Gear, W Michael - Novel 05 (4 page)

 
          
 
Thirty thousand dollars. Enough to outfit an
entire brigade for the
Santa Fe
trade.
New Mexico
was starved for goods, and they paid in silver. William Becknell had
turned a two thousand percent profit. A man could still build a solid
foundation in the far Western trade. A fortune could be made with the right
Yankee mind at the helm.

 
          
 
"What, sir?"

 
          
 
"Hmm? Oh, nothing." Phillip took a
deep breath and nodded to himself. "My son, I can see now that I've made a
terrible error."

 
          
 
"Then I can go back to my studies?"
Relief began to shine in Richard's large eyes.

 
          
 
"Absolutely not. No, Richard, I've had
enough." The time has come, boy, to correct some of the mistakes.

 
          
 
Richard blinked hard, then shook his head in
disbelief.

 
          
 
Phillip leaned back in his chair, plucked off
his spectacles, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "As of this moment you
may either leave this house ... or take up your duties, and be productive for
once in your meaningless life."

 
          
 
"But, I. . . You can't do this to
me!"

 
          
 
"Why not?"

 
          
 
"Because I'm your son! It's your duty!
You owe it to me!"

 
          
 
"As long as you live out of my purse, I
can make you do any damn thing I like!"

 
          
 
A choked sound escaped from Richard's throat.

 
          
 
Phillip sighed wearily. "I've made a lot
of mistakes in my life, Richard. Many of them in raising you. I had no idea
that your studies would take you so far from productive reality. Nevertheless,
I shall make amends ... late though it may be. Boy, the world out there is not
an abstraction, not as Messer Rousseau's fanciful treatise would have you
believe. It's a very calculating place. One from which I have sheltered you.
I'll not have any son of mine while away his life as a professor of philosophy.
Your mind has been ruined by these quacks and charlatans."

 
          
 
"They're neither quacks nor—"

 
          
 
"I will not have you perpetuate such
absurdities on other susceptible young minds. Instead, Richard, you will assume
the responsibilities that I have too long allowed you to avoid. That is all!
The final word! So long as you live on my money, you are not going back to the university.
Is that clear?"

 
          
 
In a futile attempt to save himself some
dignity, Richard looked up. "You don't understand."

 
          
 
"I’ll send Jeffry over to
Cambridge
for your things. What's this? I'll not
brook that pouting face. You look like a scolded little boy. You're twenty-two
years old, for God's sake, and you can damned well act it! We'll talk more
tonight at dinner. I have some arrangements to see to . . . some friends I must
discuss this with." Phillip cocked his eyebrow again. "Or, you could
just walk out that door downstairs and take responsibility for yourself."

 
          
 
Richard gaped in stunned disbelief.
"Responsibility . . . for myself?"

 
          
 
Phillip's heart sank. "You may go. You'll
find your room the way you left it. Jeffry will call you to supper. Please,
make yourself presentable for the table."

 
          
 
Richard slipped through the doorway as quietly
as possible. Phillip slumped in the overstuffed chair. Was this the right
thing? He reached behind him and pulled the bell cord.

 
          
 
Within moments, Jeffry answered the tinkling
summons, opened the door, and crossed the carpet to stand before the desk.
Jeffry stood over six feet, whip-thin, posture as unforgiving as a ramrod's.
His cropped hair had silvered, adding to his distinguished look. The white silk
scarf at his throat contrasted with his dark-hued skin.

 
          
 
Phillip stared at the desktop. "I've cut
off his money. I would like you to go over to that hovel he's been living in
and clean it out. He won't be going back."

 
          
 
"Yes, sir." Jeffry studied him
neutrally.

 
          
 
"Can you believe it? Twenty-two years
old, and I sent him to his room! I've failed him, Jeffry. I'm not sure how, or
what I could have done differently, but I failed him."

 
          
 
"He's young, sir."

 
          
 
Phillip glanced up wearily. "At his age,
I was lying in a hospital, biting on a bullet while the surgeon tried to make
up his mind whether or not to cut off my leg. Fortunately, they were so busy
with dying men I lay forgotten for a couple of days. Jeffry, I'm thinking,
thinking of sending him west... to
Saint Louis
."

 
          
 
"With the banknotes, sir?"

 
          
 
Phillip stared into the past, seeing his
wife's face, strong, beautiful. He could almost feel her cool hand against his
cheek as she told him it was all right to leave, to take a year and sail to the
major markets to set up accounts. That risks could be taken, that she'd be
waiting when he returned...

 
          
 
"Yes, Jeffry. He's got to learn to be a
man. We didn't fight and die to make a nation of children. Imagine. He's
twenty-two ... and doesn't even own a rifle! A
Massachusetts
man without a rifle!"

 
          
 
Phillip reached over and laid his hand on the
leather-bound Bible that rested on his desk like a silent guardian. Isn't there
anything of me in him?

 
          
 
Mankind are so much the same, in all times and
places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular.
Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of
human nature, by showing men in all varieties of circumstances and situations,
and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and
become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior.

 
          
 
—David Hume, Of
Liberty
and Necessity

 
          
 
Her name was Heals Like A Willow. She stood
shivering, rubbing her half-frozen hands while the wind blew snow down over the
cracked sandstone cap-rock. Misty white flakes swirled around her in a mocking
dance. The tiny crystals pattered on her cold face and dusted the buffalo robe
wrapped tightly around her.

 
          
 
Her true people were the Dukurika, the
Sheepeaters of the high mountains. The husband she was in the process of
burying had been a man of the Ku 'chendikani, the Buffalo-eaters who traveled
from basin to basin on horseback, hunting bison, fishing the rivers, and
ambushing the elk. She had fallen prey to his flashing smile and warm humor. In
the years since leaving her father's lodge, she had lived like the red-tailed
hawk, rising high during times of plenty, only to plummet during those of
hunger and warfare. Even in the direst of days, her husband had kept her happy
with his reassuring smile and the twinkle in his dark eyes.

 
          
 
With the birth of their son, their souls had
grown together like tangled vines of nightshade. How much of herself had been
torn away by death?

 
          
 
You can't afford to feel. Not yet. Soon, she
would. Life, by its very nature, would force her to find out how deeply that
wound ran.

 
          
 
Save that for the eternity stretching before
her. Just live now. Finish this last responsibility.

 
          
 
She braced herself awkwardly on the steep
slope. Here, just under the rimrock, the footing was treacherous. Above her the
red sandstone rose in a sheer face, the surface rounded by eons of wind and
storm. Each step had to be placed with care. Snow had drifted in around the
angular rocks that had tumbled down the slope. Old drifts, newly mantled, had
crusted hard, broken here and there by branches of sage and bitterbrush, and
chunky red stone. When she found a rock the right size, she kicked at it to
break the frost's stubborn hold. When it finally broke free, she picked it up
with mittened hands and stared upward at the long crack in the caprock. Most of
the crevice had been carefully rocked in. Only one last hole remained, black
and gaping—like the wound in her souls.

 
          
 
She retraced her steps back through the
wind-driven snow and studied the rocked-up crevice. Stretching, straining, she
grunted as the stone wavered in her grip. As if for once Tarn Apo favored her,
she slipped it into place, arms trembling from the effort. She teetered for a
moment, caught her balance, and sighed as she rubbed her stained mittens on the
heavy buffalo robe she wore.

 
          
 
"That is the last. Rest well, my loved
ones."

 
          
 
The numbness lay heavily upon her souls,
unbreachable even by tears. As she stared at the dull red cliff, small flakes
of snow chased angrily past her and the wind ripped at tendrils of hair pulled
loose from the hood of her buffalo coat. Above the red cliff the sky brooded
with heavy clouds and the continued threat of snow.

 
          
 
How did I have the strength to do this?
Images, dreamlike, spun through her head.

 
          
 
She had needed a juniper branch to wedge her
husband's frozen body into the narrow crevice. Her son, so much smaller, had
been laid in the packrat-tracked dust at his feet. She'd sung the prayers then,
calling on Tarn Apo, "Our Father," the Creator, then upon Wolf, who
had helped to fashion the world after the Creation. She'd pleaded that they
would receive and cherish her loved ones, and that they would show them the
trail to the Milky Way, the Backbone of the World, and hence to the Land of the
Dead.

 
          
 
Such prayers had to be sung to ensure that her
loved ones would not lose their way on the journey across the sky. Should they
do so, they might return to Tarn Sogobia, "Our Mother," the earth.
Mugwa, ghosts who lost their way, no matter what their nature in life, harassed
the living by appearing as whirlwinds and shooting sickness into people.

 
          
 
She raised her eyes to the bitter sky, masked
by sullen gray clouds. Snow blew down upon her, but she sang the mourning song
again, fingers knotting in the thick leather of her mittens. The dead could
find their way through clouds, couldn't they? Storms don't matter, she
reassured herself.

 
          
 
Willow
closed her eyes against the sting of the
wind. Enough trouble was loose on the land.

 
          
 
They stared at her from the hollows of her
memory: her husband's face, so strong and serious, trusting her to cure him;
her little son, his round face sunken, his black eyes bright with fever.

 
          
 
I failed you . .. both of you. Traitorous
muscles sent shivers through her. She opened her eyes as the wind battered her
robe, and studied the patterns of rock where she'd walled their corpses in. Her
soul's eye could see into the darkness where they lay. Her husband's face had
looked unnaturally pale, a juniper-bark mat covering his eyes and a leather
band around his mouth. To meet the gaze of the dead was to summon one's own
death at best, and to court possession by evil at worst. Terrible things could
issue from a dead man's mouth: corruption, disease, or soul loss.

 
          
 
The injustice of it goaded her, and for a
moment she glared upward into the stormy sky, angered that Tarn Apo could have
created a world where such a loving and kind man as her husband could become so
threatening after death.

 
          
 
It's not him. He's gone. His souls are
searching the way to the afterlife and its rewards. She turned her attention
back to the rocked-up crevice; snow had begun to settle in the niches and
hollows. They had planned so many things together. His eyes had sparkled as he
played with their son. She had imagined them together, snug in warm winter
lodges, walking arm in arm through green high-country meadows in summer,
slicing hot meat from his kill on a frosty fall morning.

 
          
 
Together, they would have watched their son
take his first step. Hand in hand, they would have seen him earn his boyhood
name. She would have smiled to herself as her husband taught the boy the
intricacies of stoneworking, arrow making, and the rituals all hunters must
know. And later, she would have marveled at her boy's first kill, that critical
step toward manhood.

 
          
 
Gone now, all of it.

 
          
 
There, behind that stack of wedged rock, lay
the empty death of dreams.

 
          
 
I didn 't have the puha to save them. I
couldn’t send my soul into the Land of the Dead to bring them back. But then,
such things were omaihen, forbidden to a woman. Only the greatest of puhagan,
the most powerful of medicine men, had that kind of puha. Such power was never
granted to a woman.

 
          
 
She lowered herself, back braced against the
cold stone, and stared off across the valley. White wraiths of snow danced like
capering ghosts, twirled by the wind as they settled onto the rounded junipers
and the rangy limber pine dotting the slopes below. Sagebrush stippled the snow-choked
canyon bottom, barely visible in the haze of flakes.

 
          
 
Willow
closed her eyes, bowing her head into her
hands, while the storm blew down around her.

 
          
 
Richard dreamed

 
          
 
He sat with his friends in Fenno's Tavern.
Soft candlelight and sounds of revelry surrounded them as they leaned eagerly
across the scarred table. Over foaming mugs of ale, they had been discussing
morality, Professor Ames smiling benevolently as his students dissected the
intricacies of proscribed behavior.

 
          
 
But something wasn't quite right. Professor
Ames kept looking at Richard, a sadness behind his smile. "You do
understand, don't you, Richard?"

 
          
 
I do, sir. I really do.

 
          
 
A soft rapping intruded, and finally brought
Richard back from his dreams. He blinked awake, stared around the dimly lit
room, and sat up. The knock came again as he unwrapped die twisted blanket.
Home, his father's house . ..

 
          
 
"Yes?"

 
          
 
The door opened wide enough to admit Jeffry's
dark face. "Master Richard, dinner is served."

 
          
 
"I... I'll be right there." His
breath could be seen against the slit of light cast by the door.

 
          
 
"Very well, sir."

 
          
 
Richard rubbed his eyes. The door closed with
a click. He groped about in the dark until he found the washstand. Jeffry,
efficient as God Himself when it came to Phillip's business, had filled the
white porcelain pitcher. Richard poured the washbowl full, gasping at the
water's biting cold.

 
          
 
Unwilling to face himself in the mirror, he
stared at the whitewashed wall as he combed his hair.

 
          
 
Philosopher, he thought. Some Socrates I am.

 
          
 
On rubbery knees he went down the stairs, and
bit his lip to nerve himself before opening the double doors. His appetite
dissolved as he quietly entered the dining room.

 
          
 
Phillip sat at the head of the big table. Oil
lamps cast a warm yellow light over the high-ceilinged room. The portrait of
Richard's mother stared beneficently down from one wall, her brown eyes
doe-soft, the faintest of smiles on her innocent face.

 
          
 
He considered the painting for a moment,
briefly imagining Laura Templeton's face superimposed on the image, then
chastised himself for blasphemy.

 
          
 
The table had been set with white linens and
lustrous silver. Lamplight gleamed on the fine china, and reflected from the
salt-glazed mugs. A single high-backed chair had been placed at the far end of
the table for Richard. The other chairs stood in a forelorn line against the
white-plastered wall. Behind Phillip's seat the sideboard squatted on stubby,
curved legs, basking in mahogany glory, displaying ceramic ware.