Into the Savage Country (10 page)

“Yes, that is what I imagined,” Meeks said. “Wreaking havoc among them with disease and unneeded babies. But I misjudged him. He was giving them money.”

Alene gave Meeks a strange, fearful glance.

“He had gone hunting with their husbands and was repaying them with meat and coins for trivial errands. I can acknowledge an admirable gesture when I see it, even if it is done by an apparent scoundrel. He is a strange man.”

“That he is,” Alene said leadenly, and my heart sank. If Meeks had plotted to find a subject of conversation more irritating to me than Layton’s unexpected philanthropy, he could not have come up with one.

After the meal, Meeks went out to smoke his pipe and Alene sat near me and said, “I need you to be truthful, William. Under the guise of it coming from Bailey, did you give me money in a blue envelope?”

“No,” I said.

She retrieved the envelope from a box under her bed. It was the blue envelope that I had seen Layton give Grignon.

“It was this envelope. Are you sure?”

“I am sure it was not from me because … it was from Layton. I saw him give it to Grignon to give to you.”

She kept her head down and held very still.

“You’re surprised,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be surprised by anything Henry Layton did, either good or bad. In St. Louis he took a hundred dollars of his father’s profits and gave it to some dirty girl walking the streets. Two weeks later he killed a companion over a silver pocket watch that he thought the companion had broken. Afterward he joked that his friend would be alive if he’d bothered to wind the watch after he stole it. He takes a delight in confounding expectations. I suppose he thinks I’m like that low woman, requiring saving, and that he can add me to his collection of surprising stories. Do others know?”

“Many others,” I said reluctantly. I told her how it had been done in the open.

“Oh, that horrible man,” she said. “And with him gone there is no means of returning it. Damn him.”

She folded the envelope and slid it in her bodice, and I understood that Layton had done what no one else had been able to: make her accept charity.

“He did it with the best intentions,” I said, half reluctantly, and she said, “He has only one form of intention and that is self-serving. He says he means well, and perhaps he does at the time, but there is nothing steady or consistent with him. And when he is in a dark frame of mind he is incapable of not trying to use whatever good will he’s built up to his advantage. I have seen it over and over. He destroys all who are close to him. He will destroy you, too, if you let him.”

I laughed loudly. It seemed an overly dramatic way to put it. “If he is such a devil as all that, undermining my flimsy character is hardly a worthwhile challenge for him.”

“It is not for the challenge that he would do it.”

“Why then? He’s a rich man. I’m a lowly trapper. I have nothing he values.”

“I can think of one thing,” she said.

I opened my mouth to ask what but just at that moment Meeks came bumbling in and Alene changed the subject. I wanted to brain the poor fellow.

An hour later, as we were plodding through the dry snow with the cold stars spread out overhead, Meeks rattled on about the crane migration and the native maneuverings beyond the settlement and the growing barrenness of the trapping lands and the hope for the next summer’s harvest, and I wanted to strangle him to shut him up so I could consider what had passed.

As soon as I was back in my lodgings I fell onto my bed and went over the situation in my mind. Layton was a wealthy, charismatic, forceful young man, and I thought by the lively way Alene spoke of him that she must be at least half in love with him. But then I recalled that she had said that I had something Layton wanted, and I imagined she was acknowledging her friendship with me.

I lay there with a warmth and heaviness flowing through me. She considered me seriously. I thought she did. But she was also charmed by Layton.

Snow tapped lightly on the windowpane.

As Grignon was the one who delivered the money to Alene, and as he plays a role in this narration, I will describe him more fully now.

Max Grignon was a waddling plug of a man with buck teeth that rested on his lower lip, a thick red mustache, and muttonchop sides. He wore a soiled black vest every day, even on the march, and spoke in long, elaborate sentences. His manner was peripherally formal and polite, but beneath this formality he was a cunning, underhanded, mean-spirited rogue. Once I saw him
reach behind Smitts’s bar, uncork a bottle, drink from it, then put it back furtively. Afterward he grinned at me and held a finger to his lips to silence me. I would not have told Smitts what I’d seen, as I do not go telling stories for trivialities, but there was no need to make me an accomplice in his petty theft, and I remember thinking he’d gone out of his way to involve me, which was the sort of thing Grignon was always doing. Like many accustomed to underhanded dealings, Grignon could not conceive of anyone acting from anything other than the lowest instincts. In short, I found him to be a wholly disreputable fellow, and my judgment of Layton lowered because of his use of this unpleasant and greedy man.

Grignon stayed in the settlement two weeks after Layton’s departure, trailing mischief and discontent wherever he traveled, and then one day he vanished without a word of parting, to the relief of everyone.

Two days after Grignon’s disappearance, Ferris, Glass, and Bridger arrived in the settlement. It had been almost six months since I’d seen them and they were decked out in native garb, with beaded hair and caps fringed with wolverine or coyote fur. Ferris leaped off his horse and embraced me, and laughed afterward, seeing my expression, as he smelled like a beast after hibernation.

“You were once the same, Wyeth,” he said. “Let me wash and we’ll split a bottle.”

Ferris went to secure lodgings and took a long time in his preparations. I waited, grew impatient, and walked across to the stables where I found Ferris collapsed in straw with half a bottle of Taos Whiskey in the crook of his arm.

I helped him to his room and he slept all afternoon and it was only near supper that he rose and staggered across to my lodgings.

“Sorry, Wyeth. Was overcome by fatigue.”

“And a bottle of whiskey,” I said.

“Just a taste,” he said. “It’s the first I’ve had in half a year. Set me reeling.”

We made arrangements to go hunting the following morning, though I only half believed he would awaken, as he was still well-seasoned when we made the plans.

The next morning I overslept, assuming Ferris would as well. When I woke I looked out my window and saw Ferris standing in the frozen road in his moccasins with a robe about his shoulders. I was up in an instant, feeling like a blackguard for keeping him waiting. Fifteen minutes later the two of us had set out for a patch of lowland to the west, where Ferris had spotted a large bull on his ride into the settlement.

Our route toward these lowlands took us on the path near the infirmary, and we passed Alene on her way into town.

“Are you off to raid the Sioux?” she called to us.

“To hunt the savage creatures,” I said. “We’ll bring you hump ribs for your larder.” And then motioning to my companion, “This is Walter Ferris. Back from the western mountains.”

“I gathered,” she said, as she had heard they’d arrived.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said, and reached from his horse to take her hand.

“Your companion promises me hump ribs,” she said. “Do you share his confidence?”

“I have confidence that we will be lifting a bottle tonight,” Ferris said. “That is the only thing I am sure of.”

“An admirably cautious forecast,” she said. Then, “I hold no
stake in your partner’s judgment, so I appeal to yours. Take care not to tarry in the hunt. The weather’s changing.”

“By the time it changes we’ll be roasting buffalo steaks over Smitts’s fire,” I said.

“Or raising a bottle to our empty larder,” Ferris under his breath.

“Make sure that you are raising those bottles and not out in the lowlands,” Alene said.

Ferris wheeled his horse in a jaunty manner. “We’ll return early. Come raise a horn with us.”

“I’ll need to come early if I expect to see William upright,” she said.

“That you will,” Ferris said. He held a hand up. “Until tonight.” We rode off with unnecessary vigor as Alene was watching us, and when we were out of sight of the settlement Ferris gave me a knowing look. He had heard of Alene in St. Louis, but he had not known she was in the settlement.

“I see you continued the hunt even after you left the drainages,” he said.

“If it is so, it has been a particularly meager sport,” I said. He glanced to check my meaning, and I said, “She is in mourning.”

It was a cold, clear, windless day, the snow dry and glistening. On arrival at the lowlands we did not attempt to hunt, but spread out buffalo robes and lay on a snowbank with a robe on top and one beneath, gnawing on bits of jerked meat and passing a corked gourd between us.

“You wouldn’t believe who we met on our return from the mountains,” Ferris said.

“Henry Layton,” I guessed.

“Yes!” Ferris said. “A thousand miles from St. Louis, and he’s
wearing an ambassador cap. I thought I’d died and woken up on Market Street. Pegleg asked him if he had porters on the march.”

“Did he take offense?”

“He knocked Peggy’s hat off and said, ‘Hadn’t thought of porters, but I’ll be glad to consider you for the position.’ ”

“What’d Peggy do?”

“He swung his rifle around, but Layton had the draw on him with his pistol.”

“It’s a Collier,” I said. “Repeating. Can fire eight shots without reloading.”

“Yes. He mentioned that afterward,” Ferris said dryly. “Not that he’d have needed more than one bullet at that range. The rest of us were scattering, but Pegleg pretended he was only checking the firing pan.”

I laughed at that, imagining Pegleg’s feeble attempts at dissimulation.

“Ten minutes after turning his gun on Pegleg he tried to hire us,” Ferris said. “Including Pegleg. Apparently he’s forming a brigade in the spring. He says he’ll pay three dollars a pelt. The others didn’t believe it. I can see the three dollars if he intends to make it up on the transport. But what mountains does he imagine we’ll trap? Did he tell you?”

“No. And I’d hardly believe anything Layton said. He’s a damned scoundrel, though I admit he’s an entertaining one. We’ve had some dealings because … his companion married the Widow Bailey, who you just met, and was then killed in the settlement last March. He brought Alene’s correspondence.”

I told Ferris how we’d ridden together during Layton’s time in the settlement, and how, on the last day, I’d seen him give money for Alene, which she’d accepted.

“It is hardly charity if it is done in the open for all to see,” Ferris said heatedly. “It’s more like coercion and self-aggrandizement. The damned blackguard. When we met him in the native encampment he tossed a coin to a native boy. Some ungodly sum that I’d have gotten down to scramble for myself. He shouted, ‘Water, water!’ ”

“What happened?”

“The boy took the coin and got the water. But he would have done it without the coin. That’s the sort of thing you can do in St. Louis. Not out here.” Ferris hesitated, then said, “The widow seemed a fine western lady. Was she won over by his beneficence?”

“Not by his money. No,” I said. “And she seems to hold her dead husband’s death against him. She paints him like he’s the devil, but she’s flustered when she’s around him.”

“And you’ve made your own advances?” Ferris said after a moment.

“I made an attempt. She slapped my face so I saw double.”

“Did you counter?”

“I did not at first. And then”—I hesitated, remembering how she’d made clear that she would not settle on a man bound to a brigade—“I countered with … nothing.”

“Oh Wyeth.”

“What?”

“Renew the assault.”

“She’s in mourning.”

“Mourning is preparation for marriage. The widow has tamed you.”

“She has showed me my manners,” I said with some heat. “And if I make an attempt and am wrong she’ll think me a scoundrel.”

“If you do not she’ll think you perfectly respectable,” he said, with derision. “She is in her ninth month of mourning. That dandy Layton will slip ahead and—”

Ferris stopped. He’d heard something. We both turned to the south where a large buffalo, up to its belly in snow, lumbered out of the pine forest. The great beast plowed forward, then stopped suddenly. It had scented us. It snorted. Slowly Ferris reached for his gun, but the ice on his robe cracked sharply when he moved and the bull bolted. In an instant Ferris and I were up on our horses, dashing through a heavy winter snow, up and down through the channels in the lowlands and out onto a windswept patch of ice that was a shallow branch of the Missouri.

Once on the ice the beast pawed and fell and stood unsteadily and fell again and wheeled as if it would charge us and slipped and fell and tried to get up and slipped once again. Ferris and I dismounted. It hardly seemed fair to shoot the beast when it was helpless like that. We watched for a full minute, but the beast merely grunted and flailed and could not move. Finally, we both raised our guns at the same time and fired. The beast lurched and tottered and stood still and Ferris reloaded rapidly and fired again. His first shot and his second were within an inch of each other, just above the shoulder, the exact spot aimed for in a bull, which fell heavily.

“Why, you’re a regular green jacket,” I said.

“I’d have missed the beast entirely on the third shot,” he said, though as I found out later, this was untrue. Among his other accomplishments, half of which he’d hidden from us, Ferris had the best shot in the brigade.

I heard a cracking sound out on the ice. I heard water glugging and more cracking and the bull began to sink.

“We should have waited until it was off the ice,” I said.

“It’s you who were hasty.”

“I was hasty?”

“Yeah. You. Hasty in shooting but not in anything else,” he said, and I gave him a dark look.