Stillwater

by Nicole Helget

  “Not now,” she whispered.

  Don’t do it. Don’t marry him.

  Angel looked at Thomas Lawrence and smiled. He nodded at her. Angel thought of Davis and was suddenly ashamed again. “Oh,” she said.

  I’m miserable too. This is wrong. Clement pleaded with her for the entire ceremony. She ignored him.

  42

  Beaver Jean Returns

  IN JUNE OF 1858, Beaver Jean had been sitting in a San Francisco saloon, clutching a three of diamonds and a five of spades to his chest. All morning he’d been flipping cards with a man who claimed to have been a general in Santa Anna’s army, a German who hardly spoke English and held a cigar with the burnt ember pointed toward his palm, and a Chinaman named Fu, who had taken Beaver Jean’s buffalo blanket, best stirrups, and pemmican pouch already and was poised to annex Charlemagne if the river didn’t reveal a favorable card.

  Charlemagne stood outside, steady and honorable as a knight in King Arthur’s court. The horse had an uppity way, but it had led Beaver Jean and his wives across many miles and through many peevish circumstances in Texas, which had been annexed by the United States, though Mexico claimed to own it. The weather there had been pleasant, but by 1848, Beaver Jean couldn’t tell who was American, Texan, Mexican, or mixed breed, nor which Negro persons were free and which were slaves, nor which Indians were hostile and which were friendly, nor where the boundaries lay or what laws applied where.

  Figuring out right and wrong was a complicated matter. There was plenty of work in the tracking department, but the area was flooded with bounty hunters, rangers, and people claiming to be law who were organizing posses, arresting ne’er-do-wells, and hanging them up in trees. Beaver Jean, with only Charlemagne’s help, had grown too old and couldn’t compete with the energetic likes of the bounty hunters of the South. For a while he looked around for Lydian. He checked out the brothels and always asked for the red-haired foxes, of which there were many, but none were ever her. He wondered, by then, if he’d recognize her when he saw her. So Beaver Jean had packed up his wives and hopped onto Charlemagne and lit out for the city of gold, where he thought that at least he could make a fortune for his son, even if he hadn’t been around to rear him up right.

  They had passed through the Great Salt Lake settlement, where Beaver Jean stayed for a while among those who called themselves The Saints. They lived a life pleasing to Beaver Jean in all ways except for exaggerated praying and propheting. He didn’t like that and kept moving west, over mountains and through deserts, and finally arrived in California, where there was gold to discover and railroads to build. In California, Beaver Jean had made a living doing what he knew how to do best, trapping beaver.

  Though for the rest of the world, beaver fur was out of fashion, for the gold prospectors and rock blasters who worked all through the cold winters, beaver fur blankets, coats, hats, and gloves were practical, warm, and durable. As quickly as Beaver Jean trapped them, his wives turned the beaver furs into every necessity a body could imagine. With some of the money, the wives, who in their own advancing age quit bickering and began to connive together in moneymaking conspiracies the likes of which Beaver Jean had not known women could plot, bought a dozen hogs and started up a pork supply to the restaurants of San Francisco. They kept themselves busy and profitable in their business affairs and made enough so that Beaver Jean could finally put his feet up for a while and let the women do the work. Each week, for his entertainments, they allotted Beaver Jean some money, which he often took to the brothels and gambling parlors, since both places were full of the world’s best excitement and greatest sinners. When he ran out of money at the poker table, he’d throw down whatever was in his satchel, attached to his horse, or sitting in his cart.

  Now Charlemagne was on the pot, and Beaver Jean was sweating fiercely over the matter. He knew if he lost Charlemagne, his wives would beat him silly and keep his allowance from him. Then he’d have to get back to the rivers and back to work.

  “Your horse be in Fu’s wok by dinnertime,” said Fu. The flop had shown an eight of clubs, a ten of spades, and a jack of spades.

  Together, a three and a five made the age of Beaver Jean’s third wife, the little Lydian, who would practically be an old woman now. Beaver Jean promised himself that if the cards turned up favorable, he’d take Charlemagne away from here before he was slaughtered for stir-fry and get his wives out of this backward, sinful land, where women bossed men, and get back to the pure air and morality of Stillwater. Maybe after her hiding and travels, Lydian had settled down there with his boy. He’d read in the paper how Stillwater had become part of the thirty-second state in the Union: Minnesota. Beaver Jean liked that name very much and remembered hearing it a long time ago. He was quick to correct all the European foreigners who couldn’t pronounce it properly, especially the big German sitting across from him, grinning confidently and holding his cards in his fat sausage fingers.

  “Not Minneee-sota,” Beaver Jean would say, “Minnesota, is the right way.” He’d point to his mouth as he pronounced the name. “No, not Minesoooota. Minnesota.” And “Not Mine-sota, like a gold mine. Minnesota.”

  “Why you still talking about new state Minnesota?” asked Fu. “Play cards, you something bitch.”

  “Son of a bitch, is the right pronunciation,” said Beaver Jean.

  The turn had shown a six of spades.

  The general from Santa Anna’s army went out. The German too. Fu went all in.

  “What about you, Beaver Jean? What you do? You fold like scared whore?” said Fu.

  “I have my only horse in the pot and now I shall throw in a fine wife as well. She is fair and good-natured and thrifty. I intend to win this hand.”

  The general from Santa Anna’s army said, “Well, we may as well see them.” He opened his hands and bid Beaver Jean and Fu to show their cards. Fu flipped over his hand, the king of hearts and the ace of clubs.

  “I put your wife on a boat to Shanghai before the day is done. She bring good price.”

  Beaver Jean’s stomach pitched. He put down his cards, his three of diamonds and five of spades.

  Then the general dealt the river. The queen of spades stared up the men. There was a pause. And each man sat thinking about implications.

  “The dirty bitch queen of spades?” said Fu. “You joking me!”

  “Flush beats a straight, Fu,” said the general.

  Beaver Jean, with his purse full of Fu’s money, decided to head home.

  After two and a half years of walking eastward, through California, Utah Territory, Kansas Territory, Nebraska Territory, the unorganized Dakota Territory, and finally into Minnesota, Beaver Jean and his wives arrived, once again, in Stillwater, now part of Minnesota. They looked around and around. Beaver Jean wondered what in the hell had happened to the town he’d left behind. Had he really been gone so long a time? Long enough to see all the trees come down? The buildings go up? Who were all these white people? Where did they come from? How was it that soaps and candles and kettles and pepper could be so abundantly available? Who had started up the newspaper? Who was it the newspaper was talking about? Where were the trappers such as himself? Where were the old army men? The old Indian chiefs? The stiff religious types? Beaver Jean stood in the middle of the thoroughfare and turned around and around, looking up at the buildings scratching the sky, out across the water cut up with riverboats, down the streets thick with mud and horse dung and ox manure.

  “You better move away from there if you don’t want to get trampled by a stagecoach,” said a young man with a downcast countenance. Next to him walked a Negro man with a lively gait.

  “Thank ye for yer counsel, young’un,” Beaver Jean shouted after him. The young men turned around. They stood against the sunset and looked like shadows against the orange horizon. “Ye know anyone to be hiring an elder like myself?” Beaver Jean asked the men.

  The Negro shouted back, “It’s either get labored by St. Croix Valley Lumbering, seek
employment at the prison, which has had some troublesome times, or join the army, which is what these sad fools is off to do.” Then they turned around again and began walking away.

  “Watch yer backsides, boys,” said Beaver Jean. “I been down into the Kansas Territory, and I’d steer clear of that away if I were ye, especially ye darker-raced friend. There’s some mighty rascally devils down there intent upon making a big war. I’d also steer ye clear of the southlands of this place they now are calling Minnesota and the lands directly west of here, which we trappers used to call the Dakotas, but I don’t know what the name for that area is now. All in them lands, the Indians are mighty unsettled and dissatisfied with their treatment by this state and government, so’s ye best watch yer backs and maybe reconsider yer intentions and get back home to yer mamas before ye get shot or scalped.”

  “Worry about yourself, old-timer,” shouted the white man. “I’m off to get outfitted with a gun and find glory and purpose. I am off in the tradition of all great men to fight other men! Hurrah!” His voice was mocking.

  “And I’m off to keep him from getting his head shot off,” said the Negro.

  “Suit yerselves,” said Beaver Jean, “and thank ye for yer advisement again.”

  The young men had been swallowed up by the people and traffic of the street. Beaver Jean’s spine itched beneath the skin, as though responding to dry lightning. He felt a faint desire to remember this moment and keep it. He thought to review it later. He looked around at the sights and sounds for later consideration. He noted his boots. He thought about the lost toes. He listened for the crunch of gravel beneath his feet. He felt a quick shadow pass over him. When he looked up, he watched an enormous swan glide overhead and dive toward the water. That was a thing easy to remember, he thought.

  Then Beaver Jean walked to the prison and introduced himself as a trapper and a human tracker, occupations that interested the warden.

  43

  Clement and Davis Enlist

  NOW AND THEN, when he could take the silence no more, Clement would go to the Thomas Lawrence mansion, Angel’s mansion, and stand outside, under cover of the few tall, full trees that remained. He had to be near her. Her presence felt vital to him. Sometimes she saw him standing there and motioned for him to go to the back, where she’d be friendly and polite, but dismissive too, as though she wanted him to leave.

  “We’re getting too old for this, Clement,” she’d said. “Someone’s going to see us.”

  “Too old for what?” he’d asked. “Who cares who sees us?”

  “I’ve got a family now,” she said. She looked toward the house. She rubbed her belly. “I’m expecting.”

  “Expecting what?” Clement asked.

  She laughed at him and raised her eyebrows. “A baby.”

  “What?” he said. He took her all in and tried to see if she looked different. Yes. She was fuller. And rounder. And not quite as pale. She was changing. She was leaving him behind. “Oh. That’s wonderful.” Clement’s stomach dropped. His throat thickened. “Can I come in? It’s cold, and I know Thomas is up north.”

  Her eyebrows came down and her cheek muscles pinched. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  His heart quickened. “Why?” he said, his voice high and demanding. “Why not?” He went on about how they were finally adults, how she was finally out from under the thumb of that crazy woman, how she was free to make her own decisions about who she did and did not want to be with. “Unless you don’t want me,” he said.

  “Clement,” she said. “Life goes on. I’m married now.”

  “To him?” He scoffed. “He’s hardly even here! He’s off smashing down the continent.”

  “He’s working for his family, and he’s building a country.”

  “Give me a break. Would you say that to Davis, if he was here?”

  “Shut your mouth, Clement.”

  “Or wait. Maybe he is here? Is he inside? Is that why I can’t come in?” Clement feigned looking in all the windows of the big house. “I’ve heard rumors. Everyone talks about you in this town. I even heard you’re a witch. I wonder how that got started.”

  “Stay away from me,” she said. She left him standing there in the dark with his questions.

  Clement convinced Davis to volunteer with him for the war, which was easy as soon as Clement told him that Angel was with child. They went to the courthouse in Stillwater to sign on with the Stillwater Guard of the First Minnesota. The men there had given Clement a gun and Davis a bugle and ladle. “No guns for Negroes,” they said. “Direct orders from the president.” From training at Fort Snelling through the trip to Washington, D.C., Clement and Davis stuck together. They met men from the logging camps of the northern woods, men from the Great Lakes area, men who farmed in the south, a couple of short-haired Indians from the reservation, and others who were schoolteachers, carpenters, railroad workers, newspaper writers, husbands, and fathers.

  “You look mighty baby-faced to be going to war, son,” said a mustachioed fellow on the train. “You sure your mama knows where you are?”

  “I’ve got no mother,” said Clement. “She abandoned my sister and me when we were just born. I was left in an orphanage with lots of other children, a lot of sick people, and a nun and an Indian woman. My sister got raised in a rich family but they didn’t want me, so I . . .”

  Davis giggled. “We all got stories, Clem,” he said. He put out his hand to shake the hand of the mustachioed man. “My name’s Davis, and this is Clement, and we’re off to kill some rebels and find some excitement. What about you?”

  “I’m an expert war veteran,” said the man. “Sick of farming, mostly. Get sick of it every time I don’t have a war to go to.” He knelt. “Don’t know many Negro men heading south. You got a death wish?”

  “Can’t have the girl I love,” said Davis, “so I may as well go get myself killed.” He smiled and elbowed Clement.

  “What’s your station?” the man asked.

  Davis pulled the bugle from his bag. “I can’t even play this thing.” He turned it one way, then the other. He pretended to blow into the wrong end. He perched it on his head as a hat.

  Clement laughed.

  “Then why’d you take it on?” asked the mustachioed man. He pulled some bison jerky from his pack and handed Davis and Clement a strip.

  “It’s the only way they’d let me come along,” Davis told him. “This, and act the cook. But I can’t cook either.”

  “You must be crazy to want to come to war,” the man said. “But I’m crazy too. I been on the Texas side against the Spanish, then on the Texas side against Mexico. One of these days Texas will want to fight the United States too. That’s how them Texans are. I don’t read the papers. Did Texas pick a side in this national argument yet? I’ll bet my life it’s on the rebellious side for sure. Those Texans are some combatsome individuals.” He used his teeth to peel a strip of meat, and talked and chewed at the same time. His mustache danced like a broom. “But I learned an iron gut on all those campaigns and can eat practically anything that’s been grown or killed.” They talked on and on, all the days it took to get from Minnesota to the East. Clement and Davis both liked the mustachioed man and hoped to stick with him.

  War wasn’t as glorious as Clement hoped it might be. Rather than fighting Confederates, Clement spent half his time drilling and the other half protecting Davis from the wrath of their own First Minnesota company boys who directed all their grumblings toward Davis. They were dissatisfied with both his work as the company cook and the company bugle-player. They accused him of softening boot leather and serving it. They accused him of cooking muskrat and opossum meat and passing it off as beef and pork. They accused him of making broth with tree bark and mud and making dumplings from bacon grease and sawdust. One soldier said he found a human tooth in his stew and charged at Davis with the butt of his gun before Clement stepped in and calmed him down, telling him, “It’s only a kernel of dehydrated corn,” though
it really was a human tooth. Although some of deeds and deficiencies the soldiers complained about were true, Davis couldn’t help it. The Union food stores were totally depleted, and deliveries over the muddy roads from the bowels of the bureaucratic beast that was Washington, D.C., were sparse and unreliable. Davis feared for his life every time he served up a meal. Along with those three fearsome moments, Davis also feared for his life every time he was ordered to sound the bugle for drills. The men would emerge from their tents with scowling mouths and would threaten to do violent things upon him, in some cases with the very bugle he blew. The regiment had many reasons to feel frustrated, and since it wasn’t possible to vent those frustrations on the weather, the leaky tents, the ruts and gullies, the maggoty food, the long marches, the lonely nights, the weeks without mail, the army, the secessionists, the commanders, or the president, they took it out on Davis.

  Here away from home, Clement had grown to depend upon Davis’s friendship. He was a funny fellow with good stories about life in a whorehouse and gossip about people they both knew back in Stillwater. To be near Davis was the closest thing to home that Clement had, which made Clement protective of him.

  Against the insults and threats, Davis tried to be brave and understanding and sometimes even make a joke of them. Clement had hardly ever heard the kinds of sentiments that were now directed at Davis from soldiers on their own side. He felt especially bad because he’d been the one to convince Davis to come along for the adventure and glory that war was sure to bring. Also, it’d keep both of them from having to make a living in the employment of Thomas Lawrence, a thing neither wanted to do but both might have to do if they stayed in Stillwater.

  But Clement’s plans for making money weren’t coming to fruition just yet. The Union had a terrible time getting their boys paid on time. For all the effort the government had taken in encouraging boys to sign on, it didn’t seem well prepared to have them. None had a proper uniform to wear. Some women back home got together and sewed proper coats and sturdy pants that had a standard look to them, but not every soldier received them. Clement got one of those coats, but he could hardly convince himself to put it on, for fear he might wear it out. Instead, he put it under his head at night and before the lamps went out would stare at the stitch work and try to imagine the woman who so carefully had pulled and drawn the thread through the cloth. He still wore the pants Big Waters had made him years ago, which now had a hole in one knee, rode a half inch above the tops of his boots, and were nearly worn through in the backside, but he was very fond of them. They made him wish that he had been better to Big Waters. His time away convinced him that family was indeed the most important thing in the world, and eventually he intended to go home and convince Angel of the same.