Cheyenne Winter

by Wheeler, Richard S.

  “Two wrongs don’t make a right! Just because they debauch the Indians doesn’t mean we should! It doesn’t make it right for us to do it!”

  “It’s a hard world isn’t it?”

  “We didn’t have to get into this business with those — criminals.”

  Maxim’s accusations whirled out of the darkness like the voice of the burning bush confronting Moses, unsettling Guy. He had no very good reply. “Maxim. For decades Straus et Fils has capitalized the fur trade. Each year the money we lent to the Chouteaus — or to the opposition — went into spirits taken up the river, or loaded into cannisters and carried out the Platte River road to the rendezvous on the Green River or the Popo Agie or Pierre’s Hole. Your grandfather, my father, and I always knew that.”

  “Then we share the guilt.” Maxim’s voice seemed harsh.

  “Are you sure you should feel guilty?”

  “Yes! The spirits ruin the tribes. If they didn’t squander their robes on spirits they could buy useful things from us! Tools, harness, traps, saws, axes, plows, cloth, seed . . . They could make something of themselves!”

  “Like white men?”

  “Yes!”

  The darkness lay thick. He couldn’t see Maxim although the lad was a few feet away. “Perhaps the tribes trade for what is useful after all, Maxim. A lot of our things they have no use for. You’ll not find a man among them who’ll harness a draft horse and plow and harrow and plant seed and harvest a crop.”

  “That’s what we should trade to them, so they have no choice.”

  “No choice. Maxim, Maxim, what is liberty all about?”

  “But these are savages, papa. They don’t know that spirits hurt them. They’ve never had spirits.”

  “They like spirits, Maxim. So much that no post can survive without spirits.”

  “It doesn’t matter what they like! They shouldn’t have spirits. That’s why Congress passed a law — ”

  “Several laws. Prompted by Eastern reformers. Who were right in a way.”

  “I know what you’re telling me. You’re telling me that life is real, and I don’t appreciate that in business one has to bend a little. Just as Straus et Fils bent a little. But I won’t bend. What’s right is right! And I’m cursed with it.”

  Guy sighed. In every age that he knew something about there’d always been a few like Maxim, the few so principled that they’d rather starve than survive because all getting and spending seemed filthy to them. He admired them, to a point. They were reformers. They became monks and ascetics rebuking the world, saints and martyrs generating the hatreds of others. Was Maxim becoming one of those or was he expressing the absolutes of a seventeen-year-old? Guy didn’t know. Those ascetics and reformers and men with burning souls so often took to burning others. The Spanish Inquisition came to Guy’s mind, a process that tortured, tormented his own Sephardic people.

  A sudden sadness sifted into Guy; a foreboding that he was losing a son. Especially when he said what he was about to say. “There are two implications for you, Maxim. One is that you should resign from a business you detest . . . and the other . . . ”

  “What other?”

  “The other is that you should make your own way in the world now and not depend on Straus family money for your comforts. If it’s tainted, Maxim, then you’ll not want to spend it. At least if you wish to live by your principles.”

  “Papa — ”

  “It’s something for you to think about. If we ever escape here. The prophets wore skins and ate honey and locusts and rebuked Israel. Some of them, anyway. The price.”

  “The prophets were right!”

  Guy didn’t answer. The sadness deepened in him and he felt a weariness upon him, a weariness of soul, of wrestling with life and its awful choices. He felt as if all wisdom had vanished from him and he was nothing more than an animal. They had wrestled with something that had no answer — unless the answer was God’s mercy upon all sinners who fumbled through life.

  Neither spoke the rest of the night although Guy sensed that Maxim wanted to. Guy had led the youth to the ultimate realities. He wondered whether, come dawn, the son who shared this dungeon with him would be a stranger to him. He had not driven Maxim out, but he feared Maxim would drive him, and all the generations of Strauses, out of his soul.

  With the dawn his hunger returned, and the emptiness of his belly clawed unbearably at him. They drank the last of their water and waited. Maxim wouldn’t look at him. Whatever the bond of the night, it was lost in the bleak glow of another day. Guy closed his eyes, trying to drive away the torment of his belly and the ache across his nose and face. He was beyond communing with the Divine except to mutter a simple plea for help.

  He heard noises, the rattle of metal, and the door swung open along with his dread. But the man standing there wasn’t Hervey; it was Isodoro Sandoval. Guy blinked. The streaming sunlight had a way of torturing his eyes at first.

  “Come,” said Sandoval. “You are free. Senor Hervey says it.”

  “Free?” It amazed Guy. He’d been steeling himself for indescribable torments. “Why?”

  Isodoro shrugged uneasily.

  “Why?” asked Guy, insistently.

  “Senor Fitzhugh came. He says to Hervey . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “He says, it doesn’t matter what the bourgeois does to you and Maxim; he’s not selling out.”

  “He said that?”

  Isodoro seemed indignant. “You have no friend at all, this Fitzhugh. He cast you to the dogs. He says he’ll keep the post going even if you both die.”

  “See, Papa? Now you know how he is! He didn’t care about us!”

  But something else was blossoming in Guy’s mind. “So Hervey gave up. It did him no good at all to hold us. And we are free.”

  “He had no principles!” Maxim snarled.

  But Guy started laughing, wheezing, and bellowing, dizzy from hunger.

  “I don’t know why you’re laughing, Papa.”

  “That’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself, Maxim.” He turned to Sandoval. “You’ll bring my horse and saddle around.”

  Sandoval eyed the clay. “Senor Hervey says to put you out of the gates on foot.”

  “Stealing my horse, is he? As well as our other horses and mules? No, Senor Sandoval. I’m going to sit in there and starve myself to death until he returns our property to us.”

  “Senor Straus — you must leave at once.”

  But Guy didn’t listen. He settled back into the clay and propped himself up against the log wall. “I will stay here until he returns all stolen property. Tell him that.”

  Sandoval shrugged and wandered off to consult with Hervey.

  “Papa! Come. Let’s get out of here now! Before he hurts us more!”

  Guy smiled. “Maxim, you have your principles and I have mine. Staying here and starving is my principle — and my sole weapon; the power of the weak against the strong, oui?”

  “Papa! You must come now!” Maxim sounded frantic. He dove into the dark room again and tugged. “Come!”

  “I am stubborn, Maxim.”

  “But don’t you see? We’re free!”

  “Then go! What’s stopping you?”

  Maxim paused, confused. “I don’t know. Oh, Papa . . . ”

  “You’ll do what you must, son, and I’ll do what I must. Hervey has my horse. This post has a lot of my livestock, mules, horses. We’ll take it back. Enough to pull wagons and carry hunters and give us all transportation. Oui, Maxim?”

  “But you’re so foolish! He’s so evil. He’ll — ”

  Guy laughed, his dizziness making him wobbly.

  Sandoval returned, his gaze averted. And along with him three burly Creole engages. “Señor Hervey, he says no. He’s keeping everything he got. He says if you don’t walk out we must carry you out.”

  The Creoles and Sandoval looked uncomfortable but ready to execute their orders.

  “Very well, Señor Sandoval. Let
them carry me out.”

  “Papa, we’ll walk. I don’t want their filthy hands on me.”

  “You may walk, Maxim. I will be carried.”

  Sandoval sighed and nodded. One Creole clasped Guy’s feet, the other slid his hands under Guy’s shoulders. They lifted him up just high enough off the earth to keep his rear from dragging across the yard as they proceeded toward the open gates.

  Guy knew two things: his position was undignified to all those engages who gaped at the spectacle. And his soul and spirit were visible to them all, including Hervey, who stood at the door of the factor’s house and watched them carry Guy through the gates and deposit him on the naked clay in front of Fort Cass.

  * * *

  Maxim marveled at his father. Guy hadn’t eaten in two days, yet he was walking the four miles back to Fitzhugh’s Post without faltering, his body erect, his jaw jutting, his legs moving as rhythmically as steam pistons. They left Cass behind them and paced through a windy autumnal morning along the trace. Maxim was seeing something in his father he didn’t know was there — an iron will governed by principle. His father had refused to leave his prison! His own father, Guy Straus! Hervey hadn’t returned the livestock, of course, but somehow Guy had won.

  What’s more, Maxim felt his own shame. When they were given their freedom, the sole thought in Maxim’s head was escape from Hervey’s clutches. But his father turned out to be the more principled of them, accepting the terror and helplessness and darkness of that hole to make a point while Maxim had thought only of his own liberty. Furtively, Maxim peered at the father he’d never known before, seeing traits in the elder Straus that he wished he could emulate. And only hours before he’d been lecturing his father about principles! Maxim burned with shame, knowing that he’d been the compromiser and trimmer after all.

  Was he wrong about trading illegal spirits for robes? No, he thought, he wasn’t wrong. That sort of trading would continue no matter what laws were passed, because spirits were a commodity the tribes insisted on having. The real world would never acquiesce to his ideals. Robe traders did what they had to: some supplied the spirits reluctantly; others didn’t care what effect they had on the tribes.

  Neither of them spoke during that long hike. Maxim worried when Guy slowed down, obviously at the limits of his energy in his half-starved state. But Maxim said nothing. Instead, he admired the man plodding grimly beside him. Maxim knew, suddenly, he’d come into his own maturity this day. He’d discovered he had his own weaknesses and he had no right to condemn others, condemn his father, for anything at all.

  They raised Fitzhugh’s Post by mid-morning and discovered a few lodges there.

  “Can you tell me what tribe they are, son?”

  “I don’t know. Not Crow, though.”

  They trudged past seamed old women and curious children and on into Fitzhugh’s Post, where engages gaped.

  “Mon Dieu!” exclaimed Samson Trudeau. He looked shocked, and Maxim realized how bad his father looked with his swollen nose and face, yellow and black and blue, and his stew-stained black suit and grimy flesh.

  “I am hungry,” said Guy.

  Little Whirlwind snapped something to her sisters, who ran back to Fitzhugh’s quarters.

  Abner Spoon helped Guy into the barracks and sat him down on a bunk while many of the rest crowded around silently, absorbing the sight of a brutalized man. They stared at Maxim, too, but not with the same sympathy. Maxim shrank under their gaze: in their eyes he had been a traitor and a harsh critic. Someone handed Guy a tumbler of water which he drank greedily.

  Brokenleg pushed into the room and stared at them both, his gaze raking Maxim cruelly and then settling gently on his partner. “Guy, Guy,” he muttered. “You’re hyar and in one piece I reckon.”

  Guy smiled wanly.

  Maxim spotted Ambrose Chatillon pushing through the crowd of giant Creoles surrounding Guy. Chatillon surveyed Guy and smiled gently. “Monsieur, you have survived a fate worse than the wilderness.”

  Maxim discovered a vast, silent esteem flowing between the guide and his father, a bond forged from weeks on the long upriver trail. More than esteem, he realized. Mutual respect. The wiry guide plainly admired his father. The realization renewed Maxim’s shame.

  “Robert Fitzhugh,” said Guy, and Maxim held his breath. It was the first time he’d heard his father address Brokenleg by his given name. “Is it true that you told Hervey you’d never cave in — no matter what Hervey did to Maxim and me?”

  Fitzhugh nodded, scowling.

  “You told him you wouldn’t heed my instructions?”

  “Sorta. I told him I wasn’t doin’ nothing’ until you were both free.” Fitzhugh met Guy’s direct stare with a bright glare of his own.

  “You went so far as to him you you’d seek out new partners, new financing, if Hervey destroyed my son and me?”

  Maxim dreaded what was coming. He recognized the muted thunder in his father’s voice, and knew its lash. But then his father’s voice softened. “I was tempted to cave in — anything, anything to escape that hellhole. But I overcame that. I refused to eat.”

  That puzzled everyone there except Maxim. Guy peered about at all of them, smiling gently. “When I accepted death he no longer had any power over me. When I refused to touch food he raged at me, poured a pot of stew over me — and walked out helplessly. He could not terrorize a man ready to die and starving himself day by day. I knew I’d won — until Maxim came. Then he had a new way of terrorizing me . . . but we survived that, my son and I.” Maxim caught the proud glance of his father’s eye.

  “But we were still prisoners, Mr. Fitzhugh. And then you freed us.”

  Something released in Brokenleg’s taut features. “I thought as how it might,” he muttered. “I thought as how that devil might give up seein’ as how it’d do no good to be poundin’ and starvin’ and holdin’ you — and might git him into a heap o’ trouble with Culbertson and Chouteau and them.”

  Guy sighed. “You’d never quit. Strauses might come and go; partners might live or die — but you’d never quit. That’s why I went into business with you and Jamie Dance, Brokenleg — that’s what I saw.”

  Brokenleg scowled. He didn’t like being assessed, being weighed, not by Guy Straus, not by any mortal. Maxim could see that. “I’ll handle the post; you can handle the rest of ’er back in St. Louis,” he muttered. It was a rebuke to Guy for coming up the river, for ignoring Fitzhugh’s cautions, for being a mangeur du lard, the Creoles’ word for tenderfoot.

  But Guy was laughing easily. It made Maxim wonder: his father enjoyed this bristling porcupine of a man.

  “Haw!” roared Fitzhugh.

  The whole exchange bewildered Maxim.

  Little Whirlwind pushed her way through the Creoles carrying a platter of sliced, cold buffalo tongue.

  “Buffler!” roared Fitzhugh. “It’s a strong meat — puts strength in a man.”

  Maxim and his father ate. Maxim wolfed down meat as fast as he could swallow but Guy took his time, telling the story of their ordeal to the assemblage in between bites. Or part of the story. Guy slid past the beating he’d received. And said almost nothing about the spiritual struggle that had led him to accept death. Or the discovery that not even Julius Hervey could break the will of a man ready to die. But even though he said little, the engages seemed to grasp the things Guy hinted at as Guy toyed with his meat. His father didn’t eat a lot, and it worried Maxim.

  “I’ve been the cause of some difficulties and worry here, gentlemen,” Guy concluded. “I certainly apologize. In the morning Monsieur Chatillon and I will be leaving you. And leaving you with admiration. I think I know what sort of man it takes to run a fur post. I esteem you all.”

  “But papa — you’ve hardly been here — ”

  “Our business awaits me, Maxim. I’ve been away too long. You’ll join us, I trust?”

  Suddenly Maxim found himself the cynosure of all eyes. He did not see a friendly face among the eng
ages. Brokenleg paused, glaring. Maxim knew Brokenleg wanted him to go. A few hours ago Maxim had wanted nothing more badly. But that was before he’d allowed Julius Hervey to herd him to Fort Cass. Everything had changed. Maxim glanced at Guy, who waited patiently for a response. He saw a man of steel and principle and felt a sudden rush of pride well through him.

  They all wanted him to leave. He glanced furtively at the engages, reading the contempt in their faces; the scorn in the eyes of Little Whirlwind; the flat antagonism in Brokenleg’s glare. He felt small inside. He’d judged them ruthlessly for months, scorning the business, presuming it was corrupt and its participants were barbaric. They itched for him to say au revoir and head south.

  He didn’t know what to say at first. Or even whom to address. He chose his father. “I owe you and your confreres and apology. I owe Monsieur Fitzhugh an apology.” He turned to look into Fitzhugh’s glare, which struck him with the force of anvils. “I have learned that I was wrong; that you do the best you can in a world that — that you didn’t create.”

  Brokenleg’s glare didn’t soften a bit.

  “I am sorry, Brokenleg.”

  Nothing changed, except that Maxim wanted to crawl away from there. He’d lost the respect of these men.

  “I want to stay and work hard and do my duties — if you’ll have me.”

  He desperately wanted Brokenleg to say yes, stay, it’ll be fine, all’s forgotten and forgiven. Instead Brokenleg glared, his gaze boring in Maxim until Maxim wished the earth would swallow him up.

  “I’ll go with my father,” he muttered miserably.

  “Reckon there’s no need. I need me a clerk.”

  “I’ll make the best clerk I know how!” Maxim cried.

  Twenty

  * * *

  The new pirogue bounced on its tether at the riverbank in front of Fitzhugh’s Post. Like countless other pirogues built by traders and trappers to get themselves and their furs back to St. Louis, this one had been made from two giant cottonwood logs hewn into the shape of long canoes. These had square sterns and were carefully hollowed out until about two inches of wood remained, along with watertight bulkheads every few feet. Connecting the two canoes was a deck of hand-sawed plank which would store cargo. A mast projected upward from the front of the deck; a tiller from the rear. Two hand-hewn paddles, avirons the Creoles called them, awaited strong arms.