And he shrugs and goes back to his position.
I take aim. Always needed to point a little to the left on account of my rifle not shooting straight. I fire and the bottle shatters.
So then we move back another five paces and we have another go. Private Creech shatters his bottle, no problem. I’m getting ready to shoot but then my lever jams. It been doing that on and off ever since I been issued that thing. I’d worked out by now there was a way of unjamming it: sharp jerk and a twist and it was sorted. But Mr Cody come over again and he says, firmer this time, “Use mine.” He don’t wait for me to answer; he just take my rifle away and put his one in my hands.
“1866 Springfield,” he says. “Second Allin conversion. You’ll do better with this.”
Right away it feels good. The weight of it. The balance. Feels like it’s alive. Feels like it’s part of me. And I swear that thing is purring with pleasure at the notion of what it’s about to do.
I raise it to my shoulder and aiming is as easy as holding out my arm and pointing my finger at the bottle. Squeezing the trigger soft, that bullet flies just exactly where I told it to go. Feels like it come right out of my fingertip. God Almighty! There something powerful fine in that.
Mr Cody come on back over and this time he give me his ammunition belt, buckling it around my waist before I can object. He show me how to reload. It take just one bullet at a time, not the seven my Spencer do but this Springfield open so easy, the bullet glide into place so quick, the whole thing snap shut so smooth, I figure I could fire off seven with this faster than with my old rifle. And it ain’t got no lever to go getting jammed.
Once I’m done, me and Private Creech got to go back even further.
By now the air’s changed from noisy with excitement to hushed with anticipation. The pride of Company W is resting on my shoulders. Reuben’s looking at me and I can feel him willing me on. Elijah’s lips are moving and I know he’s praying and Isaiah is tugging on his knuckles like he’s about to pull each and every one of his fingers clean off. Captain Smith’s standing there. Just standing, arms folded. He give me a nod. Beside him, Tiberius is white-faced, jiggling nervous like he about to pee himself. I don’t want to let none of them down. Not if I can help it.
We fire a third, then a fourth time and I’m loving the feel of that weapon in my hands. Me and Private Creech was evenly matched until the fifth.
The fifth time, Private Creech misses his bottle. His shot goes thudding into the fence post, splintering the wood. The cry that goes around General Michaels’ men makes my heart shrivel away inside me. It’s more howl than anything. An animal noise. Wild with anger. It’s the sound them men made when they come lynching Amos and Cookie. The state of my bowels might be a joke in Company W but right now I feel like I’m gonna fill my pants for real right in front of all of them.
I can feel the weight of Company W’s hopes. The pressure of it on my shoulders is getting unbearable. Trouble is, I can feel the weight of General Michaels and his men’s hopes too and those folks’ wishes seemed to lay upon me even heavier. My hands are shaking so much I can barely reload. I drop my bullet. They start jeering. Whooping. Screeching. Baying for blood. Sound’s worse than war cries.
Mr Cody is at my side again.
“Take your time, trooper. Steady as you go. Don’t forget to breathe.”
He put a hand on my shoulder. A friendly hand that’s mighty strong. He grins and says, “It doesn’t matter either way. Relax. I win some, I lose some. Been good seeing them all shook up, though, ain’t it?” He give me a wink and walks off.
I take a deep breath. I get a hold of myself. I look along the barrel of that rifle and take aim. Them clouds is just starting to shed their load. Specks of rain coming down, drawing my eye off of where it should be.
And now the sweat’s beginning to drip down into my eyes and my hands are clammy but my finger’s on the trigger and I give it a real gentle squeeze. At that selfsame moment Isaiah give his knuckles a crack. I jerk. The bullet flies.
I swear time slowed right down. I could follow the path of that bullet like it was a leaf floating along the stream, or a feather drifting down to earth. There was silence. I wasn’t breathing. No one was. For a second I thought I’d aimed too far to the left. Maybe I had. Maybe it was Isaiah’s crack! and me flinching to the right that did it. Slow as slow that bullet clip the bottle. It shatter, and it was like seeing a bunch of Miss Louellen’s diamonds thrown in the air – all them fragments seemed to shimmer, mixing in with the falling rain like there was millions of them, like the whole world was full of fractured glass.
That quiet continued for one, maybe two seconds longer. Then the men of Company W gives this great cheer. Reuben got his arms around my legs – he’s picking me up. Elijah got me too. And Isaiah. They’re lifting me up on their shoulders, lifting me up in the air, carrying me around in the rain. Tiberius is whooping and cheering loudest of all. I look at General Michaels and he don’t seem none too happy. I can’t even glance at Private Creech. But I’m praying I don’t never have the misfortune to find myself out in the field with him. Because if I wake up one day dead with a bullet in my back I’d sure as hell know who put it there.
The General give Mr Cody his money but it’s like he tearing out his own liver in doing it. And when Reuben and Elijah and Isaiah and the rest of them finally put me back down on the ground Mr Cody walk over to me and slap me on the back so hard I near fall down flat. I hold out his rifle to him.
He don’t take it.
“It’s yours,” he says. “You earned it, O’Hara.” He give me another wink as he show me a fistful of dollars. “The General’s buying me another. Ain’t that kind of him?”
I’m real surprised at myself. I never thought I’d go taking no gift from no white man. But when it come to that Springfield? Lord above! It was just too damned good a rifle to refuse.
25.
Mr Cody’s wager didn’t improve the feeling in the fort none. Wasn’t no concern of his: he was off out of there as soon as the storm passed by, on his way buying, selling, scouting, trading – Lord alone knows what that man did to get by. He shook me by the hand and I wished him well, I truly did. But that was it. He was gone and I was stuck inside, watching my back the whole darned time, expecting to get me a knife between my ribs.
Elijah, Isaiah and Reuben stuck to me like ticks. I was thankful. Kinda. It was real nice of them but it put the fear of God into me: if one of them monthlies come along I was gonna have a lot of explaining to do. As well as the worry of that happening, I wasn’t getting no time on my own – to spend with Abe – and it started to drive me crazy.
I guess Captain Smith saw how things was because he had me on every routine patrol, every mail run. Any time he could get me out of the fort and into the field, he did.
Fall turned into winter. Snow settled thick over the prairie. Christmas come and go – in the barn again, not the recreation hall, for the same reasons as the year before. Must have been early in the new year when we was coming back from patrol and I see a little old Indian on a little old pony up ahead. He’s heading for the fort, same as us, and we follow in his tracks all the way. When we get there and he gets off his pony I see it’s Bent Back, the chief I seen standing down by the creek that time they made that peace treaty. He’s the one that camped on the far bank. He was the first to put his mark on a piece of paper. He was the one told Sherman he was a good Indian.
He says he’s come in to have a talk with General Michaels. The General come out of his office and shut the door behind him. He don’t invite Bent Back inside. He keep him standing out there in the cold and the snow while Bent Back ask if he can move his people closer to the fort. For protection, he says, though he don’t say from who or from what because the General cut him off. Bent Back is saying he’s heard a rumour when General Michaels snaps out, “No.” He tells Bent Back to return home to his people. They won’t be attacked.
That’s all there is to it. Bent Back don’
t say no more. He gets on his pony and he heads off without another word. I watch him go. I ain’t never seen a man look so beat. And the snow starts falling and the wind’s whistling so I can’t tell if it’s that I’m hearing or if it’s people screaming. Or maybe horses.
The next day Captain Smith sends me and Reuben off out again, only this time we’re carrying a heap of messages for the fort about twenty, maybe thirty miles along the river. The military is inclined to ignore such things as the weather when it comes to promoting the interests of civilization. Come what may, the mail had to go out.
Me and Reuben wasn’t best pleased to be picked for that particular task. Since Thomas been found dead, we rode in pairs. The idea was, we could cover each other’s backs. Them bears was dead and gone, but there was always enough young warriors around – crazy from liquor – to cause mail carriers a heap of trouble. So as well as having to cross icy streams and feel the bitter wind blowing right through you there was the chance that you might get yourself killed or captured and, given a choice, we knew we’d both opt for the killing, not the capture, on account of the hideous torturings folks said Indians carried out on troopers.
We set off and that snow looks mighty pretty but it’s a freezing hell to ride through. In the daytime, when the sun come up, the surface melt a little. Then down come the night and it freeze hard again. So Abe has to crunch through a layer of ice which can cut a horse’s legs clean open no matter how careful he tread. In addition to which there was the risk of a blizzard coming. Me and Reuben knew them things was deadly dangerous. We’d heard of settlers who’d got froze solid getting lost between the house and the barn when they gone out to feed their animals.
Well, we was way out of sight of the fort when the snow starts falling. Flakes as big as my fist. It’s heavier than we ever seen it and there’s a biting wind blowing it into drifts. I can’t see nothing remotely recognizable, can hardly even see Abe’s ears ahead of me. And in them conditions the prairie’s a real easy place to get lost in so that’s what we does. We gets lost. And being as how this is me and Reuben we does it real good. We’re riding leg to leg, knees rubbing against each other, so we don’t part company because the notion of getting separated out there is too godawful to contemplate, but we got no idea of where we are. No idea of which direction north lies, or the location of the fort we come from or the one we going to. Can’t tell the sky from the land neither. We keep riding because if we stop we’re gonna be smothered by that big old blanket and we know without saying nothing to each other that we won’t get found until spring. So on we go, and we might be riding around in one big circle or we might be heading out into the wilderness, and I’m sure I can hear wolves howling through that wind and I’m scared as scared can be and that sound is coming closer and now Abe’s heard it too so he speeds up, or at least he tries to – it’s hard moving fast through them drifts. Our animals are jostling together and they’re sending each other into a panic or maybe it’s me doing it, or Reuben.
Then something appears out of that snow like it been dropped from the sky in front of us. But it ain’t no pack of wolves. It’s an Indian.
Now I reckon he was surprised as we was. He didn’t make no move to harm us. But Abe was real twitchy by then. When that fella come looming out of the blizzard Abe rear up high on his back legs and whirl round away from Reuben and towards the Indian. I was a fair-enough rider – spent two years in the saddle. But I was half froze to death. Guess I was just too chilled to stay put.
I fall, thumping off into the snow, landing in a deep drift. And before I can get myself back up and out of it that Indian’s grabbed Abe’s reins and took off with him.
He thieved my horse! Was so mad I forgot for a while how cold I was. I pull myself out of that drift and run after them but I ain’t got more than a couple of steps before I sink right into another one and they was already out of sight, the snow coming so thick I couldn’t see more than two, maybe three feet ahead. When I turned round I saw I lost Reuben too and if it wasn’t for him shouting after me things could have gotten a whole lot worse.
We find each other and I climb up behind him, and we start off after that Indian because there’s only one of him and two of us and I want my horse back.
It wasn’t hard to follow them tracks to begin with but it ain’t long before the snow’s filling them in and the wind’s doing its level best to rub them out and of course that fella knows the prairie a hell of a lot better than we do so come nightfall we was in a heap of trouble. We find ourselves a withered old tree and press ourselves close to it like it was our long lost ma. Wasn’t no question of sleeping – fall asleep in conditions like that and you don’t never wake up. All we could do was wrap ourselves in Reuben’s blanket and huddle up under the belly of Reuben’s horse and pray to Almighty God that the snow would stop so by morning we could figure out where in the hell we was.
By dawn the three of us was barely alive. Then the sun come up and there’s a mist hanging over the water but we can see we’ve fetched up on a rise near the river and there are fifty, maybe a hundred tepees grouped in circles down along the valley.
I’m not thinking straight. We’re right there by the enemy but all that’s running through my head is that it’s a real pretty scene, with the sun slanting through the mist, and the snow sparkling fresh, the clouds coloured scarlet and the light on the land kinda golden.
“What you planning to do?” says Reuben and despite the cold that man’s managing to smile through his chattering teeth. “You just gonna walk in there and fetch Abe out? Because I ain’t going in with you.”
Goes without saying that I didn’t have no plan. But while I was thinking how best to rescue my horse I see Bent Back step out of his tepee.
Well, that fella seems like a good-enough Indian to me even if Sherman don’t think so. Maybe I really can just walk in there and ask him for my horse. He’s a chief, ain’t he? He can tell the thief who stole Abe to give him back.
But before I can take a step there’s a woman shouting. Don’t understand the words, but it’s some kinda warning. Bent Back steps into his tepee and comes out with his gun. He fires it into the air, and that wakes up the village.
And then I hear the darnedest thing. Music. There’s a band playing. Me and Reuben look at each other.
“You catch that?”
“Yeah.”
“Figured I was hearing things.”
As we look, General Michaels’ men come riding along, a hundred or so of them riding abreast in a line like they about to charge and the band’s playing and them Indians don’t know the words to the song but me and Reuben do – them men been singing it all through Christmas Day same as the year before.
My name it is Sam Hall
And I hate you, one and all
I hate you, one and all,
Damn your eyes!
All of a sudden I’m feeling sick to the bottom of my belly because I know just exactly what’s gonna happen next.
Bent Back walks towards General Michaels, and he’s got his hand raised and that’s a gesture of peace but it don’t make no difference. Him and his folks must have done something real bad that I don’t know about because he takes a bullet through the neck. Just like that. He falls and they trample right over him. Them soldiers charge, and they’re riding through the camp, and I seen it all. All that killing. Women. Children. Old folks. And it ain’t enough just to kill them Indians, they’re being scalped too, and worse, and it’s General Michaels’ men doing all that savagery not them redskins. And there’s Private Creech right there in the middle of it, golden curls flying, whooping and screaming and laughing like Jonas Beecher. And the words of that song are banging through my head to the rhythm of the shooting and the hacking and the raping and the butchering. Didn’t take them long. General Michaels’ men was real efficient. And when they finished with the people, they make a start on the horses.
Imagine killing one horse. Just one. It’s a big animal so there’s a lot of blood. Imagine
putting your gun to its head and pulling the trigger. If it don’t know what you’re about to do it’ll stand real quiet and nice for you. But once you kill one, the others panic, and you can’t get a clean shot at the next. So you wound it mortal bad and it takes longer to die. Imagine killing one horse. Then imagine killing five. Ten. Fifty. One hundred. And all the time you’re shooting they’re trying to run but their legs are hobbled so they can’t do more than limp and shuffle and scream and scream and scream. One hundred horses. Two hundred. Five. Six. Seven hundred.
When they start in on that herd I start running. Reuben’s shouting but all I can hear is them screams. One of them’s Abe, I can feel it. He’s down there, scared out of his mind, and if I don’t reach him he’s gonna die along with the rest of them. I’m running, running through snow that’s two, three, four foot deep in places so it ain’t much of a run, it’s more of a stagger and a fall and a stumble and it ain’t fast enough, it ain’t nothing like fast enough. And I’m too late even before I fall into a gulley full of snow. I’m up to my chest in it and I can’t get myself out and I’m thrashing and fighting and yelling at them to stop but they can’t hear me none, I’m too far away and even if I could reach them General Michaels’ men ain’t gonna pay no attention to no goddamned moke.
By the time Reuben gets to me the screaming’s stopped but that silence is worse than the noise because I know it’s all over and I failed. General Michaels is moving on out, along around the bend of the river. My horse is down there and he’s dead. Or he’s dying slow. And I gotta see with my own eyes, because there’s this killing piece of hope that’s telling me maybe the Indian what thieved him didn’t come from this place – maybe he come from another tribe, a different village. Maybe Abe’s alive and well just over that hill or that one there. Maybe I can still find him safe someplace.
Buffalo Soldier Page 14