Ride the Moon Down

by Terry C. Johnston

  The ghost figure suddenly took shape. “I ain’t see’d your hide for longer’n I can count!”

  “Tullock?”

  “No!” and the tall, rail-thin figure stepped right around the corner of the post, stopping at Scratch’s knee to peer up at the frozen man from the hood of his capote. “It’s Levi, Scratch! Levi Gamble!”

  The two tiny rooms that made up Fort Van Buren were gloomy with the blizzard’s blotting out the sun. Little light but for the four smoky oil lamps, a pair of flickering candle lanterns, along with that stone fireplace where two Indian women and a half-dozen children sat basking in the warmth.

  Gamble shooed them back, clucking in Assiniboine, clearing a path through them as he ushered Waits-by-the-Water from the creaky door and had her settle right in the middle of the hearth where she dragged the crusted buffalo robe from her shoulders as the ice adhering to it began to sweat and dribble to the hardpacked floor. She bent her head, kissing the boy’s face, wiping her tears from his cheeks.

  “I’ll see to this’un, Titus Bass,” Samuel Tullock offered with a kindly growl, kneeling and putting his arms out to accept the young girl as she emerged stiff and frightened from the buffalo robe and elk-hide coat Scratch had clutched around them both.

  “I … I thankee,” Bass whispered, his throat clogged with appreciation—to Gamble, to Tullock. To God. “I truly do.”

  Then he turned back to the door with Levi.

  Outside the two of them stumbled after the animals already drifting before the wind that hurtled the men around like wood chips on a mountain stream. Lunging after the mule’s lead rope, Scratch managed to yank Samantha back toward the cabin.

  The other ponies reluctantly turned when she did, following her as they would a bell-mare, while Gamble hollered and slapped and cajoled them from the rear as they busted through the snowdrifts already accumulating waist high at the corner of the fort. It was there the wind whipped and eddied. There along the south wall they tied the ropes off to iron swivel rings pounded waist high into the unpeeled logs.

  For a long moment Bass stood there, shading his eyes from the wind and frozen snow with a mittened hand, staring at the ice caked on their legs, around their bellies. Howling snow and crossing that damned river—

  “Ain’t nothing more you can do now!” Levi yelled above the deafening wail of the wind as it careened around the corner of the wall with a constant white slash.

  For a moment Bass stood there, looking at all of them, the way the ice crusted their eyes, forelocks, and manes, how wind-scoured ridges of it lay gathered against the packs and even across the broad flanks all the way down to the tail roots.

  Then he said, “If they’re meant to make it—they’ll be here when the storm’s passed.”

  “C’mon,” Gamble urged. “Get on inside with your family.”

  Some of the drifts were already tall enough that the deep snow billowed out the long tails of his coat, his legs busting through until he stood crotch-deep in the shocking cold, snow seeping down inside his breechclout and leggings. They had to kick with their toes, dig with their heels, at the thick, icy crust forming at the foot of the doorway. Eventually the two of them together were able to pry the door back toward them far enough to allow them to slip through sideways, then drag it closed against the square-hewn jamb.

  Both Gamble and Bass sank to the floor, gasping, pummeled by the wind, worn down with the subzero cold, suddenly back inside where a man could hear his own heartbeat again, could hear the crackle of burning wood in that fireplace. Where a man felt relief at finding himself still alive.

  Scratch’s face started to hurt as his breathing began to slow. He dragged off the coyote cap and that long strip of blanket he had tied around his head and over his ears, working at the frozen, crusted knot under his chin. Across the room at the fire, Waits-by-the-Water nursed little Flea in the flickering glow of that fireplace as she talked in low tones with the women. A young half-breed girl sat with Magpie, a pair of dolls between them.

  Titus gazed into his wife’s face—her eyes saying that her faith in him had not been misplaced. As he worried the big antler buttons from their holes and pulled the flaps of his coat aside, his daughter looked over, stood, and started his way.

  “Popo,” she said as clear as she ever had, coming into his arms.

  As Magpie laid her cheek against her father’s chest, Titus sighed. “That’s a second time you’ve took my family in from a winter storm, Levi. How’s a man s’pose to repay you for kindness like that?”

  “I’ll figger something out,” he gasped with a weary smile.

  “We damn near thought you was the wind,” the trader said as he came over to the two of them with a long-necked clay bottle in hand. “Till Levi claimed it weren’t the wind calling my name out there.”

  Bass gazed at Gamble. “I’d found the fort a’ready, by damn, Levi—no sense you coming out in that storm to fetch me.”

  “Like your ass weren’t half-froze to the saddle as it was, Titus Bass,” Gamble said, reaching up to take the bottle from Tullock as the trader squatted between them, shoulder to shoulder. He sniffed, smiled, and tilted his head back as he drank long and slow with eyes closed. Levi licked his lips when he passed the bottle on past the trader to Bass.

  “You’ll like it,” Tullock declared.

  “That there’s good company rum, Sam’l,” Gamble observed. “Not the sort I’m used to drinking up at Union.”

  “It ain’t for the trade,” Tullock explained. “This here what’s made for the factors.”

  “That’s some fine rum, mighty fine,” Scratch said as he wiped the back of his hand across his lips and mustache. “Don’t much care where it come from, Sam’l—long as it warms up that cold man inside me.”

  “If that stuff don’t warm you up, then the nigger inside you is awready dead!” Tullock swore.

  After he took a second slow swallow, Bass handed the bottle to Tullock, licked the droplets on the ends of his mustache, and asked, “What brings you down here this season, Levi?”

  Gamble tore his eyes away and glanced at Tullock. The trader nodded, placed the clay bottle on the floor between Levi and Titus, then stood and moved off toward some crates in the corner as if he were going to busy himself elsewhere.

  When Gamble finally looked back at Bass, Scratch already had a cold rock of something resting at the bottom of his belly.

  “I been down here going on two weeks already, Titus.”

  Scratch was afraid it had nothing to do with good news when he asked, “Little late in the season for you to be bringing trade goods upriver from Fort Union, ain’t it?”

  Tullock still had his back turned when he said, “I ain’t gonna get no trade goods this year.”

  For a long moment he studied Gamble’s face. “S’pose you tell me what you’re doing down here, Levi. You didn’t go and kill nobody, did you? Didn’t go and get yourself in trouble with your booshways?”

  Gamble stared at his knees, then answered. “It don’t have nothing to do with any of that.”

  Suddenly Tullock wheeled and blurted, “They got smallpox on the river! Smallpox.” And as suddenly he turned on his heel and disappeared into the darkness of a small adjoining room.

  Stunned silent, Titus watched the white-faced trader go, then looked at Gamble. “Sm-smallpox?”

  Levi nodded. “Come upriver on the summer boat, St. Peter’s.”

  Bass quickly glanced at Waits, at the boy suckling at his mother’s breast. Staring in turn at those other women and children as the fear climbed out of the pit of him. “Y-you ain’t … ain’t got no smallpox in you—”

  “No,” Levi interrupted, laying a hand on Bass’s forearm a moment. “But I did have me a terrible fight with it.”

  “Fight?”

  With a struggle Gamble rose, moved off a couple of steps, and brought back an oil lamp where a smoky wick burned in rendered bear grease. Bringing the flickering light near his face, Levi knelt in front of Scratch. “Y
ou see what it done to me?”

  Gamble’s face, the shape of that nose and those eyes, they remained unchanged. But the cheeks and the forehead were deeply scarred, pitted with the ravages of the scourge.

  “I ain’t never knowed no one had the pox,” Bass admitted quietly, awed by his fear.

  “Pray God you never do, Titus,” he said, putting the lamp aside and settling back against the wall, sweeping up the clay bottle to throw down another drink.

  Scratch stared through the dim, flickering light provided by the lamps and that fireplace, gazing at the Indian women, at the children. “Your wife, your young’uns—they get it just like you?”

  “Neither of them my wife,” Gamble admitted sullenly. “They be Tullock’s woman and her relations. They was awready here ahead of me when I come in. Don’t you worry: they ain’t got no smallpox. Be down with it awready, but they ain’t—”

  “So wh-where’s your family, Levi—”

  “Gone. All gone.”

  “The pox?”

  Gamble nodded and finally looked at Bass, handing Titus the clay bottle. “Here, drink up with me, ’cause it don’t help no man to drink alone.”

  Wondering what he could say, suddenly made to think of other men like Asa McAfferty and Joe Meek, men who had had their women killed, had their hearts ripped right out of their chests … Scratch took the bottle from him. “No man’s ever gonna have to drink alone when his heart’s been broke.”

  Levi stared at the floor. “Titus, there’s a hole inside me what I don’t think I can fill with all the rum in the world.”

  “How … how’d the pox come up here?”

  “They said one of the men on the boat. He come down with it, and they didn’t turn back because they had just so much time to bring trade goods upriver, had furs to take down to St. Louis. Brung the pox to Fort Clark. The boat brung it on up to Fort Union.”

  “Your woman … how many others?”

  “More’n anyone can count,” Levi whispered like a death knell. “Before fall come, it destroyed the Mandan down at Fort Clark, the Arikaree too. Ain’t any of ’em left we heard of.”

  “The Ree too?” Bass thought on the people of that rattle shaker Asa McAfferty had killed many a winter ago.

  “When the boat reached Fort Union, they quickly unloaded the goods bound upriver for Fort McKenzie, then loaded ’em on the keel and pushed on up the Missouri.”

  Bass shuddered. “You telling me they took the pox into Blackfoot country?”

  Gamble nodded. “Word coming downriver says Culbertson tried to warn them Blackfeets away from Fort McKenzie—but the niggers was suspicious the company was stealing powder and lead from ’em. Powder and lead they needed to make war.”

  “War on the Crow and Flathead. War on the white men,” Bass said quietly. He looked into the thin man’s sallow, gray face—recognized the torment there. “Hard to believe. Your wife … and all your young’uns.”

  Gamble only nodded silently.

  “How’s a man … make sense of that, Levi? Watching your family get took by the pox? Get took by something you can’t fight?”

  “The day after the boat come, a few of us went out to tell the villages in the area not to come in, warning ’em something terrible would happen to ’em if they did. But a few days after we told ’em not to come in to trade, some young bucks rode on in to steal some horses. Halsey—the new booshway up there—he put up a reward for those horses. One of the men who was ’bout to come down sick went out to catch them horse thieves.”

  Titus watched Tullock trudge back into the light, another clay bottle clutched in one hand as the trader grumbled, “’Stead of the pox staying there at the fort, that ignorant bastard give it to the horse thieves—and them young bucks took it back to their village.”

  Bass wagged his head. “But that wasn’t how your woman, your children, got took.”

  “First one to come down with it was Halsey hisself,” Levi declared, courage in his voice. “One of the other booshways claimed he knowed how they could ’noculate everyone else from Halsey’s sores. So we done that, all of us—hunters, interpreters, coopers—all of us … and our families too. A simple thing: make a small cut in our skin and rub a little of Halsey’s pus in that bloody cut. They told us it was gonna keep us all alive.”

  What did you say to a man who had watched his wife and children come down with the raging fever, the boils that erupted into pustules, unable to save even himself from the disease—forced to watch as all those he loved were ripped from him, while he somehow survived.

  Titus asked, “How … how come you … you—”

  “Lived?” Levi finished the question. Then shook his head. “Ain’t none of us can answer that. Maybeso the white man got a stronger constitution, Titus. Most of the whites come down with it lived. And near ever’ one of the Injuns what got the pox … they’re gone.”

  Settling to the floor nearby, a grim-lipped Tullock set that second clay bottle between the three of them.

  “So now the company’s give the pox to the Blackfoot,” Scratch repeated the ominous news as if to make some sense of its unreality. Then suddenly it struck him at the pit of his belly where that cold stone still lay. “What about the Crow?”

  “So far as we know,” the trader said as he leaned back against a bundle of robes, “the pox ain’t come no farther up the Yellowstone.”

  “F-far as you know?”

  Both of them nodded. “None of the Crow been in to trade with me since late summer—’bout the time I heard first rumors of it up at Fort Union. I was on my way north to find out why the boat didn’t come down with my year’s goods.”

  “No Crow?” Scratch echoed, hopeful. “Maybeso they heard and they’re staying away.”

  “Can’t count on that, Titus. Someone’s gotta tell ’em,” Levi advised. “That’s what me and Sam’l been trying to sort through last few days. Where to find ’em—how to tell ’em to stay away.”

  “And someone’s gotta tell ’em to stay away from the Blackfoot,” Scratch declared solemnly. “Can’t go make war on them what’s got the pox.”

  He watched both Tullock and Gamble nod as they glanced at one another.

  Levi turned back to gaze at Bass. “We figger you’re the one, Titus.”

  “The one for what?”

  Gamble sighed. “Go tell the Crow the white man’s brought sure death to the mountains.”

  23

  Those ghastly, unspeakable images Levi had burned into his mind continued to haunt Bass, day and night.

  Scratch even believed he could somehow smell the stench of those dying people, wriggling maggots starting to nibble away at their decaying bodies even before they had taken their last breath.

  Once those who had been inoculated with Jacob Halsey’s illness began to sicken with the maddening fever and die, the fort workers were ordered to remove their families at the first sign of the disease. The half-burned Fort William barely standing a hundred-some yards east of the Fort Union stockade became their sick haven. This post where the Deschamps clan once reigned soon became a den of death.

  Most days, Levi had explained, the winds in that country came from the west, occasionally out of the north. But on those rare days when the wind did not blow at all—or worse yet, the upslope breeze drifted out of the east—the stench of putrefying flesh of those too ill to do anything but lie in their own human excrement mingled with the unbearable reek of decaying bodies.

  This matter of odor, even stench, was something of such immediate vividness to one who lived among these mountains. Outdoors, here beneath this restless sky, in a land where the air always moved, for a man to describe to another the overwhelming power of that decay made it so vivid that Titus believed he truly could smell death’s most gruesome, repulsive retribution in his own nostrils.

  From the ramparts of Fort Union the company employees watched many of their loved ones and friends, watched those friendly Assiniboine stricken with the unbearable fevers, all go stumbli
ng down the barren slope to the boat landing at the Missouri where they plunged themselves into the cold waters, their dulled minds seeking somehow to snuff out the unquenchable fire. Most who plunged into the river simply never returned to the bank. Their constitutions weakened, sapped by the pox’s destructive power, then shocked by the brutal cold of the powerful and capricious spring-fed currents, one after another they vainly flailed at the river as they were swept away to a watery end.

  And that moaning Levi described—the uncanny wails drifting night and day from the blackened walls of Fort William, from those hide lodges where death’s angel touched the Assiniboine one after another—and from the dusty banks of the river where the few went to mourn the many who had crawled to the Missouri to die.

  Through the hours of that winter blizzard, Gamble described the pitiful whimpering of the dying children, the groans of the women no longer able to care for their little ones. How the horror of it floated on that dry summer wind both day and night without ceasing.

  “Like a haunting,” Levi quietly explained.

  An undeniable wraith that would not depart, could not be driven away. Unceasing until its ravenous appetite had consumed all and there were none left to cry out for mercy.

  “What become of ’em?” Titus had asked as winter’s fury howled outside those log walls of Fort Van Buren. “Y-your family.”

  “After more’n a day of quiet—not a sound from anyone or anything—I went to the stockade. Looked in through the window at all that was left of them what went there to die,” Gamble whispered. “There was nothing moving but for the scratch of the mice at the food we’d brung to leave at the walls for the sick’uns.”

  “They … your wife and chirrun … was all took?”

  “Aye, Titus. Some of us, we soaked our kerchiefs in coal oil and tied ’em around our noses, done our best to remember to breathe through our mouths. But still that stink … that stink.”

  “You done what you had to do to bury your own family,” Scratch said barely above a whisper.