The Big Sky (51 page)

"You want to fight or just talk?"

"Fight's my name and fight's my nature, and holdin' back this way sours my milk."

Still smiling, the man came in, his head ducked like a bull's, his thick arms out in front of him. Nigger Sam yelled, "Fix 'im, 01' Cranky! Fix 'im!"

Boone waited until the man struck, waited until he felt the blow hard and solid on his face, and then he let go, standing flat-footed and braced so as to get power in the blow. The one lick stopped the farmer. His head jerked straight and his body swung off balance. He went down hard when Boone struck again and lay on his back with his eyes only half open. After a while he grunted over on his side and looked up while Boone waited. There wasn't any grin on his face and no pleasure in his eye, but only a dull surprise. A trickle of blood ran from his broken lips.

"Get up if you want to fight."

"Don't you dast, Henry!" It was the woman, rushing between them while her mouth spouted words. "You stay right there. Hear?" Her gaze swung to Boone. "You got murder in your hands and murder in your eyes, or I don't know gee from haw. My man fights just for fun and shakes hands after and makes friends." She raised the corn-shuck broom. "You gitl Git off our place, you -you murderin' white Injun, you!"

"He asked fer it."

"Git!"

Boone turned. Mefford was piling back into the
pirogue
, and Sam and Antoine after him. "Push 'er out, Caudill," Mefford cried, chuckling. "I can stand to men's talk but not to skirt scat." The
pirogue
eased out into the current. "He won't forgit that lick, by Jesus!"

The man had climbed to his feet. He stood with his arms limp and the smile broken on his mouth and the light knocked out of his face.

Boone didn't guess he would dare a mountain man again.
 

"By Jesus," old Mefford said, "Here's doin's. Ever see the like of that, Caudill?"

At the Independence landing a steamboat was pulled up, its smokestacks cold, and men were rolling barrels and carrying sacks from her. A couple of skiffs lay close by, rocking to the pulse of the river. On the bank other men bustled around white tilted wagons hitched to droop-eared mules or oxen standing lazy in the sun. The men pushed and lugged and lifted. They strode to the water's edge and struggled back with their loads and stuffed them through the tail holes of the wagons. They swore at the teams, their voices fullthroated and strong with purpose. "Whoa, you, Bess! Whoa, Jack! I'll beat the tarnal hell out of you, you wood-headed bastards!" Downstream a piece, as if too polite to stand close to the swearing, two women watched. A small boy pulled at one of them, wanting something.

Mefford said, "Hurrah for Conestoga! I ain't ever seen movers till now."

"Crazy sons of bitches!"

"Likely so, but it ain't catchin'. We'll have a whiff of 'em." Mefford slanted the pirogue to shore. Sam jumped out and tied up, and Antoine and Mefford got out after him. "Come on, Caudill." He lifted his voice, aiming at a man walking back to the steamboat. "What you fixin' to do?"

The man stopped and spit in the dust. "Where you been anyhow?"

"Up river."

"Must have catched your head in a hole, not to know."

"We hearn a word or so, but a man can hear anything." The man spit again while he measured Mefford. "Bound for Oregon, that's what." He walked on, as if what he said was enough to still the tongue.

Sam and Antoine and Mefford drifted off, watching as they went and stopping to talk when someone would hold up for it.

The wagons arched high over Boone in the
pirogue
. They stood big against the land and sky, seeming big enough to roll the country flat to a man seated low on the water. From a hill, now, or out on the plains they wouldn't be as much as a bug on a hide. Boone wondered if Dick Summers had seen them. He wondered if Dick watched from some place now with the little smile on his mouth and the wrinkles drawn around his gray eyes. He aimed to talk to Dick, but not anyway soon. He didn't want to see him now, nor anybody else in particular.

"Passel of 'em. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand over townway."

The man who had come idling along the bank didn't quite look at Boone. Just the tail of his eye looked, traveling from Boone's moccasins to his leggings to the red cotton shirt he had put on for summer to the handkerchief he wore on his head.

"They're buyin' and tradin' and meetin' and electin' and all."

"So?"

"There's a world of 'em, God hisself only knows how many, and all hot for Oregon." The man ran his hands into the pockets of his homespun pants. "Don't know nothin', most of 'em, about travel. I give 'em some advice. `Take a flintlock, not a cap gun,' I says. Right, warn't I?' His eye looked for an answer and, finding none, shifted off again. "What good's a cap gun without caps, and where you gonna find caps in Oregon? Take a plenty of cured meat and flour and some sweetenin',' I told 'em, `and stache the sweetenin' in the flour so's not to break the glass.' A body needs a sight of things, travelin' -pots and kittles and knives and salt and yarbs and dried stuff and beans. Can't get along with just a little old plunder bag full. Right, ain't I? I reckon they could use me, if it was so's I could go along. I done traveled a right smart in my time, maybe not as much as you, from the looks of you, but a right smart all the same."

One peg boot came out and scuffed the ground in front of him. "Wisht I could go, but a man with ten in his fambly can't light out like a bird. I done spent too much time in bed, I reckon. A man can't do everything." His eye, set in a face that had got old without growing up, went to Boone again, expecting a smile or a nod or a yes said by the mouth. It was a weak and shallow eye that drove away easy. "Got to stay hereabouts, hitched to a plow like a mule, account of my fambly. Ain't nothin' in farmin' in this country, neither, just work and sweat and no money or fun. Not like in Oregon, where things grow big and rich without hardly no trouble at all." The eye lighted, thinking of Oregon. "What you say? A man with ten children and a woman wore-down-like, you think he could make it?"

"You got no business in Oregon."

"No?"

"No more'n these others, the goddam fools! Ought to stay home and not spoil a country as wasn't meant for the likes of you. "

The man's jaw sagged like a scolded boy's, and the shallow eyes rounded.

"Stick to your bed and your birthin'. It takes a sureenough man for Oregon." Boone drove the eye away again.

The man's face had gone empty and still as if waiting for thought to come to it. He turned it toward the ground and watched one boot push out and then the other. His mouth worked as if to speak, but nothing came. He sidled off, his shoulders drooping under his worn shirt. A man might feel sorry for him except he was a fool. He might feel sorry, except, by God, it did good to get him told.
 
 

Mefford said, "There she is, you niggers, old St. Louis herself, just waitin' for us. Me, I'm dry as a year-old cow chip, and I hanker for women and play and all. Get up, river! Get up,
pirogue
! This coon can't stand to poke."

"I'll git off yonder." Boone motioned with his thumb.

"What!"

"Yan side."

"Not gonna spree in St. Louis!"

"I told you yan side."

"By Jesus!" Mefford wagged his head while he changed course.

Antoine put in, "Caudill, he have something better,
peutetre
, that way."

"Maybe so, but there ain't nothin'll surprise me after this."

"We hurry, to put him off, Sam," Antoine said, stroking with his oar. His voice was happy with looking ahead. "The small minute of waiting seem so long."

The
pirogue
nosed against the shore.

"Good luck to you, Caudill, and I hope you don't get no crazier and no crankier."

As Boone went by him, Black Sam looked up, his sleepy eyes suddenly soft and deep. "Goo'bye," he said. "Goo'bye, sad man."
 
 

The stagecoach stood at the side of the trail, like a big black egg on wheels, the horses unhitched from it and tied up to trees. Two passengers were on the ground watching while two others helped the driver shape a pole to replace the doubletree that had snapped when an axle hung on a stump.

Unspeaking, Boone walked by, feeling the faces of the passengers turning with him and hearing their lips murmur after him. Out of the murmur a few words came. "Got his hair in pigtails. See? Like a wild Indian."

Farther on a priest sat on a stub, his hands folded over a book in his lap while his eyes dreamed in the trees. As Boone approached, he lifted the book and turned a page or two and then put it down and let his hands rest on it again while his lips moved silently. His eyes woke up when Boone came even with him. "Good day," he said. He was a middling man as to size, with a round face that was full and pink from good living and looked all the pinker for the white collar and black coat below it.

"How."

"Rather walk than ride?"

"Quicker if a man's used to it."

"The trees are beautiful. Such a forest!"

"Too damn thick for my likin'."

"Sit down, won't you?"

"What's on your mind?" Boone let himself down on a stump.

"You're what they call a mountain man? A fur hunter?"

"I've catched a few."

"Where?"

"Most any place you could name."

"Missouri? Yellowstone? Columbia? Colorado of the West?"

"All of them and more."

"Please excuse my questions. You see, I want to go among the Indians. I'm on my way to Bardstown and from there, I hope, to the far west." His gaze went down to the hands folded across the book. "You've had many experiences with the Indians, I'm sure."

"Some."

"Say you were in my place, where would you like to go if you had the choice? I mean, to what tribe?"

"They don't want white men's ways, none of 'em."

"You haven't heard of our mission among the Flatheads?"

"Bunch of squaws. Squaw tribe, Flatheads and Nepercies both."

"Perhaps the others think they don't want white ways, but they need God."

"They got their own god."

A small smile, not unfriendly but not shilly-shally either, came on the black robe's face. "A god, but not God."
"The ones they got do good enough -good as any, I reckon."

The priest shook his head while he held the small smile. "No god does well but God."

"Can't see much difference myself."

"It isn't what a man sees." A plump finger came up and laid itself over the heart. "It's what he knows in here."

"You think your way. I'll think mine."

The face reddened above the white collar, but the voice stayed gentle. "That's a privilege in this country even though we abuse it." It was a keen and knowing pair of eyes he had. After a little silence he added, "Men are happier, knowing God," and waited for the answer it would bring.

"I git along all right."

"I see."

Boone got off the stump the priest had motioned him to. "No use to talk. Wisht you priests and preachers would stay out of the mountains myself."

"Why?"

"Just, goddam, because."

Boone didn't wait for more talk. He lifted his rifle and went on, walking the road to Paoli.

He always had felt at home outdoors. It was as if the land and sky and wind were friendly, and no need for a pack of people about to make him easy. The wind had a voice to it, and the land lay ready for him, and the sky gave room for his eye and mind. But now he felt different, cramped by the forest that rose thick as grass over him, shutting out the sun and letting him see only a piece of sky now and then, and it faded and closed down like a roof. The wind was dead here; not even the leaves of the great poplars, rising high over all the rest, so much as trembled. It was a still, closed-in, broody world, and a man in it went empty and lost inside, as if all that he had counted on was taken away, and he without a friend or an aim or a proper place anywhere.

When he came to a town, though, it wasn't any better, with fools staring and wagging tongues and thinking as how one man ought to be like another and all knuckling under to rules and ways and work and sheriffs and judges, and calling themselves free. And all living smothered by walls and roofs, breathing air that the good was gone from, breathing each other's stinks and the stinks that the hogs made in the pens back of the houses. Even the forest was better.

Near a deadening along the trail a big blue-tick hound got up from the door of a cabin and walked out, stiff-legged, for a look at Boone. His nose spread with smelling, and a soft rumble sounded in his throat. He raised old, sad eyes to Boone's face. Someone had cut his tail off. The nubbin that was left tried a slow, asking wag.

Boone walked around him, and afterward a voice called out, "Say, you, that's my dog!"

Boone turned and saw the hound at his heels and a redfaced man standing in the door. "Don't act like it."

"Mine just the same."

"Who's sayin' he ain't?"

"You been whistlin' him off."

"You're a liar."

"Must have. He ain't never followed a stranger before. Here, Blue! Here you, Blue!"

The dog sat down, his grayed muzzle lifted toward Boone, his sad eyes seeming to flow with the question in them.

"It's them goddam leather pants has got him trailin' you. Thinks you're huntin', maybe. Chase him here, will you? I take it back about the whistlin'."

"Chase him your own self."

"All right, then, if you want to keep your dander up, mister, but I done took it back."

Boone said, "Git home, boy! Git!"

The hound didn't move, except that in the dust his piece of tail swung a slow quarter-circle.

"Good-enough hound," the man said, coming up with a stick, "but independent-minded as all hell. Has a idea he can think and do for himself. I've beat his hide off and kep' him tied and starved him and all, but like I said he's a muleminded damn hound. If he wants to run he runs, and no holler or horn'll bring him back. Tell him to lie down and he stands up, and tell him to stand up and he squats."