‘The girl was a whore,’ was all Bodenschatz would say. ‘You could see it in her eyes. Why all the world weeps over a brat like that and lets the murderer of my beautiful sister go free . . .’
All he had asked for was his books – which he read and reread – and Mina’s gloves, portrait and chemise. These he kept inside his clothing, next to his skin, and turned in smouldering disgust from January’s attempts to draw him into speech.
Through most of the first day, Veinte-y-Cinco cried, on and off, and talked incessantly of her daughter. Again, to January’s surprise, Mick Seaholly proved to be a patient listener – in-between working the bar – and doled out to her the hard comfort that: ‘It ain’t like she’s turnin’ her back on finishing school and engagement to some nice boy from Philadelphia, acushla.’
‘I wanted something better for her,’ the woman whispered, huddled against January’s side in one of the makeshift crib-tents that had been temporarily reset, this one apart from the others. Even the most loutish of the trappers kept their distance.
January met the barkeep’s wide, heaven-blue glance over her head.
‘We all want somethin’ better for other people,’ said Seaholly dispassionately. ‘But they go right on ahead and make their own mistakes, just like we do.’
By the second night, when the searchers returned with word that they hadn’t been able to pick out Blankenship’s tracks from the hundreds in all directions that they were mixed with, Luz Veinte-y-Cinco was able to thank them, and to let her daughter go.
It was four weeks down from the mountains, through the gap in the ranges called the South Pass, and across mile upon mile, day upon day, of arid scrubland to Fort Ivy. All the way, January was oppressed by a vague sense of failure and defeat. ‘What would have given you a sense of success?’ inquired Hannibal, when he spoke of it one night when they both had guard duty. ‘Shooting Bodenschatz from behind a tree? Your success is that you’ll come home.’
‘With another two hundred dollars,’ added January, trying to speak lightly. Trying not to think of what he’d seen daily in his heart: the house on Rue Esplanade closed up when he reached it, the frantic canvassing of neighbors. Seeing in his fears how their eyes would avoid meeting his: shall you tell him or shall I?
Rose . . .
Even on better days, he knew that Hannibal was absolutely right. The two hundred dollars barely mattered.
His success was that he’d come home.
And Rose would be ripe with their unborn child.
Virgin Mary Mother of God, he prayed to the desert stars, let it be so. It had been five months since he’d seen either her or a single line of her handwriting . . . Let it be so.
The desert stars made no reply.
Sitting on guard at the edge of the camp, his rifle in his hand, looking out across the silvery darkness of sagebrush and bunch grass for some break in the patterns of what he knew to be safe – jackrabbits, foxes, prairie dogs, kangaroo rats – he realized he would miss this open silence, this thin, free air. Far off he could still see the white peaks of the Wind River Mountains, glittering in the starlight: the Green River in which he’d almost drowned, the dry coulees where he’d almost starved, where he’d fought for his life against the Omaha and the Crow . . .
He’d miss those, too. No wonder the mountain trappers stayed in the mountains.
It wasn’t only beaver that they sought in those valleys that whispered with the voices of the pines.
Beside the fire, Manitou slept – and dreamed of what? The medieval streets of a German University town? Or the empty world where he was safe from the danger that the thunder spirit in him would awake?
By daylight the big trapper kept close to the train, as if to reassure – or remind – Bodenschatz that he, too, was going back to the United States to face justice for what he had done. But as they moved east and the endless pale-yellow miles stretched on, he became more and more uneasy. ‘We should be seein’ Indians by this time,’ he said one evening, as the engagés were setting camp. ‘This’s the time of their Fall hunt. Plain should be crawlin’ with ’em. I ain’t even seen sign, have you?’
Both Shaw and Goodpastor shook their heads.
Shaw was quieter also as they put the miles behind them. He took his turn at scouting, but January could tell it bothered him to let Bodenschatz out of his sight, and most nights he would stay awake, watching him. Having risked his brother’s anger for the sake of doing justice, January guessed, he lived with the dread that something would go wrong and leave him bereft of both justice and revenge. And if that happened – as he had once said to Manitou – he stood to lose not one brother, but two: all the family that remained to him in the world.
For his part, the prisoner had little to say for himself, and what little he did was mostly sarcasm: ‘If to destroy me, I have made that beast take himself back to justice,’ he remarked on one occasion, ‘then I have accomplished my aim.’ When he wasn’t reading – and he scorned Hannibal’s small volume of Shakespeare’s comedies – he watched Manitou with glittering eyes. ‘I will confess whatever you ask me to,’ he said on another evening to Goodpastor. ‘Just so that you bring him also to the scaffold and let me tell in open court the things that man has done.’
But January thought that as they went east, Shaw was bracing himself.
Tom Shaw met them at the gate of Fort Ivy, his narrow face dark with shock, anger and disbelief as he saw who rode in their train. ‘What the hell you think you’re doin’, bringin’ that piece of pig snot back with you?’ he demanded, when Shaw dismounted and helped Bodenschatz from the saddle. He turned and struck Shaw open-handed across the face. ‘Where the hell you think you are, brother? New Orleans? Goddam Philadelphia? You think any jury back in the States is gonna convict a man for shootin’ another way the hell and gone out past the frontier?’
‘I do, yes,’ replied Shaw in his mild voice. ‘I said I’d bring him to justice—’
‘There ain’t gonna be no justice for what he done to Johnny!’ retorted Tom. ‘You think twelve “good citizens” is gonna care about somethin’ that happened out here? Like God Himself could even find twelve good men in Independence—’
‘Been awhile since you been to Independence, sir,’ Goodpastor broke in. ‘It’s settled some, and there’s enough men there who’ll convict a man, if not of killin’ your brother, then of killin’ his own father – which is what we got plenty of evidence for, an’ affidavits, too. Not to speak of plottin’ with the savages to murder every man in the rendezvous. Believe me, he’ll hang.’
‘You stay outta this.’ Tom Shaw barely glanced at the older man. ‘I don’t give spit in a whirlwind about what-all else he done. This’s blood. An’ we was brought up – I was brought up – that blood wins out, over what twelve “good citizens” or the whole damn Constitution of the United States might say . . . or might not. I was brought up not to take chances with your blood.’
He took the pistol from his belt, and Shaw stepped between its barrel and Bodenschatz. Tom reached to thrust him out of the way, and Shaw, his face a careful blank, thrust back. ‘We had enough murder here,’ he said. ‘Seven white men an’ a woman, killed ’cause of another man’s revenge, not to speak of a score of Indians who got dragged into it just through bein’ there. It needs to stop.’
‘No, brother,’ said Tom quietly and lowered the pistol to his side. ‘We’s one death short.’
They camped outside Fort Ivy for two nights. Shaw and January divided their time in guarding Bodenschatz while Goodpastor and Hannibal negotiated for supplies. The engagés who’d traveled to the rendezvous with them were clearly troubled by the whole affair: ‘En effet,’ said Clopard to Shaw, when he helped Manitou carry out sacks of flour and cornmeal to be loaded on to the mules, ‘what does it matter, eh? It isn’t like anybody will know, or come after you.’
‘Nope,’ agreed Shaw, and he shifted his rifle across his knees. ‘It ain’t.’
Tom Shaw never crossed the twenty yards
of open ground that lay between the fort’s gates and the camp, or as far as January could tell, even came as far as the gate. Gil Wallach spoke to each of the brothers once, about settling their affairs with one another: ‘You think how long it is, from New Orleans out to here, Abe. You think of all that happens out here. You really want to risk never seein’ your brother again, for the sake of justice to a stranger who so far as I can tell is pretty much a murderin’ weasel?’
Shaw leaned his head back against the thin trunk of the lodgepole pine by which he sat – one of the small clump of trees near the fort, where in other years the local Indians would have been camped by this time – and repeated: ‘For the sake of justice. I have lived where there’s no justice, Gil.’ For a time he sat in silence, then added, ‘An’ I have lived where I had no brother. I’ll think on what you say.’
But January guessed he wouldn’t.
It was from Wallach, too, that January learned why they’d seen no hunting parties as they’d crossed the high plains back to the Fort: ‘There’s smallpox in the tribes, all up and down the river. It started among the Mandans at Fort Clark – there was a couple cases in the deck passengers on a steamboat that come through. Now there’s ten, twenty a day dyin’. Blackfeet, Minnetarees, Arikara, Assiniboin . . . they’ve all got it now. Whole villages wiped out, wolves an’ rats eatin’ the dead among the lodges.’
‘Looks like our friend Iron Heart was a little ahead on his revenge,’ said Manitou quietly.
Wallach bristled like a miffed porcupine. ‘Well, it wasn’t us that did it. Not the folks at the rendezvous, I mean, nor the trappers—’
‘No,’ sighed Manitou. ‘It never is. Didn’t mean to say it was.’ He turned and walked away from the camp then, out on to the prairie: silent, open grassland that would never thereafter be the same. The tribes were dying. There weren’t even buffalo to be seen. Only dry wind, and heat.
Bodenschatz called out angrily to January, ‘You gonna let him just run off like that? You gonna let him get away, just ’cause he’s a friend?’
‘Oh, shut up,’ said January, weary to his back teeth of vengeance and anger, hate and death. ‘He isn’t going anywhere.’ He wondered if Morning Star and her family were still alive, or Silent Wolf and his Blackfeet, or Walks Before Sunrise . . .
And knew that there was not the slightest likelihood that he would ever find out.
Manitou was silent when the train moved out the next morning, on the worn trail down toward the distant Platte. The beaten trace snaked like a blonde ribbon, visible for miles in the brown distance and rutted now with the wheels of the big immigrant wagons. January was conscious that among the debris of the trading caravans along the ruts, there were objects that could only have been thrown out by those seeking Oregon land. A broken spinning-wheel, like the echoes of a woman’s voice. A small trunk of books. Anything to lighten the load as the dry air shrank the wood of axles never designed for these high plains and the ox teams broke their sinews at labor . . .
‘More of ’em this year,’ remarked Goodpastor. ‘Fleein’ the bank crash, probably. Headin’ for free land in Oregon.’
‘And they took their journey from Elim,’ quoted Hannibal, ‘and all the congregation of the children of Israel came unto the wilderness . . . where God obligingly slaughtered everyone they met for them.’ It was the closest he came, in all that journey, to speaking of Morning Star.
‘That’s gonna sit well with the British.’ Shaw edged his horse over beside the Indian Agent’s, his pale eyes in their worn dark circles never leaving the sharply rolling land, the dry watercourses and the empty skylines. ‘Get enough settlers in that territory, we ain’t gonna need the American Fur Company startin’ schemes with the Crow to get us into another war with England. Settlers’ll do it every time.’
‘An’ now their king’s dead –’ this news had also been waiting for them at Fort Ivy – ‘I doubt that little niece of his – what’s her name?’
‘Victoria.’
‘I doubt that little gal’s gonna go startin’ any wars over fur.’ Goodpastor shook his head. ‘Independence’ll be crawlin’ with ’em.’
‘Good.’ On his led horse, his hands still tied to the saddle tree, Bodenschatz turned cold eyes on Manitou. ‘That way it will need no testimony of mine to prove that the judgement against him in Germany was unjust, a fraud by the rich. You had best watch him, when he gets among civilized men. You who keep me bound, who keep watch on me with a rifle, as if I were some kind of dangerous criminal – you will see your mistake. He is the one who—’
The crack of the rifle seemed very small in the dry hugeness of the scrubland; like a firecracker, January thought, even as the prisoner’s body arched backward with the impact, mouth popping open, eyes staring in shock at the sky. Shaw wheeled his horse at once, scanning the horizon for dust while January flung himself from his saddle, caught Bodenschatz as he sagged sideways. The prisoner’s wrists were still tied to the saddle, and by the time January had got them cut free Bodenschatz was dead. He heard Shaw say: ‘That draw we passed—’
Hooves thundered away. An engagé brought a blanket. January laid Bodenschatz on it and opened his shirt. The bullet had struck him just behind the right armpit and gone through both lungs and the heart. The worn batiste chemise, the pink kid gloves, folded small into a packet beneath his shirt, against his skin, were soaked through with blood.
They came back to the camp at fall of night, having found no tracks. January could have told them they wouldn’t. He guessed, from the angle of entry of the bullet, that in fact the killer had been elsewhere than the cover they’d suspected. ‘Don’t matter,’ said Shaw quietly, when he helped January dig the trail-side grave. ‘I know who done it.’
‘You want to go back for him?’ asked Manitou. Stripped for the work, his chest and arms showed in the firelight the horrific mazes of scars left by repeated torture, tracks of a pain that was his only salvation.
‘An’ do what?’ Shaw’s face was covered with dust, the straggly beard he’d grown on the trail thick with it, his eyes strange and light in the dark grime, like a bobcat’s, except for the pain in them. ‘Arrest him by an authority I ain’t got, for a murder I can’t prove, that no jury in the State of Missouri’s gonna convict him of? They’s only so much I can do,’ he said, driving his shovel to break the hard knots of interlaced grass roots, ‘an’ I done it. Now let’s put this sorry bastard to bed an’ go home.’
Manitou Wildman rode with them for three more days, then disappeared one night, leaving not even tracks behind. January guessed he’d go back to seek out his brothers the Blackfeet, if any of them had survived the epidemic.
‘Did it ever occur to you,’ January asked Shaw on the following night, ‘that it might have been Franz who killed Mina, and not Manitou at all?’ He’d left the chemise and gloves inside Bodenschatz’s shirt when they’d laid him in his shallow grave. The locket as well, which they’d offered to Manitou and which he had refused to touch. ‘He loved his sister – passionately, it sounds like. Jealous men have done worse. And guilty men have gone to greater lengths, to absolve themselves of what they feel is another’s fault.’
‘That crossed my mind from the first.’ Shaw stirred at the fire with a stick. January had shot a buffalo that afternoon: probably the last time he would do so, he guessed, before they reached Independence. They’d begun to find the droppings of corn-fed horses, and to see the signs of white hunters, with their large fires and boot prints in the earth.
His journal to Rose – which he’d kept every evening of the return journey – was overflowing with these observations, and with the remembrances of the men who’d taught him. Please, Mother of God, let me put it into her living hand . . .
‘They’s no way of provin’ it,’ Shaw went on. ‘An’ no point doin’ so. We can only know so much, Maestro. Then we got to let it go. Like that old play Manitou spoke of: it’s why we got to get twelve strangers to sit down an’ say, “This is how we settle it: it’s done
.” It’s got to be taken out of our hands. If it ain’t, it eats us alive.’
TWENTY-NINE
They reached New Orleans on the eighth of October, on a low river, well ahead of the winter rise. They traveled deck-passage from Independence, Shaw and Hannibal sleeping forward among the white ruffians and river rats surrounded by an assorted cargo of St Louis furs, travelers’ trunks and sacks of corn from the Missouri farms. January bedded down among the few slaves and such free blacks as were on the river at that time of the year, on the narrow stern-deck near the paddle wheel. Every few hours he would wake and warily touch the money belt strapped around his waist beneath his clothes: Gil Wallach’s payment of the final two hundred dollars in silver, which would be, January guessed, the salvation not only of himself and Rose, but also of his sister Olympe’s family too. As the Deborah T. began to pass familiar landmarks – the sharp bend at Bonnet Carré Point, the marshy pastures above the hamlet of Kennerville, the old oak on the levee at Twelve-Mile Point – January’s frantic restlessness redoubled, the longing to hold Rose in his arms again battered by the conviction that he would return to find Rose dead of summer fever – of the smallpox – of the cholera. Three letters from her had waited for him at General Delivery in Independence, the most recent dated mid-August: she had said that there was fever in the city.
‘Benjamin, there’s always fever in the city in August,’ Hannibal pointed out.
January took little comfort in the words.
Shaw said nothing, his elbows on the rail, his eyes on the low white American houses of Carrollton and the dark-green fields of sugar cane just visible beyond the levee. He had been nearly as silent on the return journey as he had been outbound, though his quiet had a different quality to it: weariness beyond speech. But as they’d come into the sticky green monotony of sugar country, the endless fields of cane readying for the harvest, the matte walls of cypress bearded with Spanish moss,he had begun to speak again about the city that had been his home for eight years: were the French creoles and the Americans blaming one another for the panic? (Probably). Had any of its gambling parlors been put out of business by the bank crash? (I wouldn’t bet on it, January had replied). The gluey heat of the summer still smothered the lowlands, and as the small sternwheeler came in sight of the pastel houses of the French town, the gray gravely slope below the levee where other small steamboats were pulled up at the wharves, January found himself remembering that before leaving the town in April, Shaw had given up his boarding-house room on Girod Street, and so had nowhere to go when he stepped ashore.
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