Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  But an American? It was not to be tolerated.

  “Pretty Tasmin, such a desirable girl,” Mary said. “I doubt a Bourbon or a Hapsburg would give much for her now.”

  “Egad, how sharper . . .,” Lord B. said, before drink overcame him and he slumped down, dead drunk.

  Having stirred the hornets’ nest, Mary slipped down to the lower deck and had a very satisfactory hour of instruction in the Sioux tongue from the old Hairy Horn, who had just decided that he wished to spend the rest of his life aboard the steamer Rocky Mount.

  39

  His skull lodge stood well above the river . . .

  “MOST boats are quiet—why is this new boat roaring like that?” the Bad Eye asked. He could hear the steamboat plainly, belching like a great beast. His skull lodge stood well above the river—and yet the boat sounded like it was just outside his lodge.

  “It’s a new kind of boat,” Draga said. “New and big.”

  “It must be big or it couldn’t roar like that,” the Bad Eye said. His lodge had a long mud platform on it, covered with buffalo robes. The robes were old, filled with fleas and lice, but the Bad Eye was not bothered by such trifles. He had grown so fat that he no longer cared for walking; his legs would still carry his weight, but they wouldn’t carry it far. Though Draga still brought him women, he now had little interest in copulation. The Bad Eye had known the great boat was on its way to the encampments—he had had many reports. But he had not expected to hear a boat roar like a beast.

  “How many men does it take to row it?” he asked.

  “No one rows it—it is a steamboat,” Draga said. “It eats wood. If there is no wood it eats coal.”

  The Bad Eye didn’t like the sound of that at all. A boat that ate wood could not be a normal boat.

  “It sounds like a god,” he said.

  Draga was contemptuous of the old fat fool, a man who had spent an idle life making up prophecies that his people were superstitious enough to believe. Blind from birth, he had never seen the world. He learned what he knew by feeling—how a puppy was shaped, or a fish, or a woman—or by listening. He took in food through his mouth and knowledge through his ears. His hearing was very acute, so acute that he could hear a mouse scratch in its burrow or identify a fly or wasp or bee by the sound of its buzzing. Because he had never heard the sound of a steamboat, he thought the boat might be a god, or else a great water beast of some kind.

  Draga came from the West, her father a Russian trapper, her mother an Aleut. As a young woman, coming south with the Russian fur traders, she had seen great seagoing ships in San Francisco Bay. She had come to the Russian River in a skin boat with her parents and some other Aleuts—but a great swell capsized the boat and only Draga made it to shore. For a time an old Spaniard kept her, but he choked on a grape and died. Draga, thinking herself Russian, tried to reach the Russian fort, but she first fell in with some Modocs and then with some Nez Perce and gradually drifted east. Two white trappers bargained for her and kept her for a year, until one of them was killed by the Blackfeet. The other trapper hid his furs and fled, taking Draga with him; in time she came to the Mandans and the skull lodge of the Bad Eye. An old crazy woman of the Modocs, who had convinced herself she could talk with the dead, had taught Draga a few spells and recipes. The old one knew of a cave where there were many bats; she taught Draga how to pick the hanging bats like fruit, kill them, dry them, mix them in potions. The old half-crazed Modoc woman thought that the bat cave was connected with the world of the dead. Draga was not convinced, but she had learned early that she could either surrender herself to the appetites of men or else become a sorceress; the choice was not hard. She had a few dried bats with her, which she used to good effect in the Mandan village. She saw that the Bad Eye was as crazy as the old Modoc woman had been—only the Bad Eye was cruel as well as crazy. She herself saw him strangle two men and a woman—it was the Bad Eye’s way of dispatching those who disregarded his rambling prophecies. Draga soon gained more power over the fat prophet than anyone had ever had. From listening to his ramblings she learned the names of many Mandans who had fallen in battle; it didn’t matter to Draga whether these dead men had been great warriors or merely fools and braggarts: she gathered names as the other women picked berries, and used them to convince the Bad Eye that she was in communication with the spirits of the departed. In time he came to trust no one but Draga—in fact the Bad Eye was more than a little afraid of the strange sorceress from the Western waters.

  Draga knew that the steamboat was just a boat. It posed no threat to the Bad Eye; the Mandans would never have let anyone harm their prophet. But the unfamiliar sounds it produced upset the old man. Draga thought it might soothe him to hear a rare but not wholly unfamiliar sound: the screams of a burning captive.

  “I want to burn one of the white women—we have three now,” Draga said. “Pit-ta-sa brought in a new one last night, a big one. Why not let me burn one? The cold is coming. The people would enjoy a good burning, before it gets too cold.”

  The Bad Eye had no intention of going along with that suggestion. The custom was to trade for captives, and these women had all come off the great belching boat. No doubt the whites would give many blankets, many rifles, to get them back. It irked him that Draga would even mention burning one of the whites. Let her go catch an Omaha or an Oto if she wanted to burn somebody. White captives were too valuable to waste. Besides, he himself had never liked the smell produced by burning people. A burned human left a bad smell in the village for days—a thing he had never understood. A roasting goose or haunch of antelope smelled good when it was cooking, but a cooked human left a sickening, sweet odor that was not pleasant—once it got into his nostrils it lingered for days.

  “No burning—the Frenchman will buy these captives,” the Bad Eye said. “We can sell them for a good price.”

  Draga knew the old man would reject her suggestion. He was greedy now for the things the whites gave him—guns he couldn’t see to shoot, axes he couldn’t see to cut with, beads whose color he could not define. She had mentioned the burning merely to remind him that there was another way to deal with captives: the old way, the way of the torture stake. Warriors used it to build their power. The wild tribes—those who grew no corn but lived by the buffalo—still used it: Sioux, Cheyenne, Comanche. Despite the power she wielded, despite her hold over the Bad Eye, Draga thought she might leave these corn-growers, these bargainers, someday. What the whites brought didn’t interest her. She thought she might go west again, to a place where she could do what she wanted with a white girl, if she caught one.

  “No burning, did you hear me?” the Bad Eye repeated. “Beat the women if you want but don’t ruin them. I don’t want any trouble with the whites on that big boat.”

  The Bad Eye waited, but there was no answer from Draga. Draga’s breathing was husky—he could hear her if she was still there—but now he heard nothing; the sorceress had left. The fact that she left so silently made him a little uneasy. A woman who moved that quietly was a woman to beware of, particularly if she spoke with the dead.

  40

  “All those tears over a little tupping.”

  “OH fiddle, a pox on Samuel Richardson,” Tasmin said. “I confess I could not get through Clarissa. All those tears over a little tupping. A great bore, I say.”

  The first of the low, brown earth lodges of the Mandans were visible not far upriver, and a trace of smoke in the air indicated that the steamer Rocky Mount was just around the next bend. The two of them, Tasmin and Father Geoffrin, had taken only two days to catch up with the steamer—days during which they had talked incessantly about literature, only pausing now and then to consider a collateral issue—that is, morals.

  “Lady Tasmin, it is not the tears or the tupping, it is the sensibility of Clarissa one admires,” Father Geoffrin protested. “A young lady of fine intelligence torn apart by virtue.”

  “Would you say I have a fine intelligence, Father?” Tasmin asked, wi
th a smile.

  “Oh, indeed,” Father Geoffrin said. “As fine as Pompadour—tendre et sincère, as Voltaire said.”

  “Oh now, hardly that fine—you mustn’t flatter me,” Tasmin said. Indeed, the little priest had been a very fountain of compliments, so far. All her accoutrements, mental and physical, he judged to be of the finest. Tasmin’s modest denials grew more and more routine. If this diminutive Jesuit wanted to be in love with her, so be it—but she still had no intention of indulging his taste for Samuel Richardson.

  “I suppose I’m rather too hardy for all that moping and scribbling,” Tasmin said. “If the lustful Mr. Lovelace wanted me so badly I’d find a bed and have him. Nothing wrong with a bit of pleasure, that I can see.”

  In fact the absence of just that sort of pleasure was making her a bit fretful. Her brief weeks of marriage had accustomed her to regular and fervent attentions in the arms of Jim Snow. From time to time she turned and looked back downriver, half expecting to see her husband trailing after them. In the heat of her jealousy at hearing of Jim’s native wives, she had lashed out too cruelly. Life among the fourteen young Berrybenders had not encouraged in her any disposition to share. She did not regret marching off—it had been necessary to make her point. Pleasant as it was to talk about books with the little priest, Tasmin found that her attention kept returning to her husband and his other wives. Jim Snow had made their home on the Green River seem quite remote. Perhaps these distant wives no longer really existed. Perhaps they had taken husbands. Perhaps they had run away, been drowned, been eaten by bears.

  “I expect you know your geography, don’t you, Geoff?” Tasmin asked—they had quickly agreed to proceed on a first-name basis.

  “I fear in this case that I am very vague as to longitude and all that,” Father Geoffrin said. “The Green River is very distant—that I can assure you.”

  “I am equally vague when it comes to the Jesuit doctrines,” Tasmin said. “What do you Jesuits think about polygamy?”

  “Our doctrines are very complex,” Father Geoffrin admitted. “Hopelessly complex, I fear. I myself have not mastered even the hundredth part of them.”

  They had just come level with the first of the Mandan earth lodges. Several filthy children were staring at them. An old crone was hobbling about, attempting to kill a skinny dog. The sight of these ragged scraps of humanity seemed to overwhelm Father Geoffrin. To Tasmin’s astonishment, he suddenly burst into tears. One of the small, filthy children immediately threw a stone at him.

  “Go away, you little wretches!” Tasmin yelled.

  The children stood their ground. The old crone, more nimble than she had at first appeared, succeeded in braining the skinny dog. Father Geoffrin’s sobs slowly diminished. He wiped his eyes on a corner of his robe.

  “A mistake . . . ridiculous . . .a mistake,” he said to Tasmin. “Do I look like a priest to you? Of course I don’t. I’m a man of the boulevards and the coffeehouses. By inclination and habit I am very clean—but in the wilderness it is rarely possible to remain clean. Then there are my skepticisms. I harbor the gravest doubts about the Deity. I have studied the works of the greatest thinkers and philosophes and yet I doubt.”

  “Geoff, this is ridiculous,” Tasmin told him. “I merely wanted to know about one river.”

  Father Geoffrin ignored her.

  “And then there are these people, these savages,” he went on. “A little boy just then threw a rock at me. Am I to attempt to save his soul? I, who have no notion of what a soul is, or whether these savages have souls? It’s all very well for Father de Las Casas to argue that they do, but then he probably knew better Indians . . . Aztecs, you know.”

  “Shut up, Geoff. . . this babble is intolerable,” Tasmin said. “If you don’t wish to be a priest, then you must simply leave the order.”

  Much as she liked the little Frenchman, her immediate urge was to give him a good smack. The steamer Rocky Mount was in sight, not a mile away. She herself had an inclination to cleanliness. Rather than stand around watching a dog being butchered, she wanted a good bath. She did not care to indulge Father Geoffrin in an ill-timed crisis of conscience.

  The little father, however, was not to be easily checked.

  “When I agreed to come among the Mandans I thought I might just manage a glorious martyrdom, but that won’t do either,” he went on. “Even the mildest toothache causes me to reach for my laudanum—I have some here in my pouch. If I were to suffer martyrdom my behavior would be anything but glorious. I would rather renounce many gods than suffer a twinge of pain.”

  All around them, in the strung-out village, heads were turning. Many Indians, their mood difficult to judge, were staring at the white woman and the priest. More and more warriors emerged from the lodges, men of uncertain disposition. The boat, which had seemed so close, now seemed far. A gauntlet of a sort would have to be run—or walked, at least—and her companion was hardly in a state to put a crowd of savages to flight.

  “Hello, miss—you’re back,” a familiar voice said, from just behind her. She turned and saw Monsieur Charbonneau. Though he was as greasy and unkempt as ever, Tasmin was very glad to see him. He said a few words to the old crone and led them safely through the crowd.

  41

  Draga, spitting out teeth . . .

  “NO, no, Fräulein . . . submit!” Bess cried, but too late. Draga, for once, had misjudged the demeanor of her victim. All night Bess and Mademoiselle had tried to soothe Fräulein for the loss of her Charlie, but they made little progress. The Fräulein’s grief was bottomless. When Draga took a stick and began to beat the new captive, Fräulein’s grief boiled into anger. Draga at once discovered that she was beating a woman with the strength of an ox. Fräulein Pfretzskaner, eyes blazing with hatred, yanked the stick away from Draga and smacked her with it—right in the mouth, dislodging two of Draga’s none-too-numerous teeth. Through a gurgle of blood Draga managed a strangled yell and several warriors came running, hatchets drawn. Fräulein Pfretzskaner whirled on them like a very Boadicea, knocking two men senseless with her stick. Draga, spitting out teeth, yelled at the men to catch her—she wanted a long revenge—and the men tried but failed. The Fräulein’s arms were slippery with blood; they couldn’t hold her. Pit-ta-sa thought for a moment that the huge woman might defeat them all, but then, as she turned, he saw his chance and killed her with a hard hatchet blow to the back of her skull. The other warriors, their blood up, continued to hack and slash.

  Buffum hid her eyes through it all, but Mademoiselle Pellenc stared.

  “The end came—they chopped her dead,” Mademoiselle said to Buffum, when the yelling stopped.

  “It was only one beating,” Buffum said, her eyes still hidden. “She should have waited. The steamer’s almost here—she might have waited. Think of the beatings we’ve stood.”

  “She wanted to be with her Charlies,” Mademoiselle said. “Now she is with her Charlies. It may be for the best.”

  That same day, as they were selecting a dog for the stew pot, the young trader Simon Le Page came and got them.

  “Mademoiselles, your liberty has been secured,” he said, with a smile. “If you’ll allow me I’ll escort you back to the boat.”

  Draga, her mouth swollen, her eyes terrible, did not dare to interfere.

  42

  Venetia cast a look of great helplessness . . .

  THE grand reunion—or what should have been a grand reunion—on the steamer Rocky Mount was turning sour. Never had the various temperaments of the Berrybender ménage more glaringly failed to mesh, and this despite the fact that Cook, overjoyed to have the missing women back—Tasmin particularly—had outdone herself, preparing a suckling pig and a great haunch of buffalo. There were quantities of fresh smelly bread, and even some mint jelly. But only Tasmin, Mary, and Simon Le Page addressed these edibles with respectable levels of appetite. Bess and Mademoiselle, who had seen nothing of such rich food during the weeks of their captivity, barely managed a nibble.
Mademoiselle, though Simon Le Page was paying her sensitive attentions, could not forget the bloody hatchets as they descended on the expiring Fräulein; the smells of the rich food were so overpowering that Bess had to excuse herself several times in order to rush to the rail and be sick.

  Bobbety and Father Geoffrin, discovering that they shared a passionate interest in the new science of geology, talked of nothing but sediments and fossils.

  “You would bring this Papist back to us, Tasmin,” Mary said—“I fear you were never solidly lodged in the Anglican faith.”

  “Shut up, Mary, you’re a rude brat,” Tasmin said, carving herself another hot slice of the piglet.

  Simon Le Page was at once dazzled by Lady Tasmin, but knew, sadly, that such a noble beauty was far beyond the aspirations of a humble young trader. Mademoiselle Pellenc, despite her ordeal, struck him as very pretty—there, he thought, there might be hope for an ambitious Québecois.

  George Catlin’s heart had leapt up when he saw Lady Tasmin come aboard with no young frontiersman in tow; he had rushed down and gushed out effusive welcomes, only to be greeted so coolly that he had spent the afternoon in a sulk.

  Venetia Kennet, who had hardly drawn a bow across the strings of her cello since Lord Berrybender shot his foot, had been required to dust off her Haydn and play a bit for the reunited company, which she did embarrassingly badly, with many a piercing shriek from the cello as she mangled her chords. Venetia had rather hoped that Tasmin would come back humbled—skinny, bruised, and starved, like Bess and Mademoiselle. But Tasmin wasn’t humbled—and even more annoying, she looked to be in vibrant health.

  “Father, do have Vicky leave off the Haydn just this once,” Tasmin said. “She’s all atremble with happiness at our safe return, I expect—she can hardly be expected to control her fingers at a time of such abounding joy.”