The Englishman’s Boy

Then the Englishman sailed into sight, parting bedlam like Moses the Red Sea, sauntering coolly up the gangplank in the latest word in bicycling suits: tweed coat, braided trousers, Hessian boots, bowler hat, glories which momentarily stilled the multitude and cast the boys on the upper deck utterly into the shade, one of whom grimly remarked, “The things you see when you ain’t got a gun.” Behind the Englishman, stooped under a load of gun cases, Gladstones, and pigskin valises, plodded a young tough in broken-down boots, his face half-hidden by a wide-awake hat gone green with age.

Once these two were safely aboard, the crew smartly shipped the gangplank and to tumultuous cheering and a continuous shrieking of the boat whistle the Yankton began to forge its way upstream, the entire boat vibrating with the effort of its engines, pulsing and shuddering like a living thing as it beat against the current. Slowly, Sioux City shrank from sight and the brown boredom of the Missouri spread itself before crew and passengers, a monotony relieved only by the menace of snags and sandbars, by rapid shifts of weather and sky. The boys on the hurricane deck buttoned their coats as the breeze freshened and hurried down to the lounge to uncork a jug of bourbon and inaugurate a month-long game of poker.

Despite making an unfortunate first impression, the Englishman, whose name was John Trevelyan Dawe, proved to be popular with passengers and crew. He lost money at poker with equanimity, stood drinks with aplomb, made gallant and edifying conversation with the handful of ladies who qualified as respectable. When inquiries were made as to what he was doing in this part of the world, Mr. Dawe declared he was a sportsman, come to trophy- hunt. He talked a good deal, but interestingly, so his volubility was forgiven.

Some of the gents, particularly the Southerners, didn’t approve of his referring to the white boy as his manservant. In their opinion, if he wanted a servant he ought to have hired himself a nigger. Their displeasure, however, was somewhat alleviated when the Englishman complained that the boy refused to shave him, brush his clothes, or black his boots. The gentlemen told him this wasn’t England. In America, niggers came in only one colour – black. The Englishman said that if this was democracy, it was outrageous.

The boy, however, did condescend to keep his employer’s hunting gear in good order. Most afternoons he could be found sitting outside their cabin surrounded by the Englishman’s armoury, sharpening knives and hatchets, cleaning and oiling the Colt pistol, the Winchester, the Henry, the Sharps breechloading buffalo gun, the Westly Richards tiger gun. The frock coats were mightily intrigued by this latter example of British gunsmithing. As the boy worked, the gun-fanciers clustered around him and loudly debated the merits and demerits of the two-foot-long.65 -calibre barrel, of the one-ounce ball it fired, of the ingenious spring which regulated the trigger pull.

One week out from Sioux City, Dawe propped this cannon on the railing of the second deck, drew a bead on a lone bull buffalo a hundred yards distant on a cutbank overhanging the Missouri and fired a shot that spun the Englishman on the deck boards like a dust devil. The smoke cleared. The bull stood on the promontory, motionless as a statue on a pediment. Limey marksmanship and Limey guns were hooted. Then, suddenly, in mid-hoot, the buffalo crumpled up like brown butcher paper balled in an invisible hand, pitched headlong over the cutbank, ploughed down the slope in a fanfare of uprooted willow and bounding stones, sliding to rest in the shallows of the river, a hole over its heart big enough to put your fist in. As one of the gents said later, “You shoot a tiger with that, the only way you going to get you a tiger rug is hold a quilting bee and stitch the bitty pieces together again.” With one shot the Englishman vaulted from curiosity to celebrity. Someone even reversed policy and bought him a drink that night.

The Yankton proceeded upriver, slow and unstately. Often she ran aground and had to “grasshopper” herself off sandbars with short bursts of power to the stern wheel and winches attached to long spars planted in the muck on either side of the bows. There were other delays. High winds forced her to lay up. The boiler burned through and had to be repaired. A deck hand fell overboard and drowned; his corpse had to be retrieved and buried. Ten days out from Sioux City, a herd of buffalo turned the channel black and bellowing and solid, so solid a man could have walked from bank to bank, using their backs as stepping stones. Passengers broke out guns and whisky and soon the Yankton was cloaked in shifting clouds of blue gun- smoke, lit with orange muzzle-flashes like a painting of the battle of Trafalgar. The gents on the hurricane deck poured fire down into the river, levering their Winchesters like pump handles, ejected casings making brass rainbows as they arced into the air. Some of the great beasts passed so close to the boat that men in steerage hung over the rails, touching the muzzles of their rifles to their humps as they fired. Dozens of the dead spun in the grip of the current, streaming tributary blood, the wounded roaring as they were sucked downstream. Hunters ran frenziedly from starboard to port, struggling for one last shot, whooping and swearing and jostling for vantage, throwing spent rifles to the deck and drawing revolvers which they emptied into the dark, struggling mass. And all the while, a prospector pranced about the deck, sawing “Dixie” on a fiddle, as the bodies swept by, like sandbars torn loose from their moorings.

The further the boat journeyed up the river and the closer it drew to its ultimate destination, the more vexing delays became for those on board. Frequent halts were made to take on fuel, either at the yards of “woodhawks” or, between stations, to land parties to cut wood. When men were landed, the captain saw to it that they were accompanied by an armed guard for fear of hostiles, a guard for which the Englishman always volunteered himself and his manservant. Once ashore, the Indian-fighting gents who had blown hard on the hurricane deck about the scalps they had lifted turned uneasy, bickering about whose turn it was to deploy himself as a lonesome lookout on the fringes of the cottonwood groves. Dawe’s sweet-tempered and smooth-as-butter manner sawed on their nerves, seemed a reproach to the ants scurrying in their pants. They put it down to his ignorance of the kind of devious, heartless, sneaking, despicable, dirty foes Indians were. It grated on them the way he talked, booming his way through the willows with that plummy, toney voice, like he was bugling for Peigans, trumpeting them in for the kill. He made everyone edgy, everyone, that is, except the skinny kid beside him who had no other handle than “the Englishman’s boy.” No one had troubled to ask this boy his name, and if they had, an answer was no certainty. The Englishman might have known it, but nobody ever heard him use it. Dawe just called him “boy.”

Dawe’s boy had the gaunt, cadaverous look of the rural poor, of the runt who has sucked the hind tit, who has been whupped with horse-halters and stove-wood, anything hard and hurting that came to hand. His anthracite eyes did his talking for him. They said: Expect no quarter. Give none. He owned a face white and cold as a well- digger’s ass. He didn’t string more than five words together at a time and no one could place his accent. He was seventeen but looked fifteen, stunted by a diet of bread and lard and strong tea. Everyone took him for a runaway from some hard-scrabble, heartbreak farm. Out West, his kind were thick as ticks on a dog.

He made quite a sight armed with the Englishman’s fine guns, a lethal scarecrow with pearl-handled Colt revolver tucked into the pocket of a patched jacket, chased Winchester cradled in his arms, a bandolier of cartridges draped over his shoulder. He walked with a hunter’s tread in his rotten boots, heel-toe, heel-toe, alone through the drifted leaves, the budding trees, deeper into the thickets, the voices behind him starting to shimmer and blend with the ringing of the axes, the rasp of the saws. When he found a suitable tree, he climbed, Winchester tied around his neck with a leather thong, light and nimble and easy, stepping higher and higher up the branch-rungs, up to his roost in the last bough stout enough to support him. There he clung, swaying in the wind, scanning the dun plains heaving themselves off into the distance, watching for Assiniboine, Sioux, Peigan. There he clung, smiling. He had heard one of the fancy men ask the Englishman why he had brought the kid ashore. Could he shoot? Because unless the Englishman knew he could shoot, there was no point bringing him. “I don’t know if he can shoot,” Dawe had said. “But I do know he’ll stand and fight.”

The Englishman’s boy wasn’t a smiler. Even with the moon standing brave and blue between the funnels of the Yankton, the hard prairie stars glittering ice-chips, the boat rocking in the ebb and lull of the water, he did not treat himself to a smile, especially not when dancing. The quality liked niggers and white trash like him to grin when entertaining. “Fly them heels, boy!” they shouted. He flew them. But he handed around no smiles. From the waist up he was rigor mortis, plank-stiff, arms nailed to his sides, poker-faced. But below, the greasy pant legs flapped and bucked, the skinny legs jerked and twitched, the boots drummed the deck boards louder and louder. “Buck and wing!” the women cried, and the coins, white as frost, began to skip and bounce about the blurry boots. Around and around he spun, showing himself to the whole encroaching circle like a damn hurdy- gurdy girl, cutting licks and capers on the deck, faster and faster, outracing the wheeze of the mouth organ, the scrape of the fiddle, outracing the faces looming dizzily at him against a background of dark water, dark sky, faces glaring white-hot in the light of kerosene lamps.

Fill your eyes, you sons of bitches. Throw your money. This poor whoreson’s a-dancing on your grave. Believe it.

Hung there suspended between a desert sky and a desert earth, ears humming with wind, alert and predatory