The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  “I’ve a thought,” Mary said. “Piet could start a school. Perhaps High Shoulders could go to it, and Little Onion. For that matter, our own sister Kate is of an age to need tutoring.”

  “Surely you will remember that I know mathematics,” Kate avowed. “I believe I shall soon master prime numbers with no help from Piet.”

  “So?” Mary retorted. “Have you Latin? Have you Greek? Have you chemistry? I think it’s abundantly clear that you could profit from Piet’s instruction.”

  Tasmin had no objection to Piet holding some sort of school. The Berrybenders were more or less settled; there was time to be filled. Little Onion had picked up a few English words, but was too shy to try them in public, though she eagerly tried them when alone with Tasmin. Whether the volatile High Shoulders would sit still for these studies Tasmin doubted. Lately he had been going on hunting trips with much success—perhaps if the hunting held up he would not take Buffum and their child and leave. Certainly his attentions had wrought a good change in Buffum. From being pale and spotty, wavery and quavery, she had blossomed into an appealing, robust young woman. She was no longer frail, no longer pompous. Her health improved, and her complexion. Tasmin had finally come to like her sister—to like Mary also, even though the latter still occasionally exhibited traces of the diabolical. With Tasmin sunk in gloom, it was Buffum who instructed the servants—what few were left—and ordered the nursery. Even in the last weeks of her pregnancy she had remained active and competent. Her confidence in her husband was total—High Shoulders, for his part, was gentle with Bess, rarely churlish. He had only a half dozen words of English, and Buffum scarcely more Ute, and yet the two seemed to communicate serenely. They obviously made more sense to one another than Tasmin had ever been able to make with Jim Snow. It was obvious that High Shoulders was unlikely to be wholly comfortable in Santa Fe. He stood out in the Plaza crowds because of his height; he towered over the small Indians of the pueblos and scarcely bothered to conceal his contempt for the Mexican soldiery. Buffum’s fears were clearly justified. Still, since Tasmin had finally come to enjoy her younger sisters, she wanted to keep Buffum there, if possible.

  In her unhappy state, Tasmin scarcely slept. She dozed—rarely did she sleep deeply. She thought that might improve once she was relieved of the discomforts of late pregnancy, but she was wrong. Once the twins were born it became even harder to slip into sleep. Confused dreams pursued her: dreams of Jim and Pomp, of buffalo, of the bear cubs, ships, England. Sometimes, in the clear mornings, she woke furious at her father for having taken them so far from what they knew—even from what they were, English gentle people, not wilderness trekkers. He had brought them into a situation for which they had no training. All the graces that, as young ladies, they had been encouraged to develop were useless to them in the American West, where there was little opportunity for them to display their comeliness and fine deportment to eligible gentlemen who might want them as wives.

  That night Tasmin watched the moon move from one side of her window to the other, as it cast its pale light on the hills. What Buffum contemplated, leaving with her husband, seemed the wildest folly, and yet she didn’t have to cast back in memory very far to recall that she had been prepared to do exactly the same thing when she had fallen in love with Jim Snow. She had been fully determined to fling off Englishness and follow Jim into the wilderness—and had done it even, for several weeks. She had tried to learn to shoot a bow and arrow; she had even, accidentally, skewered a skunk. She had made love in nakedness while, nearby, hundreds of buffalo bulls were roaring in their rut. She would have chanced anything with Jim; but if the recent trek had taught them much, it was that such daring was only romantic folly. The plains, the hills, the West were far stronger than any strength they had to set against it. It had already crushed two of her brothers: Bobbety and the mysterious Seven. It had killed most of their servants: Fraulein Pfretzskaner, Gladwyn, Señor Yanez, Milly, Tim, Master Jeremy Thaw, and good George Aitken, the steamship captain. And of course it had taken Pomp, a man adept in its ways.

  But Tasmin had been willing to chance it, as Buffum was now, mainly on the basis of attraction to a certain man. Attraction could shift and slip; she knew that now. And yet, in this unsettled place, where there were no manners, no society, no pattern, what, except feelings, was there to trust? She who would once have followed Jim Snow anywhere was now not even sure she liked him. Would the attraction she had once gambled on ever return? Would Buffum, if she left, survive the wilderness?

  Tasmin didn’t know, but she was extremely sulky with her father, whose selfishness had landed them in their predicament. She passed him in the halls without a word or a look.

  Lord Berrybender eventually became disquieted by his daughter’s icy attitude. What was the matter with Tasmin? They were housed in a good house, provided with ample comforts. Old pleasures— cards, music, claret—could be resumed. Why couldn’t there be harmony in the household? Why did Tasmin look at him as if she wished he were dead?

  “Tassie’s very short with me,” he told his wife. “Extremely short, one might say. Can’t think why.”

  He began to fumble under her gown. Vicky, half asleep, offered no opposition. She rarely did, when her husband was in a mood of disquiet. Better to accept him, let the the old boy squirt off, as he would in a few moments, usually. Otherwise he’d toss and turn, grumble and groan, half the night.

  6

  . . . the river, flowing quietly, quietly flowing . . .

  CAPTAIN WILLIAM CLARK was at table with Toussaint Charbonneau when the river man Joe Compton brought the sad news. Everyone who worked the river, if they knew what was good for them, hurried to William Clark’s offices when they arrived in Saint Louis. Nobody was hungrier for news of the West than Captain Clark—after all it was he, with his long-dead partner, Captain Lewis, who had opened it. One wall of his office was covered with a huge map of the trans-Mississippi regions; the Captain loved nothing more than augmenting his map, adding a stream here or a pass there, whenever he was brought information that he considered reliable.

  Of course, the Captain’s great trek had occurred some thirty years ago. Hundreds of men— trappers, miners, adventurers, hunters, scientists, soldiers—had gone up the river since then. There had been substantial expeditions. Fewer and fewer areas of doubt remained, where the geography was concerned—those few gaps persisted because certain tribes, the Blackfeet principally, were still too strong to trifle with. The Captain was not satisfied that the course of certain rivers—the Green, for example—was understood sufficiently. The explorer Jedediah Smith, a man possessed of keen geographical intelligence and sufficient curiosity, had meant to pursue the matter of the Green, but had run afoul of some hostile Kiowas on the Cimarron and had been killed some three years back. Progress was certain, but progress was slow.

  The news Joe Compton brought—that Pomp Charbonneau had been executed by a deranged Mexican captain while on the road to Santa Fe— was such as to drive all thought of geography out of the Captain’s mind. Compton, a skinny fellow the ends of whose long mustache curled down toward his shoulders, was startled to see the famous Captain Clark flush and begin to cry.

  “Not Pomp! Surely you’re wrong, man!” he cried. “Why would anyone shoot our fine, friendly Pomp? Why couldn’t someone stop it?”

  “As to that, I couldn’t say,” Joe Compton replied. He had heard that the Captain had been good friends with young Charbonneau—he thought it his duty to report the lad’s demise. But the sight of two men weeping—for old Sharbo, the boy’s father, was soon sobbing too—was more than he bargained for.

  “Just thought you’d like to know, Captain,” he said, and left. He had been a long time on the river and was anxious to get to a tavern and perhaps find a whore. The sight of grown men crying unnerved him considerably. The last time he himself had shed a tear was when an impetuous dentist had pulled three of his teeth at one time—two more, in Compton’s opinion, than had been strictly necessary
.

  “I feared it! I feared it!” Toussaint Charbonneau told his old friend. He wiped his dripping eyes on a sleeve that was none too clean.

  “I always feared that Pomp would go before me—and now it’s happened,” he said.

  Captain Clark made no immediate attempt at consolation, though he did pour the old man a strong brandy, and another for himself. He thought of his own seven children, all of whom he loved dearly—and yet Pomp’s death stung him as deeply as would that of any child of his own loins. All the long way west, from the Mandan villages to the great Pacific and then back again to the Mandans, the lively little Pomp—delivered by Sacagawea not long before the expedition proceeded upriver in the spring of 1805—had been his chief delight. All the men liked Pomp. As soon as he was old enough to walk, his principal aim had been to escape control—principally his mother’s control. Sacagawea was always losing Pomp and having to hunt him—her reprimands were severe, and yet nothing could suppress the little boy’s good spirits for long. William Clark could not but love the child—and had come close to loving the mother as well. He liked to think that Janey, as he called Sacagawea, had a kind of fondness for him too. Why else had she presented him with a dozen weasel tails; they hung in his office still, by his great map. His own clear delight in their little dancing Pomp had won Janey’s trust—won it so thoroughly that, as soon as the little boy was weaned, she brought him to Saint Louis and left him for the Captain to educate. That had been the last time Bill Clark saw his Janey—she died of a putrid fever, in one of Manuel Lisa’s forts, a few years later. The Captain himself had had two good wives—his Julia and now his Harriet—and yet his lively Janey sometimes still appeared in his dreams, chattering at her shambling husband or else chasing her errant child. With Janey gone, and now Pomp also, he felt it could not be long before his own life waned.

  “I named a big tower of rock after your boy, Sharbo,” he said. “It was when we were crossing to the Yellowstone, on our way back. There was a kind of pillar, as I recall—mostly that reddish rock. So I named it Pompey’s Tower and carved my name and put the date. I expect it’s still there—it was the only sign I felt like making, on the whole trip. It was the sight of that pillar that gave me the notion.”

  Toussaint Charbonneau put his head in his hands. He felt that never in his whole life had he done anything right. It seemed to him that this tragedy was the result of his own inconstancy. If only he had not taken a notion to leave the Berry-benders, his boy might still be alive. He himself had been to Santa Fe—he knew how to cozy along the hot-tempered Mexicans. But Pomp was making his first trip—he must somehow have angered whoever was in charge. Compton suggested that the captain had been crazy, killing himself and a soldier, besides Pomp. He felt sure he could have found a way to soothe the infuriated captain, if only he had been there. Now, of course, it was too late.

  “I feared he’d go before me—I always feared it,” he said, several times, until, the brandy bottle empty and his step very unsteady, he stumbled back to the little room where the Charbonneaus stayed when with Captain Clark. His little Hidatsa wife, Coal, kept it neat; their little boy, Rabbit, bright-eyed and quick to smile, was also a delight to Captain Clark. He was much like Pomp, and yet he wasn’t Pomp.

  Not wanting to sleep, heavy in his heart, Captain Clark said a word to his wife and left the house, another bottle of brandy tucked into his coat pocket. He walked a mile or more through the misty night to a place where he could see the river, flowing quietly, quietly flowing, as it passed on south toward the distant sea. A patriot, an American, a soldier, a farmer, the Captain had lived through great times and seen great things. He had seen the plains completely covered with buffalo. He had seen the remains of a great whale, on the beach in Oregon. With his friend and partner, Captain Lewis, he had just managed to bluff the furious Teton Sioux, who might well have made, at the outset, an end to all of them, had a misstep occurred.

  Glory had been theirs, when they returned to the excited young nation—of all Americans only Mr. Jefferson was then more famous. And yet glory had not lasted. Within three years his moody friend Captain Lewis had killed himself in a filthy tavern on the Natchez Trace. The great sweep of land to the west that he and Captain Lewis had crossed and recrossed, measured and studied with all the scientific rigor they could muster had seemed, when they inched across it, so vast that it could never be filled. And yet it would be filled. He and Captain Lewis had not been stopped—no more would other Americans be stopped. The Mexicans would soon enough be swept aside. Pomp had merely been the first to fall, in the war that would surely come. He himself had seen the whole country, from the Palisades of the Hudson to the Columbia River Gorge; in his youth he had been one of the few who could claim such a comprehensive view; but now many could claim it. Immigrants were steadily filtering into the land across the river. And yet only thirty years had passed. What was thirty years? Another thirty and westward-tending Americans would fill all the habitable places, and render some habitable that had not seemed so before.

  Bill Clark was a busy man—he had the myriad needs and activities of the Indians to administer. He was happy in his work, proud that the Indians respected him. And yet, beneath his pride was the sure knowledge that the glory of the native peoples, as he had seen it in its fullness, would soon pass away—much, thanks to smallpox and cholera, had already passed. Little Indian boys no older than Rabbit would live to see the end. The Teton Sioux that might have killed him would be tamed or broken.

  The Captain walked a half mile closer to the Mississippi, close enough that he could hear a fish jump and plop back. He heard the slap of water against a not-too-distant wharf. Far away, somewhere on the Missouri shore, a steamboat tested its horn. It was cloudy—only a weak moon shone through. The Captain took a seat on a stump and pulled out his other bottle of brandy. He considered himself a healthy man. He loved his Harriet. He loved their children. And yet the child who had touched him most, his little dancing Pomp, was now dead in New Mexico. Janey long dead, Pomp just dead—it seemed to Bill Clark that the happiest parts of his life had been with that young mother and that spirited child—neither of them his exactly; they were the family of an old drunk man now sleeping off his grief in a little back room.

  Had it been glory, or had it been folly, the unrelenting American push? Were town and farm better than red men and buffalo? Bill Clark didn’t know, but he could not but feel bittersweet about the changes he himself had helped bring. He was happy, though, to live near the Mississippi—nothing wore away grief but time, and yet the sound and sight of moving water helped. Perhaps old men could not help questioning the life they had lived, as their life approached its end. He would never deny, nor could he forget, the great march—the land, the vast and various land, was so beautiful that there was a kind of glory in it.

  When dawn came William Clark was still sitting on his stump, the brandy bottle empty. He would always miss Pomp Charbonneau. Below him the sunlit river rolled on.

  7

  Petal, her interview ruined . . .

  FROM HER EARLIEST AGE Petal recognized that her mother was the most important person in their world, and their world, for almost two years, was the large household in Santa Fe, where her mother reigned and where she meant to reign herself as soon as she mastered the ways of adults sufficiently to be able to outwit them.

  Petey, her twin, she tolerated—sometimes she was good to Petey and sometimes she was bad, but if he tried to climb into their mother’s lap at a time when Petal wanted sole possession of it, she had no qualms about shoving him off the bed. Her mother was hers: no one else—not Petey and not Monty— was allowed to make a claim, unless, of course, they made it when Petal had other things to do.

  Tasmin, for her part—and indeed, the whole household—had soon to recognize that an unusually strong-willed child had come among them. And not merely strong-willed, either. As Mary Berrybender had once been able to sniff out tubers and edible roots, Petal seemed able to detect the natur
e of feelings—even feelings that the adults themselves had thought were buried deep.

  When Tasmin was carrying the twins—before she knew they were twins—she had suspected that she might be with child by Pomp Charbonneau. Yet before the twins were six months old it was evident to the whole household that they were Jim’s. Their fingers were Jim’s, and their hands, and the way they moved. Petal’s startlingly direct look was identical to Jim’s. The realization that she had not, after all, borne Pomp’s children added, for a few days, a new weight of melancholy to Tasmin’s sadness. And yet it was not, finally, a heavy weight, nor long held. Tasmin knew she had to let the memory of Pomp go, if she were not to become insane. She had several times wished herself dead, but she could not wish herself insane. Seeing Pomp in the twins would have been too much; besides, in her steadier moments, Tasmin acknowledged that it was better that the children have a living father such as Jim—a competent man on whom their lives might yet depend.

  When the twins were brought in to nurse, Tasmin sometimes let the babies loll on her bed for an hour. She cuddled and coddled the boy, Petey, who seemed to need much hugging. Petal sometimes spent her whole visit quietly staring at her mother. There was something a little disquieting about Petal’s capacity for inspection.

  Not long after the neat theft of the blue rooster, Petal one day planted herself in front of Tasmin and looked her mother dead in the eye.

  “Are you happy?” she asked.

  The question was so unexpected that Tasmin flinched—what sort of child was this little girl with the raven curls? No adult in the household would have dared ask Tasmin that question. None would have needed to. They all knew much too clearly that Tasmin was not happy.

  “You tell me,” Petal insisted. “Tell me right now. Are you happy?”