Track of the Cat - Walter Van Tilburg Clark (9 page)

He left the statement in the air, as clearly only an
introduction, and lighted his cigar again. When the smoke came full
and easy, he blew a long, slow cloud of it up into the lamp, and went
on.

"We had one once, did odd jobs for us in
Virginia City. A woman. The men wouldn’t work at all, if they could
help it. Beneath their dignity. They preferred to beg for food and
whisky and cast-oif clothes. She was a sight, this one. Rose, we
called her, in order that there should be something sweet about her."

He chuckled and looked at Gwen to be sure she
understood the joke. Gwen made the little smile, and looked from the
corners of her eyes at Harold. His face was expressionless and he was
working one hand slowly back and forth over the other, which he had
made into a fist on the table.

"And also," the father went on, "because
we had to call her something. She was unbelievably fat and dirty, and
had bad eyes, like most of them, and her hair down in bangs so long
it half covered them. She wore a bedspread with huge red flowers on
it for a shawl. That’s actually what suggested the name Rose to us.
And an old pair of men’s shoes, three sizes too large for her, and
never tied up. She was honest enough, as Indians go," he said,
chuckling, and
inviting Gwen, with a look, to
enjoy this joke too. "Never stole anything unless we left it
around in the open, or weren’t there to watch her.

"Well, to get to the point, I always took it for
granted that Rose was forty-five or fifty at least. Her face was
heavily lined, and she’d had something like twelve children, though
there didn’t seem to be more than three or four of them left alive.
They have no idea how to take care of a child, or any interest in
doing so. Once they’re off those boards the women carry them around
on, they either survive or they don’t, pretty much by accident,
like any other little animals. But then I chanced to meet a man who’d
known her before she came to Virginia City. He was a hunter or
trapper or some such. At any rate, he was a squaw-man. He’d lived
with Indians more than with whites, and wore his own hair clear down
over his shoulders, like a buck. Joel Blaine, I believe his name was.
Ever happen to meet him up there?"

Gwen shook her head.

"No, you wou1dn’t be likely to, I guess.
Probably before your time, and a secretive cuss anyway. Got that from
the Indians too, I suppose. At any rate, he’d known Rose when she
was a kid, and guess how old he said she was?"

He asked the question happily, and sat back smiling
widely at Gwen and waiting to astound her with the answer.

"I wouldn’t have any idea," Gwen said,
trying to smile.

"Twenty-six or seven, not more," the old
man announced triumphantly. "And it’s the same with Joe Sam
here," he went on, after allowing her time to understand him
fully.

"You cou1dn’t possibly guess his age by
looking at him, and he himself hasn’t any real idea of it, either.
He claims he’s over a hundred, but I’ll wager bourbon to sump
water he’s not much over half that."

"He’s older than that," Harold said. "He
was already a brave when Fremont camped at Pyramid Lake, and that was
pretty near sixty years ago. Remember, he told Arthur about a brass
cannon they had?"

"He’s like any other child," the father
said. "He don’t know the difference now between what he saw
and what somebody told him, maybe thirty years later."

"I don’t know," Harold said. "He
remembers a lot of little things, too, like about the kind of buttons
Fremont had on his coat. And he was a war chief of some sort, when
they had that fight on the Truckee. He spoke in the last council they
had before the fight. He had four children too, and one of them, the
oldest girl, was in her teens already. And they were all by his
second wife. His first children were already grown up and had
families of their own. He says two of the boys were killed in the
battle. And that was in sixty.”

Before the father could speak, he went on to Gwen,
"It was right after that the black painter got started. The
Indians took an awful lickin’ in the second battle, when they had
troops from
California and everything in against
them, and they scattered all over the country north of the lake. When
the reservation was laid out, their chief, Winnemucca, called ’em
all back, but there was quite a few wouldn’t come. Thought it was a
trap, I guess, or just didn’t like the idea of being fenced in when
they’d had the whole country to themselves."

"About the way the jack-rabbits had it,"
the father said.

"Maybe," Harold said. "Anyway, they’d
been getting along on it for a sight longer than there’d been white
men anywhere in America, and the country was still as fit to live
in as it ever had been. Our kind wrecked it worse in
ten years than they had in lord knows how many hundreds, maybe
thousands."

"Ignorance and poor tools," the father
said.

"We got a long ways to go in some things then,
before we catch up with their ignorance."

"You sound like Arthur," the father said.
"Arthur and that sour-faced newspaper friend of his in Virginia
City that got him started reading all that useless trash; what was
his name? Bates. Jim Bates. Back to nature, and it’s a sin to make
an honest dollar, and so on."

"Not an honest one," Harold said, and
looked quickly at Gwen again.

"Anyway, Joe Sam was one of them that wouldn’t
come back. He took his family and traveled clear up into the
mountains somewhere northwest of us here, up around Shasta somewhere,
near as we can make out. Arthur thinks the black cat got started up
there, in some extra bad winter. He thinks it’s kind of Joe Sam’s
personal evil spirit, not a regular one for the Piutes. Either way,
it’s got so, in his mind, it kind of stands for the whole business
of being run out by the white man, the end of things, you might say.
Like the ghost dance was for the ones that stayed together."

"Wasn’t there a real one?" Gwen asked.

"I don’t know," Harold said. "I
never saw a black one myself, or heard of anybody that did, for that
matter. But there might have been one—a freak, dark enough to call
black. There was something, that’s sure.”

"A dream," the father said. “The old fool
can’t tell dreams and facts apart any more."

"No," Harold said, shaking his head. "It
comes out too often. Little things about it. Whatever he’d added to
it since, he remembers something."

"He can’t remember anything," the father
said. "He couldn’t even remember his own name. ‘Sam’ he
said, when we asked him," he told Gwen. "He’d heard it
somewhere, and that was all he could think of. So we called him Joe
Sam, because Curt was already calling him Joe."
 
"He knows his real name, all right,"
Harold said. "He won’t tell us, that’s all. Indians keep
them secret. They think it gives anybody a power over them to know
their real names."

"Rubbish," the father said, "pure,
romantic rubbish. The notions Arthur digs up," he said to Gwen,
"are enough to make a reasonable man weary. It’s all this
useless stuff he reads." He waved a hand loosely at the
bookshelves in the corner behind him. "Novels and poetry and
fairy stories about the ancient Greeks and the Chinese and the Lord
only knows what. Not a dependable fact or a piece of usable
information in the whole lot. Now it has him  manufacturing the
same sort of nonsense. He’s as completely a dreamer as Joe Sam
himself, only it isn’t just by spells."

"He does a little thinking of his own,"
Harold said, as softly as Arthur might have said it.

The father snorted. “Precious little I’d call
thinking."

"About all that’s done around here, though."

"If somebody around here wasn’t doing more
thinking than Arthur," the father began loudly, but then
stopped, pounding a fist softly on the table and muttering, "When
a man can’t even finish a sentence in his own house," because
the door of the north bedroom had opened, and Grace was coming in.
The rims of her eyes were red from crying, and she didn’t look
toward the table.

The mother said, still watching the lines of her
Bible, "You’ll have to put the pan on again, Grace. I didn’t
keep anything for you, not knowing when you’d want it."

"All I want is some coffee," Grace said.

She went to the sink, in the corner between the stove
and the north bedroom, where her back was to the rest of them, and
took a white wash basin down from the wall and filled it with cold
water from the noisy pump. Then she leaned over the basin and began
to douse her face with the cold water, lifting it with both hands and
rubbing hard and quickly.

The mother got up and filled a coffee mug at the
stove and brought it back to the table. Then she picked up her Bible
and went around the table behind Gwen and sat down in the big,
leather platform rocker by the front window. She worked the rocker
around to one side, to get it out of the father’s shadow, and
leaned forward to put the light on the pages, and began to read
again.

Grace emptied the basin, and wiped her face hard in
the rough roller towel. She stood for a moment, just holding the
towel over her face with both hands. Then she lifted her head, wiped
her hands quickly, and came to the table, and sat down where her
mother had been sitting.

"I’m sorry I made such a scene," she
said.

"It’s all been one big scene this morning, as
far as I can see," the father said. "There’s no need to
apologize for any particular part of it. It seems to me," he
said, smiling at Gwen, "that all the beds in the house, except
Gwendolyn’s and mine, had two bad sides this morning."

Gwen made her quick smile for him.

"Grace," he said, more cheerfully, "let
me pour you a little drink. Best thing in the world for the nerves,
and for this unseasonable cold as well."

"No, thank you, Father. The coffee’s all I
need."

"Well, I shall have one, I think," the
father said. "Such a turmoil about nothing."

He poured his glass a third full again, corked the
bottle with careful dignity, and raised the glass a little at Gwen.

Gwen made the smile for him once more, and then,
after a moment, looked at Grace and asked, "You feel better
now?"

"I’m all right, thanks," Grace said. "I
shouldn’t let Curt make me so mad. Goodness knows his teasing’s
nothing new."

She smiled at Gwen, though not easily, and lifted the
mug and began to sip the coffee.

"Harold was telling me about Joe Sam’s black
panther."

Grace stiffened her shoulders and shivered. "The
poor old man," she said. "No wonder he has these spells."

"We don’t have to talk about it now, though,"
Gwen said.

"Oh, it won’t bother me," Grace said.
"Curt jokes about it all the time. Go ahead, Harold."

"Well," Harold said, rubbing his hand
slowly over his fist on the table again, "there isn’t much to
it really. I mean to tell about. Near as we can make out, they were
camped by some creek or other, and one day, about sunset it was, he
heard his wife scream down by the creek. He got down there as fast as
he could, but he just got a glimpse of this big cat sneaking off 
through the willows on the other side, and there was his wife and his
oldest daughter, dead by the creek. His wife was dragged half into
the water and her neck was broken, and the girl was farther up the
bank, and pretty much torn up, I guess. He says the cat was black,
and its tracks were a lot the biggest he’d ever seen. It happened
in the first snowstorm that year. It was snowing when he found them.
Now he always thinks the black cat’s around again when the first
snow comes."

Gwen made a little grimace of pain and looked from
the corners of her eyes into Joe Sam’s corner by the stove. Then
she turned her head and looked there directly.

"Where did he go?" she asked quickly.

Harold was still studying his hands on the table. "He
stayed up there for quite a while, hunting for that cat."

"N0, I mean now," Gwen said. "He’s
gone."

The others looked at the corner too. The coffee mug
and the plate, with all the food still on it, were there on the door,
and there was the wood-box, with the white, split, pine sticks piled
high in it, but that was all.

"He went out while you was squabbling about
Arthur'," the mother said.

"I didn’t hear a thing," Gwen said.

"It’s those moccasins he wears," Harold
said. "He won’t wear anything else, even when there’s snow
down. In the summer he goes barefoot half the time.”

"It scared me," Gwen said, laughing a
little. "He’d been there all the time, and then I looked, and
he just wasn’t, and I hadn’t heard a thing. I thought for a
minute I’d only imagined him in the first place."

“
He probably went back to the bunk-house,"
Grace said. "He sleeps out there, and he stays there most of the
time, when he isn’t outside. He doesn’t like it in here with us."

"He didn’t eat anything," Gwen said.

The mother looked up from her book. "You have to
spoon feed him like a baby when he gets took with one of these
spells. But I wouldn’t worry my head about him any, if I was you.
He’s lasted a good while on his own system. You better go out and
see he’s got a fire, though, Harold. He’s just as like as not to
set there all day beside that stove with no fire in it."