Kit was almost as shocked by Tasmin’s appearance as he had been by the news of Pomp’s death. Tasmin’s cheeks were sunken, her eyes dull, her hair a tangle. She only wanted to talk of Pomp. When Kit told her that her husband was expected back at Bent’s Fort soon she showed little interest. Kit, happily married now to his Josie and living in a little house in Taos, soon exhausted his opinions. He had followed the wagon with the prisoners in it—Pomp, High Shoulders, Tom Fitzpatrick—expecting them to escape as soon as it was dark. The Mexican soldiers were just boys, too cold and scared to stop anyone who really wanted to escape. In the chill reaches of the night, with the snow blowing, they would have been unlikely to stop experienced men bent on flight. Kit, using the blizzard as a shield, had stayed close by, leading three horses; at midnight, just as he had expected, High Shoulders appeared, and then Tom Fitzpatrick. When Kit asked old Tom where Pomp was, he merely shrugged. “Wouldn’t come. Too fond of Jimmy’s wife, I expect,” Tom said. Kit thought it was a poor reason: when you were caught, the first order of business was to get away—then there would be plenty of time to be fond of Tasmin.
Facing Tasmin in the big cool room in Santa Fe, seeing her hollow cheeks and listless movements, he waited while she cried a little—but mostly Tasmin seemed beyond tears; blank, empty. The woman whose spirit had meant so much to Kit for so long had lost her spirit, and all because Pomp Charbonneau had been too big a fool to run away from a troop of Mexican soldiers whose captain was crazy as a bat.
“Pomp, he was always different,” Kit remarked— and yet, when Tasmin pressed him to expand on his statement, he was at a loss. Pomp could do all the things the other mountain men did—and he could do some things the mountain men couldn’t do, such as read a book or speak in foreign languages— and yet he wasn’t like the other men. He was friendly to a fault, and could read the country as well as Kit could, but in times of danger, when it was necessary to be quick, he often lingered, as if to inspect the danger and understand it. At the fort, the day of the arrest, he could have hidden himself in the woolshed, as Kit had. It might have worked, only Pomp didn’t try. He probably thought he could slide by the crazy captain and explain things to the Governor; he waited and watched when he should have hidden or run.
Tasmin was very large with child. Kit thought that might be one reason she looked so bad. But large or not, on a cold, snowy day, she made him walk with her to the graveyard near the church, where Pomp was buried. Kit felt awkward. Why visit the dead? Yet Tasmin insisted on standing there, cold and sad, for almost an hour.
Tasmin knew that Kit didn’t share her grief—no one did, nor could she expect them to. Eliza, the kitchen girl, to whom Pomp had often been kind, came closest to feeling what Tasmin felt; and yet Eliza had merely responded to Pomp’s kindness— she hadn’t been in love with him. Mary Berry-bender had an inkling as to how deeply attached Tasmin was to Pomp; she made no effort to reason with her. “There is no reasoning with grief,” Piet told Mary. “It wears away slowly, like the face on a coin.”
“Mine would never wear away, if you died,” Mary said. They went out often to chip at fossils in the pale, snowy hills; they were happy.
Jim Snow came, as he had promised, a few days before Tasmin was delivered of the twins. Buffum had had her Elf the week before; Vicky’s Randy arrived two weeks later. Tasmin wept when Jim appeared; the eager way Monty ran to his father touched her. And yet when Jim tried to kiss her she turned her mouth away.
“There’ll be a wait, Jimmy,” she told him flatly.
Jim, like Kit, was shocked by Tasmin’s appearance; but Monty was healthy, at least—he babbled about Mopsy, the little mongrel dog.
“We won’t eat Mopsy, not ever!” Monty insisted. He had not forgotten that Hugh Glass had eaten the bear cub Abby. He wanted to make sure nobody would ever eat Mopsy.
“I expect we can find better things to eat than a skinny pup,” Jim said, wary of absolute promises. Lord Berrybender was talking of going on to Texas—there were said to be fine plantation lands near the Gulf. But even Lord B. recognized the impracticality of setting off with so many infants and decided to wait in Santa Fe for some new guns he had ordered while in Bent’s Fort. The order had to go to England—he only trusted English guns—and come back, a wait of perhaps a year and a half, by which time the infants ought to be safely mobile.
Tasmin didn’t take her husband to Pomp’s grave—she had no wish to share it with him.
A week after the twins were born Jim asked Tasmin what she wanted him to do. Commerce on the prairies was rapidly increasing; the Bent brothers were fearful of losing ground to rivals. Jim Snow and Willy Bent had made a perfect haul to the east— now Charles Bent was pressing Jim to go again. There was no employment for him in Santa Fe, and there were three children to think of now.
“Go,” Tasmin said. “Perhaps when you come back I’ll like you again.”
At the moment she felt empty—what did she have to say to this man, her husband? They now had a brood of children, and yet she felt little connection to Jim. Better that he go.
Jim hesitated. He didn’t understand his wife, but he knew that the Mexican authorities had behaved capriciously once, as a result of which Pomp was dead. What if war broke out between Mexico and America? What would happen to his family? And yet Tasmin, indifferent to his presence at first, began to be hostile. She clearly didn’t want him around.
Cook, seeing that Mr. Snow was confused, took it upon herself to explain matters to him. Cook liked Mr. Snow. In her opinion it was only his abilities that had brought them safely thus far. She had studied maps. It was clear that Northamptonshire was still very far away. There might be more savages to contend with, more parching distances to cross—in her opinion doom would overtake them if they lost Mr. Snow.
“It’s only that Lady Tasmin was such a good friend of Mr. Pomp’s,” Cook explained, as Jim listened, grateful for any clue that might help explain Tasmin’s hostility.
Much as Cook liked Jim Snow, she had no intention of telling him all she knew about Lady Tasmin and Pomp Charbonneau. She was far from the opinion that delivering the whole truth was a good thing. Much harm could come with truth, in her opinion.
“When my husband died, God bless his soul, I hated any woman who still had a husband. If I couldn’t have my old John, who gave me eleven bairns, then I didn’t see why other women should get to have their men. That’s not Christian, I know, but that’s how womenfolk are. And maybe not just womenfolk.”
Jim looked surprised. Was Cook telling him that Tasmin disliked him at present just because he was alive and Pomp dead? Weren’t people always dying? He missed Pomp himself—they had enjoyed many fine scouts together—but it didn’t make him hate Kit Carson or the Broken Hand.
Jim felt reluctant to leave the kitchen, with its good smells. Cook said no more—in her view explanation was mostly wasted on men. Though her opinion of the scrawny Mexican chickens was low, she had managed to catch a fairly plump hen, just browning over the roasting pan. She had meant it as a small treat for her suitor, Mr. Fitzpatrick, who had left off suggesting indecencies and was on the whole behaving well. But seeing Jim Snow’s despondency, she changed her mind, slid the hen on a plate, and sat it in front of him. “You’ll be needing your strength, if you have to climb back over that pass,” Cook told him.
They had crossed the pass with five dead men in the wagon. Tasmin, inconsolable, had sat by Pomp’s body all the way. Cook remembered the sound of ice crackling under the wagon wheels as they rose higher into mist and cloud. The pass was so high it seemed they were rising to heaven, although, under the circumstances, with five men dead and all of them half frozen, it was more like entering a cold hell.
“I want some!” Monty cried, seeing the chicken. Talley crowded around too. Jim gave each boy a drumstick. Traveling as he did, eating whatever he shot, singeing it, sprinkling on a little salt if he had any, with only now and then the treat of a buffalo liver, he could not but wonder at Cook’s skill. Sh
e made the best meals he had ever eaten. The plump hen was delicious. He thought he might just have a slice or two, but before he knew it, the hen was eaten and he and the two little boys were licking the greasy bones.
3
Snowflakes swirled around him . . .
ALL THE WAY TO TAOS, Jim kept remembering how desperately Monty cried when he realized his father was leaving. Little Onion couldn’t shush him—he kept stretching out his plump arms to Jim, who had not expected such a display. He did his best to assure the little boy that he would be back, but Monty’s sobs increased until finally Tasmin stepped out of her room.
“Go,” she said. “You’re just making it worse. Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve been an expert at leaving. One looks around to find you gone. Perhaps it’s the right way. Babies don’t cry for the vanished, just for those about to vanish.”
“I had no idea he’d carry on this way,” Jim said.
“Nor did he, but I assure you he’ll live,” she said. “Just go! Vamos! Scat!”
Jim went, but he couldn’t free his mind of the image of Monty’s distress. He had never supposed himself missed. Men had tasks that took them away, sometimes far away. From the heights of Taos the plains beyond looked as if they stretched on forever, yet Jim had just crossed them twice and was about to cross them again. Jim didn’t like the bustle and noise of Saint Louis—he was always glad to get back to the quiet spaces; and yet, when he considered the future, he wondered if Saint Louis might be the right place to lodge his family. Tasmin would have some society. Captain Clark admired her and would see to that. There’d be someone to see to the children’s lessons. The tiny twins were just mites yet, but Monty had been just a mite not long ago, and now he was a boy possessed of a good appetite.
Coming down toward the Kaw on his recent trip, he had seen a curve and a thicket of reeds that looked familiar, but he couldn’t think why until they were well past it and dusk had fallen. It was on that curve that he had first seen Tasmin, stripped off, preparing to bathe in the cool dawn. He had been stepping into the river for the same purpose; he too was naked. He could remember his startlement vividly. He had taken in nothing of Tasmin’s beauty, so profound was his own embarrassment. All he had wanted to do was hide. A little later he had killed a deer and fed her its liver.
That had not been very long ago, and yet, in that modest interval, the two of them had married, gone up the Missouri, crossed to the Yellowstone, and then gone all the way back south to Santa Fe. They had three children—it was Little Onion’s opinion that it had been the big meteor shower on the plains that had caused the twins. Whatever caused them, they were born, healthy, and in Cook’s opinion, likely to live. For the moment they were well provided for, but that might change. Jim had nothing to sell except his skill as a plains-man—he supposed there would always be a need for reliable guides, more and more need as the Americans filtered into the West; but guiding kept him far from his family, and his son’s outburst had shown him that absences didn’t suit everybody. They had once irked Tasmin as much as they now irked Monty. What the twins might want, as they got older, he couldn’t guess. As he approached the little house Kit Carson and Josie had taken he didn’t feel at ease in his spirit, as he usually did when he traveled alone.
The small house Kit and Josie lived in was little more than a hut—fortunately, both were short people. Jim thought he might stop in for a night as he headed east. Snowflakes swirled around him as he rode up. It was chilly weather. Kit was behind the house, chopping firewood, a fact that rather surprised Jim. Two walls of the house were already banked high with chopped firewood, and yet Kit was going at it as if he and Josie were down to their last stick. How much wood could they burn anyway, in one small fireplace?
Cold as it was, Kit was soaked with sweat from his vigorous work with the axe.
“If you don’t slow up on the firewood there won’t be a tree left standing,” Jim said. “You got enough chopped to heat a fort, and you don’t live in a fort.”
Kit stuck his axe in a log and left it. He stared at the towering stacks of firewood as if noticing them for the first time.
“I hate running out of firewood,” he said.
Then he sighed.
“There’s nothing wrong with having plenty of firewood, is there?” he asked. To Jim he seemed distracted, even rather gloomy.
“I don’t know what else to do when Josie’s mad at me,” Kit admitted. “It’s too cold to just sit around. So I chop firewood.”
This was the first hint Jim had had that the newly married Carsons were experiencing marital unease—though, once he thought about it, it was not surprising that Josie got mad at Kit. Jim himself was frequently mad at Kit—at least he was if he had to be in his company for a day or so. Josefina had been mightily taken with Kit before the marriage, but now that she actually had to live with him it was no wonder that she found him irritating.
Jim was about to ask what Josie was mad about when the girl herself popped out the door. She looked as friendly and cheerful as could be.
“Come in, Jimmy—we got posole,” she said.
Then she looked at her husband.
“What about you, woodchopper?” she asked. “Don’t you ever get tired of chopping wood?”
Kit was perplexed. Twenty minutes earlier Josie had been seething like a kettle, so angry with him that she spluttered when she tried to talk. But now she was his old, cheerful Josie again, a twinkle in her eye as she stood beneath the high piles of stacked firewood towering above her head.
“If this wood falls on the house it will be the end of us,” she said.
In fact she had been furious with Kit, earlier— she had given him a long list of supplies to bring back from the trading post, but he had let the list blow away and had forgotten half the things on it, including the most important item of all, a swatch of soft flannel which she had ordered specially from Saint Louis and had been waiting for for a year. She wanted to make the flannel into a warm nightgown to wear on cold nights, when the north wind howled through Taos. Kit had promised her faithfully that he would bring the flannel, but then he had carelessly lost her list and had returned with some scratchy wool cloth instead. When she blew up at him he just looked puzzled. For a man as finicky as Kit was about his moccasins and his buckskins, it was absurd to think that he couldn’t tell the difference between wool and flannel. Every time she entrusted him with an order from the trading post he forgot half her requests and muddled the rest. Kit was famous among the mountain men for his exceptional eyesight, and yet, in a store, he couldn’t tell the difference between two cloths.
Of course it was vexing to have a husband who constantly forgot what he was sent to fetch; Josie had given him a fiery dressing-down, but then she cooled off. It was over. She would get someone with an errand that required going to the trading post to bring her her flannel. Now it was time to forget it—time for supper and bed.
Kit was so relieved when he realized his wife was no longer angry with him that he became giddy for a moment. Josie’s tempers, when they flared, were so violent that Kit always concluded that he had ruined his marriage beyond repair. Her angers seemed to signal the end of everything. Then, when they abated and domestic life went on, Kit felt so happy that he usually hit the bottle, if there was a bottle to hit, as there happened to be on this occasion, even though he knew the abstemious Jim Snow didn’t much approve of drinking. He poured himself a cup of whiskey, Josie watching him merrily all the while. Josie had a tendency to become amorous after one of her fits— she would certainly be amorous if she sat there and got drunk.
“He forgot all the things I told him to bring— that’s why I chased him out,” Josie said. She saw no need to be reticent with Jim Snow, who had traveled with Kit and must often have suffered from his forgetfulness.
“I hope all that firewood don’t fall on the house,” she said, a second time.
“It won’t fall on the house—don’t you think I even know how to stack firewood?” Kit a
sked, flaring a little himself. Jim and Josie looked at him as if he were a rank incompetent.
Jim polished off two large bowls of posole and sat staring into the fire. The fact that Kit had made peace with Josie reminded him uneasily that he hadn’t made peace with Tasmin, and would have no opportunity to do so for many months—not unless he refused to lead the wagon train that the Bents were even then loading. He could refuse; but he didn’t think Tasmin would welcome him back to Santa Fe, just then. Tasmin, like Josie, sometimes seethed and settled down; but Jim felt her present mood was different. Probably Cook’s explanation was the right one. Tasmin was grieving for Pomp—no doubt it would wear off someday, but not necessarily soon. He might as well go on to Saint Louis while she was struggling with it—or so it seemed.
“I’ll have some whiskey, if you care to share it,” Jim said, startling Kit so greatly that he almost dropped the jug.
“Have it all, I’m drunk enough—Josie will get me down and beat me if I get any drunker,” Kit declared.
Josie smiled. She meant to get her forgetful husband down all right, but beating him wasn’t what she had in mind.
The whiskey jug Kit handed Jim was more than half full—yet in the space of an hour, to Kit’s shock and Josie’s surprise, Jim Snow drank it all. He became a little flushed, but otherwise merely sat, staring into the fire. Kit started to remind Jim that whiskey cost money, but thought better of it. It didn’t cost enough to risk making Jim Snow mad.
For Jim to drink like that suggested to Kit that there was trouble somewhere—probably at home. Tasmin had never been an easy wife. Kit, curious, decided that the best policy was to ask no questions.
When the whiskey jug was empty Jim thanked both the Carsons for their hospitality and stood up to leave. Kit was startled: it was after midnight, cold and blowy, whereas their house was snug, warmed by some of the sweet-burning firewood he had stacked up. “You’re welcome to sleep here,” he said. “It’s freezing out and you’re drunk. Surely you ain’t fool enough to ride off this hill tonight.”
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