‘You find that feller’s camp?’ asked Bridger as the three gathered around January.
‘Not exactly. Titus in?’
‘He’s gone up to McLeod’s – looks like here he’s comin’ now.’ A clatter of hooves and a jingling of bridle bits as the horses emerged from the darkness; January could see in the Controller’s face that he knew. Titus signaled to Seaholly to leave the bar to Pia and preceded them all into his big markee.
‘What happened?’ he asked January. ‘What exactly did you find? It true what Frye says, that the Dutchman and his whole outfit are dead?’
‘Except for Clarke, yes. It didn’t look like the cholera, and it didn’t look like yellow fever – I’m a surgeon, I know the signs – but they purged and puked themselves out, and died in the night. They were still warm this morning.’
Silence. The traders bunched in the small tent murmured among themselves, eyes glimmering in the shadowy lantern-glow.
‘My question is,’ went on January, ‘if anyone else in the camp is down sick?’ He looked at the men, in their dark town-coats and beaver hats. Sooner or later, these men saw every trapper, every Indian, every engagé in the camp.
And heard every breath of gossip.
Their voices clucked a little like the river stones: Jim Hutchenson? . . . Nah, that’s just a hangover . . . Fleuron was pukin’ pretty bad t’other day . . . Well, he’s in with Irish Mary now, so I guess he’s feelin’ better . . . What about the savages? . . . I ain’t heard no death songs . . .
‘You didn’t just leave ’em laying out there, did you?’ asked the Missourian Pete Sharpless uneasily, and Wallach retorted:
‘What, bring ’em back to spread the sickness here in the camp?’
‘Shaw and the Beauty are out there, burying them,’ said January. ‘They should be back—’
‘And what about you?’ demanded Morales. ‘I don’t want to sound cold, señor, but who’s to say you’re not spreadin’ that sickness to every man in this tent?’
Taken aback, January said, ‘I’ve got no reason to think I am—’
Though the tent wasn’t a large one, it was surprising how much space the traders – including Gil Wallach – could put between themselves and January without actually backing out the door.
‘An’ they had no reason to think they’d picked it up, until they died.’ The Mexican trader looked around at the others. ‘I’d vote, first off, that we quarantine Ben and Frye until we know what this thing is.’
‘Makes sense,’ agreed Wynne.
‘Shaw and the Beauty, too, when they get back to camp.’
Wallach opened his mouth to protest, but closed it. Bridger asked, ‘And how do we keep the Indians from coming in quiet and killing them, the minute they hear there might be a white man’s sickness there? That smallpox outbreak in Nebraska in ’32 has some of ’em pretty spooked.’
‘Don’t tell ’em.’
‘How they gonna know?’
‘They’re gonna know, boyo,’ pointed out Seaholly, exasperated, ‘because some Granny Poke-Nose trapper’ll see the quarantine camp, ask somebody why he can’t go into it, come to me and get himself fogbound and then proceed to go airing his yap to every man in the camp, including the local representatives of the Ten Lost Tribes—’
‘Not if you put ’em on that island in the river behind my place,’ said Morales. ‘It’s half a mile to the next camp downstream, and it stands high enough that even cloudbursts don’t cover it. I’ll keep a watch, to see no man crosses over to it. Those who ask, I’ll tell that you have the heatstroke, or got your head cracked, and must have rest.’
‘That sit with you, January?’ Titus turned to him.
In the faces of the men around him, January could see that he had little choice. ‘Fair enough. But send me word of whatever you find out. I trained in the biggest hospital in Paris—’
‘They let niggers be doctors in France?’ Sharpless was genuinely startled.
‘There’s no law against a black man being a doctor in the United States, you ass,’ snapped McLeod. ‘Lord God—’
‘We’ll send you word,’ Bridger promised. ‘Kit,’ he added to Carson, ‘why’n’t you and me ride out tonight and meet Shaw and Clarke – Dry Grass, you said? There’s just a few too many Blackfeet wandering around the hills, and the thought of them catchin’ the plague from scalpin’ the burial party somehow isn’t enough to console me for their loss.’
January said quietly, ‘Thank you.’
After that it was only a question of making their way in secret among the cottonwoods and wading out – breast deep in the fast-flowing black water – to the island, which January guessed would be easier still to attain in a day or two, barring another storm on the mountains. Wallach went to fetch January’s ‘plunder’ from Morning Star’s lodge; Titus donated a small tent for shelter, and Seaholly even contributed a few bottles of whiskey that January wouldn’t have touched on a bet. Frye protested – he had assumed when he left the camp a few days before that he was going to find himself a partner in a miraculous secret beaver valley – but was told to shut up. ‘Less you say, the better,’ McLeod informed him grimly. ‘In fact, come to that, if Ben has to be free to give advice on matters medical, that means that you, Frye, are the one who got a crack on the head—’
‘God damn it, Mac!’
‘—and is being looked after here by January,’ approved Stewart. ‘I like it. It’s got –’ he made a gesture reminiscent of young Mr Miller framing a scene to sketch – ‘symmetry.’
‘It’s got horse hockey,’ retorted Frye, uncomforted.
The shelter was set up on the backside of the island’s ridge, where a fire would not be seen from the camp, and Titus supervised the driving of a ring of stakes about twenty feet in all directions from the shelter. ‘Any man comes across, I’ll send a man with him, to make sure he doesn’t get closer to you than ten feet,’ promised the Controller. ‘It’s nothing personal, I hope you understand, Ben . . .’
‘I understand.’ And I understand you’re pretty pleased to rob Gil Wallach of two clerks without having to hire them yourself . . .
‘We’ll see you’re provided for. Hell,’ the big man added, ‘I’ll even send one of my clerks up to Wallach’s to help out, him bein’ short-handed . . .’
January kept his thoughts to himself as Morales and Sharpless – both newcomers to the trade – exclaimed at the generosity of this gesture and Bridger and Carson exchanged trenchant glances.
By this time the lemon-rind moon stood high overhead. Here on the rear of the island, the noise from Seaholly’s – fifty yards upstream and about that distance back from the water’s edge – was softened by the intervening cottonwoods, and the smell of the camp’s waste dumps mitigated by the river breeze. January debated whether to point out that establishing the shelter on this side of the island not only hid their fire from the curious in camp, but also exposed it to whatever tribes might be wandering around on the east side of the river, but decided to keep quiet about this. This campsite would give Morning Star and Hannibal a much better chance of coming and going unseen.
Only a few of the ad hoc Committee of Public Health still lingered when Wallach returned to the island shortly after midnight, carrying January’s blankets, clothes and shaving gear and followed by Hannibal and Pia with a pot of Veinte-y-Cinco’s stew. ‘Don’t cross the stakes,’ said January – for the benefit of Titus and the ever-inquisitive Morales – and added in Latin, ‘I need to have someone who can come and go in the camp.’
In the same language, the fiddler replied, ‘That’s not all you need,’ and taking a camp kettle, picked his way over the moonlit rocks to fetch water. He took his time about it, only returning when the defenders of the camp’s health had all sworn each other to secrecy again and started back toward the AFC camp. Wallach, January noticed, kept Pia under his wing and firmly away from Titus, who ignored the child as if she were a pane of glass.
‘You let me know if there’s anything
I can get you,’ called Morales over his shoulder. ‘I have a couple books up at the tent, if you’re inclined that way: an almanac and Robinson Crusoe.’
The offer being put off until the morrow, the trader quickened his steps to catch up with the others and disappeared into the trees.
‘And left the world to darkness and to me.’ Hannibal stepped out of the shadows and through the staked circle. January gestured him into the shelter – he didn’t quite trust Edwin Titus’s motives – and followed him inside.
‘Where’s Shaw?’
January shook his head. ‘He stayed behind with the Beauty and Morning Star, to bury the Dutchman.’ Quickly, he outlined what they’d found in Dry Grass Coulee. ‘It never occurred to me they’d quarantine us. It should have.’ He slapped at a mosquito. ‘New Orleans is such a pest hole, I’ve gotten used to thinking that everyone’s in the same danger of whatever disease is around.’
‘You think Titus is behind this somehow?’
‘I think he’s glad Gil’s out two clerks. Beyond that?’ He shook his head. ‘Whatever this is, it’s bad. It strikes hard and swiftly—’
‘Rather like the Blackfeet,’ said Hannibal grimly. He held up the two folded letters. ‘I’ve got them translated,’ he added. ‘And what they say isn’t good.’
EIGHTEEN
‘The letter dated April of 1834 begins: I have found the monster.’ Hannibal drew himself closer to the fire that burned on the open side of the shelter, for even in early July, the mountain nights were chill. ‘It’s in the Bavarian dialect, and that bears about the same relation to German as Portuguese does to Spanish. I’ll have some of that,’ he added as January poured himself some of the coffee Frye had made. Frye settled for a half cup of Seaholly’s contribution to the plague tent. After the day he’d had, he said, he needed a drink, and January couldn’t argue with him there.
‘I have found the monster.’ For an instant, January saw in his mind the image of the doomed Baron Frankenstein, chasing the creature he had made across the Arctic ice into the darkness of eternity. He was from Ingolstadt, too.
‘Franz Bodenschatz is, obviously, Frank Boden.’ Hannibal angled the faded letter toward the low orange light of the flames. ‘He describes Fort Ivy, and the enmity between the AFC and its rivals, pretty accurately. He calls Tom Shaw a dullard and Johnny a schwammerl – a simpleton – and describes how he, Bodenschatz, came up there from New Orleans, through St Louis. I assume this is the reason his father had the letter with him—’
‘His father?’
‘The letter starts out: Honored Father. At one point he says—’ Hannibal turned the creased, discolored sheets ninety degrees; obviously there was little paper available at Fort Ivy, and what there was, January guessed, had begun its life as the flyleaves of Franz Bodenschatz’s books. ‘Thank you for the news of Katerina. I am sorry that even after your efforts, she seems incapable of understanding why I do as I must. What is wrong with these women? How can her heart be so hardened as to forget what Escher did? I fear I misjudged her, seeing in her facile pity for – something-or-other, some kind of bird, I think – and kittens the illusion of true capacity of the heart. When I have returned from America – when I have destroyed the Thing which martyred our Beautiful One – I will naturally pursue the honorable course and return to her. Yet how can True Love exist, knowing as I do now the shallowness of her selfish heart?’
He folded the letter. ‘And how’s Katerina Bodenschatz going to have True Love for a husband who runs off to America on a mission of vengeance, leaving her with two children, one of them a babe in arms at the time of Franz’s departure, which as of April of 1834 had been – he mentions it somewhere in here – nearly seven years previously?’
‘The Thing which martyred our Beautiful One.’ From his pocket January took the locket, and he opened it in the firelight. The childish face of the girl within smiled out at them, and a bead of pine resin, popping in the fire, threw up a trail of yellow sparks and gave the illusion for a moment that she was about to speak. ‘Escher, I presume.’
Hannibal unfolded the other sheet. ‘Honored Father,’ he read. ‘All stands now in readiness. We have found an ally at last, whose heart bleeds as ours does, with wounds no balm can heal; an ally unshaken in the righteousness of our cause.’
‘Or who says he is, anyway.’ January spooned stew on to the tin plates that had come along with it: cornmeal, grouse, an assortment of Mexican spices. ‘A man on a mission of revenge is one of the easiest to enlist to whatever cause you please, because he isn’t thinking straight.’
‘Hepplewhite seems to have convinced Franz, at all events,’ murmured Hannibal. ‘He can bring us unseen into the camp where Escher will be, and from there the trap will be easy to lay. No need even for bait, for the man’s own disgusting habits will cause him to throw himself upon the trap spring, like the beaver who follow the stink of one another’s – I’m not sure of the word here, but you know what they bait beaver traps with – to their watery ruin . . . Nice turn of phrase there, isn’t it?’
He rubbed his eyes – it was now, January calculated, well past two in the morning, and the fiddler had been deciphering faded handwriting by firelight since just after dark.
‘What’s the date on this one?’
‘This past September. Sa–sa, sa–sa, advice about having the garden and greenhouses looked to, instructions for the trip from Ingolstadt to Hamburg – evidently Papa doesn’t get about much – and thence to New York on the Charlotte, to get a steam packet to New Orleans. Who to see in Independence – he’s apparently coming the same way we did – which trader will get him to Fort Laramie, and a list of things he needs to bring. The journey is a difficult one, he says – there’s the understatement of the year! – good boots, medical kit, tea, coffee, trade goods from St Louis in case the train he’s traveling with runs into the Pawnee . . . “In case,” ha! Here we are.’
He turned over the last page. ‘In exchange for this, Hepplewhite will conceal us and our effects, and see to our safe return from the frontier. I hesitated to make this bargain with him, and yet, what sort of men are these, that we need to concern ourselves with their fates? I have been among them for two years now and can attest that they are brutes, little better than Escher himself. They have long since surrendered their humanity to drink, violence and the shallow pleasures of copulation . . . Clearly a man who has never properly copulated. The whole congregation of them, did you pass their souls through a hundred distillations and the finest filters you possess, would not yield sufficient paste to polish one of our precious Mina’s little shoe-buckles. The world will be cleaner for their absence.’
Hannibal raised his eyes from the letter, a whole ladder of parallel wrinkles repeating the lift of his brows. Only the sound of the river, gurgling over its stones, broke the silence of the night, drink, violence and the shallow pleasures of copulation at Seaholly’s having given way at last to the peace of the mountains, the stillness that had existed since the great ranges were formed.
‘He thinks he’s some punkins, don’t he?’ Frye wrapped his arms around his knees. ‘Brutes and beasts, are we? Waugh! Bet he still puts his pants on one leg at a time. Is Mina the little gal whose picture’s in the locket?’
‘I think so,’ said January softly.
‘And she’d be this feller Boden’s sister? If he’s callin’ her “our Mina” an’ his poor old Dad’s the one that’s carryin’ her picture? Sounds like this Escher he talks of killed her . . . You said the old man was in mournin’. That’s a dirty shame.’
‘It sounds like it,’ agreed Hannibal. ‘And it also sounds like Franz has made a deal with Hepplewhite, whoever he is, to kill most – if not all – of the people here at the rendezvous, if this Escher is among them.’
‘Kin he do that?’ Frye looked out of the shelter, at the darkness beyond the fire. All the way up the trail, the camp-setters – and Shaw – had warned them never to get too close to a fire, lest the gold light make of them a target
for lurking Indians. ‘We got some tough hombres here . . .’
‘And two of the toughest,’ pointed out January, ‘went out just after dark looking for Shaw, who I’d back against almost anyone in camp – and none of the three of them have returned.’
Gil Wallach had taken Morning Star’s canoe that had brought himself, Pia and Hannibal to the island; it made January deeply uneasy to see the fiddler wade out into the river, his clothes in a bundle on his head. Completely aside from the cold of the snow-melt river, travel in the wilderness had made January aware of just how swiftly the water could rise from a thunderstorm on the mountains miles away. Nor had he forgotten the ambush on the night of the banquet.
‘I’ll pass like a frightened rabbit through the bottomland without even pausing to dress,’ Hannibal had reassured him, ‘and scamper down the trail in front of the AFC camp. I assure you I scream very, very loudly when set upon. Someone will have to notice.’
January kept to himself the reflection that any ambushers might well originate from the AFC camp, and took comfort – as he watched his friend reach the shore and vanish into the black shadows of the bottomlands – in the thought that the targets of the earlier assault had probably been himself and Shaw. Hannibal was fairly worthless to anyone, though the thought of vengeful Sioux braves lining up for the privilege of assassinating him to win the hand of Morning Star kept him smiling all the way back to the shelter.
All any Sioux brave had to do to win Morning Star’s hand was lay in a stock of trade-beads and wait ’til the end of the rendezvous.
Lying in his blankets a little distance from the dying fire, January listened to the yipping of the coyotes, the mutter of the river around the island’s flanks, as the images of Shaw, and Clarke and the crumpled, wolf-eaten bodies in Dry Grass Coulee merged into the image of Victor Frankenstein, wrapped in furs, running across the towering bergs of Arctic ice in pursuit of the thing he had created, the monster that owed him its very existence.
The Shirt On His Back Page 17