Paxton and the Lone Star (12 page)

“Oh, God, will you stop saying how sorry you are?” Elizabeth shouted. She followed him, beating her thighs with her fists. “You're
not
sorry! If you'd just helped when it mattered!”

“Beth!” Hester called. “It's for the best.”

“No it's not!” Elizabeth screamed, whirling on her mother. “Don't you realize—”

“Your mama's right, miss. The matter's closed. Unescorted women is bad luck and plenty of it. Plenty.”

“Beth!” Hester repeated more sternly, taking strength from the hope that she might return home after all. “We can have Mr. Jones speak to Sēnor Medina. I am sure he will return our money when he learns what's happened. We'll buy a small house somewhere back East and—”

“No!” Elizabeth said. “No no no no no no! We've left the East. That part of our life's over. The only home we own is out West in Texas. We
own
it, Mother. It's waiting for us. We can't deny Father's dream. Not now.”

“Your
father's
dream,” Hester said, rising and striding toward Elizabeth. “Not mine, do you hear. Not mine!” All the rancor and ill-will that had festered in her for months now spilled out. “Your father is dead and I am the head of this family. You are my daughter, not the man you dress to be, and you will do as I say. We shall follow Mr. Jones's advice, and that is that!”

Elizabeth felt caught in a trap. On one side, the implacable wagon train master, on the other, her mother, willful and vindictive. “Lottie?” she said, pleading for support.

“I …” Lottie twisted her bodice string around one index finger, and stared at it as if it were a fortune teller's device that, in its spirals, held the secrets of her future. “Father's dead,” she finally said in a tiny voice. “It's not our decision to make.”

“Oh, no?” Shoulders squared, anger and determination sparking in her eyes, Elizabeth faced each of them. “Well, I think it is, and I—we—whether any of you like it or not, are going to Texas. One way or another, we
are
going!” Unable to stay in their presence without saying something she knew she would regret later, she turned and ran for the sanctuary of the trees. “You can count on it!” she shouted over her shoulder.

“Beth?” Hester called after her. “Beth! You come back here immediately!”

Jones cleared his throat. “I, uh … I reckon I'll be goin',” he said, unused to family squabbles and wanting nothing more than to escape. “Let you work it out for yourselves. Best way. I'll see what I can do about findin' someone to buy your grant and wagon and all.” He tipped his hat to Hester and Lottie in turn. “Ma'am. Miss.”

The two women watched him leave. “Beth?” Hester called again before returning to her seat and twisted thoughts. “It's no good, Beth. We're going back to Pennsylvania.”

Huddled alone in the damp shade beneath the still-dripping broad leaves of a magnolia, Elizabeth heard but didn't respond. They weren't going back, of that she was sure. One way or another, they would press on to Texas as her father had wanted. Of more importance was the man named Holton Bagget.
Damn the murderer! Damn the thief who stole my father's life and dream.

“He can't be touched,” Jones had said.

And with that recollection, the anger, rekindled, burned anew. “I wouldn't be too sure about that, Mr. Jones,” she said, rising abruptly and striding toward the clearing. “Not too sure at all.”

Chapter VIII

Ponder's Crossing. If a man wanted a drink, a good time, and a reasonable chance not to regret it later with infection, if a man wanted to hear news of the trail west and who was where and why in the howling wilderness, if a man wanted a touch of civilized damnation before beginning a lonely journey to follow the setting sun, he went to Ponder's Crossing.

On that noon in October, with the clouds coming down the Mississippi on the north wind that had cleared out the previous night's storm, Ponder's Crossing was quiet, if a lack of drinking, cussing, and fighting could be called quiet. More than a dozen men were strewn about the hall in various attitudes of dissipation and snoring off the excesses of the previous night. The Vikings in this Mississippi Valhalla were a singular lot. Big Nose Castor lay stretched across two tables, honking and whistling as he breathed. Antlers Stoner lay crumpled in a corner by the piano. Crease Anthony lay with his head on the great pillowy gut of Frank “Savory” Dill, which wasn't all that good an idea except that Crease was unconscious and his nose was out of order anyway due to an overdose of unholy spirits. Holton Bagget was there, too. One of the two men standing up at that hour, he was a mustachioed, swaggering young man with red-rimmed eyes and a fresh cut through the dark brown kidney-shaped birthmark on his right cheek. Holton had had a long hard night followed by a restless morning. About ready to sleep at last, he quaffed a mug of Luke Ponder's house beer, fondly referred to as River Rat, and stared at the delightfully lewd painting hanging over the mahagony bar.

Luke Ponder, Hon. Prop., according to the sign that hung over the door outside, looked up from his account books. “'Nother?” he asked automatically as the empty mug hit the bar.

“One,” Holton answered, shifting his gaze to the reflection of a lanky man about his age who sat on the outside balcony overlooking the river. Holton leaned his elbows on the bar and jabbed a thumb in the newcomer's direction. “He one of them farmers from that goddamn wagon train Jones is takin' out?”

Luke's deft twist of the wrist sent the full mug right where Holton could pick it up without moving. “No,” he said. “He's with Leakey.”

“Hogjaw?”

“Who else? I guess you didn't hear him come in, bein' up in town with the Cap'n an' all.”

Holton spit in disgust. “Man can't get any sleep at all, the way it's gettin' around here. Too damn much law, anyways. Hogjaw still as ugly?”

“You still afraid to call him that to his face?”

“I ain't afraid of no man.”

Luke sniggered. “'Ceptin' Leakey.”

“What the hell you trying to say, you old bastard?” Holton snapped.

“That you're smarter than you look.” Luke Ponder grinned. “I'm payin' you a compliment, boy. I'm sayin' you ain't no fool.”

“Ahhh …” Holton picked up the mug, took a swallow of beer and made a face. “When it don't taste good, I need sleep. You got any rooms left?”

Luke ran a mental tally, shook his head no. “They're all bein' used.”

“What about Jodie?”

“Her too,” the bar owner muttered, returning to the task of taking inventory, a routine to which he adhered every midday.

A cooling breeze drifted in through the open doors facing the river. Holton stepped over Crease Anthony and walked outside. Built over the slow brown waters of the Mississippi, the balcony provided a place for men to stack their rifles and gear or, for the occasionally reflective sort, a point from which to contemplate the queen of rivers. Holton demonstrated two further uses. Leaning on the railing, he urinated in the river, and then, after a perfunctory search among the assorted packs, arranged a bed for himself along the back wall. Soon he was snoring as industriously as the men inside.

True's chair was tilted back on its hind legs. His heels were propped on the balcony railing and his hat was pulled down over his eyes. He had been dozing lightly and, with the intrusion, sighed over the loss of his solitude and pushed up his hat so he could see. The air was balmy enough, but with an edge of crispness that presaged fall. New clouds, dark and heavy, hid the noon sun. From time to time, a beam of light like a gilded saber plunged into the river before the brooding gray clouds could gather and snap the blade at the hilt. Then the world would be somber and still again. Below, a raft carrying two boys and a black man drifted by. Embarked on a grand adventure that would last until supper time at least, the boys shouted and waved to True while the man, concerned for the smaller one's safety, tried simultaneously to steer the raft and to grab hold of his charge's belt loop.

True watched the boys into the distance, extended his legs, and rocked back and forth. The journey from Solitary had been, in the main, uneventful. They had traveled through dense forest for the most part, with little more than occasional vistas from high points to give them a sense of direction or of the passing miles. They had eaten their own cooking, and grown bored with it. They had wished for any other voice to relieve the boredom, for they had only their own tales and complaints for distraction and entertainment. They had hoped to make Natchez the night before, but the storm had forced them to a halt three miles out of town where they camped under a makeshift shelter in the lee of a huge old magnolia and, wet and disgusted, listened to Hogjaw describe Ponder's Crossing as the wildest place east of the Green River Rendezvous up in Sioux territory. The next morning, Joseph and Andrew just naturally had to see for themselves, so all four had headed straight for Natchez Under the Hill.

To True's way of thinking, they had seen a few worse places, and many better. Home sweet home, as Hogjaw affectionately if sarcastically called the thin strip of weather-beaten buildings connected by a sea of mud, was still going strong an hour after daybreak. Hogjaw left immediately, saying he had to attend to business. Andrew disappeared just as rapidly with a statuesque mulattress to an upstairs room. Joseph downed two shots of rye and picked out a woman almost as fast, lingering only long enough to rib True for rebuffing the advances of a well-endowed whore named Mouse. True was content with two mugs of River Rat, which he took to the balcony where he could watch the sprawling, twisting expanse of water unravel toward the horizon. Shortly thereafter, with Ponder's Crossing finally winding down and emptying behind him, he watched a fleet of keelboats poling past, working their way upriver close to shore. A hard life, Hogjaw had remarked once during the long miles, and one often ended prematurely by a knife or gun or the river itself. Not the sort he'd like to lead, going up and down and up and down and never getting anywhere a man could call home. It looked like a fair assessment, True thought. Dirty and unkempt, shoulder and thigh muscles bulging under thin homespun as they trudged the deck with their long poles, the keelboaters presented a picture of drudgery patterned after Sisyphus, the Greek who was doomed for eternity to push the same rock up the small hill over and over again.

Half a continent lay behind him, another half in front. The keelboaters went up and down, up and down. Everything changed, nothing changed, not least the river that, even as its face was altered by the changing light, remained eternally the same. People too were little different. They came and went, worked and lazed, hoped and despaired, laughed and wept. Some wore fine linen, others drab homespun. Some lived in fine houses, others in hovels. Some drank and caroused and copulated without a care in the world, and he, True Paxton, thoroughly melancholy by this time, sat alone on a balcony and listened to men snore and delved into his soul and tried to forget his mother's disturbing farewell and prediction that he would never return. Half a continent behind him and half before. It was one hell of a way to spend a day.

Luke Ponder shook his head and spat into the nearest spittoon. “A mite too serious,” he muttered to himself, keeping an eye on True and wondering where Leakey had found him. “But then, there's some that say men of a serious nature are destined to accomplish much.”

He broke open a new keg of River Rat and tasted it, made a mental note to let the next batch age another day or two before using it. “'Course, they also tend to be a trifle shortlived,” he went on in the interminable conversation he held with himself when no one was about. “The man to bet money on, though, is the brother, Joseph. Now there's one to move mountains.” Ponder counted the bottles of rye, checked them against the head barkeeper's tally sheet. “He's bold and he's strong, and there ain't a timid bone in his body, from the looks of him. Yessir, Luke, that Hogjaw knows how to pick 'em.”

A shrill whistle muted by distance interrupted his train of thought and reminded him that it was Saturday and that the sidewheeler from Vicksburg was due to dock before very long. He glanced at the clock in the center of the bar and told himself to shut up and get on with the counting so he could hie it back home before the place started waking up and got took with the usual Saturday fever. Ought to just sell the damn thing, he thought. The widow he'd married was wealthy enough to support them both in her fine house in town, and with what Ponder's Crossing would bring they could live like real gentry. He slid a stack of gold American coins into the bag, made a note on his tally sheet, and started separating the Mexican coins from the French ones. But he wouldn't sell, he knew, even if his wife did worry about losing another husband. “You're too old for that place,” she said. “Dangerous men go there.” Dangerous men, faugh! What did she know about dangerous men? He was the one who'd handled every brand of man, these last thirty years, and made Ponder's Crossing the busiest place north of New Orleans and south of Vicksburg. Built it with his own hands, he had. It was in his blood. Wasn't dangerous, so long as he limited his visits to the middle of the day, and let the head keep run the place at night. Hell, today it was dead as a whorehouse at Christmas. Luke Ponder slid the pesos into a small bag, tied it, and dropped them into a leather saddlebag. Too bad, in a way he thought wistfully. Sometimes, he plumb missed the excitement.

“If I was you,” the trapper said to the fairskinned lad who had awakened him from a whiskey-induced nap, “and I was lookin' for just about anyone, the place I'd begin askin' at is Ponder's Crossin' over there. Nary a soul comes into Natchez Under the Hill without stoppin' to sample ol' Luke's whiskey and pay respect to his darlin' doves.” The trapper smacked his lips. His smile was a blend of the beatific and the Mephistophelean. “Got a colored gal there by the name of Mouse,” he said in a dreamy voice. “No dove ever cooed so sweet. She'll leave your feathers all aruffled so it takes a coon's age afore they straighten down.”