Cheyenne Winter (22 page)

Perhaps it was a joke. Guy set his shoulder into the door and pushed. It rattled slightly and held. No joke. Julius Hervey had imprisoned him. Guy felt his pulse rising, some terror too deep to fathom shrieking through his body. He didn’t know what he was afraid of; only that the walls and ceiling and floor threatened him. He discovered cold sweat on his brow and felt it collect on his chest.

He paced. The cubicle was scarcely ten feet square but it permitted him to walk a tight circle while he tried to bring his crazed body under control. Calm had vanished; his body acted as if it were about to be pushed off a cliff. He couldn’t think; his mind had ceased to function and thought had been replaced by a white hum, pure animal instinct. He paused at the door, pressed an ear to it, and heard little. Scraps of French from the Creoles out in the yard. He wanted to shout and roar.

Instead, he paced, hoping this rude jest would end but knowing Hervey didn’t jest. He discovered a terrible thirst in him and then a vicious hunger, and knew he had lost the freedom to feed himself or find water to slake his thirst. They became urgent to him: he needed water at once, at once! The very necessaries of life, water and food, lay beyond his means. Air! He needed air! He’d suffocate! Indeed, the air was rank. He gulped it in, exhaled it slowly, and wondered how long it’d last.

A terrible helplessness slid into him. He had never been familiar with helplessness. He’d never experienced confinement. He’d never had to wait on the whim of another — a madman at that — for sustenance. Never in the quiet comfort of his life in St. Louis had he known anything even remotely like this. The only time he’d ever thought about confinement and helplessness was when his father had had the stroke, a few months before his father died. Guy remembered how his father had lain helpless and desperate, a prisoner in his own body, his will thwarted and humbled, his eyes wild with an anguish he couldn’t voice.

Guy stretched his hands, pumped his arms and legs. His body worked. Soon Hervey would free him! If Hervey didn’t the Creoles in the post would help, even if in the middle of the night. The thought comforted Guy. An end would come to this. That thought calmed him a little. He peered about, looking for weakness and seeing none. He’d worn his black suit as he always did on banking and business occasions when formality was required. His finely tailored business clothing carried its own messages to the beholder. Now he regretted it. If he’d worn his trail clothing he would have his penknife which he’d used so often to shave bits of tinder to start the campfires, along with flint and steel and charcloth. With a penknife he could begin to cut his way free from his wooden cage — to whittle away the planking around the door latch.

But that was idle yearning. He had nothing. He was here, caged by a madman after traversing two thousand river miles of open country with scarcely a building upon it, much less a jail. It struck him as odd and paradoxical to be confined here.
Here!
His throat felt parched; his stomach rumbled, though he’d felt no need only minutes before. He ignored the howling of body and soul, or tried to.

Time stopped. He imagined he’d been confined scarcely fifteen minutes. How could he endure an hour, a day, a month? He knew he had to stop his fevered mind from raceing, and stop his fevered body from straining at his bonds, or he couldn’t endure. Calm, sleep, naps. These might help. He settled himself down upon the filthy clay, repelled by the sinister odors that lifted to him. He closed his eyes, shutting out even the vagrant light from the door. But all he felt was helplessness. He no longer possessed the simplest things. He could not control whether he lived or died, whether he was cold or hot, hungry or full, thirsty or satiated.

He let his vision slide past log walls and dark plank ceilings, out, out upon a sunnier landscape not of the world and its finite horizons but beyond, where love shone like a hundred suns, and the scent of goodness was an incense. He summoned up psalms, which came to him in rusted fragments, drawn from some deep well of sweetest water.

“Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest, O Lord, and teachest him out of thy law;

“That thou mayest give him rest from the days of adversity, until the pit be digged for the wicked.”

Thus he occupied himself, dredging up bits and pieces of a lost Talmudic education. There had been no iother Hebrews in frontier St. Louis, no temple. When he was twelve his parents had sent him down the river to New Orleans for a season to learn at the hand of a rabbi. But there’d been nothing since. Even his wife was a gentle and his children were not actually Hebrews, though David and Maxim both sought knowledge of their heritage from him. Clothilde had followed her mother and become a Catholic. He chided himself for his neglect of the sacred things.

And he prayed, feeling the weight of his own iniquities and worldliness at first. But as he stumbled through his supplication he felt his spirits soar and his sense of unworthiness depart like a heavy weight off his shoulders. And he marveled. White light shone sweetly in the midst of this dark dungeon. He had been lax but had never abandoned his faith, and now it flooded through him.

A calm permeated him at last. It had come with surrender, and the acceptance of his straitened world. He would not rattle the door in anguish or lament the lost minutes or cry out against oppression, but would spend his time here renewing his peace day by day.

He forgot himself at last. His own misery no longer occupied his mind or drove him into despair. Instead, his mind turned to his captor, Julius Hervey — a man such as Guy had never encountered before. Nothing, utterly nothing, stayed Hervey’s will. His sojourn in these wilds had stripped him of every vestige of restraint and honor. A man devoid of civilizing impulse could only be mad, or nearly so. He remembered the wild flame in Hervey’s eyes, and saw in it the dance of darkness.

What did Hervey want? Why had Hervey thrown him into this hole? What did he hope to gain from it? The more Guy pondered these questions the more they mystified him. Hervey was not without restraints, even here in a sea of lawless land. Alec Culbertson was set over him. And Hervey was responsible to Pierre Chouteau as well. In fact Chouteau doted on him, called him his mad dog, resorted to him when he needed something done that wouldn’t look good in daylight, and boasted of him among fur men in St. Louis — in part to scare off opposition companies. Julius Hervey had never failed to make a large profit even when other factors failed. Hervey was American Fur’s mad dog.

What did Hervey want? An agreement to shut down Fitzhugh’s Post and get out of the business? Some piece of paper to that effect? A forced sale of Rocky Mountain Company property for a pittance? No. All these things Guy would swiftly repudiate back in St. Louis. The whole world would know of the duress. No. Hervey wasn’t that naive or dumb. The captivity of the principal partner of the Rocky Mountain Company would only cause scandal that would reverberate clear back to John Tyler in the White House. What then?

Nothing that Guy could think of — until he realized that reasons didn’t have to be rational. Madness had its own reasons. Guy felt the stirring of anguish again. A madman could discover pleasures in humiliating — or torturing — a man in Guy’s position, a financier, a power to be reckoned with in the city called the gateway to the West. A madman might delight in starving or dehydrating a man like Guy  . . . The helplessness flooded through Guy again. His sojourn in the darkened room might be paradise compared to what Julius Hervey might do to him, bound hand and foot to the robe press out in the yard.

But that didn’t make sense. Hervey didn’t make sense.

The light changed and Guy guessed the day was fading. He had no way of knowing except to tell day from night. No one came. Hunger and thirst goaded him now. And that is what Hervey wanted. To let Guy experience the crying of his own body and to beg, to surrender himself to Hervey’s will, do anything for a scrap of food, a sip of water. Power. Hervey was mad for power.

Guy knew then he had a weapon after all, a weapon that would have its effect even upon a half-mad man. He had a weapon that would drive Hervey to some sort of defeat — if Guy could endure it — and he wasn’t sure he could. Guy knew what he would do: he would refuse all food. From now until his release he would not swallow a bite. Hervey might demand, might torture, might command, but Guy would swallow nothing  . . . if he could find the courage and subdue the madness of his own body. He might die of hunger. But that would be the last thing that Julius Hervey wanted, the one thing that would ruin the man forever. Guy felt the torture of his empty belly and prepared himself to endure.

Guy Straus had thought about death a great deal, as many middle-aged men do. And the contemplation of his end had helped him understand the living of his life. He had hoped for a good death; all men do. But he had never imagined, back there in St. Louis, that it might pounce upon him at a northern fur post, in a reeking little dungeon, at the hands of a man without scruple.

Night poured through his soul like a vat of India ink, his mood perfectly matching the blackness of his cell. He was denied even the hope of stars, the pinpricks of light that promised a tomorrow. His body tormented him, revealing hurts and discomforts as he slouched against a hard log wall. Thirst was the worst: he’d been confined since yesterday morning without a drop of water. A hundred yards away a great torrent of it raced by en route to the Gulf of Mexico.

He dreaded a death from thirst. Of the agonizing way to die it was one of the worst. Hervey knew that and was using it. Guy wished he could subdue his tortured body the way some men did, transporting their souls to some distant shore until they scarcely noticed their own mortality. But he couldn’t. The ache of his empty stomach intruded upon his thoughts; his desperation for water became simply an obsession burning in his mind like a forge.

He could not think but his will collected and hardened, and when the whirl of time brought a faint light to the threshold he had prepared himself. He would use his sole as weapon, if given the chance: he would use his death. Oddly, he had not spent the night mourning, or yearning for Yvonne or his children, or the comforts of his brick home. Instead, he had honed down his will into a sharp blade that would cut even Julius Hervey. Through some mysterious process he’d gotten to know Hervey through the endless dark; almost as if Hervey had sat down across from him and bared the working of his soul. Almost as if Julius Hervey’s spirit had confessed and Guy was his confessor.

Hervey’s spirit knew nothing of love and didn’t understand it. Hervey’s spirit was possessive. Hervey wanted to own men even more than he wanted to own anything else. Men and women. There were only two ways to possess another mortal: with love, or with the threat of death and pain. As Guy listened to Hervey’s spirit that night, Guy knew what he had to do to resist. He had to die. It alone would defeat Julius Hervey.

Guy waited as the light thickened in the pinholes around the door, knowing that Julius Hervey would soon come to torture him. He was not mistaken. He heard the clank of metal and the door swung open suddenly, revealing Julius Hervey in aching light. Guy blinked at the whiteness.

“The great capitalist,” said Hervey.

Guy smiled.

Hervey waved a glass carafe filled with clear, sweet water, and chortled. “Come out and have a drink,” he said. “Breakfast. You’ll want breakfast.”

Guy didn’t move.

“Your rescuers didn’t show up, Straus. Ol’ Fitzhugh, I was rather hoping he’d poke around. Or the boy. I like the boy. I ain’t seen hide nor hair. I thought mebbe you’d all be here together by now.”

Guy smiled and slouched into the log wall. He could scarcely keep from staring at the carafe of cool water.

“You ready to deal? Any time you want to deal, we’ll deal, Mister Moneybags.”

Guy smiled.

“Mebbe you aren’t hungry?”

“Oh, I’m that,” said Guy. “But last night, Mr. Hervey, I realized the end had come for me and I’ve made my peace with God. Perhaps you should make peace with God.”

For once, puzzlement replaced the smirk on the man’s heavy face. Hervey peered into the gloom of the dungeon as if looking for something — like a cache of food and water smuggled in by an engage. He found nothing. Guy saw that several Creoles stood out in the yard watching all this, and listening.

“You coming out or do I drag you out?”

“I’m quite comfortable, thank you, Mr. Hervey.”

“You ain’t ready to come to medicine.”

“I’ve made my peace with God,” Guy said, knowing his spirit had but his body hadn’t. The promise of water and food set off wild spasms through his body.

“Well, croak then,” said Hervey. The smirk had returned. He swung the door shut and latched it. Guy repressed the need to scream at him, to say yes, yes to anything, only give him water. Instead, he slumped back into the wall, closed his eyes, and began reciting the fragments of psalms he remembered. He found other fragments returning to him as if freed from the bottom of some sea, rising to his awareness but encased in barnacles. He spoke them out loud, feeling giddy with need.

Guy knew he’d won the first round, triumphed not so much over Hervey as over his own body. But he didn’t know how long that would last before his body betrayed his will.

He dozed for the first time, and awoke surprised that he had dozed. The thread of light along the threshold glowed bright, and he guessed it was midday. His throat felt parched, and he could hardly muster the saliva to wet his lips. But as long as he stayed quiet he seemed to dominate the roaring lion of his own body. No one came. He’d passed a full twenty-four hours there and had plunged into the second day. He tried to doze again but that blessed estate eluded him. Several times he heard men just outside, often whispering in French. The engages did not like this; but none of them dared to thwart Julius Hervey.

The day wore on and Guy’s spirits grew ragged. Was he simply committing suicide? Why resist Hervey? What did Guy live for, hope for, dream of? Guy couldn’t even answer those painful questions. He was doing what he was doing because — he had to. He knew he was severely dehydrated now. His heart raced for no reason. His body cried for water. The hunger he could endure but not this.