Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One: On Lookout Mountain
Chapter Two: A Society of Men
Chapter Three: Separation
Chapter Four: East and West
Chapter Five: Rome, London, Tokyo
Chapter Six: Reacquaintance
Chapter Seven: Celebrity
Chapter Eight: Scouts of the Plains
Chapter Nine: Reunions
Chapter Ten: The New American Way
Chapter Eleven: A Perfect Stranger
Chapter Twelve: Last Days
About the Author
Also by John Boyne
Copyright
John Boyne was born in Ireland in 1971. He is the author of nine novels for adults and four for younger readers, including the international bestsellers The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which has sold more than six million copies worldwide, The Absolutist and, most recently, Stay Where You Are and Then Leave. His novels are published in over forty-five languages. He is married and lives in Dublin.
www.johnboyne.com
@john_boyne
William Cody grows up surrounded by his father’s tales of Buffalo Bill, to whom he is distantly related, and his fantasies of the Wild West.
Though he escapes his heritage by fleeing abroad and starting a new life for himself, he finds that he is always drawn back to England and to his ancestry.
When his father proposes that together they should recreate Buffalo Bill’s stage show, ‘The Congress of Rough Riders of the World’ for a contemporary audience, William refuses to have any part of it. When tragedy strikes, however, it is to his father that he must eventually return.
My great-grandfather is buried on Lookout Mountain, his grave overlooking the Great Plains and the Rockies, far from the Cedar Mountain, Wyoming, resting place that he had requested before he died. This grave, chosen for him by family when he no longer had a say in it, is near Denver, Colorado, where I lived for a year, where I worked, where my son was born and where my wife was murdered.
Standing there, with the white-topped peaks in the distance forming part of the great spinal column that connects the forests of western Canada to the dry-aired flatlands of New Mexico, the senses are struck by the spicy scent of pine needles in the air while the quick breeze encourages brisk movement. The wildlife – the bison, the elk, the great bears – drift from hilltop to plateau, glancing warily at visitors. There is no restlessness here, just slow movement and ongoing life. This is a separate place and although it was not my great-grandfather’s desired grave, I feel sure that he would have been able to approve of it.
My father, Isaac – who, like me, was named for his great-grandfather – never visited Lookout Mountain, never in fact set foot outside England during his lifetime, but he always spoke of it with authority, the same authority which he lent to his study of the life of the grave’s occupant, who died in 1917, the year before Isaac’s birth. My most recent visit to the grave was my third. My first came a few weeks after arriving in Denver in 1998 and then again about a year later. Isaac assumed that I would be here more often – he refused to believe that my wife and I would come to Denver for any other reason than to be closer to Lookout Mountain and it remains much more his place than mine. I could never equal his passion for our family history, his need to have an illustrious past, a celebrated ancestor. He was a storyteller with just one story to tell, but that story was the story of a lifetime. I was interested, I was certainly intrigued, but Lookout Mountain has never been my haven. In fact, it’s represented something which has caused me only pain. My most recent visit came about because Isaac had died and there was something that I needed to do there.
I’m a child of the 1970s, born on the first day of the decade, when Isaac was fifty-two and a first-time father. He met and married my mother when he was fifty. From time to time he would tell me stories about his childhood, his youth, but he gave very little away, his own life and history being of little interest to him. In fact, I never really got to know where he had come from or what his own childhood was like. Instead, the stories he told were about his grandfather and he gave me his name, William, which I kept in its full form, unlike my ancestor who opted for the diminutive Bill. I was probably six or seven before I realised that my father was the same age as most of my schoolfriends’ grandparents. It confused me a little, and scared them, but I didn’t ask many questions. I barely knew my mother. She left home when I was four years old, divorcing my father and marrying a doctor before emigrating to Canada, where she still lives. We rarely speak.
It’s hard to know whose story this is. It’s partly mine and it’s partly Bill’s, but in the centre comes Isaac, telling me all he knew about his grandfather and making me who I am at the same time. Three generations of men, separated by long periods of time and place, in some ways none of us really related to the others at all. I spent my life running away from Isaac but now that he’s dead, I find myself keeping his memory alive more and more through the stories.
Isaac’s prized possession was mounted on the wall of our living room and I knew better than to take it down without permission. It was a Smith & Wesson handgun, manufactured in Kansas in 1842 and given to Bill by his own father as a reward for saving his life when he was a child of nine. An American, Bill’s father had been taken as an Abolitionist by some Pro-Slavery men after he gave a speech near the Salt Creek trading post in Missouri where he refused to endorse the admittance of slavery into the new state of Kansas. Having been part of the original settlement of Iowa when it was brought into the union, Bill’s father had been entrusted with leading the settlement of the region. As such, his was a voice which was given credence by the local population. When he spoke, his words carried almost the weight of government, a future government, and his policies and ideals could settle plans for the manner in which the new state would be run. He was invited to speak on that day by the men of Missouri who believed, wrongly, that he would endorse their plans for the ratification of slavery. When he did not, and when he spoke vehemently against such a policy, he was stabbed by a local man and although the wound was not fatal, from that moment on his life was under threat.
‘Is it loaded?’ I asked Isaac, time and time again throughout my childhood, staring at the carved wooden handle and rust-tinged metal. ‘Could it kill someone?’
‘It might be,’ he replied, always refusing to let me know one way or the other. ‘The thing about that gun is that it’s so old and it’s seen so much gunpowder run through its chamber over the course of its life that it’s likely to explode in the hands of anyone who takes it down and tries to mess with it without permission. Be warned now.’ This was his way of ensuring that I did not touch the gun. ‘I’m trusting you now, William,’ he said, pointing towards it but staring at me fiercely, fierce enough to make me know that there would be few things he would ever say to me in his lifetime that would carry such a weight of responsibility. ‘You’re never to take that gun down, do you hear me? Never without asking me first.’
I nodded. I heard him all right. But I was a child at the time and I didn’t necessarily listen.
Bill’s story, as Isaac tells it, began in an Iowa log cabin in 1846. He was probably one of the first children to be born in the newly settled state but his childhood on those flat plains ended after only five years when the barren land was swapped for the Mississippi River as the growing family moved to LeClair. When I think of his days growing up along those banks – a Mark Twain childhood – it fills me with envy, so far removed is it from my own London upbringing. Only two generations separate us, but Bill’s and my life are so different and I can no more understand his life in the nineteenth-century American mid-west then than he could have predicted mine now. And yet I do, I think of it often, I write of it now, for as separated as we are, he is part of my chain and my ancestry, part of my links to a time and place which no longer exist. The west. The settling of the Americas. The basics of Isaac’s stories are all my father and I had to connect us and that’s where they were set, almost every one.
Although he had enjoyed little formal schooling himself, Isaac was a keen educator when it came to his only child and tolerated no truancy on my part. Playing the role of both father and mother he got me ready for school in the mornings, prepared my lunch and dinners, and sat with me in the evenings to help me with my homework. To be allowed a sick day from school I practically had to be admitted to hospital. I was a solid student and did well; there was no alternative offered to me. When I went to bed at night, Isaac’s day also ended for his life was empty without me and so, to fill those hours before sleep, he drank whisky.
It’s easy to see why he wanted me to make something of my life and to excel at everything to which I put my mind. For he had led a carefree existence as a child, unmonitored by his father Sam, and left school when he was only fourteen, a reasonable age to begin the career at which he was to prove quite successful for a time. That of petty criminal.
Isaac was a small man, in stature if not in personality, and even in his late twenties he could have easily passed for a teenager. He used his lack of size to assist himself in his career as a burglar and a thief. He was good at it too, it has to be said, managing to make quite a living at his chosen profession until, inevitably, a series of misdemeanours saw him jailed for four years, a period which counted for almost half his thirties, after which he never again laid hands on anything which did not belong to him. Whatever took place when he was inside, he turned his back on his past when he was released and worked in a variety of jobs – labourer, taxi driver, builder – until he met my mother and settled down with a small painting and decorating business which paid little but sufficient to support comfortably enough the three of us, soon to be the two of us.
I think my father wanted a son who would do the things that he had never done. He gave me opportunities but watched over me at the same time and never allowed me to squander the chances which came my way. He felt he had done nothing of substance with his life, unlike his idolised grandfather, and wanted me to be more like the older man than like him.
Bill, on the other hand, received scant education and expected less. His brief studies were prematurely ended when he was nine years old after an incident which led to his sudden exile from Mississippi and near imprisonment. He was bullied at school by an older boy, Stephen Gobel, who was his rival for the affections of one Miss Mary Hyatt. A long-simmering feud erupted into a fight, during which Bill drew a small dagger from his pocket and stabbed Master Gobel in the thigh. The sudden appearance of so much blood, not to mention the squealing of the injured boy like a stuck pig, led Bill to flee the school and join a freight train headed for Fort Kearney, where he spent the summer herding cattle, a far cry from the regular summer activities of the nine-year-olds of my generation.
Like Bill, I too became a steady brawler during my early years in school. Streamlined and cosseted at home, I sought my opportunities at school to prove myself and to assert my individuality. I made the early mistake of talking about Bill’s life and adventures before realising how disbelieving my peers would be and paid for it for some time before I decided that the slightest slur against my alleged ancestry would call for severe action on my part. Unlike Isaac, I was not a small child and was capable of sizing up to anyone in the schoolyard with only a modicum of fear. I never betrayed it though and made sure to get my blows in first, proving my seriousness in a fight almost before it had even begun. Often my adversaries would be surprised by my attitude and back off; at other times they would prove equal to the challenge and beat me senseless. Either way, it infuriated Isaac.
‘It doesn’t matter who wins or loses,’ he said when I came home one afternoon, a little bruised perhaps, a streak of dried blood slashed roughly across my cheek, but nonetheless the victor in my latest playground clash. ‘You don’t go to school to treat the place like a boxing ring.’
‘But they were making fun of—’
‘It doesn’t matter what they were doing, William, that’s not why I send you there,’ he shouted. ‘Look at you. Look at that cut over your eye.’
‘But I won,’ I protested, expecting him at least to be impressed by the fact that if I was going to involve myself in fighting then I could come out on top.
‘Worse still,’ he said however, causing me no end of confusion and self-pity. ‘I’d rather see you lose. At least then I’d know how badly the fight ended and feel that you might have learned some lessons from it. What does the other boy look like anyway?’
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure how to phrase it. ‘He’ll be all right,’ I muttered, shuffling my feet on the ground and refusing to return his gaze as I recalled the sight of a split-lipped boy sniffling and limping his way back home, one eye beginning to seal in upon itself, throwing curses at me in defeat, threatening what he would do to me the next time that he caught up with me. ‘He’ll live.’
‘You’re a disgrace to yourself,’ he told me. ‘Picking on a bunch of kids.’
‘But I’m a kid!’
‘That’s no excuse. When your great-grandfather was a boy, do you think he went around causing fights for no reason? Do you think that’s how he went on to achieve so much?’
‘Probably,’ I said, refusing to be beaten in any argument, physical or verbal. ‘He wasn’t exactly famed for his pacifism, was he?’
Isaac squinted at me and held back. I could see him working this through in his mind, wondering where I had learned words like pacifism and attitudes like sarcasm at the same time. That was the start of it, he must have realised. The point where I was growing up and could slip away from him if he was not careful.
‘Don’t let me down now, William,’ he said eventually in a quiet voice. ‘There’s a lot expected of you. A lot to live up to. I gave you your name for a reason.’
Sometimes, for no reason other than the fact that I could, I hated and resented my great-grandfather in equal parts.
The first winter that Bill spent in Kansas was a preparatory one. The Enabling Act was before Congress, awaiting ratification, and when it was finally passed it allowed settlers to stake claims on the land, to settle down and earn a living through the farms. The family had moved there some time in advance of the decision, anticipating the bill’s approval, and were able to claim a portion of the land, where they built their home and started their working of the soil. They planted crops and reared livestock. Another child was born. Bill became familiar at an early age with the tribes who had lived there before the settlers arrived and learned to speak some of the Kickapoo language which dominated the area. He became fluent quite easily and this helped him become friends with the Indian children who lived nearby.
His friendship with the tribes who would ultimately be driven off their land by the American settlers led to his early initiation into the Mide religion, with which he was enamoured for a brief time during childhood. Traditionally, belonging to the Mide involved initiation through the learning of stories about the Kickapoo past, their slow drift westwards across the continent, and their belief in the value of herbal medicines to counter any illness and mark any significant event in a man’s life. They were a peaceful people, given to ritual and tradition, and although they must have been wary of the arrival of the white men, they were at first treated well, and as neighbours, unlike many of the other tribes of the Northern American continent at that time, and the two cultures settled into a peaceful cohabitation.
Famously, the family arranged an enormous barbecue on their new land to cement a friendship with the Kickapoo people. The barbecue lasted for two days and several hundred Indians were fed the slaughtered animals which formed part of their farm. Bill’s mother introduced them to coffee, which they had never tasted before; the gradual replacement of one culture with another had begun, masked as kindness, and was being replicated across the new United States.
For the first time Bill had begun a friendship with an Indian boy, whose name was not passed down to us, and some of the skills of the native culture were shared. They spent long afternoons shooting birds from the sky with bows and arrows, no doubt missing more than they ever managed to kill, but it was an education and a beginning into learning the ways of the Indian which would benefit Bill as his career developed.
My knowledge of other cultures, in comparison, was limited to those few students in my class who were black, or Pakistani, perhaps the odd European exchange student. Each was treated with varying degrees of suspicion and each, in general, kept with those who they knew best. Unlike my great-grandfather’s early days in Kansas there were not many attempts made in my south London comprehensive to integrate our English culture with that of the immigrant or the foreigner. Fights would break out in the schoolyard based on the simple existence of difference between us, a difference we could not define but which in some strange way threatened us. As a boy, I tried not to involve myself in these confrontations, confused as I was by the differences between right and wrong. Isaac’s ongoing stories of my great-grandfather’s life and times, both within and without the native people of the west, had created a feeling of ambivalence within me towards other cultures. I knew that Bill had begun his life as a friend of the Indian, but I also knew that he had eventually taken up arms against them in order to fulfil the role which he had created for himself as an archetypal hero, and then he had finally exploited them in his later life by helping to create the kinds of myths which, when properly continued, transpose themselves into history and become the very things which are ultimately taught as fact.
Isaac, on the other hand, would never question either Bill’s motives or his integrity, believing that his grandfather’s subtly changing attitudes over the course of his seventy years reflected not an alteration in his own point of view for mercenary or personal reasons, but rather a change in the behaviour and attitudes of the Indian tribes themselves. Of course, this was based entirely on his belief in his grandfather, his utter and unswerving pride in that man’s achievements and life, and the vicarious manner by which he sought to add splendour and mystique to his own at times unfulfilling existence. Having said that, the integrity of which I speak is one which was matched by my father’s own life and value system. He may have tried to dominate both our lives with his overpowering sense of personal history and he may have ultimately paid a high personal price for that perseverance, but by God he believed in it and I’m not sure I’ve ever found anything to place my faith in quite so strongly as Isaac placed his faith in the continuing momentum of his ancestry.
To the Smith & Wesson gun and the manner in which Bill saved his father’s life, some more of Isaac’s stories can relate. A plot was hatched by the Pro-Slavery men to murder Bill’s father for his voice was becoming too strong in the state to be ignored. He was forced into exile from his home but it was rumoured that he himself was plotting to create a constitution for Kansas which would outlaw, if not the existence of slavery, then at least its promotion and expansion, a small step perhaps but part of a greater eventual plan.
Bill’s mother learned that a group of men had discovered her husband’s whereabouts and were riding out to murder him and she instantly despatched the child Bill on his pony to Grasshopper Falls, where his father was in hiding. A long ride ensued and, incredibly, in the middle of the night Bill came across these men as they rested and planned the attack they would make when they caught up with their prey.
‘Hold there,’ called the roughest of the three, an overweight and hirsute farmer whose horse no doubt bore a sorry weight. The man had seen the nine-year-old boy passing in their direction but had been unable to make him out in the distance. ‘What’s your business there, boy?’
Bill slowed down his pony and cautiously continued at a trot, forcing himself to pull the animal up calmly when he reached the men, immediately afraid that they would understand his purpose. ‘Going home, sir,’ said Bill quietly, pulling his peaked hat further down his youthful forehead, the long strands of straw-coloured hair flicking out beneath it in wisps.
‘And where’s your home then?’ asked another man, the thinner one, the one whose complexion made it clear that he felt more at home in a saloon with a bottle of whisky in front of him than he did sitting around a campfire in the dead of night with a couple of hired killers by his side and a task of murder lying ahead before his breakfast.
‘Not far now,’ replied Bill. ‘Another mile or two.’
‘You know what’s a mile or two from here?’ he asked suspiciously, looking into the distance as if he could see that very length from his standing point. ‘Nothing but what you see around you now, that’s what. This is just plains land. It’s six miles easy to the next town.’ The next town being the very one where Bill’s father was no doubt preparing for a night’s sleep, even as his son rode towards him. ‘You’re not lost, are you?’
‘No sir,’ continued Bill. ‘I’ll get there. I know where I’m—’
The small fire which the men had built to warm their evening chose that moment to spit out a hunk of red hot wood with a noisy crack and Bill’s pony, taken by surprise, reared up in surprise. ‘Calm down,’ he muttered in the nag’s ear. ‘Take it easy now, boy.’ Something in his attitude must have caused the men to become suspicious, for one reached over now to take the lead of the pony, causing the animal to take a cautious step backwards.
‘Why don’t you get down from that horse now,’ said the man, looking up at Bill and squinting in the darkness in order to get a better perspective on the boy’s face.
‘I think I ought to keep going till I—’
‘Get off the horse,’ he repeated sharply. ‘You’ve got too far to go tonight on your own. You can’t be headed home, that’s for certain sure.’
‘I know where I’m going,’ repeated Bill, ready to pull on the reins and dig his spurs into the unfortunate beast’s side if necessary, in order to continue them on their way. A full moon travelled slowly across the night sky and its progress lent a sudden brightness on to their night scene, causing the thin man to exclaim suddenly.
‘Here, Meadows,’ he said, pulling on the fat man’s sleeves as he squinted in the direction of their new arrival, attempting to make out the features of the face which still lay somewhat hidden beneath the cloth hat that his mother had forced him to wear before leaving. ‘You know what I think? I think this is the son of that black Abolitionist we’re chasing after. That’s it, ain’t it boy? That’s who you are, say it is.’
‘You’re wrong,’ said Bill firmly, his inexperience and youth betraying him for once. ‘I’m not his son.’
‘Whose son then?’ asked the thin man, coming towards him now and reaching up to pull him down. ‘Get down here anyway, boy, that we can take a good look at you.’
Sensible to danger, he had to make a quick decision. If he alighted from the horse he could be left stranded there, miles from either home or destination, while the killers rode on to complete their work. He could even find his own throat cut within a minute or two. He blinked, he looked from the face of one man to the other, and deciding that it was better to be foolhardy than trusting, he dug his ankles deep into the sides of the pony beneath him, pulling on the reins so hard that as the beast turned away from the men they were forced to jump back in fright. Meadows missed a step as he did so and fell back towards the fire, where he landed for a moment before scrambling back to his feet in fright, the confusion of the moment causing neither of them to notice as the boy rode off into the darkness.
‘I’m on fire!’ shouted Meadows, the white cotton material of his left sleeve suddenly darkening beneath a moving stream of flame. ‘Put me out, I’m on fire!’ he roared again, dancing on the spot before his companion pushed him to the dirt and rolled him over once quickly, smothering the flames immediately.
‘He’s escaping,’ shouted the thin man. ‘Get after him.’ They ran to their horses and untied them, ignoring the neighing protests of their tired charges and within moments were racing along the plains, following my great-grandfather, who was to prove too fast for them with his lighter weight, arriving in Grasshopper Falls a full thirty minutes before the intended killers. Just as the sun broke through the sight-lines on the corner of the town and before it had finished its ascent and announced the day, my two ancestors had fled and survived their certain murder.
‘That was when he got his reward,’ Isaac told me. ‘There were no phones or messengers in those days. From the minute your great-grandfather was sent away on his horse with the warning, his mother had no idea whether either her husband or son were still alive.’
‘Did they go home?’ I asked, a boy of Bill’s age myself then, nestling against the pillows and my father as I drifted off to sleep. Around me the light threw shadows on the western memorabilia with which Isaac had decorated my room. The contradictions of both a confederate and a union flag, posters of cowboys riding across prairies, on my desk a model of Fort Laramie, where a treaty was once signed between the leaders of the Cheyenne and Comanche people and the government, moving the natives from the Great Plains and into Western Oklahoma in exchange for food, supplies and the possibility of a limited education.
‘Eventually, Bill did,’ he said. ‘Got home and he was the hero of the hour. When the whole family were reunited, his father gave him that gun, which until then he’d been wearing on his own holster, as a reward.’
‘I bet he let him use it too,’ I muttered in protest at my father’s insistence that I leave it alone. ‘I bet he didn’t just hang it on a wall for show.’ Isaac ignored the barb.
‘Those times were different,’ was all he said. ‘Stay there for a minute though.’ He left the room and I glanced at the clock. Almost eleven p.m. I was falling asleep but didn’t want to give in until he returned. This was the part of these stories that I enjoyed the most, the reason I always stayed awake to their end. This was the punch line, the reward which was mine for allowing Isaac to tell his history.
He returned in a few minutes and I saw his dark figure standing in the doorway, the light from the hall throwing his body into darkness for a moment before he came inside, a small, ageing man with a large gun by his side, a gun twice the size of his own hands, a gun that you could see even he had difficulty holding, let alone a nine-year-old child like his grandfather had been at the time. As he leaned over me, I caught a sudden wave of whisky breath and marvelled at how he could manage a swift drink in so short a time between leaving my room, collecting the gun and returning to me.
‘There you go,’ he said, sitting down on the bed beside me and massaging the gun fondly, the prized possession that it was, second only in his life to me. For while I was never allowed to touch the gun on my own, or take it down from the wall, he was permitted to finish his stories with some style, displaying for me at their conclusions the rewards which were given to boys who put their own lives at risk to save their fathers. ‘Take a look at the side,’ he said, flicking on the bedside lamp beside me and I blinked with the sudden brightness before peering down at the tight inscription which I had read there a hundred times before. My father’s own name: Isaac Cody.
‘My great-grandfather’s name, given to me,’ he said, he always said. ‘Just like you’re named for yours, William.’
I thought about it. For once I had a question to ask. ‘But why am I William?’ I asked, looking up at him now, my brow furrowed in that little-boy look of confusion. ‘Why can’t I be Bill too?’
He laughed. ‘Now that would be a blasphemy, my boy,’ he said, shaking his head as if the very idea was impossible. ‘It’s one thing to name you in the man’s honour. Another thing entirely to be using that same name on a daily basis. Bill Cody?’ he asked, thinking about it for a moment before dismissing the whole idea as impossible. ‘There’ll only ever be one Bill Cody and he’s dead and buried now. That’s a name you’d have to earn. For now you can stay a William.’
‘But Buffalo William doesn’t sound as good,’ I protested weakly.
‘Your great-grandfather’s name is his own name,’ he said firmly, switching off the lamp and walking slowly towards the door. ‘And he spent a lifetime building it. You let him have it and you make your own name. That’s what life is all about.’ He paused for a moment and stared at me as I pulled the blankets up to my shoulders and rolled over on to my side, exhausted now, ready to close my eyes. ‘Tomorrow night I’ll tell you another story,’ he said, closing the door behind him and leaving me to darkness and sleep. And I knew this was true, because in Isaac’s world there was always another story to tell.
Bill was only thirteen years old when he first joined a freight trail. Already though, he was hardly a child, having killed his first man – an Indian – earlier that summer, a murder which had lent the boy a certain amount of notoriety which he was known to have both enjoyed and encouraged. It’s hardly surprising that he became the showman that he did in later years, considering his earlier inclinations towards publicity and attention. Even faced with a murdered man bleeding at his feet he could see only newspaper headlines and dollar signs.
A freight trail consisted of twenty-five wagons, each of which steered about seven thousand pounds of oxen across the frontiers. Bill was the lowest of the low on these trails, a hired hand, a teamster, but he wore his official title – that of ‘bullwhacker’ – with pride. There was no private time and precious little sleep but the bullwhackers cared little for such indolent pleasures, content instead to value the freedom of the open plains and the constant potential for danger. They were a youthful bunch and it was not unusual to have a hardworking and eager child among their number.
Bill’s first experience of the problems which the freight trails could encounter, however, took place in the summer of 1859, when he joined the crew of a wagon trail destined for the plains near Salt Lake City, where the armies of General Albert Johnston were preparing for an offensive against the Mormons. The practice of polygamy was one which the government of the new United States was firmly opposed to and as the nation spread further west, expanding the reaches of its executive branch into new territories, it became vital that her people followed one law of a unified land. The Mormons had already been driven from both Missouri and Illinois but had finally established a home and settlement in Salt Lake City. Despite the aggressive tendencies of the government, this time they were not going to give up their homes or way of life without a fight.
Bill was stationed at Fort Leavenworth and had made, two friends in Albert Rogers and David Yountam, boys slightly older than he was but who envied him the brief celebrity which he had enjoyed after killing the Indian. Their duties at the fort were varied and ill-defined; for themselves, they were simply happy to be part of a society of men who could be called upon at any time to undertake an exercise of danger. They had been at the fort longer than Bill and upon his arrival had been torn between their liking for him and their natural inclination to bully a younger boy; almost despite themselves a friendship had formed. Rogers was a Missourian who had not seen his home since the age of seven; now, at fourteen, he was preparing to sign up as a bullwhacker once the next trail was announced. Yountam was a year older again but had lost his left arm when he was thirteen after an unsuccessful argument with a buffalo which had seen the limb ripped off at the elbow. To prevent a potentially fatal spread of disease around his body, the local doctor had simply carved off the ravaged appendage at the shoulder, eventually sealing the hole with fire, an action which had left a misshapen memory at the boy’s side, devoid of nerve endings, insouciant to pain. It was Yountam who first broached the idea of their joining the trail towards the camp of General Johnston.
‘When does it start?’ asked Bill as they lay in their bunks in a small, white-sheeted tent just inside the limits of the fort, where non-commissioned lads such as they made their home while waiting for chance or opportunity to come their way.
‘Not soon enough for me,’ replied Yountam, scrambling up in bed to look at his two friends; any glimmer of escape from the monotonous, dreary lifestyle of Leavenworth was enough to fill him with excitement, so bored was he with his daily tasks of shining officers’ boots and cleaning up after the horses. ‘They say that General Johnston is planning an attack on the Mormons late this summer but that supplies have to be brought in so that when they are routed, the army will be able to settle the land. Otherwise the Mormons will just wait for them to leave and go back again.’
‘I don’t know why they’re bothering,’ muttered Albert Rogers, a louche lad who questioned all authority just as much as he desired to be a part of it. He had a reputation for insubordination but could think of no life outside the army which would suit him as well. ‘What harm have these Mormons done anyway that’s so wrong, can you tell me that?’ He didn’t look at the two boys as he asked his question, merely lay back in his cot, one arm slung across his eyes, blocking out the light from the candle which Bill had lit earlier.
‘They’re Mormons!’ replied Yountam immediately. ‘Ain’t that enough?’
‘Enough for what? Just ’cause you give them a name, that’s enough to say they should be driven away from wherever they choose to live? That’s a reason, is it?’
Bill sat back and looked from one boy to the other cautiously. Ethical debates were frequent between these two, who had known each other for three years before Bill’s own arrival into their lives. He was often torn between feelings of frustration with them – for they argued constantly and over the most ridiculous things – and a sense of hero worship which he found difficult to contain. They had assumed the roles of older brothers to the thirteen-year-old boy and as none of them had any family nearby, their relationships were close. Bill was still new to this centre of military activity; he was a child capable of losing himself in his desire to be part of this dream world. And yet for him, the friendship between Rogers and Yountam seemed not one based on actual affection, but rather on their familiarity. Yountam searched continually for adventure, never questioned anything he was told to do, and wanted nothing more than to be given a direction in which to travel and a hot meal when he got there. Rogers, for all his commitment to remaining part of the daily life of Leavenworth, appeared to see it as little more than a place to eat and sleep. His belief system questioned everything and on more than one occasion, Bill feared that the conversations between his two friends would end in a fight, even bloodshed.
‘Mormons go against our way of life,’ proposed Yountam, a comment which made Rogers merely snort.
‘Way of life,’ he muttered disparagingly, spitting out the words like rotten food. ‘What’s that then, Davy? Sleeping on a cot in the middle of a field with a quarter loaf of bread inside us, that’s a way of life is it? One to be defended and preserved at all costs? God save us if it is.’
‘You know what they do,’ insisted Yountam. ‘All them wives they have. Ain’t natural for a man to have so many.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rogers after a pause, sitting up now and looking at his two companions with a dry smile on his face. ‘I wouldn’t object to a bunch of women running around after me, ready to satisfy my every need and desire. How about you, Billy? Would you say no to a little bit of pampering?’ He looked across at his friend and gave him a large, conspiratorial wink. Bill, thinking of his own growing interest in some of the officers’ daughters who passed him by every day without so much as a smile or a nod, sat back nervously and looked away, pleased that the candlelight spared him revealing his blushes. ‘Of course, maybe that’s not what you’re after though, Davy,’ he added sarcastically, spoiling for a fight. ‘Maybe that’s not the kind of thing you go for at all.’
‘Don’t matter what you think, Albert,’ continued Yountam, unwilling to allow his friend’s cynicism to alter his plans and ignoring the digs that were coming his way. ‘I don’t hear them generals coming over here to ask your advice on who we should and shouldn’t be fighting. That’s what they say is going to happen and that’s what we ought to be a part of. You don’t want to stay in this tent rotting away for the rest of the year, do you?’
‘No!’ cried Bill loudly, wrapped up in his friend’s enthusiasm, his exclamation coming out so loud and suddenly and with an unexpected falsetto crack in his voice that the other two could not help but laugh.
‘There you are then,’ said Rogers, lying back again, his hand reaching down with neither self-consciousness nor embarrassment to stroke himself beneath the ragged sheet which lay above him, unwashed for three years now. ‘You’ve got a convert there, Davy. Another one on the trail against those diabolical Mormons, may they burn in hell. What a friend he has in Jesus. So when do you start off on the crusades?’ he added sarcastically.
‘We have to get permission to be part of it,’ said Yountam. ‘It’s not going to be easy to get in. One of us is going to have to petition Lew Simpson. He’s got to approve it.’ Simpson had been appointed the commander of the trail and was one of the oldest hands at cross-country bullwhacking, not to mention a fearless, celebrated character in his own right. We have to make our case to him and make it convincing too. They’re not looking for many boys of our age and there’s a fair number wanting to be a part of it.’ He looked across at Bill, who stared back at him blankly. ‘What do you say, Billy Boy?’ he asked. ‘Are you up for it?’
‘Me?’ cried Bill in alarm. ‘Why do I have to ask him? Why can’t you? It’s your idea.’ Secretly, he was afraid of Simpson, a figure of true authority in the fort who inspired fear in all those boys who had yet to encounter real adventure. His legend made him the stuff of both envy and nightmares, while his enormous girth intimidated all.
‘Take a look at me,’ said Yountam quietly. ‘A one-armed boy isn’t going to be the best advertisement for our cause, now is he? And if he takes against me, then he’s likely to take against both of you as well.’
What makes you think I want to go anyway?’ asked Albert Rogers, pausing in his activities for a moment to look across the tent.
‘Well you do, don’t you?’ replied Yountam. ‘You don’t want to be left behind here on your own, am I right?’ Rogers snorted and said nothing. Of course he wanted to go; it was simply his sense of calculated deliberation which refused to allow him to show any enthusiasm.
‘You can do whatever the hell you like,’ was all he said in a casual voice; neither Bill nor Yountam took his derision seriously. They knew he would never agree to being left behind.
‘Here’s the thing, Bill,’ continued Yountam, looking again at the youngest member of their trio. ‘You’ve got that Indian story to tell, right?’
‘I suppose,’ said Bill nervously. ‘Ain’t that good a story though,’ he added, playing it down in order to get out of this task, something he had never done before.
‘You just go to Simpson, tell him about it, make it sound real good, convince him that you’re about the most fearless fellow at Fort Leavenworth and that the trail would be crazy to leave without you and when he agrees you tell him that you’ve got two friends who are every bit as brave and strong as you are and we come as a team and before you know it we’ll all be on our way to the general’s camp. What do you say, Bill? Will you do it?’
My great-grandfather closed his eyes for a moment and thought about it. It was true that he was beginning to grow restless at Leavenworth. He looked at the cramped tent in which they sat, could feel the grumblings in his stomach from the lack of rations they were given, and knew that the time had come to move on. He didn’t really have any choice in the matter.
‘All right then,’ he said, resisting a sigh and forcing himself to sound decisive. ‘I’ll do it.’
Yountam sat back and smiled, satisfied with his persuasive abilities. In the corner, Rogers merely snorted and – spent from his activities – turned over and drifted off to sleep.
Isaac wanted to know whether I told people about my great-grandfather and the life that he had led. I wasn’t sure what to say; after all, I didn’t particularly want to hurt his feelings but the time never seemed right for me to tell my friends the stories that he told me.
‘Well no,’ I admitted. ‘Not often anyway. It doesn’t really come up.’
‘It doesn’t?’ he asked in amazement, looking at me as if it was vaguely crossing his mind to question whether I was actually his son or not. ‘Well why ever not, William? When I was your age I told all my friends. They thought it was the greatest thing ever. A man like that in the family? Doesn’t seem right just to—’
I shook my head, interrupting him. I’m sorry,’ I said quickly. ‘I just … I can never seem to find the right way to tell people about it. About him, I mean.’ This was a lie. I’d been hearing stories about my namesake and supposed ancestor Buffalo Bill Cody for as long as I could remember and as a very young child I felt exactly like Isaac’s friends had felt half a century earlier. I thought it was exciting and unusual and I felt proud that I knew tales of my heritage that other boys of my age could never equal. The adventures which my great-grandfather had undertaken, and at an age not so much older than I was then, fascinated me and made me wish that I could travel the world too, making a name for myself to rival his. And so I had in fact told several people about Bill, but these stories, this revelation, had not received the kind of impressed reaction which Isaac would have expected. Which he would have demanded.
I was seven years old when a group of friends began to form around me, the ones who would stay with me throughout my youth and early adulthood. We became close soon after we met, and before long we were inseparable, our friendship stemming from the simple fact that we sat together in the back row of our classroom. Of the three of us – Adam, Justin and I – Adam, the oldest, was the closest thing we had to a leader, someone we all looked up to and who determined one way or another how we spent our days. Justin was quieter and often seemed happy simply to have us as his friends; he was very open hearted and we knew we could rely on him for anything, while I was perhaps more lively and troublesome than either. We all, however, managed to find ourselves in the requisite number of scrapes and mischief that young boys should.
Their family lives were very different to mine. They each had a mother and father and between them a fair number of siblings, while my house consisted solely of Isaac and me. Also, the fact that Isaac was a good deal older than any of their parents made my domestic arrangements curious to them and as children they were, I think, slightly afraid to come to my house. With good reason, as things turned out.
Isaac was never the easiest man to cultivate as a friend. He rarely showed affection and his abrupt manner could be downright terrifying to strangers. Ever since my mother had left, he had grown to live his life increasingly and vicariously through me. He knew my homework and my schooldays better than I knew them myself. He made me account for every moment of my day and grew offended if he felt that I was keeping secrets from him. And, like any child who for the first time manages to cultivate a group of friends his own age, there were many secrets to keep, many small confidences which I had no desire to share with him. There were things that we did together – childish things, mischievous things – which Isaac had no place in, where he could have held no interest, but which nonetheless he felt excluded from and blamed me for.
He manifested the pain of such exclusion through long silences with me and general rudeness to my friends. When they came to our house, which was not often, he would stare at them suspiciously and hover outside whatever room we were in, always finding some excuse eventually to enter it, driving us to another place, a different part of the house, or one of theirs. He would lean over them and they would flinch if it was evening time as the rush of whisky breath could be quite overpowering.
The only thing which my friends liked about my house was the Smith & Wesson gun on the living-room wall. They stared at it with rapt attention whenever they were visiting, but Isaac saw to it that they were almost never left alone in the room with the gun, for as little as he trusted me with his prized possession, he trusted them less. Unlike his attitude to me, however, Isaac refused to tell them his stories, feeling that they were his to hand down to me and mine to deliver to the world, and yet he grew angry at my refusal to do so. He saw it as my betrayal of my heritage and of him.
It was in school that I finally decided to risk telling my classmates what Isaac had been telling me for years, I was about eight at the time and our teacher was asking each student in turn to tell a story about their grandparents. Most of the stories were normal enough, each depicting some pleasant, uncontroversial old person whose life seemed dominated by rocking chairs and allotments, rather than bullwhacking and settling huge areas of North America. When it came to my turn to speak, I decided to take a chance.
‘William,’ said my teacher, Miss Grace. ‘Your turn. Would you like to tell us about your grandparents?’
‘They’re dead, miss,’ I said with a shrug.
‘What, all of them?’ she asked irritably, as if they had died simply to provoke her.
‘All of them,’ I agreed. A few of my classmates turned to stare at me, squinting their eyes in despair. It was as if they thought I was just being deliberately awkward.