The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  The Bad Eye, blind from birth, could not see the festers, popping out like pods bursting over his body but he could smell the smell of sickness, the smell of rot. Stalled on his filthy platform, unable to do more than sit up, he sent one of the young girls hurrying to Draga. Near the platform was a big trunk, given him by an important French trader, long ago. In the trunk were his money, his beads, his knives, watches, pistols —all the things the French and English had given him as presents over the years, either in ransom for captives or in hopes of buying his favor. It was a large trunk, but it was full. As he sat on his platform he could hear the groans of dying people, hear the wailing of the grieved and the despairing.

  The Bad Eye did not intend to die with them—he wanted the powerful witch, Draga, to come and cure him. If Draga could protect herself from this evil plague, which caused the hot pods to burst out on his skin, then Draga could help him too. She could make the pods dry up, make his skin grow cool again, not feverish, as it had been since the illness came. If Draga would just cure him she could have what she wanted out of the trunk. He knew her to be a greedy woman— it would be easy enough to bribe her with the treasures in his trunk. Then, once the plague passed, the French and English and Americans would return to the river and make him rich again.

  At first Draga refused to come—she told the girl to tell him she was busy. This delay infuriated the Bad Eye—he knew that if Draga didn’t come and bring him a cure, he would die—it would be too late. He sent the girl back again and this time Draga carne. He didn’t hear her enter but he knew she was there because her presence made the air feel bad.

  “I want you to make a spell and cure me,” the Bad Eye told her. He did not immediately mention the treasures in the trunk.

  Draga only chuckled. She was not a friendly woman—even her chuckle was like a curse.

  “You are the great prophet of the Mandans,” she reminded him. “You are the prophet all the People feared. Make your own spell.”

  “There’s a great trunk there, full of treasure,” the Bad Eye told her—he didn’t want to waste time haggling. “If you cure me, I’ll give you the key and you can have it all—then no one will be as rich as you.”

  “Why would I need your key?” Draga asked. “I brought an axe.”

  The Bad Eye had not considered that possibility. No one of the People would have dared touch his trunk— but Draga was not of the People. She began to chop into the trunk—he could hear the tinkling of his treasures as they spilled out onto the floor.

  “Take it all, but make me a spell,” he offered, but again, Draga laughed her evil laugh.

  “The whites fooled you,” she said. “They knew you were blind so they gave you only the cheapest trinkets. You were a fool to suppose that the whites would make you rich, when they could trick you so easily. And your People were fools to believe you were a prophet. You’re just a blind man who got too fat to walk.”

  “Make me a spell!” the Bad Eye commanded, summoning all his force; but no one answered. He could tell by the feel of the room that Draga was gone.

  In the delirium of his fever the Bad Eye slept a little and dreamed of water. In his dream he was floating on the river, whose ripplings he had heard all his life. As he floated, many tiny fish came and nibbled at his sores. He felt them nipping, and little by little, his sores healed and his skin grew smooth again.

  When he woke the Bad Eye knew that in his dream he had been granted a good prophecy. The water would save him; the little nibbling fish would cure him. The only problem was that he was in the Skull Lodge—he could hear the river as it flowed past, but he needed to be in it, and there was no one strong enough to help him out of the lodge and into the water. All the warriors were dead—the few children and few old people who were alive had not the strength to support his weight. The Bad Eye felt bitterly angry. He was the great prophet of the Mandans, but the tribe had collapsed and there was no one to assist him in the time of his greatest need.

  Then it occurred to the Bad Eye that perhaps there was a chance, after all. He couldn’t walk but it might be that he could crawl. Carefully he rolled off the low ledge where he had held court to tribes and traders for so long and managed to heave himself onto his hands and knees. The effort was enormous; sweat poured off him, stinging sweat that mingled with his sores; but he did manage to crawl a few yards before he had to stop and rest.

  Three times he had to stop, exhausted, before he was out of the Skull Lodge. All around him he smelled death—it seemed there must be hundreds of cawing ravens in the camp. But he could also smell the water, which gave him hope. It seemed not far. If he stopped and rested from time to time, surely he could reach it and be saved by the nibbling fish. It was not an easy crawl. Several times he blundered into corpses, or parts of corpses. Once he became entangled in a tree that had washed ashore. But he kept on, convinced that he would be healed if he could only reach the water and give himself to the little fish, the nibblers. For a time it was day—he felt the sun—but the river was much farther than he had supposed it would be, and there were many obstacles in his way. A large creature that he supposed to be a dead buffalo, putrid now, had to be skirted. Finally, after much pushing, he got around it.

  Near the river he got into some terrible sticky mud. His hands sunk deep into it when he tried to crawl over it. The water was not far—he could hear the song of its flowing, but his strength was almost gone. Night had come; the mud was cold. Soon he began to shake from fever, shivering one minute and burning the next. Every time he rested it became harder and harder to raise himself onto his hands and knees. The mud was a dreadful obstacle; he could only crawl a few yards before collapsing. At one point, on the slick slope, he slid a few feet and almost rolled onto his back. That wouldn’t do: on his back he would be as helpless as a turtle who had been flipped over by a raccoon. Feeling that he was going to be too weak to reach the water, the Bad Eye put all his strength into one last effort, and he did reach water, but it was not the river, it was only a shallow pond near the river’s edge. The coolness of the water made him shiver so violently that he felt death might be shaking him. With his hands he raked the water of the little pond, hoping to touch a fish, a little fish, who might nibble the poison out of him. But the only fish in the pond was a dead one, who lent the water a stagnant smell. The Bad Eye felt keenly disappointed. He was in water, but not the right water. He knew he must try again, and he did try, but this time his weight was greater than his strength. He could barely even hold his face out of the water of the pond, even though the pond was only a few inches deep. He tried to crawl out of the pond but water lapped into his mouth and nose when he failed to lift his head. Frightened and bewildered, he began to sputter. His face had never been in water before— except perhaps long before, in boyhood, when his mother had taken him into the river in hopes that it would cure his blindness. All his life he had heard the sound of the river, and yet now he couldn’t reach it.

  When he lifted his head above the water he could breathe the humid, smelly, fishy air, but when he tired, when his neck could no longer support the lifting of his head, his face fell into the water, causing him to choke and splutter. He thrashed, but he could not advance: then he began to drink, swallowing the filthy water, gulping as fast as he could so that it wouldn’t cover his face when he rested. Perhaps if he swallowed enough he would finally float, as he had floated in his dream.

  It was there, in the misty dawn, still fifty yards from the channel of the great river he had been trying to reach, that the Partezon, riding with Fool’s Bull through the camp of the dead, found the great prophet of the Mandans drowned in a puddle so shallow that the water hardly came above the hocks of the Partezon’s white horse. A frog sat on the drowned man’s head; it leapt into the water with a plop when the two horses came to the edge of the pond.

  “Look, there he is,” the Partezon said, to Fool’s Bull.

  “So what? He’s just a dead man, let’s go,” Fool’s Bull urged.

  B
ut the Partezon was not to be hurried; he sat on his white horse, looking at the swollen corpse of the Bad Eye for what seemed to Fool’s Bull like a long time.

  “He was supposed to be the greatest man in the world,” the Partezon remarked. ‘And now look: frogs jump off his head. He’s just dead, like anybody else.”

  “Yes, dead—like we’ll be in two or three days if we don’t get out of here,” Fool’s Bull remarked bitterly.

  “You’re always in too big a hurry,” the Partezon remarked, but he finally turned his horse and rode downstream.

  20

  Far out on the prairies . . .

  FAR OUT on the prairies, a day or even two days out from the river, the Partezon and Fool’s Bull had begun to come upon dead people: Mandans, Rees, a few Otos who had fled in hopes of saving themselves from the great sickness that seemed to hang over the river. They were now half eaten; they had failed to save themselves. As the two riders came closer to the river they saw more and more dead—so many that Fool’s Bull would have much preferred to turn back, hunt a little more, enjoy the summer prairies. But the Partezon refused to listen—he always refused to listen. The last thing Fool’s Bull would have chosen to do was ride through a country where everyone was dead or dying. It made no sense. This plague had already destroyed the people of the river. Why go where people were dying? The sickness might leave the river and follow them onto the plains, in which case even they would die too.

  Fool’s Bull had said as much to his stubborn companion, but such sensible considerations didn’t interest the Partezon at all. He just kept riding east, ignoring, with his usual rudeness, every sensible thing that Fool’s Bull brought up. Over and over Fool’s Bull vowed to himself that he himself would turn back and leave the Partezon to his folly; but he didn’t turn back.

  Mainly he kept riding east because he didn’t want to give the Partezon a chance to call him a coward, which the Partezon would certainly do if Fool’s Bull pulled out of this strange quest.

  “We’ll die ourselves if we’re not careful,” he said several times. They were on the edge of what had been the largest Mandan village, and yet they saw nothing but abandoned lodges, some of them with dying people laying half inside and half out, too weak to go farther. Old people, young people, warriors, babies: all were dead or almost dead; the few who clung to life looked at them indifferently as they rode past. They were too far gone to struggle.

  “I expect to die someday,” the Partezon remarked. “I don’t know why you think you ought to live forever.”

  “I don’t want to live forever, but I don’t want to die right now, either,” Fool’s Bull argued. “I have two young wives, remember. If you had a few young wives, instead of your cranky old wives, you wouldn’t be so reckless with your life.”

  “I am too old for young wives,” the Partezon argued—it amused him to see what lengths Fool’s Bull would go to avoid certain tasks.

  “Your young wives look bossy to me,” he added. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they wear you out pretty soon.”

  Conversation with the Partezon was rarely satisfactory, mainly because the Partezon scorned what seemed to Fool’s Bull a sensible, simple, reasonable approach to life. Common sense should have told the man that it was foolish to come into a place where all the people were dying of a horrible sickness; and yet, there they were. Only after they had ridden all the way to the river itself, and seen the drowned body of the Mandan prophet, did the Partezon seem satisfied.

  “It’s a poor prophet who can’t even save himself,” the Partezon commented, once they had watered their horses and turned back to the prairie.

  The Partezon had heard about the Bad Eye for many years; he had hoped to see him and perhaps converse with him a little. The Mandans had always seemed to him a gullible people, easily tricked by the white traders. It would have been interesting to see what kind of prophecies the fat prophet would have come out with.

  Fool’s Bull, for his part, was horrified by the state of the dead people he had seen. He was long accustomed to seeing men die in battle and had witnessed many captives being tortured; those deaths had seemed clean, in a way: they were honorable deaths, involving defeat but not shame. The dead in the Mandan camp were different: they were foul deaths, putrefying deaths; and there were so many dead that proper burial was out of the question. He didn’t want to see any more such scenes.

  “I hope the sickness doesn’t follow us,” he said, several times.

  “You should listen when I tell you something,” the Partezon scolded. “The minute I saw those two whites fly up in the air, where only birds are supposed to go, I told you that the time of the People was ending. Now that you’ve seen it with your own eyes, perhaps you’ll pay attention when I tell you something important.”

  “I saw it, but I don’t understand it—how can a whole tribe suddenly die?” Fool’s Bull asked.

  “The whites made the plague, that’s why,” the Partezon answered. “Maybe they dropped it out of the sky. If they can fly, then it must be easy for them to sow plagues. Maybe they fly over at night and drop the poisons into cooking pots or onto blankets. I don’t know how they spread this pox, but I’m sure they do it.”

  “What if they drop some on us?” Fool’s Bull asked, suddenly fearful—the Partezon had voiced an awful thought.

  “Then we’ll die, as the Mandans died,” the Partezon told him. “Only I don’t plan to be as foolish as that fat prophet—I won’t crawl into a puddle and drown.”

  “It’s all very well for you to be calm about dying— you’re old,” Fool’s Bull reminded him. “I’m a young man with two wives to sleep with. I don’t want this pox dropped on me.”

  “What you are is a liar,” the Partezon told him. “We were born in the same summer—they put us in our cradle boards together—it’s nonsense to say I’m old and you’re young.”

  Fool’s Bull realized he had spoken carelessly. He and the Partezon were the same age. And yet he wanted to live a long time and the Partezon seemed indifferent to the prospect of immediate death.

  “Even if the whites can fly, it doesn’t mean the time of the People is over,” he argued.

  “You’re wrong—that’s exactly what it does mean,” the Partezon told him.

  Of course, he himself did not mean to die shamefully, half in and half out of a lodge, as so many of the Mandans had. He had had a full life, killing many enemies, stealing many horses. When it came time for him to pass into the spirit world, he meant to do it in a dignified way. He meant to go alone in Paha Sapa, the sacred Black Hills, and find a cliff high up, where the eagles nested; there he would fast and pray and chant a little until the spirit left him and passed on to the Sky House, the place of spirits, higher than any white man could hope to fly. He had supposed that the life he had always known would last forever, season following season with the old ways unchanged; but that was shallow thinking. Things changed for everything: for the eagles, for the Sioux, for the buffalo.

  Even as he was thinking these thoughts he happened to see some dim brown shapes on the far horizon and at once put his horse into a gallop. The brown shapes were buffalo—the Partezon wanted to kill a few more, while his arm was strong and his heart high. The sight of the buffalo excited Fool’s Bull too—he forgot to complain. Soon the two men who had hung in cradle boards together, many summers before, were racing full out, bows ready, eager to kill a few more buffalo, in the old way, their way, the fearless and noble way of the fighting Sioux.

  21

  It was well past noon . . .

  IT was well past noon when Amboise d’Avigdor finally caught up with his impatient masters, Benjamin Hope-Tipping and Clam de Paty At once, of course, they noticed that he now had only one ear, and jumped—as he had feared they would—to the wrong conclusions.

  “What? You clumsy young fool! You cut off your ear?” Clam exclaimed. ‘And I suppose you used my razor to do it—an instrument far too fine for your clumsy hands.”

  “No, monsieur . .
. no, I didn’t,” Amboise protested, “though I did just borrow your mirror for a few minutes, to inspect my head.”

  “Rot, I’m afraid, Amboise—it’s rot!” Ben Hope-Tipping complained. “The fact is you now have only one ear, and how else could you have lost the one you’re missing?”

  “I don’t know, sir ... I swear I don’t . . . it’s a great embarrassment to me, I assure you,” Amboise pleaded. “The palfreys were recalcitrant, you see, so that I was unable to catch up with you. So I just lay down to rest for a few minutes and when I awoke I was all bloody— quite offensively so—and I am exactly as you see me now, a man with only one ear.”

  “Now, now . . . stop lying, monsieur,” Clam began.

  “Ears do not simply remove themselves as one sleeps. Ears are well attached, I might add. Quite firmly attached, I insist. One can box them sharply, as I am inclined to box yours, and yet they do not fall off.”

  “Well, Clam, accidents happen,” Ben said. He saw no point in berating this shivering boy who had at least arrived with their kit intact. “Never mind about the ear—the thing to do now is shave and get into some decent clothes.”

  “This wasn’t an accident,” Kit told them, looking carefully at Amboise’s head.

  “Not an accident—explain yourself, monsieur?” Clam insisted. “You mean this foolish boy cut off his ear on purpose?”

  “He didn’t cut it off, the Ear Taker cut it off,” Kit said.

  There was silence on the prairies.

  “Excuse me? The Ear Taker? Who is this Ear Taker?” Ben inquired.