by Win Blevins
Somebody was tapping him.
Yellow Foot’s face.
He rolled over and closed his eyes again.
The tapping came back and it was Yellow Foot’s face, sweet and girlish.
Oh, yeah, the girls. He looked across the room and they were still there, lying next to Hairy under the blankets.
He remembered them, one girlish and delicate-looking and very naughty and the other tall and horse-faced. McKenzie had sent them to the room, with a quart of good awerdenty and his compliments a thousand times over.
They wanted to make the beast with two backs, as Hairy called it. At least they expected to.
Silk remembered what happened. He put them off and felt the fool.
He also remembered what he imagined happening. He dallied with the delicate one and didn’t get mad until he found out that Hairy, and the ladies, expected to take turns. Silk fled to the bottle.
In another fantasy he enjoyed himself lustily with both of them in deliciously creative ways until he passed out. Hairy wasn’t in this memory at all.
In his favorite memory he lay there naked and the girls stroked him with their cool hands.
Upshot: He was still a foolish virgin.
He turned his head. A-a-agh! The tippling part wasn’t fantasy. A bodacious hangover.
Tap, tap.
Oh, yeah. Yellow Foot. What was Yellow Foot doing here? He turned and looked into Yellow Foot’s gentle face.
Yup, Yellow Foot was here. The Indian motioned outside. Regretting his waking state, his headache, his very existence, Silk got up and followed Yellow Foot out.
Easing through the door, he looked down. Good. He had his pants on.
They slipped down to the river. “Hairy, he in trouble,” Yellow Foot began.
“Yeah, with me,” Silk said. But he couldn’t think of any way to explain why that wasn’t humiliating.
After a little Yellow Foot went on. “Cheyenne want him. Lots.”
Silk pondered this. He nodded his head sagely several times. It figured. Well, they could go around Cheyenne country on the way back to Fort Cass, just like they had gone getting here. They’d be pretty safe from the Cheyennes living with the Crows.
“Antelope Jim say this.” Yellow Foot handed over a piece of paper. It was folded tight and said in block letters on the outside “SILK.”
Silk—
Tulloch says Shians hot for Hairy, know where you are. Likely ambush way back. Be careful. McKenzie wants Shian trade bad—watch out, don’t trust. Stay clear of Shians. It’s Hairy they want, not you, so they got the story straight.
It was unsigned.
Silk folded the paper, then thought better of it, and set out to burn it.
Fiddling with flint and steel gave him time to think. His first thought was that McKenzie would sell out anybody, for the fun of it.
Silk looked at Yellow Foot. So Yellow Foot, he of the doe eyes, had made the trip from Fort Cass alone, in danger, to warn them. Must be ’cause he owed them one from the business of the wrong horse. They were sure square now.
He clasped Yellow Foot on the shoulder. “Thanks.”
He pondered. Couldn’t let Yellow Foot get any more mixed into it, or he’d be wolf bait too. Silk fished out his little journal, tore out a page, and scribbled on it. “Give Antelope Jim this message, please,” he said.
The words written were: “Thousand thanks to you and Yellow Foot. Gave him this paper for you so he’d get clear.”
Yellow Foot nodded and smiled and got up. Self-consciously, he stuck out his hand for Silk to shake. It was as limp a handshake as Silk had ever felt, but a winning smile came with it.
Then Yellow Foot moved off toward a grove of cotton-woods. Probably had his horse hid there. That was the way of him—do the necessary and move on.
Silk liked him.
Now he needed a scheme. A heck of a scheme.
“Damn, this…child…gone…truly die,” Hairy wheezed.
He was up to his neck, naked in the Missouri. Ice was still floating in the river.
Darn right he was cold—that was the idea—Hairy should be clammy to the touch, in case anyone wanted to check. Silk smiled and leaned out and pushed him under again. Hairy’d feel cold as death, all right.
It had been Hairy’s idea, naturally. At first Silk said he wasn’t having any more of Hairy’s strokes of thespian genius. Then he pondered how satisfying it would be to fool the imperious McKenzie and his snob henchman Hamilton…
“Hoss,” Hairy said while they were doing the make-up, “it will be my most magnificent performance. Many actors have died onstage,” he gloated, “but nary a one has played a corpse with his life in the balance!”
He was working on the brown wig, feathering vermilion into the hairs lightly. Behind the ear was a dark hole, so red it was nearly black, about .50 caliber size, with red dripping from it. Silk had to admit it looked very convincing.
“Remember, lad, they don’t know it’s a wig.”
Hairy cut a scalping hole at the top center of the wig and dabbed red all around it. He wailed a little about ruining the wig—it couldn’t be replaced. Well, maybe it could be patched. He saved the plug.
Then he watched carefully with his hand mirrors while Silk made a big red blotch on top of his bald head to represent where the scalp was taken. It took a lot of work, and used up about all their vermilion.
Finally, Hairy said, “Lad, it’s a masterwork.” Silk thought it was pretty good himself. He even got squeamish about touching it, there toward the end.
Hairy rubbed gray make-up into his face, but Silk didn’t let him overdo it—“You’ll look pallid from the river,” Silk pointed out.
A bullet hole in the head. A bloody patch where scalp was missing. Pallor. Clamminess.
Ought to work.
At last Hairy’s protests got worrisomely feeble, and Silk helped him out of the water. The poor fellow was blue and the touch of him gave Silk the chills. It also gave him a thrill of revenge.
They made tracks for the fort, Hairy draped across the saddle.
“I’ll be wanting a box, Mr. Hamilton.” He tied Hairy’s horse.
“My boy…”
“A box.” Silk bit the words off hard. “For a wooden overcoat.”
The engagés were clustering about, not too close, crossing themselves. A breed child reached out and touched Hairy’s hand, which dangled nearly to the ground. The kid jerked his hand away.
“We have no mill here,” Hamilton stammered, “I…”
For a snob, Hamilton sure flustered easy in the presence of something real, like death.
“Mr. Hamilton, my friend is dead. I mean to do right by him. I want a box, and a couple of men to dig a grave. You can scrape up the boards. Hairy’s credit will cover it.”
“I suppose…”
McKenzie came up, a hard look on his face. He walked around the horse, squatted, looked at Hairy’s head. Hairy’s eyes were shut, his mouth was gaping open. He was giving it everything.
“Seven foot long, Mr. Hamilton, remember. Hairy was six and a half feet tall.”
McKenzie touched Hairy’s hand, grimaced, and stood up. Hand must have been nice and clammy, Silk thought, while pretending not to notice.
“Who did this?” McKenzie demanded.
“Darned if I know.”
Hairy had coached him to be short with his answers, and prickly.
“How did it happen? We don’t let killings of white men go unpunished.”
“We were setting traps. Hairy got too darn far away. I come running at the shot, but you see I was too late.”
“Who did it?”
“How in heck would I know?” This way of talking to Baron McKenzie was fun.
“Who would want to do it?”
Silk shrugged. “All it takes in this country is being a white man.”
McKenzie spoke softly to Hamilton, too softly for Silk to hear.
Silk wondered if the baron knew about the Cheyenne troubles. Proba
bly send word of his disapproval to Leg-in-the-Water, along with a list of the latest prices.
Silk borrowed a shovel and led Hairy’s horse, bearing the immense corpse, off to the little burial plot.
While Silk dug—Hairy had to lie still, in case someone looked—Hairy speculated on staying in the coffin to hear Silk’s funeral sermon. “How many men get to hear themselves eulogized, lad? You’ll do it grand—it’s in your blood.”
But he was scared of having the lid closed dark down on him, being lowered into the grave, and having to hear the shovelfuls of dirt thud down inches above his eyes.
Sprawled out there playing a corpse, while Silk did the digging work, Hairy put his theatrical imagination to work on how it would feel. He whacked his belly flat-handed to get the sound of dirt thumping on the lid.
“Be still,” Silk barked.
Hairy looked at him sheepishly.
Silk threw a spadeful of dirt onto Hairy’s belly. “You wanna know how it would feel? “Silk teased. “Here.” He heaved a shovelful onto Hairy’s neck.
Forbidden to move enough to be seen, Hairy turned his head sideways and made a dead face, tongue hanging out.
Silk couldn’t help laughing.
Silk had tried to think of a way to rule this burial out, if he could just figure how to get Hairy gone and the coffin filled with rocks without risk of being seen. It was tricky. Then the skirt fiasco came to mind again, and he suddenly thought how Hairy deserved to be buried alive.
He told Hamilton the funeral would be at sunset, which was the only way it could be timed. He’d have to bury Hairy and then get him out before he suffocated, or died of fright or superstition.
Hamilton said the engagés loved a funeral. Too bad they didn’t have a priest, Hamilton allowed.
No need for any priest, brother Hamilton, Silk said to himself. This child didn’t listen to David Dylan Jones from the front pew all those years for nothing. This child shall do it grand. And nasty.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
then grace us in the disgrace of death
—Love’s Labours Lost, I.i
Around the fresh grave the fort crew was gathered not only the common herd of Frenchies, Spaniards, Indians, and blacks who worked there but Mr. Hamilton and Mr. McKenzie, the autocrats of the mountains. Perhaps from delicate feelings McKenzie had left his concubines at home—whether his delicate feelings, or theirs, or those of the bereaved, Silk couldn’t have said.
Still, it was not an ideal audience. Though Mr. McKenzie was conspicuously dignified, Mr. Hamilton was on the verge of looking amused, and the engagés appeared to have had too much to drink.
It struck Silk as a shame that the only bereaved at the funeral, the only family, so to speak, was the one to preach the funeral sermon, himself. He lifted his voice into the spring twilight and brought forth:
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see!
Since no one joined in with him—darned papists—Silk quit after one verse.
It did seem sad, Hairy being cut off untimely at the hands of the benighted redskins. Silk almost shed a tear—until he thought of his friend stretched out alive and smirking in the coffin at his feet. He wondered if the old boy was taking a snooze in there. Just to be sure, he thumped the box accidentally with one foot as he began to address the grief-stricken.
“Brethren,” Silk began, “we are gathered here together to mourn the passing of our friend Ronald Smythe, rhymes with scythe, known to some as Shakespeare.”
He raised his thin voice.
“Lord, we commend his spirit unto Thy bosom.
“Lord, we ask thy mercy upon his soul, that he may spend eternity in Thy everlasting arms.”
Having begun thus formally, Silk spoke somewhat of Hairy’s history, such as he knew it, trying not to offend by repeating the actor’s fabrications. Silk then set off upon what he knew of his partner directly, and touched upon their meeting as the grizzly stalked the man, and Hairy’s pity for the woman Iron Kettle, that led them to abide with the Crow nation, and Hairy outwitting the Cheyenne enemy. All this he described briefly but sentimentally, not including certain details that might have sullied the dignity of the moment.
He might have mentioned the pursuit of the horse thieves, but he thought a funeral sermon not an occasion for mirth. He would have spoken of Hairy’s sojourn as an actor, and his skill with wigs and beards, but that might have called unnecessary attention to the element of deception. Besides, Silk observed that he was beginning to lose the attention of his audience.
Dramatically, Silk knelt beside the pine box. It must have seemed to the watchers that he looked at Hairy’s wooden overcoat with tears in his eyes, experiencing a last moment of communion with his friend. In truth, he didn’t know what he was going to say. And if he was going to say what had just come into his mind, Silk wanted to be close enough for Hairy to be sure to hear it.
“We confess, O Lord, that he was a man to try the boundaries of even Thy boundless patience. He played the fool on stage, Dear Jesus, until he became the clown in life. He pretended so often that he took himself in. And his judgment, Lord—why it was so shrewd that going along with him was surer than hanging. And his friendship—why, it was such that you were sure to be humbled, and usually humiliated.”
Silk thought he saw the coffin actually move. Yeah, maybe it moved. The son of a gun was going to blow his disguise and get himself killed!
Silk rose, put a foot on the coffin, and leaned an elbow on his knee. Even McKenzie nearly smiled at this breech of decorum, but it couldn’t be helped.
“But, Lord,” Silk plunged on, “if he had the foolishness of a child, he had the sweetness as well. The innocence, Jesus, of a lamb. The affection, Lord, of a small daughter, and the playfulness of a little boy. To top all he had the luck of a drunk or a dimwit—surely, Lord, Thy angels must have been watching after him.
“He was a good man, Almighty Father, good enough to make you welcome him home. He cared for people and never hurt anyone. He was brave, brave unto taking terrible risks. He had a voice worthy of the thunder, Almighty God. He was loyal—a man could depend on him. He loved poetry and song, and saw poetry everywhere in life. And, Lord, he was filled with joy in the world You created—life around him was a barrel of fun.”
Silk was beginning to touch even himself. He felt a tear threatening to well up. “The truth is, Lord, I didn’t always know if I liked him.” He blinked and the tear ran. “But I loved him, and I think You do, too.
“I’ll miss him, Lord.” He hesitated, looking down at the coffin. “It’s not right for him to be gone yet.”
Silk knelt over the box and cried unashamedly. He didn’t know if his own tears were real or staged.
After a few moments McKenzie touched Silk on the shoulder. Silk stood up.
“If your men could just lower him,” Silk said softly to the baron. McKenzie gestured and engagés moved to the ropes.
When the coffin was in the hole, Silk said, “I’d like to be with him a while yet. I’ll shovel the dirt in myself.” McKenzie motioned and everyone moved off.
Silk squatted by the open grave, a big black hole with Hairy at the bottom. He made a small, dark round shape above the blackness. The spade handle drew a thin, slanting line against the pearly sky.
Silk looked down at Hairy’s wooden overcoat. There were still tears on his face. He whispered, “I did it, you sumbuck! We got away with it!”
The coffin didn’t talk back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again
—Hamlet, I.i
Silk poked his borrowed horse along beside the wash, heading for the spring. He and Hairy had found this spring, and a nice grove in a sheltered place, on the way to Fort Union. A good place to camp.
Silk was looking forward to eating big on the d
eer Hairy would have shot, lying about, and trading tales. Hairy would probably give a critique of Silk’s funeral sermon, they’d remember together how Silk had pried the coffin lid off, Hairy would tell about nicking a pony out of the big fort herd, and altogether they’d celebrate the outwitting of McKenzie and the vengeful Cheyennes. And then they’d move on to that spot Hairy talked about, the white sulphur hot springs. They’d take a week there, Hairy said, just being lazy. Hot springs were a luxury, in Silk’s eyes, big enough to get a man to take a bath.
Silk was proud of the tales he had to tell. It had gone off fine with McKenzie. Silk had buried the empty box, and spent three nights in the fort to make it look good. No, Mr. McKenzie, don’t believe I’ll accept employment. Yessir, I’m headed to Cass to meet my Crow friends. Yessir, I’d be pleased to take your letters along for fifty shinplasters. Nossir, I don’t need to rest up a while longer. Yessir, I will be careful. All this, naturally, with a long face, an ineffable, world-weary sadness.
Sometimes it had been hard not to laugh.
It would be good to see Hairy, and to rest. And then to rejoin Jim and Pine Leaf and the Crows. And Rosie—Silk missed the doughty old mule.
There had been one bad moment with the baron. “Our reports have it,” McKenzie ventured calculatingly, “that the Cheyennes mostly wanted Shakespeare, and not you.”
“Probably,” said Silk with a glare that added, “That’s what they got, ain’t it?”
“Our reports also have it that the Cheyennes are not in the country yet.” McKenzie waited.
“You might not know,” offered Silk.
“True enough. But let’s say that some other Indians were guilty in this case. The Cheyennes may turn their vengeance toward you.”
Silk hadn’t thought of that. Great to get the devils off Hairy’s tail. Not good to make them switch. Especially since Silk would lead them straight to the living Hairy. Whoa, hoss!
McKenzie asked the tale of the theft of the horse that wasn’t Leg-in-the-Water’s, and Silk gave it to him straight.
McKenzie pulled at his chin. “I shall send word to our Cheyenne friends that you were not responsible,” he said, “and that the real culprit is dead.”
