But that night I learned another important lesson: don’t no Indian like fighting after sundown.
Soon as the sun’s sinking they make camp at the head of the ravine. There ain’t no getting past them. No way out for us. No way in for the rest of Company W neither. They go off to do the job we was supposed to be doing: riding away in a cloud of dust to find that wagon train, leaving me and Reuben, George and Isaiah and the other fifteen of us still alive stuck in that ravine.
As bad nights go, that was one of the worst. I figured maybe dying wouldn’t be so terrible, not if it come quick and clean. But Indians was savages. Them white troopers was full of tales of torturings – settlers being roasted on a spit like turkeys, or tied to a wagon wheel and set on fire – and I knew now they wasn’t making them stories up. I was about to do what I did when Cookie and Amos was killed: pass out with the sheer terror of it.
But Reuben come creeping out from behind his dead horse and take hold of Abe’s bridle. Give him a tug so Abe takes a step or two forward. It’s like pulling out the cork from a bottle. That’s when I realized how bad my leg was crushed. Once the blood began to flow it had me almost screaming.
We ain’t got no more than a canteen full of water each and I had to give some of mine to my horse, wetting his tongue, his lips, his nose. Abe wanders off down a little way. He don’t much like the smell of blood and death, but he’s hungry so he’s looking for some grass to eat. He’s fine when he finds some. Me and Reuben get back under that overhanging rock, and he says to me, “You think it was gonna be like this, Charley?”
“What?” I says. “The army?”
“No,” he says. “Freedom. Ever figure things would turn out this way?”
“No.” I glance down along at them Indians. They got a fire going and they dancing around it. Red Barrel Chest look even more like the Devil now, and he sure sound like it, whooping and hollering in a way that gets my blood about ready to curdle.
Now Reuben could see and hear them well enough but he acted like they just wasn’t there. He went right on talking, like we was sitting on the lawn at some fine folks’ picnic.
“You know what I figured?” he says. “I figured Master is free, right? And he didn’t never do no work. I put them things together. I thought when freedom come we was all gonna be sitting out on the porch sipping mint juleps.”
“Eating gingerbread?”
“Yeah. Plate stacked with slices thick as my thumb.”
“Watching the sun go down?”
“Sure. Pretty pink clouds all over.”
“Me too.”
The notion of us, dreaming we could sit leisurely on some old porch watching the sunset while we was actually stuck in a ravine waiting to get skinned alive by savages suddenly gets us smiling.
“I figured it was going to be like the Bible,” I say. “I thought Sherman must be Jesus, Joseph and Moses rolled into one. I figured he was gonna lead us out of captivity all the way to freedom. With clouds of glory, and choirs of angels, singing their hearts out.”
“Well, there they are,” says Reuben pointing at them savages. “This must be it! Heaven on earth. The Land of Milk and Honey. Look at you and me, Charley. Ain’t we reached the Promised Land?”
We’re laughing so hard the tears come rolling down our faces and it ain’t long before Captain Smith come crawling over and tell us to pull ourselves together, for God’s sake, and calm down or else he’ll have to discipline us for unsoldierly behaviour.
We sit quiet after that. But the fear’s gone. With Reuben there at my shoulder, warm and alive, like my own blood brother, my courage comes creeping back. I even manage to sleep some before the fighting starts up again at dawn.
The moment the first shot is fired Abe comes hurtling under that rock, nearly squashing me and Reuben flat. Like I said, my horse had one hell of an instinct when it come to self-preservation.
It seemed that the rest of Company W found the wagon train we been looking for soon after sunup. Them settlers said there been thousands of Indians attacking them, but maybe they was exaggerating some. I wasn’t there, so I can’t say. All I know is that most of them survived and Company W drove their attackers off without too much trouble. Then they come riding back for us and we proved a whole lot harder to rescue.
We was so fixed into our holes in the rock we’d just about reached stalemate so the fighting went on all day. We was picking off one Indian here, one Indian there, but they was doing the same to us. We was getting tuckered out. Finally our troopers put in one almighty effort and push them Indians just far enough from the mouth of that ravine so we can slip on out.
The day before we gone riding in with thirty men. Thirty horses. We come back out with four. Four horses. Eleven men. All of them injured, bleeding bad, clinging together two, three to a horse. And it still wasn’t over. Them Indians was being gunned down but they just wasn’t giving up. They’re singing songs – singing their hearts out, like death don’t bother them none and they can’t think of nothing finer or more dandy than being killed right here, right now! They begging for it, almost. They’re coming at us again and again, and some of us ain’t had nothing to eat and our canteens is empty and our throats is dry. The rest of the company is in better shape and they’re driving them Indians back over and over, yet each time it’s getting harder and things is starting to look real bad.
But then the sun goes down.
Red Barrel Chest and his men could have killed every single one of us but for their habit of stopping fighting at nightfall. When we start limping back to the fort the Captain says they’re scared of ghosts and evil spirits and that starts George off, talking big. He’s walking along, leading his horse, because Isaiah and Thomas been hurt and they was slumped across his saddle. “We’re superior to them,” George says. “We’re civilized. We ain’t scared of the dark. We ain’t superstitious cowards. We’re soldiers of the United States Cavalry. We can outwit a bunch of savages.”
Turned out them Indians wasn’t as dumb as George thought.
We was within sight of the fort when he trod on a rattler. He was so damned surprised to be bit! We’d have all been laughing our heads off, if it hadn’t of killed him.
20.
Rattler bite don’t kill a man quick – leastways it didn’t with George. He died slow and he died painful and I blamed them Indians for that too. When it was finally over George joined Henry in my dreams, sitting there on the end of my bed saying over and over, “We was gonna kick their butts so hard they’d be breathing out their assholes. Why couldn’t we scare them, Charley? I don’t get it.”
Losing all them men and all them horses was real hard. And it didn’t endear us to General Sullivan none, even though it was his orders we was following at the time. Captain Smith told him that our conduct was “exemplary” and some of us “had quite literally laughed in the face of danger” but he didn’t want to hear none of it.
A lot more trouble came our way that summer. Indians was attacking anyone. Everyone. Railroad workers, wagon trains, miners, ranchers. The Captain said they was even going for them farming Cherokees. Guess Indians had a pecking order too, because them wild warriors sure seemed to hate the tame ones. Before long they’d killed so many folks that the fine gentlemen in Washington give up on the notion of fighting and decide to send along some peace commissioners to talk to them instead.
So Company W was on the move again and this time we fetched up someplace with a lot of tall trees and a river winding round and about. The air was clear and still and it was a real pleasing spot. According to Captain Smith, we was there to keep things safe and peaceable when the smart civilized folks sat down with the ignorant savages to make an agreement. But before that there was latrines to be dug, and Company W was just the men for the job.
Me and Reuben was on fatigue duty, digging our hearts out, standing knee deep in a trench when this scrawny-looking officer I ain’t never seen before pass by. I wouldn’t have given him a second glance if it hadn’t of bee
n for the Captain standing to attention so sudden and flushing scarlet as he saluted.
Reuben’s nearer than me so he catches his name. “Charley!” he says out the corner of his mouth. “That’s Sherman!”
“Sherman?” says I. “Heck!”
In all them weeks me and Amos and Cookie been trailing along behind the Yankees I ain’t never seen him in the flesh. To tell the truth, he’s a little disappointing. He was a whole lot smaller than I imagined. Red-haired and kinda scraggy. He reminded me of Abe, only my horse’s eyes was kind as kind and Sherman’s had one hell of a mean expression in them. If them Indians had any sense, they’d roll over like dogs and wag their tails at him.
See, I’d heard enough officers talking about strategy by now to know that William Tecumseh Sherman was a military genius. He’d marched his troops into Confederate territory, hit the enemy so hard and fast they was knocked out stone cold, didn’t have a hope of ever getting back on their feet. And the reason his men had moved so hard and fast was because he didn’t have no lines of supply to slow him down: there wasn’t no long wagon trains loaded with food trundling on along behind, getting stuck in the mud, needing ten men to pull them out, holding everyone up. Them Yankees had killed Mr Delaney’s hogs and cows because they was under direct orders from Sherman to feed themselves on whatever they could find: what they thieved was all they ate.
They been told to make the Confederates howl, and all that burning of houses and smashing of crops been done by civilized white folks to a bunch of other civilized white folks. I figured it stood to reason that Sherman would be a whole lot tougher on a bunch of heathen savages.
Well, along come the government folks from Washington and along come the Indians. Captain Smith says they’re Cheyennes and Arapahoes and Kiowas and Comanches: a whole heap of tribes all led by different chiefs. The only one among them I seen before was Red Barrel Chest. There was thousands of warriors and they bring along their wives and their children and their old folks and their tepees and their herds of horses and packs of dogs. They set up villages along the river and before too long we was sitting right in the middle of them and all you could see and smell and hear was Indians, Indians, Indians in every direction. They may have been different tribes but they looked the same to me. Wild. Dangerous. All excepting this little old bent-backed, grey-haired chief who didn’t look like he had the strength to harm no one.
Them Indians had all camped on the same side of the river as Company W. Bent Back was the only one took his tribe to the far bank down aways where there was a bend jutting out like a finger.
One morning Reuben and me was detailed to water the horses. We led a bunch of them out on halters to the river but the only place we could get them in and out easy was down by where Bent Back and his tribe was camped. They was minding their own business. Didn’t no one even look at us while we seeing to the horses.
Then all of a sudden my skin starts pricking. Bent Back is coming through the trees on the far bank. I can see him, but I can’t hear him. He walks through them leaves so silent he might as well have been floating above the ground.
There something snagging in my head.
“Why’s he camped on that side?” I says to Reuben, real quiet.
Reuben has a think. “Maybe he want to make a quick escape.”
Bent Back was just about the most harmless-looking Indian I ever seen, but Reuben was right: he’d put his folks in the one place they could run away from real quick. “You figure he gonna attack?”
“Maybe. Attack. Then retreat fast.”
“Go tell the Captain.”
So Reuben goes, taking his horses with him, and I’m left standing there alone with Abe and holding the ropes of five others while they drinking peaceful. I look across the water at that Bent Back chief, wondering what he’s doing, but as I stare at him I gets the strangest feeling. He’s standing right by the water’s edge, just standing. There was something mighty unsettling about the way an Indian could do that – still and silent, like they was rocks. While I was staring he turn his head and I see them eyes of his. There was something in them that bring Cookie to mind. He look about a million years old. And for one second, maybe two, there was a noise carried in the wind. Seemed I could just catch the faint echo of women screaming, babies crying, tearing flesh and broken bones, the smell of burning. Horses dying.
Then it was gone. The river was running over the stones, the wind was blowing through the cottonwoods and one old, broke, bent-back Indian was turning away and going back to his tepee.
When the Washington folks was ready to begin talking they all sat themselves down but the Indians didn’t come and join them, not right away.
Me and Reuben was on guard duty along with Isaiah and Elijah. My rifle was in my hand the whole time, cocked and ready because when them warriors finally decide they’re ready to come along in, they kick off with a real fine display of their almighty power and magnificent manly bravery. They come galloping up to the commissioners, screaming and whooping their war cries, looking like they was about to spear then trample down the whole lot of them. But they stop dead about a couple of yards in front of Sherman and let their horses prance while they glare into Sherman’s eyes and he glares back at them and they all look so much like dogs squaring up to each other, hackles raised, growling, that for a second I felt like laughing.
Reuben’s thinking the same as me, because he says, “Look kinda like mutts, don’t they?”
And I says, “Any second now they gonna start pissing on the cottonwoods, see who can hit highest.”
That bunch of Indians settle themselves down then another chief comes riding in. His warriors are all firing their weapons in the air, screaming and hollering and making everyone in the place ten times twitchier than they been before. When they settle down, in come another bunch.
It went on for the whole damned morning and I stopped feeling like we was going to be trampled to death. It was show, was all. A heap of strutting and preening. They was like roosters. Before long I started to get kinda bored. Kinda itchy. Back on the Delaney place I been worked from before sunup to after sundown. And now I been trained for action. Any time I wasn’t doing something – even digging latrines – I started to get restless.
All the chiefs was sitting down by the time Bent Back showed up. He rides towards Sherman at a walk, real quiet, real calm. He points to himself and tells the General that he’s a good Indian.
Sherman grinds his cigar butt into the ground. “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” he says.
Well, I was nursing me a bellyful of hate on account of Henry and George and all them others. I figured Sherman was speaking the truth. He was a white man with a heap of book-learning. A military genius. How in the hell was I supposed to know any different?
Well, eventually they’re all sitting down and the talking starts up. The purpose of it was this: the government done decide it wants them Indians to go settle down someplace. It wants them to stay put, and not go off killing and thieving. Couldn’t nothing be simpler. If they do that they’ll be given houses and schools, food and blankets and whatever the heck else is their hearts’ desire. As long as they keep south of the river they’ll be left alone. Sherman tells them they can hunt buffalo and indulge all their savage heathen ways as long as the grass grows and the waters run. But north of the river, settlers is gonna move in and civilize the place.
Having been on the receiving end of Red Barrel Chest I watched with interest when I see him stand up. I nudge Reuben and Reuben nudges me and we both listen good when Red Barrel Chest opens his mouth.
I’m expecting him to whoop and scream and come out with all them savage noises, but he don’t. He starts talking and the interpreter starts translating and it’s all about how much he loves the land, and how he likes to roam free on the prairie, and how he ain’t planning on giving none of it up to no settlers. Then he starts going on about how he don’t want the schools or the churches or the homes the government is offering to bu
ild, and I starts getting mad.
I says to Reuben, “Why’s the government offering to build houses for a bunch of savages?”
“And why ain’t they got the sense to take them?” It’s Elijah who answers me. He’s real mad. “Ain’t no one never come offering to build me no house. Ain’t no one giving me no little plot of land to raise corn.” I know full well he’s got a wife and baby back east and she’s struggling along on the money he sends. Elijah spends most all his off-duty days whittling little bits of wood into animals for their baby boy. He was aiming to make him a whole ark full.
Now when you’re in the army you follow orders, that’s all. We was paid for fighting, not thinking, so mostly I tried to avoid it. But right here, right now, well, I just couldn’t help myself.
The way Red Barrel Chest spoke of being free and the way I’d heard white folks speak about it – it was like they was using the same-sounding word but with two entirely different meanings.
I seen them settlers heading out on them wagon trains. To them being free meant getting their own place. Shaping it to what they wanted. Taking the big empty wilderness and turning it into something better. Freedom was ownership. Staking out a plot. Building on it. Didn’t matter if it was small. Was someplace to rest their heads. Someplace to call home.
But here’s Red Barrel Chest talking about how he wants to wander about, rootless as a piece of tumbleweed, over the whole damned prairie! He ain’t gonna make nothing of all that good grazing and all he ever gonna do is follow along behind them buffalo. It ain’t never occurred to him or any of them warriors to build a fence so as them animals would stay put.
I was thinking folks got to anchor themselves to something, same as trees. Even grass got roots. Gotta have something to hold you to a place. Gotta leave something to show you was there. Why bother living otherwise? Each time Company W was sent someplace new, I carved my name into the stable wall. Felt good to leave a solid mark. Show that I been there. But them Indians – they vanished like ghosts. A whole village could come down in less than an hour and they was off like they never existed. Like they was just cloud shadows sliding on over the prairie.
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