A Good Man (40 page)

Right off, Léveillé recognized that the horses White Dog and his cronies had in their possession belonged to Father de Corby. He also overheard the Assiniboines boasting to the Sioux warriors that they had helped themselves to these fine buffalo runners on their way north. When Léveillé informed me of this, I sent Solomon, McCutcheon, and two constables to straightaway arrest the braggart. Immediately, he kicked up a fuss, appealed to the Sioux to help him. Were they going to let red coats take their friend? The Sioux appeared to be giving consideration to White Dog’s pleas, so I laid hold of a set of leg irons and headed for him, trusty old Léveillé at my side. Shook those shackles in the horse thief’s face and told him he’d better tell me where he’d got those horses from or I’d snap the ankle bracelets on him and haul his arse to the guardhouse in Fort Walsh. By now the Sioux seemed more interested in seeing how the game would play out than taking the Assiniboine’s part. Sensing a change in the wind, White Dog lost his nerve and started to make excuses; he had found the horses loose on the prairie; he didn’t know they belonged to a Black Robe. Bastard was clearly lying but when he volunteered to hand over the horses, I thought that was sufficient to make my point with the Sioux that I wasn’t a man that topples over in a breeze.

But as I turned to go, White Dog passed a remark under his breath. I asked Léveillé what he had said and was told that the war chief had muttered he would “meet me again.” I went hot, stuck my face in his, tore through him stem to stern. Informed him if he didn’t withdraw his goddamn threat, I’d clap him in irons and give him a taste of convict’s gruel. The worm turned then, claimed he hadn’t uttered a menace, hadn’t been heard right. Having made him eat his words, I decided to let the matter drop, since not one of the Sioux made a peep of protest. Confiscated the priest’s horses and rode off at a leisurely pace to show we had no anxieties about retribution.

You might pass on to Ilges how I handled White Dog and emphasize that Sitting Bull has seen what he can expect from me if he kicks up a ruckus. Tell him I have my new wards well in hand. But enough said. I have not written so much since the days my old schoolmaster gave me lines to write because I laughed off his canings.

Yours truly,

Maj. James Morrow Walsh

   P.S. Will keep in mind your warnings about Bull, but so far he doesn’t strike me as bearing any resemblance to any hustings-huckster I ever laid eyes on.

Walsh’s dispatch gave Case plenty to mull over. The Major had a habit of relying on snap judgments, and Sitting Bull had clearly made a favourable impression on him. The question was whether Walsh had arrived at a correct reading of the man. For Case, Sitting Bull was a fascinating puzzle, one that he and Ilges had often attempted to piece together from the scanty evidence available to them: the sketchy history of the chief’s past relations with the whites, newspaper articles, the attitude to him expressed by members of other tribes, the observations made by the Sioux who had lately begun to turn themselves into reservation agents.

The journalists universally castigated Sitting Bull for his arrogance and reviled him as the mastermind behind the American defeat at Little Bighorn, a war chief deranged by blood lust, the man responsible for the slaughter of Custer’s brave boys. The Sioux lately come into American custody presented a different picture, maintaining that on the day of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull had not joined the battle, but had remained in the camp to help protect the women and children. For them, what made Sitting Bull a great and revered man were the blessings the One Above had bestowed on him, great and powerful visions. He was foremost a holy man.

Ilges was inclined to attribute the extraordinary influence Sitting Bull exerted on his people to the gullibility of Indians all too willing to swallow medicine man hocus-pocus and mumbo-jumbo. Case didn’t think this explained everything. In his days as a policeman he had visited enough Indian camps to see that the kind of consensus Sitting Bull appeared to have forged among his people was seldom achieved. In his experience, chiefs had little power or authority to order anyone to do anything. If they were respected, judged to be wise and upright men, then they were followed and deferred to. That Sitting Bull’s people had been willing to endure so many hardships, to continue to resist the Americans for so long, and had now swallowed the ignominy of exile surely testified to a man endowed with a powerful personality.

But Case had a distrust of powerful personalities, which in his experience had a tendency to swell into alarming megalomania. What most stirred the rage of American editorialists against the chief was his serene refusal to concede that whites had any rightful claim to Sioux territory. Sitting Bull had presented them with a fact they could not refute, and it choked them with fury. But it appeared to Case that the chief, in his turn, was incapable of admitting another fact: that the struggle he had embarked on could not be won. The Little Bighorn was a pyrrhic victory that the Americans would revenge. As admirable as the chief’s stubbornness was, however intelligent and clever he might be, God was always on the side of the big battalions. For the time being, Sitting Bull had escaped those battalions by crossing over into Canada. How long it would be before he resumed the fight against the white man it was impossible to say. If he yielded to that temptation, he would certainly heap more suffering and misfortune on the Sioux. And he would collide with Walsh; the consequences of that could be nothing but dire.

June arrives and Ada has still not changed her mind about matrimony, even though she speaks frequently and fondly of family life, of her beloved mother, father, and brother. The happy domestic scenes she paints move Case to dream of emulating her parents, of building just such a life, of having children and raising them on just such a pattern as she dibes, in a home as harmonious and simple as his had been fraught with upset and complication.

Whenever Case begins to stalk the question of why she will not have him, Ada divines where he is heading and cuts him short. Not in a fashion that could be called abrupt or unkindly, but often with a wistful pleading smile as she says, “We must know each other’s minds. We must see each other clearly.”

Ada is happy; he knows she is happy. But she won’t admit her happiness, or trust he has something to do with it. One night he thinks, What she wants me to do is explain my wasted years, to admit them, to assure her I will never abandon her as I abandoned so many things before.

So he does, confessing the aimless dilettantism, describing how he now realizes that his exile in the Police was both self-punishment and a flight from responsibility, details every sin except one. And excluding it from his confession is no better than a lie. Falsehood is easy, truth is difficult, according to Miss Eliot. In this instance, one is as hard as the other. He cannot bring himself to speak of Pudge, but keeping silent about him makes him feel again the pressure of his old friend’s thumb, how it had squeezed him, left him feeling small, contemptible, humiliated.

Sitting in Ada’s parlour, waiting for her to come home, Case will catch a whiff of the leather-bound books in her library and suddenly he is back in old Sutherland’s study for a meeting of the university’s Literary Society. One of six or seven young men sitting at Professor Sutherland’s feet to listen to him expatiate on Truth and Beauty, to eat his cakes and to drink his tea, to hear him emotionally declaim Great Verse in a voice corroded by time. And when Sutherland was done, the young men would timidly read each other their poems, and while they did, Pudge would sigh, roll his eyes, and whisper asides to Case and only Case, his way of indicating they were the only two who were aware that they were in a stable of donkeys presided over by a senile, braying ass.

That is, until the afternoon that Sutherland called upon Case to read one of his own poems. In a trembling voice, a teacup and saucer balanced precariously on a shaking knee, he had read a sonnet. When he had finished, he glanced over at Pudge, seeking some sign of approbation, but Pudge was ostentatiously feigning sleep in one of Sutherland’s tatty armchairs. Of course, later his friend had apologized with elaborate insincerity. “Orpheus himself, celebrated for his power to move inanimate things with the power of his sweet songs, could not have roused me from the coma that Perkins’ ditty had induced. No reflection on you, Wesley. But give me your sonnet so I can savour it at leisure.”

Even though he knew what was coming, it had been impossible to prevent Pudge prying the poem from his hands. It was returned by mail, punctuation and two misspellings corrected. At the bottom, Pudge had written, “Your rhymes tinkle like the dinner bell. And what a feast! So much meat! So well roasted!”

He was barely eighteen. Rereading his poem had left him feeling physically ill. This was the moment Pudge had made him his captive by rubbing his nose in his naïveté. Shortly afterwards, Sutherland remarked that the ancient Greeks had believed that human beings had been sundered in two by the gods, and all of life was a search for one’s missing half, a yearning to merge with it. Pudge had sneered, “And what a merging it is, the monstrous Two-Backed Beast. And the outcome of all that grunting and snorting? As Augustine observed, we are born between excrement and urine.”

And he had not dared to object to what Pudge said, only produced a cowardly, shamefaced snigger.
Poor Wesley clutching at straws. Clutching at Truth and Beauty, feeling them slip between his fingers
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Harding was so well satisfied with the way Dunne had settled the business with Gobbler Johnson that he immediately proposed another job for him. In order to extract the gold from the supposedly played-out claims he had bought from panhandlers like Gobbler Johnson, Harding required experienced hardrock miners. The year before, he had begun to recruit “cousin Jacks,” Cornishmen who had worked the tin mines of their native land. But the foreigners had proved to be stubborn complainers. They accused him of not supplying enough timber to shore up levels, and continually griped about dangerous work conditions. Now they were attempting to organize a labour union. Harding wanted Dunne to ferret out whoever was behind this disloyalty so they could be dealt with and the work run smoothly.

At first, Dunne had hesitated to accept this new assignment because he yearned to be united to Mrs. Tarr. However, he understood how too hasty a marriage could set tongues wagging since everybody knew how much time he and Mrs. Tarr had spent in each other’s company while she was a married woman. It was difficult for him to calculate exactly how long to wait before he escorted her down the aisle, but a wedding two months after her husband’s death did not strike him as being a respectful, decent interval. And making another substantial sum of money was not to be dismissed out of hand. It would demonstrate to Mrs. Tarr what a good provider Michael Dunne was.

So he went to work straightening matters out for Mr. Harding. But things did not go easily. The Cornishmen were a secretive and clannish bunch. They preferred to speak Cornish, a language every bit as baffling as the tongue of the heathen Chinee, which made it difficult to pick up anything by eavesdropping on them. They were difficult to befriend, or even strike up a simple conversation with; they seemed to want nothing to do with anyone but their own kind. And what a strange kind they were. Of this Dunne became convinced over the weeks he spent studying them as best he could, from a distance. On Sundays, the cousin Jacks raced their whippets and greyhounds – every man seemed to own a pair – and Dunne was there watching. When the races finished, the Cornishmen formed into choirs, stood in the very fields where they had run their dogs, and sang. Grown men mad for singing and cheering dogs. Dunne found these inexplicable enthusiasms, but they were evidence of passion, and passion was the weak underbelly, the soft spot that might yield to him.