Crack in the Sky (38 page)

Elbridge said, “Eventual’ you come back Santy Fee?”

“Taos—that’s when I hooked up with Pratte and Savary,” Williams said dolefully. “This nigger’s had him good fortune to pull out’n the thick of it a time or two. So I figger my luck runs high ’nough I don’t dare travel with no brigade no more.”

“You fixin’ on trapping the Bayou now?” Scratch asked.

He stared at the fire a moment, then answered, “Nawww, I’ll mosey on. You fellers busy here this side of the Park. If’n I take a shine to it, I’ll lay some traps on the far side. It don’t pay to crowd ’Nother man.”

“Enough beaver in the mountains for us all!” Isaac cheered.

“Damn right there is,” Williams said. “If’n we don’t trap ’em out, the Englishers do.”

“Trap ’em out?” Bass echoed. “How we ever trap out all the beaver?”

Of a sudden Williams grew animated, his eyes alive with the loathing and hatred he felt for the huge Hudson’s Bay Company. “Them Frenchie brigades the Englishers put out up north go right on into a stretch of country and trap ever’ living flat-tail there is. Strip that country clean: ever’ stream, ever’ beaver too—not matter that they catch some kits while they’re at it.”

“Sons of bitches,” Rowland grumbled.

“They h’ain’t got no business in our country,” Williams declared. “I plan to stay north of the greasers and south of the Englishers and all their Frenchie parley-voos.
’Sides, I’ve come to be partial to the Utes. But watch yer ha’r when there’s ’Rapahoes about.”

“The hell you say?” Bass growled. “Last time I run onto Arapaho my own self, I damn near went under.”

Williams grinned in the fire’s light. “Ye’re a lucky man. Them ’Rapahoes can be bad as Bug’s Boys when it comes to a white man. They’ll kill ye flat out and run off with all ye had. They leave ye ’thout an outfit?”

“They took that—’cept for the rifle they didn’t find, run off with all my animals but for my dear mule,” Scratch explained.

“Leastways ye come out of it with yer ha’r,” Williams observed, his leathery brow wrinkling in remembrance. “Live to fight ’Nother day. Jest like I done a time or two—did ye lay up in some rocks a’hiding till the red niggers quit the country?”

“Weren’t so lucky as you, Bill,” Scratch replied, reaching for the knot at the back of the bandanna he tied over the top of his head. “One of the black-hearts took part of me with him.”

Slowly nudging the large knot upward, Bass removed the bandanna and a circular scrap of beaver fur in one smooth motion, turning his head. As he did so, Williams could see the results of the scalping that had removed a crude circle some six inches in diameter from the crown of his head late in the summer of twenty-seven.

Setting his coffee tin down and wiping a forearm across his lips, Williams scrambled to his feet and stepped right up to loom over Bass. He took Scratch’s head in both hands and turned it gently toward the firelight, peering at the skull plate from all angles, then inspected the wound so closely, he was almost rubbing the end of his nose against the yellowed bone.

“It pain ye any?”

“Not after I learn’t to keep it covered.”

“With that patch o’ beaver plew?”

“Found this here fur is the trick,” Bass replied. “Sun does a powerful evil to my skull if I don’t keep it covered.”

“’Magine it would, Scratch.” He continued to study the bone closely. “Back east where I was raised up from a
kit, I heard me a time or two of fellers getting scalped and living to tell the tale of it.”

“They done their best to kill this nigger off,” Hatcher said. “But I figger Scratch here just born under a good star.”

Williams gently patted the bare bone, then shambled back to his place at the fire and settled down with his cup. “Way I figger it, Bass—ye been told plain as sun that there be a heap more living in store for any man what lost his ha’r but wasn’t put under by the niggers what took that skelp from him.”

“Maybeso,” Gray replied with a cynical wag of his head as he quickly tallied the befuddled reactions of the others around the fire and began to grin widely. “But only if you’re a coon what believes there’s hoo-doos hiding behin’t every tree!”

“Hoo-doos, is it?” Hatcher asked with a snort, animated once again.

Elbridge gushed, “Don’t that beat all, Jack? Williams here says after he’s dead, he’s coming back as a bull elk what got it one bad antler.” And he showed them, mimicking what the old trapper had told the two of them near sundown. “If that ain’t the kicker—he says the Injuns are the ones show us how to talk to ghosts.”

But instead of laughing right off, Jack appeared to study Williams, then finally brought his gaze back to Gray and said, “Sounds to me like Bill Williams here savvies things same way as Asa McAfferty.”

“O-o-oo! That name just give me the trembling willies!” Isaac shrieked.

“Me too,” Rufus agreed with a shudder. “That crazy coon gone and rubbed out a ’Rikara medicine man—”

“Damn!” Williams exclaimed, leaping to his feet so suddenly, he startled all of them into stunned silence. “Ye really know a nigger what kill’t a medeecin man?”

In amazement they all watched the skinny man shuffle-footing it there by the fire, restless as a bull in spring, very much like a man walking over a bed of coals, trembling uncontrollably every few moments as if he had come down with the ague.

“Like Jack said,” Caleb was the first to dare speak, “feller’s name is Asa McAfferty.”

“He really kill a medeecin man?”

Hatcher nodded. “His hair turned white after rubbing out that Ree.”

Another convulsion shot through Williams’s body as he attempted to hold his arms and hands still over the fire like a man in dire need of its warmth. “Ye sure it weren’t just a Ree warrior?”

“Medicine man,” Hatcher agreed.

And Solomon added, “A real rattle shaker.”

Rubbing his hands together over the flames, Williams asked, “An’ his ha’r turn’t white?”

“McAfferty’s did.”

Williams looked straight at Bass. “Just as I tol’t ye, Scratch. Mark these words. I’ll lay that McAfferty these boys talking about is the sort what don’t just hear the hoo-doos through that crack in the sky yonder. He’s gone an’ see’d them spirits too!”

Graham asked, “Say, Bill—you figger that’s what turned McAfferty’s hair white?”

Slowly Williams turned so his rump faced the flames. As he rubbed the breechclout covering his bony posterior, Williams said, “Only thing I ever heerd of turning a soul’s ha’r white is coming eye to eye with a hoo-doo.”

Caleb whispered solemnly, “Don’t say?”

Williams pursed his lips in reflection for a moment, then said, “That McAfferty must be a nigger with some strong magic.”

Leaning toward Hatcher’s ear, Gray whispered, “Here he goes with his magic talk now!”

“If’n the rest of you don’t wanna hear what Bill’s got to say,” Titus snapped at Elbridge, “s’pose you g’won and have your own talk on your side of the fire.”

Elbridge started to rise suddenly. “You ain’t gonna tell me where I ought’n go—”

Hatcher suddenly put his hand out and grabbed hold of Gray’s arm. “Maybe ye ought’n go fetch yer squeezebox. And bring me my fiddle too.”

“You figger on some music tonight?” Rufus asked as
Gray reluctantly nodded and moved off, glaring back at Williams.

“Music’s better’n my men squabbling over hoo-doos like some puffed-up prairie cocks.”

“Didn’t mean to cause no trouble here,” Williams said.

Still edgy, Bass watched Elbridge as he grumbled, “Ain’t your doing, Bill.”

With a wag of his head Bill declared, “This here’s why I travel alone now, boys. Can’t allays count on folks caring to listen to what ’Nother man’s gotta say—even after they gone and asked me to tell ’em what I think.”

“Elbridge just be the sort don’t want ye to know he’s unnatural scairt of ghosts and such—even the talk of it,” Hatcher whispered, glancing over his shoulder to be sure he wasn’t heard. “Scratch—I want ye to know he didn’t mean nothing by what he said.”

“No harm done,” Williams volunteered.

“Yeah,” Bass agreed, nodding. “No harm done. Didn’t know he was scared of such.”

“Elbridge allays makes fun of ever’thing he’s afraid of,” Hatcher explained.

“Ye’re friend’s awright being ’fraid,” Williams declared. “Something wrong with a man what ain’t afraid of nothing.”

Jack nodded, staring at the flames for a moment more before he admitted, “Truth be, I ain’t so sure I wanna have any more talk of ghosts around me too.”

Williams said, “Ain’t nothing ye be scared of with a little talk, Hatcher.”

“That’s right, Jack,” Bass replied confidently as he laid the beaver fur back over his skull and tugged on the blue bandanna. “Only things a man should be scared of are them what a man can see. Like Injuns. Or grizz. Even a whiteout blizzard.”

“To hell with fearing what I can see,” Hatcher declared sourly, staring into the fire. “Only things this child’s ever been afraid of are what I
can’t
see.”

Spring was all but done warming the earth in advance of summer, carpeting the hillsides with a new color every day as wildflowers of bewildering hues raised their heads to sway in the breezes drifting along the slopes where snow-melt raced toward the valley floor. More than a moon had passed since Bill Williams had departed as he said he would—leaving at sunup the next morning, the old man had crossed to the far side of the Bayou where he disappeared into the shadowy timber. And was gone.

Better than a month of hard work trapping first one creek, then another, trying every stream that showed some promise by its beaver dams, slides, and lodges. As diligently as the beaver labored to fell the young saplings that forested their watery meadows, the trappers worked all the harder still. Time enough for a man to fit in a little sleep here and there after setting the traps at sundown, rising early to check the line at sunrise the next day. After dragging the pelts and traps back to camp, scraping and fleshing and lashing them onto willow hoops, a man might catch a little shut-eye before the sun began to fall and it was time to haul the traps back out as twilight brought a delicate rose-colored alpenglow to this high valley.

“Billy Sublette damned well better get his ass to the Popo Agie this summer,” Rufus Graham often grumbled, reminding them how the trader had distributed supplies to company men well before last July’s rendezvous.

Hatcher agreed, “All this prime beaver gonna stake us to one big hurraw!”

“If Sublette brings out the likker,” Isaac argued in that overly solemn way of his, scratching aimlessly at his whitish beard stained with dark, yellowish-brown streaks that characterized the man’s careless tobacco chewing.

Was that all a man worked for? Bass wondered. Did a man force himself through endless hours standing up to his crotch in the icy streams only to earn himself some two weeks of revelry with whiskey and women and wildness? Was there nothing more to what days were granted a man?

Such brooding thoughts troubled his head as Titus chopped down aspen saplings for float-sticks, peeling each before sharpening one end, then lashing them together in a
bundle for the next day’s sets. These were matters rarely considered by most men adrift here early in the far west. By and large they were of a breed who existed in the here and now, and that was all that concerned any of their kind. That day, perhaps the next, maybe even those thoughts of how fast the summer rendezvous was approaching … those were the only concerns of most trappers: survival, and that which lay on the immediate horizon for a man—what to eat the next time their bellies rumbled, where to lay their blankets and robes the next time they grew weary, where to find water and grazing for their stock …

But never, never, never did any of the rest want to talk again about what Bill Williams had stirred up within Titus Bass. And as the days rolled past in slow, easy succession, Scratch was beginning to believe the others refused to talk about those uncertain, frightening matters because such talk stirred up feelings better left untouched within each of Hatcher’s men. Simple men. Iron-hard, hand-forged men. The sort not easily given to ruminations on life and death and what might exist beyond one’s grasp.

A man lived. Then a man died. So be it.

Yet as many times as Bass tried to convince himself he should put such notions out of his mind, those notions grew more troublesome. After all, he spent so damned much time alone every day. Hours alone with only his thoughts, with matters that deeply pricked a man who had begun to fear he hadn’t spent near enough time listening to the stories his mother read her children from her Bible.

Did a man’s life tally up for no more than dumb luck? How else could he account for one man going under to nothing more than ticks … when he himself had been shot, scalped, and left for dead? Was it a roll of the dice or a lay of the cards that determined who lived and who died? Or … was it something more?

Was it as Williams explained it: that Titus Bass had been told plain as sun that there was a heap more living in store for the sort of man who survived a scalping by those intent on killing him?

For some reason unfathomable to a simple man, had
Titus Bass been chosen not to die? Had he been somehow plucked from the grasping claws of death itself? Why had he been spared a fate that befell other men? Who were these capricious and fickle spirits deciding such things?