“I’ll just take Monty over to Little Onion,” she whispered. “If he wakes up and sees you, there’ll be no getting him back to sleep. Poor child, he’s handed back and forth so often he must feel rather like a package in the mail.”
“Hurry, then,” Jim told her.
“Listen—just let me do this in my own way,” Tasmin answered. ‘And please get a blanket. I’m a mass of scratches, as it is.”
For a fleeting moment, as they walked out of camp, Jim’s hand already busy, Tasmin thought of Pomp. Was he near? Would he care if he heard her cries and sighs? Did he not want what they were about to have?
But once they spread their blanket Tasmin gave all her attention to Jim. He was back, he was her husband, she had missed him, and now it was time to enjoy being a wife.
26
Once the night drew on . . .
POMP had developed the habit of napping during the noon stop, and again in the early evening, when most of the company were busy with their meals or little chores. Once the night drew on, he seldom slept; this was not merely because there were dangers to be guarded against. It was at night, alone, that he felt most himself and most at peace, sitting somewhere not far from camp, hearing the boys at their singing, listening to the low sighing of the wind or the occasional rustlings of beasts—the rumbling roar of the bull buffaloes, when they were near a herd, or the cough of an elk or moose, the yip of coyotes, or the deeper howls of wolves.
From his spot slightly above the camp he watched Jim Snow go into camp and wake his wife, saw Tasmin take her baby to Little Onion, saw the couple make their way onto the prairies to the west, where, as mates would, they would soon be doing the thing Tasmin had invited him to do the morning the balloonists arrived. While he was watching them slip out of camp the bear cub, Abby ambled up to Pomp and stuck her cold nose in his face. Usually Abby bedded down with Hugh Glass, but sometimes, wakeful, she seemed to feel that she should check on everybody, to make sure the camp was secure.
“Go to sleep, Abby—it’s late,” Pomp said, scratching her forehead, a caress she particularly liked. Very soon she slumped down beside Pomp and went to sleep.
Occasionally, at night, Pomp found that he wished his old tutor, Herr Hanfstaengl, were with him so they could examine the interesting questions that arose in the course of a day: for example, that he, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, had readily caressed a bear but had declined, on more than one occasion, to caress Tasmin Berrybender, a woman he both cared for and admired. They had made love once, he and Tasmin—she had easily drawn his seed into her body their pleasure very sharp. Most men would have hastened to repeat this pleasure—repeat it as often as possible; and yet Pomp hadn’t. In fact he had done what he could, short of insult, to avoid further embraces with Tasmin. Herr Hanfstaengl, possessed of a stout wife and eleven children, would surely have been curious to know why he had declined to pursue this love affair. Was it because Tasmin was the wife of his friend? Was it from morality that he abstained? Or was it merely that his temperament was to stand apart? Herr Hanfstaengl, who had known the great Kant, had also mastered Sanskrit and was writing a lengthy study of the Eastern holy books. One conversation Pomp remembered in particular: Herr Hanfstaengl had been explaining to him that the Hindus believed that there should be four stages to a man’s life, each lasting perhaps a score of years. The first stage would be given to enjoyment, to women, drink, the pleasures of the flesh. In the second stage a man was expected to be a governor, to work for the people of his community; in the third stage he should become the head of a household; and in the fourth and final stage he was to give away all his possessions and live alone, in a hermitage, in a cave, on a mountaintop, to subsist on as little as possible while meditating on the eternal things, the holy truths.
In Stuttgart, in the prince’s castle, Pomp had been happiest playing with the creatures in the prince’s small zoo: three goats, an ibex, two gazelles, several monkeys, a gray parrot, and a coatimundi. Watching Pomp with the animals, all of whom approached him without fear, Herr Hanfstaengl one day observed to Pomp that in his case the stages were happening in reverse, Pomp having little interest in the common pleasures of the sort that had caused Herr Hanfstaengl to father eleven children.
“You are not in a cave or on a peak, but I think you are in a hermitage anyway, my dear Pompey” the tutor told him. “You are at peace in the hermitage of yourself. These beasts, these simple creatures who know no guile, they come to you and stay with you. You win them with your calm. But people ... I don’t know if people can come in. You have turned the stages around, and perhaps that is how it will always be.”
Pomp had come back to America, back to the Osage prairies, and then beyond them into the deep West, but he had not forgotten his wise old tutor’s words. Animals, like the young bear sleeping beside him, he could still welcome; but Tasmin he had kept out. Not completely out—he had come to love her in his way, which was not her way. Why had he refused Tasmin? It was not because of Jim, who freely admitted that Tasmin was more than he could happily deal with. She wore Jim down, not merely with the peremptoriness of her appetites but simply with a force of personality that seemed to operate constantly. Almost everyone, even the strong mountain men, had a time of quitting, a day when they pressed no issues, trapped no beaver, did nothing special. But Tasmin Berrybender seemed not to know the meaning of quiescence, the ability to just let be.
“You’re educated,” Jim had said to Pomp several times. “You and her can talk about things I’ll never know about. You ought to talk to her more.”
“You might learn about some of those things, if you let Tasmin take you to Europe,” Pomp told him.
Jim shook his head. He didn’t want to go to Europe. The prairies and the mountains, the rivers and streams of the West were in themselves a sufficient world, a world about which he still had much to learn. The things Tasmin talked about with Pomp and Father Geoffrin—novels and operas, palaces and princes— might well be good and worthwhile things, probably were; but he had the land and its millions of details to study, and that was all he wanted.
Pomp couldn’t disagree. Jim was a frontiersman, one of the most accomplished frontiersmen in the West. Pomp knew himself to be a competent guide, but in tight situations he had not quite Jim’s keenness, Jim’s instincts. In the battle with the Utes, Jim had killed, and he himself had almost been killed. In the struggle for survival Jim had a slight edge; but the fact that he could read novels whereas Jim couldn’t was not the cause of Jim’s problems with Tasmin. Tasmin, when she wanted something, would not be denied. For the moment he had dodged her, but Pomp knew she would be back—she had given no indication that she considered her marriage vows a barrier to whatever else she wanted in the way of romance.
In the pearly dawn Pomp saw Tasmin and Jim slip back into camp. Tasmin went at once to Little Onion and took her child. Jim walked over to where Kit Carson was sleeping and nudged him a time or two until Kit reluctantly sat up. The two seemed to be slightly at odds, Pomp didn’t know why—of course, Kit was frequently at odds with somebody and occasionally at odds with everybody. It was clear even from a distance that he didn’t welcome being waked up just to hear Jim Snow’s complaint.
Abby suddenly woke up, shook the dew off her coat, and went gamboling down into the camp, startling the one-eared servant, Amboise d’Avigdor, who was up early brewing tea for his masters.
Kit Carson turned his back on Jim and walked away. Pomp stood up and stretched—his watch was over for the night. Kit turned in his direction, so Pomp walked down to meet him.
Kit, who had a cowlick that stuck straight up at times, was red in the face from indignation.
“You don’t look happy,” Pomp remarked.
Kit shrugged. “Tasmin’s still mad at me for staying gone so long and now she’s got Jim stirred up too. I’m thinking of leaving the whole bunch of them for good.”
“You made yourself too useful, and now Tasmin depends on you,” Pomp told him. “I’d say you’
re stuck.”
In Kit’s heart was bitter confusion. He had not supposed Tasmin would mind his absence, or even notice it, and yet she had. Probably Tasmin had harassed Jim, so now Jim was annoyed with him too.
“I say goddamn them both,” Kit said, in a fury.
Then Kit looked abashed. It was the strongest oath he had ever uttered.
“Cook’s got breakfast going,” Pomp said, putting his arm around Kit. “Stick by me and I won’t let them beat you up. I expect you’ll feel better after you eat, anyway.”
27
. . . it’s not got a thing to do with love . . .
“PRACTICAL copulation, I suppose you could call it,” Tasmin remarked to the former Vicky Kennet, now her stepmother. They were bouncing along in a wagon driven by Little Onion, who, proud of her role as driver, now drove with spirit and a certain recklessness when it came to the avoidance of holes, or even small gullies.
“I’ve not heard it referred to in quite those terms,” Vicky admitted.
“Practical copulation—it’s what married couples do,” Tasmin assured her. “Clears the head, of course, but it’s not got a thing to do with love, that I can see.”
“I would agree that the practicality of it isn’t necessarily determined by sentiment,” Vicky said—at the moment she looked rather droopy. “But you’ve always been luckier than me. There is also such a thing as impractical copulation, I can assure you. I suppose I might be considered to be something of an authority on that kind.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Vicky,” Tasmin said. “Papa flagging a bit, is he?”
“It’s not merely that,” Vicky assured her. “It’s that the less he can do, the more he wants to do. Efforts are made but satisfaction is not exactly frequent—despite which I’m pregnant, I fear.”
“So that’s why you look so wan,” Tasmin said—she hoped that Vicky had not seen her vomiting behind a bush that morning, just as she had vomited into the Oto corn when she had been pregnant with Monty— although what good there was in concealing what would soon be obvious to all, she could not have said. She was undoubtedly pregnant too—and just as her husband, Jim Snow, had become an absolute martinet, forcing the party on toward Santa Fe at a pace that did not take into account the problems of pregnant women. He considered that the rendezvous had taken far too long—he wanted to reach the distant city before winter could catch them on the naked plain.
The suspicion lodged in Tasmin’s mind that the child inside her was very likely Pomp’s, not Jim’s. Now that he was back, he was at Tasmin frequently—there would be no reason for him to suspect that any child she bore was not his. And yet Tasmin remembered how deeply she had opened herself to Pomp, how long she had held him, capturing the long flow of seed. Jim Snow, although he had come to like his son, Monty, often rolling him around and tickling him in the evenings, was not, in Tasmin’s opinion, particularly attentive when it came to babies. He was not keen, as she and Vicky were, to inspect a baby closely, identifying features that belonged to this parent or that. Besides, the child inside her might well be a girl—in which case neither Jim nor anyone else would have reason to suspect that the child was Pomp’s.
“Now Buffum’s pregnant too, by her splendid Ute,” Tasmin remarked. “There’ll soon be a crowded nursery. Then there’s our sweet Coal. Do you suppose she’ll manage to squeeze another child out of old Sharbo?”
“Oh, but he’s so yellowish—if I were Coal I believe I’d take a lover,” Vicky said.
Tasmin glanced at Little Onion, their spirited driver, and—though Tasmin sometimes forgot this—her husband’s other wife. At once, somewhat to her own dismay, a very wicked thought occurred to Tasmin, a thought so extremely wicked, and yet so logical, that she would have preferred to discuss it with someone French, ideally her old femme de chambre, Mademoiselle Pellenc, to whom no love scheme, however wicked, could bring a blush. But Mademoiselle Pellenc was no longer a mademoiselle and was far away besides.
Tasmin was so shocked by her own notion that her first instinct was to slide the whole question of maternity sideways—she certainly didn’t want the watchful Vicky to gain an inkling of what was in her mind.
“I don’t suppose our Mary will really mate with that stumpy botanist, do you?” she asked.
“Why not? Piet is quite good to Mary and it cannot always be an easy task. I believe he loves her deeply” Vicky told her. “You’re such a snob, Tasmin. Just because you caught a fine-looking man doesn’t mean that only handsome people procreate. Piet and Mary might surprise us someday with a fine little babe. Just consider Cook.”
Tasmin did consider Cook, a forthright woman who had raised twelve children, in spotless cleanliness and considerable fear of their mother, while also taking a large hand in the raising of the many Berrybenders. Yet Cook, a widow, was shaped like a barrel, and was quite prickly when approached, as old Tom Fitzpatrick was finding out, to his frustration.
“You’re right, there’s Cook,” Tasmin admitted. “If Cook can produce twelve, I suppose Piet and Mary might manage one or two.”
Tasmin had been heartened by Jim Snow’s return. After all, she liked him, and their ruts, as she put it, cleared their heads. But there were other, more complex considerations. Why should Little Onion be childless, while all around her babies were arriving? The advantage to polygamy, as she saw it, was that it spread around certain chores, the conjugal chore not least among them. Jim, after all, was married to Little Onion, though he claimed it had only been at the urging of her sister Sun Girl, then his wife, but now dead. Still, he had married her—was it really fair that he offered her nothing in the way of pleasure after the loyalty she had given so freely both to Monty and to Tasmin? He presumably enjoyed her sister; why wouldn’t he enjoy Little Onion as well?
“You’ve a wicked gleam in your eye—a very wicked gleam,” Vicky remarked.
“Supposing I do?” Tasmin said sharply, annoyed that Vicky had become so keenly observant of her moods.
“I can’t recall that I ever claimed to be a saint,” she added.
Vicky’s casual comment merely served to remind her of how much more acute women were than men in regard to the intricacies of love. Jim Snow could sit beside her for a year and never have the slightest suspicion of what was on her mind, yet Vicky, newly pregnant, not too well, constantly set upon by Lord Berrybender, had nonetheless a probably not inaccurate picture of what Tasmin was contemplating.
“Read much in the old romances, my dear?” Vicky asked, with a languorous smile.
“If you mean Miss Austen, I don’t find her particularly romantic,” Tasmin declared. “Can’t say that I care much about marriage arrangements among the middle classes.”
“No, not Miss Austen,” Vicky argued. “I mean the old romances: King Arthur, the fair Guinevere, Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad . . . that bunch.”
“Nanny Craigie read us a bit about the knights,” Tasmin recalled. “I don’t know that I believed it. Why, for goodness’ sake?”
“I was just thinking that the rule of chastity was rather extreme, in those days,” Vicky said. “Much worshiping at a distance. Very courtly love. Knights sighing with great passion but never exactly allowed to get down to it.”
“Why would I want to read nonsense like that?” Tasmin asked. “It’s worse than middle-class marriage. At least in Father Geoffrin’s naughty French books, people do get down to it. In fact, they seem to do little else.”
“Oh well, don’t mind me,” Vicky said. “I don’t quite know why Guinevere popped into my head. Perhaps I recall some girlish fancy of having a fine brave knight love me eternally, though scarcely being allowed to do more than kiss my hand.”
� fine vision, but that’s hardly Papa,” Tasmin reminded her.
“No, it’s not,” Vicky admitted.
They bounced on, saying no more about the matter. Jim had led the party onto the plain east of the mountains, but a few great peaks, snowcapped and hidden in cloud, were visible to the west. Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzpa
trick, and the Sublette brothers frequently spent their days in the foothills, hoping to find streams that still had beaver. Game had been scarce, but that morning Lord Berrybender, dashing ahead, had managed to kill a buffalo and an elk. The journalists, following on their palfreys, scribbled industriously whenever the company halted for any reason. In this instance they stayed behind to watch the buffalo and the elk being butchered, the butchers on this occasion being Pomp and young High Shoulders. Pomp, his shirt off and his arms bloody to the shoulders, seemed to be doing most of the cutting. Jim himself had told Tasmin that none of the mountain men were as skilled at taking every usable part of an animal as Pomp Charbonneau.
“He was trained not to waste a scrap, and he don’t waste a scrap,” Jim told her.
Pomp, seeing the ladies bouncing past, gave them a friendly, if bloody, wave. Signor Claricia and Seftor Yanez stood disconsolately around the rapidly shrinking carcasses, while Cook, somehow spotless, received the bloody slabs on large platters acquired, like the wagons and much else, from William Ashley.
The two journalists stood over Pomp, who politely pointed out to them the variously named cuts as he removed them. While the ladies watched, he carefully cut thin slices from the buffalo liver, squeezed a bit of bile on them, and handed them to the journalists—a prairie treat to sample.
Ben Hope-Tipping seemed none too pleased with this raw meat, but Clam de Paty with a great, all-embracing gastronomic tradition to defend, ate his with apparent relish.
“It’s rather like liver of aurochs,” he said, with a touch of pomposity.
Tasmin gave Pomp only the briefest wave—it was clear that Vicky had her suspicions. She tried her best to pretend coolness, though dissembling in the matter of the emotions was not something she did particularly well.
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