He goes on talking until he’s said his piece, and then he rides off. His head was held high. Mine was in my hands because right away – while I’m left standing there – the agent skedaddles over to General Michaels to tell him all them warriors’ names.
And the next thing I know, Company W is being ordered to saddle up and stay hidden in the stables in case there’s a fight. And I – on account of my being so useful with a gun – have to go right into the General’s house with a dozen others and hide in the front room, peeping between the shutters so we can see what happens. And I ain’t set foot inside a house so fine since the Yankees set fire to the plantation and it feels real strange to be back in one where there’s lace tablecloths and velvet cushions and the smell of women’s perfume and fried chicken hanging in the air. We’re looking out onto the porch where General Michaels and some of them other officers have summoned all them warriors and are waiting for them to arrive and it’s a bit like seeing the master waiting for his neighbours to come calling, only there ain’t no mint juleps, nor Irish whisky, nor no gingerbread.
Them warriors come in of their own free will, most of them. One had to be forced in. One had to be run down and dragged in.
But soon enough, there they all was, sitting on the porch and of course they ain’t alone. Their squaws and their kids and a whole bunch of other warriors have come along to see what’s going on so there’s a great crowd of Indians standing there in front of the house.
General Michaels tell them chiefs they being arrested for killing seven settlers on the wagon train. And Red Barrel Chest yell in his big, booming voice that he’d rather die than be a prisoner, and he reach for his pistol.
General Michaels give the command and we throw back them shutters and we point our rifles at all them warriors’ hearts and I got mine pointing at Red Barrel Chest and I’m praying he won’t do nothing because I don’t especially want to fire on someone who’s not firing at me, even if he got his gun on the General.
Then the Indian with the moustache stands up and says he ain’t gonna let none of them be taken. Him and General Michaels are gonna die right there on the porch. And then another warrior ride up and he got two rifles and he throw one at one fella then get off his horse and come over and sit down in front of General Michaels and he point his weapon right at the General’s head.
And we get given the order, so we pull back the hammers on our guns. It’s gonna be the biggest God Almighty bloodbath since what General Michaels done down along the river and I’m right there in the middle of it and I’m wishing I got a death song to mark the occasion like them warriors do because it feels strange being wiped out in someone’s house where there’s all that polished wood and white lace and a piece of Mrs Michaels’ embroidery thrown down on the chair with the needle still stuck in it. The sight of that little piece of cloth makes my mind go wandering off to Mrs Beecher and how her husband been teaching their boy to read when she was off at her sewing circle and I start wondering did she ever stitch anything so fine and dainty? And Mrs Michaels’ fancywork is going to be spattered with blood and brains any second now. My blood. My brains. And wouldn’t Jonas have laughed to think of me fetching up dead like this on the floor in the middle of someone’s parlour?
My mouth’s running dry. All them soldiers in the stables come streaming out, half to the left, half to the right and they got the crowd surrounded. General Michaels is looking real mean but Captain Smith takes matters into his own hands. He yell at the interpreter to tell them Indians that violence ain’t gonna save none of them warriors from justice.
Our guns is pointing at them Indians’ chests. And the Captain tells them, real calm, real quiet, that they’re going to be held for trial and there’s nothing none of them can do about it.
It’s the truth, plain and simple. They don’t have no choice, and they know it as well as we do. Only decision is whether they’re going to come quiet, or be killed right there on that porch.
We was all balanced on a knife edge. There was this silence so deep I swear I could have heard a pine needle falling to the ground. And it’s a mighty tricky thing keeping still when the hammer on your rifle is cocked like that. Your fingers get twitchy. They start to ache because they know the routine better than your head does by now: hammer, trigger, fire. Not doing it is like trying to turn back once you’ve jumped off a cliff. Only if you fire before the command’s given you likely to start up a whole new war. So you don’t move a muscle, not even if Mr Cody’s rifle is purring in your hands. Not until Red Barrel Chest stands up.
He catch sight of me behind General Michaels and he look me real hard in the eye, a look so full of hate and rage and wild despair that it make my blood boil at the same time as my heart fill with sadness. And he turn away. He put down his gun. One by one the others do the same thing.
So they didn’t exactly agree with the Captain, but they didn’t put up no more fight. Their families stood there watching, quiet as mice, while we took them warriors off to the guardhouse and locked them inside.
They was held prisoner for a couple of weeks. Then all of them was supposed to be taken off to the courthouse in town to be given a fair trial but the one with the moustache didn’t never get that far.
We load them into the wagons, but suddenly he stand up and he call something to Red Barrel Chest. He nod towards the tree on the horizon. Then he start his death song.
Now I heard plenty of those in my time. When the odds was stacked against them, a warrior would start singing. And these wasn’t no sweet voices, twining around each other like honeysuckle, rising to heaven. They was chilling things. Strange. Ghostly, almost. Sad, too.
The sound of that moustached man’s singing freeze me to the marrow. A death song’s a haunting thing. And I was thinking, How’s he gonna die? I mean, he was chained to the wagon. I seen Elijah make them manacles. They was fitted around his wrists tighter than a wedding ring around a finger. Was no way he’d get out of them. So what was he going to do? Kill himself just by wishing hard enough? Well, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d of done just that – some of them Indians was like witches, the things they could do. Sound of that wailing cry was enough to make a person believe he could summon up the Devil to strike us all stone dead.
Once his song is finished he sits down again in that wagon and pull the blanket over his head. It trundle along, same as before and it’s getting further from the fort and closer to the tree and nothing’s happened, so I figure maybe he’s planning on starving himself to death.
Only he ain’t.
Now them Indians was sometimes capable of doing things that made your brain bust with the horror of them. No wonder the US Army couldn’t scare them.
Suddenly that moustached warrior jumps up. He’s got out of them manacles and the way he’s done that is to bite through his own flesh, ripping off the skin with his teeth till his hands is small enough to slide through them. I’ve known some bad, bad times, but I can’t begin to imagine ever being desperate enough to do something like that.
He’s got a knife hidden somewhere, though God alone knows how he done manage that because he was searched and searched again when he was arrested. But he take that knife and stick it into the soldier who’s driving the wagon – who just so happens to be Private Creech – right under the ribs, straight into his heart. That Indian done me something of a favour.
He grabs a rifle. His hands is running with blood. It’s everywhere. He can’t get a grip on the weapon. Before he can fire it at the other fella on the box he gets himself shot.
It’s a mortal wound but it ain’t fatal yet. The General orders him to be thrown in the ditch and the first wagon just carries right on rolling away towards town and the courthouse like nothing has happened.
Me and Elijah have to stand guard over him, make sure none of his folks come nowhere near. That man don’t die quick and he don’t die clean. It takes more than three hours for the life to finally leave him. He don’t make a single sound all that time.
If I could have helped him to a faster end like I done with Abe I’d have put a bullet through his head. But that was against orders.
The others, well, they was put on trial and they was found guilty by the white men on the jury in about ten seconds flat. They was sentenced to hang. But some other white folks – including the civilian agent who done report them all to General Michaels in the first place – went to the governor and begged him to show them mercy. They was given life imprisonment instead.
Life imprisonment for the man who wanted to roam the whole dammed prairie? If he’d been given a choice, I figure Red Barrel Chest would have preferred the hanging.
30.
What happened to Red Barrel Chest and them others got all the Indians stirred up again real bad. They was restless and twitchy and that makes them settlers restless and twitchy too and they start complaining to the folks in Washington so before long the government decides it’s got to tighten its grip even harder. Orders come in that the Indians got to be kept in line. Each and every one of them have got to camp within ten miles of the fort and they got to come for a weekly roll call. Any who don’t answer when their name is hollered out – man, woman or child – is officially classed as a hostile, a renegade, an enemy who’s gonna be hunted down and killed.
It felt like we was sitting on a powder keg again and sure enough it done explode into another war. Only this time it was worse because I was beginning to feel like Company W was ants being stirred up with a stick: black folks being set against red ones. We was fighting because we had nowhere to go and nothing to lose. They was fighting because they was about to lose everything. I was starting to wonder if maybe we wasn’t both fighting the wrong people.
The Indians got the army telling them they gotta stay put on the reservation, else they’ll be shot. But I seen with my own eyes that the food they been promised don’t show up the whole of the following winter and the whole winter’s a long time to go without eating and them folks start to starve. So off go the warriors in search of buffalo and off we go in search of them but they was way ahead of us and we never did catch up. All we found was the carcasses of hundreds of dead buffalo, laying over that prairie like the droppings of some giant animal. It was one hell of a sight. One hell of a smell too. Seemed that white hunters had got there before them warriors was even close, took off the skins to sell, left the rest to rot. They was crawling with maggots. Wasn’t nothing fit to eat left on them. It made them warriors so mad they went off killing all the hunters and fur traders they could find.
But if they was mad, Captain Smith was pretty mad too. He had himself one hell of an altercation with the General when we got back to the fort. We could hear every word over in our quarters. He damned nearly got himself court-martialled for insubordination.
Captain Smith was a deep-down decent man. The way he saw it, them hunters was thieving what was rightfully Indian property. But the General refused to let Captain Smith take us off in search of them. The way the General figured was that if the buffalo was wiped out, them Indians would be wiped out too, like vermin, sure as night follows day. He told Captain Smith it was an “elegant solution to the Indian Problem”. It would clear them off the land for once and for all. Guess he had Sherman’s backing on that one.
Seemed wrong to me then, seems wrong to me now. Them buffalo was created by the Lord God Almighty. Wasn’t for mankind to go wiping them off the face of the earth. But didn’t no one ask for my opinion.
Them Indians hold a sun dance and they get themselves fired up with singing and dancing and sticking arrows and knives in themselves to prove how big and brave they are. And after a few days of this, them warriors go on the warpath. But this time it ain’t just the men who go running. Their families follow right along, so thousands of folks go streaming off the reservation. The plains are in uproar and we’re the ones supposed to sort the whole damned mess out.
We’re criss-crossing the prairies after all them runaways – who now count as hostiles and renegades – for weeks on end and sometimes we find a bunch of them but more often we don’t. Then one day we come by a trading post. Seemed white hunters been real busy lately. There are fresh buffalo skins piled high by the door.
We ride towards it and there’s some strange-looking carvings on top of the corral posts and a mighty bad smell, but I don’t pay it much attention because the trader come out to talk with Captain Smith. He’s looking kinda pleased with himself and, after wiping his palms on his apron, he reaches up and shakes the Captain by the hand.
“Well, lookee here! Here come the cavalry!” he says, and I don’t especially like the smile on his face. “You’ve arrived two weeks too late to save us all.”
Captain Smith ignores the fella’s tone. “Did you have some trouble here, Mr…?”
“Jones,” he says. “Sure did. But we didn’t need no bunch of mokes to help us out. We killed them Indians all by ourselves.”
And he jerks his thumb towards the corral and I realize them strange-looking things on the posts ain’t carvings.
They’re heads.
And that explains the smell and the fact there’s so many flies buzzing and why the horses is all grouped together, nervous in the middle, because they don’t like the smell of blood no more than I do.
Mr Jones start telling Captain Smith how Indians come attacking at sunup one morning. He was bragging his head off: he talked the same way all folks done after they survive an attack. From what he said you’d have thought he fought off more than a thousand desperate warriors. Well, they may have been desperate, but there sure wasn’t that many of them. I ain’t repeating his account – I didn’t believe less than half of it. What it amounted to was this: some chief led the charge but Mr Jones and them hunters at the trading post was sitting inside some mighty sturdy walls, and what’s more they got themselves new telescopic sights on their guns, which is a whole lot finer than anything the Indians got. Finer than what Company W got, come to that. They could shoot them warriors off their horses from a mile away without so much as breaking a sweat.
Well, the Indians keep right on most all of the day but they ain’t getting nowhere and by the time the chief call off the attack fifteen of his men is lying dead. And if you’re an Indian you can’t go fetching along a bunch of new recruits from out east to replace them. So he rides off, and then them hunters come out and cut off the dead warriors’ heads and stick them up on the corral to warn off any Indian who’s thinking of doing the same thing.
Now that sight was enough to turn my stomach in any case. But Mr Jones’ next words were like having a cold knife slide into my guts.
He says, “Was a mighty strange thing. There was a bugler with them. All the time they was charging he kept playing and shooting. Was the darnedest thing, seeing them all ride along to music.”
Before I can stop myself I says, “What was the song?”
Mr Jones looks like he don’t want to reply to no question from the likes of me. He’s torn between going on with his story and turning his back on us. In the end he can’t resist completing his tale, and every sentence is like a twist of that knife.
“‘Sam Hall’,” he says, and he sings a line just in case the Captain don’t know the tune. Which of course he does, because he’s heard General Michaels’ men singing it as often as the rest of us. He skip right ahead to the last verse. “My name is Samuel, And I’ll see you all in hell, I’ll see you all in hell, Damn your eyes!” Then Mr Jones adds with that snake-like smile of his, “Was driving us plumb crazy till I brung him down.” He pick up an imaginary gun and point it at his imaginary opponent. Pulls an imaginary trigger. “Got ya!” He laughs, long and loud. “Sure was a relief when he stopped. And do you know who the crazy dumbass was a-playing that bugle?”
“Enlighten me.” Captain Smith’s voice is cold as cold because he was there that first Christmas when we decorate that barn and we all got to messing with them musical instruments.
But Mr Jones don’t even notice, because this is the punch
line to the biggest joke in history. He slaps his leg, and he’s laughing so much he can hardly spit the words out. “A nigger!”
“Do you know the man’s name?” asks Captain Smith.
“Nope. Weren’t nothing in his pockets worth having. He was in army uniform, though. We figured he was a deserter. Ain’t no one been able to identify him. Want to take a look? Mind you, he’s getting a bit beyond being recognizable.”
Captain Smith ride over to the corral and it don’t take a whole heap of figuring to work out from the look on his face that he knows that last head.
The Captain look across at me and he give the very smallest of nods and my heart feels about as heavy as a stone. Behind me Elijah takes a deep breath and Isaiah gives a gulp but none of us say nothing because there ain’t no words what will cover Reuben ending up dead.
31.
Any pride I had in being a good soldier, any belief that I was part of something big, something fine – all that vanish like gun smoke when I seen Reuben’s head on that post.
How in the hell he had ended up with them Indians I didn’t know and there wasn’t no way of finding out. Guess they’d found him wandering alone over that prairie. A soldier, running away from the US Army. A deserter who thought that Red Barrel Chest had a point. Who seen Bent Back shot when he raised his hand in peace. Who was maybe prepared to change sides and fight for a lost cause. They needed all the fighting men they could get. Made sense keeping him instead of killing him.
All I could think was that it was my fault: mine, mine, mine. If I hadn’t of scared him off like that, if I’d have just told him what I was. But I’d been too much of a goddamned coward. I’d killed Reuben. Same as I’d killed Amos and Cookie. Henry. And Abe. Seemed I killed things just by caring for them.
After that, the world seemed a bad, sad place to be. I figured God must be sleeping, else how could he stand to look down on his creation and see the mess folks was making of it? Them Indians was better off out of it. I’d have left it behind too, if I’d have had any choice. But it didn’t seem to matter what I did. I could take all the crazy chances I liked, throw myself in the line of fire, go hand to hand with the enemy – there wasn’t no bullets out there with my name on them. No arrows nor blades neither. Seemed Death just didn’t want to take me. All I got was a reputation for outstanding courage, nerves of steel and excellent marksmanship.
Buffalo Soldier Page 17