The Last Crossing, page 19
“You figure him to whip me, don’t you, Aloysius?” he asks. Custis has read my face. If the Captain were trained by a disciple of Daniel Mendoza, Custis’s prospects ain’t good. But I hold my peace. You don’t tell a man he’s going to take a beating just before he sets foot in the ring, it disheartens him. “You’ll do fine – if you catch hold of him,” I say.
“Well, I been whipped before,” Custis sighs gloomily.
The Captain’s eager to start, flinging his arms impatient back and forth across his chest. “Is your man ready, Mr. Dooley? Or does he care to reconsider and make an apology?”
“Well?” I ask Custis. “I’d think about saying I were sorry. No harm in it.”
Custis clenches his teeth, that’s his answer. I throw my jacket to the ground. “Scratch,” I say, pointing to it. “Gentlemen, one foot to the coat and bear up.” Charles holds a pocket watch open, Lucy Stoveall huddles beside him. Grunewald and Barker lean forward and peer. Ayto shouts, “Slash him, Captain!”
I signal to Charles. “First round!” he cries, and I hurry to Custis’s corner.
It’s bad. Gaunt is quick and light on his feet as a waterwalker bug. He raps Custis’s face like a door, short, sharp jabs, and retreats. He been taught well, lets Custis come to him and catches him coming, then dances aside, and smacks him on the kidneys when he blunders by.
“Stand ground!” I shout to Custis. “Don’t let him draw you!” Custis takes heed, plants himself. The Captain circles him, cocking his eye at the red splotches he’s painted on Custis’s face. Custis snatches for a handful of hair, but comes up empty.
Ayto hoots and laughs. Grunewald and Barker join in. Gaunt bores away, the smack of his fists on Custis’s face is like a butcher slapping steaks on a counter. He drops Custis straight to the dirt and stands astride him.
“Give him room, Gaunt! Back to your damn corner! End of round!” I shout.
Custis’s sitting dazed on the ground, a bad cut over his right eye streaming blood. The Captain points. “First claret,” he says with a laugh, and saunters back to his corner. Ayto claps his back and congratulates him. I heave Custis to his feet. He’s groggy, pouring blood. I pinch the cut as tight as I can. “Listen to me, the next time he shoots a facer at you, hit him with your wrist bone on the inside of his arm, just above the elbow. Like this.” I show him how to chop Gaunt. “You might be able to break his arm and end this thing.”
Custis ain’t paying me no mind. He’s staring at Lucy Stoveall and she’s staring back. The flowers she picked lie in a bright heap at her feet. Custis’s right eye’s juicy and puffy, already squeezing shut, but I reckon he owns a even more tender spot. Straw don’t like to be shamed, lose his dignity, and anybody can read Lucy Stoveall’s thoughts from the look on her face. She’s thinking, Why, you poor old stubborn fool.
“Next time the Captain pastes you, go down and stay down. Don’t come to scratch.”
“No,” he says, so quiet I can scarce hear him.
Charles Gaunt calls out, “Second round!” He don’t look happy saying it.
“Go down and stay down,” I remind Custis.
This time, the Captain toys with Custis a good five minutes, playing all the tricks, drumming Custis’s ribs to make him tuck his arms, then up to his face, twisting punches so as to split Custis’s skin on the eye sockets. He slashes him like he would with a razor, mashes his viz to a swimming, bloody bog. Then the Englishman steps back, his work pure pleasure to him, measuring Custis for the next shot. When it comes, a rattling blow to the head with his hip behind it, Custis’s legs fold. Down he sinks, slow and dreamy to his knees, arms sagged at his sides. I got to lead him, half-blind, off the field. “We’re throwing in the towel,” I say. “Enough’s enough.”
Custis sucks wind like a rotten-lunged consumptive, can’t catch his breath. Lucy calls out to me, waving her arm. “Stop him! Don’t let him go on!” Custis’s head snaps up at the sound of her voice. He wipes his bloody eye with his forearm and lurches up. The Captain’s waiting with his foot on scratch. Charles calls a new round in a faint voice. “We ain’t answering!” I shout, holding Custis by the belt, but he tears himself loose and sways towards the Captain.
They’re face to face, fists milling when Custis rushes the Captain surprising sudden, snatches hold of the Englishman’s windpipe. With the Captain caught fast in his fist, Custis’s legs churn, he leans all his weight behind his stiff arm and ploughs him backwards. Hurly-burly he drives the Captain, faster and faster, until the Captain smacks into one of the Conestogas so punishing hard crates crash and the wagon rocks on its wheels.
The charge has near done Custis in. He’s just laying there against the Captain, gulping air, dead weight pressing the Englishman to the wagon box, fingers still knotted on his throat. The Captain’s face is one big mulberry birthmark, stringy veins popping out on his forehead. He plucks at Custis’s fingers, trying to pry his hand off.
Custis raises his head from the Englishman’s breastbone and clubs him on the temple with his fist. Once, twice, three, four times.
Someone hollers, “Foul! Foul!” and out the corner of my eye, I see Ayto rushing up behind Custis, a stick of firewood in his hand. He lays into the back of Custis’s legs with it like he was chopping a tree. Down Custis goes.
I run for Ayto, but Grunewald and Barker come between us. They’re slung all over me, dragging me back. Ayto’s still bellowing, “A foul! He fouled the Captain! Everybody saw!”
“Hold and hit is fair! London Rules! You cowardly, backstabbing son of a bitch!” I holler.
The Captain is doubled up hacking, hand to his windpipe. I look about for Custis and spot him on his hands and knees, crawling towards my jacket on the ground.
Custis Straw heading for scratch.
Maybe because I’ve gone so still, eyes following him, they all turn and look. Custis is raising himself upright, bit by bit, gingerly. He wobbles, but he stands.
“Scratch,” he says.
Nobody stirs. Not Ayto, not Grunewald, not Charles, not Lucy. Barker’s still got his arms wrapped about me. The Captain lifts his head slowly, hand pressed to his throat.
“Scratch!” Custis repeats. Good and loud.
But Lucy Stoveall’s louder. “Give it up, Mr. Straw!”
Barker looses his grip on me. The Captain takes his hand from his throat and starts to walk forward, cold and deliberate. Perfidious Albion, my Da used to call England.
I shout a warning. “Custis!” But the Captain is already on him swift and savage, crumples him with a hail of blows.
Then Lucy Stoveall is there between them, shrieking at the Englishman, “Are you blind! Step back! He’s had enough!” Custis fumbles up against her skirts and buries his face in them like he’s a child hiding from some terrible sight. Custis clings to her legs because there’s nothing else to cling to. “This is done! This is finished!” she screams.
“No,” Custis mumbles. “Scratch.”
“Mr. Straw, you’re finished.”
He lifts his bloody face up to her. “I’m not finished.”
I sail my hat into the ring. It lands with a crow hop. “The towel!” I shout. “We throw in the towel!”
Custis jerks away from Lucy, walks to my hat on his knees, flings it back at me. “Scratch,” he says.
He puts one hand on the ground to steady himself, tries to lift himself. He can’t. I run to him. “Aloysius?” he asks.
I bend down to him. “Yes, Custis, it’s Aloysius.”
He paws at my shoulder. “I can’t see you too well.”
I lift him to his feet, sling his arm over my shoulder. He’s walking peculiar, stepping high, like he fears a stalk of grass could trip him. “That was good of Lucy Stoveall. What she done. Taking my part,” he says, and faints dead away.
16
Jerry Potts forges into the night with fierce, hot determination. Ayto has shamed him, kicked him like a pot-licking dog. He must get far away from the sight of Ayto’s fat face so it doesn’t badger him into sending the man to smile up at a coffin lid.
Killing an American would bring him before a white judge and he wants no part of that. A year ago, two Blackfoot were murdered in Fort Benton and the law looked the other way. But when the Blackfoot took their revenge on Malcolm Clarke in the valley of the Prickly Pear, the army was called out, and Major Baker’s troop of cavalry fell on the village of Heavy Runner on the Marias. A hundred and seventy Blackfoot, most of them women and children, were put to sleep that January morning, smothered in burning teepees, shot and hacked to pieces. It did not matter that Heavy Runner was a friendly, had never harmed a white man. A price must be paid and the price was a hundred and seventy Blackfoot for one white man. Buckets of blood for a cupful.
It is a bad memory, but the worst part of it is Joe Kipps. Kipps, a Blackfoot half-breed like himself, scouting for the whites, leading Major Baker down on his mother’s people, sitting on his horse and never lifting a hand to stop the soldiers while they dyed the snow red with blood.
Is this what a half-breed must do now? Turn his back on one portion of himself? Sell himself to the strongest side? Take white money and sniff a trail for them like a dog? He is finished with that.
What finally made up his mind to leave the English was the Captain’s sudden decision to abandon the route to the whisky posts and make for the Sand Hills. Barker had dropped an innocent remark about the country of the big dunes and the Captain had become all ears, full of questions, on fire to see the Sand Hills. The Captain and his brother had argued over this a long time, but in the end Addington Gaunt had got the last word as he always does. A short excursion of several days. What does it matter? he had said.
So let him find the dwelling place of the dead, the country of skeletons for himself. All the Captain thinks about is the book that Ayto is to write that will make the Englishman famous. Famous for what? Traipsing over a small piece of ground, his wagons stuffed with goods like a sutler’s store. What is the Captain’s journey compared to the one Bull’s Forehead made? Nothing.
Sixty years ago, the Blackfoot, hungry for horses, had gone on a raid far to the south, past the big Salt Lake, deep into unknown lands. They had no one to guide them, nothing to rely on but their wits and courage. Potts can see them travelling by night, crossing the territory of many Indian nations; fighting some, singing and feasting with others. For a year they had suffered much hardship and danger until they reached the place where the Spai’yu, the Dark White Men lived, and where it was rumoured there were many ponies. There in Spai’yu ksah’ku, they hit the Dark White Men hard, ran off many fat horses and mules. They had crossed a thousand miles for Spai’yu horses, and they had travelled back a thousand miles to bring them home. No one would ever write this story in a book, but that did not make it any less true. He and Dawson had seen with their own eyes weapons taken from the bodies of the dead Spai’yu, weapons that the Americans and English had never traded in the north, steel lance heads, a thin-bladed sword that bent in your hands, sprang back with a twang, that had beautiful flowers of gold decorating the blade. Dawson called this long knife a rapier, said it was made from the best steel the white men could forge, a steel called Toledo. He said it proved Bull’s Forehead had reached Mexico.
Bull’s Forehead was an old blind man when he told them this story, but the many strange things he had encountered on his trip were still bright in his mind. The bitter Salt Lake, the Indians who lived like white men in houses made of clay, had impressed him deeply. What amazed Bull’s Forehead most were the caves he had seen high up on cliff faces where, long-ago, Indians lived the life of bank-swallows. Bull’s Forehead had said he did not know if those Indians could fly like birds, but he supposed they must have been able to.
Captain Gaunt could never match the exploits of Bull’s Forehead and the Blackfoot raiders. He is brave, but a fool. He tries to rule everyone with a word. Discipline. But he has no discipline himself. He rides off to hunt whenever it pleases him, even when there is more meat in camp than they can eat. Potts thinks of the Captain’s harsh words to him. How he had said it was proper for Ayto to kick him because he had stolen liquor and got drunk. Yet Ayto himself scarcely draws a sober breath, and he often sneaks the Captain’s bottles from the wagon.
How can the Captain expect to command men when he shows so little dignity, walks on his hands by the fire, boasts of how he will kill a grizzly with his tall English bow? The Englishman does not understand it is only correct to speak this way after the thing is accomplished, when the right to do so has been earned.
The Captain wants to go to the Sand Hills where the ghosts of the Blackfoot live. He has been told that in the Sand Hills he may bump up against a furious, broken people, and find his own death. He laughed at the warning. He is too stupid to understand that when warriors sell their buffalo runners for red eye, when children cry because of empty bellies, when their mothers lie down with traders for a pint of whisky, their shame quickly turns to rage.
And the white scabs disease is back. The young men murmur that the traders spread it by selling infected blankets, some claim an evil old white man covered with sores spits his sickness into every bottle of whisky before it is sold to Indians. Everywhere the young men talk of how the Hairy Faces must be made to pay for the despair, the hunger, the illness they bring to the lodges of the Real People. This is what the Captain is ready to lead his wagons into.
Potts draws his pony to a halt. The port is sour, curdled in his gut; he empties his belly from the saddle, wipes his mouth and lifts his face to the stars. The Milky Way is spread like the white fleece of a mountain goat across the black sky.
Climbing down from his pony, he knows he has not convinced himself to abandon them. He only needs to think of Custis Straw stretched out in that wagon, half-crippled, half-blind, and he knows it is wrong to leave behind the man who did his best to help him, to protect him from Ayto. In all Straw’s years trading with the Indians, no one ever accused him of dishonesty, or false speaking.
To save white men from themselves is the burden Andrew Potts’s blood places on his son. At Sun River, he rescued two prospectors when the Sioux attacked them. Holed up in a ramshackle cabin, the prospectors loading for him because he was the better shot, he had been able to hold the Sioux warriors at bay until night came. Then it fell to him to walk through the Sioux camp wrapped in a blanket to hide himself from the eyes of the enemy, risking his life to steal horses so he and the two white men could escape.
Potts lies down on the ground to rest, reins looped around his wrist. The pony pokes its nose into his sore ribs and gives a snuffle.
He will sleep until A-pi-su’-ahts, the Early Riser, the Morning Star, greets him. When Early Riser looks down, he will ask the Child of Sun to lend him the necessary strength to continue on with the Englishmen.
CHARLES Addington’s rashness and arrogance has brought our enterprise to the brink of disaster. Our guide’s absconding in the dead of night badly rattled Grunewald and Barker. Only his unexpected return late this morning squelched their uneasiness. I am sure if Potts had not reappeared, the teamsters would have insisted on our immediate return to Fort Benton. True to form, Addington seemed completely unaware of their demoralized and anxious state.
When I tried to talk sense to my brother, make him see that to allow Ayto to persecute our scout was, at best, impolitic, he would not grasp my point, would not acknowledge that Potts is essential to our expedition.
“There’s no harm in Mr. Ayto,” was Addington’s response. “I find him amusing.”
“He does not amuse Mr. Potts. Have you not remarked how his face darkens when Ayto refers to him as Mr. Moses and you cackle?”
“I do not cackle and no, I did not remark it. It would be like noting boot polish darken.”
At least Addington accepted my suggestion that Straw recuperate in one of the goods wagons until he is fit to travel to Fort Benton on horseback. Generous in victory the way he never would be in defeat, Addington even instructed Lucy to prepare Straw some beef tea, and contributed a bottle of his own barley water for the recuperation of the invalid. But admit the foolishness of his actions, promise to mend his ways? Most certainly not.
Since the debacle yesterday, Straw has kept to his wagon like Achilles to his tent, the saloon-keeper Dooley playing nursemaid. A while ago, Potts clambered into Straw’s wagon on the heels of my brother’s reprimands for the trouble he’d caused, and has yet to emerge.
So here we sit like the ship becalmed in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Addington has gone to give Mr. Ayto an archery lesson, the teams are not yet hitched, it is almost noon. The day will be frittered away, wasted for naught. Our trip to the Sand Hills, so much an object of controversy between Addington and me yesterday, is no longer a matter of urgency to him. He was deaf to my argument that the barren waste described by Barker could neither harbour Simon nor anyone with news of him. I see now that the issue is not necessarily our destination, but my brother’s need to assert himself, and assert himself he will. We go to the Sand Hills – today, tomorrow, the next day. Who can predict? The only thing that is certain is that we shall depart at his pleasure.
Meanwhile, I stew in this heat, figuratively and literally. At eleven o’clock, when I took the daily reading of temperature for Father’s records, the thermometer already showed eighty-eight degrees. We will loiter about here and at the end of the day have nothing to show for it but sunstroke and bad temper.
If nothing else, I might seize this opportunity to repair the damage Addington has so recklessly wreaked. Now, while all the disaffected are gathered in conclave in Straw’s wagon.
I hear an earnest murmuring from inside the wagon as I prepare to announce myself. “Mr. Straw, it is Charles Gaunt. May I speak with you?”
A silence ensues, followed by an ejaculation difficult to construe as either a yea or a nay. Peering into the dim interior, it is just possible to make them out; Straw propped against a sack, his friend Dooley towering on a keg, Jerry Potts seated cross-legged on the floorboards. They radiate wariness, hostility.
