the Lonesome Gods (1983) (7 page)

She paused. "Tell me the truth, Mr. Smith. Did you really amputate your own leg?"

"Had to. Wasn't nobody to he'p except there toward the end. Milt Sublette, he did some cutting. Injun shot me in the leg, shattered the bone right below the knee. Wasn't no doctor within a thousand miles, prob'ly. It was cut or die, and all the time, them Injuns was around. I'd rather lose a piece of my leg than my hair. So I cut her off."

"You had no surgical training? I'm astonished."

"Ma'am? What you all mean by surgical trainin'? Of course I had! I'd killed an' skinned out maybe a hundred baffler, and as many deer, to say nothing of all the other game.

"Wasn't one of us there hadn't cut arrows out of people or cleaned up bad wounds one kind or another. I'd done more cutting on animals and folks than nine out of ten surgeons. I'd cut meat and I'd cut bone maybe a thousand times since I was a youngster. Cuttin' on a man offers the same sort of problems.

"You civilized city folks live in a world a whole lot different than ours! Why, Ewing Young, him that was our leader a time or two, he was tellin' us one time how a man named Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood. We thought that was almighty funny, amusin' I mean, because every Injun on the Plains and in the woods knew all about it. Hunters for thousands of years understood, and those old priests who performed thousands of human sacrifices, do you think they didn't know? This Harvey feller, he just wrote it up for folks to read.

"I hear folks talkin' about Lewis and Clark and all they 'discovered.' Why, I talked with a Frenchman who was guide to David Thompson, the Hudson Bay man. That Frenchman had been all over that 'discovered' country ten years before!"

"Mr. Smith," Miss Nesselrode asked suddenly, "what is it like in California? Over the mountains, I mean?" He looked at her, then squatted on his haunches again, nursing the coffee. "It is the best of lands," he said quietly, "and will someday be among the greatest. Don't go there unless you can grow. That's the trouble with the Spanish folks, they've lived too easy all these years, nobody to fight, or reason to. Now some of them smart Yankees are there, things will be different.

"Me, I've been a mountain man and a trapper. Why do you think I left the East to trap for fur? Because that was where the money was! I could make more in a week, if I kept my hair, than I could make in a year back to home! That's why those other fellers come west, too. Now that folks want silk hats instead of beaver, those smart Yankees are lookin' about. They've seen Los Angeles.

"Now, you watch it change! They won't be content to ride horseback or set in the sun! Look at Wolfskill, now. I
h
unted and trapped with William Wolfskill. Now he's out there with grapes and oranges growin'. You see, he'll make him a fortune. Ben Wilson's there, too, and Workman, Rowland, and others.

"That country is goin' to grow! Folks who are smart are goin' to get rich, and a lot of others are goin' to set by and watch it happen.

"Get hold of some land. It will last and be there when all the rest has changed. Everything else fades with time, but the land stays there. Sure, there's floods, earthquakes, and storms, but by and large, the land stays.

"Get land for the long pull, and look about to see what folks need most and get it for them and make them pay for it.

"I'm an old man now. Never was a hand to hold t
o
money, anyway. I spent it all on drink and whatever, but you watch Ben Wilson, watch Wolfskill, Workman, and some of them others! Shrewd, knowin' men they be! They will make Los Angeles into a city, and all you've got to do is ride the river with them. You take it from me!"

"Thank you, Mr. Smith." She held out her hand to him.

I had never noticed how slim and beautiful her hands were.

He took it in one of his, brown and hard and strong, and he looked at it, then at her. "It was a pleasure, ma'am. A pleasure."

Suddenly he got up, walked to his horse, and without touching a stirrup, swung himself into the saddle. Then he looked back at her.

"I have a feelin' about you, ma'am. I shall come to Los Angeles sometime, just to see if I'm right."

And he rode away into the night. For a moment the firelight was on his broad back; for a moment or two after that we heard the grate of his horse's hooves on gravel, and then he was gone, as if he had never been, and we heard no other sound.

Farley looked over at my father and shook his head in what must have been wonder, and Miss Nesselrode simply stood looking into the dying fire for a minute, then looked at Papa.

"He's quite a wonderful man, isn't he?"

"He's an old devil," my father said, "but he is a wonderful man, too, and you, I think, have made a friend." "I doubt I shall ever see him again."

"That may be, but he will not forget you. And do not underestimate the man." My father coughed slightly; then he said, "Some of the mountain men were finely educated, some were not, but all were extremely practical men whose minds were beautifully tuned. They could not be dull, for to let their wits dull was to invite death.

"One does not need education to be intelligent, and these men might be short on what educated men use in the way of information, but their wits were sharp, their minds were alert, they were prepared to move, to change, to adapt at the slightest need.

"All about them were conditions and circumstances to which they must adjust, attack by Indians or outlaw trappers was an ever-present danger, they lived on the very knife-edge of reality, and when this is so, the mind becomes a beautifully tuned instrument.

"They did not fall into patterns or ruts. There were none. Each day was different, each brought new problems. No two traps could ever be set exactly the same. Whatever else you could say of these men, they were intelligent in the finest sense. Peg-Leg Smith is one of them. The men of whom he spoke were also mountain men, but of different character than Smith. When the money went out of the fur trade, they did not hesitate. They looked about for other opportunities, and in Los Angeles they found them."

Farley stood up and brushed off his pants. "It is late," he said, "and tomorrow we go down into the real desert." "Good night, gentlemen," Miss Nesselrode said, and she went away to the wagon.

When she was gone, Farley looked at my father. "Do you think he will come back?"

"No." He paused. "Oddly enough, the man's a gentleman, in his own way. If I were you, I'd keep watch, bu
t
I'd bet every dollar I have that we will not see him again."

My father turned away toward his blanket roll. "Hannes, I'm tired. You'll have to help me with my boots."

Chapter
8

In the night I was suddenly awakened--by what sound or sense, I do not know. Listening ... All was still.

From under the wagon I could look out and see the morning star hanging in the sky like a light in a distant window. Then I thought of my grandfather, that fierce old man who hated us so, and whom I had never seen. Under the blankets I shrank, my stomach tied in a knot of fear.

"I am Johannes Verne," I whispered to myself. "I shall not be afraid."

Over and over I said it, and the words seemed to ease the tightness, and after a while I lay quiet, but wide-awake. Carefully, not to disturb my father, who lay close by, I slid from under the blankets and went out to stand alone in the night.

There was a step behind me, and turning, I saw Jacob Finney. "Can't sleep?" Finney asked very softly.

"I was awake." Then I said, "I like it. The desert, I mean. I like the desert nights, and the stars."

"Yeah, me too. No matter how hot it is by day, the nights are cool. It's a resting time."

"Sometimes I think there's something out there, something calling to me, only I can't hear anything."

"I know." Finney got out his pipe and began to stoke it. "Some folks can't abide the desert, but those who love it, like you an' me, for them there's no place like it. Kind of magic."

"My mother loved the desert."

"Spanish girl, wasn't she?"

"Yes, sir. Her name was Consuelo."

"It has a lovely sound." He lit his pipe. "Knowed a Spanish girl once, down Sonora way. I guess I was in love with her, but then there was trouble and I killed a man. Shot him. I had to leave. By now she's married to somebody else an' prob'ly never thinks of me."

He cleared his throat. "I think of her, though. I got something to remember, anyway. There was a fountain in the patio and we used to set there in the moonlight. Sometimes we'd talk, but mostly we just set. Her mama was close by, but that made us no mind. We really didn't need to talk.

"I heard about your pa an' ma, an' how they run off into the desert an' were married there by a priest comin' up from Mexico.

"Can't figure why the old don hated him so. He was an Anglo, of course, and a Protestant. Maybe that's enough for an old Spanish man who is proud of his name and family. An' maybe it was because your pa was just a seaman. I don't know, but it was too bad. But he's become kind of a legend, y'know.

"The way they chased him. Four or five bands of men huntin' just her an' your pa, an' he slipped away from them, time an' again.

"The Injuns he'ped. They set store by your pa because during a starvation time for them he gave them beef cattle. He'd been building a herd, hoped to make hisself wealthy so the old don might accept him. Well, when the Injuns was starving, he gave them beef, so when your grandpa was after him, the Injuns hid him, told him where to hide, like that."

Finney glanced at the stars. "Better roll your bed, youngster. We're startin' early because of the heat."

After Jacob Finney walked away, I turned back to the desert. For a long moment I stood perfectly still, listening. But was I listening? What was I listening for? I did not know. Behind me there was a stirring. Behind me there was movement, activity, but it seemed far away. I walked a few steps further and the sounds seemed t
o
recede. I stopped again, and then I felt an odd coolness, a feeling of something strange, something different.

I shook myself, but it was still there. I looked around and I could see people around the camp. Mr. Kelso was saddling his horse. Mr. Finney was loading his rifle again, and my father was rolling his bed, yet it all seemed far away and in a world different from the one in which I stood. Yet I did not know why.

I waited, expecting something, but I did not know what, and then I saw the shadow out there in the greasewood. A shadow where there was nothing that could offer a shadow. Yet something was there, something a little more tangible than a shadow, something that seemed to be appearing, something that seemed to be happening. Back at the fire, someone spoke, asking about me. I heard my father say, "He's walked into the desert, but do not worry, he will be back."

Suddenly I was not at all sure if I could go back. That I even wanted to go back. I looked again for the shadow, and it was still there, standing as if waiting--waiting, perhaps, for me?

Turning sharply, half-afraid, I walked back toward the fire, walking slowly, always with the feeling that I wanted to look back, even to go back--perhaps to join that shadow? No ... not that. Not that exactly.

My father walked out to meet me. "Hannes? Are you all right?"

"Yes, I am."

He stood beside me for a moment and said, "Your mother and I used to walk into the desert at night. We loved it, and loved our time together.

"Long ago, before the Indians who live here now, there were other people. Perhaps they went away, or maybe they died or were driven out by these Indians' ancestors, but they are gone. Yet sometimes I am not sure they are gone. I think sometimes their spirits are still around, in the land they loved.

"Each people has its gods, or the spirits in which they believe. It may be their god is the same as ours, only clothed in different stories, different ideas, but a god ca
n
only be strong, Hannes, if he is worshiped, and the gods of those ancient people are lonesome gods now.

"They are out there in the desert and mountains, and perhaps their strength has waned because nobody lights fires on their altars anymore. But they are there, Hannes, and sometimes I think they know me and remember me.

"It is a foolish little idea of my own, but in my own way I pay them respect.

"Sometimes, when crossing a pass in the mountains, one will see a pile of loose stones, even several piles. Foolish people have dug into them, thinking treasure is buried there. It is a stupid idea, to think a treasure would be marked so obviously.

"It is an old custom of these people to pick up a stone and toss it on the pile. Perhaps it is a symbolical lightening of the load they carry, perhaps a small offering to the gods of the trails. I never fail to toss a stone on the pile, Hannes. In my own way it is a small offering to those lonesome gods.

"A man once told me they do the same thing in Tibet, and some of our ancient people may have come from there, or near there. Regardless of that, I like to think those ancient gods are out there waiting, and that they are, because of my offerings, a little less lonely."

When I climbed into the wagon, Miss Nesselrode was sitting up, and Mrs. Weber was also. Fraser was lying half on his side, still trying to sleep. Fletcher seemed not to have moved from where he sat. He stared at me, then looked away irritably. He did not like me, but then, he did not seem to like anybody.