Crows and Cards (Houghton Mifflin Stereotype Editions)

by Joseph Helgerson

  Up to then the chief had been staring straight ahead, but now he turned toward the Rose Melinda and gazed at me. You could tell in a flash he was blind, as both his eyes were snowier than a blizzard, not that it mattered. I sure enough felt as though he was seeing parts of me never before seen under the sun, parts I didn't even know I had.

  After a bit, he raised his right hand, kind of stern-like, to show me his palm. I'd heard that's how Indian folks say hello, so I raised my hand back.

  The instant I done it, the chief smiled possum-wide and dropped his arm! Now how'd he know to do that? The princess sure had never said a word to tip him off. What's wilder, my hand flopped down in the same breath, without any marching orders from me. Why, I didn't feel much different from some puppet on a string, which spooked me considerable. To get a good deep breath in me, I had to step back from the railing.

  "Looks like old Chief Standing Tenbears has cards on his mind," Chilly said, satisfied-like.

  "Y-you know him?" I stuttered.

  "More than I care to admit," Chilly mumbled.

  "He lives here?" St. Louis appeared to have everything.

  "So long as I still got his medicine bundle, he does. I don't imagine he can go home without it. That thing means more to him than life itself."

  "How'd you get ahold of such a thing as that?"

  "The chief likes to imagine himself a poker player. Matter of fact, he's got a solid gold crown you're going to help me win."

  "I am?" I edged back to the railing for a peek, but the princess had already returned to the chief and moved on.

  "Oh yes," Chilly predicted. "You and that telegraph I told you of."

  We stood there quite some while longer as Chilly explained that a little ways back the chief had wagered the most valuable thing he owned against a sizable pot of cash. Chilly took the bet, assuming that the chief's prize possession was a gold crown he was supposed to tote around.

  "Wasn't the case though," Chilly muttered. "When that scamp lost, he trotted out a moth-eaten old medicine bundle, claiming it was what he owed me. There was tears pouring down his cheeks—that's how shook up he was 'bout parting with it."

  Seeing how much that ratty bundle meant to the old man, Chilly had offered to take the chief's gold crown instead, but that wouldn't do. The princess declared that above everything else her father was a man of his word. He'd wagered his most valuable possession and that meant his medicine bundle, which was worth a half-dozen gold crowns so far as he was concerned.

  "Couldn't budge him on it either," Chilly complained. "But it ain't no matter. I'm still going to get that gold crown or my name's not Charles Ambrosius Larpenteur—the Third."

  Hearing his whole name roll off his tongue like quicksilver gave me goose flesh. I, for one, wouldn't have bet against him. The freight wagons and Conestogas rolling by on the levee didn't stop to call him on it either. Even a policeman strolling past bit his tongue, though he did seem to keep a wary eye on us.

  Not till the policeman was good and gone did Chilly give the sky one last peek and decide that the coast looked about as clear as it was likely to get. We headed ashore, jumping aboard a coach that was leaving the corner of Locust and Second streets for the south part of St. Louis. That suited me about perfect, since my Uncle Seth's tanning yard lay to the north end of town.

  For a few blocks the coach clacked over cobblestones, which took some getting used to after the muddy, rutted lanes back home. The storefronts along the way were mostly stone or brick and right smart looking. Off to one side I saw a hotel so fancy, it flew its own flags up top. Down another street rose up a domed courthouse, though I didn't know what a dome was till I asked. Chilly explained that to me as if I was some kind of chucklehead, which didn't rub me too wrong, not busy as I was taking in the sights. There were tobacco warehouses and stove works and a church with a spire so tall that its clapboards must have got their white from rubbing against the moon. I saw a game of ten pin and noticed that most everyone who could afford the luxury was puffing cigars. The smoke must have scared off some of the odors ranging around.

  Any kind of critter capable of pulling something was on duty. I even saw a dog harnessed to a toy wagon full of coal chunks. The ragamuff guiding that dog was a lippy little thing, sticking his tongue out at me as we rolled by. The brat's ma caught him at it and right there in public took a broom to his bottom. He commenced to weeping and wailing, but I didn't feel too sorry for him. Unlike some of us, didn't he still have a ma standing beside him?

  The boy's coal must have tumbled off one of the full-sized wagons hauling it up and down the street. And the drivers of those bigger outfits certainly had a la-di-da way of cracking their whips. Then too, there were gents and ladies riding in fancy rigs and riffraff just woke up from their beds of straw. Most every block had one or more grog shops or beer houses or saloons or coffeehouses that appeared to sell drinks strong enough to rattle your teeth, if you had any.

  Pretty soon the pavement piddled out and dirt took over. There were holes and ruts that must have seemed as deep as small canyons to the coach's horses, easy as they spooked. The streets narrowed up and went all crooked as everything got older, and storefronts gave way to houses that appeared thrown together out of wood and spit. Old ladies on caved front steps sang out, "Bonjour." Chilly told me that was French for "Mind your own business." I figured maybe he was funning me, friendly as those ladies seemed.

  Finally the coach creaked to a halt and the driver called out, "End of the line," which meant we had to hoof it from there, with me lugging Chilly's carpetbag along with my poke and boots. There wasn't even any discussion about my being a pack mule. Chilly just dropped his bag on my toes and headed off without checking to see how I was keeping up. Not that I minded. Eager as I was to see where we were headed, I'd have tried to carry Chilly too, if he'd asked me. We kept moving away from the river till we nearly ran out of town, picking our way from one patch of shade to the next as if hiding from something, though surprising us would have been a task, what with the way Chilly kept a weather eye on everything, including the sky. The only man I ever saw watch the heavens any closer was my pa, who foretold rain, sleet, and hail regular as clockwork.

  At last we pulled up to a rambling, old two-story house that was knocked out of dark timbers. There was a sign hanging over its front door that had a red, spouting whale painted on it. I wished I could have shown off that sign to my littlest brother, Lester, who was all the time wild about whales. Being but three, he couldn't hold chalk proper yet so was forever pestering me to copy the whale picture from Ma's dictionary for him. Thinking of that gave me a pang. Anyway, somebody had peppered the whale on that sign pretty lively with shot, but it kept right on swimming along, which I figured I better do too.

  To one side of the house was a tipsy balcony where a man sat on a split-bottom chair playing something weepy and mournful on a violin. He didn't hold it like some country fiddler but had it tucked under his clean-shaven chin. Dignified as he sat there, you didn't hardly notice the pair of Shanghai chickens pecking around his boots. More what caught your eye was the way he pursed his lips, as if tasting the music, and how what few wisps of hair he had left fell across his smudged eyeglasses whenever he leaned forward to tease out a high note.

  "That fool's the Professor," Chilly informed me. "Don't get any notions about those hens of his. They follow him everywhere, worse than family."

  Without any further to-do, Chilly pushed on up the front steps and into the house, which had itself quite a stock of glass in its windows and real fetching calico stretched over the panes that had gone missing. There were several dogs howling out back who seemed to be objecting to the piano playing going on inside the place. I couldn't see how the Professor's violin would have set 'em off, but that piano playing was another breed of music entirely. Whoever was pounding on those keys knew no mercy.

  "This here's Goose Nedeau's place," Chilly said, "or at least half of it is. The other half come into my hands a while back
over a matter of some deuces. It's where we'll be holing up. There's only but two things you got to remember if you're going to get along with Goose."

  "What's those, sir?" I had to speak up loud to be heard above the dogs and piano and violin.

  "Don't talk harsh of his piano playing and keep your hands off that whale sign. It was handed down from Goose's father, all the way from the isle of Nantucket."

  I vowed I'd do my best.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE NEXT FEW DAYS FLASHED BY quicker than a jenny wren. Chilly and me shared a room on the second floor of the house, which turned out was really an inn. He got the bed, leaving me any spot I wanted on the floor. I didn't get so much as a corn-shuck tick to curl up on, just an old patched-up throw like the one the hounds bedded down on back home. At night, when I rolled up in that ripped old blanket, the back of my ears went all lonesome on me, 'cause of course that's where Pa used to scratch his dogs if they nuzzled his leg.

  One corner of the room had a wardrobe, where Chilly piled all his truck, including everything from vests with handpainted tigers on 'em to an alligator hide. Winnings, he called 'em. Over in another corner stood a wood stump with a fancy silver box resting atop it. When late afternoon sun hit that hammered silver, it hurt just to glance that way. And that was only the beginning of what I could tell you about that little treasure chest. It was where he stashed good-luck pieces won off other gamblers. That thing was jam-packed with the most unlikely collection of stuff imaginable: a blue-jay feather, a brass ring, a tear-soaked letter. One misguided fella had contributed a walrus tusk, or at least that's what Chilly called it. He let me heft it in my hand while advising, "Let that be a lesson to you. There wasn't a thing under the sun going to help that fool fill an inside straight. Not while I was dealing."

  I'd have to say that nothing pleased Chilly more than dropping some poor gambler's last hope inside that box and closing the lid.

  The room also had a washbasin, and it fell to me to keep fresh water in it. Hanging above the basin was a gold-framed mirror that Chilly used for shaving. If you glanced in the mirror just right, from the side, you could see that atop the wardrobe sat a deerskin wrapped around something bulgy. That was the Indian chief's medicine bundle, I guessed. I kept at least as far away from it as I did from the gator hide.

  The window in the room had several pieces of glass left in it, though there was one pane less after the second morning we pulled in. That day started out sunny, but I woke to a clap of thunder and a crash of glass. Chilly had spotted a crow at the window and taken aim. He sent me outside to hunt for a bird carcass and wasn't pleased when I couldn't find so much as a feather. 'Course, Chilly's shot turned out all the hounds that was tied up in back, but as I was to learn, it generally took considerable less than gunfire to roust those dogs. They harmonized with Goose's piano playing, barked at roosting passenger pigeons, and snarled up a storm at any raccoons crossing by upwind. Once they got going, sleep was all uphill.

  The meals served down in the kitchen weren't regular, but they weren't skimpy either. The fellow doing the cooking was a largish, roundish slave, name of Ho-John, whose skin was dark as good, rich earth and who three times had been caught clinging to a log while trying to swim to Illinois, which didn't tolerate slavery. Goose made him wear chains around his feet 'cause of his swimming habits, and Ho-John made sure everyone could hear those chains jangle and clink with every step he took. He also had himself a real stubborn way of burning most everything on the edges and leaving it runny toward the middle. Even the porridge had singe marks. No amount of thundering could shake him of the habit either. He claimed he was a carpenter slave by trade—no cook—and that till he figured out some way to use a hammer and nails and saw to fix up meals, he reckoned we could expect more of the same to land on our plates. Since there weren't any ladies allowed at the inn, he did all the seamstressing too and could sew a tolerably straight line, though he didn't think any more kindly of that duty than any of his others.

  I gave Ho-John a careful looking over but couldn't spot nothing out of the ordinary 'bout him, 'less you counted the lodestone he kept on a piece of rawhide around his neck. He claimed that stone always pointed north, which was the general direction of the Free States and his hopes. I'd known others with hopes, of course, but none what had a north, south, east, or west attached to 'em. Other than that lodestone, the only thing that Ho-John cared for at all was the hounds living out back. He considered those dogs family and pampered 'em worse than royalty.

  There were six guest rooms at the inn, all upstairs. One room was Goose's, one belonged to the Professor, and one went to Chilly and me. The rest were on hand for any gambler too liquored up to make it home without falling flat. The first floor had a couple of gaming parlors out front, the kitchen to the rear. Large affairs, the parlors were. They had tables built from scratch by Ho-John, right handsome ones too, with plenty of split-bottom chairs around 'em. Lanterns hung everywhere, as nighttime was when all the gambling got done.

  Paintings fancied up some of the walls, with President Washington being a favorite. Goose Nedeau liked to claim he was related to the old French families around town and so gave Lafayette equal billing. Napoleon and a couple of French kings named Louis got footage too. The guests were pretty rough on the paintings—sassed 'em regular. Their words were considerably shocking, but their tongues never did fall out, the way Ma had always claimed mine would if I'd dared speak thataway. It was just one revelation after another around that inn, and grown up as most of these discoveries made me feel, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

  'Course, the reason all these paintings got talked to so much was the bar, which took up the side wall in the main parlor and served everything from bust-head whiskey to some special punch dipped from a kettle. The Professor, who presided over the bar, wore a mostly white apron and tied black garters around his sleeves. He had a slow, friendly way of pouring a drink that made everyone feel welcome. All the gamblers said so.

  It didn't sit too good with Chilly, but me and the Professor and Ho-John fast became friends. The reason for that was the respectful way I kept my distance from the Professor's hens and the fact that I didn't complain none about Ho-John's cooking. I ran errands for one or the other of them whenever I had the time, but mostly I was kept hopping with my apprenticing. My days didn't have much room for being homesick, though such feelings did rear their heads at the darnedest times, say when passing the whale sign, or when listening to the hounds howl, or when a steamboat whistled away over on the river in the middle of the night when everything was lonesomest. But such bouts lasted only as long as it took me to remember who'd bundled me off to St. Louis in the first place.

  Since Goose Nedeau was in league with Chilly, he now became my teacher too. He appeared to be thrown together out of gristle and ruin, a hard-luck gambler who made little honking squawks in his throat all the time, like some sick goose. Most days he spent a good deal of time complaining that he hadn't had a good solid breath since Andy Jackson first muddied up the White House twenty years back. He shaved regular and missed various patches of stubble regular too. Bad as his hands shook from swilling whiskey, he rolled a loose cigarette that dropped enough ash to set himself on fire once or twice a night. His prize paisley vest was pitted with burn holes, and smoke seemed to rise like early morning fog off his silver mane of hair. He said he'd been forced into innkeeping 'cause of his health, though he didn't seem to take much interest in his new profession. Mostly he sat around dredging up days of yore, when he claimed to have single-handedly captured Black Hawk and made the entire Mississippi River safe for settlers. He had a go at the piano regular too, though he was banned from playing music, as he called it, whenever a card game was in progress.

  On the day after we pulled in, Chilly sat me down in the main parlor. It was early yet, which around there meant any time before noon, so there weren't any customers about. Goose was already slouched at the table Chilly steered me to. The Professor had tied on his ap
ron and was wiping out glasses over behind the bar. His chickens—Aphrodite and Venus—were up on top of the bar, inspecting each glass when he was done cleaning it.

  "How you liking your new digs?" Chilly asked me.

  "It's awful grand," I answered.

  There wasn't any early-to-bed, early-to-rise philosophies, and the burnt edges on the vittles hadn't started to churn my innards yet. What's more, being around a pair of birds named after the Greek and Roman gods of love seemed powerful civilized. And 'course I was looking forward to doing more for the orphans of St. Louis, and showing Pa and Ma by sending winnings home to 'em, and maybe even buying myself a first-class pocketknife.

  "Are you sure he's small enough?" Goose piped up while casting his eyes in my general direction. At the moment he was studying the empty chair beside me.

  "Measurements have been taken," Chilly boomed, speaking twice as loud as normal 'cause he'd been contradicted.

  "How's his eyesight?" Goose asked, resorting to his nose to find me. He had himself eyeglasses but rarely trotted them out, claiming they were about as helpful as a pair of stove lids.

  "Keen enough," Chilly reported. "Did you want to check his teeth?"

  "He got any extras?" Goose asked, sounding ready to claim 'em. Those of his teeth that hadn't gone missing had a mossy shine to 'em.

  "The main thing you need to know about Zeb," Chilly said, "is that we can trust him. He's been sworn into the Brotherhood."

  "Which brotherhood's that?" Goose wanted to know, turning suspicious.

  "Why, the Brotherhood of the Gambler," Chilly answered, considerably put out over having to explain something so secret. "What'd you have for breakfast, anyway?"

  It might have seemed a queer question if but a half hour before I hadn't seen Goose tell the Professor to pour him a good stiff breakfast of his best medicine. The Professor's restorative smelled the same as a small bottle of rye whiskey my ma kept on hand for toothaches and other ailments too terrible to think on.