Sin Killer

by Larry McMurtry

  Tasmin held tight to Kit for so long that it embarrassed him—she couldn’t help it; she was too flooded with feeling to turn him loose.

  “I did miss you, Kit,” she said finally. “Are you a father yet?”

  For a moment Kit himself looked sad. “We had one but it was born too early—didn’t live,” he said, in a tone of some discouragement. It reminded her that in every life there were disappointments, some as acute as her own.

  Greasy Lake was carrying what appeared to be a rolled-up buffalo skin, rather yellowish.

  “Where’s Mr. Lake going now?” she asked.

  “To Cape Cod—hard to believe, ain’t it?” Charles Bent told her. “Some Comanches killed that yellow buffalo he found. It’s upset him a bunch. He thinks it’s the End of the Indian peoples—I disagree. When we’ve killed all the buffalo—and we will—then it’ll be the End of the Indian peoples.”

  “Why would he want to go to Cape Cod?” Buffum asked.

  “Because he thinks that’s where the sun is born, out of the ocean,” Charles Bent told them. “He’s going there to do some big-time praying.”

  Later, when he saw the huge improvements Buffum had made in his warehouse, he confessed himself much impressed.

  “Do you think I could hire her?” he asked Jim.

  “Buffum? I think she’s rich already,” Jim told him.

  “That don’t mean she couldn’t be richer yet— and help me get richer too,” Charlie told him. “She’s better than Vrain with inventories, and Vrain’s no slouch himself.”

  68

  . . . the Missouri’s shores were vague with summer heat.

  THE THREE BOYS were buried on a green hill, beside a little frame church. Little Onion was laid by Monty, her dearest. Captain William Clark read the Twenty-third Psalm, and his wife, Harriet, who had a beautiful voice, sang a bit of Handel. Charles Bent carefully took Tasmin’s order for the head-stones, making sure he had each name right. Tasmin stood by Jim, with Rosa on his other side. Buffum watched over Petal and Elf. George Catlin and Father Geoffrin were ashen. Their wait was over, but what next?

  The funeral party then repaired to Captain Clark’s house. Jim had scarcely spoken to Tasmin—he merely said hello. At the house he busied himself with the Captain’s great map of the West, suggesting certain changes in the region of the Pecos River—things he had noticed on his recent travels. Tasmin was afraid he didn’t mean to speak to her at all—not in punishment, but because talk was not his way. Helpful as Little Onion had been, months might pass with Jim scarcely addressing a word to her. Jim looked haunted still. The violence that had coursed through him when he was among the slavers must have seared something in him, as perhaps the long-ago lightning had when it flung him through the air.

  Tasmin finally decided to corner him—after all, she merely wanted to thank him—nothing more.

  “I do thank you so much for bringing them, Jimmy,” she told him. “It’s an immense comfort to me that our sons are together, in a nice place where we can both visit them.”

  “Do you mean to stay here, then?” he asked.

  “Petal and I are going to England—we’re going, but I don’t know that we’ll stay,” she told him. “We may come back. Petal regards you as her own— and she’s quite right. When we do come back I’ll get word to you through the Bents—or Kit. I’m sure someone can find you.”

  “Charlie wants me to work with Vrain, up on the South Platte,” Jim said. “I may do it—I like the cooler country.”

  “But you won’t mind, if I send word that Petal’s here, will you?”

  “I won’t mind,” Jim said—it was the most she could get him to say.

  She did, though, thank Rosa for the nice shrouds.

  “I hope your child is healthy, when it comes,” she added. She didn’t want Rosa to think she held a mere frailty of the flesh against her.

  “I hope—I don’t want to bury no more little ones,” Rosa said.

  Tasmin began to drink straight brandy—a lot of it. She felt no certainty that she would ever see the man she regarded as her husband again. At some point Buffum came over, an excited look on her face.

  “What’s colored you up—not an impressive new cock, I hope?” Tasmin said.

  “Hush, Tassie—no,” Buffum told her. “Mr. Bent’s just made us rather a grand offer—he thinks we should settle here and start a store. A very big store, with all the finest things from Europe.”

  “What, us aristocrats?” Tasmin asked, astonished. “Sell thimbles?”

  “Oh no, much better than thimbles,” Buffum announced. “The latest frocks from Paris—Geoff can help us pick them out. And furs and muffs and bonnets, and parasols and opera glasses and combs and jewels.”

  Tasmin, quite drunk by then, felt like laughing at the idea. But Buffum was very fired up by the idea, and Father Geoffrin was looking cheerful for the first time in weeks.

  “Mr. Bent says Saint Louis is the coming town,” Buffum went on. “He’ll help us get the capital. He thinks the two of us would be excellent managers. And we’d call it Berrybender’s—if this one works, he thinks we might even put one in Cincinnati.”

  “Why would Charlie Bent think I’m a good manager?” Tasmin wondered.

  “Well, you did manage us, all the way west and back,” Buffum pointed out. “Without your spirit none of us would have made it. Please consider it, at least. It would be so very boring just to go home and be a lady.”

  Tasmin thought that might be true. What would she do in England? Take lovers and quarrel with them? she do in England? Take lovers and quarrel with them? She had almost forgotten how it was to feel happy, as Buffum was happy now; and yet she had once considered herself perfectly happy, in the days before she met Jim Snow.

  “It’s nothing I would have expected, and yet I suppose we might run a store. At least I’d be near Monty and Petey and our Onion. I don’t know that I’ll be able to tolerate being across an ocean from where we put them today.”

  The next morning George Catlin caught a steamer. He was going to Washington to attempt to sell his Indian portfolio to the American nation. Tasmin saw him off. She held him as tightly as she had held Kit Carson the day he arrived.

  “I know I’ve been hard on you, George,” she told him. “I don’t know why I have to be so hard— nor do I know why you tolerate me.”

  “Well, because I love you, dearie,” George said. “Are you really going to London?”

  “For a bit,” Tasmin told him. “I want Petal to see it.”

  “If my pictures don’t sell in Washington you may see me in Picadilly,” George told her. “I’ve heard the English do buy pictures, and the blood-ier the better.”

  Tasmin had expected Father Geoffrin to pester her, once his rival was finally gone; but she soon saw that Geoff had transferred his delicate attentions to the glowing Buffum. The two of them were engrossed in plans for Berrybender’s, their store.

  “You little deserter,” Tasmin told him, the next time she caught him alone.

  Father Geoffrin merely laughed. “Oh, you’ve been so bitchy to me,” he reminded her. “I’m not like humble George Catlin. I don’t turn the other cheek.”

  “If you did turn it I’d slap it,” Tasmin replied. Later, they made up, but it was clear to Tasmin that the newly beautiful Buffum was in the ascendance where Geoff ’s attentions were concerned.

  A week later, having loaded up a great load of goods from the Bent warehouse—all meticulously accounted for by Buffum—Charlie, Kit, Jim, and Rosa got ready for their journey up the river and across the plains.

  Tasmin and Petal came down to the Missouri docks to see them off. While Petal did her best to charm her father out of going, Tasmin gave Kit another tight squeeze.

  “I’m sick of good-byes—but I hope your next baby lives,” she told him. “I’ve a notion you’d make a fine pa.”

  Kit choked up. Tasmin was so changed, sadder, yet kind to him. He could only mumble a goodbye.

  Rosa gave
Petal a little white cap made from rabbit skins, much like the one the young Hidatsa girl Coal, wife to Toussaint Charbonneau, had made for Monty when he had been an infant. Tasmin thanked Rosa again for the shrouds—then she suddenly ran out of words. She smiled, Rosa smiled, Tasmin turned away.

  When the boat was ready to leave, Jim put Petal down. Tasmin felt desperate to say something— anything—since it seemed Jim wasn’t going to make even the simplest farewell.

  “I’ll be sure to let the Bents know when we get back,” she told him again.

  “That’ll be fine,” Jim said. He stuck out his hand—startled, Tasmin shook it. Behind him Tasmin saw Rosa put a hand to her mouth, shocked— perhaps even appalled. This was a wife he was leaving! Was that all?

  It was all. Tasmin turned away—hurt, confused, crushed. Jim Snow seemed to her quite the oddest man she had ever known—Rosa by now had probably realized as much herself. Tasmin tried to buck up. It was just his shyness, his deep unease with females, she told herself. And yet she felt not merely lonely: she felt negated, as she had that day when Jim left to go kill the slavers.

  Soon the boat pulled away. West of them the Missouri’s shores were vague with summer heat. Jim Snow stood in the rear, with Kit and Charlie Bent. Petal stared, silent. Tasmin remembered going ashore at dusk that first evening, to inspect the great dun prairies. She remembered her ecstasy at the first sunrise—that had been but a scant four years ago. Then, she had been wholly innocent of the brutalities the distant vistas hid, though only the next day the Osage tried to kill her. And yet, for long, it had seemed a grand adventure, rather than the death march that was to bring her two sons to their new grave in Saint Louis. And not just her sons: Pomp Charbonneau, Little Onion, Fraulein Pfretzskaner, Old Gorska, Signor Claricia and Señor Yanez, Tim and Milly, their big Juppy, and all the others who had fallen to the implacable land.

  Thinking of Jim and Rosa—she could still just glimpse Jim; Petal was hopelessly waving—Tasmin wondered if she could have displaced Rosa and kept Jim, had she cared to throw her whole self into the fight. She knew him; she had her wiles; she might have summoned all the ruthless brilliance of the Berrybenders, pitched everything into the effort. And yet, even assuming that she could still summon that pure force, what would it have accomplished? It was not the sad, kind Mexican woman who kept her husband from her: it was the merciless land, where Rosa was at home and she wasn’t. She could never, it seemed to her, win Jim, her American, from this place that he fit and she didn’t. Rosa could go with him, be useful in the ways that Little Onion had been useful. She could make him fires, cook his prairie meats, mend his buckskins, accept him if he wanted her, doctor little wounds. Tasmin herself might still love the man—it was the land she couldn’t love. Perhaps it was better, though it was terrible, that she lose the man with whom she had had much pleasure, pleasure that now seemed hard won. They had begun their lovemaking far out on the prairie, where the buffalo bulls in hundreds roared in their rut. Naked, those first few times, Tasmin had been convinced that she was now a child of nature—and there was the folly hidden under the glory: she was a daughter of privilege, English privilege, and Jim was a son of necessity—American necessity. Such a combination might thrill, but could it endure?

  Petal had stopped waving.

  “My arm got tired,” she said.

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “You made Jim go!” Petal accused.

  “Not so—he made me go,” Tasmin said.

  “Will I ever see my Jim again, or is he gone’d forever?” Petal asked.

  Tasmin picked her daughter up and looked at her sternly.

  “You mustn’t ask me that, my dear,” she said. “It’s rather too soon to know.”

  Petal cried; but later, for the next many months, she made good use of her mother’s formulation. When anyone taxed her to explain some ambitious mischief, Petal would look them in the eye and say: “You mustn’t ask me that, my dear. It’s rather too soon to know.”