The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  Amboise’s first fearful thought was that he had somehow been scalped. Perhaps the old Indian who had seemed so uninterested in him the day before had slipped back in the night and scalped him. Astonished that, as a scalped man, he could still walk around and make water, Amboise rushed to the wagon and quickly pulled out Clam de Paty’s little shaving mirror, a useful object that he was obliged to locate for Monsieur de Paty every morning when he was ready to shave.

  Amboise opened the mirror, which was in a handsome leather case, and quickly had a look at himself, a procedure that only deepened his puzzlement. One of his cheeks was very bloody, and yet it was plain that he still had his hair, and looked, on the whole, very like his healthy young self. But what could have occurred to make him so bloody? His bosses were always berating him for his clumsiness, but could he have been somehow clumsy enough to cut himself while he slept? Such a loss of blood seemed to indicate that he had been bleeding most of the night, and yet, where was the cut? Could he have walked in his sleep, fallen on some rocks, or perhaps accidentally cut himself on the axe that he used to chop firewood? None of these explanations really satisfied, since he had awakened exactly where he lay down. Clam de Paty’s little mirror was small—until Amboise tilted it at an angle, it hardly showed his whole face. When he did tilt it, what it showed plainly was that one side of his face was bloody and one side normal, if rather stubbly—unlike his bosses, Amboise could rarely find the leisure to shave. The more he tipped and slanted the mirror, the more it struck Amboise that, after all, something was rather odd about his face—something just a bit off— but because of the abundance of dried blood he could not at once say what it was. Then he put up a finger, meaning to scratch his left ear, and found that, instead, he only scratched his temple. Very carefully Amboise tilted the mirror and made the astonishing discovery that he no longer had a left ear. At first he could not credit his own vision, which was apt to be bleary and not too precise in the first moments of the new day. He had gone to sleep with two ears on his head—he felt quite sure of that fact—and yet now he seemed to have only one, which defied all the laws of nature, as Amboise understood them. For a minute he blamed the mirror, a small mirror, inadequate for close inspection; and yet, play with it though he might, he could not make the mirror contradict his first impression, which was that he no longer had two ears. The right one was there, stiff as an ear should be and even fairly clean. But the left ear was simply not there, a fact so startling that Amboise sat down and fell into a faint, in which he dreamed that he was bathing in a cool river. In this dream, a brief one, he definitely had two ears. He did his best to delay a return to consciousness, but despite him, consciousness soon returned—a glance at the mirror was enough to confirm the dreadful fact: he was a man with only one ear, an inadequacy that was likely to strike his employers as very discreditable indeed. His employers were exacting men, so exacting, in fact, that Amboise found he was worrying more about how to explain the situation than he was about the loss of the ear itself. Bitter as they would be about the fact that he had not presented himself to make the fire and arrange the bedding, they would take one look at him in his altered state and at once draw the worst conclusions. Very likely they would conclude that he had taken advantage of their absence to borrow one of their shaving kits, perhaps had tried to shave using one of their mirrors, and in an excess of clumsiness, cut off his own ear. The fact that he had smeared blood not only on Clam de Paty’s mirror but on much of their kit as well would lend strength to such an assumption. Amboise wondered again if he might, somehow or other, have cut his own ear off, concluding that it was impossible. His first suspicion— that an Indian had crept in and cut it off while he slept—was undoubtedly the right explanation. The old Partezon, who seemed so uninterested in him, had had his sport after all. There was no sign of the ear anywhere—whoever cut it off took it away. Who was more likely than the Partezon to commit such a cunning act?

  Very hastily Amboise took Clam de Paty’s mirror to the river and washed it clean of blood. Then he stripped and ducked himself several times, so that he would be clean too. A quick check in the mirror revealed a hole in the left side of his head, but with no ear to shield it. The gristly appendage that had been with him for all of his twenty-one years was now gone.

  He carried a bucket of water up from the river and did his best to clean the blood off the various articles in the wagon, making rather a damp job of it. Then he hitched the gelding to the wagon, put the palfreys on a loose rein, and hurried off as fast as he could go to the west. He was anxious to be back with his bosses before the old Indian came back and stripped him of his other ear—and perhaps a few other parts of himself as well.

  13

  Restraint was not her way . . .

  THEY trusted me to keep them safe, and I failed,” Pomp said, in a voice so low that Tasmin could scarcely hear him, though she stood close to his side in the woods a few hundred yards below the camp. They stood over the remains of the friendly bear cub Andy who, with his sister, Abby had been caught by Pomp just before the battle in which Pomp was so badly wounded. Andy had been clubbed to death, skinned, and cut up, no doubt by the same Indians who had killed the other freed animals, once they wandered away from the enclosure where they had been penned. Pomp himself, once he recovered, had freed the animals—buffalo, deer, antelope, elk, and moose, all half tame and no doubt easy prey for the Indians, who were coming to the camp to get in a last bit of trading with William Ashley.

  “Damn the Indians . . . they should have seen they were pets!” Tasmin said—Pomp’s sadness affected her so deeply that she had to say something, even though she knew there was no logic in her complaint—why expect Indians, who lived by hunting and whose erratic food supply had usually to be earned by exertion and danger, to pass up easy meat? Pomp himself, as the young animals were captured, expressed certain doubts about the semidomestication of these wild beasts, which Drummond Stewart had wanted to put in his Scottish zoo. He knew that the caution wild animals needed would not be easily regained—Andy’s death made the point emphatically.

  “I know there are zoos and game parks and such in Europe, but out here I think it’s best just to let the animals be,” Pomp remarked. “Once you interfere with them they forget how to be wild.”

  As you yourself have, Pomp Charbonneau, Tasmin thought—then she took Pomp’s face in her hands and kissed him, a thing she had been wanting to do for weeks and weeks. They were alone in a deep glade, what better chance could she have? Restraint was not her way—she wanted to make Pomp not look so sad. It flitted through her mind, as she drew Pomp’s face toward her, that she had done much the same when she could no longer resist the urge to kiss her husband, Jim Snow, now several weeks gone on his scout to the south. He should know better than to leave me, Tasmin thought—Jim knew she was a passionate animal, strong in her appetites; he also knew she cared for Pomp, though perhaps without suspecting in quite what way she cared—she had hardly been certain of the nature of her feeling herself. Jim and Pomp were friends; they had hunted and camped together often. Yet their natures were very different, Jim hard, Pomp soft, and the one not necessarily better than the other. Tasmin had learned to align herself more or less comfortably with her husband’s hardness, even if it involved sudden slappings and moments of frightening violence, but Jim’s rough masculinity was not the only kind she could respond to. Pomp’s shy softness had a deep appeal too. She had thought much about Jim and Pomp and come to the conclusion that she was not likely to find complete sufficiency in any one man. She had seen herself that life was very uncertain—William Drummond Stewart had been a virile man a month ago and now he was as dead as Charlemagne, as was her brother Bobbety. The insistence with which her father, Lord Berrybender, pursued even his most vagrant appetites—which had once seemed the most abysmal selfishness—now, in the light of life’s risk, made more or less good sense. Perhaps it was better to honor one’s appetites while one could. Had Pomp been clearly happy, at ease in his s
oul, Tasmin felt she might have chosen to let him be; but he wasn’t serene, there was sadness in his eyes— so she stopped thinking about it all and kissed him. If Jim Snow beat her for it or killed her for it, so be it! Her kiss, when she first delivered it, was tentative, soft, shy—for all she knew it was Pomp’s first kiss. She kissed his mouth, and then, still soft and shy, kissed his cheeks, his eyelids, his throat just once; and then she kissed his mouth again, a longer kiss this time, if still a soft one. Pomp did not withdraw; she even felt his breath quicken a little, and that slight hastening of breath gave her confidence that she had not misread him or forced on him something he didn’t want. Pomp did want her kiss, and even returned it a little, if awkwardly—it was no polished seducer she was dealing with. She drew back and looked in his eyes, in which she saw a startled, boyish uncertainty—perhaps a little fear even. He looked at her alertly, as if trying to pick up an odor or identify the call of a distant bird.

  “I’ve come to love you—I won’t lie—I can’t help it!” Tasmin said. “I hope you’re glad.”

  She seized his hand and twined her fingers in his, waiting—it seemed that her whole future depended on this soft-souled man who had not yet learned to lust.

  “I’m glad—it’s all new to me,” Pomp said. “I’m not as good a kisser as you.”

  “Don’t be a fool, you’re lovely, you’re fine!” Tasmin burst out—in her relief she spoke so loudly that she quickly looked around to see if anyone from the camp might be close enough to hear.

  Then she kissed Pomp again, longer and with a little more diligence this time, lingering over his mouth. She moved a little closer, locking her arms around him, aligning her body with his; at this Pomp stiffened a little, not the erect stiffening of the aroused male— it seemed merely that he was surprised that anyone would want to be so close to him. She lay her cheek against his breast, listening to him breathe. Just knowing that he wanted her kiss was heaven—she asked nothing more at the moment. She wished she could stand close to Pomp, reaching up now and then for a kiss, all day—and yet even as she enjoyed their light embrace she knew that the larger world and its demands were not far to seek. Her child, Monty, would soon be wanting to nurse—motherhood could not be scanted for long, no matter how keenly she wanted to stay in the quiet glade with Pomp, nuzzling and kissing. She had feared that he might mention Jim—but he hadn’t.

  “Have you never had a woman? I must ask,” Tasmin said, blushing. Pomp merely shook his head—if anything his silent confession made her feel all the more shy. Jim Snow had been no virgin when he came to her, and she herself had been well prepared for the conjugal business of marriage by her vigorous couplings with Master Tobias Stiles, her father’s head groom. She and Jim, of course, had had their share of awkwardness and confusion when they first met, but these had to do with clashing personalities; physically they had been primed for one another, evidence of which was that Monty had been conceived in their first blissful weeks.

  Yet now it was Pomp’s deep physical shyness that she found so delicious—out of respect for it her kisses were delivered softly—she did not want to frighten him.

  “I’ve seen chambermaids do this, in Germany,” Pomp admitted. “The prince had thirty servants and the young maids were always getting in love.”

  “Why, you little spy,” Tasmin said. ‘And what did the sight of all this kissing make you feel?”

  “Sad,” Pomp admitted at once.

  “Sad . . . but it’s merely life going on,” Tasmin told him.

  “Because I thought no one would ever want me, “ Pomp admitted.

  “But you were wrong. Many women will want you, although I don’t intend to let them get past me,” Tasmin informed him.

  Pomp gave a tired shrug. “My mother loved me so much that when she died I tried to die too—I was always springing fevers,” he remembered.

  Tasmin remembered the night when they were walking to her tent by the icy Yellowstone, when Pomp had admitted that he rarely felt lust. His polite neutrality had irritated her then—now, in the warm summer, with her arms locked around him, she thought she understood a little better. She had wanted, even then, with her husband not two hundred yards away, to kiss him, to push him toward life, to plant him solidly into it and not allow him to be tempted by the other place, death, the mystery that enclosed the mother he still yearned for.

  Frightened for a moment, she kissed him again, more deeply this time.

  “Those German girls, those maids and cooks, just weren’t bold enough,” she said. “You’re a shy one, Pomp. You need a shameless English girl like me, who ain’t afraid to grab you.”

  Pomp gave her a shy smile, tempting Tasmin to the longest kiss yet, a kiss that seemed to remove them from the normal sphere of daily activity and lifted them to a place where there was only one another. But it wasn’t merely daily activity that Tasmin wanted to banish—what she wanted was for him to be tempted by her, not by the other place, the place where his mother was. Yet even after this melting kiss, the shadow remained. Happiness, even the extreme happiness she felt when he accepted her kiss, was no barrier to danger. She felt that she would have to be very alert, very forward, so that this young man, her darling, her breath, would not misjudge some dangerous moment because of his old temptation to the shade. Even as she held him and kissed him she wasn’t sure that he was quite won.

  “You must watch yourself from now on,” she told him solemnly. “You mustn’t be careless—you mustn’t get killed. It would break my heart. I fear we’ve many dangers to surmount before we reach Santa Fe.”

  “Yes, and from what I hear, Santa Fe’s as dangerous as any other place,” he said. “Most of the Mexicans would as soon kill us as look at us.”

  “Just don’t get killed—will you promise?” Tasmin asked, holding his cheeks in her hands so he would face her.

  “We mustn’t talk about it—it’s bad luck,” Pomp said. For a moment he looked scared. Just then, in the distance, Tasmin heard Monty wailing. Monty was fascinated by horses—perhaps he had toddled too close to one and been kicked, or else cut himself with a knife someone had carelessly left in his path. Little Onion was the soul of vigilance where the toddlers were concerned, but the little boys had already proven ingenious at injuring themselves, no matter how closely their keepers watched them.

  “Damn it, what’s wrong with that child now?” Tasmin wondered, annoyed at having her idyll interrupted. “I suppose we can’t just stand here kissing forever, although I’d like to. Come with me—I’ll feed the hungry brat.”

  “You go—I want to bury what’s left of Andy” Pomp replied. “Besides, I’d be shy around the boys yet.”

  “You mean you think it shows—that we’re in love?” Tasmin asked.

  “The boys don’t have much to do but gossip and pry,” he reminded her. “I guess most people like to gossip and pry. Back at Prince Paul’s castle the servants did so much gossiping they barely had time to get the meals cooked, or the horses groomed.”

  Tasmin was reluctant to stop holding him—she kissed him one more time.

  “What a nuisance society is—even this society, which is hardly elevated,” she said. “I think we deserve a little more time to ourselves, with no comment encouraged.”

  Pomp smiled.

  “You’re the most beautiful woman in the world,” he told her. “People are going to have something to say about everything you do.”

  “Oh hush—how many women have you seen, that you should pay me such a compliment?” Tasmin retorted, though she blushed. What with the Indian attack, and her nursing, and her mothering—all the general press of life—it had been weeks since she had had a moment in which to consider her looks. On the boat up the Missouri she had amused herself in all the usual ways: redoing her hair, trying on dresses and jewels, looking in the mirror, worrying that the American climate might affect her complexion. She had also had a bit of time to study herself at Pierre Boisdeffre’s trading post. But once on the trek, she had no time fo
r looks— it seemed to her that looks might as well be left out of the equation until they returned to civilization. What she saw the few times she did look was a sunburned, windburned, freckled girl, scratched by weeds and bushes and so pressed by the need to keep her baby well and her husband satisfied that looks hardly seemed worth worrying about. For the moment, energy seemed to matter more, and so far, her energies were still equal to the hundred tasks of the day whether the tasks were motherly, wifely, or miscellaneous. Still, that Pomp considered her the greatest of beauties was very satisfying.

  “I expect there are fine beauties in London or Paris or even New York City that might dispute that comment,” she told him. “Of course, there are few of them out here—I suppose I profit from an absence of rivals.”

  Pomp smiled again—in the distance Monty’s wails had intensified.

  “I’ve not paid many women compliments,” Pomp said. “I’m just now starting—with you.”

  “Oh, damn! What could be ailing that child?” Tasmin complained. “I hope you won’t be long at your tasks— I want you to come back soon.”

  “I expect your sisters will be curious, too,” he reminded her. “They’re always watching, those girls.”

  “Yes, and they’ll be slapped, unless they’re careful!” she declared hotly, before she turned away to see what could be the matter with her sturdy child.

  14

  Tasmin had guessed it: horses!

  TASMIN had guessed it: horses! A large one belonging to William Ashley had stepped on Monty’s toe. Little Onion had already made a poultice for the damaged digit, but Monty still sobbed and choked, great tears rolling down his plump cheeks, while the two other toddlers, Talley and Rabbit, looked on in shocked wonder. Seeing his mother, Monty immediately flung out his arms to be taken, and Tasmin did take him, though of course there was not much to be done for a mashed toe that Little Onion had not already seen to.