The True Account

by Howard Frank Mosher

  “They must wish to recapture you very badly, Señor Private True. But tell me. What is the exact purpose of your Captain Merry’s trip?”

  “Nothing more nor less than to link forces with an American army being sent round the Horn to the mouth of the Columbia River in five warships. From there they will march south to seize your precious metal mines in California, and thence to New Spain, coming at Santa Fe from the west and burning it to flinders. Finally to annex all of New Spain south to Mexico City.”

  The bishop lifted his eyebrows and tugged at his beard. Finally he inquired, “And as vizier to me, what would you do first?”

  “I shall deliver Meriwether Lewis’s entire expedition into your hands,” my uncle replied. “I ask only that you let me serve Lewis the same as I did Polyphemus.”

  The bishop thought for a time, then smiled his benevolent smile. “Tell me this plan of yours, grand vizier.”

  36

  THAT EVENING Nacogdoches told us more about his life. He had been born in Madrid, the son of a cardinal and a street whore, and at thirteen he had signed on as a professional mercenary, to fight under various Mediterranean beys and despots. He had come to North America in the employ of the Guild of Venetian Glass Bead Makers, who had engaged him to track down and assassinate several of their company who had defected to Mexico, where, in violation of their oath of secrecy, they shared the mysteries of their craft with others. While the Whore of Babylon nodded with delight, the bishop calmly catalogued how, by poison, garrote, arson, and a dozen other infernal devices he had eliminated the bead makers and their families as well. In Santa Fe he had entered the service of the Spanish governor, first as a spy, then as an Indian exterminator, ranging out as far as California and taking over a thousand scalps. But he quickly grew restless with this employment, and when the governor offered him the commission to stop Lewis’s expedition by any means necessary, he recognized an opportunity to fulfill a long-held dream of establishing his own empire. Indeed, he had intended all along to turn this mission into a tour of annihilation and to declare himself Emperor of Louisiana.

  Nacogdoches had begun, the past fall, by scouring New Spain for the worst dregs of humanity: banished Comanches, remnants of the Anasazis, parings and castings of mankind from the prisons of New Orleans and St. Petersburg, whence Polyphemus and the Whore of Babylon had come.

  He and his crew had left Santa Fe on New Year’s Day, escorted to the city’s gates by a brass band and five hundred cheering citizens. On the second morning they had wiped out a Navajo village. From that day onward they had perpetrated wholesale murder, sacking the countryside and shooting, burning, or crucifying all the people in their path, keeping only enough prisoners to carry their gear and to serve as provender, for many of these monsters, including the bishop, had taken a vow to taste nothing but human flesh for the rest of their lives. As for Lewis’s expedition, he cared not a whit for its success or failure. His sole objective was to possess himself of the Americans’ guns.

  As background for these ravings, the more chilling because of the bishop’s mellifluous voice, measured phrases, liquid brown eyes, courteous demeanor, and benign countenance, the Anasazi musicians kept up a terrible symphony with their tinkling bells, rattling castanets, and bone flutes. While Nacogdoches spoke, I sketched his portrait. He praised the finished picture effusively, then crumpled it into a ball and tossed it onto the fire.

  “Now, vizier,” he said to my uncle. “Be so kind as to repeat to me your plan for the destruction of Captain Merry and his men.”

  “Gladly. His scouts and trackers know we’re in this canyon. The entire party will be here tomorrow morning, and my nephew and I will lure them deeper into the chasm. Your chief and his men will station themselves on the bluff above. As the members of the expedition pass by below in single file, you can pick them off like ducks.”

  Nacogdoches said something in the ancient tongue to the chief, who nodded. They continued to confer for some minutes, after which the bishop told us that he and twenty of his men would remain in the canyon, hidden behind the oddly shaped stone columns, to cut off any chance of escape for Captain Merry. The rest of the company would wait with their bows and muskets on the cliff top, as my uncle had advised. After the massacre, the bishop would hold a great banquet and his men would feast upon their victims and smoke for jerky any leftover American flesh.

  Meanwhile, the blue fires burned in the seams of coal, the death music played, and the slaves moaned. Finally all but my uncle and Nacogdoches, who claimed never to sleep, fell into a stupor.

  37

  BEFORE DAWN my uncle woke me to witness the bishop speaking confidentially to the Whore of Babylon, propped on his knee like a hideous white doll. A few minutes later we led the Anasazi chief and his men up the path to the top of the bluff. Leaving them there as the sun rose far off over the prairie, we rode north, guarded by the yellow-painted assassin on one side and the red devil on the other. The vast herd of migrating buffalo kept pace with us. I knew that somewhere beyond them, Franklin and the Hidatsas lay in wait. Soon we were out of sight of the main body of renegades. But how to rid ourselves of our escorts? As we rode, my uncle spoke to me briefly in English. A few minutes later he reined in his mule.

  Pointing excitedly down the river valley, as if we saw the captains’ expedition coming, we motioned for our guards to hide on the terrace above the river. Still pointing and now calling out, as though to the captains, we descended into a dip, putting a low rise in the prairie between us and the murderers. There we quickly dismounted, got out our flint and steel, and, beginning at the edge of the cliff and working our way rapidly back toward the line of migrating buffalo, began lighting the prairie grass on fire. The wind was in our favor, out of the northwest, and the grass took fire as quick as tinder. By the time Monsieurs Yellow and Red realized what was happening, it was too late for them to reach us. A high wall of flames, whipped on by the wind, was roaring toward them, driving them back toward the mob of assassins on the promontory.

  As we approached the moving buffalo, still igniting the grass as we proceeded, we glimpsed rolling black smoke to the south and west. “Now for Act the Fifth, Ti,” cried my uncle.

  We reached the herd at a place where the path funneled between two steep hills, and lit the grass here as well. For a few moments we were surrounded by flames and bellowing buffalo. Then we were through the pass and riding hard along the western flank of the stampeding bison, toward Franklin and the Hidatsas, who were galloping our way from the south and firing the grass with long bulrush torches as they came. The prairie was now ablaze on all three sides of the projecting bluff.

  Back and forth between the walls of leaping flames rushed the trapped crew of murderers, frantically trying to find some means of exit before the buffalo arrived. But the Hidatsas, led by Franklin and my uncle, were now in their element. Made reckless by their great rage and grief over the fate of Blue Moon, they rode through the fire and directly at the buffalo to drive them harder toward the cliff and the Anasazis.

  As the bellowing animals bore down on the Force of Terror, followed closely by a wall of fire whipped on by a strong west wind, the assassins, in their Spanish mail and black Moorish helmets and remnants of their victims’ clothing, made one last surge to break through the oncoming beasts, but to no avail. The bison were thundering toward them in a line five hundred yards long and at least twenty animals deep. Faced with certain death under the hoofs of the stampeding animals, the Anasazis turned and ran for the edge of the bluff. The man in the red dress was hooked up on the horns of a huge bull in the vanguard and carried over the precipice impaled. The Indian in the funeral veil was trampled beneath hundreds of hoofs. Their chief disdained to run. He lifted his arms high above his head, uttered a great curse, and disappeared under the rushing herd. Men and bison alike poured off the edge of the cliff and plummeted to the rocks far below.

  It was now imperative to cut off the retreat of the assassins left in the canyon with the bisho
p. With the entire promontory ablaze, my uncle signaled to me and the Hidatsas to follow him back around the fire line to the hidden trail leading to the gorge below. Reaching the ravine, we rode as fast as we could down the path toward the canyon floor. There we met the remaining members of the Force of Terror.

  “For the Great Republic of Vermont and Ethan Allen!” roared my uncle. Brandishing his prehistoric bison bone like another Samson, he rode into the mob of Anasazis and renegades and drove them back down the canyon. Franklin felled a fleeing enemy with each shaft from his ivory bow. The remnants of the Force leaped into the Little Missouri, where they were easy prey for the Hidatsas.

  In the midst of this melee, Bishop Stephanos Nacogdoches sat on his palanquin, still holding the albino dwarf on his knee and smiling benignly. With supreme impiety he lifted his hand and bestowed a benediction upon my uncle, who raised his ancient arquebus and shot him directly between his serene brown eyes, tumbling him and the dwarf into the river. The bishop promptly sank, and the Whore of Babylon was swept by the current around a bend and out of our sight forever.

  Soon enough our enemies were all dead or being hunted down one by one, so Franklin and my uncle and I started back up the steep trail leading out of the canyon. Partway to the top, we paused briefly to regard the scene below. By now the Hidatsas had regrouped, and were beginning to look in a meaningful way toward the Anasazis’ former captives—who wisely chose that moment to head south on the Force of Terror’s horses, one man wearing on his head the bishop’s miter, another the dancer’s red dress. As the emancipated slaves proceeded up the Little Missouri to the reverberations of Polyphemus’s great drum, I was very concerned for the welfare of any people they met on their way. For they seemed, all caparisoned in the bloody tattered raiment of their vanquished tormentors, to have taken up their mission as well.

  “Look,” Franklin said as we emerged from the gorge onto the scorched prairie. “The buffalo are moving north again. Nothing stops them.”

  He was right. But when I remarked to the savant that their numbers seemed inexhaustible, he shook his head and said he doubted not that within the span of one man’s lifetime Louisiana would be all but empty of them, and of free Indians as well, and I had better paint both now while I could, for few others would ever have the chance. This I resolved to do, regardless of what else might befall us as we adventured our way west.

  38

  LATER THAT DAY, having left our Hidatsa friends behind to prepare the slaughtered buffalo, we began to encounter many bison with eyes swollen shut and most of the hair singed off their bodies. These were the sad survivors of the herd trapped by the fire, which had managed to burst through the wall of flames but were so badly burned that all they could do was stagger sightlessly over the prairie, bellowing in anguish, stumbling into gullies, and crashing into one another. This piteous scene brought tears to my uncle’s eyes, but he insisted that I sketch it to show “the horrors of unfeeling and indifferent nature in the West, as well as her beauties.” Then we spent several hours hunting down the burned buffalo and putting them out of their misery, after which he declared, “Oh, Ti. From this moment onward, I eat no more bison meat forever.”

  But that night, famished and with the savory fragrance of the buffalo back-steaks and tongues that Franklin was cooking wafting past his long nose, the private said that however it might be in other worlds, in this one every Jack and Jill, and every True Teague, too, must feed his body to preserve his soul. And he consumed his usual five or six pounds of meat with good relish, declaring afterward, over his half pipeful of hemp, “All’s vanity in the end, Ti. What can we do in this short life but try to make our fellow creatures’ paths as smooth and comfortable as possible, and leave the rest to Providence?”

  This seemed like wise counsel. But later, as we sat by our campfire, I could not rid my mind of the hideous cruelties we had witnessed in the canyon on the Little Missouri. Finally I said, “Uncle, I believe there is much wickedness in Louisiana.”

  “Yes, Ti. And in the world at large as well.”

  “And yet Louisiana and the world at large were made by a good Creator, were they not?”

  “They were, Ti. Very good indeed.”

  “And the evil in His creation is the handiwork of a certain Gentleman?”

  “I have told you so many times. And told you true, Ti. And—ha ha—I am True as well. I have told you true and True I am.”

  “But here is the problem,” I continued. “Do not some do evil in the name of doing good?”

  “I fear they do, nephew.”

  “And others love evil for its own wicked sake? Like the Harpes and Bishop Stephanos Nacogdoches.”

  “Aye.”

  “Then how do we discern true good from evil?”

  “Why, it’s as simple as A Apple Pie. Our hearts tell us the difference.”

  “Is the heart never wrong, then?”

  “No, never. Is it, Franklin?”

  “No, sir, it is not,” said the savant.

  “But uncle,” I exclaimed, “what must we do, then, with the evildoers?”

  “Why,” said he, with the greatest good will, inhaling the mild fumes of his cannabis, “we must chop off their heads!”

  And with a wink at me and a tip of his stocking cap to Franklin, my uncle rang his bell, lay down, and fell soundly asleep. But I dreamed that night of devils in bishops’ miters, and flaming buffaloes, and myself taking Little Warrior’s scalp, and woke up wishing with all my heart that I was a small boy again and home in my own bed in Vermont.

  THE GREAT FALLS

  39

  A FEW DAYS LATER we reached the place where the lovely River of Yellow Stones falls into the Missouri. At the junction of these two great waterways we stopped for a few days to rest. My uncle reworked his play and fished, I painted our battle with the Force of Terror, and Franklin rendered the same scene with bright-colored stick figures on a buffalo hide.

  Franklin was delighted with my uncle’s fly-casting, which he admired from the riverbank for hours on end. Expert angler though he was, the private had been unable to entice a single fish to rise to his lures since setting out from Fort Mandan. But fish or no fish, he said, angling with the fly was good for the soul, for it connected the angler through rod, line, and leader to rivers and the wonderful countryside they flowed through in an intimate way that no other endeavor did. He declared that flyfishing was the most hopeful of all sports, and that hope, more than any other quality, was what distinguished us from the lower orders of life, such as fish themselves. Though he assured us that if he ever caught another fish, he would promptly release it, thereby giving it cause to hope that the next time it was hooked it might again be set free. And since hope was all he had to show for his angling thus far, he was more sanguine still, and he executed every cast—hundreds upon hundreds a day—as if he expected a hard strike momentarily and a great speckled beauty leaping at the end of his line. Franklin, in the meantime, had taken up the sport and had become as avid in its pursuit as my uncle.

  One evening I offered to show the savant the art of perspective in painting. To my astonishment, he casually took up my brush and added to my picture of the battle a perfect representation of himself, bow at the ready, riding down on the Spanish force. The famous portraitist Ben West, I thought, could scarcely have done it better. “All great art is simple, Ti,” Franklin told me with a superior gesture at his buffalo-hide painting. “But you must not suppose that we Indians do not understand perspective. Of course we do.”

  Heading west along the Missouri once more, we entered a land so vast, wild, and broken that it seemed to defy being painted from any perspective whatsoever. It was an incredibly harsh place of twisting draws leading nowhere, dry canyons, endless sweeping wind, no trees—Franklin said there was not enough rainfall here to support them—and barren red rock. Only the hardiest creatures survived in this hostile country. One evening I watched a pack of gray wolves decoy a yearling antelope away from the herd by flattenin
g themselves out and creeping along on their bellies, then dashing off a few yards, then creeping again, until the antelope could not resist drifting away from the safety of the others to discover what these interesting animals might be. When they had cut it off from the rest, they chased it into the river, where they easily killed it by slitting its throat with their fangs, then dragged it onto a sandbar to devour. But before the wolves could begin to dine on their prey, a huge grizzled bear descended upon them and dispossessed them of their spoils without so much as a by-your-leave. So fierce was this monster that the magpies, which had already begun to feed on the lights of the antelope as the wolves disemboweled it, flew off in a panic at its first approach. I sketched the bear standing on its hind legs, looking east down the river as if guarding all upper Louisiana from interlopers. Franklin said that his Blackfoot relatives were as much fiercer than the grizzled bear as the bear was fiercer than the wolves and the wolves than the antelope. This I found very sobering. But as day succeeded day and week followed week, we saw no Blackfeet, and no other people in that desert of a landscape, which seemed as empty of humans and habitation as the moon.

  Near the end of May we passed a vast palisade of white rock towering hundreds of feet above the river in the likeness of ancient ruins. Immediately my uncle claimed that we had discovered the lost city of Troy; and he showed us with great exactitude where the Greek army had camped, where the colossal wooden horse had been dragged into the city and poor Hector dragged around it by Achilles. I painted a quick impression of the hollow equine atop the gleaming white cliffs, with my uncle himself astride it in his knight-errant’s gear, and both the horse and him eating one of my mother’s cartwheel cookies.