Death Rattle (64 page)

As his heart rose to his throat in anticipation, he suddenly found himself worried—brooding that something could surely go wrong. Josiah might have pulled up stakes and lit out. Why didn’t he think of that before? After all, it had been four years since Mathew Kinkead described just how successful Paddock had become.…

Don’t fret, he scolded himself as they approached the
placita.

The end of the street they were on disgorged them onto the crowded town square where their animals clattered to a halt in the midst of adults and children, burros and dogs,
carretas
and a blanket of wispy smoke from
many open fires … and lots of discordant noise. Such deafening noise. Braying mules, women yelling at their children, boys and girls crying or laughing or screaming at the top of their lungs. The only thing anywhere like it was the racket of a Crow village setting out on the tramp. Right behind Titus, his three children stared incredulously at this strange and raucous scene.

An empty cart stood nearby, resting at the corner of an adjacent street, its stubby double-tree plowing up a pair of short furrows in the frozen, snow-crusted earth. He tapped Waits on the forearm and pointed at the
carreta.

“We’ll tie up the horses over there,” Bass explained. “Then go looking for some word of Josiah.”

Minutes later she was walking behind him, clutching Jackrabbit’s tiny hand, while Magpie and Flea both held on to their father’s hands as they melded into the bustling cacophony of the market square, where Indians from the nearby pueblo rubbed shoulders with straw-hatted peons, farm laborers, and house servants too. In this rigid society built upon a strict adherence to separation of the classes, the wealthy landowners and their bold, leather-clad vaqueros strutted and preened like nobility, parting those of lower stations as they moved from vendor to vendor.

In those first moments as he struggled to take it all in at once, Scratch saw how the dark eyes of the Mexicans or blanketed Pueblo Indians were trained their way … how quickly those hostile stares turned away as the strangers ebbing and flowing around his family went back to what had occupied them before they had noticed the newcomers in their midst.

Stopping at the center of the square, Titus turned round and round again, gazing upon it all, a riptide of memories battering him suddenly: a journey here with Hatcher’s outfit and their pursuit of Comanche raiders, recollections of that tiny booth Bill Williams set up to sell off his extra trade goods, memorable visits here with Asa McAfferty … and that fateful visit to Taos thirteen winters gone now.

His gaze was drawn to his daughter, perhaps seeing
her with new eyes in this moment—recognizing how tall she had grown, how much older she appeared now that he realized she stood on the verge of womanhood.

Suddenly Bass reached out and grabbed the arm of an older man with a kind, furrowed face—clearly a poor
pelado.

“Señor,
do you know Josiah Paddock?” he asked in the Spanish he had not used in more than four summers.

With frightened eyes the man glanced down at his elbow. Titus let him go. “Paddock?” he repeated the name with his Mexican flare.

“Si,” Scratch replied, sweeping his arm in a half circle around the market square.
“Dónde esta
Josiah Paddock?”

This time the old man’s face softened, and he took hold of Bass’s elbow, turning him a quarter circle, leading the American trapper two steps toward that side of the square.

“There—that is the store of Josiah Paddock,
señor”

“A st-store?”

“Si,”
the man replied, then gave the Indian woman and their children a quick, cursory glance. “Josiah Paddock.
Americano
—like you.”

A handful of dark-skinned Indians from the pueblo moved past, slowing to give Bass and his family a brusque appraisal, then hurried into the narrow mouth of a street that took them out of the square and into a maze of lanes and courtyards.

When Titus turned to speak to the old man, he found the
pelado
already stepping into the crowd.
“Gracias, gracias!”

“What did he tell you?” Magpie inquired.

Grinning at his wife, Titus said, “He has a store! Josiah has a store now.”

“Which one?”

“There—that one!” And he started them toward the western side of the square.

“It is his alone?”

“Just look! It’s plain he’s done very, very well,” Scratch said, proud enough to bust his buttons.

Arrayed above the brick-red clay tiles of that porch running the entire width of the building was a wooden sign, its paint beginning to show years of sun and weathering. The four of them stopped out in the sun with Titus as he translated its words to them.

“Paddock’s Emporium,” he said in English before explaining in Crow. Scratch pointed to those two large words at the very top of the sign. Then below it, he read, “Trade goods, notions, general merchandise of all description.”

Right below those bold English words, he spotted smaller letters that had to comprise Mexican words. “Perhaps Josiah gets more of his business from American traders than from these Taos Mexicans.”

“Will he be here?” Waits asked, tugging on his elbow as she stepped onto the low porch spread beneath the wide tile awning.

“Let’s see for ourselves,” he replied, following her between a knot of shoppers and those stacks of barrels and crates cluttering the crowded porch.

They stepped through the open doorway, when he was immediately struck by the heady perfume of cedar burning in the two small mud fireplaces, each in its corner at the back of the store. His eyes raked over each person, then suddenly he recognized her across the counters and displays. Oh, how the years had changed the young Flathead woman who fell in love with Josiah back in Pierre’s Hole so many summers ago now.

As he stood there with his family crowding to a stop around him, Looks Far Woman happened to glance up and he caught her eye. She stared blankly a moment—then her eyes widened like a wild horse’s on the run.

He instantly put a finger to his lips, signaling her not to call out. With a hand clamped over her mouth to keep from screaming in excitement and surprise, Looks Far Woman nodded eagerly. Then Titus put both his arms up in a gesture, as if to ask, “Where is he?”

She grinned as she pointed to the far corner where three vaqueros huddled around a taller man, whose long hair spilled to his shoulders. Paddock’s back was to him.

“Wait right here, children,” he whispered to them before he took three steps to the center of the store, where he stood in the open.

“I heard tell of a goddamned lazy, no-account, pork-eatin’ son of a bitch from Saint Louie claims he’s proprietor of this here mercantile!” Bass roared.

As his voice boomed, it instantly silenced every voice in the shop, every patron riveted in place—all wheeling suddenly to stare at him in a mixture of confusion and outright fear. All … save for that tall, broad-shouldered American.

Scratch waited for his old friend to turn around so he could have a good long look at the man, to measure the passage of time on Josiah’s face. It had been more than twelve years now, after all … but Paddock stood frozen in place, his back still to Titus.

Near Josiah’s elbow a tall, thin youngster appeared around the end of a wooden shelf holding bolts of cloth. His eyes narrowed menacingly on the gray-headed fur trapper dressed in buckskins. “You know what’s good for you, mister,” the young man warned, “you’ll back right on out of here before my pa walks over there to toss you out on your ear!”

“Joshua?” Titus asked in little more than a whisper, inspecting the boy up and down in utter disbelief. “Is that really you? Damn, but I used to hold you when you was a squawlin’ li’l bear cub—”

The boy grabbed his father’s arm, saying, “Who is this, Pa?”

Baffled that Josiah hadn’t turned around immediately, Scratch stared again at the back of Paddock’s head while more of the Mexican customers backed away from the shopkeeper. Titus was just opening his mouth to speak—

The very instant Paddock growled, “Seems I can place that voice now … though it’s been years. Sounds to me like it belongs to a boneheaded, dog-ugly, side-talking, beaver-loving idjit who never had the good sense to come in out of a winter blizzard.”

Slowly Paddock turned around, his eyes already misting. “Appears I’m that son of a bitch you’re looking for.”
His voice was clearly growing raspy with emotion as he found it hard to speak. “I’m proprietor of this mercantile for no other reason than what that dog-ugly, big-hearted bonehead done for me so many, many years ago!”

They collided in the middle of the store, crashing bone to bone with a resounding crack as the taller, more muscular Paddock threw his arms around the shorter, thinner man, rearing backward as he swept Titus into his arms—hopping and dancing around and around.

Looks Far Woman was already moving, flushing down the backside of the long counter, her arms waving convulsively in the air, braids flying and tears streaming down her cheeks as she squealed in delight. Wait-by-the-Water herself streamed down the front of the counter that separated them, blubbering nonsense at this long-overdue reunion.

Near the center of the store Magpie stood dumbfounded, gripping one brother’s hand in her right, the youngest’s hand in her left, as all three stared in rapt amazement at the noisy, confusing scene unfolding before them. In the next few moments a group of youngsters came to join the tall adolescent who stood almost as tall as his father. Both groups of children alternately glared at one another, then looked at their backslapping fathers, and over to their weeping, blubbering mothers, before they glared warily at one another again.

“I feared you was dead!” Josiah exclaimed breathlessly while he came to a halt with Bass at the end of his arms.

“Me? How many times was it I had to tell you I ain’t near good enough to go to heaven—an’ the devil don’t want me around neither!” Scratch cried, laying his gnarled hand along Paddock’s bare cheek. “Damn, if you ain’t a sight after all these years, Josiah.”

“Twelve! Can you believe it’s been twelve years, old man?”

Turning slightly, Titus waved an arm across the store. “Just lookit what you done for yourself.”

“What we’ve done,” Josiah argued as he waved Looks Far over.

“You’re still as pretty as the day I first laid eyes on you in Pierre’s Hole!” Scratch declared as he pulled the Flathead woman into his arms and promptly squeezed the breath out of her. “You’ve done a fine thing, Looks Far—sticking by this wuthless polecat’s side through the last dozen winters!”

“It came hard at first,” she said in mock seriousness, but good English, then winked at Titus. “All the early years, settling in a new life, around new people and a new tongue too … but,”—and she took a step backward to loop an arm inside Josiah’s elbow—“my husband always kept me big with child, so I couldn’t leave!”

“Child?” Waits echoed in English, recognizing that word from her husband’s language.

“We have five now,” Looks Far disclosed. Her face went sad momentarily when she said, “We lost one before I grow too big in my belly … and another was stillborn. But all told, we had four healthy children come to join Joshua.”

“Joshua.” Titus repeated the boy’s name, turning to look eye to eye with the tall youngster. “It can’t really be you.”

“Come over here, son,” Paddock prodded his firstborn. “I want you to shake hands with this old friend of ours.”

Joshua stepped away from the cluster of his brothers and sisters, stretching out his long arm with that big hand as he asked, “It really true what you said, mister: You knew me when I was a baby?”

“I was the one what taught you to quit squawling one night when you was scared of the stars.”

“S-scared of the stars,” Joshua scoffed as he shot a warning glance at his siblings.

“I remember that now, son,” Paddock said, looping his long arm across the youngster’s shoulders. “The night of falling stars, and you wouldn’t stop bawling for your mother or me, so this man poured water on your head till you shut right up.”

“He poured water on your head?” one of the young boys repeated with a smirk.

Titus glanced at the boy and said, “It’s a ol’ Injun trick. They can’t have babies crying and squawking to alert any enemies, so they teach all their young’uns not to cry out. Ever’ time they make a noise, them babies get water poured on their heads so the young’uns learn to hush real quick.”

Turning to his father, that young boy gushed, “He really did pour water on Joshua’s head, Pa?”

“Come on over here, Ezekiel,” Paddock said to the youngster smirking at Joshua.

“So you’re named Ezekiel?” Scratch asked, dropping to one knee. “How old are you, son?”

He glanced up at his father. Josiah nodded. Ezekiel looked squarely at the stranger and held out his hand. “I’m nine years old, sir.”

“Sir? Sir? Why, will you listen to that?” Bass cried. “This boy’s got better manners than his ol’ man ever did! Ezekiel, remind me to tell you some evening the story how your father come to run across me in the mountains. He wasn’t at all the sort to practice a lick of good manners back in them days. Well, now—I’m mighty pleased to meet you, Ezekiel. Do folks call you Ezekiel?”

The boy cleared his throat and declared, “Only my parents, sir. My mother and father. All my friends call me Zeke.”

“Zeke, is it?” Titus rose to his feet and looked at Josiah. “You gone and named your boy after my dog?”

“A dog?” Ezekiel squeaked in disbelief.

“They named Ezekiel after a dog!” squealed Zeke’s older sister as she started giggling.

“No, son,” Josiah assured with a chuckle. “I always been partial to that name. It’s a good name, a strong name too. That’s why we gave it to you.”

Then Scratch explained, “I had a dog named Zeke back when your father an’ me was runnin’ the mountains, I want you to know.”

“Ol’ Zeke,” Paddock said wistfully. “I remember that gray mutt now. Rescued him from a waterfront dogfight in Saint Louis, didn’t you? Then we brung him west, all the way to the mountains with us that spring.”