The Last Crossing (21 page)

“A jest on my part, but an indelicate one. No criticism implied. Accept my apologies, Mrs. Stoveall.” He bows his head to me. His crown looks tender as a baby’s topknot, hair all swirled and soft. I’m sorry I mistook his meaning.

“I’m a touchy woman, Mr. Charles. So I ask pardon from you.”

He nods and smiles, falls back against a bag of flour, getting himself comfortable. We’re friends again. “I have been observing you closely, Mrs. Stoveall,” he remarks, “and I like what I see. You are an admirable addition to our company.”

I feel a blush spread on my face. “Well, that’s handsome of you to think so.”

Mr. Charles smiles. “Shall I confess something to you?”

“If you got the need.”

“Do not think ill of me, Mrs. Stoveall, but when you made your proposal to join us-I did not think it wise of my brother to accede.”

“Yes, and why was that?”

“I was concerned for the reputation of a woman travelling with men who were unknown to her.” He reaches up and taps a skillet hanging from the wagon hoops with his fingertips, as if it helps him find his words. “But I was very wrong. You have been a great boon to our morale and well-being. I am most genuinely grateful for your presence.”

“I do my best to make you gentlemen comfortable.” He’s got more to say, it’s writ large on his face.

“Yes.” He ponders a moment, fingertips still tapping the skillet. “Permit me to say a few words about my brother – in strictest confidence. In Fort Benton, his offer of protection may have appeared the height of chivalry. But keep in mind, my brother is a very impulsive man. He likes to cut a grand figure before an audience.” Mr. Charles leaves it there for a bit. “His character is erratic … not entirely dependable. If I were you, I should keep my distance from Addington. And if you should ever require assistance – for any reason whatsoever – it would be better if you came to me.”

I study on this, study on the look he wears. Mr. Charles can’t bring himself to put it straight to a woman, even a married one. “All right,” I say, “I’ve been warned.”

CHARLES
For most of a blazing hot afternoon Mr. Potts led us a merry, foxy chase. Dawdling until our wagons drew into sight, and then showing us his brush, galloping off just beyond our grasp. Several times Addington attempted to overtake him, but his thoroughbred was no match for our scout’s knock-kneed, tireless pony.

Now, in late afternoon, we have finally reached our destination, a river valley collapsed like a toothless mouth in the face of the plain. As our wagons zigzag down the slope, I spy our guide, his horse unsaddled, a fire lit beside the Whitemud River, a disconsolate trickle of brown water dotted with muddy bars covered in brush. On the tops of the willow thickets which thrive on these tiny islands, red-winged and yellow-headed blackbirds flick about in the wind like diminutive pennants. The white clay cutbanks are riddled with the nest-holes of some species of swallow, thousands of which skim the surface of the water, curvet, cut elaborate arabesques of flight. An explosion of ducks erupts from the river at our noisy approach.

Addington immediately beards Mr. Potts. “You did not give us the slip, sir. I persevered. The deserter is overtaken.”

“Now we rest,” says our guide.

Mr. Potts’s imperturbable demeanour has the most maddening effect on Addington. “No,” he growls, “we do not rest. We search for Reverend Witherspoon’s grave. We make use of the remaining hours of light.”

“Maybe we eat first.”

The exhausted horses droop in a lather of soapy sweat. The rest of us are equally exhausted. Everyone is of the same opinion as our guide, that we rest, that we sup. Only Mr. Ayto gleams a look of encouragement to my brother.

Mrs. Stoveall says, “I can whip something up quick – with the tinned goods.”

Addington turns on her. “Our course of action is settled, Mrs. Stoveall. You may, for the present, occupy yourself watering the horses. The rest of us shall conduct a search of the vicinity.”

“Addington, that is no way to speak to a lady.”

My brother rounds on me, face brick-red, an ominous bulge to his eyes which I remember so well from childhood. “You, sir, are a milksop.”

Mr. Ayto makes an untimely intervention. “Yes, it is not wise to undermine the Captain’s authority–”

Mr. Potts suddenly says, “Over there.” He points to a ravine several hundred yards off.

Addington, voice shrill with exasperation, demands, “Over there! Over there! What are you talking about, man!”

“The English preacher man is over there.”

“What do you mean, ‘Over there’?”

“I reckon over there you find him.”

“Oh, I see,” says Addington disdainfully. “A case of mental telepathy. Native clairvoyance.”

“Just so,” chimes Ayto.

Mr. Potts simply follows his own undivulged logic and heads for the coulee. After a moment of indecision, we follow, Addington furious, the rest of us puzzled and inquisitive.

It seems impossible that our guide should be so certain, even though he was present when Addington and I interviewed the prospector who had stumbled upon Reverend Witherspoon’s body, a meeting arranged by Mr. Baker two days before we set out. The prospector had offered very vague information. He could not pinpoint for us where he had found the body, beyond saying he had come across it on the Whitemud River, perhaps a half-day’s ride from the Cypress Hills. A hard spell of cold had settled in, the prospector told us, and he had seen tracks of Indian ponies about, and that decided him not to linger in the locality. He hadn’t buried the clergyman, just hastily erected a cairn of logs over him as a protection from scavengers, and lit out as fast as he could for Fort Benton. “That fool was dead, and I wasn’t about to join him. I smelled Sioux, so I rode out of there fast.”

The coulee into which Mr. Potts leads us is choked with brush and spindly poplar, impeding everybody’s progress except for our narrow-shouldered, bandy-legged guide, who seems to pass through it without
disturbing so much as a twig. In moments, he disappears from sight, and leaves us to claw our way through crackling undergrowth. Then a reprieve, a small clearing presents itself, and in it stands our scout, nonchalantly posed beside an impressive jumble of logs.

Addington seems nonplussed, falls into a brown study. No doubt he meditates on the diminishment of his self-importance occasioned by our guide’s miraculous success in locating what appears to be Witherspoon’s resting place. I ask, “Mr. Potts, tell me how you knew to come here – exactly here?”

He circles the logs, thoughtfully poking them with a moccasined foot. “Not much timber round here,” is his obscure explanation.

I press him further. “I don’t understand. But how did you
know?”

“Don’t let him pull the wool over your eyes,” Addington snaps. “This is no great mystery. Potts was here an hour before we arrived, and he had the good fortune to stumble across the cairn. Now he’s trying to amaze us by playing the shaman.” Addington shoots Mr. Potts a dark look. “Am I right, Potts?”

Mr. Potts grins broadly. “You cracking smart, Cap’n.”

For the first time today, Addington overlooks the scout’s insolence. “Pull those logs apart,” he says to the teamsters. “Let us see if what we find is indeed Witherspoon.”

It is Witherspoon, although I would not have recognized the blackened, half-rotten, leering corpse Grunewald and Barker uncover as the man who had once sat in the sitting room of Simon’s and my house in Grosvenor Square, expounding the bizarre dogmas of his church.

His cadaver excites horrible images in my mind – Simon in a similar state, his gentle face blistered by corruption, his teeth bared in a grinning rictus, his skull a mess of haphazard tufts of hair. But I try to keep at bay a horror that seems more real – that this vast and empty land will remain mute, will never yield an answer to Simon’s fate.

My stomach turns and sends me blundering back to the wagons.

Addington found inexcusable my refusal to take part in the burial service for Obadiah Witherspoon. But I wanted to hear no words said
over his corpse. I will not feign sympathy or respect for the man who deluded my brother with fanatical doctrines and led him to renounce his family in favour of this accursed place.

In any case, Addington was only observing the formalities. No sooner had Witherspoon been interred than my brother announced he was off to hunt, and made some reference to Mr. Ayto about “baked funeral meats” for our supper.

Mr. Potts remarked to him, “Maybe you get lost. Maybe we starve before we get our supper.”

Addington patted his coat pocket. “Never fear me getting lost, my good fellow. I navigate with a compass. A compass doesn’t lie.” Well-satisfied with having had the best of the exchange, my brother departed grandly, leaving us to our various amusements, Grunewald and Barker to gamble with the money my brother paid them to play sexton, Mr. Ayto to trim his toenails with a clasp knife, Mrs. Stoveall to see to domestic arrangements, and Mr. Potts, seemingly impervious to my brother’s insult, to doze beneath a wagon.

A little while ago, when Grunewald and Barker were conducting their own crude inquest into Witherspoon’s death, I overheard them say that they believe Witherspoon was not dispatched by savages, but met his death by misadventure. If Simon had been present at the time of Witherspoon’s mishap, he certainly would have seen that the man was decently buried. Somehow, they must have become separated. But how and why? And what chance would my delicate and unworldly brother have of surviving on his own? I will not allow myself to lose hope.

Sitting here, on the bank of the Whitemud, I have decided to take refuge in my watercolours.

The half-sheet of Imperial, best linen ragcloth paper, spots with bits of debris. The water from the river is slop, straining it through cheesecloth has not removed all particulate.

The methods which Mr. Balducci drummed into me are not of much use in depicting western skies. Lay down a yellowish or reddish wash first to mute the brilliance of the succeeding blue, to lend it a pleasing softness, he always said. Very correct for rendering a hazy,
moist English sky. But here, the heavens are of a crystalline brilliance and daunting depth.

So I lay down a wash of blue followed by a second coat of azure, hoping to thrum the optic nerve of the viewer. As my second application dries, I pick away at the filth speckling the surface of the paper. As my concentration takes a recess, I find myself visited by eerie thoughts. That Simon may have set his feet on the very spot where I sit. That he may be watching me this moment, hidden in the stand of trees confronting me from the opposite bank of the Whitemud, waiting for me to cry out to him.

I catch a rustling of grass, the snap of a breaking twig, and look up, half-expecting to see Simon smiling fondly down upon me. But it is Lucy Stoveall who greets me.

“Do you mind?”

“Please do.” I shift to make room for her on my patch of grass, and she settles down, hugs her knees, peering with undisguised interest at the paper pinned to my board. I was rather pleased by my efforts, but with Mrs. Stoveall staring at the painting, my sky suddenly seems bland and insipid.

“Well,” she says, “aren’t you the clever fellow.”

“No, not clever. But I had a good many lessons.”

“It’s a pretty picture.”

“A picture certainly. But pretty was not really my goal. You see, I’m rather at a loss as to how to render the scene. It’s the sky that confounds me. These skies are not what I’m used to in England.” I point and her gaze follows my finger. “Now how do you paint that?” We both squint into a cloudless heaven that seems to spill a fierce, pale blue light on our upturned faces. “When your training no longer answers – why then you must experiment. And it is not the skies alone, the quality of light here changes everything, even the shadows.” I trace our silhouettes, crisply etched on the ground. “I was taught to bleed the edges of shadows. But here, on this land, a shadow is a cameo, cut from black tin, sharply defined, stark.” I rummage for a more expressive word. “Heavy.”

Lucy examines our figures, dark on the ground. “You’re right,” she says. “Black as stovepipe tin. I never thought it before.”

I realize how much I’ve said and with what urgency I’ve said it. My first heartfelt words in a month. “You must forgive me, Mrs. Stoveall. Art has always been my chief concern – until these last difficult months,” I say.

“Your brother. I saw your face. I wondered if it was right to interrupt.”

I cast my eyes about me. “I had the most uncanny feeling that somehow Simon was present. I was almost tempted to call out to him.”

Suddenly her eyes brim with tears; she shakes her head. “Madge hovers near me too.”

“Your sister,” I say, “I’m sorry.” Awkwardly, I place my hand on her shoulder. Through the thin cloth I can feel the heat of her sorrow.

Lucy asks quietly, “If you could talk to your brother, what would you say?”

“Ah. I would beg forgiveness for how we parted. I was very angry with Simon at the time. I berated him for his damnable idealism. My brother was very sweet-natured.”

“My sister was a right good girl too. The best I could imagine.”