by Win Blevins
One last job, another way to slow Boy down. She found a flat stone the size of her hand. She stood over her ex-husband’s naked form, asking herself if she really wanted to do this. The answer was yes.
Could she get it done? Why not? She’d seen it done to colts.
She pulled his legs apart, knelt between them, put the stone under his scrotum, and pushed aside his penis. With one hand she pulled the balls toward herself. With his belt knife, she carefully cut off one testicle.
She looked into his face. He seemed to try to focus his eyes on her. The eyes swam and floated away again.
She cut off the other testicle. She held the two bloody lumps, like big peach seeds, and looked at them. For some reason, she didn’t know why, she put them in her belt bag.
Twenty-six
PAYETTE SAT AT the head of the trestle table, surrounded by Sam, Flat Dog, Julia, Hannibal, and Esperanza. At the other end were the fort hands, including two Owyhees, plus Azul and Rojo. Esperanza looked nervously at the china plate, flatware, and napkin in front of her. Julia whispered to her, “Just watch what I do.”
She looked nervously at her sons at the other end of the table. They were talking enthusiastically with the hired men. She hoped the boys’ playfulness wouldn’t include throwing food.
First Payette had a little fun. “Since we have no wine—rum later, gentlemen—it is our custom here to toast our guests with this drink almost unknown in the Rocky Mountains, none other than cow’s milk.” He lifted his glass. “To you and your journey—bon voyage!”
Now Esperanza had her first taste of milk since she was an infant. She made a sour face.
“Our guests from the United States,” Payette told her, “are generally more delighted by our dairy products than anything else we can offer.”
Esperanza looked at her mother and curled her lip.
More treats—plump loaves of warm bread and bowls of creamy butter. Esperanza watched carefully as the others used their table knives, not the big knives in their belts, to pick up and spread the butter. She did the same, took a small bite, then a big bite, then finished the slice and reached for another.
Sam thought, At least there’s something about civilization she likes.
The next course was slabs of dried salmon.
“Thomas Aquinas gave us seven proofs of the existence of God,” Hannibal told Esperanza. “I think salmon is the eighth proof.”
Though his friend liked to say fancy things, Sam hadn’t heard this one before.
“This tastes incredible,” said Esperanza. These were the first words she’d spoken at dinner.
“On this river lower down and on the Columbia,” Payette said, “are the Indians we call Salmon Eaters. They catch lots of salmon in weirs and dry it on racks to preserve it. Fort Hall trades with us and Fort Walla Walla, their pemmican for our salmon. Mr. Ermatinger says the fish represents a welcome change from the ubiquitous buffalo. We see it the other way.”
Though Sam had learned to read a dozen years ago, he would never get used to hearing words like “ubiquitous” in conversation.
“The two basic groups of Natives in the Oregon country,” Payette went on, “are Buffalo Eaters and Salmon Eaters.”
Esperanza took a second piece of salmon and picked up some flesh with her fingers.
“Fork,” said Julia quietly.
Esperanza took the hint.
The vegetables were green beans and boiled potatoes. Esperanza watched the others and used the potatoes as an excuse to consume more butter.
Sam thought that if they lived in civilization for a while, everyone in the family might not be so scrawny.
Payette crowned the meal with cups of coffee and pieces of fine Swiss chocolate. “The chocolate is a personal indulgence of mine,” he told them.
From the look on her face, Esperanza’s conversion to civilization got another boost from the candy.
When the table had been cleared and the company was waiting for glasses of rum, Hannibal said, “We met a man named Kanaka Boy, said he’s a trader. What do you know about him?”
Payette gave them a look of amazement. Then he calmed himself. “I want to say you kept company with a right bastard—pardon me, ladies. But I confess I’m not sure.” He looked around at each of them, uncertain. “He seems more a nuisance than an adversary. We shall keep an eye on him.”
The rum arrived, and Esperanza asked for a glass.
“Just a sip,” Julia told Payette.
Hannibal proposed a toast—“to the glory of salmon.” Esperanza joined in the ceremony of clinking glasses.
Payette looked nervously at Julia and Esperanza, and Julia took his meaning. “I must put the children to bed,” she said.
She took Paloma’s cradleboard from where it hung, put it on her back, and put her hands on the boys’ shoulders.
“Aw, Mom,” said the boys. She pushed them along.
“Esperanza,” she said, “come.”
“I want to stay up,” said Esperanza.
Julia looked at Sam.
“She’s an adult,” he said.
Esperanza threw a snitty look at her mother’s retreating back.
“Let me show you a map,” said the Frenchman—he said he’d been born in Montreal. He took a big scroll from a side table. “As it happens, I’m proud of this document. I myself trained the young man who made it in the use of surveying instruments.” He spread the scroll on the table.
Sam, Flat Dog, and Hannibal rose and leaned over the huge drawing.
“The Company has put this together from the information of all their partisans,” said Payette. It displayed the entire Oregon country, from far north into Canada to the border with California and from the crest of the Rocky Mountains to the sea.
Sam was impressed. The mountain men kept their maps of the West in their heads. None except his friend Jedediah Smith had ever written down the streams and mountains, plains and deserts, and Diah’s were lost when Comanches killed him on the Cimarron.
“After you crossed the Snake River plains and followed the river north here,” Payette said, pointing, “you saw the Owyhee Mountains off to the southwest. On their far side is the Owyhee River. It heads up in the mountains and flows through here—a terrible desert, terrible—and on north to where it joins the Snake.” He fingered a spot near his own fort. “Kanaka Boy’s camp is somewhere here, according to report. However, he might move the camp often. You can never tell about these types. We don’t really know where they are.
“We have reliable reports that Kanaka Boy and his merry men distill whiskey to trade to the Indians. Villainous practice, harmful to the Indians and certainly contrary to the Company’s interest. Now that we’re aware of his activities, the factors of the three forts, Vancouver, Walla Walla, and here, are keeping a wary eye on Mr. Kanaka, or is it Mr. Boy?
“Unless you have a weakness for excessive inebriation,” Payette said, “I’d say that pilgrims like yourselves are safe from him.
“Now I’d suggest one more glass of rum. What do you say?”
He poured for the men and cocked an eye at Esperanza.
“Please,” she said.
This time Julia wasn’t around to say no, and Sam didn’t.
Esperanza accepted a full serving, gulped it down, and smiled at both her papas. Sam saw only a slight flush of tears in her eyes.
A terrific crash came from the kitchen. The door banged open. A young Hawaiian propped himself in the doorway with a bent arm, head pulpy and bloody from a beating. One legging was stained with blood. He staggered a step forward, said, “Help me,” and fell hard to the floor.
Twenty-seven
“WHO ARE YOU?” Payette asked several times, and then in a sharper tone, “Who the devil are you?” He gave the boy another sip of rum to bring him back.
“Jay,” the boy finally said in a weak voice. “Call me Jay.”
The boy’s face was a bloody mess, and his nose looked broken. One ear was torn half-off, and blood was in his
hair. His clothes looked like he’d been smashed into the mud several times. Underneath the blood, though, Julia could see that this was a Kanaka boy of about fifteen or sixteen, still beardless, a boy whose face had once been pretty in the Hawaiian way.
“Help me,” he said.
“Let’s have a closer look,” said Payette.
Julia and Esperanza cleared the table, and the men lifted Jay onto it.
“I’ll get hot water and clean cloths,” said Julia. She and Esperanza disappeared into the kitchen.
Payette felt of the nose.
“Ow!” said Jay, and jerked his head away. That made him roar, “Ow!” a lot louder.
“It will heal,” said Payette.
He pulled up the right legging and inspected the wound. “You’ve been shot,” he said, “straight through, between bone and tendon.”
Seeing blood on the shirt, Sam reached for the ribs. “Any injuries here?”
Jay covered up his chest with his arms. “They only beat me in the face.”
“Who?” said Payette.
“Kanaka Boy and his men.” Jay hesitated. “I wanted to leave . . . his outfit. Boy doesn’t allow that.”
Sam, Hannibal, and Flat Dog looked at each other, thinking there must be more to the story.
Jay tried to struggle up onto one elbow and fell back. He looked at Sam and Flat Dog. “You have to help me. Boy will kill me.”
Julia put a pot of hot water near the boy’s head, and Esperanza dropped clean cloths into it. “Be still,” Julia said. “I’m going to sew that earlobe back in place. This is going to hurt.”
She nodded to Sam and Flat Dog, and they held Jay’s head hard, the injured ear turned up.
Julia produced a needle and thread from somewhere and sewed. Jay gritted his teeth, growled, and banged his feet, but he didn’t cry out. The two men kept a vice grip on his head.
Then Julia washed the blood off his face and felt gingerly of the jaw, cheekbones, and forehead. “I don’t think anything’s broken except the nose.”
Esperanza studied the face with an expression Sam couldn’t read.
Jay was in a daze, maybe from the pain of the sewing.
“Those gashes are going to leave scars,” Flat Dog said.
“I’m afraid you won’t be pretty any longer,” said Julia.
“Just as well in a lad,” said Payette.
Jay muttered something.
“What did you say?” said Sam.
“Help. Please help me.”
“So we are doing,” said Payette.
“I mean you Americans,” said Jay. “Please help me. Take me with you, down the river. If I stay here, Boy will find me and kill me.”
“Shush,” said Julia. “Get a good night’s sleep and we’ll talk about everything tomorrow.”
“I’m scared.”
“You’ll be safe with us tonight,” said Sam. “I promise.”
Sam and Hannibal supported Jay under the shoulders, got him through the dining room, out into a night lit bright by the moon, and finally to their brush hut.
Jay looked at it, then at them, and seemed to recoil. He looked across at Flat Dog and Julia ducking into their lodge. Then back at the brush hut, where there would be barely room for the three of them.
“May I . . . ?” Jay couldn’t get it out. He met Julia’s eyes. “May I . . . ?”
Sam saw something happen in Julia’s eyes. “Of course,” she said. “Come into the tipi with us. You’ll feel safer.”
She came forward, wrapped her own blanket around Jay, and led him to the lodge.
“What do you think?” Sam asked.
Flat Dog and Hannibal spoke at the same time. “It’s a risk.”
Julia rematerialized in the darkness of the lodge door and came to them. “You will not,” she said, “think for a moment that we can ride off and leave this poor boy.”
Part Three
Twenty-eight
SAM, HANNIBAL, AND Flat Dog built a rope corral for the hobbled horses, from cottonwood to cottonwood in the bottom-land near the river. From her cradleboard Paloma watched Julia and Esperanza put up the tipi for the night. Azul and Rojo chased a sage chicken around and around a log. The bird didn’t want to fly, and the boys wanted to whack it with a stick and turn it into supper. They tried this trick often and succeeded seldom.
“I’m still thirsty,” said Flat Dog.
The three men walked back into the water calf deep and slurped out of both hands, cupped.
Hannibal said, “Don’t you like Jay?”
Sam shrugged. “If I’m going to pick up more children, it would be nice to get laid along the way.”
Hannibal and Flat Dog laughed. Their friend had one child the usual way, Esperanza, and then adopted Tomás. Now Jay, a Hawaiian on the lam, seemed to be adopting Sam. And Sam hadn’t had a mate in seven years.
He was now a determined bachelor. His first marriage lasted nine months, and Meadowlark died in childbirth. His long affair with Paloma Luna ended in cancer. He had made up his mind that, for him, matrimony was a blight.
They looked across at Jay, who was gathering the small limbs for the night’s fire. Soon they would drag some bigger logs over.
“I don’t get it, though,” said Sam. “He always rides along with Julia and Esperanza. They don’t need him to mind the pack-horses.”
“He’s getting well,” said Hannibal. “Getting well in the body and the head and the heart. He’s had bad things happen. Worse, I expect, than he has let on.”
Julia had implied the same. So while Sam, Hannibal, and Flat Dog rode ahead and on the flank every day, scouting for enemies, Jay walked his horse along with the women. Then, in the evenings, he hung around Sam like a kid or a dog.
Sam said, “If Kanaka Boy is after his ass, he ought to help us keep an eye out for him.”
Hannibal said Jay could also help with a little of the other men’s work, like taking care of the horses, sharing watch, and hunting.
“Not that he could do those without a rifle,” said Sam. A boy of fifteen without a rifle, it was an odd thing.
Sam and Flat Dog both grabbed limbs of a downed trunk. “I’m thinking something,” said Flat Dog. He said nothing more until they set the heavy log down for a moment’s rest. He turned to Sam and said, “Ba’te.”
“Jay?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t think of that.”
“What is it?” asked Hannibal.
“Man-woman,” said Sam.
Most tribes had them, men who dressed as women and lived as women, often even married men. They weren’t what people back in the States called queer, exactly. They were called by the spirits to live that way, just as others might be called to be a warrior or medicine man or even a contrary. Men-women were commonplace among the Crows and were honored as walking a sacred path.
Hannibal took a thoughtful look but said nothing.
Sam and Flat Dog dragged the log to the camp and dropped it. They looked around to make sure, and only Julia and Esperanza were nearby.
“Maybe we figured out why Jay seems odd,” Flat Dog told his wife.
She looked at him.
“Ba’te.”
“Man-woman?” said Julia.
Sam said, “Seems that way to me, too. Jay is ba’te.”
Julia blinked at him several times in surprise.
Esperanza said, “That’s dumb. He is no such thing.”
But Julia, considering, said, “That may be it. In fact, I’m sure that’s it.”
“I think,” said Sam, “that from now on we better call him he-she and him-her.
Flat Dog chuckled. “Let’s not do that.”
WHEN THEY WERE two days’ ride from the Walla Walla River, Jay broke his habit of never looking Sam in the eyes. “I have a big request,” Jay said in his melodic English. “Can we stay at the Methodist mission instead of the fort?”
They were sitting at the fire after supper, enjoying their plentiful coffee. Everyone waited for Jay t
o go on. The mission was two easy days’ ride east of the fort.
“Boy worked at the fort. So did I. Everyone knows us. If I go there, word will get back to him fast.”
“I want to stay at the mission anyway,” said Julia. “Near Narcissa Whitman.” The two had met at rendezvous four years ago. Narcissa was definitely not the stereotype of a missionary wife. Instead of being appalled by the mountain men and Indians, she seemed delighted by them. They were delighted by her red-gold hair, full breasts, and merry laugh.
“I have to be honest with you. Me being there will make it dangerous for all of us.”
Quickly, Sam said, “Us?”
Now Jay hung his head again. “I was hoping to go on to Fort Vancouver with you.” He waited a moment and looked up. “The truth is, I’m terrified.”
“Of course you may go with us,” said Julia.
Sam took his time with what he had to say. “We’re planning to spend the winter on the Walla Walla. We’re going to trade for a lot of horses, break them to the saddle or the harness, and sell them to the Americans at the settlements on the Willamette.”
“That’s how we’re going to make our money to get started in California,” put in Hannibal.
Jay looked like a deer about to bolt.
“Of course you may go with us,” Julia repeated. She spoke in a tone hinting that men are hopeless.
“You know there’s no going over the mountains with the herd until spring,” Sam said. “Too much snow.”
“Then I can help,” Jay said eagerly. “I know the trail over the mountains. It goes behind Mount Hood.”
“But won’t word get back to Boy?” asked Sam.
“The Whitman mission will be all right. No Kanakas work there. I’ll be careful.”
“Then we’ll spend the winter with the Methodists,” said Julia.
Sam looked at Jay. He seemed to be a member of the family now. Sam kind of liked him, a sweet kid with a good heart. But why didn’t he just say he was ba’te?
Twenty-nine
NARCISSA WHITMAN BOUNDED down the steps of the mission house and swung Julia by the hands. “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it. This is wonderful.”