The Last Crossing (15 page)

“Well, it’s a life’s study. I don’t reckon I’ll ever get to the bottom of it. It can wait.”

“My brother is devout.” The way he says it, devout on his lips sounds like a disease.

“That the one that went missioning to the Indians?”

Mr. Gaunt nods. “You’ve seen my circulars?”

“Hard to miss, Mr. Gaunt.”

He fidgets with his waistcoat, sips his gin. “As you may have overheard, I am looking for a Mr. Potts. Do you know if he has a residence in town?”

“I hear he’s camped upriver, about five or six miles from Benton. I can take you there if you like.”

A look of surprise and relief flits across Mr. Gaunt’s face. He sends me a thankful smile. “That is most welcome news, sir. Very hospitable of you. I am at your disposal whenever it is convenient.”

He’s all eagerness, but good manners covers it so only the hem shows. I’ve put down five whiskies in my belly and I don’t relish shaking them up in a hot afternoon ride. Mr. Gaunt can wait. “Tomorrow then. Early. Meet me here.”

“My brother Addington will certainly wish to accompany us, if you are agreeable to that.”

“The more the merrier.”

He starts to thank me again when the sound of broken-down boots slapping the puncheon floor makes him turn round in his chair. The barfly is teetering over him.

“You walked away from me. Who the hell you think you are?”

From behind the bar, Aloysius shouts, “Clear off out of there, Rand.”

Rand ignores him. “Don’t turn your high and mighty nose up at me – not when you keep this sort of company,” he says to Mr. Gaunt, pointing at me.

“Go away, son,” I say. “You weren’t invited to this party.”

“And if I don’t?” Just like that, Rand’s dragged a Smith & Wesson topbreak .38 out of his jacket pocket and has it aimed at me. He’s swaying so wildly from the effects of drink that the gun barrel moves like a pendulum in front of my face. “Little girl diddler,” he says.

I see Aloysius, five paces to the side of Rand. I don’t know how he got to that position so fast and so quiet. Aloysius stands on those long legs of his as still as a blue heron peering into water, beak poised to strike. A twelve-gauge sawed-off rests in the crook of his arm. It’s not pointed at Rand, it’s just propped there comfortable and ready. The Irishman doesn’t say a word.

The young rowdy’s eyes flick from Aloysius to me, back to Aloysius. Rand laughs too loudly, pockets the pistol, walks unsteadily to the swing doors. They flap and wheeze on their rusty hinges as he passes through them.

In the sudden quiet when the doors stop swinging, I hear the building creak and breathe, more alive than I will ever be.

O
n the bank of the Missouri, Jerry Potts sits under a moulting cottonwood, surrounded by a blizzard of drifting fluff, clothes speckled white, head hoary. The gnarled tree’s cotton lies thick on the ground, eddies and squirms with every breath of breeze, swirls down to settle onto the ash-coloured surface of the river, where plumes of mist lazily rise and disperse. Dawn breaks dove grey, a pearly sun squinting at Potts’s herd of horses watering in the shallows. Silence is peppered with soft sounds, the suck of a hoof extricated from mud, the snuffle and gulp of drinking horses, the quiet patter of water dripping from a lifted muzzle, the tentative song of birds hopping about in the brush.

A man notoriously close-mouthed, infamous for one-word answers, he is practising thinking in English. Resting his hand on the grip of the pistol jammed in his belt, he laboriously retrieves all the English names for the weapon. Revolver. Six-shooter. Side arm. Equalizer. Firearm. ·45. Short gun. Hog-leg. Roscoe. Peacemaker. Colt. It is a difficult task to recall them all. English is a stubborn, balky tongue. It moves in his mind in fits and starts, often planting its feet and refusing to budge.

He wonders why it does so. His two Almost Fathers, Harvey and Dawson, spoke nothing to him but English. Maybe his head is like the buffalo paunches in which the Blackfoot store water. Maybe his mother, Crooked Back, poured so many Kanai words into his baby-ear that he has room in his head for only a few drops of English.
Thinking in English is too hard, too wearisome, and he allows his mind to slip gratefully into the tongue of his mother’s people.

Nothing exists for white men unless they give it a name in their own language. His mother’s people, the Kanai, they call Bloods. The Nitsi-tapi, they call the Blackfoot. Once they give a name to a thing they think that is enough to understand it.

The Nitsi-tapi accept him as one of their own, despite his Scotchman father. The whites will never do the same. The whites are proud of their blood, always boasting that theirs is stronger than the blood of any other people. So how is it that the strong blood doesn’t overcome the weaker? If they believe what they say, why isn’t he a Scotchman? But even Dawson, the Almost Father he loved, never believed him a true Scotchman. He thought like all whites. One drop of black blood makes a man a nigger, and one drop of Kanai blood makes Jerry Potts a red nigger.

He lifts his face to the cloud of falling cotton, delighting in its gentle, tickling touch. It feels like baby Mitchell’s soft black hair brushing against his throat in the days when he could hold his son close. To give his son an English name had been a mistake. Bad luck for them all. For Mary, for Mitchell, for him.

It has been two long years since he last saw his boy, since Mary took Mitchell south to the basin of the Powder and Bighorn rivers to live in the lodges of the River Crow. By now, Mitchell will have forgotten the face of his father, just as he himself has forgotten the face of Andrew Potts, long dead in the ground. In a little time, Mitchell will be playing the hoop-and-arrow game, herding horses with the other Crow boys. A few more winters will pass and he will be tall and strong enough to go on his first horse-stealing raid, perhaps as servant to the pipeholder. It is a great sorrow to Potts to think his son will grow up to be a Crow-speaker, will never learn more than a few simple words of the beautiful language of the Kanai, just enough to hurl insults at them when they meet in battle. It is even sadder to know that his son is being raised to hate the blood of his own veins, being taught to call the Real People the Treacherous Ones in the fashion of the Crow. His
son’s spirit will be divided like his own is, never at rest. Mitchell the Crow-Kanai, Jerry Potts the Scotchman-Kanai.

How foolish desire is, Potts thinks, to have led him to lose all reason, to take a Crow woman to his bed. Mary, eighteen, in a green trader dress that rattled with rows of elk teeth, her glossy hair black as the obsidian points the Nez Perce tribe trade from behind the Backbone of the World. Mary, graceful, quiet, gentle. Mary who once teased him about the skimpy whiskers of his moustache, calling him Mouse.

He had given her father, wily Talker Drum, a present of twenty horses, a Spencer carbine, ten ropes of tobacco, a dozen silk handkerchiefs before he would consent to the marriage. Talker Drum bargained hard, but in the end he was very pleased to have a son-in-law who was the Almost Child of Dawson, a fine connection that ensured Talker Drum would be supplied with much powder and shot, plenty of coffee and sugar. But not long after Potts had taken Mary as his wife, the American Fur Company had fallen on hard times. The white men in England and the States were not pleased to wear beaver hats any more. Dawson, “King of the Missouri,” the Almost Father who had been so kind to him, went back downriver, just as Harvey had done years before. What was Jerry Potts to Talker Drum then, with Dawson gone and his trade goods with him?

After Mary left him, he had wanted to believe it was because he had no more gifts for her family, no more silver earrings for her. Bitterly, he had told himself greed had worked in her like a cactus thorn burrowing deep in the flesh, spreading poison.

Now he understands the fault was not all Mary’s. When, in the night-darkness, under the buffalo robes, she had taught him to speak the Crow language, she never dreamed how he would use it. Neither did he. It was simply a game, Mary laughing at the strange way Mouse pronounced her mother-words, pulling his whiskers when he made a mistake, both of them laughing, hugging each other tight under the robes. But now Potts knows that to speak English or to speak Crow does not lend you the heart of the stranger. He had used
Mary’s loving words, the tongue of her own people, to lick the flesh from their bones and make them skeletons.

He does not regret that the Crow words saved his life, but the words Mary taught him also made a sharp knife that sliced her heart in half-one raw piece mourning those he had sent to the Other Side Camp of the Crow to sit in the darkness beside the dead, The Without Fires; the other piece glad that the knowledge she had given him brought her husband safely back to her and their child. Potts knows now that to live divided is dangerous, a confusion that sickens the spirit.

The winter day the gulf opened between Mary and him was one of strong cold, the snowdrifts scabbed with icy skin tough as a warrior’s parfleche shield. He had left camp to hunt a little after the midday meal; frost crystals were dancing in the air, a mist of small stars that burned his nose and lungs with every breath. The Big Hairys would be gathered in the coulee bottoms to shelter from the cold, to huddle together in the belly-deep snow. A few shots would reward him with plenty of meat and fleecy head-tail robes in prime condition.

He rode the bank of Shonkin Creek, following every twist of the stream until thick, bristling brush overhanging a bend blocked his way, forcing him to turn his pony down on to the frozen creek. The footing was slippery, chancy, and he let his horse feel its way while he kept his eyes down, looking for muskrat runs where the ice would be thin. His pony skittered round the bend, and when Potts glanced up, there they were, a party of mounted Crow warriors on the bank above him, silhouetted against the steely sky. For an instant, he was about to quirt his pony and run for it, but then he checked his hand, left it resting on his thigh. If he galloped the horse on the ice, it would surely slip and fall, leaving him helpless.

He stared up at his enemies, weighing the danger. Seven of them. Three armed with horn bows, four with breechloader One Shots. He had his Many Shots Henry repeater, but the odds were still not in his favour. He made the sign of peace, twice, waiting tensely for them to reply.

An answer was slow in coming. The Crow had the upper hand and knew it. He could see contempt for him on the red-painted faces
and in the cold eyes with their vermilion-tinted lids. The warriors’ long hair was fanned out on the rumps of their ponies, their roached forelocks stood up, menacing as porcupine quills. He picked out their leader immediately. A man whose nose had once been badly broken and that had mended crookedly. A man who wore ten scalp locks stitched to the seams of his leggings, dead men’s hair ruffling in the wind. Strings of sea shells dangled from his earlobes, turning green then blue in the winter light, twinkling with the slightest movement of Broken Nose’s pony. Potts knew it was in this man’s hands whether he lived or died. He saw the pipeholder was full of excitement, despite the arrogant stillness in which he held his face. Broken Nose’s breath was coming in short, sharp pants, steam jerking from his nostrils.

Once more, Potts signed friendship and finally Broken Nose began to hand talk. Their camp was a short ride off. Would he come with them and pay a visit to the chief? Smoke a pipe, warm himself at their fires, feast on boss ribs? Potts had no choice but to accept the invitation with a nod of agreement. He kept his gaze fixed on Broken’s Nose’s blazing eyes.

Laughing and motioning, the Crow beckoned him to join them. Potts dug his heels into his pony and scrambled up the bank, skin prickled in fear of the first arrow, bullet, knife thrust, blow. But nothing happened. Smelling its rider’s fear, his pony began to mill about and snort, jostling the Crow’s horses. This made the warriors encircling him laugh all the harder.

They set off down a narrow game trail wending its way through the thicket, the three bowmen leading, Broken Nose and the riflemen at his back. The poplar and brush were so thick they hemmed him in tight. It was impossible to try to escape.

Behind him, the Crow were talking, unaware he knew their language. Broken Nose said he did not know what to make of Potts. His jacket was decorated with Blackfoot designs, but he had white man’s hair on his lip. The others sniggered at this.

Potts slipped the mitten from his right hand, forced it inside his shirt to warm his fingers, to take the stiffness from them. He fondled his cat-skin medicine, begging it to lend him its power. He gave thanks
to the cat for sending him the dream. Searching Fort Benton high and low, he had found the black tom atop a fence behind T. C. Powers’s warehouse. It had humped its back, bristled, howled, hissed, spat, the bull’s-eye lamps of its eyes burning with spirit power.

One clean shot through a glaring eye, and then he had skinned it on the spot, and given Mary the pelt to tan. For years he had worn it close to his chest, drawing the tom cat’s hunting stealth, its fierceness into his own heart. As he prayed to it, everything became keen and clear as if the creature was lending him its eyes. Each bobbing ice crystal blazed with a separate fire; the naked limbs of the poplars glistened like white bones. The hair on the nape of his neck lifted.