Centennial (37 page)

“Last time we were fightin’,” Jacques said.

“You’re bigger,” McKeag said uneasily. Then grasping for something to say, he asked, “Is your mother here?”

The brothers laughed at this, and Jacques said, “Here last year. Too many fights.”

“We’re lookin’ for a fight right now,” Marcel said. “Emil Borcher. He started it ... had one of his friends come at Jacques with a gun.” McKeag thought it best not to say that he had seen Jacques attack Emil with the knife. They ran off, seeking more trouble, and that night when the brothers could not have known that McKeag was listening, he overheard Jacques telling a crowd of young bullies, “McKeag. He used to trap with my father. I had to drive him out of camp ... cut him up bad with my knife ... caught him in bed with my mother.”

McKeag felt so unclean, so humiliated that he wished the ground might envelop him right then to get him out of this evil place. I should have killed him years ago, he thought, and during the rest of the rendezvous he avoided the brothers.

For Pasquinel the turbulent meeting was heaven-sent. He was drunk most of the time, bought enormous quantities of good alcohol from the Canadians, who were allowed to sell it to whites, and danced and fought and chased Indian girls and sought out other Frenchmen to sing the traditional song of the voyageurs, “A La Claire Fontaine,” that haunting melody with words that caught the full meaning of youth and the start of life:

“
Sing, nightingale, sing!

You have the singing heart.

You
have the heart that laughs ...

Mine is the heart that weeps.

Chante, rossignol, chante.

How l
ong, how long have I loved you.

Never, never will I forget.

“
Now I have lost my sweethe
art,

Without any reason at all.

It was just a bouquet of roses

That I forgot to give her.

Chante, rossignol, chante

How long, how long I have loved you.
”

Pasquinel bought the singers drinks. He was a generous man, respected for his ability to survive; old-timers knew how often he had stood alone against assailants. He was also the champion singer of love songs, the patron of the rendezvous.

But he was a difficult man, for he attracted trouble. He fought as often as the meanest-minded man at the rendezvous, and when McClintock, his proved friend, remonstrated with him about the behavior of the two boys, claiming that Jacques had raped the daughter of an Arapaho chief without paying, Pasquinel grew furious.

“Lie! Pasquinel always pays.”

“You do,” McClintock assured him, “but not your son.”

Pasquinel pulled back his right arm, launching a hard blow, which McClintock parried. Immobilizing the stocky Frenchman, he lectured him: “You warn Jacques to keep his fingers out of my ball and powder. He’s a thief.”

“By God!” Pasquinel roared, trying to strike his friend again.

“Tell him, McKeag,” McClintock said, thrusting the pugnacious Frenchman from him.

“How’s trappin’?” Pasquinel asked his old partner, forgetting his fight with McClintock as easily as he had begun it.

“The streams are beginning to lose their beaver.”

“Jamais,” Pasquinel roared. “You just have to go higher in the mountains.”

This started a long discussion, in which several mountain men participated. Those who trapped in the high Rockies agreed with Pasquinel that beaver could never diminish. “They hide in those lodges all winter making babies,” a newcomer said.

But the Oregon trappers, who had been working the rivers for a longer time, knew that McKeag was right. The beaver were thinning out. “Always farther up the river,” an Englishman from Astoria said. “Pretty soon you won’t make a bale a year.”

“Ah!” Pasquinel replied. “Last winter ... Blue Valley ... I make six bales ... no work.”

“I don’t know Blue Valley,” the Englishman said. “I suppose it’s fairly high.”

“You climb ... you climb,” Pasquinel said.

“That’s what I mean,” the Englishman said. “I’ll wager there are no streams above it.”

“Well,” Pasquinel began. He stopped, and across his face came a look of bewilderment which all could see, the confession that above Blue Valley there were no more streams. There was a moment of painful silence, broken by his hearty cry “Ah! So long as men wear beaver hats, so long we have beaver.”

On the sixth day after McKeag’s arrival there was great excitement at the rendezvous. A teamster arrived from Saint Louis. He had come up the Missouri by boat, had disembarked at the Platte, and had brought his cargo over the pass and now to Bear Lake. It was an amazing cargo, so rich and varied as to allure the white man as much as the Indian.

There were penknives and jars of preserved peaches and new pistols and better knives and cloth and beads galore. There were shoes and smoked dried beef and cured pork and bottles of French wine and English brandy and Kentucky whiskey. There were little barrels of candy which the men grabbed for as if they were children, and hard sweet cookies, and forks and hammers and screwdrivers and dried chickens.

Whoever in Saint Louis had packed these twenty-two horses had exercised imagination of the highest quality, for when the goods were unloaded, there was something for every man, something calculated to stir the heart of any woman. When the horses set out, they carried stock worth four thousand dollars in Saint Louis. At the rendezvous they would sell for fifty thousand.

McKeag bought nothing, would not even look seriously at anything. He had so simplified his life that he had all he required; his lead and powder he bought at regular intervals from whoever was passing his lonely camp. To indulge in something like sweetened peaches was beyond his imagination. And yet at this rendezvous he savored something so enticing that he would ever thereafter be its slave.

In the late afternoon he was standing by a tent run by a trapper-merchant from Oregon, an Englishman named Haversham, the only man at the rendezvous in European dress, and Haversham asked “Care for a cup of tea?” It had been a long time since McKeag had drunk tea and he said, “Don’t mind if I do.”

The Englishman had two china cups and a small porcelain pot. Washing the cups with steaming water, he took down a square brown tin, opened the top carefully and placed a small portion of leaves in the pot. To McKeag they bore no visible difference from the tea leaves his mother had used, but when Haversham poured him a cup and he took his first sip, an aroma unlike any he had ever known greeted him. He sniffed it several times, then took a deep taste of the hot tea. It was better than anything he had previously tasted, better even than whiskey.

What did it taste like? Well, at first is was tarry, as if the person making the tea had infused by mistake some stray ends of well-tarred rope. But it was penetrating too, and a wee bit salty, and very rich and lingering. McKeag noticed that its taste dwelled in the mouth long after that of an ordinary tea. It was a man’s tea, deep and subtle and blended in some rugged place.

“What is it?” he asked. Haversham pointed to the brown canister, and McKeag said, “I can’t read.”

Haversham indicated the lettering and the scene of tea-pickers in India. “Lapsang souchong,” he said. “Best tea in the world.”

Impulsively McKeag asked, “You have some for sale?”

“Of course. We’re the agents.” It was a tea, Haversham explained, blended in India especially for men who had known the sea. It was cured in a unique way which the makers kept secret. “But smoke and tar must obviously play a part,” he said. It came normally from India to London, but the English traders in Oregon imported theirs from China.

“How long would a can like that last?” McKeag asked, cautiously again.

“It’ll keep forever ... with the top on.”

“I mean, how many cups?”

“I use it sparingly. It would last me a year.”

“I’ll take two cans,” McKeag said, without asking the price. It was expensive, and as he tucked his small supply of coins back into his belt, Haversham explained, “The secret in making good lapsang souchong lies in heating the cup first. Heat it well. Then the flavor expands.” McKeag hid the canisters at the bottom of his gear, for he knew they were precious.

The incident in this rendezvous which the mountain men would refer to in their camps for years to come started when Pasquinel got drunk and went among the tents shouting, “The Hawken is the best goddamned rifle in the world.”

This naturally brought wagers from the Oregonians, who used European guns, which in years past had proved superior to any American product. Recently, however, Jacob Hawken in Saint Louis had begun perfecting a rifle which was to command the plains, and men like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson had performed some commendable feats with it. The Hawken partisans felt that this was the year to pick up some English money, and a contest was proposed.

Negotiations led to so many arguments about rules and scoring that Pasquinel, drunk and impatient, halted the bickering with an announcement: “I show you how good the Hawken is.”

He had acquired, on his last selling trip to Saint Louis, a splendid example of Hawken’s work; he had been steered to the German gunsmith by Hermann Bockweiss, who had bought him the gun as a present. It had a thirty-six-inch barrel, which the English thought too short, and fired a .33-caliber ball, which they thought too small. Its metal parts were beautifully machined but the woodwork was Only average. It was a better gun than it looked.

Pasquinel paraded his rifle for anyone to see, and the crowd expected him to try to perform some difficult feat. Not so. He called for his son Jacques and for an empty whiskey bottle; Placing the boy in a favorable spot, he handed him the gun and walked unsteadily about forty yards away, planted his feet firmly and put the bottle on his head.

It was William Tell in reverse, and men started taking bets as to the four possible outcomes: the boy would miss altogether, would hit the bottle, would wound his father, would kill him outright. The scar-faced lad raised the rifle, took careful aim and knocked off the top of the bottle.

The crowd applauded, but Pasquinel senior was not through. Returning to where men were congratulating Jacques, he took the Hawken and handed it to his younger son, Marcel. Holding the bottom part of the whiskey bottle on his head, he started to walk back to the target position, but now some sensible Englishmen protested that this was insane.

“He’s got to learn sometime,” Pasquinel called over his shoulder. Taking his position, he stared at his younger son. Marcel raised the heavy gun, steadied it, aimed carefully and pulled the trigger. The glass shattered, and Pasquinel told the crowd, “I said it was a good rifle.”

In the closing days of the rendezvous something happened which had a profound effect upon McKeag. One afternoon one of the Santa Fe men was wearing the yellow apron and numerous trappers had taken turns waltzing with him and doing improvised square dances they remembered from Kentucky. After a while he tired, held up his hands and said he had had enough, so the yellow apron was passed to an Englishman from Oregon, and he drew loud applause for his steps in English style. Half a dozen Americans volunteered to dance with him, and he displayed considerable grace as he tried to match their robust movements. It was agreed that he was excellent, but in time he tired, too, and passed the apron on to the first man he saw.

It happened to be McKeag, who was both embarrassed and confused. He knew little about dancing and certainly nothing about women’s steps. He fumbled with the apron, allowed it to fall, then picked it up and tried to fob it off onto someone else.

“Dance! Dance!” the trappers shouted, and someone tied the apron around his middle. Hands forced him into the dancing area and he stood there, looking quite foolish. A Canadian with a fiddle, knowing that McKeag was Scottish, struck up a Highland tune, and from his remote boyhood in the Highlands, McKeag remembered a rude dance.

He began awkwardly. Then his feet caught the rhythm and hesitantly started to respond. His body swayed. His head cocked saucily to one side and he began to recall how the steps went. Slowly and with an almost audible creaking of time’s joints, he began to dance, and the terrible isolation of recent years dropped away. In dancing he became whole again.

While he remained preoccupied with doing the right steps he became aware that another person had moved into the area and he was afraid lest he make a fool of himself with a partner. Then he looked up—it was Pasquinel, drunk and ready for yet another exhibition. McKeag looked at him and perhaps his fear communicated itself, for Pasquinel saw that he was frightened and forgot whatever foolishness he had planned. Slowly his feet began to move in accordance with McKeag’s, and gradually the two men evolved a kind of harmony. What resulted could scarcely be termed a dance, for it had little grace and less rhythm, but it was the related movement of two human beings and those who watched treated it with respect.

As the dance reached its climax, with Pasquinel breathing heavily and holding his left shoulder conspicuously low, McKeag closed his eyes and allowed the music to command him, and for the first time in many years felt actually happy. “I was so lonely,” he muttered to himself, and he had barely said these words when he heard trappers shouting, “Give him air!” and he looked down to see that his partner had fainted.

When they got Pasquinel stretched out, with McKeag at his head still wearing the yellow apron, he opened his eyes and whispered, “The arrow ...”