Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

“There’s a blow of black despair for you. I sink back down into the mud, can’t pick myself out of that wallow. I’m whipped.

“The sun keeps climbing, the mud dries stiff on my face, my hands, my hair, my clothes. And I just sit, can’t rouse myself. Until I hear horses. Good Lord, maybe I been saved. I look up from studying the mud caked on my trouser legs and what do I see? Three Indian bucks making towards me on their ponies.

“I shake myself up then, by the Jesus, shake myself up and go for my pistol. But there ain’t no pistol to hand. All that capering the night before jogged it loose and it’d gone missing somewheres. I cast about every which way but all I see is puddles with sunshine slanting off them, hail-beat grass, and mud-holes. No Colt. The only weapon stands between me and those Indians is a knife.

“They’re on me now. Rein their ponies up in my face and investigate me Indian-fashion – poker-faced and solemn. I must’ve been a study. Raggedy-ass white man in clothes a beggar of a fort Indian wouldn’t wore. Hair all matted and twisted up in mud like a mop, rest of me crusted over with a acre’s worth of God’s good earth.

“They was right handsome boys, all done up for a party, paint and feathers. The one I figured for the leader of this expedition was straight as a gun barrel, a fall of that blue-black Indian hair hanging down to the small of his back, half his face painted yellow and the other half red, necklace of brass bells hung round his neck that went tinkle-tinkle every time his horse pawed the ground.

“He points to me, says something to his friends in Indian gab. The way they laugh ain’t encouraging. He shoulders his pony into me and taps my hair with his quirt. In a big, loud voice he puts what I take to be a question. I’m guessing something along the lines of, What you doing spoiling my air and my scenery?

“By the Christ, thinks I, by the Christ. These lads are Blackfoot. I’d heard plenty of how they done woodhawks and hunters along the Missouri. They didn’t leave no pretty corpses. Lot of dead men with their own dicks stuffed in their mouths.

“Red and Yellow Face gives me another flick with his quirt and makes some remark to his boys that sets them laughing fit to bust a gut. I suspicion what’s funny is me plastered in hog muck. Man’ll do most anything to save his precious skin and I did. Down I goes on hands and knees, sticks my rump in the air, lets loose a squeal to wake snakes, and starts rooting like a pig in his pen. Lord, the look on those Indians’ faces. They’d never seen the like. But when the surprise slid off them they howled with laughter. That was a favourable sign. Nobody likely to murder you when they’re laughing at you.

“Old Red and Yellow Face was pointing at me and saying the same word over and over. The other two kept nodding their heads yes, yes, every time he said it. I speculate Old Red and Yellow Face was a man of the world, been to the white man’s forts, seen his pigs. Every time he said the word, I nodded and grinned and grunted all the louder. I even pitched myself in a good-sized mud-hole and rolled for him, wriggled on my back, all four trotters up in the air. Your Indian’s got a natural contempt for the pig, but this was right up their alley, watching a white man do pork proud.

“What they didn’t know I was up to, rooting through the slop on my hands and knees, wiggling my hams, was I was looking for that revolver of mine. Playing pig got my snout close to the ground. And when I found that Colt, I aimed to knock Red and Yellow Face and his brethren off their ponies like they was turkeys setting on a rail fence.

“So I kept oinking, and praying, Please God let me lay hands on that gun. Once or twice I thought the boys might be losing interest so I sat up on my haunches like a fat old boar and made windy, wet farts with my lips, or flopped my hands up alongside my head like they was pig ears. When they was roaring with joy I’d get back on the hustle again, covering ground looking for the Colt, the Indians heeling their horses behind me, not wanting to miss nothing.

“My spell of sickness had weakened me considerable though. Wasn’t long before I was feeling mighty dogged out, but I says to myself, Keep moving, you got to keep moving until you get that gun. Over and over I said it. And that’s what I done, went on sinking my wrists in gumbo, the mud sucking the strength out of me, leaving my arms so wearisome heavy it was all I could do to pull them free. Keep moving, I said, you got no hope but that gun.

“Everything squeezing in, your eyes begging for a flash of shiny metal, and this noise in your head like a saw whining through wood. And that’s the sound of your own breath, but you got to keep moving, keep moving. Your eyes start to haze, like blood dripping into water, one drop at a time, each drop spreading, and the water going misty, then cloudy, then bright, until there ain’t nothing but bright blood, and then you get a new notion – that that noise is the sound of a saw chewing through your heart, the blood spurting deep down in you with every stroke, slowly inching up in you until you drown in it, drown in your own heart’s blood.

“And I did. I drowned. Keeled over. Sank. I had strength but for one thing, fumble for that knife in my boot top. Pick away, pick away went my fingers but they wouldn’t close on it. Then I knew it was all over. Just lay there panting, hog waiting to be butchered. Lay with my face in the mud and waited for them to come, do what they done to those woodhawks on the Missouri, cut me down to size one piece at a time.

“It was unholy still. A still kin to the still of an empty house, but bigger and stranger. Empty world, it said. I waited. Nothing come. I rolled over, staggered to my feet. I’d have swore there weren’t another soul in a hundred miles. Indians was gone, like smoke in a wind.

“Couple of hours I walked in circles looking for my pistol. Where there’s three Indians could be more. Found my hat. Found a dead prairie chicken laying where the hail had killed it. Sight of that, hunger came over me so fierce I pulled the feathers off it, ate it raw where I stood. It’d been one long stretch since I’d took food.

“Found my hat, found the chicken, but never found the Colt. When candle-lighting come, I turned south and tramped for the border. Walked like a dead man. Walked all night. Sun rose and I found the third thing, my horse stepping south too.”

There is a long pause. I hear him suck at the reefer but no light shows; it has gone out in his fingers. I lift my pencil from the paper but he starts to talk again, his voice no longer deliberate and hard, but mournful and echoing like it had begun.

“Them old-timey, genuine Indians used to go off solitary in the wilderness so’s to find their creature spirit,” he says. “That’s where they learned it, in the wilderness.”

I ask what he means by creature spirit.

“Creature spirit,” he reiterates. “Spirit they shared with some creature – grizzly spirit, elk spirit, coyote spirit, crow spirit. Hardship and the country taught them it.” There is another pause. “What you make of mine?”

“Your what?”

“You ain’t been listening, have you?” he says.

The next morning I type up a transcription of the interviews. In the end, I send only the last one because it has about it the ring of naked honesty that Chance is after. I believe it marks progress, shows how McAdoo, under my prompting, is slowly moving nearer and nearer to what we are seeking – the truth.

That night as I am getting ready for bed a knock comes at my door. There is a note from Chance by messenger. The note reads:

Dear Harry,