Into the Savage Country (7 page)

“I ask for no assistance. I will be glad for your friendship.”

I could think of nothing more to say and she did not offer any word of familiarity. Slowly the position she was in settled inside me. She had taken on Bailey’s rich-man’s debts without the rich family to buffer her. The cuffs of her pants were frayed. She was wearing a patched winter jacket though it was summer.

“I must return to the children,” she said after a moment, though I’d seen the children straggling away to the native encampment. “I will call on you in town. Do not come here again. Because of the illness.” She added, “I’m glad you’ve recovered.”

“I had until about five minutes ago,” I said, holding my hands over my heart. That made her laugh, though briefly.

“I will see you in town, William. Don’t be such a fool as to come again.”

I waited until she’d entered the courtyard, then walked back to the settlement.

So, Alene Chevalier had gotten married to a dandy from St. Louis who’d lowered himself to take her on after losing everything else, then had gotten himself killed while hunting. I remembered how she’d cut me when Layton and Bailey were with her, and now I understood why. She was angling for Bailey and had not wanted me to interfere. She had succeeded in her venture. She’d married the gentleman, which was a wonderful match for her and ought to have secured her future, but Bailey had managed to get himself killed at the worst moment and left her without his fortune but with his debts. Now she was stranded in the settlement.

It was a comedown for her, to be sure, but it left the door open for me. I think a more compassionate man than me would have noted the possibilities of the situation, particularly as I was flush after the half season.

Back in the settlement I heard the whole story from the blacksmith Higgenbottem, a stringy mulatto who worked bare-chested and made wonderful beaver traps for a dollar less than they cost in St. Louis.

“From what I heard his friend Layton killed some ship’s captain in a duel in St. Louis and Bailey acted as his second. In return Layton invited him into a land deal. Bailey signed the deal and funded it, and when it was found to be fraudulent, Layton battled in court, and Bailey, blasted by his father, did the brave thing and made a dash for the territories. The first day in he tossed two gold coins in the dirt. Didn’t even get off his horse. ‘Make me twelve traps.’ Twelve. As if he could even keep track of half that number. On the second week some barefoot urchin from Frankfurt, Kentucky, stole a silver shaving kit. Fancy thing with his initials. Bailey demanded satisfaction. The kid could not have been more than sixteen years old. I’m not even sure he knew what he was
agreeing to. The next morning they met out on the mud flats. The boy, being from Kentucky, knew how to handle a weapon. He fired and grazed Bailey’s neck. Bailey fired in the air. An honorable gesture, given that he’d just been shot. Afterward, Bailey shook the kid’s hand and gave the shaving kit as a token. Don’t know what to make of the dandy. Throwing the money in the dust like some blackguard. Then firing in the air like an honorable man. And then giving the shaving kit. I suppose he would have turned out all right if given half a chance. In three months he had lost his gut and was learning to use his weapon. Said he was having a wonderful time. He’d gone out hunting with only a native scout and one other soldier. Had a skirmish with the Sioux. Then came across an elk and while getting after it his horse stepped in a badger hole. That was it for the horse and Bailey. The widow’s a half-breed they say but she seems like a Frenchy if I ever saw one. Can read and write like any professor. She said she’d teach me.”

“Imagine that,” I said.

“I got no mind for it.”

The mulatto doused a glowing horseshoe, sizzling, in a barrel of water.

“Four soldiers have proposed. She turned them all down. ‘In mourning,’ she says. Some say she’s trolling the waters. I say these waters aren’t deep enough for her. You have a mind to try your hand at it, I see.”

“Why not?” I laughed.

“Yes. Why not? All the same …”

The next morning I was outside the infirmary again, ignoring Alene’s advice not to visit. After some minutes of idling Alene came to the door and waved me off. She did not walk out to greet me but started sweeping up and a moment after that a mustached nun who put beaver traps around the fruit trees in the garden to
keep the children from taking the apples, a nasty creature with a small, pinched mouth and a dry-looking tongue, writhed her way out to the road where I stood.

“The general warned the soldiers from coming.”

“I’m not a soldier.”

“Then even worse. You’re a beastly trapper. She’s in mourning for Sir Bailey.”

“I know her from St. Louis.”

“I don’t care if you’ve known her from the cradle. There is sickness here. You think you’re the first to come? Not the first. And not the most promising. And one would-be suitor already dead from the illness. I’ll talk to the general. Go away. Go!”

She shooed at me and behind her Alene half seemed to protest, but not loudly. She was showing sense in keeping me away from the illness.

“I’ll see you in town,” I yelled.

“Good day, Mr. Wyeth,” she called faintly.

A few wasted-looking natives sat along the wall in the sunlight watching her dodge my advances. They cackled among themselves and it was irritating, to say the least, but I had little choice other than to retreat. I went back to my lodgings and mulled it over. Alene was there, penniless and desperate, and for the first time in my life I had some money, yet it seemed she would not even speak with me. Given the exaggerated tales of my fortune, many women would have made up to me out of desperation, but Alene was the exact opposite. She did not want to appear to beg, and that made me all the more determined to offer assistance.

One of my father’s main complaints of me was that I had no ballast, always looking off to the horizon, dashing here or there without forethought or consideration, as ill prepared as I was
enthusiastic. If he had seen me that fall he would have felt that flawed impulse had borne full fruit. I went from being flattened and deflated over memories of my injury to puffing myself up in a blissful daze, drunk with dreams of my imagined future with the Widow Bailey. Gauzy schemes filled my idle mind.

Late summer now: Dry grass, and the drone of insects, and I was near the high point of the ridge, stepping up the steep drainage to the white stone bluff that overlooked the Missouri, when I saw that Alene already occupied the space. She was clearly annoyed to be caught there by herself and began moving away before I arrived.

“I’ll leave you to the view,” she said.

“I’d rather you stayed and admired it with me,” I said in an awkward way that was meant to be gallant.

“I have my work with the children,” she said.

“It is not work that sends you away. You know that,” I said. “I see you struggling, Alene. There are those who’d come to your aid if you’d let them.”

“At what cost?”

“At no cost.”

“It is not my experience that aid comes from men without a price.”

“You have grown bitter from your experience.”

“I’ve grown practical,” she said. “I appreciate your commiseration.”

There was a savagery in the
commiseration
. She started to go, but I held a hand out as if I’d detain her. She moved to walk past me. I tried to take her hand and she slapped me, hard, so there was
a white light in my head and a tree on the horizon passed across my view twice. She was hurrying away through dry grass. All around there was the metallic droning of insects.

“Well that’s blasted,” I said. “All because of fat Bailey.”

I laughed to myself, falsely jovial.

“A woman of principle,” I said out loud.

I walked back to town with my cheek burning and a dull resignation simmering. Up to that point I’d seen her physical attractions and understood her to be a western lady with an able tongue and fine manners. A catch for any young trapper. But that slap drove appreciation into me like a spike. I understood that her husband’s death was not a mere inconvenience for her. She was attempting to mourn him and was enduring hardship honorably. My attentions were only increasing her hardship.

Three days later I saw her exiting the dry goods store carrying a tiny quantity of flour. She put a hand to her cheek with some of her past jauntiness.

“You’ve recovered, Mr. Wyeth.”

“Barely,” I said.

“I am pleased to see you’re not slain,” she said.

“But I am,” I murmured, so low I’m not sure she heard. She paused to see if I’d tarry, but I did not. I hurried on with my heart pounding and my hands shaking and that was the model for our future relations. I began to address Alene as Miss Bailey and did not try to stop her in the road and did not idle near the infirmary.

She does not want your companionship, I thought. Most likely she never did, and she certainly does not now. She is in mourning. Leave her to it.

In my free time I began to pore over maps of the west and my
mind returned to the fur country. I made preparations for joining a brigade in the spring.

Mid-fall now, and the nights were cool and in the morning, if it was clear, there was mist over the river. Several fully laden keel-boats passed the settlement on the way to St. Louis and every afternoon the men would gather in front of Plochman’s and discuss the encroaching of the Brits and the diminishing of fur-bearing creatures of all sorts, along with the various American trapping companies that were springing up like mushrooms in St. Louis. Often during these discussions Alene hurried past, giving a slight wave or nod, but never stopping to talk. Plochman would whisper that her inheritance had been contested by Bailey’s family and that they vowed she’d receive nothing, or he’d inform us that all she bought was on credit, but despite her poverty she would not take charity. Smitts and Plochman and their wives consulted on various schemes, wondering how to help her, and one day that fall an idea presented itself to me.

Fort Burnham had no official trade with the natives like the Hudson’s Bay Company had at Fort Vancouver and Flathead Post. Unlike the British, the American government, in a misguided effort to avoid conflict with the natives, discouraged all trade of any sort. This stricture was foolish and shortsighted, but it meant there was much opportunity for an individual in buying and selling trinkets and pelts. Many of the soldiers tried their hand at the trade but they were handicapped by not knowing a good pelt when they saw one and not having spent enough time with the natives to understand their customs. With the natives you had to be patient, smoking the pipe and spending a whole day bartering
to get what you desired. Also, because of the amount of time needed to negotiate with the natives, the general discouraged the soldiers from making a side income. I knew a good pelt when I saw one, I knew the basics of tanning, and I had learned a great deal about the natives in my half season on the march. All that was to my advantage. So that fall I took up bartering for pelts and made nearly as much as I’d have made in the mountains, at a tenth of the risk and a twentieth of the effort.

All through that fall Mandan and Sioux natives would show up at my lodging in twos or threes, bare-chested and tossing furs down with disdain, demanding powder or balls or vermillion. These natives I traded with were not accustomed to our manner of exchange and did not know what was expected of them, and the pelts were often of the worst quality and close to unusable, though they’d act as if they’d just brought me a king’s ransom. There was always much bickering about how much they’d receive and accusations that I favored Americans over the natives. I did not. At least, I think I did not. Often the natives did not care for their furs in the proper manner. They took beaver who were too young or in summer when the furs were thin, or acquired the furs at the proper time but left them out in the elements and ruined them, or scraped them too thin or patched holes incorrectly. I advised the various natives I traded with on what they could do to improve their rate of return, and a few times got Alene to speak with them, as she was known as a medicine woman among them. I thought that might have some impact on them but it did not. They’d listen silently, haughtily, and go on treating the pelts carelessly. This is not really part of my story but it seems my difficulty with this group of Mandan and Sioux was indicative of relations between the natives and the Americans as a whole. The natives took on some of the trappings of our civilization, covetous
of our knives and guns and horses, but they never really took on our system of trade enough to use it to their advantage. They participated in the trade without forethought, always leached by it, never benefiting.

The fall passed. The beaver and deer pelts piled up in my room until I had somewhere between sixty and eighty pelts. That would be an enormous number of pelts for one man a few years later, but at that time I thought I’d have gathered a far greater number out on the trail, though I’m not sure this is true.

Six weeks had passed since that slap on the bluff. The first snow had fallen and melted, and a few mornings afterward there was a hard frost. The dawn was very cold and very still. Every straw-colored blade of grass glistened, white with frost. I loaded the deerskins on my pack horse and led it out to Alene’s sod cottage beyond the infirmary. It was half dwelling and half hole in the earth, with the wind howling through visible gaps in the roof and a single window of untreated deerskin that let in a weak light. Hardly a lodging for a lady.

She must have heard my horse, and not wanting to invite me inside, came out with a buffalo robe wrapped around her shoulders. I loosened the straps on my pack horse and the bound wrapping fell to the ground.

“Native pelts,” I said. “Deerskin. Can you tan them? I’ll pay you. And if you can use them to make shirts or leggins you could sell the finished product to the soldiers and we could split the profits.”

“I have no paste,” she said.

“I have arranged with the Sioux scouts to bring the brain paste, if you’ll agree to tan them, at the normal price, with the normal quality. I have found no tanner who can preserve the hides as you did in St. Louis.”