Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “You had better come with us,” Jim told them. “I doubt you could make it back to Santa Fe.”

  The soldiers supposed they were all doomed— they wished they had never decided to be soldiers.

  Corporal Dominguin, now nomimally their leader, brightened at Jim’s suggestion.

  “We will be happy to come with you, señor,” he said. “We were afraid you meant to abandon us.”

  Jim had to pull Tasmin away from Monty’s grave. “Let me stay,” she begged. “I’m useless now. Go on—save the twins.”

  She remembered how often Monty had seemed bewildered—in fact she was the part of his life that had bewildered him, kissing him one minute and ignoring him the next.

  “You have another wife, and a good one—can’t you just leave me?” she asked.

  Jim made no effort to talk to her. He put her in the wagon and pulled Buffum off High Shoulders’ grave.

  Vicky refused to ride with Lord Berrybender, or to help him in any way. He finally persuaded Cook to ride in the buggy with him, and take the reins.

  “Oh, Jimmy—I don’t know—I wish you’d leave me,” Tasmin cried.

  “Hush about that,” Jim said. For once, he thought he understood his wife. Whenever Monty’s face came to mind, which was often, he felt a plunging sadness. He knew there were many things he should have done differently but now would never have the chance to do.

  A blinding snowstorm struck as they were toiling up the low pass. Tasmin was almost glad of the pain of the cold.

  “We’re leaving a great many dead in Nuevo México,” Mary remarked, sighing. “If Piet had died I would have died. I could not live without him.”

  “To think so is a very great luxury, very wrong,” Buffum told her. “I thought the same myself but as you see I’m alive.”

  “Old Gorska killed himself, in despair for his son—I rather admired him for it,” Mary replied.

  “Shut up, all of you—you’re making it worse,” Tasmin told them.

  “No, Tassie—I have to talk—it’s the silence I can’t bear,” Buffum said.

  “We have our young to consider,” she added. “I know that, but please shut up,” Tasmin asked.

  “It’s too much snow,” Petal said, popping out from under a blanket.

  Tasmin felt a moment of resentment. How had this noisy child survived the place that killed Monty? And wouldn’t this place—this West—finally kill them all?

  “You’re all young,” Father Geoffrin told them. “There will be other children.”

  Tasmin slapped him—she couldn’t help it. “We don’t want them, you fool,” Tasmin yelled. “We want the ones we lost. Monty! Randy!”

  “I was just . . . ,” Father Geoff said, and then gave it up.

  38

  In the morning Jim rode back to find her.

  NEITHER TASMIN NOR JIM COULD SLEEP. Petey dozed in Tasmin’s arms, Petal in Jim’s. Little Onion was walking Elf, crooning to him in her own tongue. Buffum continually threw small chips of wood into the fire.

  One of the young soldiers had a kind of tambourine—the soldiers sang songs around their own campfire. Everyone seemed to fear sleep, except Lord Berrybender, who was snoring loudly. They had bought three nanny goats in the village. Cook was milking one of them.

  “I forgot my cello,” Vicky said. “Come all this way with me, and I forgot it. I must just go back and fetch it.”

  Jim shook his head. “It’s the other side of the pass,” Jim reminded her. “There’s two feet of snow up there.”

  “But I must have my cello,” Vicky said, in a voice that was high and unnatural.

  “He’s right, Vicky—let it go,” Tasmin advised. She didn’t like the look in Vicky’s eyes.

  “There are plenty of cellos in this world,” Tasmin reminded her. “I personally will see that you have the finest in London, once we get back.”

  “It was the deaths—I forgot it—it’s been my cello for such a while.”

  “Please forget it, Vicky—please,” Buffum pled. “I think we should tie her,” Jim said to Tasmin, later.

  “No—I fear she’d go crazy.” “She is crazy—grief crazy,” Jim argued. “So am I, or very nearly,” Tasmin told him. “She’s worse,” Jim insisted. “And she’s got Talley to think of.”

  I’m thinking of Monty—I suspect you are too.”

  “I still think we ought to tie her—it’s for her own good,” Jim insisted.

  “Doing what one can to dull this pain is for one’s own good, Jim,” Tasmin argued.

  Despite Jim’s vigilance, Vicky escaped. In the morning Jim rode back to find her. Fortunately it had warmed a little—she had only managed to stumble half a mile. One foot was frostbitten but Cook and Father Geoffrin rubbed it vigorously with snow and concluded that it could be saved.

  “I’m only dubious about the little toe,” Geoff concluded.

  When the dawn mists cleared they looked down a long slope to the snowy prairies, almost covered with grazing buffalo.

  Lord Berrybender, to his fury, was not permitted a weapon. The old man was bent on revenge for the beating he had been given by his wife.

  “I fear he’ll shoot Vicky, if we allow him a gun,” Jim argued.

  Lord Berrybender, in tears, appealed to his eldest daughter.

  “But I’ve come all this way to hunt—and there’s the buffalo,” Lord B. insisted. “Why shouldn’t I hunt?”

  “You’ll have no gun today,” Tasmin assured him. “We’ve suffered grievous losses. Two children are dead. Do you think we care a fig for your hunting?”

  Lord B., infuriated, tried to slap Tasmin, who ducked and slapped him smartly hard.

  “We are none of us at our best today—indeed, we may never be at our best again,” she told him, fiercely. “But we are struggling to behave as civilized people. Your own behavior is disgraceful. Any more out of you and we’ll have the soldiers tie you to your buggy.”

  “Not a bit of it, you insolent bitch!” Lord Berry-bender shouted, enraged.

  “Spent thousands on this trip—I suppose I will hunt when I want to—and no more damned impudence from you!”

  He shoved Tasmin and hobbled to his gun cases. He tried to grab a rifle but Vicky seized the barrel and the two of them struggled in the snow. With a violent yank he managed to wrench the rifle from her and was just looking to his ammunition when Jim picked him up and flung him violently to the ground; then he dragged the old man to the buggy and pitched him into it. With help from Little Onion and Corporal Dominguin they soon had him tied in his seat. Lord Berrybender was frothing and spitting in his fury.

  “I’ll have every man jack of you lashed at the cart’s tail!” he yelled. “Don’t care if you are my own blood. Put you in the stocks! Pelted with offal!”

  “Maybe his mind’s slipping, Tassie,” Mary conjectured. “He’s like he was that day Bobbety shot his horse.”

  “We’ve just lost seven people,” Tasmin reminded her. “One was his son and two were his grandchildren—and yet he still wants to shoot.

  “I think most of us are not far from crazy at this juncture,” she went on. She meant it; she felt only just sane. It seemed to her she might just hang on to sanity if there was no more trouble, no more loss. But here they were again, facing a wintry plain—a plain that seemed endless. There would be more trouble and, very likely, more loss.

  Suddenly they were all startled by a wild ululation from Jim—furious at Lord Berrybender. The Word suddenly poured out, frightening the old lord so that his hair stood on end. Tasmin remembered the sounds of the Word from the day the Osage chased them; to everyone else it was a shock. Lord Berrybender thought his son-in-law must have gone mad. What did it mean?

  Petal was extremely startled, but not frightened. “Petey, listen at Jim,” she commanded, and Petey did listen, amazed.

  The whole camp fell silent until the Sin Killer finished his cry.

  “As I was mentioning, Mary, some of us are not far from crazy,” Tasmin said. Jim Sn
ow gave her father a hard shaking before he turned away.

  “That’s only the third time I’ve heard you do that,” Tasmin said, when Jim, calming, came to her.

  “You missed Billy Williams—he’s the one who shot High Shoulders,” Jim told her. “I yelled him the Word, not long ago.”

  “Do it again,” Petal demanded. “I like it. Do it for me. It’s like a gobble bird.

  “Some people call them turkeys but I call them gobble birds,” Petal added.

  Despite her cheerful request, Jim did not do it again.

  39

  “It just comes out, when I see bad sinning,” Jim told his wife . . .

  IT JUST COMES OUT, when I see bad sinning,” Jim told his wife, trying to explain his crying of the Word.

  What he had done so startled the camp that, for a few minutes, they all forgot their grief. Soon enough sorrow edged back into their consciousness, but they looked at Jim differently. Petal was the only one in the company who tried to make him make the strange sounds on command—her command.

  “Be the Sin Killer,” she asked her father, but he wouldn’t obey.

  Lord Berrybender was so upset by what his sonin-law had just done that he got an attack of the shakes. He trembled so violently that Cook finally gave him a little whiskey, to calm him down.

  “I wish I knew exactly what you think the bad sins are,” Tasmin said. “I’m sure we’d all try not to do them if we just knew what they were.”

  Jim felt shaky himself. In his rage he had pulled his knife, just as he had with Billy Williams. It had been in him to cut Lord Berrybender’s throat—he had just managed to stop himself, and yet all Lord Berrybender had done was make himself a violent old nuisance.

  “I nearly killed your pa,” he said, to Tasmin. “I had the knife out. It’s lucky I stopped.”

  “I believe it made a profound impression on Papa,” Tasmin told him. “On all of us, for that matter.”

  For a second night they scarcely slept. Jim untied Lord Berrybender but didn’t speak to him. Lord B. looked pathetically at Vicky, hoping for a word of sympathy, but Vicky turned her back. Cook finally took pity on him. She had been His Lord-ship’s cook for many years; his flaws and faults were abundant, but still he must be fed—though, as she worked, from time to time she found herself sobbing at the thought of dear Eliza and the little lost babies.

  “Where will we go now, Jimmy?” Tasmin asked. “Are there no towns anywhere? We’re all tired of this wilderness my father’s selfishness has brought us to.”

  Jim had been asking himself the same questions. There were Mexican towns to the west but they would all just be arrested again if he took them to a Mexican town. He knew there were settlements in south Texas—but he didn’t know the country and would have to feel his way along, hoping to strike one of the forks of the Brazos River, which he had been told led to the settlements. When he and Kit had come back along the Canadian River country after their trip to New Orleans, they had met numbers of immigrants, but none of them had any very reliable information to pass on. With luck, once they got east, they might chance on a party of immigrants and join up with with them as protection against the tribes.

  Tasmin could not remember Jim being as doubtful about how to proceed as he was at the moment. Always before, he had seemed to know exactly where he wanted to go—when decisions had to be made, he made them without hesitation. His sudden lack of certainty filled her with despair. They were caught in a nightmare—a nightmare that had no meaning. If they had come to a place where even Jim Snow felt daunted, then the future looked dark indeed.

  “Remember that first morning, when we met?” she asked. “You killed me a deer and we set out in the boat and I became rather impatient. I offered to put you ashore and proceed on my own, but you wouldn’t have it—then the Osage got after us and you saved me.”

  Jim just nodded—of course he remembered. “If you’d just gone ashore as I wished, none of this would have happened,” she went on. “You’d have survived and I’d have been killed. Probably all of us would have been killed, and it would have served us right. We left our place—and a good place it was—for a place where we could not possibly belong. The Indians were right to try and kill us. We were just invaders—spoiled invaders.”

  She paused—she knew she was just confusing Jim. And yet it was how she felt: better to have died than to have lived to bury her child.

  Jim kept his mind on the route. Past times, such as Tasmin was talking about, didn’t interest him. He meant to kill several buffalo and have Cook and Little Onion jerk the meat. They might pass out of the buffalo range—they would need meat.

  “I wish Kit was here,” he admitted. “Kit’s been a passel of places. He might even know something about Texas.”

  Tasmin saw that he did not want to deal with the complexity of her regret, which was hers to suffer alone—yet she knew he grieved for Monty. As parent and child the two had got off to a slow start, but improvement had been rapid. Jim often took Monty up beside him on the mare—he had even tried to teach him one or two birdcalls—calls Jim himself didn’t do well.

  Jim after all had the job of saving them. Why should he care about her moody recollections? And yet the fact that he didn’t made her feel lonely; she abruptly got up and walked away. She felt like giving up—what Vicky had done under the pretext of recovering her cello. Vicky could not stand what was—she had sought the cold, hoping it would all be over.

  Tasmin stood at the edge of the camp for a long time—not particularly thinking, just being alone.

  “I wish you’d go talk to Tassie,” Kate Berrybender said, to Father Geoff. “She might run away. Couldn’t you stop her? She likes you.”

  Geoff got up and did what Kate asked. “Go away, Geoff—can’t you see I prefer to be alone?” Tasmin said at once, when he approached.

  “Don’t leave—we all depend on you,” Geoff told her.

  Tasmin looked at him so coldly that he turned and went away, fearing that he had failed in his mission.

  Tasmin stood until her feet and fingers were numb with cold—the faraway stars were brilliant. Finally she went back to the wagon and made sure her children were covered up.

  40

  . . . an extremely irritating old fellow.

  HIS NOSE IS TOO SMALL,” Greasy Lake told the Likeness Maker. “He’s proud of his nose—I think you better make it larger.”

  George Catlin was both exasperated and frightened. He was attempting the portrait of a Comanche warrior named Flat Nose—the man had been kicked by a horse in his youth and was very flat-nosed indeed. But he himself was not a caricaturist—he did not like to exaggerate anatomical features and he also did not like to receive instruction from Greasy Lake, an extremely irritating old fellow. George had jumped at the chance to come out with the military to this great convening of Comanches and Kiowas on the southern plains, in an area of bumpy mountains, the prairies swarming with buffalo.

  There was no real danger—he had Colonel Dodge’s troops to protect him. And yet there was always an element of the gamble, when doing portraits of Indians. George Catlin had done nearly four hundred such portraits—the risk that a savage sitter wouldn’t approve his own likeness was always there.

  Still, he had come, and he was determined to paint—there might never again be such a gathering of tribes on the south plains. It was a golden, if a frightening, opportunity. He was, it was true, disappointed in Colonel Dodge, who had not brought nearly enough presents, and now, just as George Catlin was gaining the confidence of his subjects, the colonel seemed to want to leave. George had decided to take the dare and stay even without the troops. If anyone was to record the Comanches and the Kiowas in their undiminished splendor, it had to be himself and it had to be now.

  He knew that he ought not to grumble about Greasy Lake—the fact that the tribes accepted him as a prophet made his own task possible. With Greasy Lake’s protection the tribes would likely not bother him, even if Colonel Dodge did leave. Toussa
int Charbonneau, though much saddened by the death of his son, Pomp, had nonetheless been kind enough to travel to the Osage country, find Greasy Lake, and introduce him to George Catlin—the presence of Greasy Lake had been an immense help in enabling the Likeness Maker to secure his first sitters. The old prophet’s purpose in being on the plains had been to attempt to locate a white buffalo, a beast that was said to have been found by the Comanches two years earlier. The white buffalo was said to be as tame as a milk cow—the Comanches kept the animal in a cave and brought people to see him one or two at a time.

  George was convinced that he had Flat Nose about right; he was convinced the sitter would like it. The great challenge, always, were the eyes. Flat Nose’s look was stony and suspicious—vanity had caused him to sit for the likeness, as other chiefs had sat—but like most of the native potentates, he was suspicious of the Likeness Maker. Early on George had learned never to do natives in profile—the Indian was apt to conclude that the Likeness Maker had stolen half his face. It was full face or nothing, when painting Indians.

  Another small technical difficulty was that the Indians insisted on painting themselves elaborately before George was allowed to depict them; getting his colors to match their colors was very important—and no item of decoration might be neglected: he must get the bear claws right, the feathers right, the furs right. Sometimes a warrior might insist on being painted with his lance, from which might dangle two or three scalps—these grisly trophies must not be scanted. To omit even one scalp from the portrait would mean trouble.

  Greasy Lake was a keen observer of George Catlin’s practice. He was not reluctant to offer advice, if he thought a portrait not bold enough. George Catlin seldom took his advice, it was true, and yet somehow, in most cases, the sitter liked the portrait and offered no violence to the painter.