fetch me.”
“Like your ass weren’t half-froze to the saddle as it was, Titus Bass,” Gamble said, reaching up to take the bottle from Tullock as the trader squatted between them, shoulder to shoulder. He sniffed, smiled, and tilted his head back as he drank long and slow with eyes closed. Levi licked his lips when he passed the bottle on past the trader to Bass.
“You’ll like it,” Tullock declared.
“That there’s good company rum, Sam’l,” Gamble observed. “Not the sort I’m used to drinking up at Union.”
“It ain’t for the trade,” Tullock explained. “This here what’s made for the factors.”
“That’s some fine rum, mighty fine,” Scratch said as he wiped the back of his hand across his lips and mustache. “Don’t much care where it come from, Sam’l—long as it warms up that cold man inside me.”
“If that stuff don’t warm you up, then the nigger inside you is awready dead!” Tullock swore.
After he took a second slow swallow, Bass handed the bottle to Tullock, licked the droplets on the ends of his mustache, and asked, “What brings you down here this season, Levi?”
Gamble tore his eyes away and glanced at Tullock. The trader nodded, placed the clay bottle on the floor between Levi and Titus, then stood and moved off toward some crates in the corner as if he were going to busy himself elsewhere.
When Gamble finally looked back at Bass, Scratch already had a cold rock of something resting at the bottom of his belly.
“I been down here going on two weeks already, Titus.”
Scratch was afraid it had nothing to do with good news when he asked, “Little late in the season for you to be bringing trade goods upriver from Fort Union, ain’t it?”
Tullock still had his back turned when he said, “I ain’t gonna get no trade goods this year.”
For a long moment he studied Gamble’s face. “S’pose you tell me what you’re doing down here, Levi. You didn’t go and kill nobody, did you? Didn’t go and get yourself in trouble with your booshways?”
Gamble stared at his knees, then answered. “It don’t have nothing to do with any of that.”
Suddenly Tullock wheeled and blurted, “They got smallpox on the river! Smallpox.” And as suddenly he turned on his heel and disappeared into the darkness of a small adjoining room.
Stunned silent, Titus watched the white-faced trader go, then looked at Gamble. “Sm-smallpox?”
Levi nodded. “Come upriver on the summer boat, St. Peter’s.”
Bass quickly glanced at Waits, at the boy suckling at his mother’s breast. Staring in turn at those other women and children as the fear climbed out of the pit of him. “Y-you ain’t … ain’t got no smallpox in you—”
“No,” Levi interrupted, laying a hand on Bass’s forearm a moment. “But I did have me a terrible fight with it.”
“Fight?”
With a struggle Gamble rose, moved off a couple of steps, and brought back an oil lamp where a smoky wick burned in rendered bear grease. Bringing the flickering light near his face, Levi knelt in front of Scratch. “You see what it done to me?”
Gamble’s face, the shape of that nose and those eyes, they remained unchanged. But the cheeks and the forehead were deeply scarred, pitted with the ravages of the scourge.
“I ain’t never knowed no one had the pox,” Bass admitted quietly, awed by his fear.
“Pray God you never do, Titus,” he said, putting the lamp aside and settling back against the wall, sweeping up the clay bottle to throw down another drink.
Scratch stared through the dim, flickering light provided by the lamps and that fireplace, gazing at the Indian women, at the children. “Your wife, your young’uns—they get it just like you?”
“Neither of them my wife,” Gamble admitted sullenly. “They be Tullock’s woman and her relations. They was awready here ahead of me when I come in. Don’t you worry: they ain’t got no smallpox. Be down with it awready, but they ain’t—”
“So wh-where’s your family, Levi—”
“Gone. All gone.”
“The pox?”
Gamble nodded and finally looked at Bass, handing Titus the clay bottle. “Here, drink up with me, ’cause it don’t help no man to drink alone.”
Wondering what he could say, suddenly made to think of other men like Asa McAfferty and Joe Meek, men who had had their women killed, had their hearts ripped right out of their chests … Scratch took the bottle from him. “No man’s ever gonna have to drink alone when his heart’s been broke.”
Levi stared at the floor. “Titus, there’s a hole inside me what I don’t think I can fill with all the rum in the world.”
“How … how’d the pox come up here?”
“They said one of the men on the boat. He come down with it, and they didn’t turn back because they had just so much time to bring trade goods upriver, had furs to take down to St. Louis. Brung the pox to Fort Clark. The boat brung it on up to Fort Union.”
“Your woman … how many others?”
“More’n anyone can count,” Levi whispered like a death knell. “Before fall come, it destroyed the Mandan down at Fort Clark, the Arikaree too. Ain’t any of ’em left we heard of.”
“The Ree too?” Bass thought on the people of that rattle shaker Asa McAfferty had killed many a winter ago.
“When the boat reached Fort Union, they quickly unloaded the goods bound upriver for Fort McKenzie, then loaded ’em on the keel and pushed on up the Missouri.”
Bass shuddered. “You telling me they took the pox into Blackfoot country?”
Gamble nodded. “Word coming downriver says Culbertson tried to warn them Blackfeets away from Fort McKenzie—but the niggers was suspicious the company was stealing powder and lead from ’em. Powder and lead they needed to make war.”
“War on the Crow and Flathead. War on the white men,” Bass said quietly. He looked into the thin man’s sallow, gray face—recognized the torment there. “Hard to believe. Your wife … and all your young’uns.”
Gamble only nodded silently.
“How’s a man … make sense of that, Levi? Watching your family get took by the pox? Get took by something you can’t fight?”
“The day after the boat come, a few of us went out to tell the villages in the area not to come in, warning ’em something terrible would happen to ’em if they did. But a few days after we told ’em not to come in to trade, some young bucks rode on in to steal some horses. Halsey—the new booshway up there—he put up a reward for those horses. One of the men who was ’bout to come down sick went out to catch them horse thieves.”
Titus watched Tullock trudge back into the light, another clay bottle clutched in one hand as the trader grumbled, “’Stead of the pox staying there at the fort, that ignorant bastard give it to the horse thieves—and them young bucks took it back to their village.”
Bass wagged his head. “But that wasn’t how your woman, your children, got took.”
“First one to come down with it was Halsey hisself,” Levi declared, courage in his voice. “One of the other booshways claimed he knowed how they could ’noculate everyone else from Halsey’s sores. So we done that, all of us—hunters, interpreters, coopers—all of us … and our families too. A simple thing: make a small cut in our skin and rub a little of Halsey’s pus in that bloody cut. They told us it was gonna keep us all alive.”
What did you say to a man who had watched his wife and children come down with the raging fever, the boils that erupted into pustules, unable to save even himself from the disease—forced to watch as all those he loved were ripped from him, while he somehow survived.
Titus asked, “How … how come you … you—”
“Lived?” Levi finished the question. Then shook his head. “Ain’t none of us can answer that. Maybeso the white man got a stronger constitution, Titus. Most of the whites come down with it lived. And near ever’ one of the Injuns what got the pox … they’re gone.”
Settling to the floor nearby, a grim-lipped Tullock set that second clay bottle between the three of them.
“So now the company’s give the pox to the Blackfoot,” Scratch repeated the ominous news as if to make
