Captain Aitken tipped his hat.
“You’ve no experience here, miss,” he said. “Probably the weather’s not so fickle, in England.”
“It’s certainly not so violent,” Tasmin replied. “A storm such as that one would have broken half the windowpanes in London.”
“Yes, and it damaged two of our paddles, as well,” the captain said.
“Mr. Catlin spoke of seeing a man on shore just before we struck the sandbar,” Tasmin said. “Did you perhaps see him too?”
“I saw him—that was old Dan Drew,” the captain said. “He’s a hunter—supplies passing boats with game when the season’s fair. Dan will soon be round, I expect, once he sees we’re stuck. Perhaps he’ll bring us an antelope.”
Tasmin’s glumness returned. It had not been the Raven Brave after all, just some ancient hunter. Her wild impulse had only been folly, after all.
“Since we’re stuck we were thinking of going ashore for a bit, to look for Mama’s old parrot,” Tasmin said. “Perhaps we’ll meet this Mr. Drew.”
“If you do he’ll talk your ear off,” the captain said. “Dan gets lonesome, walking the river. I wouldn’t mind a word with him myself—he keeps up with the moods of the tribes . . . knows who’s at war and who ain’t. It’s useful information.”
“I wonder if he knows Mr. Snow?” Tasmin asked.
Captain Aitken gave her a thoughtful look. Tasmin felt awkward—perhaps too much eagerness had showed in her face or her voice.
“Dan buried Jim Snow’s parents—they were massacred by the Kickapoo,” Captain said. “Jimmy was just a babe. They hid him in a cactus patch—was Dan found him and took him to the Osage, who adopted him. He was pretty full of stickers before he got out of that cactus, Dan said.”
“My goodness . . . what horror,” Tasmin said. She waited, but Captain Aitken volunteered no more information, so she went down to call for the pirogue.
Gorska Minor, who was occasionally disposed to be helpful, brought the pirogue round and helped Tasmin store her kit, which she decided to bring along just in case. Gorska Minor had a tendency to leer at the girls—he often stationed himself just below stairs, the better to peer up petticoats; it was he who spread the rumor that the massive Fräulein Pfretzskaner had quite dispensed with undergarments.
Tasmin, Bobbety, Buffum, Mary, Piet, and the hound all came trooping down to the pirogue, but there was no sign of the hysterical French maid.
“Where is she, drat her?” Tasmin asked.
“Locked in her room—I suspect she is taking poison,” Mary said.
“Quite likely it’s merely constipation,” Bobbety declared. “I suffer from it myself.”
“It’s this American diet,” Piet suggested. “What we all need is some good cabbage soup.”
“I am hardly in the mood to delay this trip just to hear you two speculate about Mademoiselle’s bowels,” Tasmin said, as she took up the paddle and commenced to row toward the distant shore. “If Mademoiselle wants to join us in the search she’ll have to swim.”
Almost at once there was a loud splash from behind them.
“She’s swimming,” Mary said.
20
Jim Snow had known the storm was coming . . .
“EVER been in a cloud, Jimmy?” Dan Drew asked. The two of them sat out the big hailstorm in his dugout, cozily enough; but the hail had receded and it was possible to converse again. Dan Drew was not one to waste an opportunity, conversation being one of his favorite pursuits.
“I can’t fly, Dan—how would I get in a cloud?” Jim asked. The dugout, which Dan Drew claimed had once been a snake den, was hidden beneath a low shelf of rocks on a little ridge. Quite a few hailstones had bounced into the dugout. Now and then Dan picked up one of the smaller hailstones and crunched it between his teeth.
“Well, the way to get in a cloud is to climb up one of the Rocky Mountains,” Dan went on. “I’ve been in several clouds in my day—I’ve even been above them. I was right on top of a storm like this trying to get up one of them high peaks near the South Platte. I was up there looking for eagle eggs.”
Jim Snow had known the storm was coming when he crossed a prairie dog town without seeing a single prairie dog. When the burrowing creatures went to ground it was time to seek shelter. Dan Drew’s dugout was not far away, so Jim ran to it, accompanied by the old parrot, who resisted all efforts to make him return to the boat. With the storm no longer a danger Jim was impatient to be off, but no one escaped Dan Drew without hearing seven or eight of his stories—most of them stories Jim didn’t believe.
“Why would you want eagle eggs?” he asked.
“Oh, they weren’t for me, they were for the professor,” Dan said. “Tom Say his name was—he was traveling with Major Long, collecting birds’ eggs and such.”
“Why take birds’ eggs, with a hunter like you to kill game?” Jim inquired, to be polite.
“They didn’t gather them to eat, they gathered them to study,” Dan informed him. “The professor particularly wanted eagle eggs, but the best I could do was an eaglet. It worked out well enough, though—Major Long tamed the eaglet. The major would stick bacon in his hatband and that eaglet would fly around his head and even land on his shoulder, trying to get the bacon—it made a big impression on the Indians. None of them had a tame eaglet.”
Jim was ready to crawl out of the dark little room—it was lit by a single candle, floating in a cup of tallow.
“That professor even collected bugs and mites,” Dan said. “He caught a louse and put it under a microscope—he let me look but it was a thing I didn’t like to see. Bad enough to have to live with lice—why study them?”
“The storm’s over, Dan—I’m off,” Jim said. “Will you be visiting that steamer anytime soon?”
“I might, if I can knock down a deer to sell them,” Dan said. “There’s a passel of grandees on that boat. I expect George Aitken has his hands full with ’em.”
“This old bird belongs on the boat,” Jim said. “I’d be obliged if you’d return it for me—I suspect it’s somebody’s pet.”
The parrot pecked at some of the smaller hailstones, crunching them much as Dan did.
Dan Drew reached over to get the bird, but the parrot waddled out of reach.
“I don’t know, Jimmy—I think that old rascal has adopted you,” Dan said.
“Well, I can’t be bothered to keep up with somebody’s parrot,” Jim said, irritated that the bird would behave so queerly.
“Old critters have minds of their own,” Dan said. “I expect this one’s going to go where he wants to go.”
No sooner had the two of them crawled out of the dugout than Prince Talleyrand took wing, flew high, and was soon out of sight.
21
A bloody death fit for an opera seemed the only way to proceed.
MADEMOISELLE Pellenc locked herself in her room, meaning to cut her throat in privacy. Feeling that Lady Berrybender’s death had deprived her of any reason to live, she meant to finish herself with some darning scissors. As Lady Berrybender’s femme de chambre she had naturally stood first among the servants; but with her mistress gone the skinny young Frenchwoman knew that she could only expect the worst. Cook, who hated her for her finical demands, would give her only gristle and gruel. Señor Yanez and Signor Claricia had already grown bolder in their advances. Lord Berrybender, who had once dallied with her familiarly, was now besotted with the tall, untalented cellist, a woman who seemed quite unfamiliar with any music except Haydn’s. And now the German slut had smashed the head of Master Thaw, the one nice man among the Europeans. Master Thaw had often paid Mademoiselle fine, elaborate compliments, but now, thanks to Fräulein, he had lost all power of speech.
A bloody death fit for an opera seemed the only way to proceed.
The darning scissors, however, quickly proved inadequate to the task Mademoiselle set them. They were quite dull; they wouldn’t cut. Instead of a great operatic gush of blood, the scissors merely pi
nched, raising an ugly bruise, which she was forced to slap over with powder before rushing out to join the boating party, her suicide postponed.
Mademoiselle was no sooner out the door than she saw that the pirogue had departed without her, an injustice that quite wrung her heart. It was her compatriot, Prince Talleyrand, that they were searching for. Mademoiselle had often fed the old bird hazelnuts—she felt quite sure he would come to her call. But there the boat went. Lady Tasmin hadn’t waited—Lady Tasmin never waited! Without a moment’s hesitation Mademoiselle jumped over the rail, realizing only at the last second that she might have been wiser to descend to the lower deck before jumping. But the die was cast. She jumped, she was falling!
Toussaint Charbonneau, Old Gorska, and the diminutive Italian, Signor Claricia, were all standing at the rail smoking when the skinny Frenchwoman came falling and fluttering right past them, to strike the sandy water with a resounding splash. They were all astonished—none of them had ever seen a femme de chambre fall out of the sky before.
“Now that was a splash, Gorska,” Charbonneau said. “I was near to getting water in my eye.”
Mademoiselle was not hurt by her wild leap, but neither was she pleased to find herself the cynosure of so many masculine eyes. Big White, the Hairy Horn, and even Charlie Hodges rushed to witness this curious spectacle. Mademoiselle had jumped into no more than three feet of water; the channel was not deep enough for easy swimming. The laughter and ribald comments of the engagés she ignored, but just as she struggled into deeper water, something brushed her leg; with her wet hair in her eyes Mademoiselle could just distinguish three ominous gray shapes. Convinced that they were crocodiles, she emitted a wild shriek and began to swim toward the pirogue as fast as she could, while behind her, the three gray logs floated silently on.
22
Hearing the wild shrieks . . .
HEARING the wild shrieks, Tasmin stopped the pirogue until the crazed Mademoiselle Pellenc swam, waded, and floundered her way to them. Getting her on board was not easy—as she crawled in, Tintamarre leapt out, amid a general splashing that left no one entirely dry.
Though the smaller hailstones had by this time melted, some of the larger ones remained. Soon, once the bank was reached, Bobbety and Buffum amused themselves by throwing hailstones at each other.
“What sport, we can pretend they’re snowballs,” Bobbety said, only seconds before Buffum hit him smack in the forehead with a well-directed hailstone the size of a goose egg.
“You’re a regular David without the slingshot, Bess,” Tasmin said. “Goliath now lies vanquished.”
“Come along, Piet, it is time we sought the delicious Jerusalem artichokes,” Mary commanded. “Come along—we’ll dig together.”
“Is she not uncanny, the little one?” Piet said, before stumbling away.
“It is not every day that I have hailstones to fling,” Bess said, looking down at the unconscious Bobbety. It was her habit never to admit wrongdoing directly.
“The crocodiles wanted to eat my legs off,” Mademoiselle Pellenc insisted, as she got undressed. Wet clothes were intolerable to her, far more so than immodesty. The sun was now bright. She soon had her dress spread on the grass to dry and surveyed the empty skies clad only in her chemise, hoping to see a flash of green.
Tasmin fervently hoped that Jim Snow was not witnessing such dubious proceedings. They had been ashore no more than five minutes and yet, already, her brother was unconscious, a lump almost as big as the hailstone rising on his forehead. Mary and the botanist had disappeared, Tintamarre had managed to get a thorn in his foot, and the femme de chambre was almost naked.
“Mademoiselle, why is it that you have hardly any bosom?” Buffum asked.
“It is because I am so intelligent,” Mademoiselle responded, icily. “The brain gains, the bosom loses.”
Tasmin, occupied for the moment with her whimpering hound, did her best to ignore both women. In fact she had already decided to take the pirogue and leave them. Other boats could be sent ashore to pick them up when evening came. The balm of summer was still on the prairies. Tasmin had stuck some biscuits in her kit bag; she had in mind to sleep in the pirogue again. Perhaps the miracle would repeat itself; perhaps the Raven Brave would appear again in the splendor of the dawn. Other, less happy possibilities—bears, Indians, floods, snakes, chiggers—she refused to allow her mind to dwell on. The prairie at least offered the hope of surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, ecstatic or fatal, while their little floating Europe offered only sameness: quarrels, sulks, spite. In the freshness of the West old ways could be peeled off as easily as Mademoiselle had peeled off her wet dress.
“Voilà! Voilà! L’oiseau!” Mademoiselle Pellenc exclaimed, pointing to the far, far distance.
Tasmin looked: the bird in question was so far away as to be no more than a black speck in the sky.
Bess had meanwhile been making a mud poultice for Bobbety’s great lump. Though the trip ashore had been her idea, finding Prince Talleyrand had not been her main motive. She had come ashore in hopes of locating a shaggy frontiersman who would shake her and slap her as Tasmin had been shaken. Hearing of Tasmin’s shaking, all the women aboard the boat had become deeply envious; they all hoped to get ashore and find men who would shake them thus dramatically. Buffum was particularly anxious to find such a shaggy swain; Tim the stable boy’s rough embraces had become rather too mechanical; a good shaking by a passionate frontiersman might yield tremors far more interesting than anything Tim could induce.
Clad only in her chemise and her shoes, Mademoiselle Pellenc had begun to hurry across the prairie, on toward the distant speck, crying, “L’oiseau! Voilà!” as she ran.
“It’s a oiseau all right, but I doubt it’s Mama’s parrot,” Tasmin said. “More likely just a crow. Go get her, Buffum—if we’re not careful she’ll get lost. These plains are quite featureless, I assure you.”
“But our dear brother is stricken—what if his brains ooze out?” Bess complained.
“Oh, stop dithering, he’s merely got a little bump on his forehead, and you put it there,” Tasmin said. “Go after Mademoiselle and don’t lose sight of her—we’re in danger of becoming dispersed.”
“Pythagoras,” Bobbety muttered. He often spoke in his sleep, intoning the names of the great.
Bess left reluctantly. She didn’t trust Tasmin, who would no doubt desert them and take off in search of her young man; but in fact Mademoiselle was racing on across the prairie and could not be callously neglected. The need to recapture the old bird lent strength to Mademoiselle’s skinny legs. Bess began to run too—if the indispensable femme de chambre should be lost, who would comb their hair in the morning, or before balls?
The prairie, which had looked so level, wasn’t, and the grass, which, to the eye, seemed so silky, was full of unexpected brambles which scratched her calves as she ran. In what seemed like seconds Bess began to feel that she was being swallowed up by the Western distance, as Jonah had been swallowed by the whale—though being inside a whale might be cozy, whereas being on the great prairie alone was not cozy. The sky above her seemed larger than England itself. She seemed to have suddenly been sucked into a great emptiness as by a gust of wind—and what would the outcome be? When she began to run she had looked back often to the river, but now she feared to look back. What if she only saw the same distance, the same grass?
The only element of hope was Mademoiselle Pellenc, who showed signs of having run herself out. Now she was merely trotting. Soon she stopped altogether. Bess saw, as she approached, that the same brambles that had scratched her calves had torn the poor Frenchwoman’s chemise away. Her skinny legs were naked, her small bosom heaved, and her wet hair was much in need of a combing.
Bess had every intention of delivering a stinging reprimand, informing Mademoiselle in no uncertain terms that her mad pursuit of Prince Talleyrand was a capricious act for which serious amends must be made. Bess considered herself a polished deliverer of reprima
nds. Among the servants only Cook—who possessed powerful powers of retaliation—was spared. But on this occasion, alone with the sweaty French-woman on the vast prairie, Bess realized that she lacked the breath required for a proper reprimand. Though sentences of censure formed distinctly in her mind, she could not get them past her lips. She was out of breath.
Mademoiselle, who had been more or less stumbling along, suddenly stopped stock-still.
“I think we should go back now, oui?” Mademoiselle said, in a small, subdued voice. “Yes, at once, let us return to le bateau. It is almost time for tea.”
“Yes, let’s return—it was foolish of you to venture so far,” Bess said, and stopped. Running, she had seen nothing on the prairie; stopped, she suddenly saw the men, risen as if from the earth. There were six of them, small and dark—their scrawny horses grazed nearby. A great shaggy carcass lay on the prairie; the dark men had been cutting it up, their arms bloody from the task. All had stopped their work, dripping knives in hand. They looked at the two stunned white women silently.
“Yes, mademoiselle, let’s excuse ourselves to these gentlemen,” Bess said, taking Mademoiselle’s arm. But when they turned to leave, the prairie was empty. There was no sign of the Missouri River, of the steamer Rocky Mount, of Tasmin, Tintamarre, Bobbety. There was no sign of anything.
The six dark men watched.
“Mademoiselle, we must run for our lives,” Bess said.
Mademoiselle Pellenc, French and fatalistic, shook her head.
“I am runs out,” she said. “I have no more runs.”
Bess had no runs herself, but it didn’t matter. The two of them were in the belly of the prairie—before they could stumble ten steps, in a rush the dark men came.
The Berrybender Narratives Page 9