The Berrybender Narratives

by Larry McMurtry

  “George and Geoff have no choice,” Tasmin said. “I need them until Jim brings me my boys.”

  The two men made no protest. “After that you two can go anywhere you please, with my gratitude,” Tasmin told them.

  “I’ll have to go somewhere where I can sell my pictures,” George told her. “And pronto, else I’ll be bankrupt.”

  “Somehow bankruptcy suits you, George,” Buffum joked. “I doubt any of us could stand you if you were rich.”

  Cook was the first member of the company to declare herself resolute for England. Tom Fitzpatrick’s suit, in the end, had been firmly rejected.

  “He’s not young, he’s not handsome, and he has no money at all,” the ever-practical Cook informed them. “I can’t see the point of it, miladies.”

  “I should have thought the point of it might be that he cares for you,” Tasmin said, a little taken aback by Cook’s firm refusal of the man who had loyally helped her across thousands of miles.

  Mary and Piet also opted for Europe.

  “I want my child to be born in a safer country,” Mary told her sisters.

  “You once were almost wholly demonic, Mary,” Tasmin reminded her. “How odd that you should have become the most practical among us.”

  “We may come back,” Piet suggested. “The arachnids attract me—spiders. I may just want to do a study.”

  Buffum refused to hear of England. “Afraid of being disappointed by the cocks?” Tasmin joked.

  Buffum merely chuckled, in her new, sultry way. Vicky chose England. “I suppose I had better go see if there is anything left in Northamptonshire,” she said. “And I do need a new cello.”

  In the evenings Tasmin and Petal, sometimes accompanied by Elf, took long walks on the gray beach, looking at the gray sea. Petal and Elf busied themselves collecting shells.

  “That sea looks too big,” Petal declared. “Why don’t we go back and find my Jim?”

  “He’s not just your Jim—I had a share in this too,” her mother told her. “Besides, our Jim is hard to find.”

  “I still think this sea looks too big,” Petal said. Kate Berrybender was the last family member to choose Europe.

  “It’s my mathematics, you see,” Kate explained. “Piet assures me I shall have much better tutors in Europe—he suggests perhaps Göttingen. I should like to advance my mathematics and I fear a lack of advanced tutors here.”

  But as the ship was loading Kate burst into tears.

  “It’s because I don’t know if I shall ever see Mr. James Snow again,” she sobbed.

  “We will see him, and anyway he’s not yours,” Petal insisted.

  “You ought to smack that impertinent brat,” Kate advised.

  66

  . . . a frustrated trinity . . .

  ON THE VOYAGE TO New Orleans both George and Geoff were desperately seasick. They could seldom drag themselves to the card table. Buffum, wilder and wilder, spent the voyage sequestered with Corporal Dominguin, now merely called Juan. Petal and Elf wandered the ship, fighting like cats and dogs. Petal persuaded a sailor to help her up into the rigging, where she clung to a rope. Tasmin shouted herself hoarse but Petal refused to descend. A team of sailors was finally dispatched to fetch her. One of the sailors was so exhausted by the effort that he fell into the sea.

  Tasmin had begun to feel rather guilty about her shameless use of George Catlin and Father Geoffrin; and yet for her it was an intensely lonely time, her husband far away and with another woman, her sister occupied with a lover, her daughter opposing her every wish. George and Geoff were old and well-trusted companions. When they were well they were able to provoke at least a semblance of gaiety in her—a bit of the old, teasing Tasmin would return. Yet the cruel fact was that both men were in love with her and were not going to get what they wanted. She resolved to send them away when they reached Saint Louis, and yet they reached Saint Louis and she didn’t send them away. They had been welded, through travel and travail, into a frustrated trinity from which none of the three could find the strength to leave. Except on her waspish days, Tasmin was kind to her old friends. They avoided all talk of romance except when the vibrant Buffum—who was actually having a romance—joined the discussion. The better Buffum looked, the more sour the three of them felt.

  Once in Saint Louis, they settled into a large house, lent them by Captain Clark, and settled in to wait. Petal and Elf immediately stuck themselves in a chimney, finally emerging very black. Once off the water, George’s and Geoff ’s health improved; there were card games again, and a semblance of levity. George made a great many sketches of scenes along the docks and the riverbank. Geoff and Tasmin shopped, buying things neither much wanted. Buffum paid a visit to the great Bent brothers warehouse, being run by two younger Bents—Buffum considered the warehouse so very disordered that she could hardly understand how the business continued to operate. Unopposed by the younger Bents, she began to reorganize the inventory and standardize the accounts.

  “She’s become a regular American—practical,” Tasmin said.

  “I know, but don’t criticize her,” George replied. “She’s the only healthy one among us. Geoff and I ought to leave—you ought to make us. You’re not going to accept either of us, yet we can’t stop wanting you.”

  “Can’t you understand, this is a deathwatch!” Tasmin said, flaring up. “I’m waiting for my dead boys. I only hoped for a little help from my friends. You’re both free to go, if that’s your attitude. In fact I wish you would go. Go! Go!”

  But then they made it up. “If only I were a better dancer,” George sighed. “Do you really think it matters that much—how well a man dances?” Tasmin asked.

  “I suspect it does,” George replied. “I rather fear it does.”

  67

  In the full heat of summer . . .

  IN THE FULL HEAT OF SUMMER, Jim came. He stepped off the boat with Rosa, Charles Bent, Greasy Lake, Kit Carson, and the drovers who had brought across a large shipment for the warehouse. Amid the stores, carefully protected, were three tiny bodies—they had brought Randy too. Rosa had purchased blankets from the Bents and had made each boy a tasteful shroud. In a pine coffin were the remains of Little Onion. Jim had felt it wrong to leave her. Charles Bent had marked the shrouds so that Tasmin might know which was which. Jim looked no less gaunt. Rosa was with child, a fact Tasmin noted but did not remark on. She had traveled that road with Jim herself: it was hard to deny comfort to the man, if you liked him.

  Tasmin held tight to Kit for so long that it embarrassed him—she couldn’t help it; she was too flooded with feeling to turn him loose.

  “I did miss you, Kit,” she said finally. “Are you a father yet?”

  For a moment Kit himself looked sad. “We had one but it was born too early—didn’t live,” he said, in a tone of some discouragement. It reminded her that in every life there were disappointments, some as acute as her own.

  Greasy Lake was carrying what appeared to be a rolled-up buffalo skin, rather yellowish.

  “Where’s Mr. Lake going now?” she asked.

  “To Cape Cod—hard to believe, ain’t it?” Charles Bent told her. “Some Comanches killed that yellow buffalo he found. It’s upset him a bunch. He thinks it’s the End of the Indian peoples—I disagree. When we’ve killed all the buffalo—and we will—then it’ll be the End of the Indian peoples.”

  “Why would he want to go to Cape Cod?” Buffum asked.

  “Because he thinks that’s where the sun is born, out of the ocean,” Charles Bent told them. “He’s going there to do some big-time praying.”

  Later, when he saw the huge improvements Buffum had made in his warehouse, he confessed himself much impressed.

  “Do you think I could hire her?” he asked Jim.

  “Buffum? I think she’s rich already,” Jim told him.

  “That don’t mean she couldn’t be richer yet— and help me get richer too,” Charlie told him. “She’s better than Vrain with inventories, and Vr
ain’s no slouch himself.”

  68

  . . . the Missouri’s shores were vague with summer heat.

  THE THREE BOYS were buried on a green hill, beside a little frame church. Little Onion was laid by Monty, her dearest. Captain William Clark read the Twenty-third Psalm, and his wife, Harriet, who had a beautiful voice, sang a bit of Handel. Charles Bent carefully took Tasmin’s order for the head-stones, making sure he had each name right. Tasmin stood by Jim, with Rosa on his other side. Buffum watched over Petal and Elf. George Catlin and Father Geoffrin were ashen. Their wait was over, but what next?

  The funeral party then repaired to Captain Clark’s house. Jim had scarcely spoken to Tasmin—he merely said hello. At the house he busied himself with the Captain’s great map of the West, suggesting certain changes in the region of the Pecos River—things he had noticed on his recent travels. Tasmin was afraid he didn’t mean to speak to her at all—not in punishment, but because talk was not his way. Helpful as Little Onion had been, months might pass with Jim scarcely addressing a word to her. Jim looked haunted still. The violence that had coursed through him when he was among the slavers must have seared something in him, as perhaps the long-ago lightning had when it flung him through the air.

  Tasmin finally decided to corner him—after all, she merely wanted to thank him—nothing more.

  “I do thank you so much for bringing them, Jimmy,” she told him. “It’s an immense comfort to me that our sons are together, in a nice place where we can both visit them.”

  “Do you mean to stay here, then?” he asked.

  “Petal and I are going to England—we’re going, but I don’t know that we’ll stay,” she told him. “We may come back. Petal regards you as her own— and she’s quite right. When we do come back I’ll get word to you through the Bents—or Kit. I’m sure someone can find you.”

  “Charlie wants me to work with Vrain, up on the South Platte,” Jim said. “I may do it—I like the cooler country.”

  “But you won’t mind, if I send word that Petal’s here, will you?”

  “I won’t mind,” Jim said—it was the most she could get him to say.

  She did, though, thank Rosa for the nice shrouds.

  “I hope your child is healthy, when it comes,” she added. She didn’t want Rosa to think she held a mere frailty of the flesh against her.

  “I hope—I don’t want to bury no more little ones,” Rosa said.

  Tasmin began to drink straight brandy—a lot of it. She felt no certainty that she would ever see the man she regarded as her husband again. At some point Buffum came over, an excited look on her face.

  “What’s colored you up—not an impressive new cock, I hope?” Tasmin said.

  “Hush, Tassie—no,” Buffum told her. “Mr. Bent’s just made us rather a grand offer—he thinks we should settle here and start a store. A very big store, with all the finest things from Europe.”

  “What, us aristocrats?” Tasmin asked, astonished. “Sell thimbles?”

  “Oh no, much better than thimbles,” Buffum announced. “The latest frocks from Paris—Geoff can help us pick them out. And furs and muffs and bonnets, and parasols and opera glasses and combs and jewels.”

  Tasmin, quite drunk by then, felt like laughing at the idea. But Buffum was very fired up by the idea, and Father Geoffrin was looking cheerful for the first time in weeks.

  “Mr. Bent says Saint Louis is the coming town,” Buffum went on. “He’ll help us get the capital. He thinks the two of us would be excellent managers. And we’d call it Berrybender’s—if this one works, he thinks we might even put one in Cincinnati.”

  “Why would Charlie Bent think I’m a good manager?” Tasmin wondered.

  “Well, you did manage us, all the way west and back,” Buffum pointed out. “Without your spirit none of us would have made it. Please consider it, at least. It would be so very boring just to go home and be a lady.”

  Tasmin thought that might be true. What would she do in England? Take lovers and quarrel with them? she do in England? Take lovers and quarrel with them? She had almost forgotten how it was to feel happy, as Buffum was happy now; and yet she had once considered herself perfectly happy, in the days before she met Jim Snow.

  “It’s nothing I would have expected, and yet I suppose we might run a store. At least I’d be near Monty and Petey and our Onion. I don’t know that I’ll be able to tolerate being across an ocean from where we put them today.”

  The next morning George Catlin caught a steamer. He was going to Washington to attempt to sell his Indian portfolio to the American nation. Tasmin saw him off. She held him as tightly as she had held Kit Carson the day he arrived.

  “I know I’ve been hard on you, George,” she told him. “I don’t know why I have to be so hard— nor do I know why you tolerate me.”

  “Well, because I love you, dearie,” George said. “Are you really going to London?”

  “For a bit,” Tasmin told him. “I want Petal to see it.”

  “If my pictures don’t sell in Washington you may see me in Picadilly,” George told her. “I’ve heard the English do buy pictures, and the blood-ier the better.”

  Tasmin had expected Father Geoffrin to pester her, once his rival was finally gone; but she soon saw that Geoff had transferred his delicate attentions to the glowing Buffum. The two of them were engrossed in plans for Berrybender’s, their store.

  “You little deserter,” Tasmin told him, the next time she caught him alone.

  Father Geoffrin merely laughed. “Oh, you’ve been so bitchy to me,” he reminded her. “I’m not like humble George Catlin. I don’t turn the other cheek.”

  “If you did turn it I’d slap it,” Tasmin replied. Later, they made up, but it was clear to Tasmin that the newly beautiful Buffum was in the ascendance where Geoff ’s attentions were concerned.

  A week later, having loaded up a great load of goods from the Bent warehouse—all meticulously accounted for by Buffum—Charlie, Kit, Jim, and Rosa got ready for their journey up the river and across the plains.

  Tasmin and Petal came down to the Missouri docks to see them off. While Petal did her best to charm her father out of going, Tasmin gave Kit another tight squeeze.

  “I’m sick of good-byes—but I hope your next baby lives,” she told him. “I’ve a notion you’d make a fine pa.”

  Kit choked up. Tasmin was so changed, sadder, yet kind to him. He could only mumble a goodbye.

  Rosa gave Petal a little white cap made from rabbit skins, much like the one the young Hidatsa girl Coal, wife to Toussaint Charbonneau, had made for Monty when he had been an infant. Tasmin thanked Rosa again for the shrouds—then she suddenly ran out of words. She smiled, Rosa smiled, Tasmin turned away.

  When the boat was ready to leave, Jim put Petal down. Tasmin felt desperate to say something— anything—since it seemed Jim wasn’t going to make even the simplest farewell.

  “I’ll be sure to let the Bents know when we get back,” she told him again.

  “That’ll be fine,” Jim said. He stuck out his hand—startled, Tasmin shook it. Behind him Tasmin saw Rosa put a hand to her mouth, shocked— perhaps even appalled. This was a wife he was leaving! Was that all?

  It was all. Tasmin turned away—hurt, confused, crushed. Jim Snow seemed to her quite the oddest man she had ever known—Rosa by now had probably realized as much herself. Tasmin tried to buck up. It was just his shyness, his deep unease with females, she told herself. And yet she felt not merely lonely: she felt negated, as she had that day when Jim left to go kill the slavers.

  Soon the boat pulled away. West of them the Missouri’s shores were vague with summer heat. Jim Snow stood in the rear, with Kit and Charlie Bent. Petal stared, silent. Tasmin remembered going ashore at dusk that first evening, to inspect the great dun prairies. She remembered her ecstasy at the first sunrise—that had been but a scant four years ago. Then, she had been wholly innocent of the brutalities the distant vistas hid, though only the n
ext day the Osage tried to kill her. And yet, for long, it had seemed a grand adventure, rather than the death march that was to bring her two sons to their new grave in Saint Louis. And not just her sons: Pomp Charbonneau, Little Onion, Fraulein Pfretzskaner, Old Gorska, Signor Claricia and Señor Yanez, Tim and Milly, their big Juppy, and all the others who had fallen to the implacable land.

  Thinking of Jim and Rosa—she could still just glimpse Jim; Petal was hopelessly waving—Tasmin wondered if she could have displaced Rosa and kept Jim, had she cared to throw her whole self into the fight. She knew him; she had her wiles; she might have summoned all the ruthless brilliance of the Berrybenders, pitched everything into the effort. And yet, even assuming that she could still summon that pure force, what would it have accomplished? It was not the sad, kind Mexican woman who kept her husband from her: it was the merciless land, where Rosa was at home and she wasn’t. She could never, it seemed to her, win Jim, her American, from this place that he fit and she didn’t. Rosa could go with him, be useful in the ways that Little Onion had been useful. She could make him fires, cook his prairie meats, mend his buckskins, accept him if he wanted her, doctor little wounds. Tasmin herself might still love the man—it was the land she couldn’t love. Perhaps it was better, though it was terrible, that she lose the man with whom she had had much pleasure, pleasure that now seemed hard won. They had begun their lovemaking far out on the prairie, where the buffalo bulls in hundreds roared in their rut. Naked, those first few times, Tasmin had been convinced that she was now a child of nature—and there was the folly hidden under the glory: she was a daughter of privilege, English privilege, and Jim was a son of necessity—American necessity. Such a combination might thrill, but could it endure?