Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  “I’m not drunk, but I reckon I could ride down a hill even if I was drunk,” Jim said. “Your wife’s a sight drunker than me.”

  With a nod, he disappeared into the darkness and the wind.

  Josie was glad Jim left. She liked having Kit to herself, in their little house. There’d be nobody but her husband to hear her, if she got loud.

  “He drank half a jug of whiskey—that ain’t like Jim,” Kit said. “I bet he and Tasmin had a fight.”

  “Don’t think about him, think about me,” Josie demanded, wobbling a little from the whiskey she had imbibed. She began to pull Kit into the bedroom; they had a good corn shucks mattress on their low bed. Kit was still staring at the door, worried about his friend. Josie began to feel impatient.

  “Come on, get your prick out—make it hard!” Josie instructed. “Get in bed and make it hard.”

  His wife’s directness sometimes shocked Kit— she spoke coarsely when she was excited, and she was usually excited when they drank whiskey.

  “I guess I’ve been married long enough to know what to do,” Kit said, a little annoyed. A few hours earlier she had been screaming at him for forgetting her flannel—now she had her hand down in his pants, in a hurry for his prick to stiffen up.

  With Josie rushing him, Kit did as instructed, but for a moment, he couldn’t get Jim Snow out of his mind. Jim had looked lonely—Kit could not remember seeing that look on his friend’s face before. If he was lonely, why hadn’t he at least stayed the night? Why go riding off in the dark when there was plenty of firewood—he wouldn’t have had to be cold.

  4

  In the sad months before the twins were born . . .

  IN THE SAD MONTHS before the twins were born, and afterward too, for many dark weeks, Father Geoffrin had been the only companion Tasmin would consistently admit. Kit Carson had come once, but Tasmin’s condition had troubled him so that he hadn’t come again—it was Kit’s view that Tasmin no longer wanted to live; and if she didn’t want to, very likely she wouldn’t. Here was a trouble Kit couldn’t bear to face.

  Father Geoffrin faced it. He came into Tasmin’s room day after day, and sat with her, as silent as she was. Tasmin stared at the hills, Father Geoffrin merely sat. Sometimes Tasmin allowed him to hold her hand—other times she pushed his hand away. Once he tried to read her a bit of Racine, thinking the beautiful French lines might reach her, but Tasmin shook her head and he put the book away. Tasmin’s room was at the top of the house. The sounds of the Plaza—donkeys braying, people quarreling, the blacksmith pounding—hardly reached her. Monty was talking now, but Tasmin only occasionally responded to his babble. She scarcely ate. Vicky Berrybender told her husband that she feared Tasmin would die.

  “No, no—she mustn’t—can’t spare Tassie,” Lord Berrybender said. “Need her to help me run my plantation, once we get to Texas. Excellent soil for cotton in Texas, I’m told. Cotton’s sure to be the coming crop.”

  Fear lay over the household—fear of losing Tasmin, their most able crisis manager. Even Lord Berrybender fell into a funk, hunted less and less, rarely put his hand on his wife. Gloom seeped like fog through the company. Even though Tasmin was far above them, everyone spoke in whispers or subdued tones. The fact that Jim had come and gone, effecting no change, was not encouraging. They all trusted in Jim’s ability. But Tasmin’s heavy sadness, her evident resignation, defeated them. Jim left, promising to come back.

  Only Father Geoffrin took the optimistic view.

  “She’s not dying,” he insisted. “She’s just sad.”

  “But she only eats chicken soup,” Cook insisted. “Just chicken soup.”

  “That’s quite enough,” Father Geoff assured her. “Keep making soup. This will pass.”

  When he said the same words to Tasmin she looked at him scornfully.

  “How would you know what will pass and what won’t?” she asked. “Watch what you’re saying, or I’ll put you out.”

  “Don’t put me out,” Geoff said, smiling. “The priests here are filthy and mean. The natives hate them. They’d like nothing better than to burn a few at the stake.”

  “No doubt you deserve it, you heretic,” Tasmin said, beginning to cry, a change Geoff thought for the good. It was her blank days that worried him most. Hours passed, even days, without Tasmin saying a word. Little Onion was profoundly disturbed. Many times she crept to the door of Tasmin’s room and peeped through the keyhole, only to see her mistress still in bed, staring, silent.

  When Tasmin did cry it was no short tear burst. She went from being dry to being in flood. Father Geoffrin waited. He put his arm around her; she shrugged it off; he tried again; she let it stay. Finally she leaned her head against his shoulder.

  “I can tolerate you because you’re like me—you have no one,” she said.

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard you say,” Geoff told her. “You have a father, sisters, a child, a husband, and devoted servants and friends.”

  “I meant I had no lover—you know perfectly well what I meant,” she chided. “Every time I leave this room I’m faced with the fact that my younger sisters have better judgment than I do, when it comes to men. Buffum is very happy with High Shoulders, and Mary, if anything, is even happier with Piet. I can hardly bear to see them, they’re so happy. I know that’s shameful, but it’s how I am. Why did I have to fall in love with a man who let himself be killed?”

  Father Geoffrin sighed. Her mind would not be denied its torment, and it seemed easily to beat the body down. Tasmin, once full-bodied, was now thin and half starved because of the punishment her mind gave out.

  “You may recall that I saw you in your first flush of happiness, when you married Jimmy,” he told her. “You were creatures of astonishing beauty. Jimmy seemed to be everything you wanted—yet you fell in love with Pomp, the one person you could never really have—but that’s merely the way of the world.

  “I’m capable of doing exactly the same thing,” he admitted. “But folly doesn’t last forever. You’re a healthy woman—you’re young. And you still have Jimmy.”

  “Don’t mention him. I don’t want him at all— even his beard irritated me,” Tasmin protested.

  “Did you confess anything—to Jimmy I mean?” he asked.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “It was on the tip of my tongue. Jim should have figured it out. He should have beaten me . . . if he had . . .”

  She stopped, shrugged, shook her head, cried, now helplessly confused. Jim Snow had slapped her for trivial slips of language. If he’d known she had been an adulteress—for all her shameless chasing she had only managed to catch Pomp twice. She was far less of a sinner than she had hoped to be.

  Could she explain that to Jim? Why should she explain it to Jim? After all, he had been the one who had entrusted her to Pomp. He was half to blame—but would he understand that, if she confessed?

  “Pomp’s dead, Jim’s not—don’t you dare confess,” Father Geoff advised.

  “I know I make an exceedingly difficult friend,” Tasmin admitted. “I’ve been even ruder to you than I was to George Catlin, and I was damned rude to George. Why do you bother with me, Mr. Priest?”

  “Curiosity,” Father Geoff said, at once. Tasmin’s eyes, for a moment, had shone with their old sparkle. It confirmed his optimism. Tasmin would recover—it would just take time.

  “Curiosity about what?” she asked. “About how you’ll look in ten years,” he said. “Despite all that’s happened you’re a young woman yet. I hope I’m alive to know you when you’re about forty. That’s when the real mischief begins.”

  Tasmin, at the time only a week from delivery, suddenly pulled up her gown and exposed her great belly.

  “If I keep letting Jim pour babies into me I won’t look like much at forty,” Tasmin said. “I’ll look like an old sow with many litters.”

  “It’s rather extraordinary, how very large women do get,” he said, looking at Tasmin’s
belly, a sight more gross than he had expected to be shown.

  Later, when the priest was gone, Tasmin remembered that she had first thought Pomp, not Jim, had got her with child. Probably that had merely been a romantic conviction.

  When her labor began Tasmin insisted on having Father Geoffrin in the room. Cook was shocked, but Tasmin prevailed: Father Geoffrin sat at her head, holding her hand. Cook learned it meant that Tasmin expected to die in labor. Petal came out first and was being lavishly admired when, to everyone’s surprise, Petey followed. Jim was out walking around the Plaza. When he came in he was told he was the father of twins. From the moment that Petal uttered her first indignant cry it was evident that a new and formidable force had appeared among the Berrybenders.

  5

  And yet, in this unsettled place . . .

  IT WILL BE at least a year before Papa’s new guns come—and his new wooden leg,” Buffum pointed out, in troubled tones.

  “Yes—or longer. Why?” Mary asked.

  Buffum was loath to put her fear into words: the fear that High Shoulders, already restive, would leave and insist that she and Elf go with him.

  “His dislike of the Mexicans is extreme,” Buffum reminded them. “The fact that they chained him is an insult he cannot forget.”

  They were having the discussion in the nursery. The four newborn infants were all in cradle boards, all asleep except Petal, who surveyed the company with unblinking and not wholly friendly blue eyes. Monty and Talley were galloping around on stick horses that the kindly Signor Claricia had made them. The clatter was considerable. Tasmin wandered in for a moment. She pointed in a menacing fashion at the two stick-horse caballeros, whose fear of her was considerable. Both dismounted at once.

  “He killed two Mexican soldiers as he was escaping,” Tasmin reminded her sister. “You’d think he’d be satisfied with that.”

  “He isn’t,” Buffum declared. “I fear that he might snap. They are very rude to Indians, you must admit. It all makes me very uneasy.

  “He doesn’t really like this country, anyway,” she went on. “Thinks it’s too dusty.” She stammered a little, from apprehension.

  “I guess her handsome Ute wants to go home,” Vicky said. “Men do want to go home, eventually. I live in hope of a day when Albany wants to.”

  “Well, he only wants to go to Texas—too bad for you, Vic,” Tasmin said. “I fear you’re destined to be the mistress of a cotton plantation. It’s Papa’s new ambition.”

  She judged Buffum’s problem to be the more serious. High Shoulders was deeply devoted to Buffum and Elf—he would expect them to go where he went—and it was dangerous for him in Santa Fe. Nor would Buffum consider being apart from him. She seemed in good health, but how long would she stand up to the rigors of aboriginal life? When circumstances permitted, Buffum still demanded a poached egg in the morning, and Cook, when provided with an adequate kitchen, still poached her eggs to perfection. But there would be no Cook in the Valley of the Chickens—and no eggs, either. Besides that, there was little Elphinstone. What if Buffum’s milk gave out? What would little Elf eat?

  “I will not be parted from my husband,” Buffum vowed. “If he goes, I go.”

  “It will not be easy,” Mary told her. “No, but it’s better than waiting for High Shoulders to be shot down by some Mexican, as Pomp was,” Buffum said. “I believe I would be less fearful in the wilderness than I am here.

  “I’m sorry, Tassie,” she added. “I should not have mentioned Pomp. I know how you grieve.”

  Tasmin shrugged. “You merely said what’s true,” she replied. “It’s not a crime to mention Pomp. In fact it’s better that he’s mentioned.”

  “I’ve a thought,” Mary said. “Piet could start a school. Perhaps High Shoulders could go to it, and Little Onion. For that matter, our own sister Kate is of an age to need tutoring.”

  “Surely you will remember that I know mathematics,” Kate avowed. “I believe I shall soon master prime numbers with no help from Piet.”

  “So?” Mary retorted. “Have you Latin? Have you Greek? Have you chemistry? I think it’s abundantly clear that you could profit from Piet’s instruction.”

  Tasmin had no objection to Piet holding some sort of school. The Berrybenders were more or less settled; there was time to be filled. Little Onion had picked up a few English words, but was too shy to try them in public, though she eagerly tried them when alone with Tasmin. Whether the volatile High Shoulders would sit still for these studies Tasmin doubted. Lately he had been going on hunting trips with much success—perhaps if the hunting held up he would not take Buffum and their child and leave. Certainly his attentions had wrought a good change in Buffum. From being pale and spotty, wavery and quavery, she had blossomed into an appealing, robust young woman. She was no longer frail, no longer pompous. Her health improved, and her complexion. Tasmin had finally come to like her sister—to like Mary also, even though the latter still occasionally exhibited traces of the diabolical. With Tasmin sunk in gloom, it was Buffum who instructed the servants—what few were left—and ordered the nursery. Even in the last weeks of her pregnancy she had remained active and competent. Her confidence in her husband was total—High Shoulders, for his part, was gentle with Bess, rarely churlish. He had only a half dozen words of English, and Buffum scarcely more Ute, and yet the two seemed to communicate serenely. They obviously made more sense to one another than Tasmin had ever been able to make with Jim Snow. It was obvious that High Shoulders was unlikely to be wholly comfortable in Santa Fe. He stood out in the Plaza crowds because of his height; he towered over the small Indians of the pueblos and scarcely bothered to conceal his contempt for the Mexican soldiery. Buffum’s fears were clearly justified. Still, since Tasmin had finally come to enjoy her younger sisters, she wanted to keep Buffum there, if possible.

  In her unhappy state, Tasmin scarcely slept. She dozed—rarely did she sleep deeply. She thought that might improve once she was relieved of the discomforts of late pregnancy, but she was wrong. Once the twins were born it became even harder to slip into sleep. Confused dreams pursued her: dreams of Jim and Pomp, of buffalo, of the bear cubs, ships, England. Sometimes, in the clear mornings, she woke furious at her father for having taken them so far from what they knew—even from what they were, English gentle people, not wilderness trekkers. He had brought them into a situation for which they had no training. All the graces that, as young ladies, they had been encouraged to develop were useless to them in the American West, where there was little opportunity for them to display their comeliness and fine deportment to eligible gentlemen who might want them as wives.

  That night Tasmin watched the moon move from one side of her window to the other, as it cast its pale light on the hills. What Buffum contemplated, leaving with her husband, seemed the wildest folly, and yet she didn’t have to cast back in memory very far to recall that she had been prepared to do exactly the same thing when she had fallen in love with Jim Snow. She had been fully determined to fling off Englishness and follow Jim into the wilderness—and had done it even, for several weeks. She had tried to learn to shoot a bow and arrow; she had even, accidentally, skewered a skunk. She had made love in nakedness while, nearby, hundreds of buffalo bulls were roaring in their rut. She would have chanced anything with Jim; but if the recent trek had taught them much, it was that such daring was only romantic folly. The plains, the hills, the West were far stronger than any strength they had to set against it. It had already crushed two of her brothers: Bobbety and the mysterious Seven. It had killed most of their servants: Fraulein Pfretzskaner, Gladwyn, Señor Yanez, Milly, Tim, Master Jeremy Thaw, and good George Aitken, the steamship captain. And of course it had taken Pomp, a man adept in its ways.

  But Tasmin had been willing to chance it, as Buffum was now, mainly on the basis of attraction to a certain man. Attraction could shift and slip; she knew that now. And yet, in this unsettled place, where there were no manners, no society, no pattern, what, except feeli
ngs, was there to trust? She who would once have followed Jim Snow anywhere was now not even sure she liked him. Would the attraction she had once gambled on ever return? Would Buffum, if she left, survive the wilderness?

  Tasmin didn’t know, but she was extremely sulky with her father, whose selfishness had landed them in their predicament. She passed him in the halls without a word or a look.

  Lord Berrybender eventually became disquieted by his daughter’s icy attitude. What was the matter with Tasmin? They were housed in a good house, provided with ample comforts. Old pleasures— cards, music, claret—could be resumed. Why couldn’t there be harmony in the household? Why did Tasmin look at him as if she wished he were dead?

  “Tassie’s very short with me,” he told his wife. “Extremely short, one might say. Can’t think why.”

  He began to fumble under her gown. Vicky, half asleep, offered no opposition. She rarely did, when her husband was in a mood of disquiet. Better to accept him, let the the old boy squirt off, as he would in a few moments, usually. Otherwise he’d toss and turn, grumble and groan, half the night.

  6

  . . . the river, flowing quietly, quietly flowing . . .

  CAPTAIN WILLIAM CLARK was at table with Toussaint Charbonneau when the river man Joe Compton brought the sad news. Everyone who worked the river, if they knew what was good for them, hurried to William Clark’s offices when they arrived in Saint Louis. Nobody was hungrier for news of the West than Captain Clark—after all it was he, with his long-dead partner, Captain Lewis, who had opened it. One wall of his office was covered with a huge map of the trans-Mississippi regions; the Captain loved nothing more than augmenting his map, adding a stream here or a pass there, whenever he was brought information that he considered reliable.