Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

Автор книги: Томас Бергер (Бри(е)джер)

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CHAPTER 23 Amelia Makes Good

WE WAS DOWN on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River at the time. At night after the day’s shooting, the buffalo hunters in the area would collect at one of the larger camps for sociable drinking and poker. The source of liquor was the peddlers who come out with wagonloads of barrels. No place was too remote for them fellows. There was a good many spots on the prairie where you might have died for want of water, but you could get a drink of whiskey most everywhere.

One evening me and the skinner rode over to a nearby camp to get us a blast, and who did I see tending the whiskey wagon but my brother Bill. One thing about him, he had found a trade at an early age and stuck to it. Maybe you recall what a rotten-looking man he had already been away back in ’57 when I encountered him selling rotgut to the Indians. Well, having sunk so far so soon, he didn’t degenerate much further during the next fifteen years. His teeth was all gone, but otherwise he looked the same to me: utterly filthy, of course, and as I come near he was telling his customers how he knowed John Wilkes Booth, who hadn’t been killed a-tall but was living at that very moment in El Paso, Texas, where he kept a general store.

Having heard from Bill’s own lips of how he dosed his goods, I decided to teetotal that evening, but couldn’t have talked the skinner out of his cup without revealing the kinship, which I hadn’t no interest in doing, so he went and ordered. As it happened, Bill was way down to the bottom of the present barrel, and had to tip it over so as to fill the dipper. In so doing he pointed its mouth towards the firelight, and I saw my skinner peer within and then stare at Bill.

“Hold on,” he says. “What’s them lumps at the bottom?”

Bill says: “That’s just the mother. You know, like on vinegar.”

The skinner shoves him away and tips the barrel over and a half-dozen objects slide out along with the trickle of the remaining whiskey, and alongside the campfire their identity was not long in doubt.

“You are a mother ____,” says the skinner. “Them is rattlesnake heads!”

Bill makes a toothless grin. “Well, all right,” he says.

Now the fellows all begin to get riled and threaten to break into the rest of his stock, so he admits there ain’t a barrel of whiskey on board that don’t have six snake heads inside it. That news causes some of them who been drinking to go off into the bushes and heave, and the remainder get out their lariats and look for a convenient limb on which to elevate my brother, but a tall, skinny young hombre pushes his way among the crowd and says to Bill: “You hitch up and get out of here and don’t come back.”

“They don’t hurt none,” says Bill in whining indignation. “They just put the old be-Jesus into the stuff. The boys like the bite of my goods.”

“Get out,” says the skinny fellow. “And you men step aside and let him do it.” And by God, if they didn’t; I don’t know why, for he didn’t look special to me, but he had some of the assurance of Custer and Hickok, if not the long hair.

The skinner rejoined me and says: “Did you ever see the like of that?” Meaning my brother, and being under some strain, I just belched. The sight of them snake heads had got to me, though I never touched a drop of the rotgut.

The skinny fellow walked quickly to me and staring coldly from under his straight black eyebrows, says: “You have an objection?”

I allowed I did not, but I also requested he state a reason why in the goddam hell he thought I might.

“You just spoke my name,” he says.

“I don’t know your name,” says I.

“It,” he says, “is Earp.”

“Oh,” I says, laughing, “what I done was belch.”

He knocked me down.

Well sir, I arose directly with gun in hand, but Earp strode away, giving me the choice of ventilating his back or agreeing with him that the incident was closed. But damn if I was going to let him set the terms, so I throws some spectacular abuse at him in front of them other hunters, and he turns and comes back.

“Draw, you goddam Belch you,” says I, for in that measured stride he had come within ten feet of me and his weapon was still holstered, his hands swinging freely as he walked. But onward he come, and I found it impossible to raise my gun and shoot him down until he went for his, but he never. Finally, having reached a range of one foot, he detained my right wrist with the wiry fingers of his left hand, drew his pistol, and struck me over the head with its heavy barrel. I was cold-cocked for fair.

This was the technique called “buffaloing,” and it was Wyatt Earp’s favorite when he became a marshal later on. In all his violent life, he only killed two or three men, but he buffaloed several thousand. I guess he was the meanest man I ever run across. In a similar circumstance, Wild Bill would have killed his opponent. Not Earp, he was too mean. To draw on you meant he considered you a worthy antagonist; but he didn’t; he thought most other people was too inferior to kill, so he would just crack their skulls. I don’t know how it worked, but when he looked at you as if you was garbage, you might not have agreed with him, but you had sufficient doubt to stay your gun hand a minute, and by then he had cold-cocked you.

I returned to K.C. in the spring of ’72 as I have said, got a haircut and a twenty-five-cent bath at the barbershop, and having donned my city clothes from a trunk I kept in storage, went over to Amelia’s school.

That prune-faced headmistress could not have been kindlier.

“Ah,” she said, pouring me a dinky little cup of tea, “we were so concerned that you would not get back to us in time from your scientific expedition.”

I was aching to see my niece and what further refinements she had acquired over the winter, but figured I had ought to play along with Miss Elizabeth Wamsley, especially when sitting in the parlor of her Academy for Young Ladies, with a potted plant sticking its leaves into my ear and a crocheted doily under both arms and another back of my head to catch the bear grease.

“I trust,” Miss Wamsley said, “that you collected many rare fossils for deposit in our Eastern museums.”

You can see what little Amelia’s version of my buffalo hunting must have been.

“You must tell me about it,” Miss W. went on. “But first, I do think we should dispose of certain matters which, though crass, are pressing. Indeed,” she said, showing her long front teeth in a supposed smile, “aren’t they usually one and the same? … Now of course you understand, dear Mr. Crabb, that when a student withdraws after completing more than two weeks of a given term, no refund of fees is granted.”

I swallowed all my tea in one gulp, so that it wouldn’t make too much of a mess in case I dropped the cup and saucer.

“Amelia has run off,” I says, and my heart turned to bone.

Miss Elizabeth Wamsley give a high titter that sounded like somebody was ripping a silk shawl.

“Not in the least, my dear Mr. Crabb! Our dear Amelia is to be married. We had no earlier means of apprising you, no telegraph or postal address by which one could reach your far-flung desert and mesa.”

“Who to?” I asks. I reckon if I had been elsewhere than that stuffy parlor with its stink of dried flowers, I should have followed up the query with a fervent threat to kill him. I had just naturally assumed that anybody who might want to marry Amelia, or say he did, would be some low-life skunk. You see, in spite of my frequent mention of how much class she had developed, in the bottom of my mind was the memory of pulling her from the gutter, and a conviction that if left to her own devices she would return there.

Miss Wamsley says: “Modest as we habitually are here, Mr. Crabb, I do think that in this case we might be permitted to suggest our satisfaction at Amelia’s engagement. Wamsley Academy alumnae are mistresses of some of the finest houses in our Nation, and ____”

“Who to?” I asks again, for I didn’t realize she was delaying so as to build up the effect, rather than soften the blow.

I swear to you she then mentions the name of a state senator, and says it was his son, a young lawyer in K.C., who Miss Wamsley had hired to represent the Academy in a matter of nonpayment of tuition-here she give me a meaningful look-in the course of which business he come to the school, saw Amelia, and “his heart was pierced by Cupid’s bolt,” according to my informant. The courtship took place over the winter, and the marriage was set for May. That was why Miss Wamsley was a-worried about the fees: her semester run to June. The money I had laid down the last fall covered only the first term. So far in ’72 Miss W. had carried Amelia on credit, though of course she knowed a celebrated explorer like myself was good for it.

I paid her forthwith a handsome sum. I was ashamed of my quick and erroneous judgment on Amelia, but the rapid rise of that little gal made me dizzy. A respectable marriage was what I had dreamed of for her, but coming this soon had caught me unawares.

The old crow cleared out soon as she got her cash, and sent for Amelia, who was taking her needlework class or some such. My niece give me a kiss upon the cheek and I was sure relieved I had had it shaved just prior. For if anybody come close to the gentility of Mrs. Pendrake, it was her. And mind you, Miss Wamsley had them Academy girls dress right severe in dark-colored clothing and covered from chin to ankle, without paint or powder or jewelry, and most of the students I seen didn’t have no more distinction than a flock of sparrows. They was drab. Not Amelia. In the same circumstances, she looked exactly supreme.

She set beside me on the sofa, with her hands in her lap and her chin at a graceful angle, and said: “I trust your trip was gratifying.”

“Miss Wamsley,” said I, “has told me you was getting married.” A little spark come into her eye, and I quick added: “I don’t have no objection.” Then I said: “I reckon you are in love.”

Amelia first looks proudly down her nose, and then she suddenly goes into a knowing expression: not tough or cynical, but simply realistic.

Putting aside her formerly lofty tone, she says: “You never really believed I was your niece by blood? Because if you did, I would honestly feel awful.”

You know how you can go along in life for years without facing essential matters of this type. Absolute definitions generally make a person feel worse. I’ve known heavy drinkers who have survived for years merely by not admitting they was confirmed drunkards. I expect you thought back a ways when I commenced my association with Amelia that I believed in our blood-relationship on mighty flimsy evidence; that a girl in her position would say anything a customer wanted to hear; that playing the role of my niece was a hell of a lot easier profession that the one from which I had reclaimed her.

These considerations was not unknown to me. But look here: the kind of life I had lived, I had earned a right to say who was or wasn’t my kin. Every real family I had ever possessed had been tore away from me by disaster. I got to figuring the natural relationships was jinxed for me, and when little Amelia offered herself, I accepted forthwith and believed the privilege was all mine.

“I mean,” she says, “I knew you were getting your fun out of it and so was I, but I have this chance now to become respectable, and who knows when it would come again?” She takes my hand, and she says: “I’d like it real fine if you could give me away. My mother ran off with a drummer when I was twelve, and my father drank himself to death a couple years later. That was in Saint Joe, and then I came downriver. A fellow that came into Dolly’s used to tell me about the Mormons; which is how I know about their ways.” She smiled; I reckon you could say she somehow preserved a innocent quality that was genuine.

Well sir, after I got used to the idea, I was right proud. I felt forlorn in that I would soon lose the company of my “niece,” but the satisfaction that I had significantly altered her fate brought me back almost even again. If respectability was always denied me personally, at least in this instance I was able to arrange it, so to speak, for another. That’s about as high as a white man can aspire.

“Amelia,” I says, “you don’t have to have blood-ties to get a family feeling about a person. I am connected in natural brotherhood to a man who is so low as to drop snake heads in the whiskey he sells, and I do not give a damn for him if you will pardon the expression. Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man’s real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin.

“So you are my niece in the only fashion that means anything. And because I love you as such, I am not a-going to give you away. You had better go as an orphan to this wedding, which is the truth, anyway.”

She really did protest, which made me feel good for I reckon she wouldn’t have wanted me there had she not had some fondness for me, but I stayed firm. I seen now that my old dream of getting her well married and then dropping around to the house of a Sunday to take dinner with her and her husband would not work. I could never keep up the pose of explorer or fossil-hunter or whatever the tale she’d handed the senator’s son as regards her “uncle.” However, after a time I did realize that it would be humiliating to have nobody stand up for her, considering the wedding was to be a social affair attended by the better class of K.C. So I promised to provide a man.

I appealed to Signorina, and by George it turned out she was living with just the right sort of fellow at this time: a decayed-gentleman type, about fifty year of age with gray sideburns and a spiky goatee. He was also an alcoholic, but swore he could walk down a church aisle without staggering when supported by the money I give him.

I also bought Amelia the finest wedding outfit, along with a complete wardrobe for the time after; and such money as I then had left, I presented to her as dowry. She never said a word of thanks. She had never expressed the sentiment of gratitude at any time during our association, for she knowed it was always a square deal for me. Maybe it is not the worst training for a woman to put in a season as a harlot.

I watched the wedding from the choir loft, and seen for the first time the young fellow she was marrying, and he wasn’t much. He was built tall and flabby and wore eyeglasses at the age of twenty-five. His Pa was a stocky man with a hard jaw and iron-gray hair. It was easy to see that Amelia was taking over from the old man as the supply of force for that boy.

Signorina Carmella’s lover worked out real fine in his role. He walked so straight up the aisle, with Amelia on his arm, that there might have been steel scaffolding beneath his tailcoat. Carmella, on the other hand, never got to the ceremony. That pair lived according to some kind of rule by which at any given time one of them lay stinking drunk at home. Today was her turn.

But Dolly come, and watched from up in the loft with me. She got right overwrought at seeing how one of her girls had made it, and cried all through the service, though I never seen no tear-streaks on her powder and paint when she was done. After the newlyweds had gone out the church door and various swells was crowding around their carriage throwing rice in that husband’s nearsighted face, Amelia looking slightly sarcastic, Dolly leans her bosom against my elbow and says: “That was a sight to remember. Come on now to my place, Short Arm, and have one on the house. Maybe you’ll find another niece.”

We kept to the rear of the crowd so as not to embarrass Amelia, and then the carriage drove off, and that was the last I seen of that little gal forever. But damn if I didn’t, along in 1885 or -6, read in a newspaper that Grover Cleveland had put her husband in the Cabinet! So she worked out real successful, the only family I ever had that did, and that is why I have told you the story.

I went buffalo hunting during the next couple winters, and summers I wandered about the Kansas cowtowns, playing poker and I also got to dealing faro, a popular game of the time. As to buffalo, by God if you couldn’t notice already by the season of ’72-’73 that the herds had commenced to dwindle. There was still hundreds of thousand, but not millions. Plenty, but not infinite. If you seen one of them railhead collection points where the skins was brung in, you’d appreciate why. What looked like a new block of buildings from out on the prairie, was in actuality stacks of hides awaiting to be loaded on the freight cars. And down on the range, you never encountered no more of them immense herds me and the skinner come across that time in ’71. No, that Was a wondrous sight never to be repeated on this continent.

But if the buffalo had started to fail because he was wild, his tame cousin the steer was gaining. Up the Chisholm Trail from Texas the cattle herds was drove, through the Nations and into Kansas, to the new towns that had sprung up as the railroads came. Now almost every year in the early ’70’s another place was in fashion, commencing with Abilene and then Ellsworth, Wichita, and Dodge City. Everyone wanted the herds, for the cowboys was paid off after they had delivered their animals to the railside stock pens, and of course not having seen a woman in some months nor any other feature of civilized life, they would blow their rolls on the local amusements.

So it was profitable for the business people, and the cowboys was encouraged to enjoy themselves to the hilt, except when you tell that to such men they are inclined to take it literal, for they been eating dust for weeks and enduring foul weather and stampedes-a loud sneeze in dead of night will panic a herd of cattle-and maybe also rustlers and Indians. So you let a cowboy see a slogan like the one a certain town had posted on the trail in: EVERYTHING GOES IN WICHITA, why, he’ll get crazy drunk the first minute he sets foot on Douglas Avenue and in the next he will have drawed his gun and started to discharge it recklessly.

Well, I had my run-ins with cowboys and bear yet the scars to prove it, and I was in Wichita a couple times in the years that everything “went” there, except that after a time they hired my old friend Wyatt Earp to see it never went too far, and when I seen him in action, busting skulls with his gun barrel, I’ll tell you I thought better of the Texans.

I guess you get my point that during these years I never belonged to no particular faction. I might not have been all that old, but I got to thinking of myself as being a holdover from an earlier era, before the railroads and steers and gunfighters and main streets full of gambling halls and dry-goods stores. I was only in my early thirties at this time, so maybe it was mere sentiment. Whatever, the years had got to passing without a worthwhile mark upon them, and all I see when looking back is a blur of poker hands and whiskey fumes and occasionally the muzzle of a weapon, and I always survived that emergency in one style or another, and though I won at cards more often than I lost, I was at the same time ever broke. I believe now that I was actually expecting to be killed. I even got to where I was setting with my back to the door.

I mean I did that once, and I was promptly shot through the shoulder from behind, by a man I never saw. It was in Dodge City, and I never did find out who done it. That was the most hateful town on the face of the earth. Everybody there hated everyone else, buffalo hunters hated mule skinners, both hated cowboys, gamblers hated anyone who played against them, and all joined in detestation of the soldiers from the fort nearby.

All you had to do to make an enemy in Dodge was to be seen by another human being: he immediately loathed your guts. Look into the sky and predict rain, and you could get a fight out of it. So when I got it in the back, I was not surprised. He was a bad shot, incidentally, for the slug missed the bone. After six or eight months the stiffness was gone except when it rained. By that time I had left Dodge, though, and I didn’t try very hard to determine the identity of the near-assassin. I would only have been interested could I have got enough dynamite to blow the whole place sky-high. For I was no exception to the rule: I hated everyone there.

My last buffalo-hunting season was the winter of 1874-75, and we spent a good deal more time looking for herds than shooting them. I cleared only about $350 from fall to spring-to give you an idea of how slim was the pickings. Then, not long after I got the skins into Dodge, I was shot in the back as aforesaid.

I headed north when I was fit to travel and went all the way to Wyoming without seeing a wild Indian. Instead, I run across plenty of homesteaders, who built themselves houses out of sod and planted wheat and corn, and they was real friendly and sometimes had young daughters they wanted to marry off, so I was well received and they shared with me what food they had-which come in right handy, for you didn’t see no game any more on the central plains.

It was nicer inside them houses than you would have thought, for the ladies tied cloth against the ceiling to catch the dust that fell, and the sod was so thick that it would endure a rainstorm without letting in a drop. The trouble come next day when the water at last penetrated; then it and mud dripped down for most a week. Of course, it rained very seldom-which was good for the houses, but death on crops. And then the summer of ’74 billions of grasshoppers descended on the plains in a great blanket stretching from Arkansas to Canada, and ate up not only what grew in the fields but also harness and covered-wagon tops and a Union Pacific train was stalled at Kearney, Nebraska, by a three-foot drift of them insects. When the grasshoppers left, after two weeks, it was as if nothing had yet been planted, all being gnawed right down to the ground. Now I have mentioned how difficult it often was for an Indian to get his three squares a day, but there was also considerable risk to being a white homesteader, at least in them days.

Well sir, sodbusting never held no attraction for yours truly, that’s for sure. I kept on moving north, and I’ll tell you why. Once again, it was curiously connected with the activities of George Armstrong Custer. Who by the way I was not looking to assassinate no more; no, unless I get revenge within a reasonable length of time after the offense is committed, I can’t keep up an active hatred for anybody. I reckon that’s a weakness of my character. I mean, I missed him in Kansas City in ’71, and then I got involved in reclaiming Amelia, and what with one thing another, eight years had went by since Washita. I guess most of us have got a sort of statute of limitations within our hearts; unless a man is a lunatic, violent feelings taper off after a while.

So though it was unlikely that Custer would ever become my personal hero, I had lost my former desire to do him in. I did not think about him at all, and when, in the summer of 1874 I heard he come back to the plains and led a column into the Black Hills to map that region, it never interested me none.

But as it happened, some scientists he carried along on that expedition found certain deposits in the area, and the journalists got hold of the report and spread it across the country:

GOLD!

The Land of Promise-Stirring

News from the Black

Hills.

The Glittering Treasure Found at Last

A Belt of Gold Territory

Thirty Miles Wide.

The Precious Dust Found in the

Grass under the Horses’ Feet

– Excitement Among

The Troops.

It Can be Reached in Six Days-Expeditions

Forming All Along the Frontier.

The Black Hills had been guaranteed to the Sioux in the treaty of ’68 after they run out the Army and burned down the forts along the Bozeman Trail, and it was a mighty nice piece of property, heavily forested and containing bear and elk. Pa Sapais what the Lakota called it, the “sacred hills,” for the Indians considered as divine any piece of ground that grew so much wood and animals. A white man on finding such a place that held everything he needed would move in and use it to the hilt. But not a redskin; he restrained himself.

I had been there once as a boy. Beforehand, Old Lodge Skins prayed a good deal and had a vision in which we would get six elk, two bear, and twenty-seven tepee poles, so that is exactly what we took from the Black Hills and nothing more, and left its dark-blue forests and silver streams as quiet as we found them. At that time we would not have known what to do with gold if we come across it.

But I had since changed remarkably. So that is why I now proceeded up towards Dakota Territory: I wanted some of that gold. I hadn’t got much of it in the Colorado rush of ’58, but I was white man enough to try again.

I wasn’t trailing Custer no more, nor was I looking for Indians. But I sure found them both.