by Win Blevins
She drew out a long, long sash, like Tal saw at the fort that one day, and handed it to him.
He gawked at it. This one was entirely of sky-blue silk. The ends were decorated with elegant beadwork, and tasseled with braids of golden cloth.
“Wherever you go wearing this sash, you go with my blessing,” said Pine Leaf.
Tal’s knees gave, and he bumped down.
“As you went with the blessing of some other girl, my rival,” she teased, “when you wore this handkerchief.” She tugged at the silk blazon in her braid.
Tal started to rise, but Jim put a hand on Tal’s shoulder, keeping him on his knees.
“One thing more,” Antelope Jim called out, repeating himself in the Absaroka language. “James Pierson Beckwourth, hero of the mountain Crows, has a special gift for Tal as well. Hand me your lance,” he said to Pine Leaf. She did and Jim lifted it high.
“I now shall knight you a new name, a badge of honor. Antelope Jim and his wives and Pine Leaf have chosen a name that stands for your style, your smoothness, your radiance.
“Therefore, by the power vested in me as war chief of the nation, which I got by popping the scalps off many Blackfoot heads, I hereby designate you Knight-Errant of the Absaroka people, and dub thee…Silk!”
He laid the lance blade on the left shoulder of the kneeling Tal, then the right.
“Arise, fair knight Silk, and go forth to mighty deeds!”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Thrice is he arm’d that hath his quarrel just
—Henry VI, Part 2, I.iii
Tal had no idea where he was. The sun was up, for a long time—he could feel it on his face, and he was hot. He didn’t intend to sit up yet, because he thought he’d be sick. Best let well enough alone. The sun on his eyelids was enough to see.
Seemed to be a lot he couldn’t recall. Getting his sky-blue sash from Pine Leaf, that was there. Also getting the new name from Jim. Silk. “Silk,” he whispered happily—and cringed. Sounded like hammer on rock in his head.
Let’s see, after the name, he and Jim and Hairy raised several toasts to the newly christened knight. Then things got dim. He thought he recalled Pine Leaf trying to take him into a lodge to be with this girl who wanted him, and he felt like a fool and said no. No, no, no. He thought he remembered Hairy and Beckwourth having a rip-roaring wrestling match in front of a big audience—his recollection was that Jim had had the best of it, but he couldn’t guess how. He could recall thinking he ought to pick a place to pass out. The rest was darkness.
He scooched and found out that whatever he was lying on was uncomfortable. He scooched again, harder—and sat halfway up in pain. Whoa! Dizzy! Falling back, he saw what he was lying on—poles.
Poles!
Jesusgawdamighty. He looked from side to side, turning his head ever so gingerly. He was ten feet off the ground, bedded down on lodgepoles propped through cottonwood limbs. No wonder his back and tail hurt.
He stared to sit up again, and discovered the earth starting to rotate on its axis. He flopped down quick.
Someone laughed. In a cavernous voice.
Tal lay back with his eyes closed and considered. He was on a scaffold, that’s what this amounted to, a burying scaffold. Someone was funning him. Someone, meaning Hairy. Tal decided to kill someone.
Something was wrong with his arms too—they didn’t work. Felt like they’d grown fast to his body.
Tal wasn’t up to killing anyone just now anyway. He got dizzy just thinking about it.
He cracked one eye, then the other, and pointed them where his arms used to be.
He couldn’t believe it.
“We wrapped you up like a Christmas present,” Hairy intoned. “You be our sacrifice to Bacchus, god of the grape.”
Tal was blinking. He’d been wrapped in a blanket and tied with his new sky-blue sash, making a giant bow. And it was pinning his arms snug.
“Wagh! You looked like you was gone under. You did so. Wagh!”
Tal decided this was too much. Time to get mad. He lifted his knees and got his hands beneath his thighs.
“Easy, hoss,” called Hairy.
Tal lunged upward, meaning to sit.
The poles supporting him bent—that is, the flexible tips of two of the lodge poles flexed even more. Then they sprang back. Tal bounced up a little, and coming down smote the poles with his bottom.
They flexed deeper. They slid sideways on the branch. They skinnied off and headed for the ground. And shot the tied-up Tal right down the chute.
Tal threw up on the rough earth, sideways. He opened his eyes gingerly. He heaved once more, sort of testing, got nothing, and thought he could risk getting to his knees. At this eminence he swayed for a moment. Then he gently began to fumble around himself, he didn’t know what for, maybe taking inventory. His skin was raging, like it had been rasped off. His head was gonging, like he’d been cold-cocked. He knew he was mashed here and there, like a stepped-on orange. He’d never felt so rotten in his life. He threw up again. Someone put a hand on his shoulder. Tal slapped it away and muttered, “Bandanna.”
“This child be sorry…,” Hairy started meekly.
“Bandanna!” Tal barked.
Cloth touched his hand, and he wiped his mouth and nose and eyes with it. He opened his eyes and saw red—everything awash in watery scarlet. He felt of his right eyebrow, and found it gashed and bleeding into the eye. When he wiped the eye, he could see. Sort of. At least see someone squatting there before him with a hangdog expression. Tal just looked.
“It was a joke we done, Jim and me,” Hairy started whining. Tal felt so malicious he let the fool go on. “We made for it to be funny, on account of you was so out, to make a corpse o’ye, and…”
Tal was getting steady on his knees. As soon as he was steady enough, he was going to squash someone’s big snout with his knuckles.
“You surely did look funny, too,” Hairy babbled on, “a-tied up like for Christmas and fancied with a bow. This child be rightly sorry about your sash, Tal, I mean Silk, truly he be.”
The sash. Tal took hold of himself. He grasped the ends of the big bow and awkwardly tugged until they untied and fell away from his arms. He unlooped them from around himself, and let the blanket drop, carefully maintaining his balance propped on his knees.
He inspected the sash.
It had grass stains, and dirt stains, on the beautiful sky blue.
And it was snagged and ripped where a limb had caught it and the earth had roughed it.
It was ruined. The sash Pine Leaf gave him was ruined.
Hairy had ruined it.
Tal lowered his head and took a deep breath. A broken tip of pole, long as a boy, was within reach. Without effort at concealment Tal reached for it, cocked it well back, and clubbed Hairy on top of the head.
The giant looked like he was going to cry. But seeing the look on Tal’s face, he humphed to his feet, fussed for an instant, and took off running.
Tal was on his tail. He whapped the pole down on Hairy’s shoulder.
Hairy dodged around a sagebrush. Tal followed, his stomach only a little whoop-de-doo on the curve. He could gain on the straightaways.
Hairy rumbled to the edge of a little dry wash, leaped in, and tried to scramble up the other side.
Tal caught him. The giant was clawing haplessly at the crumbly earth.
Tal laid it to him on the back. Hairy pretended not to notice. Tal whacked him on the head, and brought blood from the scalp.
Tal raised the pole overhead again, and started to lose his balance backward. Hairy, tears on his cheeks, put out a big hand, pushed Tal to the ground, and ran off down the wash, sending back a pathetic wail.
“Go find yourself another sucker for a partner,” Tal screamed after him.
“You through?”
Antelope Jim was squatting on the bank, looking down at Tal, plopped in mid-wash.
“Yeah,” said Tal bitterly, “I’m through with him.”
Jim let this set.
“Through for good,” Tal said, getting to his feet. “Partner like that—get me killed, or mocked, or run out of the country.”
Jim stuck a hand down and helped Tal up the side of the wash.
“Man’s gotta be a jackass to buddy up to that.”
Jim said nothing, and handed Tal a canteen. When Tal had swigged deep, they started toward Jim’s lodge. Tal saw Jim was carrying the sash, which Tal had left in the dirt. Well, to heck with the sash—it was all spoilt now.
Tal didn’t have much to say over coffee. “Hangover cure,” Jim muttered. Jim’s wives served Tal in their one metal cup, which was a gesture of consideration for a guest. Only Little Wife spoke to him, and she carefully prefaced each sentence with his new name, Silk. The three women sat or kneeled at the back of the tipi while the men ate. Mad as he was, Tal couldn’t help noticing that something was different. The women treated him like a warrior, not like a kid.
Well, I am a darn warrior, he thought to himself. Got the horse—well, a horse—and the scalps. Well, Hairy got the scalps. Tal was half confused and half mad.
Jim started in easy. “You two got some bond, you know.”
Silk just looked at him, harsh.
“You saved his life from the griz.”
“Now I’m real thankful for that,” said Silk sarcastically.
“And he saved yourn from the Cheyenne.”
Silk snorted.
“He buddies you.”
Silk slammed the metal cup onto the ground. Coffee splattered—Silk was glad it missed the hides, but made no move to pick up the cup. He crawled toward the door flap.
Jim folded up the sash and handed it to Little Wife. He spoke to her in the Crow language, too rapidly for Silk to pick up a word from outside. Then he joined Silk in the autumn morning.
It was cool, sunny, and promising. For a moment they stood there gazing around, ill at ease.
“Silk,” Jim started in, “it’s an open winter so far. Ought to be fair enough to travel for a spell yet. What say we go for a walk? I got something in mind.”
Tal fidgeted and thumbed his belt downwards and nodded. “Don’t care what we do,” he allowed, “so long as it’s far from Hairy.”
So they got to packing, with Pine Leaf’s help, and left without even telling Hairy goodbye.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
all the good gifts of nature
—Twelfth Night, I.iii
But Antelope Jim evidently didn’t care to say what something he had in mind. That afternoon and night and all the next day he had nothing to say. Trudged up South Fork with his eyes sharp on the countryside and his mouth shut. His legs cranked, and he sometimes raised one hand to shade his eyes against the glare. But no words.
Which was fine with Tal. Or Silk, as he tried to think of himself. Silk was trailing, letting his feet follow one another mechanically across the thin layer of snow, dwelling in his mind on his father once more. His father that had run off and left him. He was mad at his dad—he let himself grumble and grouse and study on looks of indifference in case he ever saw David Dylan Jones again.
Silk did not often let himself ponder the Reverend Mr. Jones, first a preacher of sermons and singer of praise, then improbably a fur trapper. This day Silk mulled on the son of a buck moodily. Several times he caught himself humming his dad’s favorite hymn tunes, and bit his tongue.
They bivouaced with just a squaw fire, ate cold pemmican for dinner, and munched breakfast pemmican on the trail. On up South Fork they walked, moving easily because of so little snow. Silk wondered where they were headed, and why they went on foot instead of horseback, and whether their possible sacks provided enough to live on. But Jim was still silent, so Silk went back to mulling on mind pictures of his dad.
When they started into high country, the weather changed and so did Silk’s mood. The wind took the half-cloudy, half-gray skies away, and the air got colder. Silk was warmer walking in the sun, but more chill in his blankets at night.
Near the big divide the vistas got bigger—Silk could study huge sweeps of the Yellowstone Mountains, running north and south. He could gaze across the hundred-mile-wide valley of the Big Horn River to the Big Horn Mountains in the east, high, remote, and glistening. Beyond the divide the country shut off the far horizons, cupped them in forested hills and rolling parks, like giant hands of the Creator. It was grand.
The meadows, only ankle-deep in snow, were almost innocent of tracks—the elk and deer had gone to lower ground to winter. The air was so crisp and clear you could have picked out moose a mile off, and told bull from cow at half a mile. The country was pristine, Silk said to himself. Pristine was one of his father’s favorite words, used to describe the Garden of Eden God meant for man.
Silk noted the country in his head for mapping in his journal at night. He would leave a space for where they were going, and why, when he found out.
Jim’s mood changed too. He was still all eyes, but he didn’t look so wary now. Sometimes Silk caught Jim studying Silk’s face, for what reason he couldn’t figure.
On the fourth day they walked into a place—the place, Silk knew immediately.
An open meadow meandered in all directions, humping gently here, reaching out there, nestling against evergreen forests on three sides. At the top, the narrow end, stood several dozen elk, grazing tranquilly. And behind the elk, their secret—steam roiling up.
Water there. Boiling, evidently. Sulphuric, his nose told him. It’s warm there, and the grass is bared, he thought.
Silk noticed Jim half-turned to look at him, smiling a little.
Near the steaming water, dead trees fingered black branches against the royal-blue sky. The lower branches were covered with rime ice and sparkled in the noon sun. Further back, pine branches hung heavy with snow that melted into long icicles.
An enchanted place, truly. Silk knew instantly that he would always remember this meadow, always treasure in his mind this first moment of seeing it. He felt magic-struck, like a child looking at illustrations of fairy stories in costly books. But this was better, for it was a grown man’s fantasy, not a child’s. And it was here. He could touch it. He intended to.
He looked his thanks at Jim for the gift of this place.
They walked beyond the elk, who seemed not to notice them—the tawny grass was easy to get at—and dropped their possible sacks upwind of the steam. The air was warmer here. Without a word Jim unloaded, stripped naked, walked to the water’s edge, and disappeared into the mist.
Silk slipped his clothes off and hurried to the edge of the pool. He felt dicey, like breaking out in giggles and goose bumps at once. “Down here, hoss, “Jim called, “unless you’re wanting to parboil yourself.”
Silk stuck in a toe to test, and jerked it right back out.
“Here where the hot mixes with cold,” Jim said.
His feet felt funny on the cold grass and rock. The water turned out to be just right.
Jim lolled back, eyes closed, let his head sink under water, then sat up and spouted like a whale. He gave Silk a snow-blinding smile.
Late that afternoon. The winter sun sinking low. Dollops of creamy light and violet shadow on the meadow snow.
They were luxuriating beyond luxurious. After half a day of lying in and getting hot, then lying out and getting chilled, they were back in the hot pools, soaking up the warmth. It seemed indecent to Silk to pamper the body in this way. He loved it.
He pampered the spirit as well. Played his love flute. Sat on the side and dangled his feet and tried out tunes on the thing. Even made some up for it. The flute wasn’t well in tune with itself, and seemed unpredictable in some ways, but he could make music with it. Could get two octaves by overblowing. Even figured out how to play one of his dad’s favorite traditional tunes, “Greensleeves,” which he dedicated not to Pine Leaf but to the flute-maker, Ginny:
Alas, my love, you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously,
for
I have loved thee so long,
Delighting in thy company.
He refused to think of Pine Leaf and the humiliation of giving her the wrong horse. The only burrs under his saddle, little ones, were wondering if this place was all the something Jim had in mind, and a little tug of hunger.
Suddenly Jim stood up in knee-deep water, his big, muscled body gleaming wet. “Heap big hunter make meat,” he pronounced self-mockingly.
He stepped onto the bank, picked up his wide leather belt, and fastened it around his bare waist. His hunting knife hung in its sheath in back, pointing between his buttocks. When Jim turned, Silk saw a scar on his thigh for the first time, a narrow, straight scar that went horizontally from thigh into the top of his crotch hair.
Jim saw him looking. “Now when I tell ye not to knife-fight Frenchies, you’ll believe old Jim, huh.”
“You mess with his woman?” Silk was conscious of sounding grown up.
“Naw, he was trying to gut me, not geld me. And he missed. He’d learn to keep that knife sharp, it wouldn’t even show.”
Jim touched his toes a couple of times. “You watch if this American ain’t fiercer’n any Frenchman.”
Jim started striding fast toward some elk fifty yards away.
Silk climbed out to watch, throwing a blanket around his shoulders.
As Jim got closer, the cows and calves began to lift their heads and drift off. One cow looked around to both sides, looked back at Jim, pawed nervously.
Jim bolted for the calf.
The little fellow made a bleat and headed higgledy-piggledly for the hillside, and the snow.
Jim burst after it. Silk had never seen a human creature run so fast, much less a naked human creature.
The cow sashayed after, uncertain.
Near the hill the calf cut right.
Jim darted across the angle.
The calf dived toward the hill, and was in snow to its shoulders.
Jim plunged after.
The cow galloped at Jim.
Just then Jim went down—scooted and buried himself.
The cow, almost there, slid and slithered and ran right over Jim.
A black man-creature raised up frosted.
