Outside it was full dark. They sat in Farwell’s trading room in the wan radiance of a single kerosene lamp turned low and smoking on the counter, shadows towering on the log walls whenever one of them got up and helped himself to the bottle of red eye resting on a hogshead. Now and then a trickle of dirt sifted down and sprinkled the floor whenever Frenchie Devereux shifted position on the sod roof up above where he sat sentinel. Four more men were posted at each corner of the stockade.
Farwell sat perched on a sack of flour, doleful head in his hands. Hardwick had made it plain to him that tomorrow the wolfers were pulling out. Farwell knew if he elected to stay behind he would be killed by the Indians for his part in this day’s doings. Moses Solomon was abandoning his post, too. His relations with the Assiniboine had never been good, and his position was every bit as precarious as his competitor’s. Some white man was going to have to pay for the thirty-odd corpses the coyotes were picking over. The two traders planned to haul what goods they could back to Fort Benton in Red River carts, burn the posts and any remaining supplies to keep them out of the hands of the Indians. Hardwick’s nasty temper had put paid to a winter’s work.
The Englishman’s boy sat on the floor beside the Eagle’s body, which was shrouded in a buffalo robe lashed tight with rawhide thongs. Across the room, crazy Scotty was squeezed in a corner, peering terrified over the top of his writing book. The rest of the men diced on a blanket on the floor, sniggering like schoolboys at the sounds coming from the back room while Hardwick cracked wise. “Lord, listen to that old steam locomotive chug. Maybe you ought to go in there and throw a little coal in his boiler, Harper, so’s he can finally get where he’s going.”
The Englishman’s boy would get the invite next. He was considering on what his answer would be. When she was offered to Scotty and he shook his head no, Hardwick took offense. “Why the hell not?” he’d wanted to know.
The Scotchman had hugged his knees like they were his sainted mother, saying softly, “I am a gentleman. The definition of a gentleman is one who never causes pain.”
“Don’t you go high and mighty on me,” said Hardwick.
“I am a gentleman,” Scotty whispered back.
Hardwick slapped his face. “Get in there.”
“I am a gentleman.”
Each time he refused, Hardwick slapped his face again, repeating, “Get in there. Get in there.” In the end he even latched onto his collar and dragged the Scotchman scuffling on his hands and knees halfway across the floor. Only when the Scotchman began to weep was Hardwick satisfied and, laughing, let him creep back to his corner, where he huddled himself up sobbing, meek as an orphan.
The Englishman’s boy was of a mind to answer the same as the Scotchman, but then he weren’t crazy. His twin, the old cold black anger, was sitting up in him touchy as a ripe boil. Hot and sore as the lance gash stiffening on his ribs. Maybe he daren’t risk Hardwick prodding that boil with his dirty finger. Maybe he ought to take his walk to that back room, because if Hardwick laid a hand on him he wouldn’t go Gentle Jesus like the Scotchman had. There’d been enough blood spilled today. He’d had his sup of it.
The train in the back room was building speed. He’d heard a winter of huffing, puffing racket like that in the whorehouse in Sioux City, Iowa. Late November, cold and starved, he’d knocked at its door because it was such a fine and promising big house. Might be the rich people biding there would let him chore for a hot meal. The woman who answered the door said, “What you want, Raggedy Andy?” He explained and she set him a job of work splitting stove-wood. That wintry morn the axe-handle bit his fingers like cold iron but he hung to it until he’d chopped her a goodly pile of butts and even shaved her a cache of kindling wood. Then she fed him buttered bread, creamed and sugared porridge. He’d swallowed three bowls of it.
That’s how he came to work in a knocking shop. For a place to sleep by the kitchen stove and three squares, he chopped wood, hauled washing water for the whores, curried and harnessed Beaky Sal’s driving team. Beaky Sal liked to tour around town in a cutter of an afternoon, to blow the smell of spunk out of her nostrils, she said. The only cash money the Englishman’s boy had ever touched was tips. Some fancy man might send him to fetch cigars, or a crew of river rats a bucket of beer from the saloon. If he moved sprightly they’d toss him a penny. Once he even run for a bag of peppermints for an old broadcloth pillar of respectability afraid to go home to his wife’s roast-pork supper with the smell of sin on his breath.
One thing he could testify, if whores had hearts of gold they was only gilt and flaked easy. Beaky Sal’s girls was mostly German whores, and they fought day and night, screeching Dutchy talk until he believed there was a rusty file running to and fro in his ears. Their line of work made them too free and easy in their manners to his taste; some would lift their shifts and squat on the chamber pot when he was sweeping their room.
No, he hadn’t found no gold there excepting Selena. Her daddy had sold her to Beaky Sal for twenty dollars when she was but a child of twelve and he was passing through Sioux City, bound for the Montana gold fields. He was a widow man and Selena only baggage slowing him in the race to fortune. He might have kept her, he said, but she was hard of hearing and that was a trial – at his age shouting wore him down.
Selena was skinny as a barked rail, but Beaky Sal figured if she fattened her she could charge the boys a premium for something young and fresh. But Selena didn’t fill out and the boys preferred the fat, red, German whores because they would play-act jolly and the best Selena could manage was to look like-an undertaker’s wife. The boys said she made their peckers droop like wet wash hanging on a rainy day. So Beaky Sal turned her into a whorehouse drudge, boiling sheets and slopping chamber pots. All the whores seemed to think she was their own personal slavey; they’d squawk for this and that, pinch her and cuff her for any mistake she made, sometimes just out of pure cussedness. One afternoon, a Kentucky whore who called herself Beulah Belle started pulling Selena’s hair in the kitchen because the washing water wasn’t hot enough for her liking. When she was at it, he’d come in with an armful of stove-wood, dropped it in the box and kicked Beulah Belle square in the arse.
Word got around he could kick like a Missouri mule and so the whores let up on Selena some. He supposed that’s why she went sweet on him. That and the candies and buttons. She was such a poor and winsome gal he couldn’t but help feel sorry for her. Sometimes when he’d got a tip, he’d buy her a pennyworth of hard candy. He knew she had a sugar mouth. Beaky Sal was always slapping her silly for putting her fingers in the sugar bowl.
Selena weren’t like him. Every bit of hardness he’d ever been handed, he’d put on the back shelf and stored. But hardness seemed to pass through her like light through a windowpane. She didn’t hold a particle of the anger he held. Not a particle. She stored sugar like he stored hate, let the sweetness out bit by bit. Her mouth tasted sweet. She didn’t favour you with a smile but seldom, but it was all the sweeter for it. Not one of them broad, false, whorey smiles, just a small and gentle and knowing one. She knew. By Christ, she knew.
He might yet be in that whorehouse if the Englishman Dawe hadn’t hired him out of it. He’d been setting on the stoop sharpening Beaky Sal’s butcher-knives when the Englishman pulled up in full daylight, arrayed in all his finery, bent on some fun with a sporting woman. He’d stopped at the step on his way in, picked up one of the knives, tested it on the ball of his thumb.
His daddy had said nobody could edge a knife like him. Once he’d whetted a blade you could split a curly hair with it, follow every kink and twist top to bottom. Dawe asked him if he could skin. Skin a grasshopper, he told the Englishman. The Englishman said he was going west to hunt the buffalo, bear and deer and goat, mountain lion and mountain sheep. He was going to carry them skins back with him to old England and for that he wanted a prime skinner and somebody to tote his guns. Gun-bearer he called it. They would have adventures, he said. The pay was ample.
So the Englishman’s boy signed on with him. He promised Selena he’d be back for her, back with his pockets full of English gold. She’d have a new dress to sew her buttons on. She’d eat white bread and honey, drink lemonade. He’d carry her out of this place.
He took her for a walk so’s he could shout it to her.
“When?” she said. “When?”
“Ever so soon as my pockets are full of English gold.”
The way things had fallen out, he knew he weren’t going to make it back.
John Duval came out of the back room, settling his suspenders. Hardwick hollered, “All goods satisfactory or money back!”
“I ain’t complaining,” said Duval, strutting to the whisky like a turkey cock.
“Well,” said Hardwick, “age before beauty. Now it’s the youngster’s turn. Nothing a youngster likes better than a pony ride.” They all laughed. “Look at him over there, stiff as a hoe-handle.” They all looked. The Englishman’s boy got to his feet. They followed him with their eyes to the back room, watched him push aside the blanket, go in.
A guttering tallow candle threw the only light. The naked girl lay sprawled on her belly on a pallet on the floor, her face buried in the blankets. She didn’t move, not even to lift her head to see who or what had walked into the room. The place was empty except for a stool kicked over on its side. The Englishman’s boy picked it up and sat down on it.
The blue-black hair spread on her shoulders. The soft hollow of the small of her back, the curve of her buttocks had their effect on him. He wished she would make some effort to cover herself, but she lay like a dead one. She weren’t though. He could see her rib cage rise and fall like the breast of a dove.
He sat for a short spell and then, so his voice wouldn’t carry to the men outside, said softly, “I ain’t intending you no hurt. I’ll just stop quiet here a short piece.” No sooner was it delivered than his explanation made him feel a fool, talking English to a squaw girl who couldn’t understand. She didn’t stir to his voice, lay like she was deaf as Selena.
He didn’t know where to put his eyes, that slim coppery red body roused him something shameful. Glancing around the room, he located her clothes bundled in a corner. He stole carefully over, picked them up. Once they were in his hands he knew it was a mistake, because he dare not go near her to give them to her. He sat back down on the stool and untwisted the dress in his lap.
Five pretty buttons he’d bought Selena for her dress. Shell buttons shining rainbowy. Twisted them up in a scrap of paper found laying in the road, so’s to give her the surprise of opening it.
He liked to give her presents. Her face lit like a lamp. She spread them buttons on the table, where the sun danced on them. Counted them into her hand. Closed that hand tight as a strongbox. Smiled and beckoned him.
He followed her up the stairs, three flights to a dusty attic. They stood face to face; he felt a purpose in it. She started to kiss him, lightly, a good many times. He didn’t hold her; he didn’t know how. Maybe she thought it his preference.
She shucked his pants. Smiling that smile, on her knees, just stroking him, passing her hand lingering and gentle over his buttocks, down the back of his legs, down his calves. Stroking him as he shivered, near swooned, as he tugged his shirt front down to hide from her what was happening to him.
“No, no,” she whispered, caught his hand, getting to her feet. She stood and pulled her dress over her head. There was little light but he could see her, pale and thin, stooping to lay her buttons on her dress. She moved back to him, kissed him, and he held her this time. Soon they was laying on the floor. The sun broke in a frosted window and she burst white in his eyes, white as snow except for the dark twigs of her nipples. He just kissed her; he didn’t know what else to do.
She guided him into her. He lay there lost in the pleasure of the slick heat, stunned. He didn’t ask for more, only to rest there, sucking her little teats. Something was passing between them in this melting, he felt as if his darkness was drawing light from her body.
She began to flex her hips under him and he hugged her. He could feel her trying to rise up into him, and he yearning to press down into her. He’d heard the rutting men with the whores, groaning as they pushed the need of their bodies into another body, forcing a black shameful exchange. But this was not the same. He was taking light.
A flush was creeping up her white shoulders, her neck, her cheeks. She arched suddenly and he held his breath, what he passed to her, passing in silence into the deaf girl’s silent world.
He looked up now and saw the Indian girl had turned her face to him, saw a world silent and blind. Nothing was reflected in the dark, unseeing, empty eyes. When he spoke, her face, like Selena’s, registered nothing. Nothing moved in that face except swollen lips, opening and closing, opening and closing.
The Englishman’s boy rose from the stool, flung aside the blanket and went into the other room. Hardwick said, “You done your business? We thought you might need help with your buttons. It was silent as a tomb in there.”
“I ain’t a hog,” he said.
“Who’s ready for seconds?” said Hardwick. “I always like two pieces of pie myself.”
“Scotty don’t want his – I’ll take it,” said Bell.
“I wouldn’t if I was you,” said the Englishman’s boy. Their faces lifted in surprise. It was the harshness of his voice and the wound stoking fever in his eyes, so that they glittered like isinglass in the tormented face. “Look at me.” His urgency stilled the rattling dice. “Don’t you recognize me?”
They all stared at him. Then Hardwick said quietly, “Who you supposed to be?”
“A curse.” He pointed to the corpse on the floor. “Ask Grace. Ask my dead Englishman. Farmer Hank… Lord knows his fate.” He pitched his voice to the corner of the room. “You know me, don’t you, Scotchman? The Scotchman knows there ain’t no bad luck blacker than the seed the Devil cursed.” He turned to Bell. “Go on in there, lie with her, stir Satan’s spunk, let it touch you. See what befalls.”
Bell cleared his throat, sat back down on the floor.
“That’s right,” he said. “You don’t want no portion of me. Who did you think I am? Nobody asked my name. I’ll tell you who I am. I’m what the black belly of the whale couldn’t abide. I’m your Jonah.” He looked around the room. “Any of you wants to test what I say, go on in there and mix your seed with mine, see if it’s a lie.”
Nobody moved. He walked across the room, his shadow breaking on the walls, pushed open the door. The rush of cool air did nothing for his fever, nothing for his lust. He was fumbling with his pants buttons, burning. I ain’t no different. I ain’t no different. I wanted her every bit as bad as any of them. Quick and savage he used himself, fell back against the wall of the post, ending it like all the rest had, with a cry.
The Red River carts stood stacked with goods, waiting to pull south to Fort Benton. The mounted wolfers were bound northwest, up the Whoop-Up Trail, to pursue their stolen horses. The Englishman’s boy had told Hardwick he would not go with him. He would push in the opposite direction, northeast.
“Good riddance,” said Hardwick.
“I’m taking the horse,” the Englishman’s boy said.
Hardwick had only jerked the cinch on his saddle a little tighter.
“I earned it,” the boy said.
Hardwick walked away from him.
Now there was only one thing left to do. They had buried Ed Grace under the floorboards of the fort and were going to burn it down over him. If they didn’t, said Hardwick, the Assiniboine would find the body, maul and mutilate it so his own mother wouldn’t know him.
They all sat their horses in expectation of the torching. Hardwick doused the floorboards with kerosene, came out and splashed the remainder of the can up and down the outside walls. Just as he struck a match, the Englishman’s boy darted his eyes frantically over the assembly and shouted, “Where’s the girl?”
Hardwick touched the match to the doorsill. There was a whoosh like a passing train and blue flame shot out around the sill, then sucked back into the mouth of the door like a fiery tongue. The Englishman’s boy threw himself off his horse and ran to the post, snatched at Hardwick’s arm, screaming, “Where’s the girl?”
Hardwick yanked his arm free and walked to his horse.
He stumbled to a door framed like a picture in wreaths of fire, tried to drive through it, but the furnace-blast sent him reeling back. He tore his jacket off, held it up to shield his face, and threw himself blind at the doorway. For a moment, he teetered on the threshold, then staggered back whimpering, the tweed singed and smoking. Tossing aside the jacket he peered into the rippling air and curling smoke. She was crouched on the countertop like a cat in a flood, the floorboards beneath her awash in fire. Briefly, smoke glutted the doorway; he lost sight of her. He wiped his eyes. The door cleared. She was drawing herself up to spring, spring down into the flames. He aimed and fired the pistol empty. Reloaded mechanically and emptied it again into the billowing smoke, even though there was nothing to see.
Outside he ran in circles, yelling for Hardwick. The grass, the trees, the creek were his only company and they could not be killed. He sank to the ground and watched the post burn to nothing. When night came down he walked among the glow of the dying embers, boots smoking. Of Grace and the Indian girl he found nothing.
Hours later, he mounted his horse and three times circled the ruins of the post, dabbed here and there with sparks like the sky was dabbed with stars. A dumb, holy prayer for the two of them. Then he turned his horse northeast, like an Indian, to seek in the wilderness.