Butcher's Crossing (21 page)

“What?”

“What do I do first? I’ve never dressed an animal before.”

“My God,” Schneider said quietly. “I keep forgetting. Well, first you better de-gut her. Then I’ll tell you how to cut her up.”

Charley Hoge and Miller came around the tall chimney rock and leaned against it, watching. Andrews hesitated for a moment, then stood up. He pushed the point of his knife against the breastbone of the calf, and poked until he found the softness of the stomach. He clenched his teeth, and pushed the knife in the flesh, and drew the knife downward. The heavy, coiled blue-and-white guts, thicker than his forearm, spilled out from the clean edge of the cut. Andrews closed his eyes, and pulled the knife downward as quickly as he could. As he straightened up, he felt something warm on his shirtfront; a gush of dark, half-clotted blood had dropped from the opened cavity. It spilled upon his shirt and dripped down upon the front of his trousers. He jumped backward. His quick movement sent the calf rocking slowly on the rope, and made the thick entrails slowly emerge from the widening cut. With a heavy, liquid, sliding thud they spilled upon the ground; like something alive, the edge of the mass slid toward Andrews and covered the tops of his shoes.

Schneider laughed loudly, slapping his leg. “Cut her loose!” he shouted. “Cut her loose before she crawls all over you!”

Andrews swallowed the heavy saliva that spurted in his mouth. With his left hand he followed the thick slimy main gut up through the body cavity; he watched his forearm disappear into the wet warmth of the body. When his left hand came upon the end of the gut, he reached his other hand with the knife up beside it, and sliced blindly, awkwardly at the tough tube. The rotten smell of the buffalo’s half-digested food billowed out; he held his breath, and hacked more desperately with his knife. The tube parted, and the entrails spilled down, gathering in the lower part of the body. With both arms, he scooped the guts out of the cavity until he could find the other attachment; he cut it away and tore the insides from the calf with desperate scooping motions, until they spread in a heavy mass on the ground around his feet. He stepped back, pale, breathing heavily through his opened mouth; his arms and hands, held out from his body, dripping with blood, were trembling.

Miller, still leaning against the chimney rock, called to Schneider: “Let’s have some of that liver, Fred.”

Schneider nodded, and took a few steps to the swinging carcass. With one hand he steadied it, and with the other reached into the open cavity. He jerked his arm; his hand came out carrying a large piece of brownish purple meat. With a few quick strokes of his knife, he sliced it in two, and tossed the larger of the pieces across to Miller. He caught the liver in the scoop of his two hands, and clutched it to his chest so that it would not slide out of his grasp. Then he lifted it to his mouth, and took a large bite from it; the dark blood oozed from the meat, ran down the sides of his chin, and dropped to the ground. Schneider grinned and took a bite from his piece. Still grinning, chewing slowly, his lips dark red from the meat, he extended the meat toward Andrews.

“Want a chew?” he asked, and laughed.

Andrews felt the bitterness rise in his throat; his stomach contracted in a sudden spasm, and the muscles of his throat pulled together, choking him. He turned and ran a few paces from the men, leaned against a tree, doubled over, and retched. After a few moments, he turned to them.

“You finish it up,” he called to them. “I’ve had enough.”

Without waiting for a reply, he turned again and walked toward the spring that trickled down some seventy-five yards beyond their camp. At the spring he removed his shirt; the blood from the buffalo was beginning to stiffen on his undershirt. As quickly as he could, he removed the rest of his clothing and stood in the late afternoon shadow, shivering in the cool air. From his chest to below his navel was the brownish red stain of buffalo blood; and in removing his clothing, his arms and hands had brushed against other parts of his body so that he was blotched with stains hued from a pale vermilion to a deep brownish crimson. He thrust his hands into the icy pool formed by the spring. The cold water clotted the blood, and for a moment he feared that he could not remove it from his skin. Then it floated away in solid tendrils; and he splashed water on his arms, his chest, and his stomach, gasping at the cold, straining his lungs to gather air against the repeated shocks of it.

When he had removed from his naked body the last flecks of blood he could see, he knelt on the ground and wrapped his arms around his body; he was shivering violently, and his skin had a faintly bluish cast. He took his clothing, article by article, and immersed it in the tiny pool; he scrubbed it as hard as he could, wringing each article out thoroughly and resubmerging it several times, until the water was muddied and tinged with a dirty red. Finally, with bits of fine gravel and soil gathered from the thin banks of the pool, he scrubbed at his blood-stained boots; but the blood and slime from the buffalo had entered into the pores of the leather and he could not scrub the stain away. He put the wet and wrinkled clothing back on and walked back to the camp. By this time it was nearly dark; and his clothing was stiff with the cold by the time he got to the campfire.

The buffalo had been dressed; the innards, the head, the hooves, and the lean bony sides had been dragged away from the campsite and scattered. On a spit over the fire, which was smoking and flaming higher than it should have been, was impaled a large chunk of the hump meat; beside the fire on a square of dirty canvas, in a dark irregular pile, was the rest of the meat. Andrews went up to the fire, and put his body against the heat; from the wrinkles of his clothing rose little wisps of steam. None of the men spoke to him; he did not look directly at them.

After a few moments, Charley Hoge took a small box from the canvas-covered cache and examined it by the light of the fire; Andrews saw that it contained a fine white powder. Charley Hoge went around the chimney rock toward the scattered remains of the buffalo, muttering to himself as he went.

“Charley’s out wolfing,” Miller said to no one. “I swear, he thinks a wolf is the devil himself.”

“Wolfing?” Andrews spoke without turning.

“You sprinkle strychnine over raw meat,” Miller said. “You keep it up a few days around a camp, you won’t have any trouble with wolves for a long time.”

Andrews turned so that his back received the heat of the campfire; when he turned, the front of his clothing immediately cooled and the still-wet cloth was icy on his skin.

“But that ain’t the reason Charley does it,” Miller said. “He looks at a dead wolf like it was the devil his self, killed.”

Schneider, squatting on his haunches, rose and stood beside Andrews, sniffing hungrily at the meat, which was beginning to blacken around the edges.

“Too big a piece,” Schneider said. “Won’t be done for an hour. A body gets a hunger, skinning all day; and he needs food if he’s going to skin all night.”

“It won’t be so bad, Fred,” Miller said. “There’s a moon, and we’ll get a little rest before the meat’s done.”

“It gets any colder,” Schneider said, “and we’ll be prying loose stiff hides.”

Charley Hoge came into sight around the chimney rock, which now loomed dark against the light sky. He carefully placed the box of strychnine back in its cache, dusted his hands off on his trouser legs, and inspected the buffalo roast. He nodded, and set the coffeepot on the edge of the fire, where some coals were beginning to glow dully. Soon the coffee was boiling; the aroma of the coffee and the rich odor of the meat dripping and falling into the fire blended and came across to the men who waited for their food. Miller smiled, Schneider cursed lazily, and Charley Hoge cackled to himself.

Instinctively, remembering his revulsion earlier at the sight and odor of the buffalo, Andrews turned away from the rich smells; but he realized suddenly that they struck him pleasantly. He hungered for the food that was being prepared. For the first time since he had returned from his cold bath at the spring, he turned and looked at the other men.

He said sheepishly: “I guess I didn’t do so good, dressing the buffalo.”

Schneider laughed. “You tossed everything you had, Mr. Andrews.”

“It’s happened before,” Miller said. “I’ve seen people do worse.”

The moon, nearly full, edged over the eastern range; as the fire died, its pale bluish light spread through the trees and touched the surfaces of their clothing, so that the deep red glow cast by the coals was touched by the cold pale light where the two colors met on their bodies. They sat in silence until the moon was wholly visible through the trees. Miller measured the angle of the moon, and told Charley Hoge to take the meat, done or not, off the spit. Charley Hoge sliced great chunks of the half-done roast onto their plates. Miller and Schneider picked the meat up in their hands and tore at it with their teeth, holding it sometimes in their mouths while they snapped their fingers from the heat. Andrews sliced his meat with one of his skinning knives; the meat was tough but juicy, and it had the flavor of strong, undercooked beef. The men washed it down with gulps of scalding bitter coffee.

Andrews ate only a part of the meat that Charley Hoge had given him. He put his plate and cup down beside the fire, and lay back on his bedroll, which he pulled up near the fire, and watched the other men wordlessly gorge themselves on the meat and coffee. They finished what Charley Hoge had given them, and ate more. Charley Hoge, himself, ate almost delicately from a thin slice of the roast which he cut into very small pieces. He washed down the small bites he took with frequent sips of coffee that he had strongly laced with whisky. After Miller and Schneider had finished the last bit of the hump roast, Miller reached for Charley Hoge’s jug, took a long swallow, and passed the jug to Schneider, who turned the jug up and let the liquor gurgle long in his throat; he swallowed several times before he handed the jug to Andrews, who held the mouth of the jug against his closed lips for several seconds before taking a small, cautious swallow.

Schneider sighed, stretched, and lay on his back before the fire. He spoke from deep in his throat, his voice a soft, slow growl: “A belly full of buffalo meat, and a good drink of whisky. All a body would need now is a woman.”

“There ain’t no sin in buffalo meat nor corn whisky,” said Charley Hoge. “But a woman, now. That’s a temptation of the flesh.”

Schneider yawned, and stretched again on the ground. “Remember that little whore back in Butcher’s Crossing?” He looked at Andrews. “What was her name?”

“Francine,” Andrews said.

“Yeah, Francine. My God, that was a pretty whore. Wasn’t she kind of heated up for you, Mr. Andrews?”

Andrews swallowed, and looked into the fire. “I didn’t notice that she was.”

Schneider laughed. “Don’t tell me you didn’t get into that. My God, the way she kept looking at you, you could have had it for damn near nothing—or nothing, come to think of it. She said she wasn’t working....How was it, Mr. Andrews? Was it pretty good?”

“Leave it be, Fred,” Miller said quietly.

“I want to know how it was,” Schneider said. He raised himself on one elbow; his round face, red in the dull glow of the coals, peered at Andrews; there was a fixed, tight smile on his face. “All soft and white,” he said hoarsely, and licked his lips. “What did you do? Tell me what—”

“That’s enough, Fred,” Miller said sharply.

Schneider looked at Miller angrily. “What’s the matter? I got a right to talk, ain’t I?”

“You know it’s no good thinking about women out here,” Miller said. “Thinking about what you can’t have will drive you off your feed.”

“Jezebels,” Charley Hoge said, pouring another cup of whisky, which he warmed with a bit of coffee. “The work of the devil.”

“What you don’t think about,” Miller said, “you don’t miss. Come on. Let’s get after those hides while we have some good light.”

Schneider got up and shook himself as an animal might after having been immersed in water. He laughed, clearing his throat. “Hell,” he said, “I was just having me some fun with Mr. Andrews. I know how to handle myself.”

“Sure,” Miller said. “Let’s get going.”

The two men walked away from the campfire to where their horses were tethered at a tree. Just before they went beyond the dim circle of light cast by the campfire, Schneider turned and grinned at Andrews.

“But the first thing I’m going to do when we get back to Butcher’s Crossing is hire myself a little German girl for a couple of days. If you get in too much of a hurry, Mr. Andrews, you might just have to pull me off.”

Andrews waited until he heard the two men ride away, and watched as they loped across the pale bed of the valley, until their dark bobbing shapes merged into the darker rise of the western range of mountains. Then he slid into his bedroll and closed his eyes; he listened for a long while as Charley Hoge cleaned the utensils he had used for cooking, and tidied the camp. After a while there was silence. In the darkness Andrews ran his hand over his face; it was rough and strange to his touch; the beard, which he was constantly surprised to feel upon his face, distracted his hands and made his features unfamiliar to him; he wondered how he looked; he wondered if Francine would recognize him if she could see him now.

Since the night when he had gone up to her room in Butcher’s Crossing, he had not let himself think of her. But with Schneider’s mention of her name earlier in the evening, thoughts of her flooded upon him; he was not able to keep her image away. He saw her as he had seen her in those last moments in her room before he had turned and fled; seeing her in his mind, he turned restlessly upon his rough bed.

Why had he run away? From where had come that deadness inside him that made him know he must run away? He remembered the sickness in the pit of his stomach, the revulsion which had followed hard upon the vital rush of his blood as he had seen her stand naked and swaying slowly, as if suspended by his own desire, before him.

In the moment before sleep came upon him, he made a tenuous connection between his turning away from Francine that night in Butcher’s Crossing, and his turning away from the gutted buffalo earlier in the day, here in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. It came to him that he had turned away from the buffalo not because of a womanish nausea at blood and stench and spilling gut; it came to him that he had sickened and turned away because of his shock at seeing the buffalo, a few moments before proud and noble and full of the dignity of life, now stark and helpless, a length of inert meat, divested of itself, or his notion of its self, swinging grotesquely, mockingly, before him. It was not itself; or it was not that self that he had imagined it to be. That self was murdered; and in that murder he had felt the destruction of something within him, and he had not been able to face it. So he had turned away.