The Last Crossing (48 page)

I step out gingerly into Front Street. Late September, sunlight shiny and clear as a new washed windowpane. Best weather offered in these parts, bothersome flies and mosquitoes gone, air with the mellow, smoky tang of good whisky to it, a touch of warmth hiding there but no more. I could stand here all day if I had the strength, take pleasure in watching others work while I idle, but I have my own job to do this afternoon, business up the road.

I slip sideways through the door of the smithy. Hewitt’s been hot-shoeing mules, the place stinks like burned fingernail clippings. No sign of the farrier about. Joel’s forking up muleshit and Danny Rand’s whetting a clasp knife on the uppers of his boots.

“Afternoon, gentlemen,” I say. Joel startles like he’s been saluted by a ghost. Rand looks up, slowly closes the clasp knife and pockets it.

“Joel, I told you to stay clear of Fort Benton. Lucy Stoveall’s back in town. I don’t want the two of you crossing paths. You better remove yourself from town and do it fast.”

“Tell him to kiss your arse, Joel,” says Rand, hand moving to his jacket pocket. Joel’s holding the fork with the tines straight out at me as if to fend off a charge.

The short walk from the Overland Hotel has caused my legs to start trembling like a newborn colt’s. Rand has brought his pistol out, aimed it at my chest. That’s the second time that boy has directed his topbreak towards my person. The banked fire of the forge throbs hot and red on his face.

“Every occasion we meet, you’ve got to wave a gun at me. Put that away, Rand.”

“I don’t know why I would. There ain’t no Dooley with a twelve gauge hereabouts this time.”

“You watch him!” Joel cries. “Watch him or he’ll do you like he done Tite!”

“Joel, one last thing and then I’m finished with you. There’s something I want you to take a look at.” As I reach into my jacket pocket, I hear Rand cock the revolver, but I don’t stay my hand, just ease it on to the belt and toss it over to Joel. He jumps like I threw him a snake, but he catches it. The belt dangles from his fist.

“First, you told me Titus had a belt like I described. Then you said he didn’t. Which is it?”

Joel’s turning it over in his hands, puzzlement written large on his face. “I ain’t never seen this before,” he says. “Titus didn’t own no belt like this.”

There’s a blow. No doubt he’s speaking the truth.

My watery bowels spasm. “I got to sit, boys. I been sick for a time.” I move to Hewitt’s anvil, straddle it, lower myself down careful, not trusting my treacherous guts.

Rand passes the topbreak pistol to Joel, jerks the belt from his hands. “Straw delivered himself into your hands. Let him abide the consequences.”

I hear a bird, a rat, some small thing rustle in the rafters. Joel says not a word.

“All I been hearing from you lately is -” Rand screws his voice into a whine, mimicking Joel, “ ‘He kilt Tite. Shot him like a dog. Straw’s going to pay. See if he don’t.’ ” Rand pauses. “So make him pay.”

“Now?”

The small thing up in the rafters has gone still. I take out my pocket watch, flick the lid, check the time. “Let’s say you’ll be gone in an hour, Joel. Go to Bozeman, Virginia City, Helena. Better still, go back to your mamma in Kansas. Because if you don’t, I’ll have to arm myself and chase you off.”

“Do it,” says Rand to Joel. “Shoot the bastard.”

I keep my eyes on the watch. The minute hand jumps. I start to wind the stem. Stop myself just short of popping the spring. “That’s all I have to say.” I get to my feet. The two of them are between me and the door. I start towards it. Neither of them move. I step by Rand’s shoulder and something snares me by the throat, snatches my boots
from the floor, drops me hard on my back in the muleshit. Rand is dragging me across the floor, shouting, “Cocksucker! Cocksucker!” I realize that the belt that choked Madge Dray is around my throat.

My guts cramp, betray me. An almighty stench bursts out of me. The belt slackens, and I flop over on my stomach. Rand steps back. He laughs, whoops. “I scared the shit clean out of Straw!”

I’m crawling, legs weak as water. Can’t raise myself, can’t stand like a man.

“Custis Straw, so afraid of Danny Rand it ran drizzly shit right out of him!”

I hear Joel say, “Let’s go to Helena, Danny.”

“Why, you blamed coward. You’re afraid of that woman.”

“Can’t fight a woman,” says Joel meekly. “Turns everybody against you.”

“Well, put your tail between your legs and go to Helena. I ain’t running. What Straw done – dirtying himself – that’ll buy me a week of drinks in this town. I intend to spread that about.”

“I’ve been sick!” I shout. “It’s my ailment!”

Joel cracks the door of the livery and is gone. When the daylight hits me, I begin to sob.

“Hey, Kelso!” I hear Rand yell. “Hold up there! You taken my topbreak! Goddamn it, Kelso! Stop, I say!” Looking up, I see Danny Rand hustling out of the livery at a dogtrot.

I yank the belt off my neck, shove it in my pocket. Crawl to a stanchion, pull myself up, hide my face in the splintery wood. I’m soaked in shit and blood and shame. I hug that stanchion for a long time, breathing my foulness. Then when my legs steady, I make my escape to Robert E. Lee’s laundry and bathhouse.

I never thought to let myself be touched in such a condition. But when the Chinaman sees me stripped trying to wipe my legs with a cloth, losing my balance, nearly toppling over, he takes the cloth from me and swabs me down gentle, clucking over my scrawny frame, saying how I’ve shrunk. He launders my drawers while I sit in the big tub, weeping.
He brushes the mule shit from my coat. He keeps boiling hot water coming all afternoon because I don’t want to get out, only soak away the hours, watch the walls drip with steam, think of Danny Rand going up and down every saloon on Front Street, men howling with laughter because of my disgrace. Everybody pleased to see Custis Straw humbled because of how I’ve walked among them, proud and full of airs. As the Bible says, “In the mouth of the foolish
is
a rod of pride.”

Come early evening, I finally hoist myself out the tub and towel down. Robert E. Lee has a store of powerful, cheap scent on hand for the boys to douse themselves with after they’ve had a scrub and are ready to sally out on a visit to the whores. I sprinkle myself with it too. Doesn’t help, the reek still clings to me.

When I go to put on my coat, I feel the belt in my jacket pocket. I take it out. I’ve lost so much weight that when I put it around my waist, the tongue fits in the punch hole perfectly. A bad conscience, the guilt of all the dead I left behind me, had to attach itself to something. I always felt that I owned the belt, or it owned me.

Out in the dusk, I finally fathom how, for years, my spirit has wanted to die. But my body wouldn’t let it. It held on hard to life in that Washington Hospital. It seems to hold on hard still.

It must have been the same with Old Adam after he was driven from the Garden of Eden. Surely his spirit sickened, begged for death. But his body had found its rightful place, needed the hard old world. Needed to lift the rocks and pull the thistles. Until it could do no more, gave out, and loosed the spirit.

Now I’ve got to journey back up Front Street where surely Danny Rand has spread news of my shame by now. My body has to put one foot in front of the other, haul my spirit past the faces in the lighted windows, the gapers in the street, the whispers.

O
ctober arrives and finds Jerry Potts still tarrying at Fort Whoop-Up. After the passing of Falling-Leaves Moon, naked trees shiver in the river bottoms. Over the twenty miles between Fort Kipp and Fort Whoop-Up, the Confederacy of the Blackfoot are camped, Northern Blackfoot, Bloods, and Montana Peigans who have decided to winter in the Queen’s country. The Peigans were taught a hard lesson last year when Major Baker fell on Heavy Runner’s band and left behind many dead women and children in the snow of the Marias. But in the heart of Blackfoot territory they feel secure from the American seizers. Winter is a time for visiting with friends, for feasting, for smoking the pipe, for laughing and games, for old men to recount brave deeds.

Potts and the Scots half-breed brothers, Alex and Charles McKay, known to the Blackfoot as Unborn Calf and The Bear, ride out to hunt each day from the fort. Everywhere the signs point to the onset of winter. The hair of the buffalo thickens and grows shaggy, the tawny prairie grass tosses in a cold, keening wind, flakes of snow appear suddenly out of nowhere. When the ponies drop their dung, steam hovers above it, just as clouds of midges do in summer. Mornings, the water bucket wears a skin of ice and the metal dipper stings Potts’s lips, makes his teeth ache when he drinks from it.

At the beginning of the last week of October, a ferocious squall sweeps down from the Backbone of the World, the Rocky Mountains,
and sprays the prairies with a discharge of sleet, short and sharp as a blast of bird shot from a fowling piece. Wrapped in his blankets, Potts listens to it rattle on the roof of the bunkhouse, then stop as suddenly as it began. But the sleet does not vanish like the clamour it made above his head; it lies on the ground, a light dusting of ice. Potts wraps his head in his arms and dozes fitfully.

Shortly before dawn, there is a racket in the Blackfoot camp that lies several hundred yards outside the walls of Fort Whoop-Up. Dogs bark and howl, men shout angrily, women wail. The uproar wakens the McKays too.

Potts rolls out of bed, throws on his clothes and gun belt, grabs his Henry, stuffs several boxes of cartridges into his pockets. The McKays follow suit and the three men hurry out of the bunkhouse into the darkness. Lights flicker in the buildings; traders rush about, their voices loud and anxious, lanterns toss wildly in their hands, enormous shadows slither over the palisades.

The harness-maker sprints across the yard; Potts catches him by the arm, pulls him up short. “What is it?” he yells into the frightened face.

“Christ, don’t ask me! But it’s devilment! Count on it!” The harness-maker tears himself out of Potts’s clutch and hustles to the wall where the silhouettes of armed men can be seen, stark against the starry sky.

Potts turns to the McKays. “Let us go into the camp and see what this is about.”

But the jittery guard on the fort gate doesn’t want to open it to let the half-breeds pass. Indians may pour through and massacre everyone inside, he says. When Potts, exasperated, unsheathes his skinning knife and threatens to cut the guard’s nose off, the man reluctantly gives way, permits them to slip out.

The Blackfoot village is seething. Word has come that a great war party of Cree and Assiniboine have hit a small encampment of Bloods on the lower Belly. While the Bloods slept, the attackers slit their lodge skins, crept into the teepees, and stabbed them to death as they lay in their robes. The brother of Chief Red Crow and many others have been killed. Only one young boy managed to escape and raise the alarm with the Many Tumours and All Short People bands. At
this moment, they are holding eight hundred Cree and Assiniboine at bay but cannot do so for long. Gallopers have been sent to the Piegan camps, but they are ten miles off. If help does not come to the Bloods soon, they will be overwhelmed.

The Cree and Assiniboine chiefs Little Pine, Big Bear, Piapot, and Little Mountain, learning of how the white scabs has weakened the Blackfoot, are determined to wipe them from the face of the earth. Even worse, the famous warriors, Yellow Hair and Curly Hair, have been seen riding with them. There is no mistaking the long blond hair, the blue eyes, the fair skins of the sons of the Hudson Bay man, Hugh Sutherland. The Blackfoot know that as much as Yellow Hair and his brother are the spitting images of their white father, their hearts are as one with the people of their Cree mother.

Potts has often heard stories about the Sutherland braves. The one that sticks in his mind is how Yellow Hair answered the Scotchman trader who scolded him, telling him he would be better off between the shafts of a plough than dressed in war clothes. Yellow Hair had said, “I have never been taught anything but fighting. I suppose I have relatives beyond the Big Water who would be sorry to see me leading this kind of life, but how can I help it?” Potts understands his reply.

All about, hasty preparations for the battle are under way. Boys run to lasso their fathers’ swiftest ponies. Weapons are broken out, men paint their faces, don eagle-feather bonnets and magical one-horn headdresses, reverently fondle medicine bundles, sing to shields that have the power to turn aside bullets. By twos and threes the warriors ride off as soon as their mounts are saddled. There can be no waiting for laggards when the fight hangs in the balance.

Potts and the McKays exchange looks. “We are as much Blackfoot as the Sutherlands are Cree,” Potts declares. “I think this is our fight too.”

“Yes,” agrees Unborn Calf.

The Bear is pleased. “Yellow Hair claims he has never been taught anything but fighting. Let us see if he has been taught well.”

But going to collect their horses from the stables inside Fort Whoop-Up, they find the gate shut to them. No matter how hard they
shout and threaten, it stays barred. There is nothing to do but to return to the Blackfoot camp and ask that someone lend them war ponies. More precious time is lost. The last of the Blackfoot warriors have stampeded off into the night, yelling encouragement to one another.