The Bold Frontier (42 page)

“Wait. Look at him. His spirit is gone. It flew before he touched the earth.”

Ironhand changed position so that he could press an ear to his enemy’s chest. He hunched that way for a long space, then raised his head, starting to shake from shock. Manitow was right again. The heart of Little Joe Moonlight had stopped.

Ironhand lurched up. His wounded leg would barely support him. His back was screaming with pain. He poked his knife at the thong loop on his belt and missed. He missed a second time. Manitow took the knife from him and put it in place, giving the thong an extra twist to secure the hilt.

Ironhand raked a trembling hand through his dirty beard. “I—didn’t want to give you the rifle.”

“Why?”

“I knew you’d kill me after you saved yourself.”

“Why?”

“Your brother—”

“The white man’s mind,” Manitow said with enormous disgust. “Don’t you think I had a hundred opportunities to kill you before this?”

“But you said I was responsible—”

“That was before I met you. I wanted to learn what sort you are. I learned. You learned nothing, you were full of poison bile of fear. You’re like all the rest of the whites, even though not as bad as some. It’s lucky you broke down and gave me the rifle or the story would end differently.”

He stepped forward suddenly—it seemed menacing until Ironhand realized the true import. Then he felt a fool. Manitow supported his back and forearm gently. “Now you had better lie down before you fall down, white man.” He no longer sounded scornful.

Stiff and sore in heavy bandages, Ironhand rode alone up the dirt track to the gate of Kirk’s Fort. Draped in a U over the neck of his horse Brownie was the smelly corpse of Little Joe Moonlight.

Kirk’s Fort was old and famous on the plains. It was a large rectangular stockade with a blockhouse at every corner. Cabins and warehouse buildings formed two of its walls. Ironhand passed through the palisade by the main gate, which opened on a long dirt corridor of sheds and shops. A second inner gate led to the quadrangle, where Indians were never admitted; all trading was done in the corridor, though even here there were precautions. Bars on the shop windows; iron shutters on the windows of the storehouse that held trade goods.

A toothless fort Indian sat against the wall, looking sadly displaced in a white man’s knitted cap and a white soldier’s discarded blouse. He popped his eyes at Ironhand, whom he recognized. The trapper rode on through the second gate and straight across the trampled soil of the quadrangle to the Four Flags headquarters building. Company employees appeared around corners or from doorways of the accounting office, the strongbox room, the powder house, staring at Ironhand in a bewildered way. Someone called a greeting he didn’t acknowledge. No one stopped him as he kicked the office door open and lumbered through, Little Joe’s stiffening body folded over his shoulder, his Henry carbine tucked under his arm.

Alexander Jaggers was occupied with familiar things: his quill, his account books. Seeing the looming figure, he exclaimed, “Ewing! Laddie—what’s this? Ye dinna hae the courtesy to knock or announce yersel—”

He was stopped by Ironhand slipping the Henry onto the seat of a chair, then laying the body of Little Joe Moonlight on top of the wide wooden desk. It disarranged the account books and overturned the ink pot, which dripped its contents on the old floor.

“He met with an accident. It happens often in the mountains,” Ironhand said with a meaningful look at the master of Four Flags.

Jaggers reddened, puffing out his cheeks. He darted a hand to a drawer of the desk but Ironhand was quicker. He leaped on the desk, over Little Joe’s corpse, and pushed Jaggers, toppling him and his chair at the same time. Jaggers flailed, kicking his legs in the air and yelling decidedly unchristian oaths.

Ironhand jumped down and retrieved his Henry rifle from the chair. He took aim and emptied the revolving magazine, five rounds, into Mr. Jaggers’s pump organ in the corner. After the roar of the volley, the organ exhaled once, loudly, like a man with pierced lungs gasping his last.

The trapper stepped to the pump organ and attacked its wood cabinet with his right hand. The hand beat and smashed like a hammer; a mace; a sledge. Thin veneers cracked and snapped. Jaggers was screaming and vainly trying to rise, but his fall had sprung some leg muscle, and each attempt was more futile than the last; he continued to wail on his back, heels in the air.

Ironhand locked his two hands together, the good with the ruined, and brought this huge hammerhead of flesh and bone down on the frame of the organ, breaking it in two as if it were a man’s spine.

Jaggers screamed misery and rage.

Ironhand picked up his Henry and walked out without a backward look.

The daylight was waning too soon. Sunset was many hours away. But the sky and the prairie were dark, and the air was damp. Away in the north, thunder was bumping.

The dew and damp produced a ground mist that congealed and spread rapidly. As Ironhand rode to the cottonwood grove two miles west of the fort, he craned around in his saddle—at no small cost in pain—and saw the corner blockhouses floating above murky gray mist-clouds, like ogres’ castles in the sky in a fairytale.

When he reached the grove, Manitow woke up, scratched his back, stood, asked, “Where for you now?”

“Back to the mountains. Back to the beaver. It’s the only trade I know. They aren’t all wearing silk toppers in New York town yet, I wager.”

Manitow paused before saying, “I know secret streams, Old Ironhand. Three or four, locked so far in the Stony Mountains you would never find them alone.”

“Hmm. Well. Let’s see. I’d like a pardner again. A free trapper needs a pardner. But I never paid your brother any sort of fee, like many do. We split what the plews brought in.”

“That would be agreeable.”

“If you think you can trust me not to cost you your life?” Ironhand asked, a sudden flash of sourness.

Manitow took it calmly, seriously. “The old Scot will trouble you no more, I think. But can you trust me?”

Ironhand’s wreck of a face seemed to relax. “We crossed that river awhile back.”

Slowly, with graceful ceremonious moves, Manitow the Delaware drew from his waist his splendid long Green River knife. He held it out, handle first.

With equal ceremony, Ironhand took his equally fine knife from its thong. He held it out the same way. Among the men of the mountains, white and red, there was no more significant gesture of trust.

“Pardner.”

“Pardner.”

They exchanged knives. Manitow kissed the fingers of his right hand and raised them over his head in a mystical gesture. Ironhand laughed, deep and rumbling. They mounted up and rode away together into the storm.

THE WESTERN WRITER KARL
May probably did more to promote the splendor and excitement of the West to non-Americans than anyone except Buffalo Bill Cody, king of the scouts, the arena show, and the dime novel. Yet not many fans of the genre, perhaps excluding specialist scholars, know of him.

Surely it is because Karl May was born in Saxony in 1842, wrote only in German, and visited America just once—four years before his death in 1912. By that time he had written seventy-four volumes, forty of them set in “the American Wild West.”

May was decidedly an odd bird for this sort of missionary work. He knew about the West only through reading—some of which was done in prison. May was jailed four times in his early life, for assorted thefts and swindles. During his longest sentence, four years, he ran a prison library.

May’s youth was hard. He was afflicted with spells of near-blindness. He came from what we would call a dysfunctional family. Of thirteen brothers and sisters, nine died.

When old enough, he entered a preparatory school for teachers. He was expelled for stealing. It didn’t seem to teach him a lesson; other crimes—other incarcerations—followed.

But reading somehow turned him around, much as it turns around quite a few convict-writers. In 1875 Karl May published the first of his Westerns.

His white hero had different names in different stories: Old Surehand; Old Firehand; Old Shatterhand. He was a
Westmänner
(Westman)—not a native frontiersman but a strong, suave, cultured European who quickly adapted to the rigors and perils of the West by means of intelligence and physical strength. Old Shatterhand possessed a “mighty fist” useful for dispatch of villains. But he also carried firepower, in the form of a fantastic repeating rifle customcrafted by the “legendary” gunsmith, Mr. Henry of St. Louis. This
Henrystutzen
(Henry carbine) with its revolving chamber holding twenty-five rounds is not to be confused with the more familiar Henrys; there is no connection beyond the name.

Partnered with May’s Surehand/Shatterhand character was a young Indian, first introduced to readers around 1892. Winnetou is a consistently brave and brainy Apache chief educated by a Christian tutor, hence receptive to the “civilized” ways of Europe, and the white man with whom he adventures.

The two heroes wandered all over the map of the West, meeting again and again by remarkable coincidence, and removing an untold number of malefactors. In one historical quarterly, a scholar did a body count of four representative May novels totaling 2,300 pages. The number of persons going to their rewards was 2,012. They were dispatched by shooting, scalping, knifing, drowning, poisoning—and sixty-one were put down by the “mighty fist” previously cited.

May had a fair grasp of Western geography, except in one respect. In addition to familiar settings of mountains and deserts, he repeatedly used “an impenetrable cactus forest”—exact location unspecified.

May’s works have been translated into many languages but seldom, if at all, into English. Yet they’ve sold upwards of fifty million copies, and continue to sell. You find long shelves of May in almost every bookshop in Germany, just as you find long shelves of L’Amour throughout the United States.
¹

At least thirty films have been made from May’s novels. An entire publishing house devoted to them was founded in 1913. At summer encampments similar to those of American Civil War reenactors, mild-mannered fans gather in costume to act out the exploits of their two heroes. Now doctoral dissertations are being written about Karl May.

So it seemed fitting, and an enjoyable challenge, to pay respects to him with a story about a couple of Westerners who battle a decidedly rotten crew from a fur trust. The story takes place in what May sometimes called the Stony Mountains.

I have used variations of the names of his two leading characters, and kept the marvelous repeating Henry (reduced to an arbitrary five shots). Those are the only resemblances. Ironhand is not a “blond Teutonic superman who speaks a dozen languages fluently and lards his conversations with little sermons about God and Christianity.” Manitow is neither a chief nor an Apache. My intent was to create
un hommage
to an important figure in the literature of the West, not to write a pastiche of May’s work, which I can’t translate very well anyway with my rudimentary German. I wanted a story bathed in a diffuse pastel-colored mist, like a legend. A story not overly realistic. In short, the kind of Western story someone might have written from afar.

One other note: The hymn Mr. Jaggers sings is reverse anachronism; it was composed years after the period of the story. But in context, the lyrics proved irresistible.

¹
A recent (2000) book about Hitler’s early days in Vienna states that Hitler was a lifelong May enthusiast (hardly a recommendation), even though May’s West was, as the
New York Times
observed, “scarcely a hymn to the Aryan.” Somehow May’s writing convinced the dictator that you didn’t need to know the territory, you just needed a good imagination—a notion that defeats of his generals often proved wrong.

W
AR CAME TO OUR
home in July of 18 and 63.

Our house and the remains of the smithy stood on the Hagerstown Road, southwest of the sleepy little town of Gettysburg, in the hills of Pennsylvania. General Bob Lee had invaded the North. It was a desperate throw of the dice for the Rebs, who were fighting for black bondage and something called secession, which at age eleven I didn’t understand.

Rumors of great armies just over the horizon reached us almost daily during the last week of June. I am sure there was fear in every heart in Adams County. Except my father’s.

On Tuesday, June 30, a terrified family passed by from the west, saying the Rebs were advancing behind them. My father, a huge, strong man hurt by his blindness, threw his cane aside and fumbled his rifle down from over the hearth.

“If they do come, Daniel, I’ll kill a Reb for your brother,” he said to me. “You will help.”

He raised the rifle over his head and exulted. “God be praised.”

My father and mother, Jenny, were Bible people. My mother lived by moral principles without any thought of the cost. Once, right after Pa’s accident, when we had almost no money, a grocery clerk making change returned an extra dime. That dime would have bought a lot. My mother courteously pointed out the error and handed him the dime. My mother read the New Testament gospels mostly. For Pa, she read aloud those books that he preferred—the Old Testament, all full of holy anger and vengeance. I suppose he cherished them because of what happened to my older brother Toby, who marched away with General McClellan on the Peninsula and never came back. …

Sure enough, before noon on July 1, Reb horsemen came storming down upon us. Wil Sharp, who had the next farm west, galloped through, yelling that the Reb dust cloud was visible from his place.

“Help me, Daniel,” my father exclaimed. “Carry my rifle, and set me up on the rail fence where I can shoot at them. You’ll tell me when to fire.”

“And they’ll shoot back, and you’ll both be dead,” my mother said. My little sister Lisbeth covered her eyes and bawled. Mother told her to hush.

Pa wouldn’t be put off. Leaning on my shoulder, he walked out of the house and I set him up with his elbows resting on the top rail and his rifle pointing down the pike. The July day was hot and humming with insects.