Dreams Beneath Your Feet

by Win Blevins

  When Lei challenged him about it, he shrugged and answered simply, “A bull does not stop after he has one cow. He wants them all.”

  The barren desert around them was not as bleak as the landscape of her heart.

  She wrapped herself tighter in the blankets and then took thought. She had to get through tonight, and she could think of just one stratagem. Lei was the only woman in camp, and in his cups Boy would want her. If she touched him, if she kissed him, he would keep her to himself, probably.

  “Boy,” she called softly.

  Fifteen

  “THIS RENDEZVOUS STINKS,” said Esperanza.

  Sam and Julia looked at each other, hiding their smiles. Esperanza had said the same thing almost every day since they left the village. Apparently everything stank.

  “You’ve seen enough to know,” Sam said lightly. She’d attended every rendezvous since she was a toddler.

  Esperanza lipped the last of her deer meat off the tip of her knife, glared her misery at everyone, and walked off. Apparently she’d made a girlfriend in the Shoshone camp.

  Julia thought how good it would be to teach her children to eat with table knife, fork, and spoon.

  “Adolescent,” said Sam.

  “Not a bitch?” said Flat Dog. He didn’t mean it.

  “Adolescent,” said Julia.

  Not that Esperanza was alone in her moodiness. Sam himself was edgy. I’ve waited twelve years to get my family. Now I’ve got all but Tomás and I’m jumpy as a grasshopper.

  Julia was frazzled. Though she wanted to think about home—California, the ocean, even seeing her sisters and brothers again—she was kept on the run by the constant task of keeping everyone’s life in order. During the two weeks’ travel here the children were bored. They wanted to go off on little side trips, explore a creek, hunt a deer, and so on. When she wasn’t watching them or the packhorses, she was cooking and cleaning. Comparatively, rendezvous was a rest.

  Flat Dog was withdrawn and unreachable. He knew it was dumb. He knew California was right for one simple reason. He had loved Julia from the first moment he saw her. Still, his heart was pulled backward. His parents. His clan. His lifelong friends. His village. The Yellowstone country. So he was lousy company. And you know what? I don’t care.

  Every one of them walked around trying not to put their minds on one notion: Ten more weeks of travel to the Willamette. Then, maybe worse, a winter in Oregon, and then another month and a half or two months to California.

  Andrew Drips strode up to the fire and waited for an invitation.

  “Set,” said Flat Dog.

  Julia handed the captain a cup of coffee. He was a gray-hair and a big-belly, and this appearance added to his air of authority. He’d been the field leader for American Fur Company for a decade, once the competition, now the only game in town. Sam respected him, but since the man was all business, there was nothing to like.

  “Not shining times,” said Drips.

  “Not hardly,” said Sam.

  “It gets worse,” said Drips. “The company’s not gonna send a supply train next year. Don’t pay.”

  Sam, Hannibal, and Flat Dog looked at one another.

  “Last for us, anyhow,” said Sam. “We’re headed to Oregon and then California.”

  Drips nodded. “You haven’t traded yet.”

  “We’ll keep our beaver,” said Sam. “I’ve got a sizable credit with the company. Would you write me a letter of credit to Hudson’s Bay?”

  “Sure,” said Drips. He grimaced. He knew these men would trade their furs at Fort Hall, where the price was better. He drained his coffee and left as abruptly as he’d come.

  Sam felt a pang—last rendezvous. When he caroused at the first one, in 1825, he hadn’t meant to attend the last one, just fifteen years later. Shining times? All gone.

  Joe Meek and Doc Newell had already left. Doc hired on to guide a bunch of missionaries to Fort Hall on their way to Oregon. Since he and Meek were married to Nez Percé sisters, Doc got Joe to come along and help out. At Fort Hall, at least, supplies would cost less.

  No one at rendezvous had liked the missionaries, and the soldiers of Christ disapproved of everything they saw. The Indians’ dress, their customs, certainly their religion, their “barbarity”—these evoked no response of Christian love from the bearers of Christian light, but only a contempt they did not trouble to conceal. And they scorned the mountain men even more than the Indians, showing particular disdain for the half-breed children.

  Several summers ago one of the first missionaries had told Hannibal a secret. When the missionary saw real Indians, he despaired completely of converting them. He’d written back to his mission board that the truth was, you’d couldn’t make them Christians until you’d made them white men.

  When Hannibal passed the story on, Sam said, “Give me a drunken Franciscan over a snotty Methodist any time.”

  “This preacher’s plan,” Hannibal said at the time, “is to switch careers, trade preaching for land development.”

  A week ago Pierre Jean De Smet, the first Catholic missionary to the mountains, had visited the rendezvous. He had conducted the first mass of the entire mountain country. Julia was disappointed. Had they arrived a little sooner, the priest could have baptized her children.

  Altogether, rendezvous was a chance for Sam, Hannibal, Flat Dog, and Julia to rest after a couple of weeks of travel and to say good-bye to longtime friends they might never see again. A few drinks, some card games, some horse racing, a few shooting competitions, some singing and dancing in the evenings, and emotions they didn’t talk about.

  Drips found Sam and Flat Dog lingering at the morning fire. “Here’s your credit.”

  Sam took the piece of paper, looked at the number, and tucked it away. He told Flat Dog, “Our plan is off to a good start.”

  Sam was more concerned about his family than religion or the state of the beaver trade. Everyone seemed more or less all right except Esperanza. If her moodiness and silence was the worst part of the trip, he’d count himself lucky.

  Hannibal felt half-uneasy. He’d had a vagabond life, and his talk with Sam nettled him. At night in his blankets he started teasing himself with the faintest thought of getting married. A woman, children, a bond to life itself. As he watched his friends, he flip-flopped. Is a wife the center that holds you? Or a weight that drags you down? Are children the people you love most? Or the ones you’re most irritated by? Involvement? How does that fit with what I’ve always loved most, freedom? Well, at least he could pretend to be the most cheerful adult in the party.

  Sixteen

  KANAKA BOY BURST into the tipi and said with a grin, “We’re going to Coos Bay.”

  Lei Palua felt a geyser of joy. It was a beautiful harbor on the Pacific Coast. They would trade for lots of shells—dentalium, abalone, white clam, and olivella. The inland Indians loved these shells and paid exorbitant prices for them. They would also stop at the Hudson’s Bay trading post Fort Umpqua to get useful objects. Shells excited Lei. The thought of smelling the ocean again, of playing in it, thrilled her.

  “And to California.”

  The geyser turned to a dribble.

  He sat down behind the fire. She poured his morning cup of coffee and sloshed the usual inch of rum into it. Boy had developed the habit of drinking from morning tonight, and instead of the rotgut he and the men were brewing out here, he drank rum from jugs he buried in secret places. Sometimes he laced the rum with laudanum. His drunkenness didn’t affect his hold on his men. They were loyal to him, would go anywhere with him. Of course, they stayed as drunk as Boy. This life was their idea of paradise, compared to being indentured servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, or even their hired men.

  She got a sudden idea, sat down close to Boy, and put an arm around him.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he said.

  She knew he liked her brown Hawaiian face, as delicate as his was broad and strong. And her long black hair. She usually wor
e it pinned on top of her head during the day, for convenience. When they rolled up in the blankets at night, he liked to take the wooden pins out, let it down, and cover her breasts with it. Then he would stroke her hair from head to belly, murmur words of love, and tease his tongue through her hair to her nipples. He could be a tender lover or a wildly passionate one. That said enough.

  Over time, though, she’d learned that he was wholly self-centered. So she learned to use his desires, as she was doing now.

  “Can we go down the Columbia and up the Willamette?” She hardly dared hope. The Company would try to grab Boy and every other man and make them fulfill their contracts. And at Fort Boise, or Fort Walla Walla, or Fort Vancouver, she could slip away. . . .

  “I want to visit my mother.”

  “No, no,” said Boy. “The route is south to the Humboldt, along it to the mountains, and across to California. The trip will take all winter and will be very, very profitable.”

  She knew the Humboldt and dreaded it. A dicey crossing of dry country to an ugly stream, which gouged a line across a wretched country. Then the ocean, she reminded herself. And north to Coos Bay, and more ocean.

  He looked at her for admiration. She often wondered what he wanted from her, why he brought her to this awful place as his wife, when he was getting all the sex he wanted from the other women, the ones who were here because they liked raw liquor and rough men. She knew things, and she was smart. Maybe he wanted her to see how smart he was.

  “It’s a devil of a crossing, Delly says, from the Humboldt to the next water.” Boy smiled savagely.

  Her spirits sank again. Why did men preen about their ability to travel through country that did its best to snuff out life? Even now they were living on the Owyhee River, cut off completely from the main road to Oregon by the Owyhee Mountains, a place hard, dry, and barren, a place that did its best to burn all life to ashes. She hated this bleak spot, furnace-like in the summer, freezing in the winter, and utterly barren of everything graceful and beautiful, everything she loved.

  She looked at Boy’s face. His eyes were on the fire, his mind far away. She wondered if he ever thought of the homeland neither of them had ever seen, the islands of Hawaii.

  Yet she was sure that Boy belonged here, not there. Raw desert was the landscape of his heart. And now they were going to ride across a desert that was worse.

  “We’ll leave in a couple of weeks, get across the mountains before the snows.”

  Boy professed to love challenges, loved to prove he could do what other men couldn’t and thought he couldn’t.

  “I want very much to see my mother. We could come back from Coos Bay by the Fort Vancouver route.”

  Boy waved her off, didn’t even bother to respond with words.

  Lei told herself this would be good. It would make her heart dance to see an ocean. She’d seen the Pacific the first time when her grandfather took her downriver to Fort Astoria. She loved its vastness, its wildness, its grandeur. Back home at Fort Walla Walla, while other people complained about having to eat salmon every day, she reveled in it, for the smell of the sea was in its flesh.

  Boy remembered that she was there and looked sideways at her. His eyes gleamed like a feral cat’s. “This will be a great deal. You’re going to love it. After this, I am a force to be reckoned with.”

  Seventeen

  THE RIDERS OF the Morgan-missionary outfit looked across the bottomland at Fort Hall.

  “The glories of civilization,” said Hannibal MacKye.

  Sam Morgan mimicked his friend. “Echoes of Greece and Rome.” Education was not a high point among mountain men, but after listening to Hannibal for seventeen years, Sam had caught on to some things.

  The fort squatted on the left bank of the Snake River. Twenty-five or thirty paces on a side, high walls built of wood, with a gate and a bastion—no threat to the Parthenon, and maybe not even stout enough to keep the Indians out.

  “All this one wants is to wet his dry,” said Joe Meek. Joe’s slow, soft Virginia drawl made listeners wait a good while for even simple meanings.

  “Is that all you think about?” Best friend or not, Doc Newell always took the contrary of whatever Joe said or did. Joe was loose and wild, Doc smart and carefully controlled. Sometimes Sam and Hannibal had discussed privately how close friendship could be based on opposition, but they hadn’t figured it out.

  “And,” said Joe, “I put my mind on other things, too, like collecting my share of our fee so I can get drunk.”

  The outfits joined two days ago, Sam and his family catching Doc and Joe because the missionaries were so slow. They were also quarrelsome. Whiskey might help Joe forget.

  This trip from rendezvous had been hard on Joe. P. J. Littlejohn, who considered himself the missionary leader, had found out what was in the kettle Joe kept sipping from all day long. The man snatched it out of Joe’s hand and dumped the contents in the dust.

  Joe gave the man only a small whupping before Doc persuaded him to let the poor bastard be. The missionaries might consider that the duties of the guides included leaving all scalps of holy men where God put them. However, Joe felt bereft when he had to drink water, and he’d turned into a grump.

  “If we had twice the dollars,” said Doc, “those wives of ours, Clap’s as bad as Rain, would spend every cent on foofaraw.”

  Doc claimed that his wife’s name, Clap, was the first syllable of a Nez Percé word, but Joe had always doubted that.

  Now Joe turned in his saddle and looked back at the families belonging to him and Doc. Joe could see the mind of his wife, Rain, working away. Right now she was counting up the blankets, awls, kettles, beads, ribbon, calico, and other treasures she would buy tomorrow. Clap was worse. She would prove again that neither Doc nor any other man could control a woman.

  Since Doc tried to be the boss of things, Clap was a thorn in his side. Even with this windfall in wages, he’d be lucky to end up with enough powder and lead to hunt buffalo and to fend off the Blackfeet. Joe’s wages being smaller, he would have a less contented mate.

  “We need a life we can afford,” Doc said to Joe.

  “Why don’t you go to Oregon?” asked Sam.

  “Hell, yes,” he said, “let’s go. It’s the Willamette Valley for us. They say the grass grows so fast there, you have to hire a hand to walk from the door to the out house back and forth ever’ minute or you won’t be able to find the path.”

  Sam listened with satisfaction. Two more families with mixed-blood children going to settle on the western rim of America.

  The outfit plodded down a long hill and through some cottonwoods until the fort came into view. Hannibal was the one who spotted it first. He grinned and said at large, “They’re running up a welcome.”

  Up the flagpole slid a big declaration in red, white, and blue—the national flag of Great Britain. A political statement.

  Sam thought, Now this may kick up even more fun.

  “BARDOLF,” ROLLER CALLED down, “there’s visitors.”

  Frank Ermatinger climbed the stairs to the fort’s bastion and pointed his field glass where Roller had been looking.

  The nickname Bardolf was an irritant. When Ermatinger took the post’s furs downriver to Fort Vancouver the last time, he took his one American employee, Roller, along for help, plus the two Owyhees—Hawaiians made first-rate laborers. On their arrival Dr. John McLoughlin welcomed them with a glass of rum. Though McLoughlin was the muckety-muck of all of Hudson’s Bay Company’s operations in Oregon Territory, and Ermatinger’s supervisor, Ermatinger despised him. Knowing that, McLoughlin twitted Ermatinger whenever he had the chance. This time he had a little fun by calling Ermatinger Bardolf.

  A backwoods American, Roller hadn’t understood about Bardolf. McLoughlin explained that this was a drunken fool from some of Shakespeare’s plays—“with a nose made red and bulbous by drink,” added the doctor.

  Ermatinger unconsciously covered his nose with one hand. It had been big and pi
nk even when he was a child. “I am no drunk, Sir.”

  “We know you for a good and sober man, Bardolf.”

  Actually, Ermatinger did like his tot of rum.

  Roller thought all this was a hoot and especially liked the idea of addressing his boss without the “Mr.” Soon half the staff at Fort Vancouver called Ermatinger just plain Bardolf, and now all the staff at Fort Hall did. Luckily, the employees were only Walker, Roller, the Owyhees, and a German. The German, heir to a more formal culture, called him Herr Bardolf.

  Now Ermatinger had the party riding toward the fort into focus. It was Morgan, with the other Americans and some Crows.

  Ermatinger knew Sam Morgan, Joe Meek, Doc Newell, and the half-breed Hannibal MacKye well enough. Whatever beaver they took on the spring hunt was due to his generosity. Relying on their character, he supplied them on credit. The deal was, they would bring their furs to him and not take them to rendezvous, where the American Fur Company would be buying and selling. Ermatinger wanted to get a leg up on the Americans at every opportunity.

  This time, from what he could see, it wasn’t going to be much of a leg up. The packhorses bore only a meager number of furs.

  Ermatinger snorted. He wondered if he’d ever get out of this country. He hated this post, the most remote in all of Oregon Territory. The supposed majesty of the Tetons meant nothing to him, and he had never seen the wonders his men described in the Yellowstone country. He hated the Snake River plains to the west. Somehow the plains had gotten the idea of growing lava rocks instead of grasses. Nor did he give a fig for the Indians he traded with, mostly Shoshones. He was not even deeply attached, if truth be told, to his attractive wife, Mary, and their daughter, a two-year-old everyone else found adorable.

  In the center of his heart he held an ambition, hot as a dry leaf under a magnifying glass. He wanted a high position at Fort Vancouver. He believed he could get it, and to hell with however McLoughlin felt about him.