The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (27 page)

They made interesting companions for my father, Kissel and Brice, because what he wanted was an audience, and a good deal of the time there wasn’t any way to tell whether these two were listening or not. It aggravated him sometimes. Brice, now he was picking up, had a habit of going off into recollections about Independence, and he said, interrupting some remarks of my father’s on the Mormons, “Yes, sir, it was a nice little business, only it was really two businesses—ice at one season and the sawmill in the other.”

“Dogmatically,” stated my father, as we began a long bend in the river, “the Mormons divide the religious world into two sections, themselves on the one hand and Gentiles on the other.”

“—as a usual thing, we started cutting in late December, when there was four or more inches of ice on the low ponds, where it’s colder. Drive down to the edge in wagons and saw all day, then load up and back to the warehouse. It makes a pretty sound, cutting ice—clean, regular and gritty. We always had plenty of sawdust to pack in, of course, because of the mill. That was my wife’s father’s idea; he had more ideas than a dog has fleas, except he never put any into execution himself. He took to bed in his middle forties, and never got up. He ran out of motion—that was his word. He said it drew all his strength to remain upright. But he wasn’t the complaining kind; he just laid there, eating, reading books, jawing with whoever came in to visit, many of them frolicky young girls of the neighborhood—because he was friendly and helpful and
would listen to anybody’s troubles—and never took on at all. He finally died of pneumonia. The doctor said he’d been laying down so long his lungs filled up and forgot to empty. He—”

“Mormons,” continued my father, “have suffered perhaps the most grievous persecutions yet known on this continent, and for a young country we have produced some notable samples. In Missouri and Illinois a number of Saints were whipped so severely that their bowels had to be swathed up to prevent their falling out. In addition to that—”

“Yes,” said Brice, again, remembering things better now, “it was a nice little business. We would pack the cakes deep in the sawdust, and through the hottest summer there wasn’t enough shrinkage to notice. It was fun getting it out, too. You’d take a long iron goad with a hook on the end and push a cake down a little railway to the platform outside. Once moving, you could trot a two-hundred-pounder along like coasting. But you had to watch out, because if the goad slipped and stuck in a tie, with the butt braced against your stomach, you’d go out like a light. It’s happened to me more than once. I figure that next year we’ll work up a better system—maybe fix a hook and chain for pulling. That ought to serve very well. What do you think, Kissel?”

Matt had been walking along, staring at the river, half hearing both palavers, but he turned politely and said, “Yes, I believe you’re right—winter’s the best time for sawing up Mormons.”

I looked at him curiously, but if there was humor, it was unintentional. He was lost, a long way off, probably thinking about the green pastures in Oregon or California.

My father now got me aside to inquire if I didn’t think Brice’s condition was a little worse, because he talked so, and said, “It isn’t natural, it has a compulsive quality that I, as his physician, find alarming. On top of that, nobody else can get a word in edgewise. I may have to prescribe something for it.”

He had struck a good vein here, and would likely have gone ahead to mine it out, but a rider came galloping back to report that some cattle were scouring again. My father immediately put
on his bedside manner, which was a kind of low, concerned humming, agreeable to him, being the only part of medicine he enjoyed, including the collection of bills. It was automatic, and as quick to arrive for a cow as for a human.

When he left, I went back to Brice’s wagon, which Jennie was driving, and climbed up on the seat beside her. She had her hair tied up with a red ribbon, saucy and trim, and wasn’t the same girl who’d been on the river trail with John and Shep. She’d come to life, and it might even be claimed that she had overdone it, because she got bossier and more muley-headed around every turn of the road. Right now she took it mighty amiss that I had gone off with the Indians. You would have thought I did it to spite her. She was so forward I couldn’t help ragging a little.

“Some people I could spit on think they’re pretty smart, strolling off and fretting everybody like that.”

“Pa said you missed me. He told me you sat in the wagon crying every night.”

“I said good riddance to bad rubbish, if you want to know.”

“It wasn’t my idea—I did it as a favor to a mutual acquaintance of us both.”

She sniffed. “Lay it on somebody else. The fox is the finder, the stink lies behind her.”

“What’s that mean, Jennie?”

“I don’t know. My mother used to say it, and that’s enough for
you
.”

“It was Brice,” I said. “He came to me private and asked if I could find him an Indian wife, cheap. He wants to get married and naturally can’t find any candidates around here. He said he was prepared to go as high as three dollars for anybody that didn’t look like a false face.”

She boxed my ears sort of playfully, but it stung all the same.

“I’ve had enough of your sass about Brice, the poor addled man. You ought to feel sorry instead of going around making fun.”

“I
am
sorry for him,” I said, “and I did my level best, but there were only three single girls in the tribe, and one of them had two
children and the others wouldn’t get married for less than four dollars. And it had to be cash
before
the ceremony, too.”

Instead of being sore, she only looked thoughtful. Then she turned her head toward me, her face shining with some kind of idea that had come to her. When she wasn’t nagging you to clean your teeth or change your drawers, she could be handsomer than anybody.

“Jaimie, you remember how I looked after you on the boat from St. Louis?”

Wondering what she was up to, I nodded cautiously.

“We’re friends?”

It was pretty clear now she was aiming to give me another bath, so I started to scramble down, but she caught my wrist.

“Friends ought to have secrets. I want you to do something, and not tell a living breathing soul, cross your heart and hope to die, but who I say. Promise?”

“It’s useless,” I said. “I stood out in a pouring rain for two days. There isn’t any more dirt on me than there is on a duck. I can’t
take
any more water; my skin won’t stand it.”

“Nobody wants to give you a bath, numbskull. You do what I ask, hear?”

It was hard to decide. So I said, “I don’t know—I’m pretty busy just now.”

“I want you to tell Mr. Brice to meet me
outside
the wagon circle, on our side, but not near the Kissels’ wagon, at nine tonight. After dinner, before everybody turns in. You want to help him, don’t you?”

“Help him what?”

“Have a good life again, spite of his wife’s dying and all.”

“He seems in very good shape to me,” I said, more or less thinking out loud. “No women pestering him, free to get as filthy as he likes, excused from eating greenery. I don’t believe I could figure out any way to improve on Brice’s condition, so if you’ll just ex—”

She spun me around, and I felt a little guilty to see she had tears in her eyes.

“You stop your mischief. This is important. There isn’t any time I can talk to him, no time at all. In the day he’s with the men, and at night I can’t go in his tent. I want you to
do
this.”

“All right, Jennie. I’ll tell him.”

She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. I did get down, then, in a hurry. She’d gone too far. I said I’d do her a favor, but it was typical of her to take advantage of it.

I got my chance just before supper, when Brice was helping stake out the oxen. But it wasn’t easy. He was in one of his fuzzy moods, and didn’t seem to catch on at all.

“Mr. Brice,” I said, “I know somebody that wants to talk to you real bad, right after we eat.”

“That’s nice of you, son, but I’m not very hungry.”

What could you do with a fellow as mixed up as that? Practically nothing he said was sensible. It sounded all right at first, but a piece was usually missing.

“She informed me to notify you particular. It’s important. She’s got some things on her chest to get off.”

“My wife and I haven’t been dining out of late. She’s expecting another baby, you know.”

Suddenly, without even thinking, I took the bull by the horns; it was time somebody did.

“Mr. Brice, your wife’s dead. She died back in Independence and you came with us, to go to California. Remember? This person that wants to talk to you is somebody else.”

He straightened up and shot me a look. Somehow he seemed a lot older than when we started.

“I remember. I was reminiscing for a minute. That can be a bad habit. Who is this person?”

“Jennie. She’ll be outside the wagon circle at nine, but she doesn’t want anybody else to know.”

“I remember Jennie. She’s going to California with us.”

“Nine o’clock,” I said, and left, hoping he’d turn up but not counting on it. He’d arrive someplace, I supposed, but it would take a bloodhound to tell where. No matter how much they pretended,
this fellow had lost his handhold on the situation. For the first time, I wondered if, after all, he wouldn’t be better off with Jennie. It was a terrible thing to wish on anybody, but this was an exceptional case.

First, though, a queer thing happened that night at supper. We were sitting around the fire—it was getting deep dusk, being now in the middle of the summer—when a figure strode up out of the shadows, and it was Coulter. After his sneery talk, he was about the last person I expected to see, and I think he was surprised at himself, because he gave a short laugh and said, “I was going by.” My father sprang up, filled with pomp, and cried, “Sit down, Mr. Coulter—you honor our humble board.” The others, except Jennie, all gave him a friendly greeting, but Jennie kept her nose in the air and didn’t say a word. It would have been reasonable for him to sit next her, where there was space, but she shifted over, so he sat on the other side of the fire. When Mrs. Kissel fixed him a plate of biscuits and beans and side-meat, he said, “I’ve et,” after which he went right ahead and sailed into it like a man starved, not looking up once.

Oddly enough, he cast a little uneasiness over us all; we talked too much and too fast, to cover up the silence. He was shy. It didn’t seem possible, but he felt uncomfortable with everybody being so nice to him. My father explained it later in a medium-brief lecture of several thousand words, on the order of a medical report. He had the notion that what troubled people in grown-up life could be told by things that happened when they were young, and he said, “Coulter’s disposition and attitudes are a challenge—I hope to probe them as time goes on.”

But right now, Mrs. Kissel asked how Coulter had “persuaded” the Indian in the wigwam to loose me, saying, “I hope you appealed to his Christian charity, Mr. Coulter.”

“Well, not exactly, ma’am,” he replied at last, his mouth full of beans. “I slit his gullet.”

Mrs. Kissel drew in her breath with a little yip, and Jennie looked so mad I thought she’d like to slap him.

It was dark now, and Coulter had finished his meal, so he laid down his pan, then fumbled in his buckskin shirt to draw out a plug of coal-black tobacco. It looked vicious. “Chaw, ma’am?” he said to Mrs. Kissel politely, and held out the plug. I’d never known him to be so courteous before; it was a side of his nature that was new to me. Most men would have gone ahead and bit off their own chew first, but Coulter, to give him credit, thought of the women first.

“Thank you kindly, I don’t think I will,” she said, and Jennie, when her turn came, only said, “Humph!” The men nodded no and pulled out pipes, all except my father, who unloaded his usual number of windy remarks, this time about Havana cigars. He said he wished he had one, which was a lie, because he never smoked anything at all, and after this, when the plug was offered to me, I reached for it and Jennie slapped my hand. By the firelight I could see Coulter’s strong teeth flash a grin against the background of his dark, swarthy face.

But he didn’t say a word from that moment on; he just sat, perfectly rigid, staring across the fire in the general direction of Jennie. My father filled up the gaps. During the last days, as we’d headed toward Great Salt Lake, he had got wound up on Mormons, so he continued for about half an hour, telling about their habits and beliefs, most of it made up, I reckon, and the rest borrowed out of a book somewhere. But if you hadn’t known better, you might have thought he had organized the sect and was the owner and general manager.

Right in the middle of a sentence, Coulter got up, said “Thankee,” and disappeared into the darkness. It was my bedtime, but I had something to do, so I crawled through the entrance of our tent, wriggled out under the opposite side, and ankled off up the train in a hurry. Most everybody had gone to bed by now; the fires were burned low. No sound but the insects wailing about summer and a hoof-stamp now and then, where a horse or an ox was restless after the long hard pull of the day. I stepped over a wagon tongue to get outside, then crouched down behind a bush, waiting for Jennie.

In a way. I felt responsible for Brice; besides, I disliked seeing him bullied. If things got to the point where he needed help, I planned to stroll up as if I was taking a breather and say good evening. That might show this bossy creature I was on watch, and maybe even up for gouging me out of a chew.

But I wouldn’t have believed she had so much cunning if she’d explained it to me beforehand. She was so sly I felt kind of paralyzed, there in the bushes, and couldn’t open my mouth before it was too late.

In a few minutes, along she tripped, as fresh as a daisy. The moon wasn’t up, but it was a light night, if you know what I mean. Stars were out in smears, and everything looked pale rather than black. The wagon tops reared up like sailboats and even the grass seemed a lighter green than it was.