Far as the Eye Can See (16 page)

“What’s that?”

“I was married to a Indian woman for a short time. A very short time. A lot shorter than I been up in them mountains, but I reckon that’s what folks would call me.”

“Is that a bad thing?” the other one wanted to know.

“Not to me. It’s just what I am.” I calculated they should know that I had been with women and was married to one and I ain’t a bad fellow. They both was wearing white bonnets and had leather-tough faces. They didn’t wear no powder nor eye paint. Eveline had brown hair a-sticking out from under the bonnet. She held on to what looked like a Sharps rifle across her lap. The other one was younger. She held the reins and was nearest to me, and I couldn’t see no hair at all, but her eyebrows was substantial and dark brown. I seen a Colt Dragoon in her lap. They both wore thick cotton dresses with long sleeves. The younger one holding the reins said, “What’s your name?”

I told her.

“Well, Bobby Hale,” she said, “this is my older sister, Mrs. Eveline Barkley. And I am Mrs. Christine Howard.” She smiled and I seen that she had all her teeth. They was broad and white and in comparison to her dark eyebrows made her look right smart. Eveline said, “We are going all the way to Oregon.” Even though it was the first time I looked at Eveline’s face, it wasn’t no big deal right then. I don’t think I’d remember it except for the way her eyes looked at me—fierce and gleeful at the same time; I felt like prey. I looked at what I could see behind them sisters in the wagon and I didn’t see no man.

“Where’d you come from?”

“Fort Buford,” Eveline said. She seemed right proud.

“I know where that is.”

“Where the Yellowstone meets the Missouri.” Her teeth wasn’t so white. She had one missing on the side and another that was crooked and stained a bit.

“We have come a very long way and we have seen this country is truly God’s,” Christine said.

“God’s country. Indeed,” said Eveline. They both sounded like they was from up north and way east—like Boston, maybe, or someplace up around there.

They whispered something between them. Then Eveline said, “Most men lose their hair as they get older, but you have a full head of it. And bright red.”

“There’s other ways to lose your hair in these parts. But I aim to keep mine.”

“It sure is darker red than most.”

“It’s a mite wet too.”

Christine snapped the reins a bit to keep the oxen moving.

“How’d you two get all the way to Fort Buford?”

“That is a story to tell,” Eveline said, and they both laughed. “We are from Rochester, New York. We came out here with our husbands to find a home and get rich.”

“You come a long way.”

“That we did.”

They wasn’t, neither one, bad to look at.

Cricket snorted, shook her head, and the bridle rattled. Then she nodded her head up and down the way horses do.

“Where’d your husbands get off to?”

Eveline made a short, snuffling sound like Cricket. Christine said, “They took off from Buford with the other wagon.”

“They wanted to go south to the Black Hills and search for gold,” Eveline said.

“And they let you take this here wagon on your own?”

“They left us at Buford,” said Christine. “They thought we should—”

“They
instructed
us—”

“Yes, they
instructed
us that we should remain at Fort Buford until they came back.”

“And you didn’t want to wait.”

“We waited a year,” Eveline said. “A whole year. We grieved them. We believe they are dead. We are going on to Oregon.”

“By yourselves.”

“We got a fellow with us,” Christine said. “He is just a little under the weather right now.” She turned slightly and looked behind her in the wagon. I seen a shadow move, and then a head come up behind her, swaying with the movement of the wagon. It was General Cooney, the fellow who shot that poor Crow brave all them years ago, and then had to apologize for it.

“I know this gentleman,” Cooney said. He neither smiled nor looked happy nor sad. He wore no hat. His hair was high in thin white curls on his head, and he’d shaved off his mustache. He looked like he was wearing some kind of woman’s dress or something.

I saluted. “Right strange to see you thisaway, General,” I said.

“What way’s that?”

“A-setting behind two women with a dressing gown on.”

“It ain’t no dressing gown. It’s a linen sleeping jacket.”

“You sick?”

“I been peaked as a crow’s beak,” he said. “I need a fogmatic as soon as possible, or I fear the consequences.”

Christine said, “The way he squalled, rolled, puked, and kicked the last few days was a caution to any woman that might be tempted by corn. And now he’s asking for more of it.”

“I’m feeling a mite better now,” he said. “And I wasn’t on no combustibles. I don’t even have no whiskey.”

“You taking these ladies all the way to Oregon?”

“Just to Bozeman. They’ll hook up with a train of wagons there, I expect.”

I looked at Eveline. “You ladies know you’re in the company of a Rebel general?”

They both nodded. “The war has been over for a decade,” Eveline said. “And we are not afraid of Border Ruffians.”

“It don’t seem like no decade,” I said.

“Nosir,” Cooney said. “It sure don’t.”

I rode on into Bozeman with them. Far as folks could tell, we was together. I hoped I’d see Theo and didn’t walk nowhere in Bozeman without looking for him a little bit. Just about every big fellow I seen from behind looked like him for a spell at first, before I recognized it wasn’t.

General Cooney stayed with the women and their wagon. He was trying to get his hands on another oxen for them. “Just one won’t make it,” he said. I only had a few pelts, and the money I got for them was barely enough to buy me a room at a place called Miss Pound’s Rooming House.

I never seen nobody named Miss Pound. It was a fellow named Robert who met me at the door. He had the longest face I ever seen on a human being and eyes that he didn’t seem capable of opening all the way, like he couldn’t stay awake long enough to cut a smile. He was tall and lean and would of scared the hell out of me in a dark hallway. He showed me a back room full of boots, a mop, a old broom, lots of dust, and a small cot. “This here’s all we got left,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

“How much?”

“Six bits a night.”

“That’s right dear for a stink hole like this. Do I get to keep the broom or the boots?”

“Take it or leave it. It’s a mite breezy outside.”

“And if I want a bath?”

“It ain’t here,” Robert said. “There’s a public house down the street a ways.”

Bozeman was one street, a long mud bog when it wasn’t covered in snow, and it was one or the other most of the time I was there. It was a long stretch between Miss Pound’s place and the army post at the other end. There was two trading posts, and a small place called Beaver Richard’s that you might call a saloon where some travelers stopped for a bit of mead or beer. Whiskey, too, sometimes. They sold whiskey in barrels to the army and to most of the wagon trains that come through. If a body wanted a small barrel to travel with, they’d sell it like that too. But they didn’t serve whiskey to the folks that hung around Bozeman unless one of them barrels broke or commenced to rot.

There was also a few shacks that folks lived in. Above a stable near the army post was another kind of stable. It was four rooms each with a woman in there if you needed some paid-for company. When a fellow said he was going to the “upper stables,” folks known what he was talking about.

The bathhouse was right next to the stables, and that’s where I went on my first day in Bozeman. I went to the real stable first and put up the horses and hung a special bag of oats on Cricket’s neck so she could eat any time she wanted. I paid for the other horses and stored my gear in a rented stall, then I went next door and checked into the bathhouse. I hadn’t been in a tub of hot water in almost a year. I cut my beard off and trimmed my hair and then relaxed for a spell in the heat of it. The steam was almost like food to me, and cupping my hands in that water and splashing it gently on my face was like some kind of angel’s wing a-soothing me. I took my time and shaved my face smooth and clean.

When I come out of that place, it had commenced to snow. I felt like I’d changed my skin. I walked up the street toward where the sisters had parked their wagon. I figured they might like to see a cleaned-up and right smartly trimmed version of the squaw man.

The snow was a long and sweepy kind of dropping down of nothing but white, coming hard in the wind and then falling as softly as a feather—as millions of feathers. When I got to the wagon, General Cooney was setting outside in front of a new fire. This time he was dressed, but the catarrh that gripped him didn’t seem to be no better. He puffed on a pipe and stared at the flames, and the snow had just begun to come down, so he wasn’t covered in it yet.

“Why you setting out here in the cold?” I said. “Wouldn’t it be a touch warmer in the wagon?”

“I got me some corn,” he said. I seen a canteen in his lap. “It’s gonna be one hell of a winter,” he said.

I took a seat by the fire and lit my own pipe. He offered me a sip of the drink in the canteen—a elixir that forced him to wince something awful whenever he sipped out of it—but I said I’d had enough of discomfort for a while. I only wanted a cup of water if I could get it. That bath had dried me out.

He called for Eveline and she come out of the wagon and jumped to the ground. “What do you want?” She wasn’t wearing her bonnet, and her hair stuck up all wiry looking in the front and it hung down by her ears like a thicket of cut hay.

“Would you mind getting my friend here some water?” Cooney said.

She looked hard at me while she went to a barrel that hung off the side of the wagon. Next to it was a hook with a long-stemmed cup dangling from it. She lifted the cup, knocked it through a layer of ice, and filled it, then brought it over to me. When she handed it to me, I said, “Thank you.”

The water was cold and very fine to drink. As soon as I was done, I wanted another cup. She stood there looking at me. “That was too good,” I said. “Mind if I get another?”

“By God,” she said. “You’re Bobby Hale.”

I smiled. I was wearing a big buffalo robe, but she could see my clean face in the firelight. She took the cup from me. Then she patted the hair by the side of her head. “You clean up very nicely.”

Cooney said, “Uh-oh.”

She turned to him and swatted him across the nose with the bottom end of the cup. It was really just a tap, but it knocked his pipe to the ground next to him. His fingers curled in front of him like he was looking for something to grab before he fell off a high bluff. His face was all scrunched up. “Damn it,” he said.

“You mind your manners,” Eveline said.

He shook his head. He couldn’t find his pipe for a spell, but then he located it, patting the ground around it like he couldn’t see or nothing.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“You see now why I’m a-setting out here,” he said. “Never take up with women.”

She started like she might hit him again, and he jumped back and covered his face with both arms.

I could see he wasn’t no general in this camp.

We sat up and talked most of the night. I told him about all my travels with Big Tree. I told him we never did have a very good year trapping, but it was good enough having something to do every blessed day, and being in that paradise beyond all the cities and towns and church steeples.

He’d spent the last four years working for the army, first at Fort Riley, then at Buford. He’d seen every wagon train that gone out toward California and Oregon, and was always tempted to go there himself one day.

“Why didn’t you go?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I didn’t have no money. I thought I might run into a woman that I could make a go of it with.”

“Is that how you ended up with these two?”

“Well, sort of.” He turned around to be sure they wasn’t anywhere near. They’d both turned in a long time ago. I could hear the snoring from the wagon. “The truth is, there’s some question about who owns that ’ere wagon.”

“You don’t say.”

“I won half of it in a poker game with Eveline.”

“She plays poker?”

“Like a Mississippi riverboat scalawag. Don’t you get into a game with her.”

“Why only half?”

“Well, sir”—he paused—“I was only in the game with the one sister. She couldn’t lose the whole wagon because the other’n owned herself a half of it.” The snow still silently swirled and collected around us—a kind of sneaky amendment in the general thickness and color of the landscape. A ordinary broomstick, leaning against the wagon, begun to look like the barrel of a white cannon. The snow piled up on Cooney’s hat, and I guessed on mine. I had no beard for it to collect in, though, and the heat of the fire kept the front of us dry and warm. My shoulders and back commenced to feel right icy, but I didn’t mind it. A buffalo skin is a fine shelter all its own. Before long, I was sipping on the hot liquid in Cooney’s canteen.