“I think, sir, I’d like to return to my hoeing.”
“And that’s a story too. A brave man, giving his last for his wife’s people.”
Skye smiled. “It’s been good to talk with you,” he said.
“You’re very like you were described, Mister Skye. I got some excellent descriptions of you, but they were wrong on one item. There’s no London left in your voice.”
That gave Skye his opening. “I’m not a Yank, so don’t write about me. Go find a Yankee to write about.”
Buntline smiled, his manner apologetic. “You know, Mister Skye, I’ve talked to people in St. Louis. You worked for American Fur and the Chouteau family, and they told me you were the best man out in the field. I talked to army men at Fort Leavenworth. They told me you’re a legend. Whenever the army wanted something, they asked you. They said you’d fought more hostile Indians than any man alive. They said you’re the bravest man ever to walk this continent. I stopped in Independence, and learned you’re the most trusted guide alive. You got people through.”
Skye listened incredulously. This man was inventing things.
“The trouble was, no one knew where to find you. They said you might be with the Crows, you might be with the Shoshones, you might be anywhere. But the best bet was to go to Fort Laramie and ask, so I did, by train and stage, and I asked, and they weren’t sure either, but then a young Indian Bureau fellow said he’d heard you’d come to the Wind River agency, and I got a horse and came here. And here you are. I’m hoping you’ll hear me out.”
The man had crossed a continent for nothing. Skye wasn’t sure how to cope with it. “They probably told you, Mister Buntline, that I wouldn’t be very cooperative.”
“Oh, they did, but of course that just gets my dander up. I’ve had trouble lining up Cody, and even more trouble lining up Hickok.”
“I suppose I should know who Hickok is, sir, but I don’t. What I do know is that I live a quiet and private life and it’s going to stay that way.”
“Well, I’m not done, not done at all, Mister Skye. There are rewards, compensations, good things in your future.”
Skye was feeling more and more testy. “I apologize, sir, for not being civil. You’ll excuse me now.”
Buntline grinned cheerfully. “I thought maybe you’d like to get rich.”
Skye was not averse to the idea, and decided to give the man a few moments before evicting him from the potato patch.
“My backers and I plan to do stage shows, sir. These shows simply pump in cash. We’d like to do one starring yourself, called Trapper Skye, King of the Mountains. We’d have you say a few lines, talk with your two wives, get into a staged battle with some redskins, and discharge your piece now and then—it’s marvelously deafening inside a theater. How about a hundred dollars a week, for starters?”
“Mister Buntline, I’m sorry you came all this way. The answer is no.”
“You say the word, and we’ll pay your way by rail to St. Louis, where we’ll organize the show. Yes, bring your wives, and we’ll give you a few lines to memorize on the train. The minute you walk onstage, and the audience sees you’re the real thing, and the roughest cob that ever came east, they’ll sit spellbound, and throw dimes onstage when you’re done. You’ll pocket a few dollars of dimes right off the boards every show.”
“Are you through, Mister Buntline?”
“Oh, no, not at all. Shipping both ways, one season, bonuses if you pack the house, and plenty of good dime novels about you to spark interest. Do that for a year or two, and you won’t be hoeing potatoes. You’ll be living like a prince.”
“A prince? Me?”
“Onstage for six months, just one season, a hundred dollars a week. You’ll have room and board, traveling money, and a bottle anytime you want it. I’ll tell you what. If you stick it out, I’ll add a bonus after the season, yes, let’s add four hundred. That’s around three thousand dollars, sir, for one season. Think about it! A home of your own. Something to retire on. Money in the bank. Think on it, Mister Skye. Just for walking onstage and saying a few lines. I promise you, sir, you’ll fill up every theater from Kankakee to Pittsburgh.”
Skye could barely absorb it.
“How about it?” Buntline asked.
“Mister Buntline, I may have lost my wife Mary. She’s gone. I’m awaiting word.”
“Well, that’s no problem. I know a few Italian actresses who look Indian in front of the gaslights. We’ll just dye their faces. In fact, this is even better. We’ll give you three or four wives and that will be an even better draw.”
Skye roared, swung his hoe at Buntline, missed him, and started after the man. But the impresario was faster and had no limp. Skye lunged again, but too late. Buntline ran over several rows of potatoes and headed for the safety of the clapboard agency buildings. Skye watched him go, his heart hammering, and then settled the venerable hat on his head. The hoe lay two rows away, so he collected it as he watched Buntline vanish inside of one of the buildings.
He hoped Buntline would complain loudly to the Indian agent. That would be the only entertainment the afternoon offered.
He used his hoe as a crutch because he was hurting again, and began to make his way across the potato patch, when Victoria intercepted him.
“What the hell was that about?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing.”
She glared at him.
“That man wants to put me in a theater with a bunch of Italian actresses playing my wives, while I run around stage killing Indians.”
“Sonofabitch!” she said. “I’ll kill him.”
“Not a bad idea,” he said. “He offered me three thousand dollars.”
“He what?”
“To shoot Indians. To cozy up to several wives. That would amuse an audience.”
She stared at him.
“I did what I had to do. I’ve never taken any pride in fighting or killing. When it happened it was because I had no choice. I won’t glorify this in a theater. I won’t pretend or make believe. I won’t turn myself into a hero when I’m an ordinary man. I won’t have little boys wishing they could be like me. I won’t turn myself into something I’m not and never was. I can’t be bought, not for three thousand dollars, Victoria. So I told him my wife was missing and I was waiting to learn of her fate.”
“Mary will come back,” she said.
He knew better than to ask how she knew that. All his life with her she had visited mysterious insights upon him, and usually was right. But he didn’t believe it. Mary was gone. She had crossed the great divide, and nothing would restore her to him. He had been quietly grieving as he hoed the fields each day. Hoeing was the only way he knew to let go of Mary. He hoed one row and then another and another, burying her.
Buntline vanished the next day, but not without leaving an elaborate contract with the agency. An owl-eyed clerk handed him a thick envelope with his name written on it in an elaborate hand. Skye’s eyes weren’t good, but he managed to decipher the blur by holding the papers at arm’s length. Sign right here and you’ll be a theatrical star and make enough money to last the rest of your life.
Skye read the amazing document, and carefully stuffed it into the agency stove and watched flames lick it. He had burned Buntline out of his life. The whole thing had left him with an unsated curiosity. Why would some novelist and impresario track him down? There had been nothing unusual in Skye’s life. He had survived decades in the wilds, but so had others. He had adopted the ways of the Indians and had become their advocate, but so had others. He had guided a few people, led a few trapping parties, explored a few areas unknown to the outside world. But so had others.
He toiled through another day of heat and dryness, and then the searchers returned. Victoria summoned him from the fields, and as he walked toward the agency buildings, he saw the young warriors collecting at the frame house of Chief Washakie. He saw no paint, which might have signified battle or victory or death, but only bronzed young men, mostly
in breechclouts, sinking off their unpainted and unadorned ponies.
The old man appeared at once, and surveyed the quiet young Shoshones as they gathered at his porch.
“I do not see Blue Dawn,” he said to Fast Bird, who had led the search.
“Grandfather, she is not anywhere,” the young man said.
“We looked for her bones and saw none. We looked for her ponies. She has gone to the place of eternal mystery, and we know nothing more.”
“How far did you go?” Washakie asked.
“We rode to the Yellowstone, and then we rode along the banks in both directions. The trail would be very old, but we looked. We were thorough. The owls said nothing to us. The coyote did not lead us.”
Washakie turned to Skye and Victoria. “Blue Dawn is not among us anymore,” he said. “I am sorry. We will not say her name. She will be the One Who Disappeared.”
thirty-two
North Star felt some mysterious tug as he and his mother worked their way up the Wind River. Something ancient and powerful was awakening in him. It seemed almost a physical force, though he knew he had scarcely been in this place, and only when he was too young to remember much about it. There was majestic beauty, with snowy peaks rising to the west, but along this trail was greenery and shelter from the winds.
The white man part of him told him it couldn’t be familiarity, because he had spent most of his childhood among the Crows of his mother Victoria’s people, and he had scarcely been here. But the Shoshone part of him whispered that he had come home, that this very land was the ancient and primal land of his people, and all that he saw was his to possess. His mind had worked like that for years now, a dual way of seeing the world, and he didn’t mind. If he was a man of two bloods, then he really wanted to see the world in each way. But just now, he was pure Shoshone, walking beside his Shoshone mother Blue Dawn, just a little apart from a place he and she had not seen, Fort Washakie.
“I do not know this,” she said, the sweep of her hand encompassing planted fields, small log cabins situated well apart from one another, and up ahead, some white frame buildings with a flag flying above them. The new agency, he supposed, given by the Yankees to his people. The thought was a little cynical. The Yankees had forced his people onto a homeland, with borders around it that made it an invisible prison.
Still, this was a good place. He saw smoke curling up from the chimneys of the cabins, and knew life progressed within. He and his mother proceeded into this settled area unnoticed. There was no town crier anymore to herald the arrival of visitors, as there had been when his people lived in lodges and moved camp whenever it was necessary. They saw some women toiling in the fields, patiently using wooden or buffalo-bone hoes to hack down weeds. They saw squash and maize and beans and potatoes and grains, some of it well tended, the rest patchy and in need of hard work.
“This place …” Mary said. “We once raised our lodges here. We met with the other bands and had games and feasts. The families arranged marriages, and it was good. Now a plow has torn up the grass.”
But the closer they got to the white buildings, the more North Star sank into himself. What would his father be like? When at last, when they stood man to man, would he welcome his son and his wife? What would he think of Blue Dawn after her long absence? Would he and Victoria even be here? Neither he nor his mother were sure.
He could not answer these questions. But this was his home, and he was in a good place and his heart was good.
The sun had dropped to the top of the distant mountains in the west, and now the long light gilded the land, burnished it with gold, so that the cottonwoods were golden, and the grasses too, and the sunlit sides of the log cabins, and the sunlit sides of the agency buildings. And opposite every gilded object was a purple shadow, a shadow that was crawling along the earth as the sun sat for a while right on the distant ridges.
They both saw Skye at the same time. The gold light lit his ancient top hat and turned his white hair bright and caught his ruddy cheeks. He was in a field, hoeing, and there was no mistaking him. Mary cried out suddenly, her hand flying to her face. His own heart tripped, and for a moment he was anxious.
She steered her worn horse toward the distant man, her man, his sire, who hoed in the golden last light, and now they progressed between rows of some plant he thought might be potatoes, and at last Barnaby Skye noticed, and set down his hoe, and lifted his old hat from his head, so the gold light caught all his white hair, and the old man seemed to straighten up, grow taller, as he stood waiting. For it was plain the old man recognized his wife and his son, and now walked toward them, limping slightly, his hoe as his staff.
They reached him and stopped. Mary slid from her horse and went to him. North Star halted, afraid now, seeing the great puzzlement in the old man’s face.
“Mary! And you?” his father said, peering first at his wife and then at his son. “You?”
His mother stood stiff and proud, for she was making a presentation. “Yes, Mister Skye. We have come to you. Here is your son.”
He didn’t speak for a moment, but stood, the breeze riffling his unkempt gray hair. Then, searching for words, he spoke. “I’m glad,” he said. “Gladder than I’ve ever been.”
He collected his wife and hugged her, and collected his boy and embraced him, and then stood back to gaze again at these two.
“Now my life is complete,” he said. “But don’t explain it. Let it be a miracle.”
“Mister Skye, we will call it a miracle,” North Star’s mother said.
Now the sun slid beneath the western peaks, leaving a rim of white fire as the gold faded away into indigo shadows.
North Star had no wish to talk. There was no need for words, and besides, all the feelings within him now were Shoshone, but he had lost his mother tongue and his English seemed poor and inadequate. His father was glad. So it was enough to stand still while his father took the measure of them both, his gaze, which seemed uncertain, absorbing his wife and then examining his son.
“What name shall I call you, son?” Skye asked.
“That name that draws you closest to me, Father.”
“Then you are Dirk, lad. And a proud name it is, owned by your grandfather in England.
“And you, my beautiful wife? What shall I call you?”
She grinned. “I’ll whisper it in your ear sometime.”
He laughed, a rumbling chuckle that wrought memories in North Star. “Let us make the circle complete,” Skye said. “Victoria hates cabins and stoves and is probably cussing her way through some cooking.” He turned to Mary. “Your brothers gave us a cabin. They are starting another.”
They walked through the fields, three people and two horses, in the gathering twilight, and no one noticed them. The first stars emerged, and Dirk looked as always for the Star That Never Moves, his natal star and one that wrought odd feelings deep within him.
They reached the door, Skye set his old hoe against the logs and pushed the door open. Victoria turned and stared.
“I’ll be goddamned,” she said.
She set down an iron spoon and examined the youth and the mother, and then she studied Skye, looking for something within him. Whatever it was that Victoria saw in him, she seemed satisfied.
“I am pleased to see you, Mother Victoria,” North Star said.
“You are here. You are alive,” Victoria said. She turned to Mary. “We stopped saying your name.”
Dirk knew all about that. The names of the dead were never spoken.
“There isn’t much in the kettle. We don’t eat much anymore. You’re both thin.”
It was true; she had only a few cups of stew boiling on a sheet-metal woodstove. “Eat this,” she said. “I’ll start some other.”
“Let me cook,” Mary said.
There was meat boiling slowly in that stew, and the scent seemed heavenly to North Star. They had scarcely enjoyed a mouthful of meat for days on end.
Victoria headed first for the younge
r wife, and touched her cheek. “It is Mary of the Shoshones,” and then she touched North Star’s cheek. “What name have you taken, boy?”
“I wish to be Dirk to my father, and North Star to my mothers.”
“Aiee, this is good!” Victoria said.
North Star waited for the questions that didn’t come. He waited to justify himself. He waited to tell them why he had left school. He waited for them to ask his mother where she had been. About the long trip. About how they connected. About what had inspired her. But Skye and Victoria asked nothing at all of him.
He was ready to tell them that he had done well with his lessons. He was good at arithmetic. He knew some geometry. He could spell. He could write. He could keep accounts. He had read many books written by Englishmen. He had learned the history of the Americans. He had learned theology, and knew the history of the Jesuits. He knew mechanics. He had done some carpentry. He could glaze a window or plane a door.
If he was weak, it was in composing sentences and writing paragraphs and papers. His thoughts were too unruly, and the nib pen too slow in his fingers. And yet, the good fathers had told him he was quick and bright, and they had little left to teach him because he was doing better than most of the other boys. They had told him he could do as well as any white boy. He wondered about that. Could he do as well as any full-blood too? What was it about being a mixed-blood?
But his father didn’t ask. His father kept staring at Dirk, staring as if he was trying to puzzle away the gap between the eight-year-old boy he last saw and this youth he was examining now.
So the questions didn’t come, and neither did they rain on Mary, and it gradually dawned on Dirk that this was acceptance; that he would not have to justify himself to his father and Victoria, and neither would Mary have to justify what obviously was a long and perilous trip. His father and Crow mother would learn about it in good time, and they were leaving it to him to choose the moment.
So Mary and Dirk spooned the savory stew while another meal was boiling, the new one without meat because the antelope meat had been the gift of Mary’s family, and it was all the meat there was.
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