“Get your gear packed an’ then come on up topside,” Slim said. “It’s about time you lazy seagoin’ bastards started workin’ as cowboys again, an’ at least halfway earnin’ your keep.”
I went back on up with Slim, thinking of the men getting ready below. Thinking of the whole actually pretty fair outfit. What Old Keats had said about being right-side up, or maybe dead or alive and all, was still kind of on my mind.
The boss, Shad Northshield, always came to my mind first and most.
Maybe that was because after my parents died in the big blizzard of ’65, he’d kind of naturally become like an older brother to me.
I was just four that hard wintertime in ’65, and my Ma and Pa had frozen to death in the little cabin they’d built, both of them hugging each other in bed one night to fight off the awful, persistent cold. The reason I’d lived is that they were hugging each other with me in between them, to give me the last little bit of warmth they had in their lives.
Shad had found us, and pried their arms apart from around me.
He’d put his head on my chest. And Old Keats, who was with him, described it one time to me later by telling me my heart “sounded like the hopeless, tiny wingbeats of an exhausted baby sparrow inside me trying to fly.”
Shad sent Old Keats on to check the blizzard-stranded cows they’d been looking for. Then he ripped up some of the inner planks from the floor of the cabin. That was the only wood in miles that wasn’t too frozen to burn. He built a fire, and not getting too close, he wrapped me in a blanket and hand-rubbed me for maybe twenty-four hours.
Then, finally, when my heart and breathing were stronger, he left me in the blanket by the fire and went out to dig graves for my Ma and Pa with a pick in the ice-hard ground.
Shad buried them there, and built fires over the newly loose ground to thaw it down. That way, with the earth melted, it would freeze over solid again, and wild animals couldn’t get to them.
Old Keats came back late the next day to find him standing, kind of bent over, near the dying fires on the graves.
“The boy?” he said.
Shad looked up at him. “He’ll be okay.” And then, “The cows?”
“Froze.”
Shad nodded slowly. “Everything out here’d be dead if they hadn’t kept that kid between ’em.”
I guess it was then that Old Keats noticed Shad was standing there over those graves in that bitter, gray, freezing late afternoon in his shirt sleeves.
Along with the blanket he’d wrapped me up in, he’d also put his coat on me.
When I came around, they’d brought me back to the nearest line shack on Joe Diamond’s ranch, and Shad was forcing lukewarm water between my teeth with a beat-up tin spoon. Old Keats was standing quietly just off to one side near him.
I gagged a little on the water, and kind of looked around, and then first thing asked where my Ma and Pa was.
The answer was clear, but gently so, on Shad’s face. And, somehow, he did a strange thing. To the best of my memory, he never really quite said they were dead, but instead he talked onward, toward the future. And because of that gentle way he had, they’ve never ever been truly dead in my mind, even to this day.
He told me to try a little more water because it was good for me. And then he said that, me being a young man already, he’d get me a job milking cows and chopping firewood and such at the main ranch house. And since he’d told me, in just that certain way that he did, that I was now a “young man,” I could only cry a little bit about my folks. But they were good tears.
And then I worked a lot and grew up some, and that was the way it was.
Right now Shad was pushing close to forty, or maybe he was even over the hill there. In any case Slim and Old Keats were the only ones among the fifteen of us who were older than him. Shad had shoulders that were about an ax handle wide and he stood over six foot high, with no gut at all and a minimum of butt, which is about as good a way for a man to be built as any. As far as his face was concerned, he had more than his share of nicks and scars from run-ins with men, beasts and violent acts of God. But you had to look close to see those marks because a lot of rain and wind and snow and sun had covered them over into one tough, not too ugly looking, but damn well used face. He had light-blue eyes that could nail you like twin iron spikes if he was mad about something, which was fairly common. Shad never grew a beard, like a lot of the older fellas used to do, but favored the sloping longhorn mustache, which drooped slightly down around the edges of his mouth toward his rocklike jaw.
But the main thing about Shad was a rare kind of a strong inner quality that stuck out like a sore thumb. He was a natural-born man and also a natural-born boss. I guarantee that if Shad had been a new private in Napoleon’s army, and Napoleon was figuring out his next attack and happened to see Shad standing there, he’d have just naturally had to go over to Shad and say, “What do you think?” And I double guarantee that whatever Shad told him would have been smart enough to get him put on Napoleon’s general staff. And if that staff didn’t happen to go along with him, he’d have had those poor bastards shaking in their boots in no time. He was purely tougher than a spike. And yet, hard as he was, Shad never asked anything from any man that he wasn’t willing to give twice back.
Funny thing too that was part of Shad’s quality. He was as good or better than any of the rest of us at the things we were best at. Like Old Keats, hands down, was the wisest and best-read man in the outfit. For example, with an eye toward coming here, he’d even managed to teach himself a little of the language from a pocket-size book on Russian he carried. But Shad generally had a wisdom that matched Old Keats’s. Chakko, an Indian gone white, was the best tracker and runner and reader of signs, but Shad was just as good. Among men raised on horses, Natcho was probably the best rider, but Shad could move any horse any direction on a dime and give you change. I was the only one who’d finished McGuffey’s Reader, but Shad could read and write and add and subtract as well as me. Maybe even better, because he had one hell of a head for learning. And Big Yawn, born somewhere in Poland, was far and away the strongest of us. But the one time he and Shad went to Indian rassling it lasted for nearly twenty sweating, muscle-crushing minutes, and finally turned out to be a Mexican standoff.
If there was one bad thing about Shad, it was that once he got his head set on something, that tended to be it. You might say he was a little stubborn. Or, as Old Keats once said, “If Shad made up his mind and him and a giant longhorn bull ran head-on to each other, the bull’d get knocked ass over teakettle.”
I know I’m going on a long time about Shad. But there’s a joyful, and sad, and good reason. And you’ll understand why. In time.
Right now, Slim and I got to the main deck, where the Great Eastern Queen was pitching around worse than before in the tossing, white-capped seas. Vladivostok was getting closer and by now you could make out a couple of long wooden wharfs set up on pilings that jutted out into the Gulf of Saint Peter with big, dark waves crashing angrily against them. Beyond the wharfs, on the land, clusters of small buildings could be seen, lights glinting dimly through their windows. At the end of the closer wharf, a man was waving some message with a couple of lamps, and up near the bow of the Queen a signalman with lamps was answering him back.
“C’mere!” Old Keats yelled from the railing, and when we got to him he pointed at a small boat approaching the side of the ship through the waves, four men pulling strongly on the oars and a fifth, who seemed to be in charge, holding the tiller.