Red Prophet: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Volume II Page 4

  Jackson rose slowly to his feet. “I reckon I’ll have to take three baths when I get home,” he said, “and even then I still won’t feel clean.”

  Hooch was delighted to see that Harrison was really mad. He rose to his feet and shouted at Jackson so loud that Hooch could feel his chair shake. “Don’t get high and mighty with me, you hypocrite! You want them all dead, just like I do! There’s no difference between us.”

  Jackson stopped at the door and eyed the governor with disgust. “The assassin, Mr. Harrison, the poisoner, he can’t see the difference between himself and a soldier. But the soldier can.”

  Unlike Ta-Kumsaw, Jackson was not above slamming the door.

  Harrison sank back down onto his chair. “Hooch, I’ve got to say, I don’t much like that fellow.”

  “Never mind,” said Hooch. “He’s with you.”

  Harrison smiled slowly. “I know. When it comes to war, we’ll all be together. Except for maybe that Red-kisser up in Vigor Church.”

  “Even him,” said Hooch. “Once a war starts, the Reds won’t be able to tell one White man from another. Then his people will start dying just like ours. Then Armor-of-God Weaver will fight.”

  “Yeah, well, if Jackson and Weaver would likker up their Reds the way we’re doing ours, there wouldn’t have to be a war.”

  Hooch aimed a mouthful at the spittoon and didn’t miss by much. “That Red, that Ta-Kumsaw.”

  “What about him?” asked Harrison.

  “He worries me.”

  “Not me,” said Harrison. “I’ve got his brother here passed out on my floor. Ta-Kumsaw won’t do nothing.”

  “When he pointed at me, I felt his finger touch me from across the room. I think he’s maybe got a come-hither. Or a far-touch. I think he’s dangerous.”

  “You don’t believe in all that hexery, do you, Hooch? You’re such an educated man, I thought you were above that kind of superstition.”

  “I’m not and neither are you, Bill Harrison. You had a doodlebug tell you where firm ground was so you could build this stockade, and when your first wife had her babies, you had a torch in to see how the baby was laying in the womb.”

  “I warn you,” said Harrison, “to make no more comment about my wife.”

  “Which one, now, Bill? The hot or the cold?”

  Harrison swore a good long string of oaths at that. Oh, Hooch was delighted, Hooch was pleased. He had such knack for hotting things up, yes sir, and it was more fun hotting up a man’s temper, because there wasn’t no flame then, just a lot of steam, a lot of hot air.

  Well, Hooch let old Bill Harrison jaw on for a while. Then he smiled and raised his hands like he was surrendering. “Now, you know I didn’t mean no harm, Bill. I just didn’t know as how you got so prissy these days. I figured we both know where babies grow, how they got in there, and how they come out, and your women don’t do it any different than mine. And when she’s lying there screaming, you know you’ve got a midwife there who knows how to cast a sleep on her, or do a pain-away, and when the baby’s slow to come you’ve got a torch telling where it lays. And so you listen to me, Bill Harrison. That Ta-Kumsaw, he’s got some kind of knack in him, some kind of power. He’s more than he seems.”

  “Is he now, Hooch? Well maybe he is and maybe he ain’t. But he said Lolla-Wossiky would see with his other eye before I laid a hand on him, and it won’t be long before I prove that he’s no prophet.”

  “Speaking of old one-eye, here, he’s starting to fart something dreadful.”

  Harrison called for his aide. “Send in Corporal Withers and four soldiers, at once.”

  Hooch admired the way Harrison kept military discipline. It wasn’t thirty seconds before the soldiers were there, Corporal Withers saluting and saying, “Yes, sir, General Harrison.”

  “Have three of your men carry this animal out to the stable for me.”

  Corporal Withers obeyed instantly, pausing only to say, “Yes sir, General Harrison.”

  General Harrison. Hooch smiled. He knew that Harrison’s only commission was as a colonel under General Wayne during the last French war, and he didn’t amount to much even then. General. Governor. What a pompous—

  But Harrison was talking to Withers again, and looking at Hooch as he did so. “And now you and Private Dickey will kindly arrest Mr. Palmer here and lock him up.”

  “Arrest me!” shouted Hooch. “What are you talking about!”

  “He carries several weapons, so you’ll have to search him thoroughly,” said Harrison. “I suggest stripping him here before you take him to the lock-up, and leave him stripped. Don’t want this slippery old boy to get away.”

  “What are you arresting me for!”

  “Why, we have a warrant for your arrest for unpaid debts,” said Harrison. “And you’ve also been accused of selling whisky to Reds. We’ll naturally have to seize all your assets—those suspicious-looking kegs my boys’ve been hauling into the stockade all day—and sell them to make good the debt. If we can sell them for enough, and we can clear you of those ugly charges of likkering up the Reds, why, we’ll let you go.”

  Then Harrison walked on out of his office. Hooch cussed and spit and made remarks about Harrison’s wife and mother, but Private Dickey was holding real tight to a musket, and that musket had a bayonet attached to the business end; so Hooch submitted to the stripping and the search. It got worse, though, and he cussed again when Withers marched him right across the stockade, stark naked, and didn’t give him so much as a blanket when he locked him into a storage room. A storage room filled with empty kegs from the last shipment of likker.

  He sat in that lock-up room for two days before his trial, and for the first while there was murder in his heart. He had a lot of ideas for revenge, you can bet. He thought of setting fire to the lace curtains in Harrison’s house, or burning the shed where the whisky was kept, starting all kinds of fire. Cause what good is it to be a spark if you can’t use it to get even with folks who pretend to be your friends and then lock you into jail?

  But he didn’t start no fires, because Hooch was no fool. Partly, he knew that if a fire once got started anywhere in the stockade, there was a good chance it’d spread from one end to the other inside half an hour. And there was a good chance that while everybody’s rushing around to save their wives and children and gunpowder and likker, they might not remember about one whisky trader locked up in a storage room. Hooch didn’t hanker to die in a fire of his own setting—that wasn’t no kind of vengeance. Time enough to start fires when he had a noose around his neck someday, but he wasn’t going to risk burning to death just to get even over something like this.

  But the main reason he didn’t start a fire wasn’t fear, it was plain business sense. Harrison was doing this to show Hooch that he didn’t like the way Hooch delayed shipments of likker to jack up the price. Harrison was showing him that he had real power, and all Hooch had was money. Well, let Harrison play at being a powerful man. Hooch knew some things, too. He knew that someday the Wobbish country would petition the U.S. Congress in Philadelphia to become a state. And when it did, a certain William Henry Harrison would have his little heart set on being governor. And Hooch had seen enough elections back in Suskwahenny and Pennsylvania and Appalachee to know that you can’t get votes without silver dollars to pass around. Hooch would have those silver dollars. And when the time came, he might pass around those silver dollars to Harrison voters; and then again he might not. He just might not. He might help another man sit in the governor’s mansion, someday when Carthage was a real city and Wobbish was a real state, and then Harrison would have to sit there the rest of his life and remember what it was like to be able to lock people up, and he would grind his teeth in anger at how men like Hooch took all that away from him.

  That’s how Hooch kept himself entertained, sitting in that lock-up room for two long days and nights.

  Then they hauled him out and brought him into court—unshaven, dirty, his hair wild, and his cloth
es all wrinkled up. General Harrison was the judge, the jury’ was all in uniform, and the defense attorney was—Andrew Jackson! It was plain Governor Bill was trying to make Hooch get mad and start in ranting, but Hooch wasn’t born yesterday. He knew that whatever Harrison had in mind, it wouldn’t do no good to yell about it. Just sit tight and put up with it.

  It took only a few minutes.

  Hooch listened with a straight face as a young lieutenant testified that all Hooch’s whisky had been sold to the sutler at exactly the price it sold for last time. According to the legal papers, Hooch didn’t make a penny more from having kept them waiting four months between shipments. Well, thought Hooch, that’s fair enough, Harrison’s letting me know how he wants things run. So he didn’t say a word. Harrison looked as merry as you please, behind his magisterial solemnity. Enjoy yourself, thought Hooch. You can’t make me mad.

  But he could, after all. They took 220 dollars right off the top and handed it over to Andrew Jackson right there in court. Counted out eleven gold twenty-dollar coins. That caused Hooch physical pain, to see that fiery metal dropping into Jackson’s hands. He couldn’t keep his silence then. But he did manage to keep his voice low and mild-sounding. “If don’t seem regular to me,” he said, “to have the plaintiff acting as defense attorney.”

  “Oh, he’s not your defense attorney on the debt charges,” said His Honor Judge Harrison. “He’s just your defense attorney on the likker charges.” Then Harrison grinned and gaveled that matter closed.

  The likker business didn’t take much longer. Jackson carefully presented all the same invoices and receipts to prove that every keg of whisky was sold to the sutler of Carthage Fort, and not a speck of it to any Reds. “Though I will say,” said Jackson, “that the amount of whisky represented by these receipts seems like enough for three years for an army ten times this size.”

  “We’ve got a bunch of hard-drinking soldiers,” said Judge Harrison. “And I reckon that likker won’t last six months. But not a drop to the Reds, Mr. Jackson, you may be sure!”

  Then he dismissed all charges against Hooch Palmer, alias Ulysses Brock. “But let this be a lesson to you, Mr. Palmer,” said Harrison in his best judicial voice. “Justice on the frontier is swift and sure. See to it you pay your debts. And avoid even the appearance of evil.”

  “Sure enough,” said Hooch cheerfully. Harrison had rolled him over good, but everything had worked out fine. Oh, the 220 dollars bothered him, and so did the two days in jail, but Harrison didn’t mean for Hooch to suffer much. Because what Jackson didn’t know, and no one else saw fit to mention, was that Hooch Palmer happened to have the contract as sutler for the U.S. Army in Wobbish Territory. All those documents that proved he hadn’t sold the likker to the Reds really showed that he sold the likker to himself—and at a profit, too. Now Jackson would head on home and Hooch would settle down in the sutler’s store, selling likker to the Reds at extortionate prices, splitting the profits with Governor Bill and watching the Reds die like flies. Harrison had played his little joke on Hooch, right enough, but he’d played an even bigger one on old Hickory.

  Hooch made sure to be at the wharf when they ferried Jackson back across the Hio. Jackson had brought along two big old mountain boys with rifles, no less. Hooch took note that one of them looked to be half Red himself, probably a Cherriky half-breed—there was lots of that kind of thing in Appalachee, White men actually marrying squaws like as if they was real women. And both those rifles had “Eli Whitney” stamped on the barrel, which meant they was made in the state of Irrakwa, where this Whitney fellow set up shop making guns so fast he made the price drop; and the story was that all his workmen was women, Irrakwa squaws, if you can believe it. Jackson could talk all he wanted about pushing the Reds west of the Mizzipy, but it was already too late. Ben Franklin did it, by letting the Irrakwa have their own state up north, and Tom Jefferson made it worse by letting the Cherriky be full voting citizens in Appalachee when they fought their revolution against the King. Treat them Reds like citizens and they start to figure they got the same rights as a White man. There was no way to have an orderly society if that sort of thing caught on. Why, next thing you know them Blacks’d start trying to get out of being slaves, and first thing you know you’d sit down at the bar in a saloon and you’d look to your left and there’d be a Red, and you’d look to your right and there’d be a Black, and that was just plain against nature.

  There went Jackson, thinking he was going to save the White man from the Red, when he was traveling with a half-breed and toting Red-made rifles. Worst of all, Jackson had eleven gold coins in his saddle pouch, coins that properly belonged to Hooch Palmer. It made Hooch so mad he couldn’t think straight.

  So Hooch hotted up that saddle pouch, right where the metal pin held it onto the saddle. He could feel it from here, the leather charring, turning ash-black and stiff around that pin. Pretty soon, as the horse walked along, that bag would drop right off. But since they was likely to notice it, Hooch figured he wouldn’t stop with the pouch. He hotted up a whole lot of other places on that saddle, and on the other men’s saddles, too. When they reached the other shore they mounted up and rode off, but Hooch knew they’d be riding bareback before they got back to Nashville. He most sincerely hoped that Jackson’s saddle would break in such a way and at such a time that old Hickory would land on his butt or maybe even break his arm. Just thinking about the prospect made Hooch pretty cheerful. Every now and then it was kind of fun to be a spark. Take some pompous holy-faced lawyer down a peg.

  Truth is, an honest man like Andrew Jackson just wasn’t no match for a couple of scoundrels like Bill Harrison and Hooch Palmer. It was just a crying shame that the army didn’t give no medals to soldiers who likkered their enemies to death instead of shooting them. Cause if they did, Harrison and Palmer would both be heroes, Hooch knew that for sure.

  As it was, Hooch reckoned Harrison would find a way to make himself a hero out of all this anyway, while Hooch would end up with nothing but money. Well, that’s how it goes, thought Hooch. Some people get the fame, and some people get the money. But I don’t mind, as long as I’m not one of the people who end up with nothing at all. I sure never want to be one of them. And if I am, they’re sure going to be sorry.

  2

  Ta-Kumsaw

  While Hooch was watching Jackson cross the river, Ta-Kumsaw watched the White whisky trader and knew what he did. So did any other Red man who cared to watch—sober Red man, anyway. White man does a lot of things Red man don’t understand, but when he fiddle with fire, water, earth, and air, he can’t hide it from a Red man.

  Ta-Kumsaw didn’t see the saddle leather burn on Jackson’s horse. He didn’t feel the heat. What he saw was like a stirring, a tiny whirlwind, sucking his attention out across the water. A twisting in the smoothness of the land. Most Red men couldn’t feel such things as keen as Ta-Kumsaw. Ta-Kumsaw’s little brother, Lolla-Wossiky, was the only one Ta-Kumsaw ever knew who felt it more. Very much more. He knew all those whirlpools, those eddies in the stream. Ta-Kumsaw remembered their father, Pucky-Shinwa, he spoke of Lolla-Wossiky, that he would be shaman, and Ta-Kumsaw would be war-leader.

  That was before Lying-Mouth Harrison shot Pucky-Shinwa right before Lolla-Wossiky’s eyes. Ta-Kumsaw was off hunting that day, four-hands walk to the north, but he felt the murder like a gun fired right behind him. When a White man laid a hex or a curse or cast a doodlebug, it felt to Ta-Kumsaw like an itch under his skin, but when a White man killed, it was like a knife stabbing.

  He was with another brother, Methowa-Tasky, and he called to him. “Did you feel it?”

  Methowa-Tasky’s eyes went wide. He had not. But even then, even at that age—not yet thirteen—Ta-Kumsaw had no doubt of himself. He felt it. It was true. A murder had been done, and he must go to the dying man.

  He led the way, running through the forest. Like all Red men in the old days, his harmony with the woodland was complete. He did not have to think about where
he placed his feet; he knew that the twigs under his feet would soften and bend, the leaves would moisten and not rustle, the branches he brushed aside would go back quick to their right place and leave no sign he passed. Some White men prided themselves that they could move as quiet as a Red, and in truth some of them could—but they did it by moving slow, careful, watching the ground, stepping around bushes. They never knew how little thought a Red man took for making no sound, for leaving no trace.

  What Ta-Kumsaw thought of was not his steps, not himself at all. It was the green life of the woodland all around him, and in the heart of it, before his face, the black whirlpool sucking him downward, stronger, faster, toward the place where the living green was torn open like a wound to let a murder through. Long before they got there, even Methowa-Tasky could feel it. There on the ground lies their father, a bullet through his face. And by him, silent and unseeing, stands Lolla-Wossiky, ten years old.

  Ta-Kumsaw carried his father’s body home across his shoulders, like a deer. Methowa-Tasky led Lolla-Wossiky by the hand, for otherwise the boy would not move. Mother greeted them with great wails of grief, for she also felt the death, but did not know it was her own husband until her sons brought him back. Mother tied her husband’s corpse to Ta-Kumsaw’s back; then Ta-Kumsaw climbed the tallest tree, untied his father’s corpse from his back, and bound it to the highest branch he could reach.