“I hope it don’t skip us,” Kit said. “Sometimes it’ll get close and then skip you.”
“It won’t skip us—it mustn’t,” Tasmin cajoled. “Maybe Father Geoff could make a prayer.”
“I’ll make a hundred prayers and even say my rosary, if I can find it,” Father Geoff agreed.
“Try to do better than Anno Domini,” Tasmin instructed. “That worked for Eliza, but the rain gods probably expect better. They might merely scoff.”
Not until the rain was close enough that they could all smell it was the group convinced that the shower wouldn’t skip them. The fresh smell of rain as the first drops splattered on the dusty grass was the most delicious smell Tasmin had ever experienced. Even the feverish Eliza’s face lit up. The first drops were gentle, wide-spaced, uneven; but then the rain came faster and steadier and steadier. Tasmin realized that here was an unexpected opportunity to be clean. Their bodies were smeared and smudged, black with dust. Was not this their chance? As the shower thickened Tasmin began to strip off.
“Go away, men—go away, hurry!” she demanded; the men, startled for a moment, turned their backs and moved away toward the wagon where the babies were, guarded by Little Onion. The women continued their stripping—soon even Cook, with her tremendous rolls of flesh, stood naked under the pelting shower. From the wagon came a wailing from the babies, shocked and then horrified that they were being rained on. Tasmin could see, through the rain, Coal and Little Onion tittering with embarrassment at the sight of the naked white women—even the trembling Eliza recovered her spirit sufficiently to disrobe.
Taking their cue from the women, Lord Berrybender, Clam de Paty and Father Geoffrin also stripped. Kit, too modest, fearful that the women might see him, merely removed his shirt. Jim Snow and the rest of the mountain men remained fully clothed. Amboise d’Avigdor dithered; he did not feel it quite proper to strip. Piet Van Wely hesitated; he stood indecisively between the men and the women, until Mary Berrybender, naked, young breasts bouncing, rushed over and insisted that he undress.
As the shower intensified, the rain became cold— the women, burning only moments before, broke out in goose bumps.
Tasmin reveled in the pelting rain, which had swept over them so miraculously. Only an hour before, they had conspired to force Eliza to drink a revolting liquid from a horse’s belly, and now the pure liquid of the heavens was washing them all clean. She slipped over to the wagon and removed the little boy’s ragged garments. All three were crying lustily, thinking that the world might be ending, but Tasmin ignored their screams—here was a heaven-sent chance to get them clean.
In no more than ten minutes the shower began to diminish—sunlight broke through the clouds and, in the distance, a rainbow arched over the plain. Mist rose from the wet grass. As the last drops splattered down, Tasmin rejoined the women, all of them faced with the same dilemma. They were clean, but their clothes, now a sodden heap, were not. Tasmin enjoyed the last few drifting drops, noticing with amusement that her belly, Vicky’s, and Buffum’s had begun to swell. Fertility had not been lacking in the Valley of the Chickens. Cook would be having to assist at three births, almost at the same time.
’All my garments reek,” Buffum complained. “I do so hate to put on reeking garments.”
Without warning Jim Snow suddenly appeared in their midst, causing Vicky and Buffum to blush, although he took no more notice of their nakedness than he would have had they been so many deer.
“Grab the pitchers and get busy,” he instructed. “We’ve got to collect this water before it soaks in.”
Tasmin saw that, indeed, the prairie was covered with hundreds of shining puddles, the rainwater temporarily caught in small declivities. The men were already hard at work, dipping cups into the puddles and emptying them into pitchers and pots. At some the horses drank—Tasmin saw Jim Snow bend down and drink his fill from one of the deeper puddles.
“Look, girls—drink like Jimmy’s drinking,” Tasmin ordered. “We’re saved, I bet—at least we’re saved for now. Scoop up what you can.”
Soon the women were doing as the men did, scooping up water in whatever containers they could find. Long into the night they worked, locating puddles by moonlight. Tom Fitzpatrick came back and fell to, but the Sublettes, Hugh Glass, and Pomp were still somewhere in the field. Tasmin had become anxious about Pomp, who had not come back for three nights. In her anxiety she conjured up accidents that could have befallen him: snakebite, twisted ankle, grizzly attack. She didn’t mention her worry to Jim—he would just have reminded her of what she already knew: that Pomp was a competent frontiersman who could well look after himself.
Tasmin thought the fine shower might be a portent. Perhaps the time of thirst was over, though the fact that the men worked through the night, searching the prairies for overlooked puddles, suggested that they had not yet reached a zone of safety.
At dawn Jim stopped for a rest, stretching out beside Tasmin.
“Do you think there’ll be more showers?” she asked. “That one was so pleasant.”
“Not regular, not this early,” he told her. “We’re only halfway across the Big Dry. We’ve still got to be careful about water.”
Tasmin put a hand on his arm but otherwise didn’t touch him. In the days of constant thirst every feeling except the desire for cool water had left her, and left the others too, she felt sure. The anxieties and titillations of romance were burned away by all-consuming thirst. Passion had stopped—in recent days she would have bartered anything for a good long drink.
When she had been over one of the deeper puddles to drink she had seen her own haggard reflection. And yet no sooner had she drunk her fill than old thoughts, old feelings, began to return. If only she could drink her fill often enough she might one day want to be a wife again.
“Pomp’s been gone three days, and so has Mr. Glass and the Sublettes, and even Buffum’s Ute,” she told him, wondering what he made of these absences.
“I expect we’ll see them tomorrow, unless they’ve spotted buffalo,” Jim told her. “There used to be a herd that grazed close to the mountains—Arapaho buffalo, we called them, because the Arapaho took most of them.”
Suddenly, across the wide, dark sky, shooting stars began to flash—only one or two at first, but then a burst, a kind of shower.
“Goodness, I’ve never seen that before,” Tasmin said, sitting up.
“They come now and then,” Jim told her. “I seen a terrible bunch of them the night before Preacher Cockerell got struck by lightning. The Indians get spooked if they see all these shooting stars fall at once. They think it means death to the tribe.”
Tasmin lay back beside him. It had been on the tip of her tongue to ask Jim if he was happy about the new baby that was coming—but she held back. At first she had supposed the child was Pomp’s—but as time went on she became less sure. Pomp was just so distant; if he had made the baby it was because she had forced him to. And what would Jim think, if he knew? Would he attack her violently, in punishment for her undoubted sin? Or would he be indifferent? Jim and Pomp, in their different ways, were very hard to know. Of neither’s feelings at a given time could she be sure.
“I hope we’re somewhere where there’s plenty of water when this baby comes,” she said. “It would be a hard mothering if it’s still this dry. What if I hadn’t good milk?”
Jim, though, had nodded off—when he slept his breathing was even, just like Monty’s. It irked her a little, that she was always the one who seemed to be awake—seemed to be pondering questions that had no obvious answers. Then she heard Monty making urgent sounds from the wagon. Monty was hungry— his needs, at least, were definite. With a sigh she got up and went to get her child.
35
Clam de Paty only smiled.
JIM SNOW and Jim Bridger, food having run very low, were debating whether they should kill their next-to-last horse, when Kit Carson’s quick eye saw movement far to the east. For a moment he could scarcely credi
t his own vision.
“I see an ox and there’s a man riding on it,” he informed them.
“I doubt you see no ox,” the ever-skeptical Jim Bridger said.
“Doubt me if you like, you fool!” Kit told him, hotly. “There’s an ox and a man riding on it, and Pomp and High Shoulders leading the way.”
Jim Snow kept his own counsel. Usually Kit was right, when it came to faraway sights.
“If you can see so good, who’s on the ox, then?” Jim Bridger asked. It went against his nature to back down easily.
Kit took another look.
’All I know about the fellow riding the ox is that he’s old,” Kit told them. “He could be Methuselah, for all I know.”
Tom Fitzpatrick took a long look himself.
“It ain’t Methuselah, it’s Zeke Williams—why, I thought the Arapaho took Zeke’s hair a year ago. It shows you you can’t believe everything you hear.”
“I don’t believe anything I hear, particularly not if it comes out of Jim Bridger’s mouth,” Kit said—he was feeling smug about the fact that his vision had been accurate after all.
There was a mist on the prairie that morning— when Tasmin looked the first thing she saw was the top half of Pomp Charbonneau, seemingly floating on a cloud. At once her spirits rose. There he was, not dead at all. But where had he secured such a noble ox?
To Jim Snow the reassuring thing was not that old Zeke Williams was still alive, but that the ox he rode seemed to be in good flesh, not gaunt like their own horses. That meant there was abundant water somewhere near—oxen sometimes faltered on the Big Dry. For the first time in two weeks Jim felt optimistic about their chances. The sight of a healthy ox suggested that they might survive.
“Hello, Zeke—where have you been this last year, and how did you get so gone that we gave you up for dead?” Tom Fitzpatrick asked.
All of them saw that the old man’s feet were swollen and cut—no wonder he had to ride the ox.
“Why the goddamn thieving Rappies caught me,” Zeke said—his eyes were bright blue and twinkling.
“Kept me all this time, hoping to sell me,” he added.
“Hoping to sell you? Why, who’d pay money for a man your age?” Kit asked. He almost got a fit of giggles at the thought.
“If I was in the market they could sell Zeke to me,” Tom Fitzpatrick remarked. He gave Kit a severe frown.
“Zeke came to the Big Horn River with Manuel Lisa a derned long time ago,” he said. “He knows every water hole in the West. I’d buy him just for what he knows.”
“Got any bacon, boys?” Zeke asked, impatient with the palaver. “I’ve been on the run from the Rappies ten days—I’ve mostly et grasshoppers.”
Pomp gently eased the old man off the placid ox. Zeke’s beard was long and white; he was so bent that, when he attempted to stand, he almost stepped on it. He was almost naked and badly scratched up, but his eyes were lively, and his look, once he spotted the women, was impish.
“Why, look at those pretty gals, what a sight!” he said. “The Rappies don’t have that many pretty gals in their whole tribe—and I ought to know. I had to marry up with four of them.”
“Four wives?” Jim Bridger questioned. “I thought you were a dern prisoner—why’d they give you four wives?”
“Not enough bucks in the band, that’s why,” Zeke explained. “The Pawnees killed a bunch off—so they had women going to waste. Women get mean as cats when they’re going to waste, and the Rappies know it.”
“So they put you to stud, did they?” Lord Berry-bender exclaimed. “Clam, you should be taking this down. Put to stud by the Arapaho. It would make rather a good report, I’d say.”
Clam de Paty only smiled. In the hard days of hunger and thirst he had lost so much weight that his red pants no longer fit. He had ceased to believe in his own survival, or the company’s. He supposed they would either starve to death or be killed in some brutal way, as Benjamin Hope-Tipping had been. Why write anything up? The rain had raised his hopes, but already the day was hot; the horizons shimmered in the distance. Ordinarily he would have written up the old fellow’s story, made a racy item of it; a lust slave amid the native Eves. It was just the kind of thing Parisians liked to read about over their coffee—but Clam was too discouraged to care. He had fought with the Grande Armée, he had been awarded medals, and where had it all brought him? To a scorching plain, rude company, daily aggravation, even danger. Had he been put on earth so rich Parisians could read racy stories with their coffee? His notebook was in his pocket but he didn’t reach for it. Who was Lord Berrybender to tell him what to write?
Clam turned and walked away.
“Moody fellow . . . that’s the French, you know . . . can’t be bothered,” Lord Berrybender observed.
Tasmin had grabbed Pomp and was chattering with him. Jim wanted to know about the ox, an animal in excellent flesh. And he wanted to get the company moving. They could all listen to Zeke Williams rattle when night came.
Tasmin had just started filling Pomp in on the events of the last few days when Jim Snow walked up, looking impatient, practical, and stern. It irked her; why had she married such an impatient person? But there he was.
“That ox don’t look thirsty,” Jim said.
“He’s not—there’s a fine spring about twenty miles east,” Pomp told him. � family of travelers found it but the Arapaho wiped them out. Nine dead. Zeke hid in a snake den, or else they would have got him.”
“I guess that means the Rappies are still around. But I doubt they’d attack us, if we stay bunched up. Seen Hugh and the Sublettes?”
“I saw them—they went exploring,” Pomp told him. “Maybe we’ll see them in Santa Fe.”
Tasmin was annoyed; she wanted to talk. If there was one truth that irked her more than any other it was that men had so little use for women’s talk. Even Pomp often looked a little absent, a little bored, when she attempted to expound her views on this and that. Was there any man, anywhere, who really cared to talk to her?
“/ care to talk to you—surely you’ll grant me that modest distinction,” Father Geoffrin said, as the two of them plodded beside the slow-walking ox. As a novelty they had sat the three little boys on the beast’s broad back, an experience that awed the children into complete silence, afraid to utter a sound in the presence of this great beast god, the ox.
“My husband merely closes his ears—it’s as if they have tiny doors—when I start to talk,” she went on. “Kit listens, but then Kit is so deeply smitten with me that he hardly counts.”
“What about your new love, Monsieur Charbonneau?” the priest asked. “Has he no taste for your enchanting babble?”
Tasmin shrugged. Did Pomp really listen to her? Could he really be expected to, when the trek was so hard, their lives so threatened?
“Sometimes he tolerates it—whether he actually likes it, I can’t say. It’s goddamn hard to determine what men actually like, don’t you think?”
“And yet men are open books compared to women,” Father Geoff told her. “You know what I miss in America? Frivolity! Out here it’s all life-or-death. No time for frivolous kisses, clothes buying, books and plays, maquillage, dancing, a little light seduction—all the things that make life so pleasant. No one here will be frivolous with you—I suspect that’s your difficulty, my dear.”
Tasmin shrugged again. The world Father Geoffrin’s words conjured up—a world where women wore rouge and powder, danced quadrilles, went to operas and plays—was so different from the world where she now found herself that in memory it hardly seemed to belong to the same life.
Even on the steamer Rocky Mount, not a year ago, she and Vicky Kennet had made themselves up and paid a great deal of attention to their hair. But that had been another time. Only yesterday she had been weak from thirst—they had all faced the prospect of dying, not a situation in which one gave much thought to hair curlers and the like.
“It’s the reason we get along so well, I expec
t, Tasmin,” the priest went on. “We both like our fun, and it needn’t be particularly serious fun. But your husband is not what I’d call a frivolous man, and neither is your new love, Pomp.”
“Stop calling him my new love,” Tasmin insisted, glancing around to be sure no one had heard him.
“I find all this rather odd,” she continued. “Here we are, inching across a prairie where we might be killed on any given day, and you think I ought to be more frivolous. I don’t know that this is very useful advice, if it is advice.”
“Perhaps not—but we might return to civilization someday,” the priest reminded her. “If we do, I hope you’ll remember that I, at least, liked to listen to you talk. It’s worth something, isn’t it?”
“Of course it is—I’m not ungrateful,” Tasmin said.
They had by then jettisoned all but one small wagon, in which her father, old Zeke Williams, and the babies rode. Sometimes Toussaint Charbonneau, still yellowish, was allowed to ride for a bit. But mostly Charbonneau walked, with Pomp at his side, carrying his gun and helping him a little if he faltered.
“I suppose there’s no one more dutiful than Pomp,” Tasmin said, looking back at the pair. “He’s far more careful of his father than we Berrybenders are of our own.”
“Of course, and it’s entirely admirable,” Father Geoff agreed. ‘And yet I do feel that dutiful men are sometimes rather lacking in spirit.”
“What nonsense! Nothing of the sort is true of Pomp,” Tasmin said, flaring up. “He has plenty of spirit.”
Father Geoffrin smiled and shrugged.
“I’m sure you’d know best about that, my dear,” he said, with a smile that indicated that he didn’t believe her for a minute.
They strode in silence for a while.
“In my experience women tend to favor rascals,” Geoff said. “I’ve often wondered why.”
“You’re more than enough of a rascal yourself, if you ask me,” Tasmin said tartly. “I believe I’ve had enough of your saucy talk for now.”