The Shirt On His Back (28 page)

And it was dark,
pitch-black, even when his head broke the surface. Rain hammered his face, and
he could see nothing of either mountains or sky. He could feel the log he'd
caught hold of was good-sized, and he half-hauled himself clear of the water,
pulling Hannibal up beside him. The log promptly turned turtle, ducking him
under and smiting him on the head with a branch. January clung, scrambled,
gasping; he felt Hannibal drag himself up on to the thrashing mass of wood and
then, still holding tight to January's arm, drop over the other side. January
hauled himself up higher as something cracked at his legs underwater, grasping
sinuously like sea serpents -
tree branches
?
Then something that was definitely a rock gouged his calf.

He pressed his
face to the wood, and tried not to feel the broken branch-stump that dug into
his chest.
There better not be any snakes in
this log.

At
least there aren 't gators in the river
.

Rose,
he thought.
Rose, don't worry. I'll be home.
He saw her - brief and complete, as if he stood next to her wicker chair on the
gallery, with a lamp beside her and mosquito- veiling hanging off her
wide-brimmed hat - and folded the memory, with its thought and peace, down into
a tiny fragment, and concentrated everything he had into hanging on.

Cold hammering
water, and blindness. Chill gnawed his flesh, spread toward the core of his
bones - he'd been in the Mississippi, and even the inexorable strength of its
currents hadn't been like this awful cold.
It's July, how can it be this cold?
He couldn't breathe, wondered if Hannibal was dead, there on the end of the arm
to which he clung, but there was nothing he could do about it one way or the
other except hang on. A wall of water hit him over the head like falling
bricks, throwing the whole log under - he clung desperately until another wave
threw them up, choking, vomiting up half the river and still hanging on.

Virgin
Mary, Mother of God, get me home safe
.

Submerged snags
tore his legs and feet, river-demon hands tried to drag him off. Two nearly
succeeded, his own grip slithering and weak. The rain was like the sky mocking
him. Another trough, tons of water pouring over his head like a building
falling, no way to tell how long before they'd slam up again like a bucking
horse into the air. The broken branch on the log itself seemed filled with a
living malice, like the spirit of the tree trying to skewer him. Another
current flung them sideways - blackness and water within blackness and water,
and the only things real were the wet wood, the jabbing pain, the numb shock of
the cold and the arm he held with so violent a desperation that he was
surprised he didn't break the fiddler's bones.

Time lost
meaning. Each breath was a battle, an event lasting years.

He wasn't even
aware of it when the buffeting grew less.

Just the gradual
thought intruding:
it's not as bad
as it was
. . . His hands were nearly insensible in the cold, but rain
no longer hammered his face. He tried to remember when the rain had stopped,
and couldn't, but at least he could breathe. Gleams of silver streaked the
black water, though the river still carried them along like a runaway horse;
the narrow moon broke the clouds. More snags tore his feet, sea serpents that
rolled away when he kicked. Another kick struck gravel. January lowered his
body as much as he dared, kicked again downward and felt his moccasin dig in
sand, then cracked his knee on a rock. For a long time he struggled to push the
log gradually in toward the eastern shore. The current thrust the log back into
the main stream like a sullen stupid monster out to drown him.

Then two steps in
succession; then three. The bed of the river shallowed underfoot, the log -
branches or roots further back, for in the darkness January could see only a
long unwieldy bulk behind him - snagged on the bottom. He called over the log,
'Can you make it to shore?' but was a little surprised to hear a reply.

'The
wills above be done! - but I'd fain die a dry death
.'

Only Hannibal
would recall enough of
The Tempest
to quote it after being dragged through watery hell.

'Hold on. I'll
come around for you.' January released his hold on the log, dragged himself
around the front end on legs that shook so violently he feared he'd fall and be
swept away. He'd meant to go back to help Hannibal ashore if he needed it, but
found the fiddler had worked his way along to the front of the log as well,
breast deep in the surging water. January had to drag him to shore by the back
of his coat.

Then they just
lay on the bank among rocks and gravel, the river streaming over their feet,
cold to the marrow and more exhausted than January could remember ever being in
his life.

'I was
distinctly led to believe,' complained Hannibal in a faint voice at last, 'we'd
be carried across the Styx in a
boat.'

'Charon's had to
cut back on expenses because of the bank crash.'

Hannibal started
to make some answer, then just lay on the bank and laughed 'til he cried.

'Come on,' said
January after a time. 'Let's make a fire before we freeze to death.'

Another break in
the cloud showed him the hills looming above them - God knew where they were -
and the cottonwoods of the bottomlands rising straight up out of the
floodwater like a pitch-dark wall. January pulled Hannibal upright and limped
through the belt of trees, the water retreating down his shins until the ground
was solid underfoot.

'Was Frye dead?'

January nodded.

'You're sure?'

'I'm
sure.'
Would I have stayed by him if he'd been still alive, unable to flee, unable to
fight? With the Indians coming out of the darkness
—
?
January hoped he would have had the courage to do so, but didn't know. 'Did the
ladies get away
?'

'I don't know. I
saw Pia run for the water . . . Was that the Omahas?'

'Has to have
been. Which means,' January added, 'I'm guessing that Frank Boden alias Franz
Bodenschatz is Charro Morales. He asked Frye about Irish Mary - he has to have
known we wanted that hat. Then suddenly he's asking us to put up with him in
his tent?
What they don't know won't hurt
them?
After he was the one who demanded a quarantine? My guess is
he was going to tell the camp a touching story about us being swept away when
the river rose.'

Hannibal swore,
thoughtfully, in classical Greek for a time, and collapsed on to a flat rock.
'So what do we do?' In the moonlight January could see he was shivering in his
soaked clothing.

'Build a fire.'

'Shall you
recite the magic spells to do that, or shall I?'

'You recite the
magic spells to chase the bears away,' said January. 'I'll scrape bark.' He
held out his hand, knowing they'd have better luck finding dry wood on higher
ground. It was clear, even in the faint moonlight, that the flood had extended
all throughout the bottomlands, leaving torn-up branches everywhere and
everything soaked. He hauled Hannibal to his feet again.

'How far did we
come down, do you think?'

'I'd say we were
in the water for close to an hour.' January flexed his hands, felt his way from
tree to tree toward the glimmers of light on the higher ground beyond. 'The
moon was just past zenith when the clouds covered it over, and I don't think it
was much more than an hour after that, that we were hit. Feel the grass,' he
added as they came clear of the trees. 'It didn't rain down this far.'

'Thank God for
small favors.' For a time there was silence as the two men collected the driest
branches they could find, carried them to the edge of the trees. There was a
clump of sagebrush large enough to make a sort of windbreak, and behind it,
January scratched the wet layer of bark from a piece of dead wood with his
knife and scraped a powder of the drier under-bark on to a split bough. Though
he could barely walk, Hannibal brought handfuls of dry grass, his breath
rasping like a rusty saw. Fingers made clumsy by cold, January struck the fire
flint from his belt pouch with the steel. It took him seven or eight tries -
laboriously re-scraping bark from time to time - while the night grew colder,
but he told himself that if Jim Bridger could make a fire under these
conditions, he, Benjamin January, certainly could . . .

'There,' he said
at last as the whisper of smoke curled up. 'I owe God my first-born son.' Even
as he made the jest he felt a strange shiver:
Rose will be close to her time, when I come home.

The warmth that
went through him had little to do with the new-flickering blaze.

I
will have a first-born son. Or a beautiful daughter
. . .

'Well,' remarked
Hannibal a bit later, 'I understand now why the ancients worshipped fire.'

Longer silence.
They arranged damp wood to dry, dragged the larger boughs to extend the crude
shelter. The fire was small - a squaw fire, they'd call it in the camp. January
gave thought to who might see it.

'There must have
been a bottle of poisoned liquor in old Bodenschatz's coat pocket,' said
Hannibal, when he'd warmed up a little. 'They'd all have drunk it - the
Dutchman, Fingers Woman, the engages. I expect Clarke found it among the bodies
... I can see him toasting their departing souls with the last gulp left. It's
what I'd have done. If Frye thought it was the cholera,' he added quietly,
'castor bean - African coffee - must be bad, mustn't it?'

'It's bad,'
January answered. 'It looks a great deal like cholera. Poison wouldn't bring on
a fever, but if there were irritation or burning, that would account for their
wanting water. You've heard how hard the smallpox struck the Indian villages
south of the Platte,' he added. 'And, of course, when we were in Mexico City a
few years ago, they all said - the
Indios
- that it
wasn't so much the Spanish that destroyed the old kings and the old gods, as
the smallpox. That there were not even enough of the living left to bury the
dead . . .'

'Et nous, les
os, devenons cendre et pouldre .
. . And
Bodenschatz would need Indian allies, if he was planning on tracking a man
through these mountains.' In the flickering orange light, his thin fingers
seemed nearly translucent. '
Hath not a Jew
hands, organs, dimensions, senses . . . If you wrong us, shall we not revenge?
D'you think they'll be coming after us?'

'They have to
be.' January huddled close to the flames, wishing he dared strip off his
clothing to let it dry, for the clammy fabric chilled his flesh worse than the
cold air would have. 'Right now, all anyone knows in the camp is what Veinte-
y-Cinco and Pia have to tell: that we were set on by Indians. But if we come
back - if even a whisper goes around the camp that Morales is Boden, and is in
league with the Omahas to poison the camp . . .'

Hannibal sighed.
'I was afraid you were going to say that.'