The Last Crossing (35 page)

I turn my eyes on Lucy Stoveall. Maybe she’s going to speak now, let the cat out of the bag, and if she does the Captain will surely attempt to visit vengeance and fire on the Kelsos. But she sits quiet and still, not a word falls from her lips.

“Mister,” says Chisholm, “as much as I’d like to see them boys punished for how they used me, I wouldn’t advise folks who’d befriended me to do nothing rash. The Kelsos are situated in a mighty strong bunker. I know, I built it. Titus Kelso made sure any Indians
who tried to storm it would pay a heavy price, and you would too.”

“What if we invest them?” the Captain suggests, unwilling to abandon his notion. “We have plenty of supplies. We could starve them into surrender.”

“Come, come, Addington, let us be sensible,” says Charles Gaunt. “Do you think Grunewald, Barker, and Ayto are willing to risk themselves in such an enterprise? I daresay not. The rest – Mr. Straw, Mr. Dooley – are not yours to command. The injured party, Mr. Chisholm, is against it. More telling, we have a woman in our midst whom we cannot put in the way of danger. Let this matter drop. We would face a long delay in reaching the whisky posts, lose precious weeks in a siege.”

It isn’t like the Captain to back down, but even that trumped-up little martinet can see there’s not a trace of enthusiasm showing in any of our faces for venturing life and limb in an assault on the Kelsos.

“Yes, yes, Captain,” Ayto murmurs. “Your brother is right. Let us avoid ill-considered adventures.”

With that, Chisholm’s audience disperses. Ayto and the Captain go off, Ayto leaning into the Captain and chattering away, likely about what a fine light the rescue of Chisholm will throw him in when it is written up in his account of his deeds in America. Grunewald and Barker start up a game of cards, and Aloysius leads off Chisholm to doctor his feet with some of the Captain’s store of iodine. Potts is the only one who remains sitting right where he was, all quiet and mournful.

I catch Lucy alone, starting to mix a batch of dough for firebread. I believe my opportunity has finally been handed to me.

“Mrs. Stoveall,” I say, “you do know who the Kelsos killed, don’t you?”

“I do,” she says, giving a wipe to her brow with a floury wrist.

“I give you my condolences. I know from Madge that you and your husband seldom saw eye to eye, but it’s still a lamentable thing.”

“Abner reaped what he sowed. That’s all I got to say.”

I summon my courage. “With your husband dead, your business is done here. Come with me back to Fort Benton. Likely Chisholm
will want to make for there too. Counting Aloysius, that’ll make three men to see you back safe.”

She trains those wild brown eyes of hers on mine; the flecks of gold in them burn with a hot glitter. “I’m sticking here.”

“Why? Tell me why you insist on staying with the English.” It isn’t a real question, but I’d like to hear her answer straight off from her own lips.

“None of your concern, Custis Straw.” And she goes back to kneading and punching her dough.

It’s a strange thing with women, how infrequently they see where their interests lie. She might as well ask for the moon as for Charles Gaunt. Men like him don’t hitch themselves to buggies like her except for short trips, a Sunday-afternoon jaunt.

“You think about it,” I say. “Tell me what you decide in the morning.”

Leaving her, I pass that peacock Charles Gaunt, sketching in one of his books. I say to him, “Tell your brother I’m helping myself to one of his bottles. He’ll find the money for it laying on the floorboards of the wagon.”

“Very well.” He’s so lost in his doodling, he didn’t hear what I just told him. It’s getting to be a habit, people not listening to a word I say.

“All you English can kiss my ass,” I tell him. He looks up startled. I go collect the bottle, then I collect Jerry Potts because he needs to dose his misery too. It’s his people rotting in the tents. The two of us walk out from the wagons, squat on the ground, share the bottle. We tip back half of it before Potts speaks. “How many dead down there?”

“I didn’t count. Could be seventy or eighty.”

“I want to burn it all up. Burn away the white scabs. Maybe we get good and drunk and we burn it all up.”

“I’m game.”

“Cock suck, white scabs,” Potts mutters, lips fumbling against the mouth of the bottle. “Dirty bastard, son of a bitch, arse kiss white scabs. White scab English buggers.” He goes on like this for a goodly
while, stopping and starting. We run out of whisky a long time after he runs out of his stock of English curse words, ways to string them together, arrange and rearrange them.

Then we stagger off, set the lodges alight, torch the whole village to the ground. Aloysius and a few others wander down to investigate the fireworks, but only he and I stay to hear Potts chant some Blackfoot mourning song for the dead. Aloysius keeps his head bowed the whole time, as if he was in church, and when Potts finishes, Aloysius informs me those lodges aflame remind him of the candles his mother used to light to the Virgin Mary.

LUCY
My chores finished and everything shipshape, as the sun goes down I bundle up a blanket and slip off. When I’m well hid behind a knob of hill, I spread the blanket on the grass, shed every speck of my clothes, lay down on it, let the air play on my skin. I imagine myself white and burning, a lantern in the dark to lead Charles to our meeting in this place. All about, there’s a lovely smell, sharp and tangy like that boxwood box I once sniffed in a mercantile when I was a girl.

A pink glow is trembling just above that low ridge to the east. Every once in a while it flicks up in the dusk. The fire the half-breed and Straw started in the Indian camp isn’t done burning yet.

Directly above me, the heavens are a black quilt, sewn up tight with more star stitching than a body could ever count. I wonder up at them. A long time stared at, they set to jigging and whirling, cutting capers in my eyes. I recollect when I was still years short of school, one night Mother took her baby girl by the hand, led her outside, pointed to the sky, and said, “Lucy, here’s a secret for you. Heaven’s lights is the brightness of children’s souls gone over. See all them dancing, happy children up there? Not a one of them with a care in the world because they can see everyone they loved below and are waiting for them to rise, join them, fly up from earth to heaven in a streak of light. And God put them there for us to ponder, to help us remember to be good. So we can join them.”

Well, not everyone of us is going to shoot to heaven. Abner Stoveall sure as hell didn’t. But funny how the dead do change in your heart. Now Abner doesn’t seem worth wasting a hard word on. I can’t hate him any more. We two struck a bargain, and there’s nary a party to a bargain who doesn’t suspect they caught the short end of the stick. I know I felt so and I’d be mighty surprised if Abner didn’t feel the same.

He had his share of disappointments in life. Wisdom pushing him to the wall, making him feel little and puny. Me no different, I reckon, shoving him off every time he crawled into bed. I used to think Abner couldn’t feel a thing, but he must have felt his smallness in the world. Was a time I wanted him harmed, and now I have my wish, it’s a thin and sour taste, not a bit of satisfaction to it.

No, Abner wasn’t the sort to blaze a path to heaven and neither am I. Me with a sharp tongue to twist his guts, and him with hard hands to raise welts. Madge was the one made to sail up on high, easy as fluff on God’s breath. If she’s looking down now, what would she make of me, laying stripped and white, waiting for a man? Probably, she’d whisper to me to take my tiny piece of happiness, hold its honey in my mouth till it melts away. Don’t risk my short share of it meddling with the Kelsos. I can hear her now. “Leave it to God.” Well, I can’t leave it to God. I don’t see God hereabouts. There’s only Lucy Stoveall.

But I’m frightened. Soon as you get hold of a bit of joy, it wants to slip through your fingers. I reckoned me and Madge would be in San Francisco before winter. Charles wants to hold me tight, yet I’ve got to struggle out of his arms, free myself from them to do my dire work.

So I lay here on my blanket and try to think another matter besides tomorrow. I wonder if maybe to the stars above I might look a star, a little bit of blinking white on this almighty big black plain.

He’s here, my Charles. I didn’t catch his footsteps with my thoughts drifting in the sky, but now I hear his voice, quiet and tender. “Lucy, darling.” He’s already busy shucking his clothes in a rush of hurry, and soon he’s above me, pale and shimmery in the night, slowly sinking down beside me. Two stars now, I tell myself. Two stars.

His skin is soft as butter to my fingers, his mouth all the sweeter to me for knowing what he doesn’t, that it’s the last time.

I can count the people I’ve loved on one hand and he’s the only one that’s left. Now I’ve got to turn my thumb down and over. Make a fist.

ALOYSIUS
I can’t plumb it. Lucy Stoveall left a letter for Charles Gaunt saying she’s headed back to Fort Benton and does a flit in the middle of the night on Custis’s Morgan. Nobody knows why.

Charles Gaunt was terrible wrought up over her departure. He and the rest trooped out after her a while ago, leaving the two invalids and me behind to keep watch over the camp, protect the Captain’s precious marmalade from marauders.

In the midst of the hubbub, Custis just sat by the fire, not saying so much as a word, duster draped over his shoulders, poking the embers with a stick, looking like death warmed over. The last couple of days the rims of his eyelids have turned a queer bottle-glass blue; the man’s whole colour has gone splotchy and bad. That session of dry heaves he had out behind the wagon this morning, the cause of it weren’t all that Scottish whisky he put down his drain last night with Jerry Potts. It’s the lack of the laudanum – I believe he’s run out.

All of a sudden, Custis gets to his feet, marches quickly to his horse, and tosses a saddle blanket on him. I go to investigate. “What’s all this, Custis?”

“I’m going after Lucy Stoveall,” he says. “The Gaunts are headed in the wrong direction.”

“How do you know?”

“It just came to me.”

“I thought you weren’t fit to ride.”

“I am now.”

“You reckon to spread your news to the Gaunts?”

“Let the Gaunts go. That hothead Captain would only be a detriment in this situation.”

What the situation is he don’t say. Custis’s tightening his cinch. “I’m in a hurry, Aloysius. I’ve got no time to answer any more of your questions.”

So I get in a hurry too. When Custis sees me collecting my tack, he don’t say yea or nay to my going with him. In minutes, we’re headed out of camp, and old Chisholm is waving us goodbye, all forlorn and glum at his company abandoning him.

After a bit, I finally get Custis to loosen his tongue. It’s his opinion that Lucy Stoveall is making for the Kelso boys’ whisky post. That purely flabbergasts me. “Why ever would she do that?”

“Yesterday, she hears they killed her husband and never says a thing. Doesn’t that strike you as strange? I offer to take her to Fort Benton and she refuses me. In the middle of the night she steals a horse and takes off.”

“Them ain’t any kind of convincing reasons.”

“Well, I’m not reasoning it, I’m feeling that’s the case. That’s where she’s gone.”

He’s stumped me with that. You can’t argue with a hunch, so I just go quiet and trot along with him, thinking of how unlikely it is that the Kelsos will be glad to see us. At least, Custis’s familiar with this country. Five years ago he come up here to try to buy horses from the Blackfoot, which was no success at all because they wouldn’t trade for nothing but whisky or guns and he refused to sell them either. So Custis got nothing out of the enterprise excepting a knowledge of the lie of the land, which is handy at the moment. Chisholm said the Kelsos was holed up on the east bank of the Saskatchewan about twenty miles from where we found the old boy in the smallpox camp. What Custis proposes is we strike the juncture of the Red Deer and Saskatchewan, then work our way north until we come upon the dugout.