Heaven Is a Long Way Off

by Win Blevins

  Maybe it’s just the trip, he thought. Maybe a few days’ rest…

  This journey had been so much easier than last year’s. Both times they left rendezvous in mid July. Last year they got to the Mojave villages in early November, this year in mid August. The difference was knowing the route and where they could find water. When they got here last year, half the horses were dead and the men were gaunt. This year the horses were gaunt but alive and the men were fine.

  Except Sam. He thought about tomorrow’s task, which he didn’t look forward to. Then he let himself picture the reason he was going back to California.

  Esperanza, my daughter.

  “SPARK!”

  The woman looked up from weeding the pumpkins.

  As Sam approached, a quirk twisted her face. No, she wasn’t glad to see him.

  “I’m glad to see you,” he said, walking forward.

  Francisco tagged along. It was like Sam had two pets, Coy and the Mojave interpreter.

  “What you want, Sam?” she said with a gleam in her eyes.

  So she was turning it into a flirtation. Spark was no one’s idea of a romantic figure. She looked a bride’s well-used older sister. Her face was a little mashed, her bare breasts were narrow and pointy, and she now sported the Mojave look—a tattooed chin. Five parallel lines curved from her mouth to under her jawbone, with some sideways squiggles. The Shoshone woman had declared herself Mojave.

  “Just to say hello.” He squatted. So did Francisco and Coy, and after a moment Spark. She had decent English from her three months with the brigade last summer and fall.

  He broke a slab of dried meat into three pieces length-wise, gave one each to Spark and Francisco, and ate. Meat of any kind was a treat for the Mojaves.

  “Thought you might want news of Gideon.”

  She gave a flirty wiggle of her eyebrows.

  He was tickled, thinking, It’s not going to work, lady.

  They looked at each other, munching, waiting. He decided to change the subject to her new man.

  “How is Red Shirt?”

  “He is good man. Big man.” Sam wondered how many wives he had. With the Mojaves’ fields of crops, at least Spark wouldn’t go hungry.

  Sam nodded to himself. Out with it. “You broke Gideon’s heart.”

  “I am woman. Put man’s moccasins outside lodge when I want.”

  Sam stared at her, thinking, You barely let his moccasins inside.

  She’d been a slave in the Ute camp at Utah Lake when they found her. Jedediah bought her, and as the brigade journeyed south, she and Gideon fell in love. Or so everyone thought, and Gideon thought. They’d shared a lodge for a couple of weeks—married, in the fashion of the country.

  Then, when the brigade started west across the Mojave Desert, she slipped off and joined Red Shirt’s family.

  First Gideon had nearly lost his life. Did lose his leg. And then the one-legged man lost his new wife. He dived into despair.

  “He’s doing well now,” Sam said.

  She concentrated on the meat, which took a lot of chewing.

  “He became an artist in California.” He realized she wouldn’t know what “artist” meant, and probably didn’t care either. “He makes very beautiful earrings and necklaces from gold and silver and turquoise and shells.” That should impress her.

  She looked at him proudly. “I make baby.”

  She didn’t have a child on a blanket or a cradle on her back. Then Sam realized. The stiff bark of Mojave women’s skirts always stuck out behind, a little comically. Spark’s also stuck out in front. Her belly was bulging.

  The name came like a pang. Esperanza…

  Sam tried to remember. Was Spark with Gideon’s child, or Red Shirt’s? Did it matter?

  She looked at him with huge satisfaction.

  “You broke his heart,” he said.

  She waited a moment and said, “Thank you for the meat. Now I weed the pumpkins.” She got up and walked away.

  Sam and Francisco ambled back toward the trapper campground.

  Francisco said in Spanish, “See Captain Smith?”

  SAM THOUGHT FRANCISCO just wanted to cadge a present of some kind, but he had something else in mind. He sipped his hot coffee, grimaced, and said, “¿No dulce?”

  Sam answered that the party had no sugar.

  Between small sips of hot coffee Francisco slowly informed them that this past winter a band of Mexicans (Spaniards, he called them) and Americans had come from Nuevo Mexico down the Gila River and up the Colorado to these very villages.

  Sam and Jedediah looked at each other. They had been first into this country, but not by much. Trapping brigades were heading west out of Taos and Santa Fe, they knew that, but they didn’t know any had come this far.

  “Find out if they crossed to California,” Diah told Sam.

  After more sips of coffee, Sam told the captain no.

  “That’s a relief.” Jedediah wanted the California beaver country for his own company, Smith, Jackson & Sublette.

  “Francisco says the trapping outfit took beaver from the Colorado and didn’t want to pay for it. They quarreled and split up here. Some of them went up the Colorado River. He doesn’t know where the others went.”

  Now Diah indulged one of his real passions. He got out the notebook where he wrote his journal and his maps. In the sand he drew the Colorado as it came down from the north to these villages. He got Francisco to draw it farther south, to the mouth of the Gila. The Yuma Indians lived around the mouth of the Gila, Francisco said, and Jedediah made a note. Then the interpreter drew the Gila coming in from the east, and where the Salt River flowed into it. But he didn’t know where either river headed up. He said the Colorado emptied into the ocean several sleeps below the mouth of the Gila.

  Jedediah copied the information from the map in the sand into his notebook and closed it with a smile.

  THAT NIGHT THE men were boiling for a dance.

  On the long trip south from rendezvous Sam had found a new musical partner—Polly Labross was a peach of a fiddler. A black man from Montreal and once a voyageur, Polly knew French-Canadian songs. Sam had learned to pipe the melodies on his tin whistle, and had even learned some lyrics in French.

  The trappers moved up to some flat ground near the huts. When Polly started tuning the fiddle, Mojave women gathered to watch. Polly scraped out a verse of “Ah, Si Mon Moine Voulait Danser,” and a dozen women crept close.

  Sam played a second verse and chorus while Polly double-stopped harmony. Polly looked like a sly old dog, his hair mottled gray and his beard black, with a shape that seemed almost Chinese. His soft eyes hinted at a wisdom that embraced thousands of secrets he wouldn’t tell.

  “Let’s go,” hollered Bos’n Brown. He grabbed Gobel’s arm and set out jigging. Gobel was Goliath, Bos’n a small and lithe David. Bos’n was a sassy fellow, quick with a quip. Now he took the woman’s role—he hopped, he bounced, he swung his bottom like a girl’s, he even jumped into the air. Gobel swung him ’round. They had a big time.

  The Mojave women, remembering last year’s affair, started dancing in place. The dance style of the fur men was nothing like their own, but they liked it.

  Sam sang in a light, clear voice over Polly:

  If my old top were a dancing man

  A cap to fit I would give him then

  chorus:

  Dance old top, dance in

  Oh, you don’t care for dancing

  Oh, you don’t care for my mill la, la

  Oh, you won’t hear how my mill runs on

  As Polly explained it to Sam, it was a tease. The dancers were asking a monk to join them. In every verse they tempted him with something different, a cap, a gown…

  If my old top were a dancing man

  A gown of serge I would give him then

  In the next verse they tempted him with a Psalter, then a rosary, and so on, but the monk never danced, and they hooted at him.

  No one gave a damn about
this story, but the tune was lively.

  Now Bos’n spun away from Gobel and held out his hand to one of the women. She grabbed hold, and around the circle they went, the woman…

  It was Spark! She followed clumsily but eagerly.

  Well, Sam reminded himself, he’d told Bos’n that she danced with several men last year, and went to the bushes with at least one, Red Shirt.

  Polly jumped faster into the tune, and Sam took a break.

  Other Mojave women joined in, and several men. Among them—surprise! Last year two teenagers had tried to steal Paladin, Skinny and Stout, Sam called them in his mind. He had gotten her back only by chasing them halfway across the river, and one nearly drowned under a cottonwood log beached on a sand bar. But Skinny and Stout were dancing now, and apparently having a good time.

  A pretty woman held out her hand to Sam, smiling. She was smiling, and she said something in her language, probably asking him to dance.

  He couldn’t help looking lingeringly at her breasts. “No,” he said.

  She said whatever it was again, and reached out and fingered his hair. Women always seemed to like Sam’s white hair.

  “No,” said Sam again, and took her hand away. He wished he wanted to touch a woman, hold a woman, lie down with a woman.

  She turned to the next man without a hint of regret. It was Robiseau, one of the French-Canadians, and he whirled away with her. Sam thought of Robiseau as Merry One Tooth, for the number of dentures he had in the upper front, which he showed off in a perpetual lunatic grin.

  When Merry One Tooth danced off, his wife glared after him. Then Red Shirt came up and motioned to her, and she danced off with the chief. Robiseau winked at her.

  At least half the trappers now were bouncing along, and both trapper wives were dancing with Mojave men.

  Polly changed the tune to a sea shanty, a slow capstan song that would give all the men a chance to ease the women close:

  When Ham and Shem and Japhet, they walked the capstan ’round,

  Upon the strangest vessel that was ever outward bound,

  The music of their voices from wave to welkin rang,

  As they sang the first sea shanty that sailors ever sang.

  “Don’t you want to dance?” said Hannibal.

  “Think I’ll turn in,” said Sam. Away from temptation, he thought, and with my memories.

  “Sure.”

  As Hannibal disappeared into the darkness, Sam wondered if his friend wanted a woman. Probably so. Even magicians liked sex.

  He stretched out on his blankets, reached to where he knew Coy would be, and scratched the coyote’s head. In the dark, when he couldn’t see, the smell and sound of the river were stronger. He remembered the brute force of its current—pound and splash, spin and suck. Its whirlpools pulled him to its bottom and to sleep.

  SAM LOOKED AT his arms, which were all scratched up. Sweat was running into the scratches—the August sun felt like coals in a woodstove. He frowned across at Hannibal, who grinned. Hannibal’s arms were probably worse than Sam’s.

  They were standing ankle deep in the river cutting more cane for the two rafts. It took a lot of float power to carry twenty-three people and their cargo across the swift, turbulent Colorado. This gear included barrels for water, blacksmith tools, tomahawks, traps, kegs of gunpowder, and much more. There were the trade goods for Indians. And the trappers bore their own gear. A typical man had a rifle, a butcher knife, two horns for powder, a blanket, an extra pair of moccasins, and a pouch containing a bar of lead, a tool for making the lead into balls, a patch knife, a fire-striker, char cloth, and so on, altogether another ten percent of his body weight.

  Sam and Hannibal shouldered the last loads of cane on both shoulders and labored upstream along the bank. When they got to where the other men were binding the cane into the rafts, they dumped their loads and sagged onto the ground.

  Coy mewled. He often seemed to pity men doing hard labor.

  The Mojaves were gathered around to see the trappers off. Red Shirt was there, Francisco, Skinny and Stout, Spark, seemingly most of the village, hundreds of men, women, and children. Partly, Sam supposed, they wanted to see how the trappers built a cane raft. With trappers working and calling to each other and Mojaves talking, everything was hubbub.

  “Captain,” called Sam. Smith looked around. Whenever Sam addressed Diah in an official way, he called him by title. “Hannibal and me, we’ll swim over with the horses.”

  “You?” Jedediah asked at large, “Who’s a strong swimmer?”

  “Me!” said Hannibal and Virgin at once.

  Tom Virgin was old, Sam guessed probably in his forties, but he was tough and strong. Sam liked him.

  “Hannibal, Virgin, ride the river with the horses.”

  “Captain, I’m sticking with Paladin.”

  Smith looked at Sam and knew his segundo wouldn’t be denied. “All right, three of you. Sam, hang on to that horse.”

  “Let’s go,” said Hannibal. All thirty-some-odd mounts, including Paladin and Ellie, were rope-corralled a hundred paces downstream.

  “Hold on,” said Diah. He was looking across the river. “You feel sure of hitting that sand bar?”

  “It’ll work,” said Sam.

  The trappers would set out in the rafts and pole across. The current would bear them downstream. Remembering last year, Jedediah and Sam figured they would float about as much down the river to the bar as across it. They allowed a good margin for error.

  Now the first raft was loaded—eight trappers plus the captain and half their gear.

  Sam, Hannibal, and Virgin started downstream to run the horses into the river. Coy tagged along.

  “Wait!” said Sam. He ran to the raft that was still on the bank and lashed the rifle his father had left him, The Celt, to the bundle of rifles there. Most of the men had wrapped their rifles in canvas and tied them to this second raft. This rifle was important to Sam. It was the only memento he had of his father, Lew Morgan.

  “Me too,” Hannibal and Virgin said together. A man swimming the Colorado didn’t want something as heavy as a rifle in his hands. Hannibal roped both rifles in.

  Off the three hurried down to the river.

  “Push off!” cried Jedediah.

  Coy barked once in the direction of the raft and scooted after Sam and Hannibal.

  The trappers on the raft shoved hard against the bank with their long poles, and the raft surged into the river. The current grabbed them hard. The raft spun in a full circle, making some of the men fall down. Everyone laughed. A big wave lifted the raft, and it dropped down the back side with a belly-sucking lurch. Men made whoopsy noises.

  At that moment all the Mojave men yelled fiercely and attacked the ten men left on the bank.

  The first blows whisked through the air. Two men got pin-cushioned, others were wounded here and there.

  Spears were hurled. Polly Labross went down with a shaft through his chest, blood gouting from his mouth onto his gray beard.

  Warriors rushed in and struck with spears and knives.

  Silas Gobel was slashed by at least two knives but roared, picked a man up, and threw him at the other treacherous warriors.

  Mojaves ran into nearby brush and came out brandishing war clubs.

  Several trappers got off shots with their pistols—the rifles were lashed to the beached raft—but the Mojaves swarmed on them.

  Jedediah and eight other men watched in horror from the river. It was like seeing ants rush onto a dying mouse.

  The current yanked them relentlessly downstream. “Pole, damn it!” yelled Jedediah. He set an example.

  The trappers had been gaping at the attack. Now they stuck their poles deep into the water, found the bottom, and shoved.

  Two men pushed upstream.

  “We can’t go against the current,” shouted Jedediah. “Pole for the other side!”

  They did, hard.

  From a hundred paces downstream Sam, Hannibal, and Virgin, arme
d with only their pistols and butcher knives, sprinted back to their comrades. Coy ran ahead of them, growling and yowling. Sam saw Bos’n Brown fall, and two Mojaves pounced on him. Robiseau staggered out of the melee, his back sprouting arrows.

  Before they were halfway back, a score of armed Mojaves ran toward Sam, Hannibal, and Virgin.

  Coy turned and dashed the other way.

  Sam fired, and a man dropped.

  Hannibal fired.

  Suddenly everything was chaos.

  A capricious wind whipped up a dust devil. Sand and smoke swirled around the trappers.

  Warriors ran into the dark pall, screaming and swinging war clubs.

  Virgin went down, his skull bloodied.

  “Run!” yelled Hannibal.

  Sam and Hannibal sprinted toward the horses, a dozen Mojaves after them.

  Sam thought, I’m dead.

  He ran like hell and caught Hannibal and got half a step on him. Coy fell in with them.

  Suddenly, out of the brush downstream, the horses stampeded. Three or four Mojaves ran behind, driving them.

  Salvation! thought Sam.

  He put his fingers to his mouth and gave a loud, piercing whistle, rising low to high.

  Hannibal did the same, looping from high to low and back twice.

  Paladin and Ellie cut out of the herd and ran toward Sam and Hannibal.

  Thank God! Sam’s mind screamed.

  The herd followed Paladin and Ellie. “Hallelujah!” shouted Sam.

  When Paladin got close, Sam grabbed her mane and swung up bareback. Hannibal did the same on Ellie.

  Sam saw Virgin staggering toward the river alone, holding his bleeding head in both hands. Coy ran toward the old man, then pivoted and came fast after Sam.

  An arrow caught Paladin. She fell, and Sam pitched over her head.

  Hooves rat-a-tat-tatted all around him. Dust and horse manure flew everywhere. Coy poised himself and yipped furiously at the horses pounding by.

  A sharp edge slashed Sam’s hip.

  He whirled and swung his fist.

  The Mojave jumped back, cocking his spear. It was Stout, who had the face of a snake.

  Sam grabbed his butcher knife and thrust forward.