The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  She forced him back until he lay full length on the grass—then she bent over and pressed a kiss on him that lasted and lasted, as their kisses had that morning. She was gentle at first but not girlish. Soon she kissed his eyelids, his throat and chest, nipped more than once at his lower lip and his neck. Pomp quivered but he didn’t draw away. Tasmin, who had daydreamed about many delicious preliminaries that might be drawn out for days or weeks, as Pomp decreed, suddenly felt such a rush of desire that she felt herself go damp and dewy; she at once abandoned the notion of exquisite preliminaries. Keeping him pinned beneath her, her avid mouth on his, she undid his trousers and grasped his shaft. Pomp seemed to shiver, but didn’t protest.

  “Just let me do what I want,” she whispered. “Just let me.”

  She put her mouth back on his, so as not to let him spoil things by some clumsy word. Dewy as she was, she had only to flex a few times to settle Pomp just where she had been wanting to settle him. Pomp lay very still; he didn’t move but Tasmin moved. Her breath grew hoarse and hot against his cheeks—in only a minute, it seemed, his seed surged, and then seeped and seeped and seeped as, for as long as possible, Tasmin held him inside her, calming, her warm cheek against his. They lay thus for several minutes, neither of them speaking, Tasmin stroking his brow, touching his hair, now and then dipping her mouth for a quick kiss. Little by little the worm of his manhood grew smaller, until it finally slipped out.

  “Now then, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she asked. Pleasure was still in her voice, just a little hoarseness.

  “It’s only happened to me in dreams,” Pomp admitted, speaking softly. He seemed to be sinking into an even deeper quiet.

  “Well, I hope you liked it as much as you liked the dreams,” she said. “I assume you did like them.”

  “I liked this more, because I like you,” Pomp said. “Only I feel I lost something, somehow.”

  He didn’t say it critically—from the gentle way he held her it was clear enough that he was pleased—and he had spoken honestly, rather than romantically. He felt he had lost something; he admitted it.

  “You did lose something, but it can easily be replenished,” Tasmin assured him. “In fact it’s replenishing, even now. But you’re mine now—I suppose you could justly say you’d lost your freedom.”

  She leaned close but could not really see his eyes.

  “If you’re just going to accuse me of stripping away your innocence, then I’m likely to box your ears,” she threatened.

  “I wasn’t innocent,” Pomp insisted. “I saw too much to be innocent, even before my mother died.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tasmin said, wondering why they were talking at all. Very likely, with the right kiss or caress, they could be making love again.

  “Ma said I was born by sorrow’s river,” he said. “I seem to carry a weight. It keeps me from being quite like other men.”

  “Stop it! Don’t talk so!” she demanded. “What we just did made me quite as happy as I’ve ever been. I don’t want my happiness to slip away, and it will if you continue to talk so sadly.”

  Pomp said no more. He accepted Tasmin’s kisses and kissed back, gently. Tasmin expected that he would begin to touch her—her breasts, perhaps, or the seeping place below, but he didn’t. She told herself she had better not rush him. Once he learned more about passion he would surely be more active. She must be patient with him, a hard resolve, because she was by nature impatient. Now that she had had a little of what she wanted, she saw no reason not to have more—yet she knew it might be best to accept his shyness, for a time. She tried to brush away the shadow that dappled her happiness. What if Geoff was right? What if Pomp valued calm more than passion? What if in his depths he just wasn’t sensual? His body had responded to her, but even then, his soul he seemed to keep for himself. He was a man without strategies. Even Jim Snow, no very refined seducer, had more guile and much more temperament. She continued to hold Pomp and kiss him but she couldn’t quite get his sad words out of her mind. He had been born by sorrow’s river—he seemed to carry a weight other men needn’t carry. What could these words mean? She hated all such reflections.

  They lay together in the darkness for almost an hour, until finally the evening chill drove them back to the campfire. The mountain men, playing cards and drinking, took no notice. In order to stoke her resolution, Tasmin flew at once into a frenzy of packing—she charged into the mountain men and demanded that they put down their cards and see to the wagons and animals. She wanted a dawn departure.

  Tasmin had finally had enough of the Valley of the Chickens. She was up most of the night, packing and hectoring, and might have actually had the party on the move not long after dawn had not Vicky Kennet insisted that her nuptials with Lord Berrybender be performed before they left.

  “I rather fear she means it—damned stubborn on that point,” Lord B. was forced to admit.

  “Oh damn! Now?” Tasmin protested, but Venetia Kennet held her ground—she refused even to come out of her tent, insisting that they become man and wife before risking the prairies.

  “All right, be quick, then—Geoff, get to it! Marry them!” Tasmin demanded.

  “But I’ve hardly had my coffee,” Father Geoffrin protested; but Tasmin was ablaze with impatience. Father Geoff managed to find a prayer book, lined up bride, groom, and attendants, and proceeded to intone what seemed to Tasmin like rather dubious Latin, while the mountain men listened in wonder. The minute he was done the bride and groom exchanged a lusty kiss, the mountain men cheered again, and the company slowly climbed into wagons or mounted horses and proceeded out of the Valley of the Chickens. Old Hugh Glass traveled on foot, the bear cub, Abby trailing behind him.

  As the bright sun shone on the long plain ahead and struck gold glints off the snow on the high peaks to the north, Tasmin felt her spirit suddenly soar. They were moving again, they were on their trip in this wide, sunny land. They had been too long stopped, all crowded up together. No wonder she had become moody; no wonder she had worried too much about what Jim or Pomp might feel. Now at least they were on the go: travelers, adventurers! What a fine life it was!

  Vicky Kennet, the new bride, sat beside Tasmin on the wagon seat. Lord Berrybender, much excited to be loose amid the game again, had converted their old cart into a kind of fiacre; he raced ahead with Senor Yanez and Signor Claricia, provided with some new guns he had purchased from William Ashley, eager to shoot whatever beasts presented themselves.

  “Well, Vic, I guess you’re my stepmother now,” Tasmin remarked. “I hope you’ll attempt to give me motherly advice when I need it, which is apt to be often.”

  “I will, but it’s not likely you’ll take it,” Vicky said, with a smile.

  ’At any rate, congratulations—I thought you had about given up on the old boy” Tasmin offered.

  “I did give up on him, several times,” Vicky admitted. “But Drum was killed and I came to find that I rather missed your father, odd as that must sound.”

  “Pretty odd, yes,” Tasmin said.

  Vicky Kennet didn’t feel especially victorious. Mainly she felt tired. The struggle with Lord Berrybender had filled some years of her life, and would no doubt go on being a struggle, and yet the sun was bright and the sky above them vast and blue.

  “I expect we’re suited enough, your father and I,” she remarked to Tasmin. “He knows my ways and I know his.”

  Tasmin wondered if she would ever be lucky enough to say such a thing. Would she ever know Jim’s ways—or he hers? Would she ever know Pomp’s ways? Did he even want to know hers?

  Before she could slip into a funk again from pondering the imponderables of human love, Monty, too unsteady in the bouncing rig to stand up, crawled to his mother, pulled himself up by grasping her long black hair, and began to make hungry sounds. As if on cue, Vicky’s little boy did the same.

  Tasmin handed Vicky the reins and pulled Monty into her lap.

  “If you drive wh
ile I feed mine, I’ll drive while you feed yours,” she offered.

  “Oh Talley won’t wait,” Vicky told her. “He’s as greedy as his father. Perhaps Little Onion can drive— then we can nurse our brats together.”

  Little Onion, stunned at first to be offered such a huge responsibility, nonetheless accepted the reins and was driving the team as if she had been doing it all her life. She drove, the two mothers nursed, and the Valley of the Chickens was soon just a blue shadow, far behind them.

  18

  . . . two wolves, huge and insolent. . .

  JIM SNOW had just killed an elk—more meat than he needed, but the only game he had seen larger than a prairie dog for three days. A week earlier he had been among innumerable buffalo, but the great herds were being pressed by so many Indian bands—Sioux mainly—that he had thought it wiser to leave the buffalo prairies and drift back to areas where there was too little game to attract many hunters.

  It was an old elk—it had been trailed by two wolves, who were waiting for it to weaken sufficiently that they could attack. The elk’s flesh would be barely edible, but prairie dog made poor eating too, and Jim had to eat. The two wolves, huge and insolent, only retreated a few hundred yards at the sound of his shot. They expected to get their share of the elk, and no doubt would.

  Jim was just sharpening his knife, preparatory to cutting up this old, tough animal, when he thought he heard a shout—it seemed he could just see a moving speck, far to the east. The speck might be a human or a solitary buffalo—he couldn’t yet tell.

  By the time Jim was half done with his butchering, the speck had grown and divided: two humans were approaching on foot from the east. It seemed likely that they were friendly, since they were approaching him directly, making no attempt to conceal themselves. Jim continued his work; he felt little enthusiasm for jerking meat that was almost too tough to chew, but nothing better offered, and a man who was too picky about food could easily starve.

  Jim had not seen a soul in six days, as he scouted to the south, enjoying the calm of the great empty country. Very likely the Berrybender party would have left the Valley of the Chickens by then—they would be expecting him to rejoin them soon and lead them to Santa Fe. With Pomp and Kit and Jim Bridger and the others with the party, Jim saw little reason to worry; they were all competent guides.

  Then he stood up in surprise: one of the two advancing specks was clearly Maelgwyn Evans, a trapper and friend he had last seen in his camp on the Knife River. The larger speck was probably one of Maelgwyn’s sizable wives. But why would Maelgwyn Evans and a large wife be hoofing it across these dun prairies, where there were no beaver to trap?

  “Ho, Jimmy,” Maelgwyn said, in his lilting Welsh voice, when the couple came in hailing range.

  “Hello yourself—this is a fine surprise,” Jim said. “I didn’t know you was much of a hand for taking long walks like this.”

  “Well, no, I ain’t that much of a walker, and neither is my little bride here, Corn Tassel, who was a maiden of the Chippewas. She’s the one gave you that good rubbing with bear grease, when you visited me on the Knife.”

  “I remember Corn Tassel, but you used to brag that you had six hundred pounds of wives,” Jim reminded him. “Corn Tassel’s no fawn, but she don’t weigh six hundred pounds, either.”

  “She don’t for a fact,” Maelgwyn agreed. “I guess you ain’t been to the Missouri lately, Jim. So you don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  ’About the smallpox,” Maelgwyn told him. “Water don’t burn, but the pox swept up that river like a blaze. I doubt there’s thirty Rees left, maybe forty Mandans, and not more than a dozen Otos.”

  Maelgwyn sighed.

  “That’s it, Jimmy,” he went on. “There’s been a raging plague—I expect it’s in Canada by now. Bodies everywhere in the villages—wolves feasting. The living too weak to bury the dead. I lost four hundred pounds of wives in less than a week—that’s how fast people went.”

  Jim Snow could hardly credit what he was being told. The Rees and the Mandans had been populous tribes, strong enough to hold their positions as river keepers since long before Lewis and Clark made their trip. Barely a decade earlier, the Rees had turned back William Ashley and a boatload of well-armed mountain men, and the Mandans had been courted by traders from as far away as the Columbia River or the Hudson.

  “Only thirty Rees?” he said, shocked—it was almost too much to believe.

  “If there’s that many,” Maelgwyn said. “They may have all died by now. People couldn’t die much quicker if you shot them. I seen six dead in a bull boat—I guess they meant to paddle off, but they waited too long to escape.”

  Jim could hardly get his mind to accept it: as long as he could remember, the Rees and the Mandans had been the powers of the North. If they were gone, what would it mean?

  “But you didn’t live on the river,” he said to Maelgwyn. “How’d it happen to hit you?”

  “My smallest wife’s sister came to visit, just as the pox hit. She brought it. Most of the Missouri valley’s just a land of ghosts now, which is why me and Corn Tassel are moving west.”

  Jim was still absorbing the shock of what he had been told: the Rees gone, the Otos, the Mandans— suddenly gone. It was hard to accept.

  “They say birds carry it—I don’t know if that’s true,” Maelgwyn went on. “I just thought I’d better leave while I still have one good wife. I couldn’t do without my Tassel. She’s spoiled me, with her good rubs.”

  The two large, insolent wolves still sat in the distance, watching.

  “This is an old elk,” Jim mentioned. “I’ve got what I need. You’re welcome to the rest. Not much game to the west that I can find.”

  “Tassel and me are bound for the Russian River,” Maelgwyn told him. “Then we may go north. I’ve an urge to learn to hunt the seal.”

  The sun was low, so the old friends decided to make camp together. There was little wood to be found, but Corn Tassel soon gathered enough buffalo chips to make a fire.

  “It’s good exercise for the jaws—that’s the best I can say for your elk,” Maelgwyn remarked, as they were eating.

  “I thought you was married, Jimmy—what became of that brash English wife, and the old wild lord?” he asked.

  “They’ve been with Ashley, at the big rendezvous,” Jim said. “I imagine they’re on the move by now. Kit and I decided to do a little scouting.”

  Maelgwyn made a show of looking around.

  “I don’t seem to see Kit,” he said. “If he’s playing hide-and-seek, I hope he won’t jump out and scare me too bad.”

  “He won’t—I left him with the balloon fellows,” Jim told him. “Heard about the balloon?”

  “Oh, everybody’s been talking about that balloon,” Maelgwyn told him. “What’s your news?”

  “Some cranes hit it while those two fellows were flying over the Platte. The two men didn’t know their way around, so I left Kit to look after them.”

  “Bill Ashley’s sold the skins of a big number of beavers,” Maelgwyn mused. “You’d think he’d be rich enough by now that he’d get out of the country before somebody lifts his hair.”

  “He says he’s quitting,” Jim mentioned.

  “If Ashley’s quitting, then that’s about it, for beaver,” Maelgwyn remarked. “I might do better to try seals—seals might get popular, for all we know.”

  ’Any news of the Partezon?” Jim asked.

  Maelgwyn, yawning, shook his head.

  � day of walking will tire a man out,” he said.

  He lay down with his large wife and was soon snoring. Jim liked Maelgwyn but didn’t care for the snoring. Most of the mountain men snored noisily, another reason he liked to roam around by himself from time to time.

  Usually Jim slept easily—even Maelgwyn’s snoring would not have been enough to keep him awake. But he didn’t sleep well that night—the story of the smallpox plague unsettled him. What if birds did carry it?
If it could wipe out whole villages of Mandans and Rees, it could kill mountain men too, not to mention English travelers. What if it had struck the company? Tasmin and Monty might already be dead. He had traveled away from them happily enough—not a worry had crossed his mind—but suddenly a big worry came. While he was roaming around, enjoying the prairie light, Tasmin and Monty might be suffering. Maelgwyn had lost four wives, all healthy women, within a week.

  The more Jim thought about the matter, the more anxious he became. He had scouted enough—most of the Indians were to the east, with the buffalo, getting their meat. Progress to the south should not be too difficult. Maelgwyn’s story of whole villages of unburied bodies convinced him that a worse threat was loose in the land.

  Jim didn’t want to wait. In a minute he had Joe Walker’s little mare saddled and ready. Corn Tassel, large and silent, watched alertly. When Jim was ready to leave he put a hand on Maelgwyn’s shoulder—the trapper’s eyes at once came open.

  “I think I better get back to my family,” he said. “That news about the pox is bad.”

  “Sure is—be careful then, Jimmy,” Maelgwyn told him. “If you ever get over by the Russian River, look me up.”

  By the time Jim mounted, Maelgwyn Evans was already snoring again.

  19

  The cawing of the ravens—hundreds of ravens . . .

  THE cawing of the ravens—hundreds of ravens— made the Bad Eye realize that the People were dying. He could not see the festers breaking out on his face and on the vast bulk of his body but he could feel them: he called for Draga. He had become too large to move upright by himself—two stout young braves helped him out of the Skull Lodge when he needed to drop his excrement. But both these young braves were now dead, along with most of the Mandans, Hidatsas, Gros Ventres. Some had fled, but others lay around the village, rotting—wolves and dogs, coyotes and ravens pulled or pecked at them. A few young girls were left alive but they were not strong enough to support the Bad Eye’s weight. One of the girls told him that the witch, Draga, was not infected—she still lived in her earth lodge outside the village.