The Millions
SO THE MEN were comparatively fit when Bull crawled back into the camp — a ghost, a skeletal thing, a flailed creature with great pools of eyes and a gaping mouth. His beard had grown all over his face and his chest had sunk. His knees and elbows were grotesquely swollen, his muscles shriveled onto the bone. He had lost his boots and socks and his feet had frozen black. Sick with pity, Joseph put his arms around the wasted man and lowered him onto a buffalo skin. He held Bull like a baby and let a bit of the soup trickle down his throat. As soon as the soup hit Bull’s stomach, he straightened his legs out, kicked twice, and perished. Bull died looking up into the trees over them, just budding. Countless golden tassels winked in the sun, and the millions reflected in his baffled gaze.
Lafayette Peace
THE BUDS SOON opened and the trees were wearing a denser film of green one week later, when B. J. Bolt arrived on foot, looking not much better than had Bull. Over a month before, B. J. Bolt had started with four men, three pack ponies, plus their own mounts, only to run into the melt. From then on, there was nothing but half-frozen mush and icy slough. After an argument over whether to continue, the other men deserted B. J. and left him just one horse, who ran right off. B. J. had eaten what he could of the food but then — remarkably, given that he could have made it back to St. Cloud — he strapped the rest of the food onto himself and headed west. There were times he waded chest-deep through ice water, holding the food over his head. Other times he cracked through fragile ice. Somehow, he continued. But he had to eat in order to walk. So by the time he arrived at the camp and unbuckled his pack, there was nothing left but a dozen hard biscuits. The men divided them and that night, as he slowly let each crumb dissolve on his tongue, Joseph thought of the otter and of his saved book, which he knew by heart. One phrase whirled in his head: Wait for death with a cheerful mind.
If only there was something afterward. Bull hadn’t seemed to see anything in the branches and Marcus Aurelius had left that question up in the air.
“I envy your faith,” Joseph said to Henri. The Buckendorfs slept in a heap. The night was clear and the flames of the outdoor fire snapped high. The two guides took turns playing soft music, and Joseph thought that if only they were not near death this would be a very pleasant night.
“Me,” said Henri, putting down the fiddle and slowly stirring the fire with a stick, “I haven’t much faith. The saints love my brother here.”
Lafayette smiled, polishing his gun, and leaned over to breathe on the barrel. He had grown extremely beautiful and frail. Yet of them all he had remained most like himself in wit and action. His music had gained in depth. He alone seemed capable of effort.
“Do you believe we will die?” Joseph asked Lafayette, who continued to clean the gun with an absorption much like prayer. “Will you promise to bury me if I do?”
Lafayette suddenly leaned over, took the crucifix from around his neck, and with a tender gesture put it onto Joseph. The fire leapt in his extraordinary, sharp-bladed face. Three times he tapped Joseph on the chest and Joseph felt his heart leap, then Lafayette turned and walked off into the woods.
“Where is he going?” said Joseph, touching the cross at his throat. “What is he going to do?”
“We will have meat tomorrow,” said Henri. That was all.
The Buckendorfs’ eyes glowed with hunger like mystic stones and their yellow fangs had grown. There had been talk of eating Bull, and the guides had promised to kill anyone who tried. They were the ones who buried poor Bull and set a great pile of stones over his grave. They knelt with their rosaries and prayed to the Virgin Mary to rest his soul. Joseph had tried to help them, but had fallen down repeatedly. He was really asking Lafayette and Henri to do the same for him as for Bull. He was very tired now. Sitting beside Henri, he took the locket that held Dorea’s picture from his inner pocket and he opened it to show the guide. Before this, he’d always looked at her picture when he was alone, ashamed, perhaps, of the fact that she was plain and older. Ashamed, perhaps, that someone might think she was his mother.
Henri placed the fiddle with great care into its velvet nest, and stroked it before he shut the lid. Then he took the locket from Joseph’s hands, and looked into the face of Dorea for a very long time. At last he gave her back to Joseph.
“Such a pretty woman,” he said. “Très jolie. You will be happy. She will give you many children and keep you warm at night.”
This was the only untruth that Joseph heard Henri Peace to utter, for after that night in which Lafayette killed a crazed old female moose, and after the next week in which another outfit arrived with flour and they all stuffed themselves sick on pancakes and syrup then rolled in agony out in the woods, and after Joseph made his way back to St. Anthony more broke than he’d started out and with a deed for two hundred acres of worthless land in his pocket, he showed up at Dorea’s doorstep only to be met by a man who introduced himself as her new husband, to whom he wordlessly gave the locket.
The Saint
FOR A LONG time after the expedition, Joseph was sick, in a general way, and he gazed long at Lafayette’s crucifix nailed onto his wall. He wondered where English Bill, his dog, the Buckendorfs, and Lafayette and Henri Peace were now. Except for B. J. Bolt, who looked in on him sometimes, the only one whose whereabouts he was sure of was Bull. So after he recovered, Joseph went to visit the doctor’s housekeeper with the dark brown hair, sweet, coffee-milk skin, and freckled nose. She sat with him in the receiving parlor where the doctor’s patients waited. From behind the shut door they could hear the clack of instruments and some muffled yelps. Joseph told the doctor’s housekeeper all about Bull and how he had spoken of her looking at the horizon and how he had set off to walk across the dead swamp of the late winter prairie to be with her. She gazed at him with clear brown eyes and nodded when he had finished telling her about the turtle soup and how Bull had died looking up into the budding branches, with her name on his lips. The last part about the name was, he hoped, a pardonable embroidery. She did look sad, and a bit surprised. At last, she spoke.
“I was going to marry him, it’s a fact. I loved him, I think, but the truth is I cannot recall what he looked like. Our affection came on sudden and he was gone so fast. He hadn’t a picture of himself. But I do think I miss him and I am very sorry that he is dead.”
She was so lucid in her puzzlement and her speech was so calm that Joseph nearly asked her to marry him right then and there. He held his tongue out of respect for Bull, and went back to the room B. J. Bolt had insisted he be given out behind Poolcaugh’s establishment. There, he pondered, as he had many times, the mystery of his survival and the meaning of the otter. He took down the crucifix and touched it to his forehead. Alexander and Pompeium and Caius Caesar, after so completely destroying whole cities, and in battle cutting to pieces many ten thousands of cavalry and infantry, themselves too at last departed from life. Heraclitus, after so many speculations on the conflagration of the universe, was filled with water internally and died smeared all over with mud. And lice destroyed Democritas; and other lice killed Socrates. What means all this? Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out!