The Last Crossing (23 page)

I knew a man who once said bad luck the first day of a journey was nothing, but misfortune on the second sticks like a cocklebur, it’s not to be shook. If that’s true, things are shaping up bad for me. Right off, I noticed the Morgan favouring her right back leg as she grazed, but when I inspected it, I found nothing, not so much as a hoof crack or stone bruise.

What can’t be diagnosed, can’t be cured. So I drink my coffee and fashion a lunge line from my lariat, then set the mare to circling me so I can study her gait. She’s hesitant to take the lead and that’s what makes her look awkward on the follow. The trouble has to be in the
front legs, not the back. A little scraping with my pocketknife and I find it quick enough, a damp spot near the V of the frog on the left front hoof. A pocket of ripe infection.

This needs to be thought through. The mare’s too lame to travel today. If I cut her loose and press on, I’m short a mount to bring Lucy Stoveall back to Fort Benton. The best bet is to ease the pressure on the mare’s hoof, and to see if she might be able to travel at an easy pace tomorrow.

I’ve got an awl in my saddlebags for making simple repairs to my saddle and harness. Once I’ve sharpened it to a needle-point, I have a lancet. I prick carefully all around the rim of the corruption, press down on it with my thumb, drain a teacup’s worth of pus and pinkish blood. Next step is to douse the sole with whisky, and bind it up in my handkerchief to keep it clean. Now there’s nothing to do but wait and hope she recuperates by tomorrow.

Problem is I’m so warm to catch up to Lucy Stoveall, to wait is vexing hard. My thoughts keep darting off to her in the wilderness, and the whisky in the bottle in my hand keeps inching down.

When I find her, what I’ll say is this: “Lucy Stoveall, I’ve got ten thousand dollars in a bank in St. Louis and another two thousand stashed in I. G. Baker’s safe. I own two hundred head of horses; even sold cheap they’ll bring fifty dollars a head. I know you had a notion once to escape your husband. So fly with me. I’ll take you to San Francisco in style. We’ll look on the Pacific Ocean. I’ve seen it from the Oregon view, and it’s as fine a thing as there is in creation. But if you don’t care for the Pacific Ocean, I’ll take you wherever you want to go – just you point me. I’m not much, but I reckon I’m a good deal better than Abner Stoveall. Run with me and I’ll get you clear of his clutches. I don’t ask but to help you. I know your fineness and I know I’m not worthy of it. But I’ll treat you right. I swear it.”

I tell myself I’ve got to hold my fire as I was taught in the 19th Indiana. The youngsters there took me for the steadiest of soldiers because of how I did everything with the utmost care and deliberation before going into battle – fixing a bayonet, checking my loads, rolling a cigarette. They called me Uncle Ice, thinking I felt no fear,
but my guts were seething and I was reckless for action. I played a part like an actor because if I didn’t, the real Custis Straw would have snapped from impatience.

I had to save myself from my own nature then, and I have to do it now. So I hold myself quiet as quiet can be, lift the bottle slowly to my lips, just as slowly settle it back down betwixt my feet. I stare at the horizon line like a man lashed to a mast.

Morning passes to the swish of a horse’s tail, the sound of Dan and the mare cropping grass, the buzzing of a fly. Now the sun squats directly over my head. It’s unusual hot, sweltering, sticky for these parts, drops of sweat plop off the end of my nose, trickle down my ribs.

Miles south of the Milk, bloated purple thunderheads are rearing up, sheet lightning commencing to flash, followed by a growl like a far-off artillery barrage. The whisky’s finished. I heave the bottle into the river, watch it popple and sink, take out my pocket watch. Every move slow, calculated, measured. It’s one o’clock. I’ve been keeping guard on my nerves for close on five hours.

The storm rolls towards me, bringing darkness with it like a baggage train raises dust. Less than a mile off, it will soon be on top of me. There’s no place to seek shelter, so I just wait for whatever it brings. I feel the temperature suddenly drop, see the grass start to thrash. There’s more lightning running yellow, forked cracks in the sky. The clouds are on the boil. A water spout whirls up on the Milk River, spins like a shiny tin siphon, and suddenly is stamped flat.

I pull off my hat, shove it under my haunches, sit firm on it. The wind shrieks, fills my jacket like it was a sail, drives a tumbleweed on to my chest, wrestles it off. Rain and wind and flying dust tear at me all at once, claw my face, shake me. I duck down, clutch the grass, rock back and forth as the storm roars and batters me. A terrible crash claps in my ears, a hot, blue-green light spurts in my eyes, cuts out, pulling down a blind. Leaning into the charging wind, grape-shot rain peppering my face, I hold on, howling like a child. Thunder covers my screams, but I feel them scraping up my windpipe.

And then, as quickly as it came, the thunder passes, muttering, grousing off to the north and there’s only a heavy rain tramping down
my back. I hear what’s left of my bellowing, a sickly lament, a low, monotonous drone.

The downpour keeps up, but I sit patient under it. I keep telling myself fear made no other part of me break and run, only my voice did that. Hold ground, Custis.

Bit by bit, the rain eases off, whimpering in the mud. I lift my face to the long prospect south. The sky is rinsed clean, a weak sun breaks on miles of wet plain patched with apple green, new penny copper, glints of silver. On that plain, a tiny black horse and its rider are making towards me as if the Apocalypse had shaken one of the Four Horsemen out of the clouds and down to earth.

I drag my mashed hat out from under my buttocks, punch the crown into some sort of shape, set it on my head, straighten my back and shoulders, and wait for the horseman to deliver his face to me.

The rider who fords the waters of the Milk and draws rein in front of me is none other than a sopping-wet Aloysius Dooley.

CHARLES
It is now two days since we abandoned our fruitless search of the Whitemud and began to trek westward, headed for the many lawless whisky posts that Potts says have recently sprung up in British territory north of the Sweetgrass Hills. He claims that the ruffians who infest this region have constant intercourse with the Blackfoot, and so I cling to the slender possibility that the whisky traders may have learned something of Simon’s fate from the natives. Hope based on such a weak foundation may be delusion, but I have recourse to nothing else. We must pursue every avenue until winter threatens and turns us back to England.

My only reprieve from doubt and despondency is furnished by Lucy Stoveall. I find her a cheering companion. Her talk is unrestrained and genial, her manner forthright and sensible, tempered by an undercurrent of melancholy which we both share. She is unlike any woman I have ever met. It is very pleasant to stretch my legs with Mrs. Stoveall and pass an hour or two in conversation that is agreeable, but
not frivolous. As all Americans are, she is a natural democrat, but a refreshing and charming one. Several times she has brought me up short with astute remarks upon the character of our companions, a reminder that one may be ignorant but not necessarily unintelligent.

Yesterday, as we rambled in the wake of the wagon, I was moved to reflect upon how difficult it is to set the boundaries with Mrs. Stoveall, to decide exactly what position she occupies, that of our servant or damsel in distress.

Today, the weather was glorious, not too warm for an extended stroll, and I took full advantage of it to spend several pleasant hours in Lucy Stoveall’s society. With so many more hard miles yet to cover, Mr. Potts advised relaxing the pace of our caravan so as to husband the strength of the horses for the rough terrain that lies ahead. Grunewald and Barker took him at his word, let the horses amble as the drivers dozed on their seats. Addington for once did not contradict Mr. Potts but, full of restless energy, seized the opportunity to ride off with Mr. Ayto to hunt.

Mrs. Stoveall and I were left free to meander and botanize. Lucy, as she has now enjoined me to call her, walked along eyes fastened to the ground, her red hair streaming in the breeze, pointing out to me and naming many small, delicately coloured flowers hidden in the prairie grasses: scarlet mallow, broomweed, sunflower, blue beard-tongue. In the sheltered coulees we explored, there were the ominously named yellow death camas and the pinkish-white bearberry. Once, I caught her deep in contemplation at the bottom of a gully, a small nosegay of native flowers clasped in her hand. A figure of sombre beauty amid the shadows, a subject for a Pre-Raphaelite. I slipped away so as not to interrupt her rumination, and waited on the prairie for her to emerge. She strode out of the declivity very purposefully, announcing she feared I had got myself lost.

A little later, my attention was directed by her to a colony of burrowing owls, tiny feathered troglodytes who make their home in abandoned gopher holes. I was astounded and intrigued that creatures of the air would choose to make their home deep in the earth. The birds were as curious of me as I was of them. From the mouths
of their lairs they stared back at me with a comical intensity. I enjoyed a hearty laugh at their expense.

We strolled on and heard a lovely song, the singer of which Lucy identified as a meadowlark. As I stood enjoying the lark’s concert, Lucy shyly inquired whether I would care to see a portrait of Madge taken in St. Louis. I said I would be delighted. She took it out of the sack which was slung over her shoulder and placed it reverently in my hands.

The daguerreotype revealed a comely young girl, dressed in a simple white blouse and skirt, her hair coiled on the top of her head in a crown of plaits.

Lucy asked, “Do you note a resemblance to me?”

I did not. Her sister left an impression of fragility very unlike Lucy’s robustness, the fragility of a Meissen figurine. The girl’s smile was timid, her teeth small, her chin deferentially dipped. Not at all like Lucy except, perhaps, for the hair. Lucy’s slightly hooded, slanting eyes, and high, curving cheekbones were certainly not in evidence in the daguerreotype. Madge, unlike her sister, could not be called handsome, a word applied to women of an unconventional beauty and a word so descriptive of the unconventional Lucy.

“Very like you,” I said, returning the portrait. “A very striking girl.”

She did not seem aware I had handed her a compliment, but she beamed, happy that I had claimed to have seen so much of herself in her sister.

It was then she asked if I had a portrait of Simon she might view. Tonight I showed it to her. Not the one Father judged the best likeness: Simon posed in the library of Sythe Grange, feet planted on a Turkey rug, playing the stiff English gentleman. Just as a wax work might be said to capture the original, to that degree Simon had been captured. But not his true, animating spirit. Not a trace of it.

The photograph I showed to Lucy was the one taken our first year at Oxford. When she saw it, she could not help exclaiming, “Why, your brother looks like a beggar!”

Simon, draped in a worsted cloak fashionable at the turn of the last century, smiling equably out at the world from under a shapeless, felt
hat. This costume had been acquired at a second-hand clothes dealer because Simon had fallen under the spell of Matthew Arnold’s elegiac poetry. Like so many other Oxford students who rambled the banks of “the stripling Thames,” and mooned about the Cumner Hills with copies of “The Scholar Gypsy” and “Thyrsis” stuffed in their pockets, he had caught the disease of romanticism. How like my brother to carry his fantasies even further than they and adopt the dress of Arnold’s legendary scholar gypsy, a “hat of antique shape, and cloak of grey.” To believe that by wafting about the countryside, Nature would imbue him with a more mysterious and authentic knowledge than the university could offer.

All this flummery was bad enough, but then he proposed that the two of us should make an overnight trek on foot from Oxford to London when the moon was full, in an attempt to recapture the questing soul and open-air life of the gypsy scholar. From this scheme there was no dissuading him. He said if I could not be prevailed upon to join him, he must make his pilgrimage alone. That threw me into a quandary. Left to his own devices, my guileless brother could not escape disaster. If he wasn’t mauled by farmers’ dogs in the dead of night, he would be mistaken for a poacher, or taken in charge as a vagrant. A threadbare cloak and pulverized, moth-eaten hat would not recommend him to a local magistrate. Despite my exasperation and foreboding, I felt I had no choice but to go.

So one evening in the midst of a bronze dusk we set off from Oxford. Simon in his ridiculous rags, clutching a pilgrim’s staff he had cut in Wychwood days before, a satchel slung over his shoulder packed with porter, bread, and cheese. In an attempt to add an aspect of respectability to the outing, I had dressed myself in the garb of a genteel sportsman.

Down the narrow streets Simon blithely advanced while I hugged the walls and slunk along under the gables, trying to make myself as inconspicuous and small as possible. After an eternity, we escaped the bemused eyes of the townspeople. It was a warm evening, very still, cloudless, and as we made our way the moon peeped above the hedges and lit our way like a lantern. Miles outside of Oxford we
encountered a farmer’s cart on the road. He doffed his cap to me, stared uncomprehendingly at my strange companion, was still peering back at us dumbfounded as his cart rounded a bend.