The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  “If it comes to a choice, I rather hope he’ll help us to get the young ladies back,” Captain Aitken said. “Wouldn’t want them to be ill-used, any more than we can help.”

  “Drat Big White anyway,” Charbonneau said.

  27

  He thought he might just have a nip of grog—maybe two . . .

  BOBBETY Berrybender claimed that the blow from the hailstone had left him afflicted with triple vision.

  “Trios, trios, I only see trios,” he insisted. News that neither Tasmin nor Mademoiselle Pellenc were there to make him poultices alarmed him so much that Captain Aitken gave him a dose of laudanum not much weaker than that he had given the old lord himself, after which Bobbety was deposited on the upper deck with Master Jeremy Thaw, whose power of speech had still not returned. Piet Van Wely, iodine on his scratches, joined them, the little group being viewed with stern contempt by the unmarked and fully operative Holger Sten.

  Charbonneau disarmed as many of the engagés as possible. Señor Yanez and Signor Claricia, both very drunk, inquired about the fate of the missing women; both still had passionate designs on Mademoiselle.

  “But what of Lady Tasmin?” George Catlin inquired.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that pretty lass,” Dan Drew said. “I expect she and Jimmy Snow are just courting.”

  “Courting? Surely not!” George said, much disturbed by the suggestion. Bold as Lady Tasmin might appear, it was scarcely credible that she would have started a romance with some raw product of the Western frontier.

  “It’s the other two that worry me,” Captain Aitken admitted. “I suppose there’s no hope of bargaining for their return?”

  “Plenty of hope, if we can find ’em,” Dan said. “I imagine they’ve taken them to the Bad Eye—he’s the main trader in women in these parts. I expect when you get upriver you can strike a bargain—if that’s where they are.”

  “We’ll be three weeks to a month getting to the Bad Eye,” Captain Aitken said. “And that’s if we’re lucky with the currents. Rather a long time for two tender ones to suffer.”

  Dan Drew didn’t answer—a month’s captivity was not long, as captivities went. It was white women who had been held a year or two that there was scarcely any good reason to bring back. They were usually broken by then, not equal to the scorn of their luckier sisters, once they were returned.

  “The Sin Killer might get them back,” Charbonneau said. “Jim throws a powerful fear into some of the tribes.”

  At this Mary Berrybender broke into her strange, high laugh.

  “But the Sin Killer is Tasmin’s new gentleman,” she said. “She is unlikely to allow him time off just to rescue her sister—though I suppose Mademoiselle is another matter.”

  “Why’d that be, little miss?” Dan asked.

  “Why, because Mademoiselle is so good with Tasmin’s hair,” Mary replied.

  She then raced upstairs to have a look at Bobbety’s lump.

  “Who makes a warmer friend, an English girl or a fish?” Captain Aitken asked, once the strange child was gone.

  Charbonneau didn’t answer. The day’s disturbances had left him weary. He thought he might just have a nip of grog—maybe two nips—and then retire to his cozy pallet. Perhaps Coal, his bright-eyed wife, would bring him his pipe and some vittles—she might even rub his aching feet.

  28

  For a moment she had hoped there might be a kiss . . .

  WHEN she saw that they were making for the river, Tasmin became fearful that Jim Snow—in the interest of her safety—might mean to return her to the boat after all. She didn’t want to go back to the boat, and was much relieved when he merely hid her in Mr. Drew’s cave while he went downriver and retrieved her sopping kit.

  Tasmin spent the little wait feeling rather blank—she had often been accused of dissecting her suitors rather as if they were frogs. But now something momentous had happened—a man of whom she knew almost nothing had offered to marry her, a thing so surprising that all capacity for analysis seemed to have left her. She merely waited. In Jim Snow’s presence past and future got squeezed out. The present—intense, exciting, huge—took all her attention.

  “Come out,” he called, when he returned. “You’ll want to spread these clothes to dry.”

  Tasmin at once squeezed out of the cave. The sun was just setting—afterglow was golden in the Western sky. Over the river a bright moon had risen. Jim quietly helped her spread her wet clothes on the grass to dry. His wariness had left him; he seemed to feel confident that the warring tribes would not disturb them.

  “We’ve got no vittles tonight,” he said. “I might try to gig a fish.”

  “There’s something else I’d like you to try,” Tasmin said mildly.

  Jim looked up, curious but not hostile.

  “I’d like you to call me by my name, Tasmin—you’ve never said it,” she told him. “It would please me if you would just say my name.”

  “Tasmin, okay—I’m Jim,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  To Tasmin’s astonishment he took her hand, shook it firmly, and returned to his task of spreading out wet clothes—she had packed only the roughest and simplest. For a moment she had hoped there might be a kiss—but for that, it seemed, she would have to wait. She hardly knew what frontier custom allowed to the betrothed; perhaps she could not immediately expect any kissing. She found herself assailed by powerful doubts. Perhaps his offer to marry up with her had been only a momentary inclination on his part—perhaps he had only said it to calm her fury. It had felt, at the time, like a true offer, but was it? Did he still want to?

  “Look here, Jim—did you mean it when you said you’d like to marry up with me?” Tasmin asked, feeling that she might burst into tears if the matter were not immediately confirmed.

  “I meant it—I sure did,” Jim said, as if surprised that there could be the slightest doubt about the matter.

  “So we’re truly to be married? I need to know it!” Tasmin said. Some jelly of doubt would not quite leave her; she wanted to be fully convinced that Jim Snow intended to make her his wife.

  “That’s right—we’ll get hitched,” Jim said, smiling at her for the first time—a shy, becoming smile.

  “The only reason I followed that boat was you,” he admitted. “I’ve a notion you’ll make a fine wife.”

  “Well, I do hope so,” Tasmin said. “As your fiancée, then, might I just ask one favor? Might I just trim your beard a little, so as to see your face better? I have some scissors with me—I’m just in a fever to do it.”

  Jim was a little startled by Tasmin’s request. He had never given a thought to his beard—it was just there, like the hair on his head. So far it had required no attention; neither of his Indian wives had even mentioned it, and yet Tasmin, his new bride-to-be, was waiting expectantly. She would surely think it rude if he said no—perhaps, independent as she was, she would even refuse to be his.

  “I guess you can cut it, if you want . . . if it will please you,” he said.

  “Oh, it will please me exceedingly,” Tasmin said, immediately getting out her scissors, at the sight of which Jim Snow looked startled.

  “You mean cut it now?” he asked.

  “Why yes, at once—just sit on one of those rocks,” Tasmin said. “I shan’t take long.”

  “But it’s nearly dark,” he said. “Wouldn’t the barbering go better in the morning?”

  “Sorry, can’t wait,” Tasmin said. “There’s plenty of light, really.”

  Jim obediently sat on one of the rocks near the entrance to Mr. Drew’s cave and Tasmin was at last allowed to do what she had been longing to do since the day they met; she got her fingers in Jim Snow’s tangled beard and began to comb it straight.

  “Don’t take too much off, now,” he said, very surprised to find himself the object of such attentions.

  “Hush now . . . how can I trim a beard with you chattering?” Tasmin said.

  Jim made no further protests.
Tasmin stood so close to him that he could smell her; she had a light fragrance, probably from the use of some fine soap. She wasn’t greased like his other wives. She was quick with the scissors too—masses of his beard seemed to be falling away. It seemed to him that she hardly meant to leave him a beard at all.

  “There . . . I’m rather content with the beard,” Tasmin said. “You are so handsome, Jim, only one could scarcely see it for the tangles. Now you could pass for a prince in any court in Europe.”

  The compliment embarrassed Jim deeply—he doubted that anyone would ever mistake him for a prince. But he liked it when Tasmin stood so close.

  “Now that the beard’s right it’s obvious that you have rather an excess of hair,” she said. “Do be sweet and oblige me for just another minute—I mean to give your hair just the lightest trim.”

  Jim didn’t protest. He had given himself over to a new power—a good-smelling power, Tasmin, his wife-to-be. Soon again the scissors snicked and his hair, like his beard, seemed to fall in masses. Tasmin snipped, she didn’t speak. She had rarely felt happier than at that moment, while at the simple task of barbering the young man who was to be her mate.

  “There, you’re sheared, Jim,” she said.

  Her eyes seemed to have widened, as she stood close. To Jim they seemed as large as the moon.

  “I just must kiss you—I must,” she said, and she did kiss him, his fresh-cut locks tickling her cheeks.

  “I should have brushed you off, you’ve hair everywhere,” she said, lifting her face from his. But then, hair or no hair, she kissed him again.

  “Jim, when can we marry?” she asked, her voice rather husky. “I fear I’m cruelly impatient. I don’t want to wait too long to be made a wife.”

  “Old Dan can marry us, when he comes back,” Jim said. “He was a justice of the peace, back in Missouri—he’s married up two or three of the boys.”

  “I hope he hurries back, then—I am so impatient,” Tasmin said.

  29

  . . . soft echoes of pleasure that left her rather dreamy . . .

  DAN Drew married them just as darkness fell, using Jim’s little Bible. Then he lent them his cave for their nuptial night, and appeared again shortly after dawn, with three rabbits and two fat grouse as wedding presents.

  “Well, you’re hitched now—first couple I’ve married in five years,” Dan observed, once he had a rabbit and a grouse cooking on a spit of wood.

  “I guess that means the country will soon be settled up,” he added, with a smile.

  Tasmin could still feel the effects of the hitching in her body, soft echoes of pleasure that left her rather dreamy but also keenly hungry. She could hardly keep from grabbing the grouse. Jim Snow was washing himself in the river. He claimed that most of his hair had gone down his shirt and was itching him ferociously. Tasmin watched him bathe with a proprietary eye. By the time he came back, his newly cut hair shining with droplets of water, Tasmin was already ripping into the first of the grouse. Though grateful, of course, to the tall frontiersman for marrying them and then supplying their wedding breakfast, Tasmin was rather hoping that the old fellow would soon run along. She wanted to be alone with her husband, to kiss him and kiss him, and more.

  Of the steamer Rocky Mount there was no sign—it had disappeared into the early morning mists—the day promised to be cooler; the breeze held a hint of autumn.

  “They’ll pass the Platte today, if they don’t stick,” Dan said. “Big White’s loose somewhere—jumped ship during the commotion. Charbonneau’s mighty upset about it.”

  “That boat’s stuck most of the time,” Jim said. “Big White probably thinks he can make better time afoot.”

  Like Tasmin, Jim was hoping Dan Drew would soon go on about his business. Decisions would soon have to be made, but for the moment he felt too lazy to think about them. It would be nice just to sit with his wife for a while, watching the river flow. Eventually he and Tasmin would decide which way to go: back to Council Grove, across to Santa Fe, or upriver to the Mandan villages, where Tasmin’s sister and the Frenchwoman were most likely being taken.

  Tasmin was impatient with any mention of the steamboat, or her family, or Monsieur Charbonneau and his problems. She had escaped that world, that tiresome fuss; now that she had secured her prize, a fine young husband, she meant to glut herself with him. The Berrybenders, with their endless complaints, were fetters that she had at last shaken off.

  “George Aitken’s exercised about the two women—I told him I’d help try to get ’em back,” Dan said. “The old lord’s roaring about lost dowries and such.”

  Tasmin, sucking the greasy bones of the fat grouse, could not but be amused at this report. It was not hard to imagine how loudly her papa would roar if he knew that she herself, who would surely have commanded one of the most lavish dowries in Europe—from a Bourbon or a Borghese, a Hohenzollern, a Romanov, from any number of Hapsburgs—had married, willingly and boldly, a penniless American, who probably didn’t even know what a dowry was. The virtue that might have brought the highest price in Europe had been given away for love. There was much that she meant to teach her young husband, and much that he must teach her about prairie ways—but the base, at least, was solid; the sweet ache in her body told her that.

  Dan Drew knew that the young couple wished him gone. Oh, they liked the breakfast he had brought them, but they wished him gone. They had just discovered each other—they wanted no one else. It was only the way of the world. The young lady was too absorbed in the love that was just beginning to really grasp her sister’s peril, or that of the Frenchwoman.

  With a smile, Dan stood up and turned to go.

  “Where will you be heading, Dan?” Jim asked.

  “I may go parley with the Bad Eye—buy those girls back, if that’s where they are,” Dan said.

  “I may have to go kill that old liar, someday—he’s bad about spreading false prophecies,” Jim Snow said casually, as he took the rabbit off the spit.

  Such talk made Tasmin uneasy—she wished Mr. Drew would just go. She liked her mild Jim best; surely their raptures would soon gentle the Sin Killer. She didn’t want her husband to be seized by violent passions. She wanted to tame him with passions of another kind. Wrapped in her young arms, flushed by her quick kisses, rocked in her eager loins, he might soon lose his dangerous impulses.

  Dan Drew gave them a nod and turned to leave.

  “Good-bye to you, young folks,” he said.

  “Thanks for hitching us, Dan,” Jim said, as the old plains-man turned and walked swiftly away.

  Tasmin at once laid her cheek against her husband’s soft wet beard.

  “You smell so sweet when you’re clean, Jimmy,” she said.

  Just then the old green parrot flew down and settled on the rock by Dan Drew’s cave.

  “Go away, filthy bird!” Tasmin demanded, but the parrot took no heed.

  30

  The stars above were secure in their courses . . .

  AT night, with the steamer Rocky Mount safely moored, George Aitken liked to sit on deck and study the stars. With his erratic crew he could do little; with his even more erratic passengers he could do nothing. His relaxation came at night, when he could get out his little book of tables and constellations and contemplate the heavens. As they moved north of the Platte the North Star, his favorite star, seemed to increase in brilliance nightly. Captain Aitken respected the river, but he loved the stars. As summer passed into autumn the nights grew chill, but Captain Aitken had a great thick coat; he wrapped himself up in it warmly, filled his short pipe, and let starlight be his balm.

  No one else on the boat, it seemed, was susceptible to being soothed by the heavens. Since the capture of the two young ladies and the departure of Lady Tasmin, the painter George Catlin had become increasingly frantic. He often interrupted the captain’s restful stargazing with futile pleas involving Lady Tasmin—he wanted a search mounted, an effort Captain Aitken knew to be quite futile. Lady Tas
min had left of her own accord—if she ever reappeared it would also be of her own accord.

  “The ice, Mr. Catlin—the ice,” Captain Aitken repeated. “We mustn’t let the ice catch us. We must get to the Yellowstone, where there’s a fort. If the ice catches us with no fort to winter in, the Indians will pick us like berries. They’ll not only take the rest of the women, they’ll take the guns and all the provisions. We’ll be eating shoe leather, if we ain’t lucky.”

  George Catlin scarcely listened. The loss of Bess Berry-bender and Mademoiselle Pellenc was bad enough, but Tasmin’s apparently willing departure shook him so badly that he considered going ashore himself to mount a search; he was only dissuaded by Toussaint Charbonneau, whose own efforts to locate the missing Big White had convinced him that the shores were too dangerous to risk. Charbonneau said the prairies were cut by many horse tracks, signifying warring bands, who would not be likely to deal gently with a white man so green as to suppose a huntsman could attract antelope by wiggling his legs.

  “Best to stay aboard, Mr. Catlin,” Charbonneau advised. “Probably we’ll find the young ladies when we get to the Mandan villages—there’s a pretty brisk trade in captives goes on there.”

  Old Gorska, since the death of his son, had given himself up to drink and weeping, weeping and drink. Over and over again he repeated to anyone who would listen that he had never seen an Indian—he had merely looked around and discovered that his son was dead.

  Mary Berrybender was devoting a great deal of time to the Hairy Horn, receiving instruction in the Sioux language. With Lady Berrybender dead and Lord B. just able to hobble about with the aid of a crutch fashioned by the skillful Signor Claricia, chaos had descended on the English company. The boy Seven, he of the cleft palate, could not be located—one theory was that he had been playing near the great paddle wheel and had been swept over and drowned. Others thought that the Piegan, who disliked the boy, had quietly dispatched him and dropped him overboard. The loss—if it was a loss; Seven had always been adept at hiding—weighed on Captain Aitken particularly. His employers in Pittsburgh were not paying him to lose noble English passengers—this George Aitken well knew. They were not much past the Ioway bluffs and several were already dead, missing, or damaged—Master Thaw still showed no signs of recovering his power of speech.