The Englishman’s Boy

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “For the love of Christ, Shorty!”

  McAdoo casually ambles back to me, the pistol dangling loosely by his side. My eyes don’t leave the revolver until we are face to face again. “There’s your lesson,” he says, holding up the gun innocent in the palm of his hand. “Take it.”

  I take it because the weapon seems safer in my hands than in his. My tongue is cracked leather in a dry wool sock.

  “I ain’t no shootist,” he says quietly, “but here’s a fact. A carrying piece has got but one business. That business is man-killing.”

  I am having trouble with my tongue, it feels numb.

  “This gun ain’t about fancy shooting, it’s about stomach. This gun ain’t got but one earthly use but dropping a man. A man who can see your face and whose face you can see. It ain’t no play toy. I knew boys could shoot the pips off a playing card with one of these, boys could dance a tin can around a yard like it was on a string. Hotter than slick shit in July as long as nobody put the wind up their ass.” He takes me by the shoulder and points to the scarecrow Wylie has planted in the garden. Ragged overalls and a pillowslip stuffed with straw on which a lopsided face has been scratched with a piece of coal. “I just put a little wind up your ass. Now point and squeeze,” he says.

  I shake my head. I don’t trust my trembling hand.

  “You wanted this fucking lesson. Learn it, Vincent.”

  I raise the gun. Immensely heavy, a great weight dragging on my arm, it is as if I am trying to lift the scarecrow staked in the garden on the tip of the gun barrel, uproot it from the earth. I fire, the pistol springs in my hand, a small captive animal struggling in my fist.

  “High and to the right,” says Shorty drily. “Point and squeeze.”

  The quaking in my hand has spread, run up the length of my arm to vibrate in my shoulder. I try to fix the bead in the centre of the overalls but it twitches with every beat of my heart. Clenched muscles cannot overrule it. Another shot. A puff of dust dances in the field beyond the garden.

  “Squeeze,” says McAdoo, “squeeze.”

  I snap off two more shots as quickly as I can; I want to be done with it, the gun kicks in rapid recoil, the smell of expended powder worms up my nostrils. Then I am pulling the trigger of a gun dead in my hand, the hammer clicking repeatedly on empty chambers, the scarecrow leering at me untouched. Shorty’s hand closes on the barrel and pushes it down to my side.

  “Learn anything?” he asks.

  Over Shorty’s shoulder I spot Wylie running hard and awkward in his riding boots, knees pumping high, shoulders thrown back. Passing the burned house, he snatches a piece of lumber from the ground and hurtles on toward us.

  “Lose the gun, Harry,” Shorty is saying. “It ain’t for you.” Then he senses something, breaks off, turns and catches sight of Wylie. “Christ,” he says, “here comes the cavalry.”

  The cavalry is upon us now. “I heard them shots, Shorty! I come to see!” he cries, breathless. “You okay, Shorty?” He holds the two-by-four wrapped in a two-fisted grip. A large rusted spike protrudes from it.

  “Calm down,” says McAdoo. “Everything’s okay.”

  Wylie’s eyes jump suspiciously from McAdoo to me. He has spotted the revolver in my hand and it seems to have stirred muddled outrage in him. “Why you shooting that gun?” he yells at me. “Shorty says you try to make him talk about stuff he don’t want to talk about.” He takes a menacing step towards me. “You leave him alone. He don’t have to talk to you.”

  “Climb down off of him, Wylie,” Shorty orders. “I was just giving Harry a shooting lesson.”

  Wylie clamps his top teeth over his bottom lip and sucks it, seeking solace and consolation even while his eyes narrow resentfully. “Whyn’t you give me a lesson, too?” he complains to Shorty.

  “Yes, Shorty, whyn’t you give him the lesson you gave me?”

  “He don’t need that particular lesson,” says Shorty.

  “Please, Shorty, I ain’t never shot a short gun but once or twice. Leave me do it, Shorty.”

  “Wylie don’t need no lesson like you did, Mr. Writer. You seen him coming to the rescue like hell in a handcart with nothing but that piece of lumber in his hand. He was ready to pulp somebody.” He gives me a wolfish grin. “No wind up Wylie’s ass.”

  “That’s right,” agrees Wylie hesitantly, unsure what the conversation is about, “I ain’t got no wind up my ass.”

  “Going to save old Shorty’s bacon, wasn’t you, boy?”

  “I heard them shots. I say, There’s maybe trouble, maybe Shorty’s in trouble, and I run like the wind.”

  I hand the pistol and a box of cartridges to McAdoo. “Give him his lesson,” I say.

  “Show me, Shorty,” Wylie pleads. “I can do her, Shorty.”

  McAdoo doesn’t say anything. He simply breaks the gun, feeds cartridges into the chambers, slaps it shut. Before giving it to Wylie, he says sternly, “Point your finger.”

  “At what, Shorty? Where?”

  “There. At that goddamn scarecrow you made, Wylie.”

  Wylie does.

  “Say bam.”

  “Bam,” says Wylie.

  “Put your hand down.”

  Wylie does.

  “Now up and bam - all together.”

  “Bam,” goes Wylie.

  “All right.” McAdoo smacks the gun into his palm. “Do the same with this, point her and squeeze the trigger.”

  Wylie hefts the gun in his hand, the brightness of the weapon pulses up his arm and into his face. He beams. The gun flies up. It goes bam. The overall shudders from the impact of the bullet. The next two shots flap the cloth as they tear through the denim, twisting the scarecrow askew.

  “See?” says McAdoo to me. “Nothing to her.” He turns to Wylie. “Like shooting fish in a fucking barrel, ain’t it?”

  Wylie grins, face shining. “Easy,” he says, head bobbing. “Easy.”

  “Try for the head,” says McAdoo. The words are scarcely out of his mouth when the barrel glares in the sun. I hear three shots, so quick they stutter, and the head of the scarecrow tosses like a buggy whip.

  McAdoo and I stand silent while a few wisps of errant straw float lazily to the ground. Wylie has drilled a hole in the scarecrow’s leer and two more, one through the right eye and the other two inches above the left.

  “Jesus Christ,” mutters McAdoo.

  “Bam,” goes Wylie with the empty gun. “Bam, bam.”

  “The gun’s his,” I say. “I don’t want it. Let him keep it.”

  I walk away, quickly. Wylie is standing with the gun, swinging it from target to target, going bam, louder and louder. He shoots the windmill, the bunkhouse window, a fencepost. I take one last glance back after I’ve cranked the car into life. Wylie has me in his sights. “Bam!” he shouts. “Bam! Bam!” He is laughing. McAdoo jerks Wylie’s arm down as I duck into the car.

  17

  The fording of the Milk was a good deal easier than the Marias – no fool and blind white horse to save from drowning. Once across, they shucked their wet clothes and hung them in the willows, built a fire and breakfasted buck naked while their duds dried. Finding themselves north of the Milk seemed to lighten the boys’ mood, they were now beyond reach of the Choteau County sheriff, the United States Marshals, the army, or Indian agents. On the Canadian side of the line there were no meddlesome lawmen of any stripe whatsoever.

  And the health of their spirits might have owed something to the fact that all trace of the horse thieves was now well and truly gone. Pure relief, the Englishman’s boy guessed, noting how the knot in his own gut had loosened over the last day when it became clear they had lost them. Biggity talk about what you were aiming to do to Indians was one thing, the prospect of delivering on it was another. There were some hard cases in this crowd, but even hard cases got second thoughts when their mouths fell shut long enough to allow a spell for thinking.

  Hardwick let them linger over morning coffee; with the trail dissolved into
thin air there was no point in hurry. The thieves might have skedaddled in any direction – maybe they’d even doubled back south. But Hardwick had decided to gamble that they were bound for the Cypress Hills, fifty miles to the north, prime hunting grounds for the tribes. And not just for the Cree, the Saulteaux, the Assiniboine, and the Blackfoot who gathered there to dance, to hunt, to make war, and to chop lodgepole pine, the slim, arrow-straight, nearly branchless trees prized for teepee and travois poles. Because also folded in among the hills were bands of Métis who had given the montagne de cyprès their name, buffalo hunters who supplied the Hudson’s Bay Company with the pemmican to feed its factors and servants in the Northwest. And traders, too. Only the year before, according to Vogle, that Bay bastard, Isaac Cowie, had packed out seven hundred and fifty grizzly pelts and fifteen hundred elk skins despite the Company’s monopoly being broken by independents trading the bad whisky the Company refused to sell. The thought of whisky of any kind, bad or good, and the prospect of a long swallow had helped cheer the boys remarkable, too.

  Nigh ten o’clock, Hardwick ordered them into the saddle and they forsook the camp by the Milk, winding up and over and through gaunt, brooding hoodoos the colour of cured hides, riding out onto a rippling plain contoured like a washboard. The heat of the previous day had eased a little, but the wind had struck up fierce, gusty. As far as the eye could see, the short curly grass writhed and shuddered under the invisible lash of the shrilling wind. The Englishman’s boy rode leaning into it, like a man shouldering through swinging doors, his bowler hat battened down tight around his ears. Handfuls of sparse, sombre cloud sped overhead, spinning shadows on the glowing, rolling grass like coins tossed carelessly across the lamplit baize of a saloon table. An occasional faint spit of rain accompanied the dark shadow, then suddenly disappeared, the sun pouncing back on them, quick and hotblooded as a cougar.

  To the left of the Englishman’s boy, Scotty rode with a stiff smile pasted on his gob. At first the boy had wondered if the wind wasn’t twisting up the corners of the Scotchman’s lips, curling them like the tips of a waxed moustache; now he figured it had nothing to do with the wind but with the Scotchman’s mind. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched him talking to himself, a brief mumble of words, a puppet-like bobbing and wagging of the head on the stem of the thin neck signalling agreement with his own propositions. And each time he ceased jabbering, his smile was stretched even wider across his face until the Englishman’s boy feared the mouth might rip at the corners; each time the smile seemed frozen a little harder and more unlikely ever to thaw, a toothy grimace as strange as that fixed, blue, teary shine in the Scotchman’s eyes.

  The boy bounced his heels on the horse’s ribs, left the Scotchman making faces and muttering to himself, and jogged ahead to the trio of James Hughes, Charlie Harper, and Ed Grace. Better to get shut of that lame duck while the getting was good. He’d had enough of lame ducks to last a lifetime. First, the Englishman Dawe, who’d sickened and died on him, then sorry-ass Hank, now this crazy-grinning Scotchman. He had enough to look out for, looking out for his own skin.

  Hughes, Harper, and Grace rode hunched in their wildly flapping coats, Hughes shouting over the roar of the wind. “Hardwick’ll land us at Farwell’s post. If he starts flying his kite there, he’ll soon forget about them horse-snatchers. We’ll do a few days’ drinking, turn around and head for home. That’s all she wrote.”

  “The hell he’ll forget,” said Harper. “Those Arapaho took him captive in Wyoming put a burr under old Tom’s foreskin when it comes to Indians. I don’t know what they done to him, but he’s got one bad hate on for our red brothers. You heard what happened in the Sweet Grass Hills last April. He scattered lead on a bunch of Assiniboine riding in under a trade flag. That’s bad business, shooting the customers.”

  The Englishman’s boy gave close attention to Ed Grace. Grace was a quiet man who didn’t bandy opinions, but now he seemed to be studying some thought, slowly shifting a wad of tobacco from cheek to cheek. A tall, raw-boned man with a strong hooked nose, hooded eyes, and a balding head, Ed Grace was nicknamed the Eagle. He shifted in the saddle, crooked his neck, and squirted a stream of tobacco juice over his shoulder, downwind. “Beating up on Assiniboines is one thing,” he offered in a hoarse voice. “Assiniboines are a scrubby, poor sort of Indian. Short on horses and nothing but sawed-off Hudson’s Bay flintlocks for guns. But I figure there’ll be Blackfoot camped in Cypress. There were last year. Caught sixty Cree braves collecting spruce gum and rubbed them all out, didn’t spare a one. The Blackfoot got no shortage of horseflesh – even the squaws and brats ride fine ponies – and they own plenty of rifles, good rifles, Henrys and needle-guns. The Spitzee Cavalry didn’t do anything to keep repeaters out of their hands and they aren’t the least bit shy about turning them on whites. The dose of the smallpox they caught lately didn’t do anything for their sweet temper or our popularity. I don’t care how much that burr under Hardwick’s foreskin is bothering him – he better not go taking any potshots at Blackfoot or some of our hair will be dangling from their belts.”

  The Englishman’s boy could see what Grace had said didn’t go down well – with Hughes in particular. He wasn’t about to swallow it. “Ain’t no goddamn Indians ever going to get the drop on old Tom,” said Hughes. “He’s a foxy one. No Indian’s going to outfox the fox.”

  “Anyway, we got Eagle here to protect us from the Blackfoot,” said Harper, giggling through his bad teeth, the fool. “This side of the line Queen Victoria owns the Indians. Eagle being a Canadian, it’s up to him to be hospitable, see that we Yankee boys have a good time and don’t have our hair troubled by no British Indians. Eagle’s the Queen’s rep’sentative. Ain’t you, Eagle?”

  “God only knows what I am,” said Grace, “but I assure you I’m not happy. Not with this situation. I ask myself why in hell I’m here. There’s no percentage in it and that’s the truth.”

  “Why, you’re here for friendship’s sake, ain’t you?” Hughes hollered into the wind. “We all of us seen the winter out together, didn’t we? We all been good partners, thick and thin. Friends is duty-bound to stand by friends, ain’t they?”

  “Who was Farmer Hank’s friend?” asked Grace. “Who stood by him?”

  Hughes and Harper threw one another troubled glances.

  “Not me,” the Eagle answered, “and not you either.” He pointed to the Englishman’s boy. “Ask him if he’s riding with us for friendship’s sake.”

  Hughes and Harper swivelled in their saddles and squinted hard at the Englishman’s boy as if they were seeing him for the first time, as if they were striving to plumb his heart, his mind, his soul for some dark motive. Grace had to smile, seeing the way the Englishman’s boy stared back at them, like a stray alley cat outfacing a pair of mangy, slat-ribbed dogs.

  Harper said, “The kid’s riding with us because he had to pull foot from Benton after he stabbed that hotel man. He don’t want to face the music. He scared off out of there.”

  “That’s right,” said Grace. “Fear landed him here. Same as us. Only we’re along because it’s Hardwick’s got us shitting yellow.”

  “Hell,” said Hughes peevishly, “I don’t appreciate that remark. Why you go putting such a complexion on things?”

  “I’m not putting on a complexion. Complexion’s there. I know it for a fact and you know it for a fact,” said Grace. “We’re all of us afraid to cross the Green River Renegade.”

  “He don’t like that name,” warned Hughes.

  “Why?” said Grace. “He worked hard to earn it.”

  Harper had been working on his righteous indignation until he’d puffed up like a tom turkey. “I ain’t afraid of Tom Hardwick. Any man says I am is a liar.”

  “That’s right, he ain’t,” confirmed Hughes. “And I’m a gent cut from the same rough cloth. Jimmy Hughes ain’t afraid of any two-legged creature walks God’s green earth. I got myself out of tight corners Tom Hardwick couldn’t have spi
t out of.”

  “That being the case, you brave boys sure as hell don’t belong in the company of two cowards like us,” said Grace. He paused. “So why don’t you heroes piss off out of here and go pin a medal on each other.” Grace leant back in the saddle and spat over his shoulder in summation. The gesture, the tone of voice, were two slaps in the face, bald contempt on bald contempt. Hughes swore, savagely jerked the reins of his horse, the bite of the bit hooking open its mouth, flinging back its head, popping its eyes.

  Grace and the Englishman’s boy kept on, didn’t bother to look back. Hughes and Harper were cursing them, the wind wiping away whole words and phrases, like a cloth smearing chalk on a slate. The Englishman’s boy strained to catch their threats. “Bastard… don’t ride away from me… you’ll answer… Jimmy Hughes… don’t forget… we’ll settle for you…”

  The Eagle gave no sign he was listening, only passed a clumsy hand back and forth over his face like he was brushing off flies. “Maybe I ought to have held my peace just a little longer,” he said. “But I might have bust. Passed the worst winter of my life, shacked up with that bunch of whoreson rascals. I thought once we reached Fort Benton I’d get shut of them, and then five mile out of town those plaguy Indians scampered off with our horses. I always was a fellow scanty on luck. I got a ten-per-cent share in twenty-five-thousand-dollars’ worth of wolf pelts and you can bet how much of that I’d see if I’d told Hardwick I didn’t intend to help get the horses back.” He fell silent, absent-mindedly rummaging about in his jacket pocket as he contemplated hard luck and mischances. A piece of soiled candy came up in his fingers. “I got no use for this,” he said, turning it over and over. “Bad teeth. But a youngster likes his candy.”

  He passed the sweet. The Englishman’s boy popped the smudgy peppermint in his mouth. “I ain’t no kid,” he said, sucking hard.

  By early afternoon, Evans suggested they call a halt, but some time between breakfast and then Hardwick had undergone a change of plan. He had ditched the notion of leisurely travel and demanded they press forward. Evans did not argue and no one else asked for an explanation; they knew Hardwick better than to question the man’s decision. For the next five hours they pushed on, then paused to water the horses while the men ate a little biscuit and jerked meat. After twenty minutes, Hardwick signalled them to mount again, there were miles to be made before dusk fell.