by Carys Davies
Cy, said Julie, had never expressed interest in any other women after Elsie.
“He did buy himself a new hat though, from Carter’s in Lewistown, before he left. A ridiculous tall city thing made of black shellac.”
Helen Lott nodded wisely and with satisfaction, like someone who knew everything about everything.
Together, the two women proceeded towards the church.
Old Woman From A Distance was seventeen years old.
He didn’t much like his name but it had been given to him and for now it was his and he would put up with it until he got another.
In the end there hadn’t been any kind of battle. In the end they had given in, succumbed, and agreed to take what they’d been offered and move off into the west.
Like a dark, diminished cloud, they had moved west across the landscape away from what had been theirs, eventually unpacking everything they’d been given for leaving, only to find they’d been given half of what had been promised.
It was all written out in the agreement with the amounts listed next to the items, but even before they met the English trader, Mr. Hollinghurst, and he told them what they had signed, the boy’s people knew that what had been promised by the government’s representative and what was written in the paper were not what they’d been given.
Of everything they’d been promised, they could see from the size of the bundles that there was less than half.
Half the money, half the red cloth, half the handkerchiefs, half the number of guns, half the powder, half the white ruffled shirts, half the blue jackets, half the rum, half the tobacco, half the white beads, half the red beads, half the blue beads, half the kettles, half the looking glasses, and so on and so on and so on.
Old Woman From A Distance remembered lying awake, listening to the men talk about what they should do. Some said they should go back and claim the rest of the things they’d been promised. Then one very old man said they should take nothing of what they’d been given—not a shirt, not a handkerchief, not a bead. He said that if they gave up their land for trifles, they would waste away.
He prophesied that a time would come when they would know that the whole of the earth had been pulled from beneath the skin of their feet, that they would wake up one morning in the dawn and find that all the forests and all the mountains, all the rivers and the vast sweep of the prairie, had slipped from their grasp like a rope of water, and all they had to show for the bargains they had made was some worthless jewelry, some old clothes, and a few bad guns. Everything they’d bartered—their dogs and their furs, their pounded fish and their root cakes, their good behavior, their knowledge of the country and the way they’d always done things—they would understand that they had given it all away for a song.
They would be driven to where the sun sets and in the end they would become quite extinct.
After that there was a silence, and after that more talking, all through the night. Old Woman From A Distance heard them speaking about the time the settlers had attacked them that past winter, how they’d gone after them and hunted them but had not succeeded because the settlers were more numerous and had better guns.
As dawn began to break, he heard his father say that there would always be more and more settlers, that for every one you saw, there were a hundred more coming behind him. Eventually Old Woman From A Distance had fallen asleep, and when he woke it had been decided: they would keep what they’d been given by the government’s representative even though they’d been cheated.
They would not go back and fight again.
They were tired and they were hungry. They would move west as they’d been told to and as they’d agreed they would, and on the new strip of land they’d accepted in exchange for their old ones, they would see how they got on.
And that’s what they’d done. They’d packed up their tents and their dogs and their babies and their grandmothers, and in spite of the big cheating paper they’d continued west as they’d promised they would, moved off across the river, and kept going.
Old Woman From A Distance hadn’t known what to think.
Part of him thought of his sister, and everything else they’d left behind in the east—their rivers and their forests and their neat gardens of beans and corn—and about the old man’s prediction that if they took the things they’d been given in exchange, it would be the beginning of their end.
But another part of him coveted the things they’d been given, and this other part of him thought that the best they could do was to not regret all they’d lost. This other part of him thought that the business his people had entered into since they’d arrived in the west, with the Frenchman called Devereux and his partner, Mr. Hollinghurst, was on the whole a good thing rather than a bad thing.
He’d hesitated when Devereux had said to him one day, a piece of copper wire and a string of beads curled in his white palm like a short red snake, “Here, for that nice little pelt you have there.”
How could you know the best thing to do? How could you know the future you would make with what you did now?
He wasn’t sure. For a long moment he’d looked at the trader’s outstretched hand and paused. Then he’d held out the pelt to Devereux and taken the wire and the beads, and when Devereux and the Englishman, Mr. Hollinghurst, had headed off to pursue their business further along the river, he’d made up his mind to go with them, away from his father’s resignation and his mother’s sorrow. He’d been Devereux’s messenger and dogsbody ever since, keeping himself close to the trader, because even though he wasn’t sure, it seemed like the best you could do.
Now, when the Frenchman brought him to meet the big redheaded white man, he stood and he looked and he listened while the two of them spoke together in a language he didn’t understand but which he thought from the sound of it was the same or nearly the same as Mr. Hollinghurst’s.
“Well?” said the fur trader, turning to him and speaking to him in his own tongue so he could follow, telling him there was profit in it.
For a few more moments the small, bowlegged Shawnee boy stood before the unusual stranger and thought about it all. About the profit that was in it. About the old man’s warnings and his predictions, about his sister and everything else they’d lost.
He paused, looking at the man’s red hair, turning it all over in his mind, and then he said yes.
If the big red-haired man paid him, he’d go with him.
Aunt Julie said it was disloyal and inconsiderate and unchristian of Bess to turn her back on Sidney Lott and refuse to walk with him any longer to church.
It was also a significant embarrassment, said Aunt Julie, when she herself still walked with the Lotts, who were important people. Every hundred yards or so now, on a Sunday, Helen Lott remarked that Bess, these days, seemed to think herself too good for Sidney. Sidney, who, said Aunt Julie, was a very nice boy and would soon be a fine young man.
When Bess remained silent, Aunt Julie predicted that the day would come when Bess would be very sorry for her rude behavior, but it would be too late then. It would be too late to be sorry when it was Sidney Lott who was the one to decide he had better things to do than keep her company on the long walk to church on a Sunday, or on any walk at all on any day of the week. It would be too late when he was the one to look right through her as if she wasn’t there, and how would she feel when that happened?
Bess said she wouldn’t care, she hated Sidney Lott. She preferred to walk by herself.
There were no books in the house except for her aunt Julie’s Bible; the borrowed primer her father had used to teach her to read had long ago been returned to the schoolmaster in Lewistown. Bess’s days were long and empty. A great part of them seemed to be taken up with listening to her aunt Julie talk about all the many things she had to do, and about the various things in the world she didn’t like, such as venison, turnips, horses, donkeys, mules, and Roman Catholics. Bess did her chores, and when they were done she played checkers with herself or went for walk
s with her favorite hinny and wished that, like Sidney Lott, she went to school.
In the evenings she sat on the porch looking out along the stony track towards the west, and one day at the library in Lewistown when Aunt Julie was taking a seedcake to a woman with a broken hip, Bess asked a fat man in a yellow vest with a pair of eyeglasses on his nose if it was possible to peruse the volumes of the President’s expedition into the west and he said, yes, if she was a subscriber. If she was a subscriber she could peruse all the books she liked. All she had to do was pay the subscription, which was nine shillings annually.
Behind him Bess could see the rows upon rows of books in their glass cabinets, and tables at which you could sit and read them. There were people there now.
Nine shillings.
The night before her father’s departure she’d lain in her narrow bed behind the curtain and heard him at the table telling Aunt Julie there was the clock, and her mother’s gold ring if they ever needed money. She looked past the man with the eyeglasses at the rows of books, their dark spines, and wondered which were the right ones. She wanted so much to see the maps and the rivers and the places where the huge animals might be and where her father might be now too, and then to see which route he might follow on his return and to be able to hold in her head a picture of him as he traveled home. She tried to think of a way Aunt Julie wouldn’t notice if the clock or the gold ring were missing, but she couldn’t. The clock on the wall was the first thing you saw when you stepped in the house, and she didn’t know where the ring was kept. Her father had worn it on a string beneath his shirt.
The man with the eyeglasses was looking down at her from above his tall desk. She was old enough to know that the best thing to do when you wanted something very much was to pretend that you didn’t. She turned and began to walk away, doing her best to appear dignified and nonchalant. Even so, she was fairly sure he was laughing at her when he called after her, did she think she had the money for a subscription?
No, said Bess, she didn’t.
The anniversary of her father’s departure came and went, and Bess turned eleven. Winter came again, and she pictured him returning with a vast furry pelt big enough to carpet their entire house, warm under their feet; people like her aunt Julie and Sidney Lott and the fat librarian with the eyeglasses all wishing they had one like it themselves.
For a long time snow lay in drifts around the house and fell in wet flakes on the animals in the pasture. The cold iced the windows on the inside and Bess made holes in it with her warm breath so she could look out. Every day she hoped for a letter but none came.
Not having Sidney anymore as a friend, she spoke to few people aside from her aunt and their neighbor, Elmer Jackson, when he came sometimes to lend a hand with the mules and afterwards to eat the supper Aunt Julie cooked for him in the evenings in recompense for his labor.
As a result Bess was often alone, and in her solitude she acquired a habit of talking out loud to herself.
“In eight more months, we will have four new mules and it will be summer. The days will be long and light, the potato blossom will be out, and I will be twelve.”
The letters, ah.
Thirty of them, folded and tied up with cord in four small packages and entrusted, at various intervals, to
a Dutch land agent and his wife
a soldier
a Spanish friar
the pilot of one of the rivercraft on which Bellman hitched a ride upriver.
All promised that when they next found themselves in St. Louis or St. Charles, they would send on the letters.
Perhaps, on the day the Dutch land agent and his wife crossed the Mississippi, one of the oarsmen was drunk. Or perhaps the wide, keel-bottomed craft bumped against a chunk of drifting ice, or perhaps the family crowded in the bottom with their children and their cart and their two horses and their cow all moved over onto the same side suddenly and unbalanced it. Anyway, the ferry (which was a brand-new one built by Messrs. McKnight and Brady, merchants in St. Louis, who had purchased the old pirogue operation and replaced it with a new one not long after Cy Bellman had passed through earlier in the winter) yawed and tipped, and pretty much everything went into the water, including the Dutchman’s wife and the bag with Bellman’s small pile of folded, tied-up letters. After that the freezing water washed off the ink in which he’d written Bess’s name and a short misspelled paragraph describing the location of his house in Pennsylvania, and then the folded papers took in the cold water like a sponge until they grew heavy and found their way down to the riverbed and sank into the soft Mississippi mud.
The other losses were less dramatic, if no less accidental. One of the bundles sniffed out by a dog from the trouser pocket of the sleeping soldier; possibly the paper was scented with the pungency of one of Bellman’s wood-smoked suppers. Anyway, it was eaten; the knotted twine, dripping with glistening dog slobber, all that remained when the soldier woke. The third was left by the Spanish friar at the post office in St. Louis and handed over the counter to a woman who came asking for mail. Her name was Beth Ullman; she put the letters in her bag and went on her way and did not return to rectify the mistake. The fourth, although delivered safely to the post office by the pilot of the mackinaw, fell out on the road after leaving St. Louis, bounced out of the carrier’s loosely buckled bag on the way to Cincinnati and was lost.
All Bellman’s letters to his daughter scattered like leaves across the soil and waters of the earth before she ever had a chance to read them.
Bellman had met many eccentrically named natives in the course of his long journey but none so peculiarly labeled as this one. Old Woman From A Distance was, he estimated, about sixteen years old, though it was hard to tell. With their smooth, beardless faces, even the older men looked young, and all of them, whatever their age, looked more or less the same to Bellman.
Devereux was right about the boy being not so well made as most of the others—he was barely five feet tall, his legs were bowed and rickety, and his eyes were very small, like pips, but he had a sharp, eager look about him, and according to the fur trader would be willing to barter his knowledge of the prairie, his skill with a pirogue, and his truffling after roots for a handkerchief or a bit of tobacco and a few worthless baubles that would glitter in the sunlight when it fell upon him through the willows.
He’d known the boy since he was a child, said Devereux. For seven years the boy had been running errands and taking messages for him, always quick, always eager and reliable. It would do him good now, a stint of scouting on his own account. He winked at Bellman. “Get him out from under my petticoats.” He named a price in both dollars and shillings.
“Is he trustworthy?”
The fur trader grinned broadly and slapped Bellman on the back. Everyone who passed through these parts always came asking him, sooner or later, about the Indians here—wanting to know their character, if they were the same as the ones that still lingered in the east, or different. “I always tell them the same thing”—Devereux rubbed his hands over the fire and invited Bellman to fill his pipe with more tobacco—“that they are generous and loyal, treacherous and cunning, as weak as they are strong and as open as they are closed. That they’re shrewd and hopelessly naïve, that they are vengeful and mean and as sweet and curious as little children. That they are vicious killers. That they are terrible cooks and dancers. That if they have half a chance they’ll keep a slave and torture him and when they’re finished with him they’re as quick as the next man to sell him to the highest bidder.” The best thing, in his experience, that you could do, said Devereux, was to show them you had things they might want, and never startle them, in case they mistook you for some other breed of savage they didn’t get along with. Further west, of course, if Bellman went far enough, he would come eventually upon the Sioux, who were ferocious regardless of who you were.
Bellman inclined his head. The smile between his red mustache and beard was polite but uncertain. He’d hoped for a more reassuri
ng answer.
“But what about this one? Can I trust him?”
The fur trader stood up and stretched. “Oh, I’d say so, sir, yes, so long as you pay him for his services. For seven years, he’s always done as he’s been told.”
With the fur trader’s help Bellman explained to the boy what he was looking for.
Not wanting to waste his ink, he drew pictures with a stick in the dust—how he theorized the creatures might look; how their horny skin or their fur or their coats of shaggy wool might cloak those enormous bones. He pointed to the top of the tallest cottonwood he could see, to indicate how large he believed they were. The boy looked at the pictures. The expression on his beardless face did not change, and he stood for a long time before he said something in his own language.
Bellman waited. “Well?”
Devereux flapped his hand. “He says he’s never seen anything like that in his life. He’ll go with you, though, if you pay him.”
Bellman dug into the larger of his two bags, past the folded cotton of Elsie’s blouse, and pulled out a length of green ribbon and a fishhook; from the tin chest he took a fragment of mirror glass and a double string of red beads, a smidgen of tobacco and a white handkerchief, and presented them to the boy, who took the things, immediately tied the green ribbon and the glass in one of his dark pigtails, hung the beads around his neck, and tucked the handkerchief in the waist of the little skin skirtlet that covered his private parts like a sporran. Then he looked at Bellman and held out his hand for more. Devereux rolled his eyes and chuckled, as if to say, “Whatever you offer them, they will always ask for more.”
“He is after another ribbon from your big box of treasure there, sir, for his other pigtail,” said the fur trader, pointing, “and another string of beads, the blue ones, which he prefers to the red.” Bellman hesitated. It seemed to him the boy was being a little greedy now and taking advantage of him; he’d begun, in the year that had passed since he left home, to be anxious about his dwindling supplies as each bargain he’d struck with the natives along his way depleted the contents of his box. He had only a few oddments left now. Still, he was eager to be under way again, and he thought his affairs would probably go better if the Indian came along with him than if he didn’t.
