that’s why she went sweet on him. That and the candies and buttons. She was such a poor and winsome gal he couldn’t but help feel sorry for her. Sometimes when he’d got a tip, he’d buy her a pennyworth of hard candy. He knew she had a sugar mouth. Beaky Sal was always slapping her silly for putting her fingers in the sugar bowl.
Selena weren’t like him. Every bit of hardness he’d ever been handed, he’d put on the back shelf and stored. But hardness seemed to pass through her like light through a windowpane. She didn’t hold a particle of the anger he held. Not a particle. She stored sugar like he stored hate, let the sweetness out bit by bit. Her mouth tasted sweet. She didn’t favour you with a smile but seldom, but it was all the sweeter for it. Not one of them broad, false, whorey smiles, just a small and gentle and knowing one. She knew. By Christ, she knew.
He might yet be in that whorehouse if the Englishman Dawe hadn’t hired him out of it. He’d been setting on the stoop sharpening Beaky Sal’s butcher-knives when the Englishman pulled up in full daylight, arrayed in all his finery, bent on some fun with a sporting woman. He’d stopped at the step on his way in, picked up one of the knives, tested it on the ball of his thumb.
His daddy had said nobody could edge a knife like him. Once he’d whetted a blade you could split a curly hair with it, follow every kink and twist top to bottom. Dawe asked him if he could skin. Skin a grasshopper, he told the Englishman. The Englishman said he was going west to hunt the buffalo, bear and deer and goat, mountain lion and mountain sheep. He was going to carry them skins back with him to old England and for that he wanted a prime skinner and somebody to tote his guns. Gun-bearer he called it. They would have adventures, he said. The pay was ample.
So the Englishman’s boy signed on with him. He promised Selena he’d be back for her, back with his pockets full of English gold. She’d have a new dress to sew her buttons on. She’d eat white bread and honey, drink lemonade. He’d carry her out of this place.
He took her for a walk so’s he could shout it to her.
“When?” she said. “When?”
“Ever so soon as my pockets are full of English gold.”
The way things had fallen out, he knew he weren’t going to make it back.
John Duval came out of the back room, settling his suspenders. Hardwick hollered, “All goods satisfactory or money back!”
“I ain’t complaining,” said Duval, strutting to the whisky like a turkey cock.
“Well,” said Hardwick, “age before beauty. Now it’s the youngster’s turn. Nothing a youngster likes better than a pony ride.” They all laughed. “Look at him over there, stiff as a hoe-handle.” They all looked. The Englishman’s boy got to his feet. They followed him with their eyes to the back room, watched him push aside the blanket, go in.
A guttering tallow candle threw the only light. The naked girl lay sprawled on her belly on a pallet on the floor, her face buried in the blankets. She didn’t move, not even to lift her head to see who or what had walked into the room. The place was empty except for a stool kicked over on its side. The Englishman’s boy picked it up and sat down on it.
The blue-black hair spread on her shoulders. The soft hollow of the small of her back, the curve of her buttocks had their effect on him. He wished she would make some effort to cover herself, but she lay like a dead one. She weren’t though. He could see her rib cage rise and fall like the breast of a dove.
He sat for a short spell and then, so his voice wouldn’t carry to the men outside, said softly, “I ain’t intending you no hurt. I’ll just stop quiet here a short piece.” No sooner was it delivered than his explanation made him feel a fool, talking English to a squaw girl who couldn’t understand. She didn’t stir to his voice, lay like she was deaf as Selena.
He didn’t know where to put his eyes, that slim coppery red body roused him something shameful. Glancing around the room, he located her clothes bundled in a corner. He stole carefully over, picked them up. Once they were in his hands he knew it was a mistake, because he dare not go near her to give them to her. He sat back down on the stool and untwisted the dress in his lap.
Five pretty buttons he’d bought Selena for her dress. Shell buttons shining rainbowy. Twisted them up in a scrap of paper found laying in the road, so’s to give her the surprise of opening it.
He liked to give her presents. Her face lit like a lamp. She spread them buttons on the table, where the sun danced on them. Counted them into her hand. Closed that hand tight as a strongbox. Smiled and beckoned him.
He followed her up the stairs, three flights to a dusty attic. They stood face to face; he felt a purpose in it. She started to kiss him, lightly, a good many times. He didn’t hold her; he didn’t know how. Maybe she thought it his preference.
She shucked his pants. Smiling that smile, on her knees, just stroking him, passing her hand lingering and gentle over his buttocks, down the back of his legs, down his calves. Stroking him as he shivered, near swooned, as he tugged his shirt front down to hide from her what was happening to him.
“No, no,” she whispered, caught his hand, getting to her feet. She stood and pulled her dress over her head. There was little light but he could see her, pale and thin, stooping to lay her buttons on her dress. She moved back to him, kissed him, and he held her this time. Soon they was laying on the floor. The sun broke in a frosted window and she burst white in his eyes, white as snow except for the dark twigs of her nipples. He just kissed her; he didn’t know what else to do.
She guided him into her. He lay there lost in the pleasure of the slick heat, stunned. He didn’t ask for more, only to rest there, sucking her little teats. Something was passing between them in this melting, he felt as if his darkness was drawing light from her body.
She began to flex her hips under him and he hugged her. He could feel her trying to rise up into him, and he yearning to press down into her. He’d heard the rutting men with the whores, groaning as they pushed the need of their bodies into another body, forcing a black shameful exchange. But this was not the same. He was taking light.
A flush was creeping up her white shoulders, her neck, her cheeks. She arched suddenly and he held his breath, what he passed to her, passing in silence into the deaf girl’s silent world.
He looked up now and saw the Indian girl had turned her face to him, saw a world silent and blind. Nothing was reflected in the dark, unseeing, empty eyes. When he spoke, her face, like Selena’s, registered nothing. Nothing moved in that face except swollen lips, opening and closing, opening and closing.
The Englishman’s boy rose from the stool, flung aside the blanket and went into the other room. Hardwick said, “You done your business? We thought you might need help with your buttons. It was silent as a tomb in there.”
“I ain’t a hog,” he said.
“Who’s ready for seconds?” said Hardwick. “I always like two pieces of pie myself.”
“Scotty don’t want his – I’ll take it,” said Bell.
“I wouldn’t if I was you,” said the Englishman’s boy. Their faces lifted in surprise. It was the harshness of his voice and the wound stoking fever in his eyes, so that they glittered like isinglass in the tormented face. “Look at me.” His urgency stilled the rattling dice. “Don’t you recognize me?”
They all stared at him. Then Hardwick said quietly, “Who you supposed to be?”
“A curse.” He pointed to the corpse on the floor. “Ask Grace. Ask my dead Englishman. Farmer Hank… Lord knows his fate.” He pitched his voice to the corner of the room. “You know me, don’t you, Scotchman? The Scotchman knows there ain’t no bad luck blacker than the seed the Devil cursed.” He turned to Bell. “Go on in there, lie with her, stir Satan’s spunk, let it touch you. See what befalls.”
Bell cleared his throat, sat back down on the floor.
“That’s right,” he said. “You don’t want no portion of me. Who did you think I am? Nobody asked my name. I’ll tell you who I am. I’m what the black belly of the whale couldn’t abide. I’m your Jonah.” He looked around the room. “Any of you wants to test what I say, go on in there and mix your seed with mine, see if it’s a lie.”
Nobody moved. He walked across the room, his shadow breaking on the walls, pushed open the door. The rush of cool air did nothing for his fever, nothing for his lust. He was fumbling with his pants buttons, burning. I ain’t no different. I ain’t no different. I wanted her every bit as bad as any of them. Quick and savage he used himself, fell back against the wall of the post, ending it like all the rest had, with a cry.
The Red River carts stood stacked with goods, waiting to pull south to Fort Benton. The mounted wolfers were bound northwest, up the Whoop-Up Trail, to pursue their stolen horses. The Englishman’s boy had told Hardwick he
