The Shirt On His Back (27 page)

Toward evening
the northern skies began to cloud up, and Frye and January shifted tent and
belongings up to the high ridge in the center of the island. Charro Morales
came over to lend a hand, and though there was no evidence that the river had
ever risen that far, offered sanctuary in his own quarters onshore. 'I won't
tell if you won't. Sounds like a bad one coming in.' And he paused to listen to
the grumble of far-off thunder.

'I appreciate
that.' January tried to recall if he'd ever seen Morales in a black beaver hat
with a chimney-pot crown to it. The man was one of the traders new to the rendezvous,
and like the other newcomers - Gonzales who claimed to be from Santa Fe, and a
taciturn man named Wynne who didn't seem to have a great deal of business sense
- was being soundly drubbed in the marketplace by the AFC, despite the quality
of his whiskey.

'You gonna take
him up?' asked Frye, once they'd got the new fire pit dug. It was surprising
how much difference the ten-foot rise at the center of the island made, in
terms of exposure to the wind. 'If this turns out to be the time that the river
does come up more'n fifteen feet, I for sure don't want to be sittin' up here
when we find out about it.' And he looked down from the modest height at the
two arms of the river - deep and shallow - rippling in the fading light. Across
the shallower western channel, the lights of campfires twinkled beyond the
trees of the bottomland; with the restless tossing of the cottonwoods, January
was conscious of how far off those lights were.

He shifted the
logs on the fire, throwing up a brighter glare and a cascade of sparks. 'I
don't know.'

'You mind if I
do?'

January
hesitated, wondering what it was that was ringing alarm bells in his mind, then
shook his head. 'Worst comes to worst, I can climb a tree,' he added, to
lighten the air. 'Can't be worse than sitting out a hurricane in bayou country.
And I'd rather not be turned out of the camp, if someone were to drop in
unexpectedly.'

While Frye made
coffee, January settled on an outcropping of the island's rocky bones and gazed
across the wider eastern arm of the river, over the bottomlands and up at the
shouldering foothills, the dark fringe of trees on the east side of the river
where the coulees ran up into the mountains proper.
I was raised in the mountains,
Shaw had said . . .

He's fast,
January reminded himself.
He knows how to
live off the land.
And he was very, very tough.

Would that be
enough?

How long do we
wait, hoping for word?
In another
week, January knew, the rendezvous camps would start breaking up. Most of the
trappers had finished their business already. The traders would head back
toward Mexico or Missouri, mules laden with furs, hastening their steps to
avoid snows that could fall as early as September in these high valleys. The
trappers and their engages would begin the long trek toward new rivers to trap,
new valleys to find where the beaver hadn't all been killed.

And
if spring finds us in a war with England,
thought January grimly,
the logical place for the
British to land their army will be New Orleans. Again
.

'Well, you beat
us there once,' remarked Hannibal, when he, Pia and Veinte-y-Cinco arrived -
well after full dark - with a kettleful of supper and, as promised, a bottle of
Seaholly's whiskey for Frye.

'Because General
Pakenham was an idiot,' returned January. 'I can't imagine Parliament would
appoint a general that stupid twice.'

'I have great
faith in the rulers of my country.' The fiddler settled on a hunk of driftwood
beside the fire while Pia and her mother got up a game of three-handed pinochle
with Frye. 'I brought the letters.'

'Read them to
me,' said January. 'Not just a summary - tell me what Bodenschatz actually
tells his father, line by line.'

'Honored Father
,'
Hannibal read, and January bent his head and shut his eyes to listen.
This is the man himself speaking,
he thought.
There has to be an answer there
.

A
description of Fort Ivy. Boden's contempt for the men among whom he found
himself: trappers, muleteers, half-breed engages. Card-games and drinking, the
same stories told a thousand times:
I think I should burst into tears of joy, if a man
came here who had read Shakespeare or Goethe, if I found one soul with whom I
could speak even a broken fragment of what is in my heart
. . .

His admiration
for the 'wild' tribes who passed the fort to trade,
whose honor is clean and who have
not been corrupted by the Americans' obsessive greed and filthy ways.
His disgust at the 'fort Indians':
broken drunkards who will sell
their wives and daughters for liquor . . .

Would
that some great barrier, like the Wall of China, had been built the length of
the frontier, to keep the Fur Companies, with their foul alcohol, their
dirtiness and diseases, their corrupt and imbecilic 'Indian agents' and that
great and filthy poison, Money, away from these savage, honest children of God,
who know no Law but Rightness, as it is revealed to them in the magic of their
dreams
.

And from there,
a long meditation upon his own dreams, and on the sacredness of Vengeance:
Law is the whore of the rich, but here beyond the frontier,
a Man does what he Must. . .

A doctrine that
would appeal to a man in quest of vengeance.
Don't you give me no law and Constitution,
Tom Shaw had said. Evidently, Franz Boden agreed.

More
prosaically, the second letter was filled with minute detail: put Gottsreich in
charge of the greenhouses and the laboratory; sell your interest in the shop to
Kleinsmark Apothekergeselleschaft; lay in a warm coat, some decent brandy
(of which there is none in the whole of the United States
),
the green China tea and the African coffee. Take the diligence from Munich to
Nuremberg, from Nuremberg to Weimar, complete with advice on which inns to put
up at - clearly, January reflected, Franz Bodenschatz's own route - and then
the steamer up the Elbe to Hamburg . . .

Purchase these
things in New York - good boots, a pistol for your protection
(Purdey is the most reliable maker
)
- then a steamer to New Orleans. January wondered how, upon reaching New York
originally, the younger man had traced his sister's fleeing murderer. And he
must have been young, January thought, if poor Katerina had just borne their
second child when her husband had deserted her in pursuit of vengeance.
Steamboat to Independence -
lay in a good
stock of liquor, fish hooks, trade-vermillion, mirrors. Join with one of the
traders bound for Santa Fe - Merriwether has a reputation for honesty, as does
Babbit, Becknell, McCoy . . .

I
will be in the vicinity of Fort Laramie, watching for you. Hepplewhite and his
men will meet us there
. . .

'Could
Hepplewhite be an Indian?'

Hannibal looked
up from the letter. 'I can't imagine where such an Indian would have been born,
if the first thing his parents saw to name him after was a chair.'

January laughed.
'A mission Indian,' he said. 'Who took a white man's name, like Moccasin Woman
- whom nobody ever calls Mrs Bryan . . .'

Hannibal was
still considering this when Morning Star appeared from the moonless dark, still
shrugging herself back into her deerskin dress. 'Will you stay in the camp?'
She looked downslope, gauging the river and the wind. 'It will come close to
you. Whether or no, my husband, you and these ladies had best be crossing back
soon. Can you hear the anger of the river?'

'Can we stay in
your lodge?' January glanced across the fire at Frye, who was recounting with
extravagant gesture and wild exaggeration a 'sea battle' between himself and
two other canoe-gliding trappers against a war party of Arapaho on the Bighorn.
'We'll slip out by morning. Morales has offered us tent space, but until I see
some kind of proof that he isn't actually Franz Bodenschatz, I'd rather sleep
near someone I know. Did you find the horses?'

'I did,' said
Morning Star grimly. 'They're in Iron Heart's camp.'

'The Omahas?'
Hannibal's brows shot up. 'Of course, Iron Heart is a mission Indian, by the
sound of his English, but they're the last people I'd have thought would be
helping a white man. He hates all white men alike—'

'Because his
people died of smallpox,' said January softly, 'down on the Platte . . .'

There was
silence, broken only by the pounding of the river, the growl of the thunder in
the north.

'One of the
lodges in Iron Heart's camp isn't being used as a dwelling, either,' continued
Morning Star after a time. 'I lay in the grass and watched the camp until it
grew too dark to see. No one went into it or came out—'

'What is it that
Bodenschatz tells his father to bring from Munich?' asked January, and Hannibal
turned over the thin yellowish sheets of the notepaper.

'A warm coat,
two kegs of decent brandy (Hennessy or Remy Martin), tea and coffee—'

'Exact words.'

'The
green China tea
,'
read Hannibal, '
and
the African coffee
.
'

'Who is he
selling the shop to?' Above them, the cotton- woods bent with the sudden
onslaught of wind; Frye got to his feet and walked a little ways toward the end
of the island, listening too.

'We better be
thinkin' about movin' if we're gonna. That river's comin' up fast.'

'Kleinsmark
Apothekergeselleschaft
. . .'

'Kleinsmark
Apothecary Company,' translated January. 'And Klaus Bodenschatz needs to close
up greenhouses and laboratories . . . Remember how his hands were stained? He
was a chemist.'

Hannibal's eyes
widened as he understood. 'Oh, Christ.'

'African coffee
isn't coffee. Any more than
Indian tobacco
is
really tobacco, or fool's parsley is really parsley. It's
Ricinus communis -
castor-oil bean
- and poisonous as the gates of Hell.'

'You mean those
folks didn't die of sickness?' Frye came back to the fire, silhouetted gold
against the rushing dark, the wind whipping now at his long hair. 'I told you
they mighta been poisoned. How'd this Boden fella manage to—'

He gasped
suddenly, his eyes flaring wide, and even as January started to his feet,
Morning Star shouted '
Run
!’

Frye pitched
forward on to the fire, an arrow in his back.