Then he tipped his hat to the faces on the porch.
‘I best be going,’ he said. ‘I so heartily sorry, Winona, I am. Yes, I find I am. You tell those men now what you told me and I will expect them to come for me. I would do just the same. My mother don’t understand the world. The world ain’t worth nothing unless you true in it. I sorry, I am.’
Then he swung himself back up on his twisty horse and rode away.
I walked back to the cabin.
‘We hear wedding bells?’ said Lige Magan.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You be quiet now,’ said John Cole to Lige.
‘I just thinking they was talking good enough,’ said Lige, abashed at his foolishness.
‘Lige Magan, I never said a word in anger to you but I punch your face real good if you ain’t hushing now,’ said John Cole.
*
I wept all the night, holding on to Rosalee like the wheel of a little ship, but knew not why – not so I could say.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A person may weep all the night and sleep in the first hours of daybreak and be surprised to wake then with a tincture of rest. I did wake so. Maybe it was also true that I felt less scorned, less wounded, than I had, because there had been something in Jas Jonski’s talk the day before that had comforted me, even if it was the comfort of a bad man. I looked back and forth among what I remembered of Jas Jonski’s words and wondered at some of it anew and didn’t know what to make of it at all. Maybe as something else to hold on to, I remembered something he had said, itself a shadowy remark. It was that Wynkle King after finding me on the road had brought me to Jas in my extremity. If that was so then might Wynkle King not know where the Spencer rifle was?
I was of a mind to find out.
I dressed in my new summer trews and for good measure a loose work shirt that Rosalee had also sewn for me. There was something in the lovely cleanliness of the Irish cloth and the neat stitching that made me feel cleaner. Made me feel dapper, and my pride rose out of that. That there could be beauty in something so poor – fifty cents for seven yards.
I found Lige Magan in the yards hitching up the wagon with Tennyson.
‘Good morning to you,’ said Lige. ‘I sorry for making a fool of myself yesterday. Wedding bells indeed.’
‘Where you fixing to go?’ I said.
‘Help our good friend the lawyer Briscoe – in his hour of need.’
‘You bring me along?’
‘You’ll come back black,’ he said, scanning over my new outfit.
‘That don’t make no odds,’ I said.
‘You go and fetch yourself a hat, I don’t want you raving in the sun.’
The hats lived on hooks in a tiny back room and as I went through the deep shadow of the cabin I had to pass Tennyson’s narrow quarters. I knew he was outside so I peeked in, like a thief. It was just an iron bed and a chair and a small table and what Rosalee called a ‘person’, which was three lengths of wood raised in a pyramid to hold your clothes. So that it seemed like Tennyson without Tennyson stood perpetually in the room. I never did ask him where he got the fifty dollars he must have paid for his rifle but looking at his possessions, or the lack of them, it did make me wonder. If you can own nothing, he owned it.
But every inch of the walls was covered in his drawings. Pictures of us, like you might see in a sheriff’s office, but without the Wanted, and the likely reward for catching us. It was strange to see us all there. Made me pause and gaze. A stately drawing of Rosalee took pride of place.
The newest work was all of one thing – jackrabbits. Now why was that, I thought? There were maybe twenty drawings of those jackrabbits. That was strange too because a jackrabbit was just a soul to be shot at since it liked so well to eat the crops. The jackrabbit’s like an orphan the minute it is born. Off it goes and it never looks back. It doesn’t need a mamma. So they say. But Tennyson must have held a high opinion of that animal. Well he must have been out in the fields drawing them because here was a jackrabbit gazing this-and-that-a-way and here was a jackrabbit running like the devil’s servant. Some of the drawings were splashed with the red colour he was able to make from berries. I didn’t know if that was meant to signify the sunset, or maybe a killing. In truth Rosalee was a demon for that jugged-hare dish she made.
She cooked the creature whole and when you lifted the lid it was like a little person in its coffin.
I was so caught up in the drawings that I went back out without fetching a hat and was told by Lige to go right back in and rectify that.
*
My heart would have wept for the lawyer Briscoe except he was so high up in his spirits you could only wonder at him.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘I ain’t going to let no foul banditti push me under.’
He was amazed that Zach Petrie had sent men to burn his house. He had never had a crazy thought like that. Only a fool attacks the law direct and Zach Petrie was no fool. The lawyer Briscoe said what makes a criminal of a man is just one thing. Choosing, choosing, to do the wrong thing. See the right thing, but choose the wrong. The beams were still smouldering on his prized house but already he had called in the carpenters and the masons and by the good Lord Jesus he was going to raise the place again, he said – instanter, as he liked to say, momently, cito. Then he was quoting the Roman writer Ovid and I remember this because he had it pinned up on the wall behind his desk – till the fire took it no doubt. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. When the lawyer Briscoe spoke Latin you knew he meant business.
He asked me would I be so kind as to act as his clerk of works for the building. Make a note of what was needed and get it all brought in and keep a record of all his expenditure. Lige Magan looked happy about that because he had been worried since the fire that I would have no wages coming in, and what I got was a goodly part of any ready money we had. The lawyer Briscoe had moved all his rescued chattels to the barn and he had bid Joe and Virg Sugrue set up his magnificent bed there and even as we spoke I could just see Lana Jane wielding her willow broom inside the soft browns of the shadows of the great building. A barn is just a giant box for dust but she was making a resolute start.
So then I was talking to the carpenters and the masons and they explained to me what they might need to make a start and the carpenters said the big timber they would need for the floors and roof would best be got from East Tennessee in the mountains where the timber was still high and plentiful. And that would need to be brought along the roads and rivers as much as possible because there was no train on God’s earth could take timber that size. It surprised me how anxious they were to talk to me and even the way they stood there before me, just as gentle and friendly as you please. I held a big ledger along my left arm and was writing in it from an inkpot that Mr Otter the plasterer held for me. Although my wound was healed I was still protecting it, as people do. Mr Otter had come out of respect for the lawyer Briscoe even though plastering would not start for a long long time, he hoped in the fall when the walls were ready for him. Mr Otter didn’t look like an otter so much as a heron because he had a staring eye and a beaky nose.
I was just beginning to warm to the work when I remembered why I had stolen a lift from Lige Magan. The fact was I was intent on finding out where Wynkle King had his house and I was hoping it was nearby in Paris somewhere. I could almost have asked Jas Jonski but maybe I wasn’t that content with him. No. I supposed by Sheriff Flynn’s account of him I might have discovered him in Zollicoffer’s saloon but I wasn’t too desirous of going there in particular if he was in his cups. I knew it was dangerous that he was in league with Zach Petrie – especially standing there before the smoking ruins of the lawyer Briscoe’s house. But I had to try and find out where Tennyson’s gun might be. That rifle was his fortune in life and I had lost it like a blamed fool. If Wynkle King had his quarters out at Zach Petrie’s I would have to think again. But I had the notion in my head he was situated in Paris – you wouldn’t come all the way from Wes
t Sandy Creek to go drinking and then be drunk on your horse and likely eaten by a mountain lion or a bear on the way back.
If I thought it was going to be a big mystery I was mistaken because when I asked Mr Otter just like that if he knew where a Wynkle King lived, he said, why, yes, he had rooms on Blythe Street above the shop where Mr Otter got his horsehair. Mr Otter said he made his own lath out of greenwood but he was damned if he was going to go shaving a horse. So that was surprising. This Wynkle King seemed very well known for a youngster.
So when I was done for that morning with my business for the lawyer Briscoe I told Lige Magan I would come back towards evening because I was going to go walking into the town. Lige Magan had shifted himself with a shovel and was shovelling the ashes and the burnt ruins with twenty other men, and twenty more were bringing barrows back and forth from where they had chosen to dump the debris. They were going to clear everything and then see what could be saved and what could not. For instance the lawyer Briscoe had high hopes for his stairway, which was now blackened and teetering but all the same more or less itself. And maybe the two stone stacks of the chimneys and certainly he thought the old porch and verandah would rise again like phoenixes because they were made of cast-iron metal in Philadelphia – you could see that written on them here and there. But I left all those important considerations and took myself along the way into town. It was a warm day but cool enough still in that early part of the year and a little breeze touched my shirt as if it was checking Rosalee’s stitching. You could sense the woods stirring with birds and all the wide and secret kingdom of those animals that don’t like to be seen by man in their daily goings about. I thought of my bear going about there and whether she was able to think of me and I hoped maybe she had given me something of herself in exchange for nearly frightening me to death. Then I wondered how much of me now was still Lakota and I also wondered how my people were faring way out on the plains if they were still there having heard news of the continuing wars and knowing in my heart of hearts that the white eyes would never forgive them for their defiance. And if I didn’t think that, the Paris Invigilator thought it for me.
And all this going about that I was doing, in the forest of the white eyes as you might say and not my own forest, Tennyson, Rosalee, Lige, even Thomas McNulty and John Cole, I thought all that was a story that had happened because the story that was given me at the start was never to be. Never to get going beyond a certain point and was only fated to end so close to the beginning you couldn’t squeeze a straw into the gap.
If they had let my mother live and my sister and had never come into our country how would it be now? I would have no notion or word of English and I would believe that the most important people in the world were ourselves and that there would be found on the earth no one to match us for goodness and majesty. And I thought I would have to be doing all the chores of the camp unless I was like my mother and would be allowed to be a fighter. I might have been a woman fighter for my people and have had great fame among them like my mother.
So then that run of thinking reminded me of Tennyson’s rifle.
Maybe Blythe Street was a good place to buy horsehair for a plasterer but it had the cold bare look of poor folk’s houses and the road all pitted from the winter rains. My hair had grown out a little so I tucked what there was under my hat. Then I let it fall out again because I had the thought that Wynkle King had found me as a girl in a yellow dress. So I wasn’t so sure of my errand then. I had a look at myself in the window of an empty shop. A shadowy little soul right enough. Strange how a body has all those high thoughts from dawn till dusk and yet might look like I looked. You wouldn’t know what I was, apart from being a Lakota. A waif, like in a story. I nodded to myself to see if that was any improvement. It was suddenly surprising to me that the carpenters and the masons had even talked to me. I didn’t look like a clerk of works although I had no idea what that should look like. I thought I looked like a girl in a boy’s trews and shirt. Why would a girl wear those? And yet I had walked through six or seven streets to reach this street right near the heart of the town and I didn’t remember anyone remarking on me. Even looking at me.
But I had come that far and so I climbed the dirty stairs to the floor above the suppliers.
The door there had a little brass plate that said W. King so it wasn’t going to be I was in the wrong place. I certainly felt like I was the wrong person to be there in the right place. Maybe Wynkle King had been one of the party that fired the lawyer Briscoe’s house? How could we know, since they had worn those burlap sacks they favoured, with the holes cut for eyes? Either way, he was a follower of Zach Petrie. Then I thought, maybe I am crazy, maybe I would be a better candidate for Old Blockley Asylum than Thomas McNulty. Tennyson was an altered man, did he even know how to fire his rifle any more? Why was I dogging around looking for it? Sniffing with my nose for it like a hound? What was the purpose of finding that rifle? What in tarnation was I thinking, what was I doing? I stood outside the dirty door in that dirty tenement and wondered. Maybe some blow to my head as well as the wound to my centre had driven me demented. So that I might be more justly running through the streets howling in an honest way in the true manner of a proper lunatic and not showing my madness by going to talk to murdering rebels and drunken pals of Jas Jonski? W. King. As a matter of record, as the lawyer Briscoe might say, the nameplate said Rev. W. King. Rev. for reverend I supposed. But Wynkle King was a friend of Jas Jonski so I couldn’t imagine he was more than twenty years of age and I didn’t think reverends came so young.
I knocked on the door.
If you can be twenty years old and yet look deceased, Wynkle King fitted the bill. I had never seen him up close – maybe I had never actually seen him at all, but just had stories of him from Jas. Just knew the name but not the owner of it. It was a moment made odder by the fact that he must have lifted me off the wagon road and what – laid me across his horse? I just didn’t know. And had the mule lingered near me when I fainted? He was a tender-hearted mule, I knew, so I hoped he had.
‘I just looking for Wynkle King, wanted to ask him something,’ I said.
‘I Wynkle.’
‘I would like to take this opportunity, sir, to thank you for saving my life.’
‘I never saved your life,’ he said, looking inclined to close the door again.
He was eyeing me up and down like he wanted to ask, why you dressed like a jackass boy?
‘Didn’t you find me up on the road and bring me down to Jas Jonski?’
‘No.’
‘That were me,’ said a voice from inside the room.
‘That were you?’ I said. ‘Who?’
I peered in. There were two windows running the front of the house so there was plenty of light.
‘That were me, I guess,’ said a man within. ‘You was wearing a yellow dress on that occasion.’
‘That right,’ I said. ‘So you – you ain’t Wynkle King?’
‘I Wynkle,’ he said.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
‘He’s my pa,’ said the younger Wynkle with his dead face.
‘Oh,’ I said, nonplussed.
Then, as if he wished to attest to his bladder’s fame, he left the room in a rush – I heard the tinkle of piss in some hidden receptacle – and all the while myself still puzzling.
But maybe Jas Jonski never did say which Wynkle King brought me, and maybe come to think of it Colonel Purton never said which Wynkle King was a confederate and accomplice of Zach Petrie. Both Wynkle Kings I can confirm lived in the same level of dirt and dereliction because the room lacked a woman’s touch. A bear might have lived cleaner in it.
‘How you know to bring me to Jas Jonski?’ I said, before I could think better of it.
‘You told me, you darn fool,’ said the reverend.
‘I told you? I don’t remember.’
‘You said it, Jas Jonski, Jas Jonski, you said, and I said to myself, that’s Wynkle’s good friend works at Mr Hick
s’s. So. I obliged you. You were in a bad way, missy.’
The younger Wynkle came sheepishly back, blushing as red as a fall apple.
‘Was my mule nearby on the road?’ I said.
‘He was.’
‘Was there a Spencer rifle in a holster?’
‘There was.’
‘And do you mind if I ask you where it might be now?’
‘I took it for taxes.’
‘You took Tennyson’s rifle? Ain’t you a reverend?’
‘You meaning Tennyson Bouguereau, that likely shot Tach Petrie?’
‘He didn’t shoot Tach Petrie.’
‘How you know?’
‘Because I was there.’
‘So you shot him maybe?’ He laughed at my silence. ‘If I had known you were connected I wouldn’t have carried you to Jas Jonski, no, sir.’
Oh, this was not going good – or in any direction I had hoped. First there were two Wynkles, which was awkward enough. But also the reverend had leaped on Tennyson’s name. And if Aurelius Littlefair had struck down Tennyson – which he had, according to this very witness – whether because he knew about Jas Jonski’s embarrassment, or just to settle an old score while he had him handy, or just because he was a freedman, well, here was a bosom pal of Aurelius Littlefair. I felt the danger of that powerfully. Had I really expected to walk up to this door and be given the rifle with a thank you and farewell? Looked like I had. Especially when I had thought it was just a weedy boy involved.
‘Give me that gun,’ I cried.
He laughed again: ‘It ain’t here, missy. I sold it. To Zach. I sell everything.’
And he indicated with an opening gesture of his right hand and a dipping turn of his head the utter emptiness of the room.
The younger Wynkle looked from his father to me, and from me to his father.
A Thousand Moons Page 11