The Last Crossing (8 page)

I blink, the wheel commences to roll again, I roll with it over ground soapy with tossed wash water, ashes, old bones and hides, empty Van Camp’s bean cans, a rack of charred elk antlers. Shiftless mudsills so lazy they pitch trash on their doorstep.

The soddie door is ajar, listing on leather hinges. I put my eye to the gap, but it’s too dark inside to make out anything. I listen, catch whispery snores. I yank the door, plunge in with a sluice of light, and the wind bangs the door shut behind me. I’m blind in a room thick with a terrible stench.

“Where are you!” I shout.

A bit of sunshine leaks through the dusty window on to pink flesh and I throw up the Colt and fire. My nose fills with smoke, my ears clang. The door flaps open and sunlight blasts back in, shows me what I’ve fired on.

Not one of the Kelsos, but a dead pig. The dirt floor is a jelly of blood and pig shit. The sow’s got a rope hitched to a trotter, and a bib of flies tied to the slash across her throat. Bluebottles swirl up, shimmer and buzz, make the snoring noise I heard at the door. Strange. There’s a piece of paper on the pig’s flank.

Bunks stripped of blankets, shelves bare. A leaky flour sack laying a trail to the doorway. The Kelsos are gone.

I stoop down and see that
PITCHER OF DIRTY OLD HOGG BY NAME OF STRAW
is scrawled on the paper. When I pick it up, printing on the other side shows through the thin paper. It’s one of the handbills the Englishman’s been covering Fort Benton with. I flip it and read.

I crumple the paper in my hand, step back through the doorway. Outside, the wind is groaning and clawing at the grass. Remembering Madge, I want to groan and claw too. After a bit, I look up and see Sheriff Hinckey bouncing a rig towards me across the prairie.

CUSTIS
Justice Daniels has gone to his dinner, Hinckey has gone to collect Mrs. Stoveall, and I’m left to kick my heels in a cell. Daniels wouldn’t pass on word to Aloysius to fetch me my Bible from the Stubhorn saloon. He said, “That don’t fool nobody, Straw. The devil can quote Scripture to his own purpose.”

He banged the door mighty hard going out when I told him I didn’t want to read Scripture, just wipe my ass with the Book of Judges.

Aloysius Donald Dooley will scold me for not being mindful of my situation. Say I’m only digging myself into a deeper hole. But I don’t intend to plead and make myself small for that son-of-a-bitch Daniels. I don’t bend for the likes of him.

Aloysius claims I’m contrary, but that’s because he’s a publican, and it’s a saloon-keeper’s job to be pleasant even if he doesn’t want to. Not that he is all that cheerful. To think of it, I’ve never seen a bar-keep dole out spirits with such an air of chastening gloom. Aloysius said he arrived in America from Ireland just a babe in arms,
but once he got off the potato diet, he grew like a weed. He is a prodigious height, six-foot-four in his stockings, and he likes to say he reached that elevation by the time he was fifteen, which made him a foot taller than his Da. He said his old man beat him frequently for the presumption of it. So maybe every drink he pours, he’s thinking that he’s just gained a dollar on the man who spent it, and fears a thumping for advancing his position in the world.

Aloysius is a fine individual, but he’d be a finer one if he’d leave off trying to reform me and instruct me. The man’s a mystery. Five years renting a room from him in the Stubhorn and all I’ve ever got out of him is that when he turned sixteen he was so tired of the Dooley family fleeing property seizures from landlords and bailiffs that he lit out West to make his fortune. He admits to rattling around various places – Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri – doing exactly what he’ll never say. At the end of it, he rolled into Fort Benton with enough cash in his pockets to buy the Stubhorn.

Aloysius and Dr. Andrew Bengough count as my only friends in this town, and they never stop airing their opinions of me. Dr. Bengough said to me once, “Your character, sir, is that of a Mussulman. As Allah wills. Hence your phenomenal patience.” Bengough thinks I’m long-suffering because I won’t answer the lies said about me. Let them all talk. What they hold against me most is I saw the nickel laying right under their noses and I picked it up. Years ago, when every man-jack in these parts headed off to Helena to prospect gold and make himself a pile, I went into Crow country and set up a trading post. What’s worse in their eyes is that I refused to trade whisky to the Indians and kept my thumb off the scale. It’s an affront to them for a white man to act in that fashion. But next spring I showed up with eighty head of prime Crow horses ready to sell to fortune hunters when the riverboats docked. And because I had earned the Crow’s trust, I had a steady supply of horses until my own herd was established. Horse flesh is always a surer bet than scrabbling in cold water and gravel for a fleck of gold. That’s what those scapegraces resent. Their pockets stayed empty and mine didn’t.

Nobody says a thing to my face, but Aloysius passes on all the rumours he hears in the saloon. He believes that if I know the impression I leave, it might lead me to change my ways. There’s nothing I haven’t been accused of. That I was a Mormon once, fled Salt Lake City, left five wives behind and enough kids to fill a school. That I was a hot-eyed abolitionist in Bloody Kansas, a friend of madman John Brown, hacking slavery sympathizers to pieces with a broadsword.

They’ll have something else to blab about with poor Marjorie Dray laying there on the dirt floor.

Why would such a thing happen to her? Live forty-five years, and you understand that’s a hapless question. In a town chock full of drifters, riverboat men, trappers, muleskinners, bull-whackers, old waddies, and sap-green cowboys, all coming to Benton to get drunk, play house with the whores, blow off steam, there’s a bushel of culprits. A boom town draws rogues like a jam jar draws wasps.

Nobody will stop to think about that because I’m handy to blame. And Madge Dray has often been seen delivering my laundry, going up those outside stairs to my room above the Stubhorn. The curious noted how long her visits lasted, wagged their smutty tongues. Aloysius warned me of it. I didn’t give a damn. I was too interested in finding out what I could about her sister, Mrs. Stoveall. First time I laid eyes on that fiery hair, those big brown eyes, I was done for. Hiring her and Madge to do my laundry was purely an excuse to see her.

But not once has Lucy Stoveall ever delivered my clothes, she made sure that was Madge’s chore. Didn’t take me long to learn how Madge loved to talk about her big sister. Worshipped her. I made the most of it. Learned Abner Stoveall had run his tenant farm in Tennessee broke. New start, he said, sold up their stock, borrowed some money from a brother, and took them off in a wagon for St. Louis. Spent the winter there, Madge and Lucy working in a rooming house as chambermaids to pay the room and board while old Abner played cards in the parlour. This spring, they caught the first boat to Benton with the intention to push on down the Mullan Road for Walla Walla, Washington. From a fellow heading downriver, Abner Stoveall bought a wagon cheap, but he got skinned. The reach of the wagon was
cracked and right on the edge of town a wheel hit a rock and it snapped like a piece of kindling. It hasn’t moved since. “Here we were,” Madge had said, “stranded in Fort Benton, Abner so deep in the mopes, feeling so hard done by, he couldn’t bring himself to lift a finger and start repairs.” But then all the talk of good money to be made peddling whisky to the Indians in British territory recovered his spirits, and in the blink of an eye he bought a new wagon and a store of whisky with all their Washington stake money, left those two poor women penniless in a broke-back wagon to fend for themselves. And that’s what they’ve been doing, living hand to mouth for six weeks, tub-scrubbing anyone’s clothes who doesn’t want to pay the Chinaman’s price. And no sign of Abner Stoveall in all that time.

I let Madge use my hairbrushes and sprinkle herself with my bay rum. It seemed to make her forget herself, and say what I reckon she wasn’t supposed to. My heart lifted when she told me outright her sister had no use for her husband. Well, why should she? He’s old enough to be her father. He’s a tyrant and a woman-whipper. She even confided a secret. If Abner Stoveall ever got them to Walla Walla, Madge said she and Lucy were going to skip out on him, do a flit, make for San Francisco, where there was plenty of work. They’d live quiet in the big city, just the two of them, free of old Abner Stoveall and his abominations. Her eyes shone with the thought of it.

It’s a sorry story. Two young women chained to that blackguard. Many times, taking my wash to them, I thought to have a private word with Lucy Stoveall about her situation, maybe offer a loan. But she’s a proud and wary woman. Always held herself at a distance, so I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

When I invited them, as my guests, to the entertainment on the riverboat, Lucy Stoveall wouldn’t take my offer. “I’ve got no use for make-believe trumpery, but you take Madge.” I saw it plain in her face, she suspected I had designs of some kind. I was disappointed in her refusal, but it was too late to back away from my invitation to her little sister.

So on Madge Dray’s last night on earth there I was, shelling out three dollars to buy her the best view she could have of Madame
Magique predigistating. Only five chairs on deck and we had two of them, right up front where no one could miss seeing us. We were Fort Benton high society that night. The good doctor Bengough beside us and two strangers behind us, one of them the Englishman who had been posting advertisements for a month, and the other, Dr. Bengough whispered, had newly arrived on the very same boat that had brought the exotic Madame Magique to us. Everybody else standing in a multitude behind the chairs, craning their necks to gawk.

It pains me to remember the happiness on Madge’s face, how she loved her outing that night. Clapping her hands when Madame Magique made her flash entry in purple tights, a star-spangled corset wrangling those mighty bosoms into a stupendous vision of ivory pulchritude. Twisting around in her seat, gasping when Madame roamed the audience, pulling double-eagles out of dirty ears. Amazed when she made an ordinary walking stick bloom paper flowers and gave us a bang-up finale to the first act – like Jesus, turning a glass of Missouri River water, too thin to plough and too thick to drink, into whisky, handing it to Sweet Oil Bob to sample and pronounce on its quality, and he pleading for another so plaintive and pitiful Madge laughed until her cheeks ran with tears.

When intermission came I bought her a bottled ginger drink from Madame’s assistant. It was her first, she whispered to me, she’d never tasted the like of it.

Madame came out for the second act in black tights and a black doublet, hair tucked up and hidden under a turban. Her assistant informed us sombrely that Madame was sometimes the “unwilling earthly tenement of souls gone over,” and that the ghost of the long-dead Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, desired to make a statement to the citizens of Fort Benton.

A skull was whipped from behind Madame’s back, up it went into the lamp light, and in a voice manly, foreign, and otherworldly, she cried, “ ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ ” and launched into a speech about death that nailed us to our seats.

But just as quick as this prince Hamlet took hold of her, he flew the coop, Madame recovered herself, looked about all bewildered,
cried out to her assistant, “Prithee, Horatio, tell me! Where am I?”

“Fort Benton, Madame Magique!” he hollered and poor Yorick’s skull banged like a rocket, sent up a cloud of blue smoke that scared the wits out of all and sundry. Madge screamed and hung to my arm, but she didn’t lose her nerve like those two prospectors who charged the gunwales and flung themselves overboard into Big Muddy. That set everybody stampeding about the deck, one or two pistols were drawn, and riot threatened. But it didn’t faze Madame. She just stood with her handsome face lifted to the stars and proclaimed with tender, calming, womanly emotion, “ ‘Good night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’ ”

Dr. Bengough leapt to his feet to start the huzzahing and cheering, a signal the danger from spooks was past. A handful of rowdies planted Madame Magique on a chair, pranced her around the deck on their shoulders, bucked her down the gangplank, slogged her through the mud of the levee up to Front Street. Dr. Bengough laid hands to a wagon tongue, called for a “chariot of triumph.” With all the shoving and pushing, boys disputing for the honour of pulling Madame Magique up and down Front Street, I smelled a donnybrook, but Madame graciously suggested she’d make herself available for as long as necessary, see to it that everybody got their chance to haul her in the torchlight parade. I remember the two Englishmen standing clear of the fray, looking on the way boys watch grasshoppers tussle in a jar. The one with the moustache had a contemptuous smile on his face.