Delivering Virtue

by Brian Kindall

  “You are my hero, friend,” I said. “I owe you my life.” I shrugged. “For what it is worth.”

  He nodded.

  I stood.

  I stretched.

  I creaked.

  I found my hat, dusted it off, and placed it with care onto my embarrassing head. And then I took my bearings. I put the pale light to my back and faced what I figured must be west.

  “Any idea about the others?”

  But no sooner had I asked then I saw spectral shadows taking shape in the smoke about a hundred feet away. I did not know if they be buffalo, Indians, Mormonic angels, or possibly Beelzebub himself, accompanied by an entourage of his dark genii. I braced myself, preparing for more hardship and peril. But hooray! The shapes soon became palpable silhouettes. And I knew them! They were three horses and a woman with a child.

  “Halloo!” I called.

  Puck snorted a salutation through the fog, and then they all trotted over the burnt earth to where Brownie and I were waiting.

  “Are we all of a piece?” I asked when they came up close.

  They none of them said anything at first. They only stared, wide-eyed, and perhaps a bit horrified. I suppose it was hard for them to recognize me – their dashing, fearless leader – in my newly donned mask of ashen ugliness.

  Then Turtle Dove laughed.

  “What?” I said, and held out my arms at my sides. “You do not like my latest style?”

  She laughed again, and laughed some more. And then Puck started in, and then Sabrina and Genevieve. Virtue, bless her soul, only grinned.

  I turned around for them, exhibiting my filthy garments and hideous maquillage. And then I began to laugh myself, although it much pained me to do so. We were greatly relieved to be reunited and, more or less, whole.

  We laughed like that for a long time, right there in the midst of that smoldering wasteland, happy, happy to be alive.

  OUR HORSES SMELLED WATER, and without trying to steer their course, we let them take us to it. They started in at a trot, raising their noses and sniffing at the smoky air, but soon they were cantering along, heads down, driven onward by their mighty thirst.

  We reached the western edge of the burn – that place where the first lightning bolts had touched down – and magically the countryside appeared before us as if none of that stormy nightmare had ever occurred. It was like stepping through a doorway from one enormous room into another. The prairie was just as it had been before – all rolling hills covered in tall brown grass rustling on the too-warm breeze.

  At last we came to a bluff, and beneath us, like a silver ribbon shimmering in the sunlight, a stream could be seen winding bucolically through a stand of willows and small trees, bringing to my mind something I had once seen in a painting by a Barbizon Master.

  The water tasted strongly of minerals – rather sulfurous truly – but we did not send up grievances to the gods. Any liquid at all was welcome as we washed the ash from our well-parched gullets. We lined up side-by-side, horses and humans alike, gratefully lapping at that lowland beck.

  Once our bellies were swollen with drink, we commenced to wash up.

  “I will tend to the horses,” I told Turtle Dove, “if you will see to Virtue’s needs.”

  She bobbed her shaggy head, and after finding a change of dress for the child, led her by the hand through the willows towards a pool.

  As was my gentlemanly wont, I saw to the girl horses first.

  “Ladies,” I said, and relieved them of their leather hardware and saddlebags. My bones were creaking, and it was all I could do to slide the saddles from their backs. I seemed to have cracked a rib or two in my collision with that bison, and I could feel a painful grinding sensation under my skin.

  I led the mares to the stream bank and, using our cooking pot for a bucket, I poured water over their backs, washing away the sweat and ashes and singed hairs. After that, I combed them out with the currycomb, taking great care with their manes and tails, sorting and untangling the colored beads intertwined therein. The whole process was exceedingly tedious, but they looked much better afterwards – quite beautiful – and both seemed appreciative of my fumbling efforts at a professional coiffure.

  They set to nibbling at the watercress growing in the stream, and then I went over to Puck and Brownie.

  “Boys,” I said. “Howdy-do?”

  They both appeared a bit worse for wear. As I unburdened them of their saddles and sawbucks, they trembled and flinched with muscle tenderness. Puck was scorched across his chest, as if a flame had flared right up and roasted him good. And Brownie had more than one horn wound along his flanks and hip. Black bleeding cuts marked his filthy, ash-covered hide.

  “You might look almost as bad as I do,” I teased. But they were neither one in the mood for a joke.

  I poured water over their backs, brushing them out with ginger strokes. They did not seem grateful, so much as tolerant. When I was finished, they only just stood there, asleep on their feet.

  “My noble cohorts,” I whispered. “Take a rest.”

  I then lined up the saddles on a log, arranging them like so, and trying to make a civilized camp with a semblance of order and discipline. Sabrina had been carrying the saddle and bags once used by Turtle Dove’s deceased husband, and I had not taken stock of its contents, as the widow woman was always nearby, and it seemed intrusive to rummage through a dead man’s belongings. But now circumstances seemed to justify my curiosity, although in retrospection, I do not know why I considered propriety to have changed any since before our fiery charge with the bison. Such, I suppose, are the workings of a fatigued, yet inquisitive mind. At any rate, I sat on the log with the heavy leather bags across my knees.

  They were decorated with beads and feathers in the style most popular with mountain men and trappers of that time so recently past, especially those of the French persuasion. The men often had long braided hair, and wore elaborate fringed buckskins and furs, purely impractical, almost, one could say, like something from a fashionable Parisian street scene, although with a strong Indian influence on their choice of garb and accessories. They were wild dandies, those boys, each outdoing the next in his attempts at style.

  I opened the flap on the bag and pulled out the contents hidden inside.

  First came a woolen shirt, red as a faded rose, and flouncy. Wrapped inside the shirt I found a battered and dog-eared Bible. I opened the book to Leviticus, for no good reason except that I had always liked the way that word sounded when spoken.

  “Leviticus,” I said, nodded at its sound, and then closed the book and laid it beside me on the log.

  Next I found a twist of tobacco, a charm on a string, and a map scribbled on a piece of rabbit skin. I turned the map first this way, then that, but could make no sense of it. It looked to be something made by a child. The twirling blue line must be water, I ventured, and the brown lines were mountains, but the starry sky seemed to be underneath, and there was no way to tell if this side or that was north or south or forward or backward. For some reason I was unable to explain, the little diagram seemed to be lacking in any awareness of time. “Is it a map of foreverness?” One wondered. At any rate, it seemed like the kind of map that could, if followed too closely, lead a man to becoming profoundly and most hopelessly lost.

  I reached more deeply into the pouch. And lo! “What, pray, is this?”

  I pulled out a silver flask. It was decorated with a scene scratched onto its side that appeared to have been created by an apprentice metal smith, as it was crudely etched and unrefined in technique. There was a nude woman standing waist deep in a pool in a clearing. A smile was engraved on her face, and her hands were cupped toward the water. She had the tiniest nipples one could ever imagine. On the bank of the pool, playing his pipes, was a faun. The whole scene was too clumsy for my taste, and had it entered into a contemporary poem or piece of fiction I was reading, I would surely have smiled at its quaint attempt at allegory, but ultimately would not have taken
it seriously, as such blatancies have always struck me as old fashioned and a mite heavy-handed and too sentimental to bear the weight of life’s truest meanings. Nevertheless, I uncorked the flask and sniffed its contents.

  I flinched. My eyes came to tears in a blink. “Hmmm,” I said, and wrinkled my nose. It was a liquorous concoction of unknown derivation. Juniper frolicked with licorice in its depths. Intriguing, to say the least, and a tad bit frightful to contemplate.

  I pressed the cork back in its place, and slipped the flask into the depths of my own saddlebag. “For later,” I said. Although I did not know exactly to whom I was speaking. “When all this business is done with and we want to celebrate our success, we will surely have a nip of the dead man’s tonic.”

  I looked at the sky. “Of course, not until that day.”

  The other bag proffered a kerchief, a pair of patched trousers, a tin fork, and a Francote Pinfire revolver, Belgian made. “Hmm,” I said, and weighed the pistol in my palm. “Hmm.”

  I wrapped my fingers around its handle, letting my index finger find its proper place next to the smooth curve of the trigger. “Hmm.”

  Now it is a peculiar thing the way a gun can make a man feel more like a man. All of an instant. There I was one minute, unarmed and vulnerable, and now here I was again, armed and dangerous. A man likes to consider himself dangerous. He likes to feel formidable, a thing with which to contend. And while I could find no bullets for this particular piece of manliness, I still had some of that virile sensation surge through me just by holding that gun in my hand.

  I lifted it up and aimed at a bird passing overhead. I lined up, following it along in the sights. “Poom!” I said, and made a mock recoil with my wrist. “Poom! Poom! Take that, you!”

  I could almost smell the burnt gunpowder issuing forth from the barrel.

  I could nearly imagine a puff of feathers, the bird plummeting toward the earth.

  “Well,” I said, admiring the gun. “Perhaps we will just put you away for a while.” And I slipped the revolver into my own saddlebags alongside the flask.

  I understand that an observer might wonder at my flagrant disregard for the agreement I had signed back in Independence – the very one handed to me by Brother Benjamin forbidding the bearing of firearms and the taking of strong drink. But I saw no violation of that pact in my actions thus far. I had, I might point out, not sipped from the flask. Carrying it along with me was not the same as imbibing its contents. So where was my sin?

  As for the gun, if God did not want me to have it, why did he offer it to me as such an obvious gift from heaven? The Lord had merely provided. He must have suspected that I would have need of a gun some time upcoming, amended his commandment, and was now only providing safe passage for his Blessed Deliverer and Holy Betrothed. Besides, it had no bullets! One could hardly call a gun a gun if it came without bullets.

  I closed up the dead man’s bags and lay them across his saddle, and then I placed my own saddlebags at the other end of the log, so as to make them appear as if they had had no interaction with the dead man’s bags.

  I heard Turtle Dove and Virtue coming from the pool. I made to look as if I were gathering sticks for a campfire. They stepped from the willows, and I was deeply surprised at how fresh and clean Virtue could emerge so soon after our filthy ordeal in the ash and dust. She wore yet another new dress, this one blue as the sky. Her hair was washed clean and was brushed straight down, where it fell loosely over her thin shoulders.

  “Well,” I said. “Look at you, young lady. So pretty.”

  The girl bowed her head with genuine humility, and then said, “Thank you.”

  “Do you suppose a bath would do the same for me?”

  She grinned. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”

  Turtle Dove held a handful of some ointment she had mixed up at the stream – wet clay and herbs and berry juice and whatnot. She went to Brownie, cooing to him in Blackfoot as she came near to his wounds. She gently administered the salve to his many cuts, smearing it with a finger along the blackened gashes. The horse’s flesh twitched a bit, but he endured the discomfort without much show, and I was impressed with his manly forbearance.

  When she was done with Brownie, Turtle Dove made for the other horses, treating their burns. She turned to me where I was watching with interest. “Baignez vous,” she said, and made a face to indicate that I did not smell so good.

  And so, like a good boy, I went to take a bath.

  I REMOVED MY SOILED attire and rinsed it in the stream. The dirt and ash made a grayish cloud in the water that flowed down over the pebbles at the shallow edge of a deep pool. I saw a fish flash silver in the depths.

  A little yellow bird hopped among the willows, curious at my task, warbling a sweet avian melody.

  “Bonjour, petit oiseau,” I said, but I regretted it at once, as my voice only scared him away. It would have been nice to have his company.

  I hung my dripping clothes to dry on the branches of a tree, although they were in such sad shape – so burnt and torn – I could not imagine ever wearing them again.

  After that, I examined my lacerated shin.

  The cut was about three inches long and went all the way to the bone. It made me queasy to look at. I did not know how best to care for it, but decided that it was surely wise to make it clean. I carefully let my feet down over the bank and into the water.

  “Yow!” I cringed, sucking air through my gritted teeth.

  The wound stung something awful when it met with that mineral rich water. A puff of blood hovered around my knee, then dissipated into the stream. After the chill had sufficiently numbed my lower leg, I let the rest of my body descend into the pool.

  It was with a mix of hurt and relief that I floated weightless in that cool liquescence. The scorched places on my face and head came to life with painful awareness. My ribs ached, and I could imagine quite clearly just how they were detached from the rest of my ribcage. I felt like a broken doll. Still, the water was a balm. All in all, I began to feel better than I had before.

  I gently rubbed the dirt from my skin.

  I paddled back and forth like a happy duck.

  I let myself sink away for a time, mindful of nothing, bobbing face-down like a drowned man, until I could no longer hold my breath.

  Finally, I crawled out onto the grass and lay belly up in the resplendent sunshine.

  An unreasonable and lighthearted tranquility settled over me in that moment. It defied the general anxiety of my circumstances. I felt exactly the opposite of ill at ease, or careworn with angst. I had known such moments only rarely in my adulthood, and the temptation was to reach out for it, trying to capture it, or befriend the feeling so as to never be alone and without it. But I have learned that such responses only scare peaceful times away, and so I endeavored to refrain from any knee-jerk moves, and just lay still.

  “Om,” I whispered to myself. “Om.”

  I was still basking in that good feeling when a shadow passed between my person and the sun. I felt an abrupt cooling on my skin. When I opened my eyes, I was confronted with a silhouette, and coming as I was from that drowsy and peaceful state of being, I was quite certain in that instant that I was at last experiencing a visitation sent by God. I blinked into the brightness, trying to discern the details of this beatific personage hovering before me.

  “Voici,” came a voice.

  Surely she was an angel!

  My pulse accelerated as I waited to receive some divine piece of doctrine, or at least some sort of a heavenly blessing, but I was surprised instead to have a bundle plop into the grass beside me. I sat up, shielding my eyes from the sun with my hand, and realizing that it was Turtle Dove who had spoken. Of a sudden, I was aware of my nakedness.

  “Oh!” I stammered. “Uh.”

  She dropped to her knees beside me, mixing up some gooey potion with a stick on a piece of bark.

  One never knows how to act in such situations. Time and again. A m
an does not want to seem overly coy when airing his wares in front of a lady, as such displays will surely lessen his appeal to that most essential part of a female. But one does feel somewhat embarrassed, especially if one is cursed with a member as gregarious and forthcoming as my own. I refrained from covering myself, but still I blushed pink all over when my penis began to grow like bean sprout right there between the Indian woman and myself.

  She did not seem to notice, only tipped her chin toward the bundle and said, “Les vêtements sont pour vous.”

  I took the bundle, and rather too quickly stood up and twirled away. She had given me the red shirt and patched trousers from her dead husband’s saddlebags. I held up the shirt by the shoulders.

  “Leviticus,” I mumbled sheepishly.

  “Portez la chemise,” said Turtle Dove. “Et les pantalons.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Merci bien.” They were not to my sense of style, and a bit too large for my frame, causing me to look like a boy who had been handed an older brother’s castoffs, but I was eager to be clothed, so I slid into them quick as I could.

  “Voici.” She said and patted the ground with her hand.

  I sat.

  “Donnez-moi votre jambe.”

  I moved so that my leg was close to her, and rolled up the cuff, exposing my wounded shin. She studied it closely, then reached into a little pouch at her waist and pulled out a bone needle and black horsehair thread.

  I blenched all the way to my loins when I saw it. “Heh, heh,” I laughed meekly, but did not otherwise speak, since I feared that any words I said might come out ignoble and sissified under the strain of the circumstances.

  After threading the needle, Turtle Dove took hold of my heel and fixed it snuggly in her lap.

  I swallowed, and lay back, grabbing handfuls of grass in each of my fists as I prepared for the upcoming ordeal. My tranquil feeling had quite abandoned me by this time.

  And then she set to work.