stockade gates for a closer look at the strangers. The men stood propped against the Red River carts contentedly sucking on stubby pipes, the stained legs of their buckskin trousers casually crossed one over the other, their eyes impassive as their faces. Ranged behind the men, the women kept an equally tranquil and silent vigil, their print dresses a field of tiny, bright, becalmed flowers. The hair of the young women was braided or coiled on top of their heads, the hair of the old women was hidden under blue and red kerchiefs. No one moved. They made the Englishman’s boy think of a mob he had seen in Sioux City crowding around the body of an old man who was slowly dying after being hit by a runaway wagon. Like that day, only the children made any noise. The Metis kids were gathered some way off, counterpointing the unnerving quiet of their elders with shrieks and excited shouts as they played some game on a blanket.
Grace was saying, “I don’t know what your feeling is, son, but I think you and me need something to eat a damn sight more than we need something to drink.”
The boy assented with a disinterested bob of his head. He wasn’t really listening; he was watching the watchers. What were they waiting for – news, a glimpse of unfamiliar faces?
“Goddamn,” Grace said, rubbing his hands together at the thought of victuals, “what I could use is some fresh meat. A bit of broiled venison, a bear steak, something doesn’t want to break your pearlies when you bite down on it.” For the first time, he seemed to see the Metis, ranged like a sombre Greek chorus loitering in a tragedy. “These half-breeds more’n likely have some fresh game on hand,” he said to the Englishman’s boy. “One of the women might cook us a Sunday dinner if we paid them. What do you figure?”
“Maybe.”
The Englishman’s boy watched Grace as he approached woman after woman, watched the women shake their heads, or stare at hands knotted in the cloth of their skirts. This would take some time, he calculated. He wandered over to scout what sport the brats were up to. Judging by their squealing, it was a dandy.
When his gruesome shadow fell across the blanket a dozen pairs of eyes lifted. At the sight of him a baby began to cry; her sister boosted her onto her lap, shushing and clucking. The Englishman’s boy stood solemn and flint-faced, looking like a spark could be struck from his chin with a steel, a shred of newspaper he’d stuffed in the sweatband of his derby dangling on his forehead like a grimy kiss-curl, smudgy and grey as his hard, stony face. He had left his Winchester parked in his saddle-scabbard, but he still wore the two bandoliers of rifle cartridges crossed on his breast, and the holstered Colt cinched tightly at his waist. Whenever he took a step, travel-dirt made his pants flap stiffly as tent canvas. One of his boots was hanging just short of complete and utter disintegration by a few waxed threads. Only a year or two older than the eldest child there, nevertheless he looked wizened, forebodingly ancient.
They stared at him with naked, undisguised wonder, and he stared back, fingering a cartridge in a bandolier. “What you looking at?” he said suddenly, making an impatient gesture to the blanket lying on the ground. “Get on with your game.”
It was impossible to say which they understood, his English or his peremptory gesture, but a boy of thirteen or fourteen with clever grey eyes and a broken front tooth swept the blanket in a matador’s pass over his knees, snatched up three white smooth knucklebones off the ground and, grinning a jagged-tooth challenge at the Englishman’s boy, began rattling the bones in cupped hands. His torso wove from side to side; his hands darted in and out from under the blanket, flew behind his back, cut passes underneath the noses of the smallest children, who shrieked with delight when his quick, lithe hands fluttered at their faces like birds against a window. All the while he sang a chant to the scudding hands; the same phrase repeated over and over, like a rosary prayer.
The chant suddenly stopped and the hands froze closed, the singer slowly twisting his shoulders to hold up his fists to the Englishman’s boy. The Englishman’s boy figured he was to guess where the bones were, how many in each hand. It weren’t no mystery to him; he’d been studying hard the didoes the bone-boy had been cutting up.
He tapped the back of the Metis’s right hand and held up two fingers. The bone-boy slowly opened his fingers – nothing. There was a sharp intake of breath around the blanket. He uncurled the fingers of his left hand. The three bones lay like little white eggs in a nest.
A great shout, a great hubbub; they smote the earth with their palms, beat it like a drum, even the baby struck her knee in imitation of the others. They all pointed, wagged their fingers derisively at the Englishman’s boy, chanting the player’s chant, a taunt, an insult.
He wrinkled his nose with distaste, blushed scarlet, drew himself straight as he could. The half-breed kid was laughing at him, brown eyes flashing, that broken tooth looking sharp as a chisel. The Metis dashed the bones to the ground with a flourish and scooped them up again in a single, unbroken, flowing movement. Then he was off chanting and rocking on his haunches, hands feinting, white bones juggling from palm to palm, fists leaping behind his back, under the blanket, wrists twisting and fingers flickering, chant rising and falling like last night’s wind hypnotically swinging the treetops.
The Englishman’s boy felt his face burn like it had a touch of sun-scald. Backwoods boy at a one-donkey circus, fooled by a fast talker with his pea-and-shell game. Fooled by a little snip like him. But he’d watch right smart this time. He’d track those bones like a hound.
The song broke off. The grinning face with the sharp tooth was tempting him with the offer of doubled fists again. The Englishman’s boy had spotted that last little skip, that dodginess at the blanket edge, the roll of the white bone between the deft fingers a split-second after the song had stopped. When everybody’s eyes were supposed to pass on to the brown imp’s face.
The ring of children were waiting for him, faces tight with suspense.
Might be, this time, he’d wipe that scoffing smile off his face. Look at him, proud as Lucifer for owning a pair of pickpocket’s hands.
He could hear Ed Grace halloing him. He daren’t look away – that scamp would switch those bones on him in an eye-wink if he did. He held the half-breed with his eyes, slowly, deliberately drew his pistol. The muzzle wagged back and forth between the clenched fists like a water-witch’s wand, then pointed. Water here, it said.
Two could play this kind of game. It produced a different kind of stillness. He tapped the hand with the barrel and stuck up three fingers. “Three,” he said.
She was quiet as a prayer. All but for Ed Grace ramping at the fort for him to come along now. Did he hear? But the Englishman’s boy had a piece of business to finish first. He was going to see that smart half-breed scamp chew feathers. The kid’s eyes were melting on him; they were going to puddle soon.
“Open,” he said. He opened and closed his own hand to show what he meant.
The half-breed shook his head like he had a bee in the ear. The rest of the brats were huddling back.
“Open.”
No sharp tooth showing now, was there? He weren’t no fool. They’d learn it now, by glory. Learn it if he’d have to break that young one’s fingers open.
“Open your goddamn hand!” He saw his own hand when he shouted, the cords on the back of it standing up rigid like bones in a hen’s foot, the thumb hooked white on the hammer of the Colt. He caught the boy’s wrist, wrenched it viciously. The face twisted, he saw the broken tooth gleam from under a curling lip. Reluctantly, the hand fell open.
It was empty.
When the Englishman’s boy let go the wrist and quickly straightened up, he went light-headed. Showed up for a fool.
They read his face, white, seething, violent as a blizzard.
His head swivelled like a turtle’s in its shell, a painful, awkward seeking. Where was the voice? The horizon swam, the post buildings wobbled, the blood surging in his head submerged the voice in foam like a boulder in a rushing river. Then he located the source, Ed Grace, calling, beckoning him up by the fort.
His thumb pressed down hard; the hammer locked and all the heads around the blanket jerked and then locked too, bug-eyed, open-mouthed.
The Colt slowly drifted up as if it were rising on its own, then locked steady too. Everything seemed to freeze, even the buzzing of the flies. He jerked the trigger. The baby started on her sister’s lap, wailed.
Ed Grace waved back. All right, he understood. He’d been heard.
The Englishman’s boy lowered the Colt which had put a bullet in the belly of the sky, fishing in his pocket as he addressed the bone-boy’s face, tilted at him like a plate on a plate rack. Eating crow wasn’t his dish, never had been. “You beat me cold – twice,” he said. “I don’t know how you done it, but you done it.” He’d found what he was
