The Last Crossing (28 page)

Hearing this, one of the skeletons strode through the Camp of the Dead, calling to all the man’s dead relatives to come to his lodge for a feast to welcome one of their descendants to his new shadowy home. This tricked the man’s relatives, but when they came near the lodge they could smell the odour of a living being, and were afraid to go in. They sniffed the lodge skins and cried out, “There is a Person here! I smell a Person!” and were much alarmed. But the owner of the lodge burned sweet pine to cover the smell of life, and at last the skeletons reluctantly entered, one by one
.

When they were all finally gathered, their host told them that the man’s great daring must be rewarded. The ghosts were sorry for the man’s broken heart and promised to do what they could. They brought his wife to him, but she was not as she had been, she was a skeleton, and horrible to look at with her empty eye sockets and protruding ribs. His father-in-law offered to lead them back to the living, but he said the man must do as he had done before, walk four days with his eyes closed. If he lost his nerve and opened his eyes, he would die, and become a skeleton like the rest of them
.

For four days the man walked like a blind man, and listened to the voice of his father-in-law instructing him. He was taught that before he and his wife could return to the world of Persons, it was necessary to wash themselves thoroughly. There was something about the Sand Hills that was very difficult to remove, he said, and the smallest spot of dust must be washed off, or they would die. Last of all, his father-in-law told him he must never strike his wife. If he did, she would instantly turn into a skeleton and go to the Sand Hills, lost for ever and ever
.

Shortly after this, the father-in-law left his daughter and son-in-law. The wife told her husband it was time to open his eyes. When he did, he recognized his wife had once again become a Person, but he still could not embrace her. This was because he had lost some part of himself in the Sand Hills and was not a complete living being
.

In his upset, he looked around and spied the tiny lodge of the old hag who had given him his sacred bundle. Suddenly she was there, demanding her powerful magic bundle back. Gratefully, he returned it to her, and when he did, he became fully a Person again, able to touch and hold his wife
.

After the two embraced long and lovingly, they took the last necessary step before returning to the Land of the Living. They made a sweat lodge and scrubbed the ghost stink off them. Together they entered their village to the amazement and happiness of all, and their little son ran to them, laughing with boundless joy
.

Potts sits, head covered in a blanket, listening to the mosquitoes whine, wheedle for a taste of his blood. His spirits are very low. He should not have given in to Charles Gaunt. Nothing of the Sand Hills can be explained in the English tongue. How do you speak of skeletons whose feet do not touch the ground when they walk? Skeletons who make war on the skeletons of old enemies, who hunt the skeletons of buffalo, gnaw their dry, meatless bones? The sad, empty life of the Sand Hills, he thinks. Ghosts longing to join the living. Whistling down lodge smoke holes in the night, tapping on teepees, begging to be let in.

He could not tell of it in a way the Englishman could understand, so he told him a story, one he had heard many times in the lodges of the Peigans. It was the tale of how the sacred bundle of the Worm People was brought to them by the man who had gone to seek his wife in the Camp of the Dead. But he had decided not to speak of the bundle or the sacred things that an unbeliever, an Englishman, could never accept.

But when he began the story, at the first mention of the dearly loved wife, his skin prickled, for he realized he was speaking to himself and not to the Englishman. He felt the weight of Mitchell on his back, could hear himself and his son crying as they wandered the barren hills. A cold dread filled him that in saying these words, they would come true, and Mary would die in the country of the Crow. Maybe she was already dead, and her ghost was speaking to him out of his own mouth.

But still he could not stop himself from talking. He hurried on, wanting to end the story as quickly as possible. He trimmed it here and there, but as he did, it became more and more his own story. Then suddenly he could not go on, could not unstick his tongue to tell the last terrible part.

In the story, shortly after the couple returns to the Land of the Living, the husband asks his wife to perform a task. When she does not rush to do it, he loses his temper, picks a stick from the fire, threatens to strike her with it. As he waves the flaming torch in her face, his wife vanishes before his very eyes, flung by his own hand back to the Sand Hills.

It fills Potts with sadness to understand how one instant of anger, one moment of unkindness, is enough to drive what you love far beyond your reach.

S
even days pass and the Conestogas begin to cross a blasted landscape, dreary knolls, hollows bristling with stubborn brush, dun bunchgrass, and low-lying sage and juniper that yield a pungent incense when crushed under the wheels of the wagons. Powdery clay steams into the air, cloaks men and beasts in a choking, sallow cloud. Everyone is too dry-mouthed to speak, the only sounds accompanying the advance are the faint music of jangling trace chains, the plangent protest of axles, the dull plod of hooves. They creep along drowsily until the terrain begins to undergo subtle alteration, to demand notice. Fingers of sand appear. The fingers become ridges, the ridges become drifts. Vehicles slew about, horses paw and strain, Grunewald and Barker rouse themselves, croak encouragement to their teams. The heat doubles, the sun presses heavily down on their heads, reflects from the sand into their faces. A broiling march through a vast, gritty oven.

A little before seven o’clock, the peremptory smack of gunshots is heard from where the Captain has dropped from view. Jerry Potts yanks his rifle from its scabbard, alarm spreads, the rest of the company retrieve weapons and hasten forward. Rattling round the flank of a baldy-topped, wind-scoured hill, they encounter a huge dune, an immense steep ramp that bunts a fierce sun with its shimmering brow. The dune is pocked with the Captain’s footprints. Halfway up the slope
he waves gleefully down at them, sweeps the scene with his pistol barrel, and shouts, “Arabia Deserta! Magnificent!”

To a chorus of mutters and curses, Captain Gaunt begins a leisurely stroll back to them, a man descending his very own stairway of gold.

CUSTIS
Aloysius and I clamber out of the wagon to the sight of the Captain sashaying down a dune, so proud and swollen with what he’s found his buttons are popping. The fool thinks he’s the hub everything turns round. Even imagines the black face I wore the past few days was because I took a licking from him in our boxing match, went so far as to say to me, “Mr. Straw, no disgrace in being defeated by me. I am recognized as an expert.” I never minded taking a whipping from any man. What I do mind is Lucy Stoveall dodging me at every turn in favour of Charles Gaunt. Last night I caught her for a word or two about returning to Fort Benton, but she was too stubborn to move. No remedy for that but time. I reckon to play cripple so as to keep an eye on her for as long as I can. The Captain can’t order me off in good conscience if I’m lame. Ayto bust my legs up pretty good, but they’re in better shape than I let on. I just lean on a stick, totter about, twist my mouth, fake godawful agony whenever I’m afoot. Aloysius’s fretting for home, and if he was to know I could manage to sit a horse he’d make an almighty fuss to be gone.

Seeing Addington Gaunt prink and preen is a most grievous pain in the fundament. Here comes the famous explorer himself, down from his dune. “Mr. Straw, testing your legs again, I see. You should scale my discovery,” he says. “The vista is splendid. Waves of sand for miles.”

“I don’t believe I’m up to the climb,” I tell him.

“Ah well, your loss.”

I hear Aloysius’s breath whistle in his nose as he watches the Captain float off. “I’m glad the Englishman enjoys the scenery. But you can’t drink it. There’s no water hereabouts,” Aloysius grunts.

“The shine’ll soon wear off Captain Gaunt’s toy, and he’ll be looking for another,” I say, settling myself on the foot of the dune, rolling up my trouser legs, and packing hot sand on my aching limbs. Dooley’s staring at the musket ball scar on my calf. The worst of my wounds are covered, the bayonet thrusts to the thigh the greyback gave me in the Wilderness before he left me to burn.

Jerry Potts is making to join us. When Ayto and the Captain catch sight of him, Ayto brays, “You are to be congratulated, Captain, on introducing Mr. Moses to his native element! Sinai!” Poor Potts just scurries on by them, ducking his head under their laughter.

Potts hunkers, angrily spits. He doesn’t like the Captain, likes Ayto less, and the Sand Hills even less than Ayto.

The hot sand sucks the throb from my legs. “Damn, this is just what the doctor ordered. You ought to try it, Aloysius.”

“No thank you,” he says. “I ain’t sitting in no sand. Sand up the crack of your ass makes a man itch.”

“What makes you itch, Aloysius, is any happy suggestion. It rubs you the wrong way to think of enjoying a simple pleasure that can’t be bought.”

Potts is biting at the ends of his moustache. “Too many people joke,” he says. “They think I don’t know about Moses. I heard of Moses. He killed the man called Far Away.”

I follow his eyes. Potts is looking up the big sand dune. The Captain has pranced back to the top and struck a pose – wide-legged stance, arms akimbo, fists planted on his hips. Charles Gaunt’s with him, sketching away like a demon.

The baleful gaze Potts is turning on the Captain makes me a tad uneasy. Rumours are that in his day the half-breed’s only killed one white man, a French engage at one of the American Fur Company posts who made life miserable for him when Potts was just a youngster of fifteen or sixteen. Maybe Jerry Potts is thinking it’s time he sent another white man to join the majority. Addington Gaunt conducts himself like a high and mighty pharaoh and I wouldn’t want the resemblance to lodge itself in Potts’s mind.

“Moses never killed Pharaoh,” I tell Potts. “The Bible doesn’t even say Pharaoh died. What Moses did was drown Pharaoh’s soldiers.” I best correct that. “Well, really, it was God drowned them. The hand of God.”

“Leave it alone,” mutters Aloysius, “don’t Sunday-school him. He don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Dawson told me the story,” Potts says. “Moses killed Far Away. Far Away treated Moses’ people bad. Moses drowned him in a river of blood.”

“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Aloysius mutters. He doesn’t approve of churching Indians.

The evening sun is bouncing off the sand, turning Potts to hot bronze, even his hat glows. “You got it wrong, Jerry. Moses didn’t lay a hand on anybody. All he did -” I lift up my walking stick to give him an illustration of it, “was he held a stick to command the waters to keep off his own people, and then he brought it down, and the waters closed over Pharaoh’s soldiers chasing the Hebrews. The Egyptians all drowned. There was no river of blood. It’s only the name that threw you – the waters Moses brought down on the soldiers was called the Red Sea. And Gaunt is no Pharaoh. He’s nothing but a niggling pissant of an Englishman. Moses wouldn’t pay him the least mind. You follow me, Jerry?”