The Last Crossing, page 6
Not one of the Kelsos, but a dead pig. The dirt floor is a jelly of blood and pig shit. The sow’s got a rope hitched to a trotter, and a bib of flies tied to the slash across her throat. Bluebottles swirl up, shimmer and buzz, make the snoring noise I heard at the door. Strange. There’s a piece of paper on the pig’s flank.
Bunks stripped of blankets, shelves bare. A leaky flour sack laying a trail to the doorway. The Kelsos are gone.
I stoop down and see that PITCHER OF DIRTY OLD HOGG BY NAME OF STRAW is scrawled on the paper. When I pick it up, printing on the other side shows through the thin paper. It’s one of the handbills the Englishman’s been covering Fort Benton with. I flip it and read.
REWARD OF A THOUSAND DOLLARS OFFERED
TO ANY PERSON OR PERSONS HAVING KNOWLEDGE OF THE WHEREABOUTS OR THE FATE OF SIMON GAUNT ESQ., LAST SEEN IN THE COMPANY OF THE REVEREND OBADIAH WITHERSPOON IN FORT BENTON ON OR ABOUT THE 19TH OF OCTOBER LAST.
MR. SIMON GAUNT IS 27 YEARS OF AGE, STANDS FIVE-FOOT-NINE, IS A GENTLEMAN OF SLENDER BUILD. HIS SPEECH AND DEPORTMENT ARE THOSE OF AN ENGLISH GENTLEMAN, HIS FEATURES REGULAR, EYES PALE BLUE, HAIR BLOND.
ANYONE WITH INFORMATION PERTAINING TO THIS MATTER SHOULD MAKE HIMSELF KNOWN TO MR. CHARLES GAUNT AT THE OVERLAND HOTEL, FORT BENTON. HE IS MOST ANXIOUS TO LEARN ANYTHING TOUCHING UPON HIS BROTHER AND ALL THOSE RENDERING INFORMATION AND ASSISTANCE SHALL FIND THEMSELVES GRATEFULLY AND AMPLY REWARDED FOR THEIR TROUBLE.
I crumple the paper in my hand, step back through the doorway. Outside, the wind is groaning and clawing at the grass. Remembering Madge, I want to groan and claw too. After a bit, I look up and see Sheriff Hinckey bouncing a rig towards me across the prairie.
CUSTIS Justice Daniels has gone to his dinner, Hinckey has gone to collect Mrs. Stoveall, and I’m left to kick my heels in a cell. Daniels wouldn’t pass on word to Aloysius to fetch me my Bible from the Stubhorn saloon. He said, “That don’t fool nobody, Straw. The devil can quote Scripture to his own purpose.”
He banged the door mighty hard going out when I told him I didn’t want to read Scripture, just wipe my ass with the Book of Judges.
Aloysius Donald Dooley will scold me for not being mindful of my situation. Say I’m only digging myself into a deeper hole. But I don’t intend to plead and make myself small for that son-of-a-bitch Daniels. I don’t bend for the likes of him.
Aloysius claims I’m contrary, but that’s because he’s a publican, and it’s a saloon-keeper’s job to be pleasant even if he doesn’t want to. Not that he is all that cheerful. To think of it, I’ve never seen a bar-keep dole out spirits with such an air of chastening gloom. Aloysius said he arrived in America from Ireland just a babe in arms, but once he got off the potato diet, he grew like a weed. He is a prodigious height, six-foot-four in his stockings, and he likes to say he reached that elevation by the time he was fifteen, which made him a foot taller than his Da. He said his old man beat him frequently for the presumption of it. So maybe every drink he pours, he’s thinking that he’s just gained a dollar on the man who spent it, and fears a thumping for advancing his position in the world.
Aloysius is a fine individual, but he’d be a finer one if he’d leave off trying to reform me and instruct me. The man’s a mystery. Five years renting a room from him in the Stubhorn and all I’ve ever got out of him is that when he turned sixteen he was so tired of the Dooley family fleeing property seizures from landlords and bailiffs that he lit out West to make his fortune. He admits to rattling around various places – Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri – doing exactly what he’ll never say. At the end of it, he rolled into Fort Benton with enough cash in his pockets to buy the Stubhorn.
Aloysius and Dr. Andrew Bengough count as my only friends in this town, and they never stop airing their opinions of me. Dr. Bengough said to me once, “Your character, sir, is that of a Mussulman. As Allah wills. Hence your phenomenal patience.” Bengough thinks I’m long-suffering because I won’t answer the lies said about me. Let them all talk. What they hold against me most is I saw the nickel laying right under their noses and I picked it up. Years ago, when every man-jack in these parts headed off to Helena to prospect gold and make himself a pile, I went into Crow country and set up a trading post. What’s worse in their eyes is that I refused to trade whisky to the Indians and kept my thumb off the scale. It’s an affront to them for a white man to act in that fashion. But next spring I showed up with eighty head of prime Crow horses ready to sell to fortune hunters when the riverboats docked. And because I had earned the Crow’s trust, I had a steady supply of horses until my own herd was established. Horse flesh is always a surer bet than scrabbling in cold water and gravel for a fleck of gold. That’s what those scapegraces resent. Their pockets stayed empty and mine didn’t.
Nobody says a thing to my face, but Aloysius passes on all the rumours he hears in the saloon. He believes that if I know the impression I leave, it might lead me to change my ways. There’s nothing I haven’t been accused of. That I was a Mormon once, fled Salt Lake City, left five wives behind and enough kids to fill a school. That I was a hot-eyed abolitionist in Bloody Kansas, a friend of madman John Brown, hacking slavery sympathizers to pieces with a broadsword.
They’ll have something else to blab about with poor Marjorie Dray laying there on the dirt floor.
Why would such a thing happen to her? Live forty-five years, and you understand that’s a hapless question. In a town chock full of drifters, riverboat men, trappers, muleskinners, bull-whackers, old waddies, and sap-green cowboys, all coming to Benton to get drunk, play house with the whores, blow off steam, there’s a bushel of culprits. A boom town draws rogues like a jam jar draws wasps.
Nobody will stop to think about that because I’m handy to blame. And Madge Dray has often been seen delivering my laundry, going up those outside stairs to my room above the Stubhorn. The curious noted how long her visits lasted, wagged their smutty tongues. Aloysius warned me of it. I didn’t give a damn. I was too interested in finding out what I could about her sister, Mrs. Stoveall. First time I laid eyes on that fiery hair, those big brown eyes, I was done for. Hiring her and Madge to do my laundry was purely an excuse to see her.
But not once has Lucy Stoveall ever delivered my clothes, she made sure that was Madge’s chore. Didn’t take me long to learn how Madge loved to talk about her big sister. Worshipped her. I made the most of it. Learned Abner Stoveall had run his tenant farm in Tennessee broke. New start, he said, sold up their stock, borrowed some money from a brother, and took them off in a wagon for St. Louis. Spent the winter there, Madge and Lucy working in a rooming house as chambermaids to pay the room and board while old Abner played cards in the parlour. This spring, they caught the first boat to Benton with the intention to push on down the Mullan Road for Walla Walla, Washington. From a fellow heading downriver, Abner Stoveall bought a wagon cheap, but he got skinned. The reach of the wagon was cracked and right on the edge of town a wheel hit a rock and it snapped like a piece of kindling. It hasn’t moved since. “Here we were,” Madge had said, “stranded in Fort Benton, Abner so deep in the mopes, feeling so hard done by, he couldn’t bring himself to lift a finger and start repairs.” But then all the talk of good money to be made peddling whisky to the Indians in British territory recovered his spirits, and in the blink of an eye he bought a new wagon and a store of whisky with all their Washington stake money, left those two poor women penniless in a broke-back wagon to fend for themselves. And that’s what they’ve been doing, living hand to mouth for six weeks, tub-scrubbing anyone’s clothes who doesn’t want to pay the Chinaman’s price. And no sign of Abner Stoveall in all that time.
I let Madge use my hairbrushes and sprinkle herself with my bay rum. It seemed to make her forget herself, and say what I reckon she wasn’t supposed to. My heart lifted when she told me outright her sister had no use for her husband. Well, why should she? He’s old enough to be her father. He’s a tyrant and a woman-whipper. She even confided a secret. If Abner Stoveall ever got them to Walla Walla, Madge said she and Lucy were going to skip out on him, do a flit, make for San Francisco, where there was plenty of work. They’d live quiet in the big city, just the two of them, free of old Abner Stoveall and his abominations. Her eyes shone with the thought of it.
It’s a sorry story. Two young women chained to that blackguard. Many times, taking my wash to them, I thought to have a private word with Lucy Stoveall about her situation, maybe offer a loan. But she’s a proud and wary woman. Always held herself at a distance, so I couldn’t bring myself to speak.
When I invited them, as my guests, to the entertainment on the riverboat, Lucy Stoveall wouldn’t take my offer. “I’ve got no use for make-believe trumpery, but you take Madge.” I saw it plain in her face, she suspected I had designs of some kind. I was disappointed in her refusal, but it was too late to back away from my invitation to her little sister.
So on Madge Dray’s last night on earth there I was, shelling out three dollars to buy her the best view she could have of Madame Magique predigistating. Only five chairs on deck and we had two of them, right up front where no one could miss seeing us. We were Fort Benton high society that night. The good doctor Bengough beside us and two strangers behind us, one of them the Englishman who had been posting advertisements for a month, and the other, Dr. Bengough whispered, had newly arrived on the very same boat that had brought the exotic Madame Magique to us. Everybody else standing in a multitude behind the chairs, craning their necks to gawk.
It pains me to remember the happiness on Madge’s face, how she loved her outing that night. Clapping her hands when Madame Magique made her flash entry in purple tights, a star-spangled corset wrangling those mighty bosoms into a stupendous vision of ivory pulchritude. Twisting around in her seat, gasping when Madame roamed the audience, pulling double-eagles out of dirty ears. Amazed when she made an ordinary walking stick bloom paper flowers and gave us a bang-up finale to the first act – like Jesus, turning a glass of Missouri River water, too thin to plough and too thick to drink, into whisky, handing it to Sweet Oil Bob to sample and pronounce on its quality, and he pleading for another so plaintive and pitiful Madge laughed until her cheeks ran with tears.
When intermission came I bought her a bottled ginger drink from Madame’s assistant. It was her first, she whispered to me, she’d never tasted the like of it.
Madame came out for the second act in black tights and a black doublet, hair tucked up and hidden under a turban. Her assistant informed us sombrely that Madame was sometimes the “unwilling earthly tenement of souls gone over,” and that the ghost of the long-dead Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, desired to make a statement to the citizens of Fort Benton.
A skull was whipped from behind Madame’s back, up it went into the lamp light, and in a voice manly, foreign, and otherworldly, she cried, “ ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ ” and launched into a speech about death that nailed us to our seats.
But just as quick as this prince Hamlet took hold of her, he flew the coop, Madame recovered herself, looked about all bewildered, cried out to her assistant, “Prithee, Horatio, tell me! Where am I?”
“Fort Benton, Madame Magique!” he hollered and poor Yorick’s skull banged like a rocket, sent up a cloud of blue smoke that scared the wits out of all and sundry. Madge screamed and hung to my arm, but she didn’t lose her nerve like those two prospectors who charged the gunwales and flung themselves overboard into Big Muddy. That set everybody stampeding about the deck, one or two pistols were drawn, and riot threatened. But it didn’t faze Madame. She just stood with her handsome face lifted to the stars and proclaimed with tender, calming, womanly emotion, “ ‘Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ ”
Dr. Bengough leapt to his feet to start the huzzahing and cheering, a signal the danger from spooks was past. A handful of rowdies planted Madame Magique on a chair, pranced her around the deck on their shoulders, bucked her down the gangplank, slogged her through the mud of the levee up to Front Street. Dr. Bengough laid hands to a wagon tongue, called for a “chariot of triumph.” With all the shoving and pushing, boys disputing for the honour of pulling Madame Magique up and down Front Street, I smelled a donnybrook, but Madame graciously suggested she’d make herself available for as long as necessary, see to it that everybody got their chance to haul her in the torchlight parade. I remember the two Englishmen standing clear of the fray, looking on the way boys watch grasshoppers tussle in a jar. The one with the moustache had a contemptuous smile on his face.
My hands shake now when I think that was the last time I saw Madge, so alive and joyful, face shining among the quick. I don’t remember much else beyond that, try as I might. Those tiny hot lights started to spark a warning in the corners of my eyeballs. I knew I’d right soon be blind in swimming black, head athrob with a megrim. Madge had to be got home safe out of that mob of wild rascals while I was still fit to do it. So I took her hand and told her it was time for us to go. She didn’t want to and begged me to stay just a bit longer, but I dragged her off.
I can recollect nothing after that. The laudanum bottle was dry this morning. But even if I don’t remember how, I know I would have seen Madge Dray home safe and sound as is a gentleman escort’s bounden duty.
There comes rain whistling down on the roof. My hands shake all the more, can’t even force them into my pockets to get them still. I got to climb up on the bed, hold to the window bars, look away from the corpse of little Madge Dray.
Not much to see, the rain’s driven most to cover. A mule train’s leaving, ten wagons, jennies straining to turn the wheels in the gumbo, ears standing up like bayonets. A street arab, one of the whores’ catch-colts, runs along beside a wagon, him all speckled with mud spitting off the rim, trying to jam a stick into the blur of wheel spokes. Some mongrel dog, patched with hairless skin, keeps darting at the pasterns of the swing mule, making it kick and bray like a cracked trumpet as the teamster tries to whip the dog off.
The kid, the dog, the mule train pass, leave the street empty except for the rain and the younger of the two Englishmen splashing through the mud. I’ve heard someone speak his name. Gant? Gantry? Whatever the name, he’s been the talk of the town for weeks, the lodestone for a tribe of fortune hunters pouring into the Overland Hotel, in the hopes of selling lies about the fate and whereabouts of his brother.
I wished I had my Bible to occupy me. Laying down on my plank bed, closing my eyes, I try to blank my mind. But it won’t do as I wish. Death lying near keeps crowding in. The jail starts to feel like that army hospital in Washington D.C., where they carted me off to after my last engagement in the war, the Battle of the Wilderness. Plenty of dead youngsters there. Every morning the beds were full of another night’s harvest of them. It came to me there in that hospital that thirty-eight was too old for foot-soldiering. And if I was too damn old, every boy on those rows of straw ticks was too damn young.
Living with a pillow wrapped around my head to shut out the whimpering, the pounding of mattresses, the begging to be given back the arms and legs that were carried away in buckets. I heard these sounds through those long, suffocatingly hot summer days and nights. I heard the soul-savers trooping up and down the aisles, mumbling prayers over dying boys, reading them their letters, leading the hymn singing, holding hands and preaching resignation to the blind, the shattered.
One of these handed me a Bible. Strange to think I’d never dipped into the Good Book before then. Two years of schooling and I could read well enough, even as a boy I chewed every word in any newspaper came my way, even studied Mr. Daniel Webster’s Dictionary, had a taste for politicians’ stump oratory, loved large words, high-flown phrases. You’d have thought the Bible would have been right up my alley, but I had no interest in it.
Now, lying in this army hospital, miles from home in a swelter of gall and despair I pored over that book, every passage speaking to me of the war and nothing but the war. “And he said unto him, My lord knoweth that the children are tender, and the flocks and herds with young are with me: and if men should overdrive them one day, all the flock will die.” It ran around in my head for days, a prophecy of all those suffering boys around me. I’d study on the Bible continual, think strange thoughts that seemed true to me then. If man is created in the image of God, then all these men are a picture of the wounded, crucified Jesus. God laid on cots, line after line, each holding up to God a picture of His suffering Self. God staring up at God, and God staring down at God.
I recall lying in my bed one day, holding the Good Book pressed to my chest. The sun had flinched below the windowsill, the shadows of the trees outside were swaying crazily on the plaster wall when the parson arrived.
I reckon it was a heartening Christian sight for him to see a man with a Bible clasped tight to his breast. Bending down over me, he murmured, “God bless you, sir. Would you like me to pray with you? Is there anything you want?”
I told him plain what I wanted. I pointed that Bible down the row of pallets and said, “I want all these Jesuses to pick up their beds and walk. Matthew 9, verse 6. Jesus said to a suffering man, ‘Arise, take up thine bed, and go unto thine house.’ And the man did. Well, Jesus is looking down and telling all these poor boys just the same. He’s saying, one Jesus to every Jesus, one God to every God. Go home, He’s saying to them.”
Pressing his hand to my brow, the parson smiled. “Rest now. Sleep,” he said, and went slanting off, boots whispering on the floor, certain I was crazed.
Not a particle of sleep or rest for me that night. Staring up into the darkness looking for the face of God peering down upon Himself. I could not find God up there in the dimness, but I did see the shades of boys quitting their beds, shouldering their stinking pallets, shuffling off homeward. I saw them winding up the blue passes of the Adirondacks, fording the black loam of the ploughed fields of Ohio. I saw them drifting along rich river bottoms, every whit as golden as the turning leaves that showered down upon their heads, or blowing grimy-faced as the dirty smoke that came blustering down the broad avenues of New York and Boston.
