Ride the Moon Down (38 page)

“Out!” the young man growled.

Around Titus the rest of the interpreters and clerks had bolted out of their beds, forming a tight crescent surrounding the two young men who stood shaking with fury in the open doorway.

Levi demanded, “Who, Paul? Tell me who!”

“Who else you think?” Paul Rem replied with a snarl. “The Deschamps!”

“You gonna help us, Levi?” the second son asked. “There’s too many of them—we need your help. They threaten all of us now—say they kill any friend of Jacques Rem!”

“We need men and guns too,” Paul demanded. “Give us the powder to blow all them devils to hell!”

“Hold on,” Gamble attempted to calm them. “Tell me how you know it was them what killed Jack.”

The second son, Henri, laughed in a harsh gust, then said, “OI’ woman Deschamps’s boys wanted to kill Papa for long time after Papa kill ol’ man Deschamps! Now she done it. We find him outside the wall—his face beat so bad, cut up so much, we not sure it was him at first.”

Shaking his head in disbelief, Gamble silenced the angry murmurs in that room gone cold with more than the wind. Eventually he stared round at the fort employees. “This here night been a long time coming, fellas. We got some business to see to.”

“You gonna help us kill them all?” Henri asked, grabbing Levi’s arm.

“The squaws and their young’uns—let them go,” Gamble ordered. “The rest, they don’t deserve to live to see another sunrise.” Turning to the interpreter named Bissonette, he said, “Louis, go to the arsenal. Get a rifle and
pistol for every man who wants to be a part of this fight. Horns of powder and plenty of ball too. The rest of you what need weapons, go with Bissonette—now!”

They flooded past on either side of Gamble and Bass, streaming out the door behind Henri and Paul Rem. Outside on the frozen courtyard stood Jacques’s wife and daughter, comforted by several Indian women and half-breed laborers.

Titus felt rooted to the spot, stunned. “Their father … he was just here. Drinking with us, telling stories, laughing with us.”

Gamble’s eyes glowered as he ground a fist into an open palm. “Come with me, Titus: I’m going to tell McKenzie that Jack’s dead. So he knows we’re going to burn out that nest of rattlers once and for all. Then we’ll go to my lodge and fetch our weapons. Time has come to kill all the rest of Deschamps evil seed.”

On the way to the bourgeois’s house, Levi started to tell Bass how the Deschamps clan had shown up on the upper Missouri about the time Kenneth McKenzie had been building his fort. Since then they had been in the thick of every foul deed: murder, robbery from the post stores, robbing and killing friendly Indians camped nearby, as well as continually committing adultery with one another’s wives. Eventually some bad blood arose between the clan and the Rem family, going back a few seasons when one of Jack’s sons was killed during a drunken spree with some of the Deschamps band.

“The old man is the root of their evil. He’s named Francois, Senior, and it’s said he’s the one killed the British governor up at the Red River colony in Canada when Northwest Company was fighting Hudson’s Bay. The Deschamps all escaped down here after that bloody deed. There ain’t no rakehellions like that clan.”

Kenneth McKenzie, Levi explained, was able to soothe the pain of the murder and put the simmering feud to rest for some time until one of the Deschamps boys stole the Indian wife from Baptiste Gardepie, a friend of Jack Rem. Old man Deschamps and his son Francois went to the cuckolded Frenchman, offering a horse in exchange for
the squaw, saying she was no more than a slut anyway and not really worth a good horse.

Seeing red, the aggrieved Gardepie refused the horse as settlement. But as Francois and his father turned to leave, he swept up an old rusted rifle barrel and clubbed both of his enemies. As the elder Deschamps lay dying, the infuriated Gardepie yanked out his dirk and finished his revenge—disemboweling the patriarch.

“Gutted him like a hog for a smoke shed,” Levi described with relish.

Titus asked, “So Gardepie killed the son too?”

“No. And that was a mistake,” Gamble answered, going on to explain how engagés from the fort rushed from the gate, saving Francois from a similar fate.

Once more Kenneth McKenzie leaped into the middle of the feud, demanding a truce between the warring families, each wary and fearful of the balance of power between them. For the better part of a year, an uneasy tension had existed around Fort Union.

“But last fall two fellas what married Jack’s daughters rode off to the Milk River to do some hunting for robes and pelts,” Levi declared.

Titus asked, “The Deschamps kill ’em?”

“Nawww—Blackfoot got ’em.”

With those two out of the way, the Deschamps clan began to feel stronger, growing more insolent by the month, increasingly resentful of McKenzie and arrogant in the face of all attempts to keep the feud at rest.

“Just the other day one of them bastards was over here at the post, bragging big as could be,” Levi said. “Told us his mother called all her boys together and said they wasn’t really men less’n they took revenge on the man who goaded Gardepie into killing their pa.”

“Jack Rem.”

“Right,” Gamble growled. “And now them bastards done it.”

By the time Levi awakened McKenzie and Larpenteur, bringing them to the door of the factor’s house, the Rems had appeared to demand use of the cannon that stood beside the flagstaff.

“Very well. Just go finish it,” the bourgeois told them. “Leave off the women and children … but you have my permission to take the twelve-pounder with you and finish this, once and for all.”

With a jubilant shriek of blood-lust, the Rem brothers whirled about with their comrades, leaping over the porch rail onto the frozen courtyard, rushing for the cannon they began to push toward the front gate while Bass and Gamble hurried to Levi’s lodge for their weapons.

The group had dragged the fieldpiece some seventy-five yards, halfway to the old Fort William stockade, when Titus and Levi caught up with them. As the engagés struggled to muscle the heavy cannon around a tall, icy snowdrift, a volley of shots split the clear, cold night, wounding one man.

“Get that loaded!” Henri ordered.

After stuffing a small pouch of powder down the breech, Paul Rem jammed a spike down the touchhole, piercing the pouch, before he threaded a short piece of fuse through the touchhole and into the pouch. Down the throat of the cannon another man rammed a ball.

“Back! Get back!” Henri Rem bellowed, waving one arm in warning as he ripped a sputtering torch from the hands of a friend.

“Wait!” Levi ordered. “Don’t touch that fuse till we get the helpless ones out!”

Paul Rem fumed a moment, glowering at the old man. “They deserve to die with the rest! Like that ol’ woman too!”

Gamble seized Rem’s arm, flinging him around to stare into his eyes. “I wanna see ’em all dead just as bad as you, Paul. But this ain’t right to kill them women what ain’t part of this feud.”

After a moment Rem reluctantly yanked his arm from Gamble’s hold and turned toward the stockade walls where his enemies hid. Shrieking at the fort, he warned, “You bastards ain’t got much time to get them women and children outta there!”

“’Less we blow you all up together!” Henri Rem bellowed.

From the distant walls came the muffled shouts of protest and cries of terror. Above them all rang the angry, profane curses of the Deschamps boys, and the shrill taunts of their matriarch.

Beneath the silvery light of a half-moon Bass and the rest watched the first dark silhouette appear. In a moment more spidery figures emerged from the rectangle.

“They opened the gate!” one of the engagés announced.

One by one the distant figures slipped away from the wall, tearing pell-mell across the bluish snow, clumsily vaulting drifts and spilling over the far side, stumbling headlong for the cluster of lodges where a small band of Assiniboine had come to camp for the winter.

Paul Rem pointed into the moonglow with his rifle. “Go, Henri! The women and children can go free! But see no men get away!”

With a whoop Henri Rem bolted off, three others right on his tail. A rifle shot split the freezing air, its muzzle flash hot and white from a loophole in the stockade fence. All the French and German laborers hurled themselves to the ground, taking cover by the cannon carriage or diving behind snowdrifts as the Deschampses opened fire.

In a heartbeat Paul Rem leaped to his feet. “Shoot! Shoot! Kill them all! Shoot!”

In the distance the women and children were screaming as Henri and his followers caught up with them. As quickly as they had sought to scatter, they were herded back together, shrieking, imploring, crying piteously. From the stockade the Deschamps men were yelling at the women. Another shot rang out, a muzzle flash from one of the dark windows near the corral.

A voice bellowed a French curse at Henri as those around Paul Rem and the rest fired a few rounds at the dark squares along the stockade timbers, sure they were gun ports or windows.

“They just say to my brother he should hang on to his pecker,” Paul snarled. “Goddamn Deschamps tell Henri they cut it off while his heart still beats.”

“Not if we can pen ’em down till they’re all dead,” Gamble bellowed.

“Are all your women and children out now?” Henri hollered as he led his men back toward the cannon to rejoin his brother.

“You are cowards!” a female voice shrieked at them.

“Mama Deschamps?” Paul yelled.

“I will spit on your grave this night!”

“This is your chance to run, Mama Deschamps!” Henri explained. “Get out now before we kill all your family!”

“Non!” she screamed. “I stay to help them kill all of you!”

Gamble yelled now, “You don’t leave, eh?”

“My boys die, I die too, Gamble,” she yelled in reply from the darkness of the far stockade. “I watch my boys kill you!”

Paul shouted, “I am happy Gardepie kill your husband!”

“Oui!” the woman shrieked. “Me happy too! Now I can sleep—my sons have killed your father!”

“Shoot them!” Henri roared in fury. “Shoot the old she-bitch too!”

At that moment it grew so unearthly quiet that Levi got to his feet. “Listen!”

It seemed they all held their breath. Bass put his ears to the breeze, hearing the faint sound of scraping, the piercing of the earth’s hard crust with a metal shovel. “That’s digging, Levi. They know you’re bound to use the cannon!”

Gamble wheeled, crying, “You gonna shoot that gun, Paul—do it now!”

With a streak of light the older brother dipped the spitting torch to the fuse which stuttered as it threw off sparks for a moment before the cannon belched, spewing a muddy yellow tongue of flame into the freezing darkness, enough that they were all blinded momentarily. Titus was just beginning to see again when the hissing ball tore through the stockade wall with a clatter. Inside the main
cabin men hollered and the aging matriarch swore profanely.

“May your mother couple with dogs in hell for all eternity!” she bawled at the Rem brothers.

“Reload the son of a bitch—now!” Gamble ordered.

As three of the laborers went to swabbing and reloading, the sounds of digging resumed.

“We blow down that wall,” Henri vowed, “we’ll go right on in and finish ’em all.”

While they were preparing that second charge, a scattering of shots came from the Deschampses. Bass knelt, selecting a black square where he had seen a muzzle flash. He held on it, released half his breath, held until he had about given up hope—then the moment that far opening lit up with another bright flash, Scratch squeezed the trigger. The ball struck bone and flesh with a loud, unmistakable smack accompanied by a shrill cry.

The twelve-pounder roared a second time. Then shots from the stockade. With more guns firing back at the Deschampses.

“Levi—they got any other way out?” Titus asked.

“Maybe we ought’n be sure they don’t try sneaking out the back of the corral where we can’t see ’em.”

Running in a crouch around the far side of those drifts the wind had sculpted near the river bluff, both Bass and Gamble managed to slip right up to the southeast corner of the corral without being spotted. Inside, the animals were already frightened, milling anxiously with the nearby gunfire, all the shouting and screams. In the distance the cannon roared a third time. Followed by shrieks and moans from the stockade, more curses from the Rem forces.

Back and forth the battle swung for the next three hours as Bass and Gamble waited out the fight—keeping their eyes trained on the back side of the stockade. Henri Rem lobbed shell after hissing shell into the tattered compound, ripping ragged holes through that western wall of the cabins. Though the cannon was causing a lot of damage, the Deschampses nonetheless managed to fire back from time to time in the midst of their interrupted digging.

“I don’t figger ’em for being smart enough to wanna escape,” Levi growled in a whisper, shivering with the intense cold and inactivity while the two of them lay prostrate in the snow.

Bass glanced to the east, finding the sky graying. “Hope this is over soon. My belly’s hollering for fodder awready.”

That next hour dragged by as the sky lightened and it seemed the stars were gradually snuffed out by the approach of dawn. Every few minutes the fieldpiece roared. Men yelled in the battered cabins; women screamed from the Assiniboine camp pitched far on the other side of the stockade. Back and forth the Rems hurled taunts at the Deschampses, and the Deschampses flung their curses at the Rems.

“Look!” Levi yelled, suddenly rising to a crouch, then darting away in a lope. “It’s the old woman!”

Bass bolted to his feet, following the moment he spotted the matriarch appear, emerging from the dark rectangle into the ashen light of dawn. Overhead at the end of her arms she held an object.

“Is that a pipe?” Titus asked as they trotted along the south side of the corral.

“That ol’ she-bitch!” Gamble snapped. “After all the thieving and murders, she wants to smoke the pipe with the Rems!”

As she walked away from the wall, Madame Deschamps continued shouting at her enemies. But instead of hurling down curses upon the Rems now, she was begging them for mercy, vowing she could keep the obligations of the pipe if only they would smoke with her—