I picked this up at a used book store in Jackson, Wyoming. I knew nothing about it, but it seemed apropos, given the subject matter and the location.
I really struggled with it. It is a story told in five parts, with its protagonist, Boone Caudill, leading the action only intermittently throughout. Indeed, not entirely sure when the novel was going, as this reader entered Part Two and found himself spending page after page in the head of Jourdonnais, the French captain of the keelboat Caudill finds himself heading up the Missouri on, I started wondering whose story this actually was and questioning the competency of the author telling it.
Whose Story Is This?
Jourdonnais is a minor character, but the point-of-view doesn’t just stay with him in Part Two. It jumps around from character to character, spending some time with Caudill, but more with someone who turns out to be another major character in the novel, Dick Summers. Dick is an older man, the kind of guide and hunter responsible for killing game and bringing it back to the keelboat, and we’re with Dick when the boat is attacked by Indians.
The Sioux’s fingers lay loose around the handle of his tomahawk. Summers thought his eyes were like a dog’s, like a pitiful goddam dog’s. He had to let him have it. The eyes followed Summers’ arm up to the knife, waiting for it to come down. The far-off part of Summers’ mind told him again he wasn’t a real mountain man. Eyes like a goddam hound’s. The knife went in easy this time.
Summers wrenched himself around and lurched through the brush to the shore. He could feel his shirt sticking to his back. The boatmen strung along the cordelle pulled up, their mouths dropping open, as he burst out almost on top of them. He made himself be deliberate. “Back!” he said. “Quick, but be careful!” He heard the Indians begin to shout behind him, from the clustered willow. Their arrows made a small fluttering noise, and their fusils boomed. He thought, “Injuns always use a heap too much powder,” while he shouted at the Creoles, trying to put order in their flight. They had turned like sheep and started to run and fallen down and run again and fallen, as the fleeter overran the others. He was shouting, more to himself than to them, “Easy! You French sons of bitches.” An arrow was sticking from Labadie’s arm, but it didn’t stop his running. It just made him yell. Christ, a man would think it had him in the heart!
The Indians shouted louder, but not from the willow any more and not like men standing still. Summers could hear them breaking through the brush, their cries broken by the jolt of their feet. The Creoles were a frantic tangle down the bank. Closer, Caudill stood, his dark eye fixed along the rifle barrel, and behind him was Deakins, unarmed but waiting. “Hump it!” cried Summers, humping it himself. The Mandan lay like a dead duck at the edge of the stream, her sail down and useless as a broken wing. Free from the towline, she was settling back with the current and pulling out, drawing away from them. While Summers watched, he saw Romaine splash into the water and run up on the bank and take a snub on a tree, and then splash back to the Mandan as if the devil was on his tail.
“Go on!” shouted Summers. “Hump it, you goddam fools!”
Caudill’s rifle went off almost in his face, and then they were running at his sides, Caudill and Deakins were, running and looking back. An arrow whizzed over their heads and buried its head in tree before them. A rifle spoke again, sounding as if it had been fired right behind their heads. “Goddam it, run, you boys!” Summers felt his legs playing out on him. His head was dauncy, as if it wasn’t fixed rightly to his neck. All of a sudden he realized he was old. It was as if all his life he had run among the sleeping dogs of the years and now at least they had wakened all at once and seized on him. He knew he couldn’t make it. “Git on, you two,” he panted. Back of him he could see the Indians, running in the open now and yelling their heads off, sure that they would get him.
And then the swivel spoke. The black smoke belched out of it, covered at first with fire, and hung in a black cloud, tattering at the edges as the air played with it. The shot silenced the yells of the Indians and the footsteps. When Summers looked back he couldn’t see a Sioux, except for two that lay there for the wolves. After a while, above the slowed sound of his own moccasins, he heard them again, but thin this time and lost in the brush. He called to Jourdonnais. “Let’s move on up and get them scalps. They’ll help a heap with the Rees and Blackfeet.”
Maybe this story belongs to Dick Summers, I remember thinking as I read this -- and then realized my frustration when it wasn’t clear to whom I should be paying attention and who would turn out to be my protagonist.
A Moral Blank Slate
Literary criticism seems sure that Caudill is the central character, and that does eventually come through, but he is, in many ways, a difficult central character to root for. In the foreword by Wallace Stegner that accompanies my paperback edition, we are given this allegorical portrait of Boone Caudill.
Caudill is an avatar of the oldest of all the American myths -- the civilized man re-created in savagery, rebaptized into innocence on a wilderness continent. His fabulous ancestors are Daniel Boone, who gives him his name, and Cooper’s Leatherstocking; and up and down the range of American fiction he has ten thousand recognizable siblings. But Caudill has his own distinction, for he is neither intellectualized nor sentimentalized. He may be White Indian, but he is no Noble Savage -- for the latter role he is not noble enough, and far too savage. Though he retains many mythic qualities -- the preternatural strength and cunning, the need for wild freedom, the larger-than-life combination of Indian skills and white mind -- he has no trace of Leatherstocking’s deist piety. His virtues are stringently limited to the qualities of self-reliance, courage, and ruthlessness that will help him to survive a life in which few died old. Guthrie clearly admires him, but with reservations enforced by the hindsight of history. Boone Caudill’s savagery, admirable and even enviable though it is, can lead nowhere. The moral of his lapse from civilization is that such an absolute lapse is doomed and sterile, and in the end the savagery which has been his strength is revealed as his fatal weakness.
This strikes me as largely correct in retrospect, but it may also be generous in terms of the themes that may or may not have comprised Guthrie’s authorial intent. Even given this clue I found myself spending a lot of time trying to figure Caudill out, trying to understand how he embodied the virtues Stegner attributed to him. From my perspective, Caudill is very much a blank slate -- just about the least introspective protagonist I have ever encountered.
On the journey up the Missouri, Caudill camps each night somewhere near the riverbank, usually with Dick Summers and another character, Jim Deakins.
Boone had his shirt close around his neck and a handkerchief half over his face to shut off the mosquitoes. They made a steady buzzing round his head, for all that he and Jim had built a smudge and bedded down close to it. He could hear Jim slapping his face and rubbing the itch afterwards.
“Worse’n chiggers,” Jim said, “these damn gnats. Listen to ‘em. It’s their war whoop they’re singing.” Boone set his mind to listening. The whole night seemed filled with the small whining of their wings. “What’s the good of a gnat, anyways?” Jim asked.
“They’ll quiet down some, if it cools off.”
“They don’t serve no purpose, unless to remind a man he ain’t such a somebody.”
“I dunno,” said Boone, knowing Jim was turning the question in his mind as he did with everything. When it came to an idea Jim was like Boone with a rock or a buffalo chip, tipping it over to see what was underneath. Boone figured it was better to take what came and not trouble the mind with questions there was no answer to. Under a rock or chip, now, a man could spot bugs and sometimes a snake.
“Maybe the pesky little bastards is asking themselves what God wanted to put hands on a man for,” Jim said after a while. “Maybe they’re thinkin’ everything would be slick, except their dinner can slap ‘em. Maybe,” he went on after another pause, “maybe they got as much business here as we have. You reckon?”
“I wouldn’t say as much.”
“They’re here, ain’t they?” Jim’s hand made a whack against his cheek. “And we’re here, ready for ‘em to feed on. I bet they figure we’re made special just for them. I bet they’re sayin’ thank you, God, for everything, only why did You have to put hands on a man, or a tail on a cow?”
Boone could look down along the shadows of his cheeks and see the Mandan’s mast, standing sharp and black.
“Or maybe they’re sayin’, like my old man would, we know it’s a punishment for our bein’ so sinful and no-account. Forgive us our trespasses, an’ God’s will be done.”
Jim Deakins is a philosopher. Boone Caudill, not so much. Unless he is the most Stoic of all the Stoics. Except he appears to lack the necessary wisdom. While Jim goes on philosophizing, Caudill’s thoughts turn towards the people and events that have brought him to this moment in time.
Sometimes, lying out this way at night listening to Jim, he thought about home and Bedwell and the sheriff and the horse he had stolen and sold at St. Louis. Mostly, though, when he thought about things like that, he thought about home. Not that he wanted to go back. God’s sake, no! Still, a man wondered about his ma and brother. And if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t be scared of Pap. He could handle Pap now, all right, even if he was still just seventeen. He had gone on to a lot in a mighty little while. He brought his left hand over and felt the muscle of his arm. He could pick Pap up and shake his teeth loose without so much as taking a long breath. When he thought about leaving home and the tears coming into his eyes and the lump aching in his throat, he wondered if he was still the same body. It would take something to make him cry now. It would take something to make him worry, even, the way he had worried when he found he’d caught a case of clap. Summers was right; a thing like that kind of wore out after a while, and a man got so he didn’t give it any heed.
Boone is changing, he changes throughout the novel, but those changes rub away the rough edges given him by his abusive father or by the other ties that bind to home and hearth. What remains beneath is smooth and placid -- and that may be something Stegner can admire -- but it also seems devoid of any in-built moral structure.
Whisky Makes Him Feel
After his journey up the Missouri, Boone will trek farther into the wilderness, seeking to become a trapper and fur trader. His initial journey into this dark frontier is with a small band of other “mountain men,” including Dick Summers, Jim Deakins, and an Indian guide named Poordevil. Once or twice a year, trappers from all over the West come together for a “rendezvous,” where they can trade their pelts and other wares for supplies and, maybe more importantly to the story, whisky.
Boone rested back on his elbows, feeling large and good, feeling the whisky warming his belly and spreading out, so that his arms and legs and neck all felt strong and pleasured, as if each had a happy little life of its own. This was the way to live, free and easy, with time all a man’s own and none to say no to him. A body got so’s he felt everything was kin to him, the earth and sky and buffalo and beaver and the yellow moon at night. It was better than being walled in by a house, better than breathing in spoiled air and feeling caged like a varmint, better than running after the law or having the law running after you and looking to rules all the time until you wondered could you even take down your pants without somebody’s say-so. Here a man lived natural. Some day, maybe, it would all end, as Summers said it would, but not any ways soon -- not so soon a body had to look ahead and figure what to do with the beaver gone and churches and courthouses and such standing where he used to stand all alone. The country was too wild and cold for settlers. Things went up and down and up again. Everything did. Beaver would come back, and fat prices, and the good times that old men said were going forever.
Whisky made Boone feel this way -- warm and happy and no longer afraid of either the present or the future. But whisky also makes Boone feel something else.
Of a sudden Boone felt like doing something. That was the way it was with whisky. It lay in the stomach comfortable and peaceful for a time, and then it made a body get up and do. All around, the fires were beginning to show red, now that dark was starting to close in. Boone could see men moving around them, or sitting, and sometimes a camp kicker jerking a buffalo ham high from the fire to get off the ashes. There was talk and shouts of laughter and the chant and rattle of the hand players. It was a time when men let go of themselves, feeling full and big in the chest. It was a time to talk high, to make jokes and laugh and drink and fight, a time to see who had the fastest horse and the truest eye and the plumb-center rifle, a time to see who was the best man.
I speculated in the margin here, wondering what else the whisky will make Boone feel, and what the whisky will make Boone do -- and then I realized that it is more than just whisky making Boone feel and do things; it is more like the whisky is what makes Boone feel, and then do.
As he and his companions move about the camp, encountering others who had come for the rendezvous, Boone makes a point of looking for a white-haired man named Streak, a fellow hunter and trapper who had once threatened to kill Poordevil, a person Boone considered a friend.
The laughing and the lying went on, but of a sudden Boone found himself tired of it, tired of sitting and chewing and doing nothing. He felt a squirming inside himself, felt the whisky pushing him on. It was as if he had to shoot or run or fight, or else boil over like a pot. He saw Summers lift his can again and take the barest sip. Jim’s whisky was untouched beside him. Goddam them, did they think they had to mammy him! Now was a good time, as good as any. The idea rose up in him, hard and sharp, like something a man had set his mind to before everything else. He downed his whisky and stood up. Summers looked around at him, his face asking a question.
“I’m movin’ on.”
Poordevil had straightened up behind him. Summers poked Jim and made a little motion with his head, and they both came to their feet.
Away from the fire Boone turned on them. “Christ Almighty! You nee’n to trail me. I aim to fix it so’s you two dast take a few drams. Come on, Poordevil.”
He turned on his heel and went on, knowing that Poordevil was at his back and Jim and Summers coming farther behind, talking low so he couldn’t hear. He looked ahead, trying to make out Streak, and pretty soon he saw him, saw the white hair glinting in the firelight. The players chanted and beat on their poles, trying to mix up the other side, and the side in hand passed the cache back and forth, their hands moving this way and that and opening and closing until a man could only guess where the cache was.
The singing and the beating stopped after the guess was made, and winnings were pulled in and new bets were laid while the plumstone cache changed sides.
Boone spoke above the whooping and the swearing. “This here’s a Blackfoot Injun, name of Poordevil, and he’s a friend of mine.”
It’s like that scene in that awful John Carpenter movie. I’m here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum. Boone means trouble, and everyone in the game circle, including Streak, knows it.
Streak’s eyes lifted. His face was dark and his mouth tight and straight. A man couldn’t tell whether he was going to fight or not. Boone met his gaze and held it, and a silence closed around them with eyes in it and faces waiting.
Streak got up, making out to move lazily. “The damn Blackfoot don’t look so purty,” he said to the man at his side. His glance rose to Boone. “How’ll you have it?”
“Any way.”
Streak left his rifle resting against a bush and moved out and came around the players. Boone handed his gun to Jim. Summers had stepped back, his rifle in the crook of his arm. Over at the side Poordevil grunted something in Blackfoot that Boone didn’t understand.
Streak was a big man, bigger than he looked at first, and he moved soft and quick like a prime animal, his face closed up and set as if nothing less than a killing would be enough for him.
Boone waited, feeling the blood rise in him hot and ready, feeling something fierce and glad swell in his chest.
Feeling the blood rise. Feeling something fierce and glad swell in his chest. Feeling. For a man like Boone, feeling things like this must be more intoxicating than the whisky.
Streak and Boone fight, grappling desperately with one another like stubborn monsters. In the melee, Boone rips off one of Streak’s ears, breaks his arm and, after Streak pulls a knife and cuts Boone’s arm with it, Boone wrestles the weapon away from Streak and plunges it multiple times into his chest, killing him.
Boone pushed with his hand. Streak fell over backwards, making a soft thump as he hit, and lay on his back, twitching, with the knife upthrust from his chest.
Poordevil let out a whoop and began to caper around, and Jim joined in, dancing with his knees high and yelling, “Hi-ya!”
Summers’ rifle still was in the crook of his arm. “I’m thinking the trouble’s over,” he said, and nobody answered until Lanter spoke up with, “Let’s git on with the game. The parade’s done passed. Any of you niggers want to take Streak’s place?” Boone heard him add under his breath, “That damn Caudill’s strong as any bull.”
Boone turned to Summers. “Maybe you’re ready to wet your dry now?”
“‘Pears like a time for it, after we doctor you.”
“It ain’t no more’n a scratch. To hell with it! Let’s have some fun.”
Summers looked at the long cut on Boone’s arm. “Reckon it won’t kill ye, at that.”
The men went back to playing hand, leaving Streak’s body lying. Closed out from the firelight by the rank of players, it was a dark lump on the ground like a sleeper. A man had to look sharp to see the knife sticking from it.
Boone passed it again, near daylight, after he had drunk he didn’t recollect how much whisky and had had himself a woman and won some beaver. There was the taste of alcohol in his mouth, and the gummy taste of Snake tobacco. He held his arm still at his side, now that the wound had started to stiffen. He felt fagged out and peaceful, with every hunger fed except that one hankering to point north. With day coming on the land, the world was like a pond clearing. From far off on a butte came the yipping of coyotes. Suddenly a squaw began to cry out, keening for a dead Bannock probably, her voice rising lonely and thin in the half-night. A man could just see the nearest lodges, standing dark and dead. There was dew on the grass, and a kind of dark mist around Streak’s carcass, which lay just as it had before, except that some Indian had lifted the hair, thinking that that plume of white would make a fancy prize.
If Boone is an everyman -- and he may well be -- he is one of the mindless everymen, moving aimlessly through life, driven by desires not consciously understood, and picking up right and wrong as equally as if they were only two different kinds of fruit scattered on the ground.
A Long Losing
Dick Summers, on the other hand, is something else entirely. The following morning, the three men -- Summers, Boone Caudill and Jim Deakins -- gather and discuss what they should do next -- stay at the camp, go east towards civilization, or go back into the mountains.
“Me,” said Jim, “I’d wait and go east with the furs.”
Summers didn’t answer, but it went through his mind again that he didn’t want to go back with anybody. He wanted to be by himself, to go along alone with the emptiness that was in him, to look and listen and see and smell, to say goodbye a thousand times and, saying it, maybe to find that the hurt was gone. He wanted to hear water at night and the wind in the trees, to take the mountains and the brown plains sharp and lasting into his mind, to kill a buffalo and cook the boudins by his own small fire, feeling the night press in around him, seeing the stars wink and the dipper steady, and everything saying goodbye, goodbye.
Goodbye, Dick Summers. Goodbye, you old nigger, you. We mind the time you came to us, young and green and full of sap. We watched you grow into a proper mountain man. We saw you learning, trapping and fighting and finding trails, and going around then proud-breasted like a young rooster, ready for a frolic or a fracas, your arm strong and your wind sound and the squaws proud to have you under a robe. But new times are a-coming now, and new people, a heap of them, and wheels rolling over the passes, carrying greenhorns and women and maybe children, too, and plows. The old days are gone and beaver’s through. We’ll see a sight of change, but not you, Dick Summers. The years have fixed you. Time to go now. Time to give up. Time to sit back and remember. Time for a chair and a bed. Time to wait to die. Goodbye, Dick. Goodbye, Old Man Summers.
These are the mountains talking to Dick, the mountains who see and know all, and they know in a way that not even Dick does, that he is at the end of the same journey that Boone Caudill has just begun -- a life’s journey that begins with chasing desire and eventually leads nowhere else.
“We didn’t do so bad,” Boone said, “what with beaver so trapped out and the price what it was.”
Summers wondered whether he had done bad or good. He had saved his hair, where better men had lost theirs. He had seen things a body never would forget and done things that would stay in the mind as long as time. He had lived a man’s life, and now it was at an end, and what had he to show for it? Two horses and a few fixin’s and a letter of credit for three hundred and forty-three dollars. That was all, unless you counted the way he had felt about living and the fun he had had while time ran along unnoticed. It had been rich doings, except that he wondered at the last, seeing everything behind him and nothing ahead. It was strange about time; it slipped under a man like quiet water, soft and unheeded but taking a part of him with every drop -- a little quickness of the muscles, a little sharpness of the eye, a little of his youngness, until by and by he found it had taken the best of him almost unbeknownst. He wanted to fight it then, to hold it back, to catch what had been borne away. It wasn’t that he minded going under, it wasn’t he was afraid to die and rot and forget and be forgotten; it was that things were lost to him more and more -- the happy feeling, the strong doing, the fresh taste for things like drink and women and danger, the friends he had fought and funned with, the notion that each new day would be better than the last, good as the last one was. A man’s later life was all a long losing, of friends and fun and hope, until at last time took the mite that was left of him and so closed the score.
Held Secret in Boone’s Head
Summers will decide that he is done with the wilderness and leaves Boone and Jim to go farm some land he owns in Missouri. Boone will see him again, but Jim will not. As referenced earlier as that one unsatiated hunger, Boone is determined to go north, ostensibly for more freedom in an even wilder wilderness, and Jim and Poordevil decide to accompany. In their journey, we see Boone even more clearly through Jim’s eyes, especially when he figures out what is actually driving Boone north.
The trio are travelling through a desolate country, known as Colter’s Hell, a place that Poordevil thinks is haunted by bad spirits.
Boone’s hunched shoulders bobbed ahead of [Jim], looking strong a bony under the slack cotton shirt. Beneath the red handkerchief he had tied on his head, his plaited black hair swung to the gait of his horse. He eye was always looking, to right and left and ahead, and his rifle was held crosswise and ready, but Jim knew it wasn’t the devil Boone was watching for. Boone didn’t worry about hell, or heaven either, but about Blackfeet and the thieving Crows and meat and beaver. He was a direct man, Boone was, and God didn’t figure with him. What he could see and hear and feel and eat, and kill or be killed by, that was what counted. That, and sometimes a crazy idea, like this notion of going on beyond the Three Forks where the Blackfeet were thicker than gnats and always hungry for the Long Knives’ scalps. Beaver, Boone said he was after, but Jim knew better. It was little Teal Eye, held secret in Boone’s head all this time, and all the time growing and taking hold of him, until finally his mind was made up and God himself couldn’t change him.
Teal Eye is an Indian princess, whom Boone first met on Jourdonnais’s keelboat. She is a member of the Blackfeet tribe, and Jourdonnais thought his possession of her would give him safe passage through Blackfeet lands, but it had actually instigated the opposite reaction.
It was a crazy idea, all right, crazy as could be. Even Bridger, bound just for the upper Yellowstone and the Madison and the Gallatin and the Jefferson, was taking a parcel of men with him so’s to be safe. Jim and Boone and Poordevil made only three. And what if Poordevil was a Blackfoot himself, as Boone argued? That didn’t mean the Blackfeet would hold off. Jourdonnais had figured the same way, having Teal Eye with him, but he was dead just the same.
But as with a lot of the things that drove him, Boone was often ignorant of their true source, either attributing different motivations or, as in the case with going north after Teal Eye, justifying the danger with simple platitudes. On the trek, Jim comes to see this tendency clearly.
Sometimes Jim wondered why he hung along with Boone. There wasn’t much fun in Boone. He was a sober man, and tight-mouthed, without any give in him unless it was with Summers. Go with Boone and you went his way. A man would think Boone would be satisfied now, having his own say-so about going north, but still he fretted because they took it slow and easy according to the promise Jim had finally pinched out of him. There was no sense in hurry, not with boiling springs to be seen and the great canyon of the Yellowstone and other doings that a body couldn’t believe. It was only high summer, going on to fall, and the service berries were fat and purple on the lower slopes, and higher up the wild raspberries shone red along the ground. There was meat on hill and hollow, and the sun shone round and warm, and the wind had slackened, saving up for fall. It was a time to loaf, being as beaver wasn’t good now anyhow.
Boone was a true man, regardless, cool and ready when there was danger about. He didn’t know what it was to be affrighted. And you could depend on him, no matter what. There weren’t many would stand as steady with a friend, or go with him as far, or stick through thick and thin. For all that he gave in to Boone, Jim felt older and a heap wiser and he knew that Boone depended on him. Some ways, Boone was like a boy still, needing just a careful word to be dropped to see things right and wise. Shooting buffalo or catching beaver or fighting bear, Boone was as good as the best, but with people it was different. He didn’t know how to joke and give and take and see things from different sides and to find fun instead of trouble. All he knew was to drive ahead. Sometimes when he was about to get himself in a fix, on account of not taking time to think, a little piece of talk, said so as to seem offhand, would set him right and steady him or maybe hold him back. Jim reckoned Boone was grateful, as a boy would be grateful without having words to say so.
A Touch of Red
This portrait of Boone, accurate as it is, is also tragically prescient. They will, indeed, find Teal Eye. Boone will, indeed, marry her and Teal Eye will, indeed, become pregnant with Boone’s son, who will be born while Boone and Jim are out on one of their excursions. When they return to camp…
A woman came out of the lodge, her eyes wide like a watching doe and her body as slim as a girl’s. Boone rode to her and dismounted, seeing gladness and trouble both in the face. Jim called, “How be ye, Teal Eye? Still purty as a pet bug, you are.”
Teal Eye didn’t speak. She reached out, almost as if afraid to touch, and placed the palms of her hands on Boone’s neck and stroked them over his chest while tears shone in her eyes.
“Later’n I thought,” Boone said while his gaze took her in, “but I come back.” His eyes questioned her, but still she didn’t say anything. He went on in Blackfoot. “Have you given me a son? Does Strong Arm have a son?”
Her mouth said, “Yes,” but something waited in her face as if she had not told him all.
“I want to see him, Teal Eye,” Jim said. “Let me git a peek, too.”
Her hand made a little motion toward the lodge. Boone stepped past her, inside. The lodge was thin and old and let the sun through, but still, coming from the shine, he had to wait to see. After a little he spied the baby on its holder, with a skin over its body and a hood drawn over its head so that nothing showed except a small and withered face. Boone bent over and laid the hood back.
From behind him Jim said, “Damn if it ain’t got a touch of red in its hair! Maybe grow up to be purty like me.”
Teal Eye breathed at Boone’s side. The English words stammered on her lips. “Eyes no see. Eyes got sick. No see.”
The baby stirred at her voice. The lids pulled open. Before they closed again, Boone saw the eyes swam shrunken and milky-blind.
The blindness will eat at Boone, but more than that it will be the touch of red in the baby’s hair that will consume him -- the touch of red, so like Jim and so unlike himself.
First, Boone will talk with two of his Indian friends.
After a while he heard Bear say, “You cry inside, Strong Arm.”
Bear’s eyes were old and tracked around by wrinkles but still sharp as a hawk’s. Boone dropped his own before them and picked up a rock and began digging at the ground with it. He was of a mind to laugh or say it wasn’t so and to go on to something else, being as his feelings were nobody’s business, but Indians were easier to talk to than whites and medium friends easier than close ones. He drew back from showing Jim what was inside him, as he drew back from showing Teal Eye, feeling weak and shamed for them to see, but it was different with two old Indians who wouldn’t add to what he said or pry beyond for more.
He nodded slowly. “Is there medicine to make the blind eye see?”
Big Shield said, “Our medicine men make medicine, but blindness is too strong for them.”
“It is better to go under,” said Bear. “It is better to kill the blind.”
“I cry for the blind one in my lodge.”
Bear nodded. “I cry for my brother who cries. Does Red Hair cry?”
Boone nodded. “Jim cries. He is my brother, too.”
Bear put more tobacco in his pipe. “It is for him to cry.” His eyes went to Big Shield for a yes. “It is for Red Hair to cry.”
For what seemed a long time Boone searched Bear’s face, which was cut and puckered by time and thought. Bear’s old lips sucked at the stem of his pipe. His breath pulled a whiff into his lungs. Then he met Boone’s gaze and answered the question in it with another. “Does the black eagle father the red hawk?”
Boone heard his own voice like a crack in the long silence. “You make light talk.”
Bear’s gaze was roaming the valley again. “It is you that make light talk,” he said. “You know. When a man knows it does not matter. I have given my wives for whisky and powder. I have given them to show I was a friend. It was all right. When a squaw sneaks out and her man does not know, then he feels blood in his eye.”
Big Shield knocked the ash from his pipe and got up. “I had a wife, and she lay in secret with a man.” He rested his finger above his nostrils. “I cut her hair off and her nose and put her out of my lodge. I took two buffalo horses from the man. I found other squaws. Life was good again.”
They climbed on their horses and jogged down toward the village.
And this will consume him. Then he will torment Teal Eye.
Teal Eye said, “Red Hair went to Fort McKenzie.”
“Who told you?” Boone watched her fussing with the baby, her eyes dwelling on the blind eyes as if of a sudden they might see.
“He came to ask for you.”
“For me, was it?” Boone asked and shut his mouth on what he might say next. There was puzzlement in her face, as if she couldn’t make out what he aimed at. He looked at the baby and looked away and looked again. The red wasn’t bright sorrel like Jim’s hair, but it was red just the same -- red crossed with Indian black and showing dark on the head like the bark of old spruce. Did the black eagle father the red hawk? He got up and stood for a while unseeing, feeling sick and swollen with suspecting, feeling like a man snake-bit, the pain small and sharp in the beginning and the mind numb but unbelieving, and then the bite spreading and the flesh puffing and hurt bursting the body. He would ask if he could believe the answer, but a woman that had tricked a man would lie to him.
To her back he said, “Better to kill a blind baby.”
The words spun her around. She got up slow, her face showing shock over the sorrow that had been there before. “Boone!”
“He is better dead.”
“You don’t mean what your mouth says!”
“You heard. How long will Red Hair be gone?”
She lowered her face from his, as if she had looked for something and not found it, and turned back to the baby. Seeing her droop, he felt mean, but fierce and pleasured by meannes, too. He watched her out of the tail of his eye, wondering what secrets were in her, wondering what she kept from him. Morning, and his talk with Bear and Big Shield, seemed so long ago that he had lived a lifetime in it. There had been the pinch of pain and the unbelieving, and then the remembering, then the figuring, while the pain grew and the unbelieving little and such a misery came in him as the spirit couldn’t stand. He knew well enough that Jim was drawn by Teal Eye. He had seen a hundred things to make him know and heard a hundred more, though he hadn’t believed that Jim would do him bad. It was Teal Eye he had misfigured, thinking it was no more than liking she felt. It was Teal Eye, bent over with her back to him and maybe the secret held dear in her and her body remembering the touch of Jim’s.
All at once he couldn’t stand to be there longer. “No tellin’ when I’ll be back.” He threw the English of it at her. “Three or four sleeps.”
She didn’t answer, but he knew she followed him with her eyes as he went out. It occurred to him while he walked to his horse that maybe she was thinking that with him gone she would have a chance with Jim.
And this will consume him more. Then he will brood.
It stood to reason … the more Boone brooded on it, remembering the smiles Jim had for Teal Eye and the long, slow looks and words like posies, and her face lighting up at the sight of him and the pleasure in it at his talk. Bear and Big Shield took it for sure he shared his squaw with Jim. More than likely the whole band did, and because of things they’d seen, being wrong only in thinking the sharing was his doing. Damn himself for a fool, going along blind while they played behind his back and made sport of him! All the time he had figured Teal Eye was his alone and never to be anybody else’s. He had lain with her at night and felt richer than other men to have her and so deep satisfied he couldn’t talk about it, even to her, for the feeling was like a weakness in him, like a secret that had to be kept in his own skull, hidden under his own ribs.
And this will consume him still more. If ever there was a paragraph that described Boone Caudill, this is it. Unable to communicate, and experiencing deep shame at the very feelings that animated him, thinking that they are a weakness that must be hidden from others. In his madness, he will lay a trap, finding and telling Jim, like he had told Teal Eye, that he would be gone for a few days, and then secretly creeping back to his lodge to find the two of them together. Teal Eye is upset, worried about losing Boone and her baby, and Jim is holding her, providing her the comfort of a friend, no more.
They didn’t see him right away. They didn’t hear the brush of his clothes against the lodge. They stood there, making one shape, making the shadow he had seen against the wall. He knew what was doing now. He knew what he had to do. No use to talk or think or wonder. No use to ask or plan. A man’s body acted for him. He said, “By God, it’s like I thought.”
They fell apart, and Jim said, “Boone!” and didn’t say more but stood trying to smile and the firelight showing guilt on his face as plain as day and flashing on the fear in Teal Eye’s eyes. Jim’s arm came out, stiff and clumsy as a stick, and Jim’s mouth said, “I brung a letter for you.”
The pistol was better than the rifle. Jim cried, “Boone! Boone!” as he saw it coming up, and Teal Eye tried, too late, to throw herself between and so to save her secret man. Closed in by walls, the pistol sounded big.
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Jim staggered back, feeling as if his whole chest was empty, feeling as if it had been sunk in by a blow. He tried to straighten. He made his legs walk him toward the door for a breath of the air he was dying for. He fell on his face. It was all he could do to turn over. He wanted to cry out. He wanted to say it wasn’t so. He wanted to own up that he had a crazy minute, but no harm done and Teal Eye not to blame. The words wouldn’t come; he couldn’t get the wind for them.
“I ought to cut your goddam nose off!” It was Boone, turned on Teal Eye. She didn’t answer. She didn’t move, except that the tears came to her eyes and glimmered in the firelight and started down her cheeks in two big drops.
Things seemed a far way off, so far away the voice couldn’t reach, far away and fading farther. Jim saw legs at the entrance to the lodge and followed them up and came to the faces of Indians thrust inside and nothing showing in them but the asking look of animals. One of the faces said, “Him go under.”
Boone stooped and whipped up the letter, and his voice lashed at Teal Eye. “No good to cry. By God, I catched you!”
Jim sucked for air. He had to speak. He had to explain. You’re a hard man, Boone, and closed in on yourself, and Teal Eye sad with the blind baby and afeared of losing you, and no one to let it out on, no one but me. No harm done, Boone, no harm at all. I wasn’t no more than a chest to cry on and a hand to pat her back.
He couldn’t catch air enough for talk, not more than a drop of it before pain bore down and shut it off. He felt if he looked down he would see his chest blown open and the heart beating naked and the lungs twisting for air. He heard Boone’s voice like a whip and Teal Eye trying to answer and heard the Indians grunting and saw them pushed in at the door and Teal Eye with her child’s eyes wet and pleading.
It wasn’t any use to try for words or breath or time; it wasn’t any use but to lie quiet while the eye saw and the ear heard and the heart bled itself out. Far off, it seemed, Boone was moving, marching to the entrance with the letter unopened in his hand, marching with his head up and the braids swinging to his step while the Indians made way from him and he passed from sight. Jim brought his gaze to Teal Eye, standing as if too hurt to live and her girl’s body drooping and the open, dark eyes crying as they looked the way that Boone had gone. “You no come back,” she said in English, so low Jim hardly heard. “You no come back.”
This was the way it was at the last. A man faced up to death alone, his sight dimming and his hearing dulling off, and he so lonesome the heart squeezed up to nothing and the mind drew back from thought. The world pulled away from him, the lodge and the air and the clouds and dark hills outside and folks that stood about, until only the ground he rested on seemed close. This was the way it was with Jim Deakins, laid out with a bullet hole in him and no one alongside to touch his hand and ease him over. This was the way it was with Deakins, who had been ready to wrong a friend and spoil a woman’s life and had got hold of himself but messed things up all the same, and now no chance to set them right. He had to lie helpless and lonesome, but not much afraid any more, while over him and over the lodge that shut him in the deep sky deepened over the empty plains. He heard talk, breathed by the breath but not sounded by the voice. “I’ll know about God, I reckon, now.” After a while he realized that it was his lips that had spoken.
It’s a remarkable series of events -- made more remarkable by the eventual revelation, by Boone’s mother, that red hair occasionally did run in their family. It is also a remarkable passage of prose, weaving the words together with emotion, that expressed by Jim and by Teal Eye, and that unexpressed by Boone. And one of the most remarkable things is that double space (which I represented above with a few plus signs), coming just as the point of view switches from Boone to Jim, offering a final glimpse into Guthrie’s true understanding of his craft that had not been present earlier.
A Strange Man
Everyone who meets Boone comes to a similar conclusion.
A strange man, Boone Caudill, riding rawboned and slouched at the head of the column while his Indian’s braids swung to the swing of his horse. A strange man, with moodiness in him, and quickness to anger and the promise of childlike savagery. Was it the rude half-civilization of the Kentucky frontier that had made him what he was, or his years with the red Arabs of the plains? Watching him ride ahead, his strong shoulders loose and his body giving to the pace of his horse, Peabody concluded he was more Indian than white man. Outwardly he was hardly white man at all. He wore the clothes of an Indian and carried a bag of amulets -- a medicine bundle, as it was called. His voice was rough and deep in his chest, even when the sounds it made were English sounds. His face was dark-eyed, weathered, and often inscrutable. He had a squaw for a wife.
And, although I think some would like to view this as the central question of the novel -- which part of civilization or which part of the wilderness made Boone the way he is -- for me, this seems like a much less interesting question. For Boone is not unique. Boone is the primordial everyman, and asking what made him is similar to asking what made the sky, the plains, or the lodge. Nothing made them. They simply came to be.
Along toward the middle of the day, beyond where even a trickle of water ran, Boone climbed the last lift to the divide. One way the land pitched down to Oregon, to the Flathead and Clark’s Fork and the Columbia and the western sea; the other, it fell off to the Marias and Missouri, to Blackfoot country and Red Horn’s band and Teal Eye carrying his young one in her. It was strange that a man could go off and leave a part of him living behind him and have no power over it and no say-so but only the knowledge that there was a live piece of him that wasn’t with him. It was as if a man couldn’t get free from what he had been and done. He couldn’t be himself alone; he had to be all the other men he was, in the season before and the season before that and the season before that. He couldn’t stand just by what he did now; he had to stand by what he had done in the past, too. Old Dick Summers would understand if he was around to be talked to. Still, it was all right, all right this time. A man knowing he had got himself a young one was all right. It gave him a different feeling from what he had had before, a kind of secret fullness in the chest.
Boone Caudill is no guide -- not through the wilderness, not through the moral universe, not even through himself. So unlike the Pathfinder, in the end, Boone remains lost, not found.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
