The Englishman’s Boy

Little Truth Seeker, kick him.” On writing subtitles for the historical epics then in vogue, her advice was, “For anything prior to 1600, be it Babylon or Tudor England, crib the King James version of the Bible. This satisfies the nose-pickers in Chattanooga who can read, although sometimes they get confused and believe they’re conning the word of God, which can later lead to confusion in tent meetings. For American historical costume dramas, the Declaration of Independence is an unfailing model for the speech of the quality. When it comes to frontier gibberish I merely reproduce the kitchen-table conversation of the relatives of my former husband. The Gentile one.”

“The true test of any scenario,” Rachel was fond of saying, “is to read it to a cameraman. Cameramen are invariably Irish and invariably drunk. If they can grasp the plot, the moral, the theme of your simple tale through an alcoholic haze, you can be assured you have struck the proper intellectual level. If one of these sons of the Emerald Isle happens to weep upon hearing your masterpiece, what can I say except – El Dorado! A word to the wise. Never consult a story editor about your script. Story editors are people who once harboured higher literary ambitions – such as writing fiction for one of the better women’s magazines. A house divided against itself cannot stand, Vincent, and story editors are cracked from top to bottom, conscience-stricken souls who berate themselves for selling out for a mess of pottage. They are whores who delude themselves they only lent their cherries, not irretrievably lost them. I, on the other hand, know exactly who popped me, when, where, and for how much.”

I owe a lot to Rachel Gold. I owe her the seventy-five-dollar-a-week job that allowed me to bring my mother down from Canada, to place her in the Mount of Olives Rest Home. And now because of the train of events she set in motion I find myself more than a scenarist; I find I have become a detective.

5

After a passage of thirty-two days, the riverboat Yankton made Fort Benton. When the mountain steamer hove round the bend, the whole town, warned by the smoke she had shown on the horizon, was turned out to greet her, to celebrate the breaking of the winter’s siege. For three weeks there had been no tobacco, no flour, no dried fruit, no molasses, no bacon to be had. Minnie Rifle Whisky, watered, and then revived with cayenne pepper, was selling a dollar a glass at the only saloon with stock. For two weeks the whole country, Indians, independent traders, trappers, mule-skinners, bullwhackers, had foregathered in Benton to await the arrival of supplies.

Now the cannon in the old adobe fort boomed a welcome which clapped and echoed in the river valley as young bloods whooped lathered horses up and down the riverbank, firing pistols in the air. On the levee, merchant dignitaries waited in a knot of sombre black coats and high-collared white shirts, Old Glory at their side, the flag doleful for want of a breeze. A French priest or two, a Methodist preacher, clerks, the better tradesmen, dowdy ravens flocked together in black. Ranged behind them, trappers and whisky-traders, bear-greased hair to their shoulders, bristling with guns, dressed in stinking linsey-woolsey shirts and buckskin trousers, boots and parfleche- soled moccasins, kit-fox caps and store-bought felt hats. Faro dealers and freighters, bar-keeps and crib girls, sin and civilization all met on a riverbank. And Frenchies, Metis from Canada, Creoles from the mouth of the Mississippi, interpreters, oarsmen, cordeliers in hooded capotes and beaded moccasins, wide sashes cinched tight at their waists. And their wives, women of every Plains tribe, a few in the white woman’s calico dress with blanket leggings peeking out from under the hem, the rest in soft ivory buckskin, Boston shawls around their shoulders, gimcrack brooches pinned to their bosoms, moon faces shining. A little further to the rear stood Peigans from the big encampment which had gathered outside of Benton to trade winter buffalo robes, one hundred and fifty lodges sprawled out on the flats, ringed by vast herds of grazing horses, the cook-fires hazing the air with thin blue smoke and scenting it with the aroma of fat meat cooking, the nights throbbing with the firefly light of hundreds of lodge fires, pulsing with drumming and the piping of elk effigy whistles as young men paid court to girls of marrying age. To salute the Yankton, these bachelors had dandified themselves with their best weasel- fur fringed shirts and daubed their faces with ochre, white clay, bright Chinese vermilion. As the captain strode down the gangplank to shake hands with functionaries of the I.G. Baker Company and the passengers spilled off the boat in unseemly haste, wading through the river mud for the town, the Peigans watched the ceremonies of the white man with a dispassion bordering on contempt.

The last passenger to disembark was John Trevelyan Dawe, carried off on a blanket by three crew members and his boy. They slung him into the wagon bed of a teamster, packed his luggage tightly about him, and spread a coat over his face to keep the sun out of his eyes.

“What’s ailing your friend?” the driver suspiciously asked the boy. He didn’t like the way the Englishman’s teeth chattered and clicked.

“Ague,” said the boy.

“Sure ’tain’t mountain fever?”

“I said her once,” the boy said, putting his foot to the wheel and boosting himself up on to the seat beside the teamster. “You got your trip money. Move them skinny mules.”

Soon they were rumbling down Front Street, the Englishman rattling and groaning on the wagon bed. Front Street wasn’t much, white dust and a ramshackle collection of log, frame, and adobe buildings, a thoroughfare littered with horse droppings, torn playing cards, and chamber-pot slops that Fort Benton’s sporting women tossed out their bedroom windows. Wild-eyed men wandered in and out among the wagons and horsemen, on the verge of being ridden down or driven over. Bursts of cheering and the energetic thumping of bar-room pianos by saloon “professors” announced the broaching of the first whisky barrels, which had been galloped posthaste up from the Yankton by buckboard. Merriment was epic and general. In a situation of robust supply, the price of whisky had plummeted to two bits a shot.

The proprietor of the Overland Hotel was loath to let a sick man on the premises, saying it was bad for custom. For a time the Englishman’s boy stood silent. Then he said, “Nothing worse than fire for business.”

The owner wanted to know what he meant.

“Never know about fire,” said the boy. “Comes out of nowhere sometimes, like a thief in the night.”

He got his room. For three days the Englishman alternately shook with a bone chill or swam in a greasy sweat slick as melted butter, the fever frying him like pork in a skillet. The boy never left his side, God’s rightful angel of mercy. His own Pap had died of a like complaint, fire and ice, his spleen swelling like the Englishman’s, rising below the ribs hard as a piece of oak, bulging out in what was dubbed the “ague cake.”

In snatches the Englishman’s boy would doze on the floor, waking when Dawe commenced raving and thrashing on his straw tick, hollering for some woman called Nanny Hooper. The Englishman’s boy had seen his share die, and it was frequent they called on their mamma in the testing time, the hour of travail, travelling back to the years of the milk-titty. But the Englishman just bellered for his Nanny Hooper, whosoever she might be when to home.

The second night came the convulsions. Straddling Dawe’s chest he rode the bucking pony, grabbing fistfuls of hair to pin the flailing head to the pillow while the Englishman’s face slowly turned black, his eyes rolling back in their sockets, his heels beating a frantic tattoo on the hard mattress.

The third night there was nothing left to do but sit on a hard chair and listen to the sound of the ragged, hoarse breathing wind down. Towards two in the morning Dawe suddenly cried, “Nanny! Nanny! Nanny!” in the high voice of a little child, then he curled himself up on his pallet and died. The boy straightened the limbs, washed the body, tied the jaw shut with a hanky, closed his eyes. He didn’t know what a dead Englishman required in the way of a leave-taking so he sat back down on the hard chair with his hands on his knees and sang “Amazing Grace” to the naked white body, the aubergine face and yellow eyelids.

Going through the deceased’s effects he was surprised to find so little real money, only forty-five dollars in gold coin. He had heard Dawe say a line of credit was arranged for him at LG. Baker Company, but a dead man couldn’t draw cash nor goods and the Englishman’s boy was owed two months’ wages.

He appropriated Dawe’s tweed jacket and bowler. Both were sizes too big for him, but he could wear the hat by stuffing the sweatband with the old newspapers which the Englishman had refused to throw away because he said they spoke to him in the soft accents of home. The boy pulled on the jacket and examined himself in a yellowed mirror. With the cuffs turned back it would serve. Warm and a hard-wearer. He slipped a box of revolver cartridges