Far as the Eye Can See (22 page)

“I think so.”

“What does it mean?”

“It means the fellow cried like a simpleton,” I said, not exactly sure. She smiled for a short spell, looking at me in surprise and shock I think, because I got it right. Then she went on reading. I could mostly understand it all, so I stayed awake longer. The truth is I liked her voice and it was especially pleasant to be able to understand most of the words she was reading. I liked the way she sounded when she said, “ ‘I am born.’ ” I could tell both them ladies was born to a higher station in life than me. Anyway, I listened for the better part of a hour or so, but eventually I found it easy enough to drift off to sleep in the warmth of that wagon.

The weather got a bit closer to thawing out for a while as Christmas approached, but then it froze up again good and solid. Sometimes the wind cut through you like a sword. To prepare for the long trip, I got myself a pack of buffalo skins and seven long poles for my own lodge. The old army tent had give out completely, and anyway, you couldn’t have a fire in the middle of it like you could with a good Indian tepee. Big Tree had showed me how to make one and so I had a good-sized Indian lodge. I’d use three of the poles for the tepee to make a travois to carry all of it and a whole lot more. Since it all dragged on the ground, I didn’t need but one other horse to drag the travois and my supplies and then on Cricket I only carried a bedroll and my guns, a few canteens of water, and a little whiskey.

Two days before Christmas, near the end of the day, the wind calmed down enough that I decided to put all my things together and assemble the travois next to the wagon. Christine come down out of the thing and stood there watching me for a spell. She was wrapped in a buffalo robe over a red dress, and I could see steam coming out of her mouth, but with no wind, it really wasn’t so cold.

I tied three long poles together near the top and set them down on the ground, then I spread them apart at the place where they would drag along the ground. Crossways on the poles, I tied a wood frame with all my skins and a pack where I’d put food and ammunition and other supplies. I set the rest of the poles on top. It was all tied together with leather and she watched me while I cinched each knot to be sure it would hold.

“What is that contraption?”

“It will soon be my home,” I said. “See, I’ll lift this end at the top and tie it over a horse’s back, and then it all comes along with me.”

“I thought you did not have to go anywhere until after Christmas.”

“I’m just getting ready. I ain’t going nowhere yet.”

“Have you thought about what you will give Eveline for Christmas?”

“I’ll be leaving just a few days after Christmas, so . . .” I had nothing more to say, because I believed it would be understood that Christmas shouldn’t be no fuss.

“But you will be here.” She was smiling, but I could see she was ready to jump me if I said the wrong thing. Sometimes I think women have a way of tilting their head a bit to the side while they study your eyes as you talk. They’re watching for it, even expecting it: the wrong thing. And if you say the wrong thing, they pounce on it like a cougar on a foal. “It will be Christmas Eve tomorrow,” she whispered.

“Well, what do you think she wants?”

“A nice perfume would be just the thing.”

I cinched the last knot and then stood there blowing out steam. “What if I give her my share of the wagon,” I said. “She’d make a mite better use of that, wouldn’t she?”

“I would very much like it if you did that. It would be a good gift for me. But it is not what you give a person who is . . .” She stopped.

“Who is what?”

“In a manner of speaking, your intended.”

“Oh, she ain’t my intended,” I said a little too fast.

She moved her head back a little and her mouth went flat and straight across the front of her face. “I said, ‘in a manner of speaking.’ ”

“There ain’t no kind of speaking where I ever said nothing like that,” I said.

“You have misled her.” Now she was whispering a mite loud.

“It ain’t true. If she told you that, she wasn’t telling
you
the truth.”

She stood there staring into my eyes. I could feel my heart beating under my leather shirt. “Damnation,” I whispered. “I ain’t lying. I don’t believe she told you nothing like that, neither.”

“What have you been doing with her on these nights?”

“One time,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“So you just had your fun, is that it?”

“We both had fun,” I said. “Nobody mentioned nothing about being intended.”

“What did you say?”

“I believe you heard me,” I said out loud.

She leaned back and hit me hard on my jaw with her fist. I almost fell over backwards. I stood there looking at her. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. She leaned back to give me another one, and I stepped aside and covered up so she only caught me on my forearm. “Christ Almighty,” I said. I was glad she wasn’t Eveline’s brother. She could hit hard.

She moved closer in, like she was going to give me something under my arms and in the belly. I lowered my arms to protect myself, and she caught me again on the jaw with her right hand.

“Are you going to quit this?” I said. Now I had both fists up and was dancing around like a boxer. I made up my mind if she hit me again, I’d pretend she
was
Eveline’s brother and give her nose a try. “You better quit,” I said. “I ain’t about to take no more.”

Then she started crying. “You . . . you . . .” She couldn’t get out what she wanted to say.

“I’ll get her the perfume,” I said. “Jesus.”

She turned around so fast her long dress belled out a bit and I seen her black stockings. She stomped off and got back up in the wagon. I tried to get out of there, but while I was pulling the travois up in the shade next to old General Cooney, Eveline come down out of the wagon.

“I suppose you heard it,” I said.

“Heard what?”

“You know what.”

“I wondered what you two were whispering about. I was asleep for most of it.”

“You was.”

“I do not want any perfume,” she said. She looked pretty good in that light. The sun was weak, as usual, but it made her skin look kind of golden, and with no smile on her face, she looked right pretty. She’d pulled her dark hair over her forehead, and her eyes kind of glistened in a lively way. “I do not want anything from you at all,” she said.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Except that one other thing you mentioned.” Now she did smile a bit, and again the gaps in her teeth was kind of distracting. Still, something stirred in me, looking into her eyes. She was a woman that known life for all its splendor and taken what she wanted out of it, and I admired her for it.

“What other thing did I mention?”

“General Cooney’s part of the wagon.”

“If I’m here at Christmas morning, why don’t we hang a few of stockings and see what any of us finds there.”

“Will you come back to this wagon tonight?”

“I’ll be here until I leave,” I said. “If you’ll take me.”

Now I had to find a damn bottle of perfume. I known the store’d have nothing for women, so I rode over to Fort Ellis and tried to get in to see General Gibbon. I figured if he had his wife with him she might be able to help out. I wasn’t going to find no perfume among the Indians or the troops, although a sizable portion of them fellows could sure use it. General Gibbon had gone back to his home in St. Louis for Christmas, so I went to the quartermaster’s store and found some toilet water but it wasn’t no real perfume. When I asked the fellow in there if he had something more sweet smelling, he laughed at me, and I got to laughing too. “I know it sounds pretty silly,” I said. “But I live with two women.”

“Oh, so you’re the fellow living up the street a way in that Conestoga with them two ladies.”

I nodded, holding the toilet water in my hand.

“I heard about you.”

“You did.”

“Living with two women. Chief of scouts, am I right? Why, you’re famous.”

“I guess.”

The fellow was bald except for a beard that started in front of his ears and wrapped around his lower chin. “A lot of the soldiers talk about you and them women in that wagon.”

“It’s a blessing,” I said. “They got a little stove in there that vents out the side and it stays mighty warm on these cold nights.”

“Well, I guess it does. You don’t need the stove, am I right?” He nudged me with his elbow and laughed again.

I laughed, too, a bit, but then I said, “It ain’t nothing like that.”

“Nooo, I guess it’s not.” Now he laughed really hard, like he was in on something together with me and we both was sharing in it.

“It ain’t what you think,” I said. Even if he had the right idea, I didn’t want him to have it. It wasn’t none of his business, and I didn’t like it that he was talking about me and my friends in that way. I didn’t care if he guessed my position exactly. I wanted him to shut up about it. So I tried to distract him with a question I really wanted to know the answer to. “What’s that you heard about me and the chief of scouts?”

“You’re leading the scout troop. Colonel Brisbin said so. You’ll be his eyes and ears out there in the field.”

I threw a half a dollar on the counter for the toilet water. “Any way I can sweeten this water a bit?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” he said, now in a soft voice. “My advice, sir? She’s a woman and she’ll know what that is no matter how you sweeten it.”

“I guess so.”

“Don’t you want another one?” He stared at me, his face about to break into a smile, but he froze it like that, waiting for me to say something.

“I guess so,” I said.

And then I seen this hanger with three white linen gowns hanging off it—the kind of undergarment a man ain’t supposed to see. “Where’d you get them?”

“St. Louis. They was on their way to California, but no one ever come to get them.”

“I’ll take two of them.”

“Well, you do have plans, don’t you?”

“It ain’t nothing like that,” I said. “How much?”

“Four dollars each.”

I looked at him hard.

“They are expensive.”

“I’ll take two for six dollars.”

“You’ll take one for six and I’ll give you two dollars change. They’re four dollars each.”

“I’ll give you a fine buffalo robe and six dollars.”

“I got to see the robe first.”

“Ah, the hell with it,” I said.

It would be the first Christmas I’d spend under a roof in almost six years. I didn’t want to look forward to it, but I did. The side of my face where Christine had clipped me was swelled up and it throbbed to beat all. And I was scared to death of what would happen that night in the wagon, so I figured it would be a good thing to come with more than one gift of a little toilet water.

Chapter 14

Well, they had a little celebration with red candles and a little pine tree set up in the back of the wagon. They wrapped it in red ribbons with a few gold ribbons mixed in. They served boiled wine and fried up a piece of buffalo meat on top of the stove. They made gravy from the drippings and had fresh biscuits to dip in it. I ate like a king.

Then Eveline suggested we pray. I listened to them going on and on about the birth of Jesus and sacrifice and all. I was full of good food and a little sleepy, but I behaved myself. I ain’t never placed much faith in all that hocus-pocus about a God and angels and all. I don’t know how anybody that’s been to a war can conceive of such a thing as a merciful Lord. It ain’t nothing but the last thing a damn fool would invent if he seen the carnage of a battlefield. If there was no God, nor a idea of a God, and a fellow wanted to imagine something bigger than hisself, and he seen a battlefield, he would not ever come up with the idea of this old fellow in the sky with a white beard who gives a damn about what goes on down here. But some folks believe it. The Indians got their own version of it. Ain’t nobody exempt from the temptation to believe it, I guess. But I don’t. I ain’t never and that’s just the way it is. Sometimes I wish I
did
believe it.

I would not challenge them two women, though. I went right along and pretended to believe everything.

It was powerful warm and so comfortable, I started thinking about what was in my near future: marching around in the Yellowstone River valley and on out to eastern Montana and the empty plains. There ain’t no shelter from the wind out there. The whole idea made me sick to my stomach and like to ruined the night. There ain’t no use in thinking about the future too much because of what it does to what’s going on here and now. If you think too much about a dark future, you ruin what’s going on today. You got to take the future out of the equation’s what I always say.

“Ladies,” I said. “I’m feeling a mite sentimental right about now, and would like to give out the presents.”

First come the toilet water. I’d wrapped both little bottles in brown paper and tied them at the top with yellow ribbon. The gowns I put in a single box—it’s all the quartermaster had—and again wrapped it in brown paper. I wrote on the top, “For the Both of You.”