Butcher's Crossing (5 page)

At one of the tables sat five men playing cards; they did not look up at Andrews, nor did they speak among themselves. The slap of cards and the tiny click of poker chips came upon the quietness. At another table sat two girls, their heads close together, murmuring; a man and a woman were seated together nearby; a few other groups were gathered at shadowed tables elsewhere in the large room. There was a quiet, slow fluidity to the scene which was strange to Andrews, and it absorbed him so that for a moment he did not remember why he had come here. At the far end of the room, through the dimness and the smoke, he saw seated at a table two men and a woman. They were somewhat apart from the others, and the larger of the men was looking directly at him. Andrews moved across the open space toward them.

When he stood before their table, all three of them were looking up at him. The four remained for several moments unmoving and silent; Andrews’s attention was on the large man directly in front of him, but he was aware of the girl’s rather pale plump face and yellow hair that seemed to flow from round bare shoulders, and of the smaller man’s long nose and gray stubbled face.

“Mr. Miller?” Andrews asked.

The large man nodded. “I’m Miller,” he said. His pupils were black and sharply distinct from the whites, and his brows were set closely above them in a frown that wrinkled the broad bridge of his nose. His skin was slightly yellowed and smooth like cured leather, and at the corners of his wide mouth deep ridges curved up to the thick base of his nose. His hair was heavy and black; it was parted at the side, and lay in thick ropes over half his ears. He said again, “I’m Miller.”

“My name is Will Andrews. I—my family are old friends of J. D. McDonald. Mr. McDonald said you might be willing to talk to me.”

“McDonald?” Miller’s heavy, almost hairless lids came down over his eyes in a slow blink. “Sit down, son.”

Andrews sat in the empty chair between the girl and Miller. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“What does McDonald want?” Miller asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“McDonald sent you over here, didn’t he? What does he want?”

“No, sir,” Andrews said. “You don’t understand. I just wanted to talk with someone who knew this country. Mr. McDonald was kind enough to give me your name.”

Miller looked at him steadily for a moment, and then nodded. “McDonald’s been trying to get me to head a party for him for two years now. I thought he was trying again.”

“No, sir,” Andrews said.

“You work for McDonald?”

“No, sir,” Andrews said. “He offered me a job, but I turned it down.”

“Why?” Miller asked.

Andrews hesitated. “I didn’t want to be tied down. I didn’t come out here for that.”

Miller nodded, and shifted his bulk; Andrews realized that the man beside him had been motionless until this moment. “This here is Charley Hoge,” Miller said, moving his head slightly in the direction of the gray man who sat opposite Andrews.

“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Hoge,” Andrews said, and put his hand across the table. Hoge was grinning at him crookedly, his sharp face sunk down between narrow shoulder blades. He slowly raised his right arm, and suddenly thrust his forearm across the table. The arm ended at the wrist in a white nub that was neatly puckered and scarred. Involuntarily, Andrews drew his own hand back. Hoge laughed; his laughter was an almost soundless wheeze that seemed forced from his thin chest.

“Don’t mind Charley, son,” Miller said. “He always does that. It’s his idea of fun.”

“Lost it in the winter of sixty-two,” Charley Hoge said, still gasping with his laughter. “It froze, and would have dropped clean off, if—” He shivered suddenly, and continued to shiver as if he felt the cold again.

“You might buy Charley a drink of whisky, Mr. Andrews,” Miller said almost gently. “That’s another one of his ideas of fun.”

“Of course,” Andrews said. He half rose from his chair. “Shall I—”

“Never mind,” Miller said. “Francine will get the drinks.” He nodded at the blonde girl. “This is Francine.”

Andrews was still half raised above the table. “How do you do,” he said, and bowed slightly. The girl smiled, her pale lips parting over teeth that were very white and slightly irregular.

“Sure,” Francine said. “Does anybody else want something?” She spoke slowly and with the trace of a Germanie accent.

Miller shook his head.

“A glass of beer,” Andrews said. “And if you would like something?”

“No,” Francine said. “I’m not working now.”

She got up and moved away from the table; for a few moments Andrews’s eyes followed her. She was heavy, but she moved with grace across the room; she wore a dress of some shiny material with broad white and blue stripes. The bodice was tight, and it pushed the fullness of her flesh upward. Andrews turned questioningly toward Miller as he sat down.

“Does she—work here?” Andrews asked.

“Francine?” Miller looked at him without expression. “Francine is a whore. There are nine, ten of them in town; six of them work here, and there are a couple of Indians that work the dugouts down by the river.”

“A scarlet woman,” Charley Hoge said; he was still shivering. “A woman of sin.” He did not smile.

“Charley is a Bible man,” Miller said. “He can read it pretty good.”

“A—whore,” Andrews said, and swallowed. He smiled. “Somehow, she doesn’t look like—a—”

The corners of Miller’s wide mouth lifted slightly. “Where’d you say you was from, son?”

“Boston,” he said. “Boston, Massachusetts.”

“Ain’t they got whores in Boston, Massachusetts?”

Andrews’s face warmed. “I suppose so,” he said. “I suppose so,” he said again. “Yes.”

Miller nodded. “They got whores in Boston. But a whore in Boston, and a whore in Butcher’s Crossing; now, there’s two different things.”

“I see,” Andrews said.

“I don’t reckon you do,” Miller said. “But you will. In Butcher’s Crossing, a whore is a necessary part of the economy. A man’s got to have something besides liquor and food to spend his money on, and something to bring him back to town after he’s been out on the country. In Butcher’s Crossing, a whore can pick and choose, and still make a right smart amount of money; and that makes her almost respectable. Some of them even get married; make right good wives, I hear, for them that want wives.”

Andrews did not speak.

Miller leaned back in his chair. “Besides, this is a slack time, and Francine ain’t working. When a whore ain’t working, I guess she looks just about like anybody else.”

“Sin and corruption,” Charley Hoge said. “She’s got the taint within her.” With his good hand, he grasped the edge of the table so tightly that the knuckles showed blue-white against the brown of his skin.

Francine returned to the table with their drinks. She leaned over Andrews’s shoulder to set Charley Hoge’s glass of whisky before him. Andrews was aware of her warmth, her smell; he shifted. She put his beer before him, and smiled; her eyes were pale and large, and her reddish-blond lashes, soft as down, made her eyes appear wide and unblinking. Andrews took some coins from his pocket and put them in her palm.

“Do you want me to leave?” Francine asked Miller.

“Sit down,” Miller said. “Mr. Andrews just wants to talk.”

The sight of the whisky had calmed Charley Hoge; he took the glass in his hand and drank rapidly, his head thrown back and his Adam’s apple running like a small animal beneath the gray fur of his bearded throat. When he finished the drink, he hunched himself back in his chair and remained still, watching the others with cold little gray eyes.

“What did you want to talk about, Mr. Andrews?” Miller asked.

Andrews looked uncomfortably at Francine and Charley Hoge. He smiled. “You put it kind of abruptly,” he said.

Miller nodded. “I figured to.”

Andrews paused, and said: “I guess I just want to know the country. I’ve never been out here before; I want to know as much as I can.”

“What for?” Miller asked.

Andrews looked at him blankly.

“You talk like you’re an educated man, Mr. Andrews.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I was three years at Harvard College.”

“Well,” Miller said, “three years. That’s quite a spell. How long you been away from there?”

“Not long. I left to come out here.”

Miller looked at him for a moment. “Harvard College.” He shook his head. “I learned myself to read one winter I was snowed in a trapper’s shack in Colorado. I can write my name on paper. What do you think you can learn from me?”

Andrews frowned, and suppressed a tone of annoyance he felt creep into his voice. “I don’t even know you, Mr. Miller,” he said with a little heat. “It’s like I said. I want to know something about this country. Mr. McDonald said you were a good man to talk to, that you knew as much about this country as any man around. I had hoped that you would be kind enough to converse with me for an hour or so, to acquaint me with—”

Miller shook his head again, and grinned. “You sure talk easy, son. You do, for a fact. That what you learn to do at Harvard College?”

For a moment, Andrews stared at him stiffly. Then he smiled. “No, sir. I reckon not. At Harvard College, you don’t talk; you just listen.”

“Sure, now,” Miller said. “That’s reason enough for any man to leave. A body’s got to speak up for his self, once in a while.”

“Yes, sir,” Andrews said.

“So you came out here. To Butcher’s Crossing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And when you learn what you want to learn, what’ll you do? Go back and brag to your kinfolk? Write something for the papers?”

“No, sir,” Andrews said. “It’s not for any of those reasons. It’s for myself.”

Miller did not speak for several moments. Then he said, “You might buy Charley another glass of whisky; and I’ll have a glass myself this time.”

Francine rose. She spoke to Andrews: “Another beer?”

“Whisky,” Andrews said.

After Francine left their table, Andrews was silent for some time; he did not look at either of the two men at the table with him.

Miller said: “So you didn’t tie up with McDonald.”

“It wasn’t what I wanted.”

Miller nodded. “This is a hunt town, boy. If you stay around, there ain’t much choice about what you do. You can take a job with McDonald and make yourself some money, or you can start yourself some kind of little business and hope that the railroad does come through, or you can tie up with a party and hunt buffalo.”

“That’s about what Mr. McDonald said.”

“And he didn’t like the last idea.”

Andrews smiled. “No, sir.”

“He don’t like hunters,” Miller said. “And they don’t like him either.”

“Why?”

Miller shrugged. “They do the work, and he gets all the money. They think he’s a crook, and he thinks they’re fools. You can’t blame either side; they’re both right.”

Andrews said, “But you’re a hunter yourself, aren’t you, Mr. Miller?”

Miller shook his head. “Not like these around here, and not for McDonald. He outfits his own parties, and gives them fifty cents a head for raw hides—summer hides, not much more than thin leather. He has thirty or forty parties out all the time; he gets plenty of skins, but the way it’s split up, the men are lucky if they make enough to get through the winter. I hunt on my own or I don’t hunt at all.” Miller paused; Francine had returned with a quarter-filled bottle and fresh glasses and a small glass of beer for herself. Charley Hoge moved quickly toward the glass of whisky she set before him; Miller took his own glass in his large, hairless hand and cupped it; Andrews took a quick sip. The liquor burned his lips and tongue and warmed his throat; he could taste nothing for the burning.

“I come out here four years ago,” Miller continued, “the same year McDonald did. My God! You should have seen this country then. In the spring, you could look out from here and see the whole land black with buffalo, solid as grass, for miles. There was only a few of us then, and it was nothing for one party to get a thousand, fifteen hundred head in a couple of weeks hunting. Spring hides, too, pretty good fur. Now it’s hunted out. They travel in smaller herds, and a man’s lucky to get two or three hundred head a trip. Another year or two, there won’t be any hunting left in Kansas.”

Andrews took another sip of whisky. “What will you do then?”

Miller shrugged. “I’ll go back to trapping, or I’ll do some mining, or I’ll hunt something else.” He frowned at his glass. “Or I’ll hunt buffalo. There are still places they can be found, if you know where to look.”

“Around here?” Andrews asked.

“No,” Miller said. He moved his large, black-suited body restlessly in the chair and pushed his untasted drink precisely to the center of the table. “In the fall of sixty-three, I was trapping beaver up in Colorado. That was the year after Charley here lost his hand, and he was staying in Denver and wasn’t with me. The beaver was late in furring out that year, so I left my traps near the river I was working and took my mule up towards the mountains; I was hoping to get a few bears. Their skin was good that year, I had heard. I climbed all over the side of that mountain near three days, I guess, and wasn’t able to even catch sight of a bear. On the fourth day, I was trying to work my way higher and further north, and I come to a place where the mountain dropped off sharp into a little gorge. I thought maybe there might be a side stream down there where the animals watered, so I worked my way down; took me the best part of a day. They wasn’t no stream down there. They was a flat bed of bare ground, ten, twelve foot wide, packed hard as rock, that looked like a road cut right through the mountain. Soon as I saw it, I knew what it was, but I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was buffalo; they had tromped the earth down hard, going this way and coming back, for years. I followed the bed up the mountain the rest of that day, and near nightfall come out on a valley bed flat as a lake. That valley wound in and out of the mountains as far as you could see; and they was buffalo scattered all over it, in little herds, as far as a man could see. Fall fur, but thicker and better than winter fur on the plains grazers. From where I stood, I figured maybe three, four thousand head; and they was more around the bends of the valley I couldn’t see.” He took the glass from the center of the table and gulped quickly, shuddering slightly as he swallowed. “I had the feeling no man had ever been in that valley before. Maybe some Indians a long time ago, but no man. I stayed around two days, and never saw a human sign, and never saw one coming back out. Back near the river, the trail curved out against the side of the mountain and was hid by trees; working up the river, a man would never see it.”