The Last Crossing, page 20
“May I?” I repeat.
“Hell, why not,” Straw finally answers.
I climb up. The heat inside the wagon is terrific, singes my nostrils with the odour of scorched canvas and unwashed men. In an instant, I find my shirt soaked in perspiration.
“I have come to tender an apology for what transpired yesterday.” They wait alertly, but show no eagerness to accept the olive branch. “Mr. Ayto’s behaviour was inexcusable, as was my brother’s. I ask you to pardon them.”
Straw gingerly shifts his bulk. His battered, swollen features are the face of a monster. His eyes peer inscrutably at me through livid fissures; his lips resemble sausages. “Well, maybe that ought to come from your brother and his friend Ayto,” is his blunt, just comment.
“I have my own apologies to make. I should have prevented it.”
“No stopping it,” Straw says simply. “It had a mind of its own.”
“Are you comfortable, Mr. Straw? Is there anything I can do for you?”
Straw’s face does not change; perhaps his visage is incapable of alteration in its present state. “You can ask Mrs. Stoveall to pay me a visit.”
A ticklish topic in light of the fact Lucy refused to bring Straw his beef tea yesterday. She confessed to me that she suspects Straw pursued our entourage with the aim of persuading her to return to Fort Benton. There was a suggestion that he has amorous designs she does not wish to encourage. “I shall pass on your request,” is all I can say.
“Something in your voice tells me you reckon she won’t.”
“I cannot speak for Mrs. Stoveall.”
“Are you sure? From what I saw yesterday it looked to me like you two have become mighty good friends.”
I do not care for his insinuating tone. “Perhaps Mrs. Stoveall finds your attentions unwelcome.”
“What about your attentions, Mr. Gaunt? Is she welcoming them?”
“We was just saying that maybe you ought to take another crack at persuading your brother not to go to the Sand Hills,” Dooley says loudly and dramatically, trying to steer Straw off this indelicate course.
Straw refuses to yield the floor. “Tell me, Mr. Gaunt, has Mrs. Stoveall gone sweet on you?”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Custis,” Dooley remonstrates him.
“I do not think my brother can be dissuaded from going to the Sand Hills. Barker’s description of them has excited his interest.” I pause. “More to the point, I think it unwise to press him on the matter.”
“Bad place,” Potts suddenly says. This is the first time I have heard the taciturn half-breed ever condescend to volunteer information. His gaze wanders about the wagon. “Sta-au’. Plenty of Sta-au’ there,” he mutters.
“I do not understand what you are saying, Mr. Potts. What does this word mean?”
“Blackfoot for ghosts or skeletons,” Straw says. “The Sand Hills is the land of the dead. The home of ghosts.”
I noted immediately Potts’s reluctance to speak of the Sand Hills. This naturally excited my interest and, with much coaxing, I cajoled him into divulging something more about it. Despite the heat and stifling atmosphere, listening to him recount his weird tale in awkward English, I was brought suddenly back to my childhood, to those dreary, winter nights when Simon and I would gather in the kitchen to listen to the servants, simple country girls, talk of spirits. They told of a strange man who had once come to the door of a poor cottage to beg bread, and was sent away with imprecations. And of how when the bread box was opened the next morning, a huge rat leapt upon the hand of the householder and bit him to the bone, leading him into a slow and painful decline, capped with an excruciating death. Or Mrs. Bullfinch’s report of the corpse of a suicide seen wandering about the countryside seeking holy ground in which it could lay itself down. Or the strange knocking in the headboard of Meredith Wilson’s bed which had announced the impending death of her betrothed.
While Simon took these accounts as gospel, I tried to debunk them. Yet my childish attempts to dismiss them only succeeded in inducing in me a profound terror. It was as if by trying to reason them away, I lent them greater life, while Simon, by accepting the existence of unseen presences, made them his friends. Night after night, I trembled and shivered under the counterpane, stubbornly refusing to confess that I was troubled by thoughts of ghosts. And Simon would cross the floor of our room, curl up in my bed to thaw my icy fear with the warmth of his body.
Now, hours after Potts concluded his story, it still weighs upon me. I felt compelled to record it in my journal, as a way perhaps of beckoning Simon’s spirit. Hopeful that by dwelling on a ghost story I would reawaken my brother’s comforting presence. What I wrote was Potts’s story, but in my own words, so as to draw Simon nearer to me.
Long ago, there was a man and a wife. In time she bore him a son. The husband loved his mate very much but she grew ill of a wasting sickness and died. Grief-stricken, the husband would put his little boy on his back, wander the lonely hills, both of them wailing aloud, day after day. Finally, the man could bear his loneliness no more so he left bis son with the boy’s grandmother, and set off to the Sand Hills to bring his wife back from the dead.
He walked and walked until he met an old crone living in a tiny lodge scarcely bigger than an ant hill, and heart-sick and weary he told her of his troubles. The old woman pitied his plight and made him the present of a magic bundle to help him in his struggle to recover his wife. That night when the man went to sleep he dreamed the old hag had gone to the Sand Hills and returned with one of his dead relatives to guide him to the Camp of the Dead.
When he awoke the man learned his dream was true and that a long-dead uncle had come to take him where he wished to go. But the old woman would not let him look on his uncle, she told him that on this trip he must keep his eyes tightly shut, and let the ghost lead him. The man did as he was told and walked for days until the ghost told him he could at last open his eyes. When he did, he shivered in terror because all about him was a great crowd of ghosts, moaning and gibbering, a gruesome sight which turned his blood cold. They rattled their bones and plucked their ribs to make frightening, eerie music, but no matter what they did, they could not make him run away.
At last the ghosts despaired of driving him off and began to question him, asking why a Person, a living being, would willingly make a journey to the Sand Hills, a place from which no one ever escaped. The man said he had come for his wife and was determined to return her to the land of the living and the son who so dearly loved her.
Hearing this, one of the skeletons strode through the Camp of the Dead, calling to all the man’s dead relatives to come to his lodge for a feast to welcome one of their descendants to his new shadowy home. This tricked the man’s relatives, but when they came near the lodge they could smell the odour of a living being, and were afraid to go in. They sniffed the lodge skins and cried out, “There is a Person here! I smell a Person!” and were much alarmed. But the owner of the lodge burned sweet pine to cover the smell of life, and at last the skeletons reluctantly entered, one by one.
When they were all finally gathered, their host told them that the man’s great daring must be rewarded. The ghosts were sorry for the man’s broken heart and promised to do what they could. They brought his wife to him, but she was not as she had been, she was a skeleton, and horrible to look at with her empty eye sockets and protruding ribs. His father-in-law offered to lead them back to the living, but he said the man must do as he had done before, walk four days with his eyes closed. If he lost his nerve and opened his eyes, he would die, and become a skeleton like the rest of them.
For four days the man walked like a blind man, and listened to the voice of his father-in-law instructing him. He was taught that before he and his wife could return to the world of Persons, it was necessary to wash themselves thoroughly. There was something about the Sand Hills that was very difficult to remove, he said, and the smallest spot of dust must be washed off, or they would die. Last of all, his father-in-law told him he must never strike his wife. If he did, she would instantly turn into a skeleton and go to the Sand Hills, lost for ever and ever.
Shortly after this, the father-in-law left his daughter and son-in-law. The wife told her husband it was time to open his eyes. When he did, he recognized his wife had once again become a Person, but he still could not embrace her. This was because he had lost some part of himself in the Sand Hills and was not a complete living being.
In his upset, he looked around and spied the tiny lodge of the old hag who had given him his sacred bundle. Suddenly she was there, demanding her powerful magic bundle back. Gratefully, he returned it to her, and when he did, he became fully a Person again, able to touch and hold his wife.
After the two embraced long and lovingly, they took the last necessary step before returning to the Land of the Living. They made a sweat lodge and scrubbed the ghost stink off them. Together they entered their village to the amazement and happiness of all, and their little son ran to them, laughing with boundless joy.
Potts sits, head covered in a blanket, listening to the mosquitoes whine, wheedle for a taste of his blood. His spirits are very low. He should not have given in to Charles Gaunt. Nothing of the Sand Hills can be explained in the English tongue. How do you speak of skeletons whose feet do not touch the ground when they walk? Skeletons who make war on the skeletons of old enemies, who hunt the skeletons of buffalo, gnaw their dry, meatless bones? The sad, empty life of the Sand Hills, he thinks. Ghosts longing to join the living. Whistling down lodge smoke holes in the night, tapping on teepees, begging to be let in.
He could not tell of it in a way the Englishman could understand, so he told him a story, one he had heard many times in the lodges of the Peigans. It was the tale of how the sacred bundle of the Worm People was brought to them by the man who had gone to seek his wife in the Camp of the Dead. But he had decided not to speak of the bundle or the sacred things that an unbeliever, an Englishman, could never accept.
But when he began the story, at the first mention of the dearly loved wife, his skin prickled, for he realized he was speaking to himself and not to the Englishman. He felt the weight of Mitchell on his back, could hear himself and his son crying as they wandered the barren hills. A cold dread filled him that in saying these words, they would come true, and Mary would die in the country of the Crow. Maybe she was already dead, and her ghost was speaking to him out of his own mouth.
But still he could not stop himself from talking. He hurried on, wanting to end the story as quickly as possible. He trimmed it here and there, but as he did, it became more and more his own story. Then suddenly he could not go on, could not unstick his tongue to tell the last terrible part.
In the story, shortly after the couple returns to the Land of the Living, the husband asks his wife to perform a task. When she does not rush to do it, he loses his temper, picks a stick from the fire, threatens to strike her with it. As he waves the flaming torch in her face, his wife vanishes before his very eyes, flung by his own hand back to the Sand Hills.
It fills Potts with sadness to understand how one instant of anger, one moment of unkindness, is enough to drive what you love far beyond your reach.
17
Seven days pass and the Conestogas begin to cross a blasted landscape, dreary knolls, hollows bristling with stubborn brush, dun bunchgrass, and low-lying sage and juniper that yield a pungent incense when crushed under the wheels of the wagons. Powdery clay steams into the air, cloaks men and beasts in a choking, sallow cloud. Everyone is too dry-mouthed to speak, the only sounds accompanying the advance are the faint music of jangling trace chains, the plangent protest of axles, the dull plod of hooves. They creep along drowsily until the terrain begins to undergo subtle alteration, to demand notice. Fingers of sand appear. The fingers become ridges, the ridges become drifts. Vehicles slew about, horses paw and strain, Grunewald and Barker rouse themselves, croak encouragement to their teams. The heat doubles, the sun presses heavily down on their heads, reflects from the sand into their faces. A broiling march through a vast, gritty oven.
A little before seven o’clock, the peremptory smack of gunshots is heard from where the Captain has dropped from view. Jerry Potts yanks his rifle from its scabbard, alarm spreads, the rest of the company retrieve weapons and hasten forward. Rattling round the flank of a baldy-topped, wind-scoured hill, they encounter a huge dune, an immense steep ramp that bunts a fierce sun with its shimmering brow. The dune is pocked with the Captain’s footprints. Halfway up the slope he waves gleefully down at them, sweeps the scene with his pistol barrel, and shouts, “Arabia Deserta! Magnificent!”
To a chorus of mutters and curses, Captain Gaunt begins a leisurely stroll back to them, a man descending his very own stairway of gold.
CUSTIS Aloysius and I clamber out of the wagon to the sight of the Captain sashaying down a dune, so proud and swollen with what he’s found his buttons are popping. The fool thinks he’s the hub everything turns round. Even imagines the black face I wore the past few days was because I took a licking from him in our boxing match, went so far as to say to me, “Mr. Straw, no disgrace in being defeated by me. I am recognized as an expert.” I never minded taking a whipping from any man. What I do mind is Lucy Stoveall dodging me at every turn in favour of Charles Gaunt. Last night I caught her for a word or two about returning to Fort Benton, but she was too stubborn to move. No remedy for that but time. I reckon to play cripple so as to keep an eye on her for as long as I can. The Captain can’t order me off in good conscience if I’m lame. Ayto bust my legs up pretty good, but they’re in better shape than I let on. I just lean on a stick, totter about, twist my mouth, fake godawful agony whenever I’m afoot. Aloysius’s fretting for home, and if he was to know I could manage to sit a horse he’d make an almighty fuss to be gone.
Seeing Addington Gaunt prink and preen is a most grievous pain in the fundament. Here comes the famous explorer himself, down from his dune. “Mr. Straw, testing your legs again, I see. You should scale my discovery,” he says. “The vista is splendid. Waves of sand for miles.”
“I don’t believe I’m up to the climb,” I tell him.
“Ah well, your loss.”
I hear Aloysius’s breath whistle in his nose as he watches the Captain float off. “I’m glad the Englishman enjoys the scenery. But you can’t drink it. There’s no water hereabouts,” Aloysius grunts.
“The shine’ll soon wear off Captain Gaunt’s toy, and he’ll be looking for another,” I say, settling myself on the foot of the dune, rolling up my trouser legs, and packing hot sand on my aching limbs. Dooley’s staring at the musket ball scar on my calf. The worst of my wounds are covered, the bayonet thrusts to the thigh the greyback gave me in the Wilderness before he left me to burn.
Jerry Potts is making to join us. When Ayto and the Captain catch sight of him, Ayto brays, “You are to be congratulated, Captain, on introducing Mr. Moses to his native element! Sinai!” Poor Potts just scurries on by them, ducking his head under their laughter.
Potts hunkers, angrily spits. He doesn’t like the Captain, likes Ayto less, and the Sand Hills even less than Ayto.
The hot sand sucks the throb from my legs. “Damn, this is just what the doctor ordered. You ought to try it, Aloysius.”
“No thank you,” he says. “I ain’t sitting in no sand. Sand up the crack of your ass makes a man itch.”
“What makes you itch, Aloysius, is any happy suggestion. It rubs you the wrong way to think of enjoying a simple pleasure that can’t be bought.”
Potts is biting at the ends of his moustache. “Too many people joke,” he says. “They think I don’t know about Moses. I heard of Moses. He killed the man called Far Away.”
I follow his eyes. Potts is looking up the big sand dune. The Captain has pranced back to the top and struck a pose – wide-legged stance, arms akimbo, fists planted on his hips. Charles Gaunt’s with him, sketching away like a demon.
The baleful gaze Potts is turning on the Captain makes me a tad uneasy. Rumours are that in his day the half-breed’s only killed one white man, a French engage at one of the American Fur Company posts who made life miserable for him when Potts was just a youngster of fifteen or sixteen. Maybe Jerry Potts is thinking it’s time he sent another white man to join the majority. Addington Gaunt conducts himself like a high and mighty pharaoh and I wouldn’t want the resemblance to lodge itself in Potts’s mind.
“Moses never killed Pharaoh,” I tell Potts. “The Bible doesn’t even say Pharaoh died. What Moses did was drown Pharaoh’s soldiers.” I best correct that. “Well, really, it was God drowned them. The hand of God.”
“Leave it alone,” mutters Aloysius, “don’t Sunday-school him. He don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Dawson told me the story,” Potts says. “Moses killed Far Away. Far Away treated Moses’ people bad. Moses drowned him in a river of blood.”
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Aloysius mutters. He doesn’t approve of churching Indians.
The evening sun is bouncing off the sand, turning Potts to hot bronze, even his hat glows. “You got it wrong, Jerry. Moses didn’t lay a hand on anybody. All he did -” I lift up my walking stick to give him an illustration of it, “was he held a stick to command the waters to keep off his own people, and then he brought it down, and the waters closed over Pharaoh’s soldiers chasing the Hebrews. The Egyptians all drowned. There was no river of blood. It’s only the name that threw you – the waters Moses brought down on the soldiers was called the Red Sea. And Gaunt is no Pharaoh. He’s nothing but a niggling pissant of an Englishman. Moses wouldn’t pay him the least mind. You follow me, Jerry?”
