scaled, though not quite mutually. Tasmin’s ascent, eventually satisfying, required a bit of straining. It was not until her ardor was subsiding that she at last got to scratch the itchy mite bite in her armpit.

  Later, the two of them bathed together in the cold green water, slipping now and then on the slick yellow stones from which the river got its name. They were as naked as they had been when they first glimpsed each other on the shallow Missouri’s shore. Tasmin could not help noting that Jim looked just as he had looked then—it was her body that had registered change. Then, though not virginal, she had been a girl; now she was a woman and a mother, a change attested to by the fact that her breasts were still dribbling milk. Under the press of Jim’s kisses she probably had rushed Monty a bit, after all—if it turned out to mean a colicky night it would be herself and Little Onion, not this man who had been in such a hurry to couple with her, who would deal with the colic. The fact that she liked being a wife and enjoyed her ardors did not entirely banish her annoyance at the general selfishness of men—little Monty not excepted! When he wanted the teat he wanted it immediately and was capable of violent protest if denied.

  The slow-moving Berrybender expedition had gained perhaps two miles on them while they were coupling and washing up. The company was still spread out, straggling on across the plain.

  “You’re getting pretty forward about your lusts, Jimmy—kissing me like that when I’ve got our baby,” she informed him. She had not, on this occasion, quite attained the dreamy state that sometimes followed their lovemaking. She felt, on the whole, rather grumpy. Though she harbored no physical attraction for George Catlin, she had, nevertheless, been gripped by a powerful affection at the moment of their parting. And then Jim Snow, like an insistent bee, had slipped in and buzzed and buzzed until he had succeeded in stealing George Catlin’s honey. She had gone along with it, lavished her sweets on the bee—but now she felt annoyed.

  Jim made no response to this mild complaint. Why wait to rut, if it was rutting you wanted? When he and Tasmin married she had been in such a hurry to couple that she had been annoyed with old Dan Drew for mumbling so over the service. Of course, she was right that the child needed to finish nursing, but, other than that, he couldn’t quite make out why Tasmin now sounded annoyed.

  “Just look at us, Jimmy,” she said. “Please consider us in all our oddity. You’re lost in my world and I’m lost in yours. I can barely make a fire, you can barely read a book. I know reams of history better than you ever will, and you know the world of nature better than all our scientists. We’re very able copulators— but that seems to be the one skill we share. Without our ruts what would we be?”

  Jim got the old, tired feeling he usually got when Tasmin began to complain. Though he had certainly enjoyed their coupling on the riverbank, he felt he might have done better, on this occasion, to just go drive the cart and let Kit Carson attempt to answer all his wife’s questions—though of course Kit wouldn’t know the answer to any of them, any more than himself.

  “Nobody but you talks about things like this,” he told Tasmin, though mildly, with no rancor.

  Tasmin had been holding his hand, but now she snatched it away.

  “Well, but I do talk this way and that’s just your bad luck, Jimmy,” she informed him. “I strongly suspect I shall always talk this way—I fear you’re just going to have to put up with it.”

  They were just coming up on the stragglers of the spread-out expedition—in this case Vicky Kennet and Buffum Berrybender. Kit had stopped the cart for a moment so the two could pick wildflowers, of which a great profusion adorned the plain.

  “Why, Tasmin—we thought you were lost,” Vicky said. “I have a little gift for you, from George Catlin— he’s such a nice fellow—he gave me one too.”

  She handed Tasmin a rolled-up sheet, which proved to be a lovely watercolor of herself and Vicky, both clearly with child, disporting themselves by a green river.

  Tasmin saw that at the bottom of her painting George had written: “Texas or Picadilly—let’s be hopeful! George.”

  “Oh, he was the dearest man—and we were both so mean to him, Vicky!” Tasmin said, tearing up again.

  “I know,” Vicky said. “Somehow it’s hard to resist making decent men suffer—perhaps it’s because there are so few to practice on. I fear we don’t deserve such thoughtfulness.”

  “Well, we won’t get it, either, now that Mr. George is gone,” Buffum said. “He was even decent to me, whom no one else even notices, and yet I too teased him cruelly.”

  “Perfidious females, all of us!” Tasmin cried—and then the three of them hugged one another and wept.

  47

  “How far is Scotland, now, Drum?”

  POMP was high on the shoulder of one of the high peaks of the Wind River range when he came upon the two little grizzly cubs. He was tracking mountain sheep at the time—his patron, Drummond Stewart, was particularly anxious to take a pair of bighorn sheep back to Scotland; and not just sheep alone. Drummond Stewart hoped to bring back breeding pairs of all the mammals of the mountains and the plains, from
the tiniest chipmunk to the mighty grizzly bear, for the great game park he contemplated on his northern estate. His plan puzzled the trappers who had come south with him—Eulalie Bonneville, the Sublette brothers, Joe Walker—who could not figure out why an apparently sensible man would want to haul a bunch of wild animals such a distance. Hugh Glass, who was the oldest of the trappers, and a man who had seen much in his life, thought Drum Stewart’s plan to be the wildest piece of folly he had ever heard of.

  “How far is Scotland, now, Drum?” Hugh asked.

  “Five thousand miles, I suppose,” the Scotsman replied casually.

  “Too far,” Hugh concluded. “A buffalo could be born and grow up and get old and die and not travel that far. It’s too far to think about.”

  “What are you, Drum? Some kind of dern Noah, gathering up critters two by two?” sophisticated Joe Walker asked.

  “Why yes—I suppose I could be considered a kind of Noah,” Drum said. “Only I won’t need the flood. Anyway, I don’t have to walk my pairs all the way to Scotland—but only to a place where we can catch a steamer, and didn’t that Indian say there was a steamer nearby Pierre’s trading post, even now?”

  “That’s what Skinny Foot says and he’s a Ute,” Bill Sublette told them. “Utes don’t usually lie.”

  “Good news for us, if it’s true,” his brother said. “A boat big enough to take Drum’s critters could also take our pelts—be easier than hauling them overland.”

  The flanks of the high peak where Pomp was tracking the sheep were never easy to ascend; thick bracken, fallen trees, tangled underbrush had to be fought through before he could reach the high sheep paths. Even then, once clear of the tangles of foliage, he might have to climb all the way to the snow line before spotting the tracks of the bighorns.

  It was while struggling through a wicked tangle of brush that Pomp heard a rustling just in front of him. He could see nothing, but he kept his gun ready. It was in such a thicket that Hugh Glass had surprised the grizzly that had mauled him to within an inch of his life. On alert, Pomp stopped and waited. He could see nothing, but he had the strong feeling that he was being watched, whether by human or animal he couldn’t be sure. Very cautiously he peered into the tangled bracken and was startled to see two brown furry faces staring back at him—the bear cubs were only three feet away. The little bears regarded Pomp solemnly; at first his chief concern was to spot the mother—in the whole West there was no animal so feared as the mother grizzly with cubs to protect.