Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “Get out, all of you! Take that blubbering stable boy and go!” Lord Berrybender demanded. “My Vicky can manage a touch of frostbite well enough . . . fortunately not squeamish, my Vicky. Nothing wrong with me that a fast bout with Vicky won’t fix.”

  “Sir, vigorous rubbing is your best chance,” Captain Aitken pointed out. “It won’t save your toes but it just might save your leg.”

  “Vicky can rub me, then,” Lord Berrybender insisted. “None better than my Vicky when it comes to rubbing.”

  “I do so dislike the word ‘putrid,’ ” Vicky Kennet said in a somewhat strangled voice; suddenly her vision began to wobble. Lord Berrybender was ordering everybody out. There he sat, almost naked, his leg possibly putrid. The thought of a putrid appendage caused Vicky’s queasiness to increase. She seemed to see the people in the room through an ever narrowing circle. Narrower and narrower the circle got until finally she could only see Lady Berrybender’s old parrot, perched on the headboard of the bed where Lord Berrybender had received his rubbing. The circle shrunk to a pinpoint and then there was blackness, deep restful blackness.

  “Quick, Jim, catch her . . . Vicky’s fainting,” Tasmin said.

  Jim Snow spun and caught the collapsing cellist in his arms—in a moment he had deposited her on the bed from which the old lord had just risen. Lord Berrybender was far from pleased by this event. He didn’t like seeing his Vicky in the arms of a young peasant, even if she was fainting. This same young peasant had somehow married his daughter, cream of the Berrybenders—and, were that not enough, the young upstart advised cutting off his leg. All in all it was too much—how inconvenient of Vicky to choose such a moment to faint.

  “Mary, quick, run to Cook—the smelling salts!” Lord Berrybender commanded. “Why must this damn woman faint, just when I need her to be rubbing my leg?”

  He stumbled back to the bed and began to slap Venetia Kennet’s face—light slaps, to be sure.

  “Wake up, Vicky . . . that’s enough now . . . important job to do . . . no fudging, my girl,” Lord B. said. “Get out, the rest of you.”

  One by one the company obeyed: Tim, still blubbering, Buffum, Bobbety, Captain Aitken, Maelgwyn, Charbonneau.

  “Stop that, Father—Vicky’s worn-out from worry,” Tasmin said—her father was still fitfully swatting the unconscious girl. “Be generous for once. Allow her a little nap.”

  “None of your business what I allow her,” Lord B. responded. “It’s all your fault anyway, you disobedient wench.”

  Jim Snow whirled, grabbed Lord Berrybender by the shoulders, and shoved him so hard that he reeled across the room, smacked hard against the wall, and sat down. Tasmin saw the flinty look in her husband’s eyes.

  “You old devil, I ought to cut your stinkin’ heart out,” Jim said.

  Lord Berrybender had not, in many years, received quite such a shock.

  “What did the fellow say, Tassie?” Lord B. asked.

  “He said he ought to cut your stinking heart out, and I expect he will unless you promptly correct your behavior.”

  “Cut my heart out—cut my leg off—and you married this butcher?” Lord Berrybender said, in rather subdued tones.

  On the bed, Venetia Kennet was just beginning to stir.

  “I married him, I’m very glad to say,” Tasmin replied. “First man I’ve met who knows how to treat a selfish old brute such as yourself.”

  As they passed out the door she shyly took her husband’s hand. This time Jim did not shove her away.

  57

  . . . dresses, hairbrushes, combs, mirrors . . .

  “I’LL say this, Jimmy—being married to you ain’t like anything else,” Tasmin said, once she had her husband in her bedroom. “Perhaps that’s why I crave you so—I was always the one for novelty.

  “I admit that I am somewhat untidy,” she added. “But then I’ve always had a maid to pick up after me, and now I don’t.”

  Tasmin’s plan had been to coax Jim immediately into conjugal activity, but in fact the bed where such activity could be best pursued was at the moment a distressing litter: dresses, hairbrushes, combs, mirrors, several novels, slippers, an intimate garment or two, a spyglass, this and that. Jim seemed thunderstruck at the mere sight of so many things—her room, Tasmin realized, was the very opposite of his own spare existence.

  Once inside the bedroom, with the door shut, Jim had permitted a kiss, but just as Tasmin was settling into it, hoping even sharper intimacies might follow, Jim pulled away and stationed himself at the window, as if to spy out the approach of enemies. Tasmin was quite vexed.

  “Oh, Jimmy . . . why mightn’t I kiss you? I’ve waited so long!” she protested. “We’re quite secure here—no one would dare disturb us.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jim said. “You never do. What’s that funny smell?”

  “Oh, it’s just Mama’s scent—I took it under protection so Mademoiselle wouldn’t be tempted to steal it,” Tasmin admitted. She had taken to daubing a little on, now and then, to block the various stenches from the river.

  “Makes my nose prickle,” Jim said. “Can’t you wash it off?”

  “Good lord,” Tasmin said, a bit exasperated. “You said yourself that Indian women anoint themselves with various greases. Why is my mother’s scent so much more objectionable? You smell rather greasy yourself, but I don’t care.”

  She rushed over and began to try to straighten her bed, or at least reduce the disorder on its surface; then, in her annoyance, she simply swept everything she could reach onto the floor—combs, books, brushes—a happy result of which was the rediscovery of a ruby brooch, once her mother’s, that she had also chosen to protect from Mademoiselle Pellenc. She had looked for it for days, and there it was, beneath a small volume of Miss Edgeworth’s edifying stories.

  Jim Snow watched with frank curiosity, as if he were observing the activities of some new animal whose den he had just discovered. Tasmin felt herself growing distraught—she had never made a bed and found the process more complicated than she would have supposed. In fact she felt like crying because of the general resistance everything—sheets, objects, her husband—seemed to make to her efforts.

  “I don’t understand it, Jim—why can’t you ever like anything I do?” she stammered—and then burst into tears. She had waited for this man through many lonely nights—all she craved was his sympathy, a touch, a look. That she couldn’t just have it seemed too cruel.

  Jim Snow was taken aback. He had been mild with Tasmin—why on earth was she crying? The fact was he didn’t like being in small, close rooms. Except for his brief stay with Maelgwyn and an hour in Dan Drew’s cave, he had not been indoors in several months. It meant adjusting his breathing and his looking: his habit was to study the distant horizons, where the first signs of danger were likely to appear, but the only way to do that, in Tasmin’s room, was to stay by the window, which is where he stationed himself. Being on a boat crowded up with people, one of them a dangerous Piegan, made him feel tense, wary. He felt he ought to stay on the alert—and yet there was nothing in his caution that should have made Tasmin cry. He pulled a curtain across the glass and sat down by her on the bed, wiping her tears away with his finger.

  “Sometimes it feels so easy, being with you, Jimmy,” Tasmin said. “But other times it feels so hard. I forget what to say. I don’t want you to slap me again . . . it’s very confusing.”

  “Now, I just slapped you the once, and that was for talking wrong,” Jim said. “You’ve been flapping your mouth ever since we met, but you haven’t talked wrong except that once.”

  “What did I say? I don’t know what talking wrong means,” Tasmin said, feeling that the whole thing was hopeless. “Couldn’t you just explain yourself, rather than slap me?”

  “Ever seen ferrets rut?” he asked. The question took Tasmin by surprise.

  “Why no, I haven’t, Jim—where would I see ferrets rut, and why would I want to?” she asked.

/>   “You’ve got that musk smell on you,” Jim said. He carefully sniffed the soft flesh of her neck—Tasmin was so surprised that she shivered.

  “It’s just Mama’s scent,” she said, hoping it was not going to be a reason for fresh reproaches.

  Jim continued to sniff her neck.

  “I expect you’ve been missing our ruts,” he said, after a moment.

  “I have . . . of course I have,” she said, startled that he had put it so baldly. “I have been missing our ruts.”

  She turned to face him, then. The tension that had gripped him when he first came into her room—a kind of caged animal tension—had left him, but another, different kind of animality was in his look.

  “Is that why women cry? Because they’re missing their ruts?” he asked.

  “It’s one reason, I suppose,” Tasmin said.

  “Then hush up crying,” Jim said. “We can have us a good long rut, right now.”

  “Oh, Jimmy, let’s do,” Tasmin said, blushing deeply at the thought that at last she would get what she craved.

  58

  “The white people will die like the grasshoppers die in the summer . . .”

  WHITE Hawk, the best hunter in the Sans Arc band, was pursuing six wolves when he came upon the small bloody white man. It was very cold—the wolf pelts, if he could take them, would be at their best, deep and soft. Wolves were hard to shoot, it was true, but White Hawk preferred hunting them to trapping beaver—with wolves, for one thing, it was not necessary to get one’s feet wet, an important consideration when the cold was so bitter.

  White Hawk had come across the wolf tracks only a little after dawn. He was hunting with Three Geese and a boy named Grasshopper. They saw the wolves some distance ahead—they were eating something. The three Sans Arc hunters had provided themselves with wolf skins for just such an eventuality. By pulling the wolf skins over them they might be able to crawl in rifle range, particularly since the wolves were making a meal and not paying too close attention.

  On this occasion Three Geese refused to crawl—he was often finicky on a hunt, likely to pout if things weren’t done his way.

  “Suit yourself, stay with the horses, then,” White Hawk said. He was rather fed up with Three Geese—nonetheless he and the boy, Grasshopper, hidden beneath their wolf skins, crawled close enough to the wolves to see that they were eating a just-born buffalo calf. Four of the wolves were skinny, but two of them were nice fat wolves, with excellent pelts. White Hawk had a good musket, supplied by his French friend Monsieur Sacq, but Grasshopper’s gun was old and unreliable. The boy had tried to borrow Three Geese’s musket, but the touchy warrior wouldn’t lend it.

  “I had better keep it, some bad people might be coming along,” Three Geese said, an excuse that merely exposed what a stingy fellow he was, since no people at all were likely to be coming along, with the cold so bitter along the Knife River.

  When they had crawled close enough, White Hawk killed his wolf neatly, but Grasshopper’s gun misfired, causing him to say bitter words about Three Geese—he would have liked to have a nice wolf pelt to trade at the Mandan villages in the spring. It was while the boy was spilling out bitter words that the small bloody white man appeared, startling them both. Grasshopper wanted to shoot him at once, but White Hawk waved him off. He was interested in how the small man had got so bloody, a mystery that was soon solved. A dead buffalo cow lay not far away—probably the cow had died giving birth to the calf. The cow buffalo had not been dead very long. It looked as if the small white man had stumbled on the dying cow and had tried to warm himself by trying to squeeze into the place the calf had just come out of, which of course was a sensible thing to do if you had no fire on such a cold night. Finding the split-open cow, a large cow that had kept pumping warm blood, was probably what had saved the little white man.

  The small bloody man did not seem hostile—he was very bloody and also very cold. White Hawk had no particular interest in him—he had his wolf to skin—and would have been happy enough just to let the man wander off and freeze; but then Three Geese came racing up and jumped to the wrong conclusion, which was that the buffalo cow had given birth to the small white man, along with the dead calf. It was typical of Three Geese’s poor thinking that he could imagine such a thing. Three Geese often leapt to ridiculous conclusions, which he clung to stubbornly, sometimes for years.

  Grasshopper, a boy of only fourteen years, became so confused that he didn’t know what to believe. This did not surprise White Hawk—Three Geese could be very convincing when he jumped to a wrong conclusion.

  “We must take him to the camp,” Three Geese insisted. “I think the Bad Eye made a prophecy about this. I think he said that someday a buffalo would give birth to a white man.”

  “No, that was not the prophecy at all,” White Hawk told him—he was working carefully with his skinning knife, so as not to mar his fine wolf pelt. The last thing he wanted was to argue with Three Geese about some old prophecy of the Bad Eye that Three Geese had got all scrambled in his memory.

  “What was the prophecy, then, if you know so much?” Three Geese asked. Seeing the fine wolf pelt White Hawk had taken made him angry with himself—he should have crawled up and got a nice wolf pelt himself.

  Grasshopper built a little fire, thinking they might as well cook a little of the dead buffalo. No sooner did the fire flame than the small white man came and huddled over it, shivering violently.

  “What the Bad Eye said was that someday a white buffalo would be born,” White Hawk explained, patiently. “When the white buffalo is born it will be a sign for all the tribes to band together and kill all the white people. The white buffalo will bring us all the power we need. The white people will die like the grasshoppers die in the summer, when we set the prairie on fire.”

  Three Geese refused to accept White Hawk’s version of the prophecy, even though he dimly remembered that someone had talked about a white buffalo—it had been idle talk, very likely. He himself had seen millions of buffalo and none of them had been white. Of course, the tribes were always talking about killing all the white people; there were many councils on that subject, but the chiefs could never get together and decide on a time to do it, or a way to do it, either. Personally Three Geese thought there were just too many white people—an old witch of the Brulé band told him once that there was a great hole in the earth where white people swarmed by the millions, like hornets. The old witch woman of the Brulés said that no matter how many white people were killed, more would just come swarming out of the hole. But the old woman had been more or less crazy—most prophets, including the Bad Eye, were more or less crazy in Three Geese’s view. Nonetheless he was not prepared to yield to the bossy White Hawk in the matter of this particular white man.

  “He wouldn’t be that bloody unless he came out of the buffalo,” he declared.

  Three Geese was so firm on that point that the boy, Grasshopper, began to have doubts himself. Perhaps the white man did come out of the buffalo. Grasshopper didn’t know it for sure, but he was anxious not to get on the bad side of Three Geese by disagreeing with his opinion too openly. Three Geese was known to be vengeful—he held grudges against many of the Sans Arc people and other Sioux as well. Grasshopper didn’t want Three Geese to get a grudge against him, so he tried to be respectful of his belief about the white man.

  “We need to find somebody who can talk to this buffalo man,” Three Geese insisted. “Guillaume or Draga or somebody. We had better take him with us until we know what his story is.”

  “Oh, all right—leave me alone,” White Hawk said.

  Three Geese went over to the fire and tried to talk to the little white man in sign, but the white man had not the slightest ability to converse in sign—in Three Geese’s opinion this fact alone proved his point. If the white man was at all normal he would know how to talk in sign.

  “He must have come straight out of that buffalo,” Three Geese insisted. “He cannot even talk in sign.”
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  “All right . . . all right . . .,” White Hawk said. Why argue with a fool? He was not feeling particularly well, and even if he had been feeling better, would have had quite enough of arguing with Three Geese. He finished taking his fine pelt and ate a bite or two of buffalo liver that Grasshopper cooked for him, though his appetite was not strong.

  By the time White Hawk and the others, with their small white captive, got back to the Sans Arc lodges, White Hawk had begun to feel hot and weak. He nearly fell when he got off his horse—his wives had to help him to his lodge. That night his fever soared and he began to have strange dreams—he dreamed of a white buffalo, and then of a white man who had buffalo horns coming out of his head. The medicine men came and gave him strong emetics, hoping to force the terrible fever out of him; but the medicine men failed. Gripped by a great illness, White Hawk died before dawn.

  Privately Three Geese thought White Hawk died because he had scorned the prophecy about the buffalo man. Grasshopper became very worried; after all, he too had been doubtful of the prophecy. What if the big fever took him too? To give himself the best possible chance he told everybody that he agreed with Three Geese: the white man, still shivering, still bloody, had undoubtedly been born of a buffalo cow.

  The women of the tribe cleaned the white man up, gave him some clothes of skins, and fixed him a small lodge, so he wouldn’t be cold. They also gave him two twin captive girls, fat ones, just to make sure he stayed warm.

  Soon people from other bands—Brulé, Miniconjou, Oglala—trickled into the Sans Arc camp, to hear the story and examine the miraculous being. News of the miracle soon reached Draga, who was very annoyed. She had no aversion to miracles, but if a miracle was needed she wanted to produce it herself, not have it happen in some remote camp of the Sans Arc.

  “It’s your fault,” she informed the Bad Eye bitterly. “You talked about a white buffalo so much that it confused everyone. Now the Sans Arc think they have a Buffalo Man.”