Sin Killer

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 wit
h 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 nature 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?”

  “I can sometimes be a little bit happy when I’m with you and Petey and Monty,” Tasmin confessed.

  Petal’s stare turned icy. Why bring up Petey and Monty, minor players in this drama of affection?

  “I want you to be happy when I’m here,” Petal insisted. “When I’m here.”

  Tasmin was amused—she felt as pure a moment of amusement as had been hers since Pomp’s death.

  “Petey and Monty,” Tasmin repeated, or tried to repeat, for at once a small and not very clean hand was clapped over her mouth, muffling her efforts at repetition.

  “When I’m here!” Petal repeated. “All right, when you’re here, if you insist on strict accuracy,” Tasmin said. “Get your dirty paw off my mouth.”

  “Speak right!” Petal warned, and then started to drift away. Tasmin caught her.

  “You do want your mother to be happy, don’t you?” Tasmin asked. “You surely don’t wish me unhappier than I am.”

  Petal thought her position had been made perfectly clear.

  “Just be happy when I’m here,” she once more repeated.

  “But you aren’t always here, my love,” Tasmin told her. “If I’m only allowed to be happy when you’re here, then I shall have to languish in unhappiness a good bit of the time.”

  Petal ignored the comment—she had something else on her mind.

  “I don’t know how you die,” she told her mother. She had heard her aunts Buffum and Mary talking about death, the business that followed dying. Already an accomplished eavesdropper, Petal had got the sense that her mother was unhappy because somebody had died. But death was not an easy thing to puzzle out. It seemed to be rather like a long nap, and yet different in nature from a nap. It was obviously an important state, and yet the adults never made its nature very clear. Petal was very curious about death. She once asked Monty about it— Monty was older. Though often rude, Monty could be amusing. He didn’t like it when Petal held the dog Mopsy up by his tail; but when she wasn’t pestering the dog, Monty could be agreeable.

  “When you’re dead you don’t breathe,” Monty told her. “They put you in a hole and cover you with dirt.”

  “But I want to breathe,” Petal insisted. “Well, you can breathe if you go to heaven,” Monty concluded.

  “Is heaven over there?” she asked, pointing across the Plaza.

  Monty concluded that his sister was a very ignorant child.

  “Heaven is in the sky—it’s so high you can’t see it,” he told her.

  After that Petal kept a close watch on the sky, but except for an occasional bird, she saw nothing but clouds. Unable to gain a clear notion about death from her brother, she took the matter up with her mother.

  “I don’t know how to die,” she repeated. “Well, and a good thing too,” Tasmin told her. “You’ve certainly no business dying for at least the next eighty years.”

  “Monty says you don’t breathe when you die— but I like to breathe,” Petal confided.

  “It’s the accepted thing to do,” Tasmin allowed. Kate Berrybender came in at that time. Petal, never happy to be interrupted, did her best to ignore Kate—but Kate had little respect for the wishes of children, Petal particularly.

  “Cook is wondering about dinner—must it be goat again?” Kate asked.

  “Why not a pig? There are plenty of swine running around this town. Have Papa buy one,” Tasmin suggested.

  “I was talking about how you die,” Petal reminded her mother.

  “It’s too late to cook a pig today—I fear it will have to be goat,” Kate remarked. Petal was glaring at her.

  “My, such a dark look,” Tasmin said.

  Petal, her interview ruined, turned and marched out of the room. How one became deaded—the term she preferred—was still annoyingly obscure.

  “There’s going to be trouble with that child,” Kate observed.

  “There’s trouble with all children, as you’ll discover someday,” Tasmin told her. “But I agree. There’s likely to be rather more trouble than usual with that one.”

  8

  . . . a quick soldier caught his foot . . .

  THE EAR TAKER, the small dark man who had first been known to his people as Takes Bones, knew it was folly to return to Santa Fe. On his way back from the north the jack rabbits began to
stare at him again, as they had before he left to explore the northern lands. That was certainly a bad sign. Then, in the space of three days he saw three owls, which was a worse sign. It was foolish to ignore such obvious signs, but the Ear Taker came back to the southwest anyway. He had not enjoyed the north. There were no Mexicans, only a scattering of whites, and Indian tribes which were so wary he could not approach them. Their camps were full of dogs, quick to pick up unfamiliar sounds or scents.

  Old Prickly Pear Woman had told the Ear Taker that if he walked north far enough he would come to the edge of the world and perhaps be able to catch a glimpse of the great snowy void where spirits were said to go; but that had turned out to be just an old woman’s lie. The Ear Taker walked north for many weeks, but instead of coming to the edge of the world he just came to a place that was extremely cold. If he had not been able to find a snug den that had once been used by a bear, he might have frozen. The bear’s smell was still strong in the den. He thought the bear might return and want his home, but no bear came. In his whole time in the north he had only taken two ears, one from a young white boy who had been traveling with some men who could fly in a basket and the other from an old trapper who was extremely drunk. He hated to give up on a place he had walked so far to see, so he stayed through another winter and learned to snare animals that made their lives in the snow. Food was never a problem—the northern ponds were covered with ducks and geese. Now and then he came across an old man or an old woman who had become too old to move with the tribe and so had been left to die. He liked to sit with such old ones, even though he didn’t know their tongue. Once he even ran into an old shaman who made his home in the bole of a big tree. Old Prickly Pear Woman had told the Ear Taker that there were shamans who could teach people to move in and out of time, so they could visit their ancestors, but the old man in the tree, though he mumbled constantly, didn’t know how to move in and out of time.