Bill Hickey ain’t ruffled. “That is unusual,” he says. “They must be desperate. Look there, Captain. Their horses are close to dropping. They need water badly.”
“What are they gonna do?” says Jonas.
“I’m guessing they’ll try getting us to chase them. Our best bet is to stay right here.”
The next thing that happens is that some of them warriors come out in the open and, oh Lord, one of them’s Jim and my heart does this flip and my stomach turns right over and I’m so mixed up inside I want to spew out my salt pork. If I’m ordered to fire at him I’m gonna have to do it. I’m the best shot in the whole of Company W and even Jonas knows that because he asked me how I come by Mr Cody’s rifle after he give it back to me, and I had to tell him. So it ain’t like I can miss.
But Jonas don’t give no order. He can’t make up his mind what to do. We ain’t firing. Neither are them Indians.
“I suppose they’re low on ammunition too,” says Bill. “You’re holding all the cards, Captain. We’ve just gotta sit tight.”
The warriors dance along, then they run towards the rocks, real slow, real tempting. Bill Hickey’s right: they’re trying to get us to go chasing after them so as the women and the children can get to the water.
Jonas is following Bill Hickey’s advice. He’s getting madder and madder because them warriors is flipping up their loincloths, flashing their privates at him and making lewd gestures but we can’t move from our position until he gives the order.
Them warriors is getting mad too because we ain’t doing what they want us to. Two of them come back towards us and one’s Jim and he got himself in range. The second man start making signs at Jonas and they’re so particular you can’t miss his meaning. My insides are turning to water. Jonas don’t know precisely what he’s saying because his brain’s about the size of an army-issue bean and he says, “What’s he doing?”
The Apache’s got his hands cupped against his chest like he’s holding a pair of melons. And then he’s pointing at me. Or maybe at Jonas.
When Jim sees what he’s doing he smacks the second man’s hands down. For a moment I think he’s told on me – he’s told them Apaches what I am. And I feel so betrayed I almost want to shoot him myself.
Bill Hickey says to Jonas, “He’s calling you a woman, sir.”
“What?”
“A woman.”
Seems they don’t have a whole heap of cuss words in Apache. According to Bill Hickey a woman’s about the most insulting thing you can call a man. Struck me as kinda funny because I seen with my own eyes that some of them women was real good warriors and wasn’t none of them cowards.
Jonas Beecher lift up his weapon and he fire at Jim but he’s so mad he miss by about a mile. But Jonas ain’t shifting from the spring. So neither can we. And now he give the order for me to fire. I raise my rifle.
Jim look straight at me and he put up his hand, kinda like a salute, and I figure it’s a greeting, or maybe a farewell, because before I can fire a shot he and them others duck behind rocks and the next thing we know the whole lot of them have gone, melting away into that land like they never been there. And I’m left wishing I could have melted right along with them.
40.
Bill Hickey been right about staying put by the spring but Jonas didn’t thank him none. He was an officer, he needed to report dead hostiles. He was itching to shed some blood. The longer the whole damned thing went on and the more desperate he become, the harder he pushed us.
We was high in the mountains, someplace right down by the Mexican border, when we see smoke rising.
Seeing smoke rise in them days was never a good sign. It didn’t never mean logs burning in the hearth or peaceful campfires. It meant raided homesteads. Torched tepees. Dead settlers. Dead Indians. When I seen it my heart sank.
But Jonas is looking happy. His hand is flapping against his leg. He got an idea in his head and there ain’t no shifting it.
“That’s got to be an Indian village,” he says. “There aren’t any settlers hereabouts, are there?”
He look at Bill Hickey and Bill just shrug. What he mean is that he don’t know, but Jonas think Bill’s agreeing with him.
So Jonas give the order. We gotta dismount and go on foot. He split us into four. Some of us are to go to the left, some to the right. Some take the higher ground, some take the lower. We gotta go quick and quiet and surround the camp. When he give the signal we gotta attack.
We done what we was told and Jonas was right: there was signs a little Indian village been down there with a group of maybe thirty people. But they wasn’t there no more and Jonas never did give no signal. Because when we was close enough to see the camp, it was plain someone been there before us.
The brushwood shelters was just smouldering ashes. Whether it was the army done it, or whether it was civilians, there was no way of knowing. They hadn’t left no note. What they had left was five dead Indians. Two men, one woman, two kids. All five had fingers, ears, hair missing. Trophies been cut off of them as keepsakes. The woman had her skirt pulled up around her waist. Whoever killed her had violated her first. She been left lying, legs apart, privates exposed to the sky.
It was real unusual to catch Apaches by surprise so I figured whoever had done it had just got lucky, but when we walked into that camp for a closer look it seemed that maybe they’d had a helping hand.
There was a flagon of whisky lying on its side under a rock. Guess it had rolled there when they been attacked. Another was right by the stream, still half full. If those Indians been on a drunk they wouldn’t have heard no one coming. They sure paid one hell of a price for that liquor.
Jonas give the order that we’re to make camp right there for the night. In the morning we’ll see if we can’t pick up a trail, catch up with the ones that got away.
I went to cover that woman up. Pull her skirt over her legs. Didn’t seem right letting her lie like that. But Jonas scream at me to leave her, leave her alone, don’t touch her. He’s madder than he ever been so I do what I’m told.
I’m gathering wood to make a fire, and I’m so bothered by the sight of that woman I’m whistling “Sam Hall” between my teeth. I don’t hardly know I’m doing it until Bill Hickey start saying something. I’m behind him, so he ain’t seen me, just heard me whistling. He says, “Captain, do you think…?” When he turn around and sees it’s me he give a grunt and don’t finish his sentence. He shrug and go on with what he’s doing. He ain’t troubled by his mistake.
But I am.
I’m so troubled I drop the firewood I’m holding. Because that ain’t the first time someone’s took me for Jonas.
I’d clean forgotten it, but now the memory hit me like a bullet straight between the eyes. My head’s reeling with it.
The other time was way back, before Miss Louellen even arrived on the Delaney place. Way back, before Jonas turned mean. He been trying to teach me to whistle. He been at it for weeks and I couldn’t get it. My baby teeth had come out and there was this big old hole in the front of my gum. I couldn’t get my lips to hold their shape. But then my new teeth start coming through. One day I’m on my own and I’m leaning against the cottonwood, trying my damnedest to make a sound, and all of a sudden it burst out shrill, clear as a bell. Not just one note, neither. I can make a tune!
Then I hear this shout, “Why there you are! Jonas, honey, I been looking all over for you.” And around the tree come Mrs Beecher.
She was pretty back then – not like the scrunched-up dishcloth she become. When her eyes fix on me, the pink bloom fade from her cheeks. Her lips thin into a tight line.
“You goddamned clumsy nigger!” Jonas jerk me back to the here and the now. He’s come across the camp and is looking at the wood I dropped. “Get on and pick that up, boy.”
I do what I’m told again, eyes to the ground, following his bidding without a murmur. My mind’s racing. All them shadows in the mist is coming together. I’m beginning to see them c
lear. I don’t like the shape they taking. I don’t like it one bit.
While the sun’s going down Jonas and Bill Hickey share what remains of that whisky. And all the time there’s that woman, lying there. Sooner or later they was bound to come around to discussing her.
“You ever had one, Captain?” Bill Hickey is at the talkative drunk stage. He lean across and point to that woman, just in case Jonas don’t catch his meaning.
Jonas don’t answer but Bill’s way beyond needing anyone to reply. He carries right on talking. Hell, he just wouldn’t hush his mouth! “You know, I was married once to a white woman. Norwegian. She had golden hair, red lips, pale skin: she was pretty as a picture to look at. But she was cold as ice in bed. Just about froze my dick right off. I had to get rid of her, I couldn’t stand it longer than a year. I reckon a white skin just doesn’t lend itself to passion. But Indians, they know how to treat a man right. The darker they are, the sweeter they taste. I had a nigger woman once, black as the ace of spades. She was wilder than a bobcat. Biting. Scratching. She was hotter than hellfire! Raked up my back with those nails of hers…”
Bill shuts up, real sudden. Because Jonas has got him by the neck. He’s straddling Bill’s chest, pinning Bill’s arms to the ground with his knees. All the time Bill’s been talking, Jonas has been drinking. He’s reached the ugly mean stage and he’s squeezing the life out of his scout. And he’s screaming, screaming, screaming in Bill’s face, “Don’t you ever! Don’t you ever say that, you hear? You hear me? You hear me, you sonofabitch?”
Bill can’t answer because he’s choking. He can’t nod his head. Can’t do nothing. So Jonas goes on, and on. “You’re lying! Ain’t no nigger better than no white woman! Don’t you ever tell me they taste sweeter. Don’t you ever! You hear me? Say it! Say you’re lying!” He let out a stream of cuss words and with each one he’s shaking Bill. Shaking and shaking till his neck’s almost broke. And can’t none of us stop him because Jonas is the Captain and we can’t lay a finger on him.
He’s raving now. “Do you know what Pa liked for dessert? Apple Charlotte. Apple Charlotte! Asswipe! He’d have Ma bake it for him. He’d sit there eating it, smiling at her, licking his plate clean. And all the time he was laughing up his sleeve at Ma. At the two of us.”
Bill’s face is scarlet. He can’t draw breath but Jonas ain’t finished yet. “Pa had himself a nigger whore, see? Name of Apple. Kept her bastard bitch of a daughter right there under Ma’s nose. D’you know what he called her? Charlotte! It was his idea of a joke. Him and his whore. They’d made their own Apple Charlotte. I saw Ma crying when she found out. But I baked that bitch for her. Soon as I got the chance. Yeah. I baked that bitch good.”
Bill has gone limp. Jonas drops him. There’s a crack of his skull hitting stone. Then silence. Don’t nothing break it. Not a bird. Not a cricket. Nothing. There’s nothing but the sound of Jonas Beecher’s ragged breathing.
Then Bill give a groan. He curl himself into a ball, put his arms up, cradle his head like it’s a baby.
Jonas don’t say nothing to him. He just goes into his tent, lays himself down to sleep like it ain’t happened.
I was awake most all of that night, remembering, piecing things together.
I only seen Mr Beecher’s face up real close that time he save me from Jonas. His two front teeth didn’t meet in the middle. Neither did Jonas’s. Neither did mine.
I’m guessing it was the gap that done it. His wife hadn’t known who he fathered until she seen me there by the cottonwood.
There must have been one hell of an altercation in the overseer’s house that night. Guess Jonas heard it all. Was right after that I found him crying his eyes out. That was when he turned mean. He turned so mean I’d forgotten he was ever different until I seen Captain Smith. A pair of blue eyes, looking at me kind. What a heap of worms they turned up!
I want to say to Jonas, Is that it? I mean, really? Hell, is that it? Is that all? Is that the only reason you got for the poison you spitting? That the reason you join a lynch mob? Burn me? Rape Cookie? Kill her? Amos? Isaiah? Elijah? Lord above! Is that it?
I want to scream it out loud, scream it so loud the whole world can hear it, scream it so loud it makes the stars rattle: Jonas Beecher got a nigger for a sister!
It might have been funny, if it hadn’t of been such a goddamned, godawful, miserable, pitiful mess.
41.
Jonas must have broke something inside that head of Bill’s. By the time the sun come up the next morning, the only scout we got left is lying dead.
We don’t even bury him. Jonas carries on as if he’s a stranger. As if he don’t mean no more to him than any of them dead Indians. And I carry on like Captain Beecher ain’t my brother. Like I don’t know about any of it. Because what else can I do?
Jonas don’t need to say nothing to none of us. If it come to it – if anyone asks why Bill ain’t with us when we go back – he can tell the General that Bill was killed by hostiles. Can’t none of us say a thing. Wouldn’t no one take the word of a black soldier over a white officer. We leave them all lying there, food for the buzzards, and follow the trail.
Or at least we try to. There was a few tracks to begin with. I’d learned enough from watching Jim to see that when that Indian village been attacked they’d scattered in different directions fast, then come together again. But after maybe quarter of a mile they’d split into two groups. Whoever had surprised them in the first place had gone after one. Jonas Beecher decided to take us after the other.
It wasn’t long before them tracks faded to nothing. Without a scout we didn’t have a hope in hell of working out where they’d gone. And by now we was well and truly lost. The only man who might have had the faintest notion of where we’d fetched up was having his bones picked clean by birds.
Only thing we could do was keep going. And we did. All that day. All the next. The whole of the one after that. Then one morning we come down the side of a mountain into a flat valley that stretches for maybe a mile before them rocks rise up again on the other side. And there – right in front of us was footprints, clear in the dust. They was fresh made. You could see the whole shape even down to the stitching at the toe of the moccasin that made it.
It was a small foot, so it didn’t take a heap of figuring to work out it belonged to a woman. One woman. On foot. Out all alone. Heading out across the valley in broad daylight, where there was no cover, nowhere to hide.
You might have thought that one woman wasn’t much of an enemy to go chasing after but Captain Beecher thought different. Far as he was concerned he could report one hostile dead.
I felt uneasy. Struck me as being mighty strange them tracks was so darned easy to see. So darned easy to follow. And I can’t keep my big mouth shut, same as ever, so I says to Jonas, “Ain’t them tracks strange, Captain?”
His eyes narrow and he look at me like I’m a hunk of dog dirt and he says, “Strange?”
“They’re mighty clear.”
“Well, that makes our job easier.”
We set off, following them footprints. And that uneasy feeling don’t go away, especially when we round some rocks and see her maybe one, two hundred yards ahead.
She turn, and I can see her belly’s curved like a full moon. And I think maybe she’s heading out on her own to have her baby someplace quiet. Or maybe she ain’t. She look at us, and she’s facing a whole company of soldiers but she don’t do nothing. I can’t be sure of it, but she look a whole lot like the woman that run our horses off when we was sent to arrest that medicine man. We eye each other across that sandy scrub.
“Ain’t that strange, neither?” I says. “She’s just standing there.”
“What are you? A coward?” says Jonas. “You scared of one squaw?”
“She’s with child, sir. Maybe she’s about to have her baby.”
“Then we’ll get ourselves two hostiles, won’t we?”
“We gonna attack a baby?”
“Nits make lic
e.”
The hair’s standing up on the back of my neck and my flesh is crawling and it ain’t just because we’re going after a woman in that state – though God alone knows that should have been enough to make the Devil think twice. It’s because she’s so darned visible. I knew you could ride right by an Apache and never know he was there until after he put a bullet in you. So seeing her standing there so clear, staring right on back at us, was downright terrifying.
She start running towards the rocks on the far side of the valley. Now her belly was big – I could see that with my own eyes – but that pace of hers struck me as being strange too. Apaches move quiet but they move fast. I seen an old woman run down a turkey once and catch it with her bare hands. There was something mighty wrong about how slow she was going. Was like she was a minnow on the end of a line being gently pulled across a creek. Somewhere, someone was fishing: waiting for us to take the bait.
We’re following her at a trot as she heads towards the rocks, but as we start to catch up I see there’s a crack in them and she’s almost there.
Jonas wasn’t the kind of man who was gonna take advice. But I can’t stop myself yelling, “Looks like an ambush, sir.”
And he start screaming at me about how I’m a goddamned coward and a baboon and a gibbon that’s scared to fight. He’s mad, crazy, ugly desperate to do some killing.
So he give the command and though I know we’re dead men riding we obey because this is the army and you can’t do nothing but follow the orders of your superior officer. We have ourselves something of a charge at them rocks, but when we reach them we see the ravine she’s gone down is too narrow for us to ride in fours. We have to go along in single file and we can’t do no more than walk because it twists and turns so much. And Captain Jonas Beecher send me in ahead so I’ll be the first to fall. He bring up the rear and in we all go, one by one, into that cool ravine and I know there’s an Indian behind each goddamned tuft of grass and each scrubby bush. And I know they won’t do nothing until the last of us is in and they can cut off our retreat and kill us all as easily as shooting rats in a barrel. And I ride and I ride until there ain’t no more than a thin ribbon of blue sky above and I can’t hear nothing but the thud of my heart and the hooves of my horse and I can’t smell nothing but my own fear. It’s only when I come round another twisting corner and I see that woman ahead of me that I feel death coming down on me like a big, warm blanket.
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