The Englishman's Boy (31 page)

T
he twelve horsemen kept the Battle Creek between them and the Assiniboine camp as they approached Farwell’s trading post. The Englishman’s boy was numbering the teepees; he tallied forty-nine and then lost count. At two hundred yards the lodge-skins resembled fine parchment, parchment written upon with yellow suns, red and blue horses, black bear tracks. Indian magic. Behind the camp, a stand of dark-green timber hung like a stage curtain.

Three young boys of eleven or twelve herding ponies down to the creek for water were close enough for the Englishman’s boy to see plainly – the narrow brown chests, the shoulder-length blue-black hair. One of the youngsters who sat a brown-and-white paint pony drinking from the stream started to mark off the wolfers with his quirt as they passed. The action struck the Englishman’s boy as mighty sassy, vaguely threatening.

Women were bending over black iron cooking kettles in a haze of blue smoke, stooping to prod and encourage flames with a stick. A number of girls ran out of camp to watch the wolfers pass. The camp dogs followed after them, howling and yapping and barking at the white men as if they had sniffed Old Nick himself. The girls hung by the creek edge laughing, their buckskin dresses soft and inviting as yellow cream in the morning sun. Several were a mite unsteady and a trifle loud; the Englishman’s boy thought they looked like they’d had a cup or two of bug juice for breakfast.

To the northeast, on the wolfers’ side of the Battle Creek, stood Farwell’s post, and directly across the stream the establishment of his competitor, the weathered peeled logs of Solomon’s fort looking like they’d been rolled out of clay. The Englishman’s boy could see a man in a red shirt chopping wood there; the blade of his axe winked semaphore flashes in the sun. The man paused in his work as the wolfers reached the walls of Farwell’s trading emporium and dismounted. It was eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. He mopped his brow and returned to splitting wood.

Farwell’s was no Fort Whoop-Up, just a ramshackle whisky post with a palisade of shaggy-barked logs ringing it, a stockade that inspired no confidence it could so much as hold off an attack by the hens scratching dirt at its gate. The trampled grass and beaten earth the riders swung down on was littered with refuse, scraps of hide and animal bones which the chickens had pecked clean. A black cloud of flies rushed up into the face of the Englishman’s boy when he trod near an elk head where the hens had left one clouded, staring eye undisturbed.

He looked around. Six Red River carts rested tipped on their shafts and through the spokes of the high wheels, half-breed children peered out shyly at the strangers. A few log outbuildings with sod roofs sprawled haphazardly about the post: a small stable, a summer kitchen with a rusted stovepipe, a chicken-house with a chopping block dabbed with little white feathers glued in dried blood. A rail corral held half a dozen horses and a gaunt milch cow bellowing to be milked.

Three or four hundred yards north of the post, the Englishman’s boy could make out faint chimney-smoke rising from squat cabins like steam from a kettle. The smoke came from the Métis settlement straggling along Battle Creek. The appearance of the wolfers had already been noted there; a broken file of men, women, and children could be seen making their way up to Farwell’s post.

“Gentlemen,” said Hardwick, “the Lord took his rest on the seventh day. Let us follow his wise example.”

There were raucous guffaws as the men pushed through the gates
of the stockade. An Indian woman stood outside the post door with a pan of shelled corn in her hands. Hardwick raised his hat to her, smiling sardonically. “So good of you to greet the wayfarer, Miz Farwell,” he said.

“No drink,” she said loudly. “No drink Jesus day.”

“We shall see, ma’am,” said Hardwick, shouldering open the door, his men crowding into the post at his heels. Inside was dark and cramped and at first the Englishman’s boy found it difficult to see. But as his eyes adjusted, he discerned a counter of raw planks laid on barrels and behind it steel traps, muskets, axes, and hatchets hung on nails driven into the log wall. There was also plenty of rough shelving stacked with wool blankets, tea, sugar, flour, and calico. Chests on the floor, lids propped open, enticed customers with misty hand mirrors and gimcrack trinkets, cheap beads, rings guaranteed to turn black after a day’s wear, little pots of vermilion and ochre. It was a carnival of smells, some good, some bad.

Hardwick rapped the countertop sharply with a coin. “Mr. Farwell, sir!” he called.

After a brief delay marked by several nervous coughs, a stout little man pushed aside a blanket hung in the back-room door and stomped his way to the counter. He had a leonine shock of prematurely white hair and arched eyebrows as black as his hair was white. He did not seem pleased by what greeted him.

“Hardwick,” he said, “I didn’t expect to have the pleasure of your company again so soon. You just rode out of here a couple of hours ago.”

“Well, Abe, I reckon I’m the bad penny that just keeps turning up … and this time I brought you a pocketful more. Twelve, all told.”

The wolfers snorted gleefully, shuffled and scraped their boots appreciatively on the plank floor.

“And what can I do you?” said Farwell, lifting his sooty, shrewd eyebrows.

“Me and the boys would like a supply of whisky to start. And not that shit you remedy up for the Indian trade – red ink and cayenne pepper and raw alcohol. Real whisky, if you please.”

Farwell brushed the palm of his hand back and forth over the countertop in a manner which conveyed his reluctance to oblige. “I cut them Assiniboine off this morning – I told them no more whisky. They been drinking for four days and every day they get uglier than Auntie. They got nothing left to trade and now they expect me to parcel them out bug juice on tick. I had to let on they’d drunk me dry.”

“Well, you ought to be heartened by the sight of paying customers then.”

Farwell shook his head. “I can’t sell you whisky. On account of the Indians.”

“What’s Indians got to do with us?” said Hardwick. “Last I looked, my boys weren’t wearing paint. Last I looked, my boys were wearing pants with two legs. Last I looked, we were all genuine white men or close enough to pass. Now, in this howling wilderness one white man has a duty to provide aid and comfort to a fellow white man.” He waited, allowing this moral obligation to penetrate Farwell’s thick head. “So why don’t you kindly sell us the comfort which we require, Father Abraham?”

Farwell shifted uncomfortably behind his counter. He thought of correcting Hardwick on the small point that his name was Abel, not Abraham, but decided against the wisdom of it. Hardwick may have spoken with an air of easy jocularity, but only a fool could miss the harsh, dark current running beneath the words. Farwell attempted to elucidate his position. “They see me selling whisky to you boys – they ain’t going to like it. That’s all.”

“Now what do you care if you’re liked by a bunch of naked savages, Abraham? What does their opinion count with you? What you want is to be respected, not liked. An Indian can smell weakness. They smell shit in your pants and take advantage of you.” He paused, stretched his arm across the counter and tapped Farwell on the arm with his forefinger. “Now, if you’re quick fetching the whisky, I won’t charge you for that lesson.”

From a shadowy corner someone brayed laughter.

“Damn it, you don’t know the situation here,” said Farwell angrily. “The old chief, Little Soldier, can’t rein in the young bucks.
They’re proud and uppity as a nigra in a new suit. Yesterday, a man working for Solomon by the name of George Hammond had his horse stolen. The brave who stole it offered to sell it back to him for a bottle of whisky. Hammond didn’t want to do it, but Solomon persuaded him. He told Hammond peace at the price of a bottle of whisky was cheap. No point in stirring up the anthill.”

Hardwick turned to the men in the packed room. “Hell, boys,” he said, “if the traders in these parts allow Indians to put on airs – is that our fault? Are we supposed to suffer for it? Besides, ain’t we just as proud as any dog-eating Assiniboine? And ain’t we owed some consideration on account of our complexions? And ain’t one of them considerations a drink after a long ride?”

Sniggers ran round the room. “You lay down the law, Tom,” said Vogle. “Hold his nose to where the bear shat in the buckwheat,” encouraged another.

“Produce them bottles,” Hardwick said quietly to Farwell, “because me and my boys ain’t going to stand for being treated like we was a bunch of bare-assed nitchies.”

For a moment, it appeared Farwell might refuse, then he shrugged, entered the back room, and returned with six bottles. As Hardwick tossed money on the counter with a devil-may-care air, laughing his careless laugh, the Englishman’s boy felt a hand close on his shoulder, heard Ed Grace whisper, “Let’s clear out of this.”

The escape of these two was unremarked except for the thirty-some-odd Métis patiently waiting outside the stockade gates for a closer look at the strangers. The men stood propped against the Red River carts contentedly sucking on stubby pipes, the stained legs of their buckskin trousers casually crossed one over the other, their eyes impassive as their faces. Ranged behind the men, the women kept an equally tranquil and silent vigil, their print dresses a field of tiny, bright, becalmed flowers. The hair of the young women was braided or coiled on top of their heads, the hair of the old women was hidden under blue and red kerchiefs. No one moved. They made the Englishman’s boy think of a mob he had seen in Sioux City crowding around the body of an old man who was slowly dying after being hit
by a runaway wagon. Like that day, only the children made any noise. The Métis kids were gathered some way off, counterpointing the unnerving quiet of their elders with shrieks and excited shouts as they played some game on a blanket.

Grace was saying, “I don’t know what your feeling is, son, but I think you and me need something to eat a damn sight more than we need something to drink.”

The boy assented with a disinterested bob of his head. He wasn’t really listening; he was watching the watchers. What were they waiting for – news, a glimpse of unfamiliar faces?

“Goddamn,” Grace said, rubbing his hands together at the thought of victuals, “what I could use is some fresh meat. A bit of broiled venison, a bear steak, something doesn’t want to break your pearlies when you bite down on it.” For the first time, he seemed to see the Métis, ranged like a sombre Greek chorus loitering in a tragedy. “These half-breeds more’n likely have some fresh game on hand,” he said to the Englishman’s boy. “One of the women might cook us a Sunday dinner if we paid them. What do you figure?”

“Maybe.”

The Englishman’s boy watched Grace as he approached woman after woman, watched the women shake their heads, or stare at hands knotted in the cloth of their skirts. This would take some time, he calculated. He wandered over to scout what sport the brats were up to. Judging by their squealing, it was a dandy.

When his gruesome shadow fell across the blanket a dozen pairs of eyes lifted. At the sight of him a baby began to cry; her sister boosted her onto her lap, shushing and clucking. The Englishman’s boy stood solemn and flint-faced, looking like a spark could be struck from his chin with a steel, a shred of newspaper he’d stuffed in the sweatband of his derby dangling on his forehead like a grimy kiss-curl, smudgy and grey as his hard, stony face. He had left his Winchester parked in his saddle-scabbard, but he still wore the two bandoliers of rifle cartridges crossed on his breast, and the holstered Colt cinched tightly at his waist. Whenever he took a step, travel-dirt made his pants flap stiffly as tent canvas. One of his boots was
hanging just short of complete and utter disintegration by a few waxed threads. Only a year or two older than the eldest child there, nevertheless he looked wizened, forebodingly ancient.

They stared at him with naked, undisguised wonder, and he stared back, fingering a cartridge in a bandolier. “What you looking at?” he said suddenly, making an impatient gesture to the blanket lying on the ground. “Get on with your game.”

It was impossible to say which they understood, his English or his peremptory gesture, but a boy of thirteen or fourteen with clever grey eyes and a broken front tooth swept the blanket in a matador’s pass over his knees, snatched up three white smooth knucklebones off the ground and, grinning a jagged-tooth challenge at the Englishman’s boy, began rattling the bones in cupped hands. His torso wove from side to side; his hands darted in and out from under the blanket, flew behind his back, cut passes underneath the noses of the smallest children, who shrieked with delight when his quick, lithe hands fluttered at their faces like birds against a window. All the while he sang a chant to the scudding hands; the same phrase repeated over and over, like a rosary prayer.

The chant suddenly stopped and the hands froze closed, the singer slowly twisting his shoulders to hold up his fists to the Englishman’s boy. The Englishman’s boy figured he was to guess where the bones were, how many in each hand. It weren’t no mystery to him; he’d been studying hard the didoes the bone-boy had been cutting up.

He tapped the back of the Metis’s right hand and held up two fingers. The bone-boy slowly opened his fingers – nothing. There was a sharp intake of breath around the blanket. He uncurled the fingers of his left hand. The three bones lay like little white eggs in a nest.

A great shout, a great hubbub; they smote the earth with their palms, beat it like a drum, even the baby struck her knee in imitation of the others. They all pointed, wagged their fingers derisively at the Englishman’s boy, chanting the player’s chant, a taunt, an insult.

He wrinkled his nose with distaste, blushed scarlet, drew himself straight as he could. The half-breed kid was laughing at him, brown eyes flashing, that broken tooth looking sharp as a chisel. The Métis
dashed the bones to the ground with a flourish and scooped them up again in a single, unbroken, flowing movement. Then he was off chanting and rocking on his haunches, hands feinting, white bones juggling from palm to palm, fists leaping behind his back, under the blanket, wrists twisting and fingers flickering, chant rising and falling like last night’s wind hypnotically swinging the treetops.