The Adventures of Silk and Shakespeare (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

To one of woman born

—
Macbeth
, V.vii.

Silk wasn’t gonna let it happen. He wasn’t going back to the Crows all rosy-cheeked with his friends dead. And he wasn’t gonna be no Blackfoot messenger boy.

He couldn’t tell if his friends thought he would. When they came into this lodge under guard, Jim signed for no talking, even English. Silk tried to talk with his fingers, but Jim shook his head and made the sign for thinking. Silk couldn’t say much with sign language anyway.

So he had to wonder what his friends were thinking, and figure how to let them and the Blackfeet know he didn’t mean to live if Jim and Pine Leaf and Yellow Foot died. And maybe calculate how to get the best of the guard on the lodge once dark came. And keep his mind off whether Antoine would show up.

He took a long breath and let it out. It truly hurt to breathe.

Jim was sitting there, his face unmoving and mask-like in the half darkness. Pine Leaf lay with her head on his lap, the first time Silk had seen such an outward sign of intimacy. Yellow Foot had his eyes closed and face lifted to the smoke hole, as though praying.

Silk kept catching himself humming. Any old piece of any old tune, like as not hitched to another piece of a different tune in a way that made no sense. He swore he’d stop it, and heard himself humming as he swore.

How could he die with his friends? Better death, for sure, than dishonor.

He could stab himself. Maybe he could kill himself, or hurt himself too bad to travel. They’d taken his knife, but he had a piece of obsidian in the rat’s nest of his shot pouch. That thing would shave peach fuzz. Yes, that would make a dandy cut. Course, it was too small to get in very far with. Might end up just scratching himself and being laughed at.

But he could cut his throat. It would do that slick. Nothing tough about a throat. Cuts easy, bleeds aplenty.

Silk braced himself to stop the swaying.

So. The picture of his own blood made him sick. He shook his head.

Silk wished he had the stuff of a hero. But he didn’t—that was plain. He didn’t. Sick at the picture of his own blood. He looked at that bit of awareness, like staring sober into a mirror.

Well, if he wasn’t naturally a hero, maybe he could still act like one. That’s what he would do.

He caught himself humming “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

At least he hoped he’d act like one. When the time came.

If only Antoine could keep the time from coming.

Just then the lodge flap opened and someone stepped in from the bright sunlight outside. Ginny’s young man, with a armload of something, which he laid down. Ginny followed with a big load, and set it down. As Silk’s eyesight readjusted, he saw powder horns, bridles, blankets. Most of what they’d left at camp, but for the saddles and guns.

Silk reeled.

“Our young men found your camp,” Ginny said faintly.

Antoine.

“What about Antoine?” Silk asked impulsively.

“He is feeding the magpies,” she answered, eyes cast down.

First Hairy and now Antoine. Silk wondered if he was conscious yet when they found him, or still conked out. Was that Silk’s fault too? Then Ginny spoke at Jim sharply. “You should have told them about him.”

Jim shrugged.

“Red Bull wanted to help you,” she went on, sounding angry. “Now he can’t.”

Jim paid her no mind.

“I’m doing what I still can for you,” she said, and let it sit there. Silk readied himself. She nodded toward her husband. “We will come back in the dark, very late, and fix it with the guard, and save you from torture.” Her eyes were dark with death.

She darted out the flap, and her man followed with measured step.

Silk heard roaring, as though from sea shells, in his ears.

Yellow Foot kept his face lifted, unchanged. Pine Leaf didn’t stir on Jim’s lap. Careful not to move her head, Jim started rummaging in the pile of goods. After a moment he came out with Silk’s flute, and held it out to him.

Silk couldn’t reach for it.

Jim smiled a light smile, easy and benevolent.

Silk took it.

“I’m sorry,” Silk said.

No one answered, or acknowledged, or maybe noticed.

After a few moments, Pine Leaf said, “Silk, you should know that Antelope Jim and I are going to get married.”

No more. Just that, flat and matter of fact.
Are
going to. Her style—run up the flag as the ship is sinking. And the way her scar made her lip pucker was very endearing.

So. The woman Silk carried a torch for belonged to his friend. Always had.

Silk Jones was growing up just in time to die.

Silk couldn’t bring himself to play the flute. But a tune sang in his head, plaintive and beautiful:

I am a poor, wayfaring stranger,

A-traveling through this world of woe,

But there’s no trouble, no toil or danger

In that bright land to which I go.

I’m going home to see my father.

I’m going home, no more to roam.

I’m just a-going over Jordan,

I’m just a-going over home.

CHAPTER THIRTY

If this be magic, let it be an art

—
The Winter’s Tale
, V.iii.

They were sitting there in the dark, stiff and weary from hours of waiting, when the song came.

They had no plan, for they did not know how many men would come with Ginny and her man. Jim had told Silk to take care of Ginny himself, probably because she was small, like Silk. He had his piece of obsidian in his hand. “Be sure of her,” Jim said. Silk would. It hurt to picture it.

So the Blackfeet would come to snuff out their candles, and they would fight—as the Blackfeet surely knew—and it would be over one way or another quickly.

Then they heard the song, softly on the night air.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made:

The voice was unmistakable.

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.

Silk felt Jim’s hand on his arm, warm and firm. Silk did not speak, but sang in his head: Shakespeare.

Shakespeare. They were going to live.

They moved at a trot through the moonlit night. Silk was uncomfortable at that pace on the rough-gaited horse, but kept pace without flagging. Beside him, grinning huge and fierce in the dark, was his partner Hairy, come like Lazarus from the dead.

It was magic, and so be it.

The big dipper said short of midnight—early in the northern night—so they had miles to go to the south. No time to talk yet. Just accept, and wonder.

Every bump on the strange horse hurt, reminding Silk that he was alive.

A couple of hours out Jim stopped to let the horses blow and talked quietly with Hairy’s two Blackfoot companions. When the party rode on, the Indians turned back.

It was still dark when they hit the trail. It was a main trail, heavily traveled, leading to the Missouri River and Crow country—home.

Jim turned the wrong way on it urging his horse uphill, kicking it to a lope. Pine Leaf, Yellow Foot, Shakespeare, and Silk Jones followed as fast as they could go.

A couple of miles further, in a little valley, they stopped to let the horses drink. Silk asked Jim why they were headed the wrong way.

“They’ll be after us. Already are. Not too many, because of the dance, but enough.”

Jim took a deep breath. The sky was beginning to lighten. “This trail is too full of tracks for them to pick out ours. They’ll figure we headed toward home. Fool ’em.

“Up ahead is Marias Pass. The west side of the mountains. The home of the Nez Percy and further on the fish Indians.” He grinned. “The long way home. Might as well see a little of the country while we’re here.”

At mid-morning they laid up, well off the trail and deep in a thicket. Jim disappeared uphill with Silk’s spyglass. And Shakespeare told how he came to be alive.

He held up his stump of a finger, leering at it. “This is what I got ’em with,” he bragged. Pine Leaf and Yellow Foot were asleep, but Silk was much too excited.

“Got us, too,” Silk complained with a smile.

“Sorry, lad. In the crucible of life and death, I didn’t think of fooling you.”

They had come on him in the last of the long northern twilight, just stood up suddenly around his campfire, perfectly silent. Four boys and a buck, Piegans. They motioned Hairy not to touch his guns, and walked into camp without even a bow raised.

Real solemn, they were, faces like death masks. The leader asked if the white man knew how to die bravely.

“That was where I got the idea,” Shakespeare explained. “I told them I was braver than any of them. Told them I wanted to show them how to bear pain easy as birds bear the wind.”

He handed Silk something strange from his shot pouch—a little ball made of many facets of mirror, on a thin gold chain.

Shakespeare took the ball back and held it up into the sunlight. It turned on the chain, throwing off glints of sunlight almost magically.

“Mesmerism,” Hairy said. “This child can mesmerize you or himself or your mule, likely.”

As Shakespeare told it, he lay down by his small fire while the Piegans watched curiously, suspended the ball from a stick above his head, and gazed into the reflected firelight while it twirled. He seemed to be mumbling to himself. Pretty soon he looked half asleep, though his eyes were still cracked open.

Hairy had his patch knife, wickedly sharp, in one hand. He held up the finger with the walnut nail. Then he began to make a thin cut around the middle section of bone. He did it calmly, slowly, even savoringly.

“You’d be surprised how little I felt,” he told Silk. The pain was there, but small, like something at the wrong end of the spyglass.

“When I got to the bone, I kept right on cutting. After a while I handed them the piece of finger. They were right surprised.

“The buck asked kind of gruff if I could take my entire self apart like that for them, bit by bit. I smiled my ogre smile and told them I could. We just had firelight, so this child judged he could get away with it. Had the white wig with the scalp plug on. Ran my knife light around the plug and popped it right off and waved it for them to see.”

Just then Jim walked back into camp. Pine Leaf and Yellow Foot both sat up suddenly. “No one,” Jim squealed, squinching his nose. “Absolutely no one on our trail,” he added. “We is home free. To the west.” He pointed.

Pine Leaf lay back down and closed her eyes.

“So what big story was you spinning out?” Jim said to Hairy.

“I was telling the lad how I used my magical powers to become a chief among the Blackfeet,” Shakespeare said.

“Wagh!” Jim shook his head. “Go right ahead. And tell us all how come you let us fret a whole day without letting us know you was close by with troops.”

“Wagh!” exclaimed Shakespeare, like a whale spouting, “this child’s feelings was hurt. My friends showed up half a thousand miles from home. I was going to introduce ’em to my new compadres and give ’em a dog feast. Then it turns out my friends never cared nothing to come after me. They was chasing some little gal. Didn’t even think about their partner Shakespeare.”

“If the Blackfeet are maybeso such good friends,” said Pine Leaf with her eyes closed, “how come you don’t stay with them?”

“Well,” said Shakespeare, “I’m afeared to teach ’em mesmerism, and I’ve had so much fun teaching ’em three-card monte my welcome’s getting thin.”

He poked a thumb inside his shirt and brought out a grizzly-claw necklace, a really big one, with the claws separated by those fancy blue beads the Russians traded. And smiled his ogre smile at Silk.

“Wagh!” said Silk Jones. It sounded more like a squeak than a roar.

They stood beside their horses atop Marias Pass. They’d seen no sign of anyone on their trail all day.

“We can cross back to the east side in four sleeps,” Jim Beckwourth said.

“Or we can go dally among the Flatheads or the Nez Perce,” Shakespeare said. “Fine Injuns. Fine Injuns.”

“Or we can go to Californy,” put in Silk.

“I thought you were going to do big battle for me,” Pine Leaf said.

“Well,” said Silk, “I’ll leave that to Antelope Jim.”

“Sure am glad to see you, partner,” Hairy said again.

Silk looked at him. “I come five hundred miles to get a fair maiden for my castle,” Silk teased, “and what do I rescue instead? A fat, old man with a talent for mischief.”

“One of many talents this child has,” Shakespeare said amiably.

“Do me one favor, will you, Hairy?” Silk went on. “Don’t get killed anymore? Please? Fake or real?”

“Ah, lad, don’t you know?” said Hairy with an expansive smile. “Shakespeare’s immortal.” He reached over and bear-hugged Silk with one arm. “Immortal,” he said softly in Silk’s ear.

Acknowledgments

My son Adam, by word and deed, inspired lots of this novel. His spirit seems to me, genie-like, to live in every page. To him my thanks and my love. Thanks also to my friend Murphy Fox, who answered many questions about Indian customs and Montana topography.

About the Author

Win Blevins is the author of thirty-one books. He has received the Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature, has twice been named Writer of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers, has been selected for the Western Writers Hall of Fame, and has won two Spur Awards for Novel of the West. His novel about Crazy Horse,
Stone Song
, was a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize.

A native of Little Rock, Arkansas, Blevins is of Cherokee and Welsh Irish descent. He received a master’s degree from Columbia University and attended the music conservatory of the University of Southern California. He started his writing career as a music and drama reviewer for the
Los Angeles Times
and then became the entertainment editor and principal theater and movie critic for the
Los Angeles Herald Examiner
. His first book was published in 1973, and since then he has made a living as a freelance writer, publishing essays, articles, and reviews. From 2010 to 2012, Blevins served as Gaylord Family Visiting Professor of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma.

Blevins has five children and a growing number of grandchildren. He lives with his wife, the novelist Meredith Blevins, among the Navajos in San Juan County, Utah. He has been a river runner and has climbed mountains on three continents. His greatest loves are his family, music, and the untamed places of the West.