The Yellowstone (11 page)

They had occasional difficulty with drifts and dry washes filled with snow, but for the most part the going was easy. Antelope grazed docilely everywhere, and after two days of swift-moving silence, Blue made fresh meat. Physically, it seemed the trip would be easy enough.

But emotionally troubled. The sameness, the repetitious dreamscape disturbed Mac and sent him into private reverie. Annemarie had withdrawn into some world of her own. She followed passively, unable to see, saying nothing, asking nothing. In camp she simply lay in the blankets, wordless. She barely ate. Mac saw tears on her face often. At night she slept beside him but didn’t respond to his touch, a mummy.

Mac was silent as well, and long-faced. He helped Blue with fires and meals and coffee mechanically, not caring to talk. He lay in the blankets next to Annemarie during the long nights, much too long to sleep through, and pondered his fate. He thought maybe he had made the wrong choice—or rather been dragged by the wayward currents of life into a maelstrom.

Enamored of a girl—a girl about to bloom into a woman, innocent, vernal, unsullied—he thought he had her love. But she was off doing the dirty deed with someone else, for sport.

Mac had made his approach circumspectly, politely, through her family. Some other fellow, an anonymous “Frenchman,” simply took what Mac wanted, gleefully. Annemarie gave it to him, probably gleefully. How funny Mac’s respect for her purity must have seemed. How she must have laughed at her reluctant suitor while she was getting pronged!

Pondering such things, Mac brooded himself into a foul mood.

He had wanted to take a wife for love, and happily to get money as well. Now perhaps she was blighting the opportunity for either. Perhaps her love was merely expedience—she simply wanted a trader, a man of means. Perhaps her people would reject her, and him. They had run away together, they were fornicators, she a fornicator doubly—she would be regarded as no longer worthy of the name Cheyenne. Perhaps if Mac invested his small nest egg in a post on the Yellowstone, the Cheyennes might stubbornly take their trade elsewhere, and all his plans would unravel.

Maybe he should trade on the Oregon Trail, where the money was. Or in Santa Fe, flush with gold and silver from the mines in Chihuahua. Maybe he should forget the Yellowstone country.

He looked at Annemarie’s young face. Her eyes were closed, but he suspected she was not asleep. It was a good face—not pale and delicate as a face for drawing rooms, but strong, firm, declarative, a face for real life.

He wondered if she loved him. Was her enthusiastic loving only the natural exuberance of an uninhibited child of nature exploring sex?

He wondered if he loved her. Was he merely enraptured by his fantasy of her, a dream he draped her in, a bejeweled gown that the flesh-and-blood person underneath could simply drop to the ground?

He remembered how he felt quickened by her. Delighted by the way she cavorted with the other teenage girls. Braced by her vigor. Touched by her unconscious grace. Entranced by her playful eyes. Transported, not merely slaked, by the solicitations of her body.

Yes, I do love her, he thought. And that’s too damn bad.

He lifted a strand of hair away from her cheek.

She spoke without opening her eyes. “So, Frenchman, will you send me back?”

“No, Annemarie.”

He put an arm around her, but she did not respond.

“Will you love the child?”

“I-don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I think maybe so.”

She pursed her mouth a little and said no more.

After a while, Mac asked her, “Who is the father?”

Without opening her eyes, Annemarie smiled a little and shook her head. “I came back to you, Green Eye. I wanted you.”

She fears I’m rejecting her, thought Mac. He looked at her still face, impassive, Indian. He wondered if that face would always be a mask to him. For now he felt a little less bleak.

Mac remembered meeting Annemarie for the first time, three years ago, when she was still a child. The band had its lodges pitched on Clarks Fork, and the four trappers joined them there in June, before rendezvous.

Mac was just beginning to learn the Cheyenne language then, and she set him up. She told him a story in Cheyenne, a story about the woman who followed coyote, but he didn’t understand it all. That night he repeated it as he understood it to Lame Deer. The woman covered her mouth, grabbed a gourd, and took out after Annemarie. The girl ran away shrieking with laughter. Strikes Foot and Skinhead were hooting and slapping each other’s back.

It seemed the story was traditional, but Annemarie had made it flamboyantly scatological by the addition of references to male and female body orifices.

Lame Deer didn’t really punish Annemarie—the joke was too good. But Mac didn’t venture any more Cheyenne sentences for several days.

He pictured the Clarks Fork country in his mind, and Sunlight Creek coming from the Yellowstone plateau above, his home country. A land of big rivers and high mountains, not like these endless, wrinkled plains. A magical land of hot springs, geysers, knife-edge canyons, roaring waterfalls, lovely, solitary peaks. A fertile land of lush grass, thick timber, and abundant game. He longed to be back there. Home.

He traced Annemarie’s eyebrows with a finger. If he and this strange girl could plant a love and grow a family, it would be there, in the Yellowstone country.

After Mac, Annemarie, and Blue hit the Oregon Trail on the Platte just below the mouth of the Sweetwater, they were in familiar territory, close to home. Yet odd sights appeared. An escritoire abandoned by the side of the trail, its frail legs intact, a drawer pulled out like a tongue and filled with snow. A huge oak bureau on its back, face to the sky. A wagon in a wash, hind end clumped to the earth over a broken axle. Two dead oxen, still in harness. A huge ceramic chamber pot, with a formal design of tea roses with intertwined stems, split in half.

Mac even made one find he wanted to keep. A clavichord, without legs, set tidily beneath a cottonwood, the size of a child’s casket. The strings seemed to be intact. Mac liked the idea of a proper musical instrument in his home, for his children.

These objects might have put Mac in mind of the trade the emigrants would bring to him next summer. But they seemed too sad. They were derelicts of civilization come to the Great Plains, small and pathetic in this vastness of landscape, no more than a scum line left by a high tide that came once and receded, perhaps forever.

At noon on a numberless day they rode into the courtyard of Fort Platte. Mac was sick to death of travel, of the plains, of his companions, of himself.

Lisette came out to greet them. “Reshaw is at Laramie,” she said, meaning the fort a mile and a half away. “He’s quit swearing to shoot you.”

Mac started helping the limp and silent Annemarie down off her horse. She had his capote on, and bandannas covering her head completely.

“Who’s that?”

“My wife,” said Mac. “Turn the horses out,” he told Blue.

“Your wife?”

“My wife.”

“Why is she in Four-Holer?” Lisette asked. “I made that for you.”

“Maybe you’ll help her. She’s blind.”

“Blind!”

“Yes. Snow-blind.”

Lisette gave a mock shrug. “Saves me scratching her eyes out.” She made a hoot of dumb laughter, but took Annemarie by the hand.

“Where’s Genet?”

She jerked her head toward the boss’s quarters.

“Tell Reshaw they ran me off, too,” said Mac. “Also for fooling with their women.”

Chapter 15

June, 1844, Moon when the horses get fat

Mac Maclean opened his eyes without stirring. Carefully not moving, so as not to wake Annemarie, he looked at the candlelight on the ceiling of the little room. She gave a little grunt next to him on the bed, turned halfway over facing him, and rolled again onto her back. She was too big-bellied now to sleep any way but on her back.

It was the middle of the night—no hint yet of the dawn, early as it came in this country in June. Mac hadn’t slept well recently. Annemarie, who grew up in unlit lodges, had gotten addicted to a night-light and would not go to sleep without a guttering candle.

He slipped out of the robes and off the slat bed and looked back at her tenderly. Her mouth worked a little, and her face turned anxious for a moment. He wondered what she was dreaming. Or whether the child might be moving within her. He didn’t like what he’d been dreaming recently. He pulled on shirt and pants and moccasins and slipped out into the courtyard.

He was in the habit of having a smoke in one of the blockhouses and watching the sun rise over the sea of plains to the east. But he heard music from the trading room.

He cracked the door. Tiny Lisette, sitting at the clavichord. “Come on in,” she said. “You can’t sleep either?”

He came in, shook his head wearily, and took a chair. He had put the clavichord on a table for fancy decoration until he could get legs made for it. “What are you playing?”

“Nothing,” she answered. “Really.” She turned back to the instrument, a kind of miniature piano, and began to doodle. “It’s crazy, but I like fooling around on it.”

Crazy because some of the strings sounded good and others twanged and clanked. And because she clearly didn’t know what she was doing, just sort of picking out patterns that weren’t quite melodies, or not good ones.

Little One seemed different tonight, simple and honest. He had seen this side of her sometimes and found her likable. And he knew she had gotten close to Annemarie. A confidante. He got out a clay pipe, loaded it, and lit it with a lucifer.

“How’s the trading?” She kept doodling at the clavichord, toying with repeated melodic shapes.

“Good. Excellent.” She knew lots of it. Skinhead’s crew had done fine gathering Lord Stewart’s animals, and Skinhead had not acted his wild-hair self. Mac had avoided losing a single animal to weather or to Indians. His men had repaired a number of wagons left along the trail, built some charettes, and prepared a stack of fresh axles. They were well prepared when the emigrants started arriving three weeks ago.

He’d been trading livestock, at least two broken-down animals for one of his healthy ones, or charging triple the Missouri cash price. Some of the run-down ones had already gotten rested and fattened enough to trade back. He had sold all his axles and had men cutting and shaping more. His repaired wagons disappeared quickly.

“So good I feel guilty about it.”

She nodded and smiled. “It feels like taking advantage, doesn’t it? But you’re giving them fair value. Fair mountain value. A healthy horse or ox is one valuable critter.”

“Like Blue.” He had noticed Lisette paying some attention to Paul, affectionate attention.

“He’s a dear.” She stopped playing. “Is Annemarie sleeping okay?” Mac nodded. “Okay” was brand-new slang, carried west by the emigrants. Just like Lisette to pick it up. “How come you couldn’t sleep?”

“Dubious dreams,” he admitted, not wanting to tell her the whole truth. He had a recurring dream that frightened him.

He is a Scots king, a barbarian in rich, heavy furs, but a king nevertheless. A young woman is brought before him for judgment. She has committed fornication or adultery and brought forth a child.

The circumstances differ. Sometimes her husband has been gone to war, but she has borne a child in the meantime. Sometimes she is a slip of a girl, too young to marry, but a mother. Always she is a lovely creature, shiningly blond, fair, demure, unsullied.

Mac as king refuses to see the child. His counselors tell him, as he knew without looking, that it is a foul thing, dark and ill-favored, half-beast, half-human. He orders it split asunder skull to crotch with a single stroke of the sword. The mother swoons, prostrate and unconscious before him. He feels superbly pitiless. The long sword rises high….

He always woke in an electric start. He hated the dream, but he couldn’t cut it off except by staying awake.

“What’s got you worried? The kid, huh? Mac, you’re going to love that kid.”

“She won’t say who the father is.”

“She shouldn’t. It doesn’t matter.”

“What worries me is her.” This was not exactly true. The notion of the child festered in him. It had been an up-and-down time with Annemarie. At first she was withdrawn and weepy. They had several tempestuous quarrels when Mac pressed her to tell him the father’s name. Then for a couple of months they were an exuberant young man and young woman together, best friends and lovers enchanted by the vernal months of marriage. In the last weeks, as her time approached, she had gotten weepy again. Mac made a point of being solicitous, but she was unreachable.

“Lucy will get her through it,” Lisette assured him. Lucy was Reshaw’s new wife, an Arapahoe. She had three children already and said she knew what to do. Reshaw had gone to Santa Fe for whiskey, which was good riddance. The fort was in keen competition with Fort Laramie, so Genet would need all the whiskey he could get. Reshaw was buying some for Mac, too.

“Women die in childbirth,” Mac said.

“She’s going to be okay. What she is going through is normal. She is tired, drained.”

Mac thought Lisette was speaking more than she knew. “I’m edgy.”

Racked with anxiety would be more like it. Sometimes he feared the birth—would it kill Annemarie? Or the baby? Sometimes he fretted that he wouldn’t give a damn about the kid—it was nothing to do with him, but he was saddled with it. Sometimes he imagined that mother and child would shut him out of their life, bonded with ties alien to him, and he would be an outsider in his own family.

He had no damned idea what to do.

“Come over here.” Lisette patted the bench she used for the clavichord.

“Yes, Little One,” he said in mock-military style.

“Teach me how to play something.”

“I…”

“Don’t tell me you can’t. I heard you play that silly thing.”

Mac had fooled with the strings one afternoon, trying to fix them. He hoped some emigrant would have a little skill and be able to re-rig the clavichord enough to make some music. After tinkering with the strings that afternoon, he played “Chopsticks,” the only tune he knew.

“Come on,” he said, showing her the right-hand part.

She caught on pretty well. They tried it together. “Come on, thump it out,” he cried. “It’s not dainty.”

A rap on the door, loud. They shushed each other, giggling, caught red-handed.

Genet stuck his white-haired head in. “Mr. Maclean, your wife is calling for you. I think it is her time.”

The damned women put their heads together and made him start a fire under a big kettle of water in the kitchen, and then told him to stay out of the way. So he was working the corrals when his mind and heart were with Annemarie.

“Those oxen are going to live maybe another week,” declared Mac, “maybe less. That’s a fact. They’re never going to mean anything to you, but they might mean a little something to me. And might not. They might die anyway.”

The farmer scraped one boot on another, eyes on the ground. “I give twelve dollars for them at Westport, mister. Each.”

Mac shrugged. “What will you be able to get for their hides in Oregon?”

The wife spit a brown glob onto the ground. “Ain’t no talkin’ to him, Em.” The inside of her bonnet showed faint, thin, brown streaks from her spitting. Nothing looked so out of place to Mac, clear west to Fort Laramie in the middle of Indian country, as a sunbonnet. But they all had them. Sometimes Mac thought they donned them as an act of defiance.

Full of defiance, these emigrants were. Emigrators, Skinhead called them contemptuously. They marched through the country on a beeline for the promised land of Oregon, despising the great plains they were crossing the people who lived here, red and white. The emigrants didn’t like what they saw. They clung tenaciously to their own notions and their old ways. Where the mountain man came and learned from the Indian, the emigrants wouldn’t stoop to that. Though they’d starve if the buffalo herds were away from the trail, though they couldn’t find water without being told where, though they didn’t know where they were going, they considered themselves superior.

Not just superior to the Indians. To the whites who lived here, the squaw men, as they called them. To men such as Mac, married to Indians. Especially to men such as Mac, who according to them should know better.

Mac at first was amused to see how shocked the emigrants were to see him in leggings and breechcloth. The women would stare and mutter. Now he’d quit wearing the breechclout. He had realized the emigrants couldn’t bring themselves to trade with such a barbarian.

The Indians were amused at the trespassers, too. They rode down to the trail and watched the big wagons and sometimes collected a small passage fee and were vastly amused at the ineptitude before them. Any one of the minor Sioux leaders could, if he chose, obliterate the westward movement on the Oregon Trail. These people could not defend themselves, take care of themselves, or even care for the livestock decently. The Indians didn’t fight because they didn’t think these folk worthy opponents.

The farmer moused his feet around and hemmed and hawed and looked at Mac forlornly. Mac gave him no help. The man wanted two good horses for his run-down oxen, and Mac wouldn’t go for it. The man would probably take the oxen over to Laramie, where they’d offer even less, and then he’d take the animals up the trail. Within a week they’d die, and he’d have to abandon entirely the wagon they pulled, and leave a lot of his belongings in the sagebrush.

It made no nevermind to Mac. Skinhead was out picking up furniture left on the trail right now. He meant to take it back to Westport and sell it.

“Just can’t see my way clear,” the farmer said at last.

Mac nodded.

“You’re not making a Christian offer,” the woman added.

Mac heard footsteps and turned. Lisette, running and grinning. “Come on!” she shouted. “You’ve got a baby girl! She’s beautiful!”

Mac grabbed Lisette’s hand and started running back inside the fort, giddily. Then they started skipping together.

“Another heathen bastard,” muttered the woman, and spit a brown glob into the dust.

“Felice,” Mac murmured.

Miracles, being miracles, might as well happen instantaneously. Instantaneously, a thing had become a person—a dark, obscure, threatening lump inside Annemarie had become a beautiful, delicate, vulnerable human being in the light of day. Much too vulnerable.

He reached out and took the blanket-wrapped infant. She was perfectly quiet, self-absorbed, at peace. A child of amiable disposition.

Mac looked over at Annemarie. Her eyes were open now, heavy-lidded, barely glimpsing Mac and Felice through her exhaustion. She smiled a little and closed them.

Felice. They had made a deal. If the child was a girl, her name would be Felice, a beautiful French name Annemarie learned from her father. If a boy, a name of Mac’s choice—William Clark Maclean. So Felice.

Mac inspected her parts. Each finger was incredibly tiny but a full finger, every part, even shiny nails. Toes likewise. Legs, arms, bottom, chest, each resoundingly human. Broad nose, shapely mouth, lovely blue eyes. Yes, blue. Mac took a tiny finger and articulated it. It worked. He stuck his gargantuan finger into the palm of her hand and she grasped it. He smiled hugely at Lisette.

“You men,” said Little One fondly. “You get all dewy-eyed.”

The child gave the faintest whimper, and Lucy took it abruptly from Mac and put it to Annemarie’s breast.

Lisette put something into Mac’s arms. A cradleboard, fully beaded, mostly white with pink and purple geometrical designs, a handsome piece of work. “My gift to her,” Lisette murmured. She reached in and showed Mac it was lined with soft, crumbled inner bark of the cedar against the child’s soiling.

Mac clasped Little One around the shoulder happily and watched Felice nurse.

“Lucy has something for her, too.” Lisette handed Mac a quilled pouch in the shape of a turtle. Mac knew what was in it—the umbilicus. Felice was supposed to wear this pouch until she was five or six—he supposed she would.

What a strange land he had come to. But he found Annemarie and Felice here.

Brusque as usual, Lucy walked out with an armload of bedclothes, heading for the kitchen and hot water. “She asked me to tell you that Yellow Hands would be here soon.”

Yellow Hands was an Arapahoe medicine woman, from Lucy’s tribe, camped down on Horse Creek. She would give the child a name that would never be used, a private and sacred name. A shock of realization came to Mac: Yellow Hands was a half-man, half-woman, like Calling Eagle. He should have known earlier. All the signs were there. Well, when your eyes are open, suddenly you see.

A strange land indeed. But any land with Felice in it was a land overflowing with milk and honey.