The Bully of Order

by Brian Hart

  A man in a calico shirt and tin pants came strutting out of one of the shacks with his boots untied and braces hanging. He stopped when he saw Tartan and looked behind him at the doorway, said something. A woman in a dusty black dress stepped out, and the man waved her back. She ignored him and came out and stood beside him. Tartan lifted his arm, and the man did the same.

  “The hell you come from?” the man said. He had a beard and was wearing a broad-brimmed hat with a porcupine-quill band.

  Tartan pointed behind him.

  “You come from the cave?” the woman said.

  “He didn’t come from the cave,” the man said.

  “Where else, then?”

  “What cave?”

  “He’s from town,” the man said. “Look at him.”

  “I followed the river. Found the trail.”

  “You found the trail. Fuckin road is what it is. Trail. I’ll tell you, Dar that filthy Irish son of a bitch Potter and his fuckin parties and bringin folks out here, he’ll be the end of us. We want to see you, we’ll fuckin invite you. Fuckin send a fuckin card.”

  “Who’s Potter?” Tartan asked.

  “Who’n the fuckin slint’re you?”

  Before Tartan could answer, the woman said, “I’ll feed him.”

  “You’d feed the devil.”

  The woman smiled. Her teeth were surprisingly white, and too big for her mouth. “Come with me.”

  Tartan didn’t trust her kindness. She didn’t seem to be used to offering it.

  More men came out of the other shacks, and a few children. The woman in the black dress caught him by the arm and dragged him away from the curious mob and into the darkness of her home.

  The table had three chairs around it, and there were dried flowers in a vase against the wall. An oil lantern was burning over the stove. Some kind of meat was stewing in a cast iron pot. The woman pointed to the table, and Tartan sat down. The woman ladled water from a copper cistern next to the stove and poured it over the meat. The man with the untied boots came inside and sat down at the table.

  “There’s another way to get here, by boat. Why didn’t you take a boat?” the man asked.

  “How do you know I didn’t?”

  “I fuckin don’t, but you didn’t, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. I figured the one we’re after, he’d be on foot.”

  “That’s what yer doin, eh? What’d he do, this one yer huntin?” the man asked.

  “Murdered a man.”

  “Who?”

  “Charlie Boyerton.”

  “With the mill?”

  “The same.”

  “What’re they payin?”

  “Quite a lot.”

  “Interestin figure, that.”

  The woman took down a tin plate and served Tartan and gave him a fork. He took out his own knife and said thank you. The man watched him intently, like it was his dinner he was eating, and maybe it was.

  “You already had yours, Salem,” the woman said.

  “I didn’t say nothin about wantin more.”

  “You were thinkin it. I can see it in your eyes. Why don’t you go do what you were doin before you stopped doin it?”

  “I didn’t have nothin to do. I was just goin to see if Law had started workin on my boat yet.”

  “Whose boat?”

  “Yours.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Didn’t even have my damn boots lashed on.”

  Tartan cut off a piece of the gristly meat on his plate and looked at it for a moment before putting it in his mouth. It was bear.

  “He’s picky,” Salem said. “You see that, Dar? He’s picky.”

  “He ain’t picky. He ain’t sure what it is. I cooked it, and I couldn’t tell you where it come from.”

  “I don’t mind bear,” Tartan said. “Just been a while.”

  “That’s right,” Salem said. “Big damn bear.”

  “You know a man named Bellhouse?”

  “I do.”

  “I work for him.”

  “He’s out here?” the woman said.

  “He is.”

  “Might be a day to keep indoors,” Salem said.

  Tartan chewed. He was hungry, but he didn’t know if he was hungry enough to eat what was on his plate. He cut it into small pieces and worked at it a little at a time.

  The woman slid her chair next to him and sat down, close enough to touch his leg. “You’re the one they call Tartan then, aren’t you? Bellhouse’s big man.”

  “I am.”

  “Salem calls me Dar, short for Darlene.” She smiled, and her eyes went watery in the lantern light. “My husband passed recently.”

  Tartan gnawed at the leathery hunk of bear steak and worried that if he didn’t spit it out or swallow it, he might throw up. His teeth were coated with grease, and his tongue was sticky.

  “Crushed by a widowmaker. Didn’t feel a thing, they tell me. He was an angel.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I thank you.”

  “He got stabbed in the neck by a three-hundred-pound whore for walkin on the bill,” Salem said.

  Dar pretended to be shocked. “We all need stories to remember our loved ones by.”

  “Be better to forget,” Salem said. “The man was a syphilitic turd.”

  “Three months to the day,” Dar said. “Been lonely here come nightfall.” She and Salem sat and watched Tartan finish his food, and then Dar took his plate.

  Salem scooted back in his chair and cleared his throat. “Can you write?”

  “I can.”

  “We got paper, Dar?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t any ink. It all dried up when I wasn’t payin attention.”

  “I got a pencil. Fetch the paper for me.”

  Dar went into a doorway at the rear of the shack. Salem dug around in his jacket and came out with the stob of a carpenter’s pencil. “You can write a letter for me, can’t you? After Dar fed you and all.”

  “I suppose.” Tartan wiped his knife clean on his pant leg and then sharpened the pencil.

  Salem leaned forward and watched him carefully. “Yer good at that.”

  “You’re only as sharp as yer pencil.” Tartan smiled but didn’t look up from his work. “Who’s the letter for?”

  “It’s to my mother. She knows I don’t write em. She’s probably too old and blind now to read em at all. Somebody’ll have to do it for her.”

  Dar came back with a sheaf of paper.

  Salem snatched a sheet from the top and slapped it down in front of Tartan. “Start with ‘Dear Mother.’”

  Tartan did what he was told. Salem sat and pondered for a moment and then began.

  “Your birthday in 1824 suggests that your life has covered the greater part of our century’s history and that your illustrious ancestors were patient factors in shaping its glorious destiny, and call to mind—

  “You get all that?”

  Tartan ignored him until he’d finished. He had fine handwriting and enjoyed showing it off. If you get one thing from childhood you’re proud of and good at, something you enjoy, you’re lucky. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m ready.”

  Salem nodded and went on:

  That there was a war in 1812

  That your father was in that war

  That he wrote some letters to your mother while there

  That I am the happy possesser of one of them

  That day, there were no steamboats, nor postage stamps

  That prior to 1812 the Territory—now Missouri—was controlled by France and Spain

  That in that year Missouri became a Territory of the United States

  That she became a state in 1821—only three years before your time

  That you were born in the grand old state of Virginia

  That the name Virginia was from the maiden Queen Elizabeth

  That Virginia was one of the original 13 states

  That she was the greatest of that memorable constellatio
n

  That when a young lady you migrated with the family to Missouri

  That even to this day the dearest memories to me are of the old settlement along the banks of Elk Fork in Monroe County

  That you are the beloved of eight children now living in several states

  That they are all thinking of you today with a love of childhood

  That now I am also on the Western slope of life

  That I now know what a pleasure it is to be with my children—now scattering—and how I long for word from them when they are away—and I hope you may be remembered by all through card or letter. All sending their love to grandma and wishing her that sweet peace and joy so well merited by a long unselfish life.

  Your affectionate son,

  Louis

  “That it?”

  “Yep.”

  “He don’t have any children that he counts,” Dar said.

  “Lucky, is what that is,” Salem said.

  “You go by Salem but yer Christian name is Louis?” Tartan said.

  “People known me as Salem for as long as people knew me as the other. Not like yer name is really Tartan, either.”

  “No, I was born under a different flag.”

  “You’re probably a Billy or a Samuel,” Dar said. “Or Issac, is it Isaac?”

  Tartan ignored her. “Why’d you want to lie to her in the letter?” Tartan asked.

  “She’s old. She don’t know what I’m doin out here, and she don’t need to.”

  Tartan considered this. “She’d likely prefer the truth.”

  Dar’s friendliness evaporated all at once, and she picked at a scab on her hand and glared at him. “You been fed and you been put to work and now you finished that too. How long you plan to stay?”

  Tartan had the sense he was seeing her for herself, and all the pieces fit: the dress, the big mouth and teeth, the bear meat. “I’ll be goin.”

  “You say you’re part of a posse?”

  “No. The sheriff has his own show. We’re no part of it.”

  “What’s his name who yer huntin?”

  “A boy, Duncan Ellstrom.”

  “How old?”

  “Sixteen or seventeen.”

  “Old enough to hang?”

  “Not for me to say.”

  “They’ll hang him though.”

  “Most likely they will.”

  “Aren’t you gonna ask us if we’ve seen him?”

  “I don’t believe you would’ve asked me to write a letter if you were hidin somethin.”

  “If I was a killer like Bellhouse, I would.”

  “Mind the defamation,” Tartan warned.

  Salem sank in his chair. “None intended.”

  “Who pays the bounty?” Dar said.

  “Boyerton’s son.”

  “How old’s he?”

  “I’d say about the same age as Ellstrom.”

  “Playin men.”

  Salem looked at Dar and then back at Tartan. “Chacartegui has warrants out for half of us up here.”

  “Go back the way you came,” Dar said. “Don’t tell no one you were here.”

  Tartan pushed his chair back and stood. “Thanks for the meal.”

  Outside, the sun was high and glowing in the mist in the trees. Through the forest he could see dozens more houses and outbuildings. Women came out of the big house as he went by. They weren’t pretty. They all looked about the same as Dar, about to cut your eyes out if you didn’t look away or offer to buy them something nice. One was missing a hand. She presented the stump to Tartan and smiled. Children walked behind him on the trail and stepped in his big footprints.

  Dogs

  Kozmin emerged from the dense forest unruffled, as neat and composed as a songbird. Ten feet to his left Duncan stepped over a downed log and stopped, squatted down to survey the small clearing. From where they stood, they couldn’t see Jacob on the other side of his camp, only the mud halo and tarps. All around them hemlocks towered and dripped on the ferns and brush and mostly blocked out the sky. Here and there the ground was trampled and grass torn up, low limbs snapped off. Gathered firewood told the story, piled up like drift next to the shack. Oilcloth tarps hung off either pitch to make a pair of drooping lean-tos. It was a sorry piece of work: string, wire, and rope had been employed, bent and rusty nails pounded into trees, and ax-hewn stakes driven into the mud.

  When they came around, Jacob was seated on a stump, staring into a small, nearly smokeless cabin-style fire—they hadn’t seen smoke or even smelled it—prodding it with a twig. Seeing who it was, he jumped to his feet and nervously flattened his shirt. Kozmin held up his hand to say hello, and Jacob did the same. Finally Duncan showed his palm, low near his hip. They were three versions of the same man, plotted along a line that would stretch from war to war, continental disorder to the first germs of empire.

  “Come and sit,” Jacob said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  Duncan put down his pack and sat on it, took out the pistol, and set it on his lap. His beard was like moss on a skinny tree; he was knobby, shaped like a man-size clothespin.

  “There’s men chasin me,” he said.

  “I see you’re the one that lifted my gun.”

  “Didn’t know it was yours.”

  Kozmin gave Jacob a knowing look. “They won’t find us here,” Kozmin said, sat heavily on a stump. “I’d say they’ll stay in their boats and hope to get lucky.”

  “It’s good to see you,” Jacob said.

  “I won’t be here long.”

  The silence stretched to the coast and shot like a snapped cable out to sea.

  Kozmin opened his bag and extracted a bottle of liquor, uncorked it. “Me? I’m not goin anywhere. I’ve got work to do, and neither one of you’ll do a dance or cartwheel or a thing to help. I know yer types.”

  Father and son warily inspected one another. Duncan leaned over and took the bottle, drank deeply, and had to cough to keep it down. His eyes watered. Kozmin snatched back the bottle. “I didn’t say I wanted that much help. Jacob, any for you?”

  “No.”

  “Sober man.”

  Duncan looked over his shoulder at the sound of the wind.

  “They won’t find you here. They never found me.”

  “I think by their scales I might rank a bit higher than you.”

  “I don’t like what you’re saying.”

  “I’m not sayin she was less important.”

  Kozmin kicked his heel into the dirt. “I bet I’m wrong. They probably will be using dogs. They won’t stay in their boats. Nothin like a manhunt to get men off their fat asses.”

  “The only way in is the way you came, so we can watch, stay right here and watch for them.”

  “Not much for vantage. Won’t see em till they step on us.” Duncan took off his hat and smacked it against his leg and crawled underneath one of the lean-tos and started taking off his boots.

  “Give me those.” Kozmin took his boots. “And the socks.”

  Duncan slid off the wool socks, dripping wet, stained with blood and grease, and Kozmin took them and the boots to the fire and set them down to dry.

  Jacob went into his shack, and when he came out tried to hand over some dry socks and a shirt, neatly folded.

  “I don’t want em. Mine’ll dry.” Duncan hugged his knees and looked out at the forest. The skin was coming off his feet in slabs as thick as bacon, and there was blood oozing from the cracks. Jacob pushed the clothes into his son’s hands and went back to his stump. Kozmin was staring at Duncan’s feet.

  “What?”

  “Put the damn socks on.”

  “You.”

  “My feet are dry.”

  Duncan fought his way into the socks and then held out his hands, behold, to Kozmin.

  “Might as well try the shirt.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “You’ll see.”

  “I’d say you’re right about that.”

  “They’d have to have dogs t
o find you here,” Jacob said.

  “So they’ll use dogs.” Duncan took off his coat and shoved it onto the woodpile, and then took off his wet shirt and put on the dry one.

  Jacob squeezed by and took Duncan’s wet shirt and coat and hung them up on nails under the eave of the shack. The smell of the rain-soaked clouds came up from the dirt and leaked from the bark of the trees like sap.

  As soon as night came on, they had a real fire and hot food. Kozmin told a story, started in the middle but it didn’t matter. Duncan and his father sat and listened like parishioners.

  Tarakanov was aboard the brig Nicolai, commanded by Navigator Bulygin. Six years had passed since he was taken hostage. They were to rendezvous with another Russian ship, the Kadiak, a hundred miles down the coast, before they proceeded on. Navigator Bulygin was accompanied by his wife, Anna Petrovna. The crew was promyshlenniki, seal hunters mostly, along with a few Aleuts, including a woman, Maria. The men were chosen for their skill and fortitude, some by Baranov himself. Tarakanov was invited because he was a great hunter and also because over the years he’d proven himself impervious to Indian attacks and captivity. He’d acquired some mysticism among his comrades. He was better than his elders, and envied. The Nicolai was outfitted with several four-pound cannons, and the hold was filled with bolts of cloth and beads, fake pearls and brass buttons for trading.