A Good Man

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “Twenty-five.”

  “You fight them until you got one round left. Save the last for yourself.” McMullen slides his finger into his mouth, clicks his thumb to the side of his hand mimicking the action of a rifle hammer striking a round. Withdrawing the finger, he wipes it with an exaggerated flourish on his trousers. “Son,” he says, “you don’t want them cats playing with you if you’re a live mouse.”

  The three men sit in silence, contemplating American soil across the Milk. The sun is a vestige of burnt-orange dome glowing on the horizon. Bank swallows are skimming above the stream, snatching insects, curvetting, rocketing up against the dying light. McMullen carries the pans and mess tins to the river, gives them a rinse, comes back, and douses the fire. “Allright,” he says, “let’s make a mile.”

  They mount, splash into the shallows of the Milk, scramble their horses up the opposite bank, fall into their former line of march. Individual stars spark into life against the dove-grey sky, the glitter steadily multiplying as the heavens turn blue-black. Soon the Milky Way hangs its trembling canopy over them. McMullen, the notorious saddle-dozer, remains alertly awake, guiding them down every twist and turn in the wagon road. Shoulders square, back straight as a plumb line, Joe is their compass needle.

  Still, with every passing hour, Case feels anxiety building. It isn’t McMullen’s advocating self-destruction in the event of defeat at the hands of the enemy that disturbs him. It is the texture of the night itself, the way the minutes crawl by, the feeling Joe is dragging them towards peril just as years ago the train locomotive dragged him through the darkness to Ridgeway. It’s the light he dreads, what it might reveal.

  Even darkness is capable of revealing that he had no business bringing Hathaway along. The boy can’t keep awake. Every half-hour, like clockwork, he begins to sway in the saddle, and Case has to ride up and give him a sharp poke. Peregrine mutters a shamefaced apology, promises to be more vigilant, but thirty minutes later he succumbs again. Hathaway needs looking after and, if nothing else, the Battle of Ridgeway taught Case he can’t be trusted with anyone’s life.

  False dawn shimmers slate-green, snaps back into a final, intense blackness. Then there is a slow flush of light; a pile of cloud becomes visible in the east, heaped like rumpled bedclothes, small birds begin to chitter and whistle in the sagebrush and juniper. As day breaks, Case twists in the saddle, sweeping all points north, south, east, and west. The sun climbs; the bunch-grass and twitch grass sweat dew. He thinks he spots mounted men in the distance, clustered at the foot of a butte, but then they resolve into harmless antelope. He feels something out there waiting for him. He would prefer it to make itself known.

  Hathaway turns his horse, comes up to him, looking worried. “Shouldn’t you have a word with Mr. McMullen? Isn’t it time to secrete ourselves?”

  “When Joe finds cover he’ll take it,” Case says tersely. His eyes move to McMullen as he says this and sees that he has halted on a small rise and is beckoning to them. They trot to his side. Joe is staring down at a coulee, its rim scribbled with brush.

  Case asks, “You thinking that’s a likely place to camp?”

  “Maybe,” Joe answers. “But that’s got me pondering.” He points to a dark mass humped in the grass near the ravine.

  “Buffalo carcass?” says Case.

  “Looks like it. Might be Indians was using that coulee for a buffalo jump. Might be they dropped that one before it reached the gulch. Might be there’s a party of Sioux down there, horses tucked away, sleeping off a feast. Wouldn’t want to stumble on them.”

  “So we move on?”

  Joe scans the horizon, looking for shelte“Sun’s up. No likely place in view. I better take a look-see.”

  “No. I’ll go. If there’s trouble Hathaway’s better off in your hands.” Case dismounts, draws his shiny new Winchester out of its scabbard. He passes his reins to Hathaway. “Hold my horse.”

  “You go afoot and are discovered, you ain’t going to make it back,” says Joe.

  “If I ride down and Sioux horses catch scent of mine, they’ll whinny. I like my chances on foot better.”

  Case starts down the gentle slope towards the patch of tall grass that circles the dead buffalo. He moves to the beat of his heart, a quick, light stuttering step, listening intently for any suspicious sound, sniffing the wind for the telltale smell of woodsmoke. Drawing closer, his hand tightens on the stock of the rifle and he suddenly realizes he has neglected to chamber a round before setting out. Does he dare lever one into place now, or would the click be audible in the coulee and give him away? He is heading directly into the sun, the buffalo hump swimming black in his squinting eyes.

  He freezes dead in his tracks; the grass is shaking; something is stirring there. Case raises his rifle. The seed tassels of the grass convulse. A coyote suddenly appears, a long rope of purple bowel clamped in its jaws. Catching sight of him it goes absolutely still, regarding him with a yellow, fathomless stare. Case stands locked in the animal’s gaze. A whiff of the ripe contents of the glistening intestines reaches his nostrils.

  Then, unhurriedly, the coyote turns, and with the buffalo guts slithering wetly between its spindly legs, it carries off its prize.

  The buffalo proved to have died of bad teeth and old age, half-starved, its ribs standing gaunt under a mangy hide. There were no Sioux in the coulee. The travellers had found a haven to spend the day.

  Hathaway and McMullen lie sprawled on the ground, dead to the world. The horses nod on their feet. Only Case is awake, sitting cross-legged, staring up the long corridor of the declivity. It is noon; the sun, directly overhead, pours heat into the breathless, narrow confine. Its sides are a jaundiced clay, deeply eroded by prairie downpours. Out of the friable earth poke arthritic, grasping fingers, the roots of the brush and trees that skirt the coulee.

  Case counts off the hours he hasn’t slept, reckons them at thirty. A short time ago, he felt his body rocking, overcome by heat and fatigue. He had to put both hands to the ground to stop the alarming teetering. He is not a superstitious man but he cannot shake the feeling that what was awaiting him as he traversed the long night was the coyote’s agate-eyed stare, the grinning mouth dangling entrails. When his eyelids fall, this is what he sees. And when his eyes snap back open they are blinded by the sun, bright as that brass button he had once placed on the breast of a corpse.

  THREE

  IN THE OXBOW RESTAURANT the blinds are drawn and the door is barred. Behind the counter of Fort Benton’s finest eatery, D.B. Dagg is watching the last patron of the night demolish his meal. It’s the same every evening: Mr. Dunne arrives a half an hour before the posted closing time, when the place is deserted, and orders supper. Proprietor Dagg finds this a great annoyance, but he senses it better not to express his aggravation to this particular customer. So Dagg stands, hands folded over his aproned paunch, waiting for Dunne to work his way through a flank steak, creamed onions, fried potatoes, gherkins, and two side plates heaped with biscuits. Dunne consumes his food as if it were a grim duty rather than a pleasure. Some evenings, this lack of appreciation for his restaurant’s cookery prompts the owner of the Oxbow to close his eyes, sending him into a light doze, which he does now until a loud, insistent rapping on the door jerks him back into consciousness.

  “We’re closed!” he shouts. “Bugger off!”

  A thin, piercing voice cries out, “Mr. Dunne! Mr. Dunne!”

  Dunne plants his fists on each side of the plate, a fork upright in one, a knife in the other. Dagg throws him a questioning look. Dunne nods, and Dagg reluctantly goes to the door, unbarring it to reveal an urchin holding an envelope in a grimy paw. Brimming with self-importance, the boy announces, “Message from Lawyer Tarr for Mr. Dunne.”

  Dunne beckons and the youngster crosses to him, bare feet whispering on the floorboards. He is one of Fort Benton’s whore whelps, a boy of ten in stained canvas trousers and a shirt he laid claim to when its owner got bounced naked as a jay bird ou
t of the knocking-shop where his mother plies her trade. The shirt hangs to his knees like a filthy dress.

  Dunne slits open the envelope with a gravy-smeared knife, reads the brief note. Mr. Dunne, I will come to your lodgings at ten o’clock. Be there, I beg you. It is a matter of the utmost importance. The signature, Randolph Tarr, is an urgent, assertive scrawl. Dunne slips the paper into a coat pocket, places both hands flat to the table, and hoists himself out of his chair, the joinery of the table wailing under the strain of his weight. Slipping a penny into the street arab’s hand, he asks, “You ate?” The kid replies with a violent shake of the head. Dunne points to his plate. “Go to it.”

  “No sirree,” says Dagg, “I got to shut down. It’s half past closing time already.”

  Dunne turns to Dagg. “I paid hard cash for that and I got the right to do with it as I please.” He draws back the chair. The boy scrambles into it to attack the leftovers. Dunne goes to the counter and counts coins into Dagg’s hand. “And if the mite wants more biscuits, see he gets them,” he says. “Biscuits ain’t extra according to the bill of fare.”

  The proprietor coughs apologetically. “No they ain’t, Mr. Dunne. As you say.”

  “And don’t rush him. Rushing is bad for the digestion.” Dunne adjusts his celluloid collar. “I’ll see you per usual tomorrow night, Mr. Dagg.”

  “Look forward to it. Always a pleasure to serve you.”

  Dunne steps out into the night. For a moment, he hovers on the boardwalk outside the Oxbowtrying to remember the face of that other whore’s catch colt. The bits and pieces of memory, a pendulous lower lip, the shine of an eye, tufts of hair that lie strewn about in his mind nearly succeed in binding themselves into something recognizably human just as it is said the bones of the dead will reassemble themselves come Resurrection Day. Then it all goes slinking off into the darkness. Dunne does the same, crossing over Front Street to where the glow from the saloon windows doesn’t penetrate.

  Twenty yards to his right, the Missouri coils heavy and black as if it were a river of pitch; intermittently, a pallid moon appears between tattered clouds, its reflection shivering on the water. On the riverbank, where the refugees who have come in from the countryside are encamped, cook fires are flickering, someone can be heard singing, a baby cries. It is chiefly women and children who populate the village of wagons and tents; many of the men are still out on their ranches and farmsteads, guarding their property against the threat of Sioux marauders. Others, who have had all the fight knocked out of them by years of drought, hailstorms, frosts, grasshoppers, and horse-killing outbreaks of the equine epizootic, have preferred to remain safe in Benton and let the damn Indians help themselves to whatever they want. According to their temperaments they take to the bottle, to gloomy silence, or to backhanding the missus. There has already been one suicide, a fellow who loaded himself down with a length of chain, a post maul, a branding iron, his wife’s Dutch oven, and then threw himself into the river. It is said his widow professes to regret the loss of the Dutch oven, which she claims was a damn sight more use to her than her husband ever was.

  Across the way from Dunne, on the illuminated side of Front Street, stands Fort Benton’s commercial district. Every third false-fronted establishment is a saloon blaring a fearsome hubbub – the wheeze of concertinas, the jangle of pianos, the squeals of hurdy-gurdy girls, the whoops and curses of roustabouts, mule skinners, and bullwhackers. Drunks piss in the streets, whores toss chamber pot slops from second-storey windows and shout down to potential customers graphically detailed descriptions of pleasures on offer. Nightly, violence erupts over gambling losses, insults real and imagined, and sporting women. These disputes are most commonly settled by brawls of the eye-gouging, ear-biting variety, but occasionally knives are drawn, shots are fired, and a corpse results.

  However, in the last few years Front Street has been easing its way towards respectability. Ideas of law and order might be notional and shaky, but Benton is tipping into the future, into what town boosters call progress. The men who lived the old wild life are withering on the vine. Up north, the North-West Mounted Police have lowered the whiskey trade into the ground and shovelled dirt on the coffin. The trappers who established the town as a fur-trading centre are long gone. Most of the beaver were trapped out years ago, and there is no market for the few who are still left slapping the water. The trade in buffalo hides rattles along, but each year the take of robes is a little less. It’s clear to everyone that the days of the buffalo, like the beaver before them, are numbered.

  There isn’t much money to be had by striking off into the wilderness. Enterprise has polished its shoes, put on a frock coat, and set up shop in town. Real wealth comes to those who have cornered the market in supplying the NWMP posts in Canada, or distributing goods shipped by steamer to Fort Benton from the great world beyond. The town is the commercial hub of Montana, and expectations run high that when settlers start arriving in the Canadian North-West, Benton will play the same role there. Everybody confidently predicts it will be the next Chicago. Michael Dunne hopes that’s true. Chicago was good to him, and he wasn’t even in on the ground floor of the boom. It was good to Randolph Tarr too, until he got carried away with speculating.

  Wedged in among saloons with names like the Jungle, the Extradition, and the Occident are new businesses catering to a more solid class of citizen. A black barber has opened Foster’s Tonsorial Palace, which provides hot and cold baths, shampooing, the latest in hairstyles, and beard-dyeing, black or brown. Patrons of the Overland Hotel are assured that accommodation suitable for ladies and families is available. Mrs. E. Smith has set up shop in the same hotel, offering accomplished and fashionable dressmaking for gentlewomen. Cabinetmaker A.M. Stork promises plans and specifications drawn to customer approval. W.S. Wetzel’s store lists everything necessary to provision a cozy home: shoes, clothing, staple and fancy groceries, dry goods, cigars, shelf hardware, toys, glassware, notions, toilet articles, drugs, patent medicines, paints, oils, tin ware, crockery, tools, as well as fine wines and champagne. The members of the Benton bourgeoisie are beginning to turn their noses up at the old stand-bys of merriment: gin, beer, Hostetter’s and Plantation Bitters, Shawhan, O.K., and Eldorado whiskey, or that most potent frolic-promoter and sorrow-killer of all, pure grain alcohol.

  Buds of civilization are showing everywhere, but the side of the road that Dunne travels tells a different story. The Benton levee is stacked high with barrels, crates, and bales of goods intended for every town in Montana, but freighters now judge it too risky to attempt to deliver them. The Red Cloud discharged its cargo yesterday and lies ready to embark passengers tomorrow morning for Bismarck – if there are any takers. River passage is not an inviting proposition. The wood-hawks that supply boats with fuel have abandoned their posts. There are worries that the Sioux will attack the Red Cloud from the banks of the Missouri as it makes its way to the Dakota Territory. If the mountain steamer runs aground on a sandbar or explodes a boiler, who’s to say Indians won’t take advantage of its helpless state, board it and wreak bloody mayhem? Dunne can see the Red Cloud’s captain in the lantern-glow of his wheelhouse staring forlornly downriver, contemplating dangers shortly to be faced.

  Dunne is closing in on his destination. He pauses to let a horseman trot by, then strides swiftly across the street, dodges into the alley between the Stubhorn Saloon and a harness maker’s shop that brings him to a rickety staircase running up the back of the saloon. He goes up it two steps at a time, strikes a match on the landing, and inspects the hair he plucked from a horse’s tail and pasted over the gap between the door and doorframe of the room he is renting. It is still in place.

  Carefully, he peels off the hair, stores it away in a pillbox for future use, unlocks the door, and ducks into the black room. Dunne has memorized how many steps it is to the table from the threshold, precisely five. He counts them off, puts out his hand, and there is the coal-oil lamp. When he lights the wick, a small, bare, meticul
ously arranged room is revealed. A narrow cot pushed tight to the west wall, a position he calculated exactly. The door opens inward, so the cot is hidden from sight until the door has turned back completely on its hinges. His table is placed squarely in front of the entry. In bed, or seated at the table, he cannot be surprised. The single window is set far enough away from the landing to make it impossible for anyone to peer in on him. Even so, he keeps the blind drawn at all times.

  A wood chisel rests on the lintel of the door, easily reached, something he knows from experience can do terrific damage, cut to the bone, disable a man with a single blow. There’s a parlour gun nestled out of sight in the kindling in the wood box. One of the stockings laid out on the floor beside his cot holds a straight razor. His long-barrelled Schofield Russian revolver is secreted under his pillow. The short-barrelled Schofield rides in a silk sleeve sewed into the lining of his jacket. The jacket never comes off until he goes to bed.

  Michael Dunne takes pride in being a cautious, careful man. He likens himself to water. It finds a way around every obstacle because it is patient. He is patient too. On John Harding’s orders, Tarr had sent him off to the Cypress Hills on a wild goose chase; he had told him it was pointless, but Tarr insisted he pursue Gobbler Johnson, so he had seized the opportunity to aim this senseless errand in a direction of his own choosing, see if he couldn’t persuade Walsh to employ him. That proving fruitless, he has switched his attention to Tarr. A man, like water, has to take his openings where he finds them.

  Dunne catches the sound of steps on the stairs. He plunks himself down at the table, chair facing the door. There is a soft knock. “You want in, name yourself,” he calls.

  “Didn’t you get my message?”

  “A dog scratching at my door don’t tell me who he is. I need to hear his bark to identify him.”