Praise for Sin Killer
“Irresistible . . . full of blood, blunder and myth.”
—The New York Times
“An adventure-filled, lighthearted farce . . . ”
—People
“McMurtry has set off this time with a huge cast—56 characters are listed by name—and a great promise to amuse and inform, and to slip in a few sly, telling insights about the roles of environment, justice, equality and compromise in nation-building. It is an excellent adventure, for sure, and a lot more.”
—Daily News (New York)
“Sin Killer offers a zany, episodic ride. With gusto and style and nonstop ingenuity, McMurtry moves his cast of characters and caricatures steadily upstream, past Nebraska and deep into a Dakota winter. It is a journey made of pratfalls, floggings, stabbings, bawdy seductions, gruesome deaths and daring rescues.”
—The Washington Post
“McMurtry’s prose is plain and exact, exhibiting the kind of clarity that appears simple yet is anything but. The country he portrays is magnificent and violent, with shocking extremes of storm and tranquility. And McMurtry’s exquisite descriptions are written for a single breath, bringing their objects to life with a few well-chosen words . . . irresistible storytelling, rich and satisfying.”
—The New York Times
“For readers familiar with McMurtry’s work, there is much to celebrate in terms of familiar style and whimsical technique in this novel. . . . This is McMurtry at his best.”
—Houston Chronicle
“If Sin Killer is the standard, the other three can’t get here fast enough . . . Lewis & Clark meet[s] Monty Python . . . few authors match McMurtry’s voice of unsentimental authority when it comes to describing the random brutality and natural hazards that greeted those hardy pioneers who ventured west of, say, St. Louis, in the 1800s. He writes as though he were one of them. . . . [Tasmin is] the best female character in McMurtry’s ever-growing oeuvre since Jacy in The Last Picture Show.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The setting, atmosphere and characters are well drawn, and the historical research is amazing. The first of four books in a planned series, it leaves you hungry for more.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“With this bright, boisterous parade of a novel, Larry McMurtry again ventures briskly into the Old West, a period that he loves and understands deeply . . . energetic and big-hearted.”
—The Seattle Times
“McMurtry has fashioned at bottom a love story, and a solid enough one to make a reader eager for the next installment in this epic. . . . This quirky, unromantic view of the West will get a grip on your imagination, even as it shatters whatever romantic images you may still hold about the frontier.”
—Detroit Free Press
“Here is an author who understands writing’s rhythm, which translates into the internal voice readers hear when they read silently.”
—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Sin Killer is without a doubt Larry McMurtry’s most enjoyable book in years. . . . It’s part soap opera . . . part romance . . . part farce . . . and altogether thoroughly wonderful. . . . McMurtry has always created memorable female characters, such as Jacy in The Last Picture Show and Harmony of The Desert Rose. Tasmin is in that fine tradition.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“McMurtry seems not only to be having a good time with this project, but he’s very happy to share it with you. . . . The progression of the characters is both geographic and intellectual, flavored well with Chaucerian absurdities and whimsy both bloody and bawdy . . . every scene [is] most artfully described by a story teller whose skill and precision work wonders with a minimum of well-chosen words. . . . If the rest are like the first, there will be no dull moments.”
—Roanoke Times & World News
“A captivating, engrossing read . . . ”
—The Sunday Oklahoman
“For sheer entertainment, you can’t beat this picaresque novel about a family of British aristocrats steaming their way up the Missouri River in the 1830s with an entourage of children and servants, and, yes, even a few Indian chiefs . . . wonderfully funny and smart. . . . The wait for the next installment will be far too long.”
—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“McMurtry knows how to tell a novel. . . . I enjoyed the darkly humorous Sin Killer almost as much as McMurtry’s other westerns.”
—Ottowa Citizen
“We’re off on another ambitious, larger-than-life adventure. It promises to be comic, witty and bloody. . . . Snow . . . and Tasmin are superb creations, and McMurtry masterfully reveals their characters slowly.”
—Edmonton Journal
BY LARRY MC MURTRY
The Colonel and Little Missie
Folly and Glory
By Sorrow’s River
The Wandering Hill
Sin Killer
Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West
Paradise
Boone’s Lick
Roads
Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
Duane’s Depressed
Crazy Horse
Comanche Moon
Dead Man’s Walk
The Late Child
Streets of Laredo
The Evening Star
Buffalo Girls
Some Can Whistle
Anything for Billy
Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
Texasville
Lonesome Dove
The Desert Rose
Cadillac Jack
Somebody’s Darling
Terms of Endearment
All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers
Moving On
The Last Picture Show
In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas
Leaving Cheyenne
Horseman, Pass By
BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA
Pretty Boy Floyd
Zeke and Ned
The Berrybender Narratives, Vol. 1
LARRY
MCMURTRY
Sin Killer
SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS
Rockefeller Center
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New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Larry McMurtry
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
First Simon & Schuster paperback edition 2005
SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com
Designed by Karolina Harris
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
McMurtry, Larry.
Sin killer / Larry McMurtry.
p. cm.—(The Berrybender narratives ; bk. 1)
1. British—West (U.S.)—Fiction. 2. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction. 3. Missouri
River Valley—Fiction. 4. Young women—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.A319 S56 2002 2002017616
813’.54—dc21
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-3302-6
ISBN-10: 0-7432-3302-6
eISBN: 978-1-4391-2705-6
&nbs
p; ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-4684-2 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 0-7432-4684-5 (Pbk)
The Berrybender Narratives are dedicated to the secondhand booksellers of the Western world, who have done so much, over a fifty-year stretch, to help me to an education.
The Berrybender Narratives are to be a tetralogy, or four-decker, in which we follow the adventures of a great English sporting family, the Berrybenders, as they make their way through the American West, in the years 1832–36. The four novels which make up the tetralogy are set on or beside the four great rivers along which the Berrybenders travel, these being the Missouri, the Yellowstone, the Rio Grande, and the Brazos.
Various people who had lives in history wander through these fictions—their fates in this story are entirely invented.
Contents
CHARACTERS
1 A FISH, AT DUSK
2 A BLOCK OF OFFSPRING
3 A DOE’S LIVER, QUICKLY EATEN
4 THE SWAMP OF THE SWANS
5 RAIN SPITTINGS AND A SLAP
6 THE RIVER STICKS
7 A BAD HAND IN A CROWD
8 THREE WILD CHIEFTAINS
9 RED NATIONS IN TURMOIL
10 THE CAPTAIN HEAVES A SIGH
11 A SQUAB AND A SQUASH
12 TWENTY-TWO PIGEONS RAINING DOWN
13 CALL OF THE TUNDRA SWANS
14 END OF A HEAVY EATER
15 THE ONLY FRENCH
16 A FUNERAL IN THE MORNING
18 THE LOST STROKE
19 THE MAID TAKES A SWIM
20 AN EAGLET TAMED
21 DIFFICULTIES WITH SCISSORS
22 A MODEST BOSOM, A BUFFALO
23 TONGUE, LIVER, SWEETBREADS, HAUNCH, AND SADDLE
24 THE SWANS AGAIN
25 A HUNTING SEAT ABANDONED
26 A CELLIST OVERBOARD
27 A NIP OF GROG—TWO NIPS
28 A PROPOSAL CONSIDERED
29 A HITCHING SMOOTHLY ACCOMPLISHED
30 THE NORTH STAR
31 A FLINCH FROM MADEMOISELLE
32 A MEADOWLARK SPEAKS OUT OF TURN
33 THE DOESKIN SHIRT
34 A COLD NIGHT
35 A BLACK-CLAD FIGURE
36 A COMPANY OF FIENDS
37 A MASTER OF HIS TRADE
38 A LONG MANE OF SHINING HAIR
39 IN THE SKULL LODGE
40 A QUESTION OF SENSIBILITY
41 FRAULEIN WILL NOT BE SOOTHED
42 A UNION ASSAILED
43 PARLOUS STATE OF THE STORES
44 AN ACCIDENTAL ÉLÉVATION
45 A STABLE BOY FLOGGED
46 SINEWS FOR A BOW
47 A BURIAL
48 THE TRADER IS LATE
49 IN A TURMOIL OF SPIRIT
50 AN OLD LORD UNDETERRED
51 THE WORLD DISAPPEARED
52 A FADING LIGHT
53 SIX HUNDRED POUNDS OF WIVES
54 RIFLE AND KIT ABANDONED
55 A VALET MISSED
56 FROSTBITE AND ITS CURE
57 A DISTRESSING LITTER, SOON REMOVED
58 WOLF TRACKS AND A BUFFALO
59 A GRAVE NOT NEEDED
60 CONJUGAL OCCUPATIONS
61 THE ICE IS UNFORGIVING
62 A DARK WOMAN VISITS THE SANS ARC
Characters
BERRYBENDERS
Lord Albany Berrybender
Lady Constance Berrybender
Tasmin
Bess (Buffum)
Bobbety
Mary
Brother Seven
Sister Ten (later, Kate)
Tintamarre, Tasmin’s staghound
Prince Talleyrand, parrot
STAFF
Gladwyn, valet, gun bearer
Fräulein Pfretzskaner, tutor
Master Jeremy Thaw, tutor
Mademoiselle Pellenc, femme de chambre
Eliza, kitchen maid
Millicent, laundress
Señor Yanez, gunsmith
Signor Claricia, carriage maker
Venetia Kennet, cellist
Old Gorska, hunter
Gorska Minor, his son
Piet Van Wely, naturalist
Holger Sten, painter
Tim, stable boy
Captain George Aitken
Charlie Hodges, boatman
Mery-Michaud, engagé
George Catlin, American painter
Toussaint Charbonneau, interpreter-guide
Coal, Charbonneau’s Hidatsa wife
Jim Snow (The Raven Brave; Sin Killer)
Dan Drew, prairie hunter
Maelgwyn Evans, trapper, Knife River
Master Tobias Stiles, deceased
Father Geoffrin, Jesuit
INDIANS
Big White, Mandan
The Hairy Horn, Oglala Sioux
Blue Thunder, Piegan Blackfoot
Nemba, Oto
Pit-ta-sa, Teton Sioux
Blue Blanket, Teton Sioux
Neighing Horses, Teton Sioux
White Hawk, Sans Arc
Three Geese, Sans Arc
Grasshopper, Sans Arc
Cat Head, Sans Arc
Big Stealer, Sans Arc
Little Stealer, Sans Arc
Step Toe, Mandan
Rabbit Skin, Mandan
Draga, Aleut-Russian
The Bad Eye, Gros Ventre
FRENCH
Georges Guillaume, trader
Simon Le Page, Hudson’s Bay Company agent
Malboeuf, his assistant
John Skraeling, trader
Malgres, Mexican/Apache
I ate between battles, I slept among murderers, I was careless in loving and I looked upon nature without patience. Thus the time passed which was given me on earth.
BRECHT
1
In the darkness beyond the great Missouri’s shore . . .
IN the darkness beyond the great Missouri’s shore at last lay the West, toward which Tasmin and her family, the numerous Berrybenders, had so long been tending. The Kaw, an unimpressive stream, had been passed that afternoon—Tasmin, Bobbety, Bess, and Mary had come ashore in the pirogue to see the prairies that were said to stretch west for a thousand miles; but in fact they could hardly see anything, having arrived just at dusk. The stars were coming out—bright, high stars that didn’t light the emptiness much, as a full moon might have done. Bess, called Buffum by the family, insisted that she had heard a buffalo cough, while Bobbety claimed to have seen a great fish leap at dusk, some great fish of the Missouri. The three older Berrybenders tramped for a time along the muddy shore, trailed, as usual, by the sinister and uncompromising Mary, aged twelve, whom none of them had invited on the tour. In the last light they all stared at the gray grass and the brown slosh of water; but the great fish of the Missouri did not leap again. Disappointed, the agile Bobbety at once caught a slimy green frog, which he foolishly tried to force down Mary’s dress, the predictable result of his actions being that the frog squirmed away while Mary, never one to be trifled with, bit Bobbety’s forefinger to the bone, causing him to blubber loudly, to Buffum’s great annoyance and Tasmin’s quiet contempt. Though Bobbety attempted to give his sister a sharp slap, Mary, like the frog, squirmed away and, for a time, was seen no more.
“It is said that there are no schools anywhere in the American West, in this year of our Lord 1832,” Bess declaimed, in her characteristically pompous way. The three of them were attempting to row the pirogue back to the big boat, but in fact their small craft was solidly grounded on the Missouri mud. Bobbety, muttering about lockjaw and gangrene, dropped the only paddle, which floated away.
“Do get it, Tasmin . . . I’m bleeding . . .I fear the piranhas will inevitably attack,” Bobbety whined; his knowledge of natural history was of the slightest. Tasmin might readily have given him a succinct lecture on the normally benign nature of the piranha, in any case a fish of the Amazon, not the Missouri, but she decided to postpone the lecture and
catch the paddle, a thing soon accomplished, the Missouri being distressingly shallow at that point of its long drainage. Tasmin got wet only to her knees.
In her large family, the ancient, multifarious Berrybenders, Tasmin was invariably the one who recovered paddles, righted boats, posted letters, bound up wounds, corrected lessons, dried tears, cuffed the tardy, reproved the wicked, and lectured the ignorant, study having been her passion from her earliest days.
Far out in the center of the broad stream, the steamer Rocky Mount seemed to be as immovable as their humble pirogue—mired, perhaps, like themselves, in the clinging Missouri mud. Sounds of the evening’s carouse were just then wafting across the waves.
2
Occasionally she caught a note of Haydn . . .
“NO schools at all, how liberating!” Bess repeated in her exasperating way; she seemed not to have considered that even if Oxford itself had been transported to the banks of the Kaw, their father, Lord Albany Berrybender, would never have spent a cent to educate any of his girls.
“Yes, that is why it has been necessary to bring Fräulein Pfretzskaner and Master Jeremy Thaw, to tutor you and Bobbety and Mary and, of course, our brother Seven and our sister Ten,” Tasmin said.
There were, in the Berrybenders’ great house in Northamptonshire, a block of offspring known collectively as the Ten, all born during a period when Lord Berrybender decided he preferred numbering to naming—the latter required a degree of attention he was ever more reluctant to grant, where his off-spring were concerned. Only two of the Ten had been allowed to come to America: the boy Seven, possessed of a cleft palate but otherwise physically unobjectionable, and the girl Ten, a wild brat so clever at hiding herself under tables and in closets that she could seldom be easily located—not that anyone had reason to seek her with any frequency.
Mary Berrybender, born just before the onslaught of the Ten, remained, as she had begun, sui generis, neither one of the older children nor one of the Ten. No less an expert than Piet Van Wely, the Dutch botanist, whose duties, never well defined, required him to deal with whatever flora or fauna the company might encounter, had been the first to remark on the fact that Mary fit no system and conformed to no category, being quite clearly in possession of special powers.