Sin Killer Read online

  Jim Snow—or the Raven Brave—seemed completely indifferent to the weather. The rain did not dismay him nor the rainbow delight him. By the time the dripping pieces of venison had been cooked and eaten—and prairie frights had in no way diminished Tasmin’s appetite—Jim Snow busied himself by whittling a new plug for his powder horn. During the meal he completely eschewed speech, as if meals and talk could not possibly happen at the same time. He had a little salt in a pouch—Tasmin asked if she might share it—her request constituted the whole sum of their mealtime conversation. In the course of four months in America Tasmin had become fairly reconciled to American practicality, but she had never met as fine an example of the purely practical man as her companion, Jim Snow. Whatever was needed—of a physical nature—he did at once, with a certain grace and a fine economy of motion. He wasted no effort and contributed no words.

  This young frontiersman Tasmin found herself traveling with was to her altogether a new species of male, quite unlike any she had ever known. Whether she proved to be Berrybender or de Bury, she was an English lady of noble lineage, a fact which had always produced a certain measure of diffidence in her suitors—social inferiors, many of them. Even Master Tobias Stiles, after tupping her vigorously in old Charlemagne’s stall, still addressed her as “my lady” when they were finished. Such contradiction as she occasionally met with in men was usually offered cautiously—her temper had made itself respected throughout the Berrybender household. Even Lord Berrybender himself seldom challenged his spirited eldest daughter.

  In their long day on the river Tasmin had offered only one or two opinions, but Jim Snow had casually disregarded even those few. He clearly felt under no obligation to respect, or even listen to, her views. He said his “no” and that was that. Frustrated, Tasmin tried her best to come up with a question she might ask that he would not resent, and after due deliberation, thought that she might just risk an inquiry about the swans.

  Tasmin sat under the uptilted pirogue, Jim Snow on the other side of the fire, his face now in shadow, now in light. He was concentrated so on his task—fitting the new plug into the powder horn—that he seemed almost to have forgotten Tasmin’s presence.

  “Was it the swans that particularly aroused the Osage?” she ventured to ask. “I’m curious. Would they have let us pass, had there been no swans?”

  Jim Snow looked up for a moment—the question, at least, seemed to interest him.

  “It would depend on what band it was, and who was leading them,” he reflected, his face tilted slightly to one side. It was a handsome face too, though his long irregular hair and rather scraggly beard could both have done with a trimming, Tasmin felt.

  “There’s a good market now for swan feathers—the white feathers, anyway,” he said. “The Osage trade ’em for guns—the beaver’s long been trapped out. They don’t want the same to happen to the swans.”

  Even to Tasmin’s Old World brain that made sense. A tribe that had lost their profitable beaver might be expected to be violently protective of their profitable swans.

  “Was that Osage you yelled at them, this afternoon?” Tasmin asked. “I confess I have never heard such a strange tongue spoken—though we are a regular tower of Babel on our boat.”

  “That was the Word of Jehovah,” Jim Snow said.

  “Goodness, are you a minister, then?” Tasmin asked, in genuine surprise. “Do you have a regular parish out here on the prairies?”

  Jim Snow shook his head.

  “The Word just comes out sometimes, when there’s heathens that need to hear it or sinners that need to be warned,” he said. “I don’t preach it in church.”

  “Well, if that was the Word, it impressed me, I must say,” Tasmin said. “Where did you learn your theology, Mr. Snow?”

  Now that the first faint traces of conversation had been produced she hoped to encourage it—blow on it, feed it grass, anything to keep her host from lapsing back into one of his long silences.

  But the word stumped him—he had evidently never heard it before.

  “My what?” he asked.

  “It’s from the Greek theologos, one who studies the beliefs in the various gods,” Tasmin said, hoping she was not being too inaccurate. She thought a tiny display of learning might intrigue Mr. Snow, but in this her miscalculation proved severe. In a moment the young man’s face darkened, became the face of the Sin Killer, and he whipped his hand toward her and gave her such a ringing slap as she had never experienced before, at the hand of man or woman.

  “You hush now—don’t be talking blasphemous lies!” he said sternly. “There’s only one God and Jehovah is his name.”

  Tasmin was so startled by the sudden slap that she could only sit in astonishment, one hand raised to her burning cheek. The slap rocked her, and yet she had instinct enough to recognize that the slap was nothing to the violence the Sin Killer might unleash if he were really in a mood to punish. Despite the sting, and the surprise, Tasmin made a mighty effort to remain calm. Her bosom may have heaved, but she did not allow herself to speak until she had sufficiently mastered her emotions to be able to address the Sin Killer in level tones.

  “But Mr. Snow, I was only defining a word,” she informed him. “In my country few preachers teach themselves. I only wanted to ask where you learned your doctrines.”

  “From Preacher Cockerell—he and his wife bought me from the Osage,” Jim Snow said. “Preacher Cockerell needed someone to tend his stock.”

  His face had cleared—he spoke mildly again, but he didn’t apologize to Tasmin for slapping her. Mention of a multiplicity of gods was evidently sufficient to merit a slap; and that was that. Now it had emerged that he had been practically raised by the Osage—how that came about Tasmin did not feel bold enough to inquire.

  “We English are very forward,” she said lightly. “When I meet someone I like—and I do like you—I cannot help wanting to know a bit more about them.”

  “Being nosy,” Jim Snow said, with a look of amusement. “That’s what I’d call it.”

  “Yes, that’s fair, I suppose,” Tasmin said. “Being nosy. I take it that you can read the Bible, since you preach.”

  At this he looked a trifle discomfited.

  “Preacher Cockerell taught me my letters,” he said. “But then he got lightning-struck and killed before I could finish my learning. When it comes to the Bible I can mostly puzzle out the verses, but I get tangled up in some of the names.”

  He reached into a small pouch that hung from his belt and pulled out a much-tattered and clearly incomplete Bible, bound in flaking sheepskin, which he handed to Tasmin. It seemed to please him that she took an interest in his religious calling.

  “Had to tear out a few pages, when I didn’t have nothing else to start a fire with,” he said, evidently embarrassed by the rather riddled appearance of his book. Tasmin was moved that he would care to show her this humble article—it went some way toward making up for the slap.

  “Well, there’s Genesis, at least . . . and you’ve still got the Psalmist . . . and here’s Solomon’s songs,” she said. Jim Snow was watching her closely; she did not want to give the impression that she scorned his one treasured book.

  “I don’t preach out of the book—I just preach the Word that’s in me,” the young man said, with some intensity. “Preacher Cockerell was a fornicator—when the Lord called down the lightning bolt that killed him I was standing close enough that the bolt knocked me nearly thirty feet. I didn’t wake up for three days, but when I did wake up the Word was in me. It’s been in me ever since.”

  “What an astonishing story!” Tasmin said, and she meant it. Being riven by a lightning bolt might make a preacher of many a man.

  “I mean to get a whole Bible, someday, when I’ve got the money,” he said.

  “My goodness, we have many Bibles with us,” Tasmin said. “If we ever catch up with the boat I’d be happy to give you one, as a small token of gratitude for all the trouble you’ve taken on my beha
lf.”

  She meant it too—nothing could be easier than to make him a present of a Bible. And yet when she said it the Raven Brave drew back, as if she had made an immodest suggestion. The swans were whistling, high overhead. Without another word this strange young man whose motives so perplexed her stood up, took his rifle, and prepared to leave the camp, actions that quite distressed her.

  “Oh, Mr. Snow, don’t leave—it was just a thought,” Tasmin said. “Am I to be allowed no generosity, where you are concerned?”

  “You’re too much of a talker—get some sleep,” he said, before being swallowed up by the humid darkness. Tasmin was left alone, in her muddy dress, with a sputtering fire and the call of swans from the high heavens. The Raven Brave’s departure was so sudden that she felt like crying—indeed, a few tears of frustration did fall. Tasmin, who had long been cosseted by myriad English softnesses, was now in a country where nothing was soft except the mud of the damnable river; and the least soft thing in the whole country, it seemed to her, was the young man who had just slapped her face. There were several lustful gentlemen of her acquaintance whom she could have probably driven to cuff her, had she been disposed to test their mettle; but Jim Snow’s slap bespoke a hardness of an entirely different order, one so decisive that she felt quite sure she would never be moved to utter the word “theology” in his company again.

  Sitting under the boat in the darkness, hearing the crackle of the fire, Tasmin felt quite alone. Her brain was racing so that she could not sleep. The night before, stretched out in the pirogue, she had been quite settled in her emotions and had slept deeply; but now her feeling surged this way and that, erratic as the Missouri’s waves. Once or twice she had thought Mr. Snow was coming almost to like her, but then her tumbling speech, which she seemed unable to control, spilled out in some comment that turned his liking to distaste, if not worse.

  Tasmin had rarely experienced a frustration equal to what she felt on that muddy prairie beach, and the worst of it was that this exasperating man had done the most aggravating thing that a man could do: he simply left. He was gone: she had no one to plead with, rail against, slap, kiss, anything. He was gone. Tasmin stared into the darkness; she listened to the whistle of the swans, to the yipping of coyotes, and to what may or may not have been the cough of a buffalo. There were rustlings in the underbrush that might have been made by snakes or raccoons, by deer or antelope, by Osage or Kickapoo—she was certainly no scholar of the sounds of a prairie night. She turned, she squirmed, she stretched, but she did not get any sleep.

  6

  There she sat—muddy, barefoot, with no kit . . .

  IT was pitch-dark, the only light being the faint glow of a few dying coals, when Tasmin gave a start and opened her eyes. The space above her had changed—where the pirogue had been was only high starlight. Mr. Snow was carrying the pirogue to the river. Tasmin’s limbs were just then feeling intolerably heavy with sleep—she wanted to sleep so badly that she was almost hoping Mr. Snow would just leave her, but he didn’t.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and he led her by her hand down the slimy, slippery slope to the river. The pirogue he pushed well out into the stream before slipping into it himself and taking the oar. Tasmin yawned; now that her protector was back she felt deeply sleepy.

  When she woke again the morning mist was so dense that she could only just see Mr. Snow, a ghostly form plying his paddle from the rear of the pirogue. Tasmin could gain no idea of where they stood in relation to the river’s shores. Except for the very slight suck of Mr. Snow’s paddle, she heard no sounds at all. No birds called, no fish leapt, no wolves howled, no buffaloes coughed. Mr. Snow somehow apprehended the angular limbs of a dead tree just ahead of them and managed to turn the pirogue so as to slip past it. Tasmin recalled Mr. Catlin’s pun about the river Sticks and had to admit that it was rather apt. So indistinct were their surroundings that they might indeed be rowing to Hades, a thought she decided not to express to the Sin Killer, who might think it punishingly pagan.

  They proceeded thus—silent and invisible—for perhaps an hour when the mist began to glow above them—soon sunlight filtered through, and the blue sky appeared, though colonies of mist still ranged along the distant riverbanks.

  “I reckon yonder’s your steamer,” Jim Snow said.

  He pointed, but a last line of mist drifted above the water—even when it cleared, Tasmin could not, at first, see the steamer Rocky Mount, at this point still several miles ahead; the best she could produce was a kind of dancing dot, far north on the water. Her blindness seemed to amuse Mr. Snow; or it may have been that the prospect of getting rid of such a talkative person had put him in a good humor—he even smiled at Tasmin.

  “I guess you’ve just come out of the woods,” he said. “Takes a while for woods folks to get to where they can see sharp on the prairies.”

  “There might be another reason why I refuse to see that boat—a reason that has nothing to do with eyesight,” Tasmin said.

  Jim Snow merely looked at her—he did not inquire about what the other reason might be. The wind had come up; it sighed across the prairie grasses, and the very sighing seemed to push Tasmin’s spirits down. There she sat—muddy, barefoot, with no kit—and yet the downcast feeling that filled her breast had only one cause: she did not want to go back aboard the steamer Rocky Mount, to the idle frivolity of the Berry-bender ménage, to the vast meals, to Mr. Catlin’s dry cackle, to her mother’s drunkenness, or Bobbety’s whining, or Buffum’s gross amour with Tim, the stable boy. Every day Mademoiselle Pellenc would call Fräulein Pfretzskaner a German slut; Fräulein, in turn, would call Mademoiselle a French whore. The tutors, the gunsmith, the botanist, and the artist, the butler and the carriage maker could all sink to the bottom of the river, for all she cared.

  And yet there it was, she soon saw, stuck, as usual, on a riffle, only a mile or two ahead. The moving dots she spotted were only the engagés, out with their ropes and poles, trying to wrestle the boat back into a navigable channel.

  Very soon, like it or not, she would be back—her only hope of escape from European tedium lay with the young man paddling the pirogue. If only he had a trace of the lover in him, Tasmin reflected, he could have conquered her in a moment. He was a male, after all; she herself had seen his honest manhood in their moment of nakedness. Her own beauty had not gone entirely uncelebrated—pale but hopeful ballad makers were forever serenading her.

  In less than an hour, Tasmin knew, they would come up with the boat. In that hour Tasmin coquetted as she had never coquetted before. She dipped one fair leg over the side and washed it free of mud. She knelt in the boat and bent to wash her face, exposing her young breasts almost as recklessly as Lady Berrybender exposed her great dugs at dinner. Yet her most immodest efforts completely failed. Jim Snow just kept rowing; to him she might have been a fish, a gull, a cat.

  Then, at the last minute, when they were almost level with the steamer, a practical thought occurred to Tasmin—there might yet be a way to tempt the severely practical Mr. Snow.

  “Will you be going to Santa Fe soon?” she asked.

  “No . . . a little later . . . when it ain’t so dry on the plains,” he said. He seemed surprised that she had inquired.

  “How much would passage cost, if one were to want to go?” she asked, a question that left him gaping.

  “Passage?” he asked. “Who would be wanting to go?”

  “Why, I would,” Tasmin said. “I’ve always been so fond of all things Spanish—the Alhambra, you know, and the dramas of Señor Quevedo. I’m sure I’d feel right at home in Santa Fe.”

  Jim Snow was so shocked by her statement that he could hardly close his mouth. Not since the moment when he had first glimpsed Tasmin’s nakedness had he been so entirely deprived of speech.

  “You by yourself?” he asked—but before Tasmin could answer there was a great braying from the steamer and Tasmin saw a flash of red as her hound, Tintamarre, jumped into the water and began to sw
im toward them.

  “Why, it’s my hound—what a passionate thing he is,” Tasmin said.

  “That big red dog is yours?” he asked. “If he’s yours I’m right glad I didn’t shoot him.”

  It was Tasmin’s turn to be surprised.

  “But Mr. Snow, whatever could tempt you to shoot my hound?” she asked.

  Jim Snow looked at her as if she were the merest fool.

  “To eat him, why else?” he said.

  “Eat my dog, when there were deer aplenty?” Tasmin asked, startled.

  “There ain’t never deer aplenty—I hadn’t seen no deer in three days, when that doe came to water,” he said. “The Osage keep the deer pretty well hunted down.”

  Soon Tintamarre came splashing through the shallows and flung himself on Tasmin, slinging water everywhere.

  “Meat’s meat,” Jim Snow added. “You’ll learn that soon enough, I guess.”

  Shock at the thought of someone eating her dog caused Tasmin’s stomach to do a sudden flip. For a moment she sat uneasily in the pirogue, while Tintamarre leapt and splashed and licked her face.

  7

  “I know who it was—Sin Killer.”

  REMEMBERING her intense hunger that first morning on the Missouri’s shore, Tasmin had to reflect that hunger might indeed drive her to eat unfamiliar foods. No doubt Mr. Snow’s luck in immediately providing her with a deer’s liver had misled her when it came to the harsh necessities of prairie life. The Berrybender mess on the steamer was so prodigious as to destroy all sense of scarcity—Lord Berrybender had filled one whole keelboat with claret, as well as some champagne and port.

  “What, travel without my claret? What a thought, sir!” Lord B. would have said, had anyone pointed out that the boat might have been filled with more humble necessities—potatoes, for example, or oranges, the lack of which was already causing grumbling from Bobbety and Buffum.