The Last Crossing (27 page)

Captain Gaunt could never match the exploits of Bull’s Forehead and the Blackfoot raiders. He is brave, but a fool. He tries to rule everyone with a word. Discipline. But he has no discipline himself. He rides off to hunt whenever it pleases him, even when there is more meat in camp than they can eat. Potts thinks of the Captain’s harsh words to him. How he had said it was proper for Ayto to kick him because he had stolen liquor and got drunk. Yet Ayto himself scarcely draws a sober breath, and he often sneaks the Captain’s bottles from the wagon.

How can the Captain expect to command men when he shows so little dignity, walks on his hands by the fire, boasts of how he will kill a grizzly with his tall English bow? The Englishman does not understand it is only correct to speak this way after the thing is accomplished, when the right to do so has been earned.

The Captain wants to go to the Sand Hills where the ghosts of the Blackfoot live. He has been told that in the Sand Hills he may bump up against a furious, broken people, and find his own death. He laughed at the warning. He is too stupid to understand that when warriors sell their buffalo runners for red eye, when children cry because of empty bellies, when their mothers lie down with traders for a pint of whisky, their shame quickly turns to rage.

And the white scabs disease is back. The young men murmur that the traders spread it by selling infected blankets, some claim an evil old white man covered with sores spits his sickness into every bottle of whisky before it is sold to Indians. Everywhere the young men talk of how the Hairy Faces must be made to pay for the despair, the hunger, the illness they bring to the lodges of the Real People. This is what the Captain is ready to lead his wagons into.

Potts draws his pony to a halt. The port is sour, curdled in his gut; he empties his belly from the saddle, wipes his mouth and lifts his face to the stars. The Milky Way is spread like the white fleece of a mountain goat across the black sky.

Climbing down from his pony, he knows he has not convinced himself to abandon them. He only needs to think of Custis Straw stretched out in that wagon, half-crippled, half-blind, and he knows it is wrong to leave behind the man who did his best to help him, to protect him from Ayto. In all Straw’s years trading with the Indians, no one ever accused him of dishonesty, or false speaking.

To save white men from themselves is the burden Andrew Potts’s blood places on his son. At Sun River, he rescued two prospectors when the Sioux attacked them. Holed up in a ramshackle cabin, the prospectors loading for him because he was the better shot, he had been able to hold the Sioux warriors at bay until night came. Then it fell to him to walk through the Sioux camp wrapped in a blanket to hide himself from the eyes of the enemy, risking his life to steal horses so he and the two white men could escape.

Potts lies down on the ground to rest, reins looped around his wrist. The pony pokes its nose into his sore ribs and gives a snuffle.

He will sleep until A-pi-su’-ahts, the Early Riser, the Morning Star, greets him. When Early Riser looks down, he will ask the Child of Sun to lend him the necessary strength to continue on with the Englishmen.

CHARLES
Addington’s rashness and arrogance has brought our enterprise to the brink of disaster. Our guide’s absconding in the dead of night badly rattled Grunewald and Barker. Only his unexpected return late this morning squelched their uneasiness. I am sure if Potts had not reappeared, the teamsters would have insisted on our immediate return to Fort Benton. True to form, Addington seemed completely unaware of their demoralized and anxious state.

When I tried to talk sense to my brother, make him see that to allow Ayto to persecute our scout was, at best, impolitic, he would not grasp my point, would not acknowledge that Potts is essential to our expedition.

“There’s no harm in Mr. Ayto,” was Addington’s response. “I find him amusing.”

“He does not amuse Mr. Potts. Have you not remarked how his face darkens when Ayto refers to him as Mr. Moses and you cackle?”

“I do not cackle and no, I did not remark it. It would be like noting boot polish darken.”

At least Addington accepted my suggestion that Straw recuperate in one of the goods wagons until he is fit to travel to Fort Benton on horseback. Generous in victory the way he never would be in defeat, Addington even instructed Lucy to prepare Straw some beef tea, and contributed a bottle of his own barley water for the recuperation of the invalid. But admit the foolishness of his actions, promise to mend his ways? Most certainly not.

Since the debacle yesterday, Straw has kept to his wagon like Achilles to his tent, the saloon-keeper Dooley playing nursemaid. A while ago, Potts clambered into Straw’s wagon on the heels of my brother’s reprimands for the trouble he’d caused, and has yet to emerge.

So here we sit like the ship becalmed in
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. Addington has gone to give Mr. Ayto an archery lesson, the teams are not yet hitched, it is almost noon. The day will be frittered away, wasted for naught. Our trip to the Sand Hills, so much an object of controversy between Addington and me yesterday, is no longer a matter of urgency to him. He was deaf to my argument that the barren waste described by Barker could neither harbour Simon nor anyone with news of him. I see now that the issue is not necessarily our destination, but my brother’s need to assert himself, and assert himself he will. We go to the Sand Hills – today, tomorrow, the next day. Who can predict? The only thing that is certain is that we shall depart at his pleasure.

Meanwhile, I stew in this heat, figuratively and literally. At eleven o’clock, when I took the daily reading of temperature for Father’s records, the thermometer already showed eighty-eight degrees. We will loiter about here and at the end of the day have nothing to show for it but sunstroke and bad temper.

If nothing else, I might seize this opportunity to repair the damage Addington has so recklessly wreaked. Now, while all the disaffected are gathered in conclave in Straw’s wagon.

I hear an earnest murmuring from inside the wagon as I prepare to announce myself. “Mr. Straw, it is Charles Gaunt. May I speak with you?”

A silence ensues, followed by an ejaculation difficult to construe as either a yea or a nay. Peering into the dim interior, it is just possible to make them out; Straw propped against a sack, his friend Dooley towering on a keg, Jerry Potts seated cross-legged on the floorboards. They radiate wariness, hostility.

“May I?” I repeat.

“Hell, why not,” Straw finally answers.

I climb up. The heat inside the wagon is terrific, singes my nostrils with the odour of scorched canvas and unwashed men. In an instant, I find my shirt soaked in perspiration.

“I have come to tender an apology for what transpired yesterday.” They wait alertly, but show no eagerness to accept the olive branch. “Mr. Ayto’s behaviour was inexcusable, as was my brother’s. I ask you to pardon them.”

Straw gingerly shifts his bulk. His battered, swollen features are the face of a monster. His eyes peer inscrutably at me through livid fissures; his lips resemble sausages. “Well, maybe that ought to come from your brother and his friend Ayto,” is his blunt, just comment.

“I have my own apologies to make. I should have prevented it.”

“No stopping it,” Straw says simply. “It had a mind of its own.”

“Are you comfortable, Mr. Straw? Is there anything I can do for you?”

Straw’s face does not change; perhaps his visage is incapable of alteration in its present state. “You can ask Mrs. Stoveall to pay me a visit.”

A ticklish topic in light of the fact Lucy refused to bring Straw his beef tea yesterday. She confessed to me that she suspects Straw pursued our entourage with the aim of persuading her to return to Fort Benton. There was a suggestion that he has amorous designs she does not wish to encourage. “I shall pass on your request,” is all I can say.

“Something in your voice tells me you reckon she won’t.”

“I cannot speak for Mrs. Stoveall.”

“Are you sure? From what I saw yesterday it looked to me like you two have become mighty good friends.”

I do not care for his insinuating tone. “Perhaps Mrs. Stoveall finds your attentions unwelcome.”

“What about your attentions, Mr. Gaunt? Is she welcoming them?”

“We was just saying that maybe you ought to take another crack at persuading your brother not to go to the Sand Hills,” Dooley says loudly and dramatically, trying to steer Straw off this indelicate course.

Straw refuses to yield the floor. “Tell me, Mr. Gaunt, has Mrs. Stoveall gone sweet on you?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Custis,” Dooley remonstrates him.

“I do not think my brother can be dissuaded from going to the Sand Hills. Barker’s description of them has excited his interest.” I pause. “More to the point, I think it unwise to press him on the matter.”

“Bad place,” Potts suddenly says. This is the first time I have heard the taciturn half-breed ever condescend to volunteer information. His gaze wanders about the wagon. “Sta-au’. Plenty of Sta-au’ there,” he mutters.

“I do not understand what you are saying, Mr. Potts. What does this word mean?”

“Blackfoot for ghosts or skeletons,” Straw says. “The Sand Hills is the land of the dead. The home of ghosts.”

I noted immediately Potts’s reluctance to speak of the Sand Hills. This naturally excited my interest and, with much coaxing, I cajoled him into divulging something more about it. Despite the heat and stifling atmosphere, listening to him recount his weird tale in awkward English, I was brought suddenly back to my childhood, to those dreary, winter nights when Simon and I would gather in the kitchen to listen to the servants, simple country girls, talk of spirits. They told of a strange man who had once come to the door of a poor cottage to beg bread, and was sent away with imprecations. And of how when the bread box was opened the next morning, a huge rat leapt upon the hand of the householder and bit him to the bone, leading him into a slow and painful decline, capped with an excruciating death. Or Mrs. Bullfinch’s report of the corpse of a suicide seen wandering about the countryside seeking holy ground in which it could lay itself down. Or the strange knocking in the headboard of Meredith Wilson’s bed which had announced the impending death of her betrothed.

While Simon took these accounts as gospel, I tried to debunk them. Yet my childish attempts to dismiss them only succeeded in inducing in me a profound terror. It was as if by trying to reason them away, I lent them greater life, while Simon, by accepting the existence of unseen presences, made them his friends. Night after night, I trembled and shivered under the counterpane, stubbornly refusing to confess that I was troubled by thoughts of ghosts. And Simon would cross the floor of our room, curl up in my bed to thaw my icy fear with the warmth of his body.

Now, hours after Potts concluded his story, it still weighs upon me. I felt compelled to record it in my journal, as a way perhaps of beckoning Simon’s spirit. Hopeful that by dwelling on a ghost story I would reawaken my brother’s comforting presence. What I wrote was Potts’s story, but in my own words, so as to draw Simon nearer to me.

Long ago, there was a man and a wife. In time she bore him a son. The husband loved his mate very much but she grew ill of a wasting sickness and died. Grief-stricken, the husband would put his little boy on his back, wander the lonely hills, both of them wailing aloud, day
after day. Finally, the man could bear his loneliness no more so he left bis son with the boy’s grandmother, and set off to the Sand Hills to bring his wife back from the dead
.

He walked and walked until he met an old crone living in a tiny lodge scarcely bigger than an ant hill, and heart-sick and weary he told her of his troubles. The old woman pitied his plight and made him the present of a magic bundle to help him in his struggle to recover his wife. That night when the man went to sleep he dreamed the old hag had gone to the Sand Hills and returned with one of his dead relatives to guide him to the Camp of the Dead
.

When he awoke the man learned his dream was true and that a long-dead uncle had come to take him where he wished to go. But the old woman would not let him look on his uncle, she told him that on this trip he must keep his eyes tightly shut, and let the ghost lead him. The man did as he was told and walked for days until the ghost told him he could at last open his eyes. When he did, he shivered in terror because all about him was a great crowd of ghosts, moaning and gibbering, a gruesome sight which turned his blood cold. They rattled their bones and plucked their ribs to make frightening, eerie music, but no matter what they did, they could not make him run away
.

At last the ghosts despaired of driving him off and began to question him, asking why a Person, a living being, would willingly make a journey to the Sand Hills, a place from which no one ever escaped. The man said he had come for his wife and was determined to return her to the land of the living and the son who so dearly loved her
.