The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, Crazy Horse, Rain-in-the-Face—they was all of this country and smelling a big storm they’d know that they wouldn’t be pursued till late in the spring. So it was a good time to get out of the wind and screw and tell lies and make war again when the weather was better.

  You couldn’t see ten feet in the swirling snow—which meant the Injuns couldn’t find us either, probably, but Carrington was running scared and he quadrupled the guard and swore any man he caught asleep or not looking out to the wind would be court-martialed summarily and shot.

  Next he come to me demanding that I ride hell for leather for reinforcements. Now, no one but a dead fool would try to ride in this goddamned blizzard and the reinforcements couldn’t ride neither and I was damned if I was going to perish of chilblains because Carrington had his head up his butt. Which is what I told him and he screamed about insolence and insubordination (my only real talents, the years would prove) and made threats. I coldly told him I wasn’t a hero, and I warn’t going to collect troops that warn’t needed for an attack that would never come till late in the spring.

  Finally I resigned my job of scout and told the jackass to go piss up a flagpole and climb the ice.

  Carrington had now got to the whining stage and he leaked streams full of sorrow over the injustices of life. All he had to do to forego Big Piney Creek was throw Fetterman in the guardhouse on charges of imbecility and forget to feed him. On he went dragging in a lot of horrible English poets like Tennyson and I’d had enough vileness for the week and I thought I’d go find some whiskey.

  There was a few wagons parked off on the parade ground and one of them had a cheery yeller light in it and when I got close I could hear banjo music and when I got closer yet I could hear some drunk singing along with Klaas, or at least that might have been the idea that they had.

  I scratched on the tenting canvas the wagon was covered with and in a bit Klaas’s round head poked out, still with the glasses upside down on his nose.

  “The whores iss all gonk,” says Klaas.

  “I don’t want a whore, you stupid Dutch bastard,” I says. “I need some whiskey.”

  “Skelly?”

  “And not the goddamn Injun whiskey.” Case my specifications here mystify you, all whiskey was dubious, but safer than the Injun whiskey, the recipe for which was one barrel of water, six gallons of alcohol, four plugs of tobacco for flavor, half a pound of cayenne for punch, and four ounces of strychnine for the blind staggers and howling horrors. Man had a skinful of Injun whiskey you could shoot him in the brain and heart and he wouldn’t die till he sobered up.

  Klaas had one-star, four-star, and eight-star whiskey, I combed out of the stream of Dutchy English flowing out from under his moustaches, and priced accordingly. Also canned and pickled delicacies such as buffalo tongues, oysters, turkey gizzards, and lobster thermidor. Hearing Klaas tryin’ to pronounce thermidor was sort of like setting a paralytic on fire to see if he could dance. I got all pitying and told him to shut up, I’d just read the labels. Ortolans in vinaigrette. Lichi nuts.

  Lord, how that man could fart. With them tight, green-and-white-checked pants I wondered why he didn’t blow his boots off. He took my money and climbed back up in his wagon. I stood there, while he motioned me to come on in.

  The wagon bed would have been crowded with just Klaas in it, and by the light of a hurricane lamp I could see someone slumped against the wagon box, in the back. Mulebreath Mucklebreech, by God, and to look upon him was to know why the South lost the War. Klaas gathered the wagon cover around him to keep the snow out. He looked like the dolt in the circus you try to concuss with the wooden balls.

  “Injuns nearf,” says Klaas. “I hafif nice cabink but can’t go.”

  I explained in slow English that there warn’t an Injun within fifty miles of us and tomorrow they’d be farther away yet. So we hitched up his team and struggled out the gates—the drifts wasn’t too bad yet—and went to Klaas’s cabin. He had a big canvas tent for the stock.

  We hauled Mulebreath in and stacked him gently in a corner.

  I settled in there for four days, and in time Klaas’s farts diminished their toxic effects. The goddamn banjo and the high tenor mule skinner was another matter. The music Klaas made with that goddamned banjo was a primitive Dutch backwoods sort called “blugerss,” lamenting foreclosures and the deaths of especially worthy and virtuous hogs. Klaas’s farts was a lot more musical.

  Time to time I thought of just shooting that Dutchy gasbag and riding into the storm, but on reflection I thought the holes in him would release enough gas to blow us all and the fort clean off the map and to Ohio, so I let the matter drop.

  Mulebreath spent his time drinkin’ one-star whiskey and explainin’ to me how us damn Yankees had actually lost and I got dragged through all the battles Mulebreath had enjoyed. I kept remarkin’ that a diet of catfish, grits, and swamp greens shrank the human brain to the size most birds carry. This happy conversation carried on until the rasp of the snow against the wagon cover slowed and in the middle of the night I stepped out and looked up and smiled at the bright stars in the sky.

  I give a map of where I’d be to Klaas and Mulebreath and they said they’d see my sorry Yankee face soon.

  There was still a lot of wind in the morning, and I was most grateful for it as it would over time scour Klaas’s vapors off my clothes.

  Eats-Men-Whole was at the end of the road and I was free in all respects. Washakie would be glad to see me and I him—ain’t often anyone gets a chance to know a giant.

  It was cold and snowy but I owned the world now, all of it I could see.

  I was a most happy young feller all the way home.

  12

  I CAME BACK TO find Eats-Men-Whole in her grave and our child dead in her belly. I stood by her bier while the wind took her spirit. I felt like there was a hot spear in my chest and I wept tears and wished they were blood. I tried to will my heart to stop but it would not. My life was in that bundle on that platform. Something in me would be maimed forever. Rage swelled up in me, I tasted copper in my mouth, I wanted to strangle every god in heaven.

  I tied the yellow silk kerchief to one of the poles. My father-in-law, Washakie, had refused to answer my many questions until I had come to wish her a safe journey to the Star Trail.

  We went back toward the camp, walking slowly, our arms across each other’s shoulders.

  “It was the sick belly, the cholera,” said Washakie. “A wagon party came through and the disease after them.”

  “Who were they?” I screamed, stepping away from him. They were all dead. I would find them.

  “I don’t think they brought the cholera as a gift,” he said, “and the whites don’t like to bury their children and women and fathers. There are many graves up the trail toward Salt Lake. If you want to kill, go kill Crows and Blackfeet. The Blackfeet killed my first wife and two little boys, killed them very badly. I was away, trapping for the Hudson’s Bay Company. I have been killing Crows and Blackfeet for fifty years. It doesn’t help, I still see them in their blood, my wife and boys, and many others that I loved. If I could kill all the Crows and Blackfeet maybe it would help. Killing hundreds hasn’t helped.”

  “Why kill Crows if the Blackfeet killed your family?”

  “Killing Crows is a duty, Shoshones been doing that for a long time. Killing Blackfeet is a pleasure, as well as a duty.”

  And God help us all, I thought. If there had been a church nearby I’d have prayed in it. I couldn’t even get drunk. I was afraid of what I might do.

  But, Washakie said, a warrior must have a heart as bright and cold as a star. In my rage and sorrow I would make mistakes.

  Another train of Mormon converts come along and their guides had died of some lung congestion sweeping the plains, and they asked Washakie for help. So he come to where I was staring out a hundred miles and told me to take them on to Salt Lake. I wasn’t too happy about having to guide folk who had already gon
e and declared themselves complete idiots by converting to Mormonism, and I rode out in a sour mood and damned if I wasn’t wrong.

  They was Norskys and Swedes and Finns and they was so hungry for land of their own that they would have tattooed their arses blue and worshiped with the Sea Dyaks of Borneo for a few hundred acres and a deed in their hands. Warn’t it some French king, who was Protestant, who remarked that Paris was worth a mass? (My kind of man, that king.)

  Anyway, the Scandihoovians and I laughed a lot. At night they would bring out musical instruments and dance. There warn’t no danger from much of anything, so I hadn’t much work to do. The worst was the poisonous things—springs, plants, and some of the small, pale brown spiders had a bite like nothing I’d seen or heard of.

  If a fiddle-backed spider bit you the flesh around the bite went white, and then gangrenous black, and the poison worked on so in some folks there was nothing to do but amputate the hand. I had to caution the children and mothers about reaching under anything.

  Winter was harsh but there wasn’t much snow and wouldn’t be until we come to the Wasatch Range, between here and Salt Lake City.

  One day I was idly setting on my horse watching the train go by when I thought I heard a banjo back on the end of it. More infernal twangs come to me, and pretty soon here come Klaas on the seat of a big Conestoga had all sorts of advertisements for patent medicines and “aids to young mothers.” The Mormons are first of all a well-run business and the more Saints there were out busting hump and making money and tithing the more missionaries can go out. It is a most interesting church having all the best attributes of a novel written by one of them ladies with three names and a pyramid stock swindle. I didn’t know how the Saints would take to Klaas, because whatever his other faults Mormonism warn’t one of them.

  The weather was warm for January. I shot antelope and deer for camp meat and the trail was so well worn once a wagon got its wheels into the ruts it was a hell of a chore to get ’em out again and nobody could get lost. The pasturage right by the trail was played out, but there was good wild hay on the back slopes and cutters with a light Cape wagon would cut and pile hay enough at the next camp.

  These Scandihoovians were pure quill. Their English was so bad—even worse than Klaas’s—that we couldn’t make a point one to another.

  They’d pause of a Sabbath morning and their leader, a tall, curly-headed dark feller name of Hansen, would rattle through some sort of service and then “bear testimony” to his conversion, which had come about after a visit by missionaries and some sort of near-fatal accident with a tree. Hansen was concussed for days, and he’d swear, “Dat I peer intuuueee Da Great Behind and see tha trut of tha Vurds of tha Buek of Muermon,” which made me very fond of him because he was twinkling all the time.

  Paris is worth a mass.

  We stopped for a couple of days to do repairs to the wagons that couldn’t be put off no longer, and since the Scandinavian land measure ain’t got nothing to do with an acre I paced off a half-section and put tall stakes at the corners, to show ’em what the size of their holdings would be. They looked on dropjawed, and then I told them there wasn’t water, and they’d have to dig ditches unless they planned to raise horned toads for the novelty market.

  There wasn’t anything in Scandihoovia looked like the animals and plants of the desert. (I’ve always thought that the State Motto of Utah should have been “I bain don’t tink this luek like Sveden.”) There was even some who had brought nets so they could set up shop as fishermen. The only thing that could live in the Great Salt Lake was a little critter sort of like a sowbug. I’d never seen it, but Bridger knew it well, and any suspicions he had of Mormon stupidity was confirmed when they lighted there and stayed.

  The wind howled steadily down out of the northwest, so if you stayed away from the left rear quarter of the wagon train Klaas’s farts and banjo doings were blown on toward Texas, and I can’t think of a more deserving place.

  By the end of February we had come up to the last of the bad salt-sage country and all that remained was to get through the Wasatch and down to the Great Basin floor. The Saints had set up skids and sledges and was plowing the snow with twelve-ox teams. My job was over.

  Hansen came to see me with a bag of gold and silver coins—probably about all they had among them—and I refused to be paid for the work, telling him truthfully that I’d never been here before and I enjoyed seeing new country.

  “Never been here before?” he said, looking kind of sick.

  “You got here, Mr. Hansen,” I says. “Trust in the Lord.”

  With just my horse I was able to work my way down the steep canyon far ahead of Klaas’s farts and plunks. I blessed the air.

  Salt Lake City was booming even in the dead of winter. There warn’t any snow on the ground at all. The Mormon part of town was orderly and clean and about as much fun as a rubber rose, while the Helltown built out past the north shore of the Great Salt Lake was like any other little Western town of the time—raw wood and rough folks.

  There was forty or so saloons each one cruder than the last, bedraggled whores working out of canvas cribs, restaurants that served rotten food where the only healthy things in the pies was the maggots and weevils, who’d died in the oven. (Years later, when I’d get roped into listening to speeches about our valiant pioneer forebears, I’d think of all the riffraff and scum what done the original work. Riffraff like me, scummily hiding out here from the consequences of misunderstandings with folks back East. We seemed to be greedy of gold, but if any of us made money we fair threw it away.)

  Course, Helltown being Helltown and folks being folks the population after dark was about half male Mormons looking for a drink and a seegar and some dance-hall fun. The steady diet of sermons and hard labor didn’t provide them with that feeling of satisfaction so necessary to all men: I done something bad and I’m proud of it.

  Some dour fellers in them shapeless Mormon black felt hats was follering me and I didn’t know why they would, so I pushed on past Helltown and went out a few miles onto the salt flats to get away from the stink and the bugs. I hadn’t but about rolled out my bedroll when they come riding up in a group and the leader got down and shined a lantern in my face, blinding me.

  “Brother Brigham wishes to speak with you,” says this sour bastard.

  When I asked what in the hell about, I got told Brigham kept his own counsel. Fine, says I, let him keep it and I hope each of his sixty-seven wives has a litter of six.

  “I got nothing to say to the man,” I finished. Various pieces of artillery appeared, and I suddenly recalled one or three items of interest to both of us. Maybe even four. Matter of fact, if Brother Brigham wanted to read me the entire Book of Mormon and do running commentary on it I couldn’t think of a way I’d like to spend time more.

  My levity was wasted on these fellers. They packed up my traps and we rode off toward Salt Lake City. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what in the hell this tinhorn prophet wanted from Mrs. Kelly’s darling son.

  We clattered through Temple Square, where a large crowd had gathered to watch the streetlamps flicker, the fastest entertainment in town, and soon we come up to Lion House, Brigham’s home. The Prophet’s tastes in architecture was as atrocious as his taste in Scripture.

  I waited an uncommon long time for him to appear. I supposed he was busy with whatever wife was on the calendar for that night, and, annoyed, I lit up a seegar. Two of the gents who had fetched me there wandered over and inhaled deep at the tendrils of smoke. Me being a generous soul I finally asked if they’d like a couple and that flustered them up a lot. They set off a ways and glared greedily at me.

  Brigham come in finally, wearing a silk bed-jacket, and he was frowning at what I took to be a checklist of room numbers.

  Two big kerosene lamps threw a warm yellow glow on the old pirate’s face as he sat at his massive, carved desk. Brigham’s face was like the old rock of the deep canyons. His close-set eyes was sh
adowed. When he spoke his voice startled me, it was high and reedy, like Lincoln’s.

  He motioned all the guards out, sending them through a passageway and locking the door behind them. There was two more sets of such doors, with alcoves, and he checked those and then poked all of the drapes and tugged at the windows and then he dropped to the floor and checked under the sofas.

  “I’d be happy to leave you want to make sure that there’s no witnesses,” I says. “You have only to say the word and unlock one of them sets of windows or doors.”

  “I see the marks of that bastard Bridger on you,” says Old Brigham, “and I can’t tell you how much it pains me to have to ask a favor of someone even as little connected to him as you are.”

  “I’d hate to think of you suffering embarrassment,” I says, pulling on my gloves, “and I can’t watch, it gives me hives, so I’ll leave.”

  Brigham came round his desk and grabbed my kerchief. His blue eyes glittered at me for a moment. He had presence, for sure, and a fierce will.

  “You insolent pup, if you wish to be buried out on Antelope Island and pickled in brine at that, try my patience a little more. Now give me a goddamned seegar and set down, I have need of ... I have a difficulty.”

  He lit up the seegar and puffed happily and put his feet up on his desk. I moved my chair over and put my feet up there, too, and we smoked companionably for a few minutes.

  Brigham was obviously enjoying his seegar hugely. He had the expression of a man finally found what was itching him and scratched it good. He sighed and farted and beamed happily up at the ceiling.

  “You don’t believe any of this, do you?” I says.

  “You mean this ridiculous faith I am the prophet of? Of course not. The banning of alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee merely saves my sheep one-third of their income and a lot of difficulty.”

  I laughed quietlike, for Brigham was a very canny, very dangerous man.

  Brigham looked at me shrewdly. “I’m sure that the theological maunderings I find necessary to a Mormon state are of little interest to you. They have a use. If a prophet speaks, he don’t get backchat. It’s lies and stupidities, and very necessary. If you would be so stupid as to quote me, my devout followers would no doubt cut your throat, all the way back to your spine, as the Word tells them to do.”