The Englishman's Boy (17 page)

The Englishman’s boy, like all the rest, had said nothing about casting Hank adrift. After a fashion, he was sorry for sorry-ass Hank, but watching him near drown the Scotchman confirmed that he was not only a fool, a shirker, and poisonous bad luck, but a man likely to drag anyone who tried to help him six feet under. Besides, the Englishman’s boy was in no position to hand around irritating advice, seeing as he had nowhere to take himself except back to Fort Benton, where trouble awaited him. He might smell trouble here, too, but maybe it was trouble that could be dodged. The white horse and Hank surely was a lesson. If Hardwick got down on you, God help you. If there came a time when he scraped up against Hardwick’s bad side, he knew now what to expect.

It was necessary to make the best of the cards he’d been dealt, and as things stood, he’d seen worse hands. In a couple of hours he’d be eating bacon and hard bread, which was a damn sight better than his dinner of cracker dust the night before last. He had a warm coat, a good hat, and he was armed. A strong, sound horse was carrying him. All he lacked was a new pair of brogans.

Scotty trotted up. Silt from the river had dried on his face in a fine, pale powder. It lent him a ghastly, otherworldly air, as if he were one of the risen dead answering to the last trump. A ghost with an odd look in his eye.

“I see Harris tweed in this howling wilderness,” he remarked.

“Which one’s Harris Tweed?” The Englishman’s boy glanced about him.

Scotty brushed the boy’s sleeve, fingered it covetously. “This is Harris tweed.”

“The stuff?”

“Yes,” said Scotty. “Harris tweed cut and stitched by a gentleman’s tailor.”

“Ain’t no gentleman wearing it.”

“Gentlemen are not commonly found in these parts. The conditions are not favourable for their support.”

“The one owned this coat died right enough,” said the boy.

The Scotchman sighed. “Misadventures are legion here. Road agents, sickness, storms, snakes, Indians –”

“Deep water with a fool in it.”

“Indeed.”

They rode on in silence for several minutes. Whereupon Scotty made a mournful request. “You wouldn’t consider selling me that jacket, would you?”

“No.”

“It’s sizes too big for you.”

“What’s the matter with the coat you got?”

The Scotchman stared down at its travel-stained front. “I suppose it’s largely a matter of comparison between the two. I mean to say –” He turned back to the Englishman’s boy. “The maker’s label on your jacket – what does it read?”

“Couldn’t say. Can’t read but a little.”

“If you would permit me?” They stopped their horses and Scotty short-sightedly scrutinized the jacket lining. “London,” he said at last, rebuttoning the jacket like a fond father putting his son in order before Sunday service. “Cruikshank’s.”

The boy held up the sleeve and showed him where the blood of the Benton hotel-keeper had drenched the cuff. “Spoiled,” he said.

Scotty ruefully shook his head, tightened his lips.

They moved on. The Scotchman said, “If I was to claim to have once been a gentleman, would you believe me?”

“I ain’t about to call you a liar.”

“I ask because you’re the only one of these fellows here who has had society with a gentleman. My mother was fond of saying that the definition of a gentleman is one who never inflicts pain.” He contemplated for a moment. “On the other hand, it is said clothes do make the man. A Cruikshank coat couldn’t hurt,” he mused aloud. “Men in animal skins –” He cast a nervous, furtive glance at some of the half-breeds in buckskin. “Well, perhaps they acquire the characteristics of what they wear. What do you think?”

“I never gave it any thought.”

“I confess regret at not having spoken up about the treatment of that chap at the ford. But when in Rome …” His voice faded off.

“It wouldn’t made no difference. I don’t believe there’s a man among us is up to changing Hardwick’s mind.”

“Not Evans?”

A harsh bark of derisive laughter.

“I had pinned my hopes on Evans,” said the Scotchman.

“Pin ’em on the donkey.”

“I believed I detected a strain of common decency in Evans.”

“Well, whatever strain’s in his friend Hardwick is right uncommon. You can go to the bank on that.”

Scotty fell dumb, growing more and more the sad and disillusioned spectre. Nursing, it seemed to the Englishman’s boy, thoughts of Hardwick, or disappointment over the refusal to sell him the tweed coat he set such store by. Or maybe both.

Crossing rolling countryside in late afternoon, the line of march scattered and ragged as it crawls up ridges and descends into declivities which cup unpalatable water with a white petticoat hem of alkali deposit peeking from under a dirty skirt of mud. Evans and Hardwick outlined in stark silhouette against a sheet of azure sky cleansed of every stain of cloud; Evans and Hardwick dropping out of sight behind a knoll to rise again in vivid resurrection, tiny black figures against a void, only suddenly to waver, to run and dissolve like characters written in weak, watery ink.

The Englishman’s boy dozing slumped in the saddle, hat tipped over his eyes, boots dangling loose in the stirrups, hands folded over the horn, horse wearily plodding on, rocking his saddle-cradle like a solicitous mother. Then, the surprise of a distant rifle-shot. The Englishman’s boy snapping awake, ears cocking, eyes springing like cats at the landscape. Held breath. A second crack, followed by a faint ringing, like the dying fall of a tuning fork, a sound wavering, dispersing in the blue vacancy.

Scotty gives a shout, rousing his horse into a gallop. The Englishman’s boy jerks his carbine from its scabbard, levers a cartridge into the chamber and turns loose after the Scotchman. Ahead, he sees five men spurring hard, rifles brandished in the air. They flounder over a knoll, disappear, suddenly reappear on the face of another barren swell, hounds of dust pursuing their heels. The boy leans into each rise over the withers of the scrambling horse, cocking himself forward in his stirrups; cants himself back in the saddle, toes up, when it drops on its haunches and slithers down a slope in a whirl of dust and pebbles. Up and down they go; two rises, three rises, four. He crests the fourth and suddenly there are no more. They’ve been rubbed flat. The sky rushes down to a great level span of monochrome – tarnished sage, withered bunch grass, dun dirt. A hundred yards beyond, the five horsemen are galloping to where their companions sit horses ranged along the horizon line like cups pushed flush to a table edge.

As he closes, he can hear shouting, wild cries, sees rifles bristling, horses stamping and wheeling. He reins his lathered horse in beside Scotty, stands in his stirrups to view the shivaree. Thirty yards off, Hardwick is on his horse, head to head with a big bull buffalo.

“Vogle was scouting for Indian trace when he spots this lone bull,” a man called George Bell tells them excitedly. “Hardwick bets Vogle he can’t take him down from back yonder, one shot with his Sharp’s buffalo gun. Vogle lets fly and misses clean. The buffalo breaks and Hardwick snaps off a chance shot. Lucky son of a bitch hits one of his legs and cripples him.” He points to the buffalo sidling and backing, shaggy head swinging slowly from side to side like a church bell tolling as Hardwick edges a nervous pony towards him.

Bell grins. “Tom’s just hazing that old buff. Playing some kind of bean-eater Mexican bullfighter, I reckon.”

Hardwick spurs his fidgety horse towards the bull. The bull lowers his head, lunges. Hardwick skips his horse to the side as the buffalo’s leg buckles, crashing him into the dust. There are war-whoops, rebel yells, shrill whistling.

The bull struggles up smeared with ashy dust, panting, maddened, drool hanging like tinsel from his beard. Hardwick slaps his horse
forward with a rifle barrel along the flank and the bull bawls, hooks his horns into the earth, gores and rips the prairie, showering dust and dirt over his back, his blunt head.

The men are all bawling, answering the bull. Deep, sonorous bellows. Shouts. “That buffler is in a fine pucker, Tom! He’s a-looking to hook you up Salt River, he is!” “Fix his flint, Tom!”

And Hardwick, heeling his horse on, a cold, arrogant look on his face, rifle-stock planted on his hip. The bull dashes for the horse, the smashed leg crumples again and the buffalo capsizes, a blur of flailing legs. The wolfers guffaw, trumpet and bellow. Hardwick steps his horse daintily around the buffalo while the bull strains to rise, great hump and shoulders pitching, wrenching himself up to totter on three legs, fractured foreleg flapping like a broken branch only held together by a shred of bark.

Hardwick presses the jibbing horse to where the bull waits with black, distended tongue and blood-red eyes, shaking his huge head, flinging threads of slobber into his dirty, matted wool, massive shoulders bridling, the curved, polished horns hooking the air. Hardwick, erect in the saddle, eyes on the bull, rowels the horse on. The musk of the bull flaring the mare’s nostrils, lifting her head higher and higher on a twisted neck, turning her eyes crazed and white, firing her hind legs into an executioner’s drum roll.

They are all shouting now, some in English, some in French. To the Englishman’s boy, the Frenchies’ gibbering is crazy folks’ noise, the babble of the county madhouse. Beside him he can hear Bell shouting frantic encouragement to Hardwick. “Go it, boy! Take him by the tail!”

The heavy head rises, the red eyes stare.

The Englishman’s boy ducks at the sudden explosion beside his ear. Hardwick’s horse is rearing and Hardwick clinging to her back. An acrid whiff of gunpowder sweeps like smelling salts through the head of the Englishman’s boy. The bull is slowly dropping to the earth, a mass of meat and bone sinking slowly under its own weight, hindquarters slumping, head lolling. He subsides into the bunch grass with a groan, a whoosh of dust squirts out from under the collapsing body.

The Englishman’s boy speaks to Scotty. Cannot hear his own voice. Scotty does not hear it either. His rifle is still tucked in his shoulder and he is looking down the steel-blue barrel at the dying buffalo. A whiff of blue smoke unravels when he slowly lowers the carbine. Now the Englishman’s boy can hear Hardwick shouting angrily, wanting to know who the fuck has meddled in his frolic.

The Englishman’s boy has never seen the like. Vogle cuts the throat and the blood pours out thick and hot, a couple of the breeds catching it in tin cups like water from a pump, gulping it down. Devereux steps forward and splits the skull with a hand-axe, dipping brains with his fingers. Others scatter blue and yellow guts in the scramble for the heart and liver; where the intestines have snaked and coiled the grass wears a greasy shine. Charlie Harper slices buffalo hump like it was a loaf of bread.

Hardwick yanks the liver out of Duval’s hand. Duval doesn’t argue, doesn’t object when Hardwick stalks off to hunker moodily on the ground. Holding the liver in his left hand, he grips it in his teeth, saws off a piece of the flesh with the hunting knife in his right. In a loud voice, between bites, he recollects a British hunter who had travelled with the wolfers for a season and had gladly eaten his meat raw. “He wasn’t too high-toned and almighty to take his meat rare. Learned to like it and his women the same way – red and raw. He didn’t put on no goddamn airs, did he, boys?” says Hardwick, staring at the Scotchman, who has refused to join the feast.

The Englishman’s boy makes himself scarce, disappears amidst the hobbled horses.

The Scotchman sits alone on the grass, looking past the bloody banquet. Like a bystander in shock at a train wreck. Refusing to see.

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