“Will you tell me what happened?” she asked. Why not be direct? “My husband doesn’t seem quite like himself.”
Rosa was relieved that Jim’s wife could speak to her in a friendly, frank way. She had been fearful of being scorned, perhaps even beaten, although she had done nothing sinful with Jem. But a wife wouldn’t know that—a wife might have suspicions. She had had plenty of suspicions about her husband—and well-founded ones, too.
“I was taken by the slavers, like the others,” Rosa said. “They were very bad men, cruel. Jem came in the morning and killed them all, every one. No one escaped him.”
“That’s no surprise,” Tasmin told her. “He spilled much blood—he couldn’t stop,” Rosa went on. “He was going to kill everybody— those women—even those children.”
She nodded toward the other captives, who were sitting listlessly nearby, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
“I was able to stop him,” Rosa told Tasmin. “I grabbed his bridle—in time he came back to himself. When he realized what he had been about to do, he broke his sword. Now Jem thinks I saved him.”
“It sounds to me like you did save him,” Tasmin said. “You kept him from killing innocent people. So it’s no wonder that now he needs you very much.”
“Yes, he needs me,” Rosa agreed. “I don’t know for how long. He saved my life. He killed the men who dishonored me. He kept us all from starving. He told me he had a wife. I’m glad you are friendly toward me. I am not a husband stealer. I told Jem I would be his servant. I can cook and make fires and do the things a servant does.”
“But do you have a home to go to?” Tasmin asked.
Rosa shook her head. “My little ones are dead,” she replied. “So is my husband—he was no great loss. So if you and Jem need a servant I will stay and work for you, to show that I am grateful.”
Tasmin didn’t immediately answer, because she didn’t know what to say. That Jim wanted to keep Rosa was obvious. What was less certain was whether he wanted to keep his wife. He had not kissed her, not touched her. He had kissed Petal, but that was all.
Cook soon took to Rosa, who immediately set about making herself useful. Tasmin could only brood and wonder.
Jim was aware that he needed to explain things to Tasmin. She was his—when night came she would expect him in her bed. And yet he meant to do as he had been doing, spending his nights by the campfire with Rosa.
Finally Tasmin bearded him—indecision and uncertainty were states not to be born.
“Jimmy, I’m not angry—I just want to know what you want.”
“I have to stay with Rosa,” Jim said, relieved that Tasmin didn’t seem angry.
“She saved me, now I need her,” he added. “I guess we should marry.”
“Well, that might work in the Ute country, where men are allowed various wives—but it won’t work here,” Tasmin said. “It would make you a bigamist, and bigamy is a crime, I’m sure—besides, I imagine Rosa’s Catholic, and the Catholic Church certainly frowns on bigamy.”
“Rosa saved me from slaughtering the women and children,” Jim said. “She’s the real Sin Killer— she killed the big sin I was about to do.”
Tasmin walked away, perplexed. She needed to talk to her counselors—George and Geoff.
“Jim’s been through a crucible—the slaughter in that camp must have been terrible,” George said. “He’s had a moral crisis and it’s left him not himself. He badly needs Rosa to lean on, but of course that may be temporary.”
“She seems a nice woman,” Geoff added. “She is, but I don’t know that I am,” Tasmin told them. “It’s so complicated. She’s very grateful to Jimmy, of course. She offered to be our servant, to show her gratitude. Besides that, she has no place to go. I don’t think a servant is what Jimmy wants. I think he wants to take her to wife. He said as much. And yet here I am, the old wife but hardly the easy wife. Rosa seems to want to be as Little Onion was. She’s been misused, and Jem, as she calls him, saved her. So she wants to help him. I don’t think she means to mate with him.”
“That could change,” Geoff told her. “Of course, given enough time—but enough time might mean years,” Tasmin said. “What am I to do right now?”
Her counselors looked stumped. They ceased to counsel.
“It’s very peculiar, the situations life presents one with,” Father Geoff reflected.
Night fell, the company ate. Tasmin slept alone. Rosa built a campfire, and she and Jim sat beside it.
64
. . . Tasmin woke up tearful . . .
IN THE NIGHT Tasmin woke up tearful, from an aching pain—but the pain was not because her husband was sitting by a campfire with a quiet Mexican woman. She cried from the grief that woke her two nights out of three—her grief for her boys. It was a grief she had come to doubt she could bear and remain sane. If Jim had known how to help her, she felt she might get better—but Jim didn’t know how to help her—never had. When, yesterday, he had casually said that he wanted to marry Rosa, Tasmin suddenly realized that words such as “marry,” “husband,” “wife” had, for Jim, neither legal nor sacramental weight. Those words didn’t mean to Jim what they meant to people brought up in settled societies. All he meant by “husband,” “wife,” “marry” was that he and the woman in question might travel together for some while. But his scanty reading of his tattered Bible had given him no sense of holy matrimony as it was understood by settled people. His agreeing to get “hitched up” with her had been, for him, a light thing. He was a mountain man; he saw no reason not to add wives when a pleasing new
woman came along—it wasn’t a fault exactly, merely the fruit of his unparented upbringing. Tasmin didn’t hold this against him—how, under the circumstances, could it have been otherwise?—but it did make her feel lonelier when she woke up in the night grieving for her boys. She now considered that she should have known all this at once, on their first night together, when she had got slapped for attempting to explain what theology was. Jim had no theology, just a notion or two: that sin, whatever it was, should be punished; that wives should be silent and obey their husbands. He had the merest scraps of belief and he couldn’t help her when she felt sad in the night.
When dawn came she went straight to the fire Rosa was already building up.
“Excuse me for inviting myself into your company this early,” Tasmin said. Jim looked tired and a little wary. Rosa offered Tasmin coffee.
“I’ve got to say this, Jim,” she told him, trying to control her voice, trying not to begin to cry.
“I can accept the death of our boys because I have to—they’re dead,” she said. “What I can’t accept is how they’re buried.”
Jim looked perplexed. The boys were buried where they died, as most travelers were buried.
“Here it is, Jim,” she went on. “I can’t bear to think of them buried lonely and far apart, far from either of us. I want them buried together, in a churchyard we could visit. A nice churchyard, with grass, and a headstone for each of them.”
“I buried my girls that way,” Rosa said. “I put up little crosses.
“If I am ever in my village again I will visit them,” she said sadly. “But I don’t know if I will be.”
“You see, Jimmy?” Tasmin said. “That’s how any good mother would feel.”
Jim waited, not sure what the women were telling him.
“I think I have the resources to be happy again, sometime in my life,” Tasmin told him. “If I can just visit my boys from time to time and know that they’re together in a proper graveyard I can reconcile myself to what’s happened and go on. But if one poor tyke is over by the Rio Grande and the other I know not where, in time I think I’ll go mad. It’s a thing I just can’t bear.”
“You should go get them for her—you can find them,” Rosa said. “If you buried them you can find them—it will help her.”
“That’s just what I intended to ask—that you go gather in our boys,” Tasmin told him,
grateful to Rosa for smoothing the way. “I haven’t asked you for many favors—I’m sure you’ll agree. But I’m asking this.”
Jim thought the request strange, but had no objection to doing it so long as Rosa would come along.
“I would be grateful if you’d go with him,” Tasmin said, to Rosa. “As their mother I know it’s my job. But it would mean leaving Petal in the lap of this infant republic and I fear she would soon bring it down. They’d be trying to recall General Santa Anna if they had to cope with Petal for a month.”
“You mean you want to wait here?” Jim asked. “No—not here,” she said. “I mean to leave Texas and I hope never to come back. I’ll wait for you in Saint Louis. I’ll make George or Geoff wait with me, and perhaps Buffum and her young corporal as well.”
Jim looked at Tasmin several times—she had a wild, desperate look, like a mare that had been lo-coed. Her face was thinning, making her eyes even larger, wilder.
“Please, Jim,” Tasmin asked. “We’ve got Petal to think of. I don’t want to become a crazed mother. If you can’t find the time to bring them all the way to Saint Louis, then take them to Bent’s Fort. I’m sure Kit would bring them the rest of the way.”
Jim thought he could see the right in it, brothers laid together in a settled place.
“No, I won’t send them by Kit—they’re our boys,” he told her. “I’ll go get them and bring them wherever you want them.”
“Thank you,” Tasmin said.
She turned to Rosa. “It’ll be a hard journey, I know. I’m grateful to you for attempting it.”
“I never took no journey till I was stolen,” Rosa said. “That trip was hard enough.”
“This one will be easier,” Jim told her. “The weather will be easing, and I’ll get you a better horse. That old sack of bones you’re riding barely made it this far.”
He talked for a bit, discussing the practicalities of the journey. Tasmin and Rosa listened with only half a mind, half an ear. Jim was thinking of guns and blankets, meat and bullets. The women were thinking of dead children, those they had brought into being, had suckled, had cleaned when they soiled, but had lost.
“I expect it will take four months,” Jim concluded.
“I’ll be in Saint Louis by then,” Tasmin promised.
65
. . . they were still good shoulders, she considered.
I THINK IT PAYS to be particular about cocks,” Buffum told them. “I’ve been lucky twice.” She was pregnant again and glowing. Corporal Dominguin was evidently given little rest. Somehow Buffum had turned into a beauty; no one seeing her now would suppose she had ever been plain. Whether this change was a result of a particularity about cocks no one could say; but Buffum was rapidly becoming the beauty of the family. Tasmin, feeling old and dowdy, was too distracted to do much about herself, although, once they got to Galveston Island, where some adornments were available, Father Geoff urged a few purchases on her: a new hairbrush, scent, a frock. Still, when General Houston gave a ball for the Berrybenders as they passed through, Tasmin had as many young men petitioning her for dances as Buffum. Tasmin bared her shoulders; they were still good shoulders, she considered. She let herself be swept up in the dancing for an hour—it took her mind off other things.
General Houston, rather grumpy, somewhat dyspeptic, did not dance. Tasmin had hoped that someone would recover her father’s body from the Alamo, but the hope was forlorn. The heaps of dead had been thrown into common graves. Vicky still teared up when Lord Berrybender’s name was mentioned, which was more and more seldom as they straggled on toward the port of Galveston and began the confusing business of attempting to decide which of them were going home to Europe and which merely to Saint Louis with Tasmin and Petal.
“George and Geoff have no choice,” Tasmin said. “I need them until Jim brings me my boys.”
The two men made no protest. “After that you two can go anywhere you please, with my gratitude,” Tasmin told them.
“I’ll have to go somewhere where I can sell my pictures,” George told her. “And pronto, else I’ll be bankrupt.”
“Somehow bankruptcy suits you, George,” Buffum joked. “I doubt any of us could stand you if you were rich.”
Cook was the first member of the company to declare herself resolute for England. Tom Fitzpatrick’s suit, in the end, had been firmly rejected.
“He’s not young, he’s not handsome, and he has no money at all,” the ever-practical Cook informed them. “I can’t see the point of it, miladies.”
“I should have thought the point of it might be that he cares for you,” Tasmin said, a little taken aback by Cook’s firm refusal of the man who had loyally helped her across thousands of miles.
Mary and Piet also opted for Europe.
“I want my child to be born in a safer country,” Mary told her sisters.
“You once were almost wholly demonic, Mary,” Tasmin reminded her. “How odd that you should have become the most practical among us.”
“We may come back,” Piet suggested. “The arachnids attract me—spiders. I may just want to do a study.”
Buffum refused to hear of England. “Afraid of being disappointed by the cocks?” Tasmin joked.
Buffum merely chuckled, in her new, sultry way. Vicky chose England. “I suppose I had better go see if there is anything left in Northamptonshire,” she said. “And I do need a new cello.”
In the evenings Tasmin and Petal, sometimes accompanied by Elf, took long walks on the gray beach, looking at the gray sea. Petal and Elf busied themselves collecting shells.
“That sea looks too big,” Petal declared. “Why don’t we go back and find my Jim?”
“He’s not just your Jim—I had a share in this too,” her mother told her. “Besides, our Jim is hard to find.”
“I still think this sea looks too big,” Petal said. Kate Berrybender was the last family member to choose Europe.
“It’s my mathematics, you see,” Kate explained. “Piet assures me I shall have much better tutors in Europe—he suggests perhaps Göttingen. I should like to advance my mathematics and I fear a lack of advanced tutors here.”
But as the ship was loading Kate burst into tears.
“It’s because I don’t know if I shall ever see Mr. James Snow again,” she sobbed.
“We will see him, and anyway he’s not yours,” Petal insisted.
“You ought to smack that impertinent brat,” Kate advised.
66
. . . a frustrated trinity . . .
ON THE VOYAGE TO New Orleans both George and Geoff were desperately seasick. They could seldom drag themselves to the card table. Buffum, wilder and wilder, spent the voyage sequestered with Corporal Dominguin, now merely called Juan. Petal and Elf wandered the ship, fighting like cats and dogs. Petal persuaded a sailor to help her up into the rigging, where she clung to a rope. Tasmin shouted herself hoarse but Petal refused to descend. A team of sailors was finally dispatched to fetch her. One of the sailors was so exhausted by the effort that he fell into the sea.
Tasmin had begun to feel rather guilty about her shameless use of George Catlin and Father Geoffrin; and yet for her it was an intensely lonely time, her husband far away and with another woman, her sister occupied with a lover, her daughter opposing her every wish. George and Geoff were old and well-trusted companions. When they were well they were able to provoke at least a semblance of gaiety in her—a bit of the old, teasing Tasmin would return. Yet the cruel fact was that both men were in love with her and were not going to get what they wanted. She resolved to send them away when they reached Saint Louis, and yet they reached Saint Louis and she didn’t send them away. They had been welded, through travel and travail, into a frustrated trinity from which none of the three could find the strength to leave. Except on her waspish days, Tasmin was kind to her old friends. They avoided all talk of romance except when the vibrant Buffum—who was actually having a romance—joined the discussion. The better Buffum looked, th
e more sour the three of them felt.
Once in Saint Louis, they settled into a large house, lent them by Captain Clark, and settled in to wait. Petal and Elf immediately stuck themselves in a chimney, finally emerging very black. Once off the water, George’s and Geoff ’s health improved; there were card games again, and a semblance of levity. George made a great many sketches of scenes along the docks and the riverbank. Geoff and Tasmin shopped, buying things neither much wanted. Buffum paid a visit to the great Bent brothers warehouse, being run by two younger Bents—Buffum considered the warehouse so very disordered that she could hardly understand how the business continued to operate. Unopposed by the younger Bents, she began to reorganize the inventory and standardize the accounts.
“She’s become a regular American—practical,” Tasmin said.
“I know, but don’t criticize her,” George replied. “She’s the only healthy one among us. Geoff and I ought to leave—you ought to make us. You’re not going to accept either of us, yet we can’t stop wanting you.”
“Can’t you understand, this is a deathwatch!” Tasmin said, flaring up. “I’m waiting for my dead boys. I only hoped for a little help from my friends. You’re both free to go, if that’s your attitude. In fact I wish you would go. Go! Go!”
But then they made it up. “If only I were a better dancer,” George sighed. “Do you really think it matters that much—how well a man dances?” Tasmin asked.
“I suspect it does,” George replied. “I rather fear it does.”
67
In the full heat of summer . . .
IN THE FULL HEAT OF SUMMER, Jim came. He stepped off the boat with Rosa, Charles Bent, Greasy Lake, Kit Carson, and the drovers who had brought across a large shipment for the warehouse. Amid the stores, carefully protected, were three tiny bodies—they had brought Randy too. Rosa had purchased blankets from the Bents and had made each boy a tasteful shroud. In a pine coffin were the remains of Little Onion. Jim had felt it wrong to leave her. Charles Bent had marked the shrouds so that Tasmin might know which was which. Jim looked no less gaunt. Rosa was with child, a fact Tasmin noted but did not remark on. She had traveled that road with Jim herself: it was hard to deny comfort to the man, if you liked him.
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