Crows and Cards (Houghton Mifflin Stereotype Editions)

by Joseph Helgerson

  "Know what you mean," I answered, doing my best to sound worldly. "My little sister Emily is mine. She's all the time getting me into trouble without even trying."

  "Do tell," Chilly said, without seeming too interested. Something over my left shoulder had caught his eye. At the same time that he was murmuring that, he was also reaching for a piece of kindling off a nearby wood stack. Without warning, he spun and launched the stick, which tumbled toward me end over end like a tomahawk.

  I dropped for the deck, not knowing what to think. The wood whirred by overhead and a split second later splashed into the river, though not before a bird cawed from so close behind me that I covered up to avoid being pecked. When nothing happened, I rolled over, cautious-like, and caught sight of a crow perched on the railing. The bird tilted its head for a better look at us, cawed twice, and lifted away from the boat just as Chilly was grabbing another chunk of kindling. Before Chilly could peg that stick, the crow dipped below the railing and skimmed away. Chilly let drive anyway, muttering daggers all the while. "Pesky bird. I can't tolerate a scavenger."

  "Know what you mean," I said, pulling myself up and dusting off. "My brother Harold is all the time—"

  But Chilly had already moved on to something else. "'Pears we got some unfinished business waiting on us. Try to keep up, boy." And off he shinned toward the back of the boat.

  I jogged alongside him, unable to resist asking one little thing that was nagging at me. "Shouldn't we have quit while ahead?"

  "'Course we should have," Chilly grumbled, sidestepping a fella with a wooden leg. "And if I hadn't gotten waylaid by them poor orphans, we might have, but they broke my concentration." He shook his head, disgusted with himself, but then he sort of chuckled at his own shortcomings too, adding, "Leastways we gave old Pearl a run that he won't soon forget. That counts for something. The rest of it's all spilt milk, and you know what they say 'bout that. Second-guessing yourself ain't no way for a gambler to carry on. What you got to be thinking of is your next bet. Like right now."

  We'd arrived at a knot of deck hands, slaves who'd been rented out to the Rose Melinda. They were throwing dice, rolling them against the crates of chickens, who were cackling dangerously. Reaching into a vest pocket, Chilly fished out the two coppers I'd paid him in addition to the seventy dollars of my ma and pa's. I couldn't hardly wait to see what he had to teach me next.

  "Might as well find out what I can do with these," he said.

  Those deck hands made plenty of room for us when Chilly stepped up to their game. Oh, a couple of 'em might have stared kind of resentful-like, as if we had something of theirs that they wanted back, but for the most part they just beamed and welcomed us right in. The closest I'd ever been to a slave was the runaway who'd holed up in the barn back home, and all I'd seen of him was the empty tin plate I collected every evening after chores. 'Course, every once in a while I got to go with Pa into Stavely's Landing and I'd seen a few slaves there, though always from across the street, never up close, so I took a special interest in this bunch on the Rose Melinda. But except for dressing in hand-me-downs about like my own, they didn't sort out a whole lot different from the crowd around the faro table. Naturally, the color of their skin and shape of their faces was different, but they rubbed their good-luck pieces and loved winning same as everyone upstairs. It was kind of a disappointment 'cause I'd been expecting them to be a whole nother tribe.

  A tall, sweaty man blew considerable on the dice and talked to them too, like they were old friends, which was what they turned out to be (for him, not us). It took but one throw of the dice for Chilly's next lesson to be over. There wasn't even time to fuss about quitting while ahead. We'd lost before I could get around to it.

  "Looks like we'll be enjoying the scenery from here on out," Chilly remarked, sounding almost relieved, as if he could only rest now that he'd done his duty and lost our last cent. "It'll give me a chance to tell you about the telegraph you'll be running."

  "Telegraph?" I choked a bit on that one, for it was news to me. 'Course, I'd heard tell of these telegraphs. People claimed you could talk to someone far gone away, clear 'cross the country, if you had a mind to, by using some kind of click code. Such doings didn't hardly seem possible, and I'd surely never thought that I'd be having anything to do with that kind of modern-day wonder. To my everlasting embarrassment, the only thing I could think of saying was, "I didn't know gamblers used telegraphs."

  "'Course we do," Chilly said. "But before I tell you about it, I'm going to have to swear you to secrecy."

  With that, Chilly led me beneath some stairs, where we could be alone and mostly hear each other, unless someone was clomping up or down above us.

  "What I'm about to tell you, Zeb, they're the rules of the Brotherhood of the Gambler, whose motto is 'Secrecy—First and Last.'" He read the deep of my eyes before pulling out a little pocketknife and continuing. "You'll have to take a blood oath to seal this up good and proper. You willing?"

  "Honor bright," I told him, shying away from the edge of that knife, which looked sharp enough for shaving.

  Grabbing my hand, he nicked the tip of my middle finger a good one before it occurred to me whose blood he'd been talking about. I near swooned, particularly when he squeezed my fingertip to get three drops out. My free hand locked onto a railing and held on for dear life, till he let go of me, saying, "That ought to do the job." His voice sounded far away and drifty, and I half expected to find myself floating up to heaven when I opened my eyes, which had crammed themselves shut. But no such thing. I remained planted on the steerage deck of the Rose Melinda with my bleeding finger still attached. In Chilly's hand was a deck of cards that he'd fished out of somewhere, and decorating their top was three red splots of blood. Even an unrepentant fool would have taken my surviving as a sign that this was meant to be.

  "Repeat after me," he pronounced, real solemn-like. "I, Zeb Crabtree, do faithfully swear upon my pa's grave to keep the secrets I am about to hear, from this day forward, in sickness and in health, for richer and poorer, so long as I shall draw a breath."

  It was a highflying, noble oath, all right, and just hearing me repeat it came close to drawing a tear to Chilly Larpenteur's eyes. He was probably remembering the day when he had first taken the pledge himself. Seeing that, I knew I was totally honor bound to uphold his oath. If I didn't, some bunch of gamblers would probably hunt me down in the night and cut my heart out and drop it in a jar to sell to some quack doctor as a curiosity for his office.

  "But my pa ain't got no grave," I fessed up. "He ain't even dead yet."

  "We'll take you on speculation," Chilly said after a moment's considering.

  So I swore it all and Chilly said that made me a full-fledged member of the Brotherhood of the Gambler, now and forever.

  ***

  What Chilly Larpenteur told me next lit up the inside of my head bold as lightning flashes. Turned out that it wasn't only the skills to play a game or two of cards that I'd be learning. Not by a mile or more. Before I was done mastering my new trade, I'd be part banker, judge, lawman, and a touch of preacher, which ought to have shown them back home. There would probably be a few other callings thrown in too, for rainy days, but he didn't bother going into those just yet.

  I'd be a banker 'cause before long I'd be floating loans and running accounts in my head as fast as a Cincinnati peddler. I'd be part judge 'cause some who gambled required being penalized for dodging debts or other "crimes of character," as Chilly put it. And since there'd be times when these cutups wouldn't take their medicine happy-like, there'd also be days when I'd have to be part lawman and bring them to justice.

  And finally there were going to be occasions when I was acting as a preacher. A gambler had a better look into a man's soul than any other living creature, said Chilly, and it was our responsibility to administer to a soul whenever we saw one in need. If Ma and Pa thought about me at all, such news as this ought to have befuddled them no end, a prospect that tickled me
more than a touch 'cause I figured it served them right.

  After sharing the general headlines on all that, Chilly served up a question. "Tell me, Zeb, what's the first thing a gambling man's got to pay attention to?"

  "Where's his good-luck piece?" I was thinking of all the gents at the faro table and how Chilly had crossed himself before joining them. His answer surprised me considerable.

  "A thousand times no to that," Chilly chided. "Such superstitions ain't nothing but quicksand. And the same goes for worrying over cracked mirrors or handling snakeskins or roosters crowing at full moons or any other fool sign you been taught. Wipe 'em clear out of your head 'cause the Brotherhood don't allow 'em. You're aiming to be a gambler—a real one—and we make up our own luck as the need arises." He jabbed a finger into my chest to drive that point home. "You'll be learning more about that as we go along. Think of something else."

  I stalled a bit before dredging up "How much money's in his pocket?"

  "That's the least of your worries." Chilly chuckled, shaking his head as though this was the first mistake every greenhorn made. "Sometimes your pockets are going to be full, sometimes empty. A gambler can't be worrying about the state of his pockets. No, there's something more basic. Give it another go, why don't you."

  I danced around it some more, turning everything this way and that in my mind, the way I'd seen Pa do many a time when tackling something stiff. Finally I said, "Playing cards? Making sure you got some?"

  "Now that's a sensible answer," Chilly allowed. "A professional man's got to pay attention to the tools of his trade, all right. That's a given, yes indeed. But they can't be his first concern. That'd be putting the cart before the horse. Hit it again."

  I sweated whole buckets trying to think of what else there might be, but in the end all I had was a waterfall sound filling my ears. When I fessed up that I couldn't think of something else, Chilly shook his head no and said that wouldn't do. He declared that a gambling man always had to have himself one more answer. I might as well get used to it, he said. A gambler was needing that one more answer for all the tight spots he was bound to find himself in. So I gave it one more shot.

  "Wits," I guessed. "He's for sure got to have those."

  "You're getting close," Chilly encouraged. "You're headed in the right direction, anyhow, 'cause it's surely true that a gambler's got to have himself more wits than everybody else. He lives by 'em. They're his capital, all right. But it's how he applies those wits that matters. Now listen close, Zeb, 'cause I've taken a liking to you, boy. It's not just anyone I'd be telling this to."

  Here he put a hand on my shoulder and stared me in the eye so long that I felt like a looking glass.

  "The first thing you've got to mind is who you're gambling with. You've got to pick your prospects right or you'll come up dry. Or worse."

  "You talking about tar and feathering?" I'd heard stories.

  "Some. But being railroaded out of a town ain't nothing to be sleepless about. There's always signs, and I'll be teaching 'em to you."

  ***

  So that's how we passed our trip to St. Louis—Chilly talking, me listening while curled up as far away from the railing as I was worth, 'cause there was a powerful lot of muddy, deep water moving along beneath us.

  The Rose Melinda shot down the middle of the river, where the current was swiftest. We passed wood yards like my pa's and gristmills and blossoming apple orchards and sprouting tobacco fields—whistling along like a teakettle all the while. Chilly claimed we must have been ripping off a good ten miles an hour when we weren't stopping to pick up letters and passengers and livestock. Anyone strong enough to wave a white hankie from the shore got stopped for.

  Night finally eased down over the trees; the river sank into darkness, which made the waters seem all the deeper. Every once in a while you could see a farmhouse lantern twinkling brave as Joshua at Jericho, but mostly what you had was black. Two or three lights meant a village, which was rare. The only lights with us regular belonged to the Rose Melinda herself, and they shone on the water like windows to another world, one you could reach only by diving to the bottom of the river and opening a door. Believe you me, I didn't have no plans of going down there.

  After a while a half-moon broke through the tree line, turning everything the prettiest ivory. Not that I had the strength to appreciate it any. Right about then Chilly started up with ghost stories concerning floating barrels that were haunted, and hangman trees that dropped all their leaves in July, and sunken steamers whose lights had lured many a pilot to his doom. At least such stories helped keep my mind off all my brothers and sisters, curled up so cozy in the loft back home. But eventually Chilly got tired of talking, which left me alone with the ghosts and the river and thoughts of my family. Finding himself some floor space that wasn't alive with tobacco juice, Chilly rustled up some sleep. But I stayed wide awake the whole night through, taking in the wonder of it all. Not even a feather bed could have put me out.

  We were still sailing along under moonlight when we met up with the Missouri River. I couldn't spy its muddy waters, but Chilly woke up enough to claim he could smell 'em, and before long he had me believing my nose was full of stampeding buffalo, blowing grasses, smoky Injuns, and whatever else the Missouri rubbed up against way out west. The adventures sunk in all them smells made me feel pretty bouncy about my decision to bail out of being a tanner.

  Not long after that, dawn snuck up on us, making everything fresh and lovely.

  Then we rounded the last bend, and ... well, all of a sudden I couldn't swallow, or spit, or nothing. Stretching out before us was St. Louis, and for a bit I forgot I ever knew how to talk. The town didn't seem to have no beginning or end, just stretched on and on. I'd never seen such a sight before and don't imagine I ever will again—not for the first time, I won't. The place was a hundred times bigger and grander than anything I'd ever come across. Wait, better make that a thousand times bigger and grander. You couldn't compare log walls and dirt floors to something like this. I reckon that ancient Rome couldn't have been any more breathtaking to them ancient Romans.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  AS THE ROSE MELINDA CHUGGED ALONG the levee, hunting for an open spot, we cruised past mounds of molasses barrels and ox yokes and rope coils and bales of fur pelts and hogsheads of tobacco and small pyramids made from pigs of lead. Behind all that rose warehouses and church spires and factory chimneys climbing three or four stories high, at least. My eyeballs couldn't jump fast enough to take in everything. Mixed in with all the sights were the tinkling of ships' bells and whistles and the ripeness of horses and mules and oxen that were pulling drays and buckboards and carts all piled high with goods bound for log cabins and soddies in places that hadn't even been named yet, at least not in any language I could get my tongue around. Considering all that left me feeling small as a wheat berry.

  When the Rose Melinda's pilot finally found an open berth, he plugged her quick. With upward of fifty steamers jockeying for position, space was at a premium. And then, just as we came to a rest, I saw the most amazing sight yet. Right down the middle of the levee rolled a blue and red wagon that had torches burning on either side of its front seat. Broad daylight, torches burning! Maybe they helped ward off the smells floating around that levee. On the near side of the wagon was a painting of a princess holding a sunburst in her hands. The painting, it wasn't any slouch and had bold letters running beneath it that read off this way:

  DR. BUFFALO HILLY'S FANTASTIC INDIAN MEDICINE SHOW

  AS SEEN BY THE CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE

  ALL OF 'EM

  It surely left me with a powerful urge to find out what the other side of the wagon had to say.

  But for right then, one side would have to do me, 'cause Chilly wasn't in any hurry to get off the Rose Melinda. We stood up on the boiler deck, waiting to see if the coast was clear, or at least that's why Chilly said we were waiting. What the coast needed to be clear of remained a mystery, though Chilly did drag a d
inky one-shot pistol out of a vest pocket when a bird's shadow glided over us. I've a notion he would have taken a potshot if it'd been a crow, but it turned out to be one of those long, gangly storklike things that are always wading around in the shallows. Whilst Chilly packed his shooter away, I shuffled a foot or two sideways, not wanting to get caught in the line of fire should any scavengers come flapping by. I wasn't exactly sure what he had against 'em. All I knew was that I was powerful glad not to be one of them.

  Meantime, I kept myself busy watching Dr. Buffalo Hilly up on the painted wagon's seat. He had to be the one driving it. Who else would be dressed up like a cavalry captain? And with a purple plume sticking out of his hat too. He was playing some kind of musical box that I later heard called an accordion.

  Did I mention he had a camel pulling that wagon?

  I recognized it straight off from a picture in my ma's dictionary, and that dromedary wasn't the end of the amazements either. No sir, what brought up the rear didn't simmer things down one bit, for tagging along behind that painted wagon was an Indian princess. Had to be. She was leading a white-faced pony that was carrying a full-grown Indian chief whose war bonnet was long enough to drag feathers across the ground.

  The medicine wagon creaked on past, gathering up the lame and achy and pockmarked as it went, but the Indian princess stopped directly in front of the Rose Melinda. Leaving the pony, she worked her way down to the shoreline in front of me. She couldn't have been much beyond fifteen feet distant and had the brownest, swimmingest eyes I'd ever run across. They beat horse eyes and cow eyes all flat. In fact, most every other pair of eyes I've seen before or since weren't nothing but washable buttons compared to 'em.

  And then she blinked!

  I flinched.

  That made her smile a flicker, if that long, before turning and warbling something in Indian lingo to the chief.