The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  Tasmin expected Pomp to be sad—it seemed such a risky undertaking his father was attempting. And yet Pomp was in a perfectly good mood; like his father he seemed, if anything, rather jaunty.

  “But isn’t it risky?” Tasmin asked. “I thought there was smallpox along the river.”

  “Oh, Pa’s bound for Saint Louis, not the Mandans,” Pomp assured her. “He likes a visit with Captain Clark every year or two. He’ll soon be in Osage country, and Pa gets along with the Osage pretty well.”

  “I still think it’s odd,” Tasmin told him. “It seems that among you mountain men the best cure for jaundice or most other ills is just to set out—go to a new place. My Jimmy does it frequently. I don’t think I shall ever get used to it, and yet it seemed to have a tonic effect on your father.”

  “Yes—Pa’s not really a trapper or a fighter,” Pomp told her. “But as long as he can travel the Missouri he seems to get by pretty well.

  “Pa’s probably just lucky,” he added, reflecting. “Of all the men who went on the big trek with Captain Lewis and Captain Clark, only Pa and two or three others are alive. Most of them were better hunters than Pa—he’s never been much of a shot. Most of them were better at handling boats than Pa. All of them were better at tracking. And yet he’s alive and they’re dead.”

  “I hope some of his luck rubbed off on us,” Tasmin said. “I have a feeling we’re going to need it before we get home.”

  38

  Just so, as a boy . . .

  CLAM DE PATY, citizen of France, sat calmly by the fine, cool spring, throwing pebbles into the water as the Berrybender party prepared to leave. His weeping servant, Amboise d’Avigdor, had already stumbled away Just so, as a boy Clam had thrown pebbles into the Seine. Last-minute entreaties were pressed on him, but he maintained a dignified silence. Pomp Charbonneau sat with him a minute; he pointed out that many Indian tribes used these springs, not all of them friendly. Clam might have to fight—he could hardly hope to prevail. Also, bear tracks had been found—an old grizzly evidently came to the springs to water.

  All this information Clam ignored. He had explained that he was finished, destroyed; and that, it seemed to him, made matters clear enough. He had no more to say. If a bear came, so be it. If Indians came, so be it. He was under no obligation to travel endlessly on. The Americans and the English were welcome to mind their own business.

  It happened to be an exceptionally fine day. The mountain men and the Berrybenders were slow to get off, but finally they departed—the noise of the expedition grew faint in the distance. The only sound was the plop of pebbles, as Clam pitched them one by one into the water. A few crickets sounded. Small birds with skinny legs came and dipped their beaks into the greenish pond. After weeks of loud company, the solitude itself was refreshing.

  Clam possessed a fine whetstone—he thought it might be a good time to sharpen his saber, the saber he had used when he fought in the Grande Armée. It was a sword of Toledo steel; he enjoyed keeping its edge keen, attending to it whenever he had the leisure. Now, of course, he had perfect leisure. He had last used his saber in the clash with the Pawnees—the edge of the saber had been dulled when he struck the Pawnee boy’s horse. But the whetstone would soon restore an excellent cutting edge. When he finished his work he whacked at a grasshopper, cutting the creature in two.

  Clam then napped for a bit in the shade of one of the small cottonwood trees. He awoke feeling rather in a poetical mood, so he took out his notebook and a tiny anthology of poetry containing some verses of Voltaire. They seemed to Clam very bad verses—he himself, he felt quite sure, could do just as well. He thought he might compose an ode to the glory of France. When his body was found, as he hoped it would be, the ode would be there in his notebook, so that his public would know that Clam de Paty had died a patriot.

  But poetical composition, once Clam got down to it, proved to be a knotty business. His rhymes wouldn’t come, and he had little confidence in his meters. A few phrases seemed to hold promise, in an airy way. He thought he might change the ode to a roundel, a form at which he had once been pleased to consider himself fluent. He had composed some racy verses once to a lady’s garter—though the lady herself had been no lady; she was a petite actress named Thérèse whose teeth were crooked, causing her to lisp in a manner that, for a time, won the affections of theatergoers; but jaded creatures that they were, the theatergoers soon tired of Thérèse and her lisp. Clam tired of her too, though his little poem to her garter had been much admired by the beau monde at the time. In despair Thérèse took poison, but didn’t die. Her crooked teeth turned black—she was seen on the stage no more. Such was the way of Paris: actors, actresses, journalists like himself, even poets and the writers of satires had but a season; many of them took poison eventually, or flung themselves into the Seine and drowned. And yet that old crab Voltaire had lived to a ripe age, spouting his tedious verses all the while. Clam became a journalist; he placed his faith in facts; he succeeded; he made his name; he interviewed the great; he went to banquets—and it all led inevitably, it seemed, to his present situation. Here he sat, in happy solitude, his Toledo blade well sharpened, sitting by a pool of green water in the American West. He thought he might pass an hour or two versifying about the buffalo, a beast little acclaimed in French verse, so far as he knew. Perhaps a few of the shaggy beasts would come to water, but meanwhile, he took another nap.

  So it went all day. His roundel was unsatisfactory— it would take him a few days, perhaps, to hit his stride as a poet. In the meantime, why not take a walk? He might shoot a rabbit, or some other small beast, for his supper. With luck he might get an antelope; he found the meat most flavorful.

  Unfortunately, Clam saw no antelope, though he strolled in a great circle around the pool with its fine surround of cottonwoods. As he walked he swished around a bit with his saber, even practiced a few lunges. He was headed back toward the trees when he began to have the uneasy feeling that he was perhaps not entirely alone. The plain seemed quite empty, and yet something did seem to be with him—an unseen presence might be drawing near.

  Clam tried to shake himself out of this feeling, which, after all, was absurd. Men imagined things. In his time with the Grande Armée he had been prey to dark imaginings. But why would this feeling come on him now, when he had merely been enjoying a quiet stroll?

  Suddenly, impelled, Clam whirled and saw the bear, a huge bear with a great brown head, not twenty yards behind him. Clam, so shocked that his hair stood up, froze—and the bear froze too. Clam looked at the bear, the bear looked at Clam, and then, very slowly, Clam raised his rifle, thinking that a bullet in the brain would soon settle the hash of this bear. It was only as he was lifting the gun that an awkward fact forced its way into his attention: his rifle was not loaded. When they killed the second palfrey, Clam had been the one to shoot the loyal beast, his own palfrey. And he had forgotten to reload his gun. Now here was this bear, an easy target, only there was no bullet to hit it with.

  Clam knew a moment of intense chagrin. He had always been a disciplined man, and yet he had not had even the elementary discipline to reload his gun—a sign, indeed, that he was finished, just as he had insisted to the company.

  Looking at the bear, Clam decided that he felt perhaps a little less finished than he had the day before. The bear had stopped when Clam stopped. He didn’t seem angry—perhaps he was merely curious. Probably he had never seen a Frenchman in red pants before, a famous journalist. In his confusion Clam allowed himself to believe that the bear knew he was a famous man, a man of reputation: why else was he being spared?

  At once Clam turned and began to walk rapidly toward the spring. He scarcely dared look back, as he walked, but he felt again that a presence was near— when he did look back, he found that the bear was still following him. He was not gaining, but neither was he falling behind. Clam considered speaking sharply to the animal but instead continued to walk on toward the pond. When he reached the water he looked behind
him and saw that the bear was rather closer than he had been—he was no more than ten paces back. Clam decided on a desperate strategy—he walked straight into the pond until the water came to his knees; then he turned and presented his saber to the bear, who had stopped just at the water’s edge. He thrust out the saber and just pricked the bear with it, right on the end of his black nose.

  Startled, the bear sneezed twice, then at once turned and loped away, a response so unexpected that Clam could not quite trust it. All the mountain men had talked to him about the vicious fury of wounded bears. Whole teams of hunters were sometimes put to flight by one enraged grizzly. And yet he had merely pricked the grizzly on the end of his nose and the beast took to his heels. Clam could still see him, far out on the prairie, loping away.

  It was a miracle—a wave of relief swept over Clam, relief so powerful that he could hardly command his limbs. He waded out of the water and abruptly sat down, rather muddying his pants. In his mind’s eye he replayed this very strange event: he felt a presence, he saw the bear, he walked away, the bear followed, he walked into the pond, he pricked the bear, and the bear turned and fled.

  For a few minutes Clam merely sat in the mud, numb with relief. His notebook was in his pocket—it occurred to him that he could write up this extraordinary event, yet, when he went to the small trouble of pulling his notebook out of his pocket, he found that he had no interest at all in writing the adventure up. Clam saw at once that it was far too incredible to be believed. Conquer a grizzly bear by pricking his nose? His editors would guffaw. He would look a fool. The bear had not even snarled, he had put up no fight, there was nothing to write up. If the bear had at least growled viciously, there might have been a possibility to be exploited. A clever journalist could do much with a vicious snarl. But the bear had been a complete disappointment. A story had been lost, even though he himself had been spared.

  Clam’s relief was great, but also confusing. He was weak in the legs; he could barely walk. He would have loved a bit of cognac, something with a bracing bite, but of cognac there was none, and besides, a chill was falling. Last week it had been hot, this week it was cold. Winter was coming. He gathered a few sticks of firewood and built a fire. As the sun set and the moon rose Clam stared into his fire, a blanket over his shoulders. He did not remember sleeping but he must have slept, because when he awoke his fire was out and the new sun just coming up. It was very cold. There was frost on his blanket, ice at the edges of the pond. The plain was so white with frost that it hurt his eyes to look at it. Though he was shivering and hungry, Clam de Paty felt a sudden, surprising surge of happiness. In fact he had made a mistake: he was not finished, after all. He was alive, the sun was rising! The indifference he had felt only the day before—indifference to life, death, starvation, the departure of the company, everything—had left him while he dozed. His encounter with the cowardly bear had changed everything. The bear that might so easily have finished him but chose not to reminded him that there was a value to life— indeed, a very great value. He had been a fool to send his servant away—if he had Amboise he would soon be enjoying a good breakfast, but Amboise, after all, was only a few miles away. The company had been gone less than a day. Without a moment’s hesitation Clam gathered up his kit and set out to catch it. The wagon would leave tracks, Amboise would drop things—the company would be easy to find. Already he could imagine their joy when he reappeared. It would be a lesson for them: never count out a Frenchman, a man who had won medals and gone to banquets, a man who had fought with the Grande Armée, a man well known to the actresses of Paris, some of them far better known than poor little Thérèse, with her black, crooked teeth and her lisp.

  39

  . . . if she was a girl yet, with a fine, springing bosom . . .

  “IT’S as if we’ve found eternity and it’s very flat,” Tasmin said to Father Geoff, as the two of them trudged along, well to the rear of the company. “I don’t even feel that I’m in a place anymore. Places have boundaries or borders, and this goddamn place has neither.”

  “I like to think of eternity as having a constant temperature, though,” Father Geoff replied. “In the great peace of infinity there should be neither hot nor cold—one can’t say that of Nuevo Mexico.”

  “But are we in Nuevo Mexico?” Tasmin asked, looking about her irritably. In the very far distance a cloud hovered over an indistinct horizon—otherwise there was nothing to be seen.

  Tasmin, bored, had taken to nagging Father Geoff unmercifully, as she had once nagged Kit Carson, but she had grown tired of abusing Kit, who would rarely fight back.

  “Do you see a Mexican?” she asked. “Do you see a hut? What announces to your keen intelligence that we’re in Mexico?”

  “Your husband announced it to me—please don’t be so shrill,” Geoff said. “He thinks we may soon be arrested.”

  ’Arrested? But where’s the jail?” Tasmin asked.

  Monty, hanging in a pouch on his mother’s back, began to fret, as he often did when his mother sounded angry. Talley too had been pouched. Lord Berrybender had announced, haughtily, that he didn’t care to have a nursery in his wagon. In his state of enforced sobriety, Lord B. had become shaky and petulant, striking out at anyone who displeased him, though, when firmly opposed, he was apt to blubber helplessly.

  “Your husband is not given to idle apprehensions,” Father Geoff told Tasmin. “If he says we’re to be arrested, then very likely we will be.”

  The weather had turned abruptly from hot to cold. Twice a wind had come singing out of the north, a wind so chill that the women could only huddle in their blankets. Once it drizzled all day and then froze—a sheet of ice covered the prairies, which made for painful walking. Twice it snowed; the women crowded all night around inadequate fires, their fronts warm and their backs freezing. Then the sun returned, melted the snows, and turned the prairies atrickle, so that the women had to flounder through mud and slush.

  So unvarying were the prairies themselves that Tasmin had stopped believing that there could ever be an end in sight. Santa Fe, the rich city they were traveling to, came to seem as chimerical as Camelot. Would they ever get there? The mountain men assured her that they would, but the distance remaining to be traveled seemed hardly to shrink. It seemed to Tasmin that it might always be as it was at present, days of walking across endless space, a baby hanging on her back and another growing in her body. The journey they were making seemed almost insanely illogical, based on nothing at all except her father’s inclination to pursue blood sports. When pressed to put a time for their arrival in Santa Fe, the men were so vague in their reckonings that Tasmin wanted to slap them.

  “Six weeks, I’d say, if the Arkansas ain’t in flood,” Tom Fitzpatrick guessed—Jim and Pomp thought they might be there a week or two sooner, if Indians didn’t impede them.

  “Ox travel is slow travel,” Jim reminded her—the statement was so obvious that Tasmin wanted to kick him.

  “I know ox travel is slow travel, Jim—I indulge in it every day” Tasmin reminded him. “I just wanted to know how much farther it is to Santa Fe.”

  “Getting to Santa Fe always takes longer than folks think it will,” he told her.

  “I just want to get there before I have this baby” she said. “Four walls and a roof are a great comfort when one is giving birth.”

  “We’ll be there way before then,” Jim assured her. “You’ve got nearly half a year before that baby comes.”

  “I know—it seems that we’ve a great deal of time,” Tasmin agreed. ‘And yet one day to everyone’s annoyance, Vicky and Buffum and I will be screeching and screaming as we deliver up our bloody brats. I’d just rather not be outside when I’m doing the screeching.”

  She realized that such a comment could mean little to Jim Snow, who had spent his entire life outdoors. He could not be in a room—even a large room—without becoming restless. Due to lack of opportunity, indoor life was beyond Jim Snow.

  “If we don’t make S
anta Fe we’ll at least make the Bents,” Jim assured her—the Bents being a company of several brothers who were said to be building an immense trading post near the Arkansas River. Nightly the mountain men allowed themselves to speculate about all the money they could make if the Bent’s big trading venture succeeded. Some were of the opinion that the Bents had paid the Mexican authorities a lavish bribe in order to secure their concession.

  “What I like about Santa Fe are the seftoritas,” Jim Bridger announced one night. “It’s been a dern long while since I’ve danced with a seftorita—or done anything else with one.”

  “Bravo, Jim!” Tasmin said. ‘And while you’re dancing with your dusky seftoritas, perhaps we ladies can find some handsome caballeros to dance with. There are handsome caballeros in this great capital, aren’t there, Kit?”

  Kit felt embarrassed—Tasmin’s unexpected questions always left him feeling tongue-tied.

  “Oh, the Mexicans are always dancing,” Kit said vaguely.

  “Well, and what about these Bents?” Tasmin asked. ‘Any dancing to be had at their establishment?”

  “St. Vrain, maybe,” Tom Fitzpatrick remarked. “He’s their partner—flatters all the Mexican ladies. I expect St. Vrain can dance.”

  “If you’re such a dancer, how come you’ve never asked me for a turn?”

  “Well, we ain’t had a fiddle, I suppose that’s why,” he said.

  “I suppose a cello is not quite the same,” Tasmin admitted. Through thick and thin, despite many abandoned goods, Vicky Kennet had insisted that they must make space for her cello, and they had.