The Last Crossing (53 page)

Potts offers us an invitation to camp with him. Riding single file through the trees, not a word is said. I best sleep in Potts’s shelter tonight, let Gaunt have the tent to himself. His grief requires privacy, and I need to consider how I’m going to tell him whatever more I decide he needs to know.

I never did give that question my full consideration because once we got the tent pitched and Gaunt crawled into it, Potts and I broke into my store of whisky. The thing is, drinking with Potts, if you pull the cork on a bottle there’s no stopping until you follow your face clean to the bottom. And if you’re fool enough to pull the cork on the second one, the same rule applies.

We made a sorry sight the next morning, the two of us trying to set a fire in the wet snow, still half-drunk, bilious and shivering like shaved dogs. That’s how Gaunt found us, but he didn’t seem to note our condition, how our nerves were all raw and scraped and our moods tetchy. He was too full of crackpot schemes he’d lain awake all night dreaming up. The first being that the three of us ought to kidnap his brother and shanghai him off to Fort Benton with us. I told him straight out I was having no part of that. He wanted to know why.

“Because I’ve got no interest in tangling with the Crow. And what’s more, I don’t hold with press-ganging a man into something he doesn’t want.” It struck me that godforsaken, chilly morning that the Englishman treated everybody as if he were the lord of the earth and the rest of us his damn servants. If he wanted to go down to the Crow country, I was expected to jump and do his bidding. Who put up the tent every night? And who happened to be freezing their arses trying to start him his breakfast fire with sopping wood?

It took him aback, me being short with him. He said, “Very well. Then I have another proposal I shall put to Simon. If he won’t give this woman up, it’s impossible for him to return to England. But I think I can persuade him to take the boy and her to Fort Benton to live.”

Just like that. Take her and the boy to Fort Benton to live. It riled me how he believed things ought to fall into place just because he wanted them to. He wooed Lucy Stoveall and got his way with her quick enough. But this wasn’t going to be as easy for him as Lucy had been.

“Give it up, Gaunt. They won’t go to Fort Benton.”

“Who are you to say what is and what isn’t going to happen? I saw several instances of Indian women and white men living together
in Fort Benton. I grant you I am not pleased at the prospect, but better that than my brother living the way he is now. Exiled from his own people.”

I lost my temper then. I asked did he want his brother to end up like Private Noonan? Gaunt wanted to know who Private Noonan was, and what did he have to do with Simon?

So I started to tell him.

“Private Noonan was the husband of a regimental laundress at Fort Lincoln. Mrs. Noonan had been married before – to another soldier – but he had died and left her a widow. Private Noonan and her were small people, just a lowly private and a shirt-scrubber. Anyway, when he was off on manoeuvres, his wife fell ill. On her deathbed she begged the ladies of the fort that when she expired she wanted to be buried in the clothes she wore, under no circumstances should they wash her body. She claimed her sense of modesty and propriety could not bear the thought of it. Well, Mrs. Noonan died before her husband got back to the fort and the ladies didn’t respect her wishes. They stripped Mrs. Noonan and they got a terrible shock. Mrs. Noonan was a man. Shortly after, Private Noonan shot himself in the stables. He couldn’t take the bullyragging from the rest of the soldiers. Do you want that for your brother?”

Gaunt took it hard. Maybe it was seeing him knocked down a peg, lose that smug English air that made me understand what I’d done, the cruelty of it. I tried to talk him through this business, enlisting Potts’s help whenever I could. I told Gaunt about the first time a French beaver man pointed out a
bote
to me among the Gros Ventre up in the Sweetgrass Hills. The trapper called her a
berdache
, the name the French had given them, but every Indian tribe has their own word for such persons.
Bote
in Crow,
wintke
in Sioux,
he man eh
in Cheyenne. If you translate them into English, they come out roughly the same, Two Spirit, I told Gaunt. I said that an old Crow man once informed me that it’s the mystery of two spirits in one body that makes a
bote
holy, a creature both male and female, yet more than either. It gives them extraordinary spirit power. The old man had said that generally the female spirit shows itself early. A little boy wishes
to keep company with the women, to sew and to bead, he begs his parents to dress him as a girl. Not to do as the child wishes would be wrong because he is born on a path, and it would be evil, a crime against nature to make him deny his spirit.

Then Potts stepped in. He said his wife had told him of a Crow warrior who in middle-age was spoken to by the
bote
spirit in a dream. The man struggled against his vision for a long time. Everything went wrong for him because he did not obey it. But the real nature is always stronger than the body, and finally the warrior accepted his path, put aside his weapons, and became a woman. Potts said that any man who took a Two Spirit for a wife was blessed. Everybody knew the Two Spirits were builders of mighty lodges, healers of the sick, graceful dancers, fine beadworkers. They brought good fortune to everyone they favoured. Potts said that an Assiniboine had once passed on to him a rumour that the great Sioux war chief Crazy Horse had several
wintke
wives and the prophet Sitting Bull had one too. The Sioux assumed that the power these men held owed something to their Two Spirit wives. A Sioux warrior would give many rich presents to a
wintke
just to have her give a name to his baby.

Gaunt listened, but I’m not sure he heard. When Potts and I were done, he got to his feet and walked away from us. He was a long time getting back. When he did, he struck me as being even more determined to save his brother from the
bote
, now he knew how matters stood between her and Simon.

In the past few days, Gaunt returned again and again to the Lodge of the Sun, trying to persuade his brother to come back to England with him. I feared the
bote
might lose patience and hand him a drubbing, but Gaunt says she seems to get pleasure out of hearing Simon refuse him.

With the writing plain on the wall, Charles Gaunt is acting as a man is liable to do when everything he wants is thwarted. Now he’s throwing all his energy into doing what he can do to avoid facing what is outside of his power to accomplish. It prods him to wild, hasty decisions. Yesterday, he talked Potts into guiding him down to St. Louis. Later, he handed me two letters, one addressed to the I. G.
Baker firm, the other to Lucy Stoveall, impressing on me how important it is that I place it
directly
into her hands.

This morning, Gaunt headed off in the direction of the Lodge of the Sun. When he came back so downcast, I picked up my Henry and pretended to go off to hunt, just to give him a little time alone to swallow one more sore defeat.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse. A sharp spell of cold settling in from the north, winter baring its teeth. Gaunt suggested we take a tramp to stir up our blood, work a little warmth into our bones. I followed his lead and he walked us into the Crow camp. He was mighty pensive as we wandered through it. Most of the Crow men were gone, likely off on a buffalo hunt. The women were fleshing bighorn sheep hides and butchering deer. Old codgers were bundled up in their robes, nodding their grey heads in agreement to whatever their companions had to say. All of them ignored us. We didn’t exist.

We wandered amid the white-blanketed pines in a thick silence, Gaunt kicking at the crusty snow with his boots. After a bit, he said to me, “I believe my brother has not long to live.”

“Your brother looked fit enough to me. Aside from his feet.”

“I said to Simon that he cannot bet on his circumstances staying as they are now. In ten years, the old life of the Crow will be gone. Settlers, civilization will put an end to it. Do you know what his answer was? That is why he chooses to stay. The brevity of the life he is leading makes it all the more precious to him.”

I kept quiet. We came upon moccasin tracks. Gaunt began to set his feet in the prints in the snow. It seemed to help him think, occupying himself in that fashion. Soon, the Indian’s trail disappeared into a thicket. Gaunt stopped, as if he was considering following the trail wherever it led. There was frost in his eyebrows; the white fog of his breath marked the quick-time of his breathing.

“Mr. Potts presented me with Addington’s personal effects after I returned from my visit to Simon. Pocket watch, ring, even the clothing. He refused to surrender it to Ayto’s keeping.” Gaunt’s brow furrowed. “There was no blood on the clothes, not a tear or rip. Very strange considering how he died, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ayto said he saw the body before it was buried. It was mauled beyond recognition.” Hands stuffed in his coat pockets, Gaunt began to shiver. “It was very scrupulous of Mr. Potts to safeguard those articles until he could return them to me.”

“Yes.”

He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. “But the one particular article my father would have wished as a keepsake, because Addington was so attached to it, was missing. Very odd. But perhaps Potts judged it worthless and discarded it. I did not wish to offend him by asking after the item.” He paused before musing, “Then again, did Addington forget to bring it from England?”

It was plain to me Charles Gaunt was thinking aloud, moving hand over hand down some treacherous wall, touching Addington’s death, touching Simon’s choosing the
bote
over him. Trying to feel his way to a place where he could sum it all up, make sense of it.

“Addington believed the item brought him luck. Superstition – believing in something that isn’t there. Simon is no different. You know, when he was a boy he used to fondle buttons. He acted as if there was life in them. Gave every evidence that he felt this life. It is a disease of the Gaunts – superstition. I’m the only one untouched by it.”

Gaunt began to walk once more. Minutes passed. “As a child, Addington adored our gamekeeper, old Caitlin. Tagged along at his heels wherever he went like a faithful terrier. When the time came for Addington to be sent away to school, he begged the gamekeeper for a memento, something to take away with him to remember the old man by. Do you know what he gave him? His belt. He took it off and said, ‘There you go, young master. If I know ye, like as not ye’ll be in and out of trouble at that school. When time comes to tan your arse, ask them to use this on you. That’ll recall your old friend Caitlin well enough, bring him to mind. My own boys certain do remember me by it.’ ” Gaunt laughed. There was no pleasure, no trace of mirth in the sound. “When Addington came to manhood, he wore Caitlin’s belt on sporting occasions, riding to hounds, shooting. Quite incongruous
since my brother was a bit of a dandy among the sporting set. To wear the belt of a servant hardly seemed proper. But Addington believed it brought him success in the field.”

We walked on. Twilight was falling, everything growing dark.

“What did this belt look like?”

Gaunt’s brow furrowed. “A sort of workman’s belt, wide, thick, black leather. I don’t remember exactly. You see, what intrigued me about it was what it meant to Addington. The idea of it. That’s why I’m sure he would not have gone hunting for the bear without it.”

So there it is. I’ll never know because I got rid of that belt. Chopped it to pieces. Burned them the day after I’d seen Joel Kelso’s face in the livery stable and knew that the belt had never belonged to Titus. I told myself the time had come to stop fingering Madge Dray’s death, turning it over and over in my hands, carrying it around in my pocket.

But if it was the Captain’s belt, would he have left his luck on a young girl’s neck? I could ask Gaunt whether he remembers studs. But I won’t. Because, God willing, here’s where I make an end to it.

For weeks, Potts has walked in circles around what stakes him fast – Mary and Mitchell. Now it seems he must cut the tether. His father-in-law, who has been carrying Potts’s messages to where Mary is camped many miles away on the Powder River, says no more parley. She will not come to speak to Potts. And she warns him if he shows his face at the door of her new husband’s lodge, there will be trouble, bloodshed.

What Mary does not know is that he has already paid a visit to see Mitchell, tucked himself away in a clump of brush outside the Crow camp, hunkered there for hours on the slim chance he might catch a glimpse of his boy.

He had recognized Mitchell the moment he laid eyes on him. His son, plump, bow-legged as his father, arms squeezing a ball of squirming, yelping fur, a protesting pup. As soon as he saw that, he threw
his eyes about, looking for the mother dog. She couldn’t be far off. If the bitch spotted his son manhandling one of her litter, she might sink her teeth in him.